How to Rebuild a Relationship with Your Adult Child - 5 Essential Steps

Episode 173 - How to Rebuild a Relationship with Your Adult Child – 5 Essential Steps

Are you struggling to reconnect with your adult child? Do you feel like no matter what you do, there’s a growing emotional distance? In this episode of The Coaching Your Family Relationships Podcast, we’re exploring five essential steps that will help you mend your relationship and create a foundation for meaningful, lasting connection.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

 Why reflecting on your relationship’s journey is the first step toward healing
 How recognizing emotional triggers can help break unhealthy patterns
 The importance of shifting from fixing to supporting your adult child
How communication style impacts your connection—and what to do differently
Why setting clear, loving boundaries fosters a stronger relationship

Why This Matters

Feeling disconnected from your child—no matter their age—can be heartbreaking. But relationships are not static; they evolve. And while disconnection may have happened over time, rebuilding your bond is absolutely possible when you take intentional steps forward.

Want the Full Step-by-Step Guide?

I’ve created a free training, Healing Your Heart: 5 Steps to Reconnect with Your Adult Child, that walks you through each of these steps in detail, with practical exercises you can start using today. Download it now - click here

Join My Class: Healing Your Relationship with Your Adult Child

If you’re ready to take this work even further, I invite you to my upcoming class where we dive deeper into these steps and give you the tools to repair and strengthen your relationship. Sign up today - click here

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She helps her clients move past contention in their homes and move into connection. Developing healthy family relationships can change lives.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:00

