How to Reconnect with an Estranged Adult Child by Calming Your Righting Reflex

Episode 205:  How to Reconnect with an Estranged Adult Child by Calming Your Righting Reflex 

What if the harder you try to help your adult child, the more they pull away? 

In this episode, we talk about why your adult child won’t talk to you, how our child-centered parenting culture has increased anxiety for both parents and kids, and how that anxiety is now playing out in your relationship with your grown child. 

Tina Gosney is a family conflict coach and family life educator. This episode is grounded in a research-based article from Family Process called “Balanced Parenting,” which uses Bowen Family Systems Theory to explain why so many loving parents feel responsible for their adult child’s emotions—and why that often backfires. 

This episode is for you if: 

• You’re wondering, “Why won’t my adult child talk to me?”
• You feel like “my adult child is pulling away” and you’re walking on eggshells
• You’ve searched for “how to reconnect with an estranged adult child” or “how to fix a broken relationship with adult child”
• You sometimes think, “I feel rejected by my adult child” and don’t know how to make it better
• You’re scared this might end in adult children cutting off parents, and you don’t want that to be your story

You’ll see how our anxious, child-focused culture trained you to over-function for your child’s emotions, and how that same pattern can make adult children feel watched, judged, or controlled.
 

What we cover:
 

• What the research on Balanced Parenting says about parents taking on too much emotional responsibility
• How the righting reflex (the urge to fix, correct, and rescue) shows up in parenting adult children relationships
• How anxiety gets passed around the family system when no one has learned to manage their own
• Why your adult child may shut down or distance themselves when you’re “only trying to help”
• A new, balanced, differentiation-based approach that helps you calm yourself instead of trying to manage your adult child

You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of the big picture—and some first steps to start changing

 If you’re tired of reacting to what’s happening in your family and want more internal calm and confidence, I’d love to support you. Reset to Connection runs live February 2–6 at 9 a.m. Mountain Time, with short daily sessions and replays available.  We'll focus on getting off the emotional roller coaster and creating confidence. The registration link is below. 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

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: 0:51

Welcome to coaching your family relationships podcast, if you're a new listener, then welcome if you're an old time, long time listener, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and family life educator. Today I'm talking about something that sits right at the center of modern parenting and of our culture and as it affected all of us, this is the writing reflex, and this is how it shows up in a very child centered, anxiety filled world. And I'm going to ground it in real research, not just in opinion. So there's a new review article in the journal family process, and this article is called balanced parenting, proposing a differentiation based parenting approach informed by bow and family systems theory. This is by Elizabeth Miller and Camille Elder. Now don't worry if you didn't understand the title, you don't have to understand the title, because I'm going to break it all down for you. What they looked at was how we are parenting in an anxious, child filled, Child Focused parenting culture, and it connects it to Bowen family systems theory. Now Bowen family systems theory is probably something that you've heard me mention, if you've listened to this podcast very often, because this is the heart. This is the heart of what I do is I work with Bowen family systems. This article that I'm going to review is going to help explain why you feel the way that you do as a parent, why you have reacted and parented the way that you have and why your adult child is responding the way that they are. Okay? So let's get into the big picture. You have been parenting inside a very anxious culture, inside a very anxious story. For decades, you've been swimming in cultural messages

