Ep.175 How to Manage Midlife Relational Estrangement with Coping Skills for Anxiety, Heartbreak and Healing

Are you stuck in the heartbreak of midlife breakdown or  estrangement and unsure how to move forward?
When relationships end it  hurts, but it doesn’t have to define your future.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    How to mind your mind and tend to your emotions so you feel better.
2.    How to grow external self-awareness
3.    How to clarify your core values so you can move forward with integrity and self-respect
🎧 Put in your earphones, take a breath, and let’s begin the journey back to your calm.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

in this episode, you'll discover how to heal when midlife estrangement breaks your heart.

Built-in Microphone: 0:06

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:30

Welcome to the podcast. If you're navigating the pain of a broken relationship, whether with a parent, adult child, close friend, or even a neighbor, you are not alone. Estrangement midlife can feel confusing, heartbreaking, and deeply personal. And while no two stories are the same, the emotional impact is often just as profound. In episode 1 0 1, I talked about the reasons for our culture's growing problem with estrangement. In today's episode, we're here to help you find your footing again in one of life's most challenging heartaches. I'll walk you through three powerful and compassionate coping skills to support your healing. How to mind your mind and tend your emotions instead of reacting or getting stuck in the pain. How to grow your external self-awareness. And lastly, how to clarify your core values so you can move forward with integrity and self-respect. You stare at the phone. No new messages from the friend that you used to text daily. You replay that last conversation or the blowup at the family holiday, wondering if that is the moment where everything in this important relationship shifted. Or maybe you are the one who backed away after too many unresolved hurts that ache in your chest. That's the grief of still caring. Even saying moving through, it sounds a bit cliche to me because the pain of estrangement from someone you love is not only heartbreaking. It's often life altering. I've seen this in my office and I've experienced it amongst family and friends. Estrangement in midlife can trigger waves of anxiety, self-doubt, grief and anger. But it can also become a powerful turning point for self and relational awareness and healing. This isn't an episode about how to fix the relationship. It's about how to heal you that may catch you off guard because when you are facing this kind of loss, it's so easy for your mind to think about, how can I get this relationship back into my life? But right now, you may not have a choice about the relationship, but you do have a choice as to how you move through the hurt. Let's begin with how to care for the emotional storm inside of you. Coping skill number one, mind your mind and tend your emotions. No two estrangements are alike. Some begin after a huge fight where someone declares I am done with you. Others begin with unanswered texts and being ghosted, what leads to estrangement beyond the hurt and anger is often a lack of communication skills and an inability to hear or to say what needs to be shared. The irony, and to me the saddest part of it is that it's these very skills that are required to repair the relationship. Yet they were often missing. So the estrangement happens. This leaves you reeling and reeling can look very different depending on who you are. I once had a client whose sibling ghosted her after a fight about caring for their parent in earlier episodes, I've shared Dan Siegel's image for mental wellness, A Peaceful river where your mind is calm, peaceful, and alert, flanked by two banks, one bank represents your mind, being rigid, imposing control, the other, your mind being chaotic, being out of control. My client's mind kept bouncing from bank to bank. She text her brother. Things like, we can work this out. Rigidity, then you're a selfish jerk. You've done nothing to help mom. Chaos. Estrangement is a loss. And loss disturbs your mind, heart, and body coping. Skill number one is about recognizing that your mind needs some tending. Like many people, you may want to fix the relationship so your mind will calm down. That makes sense, but you're actually outsourcing your healing. If you want to feel better, you have to move your energy towards helping yourself feel better. Start by simply observing your mind without judgment. Another client came in because his wife insisted he come. It wasn't until our fourth session that he mentioned he no longer spoke to his daughter. He said it like he was talking about his fourth grade teacher. I asked him to say it again and observe what happened in his mind. He said it, and then he replied, my mind is blank. This man was relying on a coping skill. Many of us use denial and emotional unclaiming, then I asked him to notice what happened in his body. When I said, your daughter no longer talks to you, he immediately said. That makes me really pissed at you. When I acknowledged how angry he must feel, he moved instantly to blame. And let me tell you, for eight minutes, he ranted on about how angry and disrespectful his daughter had become. At the end of his rant, he said, how dare she hurt her mother and me like this? I responded. I am so sorry. this is heartbreaking. It must feel so painful. He looked so confused and then he sat in silence in 20 minutes. he had cycled through blame, denial, and hurt These are often the only tools we were given. In our culture. The two most common responses to pain are blame and unclaim. That silence. It's often where people don't know how to tend to befriend their own pain. When I asked him how he and his wife care for their hurt, he said, I have beer and television. My wife, that's what her sisters are for. We're all doing the best we can, but when it comes to estrangement, it is rarely tidy. Why? Because humans, we're messy. We're complicated. Each and every one of us, while it's human to wish estrangement hadn't happened. It has. So coping, skill number one is to lean into using the loss for growth. Observe your mind. Learn to regulate your emotion. I