Why Needing to Be Right and Staying in Control Are Hurting Your Relationship with Your Adult Child

Episode 198 - Why Needing to Be Right and Staying in Control Are Hurting Your Relationship with Your Adult Child

"Why won’t my adult child talk to me?"
If you’ve found yourself asking that question, you're not alone—and this episode is for you.

I’m Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and family life educator. In this special rebroadcast, I’m bringing back two powerful episodes because the messages inside them are so important. They highlight two common, but losing strategies in family relationships: the need to be right and the need to stay in control.

These patterns show up in nearly every strained parent-adult child relationship, especially in families experiencing emotional distance, conflict, or even estrangement. If you're searching for how to reconnect with an estranged adult child or wondering how to fix a broken relationship with your adult child, this is where you start.

Most parents don’t realize they’re relying on these strategies—but they often show up as walking on eggshells, trying to get your child to understand your point of view, or needing them to see you in a certain way. These are protective strategies, but they push your child further away.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How the need to be right can damage trust and lead to long-term disconnection
• Why trying to control how your adult child behaves, thinks, or sees you often backfires
• What’s happening in your brain that keeps you repeating these ineffective patterns
• How to stop the cycle and start building a healthier, more respectful relationship

If you've been asking “why does my child hate me?” or feel like “my adult child is pulling away,” this episode will help you understand what’s really going on underneath those feelings—and what you can do about it.

This is about more than just improving communication. It’s about emotional maturity in parent-adult child dynamics, and learning to respond with grace and strength—so you can create connection without control.

Let’s Connect:
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Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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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: 0:41

