How to Help Your Adult Child Feel Heard and Emotionally Safe: Helpful Therapy Words, part 2

Episode 232: How to Help Your Adult Child Feel Heard and Emotionally Safe: Helpful Therapy Words, part 2

Your adult child may be telling you they don't feel heard, understood, or emotionally safe with you. And if you're a parent who genuinely loves your child and wants a close relationship, those words can be painful and confusing.

You may be thinking, I am listening. I do care. Why doesn’t my child see that?

In Part 2 of Therapy Words That Can Actually Help, we’re talking about three relationship skills that can change the way difficult conversations with your adult child feel: curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety.

These words are not about agreeing with everything your adult child says or taking responsibility for every feeling they have. They are about learning how to understand your child’s experience before trying to explain, correct, defend, or solve it.

When an adult child feels misunderstood, criticized, dismissed, or pressured, they may begin sharing less. Over time, difficult conversations can become something both parent and adult child avoid. Curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety give you a different way to approach those moments and can help create the conditions for more honest communication and stronger connection.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How curiosity can improve communication with your adult child by replacing defensiveness, assumptions, and problem-solving with a genuine desire to understand what they are experiencing.
• What attunement means in a parent-adult child relationship and why listening to the emotion underneath your child’s words can sometimes matter more than finding the perfect response.
• What emotional safety actually looks like between a parent and an adult child, especially when you disagree about choices, beliefs, relationships, or painful events from the past.
• Why making your adult child feel heard does not require you to agree with them, accept their interpretation as the only truth, or abandon your own perspective.
• How to have difficult conversations with your adult child without immediately defending yourself, explaining your intentions, or trying to fix the problem, so there is more room for understanding and connection.

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about differentiation and acceptance: staying grounded in yourself while accepting what is actually happening in the relationship. Those skills create the foundation for what comes next. Curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety are about what happens when you turn toward your adult child and try to understand their experience.

You do not have to say everything perfectly for your adult child to feel more comfortable talking with you. Often, the biggest shift begins when they sense that you are trying to understand them instead of preparing to defend yourself.

And that can change the entire direction of a conversation.

In Part 3, we’ll take the next step and talk about repair and accountability, especially when there has already been hurt or conflict in the parent-adult child relationship.

If you know another parent who is struggling in their relationship with an adult child, share this episode with them. They may need to hear it too.