that sound like this: 2:52

Good parents stay close to their children, are tuned in to their children's needs. A good parent anticipates their child's needs and gets out in front of them. A good child or a good parent protects their kids from distress and protects them from making mistakes. So this balanced parenting article shows that over time, parents have stopped seeing kids as these resilient, sturdy, capable humans, and started seeing them as easily damaged, fragile and anxious. And what did loving parents do? Of course, they stepped up and gave more time, more emotional energy, more mind and mental energy as well, and more watching for signs that something could be wrong. And this is not because you're needier controlling. It's because the culture told you that if your child struggles, then you missed something. It's your fault that your child is struggling, so you need to be more vigilant. You need to give more time, more emotional energy, and you better not miss any of the signs. That's what your culture told you. Now, research shows in this article that most parents now feel responsible for their child's internal emotional state. From a coaching perspective, I know that it is not even possible for us to be responsible for anyone's internal emotional state. So what if your child is anxious? Culture tells you you must have done something wrong. What if your child is unhappy? Culture says you should fix it. What if your child is struggling? Well, culture says, but also it probably sounds like the own, your own voice inside of your head, and that says, well, then you should have stepped in sooner. So of course you're anxious, of course you feel pressure, and of course you feel responsible. And the painful twist that this research, research keeps finding is that when parents over function emotionally for their kids, that means when you are doing the emotional work for them instead of with them. Kids actually become more anxious and less able to manage themselves. So in a boiling it down to one, concise point is good intentions carry too far, have consequences. How is this showing up in your family system? We're going to put Bowen family systems theory on top of that. Research in a family system, anxiety moves between people. It doesn't just live inside one person. Anxiety is contagious. Think of like you know seeing a stream, or, let's just say, like a pond of still water, and you throw a rock into it, and how it ripples out, all the water is affected. Now. All the water is moving. This is the same thing that happens inside of a family. A family might be calm, and then one anxiety situation gets thrown in there, one person has an issue, or a situation happens, and it causes one person to be anxious, and then that anxiety ripples out through the family. So when the child is anxious, the parent get anxious, and then the parent tries to calm down their own anxiety by fixing the child's anxiety, and by trying to fix the child's anxiety, the child then feels anxious about the parent. This is called the righting reflex. This is the automatic urge to right the ship, to fix, to advise, to correct, to rescue, so that you can feel calmer inside. Lots of times, and most of the time, we don't even realize that's what we are trying to do. We think we're just trying to help them and make their life better, and we want all these things for them. But the truth is, if we really can dig down, if we have enough self awareness to know that if they feel good, then I feel good, then we realize that we're doing this partly for ourselves as well. So this might sound like you saying something like,"have you tried X, Y, Z...""You know what you should do..." Or, "let me tell you what worked for me when I was your age..." So this comes from love. It also comes from anxiety,balanced parenting. This article talks about parents over function over functioning. Emotionally. Remember taking on more responsibility for your child's life and feelings. That is actually helpful. This is what it looks like. And the thing is, this does not end when they magically turn 18. When we go back to Bowen family systems theory, it says when parents stay emotionally over focused on a child, the pattern just changes shape. So it goes from packing their lunches and making sure their homework is done to making sure they have good friends, to tracking careers, partners, spiritual choices and their mental health. Your child grows up, but the anxiety pattern does not it just miss and change. It morphs and changes. So now when your 28 year old child says, you know, work's been really rough. What your nervous system hears is, there's an emergency here. I got to help. I need to say the right thing. I have to fix this. And the writing reflex kicks in before you even know what you're doing. So I want to paint a picture for you what this might feel like a little closer to home. Let's just say, you know your adult child calls you and says, I am so overwhelmed, I don't even know if I like this job anymore. And you feel your body tense up. You feel it constrict. Your heart starts to beat harder and faster, and your brain starts getting really panicky and thinking, really, your thoughts are spinning really quickly. And so you start to think like, what if they quit and they can't pay their rent? What if they stay there and they just live, give their life, and they just get depressed and they're so sad for the rest of their life? Or if I don't say anything, am I being a bad parent? And so instead of like, you know, trying to fix those things, you jump in and you say, Well, maybe you should start looking for something more stable. Or, you know, when I was your age, I stuck it out and it paid off for me. Or you can't just quit without a plan. Have you thought this through? So from your side, it's love and guidance, and it's being a responsible parent from their side. It lands like, Oh, you don't think I can handle my own life, or, Oh, you're more anxious about this than I am. Or I can't just feel something around you without being