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.
The price of positive change is fear. Several different species of fear may crop up in the attempt to change how you communicate. Let’s look at the fears that might show up when you consider adopting a clear, direct communication style.
Fear of being vulnerable. Open and honest communication requires us to expose our true thoughts and feelings. Once those are out of our mouths, they can be criticized, ridiculed, or rejected. When we’re not used to being vulnerable, it seems safer to stay a little closed off, and even to be vague at times in what we say. Without built-in deniability, we feel like sitting ducks.
Fear of conflict. What if we say something that someone else disagrees with? Or worse, what if it hurts or offends someone to hear what we have to say? Expressing ourselves clearly and directly invites the last thing most of us want in our lives: conflict. Fear of conflict is as common as conflict itself. That’s probably because we humans can be pretty bad at managing it. But conflict is a necessary part of relationships. It’s born out of different people having different points of view, which is inevitable. We can learn to tolerate conflict by coming through it repeatedly without lasting damage.
Fear of the unknown. What would happen if everyone owned and openly expressed their thoughts and feelings? Who knows? Familiarity is a balm, even when our familiar patterns of communication are not the best way, or even the easiest. But for parents with estranged adult children, those familiar ways of communicating are often part of the problem. There comes a point when the fear of the unknown starts to be eclipsed by the fear of things staying as they are. Estrangement can create such a turning point.
Fear of intimacy. Those of us who don’t like to let others get too close may feel threatened by the idea of using clear and direct communication ourselves, even if we appreciate it in others. Sharing our true thoughts, feelings, and needs is akin to letting a listener get to know our real selves. And many of us have an unconscious habit of keeping ourselves hidden unless we know we’re safe from judgment or personal attacks.
Changing the Pattern
Why does all this concern with communication matter for the estrangement with your child? Isn’t it too late for the family to improve communication? Yes and no. Your child might never move back in with you (although in this day and age, you never know), but you can still be the vanguard of a new wave of clear, direct communication in your family. In every estrangement, there are emotions at play. Even if your child expresses nothing but apathy toward you, he didn’t start out apathetic. Voluntary estrangement is motivated by emotion. And if you’re going to get to the bottom of it and help your child heal whatever needs healing, you’ll want the best communication tools you can muster, with emotional literacy as the centerpiece.
To make sure communication goes well with your estranged child when you have contact, you’ll need to understand how to respond if your child gets triggered even by calm, clear, direct, ownership-taking statements from you. The more adept you are at identifying and tolerating your own feelings, the easier it will be for you to respond appropriately to theirs. You’ll also want to be able to differentiate between their feelings and yours, so you can hear that they’re angry or hurt without becoming angry or hurt yourself. This takes lots and lots of practice. So why not start today?
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.