Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Did you ever expect being the parent of an adult child would be so difficult? Introducing "Bite Your Tongue," a look at exploring that next chapter in parenting: building healthy relationships with adult children. From money and finance to relationships and sibling rivalry, we cover it all. Even when to bite your tongue! Join your hosts Denise Gorant and Kirsten Heckendorf as they bring together experts, parents and even young adults to discuss this next phase of parenting. We will chat, have some fun and learn about ourselves and our kids along the way! RSSVERIFY
Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Embracing Emotional Maturity: The Path to Better Adult Relationships
Emotional maturity transforms our relationships with adult children, but what exactly does it look like in practice? In this powerful conversation with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and author of The New York Times bestseller "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents," we discover that emotional maturity exists on a continuum that shifts with our stress levels and resources.
When our adult children challenge our memories or share perspectives that differ from our own, our defensive instincts kick in automatically. But Dr. Gibson offers a revolutionary approach: temporarily set aside your need to be right and focus instead on understanding their emotional experience. This shift from "courtroom thinking" to empathetic listening creates space for authentic connection.
We're experiencing a profound cultural transition from what Gibson calls the "family age," where identity came from roles and external markers, to the "self-awareness age," characterized by greater psychological understanding and individual consciousness. This explains why so many parents feel caught between outdated expectations and new relationship dynamics with their adult children.
The most transformative insight? The very phrase "adult children" contains problematic contradictions. "My child" suggests ownership over another autonomous human being while failing to acknowledge their full adulthood. Instead, Gibson suggests approaching our adult children more like valued friends whose company we enjoy and whose autonomy we respect.
Self-awareness (recognizing our thoughts and feelings in the moment) and self-knowledge (understanding the patterns behind our reactions) form the foundation of emotional maturity. Together, they allow us to separate our defensive responses from our deeper desire for connection. When an adult child sets a boundary that feels hurtful, these skills help us recognize our feelings without reacting impulsively.
Have you noticed shifts in your relationship with your adult children? Share your experiences and continue the conversation by following us on social media or visiting biteyourtonguepodcast.com. The journey toward more authentic family connections starts with understanding ourselves.
Huge thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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So many people look at themselves with such critical, judgmental, hopeless eyes because that's the way they've been raised. They've been shamed, made to feel terrible about themselves when they do something wrong and they carry that little internal critical voice around inside of them. And they carry that little internal critical voice around inside of them. So it makes it very hard for those people to begin to look at themselves. In order to grow, and first we have to realize that we have to love ourselves. Everything starts with accepting yourself, right where you are and knowing where you're at and, yes, where you hope to be, but not to beat yourself up because you haven't gotten there yet.
Speaker 2:Hey, everyone, welcome to Bite your Tongue the podcast. Join me, your host, denise Gorin, as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children. Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you with our adult children. Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you. Get ready to dive deep and learn to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when to bite our tongues. So let's get started. Welcome back to Bite your Tongue the podcast. We're back. Sort of I'm Denise and I'm flying solo today, making scheduling interviews a little bit easier, while I might bring Ellen or Kirsten back as a guest host later on, for right now it's just me. Connie Gorin-Fisher is still here as our amazing producer and audio engineer. As always, we're not sticking to a regular schedule. We're on a mission to find the very best guests, not just fill slots. But before we dive in with today's episodes, I have some exciting personal news. I welcomed my first grandchild in April, a beautiful baby boy. I was able to hold him when he was just four hours old. It was truly magical. I took tons of advice from our episode with the grandmother doula, though I definitely overstayed my welcome. I've learned so much and I'll share a lot of that in a future episode, but for now, let's dive into today's topic.
Speaker 2:Today's episode truly is a must listen. We're exploring a crucial topic our role as parents and how it shapes our relationships with our adult children. This is it everyone an episode everyone must listen to and share. Today's guest is someone I've been wanting to talk to for a long time Dr Lindsay Gibson. She's a clinical psychologist and author of the wildly popular book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. This book is a New York Times bestseller and has been published in 37 languages. I read the article about her that appeared on the very front page of the New York Times Magazine section I think it was in May and I thought now this is someone I really need to interview.