corrected. You're always correcting me. What do people do when they experience someone else trying to manage them? Well, the first thing we do is pull away. Research on autonomy shows that unsolicited advice in adulthood often feels like a threat to independence. It does not feel supportive. So you end up in this awful paradox. The more I try to help, the more distant they become. Now I always know, and this article actually points out that parents are going to have a lot of objections to this type of balanced parenting, rather than an anxious. Failed child centered parenting. So I'm going to go over some of the objections that you could have going through your head. And these actually are just baked into our culture. So they are very, very understandable. The first one is, but what if they make a terrible mistake? So what you're picturing is real world consequences that have. Those are these have a big impact on their life, addiction, divorce, job loss, leaving a faith, losing money, the balanced parenting research points out that our culture has become so highly anxious about the rising generation and parents are told repeatedly that if something goes badly, it's because they were not attentive enough. So of course, you think if I don't warn them, then I'm failing. But the hard truth from research says trying to prevent every mistake actually interferes with their ability to learn how to manage life and their own anxiety. What they don't learn when you step in is I can feel afraid and still move forward. I can recover from a bad choice. I can sit with discomfort and problem solve. But instead, when you step in, what they learn is, when I'm scared, when I don't know what to do, when I'm anxious, someone else is going to take over and do it for me, and then they grow up without having practiced managing their own anxiety and solving their own problems. The second objection I think you might have is, you know what they need my wisdom. I have so much wisdom. I have lived through a lot of things, and I have a lot to share with them. Now, I do not doubt this. I know you have survived, survived hard things. I know you have decades of hard, real world life experience. And this article balanced parenting does not argue that parental wisdom is bad. It argues that when your parental guidance replaces their own thinking and coping over and over and over again, they become more dependent and more sensitive to other people's reactions. So I want you to think about that they become hypersensitive to your disappointments, your worry, your tone of voice, and if they're becoming more hyper sensitive to you, who else do you think they're becoming hypersensitive to everyone else in their life, and that is not what you want, because that fuels more and more anxiety. So your wisdom is real, but the way it's delivered can keep them emotionally younger than their actual age. For example, the old pattern might look like, Hey, listen, I've been married for 35 years. You can't just bail, because this is hard, but the impact on them says I can't talk honestly with you about my relationship unless I'm doing what you approve of. Third objection, I think that you might or probably have, because it's very cultural, is if I don't say something, then I'm a bad parent. And this is a big one, because the balanced parenting article points out that modern parenting culture often says evolvement equals love, silence or stepping back equals neglect. So when you try to give them space and not fix their problems, your own anxiety starts to scream at you. It says you're abandoning them. You have to do something. It's your job to fix this. This is not you being dramatic. This is cultural conditioning, plus that anxiety that I told you that ripples throughout a family system. This is those two things speaking so loudly, screaming at you. No wonder you're having some anxiety when you pull back the fourth objection I think you have, but I'm their parent, they should want to hear what I think. Don't they want to hear what I think. You know, when they were younger, they did want to hear what you think they needed for you to be in charge. They didn't know how to keep themselves alive without you. They looked to you for safety and guidance. They looked to you because they weren't sure how they fit and who they were in this big, scary world. But here's what Bowen theory and the balanced parenting research both say, that healthy development means resolving this, this original bonding, this original attachment, that we are one person, and it means that we slowly become. Two separate, connected adults, and we have to do that emotionally. If that emotional separation does not happen, then when we stay close, it's not usually sweet, if we're still bonded into the one emotional unit, that's usually when we get into a lot of conflict, or that's when we keep things really fake peace, you know, like where we don't talk about things because we don't want to go there. And so we keep things very surface, or we're not close, and we just emotionally cut off and distance. And so when you say they should want to hear what I think, what you might really be saying is I don't know how to relate to them if they're a separate adult and they have different inner world than I do. But this is actually just a growth edge for you. This is not a character flaw, and it's probably something that no one has ever taught you how to do, and maybe you've actually never seen anyone who's done this, because it's very common to just have people in your life that are emotionally one unit and have not separated from each other. You might not have an example of what this looks like in your life. So this just means this is a growth edge. This is just somewhere that you can grow, and when you grow, it actually helps your child to grow as well. Here's the fifth and final objection that I think you might have, which is, they used to come to me for everything, and now they don't, and that really hurts. And why do we think this? Because we've been living inside