00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 202, "Pain, Peace, and Parenting Disengaged Adult Children." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my friends. I'm so glad to have you here today. We are talking about something that has just really been heavy on me this week. And I'll be honest with you, I'm recording at a time I don't usually do: Sunday morning. I just have worked with three people this week on this issue and it's an issue that's a little bit close to me as well and just keeps coming back that I need to talk to you about this and I need to share this. I'm sure that there are some of you out there who can really benefit from this concept and from this idea. So this morning I sat down and I wrote down my thoughts, and I just got to record this. I got to put this out there, so here we go. 

01:14 

We are talking today about pain, peace, and parenting disengaged adult children. So three clients I've worked with this week who are struggling with adult children, who have just decided they don't want a relationship at all with their parents and the reasons are different. But for the most part, these children, they're all in there 20s I believe or close to, but they have different reasons for just deciding that these parents are doing it all wrong and that they have should be doing it better and that they're being disrespected and that that they're not being heard, that the parents are not respecting their boundaries. A lot of different stuff...their ideas about things are different and because of that they can't have a relationship. Anyway, a lot of different stuff going into this, and whether those stories are true or not, those kids believe them. And they are reality for those kids and those kids are feeling some tough stuff. And I think it's important to remember. I think sometimes we look at these situations from our own viewpoint and we go "how could they do this to me," but learning how to also put ourselves in a space of compassion for them and say "how could they do this to them?" 

02:58 

I mean, all three of them said, "you know what, I've had a great relationship with this kid. All growing up, all through their teenage years, their young adult, everything was good, everything was great. And then all of a sudden, this child just started believing that I was bad, that there was trauma from their youth..." you know, the situations are just all different. But regardless of what the circumstance is that brings this about, sometimes this is where we find ourselves with adult kids who disengage. And sometimes more strongly than others. One of these dear clients that I worked with this week said that their child told them, "I don't want any of you to contact me at all unless somebody dies." Another one, the child has said, "We don't want any contact at all. We don't want you contacting the grandkids, we don't want you seeing them." Another one has said, "we'll let you see the grandkids about every three months for about an hour." And the pain is real, my friends. Of course there's pain. And there will be pain moving forward. This is what I want you to understand. It's not that the pain goes away when we find the peace. It's not that we feel pain or we feel peace. And that's what the topic of this is about, is that we have these two very different emotions residing in the same space, next to each other, bumping up against each other. 

04:46 

So I think sometimes people think that we can use this work to stop from having the pain. And I know that for me, I'm using this work to learn to feel a little bit more pain. I know that sounds crazy to some of y'all, but I turned off my emotions for a long time and I don't think I'm alone in that. I think there's a lot of people that do that, but I turned off my emotions. So I'm using this work to move into more pain. Some of y'all it will be helpful to use this work to feel less pain because we tend to double down on the pain that we're feeling and to increase the pain that we're going through and we're going to talk about both of those situations today. So for example I would often try to decrease the pain with protecting myself, with shutting down my emotions, whereas other people increase the pain by blaming either themselves with the other person, by seeking to control things that are out of their control and by resisting reality. Those things increase the pain. It's like we have this base layer of pain and then we layer on pain of blaming myself and feeling guilty. We layer on the pain and the frustration of not being to control the other people. We layer on the pain of fighting and fighting and fighting against what's real. 

06:06 

So that's what the three people, well two of the people, that I worked with this last week...that's what they do. They've been doubling down on the pain, with this self-blame or trying to control or resisting what it was. Me? I shut down my emotions; that was my go-to. If you've been listening for a bit, you know that I have a son who has disengaged with me and it's not to the point where he has asked me never to contact him, but I will reach out, three weeks later reach out, two weeks later reach out, and get nothing nothing nothing, right? So I have a disengaged adult child and I know how hard it is. But I think ultimately as parents we have to decide "who do I want to be? What kind of parent do I want to be?" We have to think that in terms of reality, like if our child does not want any contact with us, we can't say "well, I want to be the grandma that takes the kids out for for lunch." Well, we may want that but right now that's not what we get. That's not our choice. And so within the context of our situation, we really have to decide "who do I want to be?" There's a lot of options there and we can show up with snide little comments. We can show up with coldness. Or we can can choose to show up with compassion and kindness, which I think is a hard path to take, but it's the more peaceful one, and it's the more fulfilling one. 