Speaker 2:I'll share a link to that story in my episode notes, but before you start thinking, wait, is that me? Don't worry, you're not alone. In fact, that's exactly what we're going to explore today how even the most well-meaning parents can sometimes fall into emotionally immature parents, and what we can do to grow beyond them and show up differently for adult kids. I saw some of myself as an emotionally immature parent during those early days of being a grandparent. Dr Gibson has more than 30 years of experience helping people untangle complicated family dynamics, and today she's here to help us look inward with curiosity, not judgment. This episode is about self-awareness, growth and maybe a few light bulb moments. So grab your coffee, maybe a journal to take notes and let's dive in. Welcome, dr Gibson. For listeners who might not be familiar with your work, can you explain a little bit about what you mean by emotionally immature parents? What are some of the key traits, and I'd love you to give us some examples.
Speaker 1:Well, emotional maturity. I like to think of that as being on a continuum, much as we think of someone's intellectual development or their social development. Think of someone's intellectual development or their social development. We start out at a very early age one way, and hopefully we develop along and become more mature as we get older. But that continuum of development, it has a movable marker.
Speaker 1:Depending on how good we're feeling, how resourced we are, for instance, if you are sick or fatigued or stressed, your level of emotional maturity is going to slide toward the more emotionally immature level.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's true for anybody, I don't care how emotionally mature you are. So I'm careful in my books to talk about relatively emotionally mature people, sufficiently adequately emotionally mature, because there's no pinnacle that somebody reaches and then hangs out there for the rest of their life. We're always, whoever you are, we're always struggling to maintain our relationships and really our state of being in as mature a level as we can muster. But for sure, all of us are going to act in ways that we regret and ways that we look back on with shame or, you know, just wishing that we had had it more together. So when we think about emotional immaturity in the sense that I write about, and you have to keep in mind too, denise, that I'm writing as a therapist who is seeing people that are coming to me, who, in this case, you know, given our topic, probably would be the adult children of those parents that are coming in.
Speaker 1:Once in a blue moon I might have a parent contact me about getting help for their end of things, but mostly I'm hearing the experience of the person who's had difficulty with the emotionally immature parent. So here's a difficulty that they tend to have. One is that they feel invalidated and two, they feel controlled or diminished or dismissed. They feel that they have not been able to be their full, true selves in their relationship with their parent, that the love and acceptance that they got was quite conditional.
Speaker 1:And I don't mean conditional, like you have to get all A's. I mean conditional also on the basis of how that parent was feeling that day. You know, was the parent able to be present enough with that child that day because of their own issues, their own problems? So there's a sense for these adult children that they have had to hide their true feelings and their true thoughts for fear of upsetting or angering their parent. The idea is that when you are relatively emotionally immature, you probably have had trouble learning how to manage, recognize your feelings, your emotions. So you tend to get reactive instead of pausing to respond to what your child is doing or saying. And you also have trouble with stress. Stress tends to disorganize a person who is more along the lines of the emotionally immature. It's just something that's very hard for them. And, of course, how do we all act when we're stressed? We act in ways that we're sorry for later.
Speaker 2:Okay, Would you add anxiety to stress when you're anxious and stressed, yeah, when you get stressed, you get anxious, you're anxious.
Speaker 1:This is really where the maturity comes in. Depending on what kinds of coping mechanisms you typically use, that's going to determine how productively or how well you're able to handle conflict or some kind of disagreement with that other person. So the stress causes a kind of a feeling of being off balance. That creates anxiety. They feel disoriented, they feel out of control, they don't know what to do. By definition, I mean, that's like the little child doesn't know what to do when something happens that upsets them, and so they tend to lose emotional control.
Speaker 1:A very young solution to that is to blame the other person and to get very reactive and it gets into that well, you did this or I only did that because I get very defensive, and that of course you know doesn't go well when you're trying to work out a problem with another person.
