How to Let Go of Control Without Losing Connection: Helpful Therapy Words, Part 1

Episode 231: How to Let Go of Control Without Losing Connection: Helpful Therapy Words, part 1

When your adult child is making choices you disagree with, pulling away, or asking for space, it can feel almost impossible not to step in, explain yourself, fix the problem, or try to change their mind.

But what if strengthening your relationship with your adult child requires something different?

In this episode, we begin a three-part series on therapy words that can actually help. We start with two concepts that can make a significant difference in strained parent-adult child relationships: differentiation and acceptance.

Differentiation comes from Bowen Family Systems Theory and means learning how to stay connected to your adult child while also staying grounded in yourself. Acceptance means acknowledging the reality of your relationship as it is right now, even when you desperately wish it were different. Neither one means becoming distant, giving up, approving of everything your child does, or pretending you are not hurt.

Instead, these skills can help you stop reacting from anxiety and begin responding more intentionally.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to let go of control without giving up on your relationship with your adult child, especially when they make choices you would not make for them.
• What differentiation means in a parent-adult child relationship and how it helps you stay connected without losing yourself in your child’s emotions, opinions, or disapproval.
• Why accepting your adult child’s need for space or distance does not mean you approve of it or that you are giving up on reconciliation.
• How childhood family patterns can influence the way you respond to conflict with your adult child today, including people pleasing, fixing, withdrawing, arguing, or trying to keep everyone happy.
• Simple ways to stay grounded when your adult child is upset with you, so you can make thoughtful choices instead of reacting from fear, hurt, or anxiety.

If you are trying to repair a strained relationship with your adult child, learning to separate what you can control from what you cannot control is an important place to begin.

You can love your adult child deeply without managing their choices. You can disagree without disconnecting. And you can accept where the relationship is today while still hoping and working toward something better.

This is the foundation for the rest of our Therapy Words That Can Actually Help series. In the next episode, we’ll talk about curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety, followed by repair and accountability in part three.

If this episode helped you see your relationship with your adult child differently, share it with another parent who needs to hear it.

Click Here to download the free guide: 5 Steps to Take Before Trying to Repair the Relationship with Your Adult Child

 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. This is the perfect spot where you can learn, connect and get targeted help to start moving your relationship with your adult child in a different direction. Set up a Connection Clarity Call with Tina to see if this is a good fit for you: CLICK HERE TO SET UP A CALL