Tina, welcome to your family relationship podcast. I'm your host, Tina Gosney, the family conflict coach. If you're struggling with a difficult relationship with your adult child, then you are not alone. The pain of that disconnection in that relationship. I know can feel so overwhelming, but you know what? Healing is possible? Just keep that in mind. So in today's episode, we're talking about five really critical steps that are going to help you to start mending that relationship. And before we begin, I want to invite you to download my free training. It's called healing your heart, five steps to reconnection with your adult child. This training will walk you through the steps in this podcast, and it's going to go in more depth than we are in this podcast. So it's going to provide you the tools that you need, and walk you through how to use those so that you can really start seeing some significant change, I want you to grab that now. There's a link in the show notes, so go grab that. And then let's get started with the podcast. I heard a motherhood described once as having your heart walk around outside of your body, and I think that is an excellent way to describe the kind of love you feel as a parent, you know, that type of love that you feel as a mother and as a parent is not like any other love that you've ever experienced in your life before, and it can feel so consuming, so overwhelming. I remember when my first child was born, and this was a few decades ago, because she's a full grown person. She's a full grown adult now, but back then, only a couple weeks old, I was a brand new mom, so young, so unprepared, and I was going through all the hormone shifts of after giving birth. I was so incredibly emotional, because that's what happens when your home hormones are just all over the place, but I remember that most of the time, what I felt was just being overcome with this overwhelming, all consuming love that filled my body and just felt like sometimes it was going to consume me. I didn't feel big enough to hold all the love that I had for this tiny little baby that was in my arms. I know so many of you mothers out there can relate to what I'm describing as a mother, there is nothing more painful than feeling disconnected from that child. No matter how old they are. You're disconnected from that heart of yours that's walking around outside of you. So you might find yourself doing things like questioning yourself and wondering where you went wrong, and replaying old conversations like what should I have said differently, and just longing for one more chance to make things right. But the truth is that all relationships, I want you to hear me, all relationships, go through these cycles of connection, disconnection and repair. The challenge is not just about avoiding disconnection, because that's not possible. It's part of the cycle of a relationship. The key is learning how to repair and rebuild in a way that fosters a stronger bond, and not discounting the repair. That repair is such an important part of the process, but it's actually the part of the process that we know the least about, so we usually discount it, or we try to ignore it and just move on, and we don't really address the hurt that's there. But that hurt does not go away over time. It just builds, and it builds on both sides, and it builds to the point where it feels like either you or your child are like being pushed to the edge of a cliff, and there's just one little thing that's going to send you toppling over the edge. So we're going to talk about Repair today. And if you're like most people, you don't know where to start. And so this episode is going to give you a very good idea of where that is. So first, I want you to reflect on the journey of the relationship. Every relationship has a journey. It's super easy to focus on what's happening right now and the pain that you're feeling, but when you step back, you're going to see a lot bigger picture, because that relationship did not become strained overnight. It evolved over time. It was shaped by experiences, by expectations, by unspoken or dismissed emotions. And maybe you have a history of not talking about difficult things or discounting emotions. And maybe you have a history of. Of explosive conflict, conflict, and then not coming back and repairing that conflict and the hurtful conversations to apologize and repair the damage. Whatever your history is, you have a relationship history, and those things build up over time. It's important to address where that build up is. I worked once with a mother who felt like her child completely shut her out. This was a young adult child. She kept reaching out, but every time they were in a conversation, it just ended up in a lot of frustration, and then when she took a step back, she saw a bigger picture of the relationship. She saw moments where her reactions may have caused that young adult child to pull away and grow distant. She saw where she had kind of been demanding in her relationship with her child, and how she had over functioned time and time again, insisting that that child live the way that she had planned on it and didn't listen to what her child wanted. So when she began to see these things, she saw that history for what it was, that it was a journey, and that was really powerful. That realization helped her so much, because it was not about then going into blame to herself, about I should have been better mother. Why didn't I see these things before? It was not about that. It was about understanding how she got there. So you know, in situations, when you begin to see how you contributed to that disconnect. It's really easy to feel guilty and to regret the past, and those feelings, if we don't know how to handle them, they tend to then define us and we keep repeating them. But to help us create something new for the future, we really need to know what to do with those feelings. This kind of reflection is a really crucial first step in my training. That free training. I'm going to walk you through specific questions so you can start seeing what was the evolution of this relationship, and then you can identify maybe something that's getting in the way of the reconnection. The second step is to identify emotional triggers and patterns. So many conflicts will follow a predictable pattern. You say something, your child reacts a certain way. You feel hurt. They feel hurt before you know it. You're both caught in the same argument. You've had how many dozens of times before. And in fact, you can probably predict what each other's gonna say. They know what you're gonna say. You know what they're gonna say. You know each other's actions and reactions. Because we learn each other's patterns, and we learn what to expect from each other. Those patterns are like dance steps. We repeat them over and over again until we're just both doing this dance and we're not even thinking about it. We're just repeating this dance. I once worked with another, a different client, who she kept having the same fight with her daughter about how often they talked. You know, mom wanted daily check ins. Daughter felt suffocated by daily check ins. And then what neither of them realized was all of those fights were fueled by these emotional triggers. And their emotional triggers were these unspoken fears of rejection from the mom and the need for autonomy from the daughter. And when the mother began to see this, she saw, you know, how often that same fear of rejection was carrying over into other ways in their relationship and even beyond the relationship with her daughter, she saw the ways that her daughter was pushing for autonomy and trying to be her own person. It wasn't limited to this conflict over daily check ins. It was a pattern that was repeating itself over and over again. So we don't just operate in one relationship as a bubble how we do one thing is how we do everything. So good for this mom to see this. So the key to breaking these patterns is to begin identifying that. And in my free training, I'm going to guide you through how to uncover those triggers, and you can get unstuck and do approach these conversations differently. Number three is to shift from fixing to supporting, and this is a hard one when you're trying to make the transition of parenting small children or teenagers into parent being a