Speaker 1:So we get that kind of reactivity and the anxiety and the stress that people feel when they have some level of emotional immaturity is so all consuming that they end up acting in a very egocentric way, that is, they just can't get their mind off of how things affected them. They're taken over by their emotional response to situations. They might prefer that they didn't, but maybe they never learned, or maybe they never had the opportunity to have somebody calm them down and teach them how to get a handle on their reactions so that they don't say or do something that alienates someone. You can imagine what that does to your empathy for the person that you're in the relationship with. It makes it very hard to have empathy for them, because you get very fixated on your own reactivity, your own anxiety, your fears, your sense of feeling lost or feeling out of control, and that makes it really hard for you to pay attention to what the other person's feeling.
Speaker 2:Oh, all of that makes so much sense. So put yourself in the place of an adult parent now who and as you've said in many of your other interviews, every parent is flawed. We've all said and done things that we know we shouldn't have said and done. Now you're in a situation where your adult child is saying something to you and the story that they're telling you goes completely against what you saw happen. You don't want to be that. Well, I said this and you said that. What is the best way to respond? Because part of you wants to say but you told me to do that, and they're saying why did you do that? How do you respond more maturely when a conversation like that occurs?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, of course it's very threatening emotionally threatening when somebody that is the world to you I mean your own child, that you, you know so badly, want a good relationship with, when they're telling you something that you did wrong and you remember that you did not do that or you did the opposite of that, or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Or you thought, you did, you tried your very best. Right Thought you did yeah.
Speaker 1:Your intention was good, right. So we all tend to interpret our own behavior according to what our intention was, not its effect on the other person. So we think that if we explain our intention, the other person will go. Of course. Now I understand. Sorry, mom, didn't mean to bring that up. I guess I'm wrong, but that doesn't work because it's not about what you intended, it's about what the effect was.
Speaker 1:So, the first thing I would recommend to somebody is keep your own history straight in your mind, write it down in your journal after you get off the call or you have the conversation, to write down your account of what happened and what your motivation was, so that you take care of that part of you that's saying yes, but I was intending to do this other thing. I really am a good person. I didn't mean to Save it for your journal, that self-validation, but when you try to get them to see what your intention was, you're now expecting them to switch horses and have empathy for you.
Speaker 1:Right Like you're saying put yourself in my shoes. This is what I intended to happen.
Speaker 1:So it's for the you know. For the time being, if you want to try to work something out with your adult child, lay aside what your intention was and lay aside the unfairness of being accused of something that you don't think you did because we got bigger fish to fry. We're trying to have a relationship, or improve the relationship, with that adult child, which means that you listen to them like a therapist in a way, meaning that you don't have judgment on what they're telling you or your own point of view. You're just trying to understand things from their point of view. You're trying to put yourself in their shoes and you'll notice that with your best friends, with your closest people, that's what they do when they listen to you. They are trying to understand what this was like for you and that makes us love them, because we all want to be understood, understood.
Speaker 1:That situation, where you have a different memory of an interchange, is so important to validate it for yourself. I am going I can't wait to write this down because I remember what really happened, but this is not a court of law. We do not have a stenographer who is taking down. What matters is the feeling that is going on between the two of you and if your adult child is trying to tell you something that bothered them, it works best if you lay that other courtroom stuff aside and just try to listen for their experience and let them know that you got their emotional experience and you see it from their point of view. Worry about whether it's true or not later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all of it makes perfect sense, I think. The only thing is, I think with a friend there is a back and forth much more so, and I wonder what is the role of the adult child in being mature in this kind of situation? What is the role of the adult child in being mature in this kind of situation, allowing the mom or the father to express their feelings? I ran into a parent the other day who listens to my podcast all the time and she said to me why is it always on us? Why do we have to be the ones that are always walking on eggshells or working to make this relationship strong? What role does the adult child have to take in this.
Speaker 1:They don't have to take any role in terms of just thinking about interpersonal relationships, like if you have two people and one desperately wants the relationship and the other one you know they're, they've got one foot out the door Right. So when you start as the person who is feeling left or feeling rejected, when you start asserting your rights and you start thinking about what they ought to be feeling responsible for too to kind of even this up you're losing sight of the opportunity that you have, because you're being given an opportunity to bite your tongue and you're not doing that because you're knuckling under or you know you're a weak, spine, spineless person. You're doing it strategically.