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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If you're struggling in their relationship with your adult child right now and they maybe are asking something from you, maybe you don't know understand what they're asking for, maybe they're using words that you don't even understand, then I've got you. You're in the right place. In this podcast, we've spent the last few episodes, in fact, episode 225 through 230, working through difficult therapy words that have made it into everyday language. These are the words that land really hard, you know, the ones that will pretty much stop you cold in a conversation. Words like toxic, gaslighting, narcissist, trauma, and triggered. Words like that. So those were all covered in episodes 225 through 230. If you haven't listened to those, you're gonna want to go back and catch them because I think it's really important to understand what those words mean and how they made it into our everyday language, and also how they're being misused a lot. And since that series is over, we've started a different kind of series. This is one that we're building around words that don't corner you. They actually give you something to do. These are therapy words that when you learn them and understand them and incorporate them into your life, you're going to build stronger relationships. Last episode, 231, I went into two words that I put in front of the whole series and I did it on purpose. And those words are differentiation and acceptance. This is the ability to stay grounded in yourself while staying close to your child, especially when things are not going well. And then acceptance is on, you know, standing on what's actually true instead of what you wish were true or what you think should be true. Now, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, I would start there because today what we're doing builds directly on top of that one. So just push pause on this episode. If you haven't listened to 231, go listen to that first and then come back here. I'm Tina Gosni. Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I'm a family conflict coach and I educate parents. And on this podcast, we talk about what to do with your relationship. When your adult-child relationship feels strained and confusing and painful, we're going to do it through a family systems lens, which means we're going to look much more than at just one event or one relationship. We're going to look at the whole family system. This gives us a lot more information about what's going on underneath the surface, which is really easy to miss. And the hope that I want you to hold on to is that when one person in a family becomes more steady and grounded, the entire relationship system can begin to shift. Today's words that we're going to go over, these are helpful therapy words. These are words that are often misunderstood or misused as well, or maybe not even used at all. But these words are curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety. When we went over last episode with differentiation and acceptance, that is who we are being in a relationship. So during a hard conversation, that's the foundation that we're standing on. Now these words, curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety, this is what steadiness actually looks like once you're in the room with them and how you listen, how you notice what's going on underneath their words, and what you end up building slowly over time without realizing it every single time you get it right. So let's get into this. We're going to start with curiosity. Now you probably have an idea of what that word actually means, and you're pretty close. So I might have some more things to some more light to shed on it for you. But I do want you to sit with one thing for a second before I define anything. When you are in the middle of a difficult conversation with your adult child, and I guess you could do this, you know, it doesn't have to be exactly with your adult child, what in the middle of a difficult conversation with anybody. Are you actually listening? Or are you already forming your response in your head? That's my question to you. Most parents, most people, not just parents, but most people, if they're really honest, are going to admit that they're formulating their response in their head and not really listening. That is worth looking at because that is the exact gap that curiosity is meant to close. So curiosity is the word that we're talking about. This in plain language version that you can carry with you is seeking to understand before you explain, correct, or defend. And that is the entire definition. It doesn't mean you agree, it's not staying silent, it's simply putting your own response on pause long enough to actually find out what is true for the other person first. And often, if we don't go to curiosity, our brain is going to tell us some facts mixed with a lot of story that we've made up. So we want to actually get curious about finding out the whole story from them and not relying on our own brain to tell us what it thinks is true. Now, there's a reason that curiosity shows up as it as its own word in a series like this, instead of just being folded into being a good listener. Because genuine curiosity requires a settled nervous system. When you're anxious or defensive or bracing because you think you're going to be attacked, your brain is not built to be curious about someone else's experience. It's built to protect you from a threat. And you see you're at that point you're seeing the other person as a threat. This is where curiosity connects directly back to differentiation, which is remember that word that we covered last time. So a parent who is swept up into their own anxiety the moment that a hard topic comes up is really not able to ask a curious question because your body is bracing around self-protection, not curious discovery. But a parent who can stay grounded, even when their child is upset, has enough spare room, spare capacity to be curious and wonder. And that wonder takes us to that curiosity. This is also one of the places that I want you to hold on to family systems thinking. In an anxious family system, conversations tend to move very quickly, and they move quickly towards conclusions, towards blame, towards trying to resolve something, because there's anxiety in the system, and anxiety hates sitting in unresolved spaces. It does not like sitting in the unknown. Curiosity slows that down on purpose. Because that's you choosing to stay in the part that you don't understand yet, a little bit longer, and that a little bit longer than actually feels comfortable, because that's usually where the