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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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Hey, welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I'm Tina Gosni, family conflict coach and a parent educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained and confusing and probably pretty painful. We do it through a family systems lens, which means we're looking at more than just one event and one relationship. We're looking at the system as a whole. This gives us so much more information about what's really happening underneath the surface because we all influence each other. And here's a hope that I really want you to hold on to is that when one person in a family becomes more grounded and steady, the entire relationship system can begin to shift. And that one person can be you. Now I've spent the last few weeks on this podcast talking about therapy words like toxic and gaslighting, narcissist, trauma triggered. These are words that your adult child might be using in their conversations with you or talking about you. And that can be when you don't understand what they're meaning, when you don't understand their context, and you don't understand what the word itself means, that can be super confusing. And for sure it feels really terrible. So if you want to listen to those episodes, which I would highly recommend, it was episodes 225 through 230. Now these are words that can really hurt parents, especially when you feel like you have sacrificed and given up so much of yourself to raise this child and to give them what you didn't have, and now you're not even sure who that child is anymore. And it feels like the tables are turning. So this is a super useful series for you to know and to be familiar with because I go into a lot of what your children might be trying to tell you by using those words. Now, this is starting a different series. I'm going to start recording a series about therapy words that are more positive. These are words that if we start to understand them and start to learn about them and we start to implement the things that they mean, this is actually going to help us to become more steady and they're going to help us to be coming into the relationship in more curious and relational way. And so this is going to give you something to do. Okay. I recently recorded an episode with Dr. Ren Riesik, who conducted a research study on adult children who estranged from their parents. Now, this is episode 224. She talked to many, I think it was over 60 adult children of all ages. This is not just, you know, young adults or those, you know, children that are maybe under the age of 35. This was all the way up into the later years as well, the children of the adult children of parents. So she talked about the new rules of family relationships and what adult children are expecting now that is different than they expected in past generations. Like the new rules of family are changing. If you haven't listened to that episode, I think it's going to be really informative for you. You should go back and listen to that one. Again, it's episode 224. Now, over the next few episodes, we're going to work through seven therapy words. These are maybe I use them a lot in coaching. I know they're used in therapy. These are words your child might be using these words with you. Even if they're not, I think that these words are going to help your relationship if you start understanding them and start using them. Today we're going to talk about what two of them and what each of those actually means, where it gets misunderstood, and then what it sounds like in a real conversation. The two words we're going to go over today are differentiation and acceptance. They might sound super abstract, so I want you to stick with me because I would put these two words at the foundation, at the front of the line, because everything else that we're going to cover in this series is going to rest on top of them. These are the two things that we really need to know. Let's start with differentiation. What does that word mean? I had a friend recently tell me, she said, I don't know how to let my daughter make choices that I think are going to hurt her. If I really loved her, wouldn't I stop her? Wouldn't I say something? Well, that question sits right at the heart of a concept called differentiation. This comes from family systems, specifically the work of Dr. Murray Bowen, and he spent decades studying how families function. And he said families are not just a bunch of individuals living together, they're actually one emotional system. And in my opinion, differentiation is one of the most single, useful ideas, not just in Murray Bowen's work, but in the work of relationships in general, especially for parents in your situation. So let's get into what that is in plain language version. Differentiation is the ability to stay connected with someone while also staying true to yourself. Sounds a lot easier to do than it actually is. This is the ability to hold on to your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own sense of who you are, even while you're standing next to someone else's big emotions, thoughts, and sense of who they are, and they're not approving, especially when they're not approving. Bowen described families as these emotional systems, meaning everyone is connected to everyone else in the same way that instruments in an orchestra are connected together. When one person's anxiety goes up, and that anxiety, I use that word, but it could be any emotion, when an emotion goes up in one person or a situation comes in that's challenging into the family through one person, it does not stay contained to that one person. It moves through the whole system. So a parent gets tense, a child feels it, a child pulls away, the parent spirals. One person's mood becomes everyone's weather. A person with a lower degree of differentiation will get swept up into that weather completely. Their sense of okayness depends on whether the people around them are okay, whether they're calm or whether they approve of them or whether they stay close to them. A person with a high degree of differentiation can stay standing in the storm. They can notice that their child is upset. They can stay present with it, they can care about it deeply, and they can still hold on to their own center. This is not because they don't feel the anxiety in the room and in their relationship, because they really do. But they don't let it dictate who they are or how they respond. Now, this is different from distance because this is not aloofness. It is not, hey, I'm going to