Speaker 2:Gosh yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, because that is going to get you more of the result. That you want is a continuation of the relationship and maybe some willingness and interest on your adult child's part to keep trying to communicate with you. That's what you're after.
Speaker 1:So, I understand, gosh. I totally understand the feeling like why do I have to be the one who's doing all the work? I would just posit as a thing to consider, possibly, that from that adult child's point of view and I'm speaking as the therapist of these people they feel like they have been doing a huge amount of emotional work on your behalf their whole life.
Speaker 1:They have felt like they had to watch what they said, or dad would get upset. They have to, you know, not tell their parent what they really did or what they really thought, because it would be a moral outrage. They have to do whatever their parents said, or else they would be failing a moral obligation and therefore they would be a bad person. I mean, the parent, of course, didn't see any of this, because they are the ones who are in the position of authority. For them, it's going to feel like that relationship through childhood and adolescence Well, maybe not adolescence, but for a long time the relationship went smoothly but they're not taking into account, they're the ones with all the power for those first 12 years, or 15.
Speaker 2:Well, 18 usually. Usually, when you're paying for things, you have more power. That's true. When they have to live under your roof, you have a little more power. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I agree. It's like how would you treat someone that you wanted to, that you liked that you wanted to be good friends with? You would be minding your P's and Q's. You would have your super tuned empathy out. You would have your antenna up because you would not want to inadvertently say or do things that are going to alienate this attractive potential friend. Quote unquote. If I were trying to set up the opportunity to be better friends with this person, it's going to be pretty far down the road before I'm going to tackle any kind of conflictual stuff with that person, if ever.
Speaker 1:I'm going to be, you know, trying to facilitate our connection. We all know how to do that. I mean nobody, well, I guess some people do and they end up not having very many friends. But most of us are very canny about what we have to do in terms of our own self-control and self-observation in order to have friends, and what we want to do with our adult children is we want to be peers with them. I mean, that's the whole, that's the secret.
Speaker 2:You mean I have to get dressed and put makeup on when I see my kids now, no, I'm just kidding. I'm thinking about, you know, a new friend. You do try to look nicer even when you're seeing a new friend.
Speaker 1:Yes, you do. Yes, you do Because you are in that self-reflective place. Like how am I doing collective place?
Speaker 2:Like how am I doing? How am I doing? Okay, Am I putting my best foot forward.
Speaker 1:Am I making this a pleasant experience for this new friend? Will they want to come back and, you know, go to the movies with me again, or have lunch, or whatever I mean?
Speaker 2:it makes perfect sense. Why does this make such perfect sense and we don't think about it?
Speaker 1:Oh, because we've had the luxury of the family role thing for years, where we were given our role, we were given our authority. They adored us, they loved us. They're so cute, they're so fun. We had all of that without really having to do a whole lot of emotional work in terms of maintaining the relationship. I don't mean we didn't have a lot of emotional work to do, but I mean in terms of like worrying about whether or not your child's going to love you. You know you don't have to worry about that for the first teen years. They need you. You are the most important person in their life and if you have trouble giving that up and transitioning out of that into a peer relationship, I think that's when you begin to feel the friction with your adult child. They grow up and have their own lives.
Speaker 2:Your book was published in 2015. So it's 10 years later now. Suddenly, it's become so popular. What has changed about our culture now that everyone's talking about this adult-parent-child relationship?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think we have to keep in mind that the book really took off. Started to take off around 2018, 2020. Ok, that coincides with when podcasts started.
Speaker 2:Oh OK.
Speaker 1:We already had an explosion of self-help books. The psychoeducation of the public was well underway. Then we had podcasts on top of that and then we had COVID, you know, which made everybody even more attentive to podcasts, and I think it sort of got a foothold in that world, because I know how many of those podcasts and things I did. So I think that was part of it. But the other part of it is there is, I think, a shift in the age that we're in. It's like industrial age, technological age. Now we're in the information age. In terms of our intimate family relationships, we were in the family age and I think now we are in the self-awareness or individual consciousness age. Is that good or bad? I think it's going to be very good, but I think the transition is going to be already is very confusing to people, very disorienting and probably will be quite conflictual for some time, because there's a transition from this would be in the family age.