most useful information lies. How does curiosity get misunderstood? Well, the first thing is that it gets misunderstood and mistaken for agreement. Parents will sometimes avoid asking real questions because they worry that if they ask questions, that's going to be read as caving in or accepting a version of events that they don't believe is accurate. Well, that's not what's happening. You can ask somebody, you know, help me understand what that felt like for you. And you can still hold your own perspective fully intact. Curiosity postpones your response. It does not erase your experience. The second misunderstanding is confusing curiosity with interrogation. There's a version of asking questions that's really just anxiously asking and anxiety wearing a question mark, or defensiveness asking aware, you know, wearing a question mark. There's this rapid fire searching for a hole in their in your child's story, trying to catch them being unfair to you. Your child can usually feel that immediately. And we want to be practicing, especially at the beginning, in a calm moment rather than a heated moment. Because if the first time that you ever try to genuinely be curious is in the middle of the hardest conversation with your child, it's going to feel really unnatural and it's not going to land well, and you're probably going to be really clunky with it. If you practice in ordinary low-stakes moments, really wondering about maybe a friend's day or a co-worker's decision or even the choice that a stranger made, that starts to build the muscle. So that you do that enough times and you build up a muscle that is actually strong enough to use and it's available when the stakes are high. Let's just imagine that your daughter tells you she's been in therapy and she's processing some things from her childhood. So if you were going to respond from an anxious, defending place, it would sound like, what things are you processing? I don't understand what I did that was so bad. But a curious response sounds like, well, that makes sense to me. A lot of people find that helpful. If you ever are open to sharing, I would love to understand about what's coming up for you. I want to understand that better. Now notice that the curious version and the curious response does not require you to already agree with what she's processing. It just makes room for her to keep talking, which is usually the thing that actually leads to useful information. There's a small shift that you can try here with curiosity, and that is to pause before you respond. So before you respond to something that stirs you up or you know gets your defenses up, silently ask yourself one question. What do I not understand about this yet? And then ask one real question out loud before you say anything else, before you explain, before you defend, or any other response you might have. Just one honestly curious question and let their answer fully land before you decide what to think about it. The next word we have is attunement. This is a word that is not usually used very much in general conversation. But let me explain it to you in what a father described to me once. He said, I was talking with my son on the phone, he said he was fine, but something in his voice didn't sound fine. And I didn't say anything about it because he said he was fine. Well, that is a gap. And that gap is what attunement is meant to close. Attunement means noticing and responding sensitively to what's happening underneath someone's words, their tone, the pacing of their language, what they're not saying, and letting that inform how you respond. Not just the literal content of what they said. It's the difference between hearing your child and actually listening to your child, having a sense of what they're happening, what's happening for them. In a family system, emotion moves through the household constantly. It happens in tone of voice, in body language, in the pace of a conversation. This often happens so below, just right below that level of constant and conscious awareness. Attunement is choosing to pay attention to that underlying layer on purpose instead of only responding to the words on the surface. And here's where it connects back to differentiation again, which, if you can't tell, is one of my favorite words to talk about. Real attunement notices someone else's emotional state without absorbing it as your own. So you can sense that your son, there's something anxious about something that he said, and you can absorb that without becoming anxious yourself. In fact, you're far more useful to him if you don't become anxious yourself. A parent who knows how to stay steady while tuning into their child's distress is offering something that a parent who gets swept up into that same distress cannot offer them, which is a calm, steady place to land. And research shows that our children need for us to be a calm, steady place to land. Attunement gets misunderstood. And the first misunderstanding is treating it like your mind reading. Noticing that something feels off in your child's voice, that's the first half of attunement. But then assuming that you already know exactly what it means and responding to your assumption instead of checking it by being curious, like that's not attunement. It's that's a guess that we just dress up as our own insight. Real attunement pairs noticing with checking. Sounds like, you sound a little different today, is everything okay? Rather than you just deciding you already know the answer to the question. The second misunderstanding, and this is a really important one given last episode, what we talked about, is confusing attunement with absorbing someone else's emotional state as your own. If your daughter is anxious and you become equally anxious in response, that's not attunement. That is something we call fusion. And it usually leaves both of you more anxious and more activated instead of less. Attunement stays connected to what your child is feeling while staying differentiated enough to remain a steady presence in the room. The third misunderstanding is thinking that attunement means you have to immediately fix whatever you sense, whatever you notice. Sometimes the most attuned thing that you can do is to simply name what you're sensing and then let it sit without rushing to resolve it, to reassure it away, or to explain it. Naming it accurately is sometimes, and pretty often, the whole of what you need to do. This is what attunement sounds like. Imagine that your son calls and he says everything is fine, but his answers are shorter than usual, his voice is kind of flat. If you were going to give an unattuned response, and you would just take his version of I'm fine at face value, and you would