do my own thing no matter what my kid thinks, kind of attitude. Differentiation is actually the thing that makes real closeness possible. Because you can only stay close to someone over the long run if you're not disappearing into them and they're not disappearing into you. Let's talk about where differentiation gets misunderstood. I want to name a few places where this concept goes sideways because it's really easy to get tripped up here and get tripped up often. The first is confusing differentiation with cutting somebody off. Some parents will hear some sort of phrase or concept of like you need to stay true to yourself. And then they quietly translate that into a permission to just not engage. Just let them do their thing and I'll do my thing. Well, that's not differentiation. Differentiation is not not caring. It's not distance, it's actually the opposite. It's the opposite of running away from something when it gets hard. A parent who is differentiated can stay in the room, stay in the conversation, stay connected, even in the midst of their own anxiety about it or their own big emotions about it, and they can do it without losing themselves in the process. Okay, the second place where this concept gets misunderstood is confusing differentiation with being really rigid. This is not about digging in and refusing to consider your child's perspective, or it's not about holding your position no matter what. A well-differentiated person can genuinely change their mind, but what they don't do is change their mind or abandon their values because someone gets upset with them. There's a real difference between saying something like, I heard you and I've reconsidered, and even saying internally to yourself, I'm going to say whatever I need to do to keep the peace right now. There's a big difference between the two of those. The third thing I want to name, and this is that it is genuinely hard to build differentiation. It doesn't happen in a single conversation or just having insight about it. Differentiation is a process that takes place over time. This is not an event. You don't just wake up one day and simply decide you're going to be more differentiated the same way that you might decide, you know, I'm going to drink more water today. This is something that is built slowly through repeated moments of self-reflection, of noticing when you get swept up and what that looks like, and then what you need to do to bring yourself back to your footing again. Most parents that I work with expect this to happen faster than it does. They want to, they understand this concept and then they want to put it in place right away. It just doesn't happen that way. But not being able to do that is not a sign that you're doing wrong, anything wrong. It's a sign that you're doing something that was designed to be a process that happens over time and not something that is a quick fix. And here's why it takes so long, which I think this is really worth thinking about and worth sitting with, you know, because you learned different patterns as a child. As a child, you learned how to survive in your home by paying really close attention to how the grown-ups around you handled themselves. If you had a parent whose mood was unpredictable, you learned how to read the room when you heard that key go in the door and they were walking in. If a calm atmosphere in your home depended on you agreeing and being very agreeable, then you learned to smooth things over before conflict even had a chance to surface. You learned at a very early age how to adapt yourself and you did it automatically and without realizing it. Because that was what kept you the most safe in your home that you grew up in. Every child does this. These are learned survival techniques that do exactly what they're supposed to do. They got you through childhood alive. But here's the part that is really easy to miss. Those techniques that you developed so early in childhood to keep you alive in your home, those were built for a child. They were built for a much younger version of you. In a home where you genuinely depended on someone else's mood and for their love and approval for your safety. And now you're an adult. You can keep yourself alive. You can leave a room. You can set a boundary or a limit. You can tolerate someone else's disappointment in you, and you are going to survive. You're going to be fine. And yet, most of us never go back and update those survival techniques that we built as children. We just keep running on old programs in a body that no longer needs those programs. And in relationships where those all those same programs are no longer required. Differentiation is in a large part the slow work of noticing the old programs and then choosing to break them again and again. Choosing to respond from where you actually are now instead of from an old pattern or an old program that was meant to keep you alive. Let's go into what differentiation sounds like, and I'll give you a small shift that you can try. Let's we're going to make this a lot more concrete, okay? So imagine that your son tells you that he and his wife have decided they are not going to have children. And you have a lot of feelings about that. Maybe you have some grief because you pictured yourself being a grandparent. Maybe you're really worried about their decision. Maybe you're just genuinely surprised because you assumed that they would want children. If you were giving an undifferentiated response to them, that might sound like you trying to argue them out of their decision that they made. Or it might look like you going really quiet and maybe even cold, like not even wanting to talk to them. Or maybe you repeatedly bring it up hoping that they're going to change their mind. If you give a differentiated response, it could sound something like this: saying something like, hey, that's a really big decision. And I trust that the two of you know your own life. And I'm gonna be really honest, I'm working through some feelings of my own about that. And these are difficult feelings, but it's not your job to take care of that. It's my job to take care of that. Notice what that does. It doesn't hide your feelings, it doesn't hand them to your son to manage either, which is what we usually do. You know, it keeps you connected to him and grounded in yourself at the same time. And now here's a small shift that you can try. The next time you notice yourself about to say or do something that is solely meant to keep somebody else calm or try to manage a situation about someone else's reaction, just pause and ask yourself one question. What do I actually think and feel here separate from