07:56 

One thing I want us to understand as we move into this discussion is that when it comes to to adult children, we will always be their parent. We will always be a noun parent right? The person, place, or thing. I'm going to be a parent but I am no longer a verb parent when it comes to my adult children. I'm no longer parenting them. They don't need a parent once they're an adult. They, and I know so I'm going to probably get a little bit of pushback on that, but I want you to just understand that, once they become adults it's our job to stand back and let them make their own decisions and choose to live their own lives. We have to let go of wanting to have a say in their lives. And this is where we have to learn to respect their agency. So we are no longer parenting. Now, does that mean they're not going to ask us for advice sometimes? Oh, they will. But we don't step in the way that we used to when they were young. And this is where it comes back to this agency piece. 

09:08 

If you recall looking at the Plan of Salvation, Satan's plan was to restrict agency, to take away our agency, to force us to make the right decision. And when we look at what we've been taught, that was in the context of "I want everybody to come back. I want everybody to be happy I want everybody to be able to live in God's presence after their earth experience." And that sounds so lovely, doesn't it, when we put it that way. "I just want everybody to be happy. I just want everybody to get the greatest reward." But we have to realize that that was coming at the price of our agency and God's plan was to give us all of our agency, meaning that we would have full control over the decisions that we make in our lives. And this means that if we apply this to ourselves as parents, it is our job to give our children, as they grow and leave home, leave our presence, to give them their agency. Well, they already have it. We just get to move into a space where we start to reject or we start to respect their agency. This does not mean that other people's choices don't affect us. Other people's choices and actions are going to go into our circumstance line and then the rest is up to us. 

10:38 

So when a child disengages, if a child says "don't contact me anymore," that goes into our circumstance line. I want us to realize that that circumstance becomes neutral. I know we've talked about this and this is going to be hard for some of y'all to wrap your heads around... the circumstance of a child saying, "don't contact me anymore," that's a neutral circumstance. We get to choose what we think about it. And this is where it comes down to what I was talking about before. Like for me, I moved into a place where I disengaged. And I was like, "fine, he's an adult. He gets to make his choices," which is true. And I still believe that. I believe that 100%. But that, for me, was coming from a place of wanting to protect myself so that I didn't feel the pain. And I went through a time where I just didn't think about it. I didn't engage with it. And I just was like, "well, he's an adult. He gets to do what he wants," because I was trying to protect myself from the pain. And I went awhile in my own situation, not feeling the pain. But then I realized that, "oh, what I really do want in life is to feel pain. I want to be emotionally engaged with my role as a parent." And so I started working on feeling more emotions and getting to the point where I do feel pain. Because here's the thing: if my child disengages with me, I want that to be painful. I don't want to be a parent for whom that is not painful. And I found myself moving into that space, and so I had to intentionally choose to move back into a space where it was painful. But we also don't want that space to be debilitating and that's going to come on the side where we increase our pain by blaming ourselves or by blaming others. Which would mean that we move into a space of "if I had been a better parent, if I had done this different, if I had done this right," we're blaming us, we're blaming them, making up stories in our head about what's going on with them. We might be blaming their spouse or their partner. It's easy to go in that space of blame, right? But what we need to do is get to a place where we are okay feeling the pain, and that the pain is part of what we get to feel because we're a loving parent and because we're an emotionally engaged. 

13:10 

Their disconnection, whatever they say, goes into the circumstance line. It's neutral. And the rest is up to us how we think, how we feel, how we act, the end result. That's all up to us. And I will tell you that finding the peace comes in letting go from trying to control things that we can't control, and finding peace comes from learning to engage emotionally. When I was disengaged, I was feeling peace in the sense that I wasn't feeling the pain, but I also was very uncomfortable with where I was in my relationship with my son. I was uncomfortable because it was a very difficult time. it didn't feel right to be emotionally disengaged. So finding the peace comes when we move into this space of allowing us to feel the pain of that circumstance and not turn it off and not turn it on full blast with other feelings. Often, we have this idea of how we think they should behave, how they should feel, what they should think. And anytime we move it into the space of trying to decide how other people should be behaving, we're crossing boundaries into respecting their agency. And part of this piece, as well, is learning to let go of our victim mentality. 