I remember being in a meeting a few years ago this, oh, this is probably about 10 years ago. You know how some things just stick with you? Well, this thing just stuck with me. The teacher in this class said, she said, You can be right or you can be happy. And I remember thinking, why can't I be both? Why can't I have both? What's wrong with having both of those things? Can I have both? And maybe you're asking yourself that same question right now, well, the answer is, sometimes yes, sometimes no, if you need to be right, and you're willing to fight for it, you're going to alienate other people around you, and people will not want to be around you if you do that. And humans need relationships with other people. And so when we alienate other people, we're alienating part of ourselves. We are not filling a need that a very internal need that we all have. We're all like pack animals. We're tribal. We need people. When we alienate them, we drive people away. When we have to be right, we drive people away. Now these losing strategies that I'm going to be going over this is these come from Terry real. He is one of my mentors that I've learned a lot from, and he talks about these losing strategies. The first one that we're going over today is that we need to be right. So one of our brain's jobs actually is to prove that we're right. Our brain is programmed to be right, and this gets us into trouble. I was at an event this past weekend that I thought, oh, I need to incorporate this story into this podcast that's going out soon. I was, Are you familiar with the chosen? That TV series The chosen. It's a series about the life of Christ and His Apostles and his followers, really from their point of view. And at this chosen event, they had several of the cast members come and speak and share stories with us about how they got involved in the chosen and how it had changed their lives. And I thought it was really good, very interesting to hear what they were saying and just a different perspective, kind of like a behind the scenes type thing. Well, in this show, the chosen there, you know, it is the life of Christ. So there are Pharisees in the story and in the series, and one of the men that plays the the main Pharisee. I'm going to, I'm probably not going to say his name, right? Sean Sharma, I think is his name, but he plays one of the main Pharisee characters. And I think you say his name, Shmuel. I could be also. I could be butchering these names. I don't know if I am, but he plays the main Pharisee that it's always like butting heads with Jesus and butting heads with the with his apostles. And it was very interesting what he said, since he's been playing this character, he said people will come up to him and they will say to him, you know, I really don't like you. Well, I mean, I really don't like the character that you play, because that character you play, he just refuses to admit that he's wrong. He always has to be right all the time, even when evidence of truth is right in front of him, he has to be right and has to discount it in some way. And he said he mentioned this man that was giving this presentation. He said, he mentioned that the cast was talking about this and how they noticed that so many of us today are like Shmuel. We refuse to see anything but our own point of view and what we think is right, even if there's evidence right in front of us that something else could be true, we fight for our own point of view without even trying to see a different one. This is what our brain is actually programmed to do. Our brain thinks something, looks for evidence that that thought is true, filters out evidence that prove it not true, and then it convinces us that this is the right way, this is truth. These are the lenses, then, that we see the world through what our brain has chosen to focus in on and show us evidence for the truth of it. Now our brain is only showing us things that prove our thoughts true. 99.9999% of information that is coming at us each and every day is filtered out. So if our brain didn't filter we would be incredibly overwhelmed by the world and all the stimulus coming in at us. We would not be able to function, because we would be overwhelmed our brain. Is actually doing us a favor. It needs to filter out things, and it is trying to help us stay alive in the most efficient way possible. So it filters out information, but it filters the way it decides to filter is really important. Now your brain is also like, I like to equate it to one of those 24 hour news stations, the ones that have, you know a person talking, usually there's a person talking on the screen, and then there's headlines that run along the bottom of the screen. And those are like ticker tape. They just keep, like, going past us right on the screen. And we can, we can focus on those. We can focus on the person that's talking. But someone is always talking. Something is always going on. In fact, I don't know how many headlines go across the screen every day, but like in a 24 hour period, I have no idea how many headlines go across the screen, but our brain has probably they say 60,000 there's different depending on who you listen to, who you talk to, 60,000 thoughts a day. That's an incredible amount of thoughts. Many of those thoughts our brain just thinks without us even realizing that we're thinking it. It just does it in the background. So there are thoughts that are big, that we notice and we see them. They're like the big talking head on the screen right. We see them, we hear them. We know that they're there. They're just like those talking heads on the news station. But there are many, many, many more thoughts that are running like the headlines, that are running like little ticker tape across the screen, and those are running through our head in the background. Sometimes, while those thoughts are running, it's like we take the TV remote and we push pause and we focus. We pick out one of those thoughts that's just running through. We pick it out, we stop and we focus on it, and we grab onto it, and we give it a spot on the big screen. And then that becomes what the talking head is saying whatever thought we're giving our attention to. It's like giving our brain a job to do, and our brain says, Oh, so this is what we're focusing on right now. Okay, let me find all the ways that this is true. Now, your brain loves a job. It's always looking for something to do to keep you safe and alive. When you start to focus on a certain way of thinking, it's really exciting for your brain to start looking for ways