what would keep the peace right now? Now, whatever your answer to that question is, you don't have to act on it immediately. Just noticing it is very powerful. That single pause done consistently, that's where differentiation starts. Differentiation is not a personality trait that you either have or you don't, it's a muscle, and that muscle gets stronger the more that you use it. Let's go into the second word today, which is acceptance. And a father that I once worked with told me, if I accept things just as they are, doesn't that mean that I'm giving up? Well, every time I talk about acceptance, I hear some version of that sentence. So let's clear up what acceptance means. Acceptance means acknowledging what's actually true right now, even when you wish it were different. And that's all. That's all acceptance is. It does not mean approval. It does not mean you're resigning yourself to the way things are, it does not mean you're deciding that the situation is fine or that it's always going to be this way, or that you're gonna stop working towards something better. What acceptance actually is, is putting your energy into what's real instead of spending it fighting what's already happened or what somebody else has already decided. A lot of the exhaustion that parents describe to me does not come from the hard relationship itself. It comes from the added extra layer on top of it. That sounds like an internal argument with reality, like this shouldn't be happening. She shouldn't be treating me this way, she shouldn't feel this way about me, he shouldn't need space. You know, every one of those thoughts is understandable, and every every one of them is also a way of refusing to gain acceptance of the ground that you're actually standing on. I want to give you an example that might make this an easier concept to hold on to. Let's just imagine you live in California and you want to drive to New York. That would be a long drive, I know, but stick with me for this. But instead of saying, I'm in California, so I need to plan my route from California to New York, you're gonna say, you know what, I don't really want to be in California, I want to be in Texas. And so you plan a route based on you being in Texas. You're gonna take roads and plan a route that makes sense if you're in Texas. Now, if you're actually in California, no matter how much you want to get to New York, no matter how many good intentions you have, you're gonna end up lost because the whole plan is built on a starting point that you're not at. It's not a real point that you're that you're standing on. Acceptance is what tells you which roads to take. It's not the destination, and it's not giving up on the destination either. It's simply being honest about where you're starting from right now, so that you know the steps to take that actually help you get a chance to get somewhere that you want. If you're not willing to admit that you're in California, then you can't use a map of California to get to New York. The relationship that you want, wherever it is that you're hoping to arrive, is only reachable from where you are actually standing. Acceptance says this. It says, this is where I am right now, this is where things are right now. It doesn't say this is where I want them to be, not where they might be in a year. It just says right now. And then when you're once you're standing on that actual ground instead of the ground you wished existed, you can finally see clear enough to stay to really take the next step. Well, I think the biggest misunderstanding about acceptance is that it we think that it means we're giving up on anything getting better. But it's actually the opposite. You can't build towards something that you refuse to acknowledge is currently true. A parent who won't accept that their child needs distance right now will keep doing things that push that child further away because they're operating from a picture of their relationship that does not exist yet. A parent who accepts the distance as real right now without pretending that they like it, is a parent who's actually free to respond wisely to what is really in front of them. The second misunderstanding is that acceptance means you're not allowed to grieve or to want something different. You can absolutely do both. You can say, I accept that my daughter isn't ready to talk to me right now, and I really don't like that that's true, and I really hope that it changes. Well, all three of those sentences can be true in the same breath. Acceptance is not the absence of grief. It's what lets the grief move through you instead of hardening into denial or resentment. And then the third misunderstanding about acceptance is thinking that it's a one-time event, just like a one-time decision. Especially in a strange relationship, acceptance is something you have to return to again and again, sometimes even every day, because the wishing it were different kind of thoughts have a way of creeping back in. And this does not mean that you're failing, it just means that you're practicing. Let's talk about what acceptance sounds like in real life, and I'll give you a small shift that you can try. Let's just imagine that your daughter has told you that she needs a break from regular contact with you. So if you gave a response rooted in resisting reality, that might sound like it might look like you constantly texting, ask her when she's coming back, or telling mutual family members that she's just being overly emotional or she's being difficult or she's overreacting. Or it might look like you waiting anxiously for the moments for things to go back to normal. A response that's rooted in acceptance sounds more like this. It might say, I don't want this distance, but I'm going to respect it because she told me that's what she needs right now. And in the meantime, I can keep working on my Whether or not things ever change on her end. So this second version is not passive. It's actually a more active stance for you because it's grounded in what's real and it's grounded in what is in your control. And that means the energy that you have has somewhere useful to go. It goes towards your own growth instead of struggling to try to get someone else to change something that is not in your power to get them to change. Here's one small shift that you can try. When you notice yourself getting caught up in some version of, you know, this shouldn't be happening. Try replacing it either out loud or inside your own head with this is what's true right now. That doesn't mean it's going to be true forever. It doesn't mean that it's fair that it's happening. It doesn't mean that that is what you wanted. It