14:46 

Now, this is a tough, tough place to go. But we do need to take charge of what we can. Because here's the thing: if there's a victim, which is me, I'm a victim of my child deciding they don't want this engagement...if there's a victim, then guess what? There has to be a villain. And in this circumstance we end up putting our child in as the villain. And that thought, that they're 

the villain, that they're causing all the problems, that they're doing all of this, does not generally have us showing up the way that we want to be. This isn't really a place that we want to reside. We get to choose, though, not to have a victim or a villain in our story. We can choose to set that aside and decide that nobody's to blame, that nothing's going on, but instead we can choose to be the hero of our own story. We can choose to show up the way that we want to show up. 

15:49 

So we just need to figure out what that entails and that starts with our thoughts. And one of the best ways that I've found to do this for me is to work a thought model backwards from the action line. So I put in the actions what I really want to be acting like, and then I figure out what emotion, what feeling, do I need to be having in order to act that way, and then what thought would create that feeling. So here we go. Action line: I want to show up in my situation respecting their wishes, being willing to listen and be curious. I want to be able to set appropriate boundaries when necessary. I want to give him space to be himself. I do not want to manipulate or use passive aggressive behaviors. So when I put those in my action line, this is the way that I want to show up in my relationship. I think "what's the feeling that's going to create that." And I think for my future, I want to be able to be the hero of my story. For me, the feeling would be a feeling of deep love or maybe even a feeling of deep respect for them as a person, and start seeing them as a separate human being, not a piece of me, but as a separate human being. I really respect them. Thoughts: then I'm going to give you several thoughts that can help create that love or that respect. Here's a thought: I choose to love him regardless of where he's at. Thought: I accept that his path may not be what I envisioned for him. Thought: I respect his agency to live however he chooses. Thought: I know he will figure it out. This is four options of different thoughts we can have, they're all a little bit different, and for me, those are all true thoughts. And when I think those thoughts in the context of my situation, I show up very differently. I'm much more patient. I'm much more kind. I'm much more willing to accept where he is and to allow him the space to figure out his story and to walk his path in whatever way he feels he needs to walk in. 

18:21 

But here's the thing: none of those thoughts are going to take away the pain. But they will bring the peace. We feel good about how we are showing up. We feel peaceful about how we're showing up. And that is all we can control. And this is where peace and pain coexist in our parenting. We do feel pain when we're estranged from a child. Absolutely we do. Heaven knows that a piece of our heart resides inside of them. I think that's part of parenting. These children are the ones who have really taught us how to love in a completely different way. And we've given our hearts and our souls to them as we have raised and worked and sacrificed for them. And so when they choose to walk away, of course there will be pain. But sitting right next to that pain, we can also have peace. Peace in knowing that we love them. Peace in knowing that we are choosing to stay emotionally engaged. Peace in choosing to be the hero of our story instead of the victim of this story. Emotions I don't see as being so much on a spectrum where we have peace on one end of the spectrum and pain on the other, that they're far apart. I see emotions and feelings more as like all being in a bucket. And they're all just bumping up against each other. And sometimes we think we have spectrum pain, like pain on one side, or peace, we can only feel one or the other. But I think we can have both right next to each other: pain that we're estranged and peace in knowing that we're showing up how we want to, that we are keeping our hearts open, that we are creating a safe space for them. 

