How to Deal with Your Adult Child’s Difficult Spouse, part 1

Episode 209 - How to Deal with Your Adult Child's Difficult Spouse, part 1

When your adult child marries someone who brings a lot of anxiety into the family system, everything can start to feel… tense. Gatherings feel loaded. Conversations feel risky. And you can’t even explain why—you just know the vibe has changed.

In this episode, Tina walks parents through the Confusion stage: how anxiety spreads through families, why you feel like you’re walking on eggshells, and what you can do to stay calm, connected, and clear—without blaming, fixing, or taking the bait.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why one person’s anxiety can affect the entire family system
• How to spot anxiety patterns (even when no one is “doing anything wrong”)
• The hidden dynamic that pulls parents into the middle (triangles)
• Why over-functioning and over-explaining can accidentally increase tension
• A simple, practical shift that helps you stop “catching” the anxiety

If you’re in the confusion stage, you’re not crazy. Your nervous system is picking up a real shift. You don’t have to diagnose your adult child’s spouse to begin changing your part in the system.

When one parent becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal.

Coming next

Episode 2 moves into stage two: Self-Blame — why parents turn inward (“This must be my fault”) and how to step out of shame and into mature responsibility. 

If this episode helped, share it with a parent friend who feels like they’re walking on eggshells around their adult child’s spouse. And be sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss the next episode in the series.

 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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If you want support putting what you’re learning into practice, come join The Connection Community in Bridge to Connection. You’ll get step-by-step relationship lessons, practical tools to calm anxiety and reduce conflict, and live monthly coaching calls to help you stay steady and build real connection with your child—especially when things feel tense. Learn more and join at https://www.courageous-connections.com/bridge-to-connection3

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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