Speaker 1:We know who we are by our roles, by what we do for a living, who we are to each other. It's quite externally defined and we define our worth from that. With all of this psychological education, the popularization of podcast information, et cetera, we are now finding ourselves to be exploring our own consciousness, our own individuality, in a way that, you know I don't know if it's ever been like this. It's really remarkable because people now are reading books, listening to podcasts and thinking of themselves. They're processing their own emotional experiences and then, as a result of that, we're getting this tremendous vocabulary and conceptual framework of all kinds of psychological issues. We're plugging ourselves into that as a way of understanding our experiences and deducing who we are and developing our self-worth. It's not coming from our roles and our family relationships anymore.
Speaker 1:I think we have gone past a point where, the more conscious you become, try to become unconscious. When you've become conscious of something, what does that mean? Try to not notice something once somebody's pointed it out to you. What does that mean? That now into account? It doesn't just disappear. Okay, and that's a good thing, because if I learn that when I do this it hurts me or I get in trouble or whatever, I can't any longer be unaware of the effects of that behavior. I'm conscious of it now.
Speaker 2:I'm aware of it.
Speaker 1:But when you're talking about this in intimate relationships like with your child, that is a very hard kind of education. It's hard on the self-esteem.
Speaker 1:It's hard to get your head around it. It's hard to put yourself aside long enough to see it from the other person's point of view. It's very difficult. But I think it's going to be a good thing because when two self-aware or relatively self-aware people talk to each other or have a relationship with each other, the relationship takes on a depth and an intimacy that you won't find in relationships that are defined much more superficially, according to roles or social things or gossip or whatever more superficial things. So I think it's going to be good.
Speaker 1:I just think it's going to be very hard on the people who aren't aware that this is happening. It's like this change came along in the dead of night, you know, and we woke up the next morning and, all of a sudden, the things that we assumed we would always have in terms of our position or our relationships now our adult child is questioning that and they're questioning what they want to do with their lives or kind of relationships they want, and they're telling us about it. We're still thinking wait a minute, you know, I'm the mom or I'm the dad. What's happening here? We don't have a reference point, but if we can be aware that maybe this shift has occurred and we just didn't get the postcard in the mail coming.
Speaker 1:Next month, your child is going to start self-actualizing in a way that's going to be very hard for you. If we don't have that preparation, all we can do is respond defensively. If we learn about some of these things, we can respond in ways that help us to get a handle on our own defensiveness and our own fears. There's a book that's going to be coming out I think it's in September. It's called Parents have Feelings Too.
Speaker 2:Finally.
Speaker 1:Yes, isn't that a great title? Yeah, and I think it's available for pre-order. Yeah, and it's. I think it's available for pre-order. But she has, like, this whole system for how to catch yourself in a reactive mode and figure out if you're being defensive and what your true feelings are that you're scared of in the moment that's making you react defensively. And then how do you deal with those feelings and process them so that you can respond to your adult child in an authentic and validating way and begin to build a real relationship with them on that basis.
Speaker 2:Wow. So as I listened to you and this is going to sound defensive, I think so, don't judge me when I grew up, all the roles were in place. Everything you said I realized was my relationship with my parents. I was their daughter, they were my parents and I just did everything I could for them to make them happy. Now I think also our generation was the first generation to acknowledge our children's feelings and emotions. My generation of being raised, it was like get over it. There weren't therapists on every corner. My generation encouraged our children to express themselves, probably had more children in therapy than any generation ever before. And yet now we're surprised when they use that therapy and know how to set boundaries and use it on us. We now had to have that relationship with our parents and now learn a whole. Nother way to have a relationship with our adult children.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's, oh my gosh, it's so hard because there's so much. I mean, first of all, it's hard to undo your natural defenses, which, incidentally, happen automatically, involuntarily, unconsciously. We don't do defenses because we want to. The beauty of a defense is it kicks in before you suffer. A psychological defense is no good if it waits until you're feeling shame or guilt or whatever and then it kicks in. No, it kicks in before you feel any of that and you find yourself becoming indignant or angry or defensive. Okay, so that you don't feel those awful feelings. But in family situations like you're describing and of course most of us in this generation grew up like that you don't have any idea how to process your emotions. Nobody was helping you learn to put words on it, how to express it in ways that were non-damaging.