showed this client my one pager on the river of mental wellness, he looked at the one pager and laughed and said, who thought of this? It's kind of clever. A little bit of education goes a long way, I have never met a person who didn't want to grow, neuroscience shows that naming our emotions can reduce their intensity by 50%. And you know what that means? That most people will save a lot of money on alcohol naming, instead of numbing awareness, not avoidance. That's step one. Estrangement makes you feel out of control. Tending to your emotions won't bring the person back, but it can help you come back to yourself if you don't know how to do this. No problem. Find a therapist. This is what we love to do. Listen to episode six and seven and commit to really helping yourself move through this loss, move through this heartache. So at the end of it, you feel. Better about you. Don't let pride or shame or fear keep you stuck. And this leads me to coping skill number two, increase your external self-awareness. What does this mean? Reflect. Honestly on your role in the estrangement, most estrangements don't occur because of a single moment or a catastrophic event. More often, they follow repeated, missed opportunities for repair. In my experience, estrangement often happens not because someone wants it, but because they don't have the relational tools to do something else. Once my clients are more emotionally grounded, it's time for deeper work. I often begin this by asking my clients to write down the story of the estrangement to fill in the blank. This person is no longer talking to me because, and just write, don't worry about grammar or punctuation. I encourage them to write freely for five or 10 minutes. I follow that up with this question what were the things that you did that led to the estrangement? A consistent pattern emerges. Clients know a lot about their own experience, but very little about the other person's. That's where external self-awareness matches my clinical observation. Dr. Tasha Erick's research shows that only 10 to 15% of people have strong external self-awareness. What is external self-awareness? It's the knowledge of how your behavior, your actions, your words, impact others. Only 10 to 15% of the population. No wonder 27% of people have an estranged relationship. So coping skill number two is increasing external self-awareness. If you want to grow through this loss, you have to want to grow as a person. Which leads me to my third coping skill. Clarify your values, and I'm gonna be honest, it is probably this coping skill that is the key to being able to heal from estrangement. And when I say heal, I mean within yourself to learn to live with this painful heartache in a way that it doesn't stop you from having a meaningful, enjoyable, and beautiful life loss, changes your values. Often without you realizing it. I want you to clarify two key values. Value number one is being right, more important than being relational. Start with yourself. Have you gotten feedback from people that sometimes you're too stubborn for your own good? Let's be honest, most people like being right until they're not, and then those who grow become curious instead of defensive. We live in a competitive culture, but relationships require collaboration, not competition. The second value I want you to reflect on is can you stand in your values even when the relationship is paused? This especially applies to parents cut off by adult children. Many begin therapy feeling like victims, but as they work through coping skills one and two, they become more stable and they start asking what it means to respect their adult child. Even from a distance, one midlife mom had an aha moment. She realized that she could give her daughter space, manage her emotions, and still love her deeply. She didn't need to disown or resent her daughter just because her daughter wasn't in contact. She could downsize her story that her whole life is ruined because she still had relationships with her other children, her grandchildren, her neighbors, her friends part of her life had been altered, but much of her life had stayed the same As she grew more into this realization, she began a beautiful ritual where each week she would go to a church and light a candle for her daughter wishing her well. Saying a prayer that someday they would reconcile on birthdays and holidays. She bought cards at small gifts and placed them in a box just in case one day it all worked out. She also sent her daughter a single text. I'm in therapy working on myself. I am sorry for the pain I caused. I understand that you need distance. I will always be open to repairing our relationship. That simple value clarified and value driven action gave her peace. She knew what she stood for. Midlife Estrangement is one of the most painful relational experiences. You can face, but it can also become a doorway to greater emotional maturity, compassion, and strength. Today we explore three powerful coping skills, how to mind your mind and tend to your emotions instead of reacting or ruminating in the pain. How to grow external self-awareness and reflect on how your behavior may have impacted the other person, and how to clarify your core values so you can move forward with integrity and self-respect. This work is not easy. It takes courage, humility, and often support from others. But every step you take toward emotional clarity is a step toward freedom from the anxiety and heartbreak that estrangement can bring. I do understand that the pain never goes away completely, but my hope for you is that you can learn to carry it, so you can be involved and show up for the rest of your life. In this week's Inner Challenge, I invite you to reflect on your values by completing this sentence. Even if this relationship never heals, I will still live by the value of. Write it on a sticky note. Place it where you can see it each day. Let the value which is positive, not the estrangement, which is hurtful. Guide your next step. I'll be back on Thursday with a follow-up episode. With healthy ways to cope. If you are the one that has stepped out of a close relationship, remember, if you'd like the one pager of my mental wellness model, send me an email mj@mjmurrayvachon.com Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife calm.