Jules, who lives abroad with his wife and kids, was planning a visit home to France. His Aunt Simone kindly offered her Paris apartment. Jules gratefully accepted and followed up to finalize dates—so he could let his mother know when to visit too.
But then came the fambush by Aunt Simone:
"Awful that you’re staying in this apartment while your mother has to sleep in a hotel or with relatives outside the city. Shame on you. You know she’s on a tight budget—and you must have more money than her. You should be staying in a hotel."
Just like that, the old stories rushed back: shame about not being able to afford the hotel room, inferiority and prostration to his aunt’s side of the family. His heart raced. His wife, watching from across the room, made gentle "easy now" gestures. All Jules could say was:
"We’ll have to reassess with this new information. Thank you for your generosity."
What Is a Fambush?
A fambush is exactly what it sounds like—a family ambush. But it’s so much more, too. It’s when all your hard-earned growth and adult boundaries are ripped away in an instant, and you’re pulled back into the roles, wounds, and power dynamics of childhood, helpless to stop it. A single comment or action can rattle your nervous system. You’re not responding from the present, but from years ago.
It’s a punch to the core wounds from the earliest age and an amplification of adult insecurities. One can spend a whole adult life learning to establish a sense of security in the world—and without warning: The empire strikes back. In a moment one word or action can sever connection to the body because the emotions evoked seem too much to bear.
A metaphor I once heard for the Buddhist concept of dependent origination applies: “When you fall from a tall tree, you don’t feel every branch on the way down.” It’s like that with a fambush. You know you’re hurting in a lot of places, but you don’t exactly know what happened.
More Fambush Examples
A family member guilting their way into an event where their presence will be harmful or distracting. A gutting comment that sours a celebration. A seemingly random reminder of an ancient mistake or identity outgrown.
A friend once described the fambush that haunted him as a teen: his mother would be on the phone with someone he didn’t know, then hand him the receiver mid-call with, "There’s someone here who’s excited to say hi to you!"
What’s the message? You’re an extension of me. There’s no boundary here. No choice.
Meanwhile, he’s mouthing to his mother: Who is this?
Feeling the Fambush
A fambush is a successful trespass on the boundaries a person had to fight for, often because those boundaries were trampled in childhood and adolescence. The first step out is to feel the feelings about what happened. Perhaps rage beneath the shame or hurt beneath the dissociation. No one can tell you—we each have to find out for ourselves.
A friend recently asked me, “Are you at a point in meditation where you can clear the mind?”
No. The big shift for me is not clearing the mind—it’s letting emotions be as big as they are. I spent my first two decades smiling while torturing difficult feelings in the basement. Slamming the door shut. Pretending there was nothing there. Stomping on the floor to drown the sounds.
The radical move is this: letting myself feel the rage, betrayal, heartbreak, disappointment—and trusting they won’t destroy me.
So the feelings are felt. What’s next? Your impatience to get to what’s next suggests that you didn’t feel all the feelings. Are there any feelings still locked in the basement? No, really? Feel that last feeling, and don’t rush them. I once was driving to a meditation retreat with a friend of mine. We were nine hours into the drive when, during the last thirty minutes, she gripped the steering wheel, and said, “I want to hurry up and relax.” Doesn’t work that way.
Seriously, What’s Actually Next?
Once the feelings are truly felt—not bypassed or numbed—something shifts—we can begin to turn to intervention to restore security and safety.
Here’s a small but powerful example from my life:
For years, every phone call with my mother ended the same way. "Do you want to talk to your father?" she’d ask—loudly enough that he could hear. We both knew the dynamic. Neither of us had asked to speak to the other. But now we were stuck: "Hey, how you doing? Everything good?"
Everything was never good. But I’d learned through painful experience that the least harmful response in this situation was always: “Yeah, how about you?”
Bo Burnham knows what I mean.
(watch from 1:16 or the whole thing…it’s great)
Eventually, I worked through the swirl of confusion, frustration, anger—and got to a place where I could reset the dynamic. I said to my mother:
"It’s important to me that my father and I have a good relationship. But when we only talk because you ask if we want to, it feels like no one’s choosing the conversation. Like we’re both stuck in a phone booth."
Then came the new boundary:
"If I want to talk to him, I’ll ask. If he wants to talk to me, he can call—or ask."
My mother responded: "What you don’t see is that your father is holding out his hand for the phone."
Suddenly, the whole thing looked different.
Now she tells me when he wants to talk. And I trust that. I have great compassion for my father. He was raised in emotionally brutal circumstances. I sense his nervous system struggles with vulnerability, understandably. And I still need us to connect on our own terms.
Escaping the Fambush
Sometimes the healing conversation isn’t possible. Back to Jules: he couldn’t talk through the pain with Aunt Simone. They didn’t have that relationship. But he did reflect on the dynamics, shore up his internal boundaries, and gracefully withdraw from the apartment offer—preserving both his dignity and the relationship.
We may not be able to stop fambushes from happening. But we can escape them.
Finding ways to respond—rather than collapse—can be among the most powerful acts of adult autonomy.
Here’s one of the most beautiful ways my parents and I rewrote the story:
Whenever I write a story that involves my parents, I ask for their blessing on it. Always, they say, yes, wholeheartedly, unconditionally, "Write whatever you need to write."
That kind of permission is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.
The old fambush story says: You’re not allowed to speak the truth of what happened.
Their answer said: We trust you to tell your story.
And that may be one of the greatest doorways to the belonging, acceptance, and trust that can await us on the other end of the fambush.