to prove you right, because all of a sudden it has a job to do. It's very excited to get a job. So I want you to think about how your brain does this. You decide what to focus on, and it gets a big space inside your brain, and then your brain goes to find evidence that it's true, filtering out other things, and then that's how you see the lens. That's the lens that you see the world through. Think about how everybody has a brain. We all focus on slightly different thoughts, or maybe even very different thoughts. This means we all see the world a little or a lot differently than anyone else. This is why I say over and over again, you don't see the world as it is. You see the world as you are, you are seeing the world through the filter that you've created in your life and in your brain. And when you get in a disagreement with someone, could it be possible you are both seeing what your brain is showing you both thinking that you are right and not seeing how any sane person could think differently, right? Sometimes we tell ourselves that, how could any sane person think the way that that person is thinking? It becomes like a tug of war, both sides pulling trying to convince the other person that they're right, maybe the other group that they're right. Think about when someone is pulling against your beliefs, and they're telling you that you're wrong. What do you do? Well, you probably hold on to them more tightly, and you start to view that other person as an unsafe person, or that other group as an unsafe group. It does not make us want to be around them more or listen to anything that they have to say, we're very unlikely to say, Oh, you're right. I see how wrong I was. Now I totally agree with you. I can see that I've been wrong this whole time. That doesn't happen. Instead, we hold onto our beliefs more tightly. We grab onto them, and we learn that that person is not a safe person to open up to and to express our thoughts and beliefs to, so we're more likely to not open up to the what the other person is trying to tell us that they think is true. So this is how it can ruin relationships. It leads to disconnection, hiding. Severed relationships. Having to be right can show up in sneaky ways. And I kind of mentioned one before, but I'll go into it again in a little bit more depth. We think a normal person would see it like this. If you were normal, you would see it the way I see it. What's wrong with you that you don't see it the way I see it? There must be something wrong with you, and then we seek out other people who will confirm our view and our rightness. We call this collecting allies to prove that air quotes a normal person thinks this way, and this is the another air quote, right way to think. This is a defensive position. It keeps us from self confronting, asking ourselves if something else could also be true this. How does it? How does being having to be right show up in sneaky ways? Well, another thing that we think in the way that we do this is my reality is the only right reality. So we do things like I'm going to send you an article, a TED Talk, a scripture reference, a spiritual talk, some type of authority based media so that you can see how wrong you are, we pull in the experts to show you that you're wrong. Sometimes we do this in a way of saying, look, it's not just me that thinks you're wrong. All these experts that have all of this education, they think you're wrong too. And sometimes we do this because we're trying to get the other person to think differently. I'm not going to say it's always coming from a place of like accusatory or like an accusatory or an ego position. Sometimes it comes in because we are so afraid for what the other person is doing, for what we see them doing. We can be so afraid to for them to continue on the path that they're on that we need to do all we can do to get them to change course. So we think, if it's not just us that is telling them that they're wrong, but these others, experts over here, are also saying it that's going to convince them to change course and to do things differently. The way we try to control others is just a reflection of how we're dealing with and trying to control ourselves. That's why we should always look inward. First, a few months ago, I was in a situation where I was one member of a group of people who were in charge of facilitating an event, and the event went really well in some ways, and in other ways, it went really not well, but there was one member of the group that was facilitating who really, really struggled during the event, and I could see her brain working to try to find safety and belonging. Things were not going the way that she wanted them to, and her brain was in fight or flight. I could see she was not thinking clearly and looking back at it now, I saw her doing things like as she was seeing things through a lens of unsafety, that she was acting in a way that was very defensive, and I think she was trying to control the narrative the way that other people were thinking of her by doing things like overly explaining things a lot about her position, or bringing up this, this event afterwards in conversations, so that she could clarify, again, clarify her position, right? In a way, it was a kind of like damage control, because I think she was really trying to control the way that other people were seeing her. I have so much compassion for this person, because I know it can be so so emotionally difficult to be in that position and think that other people are not thinking well of us, or that maybe they have a negative a view of us, right? Isn't it interesting that we all think that we can control the way that another person thinks of us? I don't think the person from this story I'm describing is unique in this I think we all have tried to control the way that other people think of us. In fact, I just saw myself doing this a few days ago, on a smaller scale, I sent a text to someone explaining more than I really needed to, just so they knew my my interpretation of the events, of the event that was happening, of the situation that we were in, and so she would know where I was coming from. I saw myself doing it because I wanted to have some control in the way she was thinking of me and the narrative she was creating in her brain about me, and I really don't have any control of that, just like she doesn't have any control the way I think about her. But we all do this. We have all been guilty of trying to control the way that I. Other people think of us, one of the things that our brain wants to do is