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Imagine this scenario. You are standing in your kitchen, staring at your phone, and not even wanting to touch it. Because you just got a text from your adult child and that says, hey, just a heads up. We might not stay very long on Sunday because Sarah's anxiety has been really bad lately. And your stomach just drops because you've been trying so hard. You've been so careful. You've been choosing your words like you're walking across thin ice because it feels like you're walking across thin ice. And still, something about their spouse, Sarah, seems to turn every family moment into a stress test. And you're so confused because Sarah's not openly rude. She's not yelling. She's not doing anything that you can point to and say, that's the problem. But when she comes in, she's tense, she scans their room, she corrects little things, and then she whispers to your child, your adult child a lot, her spouse. And they both get really quiet when people laugh. And then they leave early. And they often cancel at the last minute. And now your adult child, your kid, feels really different too. And you've noticed they're so much more guarded. They're so much more anxious. They're less spontaneous. They're so hyper-fixated on their spouse and watching their spouse's face the whole time that you're left sitting with this, all these questions just swirling in your mind. You're thinking, is it me? Am I imagining this? Should I say something? If I do say something, am I going to get pulled into a fight? Am I going to get blamed for something? And if I don't say something, am I enabling an unhealthy relationship between my child and their spouse? This is the confusion stage. This is the stage where we don't have clarity yet, but we can still feel that system shifting. We know something is happening. Today I want to help you make sense of what's happening without blaming anybody, without pointing any fingers. And I want to help you do that without getting pulled into what feels like an anxiety tornado. Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. If you're a new listener, then welcome. I am so glad you're here. And if you've been here with me for a while, welcome back. I am so glad that you're here. I'm Tina Gosni, a family conflict coach and a family life educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confusing, and painful. And we do it through a family systems lens. Because here's the hope that I want you to hold on to is that when one person in a family becomes more grounded, the entire relationship system can begin to shift. And I want you to realize that it's important to look at the entire system because then we can understand things a lot better. So in this episode, this is episode one of a five-part series, and we're going to talk about a confusion stage, especially when your adult child marries someone who brings a lot of anxiety and stress into your family system. And suddenly family gatherings feel tense, communication feels loaded, you can't tell what's real anymore. And maybe your siblings, their siblings, and your children are not even getting along anymore. When parents are having difficulties in their family, specifically in their relationship with their adult child, they're going to usually follow this pattern. The first stage is confusion. Why is this happening? I don't know how we got here. I don't know what to do now. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do or what I'm supposed to feel. How is this happening to us? The second stage is self-blame. This is when we start taking all the responsibility for fixing a situation. And we start blaming ourselves for things that didn't work and that don't work. And we start looking to the past like maybe I should have been more this way or should have done more of that. And none of this is productive. The third stage is defensiveness. Why are these things happening? We don't deserve this. This often looks like pointing blame towards another person. That person is causing problems in my family. And the fourth stage is powerlessness. This is the point, the point where we just start to give up. Like I've tried so many things. I don't even know what I could try anymore. It seems like everything that I try just makes things worse. So I'm just going to give up. Those first four stages are not linear. We tend to move back and forth through them. And the fifth stage is growth. This is learning about what's in my control, what is not in my control, and which is a really important thing to figure out. And we can experience growth in any one of those four first four stages that I went into. Today, specifically, we're going to talk about why anxiety spreads through a family system, even when no one's trying to cause problems, why you feel like you're walking on eggshells, what not to do when you're confused, because confusion makes us really reactive. And I'm going to give you one practical mindset shift that you can start using right away. So you can start staying connected to yourself while you're in connection with other people. And this five-part series about the spouse of your adult child is going to go through each one of those stages. And today we're going through the confusion stage. So let's really slow things down and look at what's happening here. This is something really important that I want you to understand about families. Anxiety and anxiety can take the form, many different forms. We're just going to call it anxiety today. It does not stay contained inside one person. It moves through a system. A family is emotionally very intricately connected. Imagine a calm, peaceful body of water. Perfectly still. Someone drops a pebble into the water. What happens next? The ripples. You can start those seeing those ripples go outward. It distributes the whole, this disturbs the whole body of water. This is like the emotional family system. One person can drop in and be that pebble that creates ripples throughout the family system. So even if Sarah is the one that's experiencing anxiety and her coming into the family system is the pebble that drops anxiety in the family system. That anxiety is not going to stay neatly inside of her. It's going to ripple out first onto your adult child, her spouse, and then it's going to ripple out onto you, and it's probably going to go further out into the siblings and maybe nieces and nephews or aunts and uncles as well. It's going to ripple into conversations, into holiday gatherings, into group texts, into who sits next to who, who talks to who, who avoids who, who overexplains, who try to tries to control the situation, who just goes quiet. This is when you can walk away from a family dinner and you can think, man, that felt so tense. Nothing even happened. Why did it feel so tense? Because anxiety, like I said, it does not always take the form of loud anxious behavior. Sometimes it looks like micromanaging plans, controlling food or controlling schedules, reading into a tone or rolling of eyes or turning around and disengaging, needing reassurance, avoiding people, maybe even disengaging by being on your phone in the middle of a get-together. It might look like disengagement by being super busy in the kitchen while everyone else is in the other room. It might look like leaving early, arriving late, leaving early, or maybe like pushing for clarity. And no one can provide clarity and no one knows the answers to the questions, but the answers, the questions just keep getting asked. And this is where parents get stuck because when you don't understand family anxiety, you assume that tension is some means someone is to blame. So that you notice that anxiety came in when that person came into your family. So then that person becomes the bad person. That person is toxic. That person is manipulating. That person is doing this on purpose. Often it's just a nervous system problem that is playing out in relationships. All of us have this tension where we are trying to stay connected to ourselves while we are in connection with other people. This is a polarity. It's something that we are all trying to balance all the time. It's really difficult to stay connected to yourself and be connected to other people at the same time. And most of us are pretty bad at it. So when you feel that tension and our nervous system gets triggered and it throws anxiety and affects, it affects our family relationships. That doesn't mean that we need to ignore unhealthy or destructive behavior. This is just a bird's eye view of understanding what is happening in the family system. We also don't have to diagnose anyone in order to respond wisely and from our most grounded self. Because when we're in this confusion stage, parents will very predictably