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An excerpt from Reconnecting with Your Estranged Adult Child 
by Tina Gilbertson

Ten million Gen X and Baby Boomer parents have estranged adult children. Parents wonder: How did this happen? Where did I go wrong? While time, in and of itself, does not necessarily heal, actions do, and while every estrangement includes situation-specific variables, there are practical, effective, and universal techniques for understanding and healing these not-uncommon breaches. Psychotherapist and author of Reconnecting with Your Estranged Adult Child: Practical Tips and Tools to Heal Your Relationship, Tina Gilbertson has developed techniques and tools over years of face-to-face and online work with parents who have foundher strategies transformative and even life-changing. Gilbertson cuts through the blame, shame, and guilt on both sides of the broken relationship, so parents will feel heard and understood but also challenged —and guided — to reclaim their role as “tone setter” and grow psychologically.

We hope you enjoy this excerpt from the book.

Try some of the following self-esteem-building activities:

Correct people who guess at what you’re feeling and get it wrong. We all do it: guessing at other people’s feelings is a commonplace and usually innocent pastime. “I bet you’re thrilled your nasty coworker got fired,” is an example. So is, “You look angry.” Observers sometimes hit the nail on the head, but often they get it wrong. Use these episodes to get to know yourself better. Think about the label that’s just been put on you. How well does it fit at this moment? Maybe you were thinking about a serious subject, suddenly realizing it requires your attention. You’re not angry at all, but concerned. Correct the guesser, even if only in your mind, when he or she misinterprets how you feel. It’s a subtle way of telling yourself that what you really feel is important.

Try something you want to do that’s unlikely to work. Invite failure. Embrace mental discomfort. Most people who are afraid to fail have an unconscious belief that they won’t be able to tolerate it. The only way to find out if you can tolerate failure is to fail. Please don’t court catastrophe in order to test this! Keep your experiment manageable. For example, apply for a job that’s a bit of a stretch, or audition for a local play. All great achievers have survived failure. There’s some truth to the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” at least when it comes to the hard knocks in life that shape who we become. Inviting failure may be scary, but defeat can be less agonizing when it’s anticipated with an open mind.

Take one tiny step toward a cherished dream. If you have a goal or aspiration for the next phase of your life, what are you doing to make it happen? If the answer is “Not much,” it may be that it feels better to hold it as a possibility “someday” than to reach for it now and realize you can’t have it. Taking a small step toward your goal — like making a phone call or doing a quick internet search — is a sneaky way of convincing your subconscious that your personal desires are worth striving for. Yes, even at the risk of failure. Prove to your deepest self you’re worthy of your own efforts by daring to take action. Self-esteem itself is an action. Esteem yourself by putting your goals at the top, not the bottom, of your daily to-do list.

Set and hold a boundary. This is graduate-level practice for those with injured self-esteem. When you’re not convinced you’re allowed to have boundaries in the first place, defending them is a stretch. Read some books or articles about boundaries. Once you have an understanding of what boundaries are and how to hold them, you’ll have to supply the courage to practice what you’ve learned. If you do, it will be worth every drop of sweat on your brow as you take those steps. The self-
respect inherent in boundary setting will crowd out baseless shame; the two can’t coexist within you. Self-respect is a light that chases away the shadow of shame.

Have that awkward conversation you’ve been avoiding. There are certain kinds of conversations it takes guts to initiate. Breaking up with someone is, for most of us, one of them. Apologizing to your adult child may be another. Each time you put yourself in the line of fire to speak or hear a bitter truth, you’re telling yourself, “This is difficult, but it’s important, and I’m strong enough to withstand the discomfort of it. If it doesn’t go well, I can apologize and ask for a do-over.” If that doesn’t make you at least a little bit proud of yourself, I don’t know what will.

As a general guideline, anything that requires you to actively accept yourself as you are, or to treat yourself as you would a valued friend, is a salve for injured self-esteem. Once your self-esteem starts to heal, and unneeded shame to dissipate, your bucket will fill up more quickly from self-care and through your other relationships. It may even grow in capacity, so that you can play the Parent to your adult child more easily and for longer periods.

Tina Gilbertson is a psychotherapist and author of Reconnecting with Your Estranged Adult Child. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Glamour, Real Simple and Redbook. In 2019, Tina cofounded www.ReconnectionClub.com, offering education, community, and support to help estranged parents repair their relationships with their adult children. Originally from Vancouver, B.C., Canada, she now lives in Denver, CO. Find out more about her work at www.TinaGilbertson.com.

Excerpted from the book Reconnecting with Your Estranged Adult Child. Copyright ©2020 by Tina Gilbertson. Printed with permission from New World Library.