it wants to control our environment and people. Other people are part of our environment. When we do this, it gets us into trouble. But we have this need. Our brain has this need for certainty, it needs to know that we can control and that things are going to be a certain way. Life, though, is inherently uncontrollable and uncertain, and one of the variables in our lives that are uncontrollable and uncertain is other people. We have no ability to control what someone else thinks, even though our brains tell us that we do one another thing that our brain likes to do is it likes to learn how to do something and then repeat it over and over again. One of the things that it learns is a certain way to think. So our brain starts creating thoughts that go in a certain direction, interpreting things a certain way, and then it wants to repeat that over and over and over again by by recreating the same thoughts over and over again. This saves our body and our brain calories when we have to figure out something new, including how to think differently. It takes a lot of calories. Did you know our brain takes up 20% of the calories that we take in every day? 20% that's a lot of calories. Your brain's job is to keep you safe and alive, and when your brain is using up 20% of your caloric intake, it's going to find ways to bring that number down, which means it's going to automate as much as possible to save energy. It can't automate something that it can't predict and count on. So the more uncertainty and unpredictability we have in our lives, the more our brain revolts. It tries to bring things back and interpret things in a way that brings us back to certainty and predictability. But predictability and certainty are not only the things that our brain is looking for, it's also looking for safety. When we know that we're safe, it greatly reduces the uncertainty in that story that I shared with you about the event, and this person who was in fight or flight during that event, she was just trying to feel safe by managing the perceptions that she had of herself and the perceptions that other people had of her, I think so much of our crazy behavior goes back to a fear of losing The love and belonging and safety that we think we have, or just trying to establish that love belonging and safety if we never felt like we had it in the first place. But when we're using that control to try to control our relationships with others, that just does not go well. It's not going to turn out well. And if you're like most of my clients, you think when I talk about control, you're thinking, I am not a person that tries to control. She is not talking to me. But controlling other people can be very sneaky, and it's not always distinguishable on the surface. It really comes down to at its core, to us not being able to deal with our own fears and anxieties, so we're trying to control the outcome of a situation that we're in, or to control the thoughts and behavior of another person. I have just a few examples of what this looks like, but I could talk for an hour about different way. I could give you so many more examples of what controlling other people looks like. One way we do this is we are very inflexible. We think this has to be done. This way, anything else is wrong, and I am not open to other suggestions or points of view, or sometimes we just want to have the focus on us. Have you ever been in a conversation with somebody, you're telling a story, or maybe sharing a difficult situation that you're in, and all of a sudden you're talking about the other person and it's no longer about you, they've changed the subject before you were ever done talking, maybe even in the middle of a sentence, they changed the subject. Or has someone you've shared something and then they had to one up. You You know, like you're having a bad day. Well, they had a much worse day, and they're going to tell you all the reasons why they had a way worse day than you did. Maybe we use sometimes we use criticism. We tell people that they're doing it wrong. This kind of goes back into last week's podcast with needing to be right, because we say, well, there's a right way or a better way to do things, and that's my way, not your way. It's one of the things that we try to control people with or we blame. We blame other people. We don't take responsibility for our own actions. We shift. Blame to someone else. One really common way that we do this is we blame other people for how we are feeling. And really just an example, is we become a victim, right? So every victim needs a villain. When we become a victim, we are powerless, and the other person is becomes a villain, so we become powerless in our own lives, which is really terrible position for us to put our put our own selves in right and but when we do that, we just need to find some way to gain control. So we go around and we tell other people our story. We want to get other people to agree with us. We start collecting allies so that we can all agree that other person is terrible and you are mistreated. That's a really common thing for us to do. We might try to make the other person feel guilty and say things like, Well, I didn't mean it like that. You always take everything so personally, or we might excuse our behavior is just joking, like, Well, that was just a joke. Can't you take a joke? It's really common to try to control people through our emotions that we display. I'm going to go more into this next week, but I want to mention it here, because it is a way that we try to control people. It's very common in households to have one person rule the atmosphere of the home by their emotions, whether that is sadness or sulking or depression or anger or being a victim when they're when they're in the home, everything revolves around them, right? Everybody is trying to manage that person. So it's an attempt to get all the attention on yourself, to use emotions to get other people to do what you want them to do. So these behaviors that I've listed, there's so many more, really, they can become abusive. That doesn't mean that if you're using these, that you're being abusive, but they can if they're crossing a line into trying to gain power and control over another person so that they're feeling intimidated that has crossed the line into abuse. I'm not going to go really into the abuse part of trying to control, but if you are seeing this in your life, and it's crossed a line into abuse, I want you to go find some help in your local community. There are a lot of things that get in our way as we're trying