of a story where my closeness, my involvement, my fixing, is what makes me a good parent, and when they don't need me anymore, it feels like rejection and failure and proof that I did things wrong. That's really painful. The balanced parenting research actually offers you some hope here, because it suggests that moving into a differentiation based approach. Remember, that was in the title, probably something you didn't know it meant, but it's a differentiation based approach. It can relieve parent guilt and burnout, and it can make real lasting connection more likely you are not bad. The cultural script is bad. You've been acting out that script in a system that passes anxiety around from person to person, and a culture that told you this is the way it is supposed to be. Now, what is differentiation based parenting? This is different differentiation based? Well, if you listen to this podcast, just about every episode will give you some differentiation based ideas, issues. I probably don't often say differentiation. I don't remember, actually, if I do how often I say it, because I don't really go back and listen to my own podcast episodes. But this is the heart of what I do, is teaching a differentiated self. And so everything that I point you towards is differentiation. So you don't have to actually know what that means. Just listen to the podcast, listen to more episodes, and you'll start to see what that means. So we're going to put this all together. This is how anxiety gets passed down. Your culture tells you you're responsible for your child's emotional world, and so you work hard because you're a good parent. You work hard to track and fix your child's every distress. Your child grows up in an environment where someone else manages their anxiety for them, and then they become adults who haven't had much practice managing big feelings themselves, so now they're anxious too, and they often feel watched, evaluated or even handled by you, and now everyone is anxious and everyone is trying to manage everyone else. This is a family problem, a family systems problem, not individual defects and not individual failures. We cannot look at families as individuals. They are more helpful to look at us as a collective system, and their research is very clear. This pattern that I just described to you is now widespread across all social classes and across all communities. This is not just you and it's not just your family. This is a culture wide. Culture, wide process that we're going through. Let's go into how we shift. And I just want to warn you ahead of time that you're going to have some objections to what I say, because you've been used to the child centered focus parenting, and when we start to change things, our anxiety kicks up. So when I say these things, if you feel more anxious, you're you're on the right track. Actually, that's understandable and it's expected. And so our job is to learn how to manage our own anxiety, and I'm going to show you with some examples of how to do that. So the balanced parenting article proposes balanced parenting. This is a differentiation based approach grounded in Bowen family systems theory in simple language. This means I stop trying to manage my adult child's inner world, and I start managing myself in my relationship with them. they are still struggling when they are 25, 35, or 45 I failed, but balanced parenting, plus this Bowen family systems perspective says growth doesn't stop at 18, my adult child is still developing an identity, building resilience and learning emotional regulation, and now my job is to give them the room to do that, and that continues throughout their life and throughout your life as well. So when your child chooses a partner that you wouldn't don't want for them, changes faith pass, leaves a safe career. You can work towards saying this is really scary for me, and I am feeling a lot of anxiety right now, and I am working on calming myself, myself down so I can still be close to them while they figure it out that is differentiation. You are separate people, but you are still connected and supportive. So let's bring this home. How has this shown up in your family? I want you to really take this in. This is those the water that you've been swimming in. You've been parenting inside an anxious child centered culture. The culture taught you to feel responsible for your child's inner life, and then the family system passed anxiety around from you to them and back again, and your writing reflex is not you being overbearing or controlling? It's you trying to calm a system that no one taught you how to manage. I want you to ask yourself very gently, where have I stepped in to manage my child's feelings instead of my own? And ask this question when my adult child pulls away, how do I usually react? Do I try to fix it? Do I chase them? Do I shut down? And one more question, how might my anxiety, not just theirs, be shaping our relationship right now, I am not telling you to love your child less I am inviting you to love them differently, with more steadiness, more respect for autonomy and more responsibility for taking care of your side of the emotional Street. Now, if this is happening in your family, if today's episode has resonated with you, you know it's time to reach out for help if you are constantly replaying conversations in your head, the conversations that you had with them in your head, if they're just replaying on on a loop, or if you're afraid to bring up certain topics because you don't want to push them further away, or if you are feeling sick and worried with guilt but you don't know what to do differently, this is Your signal that you do not have to keep doing this alone. And if you would like to find someone to work through this with you, I would be honored to be that person who helps you with this. I do want you to remember relationship repair starts with you. You are absolutely capable of becoming the steady, grounded present your adult your adult child can trust. I'll meet you back here next week.