move on to the next topic. If you're giving an attuned response, you would sound like, hey, you sound a little more tired than usual. Is that fair to say, or am I misreading this? That question does two things at the same time. It shows him you're paying attention to what's happening underneath the surface, and it leaves room for him to say more, or to confirm that he's just tired and that's all that it is, without either answer being wrong. Here's one small shift that you can try. In the next conversation that you have with your child, notice one thing beneath the words that they're not saying. Maybe a change in their tone or a pause that they take, or just a pace, maybe they're talking slower or faster than they usually do. And then name it out loud, it's an observation, not a conclusion. So you could say, like, I notice you got kind of quiet there, and then just stop talking. Let that be the whole intervention and see what they do with that space that you give them. The last word for today is emotional safety. Well, this is actually two words, but we're gonna just say this is our last, our last thing that we're gonna talk about. I want to start this one with a definition because this phrase gets used constantly, emotional safety gets used constantly, but rarely gets defined. And so I don't think that we really know what it means. It means creating interactions where someone can be honest with you without expecting punishment, ridicule, or retaliation, and without having to manage your reaction on top of managing their own feelings. Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say emotional safety means never having hard conversations, or never disagreeing, or never feeling uncomfortable. Discomfort and safety are not opposites. What actually threatens safety is unpredictability. Maybe a conversation that might go fine or might blow up, depending on what your mood is that day. And a consequence is that your child learns that honesty with you tends to cost them something. It costs your withdrawal, your anger, your hurt feelings, and that it's their job to soothe that. We touched on some of the nervous system science behind this back in the episode on the word triggered. When one person doesn't feel safe, their body shifts into a state that's built for handling threat, not for having an actual conversation. Emotional safety is in large part what keeps that shift from happening in the first place. This is the groundwork, groundwork that makes curiosity and attunement even possible. Because if we don't have a calm nervous system, if we don't have emotional safety in the relationship, then neither of us can be curious or tuned into the other one. Now, emotional safety does get misunderstood as the same thing as comfort or the absence of conflict. You can have a genuinely hard, honest conversation and still be emotionally safe. If the way you handle that hard conversation is steady and non-punishing. Safety is not about whether conflict happens, it's about what happens after it does. The second misunderstanding runs the opposite direction. Some parents hear emotional safety and then they start walking on eggshells around their own child. They start suppressing anything that might cause friction and they start agreeing with things that they don't actually agree with. And sometimes they go quiet about their own needs entirely. Well, that's not safety either. That's just a different flavor of unpredictability because your child knows you. They know how you usually react. And when you start changing those things and you don't let them in on what you're doing, you're just starting to shut down. That is pretending to be calm instead of actually being grounded. And that will leak more tension into the relationship and it will eventually come out sideways in a way that you probably don't want it to. Real emotional safety includes room for your honest feelings too, when you express them steadily and you don't suppress them and you don't dump them on the other person. The third misunderstanding is expecting that one good conversation is going to establish emotional safety. This is something that is not built through one single grand gesture, one apology, one heartfelt talk, a promise to do better. It's the way that trust is built. It goes through many small, ordinary moments where your child brings something to you and you respond the same steady way that you did last time, and the time before that. And it's predictable, it's repeatable. This eventually convinces your child's nervous system, not just their mind, but it needs to convince their nervous system, their body, that it is safe to keep bringing things to you. Imagine your daughter tells you that she made a decision and you strongly disagree with this decision. An unsafe response might swing between two extremes, depending on what your mood is that day. Sometimes you might lecture, sometimes you might go silent, sometimes you might force enthusiasm you don't really feel. But a safe response is consistent regardless of your internal reaction. It might sound like, thank you for telling me. I'll be honest, I have some feelings about this that at some point I might want to talk through with you, but I just want you to know right now that you can keep bringing me things like this, and I really want to hear it. Well, when you respond like that, it doesn't hide your honest reaction, and it doesn't punish her for telling you the truth either. Here's a small shift to try this week. The next time your child brings you something difficult, even good news that you might have complicated feelings about, or hard news that you were not expecting. Pause and notice your own reaction first and do that silently before you respond to anything. Then aim for a steady tone that you would use if you had heard something that was super easy. When you're consistent with that, more than any word that you could say, you don't have to say the perfect words, but when you're consistent with the way that you respond, that is how emotional safety is built. Now I grouped these three words together: curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety, because they build on each other in a specific order. Curiosity is the stance that you take before you respond. You choose to understand before you explain or defend. Attunement is the skill of noticing what's happening underneath the words in your child and in yourself. And emotional safety is what these two things produce over time. A relationship where your child has learned that through repeated experiences, that when they bring you something hard, they aren't punished for it. All three of them rest on what we covered last time. That's why I keep emphasizing going