just means that that's true right now. Just say it plainly without having the fight underneath it. That one sentence, this is what's true right now. If you repeat that enough times, that tends to loosen a grip that arguing with reality never manages to loosen. How do you make these two words, differentiation and acceptance? How can they work together? I put these together in the same episode for a reason. They're a matched pair. Differentiation is about staying grounded in yourself while staying close to your child. And acceptance is about staying grounded in what's actually true instead of what you wish were true. When you put them together, you get something really powerful. You get a parent who can see the relationship clearly. You can see your own feelings and own thoughts fully, and you can choose your next move on purpose instead of choosing it out of some emotional drive or anxiety. The combination is really the foundation that the rest of this series is built on. The next two series are also going to be similar to this one, and we're going to cover words like curiosity, attunement, emotional safety, repair, accountability. And these are all things that you do. I wanted to start with differentiation and acceptance because these are who you are being while you are doing those other things. And if we haven't worked on our being first and we're only working on skills, when things get really difficult, our foundation tends to collapse. If we have acceptance and differentiation working together as our foundation, we can hold together and we don't collapse. Building a foundation is not quick and it's not easy. And neither is developing differentiation and coming to acceptance. When you live this out in your specific relationship, your specific family with your specific history, this is pretty hard to do alone, especially if you were not raised doing those same things. And it's true whether you work with me or you work with a therapist or another coach, that you might want a support system of your own. The parents that I actually see the most progress in are the ones who have a space to practice this out loud, to get feedback, to be reminded that they're not the only ones doing this. So if we only have education and insight, that tends to stay in our head. It's a different skill to learn something than it is to practice something. So practice with support actually changes the way that you show up. And this is exactly what parents tell me changes for them when we do this work together in Bridge to Connection. This is where we work on three things together. We have education, that education piece, where you don't know what you don't know. So I'm going to teach you some skills and some lessons that will help you to know how to show up differently. And then we have group coaching where you get to practice out loud and you get to see other people practice out loud. So you see that you're not the only one that is working on this. And there's so much strength and support. And then we have one-on-sessions with me, where we're going to go deep and dive deep into your specific family and your specific patterns. So parents who come out on the other side of this, this is what they're able to do. Things like sit in a hard conversation without collapsing and losing themselves. They are able to tell the difference between their old survival habits and when they're making a real choice to stay close to their child when things are genuinely difficult. Now, if this episode is resonating with you, this is the place where we take it further. And if you want to see if this is right for you, there is a link in the show notes for a connection call where we can explore that together. This is a free call. Just click on that link, set up a time to talk to me, and we can explore whether this is going to be a good fit for you. I want to close with some of the most common mistakes that I see regarding differentiation and acceptance. I think if I name them, I can help you avoid them. Mistake number one is treating differentiation as a permission to withdraw, which is so easy to do, especially when things are difficult. If you find yourself using this, that you know, phrase like I'm just staying true to me, and you use that in order to justify pulling away from difficult situations. Well, that's not differentiation. That is distance, wearing differentiation language, because real differentiation stays in the room. Mistake number two is treating acceptance as a finish line instead of a starting point. Accepting where things are right now does not mean that you stop there. It means that you're finally standing where you're solid enough that you can decide what your next step should be and it will be more effective. Mistake number three is expecting yourself to master either differentiation or acceptance in one attempt. Both of these are practices that we do over time. They're not a switch that we flip. You're going to lose your footing. You're going to get swept up into someone else's thoughts and opinions and anxiety, and you're going to catch yourself arguing with reality again. That is not failure. That's where practicing a new muscle comes in, and this is what it looks like. Here's what I want you to take with you today. Differentiation and acceptance are not abstract therapy words that are meant to sound nice and sit on a shelf. They're actually the ground, the foundation that everything is built upon. Staying connected to your child while staying grounded in yourself. When you stand on what's actually true instead of what you wish were true. And then, you know, these two things, differentiation and acceptance, when we practice them together, this can quietly change how the relationship goes. It can shift the trajectory of the relationship. You're still here, take a breath, be patient with yourself, and remember you don't have to do this perfectly. I do sincerely want to thank you for being here with me today. And I want to remind you that when one person in a family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal. In next week's episode, we're going to continue this series with three more words that can actually help. We're going to go over curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety. This is Coaching Your Family Relationships, and I'm Tina Gosni, and this is where parents of adult children get the help that they need to repair and rebuild and strengthen those family relationships. If this episode gave you something useful today, would you please share it with another parent who could just use a little bit more hope and a little bit more help this week? Thanks, and I'll see you next time.