Speaker 2:In fact, we were shut down.
Speaker 1:Shut down Absolutely. If you had an outburst, you were made to feel very bad about that. We didn't get any practice in that at all. But what you were saying, denise, about now, we did all this for our kids and we listened to their feelings and now they're coming back and we're being treated like this. I was thinking about that very thing as I was preparing for our talk today and I was thinking, you know you could give yourself a pat on the back that you raised a kid, that instead of smothering and suppressing their whole individuality and emotional life, they are setting a boundary. They are telling you no, they are saying I need a break. There is something that maybe you did that enabled them to have the courage and the faith that they could take this step toward their own individuation, their own self-development. Maybe you did something right in the sense of giving them that confidence. Ultimately, Now they may have had to go to therapy to work through. You know their anxieties and whatever, whatever. But you know, maybe they had enough love to give them a sense that I can survive if dad and I, mom and I are on the outs for a while.
Speaker 1:There was a great quote from George Valiant, who did the Harvard Men's Study for 50 years, a longitudinal study and they looked at what went on in children's backgrounds of these men that were studied and how did it end up showing up in their adult life what really mattered to their development. This was a study with inner city youth, so they were a lot of them were were quite disadvantaged. What they found was that the good stuff they got as children really counted more than anything that went wrong. I just love that. I love that Because I think it's. I mean, I think we can see the truth of that.
Speaker 2:You know, it's funny that you say that I'm loving this conversation and I think you are completely brilliant, everything you're bringing to the table. Recently, I think, I told you I had a new grandbaby, a new grandson, and I was spending time with my daughter and when I got home she sent me a text and it was very I don't want to say curt, but I could tell a very strict boundary was being set and I replied, saying I'm so proud of you, you know how to set your boundaries that work for you. And she replied I was raised by you. And she put a little heart and I said well, I still struggle with it. And she replied I guess I do too. I was a little offended by this bump, but I thought wait a minute, I wish I would have been able to do that. So I guess I replied properly because I was like wow, yeah, this is firm on me, but she needs to say what she needs to say.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and what you're describing is an emotionally intimate conversation where you each are sharing a little piece you know it's not a diatribe by either way. You're sharing a little piece of something true about your emotional experience or your past. Okay, and you went to that deeper level with her and stayed there for a little while, and that I mean that's what builds stronger relationships, right.
Speaker 2:I want to talk a little bit about estrangement, because you brought it up that maybe it's okay to have a little bit of this, having young adults come and talk to you. There always are two sides to a story, so what you're hearing from them is how they perceive this situation. When do you make a judgment that, yes, it was an emotionally you know immature parent and you were faced with these things, or that every parent is flawed and here are some ways to move on? I worry that adult kids are being pushed to move away from that parent that might be saying things that aren't appropriate rather than trying to mend and improve that relationship.
Speaker 1:If a therapist is doing that, they're not a good therapist. Someone comes in, tells you a problem and you say in effect, yes, whatever you say, I'm on board with you and yes, you shouldn't see your parents anymore and yes, you should cut them out of your life. I mean that's crazy. My goal in therapy is for this person to at some point get enough of their own self-development going and enough self-awareness and self-confidence and self-knowledge that they can run their own life and they can consult their own inner guidance, and that inner guidance will be in accord with reality. Okay, I'm not interested in somebody just following whatever they thought of. Next. It's like does it stack up? Is it accurate? Does it reflect what's going on? Tell me more about that.
Speaker 1:You're trying to find out as much as you can from a one-sided story.
Speaker 1:What went on For someone to take at face value what somebody is telling you about their parent and then to, on the limited amount of data, to suggest that they should estrange themselves from their parent. I mean this is such a reductionistic, inaccurate picture of what goes on in good therapy, and I'm not denying that there are therapists out there who are irresponsible or have a hobby horse to ride about this or working at their own unresolved parent issues through their patients. I understand that that happens, but to sort of paint therapy as turning adult children against their parents I think is probably very inaccurate. And it begs the question what do you do when a patient comes in and they are in distress and they tell you what the parents said, and they tell you how it felt and you're realizing that they are being made to feel depressed or anxious or whatever because of this pattern that they've got going with the parent. If you just said, well, cut this person out of your life and you'll be all better. I mean, how sophisticated is that? Not very.