to let go of this losing strategy. We're trying to get rid of it. We don't want to try to control people anymore. There's a lot of things that can get in the way. One thing I think really gets in the way is that we don't even know what we don't know. We don't have the tools to do something different, to create something different. I think that's why it's really important to learn for ourselves, to educate ourselves. This class that I'm registering for is a great place to come and get new tools, so make sure you are signing up for that class. The rest of the reasons that I'm going to give you why this is difficult really boil down to not having a really solid sense of who you are, not being willing to look at yourself and see how you're creating the very thing that is causing you so much pain, and one of those things is a need for validation. This looks like you want to be validated in who you believe that you are, and you want other people to think that same way about you. For example, I've talked to many women who say I need for all of my children's lives to look a certain way, so that I don't feel like I'm a failure, so that can feel like I'm a good mother. I did all the things I was supposed to do, and if they are struggling in their lives, I must have done something wrong, and I don't even know what that was. So I need for my kids to be okay, so that I can be okay, or it might look like this. And I've actually coached a lot of people on the same thing too, as well, and that is the idea that in order for me to be a good person, if somebody asks me to do something, I always have to say, yes, well, they don't even actually have to ask me directly, but if they're asking for volunteers and I'm in the room, then I need to say yes, because that means I'm a good person, and I want to see myself as a good person. So this is how when it's just couple other ways that we look for validation, and when we are not able to get the validation that we want, or we're looking for it outside of ourselves. We do not know how to handle the anxiety. If we can't control all of the inputs into situations in our lives, then we have a lot of anxiety about that, one of the ways they. We do this is over functioning. And that is this thought of like, I can't get anyone else to do this right, so I need to take it over or or I have to micromanage everyone else involved so they don't screw this up. You know, a really good sign of you over functioning and having having that mindset is if you're feeling resentment in your life, resentment is a big red flag. Perfectionism also gets in the way. This is this idea that I need to be the best and not make mistakes or I won't be accepted and loved, and the more perfect I am, the more accepted and loved I will be. So I need to control the way that other people are seeing me, and I need to control myself, and I need to be better, and I need to control the way that I do things. Again. This goes back into that idea that we can control the way that other people think of us right, a really big way, a really big thing that gets in the way of us being able to let go of this need for control is to constantly be looking outside of ourselves for a solution we don't want to look inward and self confront because that is too hard, and that will challenge this view of who I think that I am, and that is too difficult for me to look at. So if I can just get other people to comply, the problem is solved. But this is being this is being blind to ourselves, not being willing to learn how to deal with our own fear and anxiety about the outcome being different than we expected, or even wanting it to be sometimes we demand, and this goes, I think this goes into the abuse category. It could easily cross into abuse, being demanding and threatening to get what you want really does give you a temporary fix to a problem. You know, when you demand that someone else complies with what you want, you might get temporary compliance, but you're also going to get resentment and resistance and passive aggressive behavior in return, and you're also damaging the long term health of their relationship. And there's only so long that that can last before the relationship breaks. You might get to what you want in the moment, but it's at a really great cost. Parents will do this type of behavior all the time, because think of how many times you're trying to get your kids to do something and they are resisting, and you just end up trying to control it's very easy to do, but it's also very costly. It doesn't teach our children that they have their agency. It doesn't teach them how to make good choices for themselves. It teaches them that to get what they want, they need to try to control and manipulate other people. And I know that that sounds really harsh, but it's the truth. And I also know that no parent is perfect at not doing this. We've all resorted to control. We have been desperate, or been in a hurry or just like the stakes were so high that we needed to control something. But when we can open our eyes and see what that what we're doing is costing us a safe, connected relationship with our own child, I think we can do better. My husband, years and years ago, started a new job, and it was in construction, where he was a managing construction crews. And his first week on the job, he got a phone call. He was home at the time, so I saw firsthand this phone call, but he got this phone call, and the person on the other end of the line was just swearing up a storm, and he that just the look on his eyes like that was not something that he an environment that he had been in before, where he was treated that way and talked to that way, and he was told that that was pretty common in the construction industry, to speak and talk to each other that way. Let's fast forward decades later, 20 something years later, and he now manages people used to do his job. And sometimes, as those people are coming in, and they're new, and he's training them, they also will try to use control and threats to get what they want, to get the subcontractors to do what they want, and he has to teach them. He says, We do not use control or threats in this company. We respect each of our subcontractors as business owners, and we treat them with the same respect that we would expect from them. He's had to teach this so many times because people come in to this company with a very different mindset, and they're used to using threats and control to get what they want, but every time they do that, it sacrifices the integrity of the relationship you.