Do you think that at a spiritual level, men and women are fundamentally different? I'm asking because it seems true to me. I've found that I can usually communicate with women at a much deeper level than with men. When I have been able to really communicate with men, they do seem to be very different at their core. I recently read somewhere that women are in general more spiritually evolved than men; that as we evolve, we naturally incarnate more as women because of our energy/vibration, and because it takes a higher vibration to bring a child through from Spirit into this world. This "evolutionary model" would explain why women are generally more sensitive and intuitive, and also peace-loving. What do you think of this notion? I'm not asking to bash men, but rather because in these modern times, we're force fed the idea that men and women deep down are the same, but they don't "feel" the same to me - they feel fundamentally different. Maybe men and women have so much trouble understanding each other because at a deep level, we're really not the same? Thanks for all you do!

- Linda

Dreamchaser:

I do not think men and woman are fundamentally different on a soul level. I think we are souls stuck inside of human bodies, and those bodies come with heads full of "logic" and raging hormones and a whole host of other mortal things. As a result, we are bound by our humanity in many ways.

I have told so many clients what I am about to say, so if you have heard it already, skip over this part or just let your eyes glaze over for a while. Women tend to be emotionally driven. We get turned on by what we feel emotionally. We can turn off our bodies and our physical needs, but we cannot turn off our "hearts."

Men, on the other hand, tend to be physically driven. Men are turned on by what they see, touch, taste, smell, feel, etc. They can turn off their emotions, but they cannot turn off their bodies. These are not spiritual differences but physical differences that arise from our roles in procreation.

This is the reason why women appear to develop much deeper bonds with other women, and why we feel our friendships are different from the way men are friends. Despite all of this, I'm here to tell you that men can be just as open, caring, sharing, giving and receiving as women.

Throughout my life I have been blessed to have all kinds of people for friends. I have friends who work for the president of the United States and I have friends who went to prison and all sorts of friends in between. I can get just as "deep" with the men as I can the women once the men trust me enough to let me into their emotions. I can also tell you that some men can be kinder and sweeter than any woman on earth, especially in times of crisis.

I feel you personally have a hard time relating to and opening up to men, and that this stems from things that happened to you in the past. You feel the need to defend yourself against men instead of opening yourself up to them, and this is causing you to miss out on a lot.

I know my life has been very balanced as a result of having my nurturing, loving women friends along with my macho but also very loving male friends. As an example, when my father died, two friends came and sat with me. The first was a female friend. She sat with me and "talked to" my soul and helped me remember that Daddy was in a better place, etc.

My male friend came later and put his arm around me, and I got to fall into a great big chest and cry. This is how he nurtured my "emotions." So you see - you too can have the best of both worlds.

I wish you healing so that you can enjoy all that men have to offer as EQUAL spiritual beings.

*****

Astrea:

Men and women are different PHYSICALLY. Sometimes we approach problems in different ways, but that depends on who we are as individuals, not on our gender. People are people, and there is a huge worldwide conspiracy afoot to separate and divide us!

Not only do the Evil Ones want to divide men and women, they want to divide us by race, religion, economy, sexual orientation, lifestyle, etc. You NAME it, kiddo! By dividing us, they take away our power as a whole. This means that the people who get rich from wars and other types of conflict can get much richer. If they keep stirring the pot, we will NEVER unite to bring an end to hunger, stop wars and other conflicts, or enjoy complete freedom of thought.

Every day I hear people say things like, "Well, that's a MAN for you, they have to be right all the time!" or "She changes her mind too much, but that's a woman for you!"

I assure you there are just as many men who frequently change their minds and just as many women who feel a need to be right all the time. We are the SAME. Sometimes we process things differently, but again, those differences are individual, not gender-driven.

Also, anyone who has lived a good number of past lives has been both male and female. When I do past life readings, people are usually downright SHOCKED to learn that they have been the "opposite" gender in another life. "How could I have ever been a MAN?" "You mean I was a GIRL?!"

We are ALL at one time or another a mother, father, son, daughter, friend, spouse and lover. People are people, and at the core, we are all the same. We all experience the highest highs and the lowest lows because we all have the SAME FEELINGS inside!

If you prefer to speak with women friends about some matters and men friends not at all, that's your decision. (That's not based on your gender either, but your own personal preferences.) Don't be BRAINWASHED by popular culture into thinking what THE EVIL ONES want us to believe - that there is no way we can see eye to eye with one another.

Don't let the medieval notion that men and women are spiritually different poison your consciousness! The propaganda to KEEP US APART is vicious and strong. Saying that women are more "spiritual" than men is just falling into a trap that's been set for us for CENTURIES; it's just like saying boys are better at math and science than girls.

I hope you re-examine this idea and hold it up to the light of TRUTH. You'll only share your spiritual path with half of the world unless you look for and embrace all the potential you encounter.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.