Speaker 2:There are people I've interviewed who have said some therapists will even help the patient write a letter to their parents explaining why they're cutting them out of their life.
Speaker 1:Well, let's say that that did happen. I would hope that the reason the therapist was helping the adult child write that letter was to help the child think about what it was that they really wanted to get across.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, we read each other, we read our emails to friends or partners to say you know, did I go too far? If the therapist is being used as a sounding board or as a sort of an objective third party, that makes sense to me. That you would take something like that to your therapist because it's very emotionally relevant and it's very important in that person's life. You would also, in that case, want to ask the person if you say it this way, how would you feel if someone said that to you? Not in a judgy way, like how would you feel, but like you know, what would that be like for you to receive this?
Speaker 1:And what is your goal? Do you want your parent to be able to listen to what you're saying? Well, yes, I do. Okay, so if someone approached you and said it this way, would that make you more or less able to hear what they were saying? And they might say, well, I probably would get mad or I probably wouldn't listen, or whatever. Yeah, so what is it that you really want to tell them here? If that client is speaking out of defensiveness and fear or guilt or whatever outrage, whatever it is, if they're speaking out of that, it's going to be very prickly, it's going to be very sharp, it's going to put the other person down and they're not going to be able to hear it. So what we want to do is we want to help them get beneath that defensiveness and get it the real thing. Like you know maybe it might be, mom when I tried to tell you how something made me feel, I ended up feeling like there was something wrong with me.
Speaker 1:I ended up feeling ashamed that I had even thought that thought. Now we're doing emotional intimacy, now I'm sharing my real feelings with you and that parent, if they can hold the line for a minute and just absorb that. That was that adult child's experience in the past and have empathy for that, have some compassion for what that must have been like for a kid, for what that must have been like for a kid. Now we are in the land of emotional intimacy. We are now sharing with each other what our experiences were.
Speaker 1:I don't think I ever sat down with somebody to go over a letter or email to a parent. Yeah, not in a reviewing kind of way. I've had a couple of people come in and read me what they've already sent, but I figured that's their communication, that's their genuine communication to their parent. And what we try to look for is what is the outcome that you want? If you want them to understand their ways of communicating, they're probably going to work better than others communicating, they're probably going to work better than others. If you want to set a boundary, and that's it, let's do it in a way that really says what you want to say and is going to set it up for whatever the next step is that you want?
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Two other quick things I want to talk about, and then we're going to wrap this up. We've mentioned it, but I want you to sum it up. You talk a lot about is the difference between surface level contact and emotional connection. We've discussed that a little bit, but I want you to give like a concrete example. And then also you talk about self-awareness how parents can build awareness and grow, no matter what age in their life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for the surface level stuff, I would say, up until I don't know, you know, maybe 30 years ago, surface level is where it's at back then I mean, if you look at like, if you ever watch TCM, the old movies, gosh, it is so superficial, it is so the interactions between the people. I mean it's very glamorous, it's very clever. The real emotional sharing stuff that wasn't part of the culture, all kind of playing roles in a way that entertainment was not about hearing about these deeper conversations like we have in some movies today. So that surface level thing was very culturally appropriate and desirable. Now, when we're trying to be more true, more genuine and authentic in our relationships with each other, that's going to require again this willingness to take the other person's viewpoint, willingness to self-reflect like could I have done anything that may have contributed to this, and that feeling of what can I do now to repair this? How can I be receptive enough that we might get to the point where maybe we could do some repair with each other.
Speaker 2:Can you ever ask your adult child like I feel like I said too much here, what can I do to make this better, or how can you approach them if you're backtracking on a situation that happened?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I'll give you an example from my life. When my son turned 18, I sat him down at the kitchen table and I said I just want to apologize to you. I did the best I could, but I was so green I didn't know what I was doing In this instance. Whatever it was I said and did the wrong things. I didn't want to do that because I love you with all my heart, but I know what I did and I'm really sorry. He said oh, mom, don't worry about it. I'm sure it made me stronger. And I said no.