20:16 

 If they ever decide to reengage, we cannot control how or if they engage with us. When they aren't interested in even communicating, it's hard to get to a place where we're resolving the conflict. But conflict doesn't mean it has to turn into contention within our own hearts. We can't control if they take this conflict, this two differing opinions, we can't control if they turn it into contention for them, but we can control whether we turn it into contention for us. I can feel pain and not be angry about it. I can just let pain be pain and I can feel peaceful about how I show up. I can turn the conflict, the difference of opinions, this neutral circumstance, I can turn it into connection. And if nothing else, greater connection with myself, like we can turn in a greater connection with ourselves, understanding ourselves better. For me, coming to understand my knee jerk reactions, seeing my unhealthy ways of responding and learning to manage my thoughts and show up the way that I really want to, this has been the journey of a lifetime for me. And this process of coming into ourselves, of knowing ourselves better, of learning how to love better and more cleanly, learning how to be more the kind of person that I want to be, which is kind and compassionate and understanding. 

21:56 

We have, at this point, started to progress on our own path. Sometimes we're so worried about our child's path and what are they doing and why are they doing it and what's happening that we forget to maintain our own path. Maintaining our own path is moving forward into becoming more of who we feel we are really called to be, living more in alignment with what our spirit desires to be. These changes will then begin to change our other relationships as well. This is the brilliance of doing this work. We can just suffer through a tough experience with estranged children. We can suffer through, we can have a struggle every single day with it and we can fight against it every single day. But as we step into this work, discovering ourselves more, understanding ourselves more and making the adjustments where we are not super happy with how we're showing up, when we can start to move into this space, then we're not just working on that particular relationship. We are working on us, on us becoming the person that we want to be, on us showing up exactly how we want to show up. And that's when we change us at a core level. That is when this work that we're doing changes not just the one relationship we're working on, it changes every relationship in our lives. The children who aren't estranged, it changes our relationship with them. We will love them better. We will respect them more. We will honor their agency more. We will be a better parent, a better person, a better spouse, a better neighbor and friend. This experience that is so painful, when worked through and understood and used to our personal growth advantage, is an experience that can bless us and serve us and mold us. We can use these tough experiences to grow. We can use them to become. We can use them to step into ourselves more, instead of out of ourselves. 

24:34 

This can be tough. I get it. I feel it. I'm experiencing it. But I also want you to understand that we can feel the tough. We can struggle. We can feel the pain and we can also feel the peace as we do our own work here. We can't do the work on our kids. We can't make our kids show up the way that we wish they would have or even the way that "I didn't raise them to be this way." That's a line I've heard. Of course we didn't raise them to be this way. But this is the way that they are choosing to be. And as Byron Katie says, "when we fight against reality we're going to lose 100% of the time." Our child's choosing to show up and estrange themselves. That's reality. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if that's your reality and I know it hurts. But it is the reality and all we can control is how we choose to show up. For me it was a path of choosing to engage emotionally and choosing to allow myself to feel the hurt. For some of you, it's choosing to stand down a bit, and don't build and double down on that hurt. But to just accept the hurt for what it is and and to not make it worse. 

26:03 

So I hope this was helpful. It feels a lot more low-key to me today. But I think that's just because it's working with these three clients. It's just my heart has just ached so much for them this week and I know it's painful. And if I've got three clients going through that. I can imagine that of the rest of you that are listening, that there's at least one or two more of you who are struggling with adult kids who have done the same thing and who are disengaging. So ,my friend, growing up is this space of realizing what I can control and what I cannot control and stepping into controlling what I can, being the person that I ultimately want to be and creating that, staying in my lane, staying on my path and respecting and loving other people as they make their way along their path, even if it's a path that I disagree with, even if it's a path that brings me pain. We still have to respect that and love it and this can be tough to work through. 

27:16 

If you are really, really struggling with this, I can help, right? Like, this is what I do as a coach. I help you learn to manage your thoughts around it. I help you learn to clean up this stuff, and it's tough. I promise you it's tough work and it's hard  work, but it is work well worth doing because it always, always feels better when we're the person we really want to be. I love you, my friends. Thank you for being here with me and for sharing this journey with me. I just pray that you will be able to find the peace, and that that peace will be able to settle down next to that pain and they'll be able to coexist in a really sweet space for you. That is going to do it for me today. Wish you all the best. If you want to contact me and talk about coaching, do some work on this, you can go to my website, tanyahale.com and there's a place where you can sign up for a free consult. I would love to chat with you about this and I would love to help you move into a space where you can allow that pain and that peace to coexist. Okay, have an awesome week and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

28:31 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.