back to listen to the last episode on differentiation and acceptance. You cannot stay genuinely curious if you're not differentiated enough to tolerate not knowing the answer yet. You cannot be attuned to your child if you haven't accepted where their relationship actually is right now, instead of where you wish it were. Now, these words are not a new set of skills that are unrelated to the first two words that I went through last episode. They are what differentiation and acceptance look like when they're actually in a room and put into action with another person. Doing this in real time is really difficult. And you have history, you have patterns, you have relationships, you have unresolved things that have come up, and it's really difficult to do this. And I would say it is multiple times more difficult to do without real support. Most parents that I work with are not struggling because they lack the desire to get this right. They are not struggling because they don't care about their child. In fact, I would say the opposite is true. They're struggling because they don't know what to do and they haven't had a place to practice this yet. They haven't had a place and someone who knows how to do these things, how to give them feedback and how they can bring that to that person and then try and maybe get some things right and get some things wrong. But either way, we're gonna pick up and we're gonna try again. The parents who make the most lasting progress are the ones who have a place to practice this out loud with support, instead of just the first time attempting this to be in the middle of a hard conversation with your child. These are the type of things that I work through with my clients. I teach them how to do these things and then we practice them together. And we go through situations that have happened and we analyze them and see, okay, next time this happens, what are we going to change? What are we gonna do that's different? So parents who go through this work with me report back things like they stopped bracing for hard conversations with their child. Their child, they gave them some distance and they came back to the parent instead of the parent having to reach out. And when they did, they thanked the parent for giving them that distance. And they report things like being able to stay in the room and stay having difficult conversations and find out information that they would not have known before if they had been defensive or reactive or tried to reassure their child away, reassure their worries away. So if today's episode has resonated with you, this is the place to take it further. If you're wondering if we're a good fit to work together, just set up a connection call with me. You're going to find the link in the show notes. That's a totally free call that we can explore what it would look like if we worked together to let me help you through this and be your support. I want to name a few of the mistakes that I see most often underneath the words that we've gone through today, because if I name them, I think I can help you avoid them. Mistake number one is about curiosity, and this is about when we use this as a delay tactic instead of genuinely being curious. When you ask a question you actually don't care about what the answer is to it, just to seem like you're open, just to seem like you're curious, that actually reads exactly what you're doing. They can tell what you're doing. Curiosity only works when it's real. Mistake number two is about attunement. This is, you know, sometimes parents think that's really overwhelming. How do I always attune into my child? Well, you don't have to. This is not something that you owe them constantly at the expense of your own needs. Attunement is a skill that you bring to important moments, not a permanent state of hypervigilance where you're trying to orient yourself around everybody's mood. You're allowed to miss things sometimes. Mistake number three is pretending like you're emotionally safe instead of actually building the emotional safety. So a parent who says all the right things in one conversation, but then reacts unpredictably the next time a hard topic comes up has not built safety. They've built confusion. Consistency is the only thing that actually counts here. And then mistake number four is expecting these three words that we've gone over today to immediately produce results. Trust that has been eroded over years does not rebuild in one well-handled conversation. It rebuilds the 10th time and the 20th time and the 50th time when your child starts to believe that you are steady for real and you're not just pretending to be steady. Here's what I want you to take with you today. Curiosity, attunement, and emotional safety are not separate skills to master one at a time. They build on each other. They build on the differentiation and acceptance that we talked about in episode 231. Get curious before you respond. Notice what's underneath the words. Let your steadiness, repeated over and over again, become the thing that keeps your child safe to keep coming to you. I also want to name something before I close off this episode. If this feels like a lot right now, these three words, each with its own layer, plus the two words that I went over last time, then you are completely normal. Changing the way you show up in a relationship that you have had for decades can feel very overwhelming and very clunky, especially at the beginning. It is very hard to remember all of this in the actual moment when things are difficult. When your child says something hard and your old habits are the fastest thing that come to you, changing those is very hard. You are not failing if you forget to pause, if you miss a cue, if you respond in the old way that you used to before you catch yourself. This is exactly where practice and support around you while you practice becomes invaluable. So take a breath, get curious, and stay steady. I really want to thank you for being here with me today. Remember, you don't have to do this perfectly. Just keep working on how you're showing up. Because when one person in a family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to shift and heal. Next time, we're going to talk about and finish this series off with two more words that actually help. Those are repair and accountability. This is Coaching Your Family Relationships, and I'm Tina Gosni. This is where parents of adult children get the help that they need to repair, rebuild, and strengthen relationships. And if this episode gave you something useful today, would you please consider sharing it with a parent who could use a little more hope and a little more help this week? Thanks. I'll see you next time.