do one or often two very predictable things. First one is overfunction. So you're stepping into places that are not yours. So you're trying to fix things, you're trying to smooth things down, you're trying to manage, you're looking to keep everybody comfortable. Because if everything goes comfortably and everything looks peaceful on the surface, then everything's okay. And the second thing we do is we collect evidence. We're trying to replay conversations in our head. We're trying to look for proof that we're right about what's happening. We are probably going to go to other people and replay those same conversations and those same situations to other people, looking for reassurance that we're interpreting things the right way. And that yes, that person is the problem. Now, both of these things, overfunctioning and collecting evidence, are both, they're both very understandable. These are ways that we're trying to get those ripples in the water to calm down. But these are both very reactive positions and they're going to keep you stuck. And it's probably going to lead you into another dynamic that often shows up in these situations. This is called a triangle. So a triangle happens when anxiety between two people is rising. Let's just say your adult child and their spouse, and then that anxiety gets stabilized between the two of them by pulling in a third person. And often that third person is you. She used to stay for hours just to hang it around because she liked to be here. And now when she comes over, she just looks tense the whole time. She is so anxious. And when her husband is with her, she he just barely speaks. And then later, after they leave, I get a text from my daughter telling me all the things that I did wrong. And I don't even remember any of those things. I'm so shocked because I don't even know how they interpreted that from what happened because I never saw it. Have you ever been caught in a situation like this? This is the situation that Linda was in. So together we had to slow it down. We had to find the pattern that was happening in her family system. The son-in-law has really high anxiety. He felt better when he could control his environment. He felt more safe that way. Her daughter, who was married to the son-in-law, was trying to manage her husband's emotions. She was constantly trying to prevent him from having an anxiety blow-up. This was her way of preventing discomfort and conflict in her own marriage. And so Linda, the mother, could feel that tension, but she didn't understand it. So she tried harder to be warm and to be pleasing and to go overboard and let the son-in-law know that he was wanted and that he was welcome in her home. And when she did this, it accidentally increased her son-in-law's anxiety. Because very often anxious people can interpret warmth as pressure or of an expectation that they're supposed to fulfill. And that was how her son-in-law was experiencing her warmth and her invitations. So then her daughter felt caught between Am I loyal to my spouse or am I loyal to my family, to my mother, to my family of origin? And instead of addressing that conflict directly, her daughter discharged it on downward onto her mom. So mom gets the feedback through the text, and the husband stays protected, and the daughter avoids a fight at home. Does this sound familiar? Can you see the pattern here? This is not because your daughter is a mean person and because she's trying to be cruel. It's because there's an anxious system looking for a place and a person to park that anxiety. Parents are often the safest target because you're the one that they expect will still love you, still love them afterwards. But this is so difficult for us parents, right? And it's also clarifying if we can stay step back and take a bigger look at the bigger picture. Once you start seeing the pattern, you can stop personalizing it quite so much. Here's the mind shift that I want to invite you to consider today. So I want you to move from asking yourself, what is wrong with them into where is the anxiety moving and how do I stop passing it along? And that's it. When you are confused, it has you chasing answers. You want certainty. You want to know what's happening. It's a natural response of our brain. But when we can grow, we can tolerate uncertainty. We can start to learn how to anchor into ourselves and be grounded, even without all the answers. So here's a practical shift that you can try this week. The first step is to name when anxiety is there. Notice what's happening. You're not going to say Sarah's ruining everything or my child is being manipulated. You're going to say, Oh, anxiety is here. Look, anxiety showed up. Okay, the first thing is to name and notice. The second step is to ground yourself into your body. So before you respond to anything, a text, a conversation, before you walk into a family gathering, pause and take a slow deep breath. And if need be, take three or five slow deep breaths. Let your shoulders drop, unclench your jaw. The thing you want to do, what you really want to concentrate on is bringing your main sense of awareness from your head down into your body. And one of the quickest ways to do that is to take a few slow, deep breaths. Because the most powerful thing that you can do when anxiety is in your family system is to regulate your own nervous system, your own reactivity. The third thing, number three, is choose for yourself what you want to do. How do you want to respond? You can even ask yourself, what would a grounded parent do right now? A grounded parent might just speak very simply instead of over-explaining. Stay kind without going overboard, being warm without chasing down a conversation or an explanation. Hold a boundary without attacking or getting defensive. Refuse to get pulled into a triangle. So if you find yourself in a situation where your adult child starts venting about their spouse and you feel that pool to fix it and to step in and start giving advice or agreeing with them, try something like this. You can say, I hear how stressed you are. That's so hard. And I love you, but I really don't want to be caught in the middle of you and your spouse. I'm here to support you, and I really trust you that you can work on your marriage directly with them. This is not you rejecting them. This is leadership. And yes, it is probably going to increase anxiety at first. It's going to increase your anxiety, it's going to increase their anxiety. But when one person stops playing their old role, that family system pushes back and the anxiety increases. But over time, as that steadiness continues to be there, the anxiety lowers. Your adult child will start to experience you differently over time as you keep showing up as this steady version of yourself. And this is not because you're going to agree with everything that they say. It's going to be because you are not being reactive to their reactive, their reactivity. You become that calming force in the rippling pond. If you're in this confusion stage right now, I want you to hear this. You're not crazy. Your instincts are correct and they're picking up on a real shift in your family. You don't have to figure out exactly what's wrong with your adult child spouse in order to begin changing what you bring into the relationship. Change can start with you. It doesn't have to start with anybody else. You don't have to have them on board. You just need to focus on you. You start with how you regulate, you can start with how you stay connected without overfunctioning. And you can refuse to be the anxiety sponge in your family. As you do that, you become that steady place that everybody else can orient to. Especially if your adult child has a home life that feels emotionally volatile, you can be that steady place where they orient themselves to. It starts with managing yourself internally first. This takes practice, practice, and you're not going to be perfect at it. But it's really going to matter, and that is very important. So, this, like I said, this is the first in a five-part series. In the next episode, we're going to move into stage two, which is self-blame. Because once confusion starts to settle down, many parents turn inward and they think, this is my fault. I failed somehow. And we're going to talk about why that happens and how to get free from it. Thank you for being here with me today. I just want you to remember you don't have to do this perfectly. Just keep showing up and keep learning and trying. Because when one person in the family system becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal. This is Coaching Your Family Relationships and I'm Tina Gosni. If this episode helped you, follow the show, share it with another parent who needs help today.