In this solo YouTube monologue, Fun Coach Tameka (Tameka Anderson) addresses estranged adult children, revealing that 90% of them share a common, unmet desire. She explains why healing feels impossible, linking the pain to spiritual abuse and distorted biblical teachings experienced in childhood. Tameka argues that estranged adults repeatedly attract unhealthy relationships because they unconsciously choose familiar patterns of rejection, abandonment, and disapproval. She identifies three universal needs—safety, being seen, and significance—and shows how journaling can serve as an external hard‑drive to offload trauma, create mental space, and reprogram thoughts. She introduces a self‑coaching model (circumstance → thought → feeling → action → result) and demonstrates its use in reframing her own estrangement from her mother. Throughout, she weaves scriptural references (e.g., Psalm 34:18) to illustrate divine compassion. The video ends with a concrete journal prompt about moments of peace despite estrangement and promotes a 30‑day healing journey linked in the description.
Chapters
Every time I did something wrong, it's children obey your parents. The reason estranged adult children do not get what we need in relationships. PTSD. Hey y'all, Fun Coach Tameka here. In this video, I'm going to reveal what 90% of estranged adult children want, why it seems impossible for us to get it, and how to hack our way into healing from the pain. Stick around to the end and I have something special for you. Family estrangement sucks. And if you are an estranged adult child, just know I'm right there with you. It's easy to feel like maybe we made the wrong choice because 90% of us don't reach our full potential after making this decision. But It doesn't have to be that way, and we can change that today. Don't stop believing. So people don't talk about spiritual abuse and how it relates to estrangement. However, spiritual abuse was a large part of my life growing up because the adults who raised me used the Bible to Prove why they were justified in inflicting harm. Every time I did something wrong, it's children obey your parents or honor thy mother and thy father so your days won't be long. And yes, I'm not minimizing this. The Bible does say this. However, the Bible is also very clear on the entire family dynamic, not just The part about the children, because immediately following that infamous quote, it says, fathers, provoke not your children to wrath. Abusive people often misuse the Bible and misrepresent God. This is why horrible things like slavery existed, however. I'm going to digress on that for now. Because of the way wounded adults misrepresented God to me as a youth, I often thought that God was this tyrant and dictator, and I ain't want no parts of it. I refused to go to church once I became an adult, and I put on what I like to refer to as my bitterness belt with God, and I wore that thing daily, proud to reject a deity that I thought hated me. This foolishness went on for years until I moved to Georgia. It's funny how when someone misrepresents God, we get angry with God and reject him instead of the person who caused the harm. But God, in all of his infinite wisdom and genius, is displaying what love looks like because real love is giving someone the ability to say no. If God forced us to have a relationship with him, that's not love. So he patiently waits, whispering his goodness and pursuing us to want to be in relationship with him. And God's way of pursuing us isn't pushy. And once he finally got me to slowly unbuckle my bitterness belt and I finally surrendered, I realized, oh my goodness, God wasn't my problem. Wounded people were my problem. So this is why I often use scripture to drive my points home. Psalms 34:18 says, the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. I love this verse so much because as someone who's lived My entire life with a broken heart, I'm grateful to know that God has always been close to me. And God consistently shows me how he sticks with me through the people that he uses. Because being an estranged adult child is hard. So much heartbreak. Like, think about it. Your heart was so broken that you had to break it again by stepping away, and it continues to break, kind of like digging In the heels, in the ground, because we see all of these estranged parenting support groups enabling the delusion. So I want to share with you several ways that God proves that he sticks close to us with the broken hearts, right? The question often is, why does it seem so hard to heal our broken hearts? Reina Al Abdullah says, we are stronger when we listen. And smarter when we share. It's such a great quote. I believe in working smarter. I'm like a systems girl, so I love to create systems for anything. And when I read this quote, I thought about it. How can I become stronger by listening and smarter by sharing? And after consulting with my favorite partner, Big God, here's what we came up with. There is something that I'm learning to do that That has helped me hack my way into healing. The fascinating thing is it incorporates both listening and sharing. That thing is journaling. Journaling is such a liberating experience. God designed our brains to be this amazing computer. And just like a computer, we have— we only have so much storage. If you're constantly adding things to your brain, you will be at capacity. And you won't have a lot of capacity to store anything. So I like to think of journaling as our external hard drive to store our memories. And it's beautiful because we can take the hard, challenging thoughts, memories, feelings, et cetera, traumas, and get them off of this hard drive. And merely put them onto this external hard drive. And what's beautiful about it is now that we've gotten it off of this one and put it on an external hard drive, now we have more space. We can reprogram this one and fill it with things that will propel us to move forward and not be stuck, sad, lonely, depressed. So I decided to do something, y'all. At the end of each video, I will end it with a journal prompt. When you're an estranged adult child, most of us don't get the gift of a loving, supporting family, or we wouldn't be