Oliver Hudson Unpacks the Childhood ‘Trauma’ He Experienced With Mom Goldie Hawn

Oliver Hudson is opening up about his childhood being raised primarily by mom Goldie Hawn and her longtime partner Kurt Russell.

“I did this course called the Hoffman Institute — which was this really powerful thing for me — where you’re unpacking the patterns that were put upon you from your parents and stepparents,” Hudson, 47, said on the Monday, March 18, episode of his “Sibling Rivalry” podcast. “This idea that we have negative love in our lives and in order to survive, we need love of some kind and sometimes it’s not healthy love but we attach ourselves to those things. This course was all about understanding what those patterns were and kind of learning how to break through them and building your toolbox.”

Initially, Hudson thought the experience was going to be focused on his dad, Bill Hudson, and Russell, 73, who was his primary father figure. But to the surprise of Oliver, Hawn, 78, came up the most.

“My mother was the one that I had almost the most trauma about interestingly enough because she was my primary caregiver and I was with her all of the time,” he shared with guest Bode Miller. “I felt unprotected at times. She would be working. She had new boyfriends that I didn’t really like. She would be living her life and she was an amazing mother. This is my own perception as a child who didn’t have a dad and needed her to be there and she just wasn’t sometimes and she came out far more than even my dad who wasn’t there.”

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While Oliver’s relationship with Hawn wasn’t perfect, they remain extremely close today.

“My parents are amazing grandparents,” the Nashville alum told Us Weekly in March 2021 while praising his mom and Russell. “We’re a very tight family. We all live very close to each other. … They’re amazing people, amazing grandparents, amazing parents.”

Oliver’s relationship with his birth father, however, has been a bit more complicated.

Their estrangement was put under the microscope on Father’s Day in 2015 when Oliver posted a throwback photo of him and sister Kate Hudson with Bill and captioned it, “Happy Abandonment Day.”

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Since then, Oliver and Bill have been able to reconnect and work on their relationship in private.

In his latest podcast, Oliver was able to share some positive memories with his birth dad from childhood.

“When I was with him, it was incredible,” Hudson recalled in his latest podcast. “He paid attention to me. We played football. We played basketball. We were on the beach. He taught me how to fish. He was so present, but he just was never there. It was a perspective shifter for me for sure.”

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As Oliver raises his own three children — sons Wilder and Bodhi and daughter Rio — with his wife Erinn Bartlett, the actor believes his own parents were simply trying their best.

“It’s an incredible week of enlightenment on who your parents were and are,” he shared when recapping his experience with Hoffman Institute. “The forgiveness and compassion you have for them at the end of this process is unbelievable. Then you realize they’re only repeating the s–t they went through with their parents.”

“The forgiveness of my father was huge because his dad left him when he was 5 years old,” Oliver continued. “My dad didn’t do that exactly, but he bailed.”