parent of an adult child, even a young adult child, it's really natural to want to protect our children from hard things, from going through difficult things and going through pain. But when we try to constantly fix their problems, they start to feel incapable. They start to feel judged. Change, and sometimes they even become resentful. We also do what we don't want to do, and we stunt their growth. We don't let them take those steps that will help them to become capable mature adults, when we're always stepping in and fixing this is what happens. There are so many parents today who are deathly afraid of letting their young adult children fail, even their adult children, and sometimes they think if their kid fails, it's going to reflect badly on me, and that's a hard thing to see, because we have this idea of how we want to see ourself and when our kid fails and it doesn't reinforce the way that we want to see ourself, we don't know what to do with that, but that's the reality for just about all parents. And if you don't know that you're doing that, then you're going to repeat that pattern over and over again. Sometimes parents think that if they don't step in and help that child succeed, and then that child fails, they're going to feel so guilty, they're going to think, I should have helped, I could have helped them avoid that, and I didn't. And the parent doesn't know what to do with that guilt. It feels like anything to avoid feeling that guilt, so they step in beforehand, because they're predicting that child's going to fail or it's not even an option. So let me step in and fix and they're taking their child's autonomy away from them. They're not seeing what their real role is. Now this is not about the adult child not being able to handle the feelings. This is more about the parent not being able to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings of guilt or the uncomfortable feeling of being seen in a way that I don't want to be seen. I remember talking to a mom once whose son was always coming to her with his financial troubles. He always was having some money issues, and she was immediately jumping in and trying to offer solutions and problem solve and and come on, you just need to be more proactive. You need to do this. You need to do that. But he was not grateful for this. He was not saying, Oh, thanks, mom. That's just what I needed to hear. You know what he did? Instead, he pulled away. He stopped telling her anything about his life. And then when she saw what she was doing, she learned how to stop fixing and start supporting. And when she started doing that, everything changed, because their conversations became more open, and her son felt more comfortable coming to her without that fear of judgment or that he or she was projecting onto him that he wasn't capable of handing this himself. Making this shift is a game changer in that free chain training. I'm going to show you exactly how to adjust your approach so your child feels supported and not controlled. The fourth thing you want to do is practice empathetic communication, because sometimes it's not about what we say, it's about how we say it. That makes all the difference, and even when we have good intentions, which I believe most of the time we really do have good intentions. Our words can still come across if we're not careful, our words come across as critical or dismissive. We don't even realize when we're when they're coming across that way. And I know that's not your intention, but that is how it's being interpreted. This mother that I coached shared with me that every time she went and gave her son advice, he would just shut down. Okay, first of all, he might not have been open to advice, right? But she felt like, Okay, I'm trying to help him, and he's not listening. So we just kind of looked at how she was showing up, and then we realized her tone was carrying this sense of urgency, and he might have been seeing that as pressure, like you need to listen to what I'm saying and you need to do what I'm saying. He was feeling very controlled by that. And then when she learned a new way to communicate, their conversations completely changed. But mom had to take a look at how she was really feeling that urgency that this son follow her advice that she was giving him, even though she was not consciously trying to pressure him. She really was pressuring him because she was thinking, Well, if he doesn't listen to me, he's going to make the wrong decisions. And it wasn't okay for this mom to let her son make his own decisions. She had to learn to talk to him differently, but first she had to check in with herself and talk to herself differently. That step is so powerful, and in this free training, we're going to walk through a method to change. Way you communicate so your child truly hears you and doesn't need to be defensive because your words are critical or dismissive. The last step, step number five, set boundaries, manage expectations, healthy relationships will really thrive when both sides feel respected, and that starts with clear boundaries. This is not about shutting anyone out. It means we're creating this foundation of mutual respect. I worked with this mother once who was constantly exhausted after interactions with her adult daughter, because every phone call, every visit, turned into a vent session where their daughter was unloading all of her marriage problems onto her mother, and the daughter is complaining about her husband, and he was doing this, and he was doing that. He didn't listen to me, and he talked to me this way. She was going into detail about all the things that her husband was doing that frustrated her. What was the daughter not doing? Addressing this with her own husband, so the mom was feeling drained. She didn't know how to say to her daughter, like, this is not okay, because she was feeling guilty. And then when she learned about setting boundaries in this loving way, like loving herself, loving her daughter, loving her daughter, her daughter's husband, that's when things started to change. Their their conversations became more balanced. She didn't feel overwhelmed anymore. Boundaries are not there to push people away. They're there to create safety in relationships, and we're going to go through boundaries in that training, we're going to set boundaries in a way that strengthens, not weakens the relationship. So reconnecting with that adult child does not mean that you're going to fix everything overnight. It means that you're taking small, intentional steps that open the door to healing and safety. I know this is so hard, you do not have to figure it out on your own. That's why I created this free training that healing your heart five steps to reconnect with your adult child, and you're going to find inside that training, step by step, Guide to putting these principles into action, reflection exercises and then practical tools to help you begin to transform that relationship. If you're ready for even more support, I would love for you to join me in a class that is coming up pretty soon. It's March 13, Thursday, March 13, at 6pm Mountain Time. This is called healing your relationship with your adult child. And in that class, we're going to go deeper. We're going to practice new communication still skills. We're going to practice boundaries. We're going to practice how to manage our own emotions and our own intentions, and you're going to develop a personalized plan for reconnecting with your child. There's a link in the show notes, there's a link for downloading the free training and a link to join the class. And if you can't make it that night live, which I would love to make for you to make it live, but if you can't, there will be a replay that I send out. You have to be signed up and registered for the class to get the replay. Thank you for spending time with me today on your family relationship podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe. Leave a review all the things you know, your feedback helps other parents find the support that they need. And I just want to leave you with this one thing, healing takes courage. Every step that you take brings you closer to a stronger, more connected relationship with your child, and it starts with that first step of courage. So until next time, take care. Keep showing up with love and with attention.