estranged, right? Why is it that we, as estranged adult children, can't get the one thing we so desperately want? I remember when I first went no contact. It was the week after my birthday. And I was pretty much in shambles. It was crazy because all of my life, all I ever wanted to do was be with my family. And now here it was, I was forced to estrange myself from them. Make that make sense. I remember calling the guy that I was seeing at the time. I told him that I had made this very difficult decision to separate myself from my biological mother. He was like, why? And so then I share with him Well, because she's not safe for me. He gave me this very disapproving look, and he finally said the dreaded words, yeah, but that's still your mother. If I condone violence. Needless to say, I decided at that moment that I would plan my escape from this relationship as well because it wasn't safe for me. So I did. However, I chose someone else not long after that. Once we got past the initial lovey-dovey phase, he asked me another dreaded question. So where are your parents? Oh man, that made my stomach hurt just him posing the question. So I sucked it up and said, well, my father's deceased. He has been since I was 7. I said that quickly to get it out the way, then very cautiously Honestly, I said, I don't speak to most of my other relatives. Too much dysfunction and not enough people willing to get help. This time, his response was a little different. He leaned in to ask more questions. Little did I know that he was asking questions because he was building his case of reasons why He shouldn't date me. So shortly after that conversation ended, so did we, which leads me to point number 2. The reason estranged adult children do not get what we need in relationships is we continue to choose people based on the familiar dysfunctional patterns of our past. We know all too well how to navigate Rejection, disapproval, and abandonment. So we subconsciously choose people who are who are highly likely to do what? Reject, abandon, and disapprove of us and our choices. And what I've learned is that as human, we all want and need the same three things: to be safe, seen, and feel significant. And if we've had to make the difficult decision of estrangement, I can go on record to guess that we're probably not getting one, if not all of those needs met. And this is the main reason journaling is helpful, because we have to learn how to choose safe people, y'all. Let me say this. You can't choose safe people if you haven't established a safety routine within ourselves first. So the third point is why we're here. Are you tired of feeling alone and unfulfilled in life? 1991, an Atlanta R&B group was formed. This group combined sass and seductiveness and had a background of gospel. One of their songs became number 1 on the R&B hip-hop charts, and it describes perfectly the point I want to drive home. The lyrics are as followed. You don't really know me. You just want to do what you want to do. That's not the way it should be. You should listen to me. I try so very hard to make you understand, but the choices you make are all demands. I tried so very hard to keep our love alive, but you don't want to meet me halfway. Then the understanding dies. There's no way we could work it out if we don't pull together. I don't mean to be demanding, but I want some understanding. I want to be with you. Y'all probably already know the song by now, so if you know the song, sing along. What I need from you is understanding. How can we communicate if you don't hear what I say? And yes, you've guessed, the group is Escape and the song is Understanding. Learn to understand you and why you do the things that you do. I spend time alone with myself daily to fill my cup. So when I meet others and they distance themselves, I don't take it personally. I understand that they're either unable or unwilling to fill my cup, and either way, That's okay because no one owes me anything, including my estranged family. Now I will say the last part really liberated me once I really got it, because to know that no one owes me anything, including my biological mom, was huge for my healing journey. And so this is the reason why you give people different levels of access to you. I tell my daughter all the time, when someone is close to us, We are at the mercy of their poorest decision, and this is why choosing safe people is so important. Here's a bonus now: if you really want to uplevel your healing, here's a hack I learned called self-coaching model. It states circumstances can trigger thoughts that cause feelings that cause us to take certain actions that cause a certain result. Cool thing about this: although the circumstance may never change, all we have to do is change our thought. And our results will change. So let's take my story, for example. The circumstance was my biological mom was harmful. I chose to estrange myself. My first thought process was she—I was thinking she must not love me. I felt angry, disappointed, sad, abandoned, etc. I ruminated over why she treated me this way, and then I fell into depressive episodes. Let's see what it looks like. When all I did was change the way I thought about estrangement. Okay, circumstances still the same. My biological mom was harmful, so I chose to estrange myself. I changed my thought to understand that my biological mom lacked capacity to love anyone because she didn't love herself. So then I began to feel compassion, grace, and honor her in her journey. Now I pray for her daily, and I'm inspired to help people around the world create space for healing. See how that works? So the journal prompt for today is: Describe a moment when you felt a sense of peace or relief despite the estrangement. What contributed to that feeling, and how can you incorporate more of those elements into your daily life? In the next video, I'll I'll break down how to quickly change our thoughts. But for now, I've created a 30-day healing journey specifically for estranged adult children. So be sure to click the link in the description and subscribe to receive notifications for the next video to follow my journaling progress. Hope this was helpful. See you next video. Bye.