Speaker 2:So it always is good to acknowledge whatever it was you thought you might have messed up.
Speaker 1:Think about it. If someone came to you and said, Denise, remember that thing. I said I think I really went too far. I've always regretted that I said it to you that way. What would be the effect on you?
Speaker 2:I guess it depends on what they said. I would say, yes, it really hurt me, and I might explain more to them why it hurt. I'm glad you figured this out. It was a very hurtful thing. I value our relationship enough that I kept going, but I appreciate you talking about it now. You talking about it now.
Speaker 1:And wouldn't your first response be almost joy that after all this time this person has cared enough about your relationship and thought about it that they're coming back to you with an apology? I won't project here, but my first reaction would be joy. Can't believe that they remember this and that it mattered to them. I hope my son felt a little bit of that. For me it felt like, yeah, on the day he became an adult he needed to hear that I didn't handle some things right, and I wanted him to know that. I realized that because I wanted us to be close. And how can you be close if you haven't, you know, done that kind of inventory on where you may have fallen down on your side of things?
Speaker 2:How about the self-awareness? How can we be more aware of ourselves and how our actions are affecting our relationship with our adult children?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, first we have to realize that we have absolutely been trained out of that. Okay, just like what you were describing, denise.
Speaker 1:I mean self-awareness that was. I don't even I wonder if maybe, maybe people back in the forties that went to ashrams or something would know what that meant, but but most people don't have any experience in that. So when we're thinking about self-awareness, we're thinking about getting back in touch with our true self, and what may have happened to us emotionally that made us become scared and defensive, may have made us overbearing, controlling whatever kind of self-protective thing we learned to do. If we can go back and become aware of our own emotional and psychological functioning, then we have the opportunity to have that. Self-reflection gives us the opportunity to then have empathy for what that might have felt like to the other person who was on the receiving end of that. You can do that through therapy, of course. I mean that's a great way to do it.
Speaker 1:But you can do it through reading, you can do it through contemplation, you can do it through talking with a friend who might be willing to give you gentle feedback, that process of self-awareness and the things that we may regret that we've done. It's all about psychological growth. You have to have a little bit of faith that there is such a thing as psychological growth and that people are always trying to do that in one way or another. They're trying to resolve their old stuff, they're trying to work it through.
Speaker 1:I believe that because I see that as a motivating force in all my successful psychotherapies that that person knew something was wrong and they've been trying to figure it out and trying to become more self-aware and get more control over it so they can have happier lives. And that's really you know. If you want to get real practical about it, we're looking for how to have happier lives. If you're going to have intimate relationships as a part of your happy life which by definition you would then you have to be able to take a look at yourself. I was going to say that but you know what, for heaven's sake?
Speaker 2:you know, the whole time I was reading your book, the thing that stuck out to me the most was the importance of self-esteem, the importance of building that in yourself so you then can create the strength and self-awareness to create those relationships around you.
Speaker 1:Yes, I would just add to that that in order to have the self-esteem, you have to have the self-knowledge Awareness and knowledge.
Speaker 2:So what's the difference between knowledge and awareness?
Speaker 1:Okay. So knowledge would be. I mean, this is what people get out of longer term psychotherapy they come to understand their reactions, their feelings, their thoughts. They get to know themselves. Oh, you know, when my child says to me mom, I wish that you wouldn't do that. And we come to realize that the reason I get all huffy and walk out is because I am terrified that they don't love me anymore, that they won't want to have anything to do with me if I get scared and insecure, so I'm going to act like I'm the injured party. That's very complex, but when you get to know yourself and you understand oh, that's how I defend myself psychologically from these bad feelings of shame or loss or fear you gain the ability to decide how you're going to respond. How you're going to respond because you will know oh, I'm having that scared feeling, I'm afraid they're not going to love me anymore. Okay now, what am I going to do with that? I'm not going to walk out, I'm just going to have my hurt feelings. I'm going to sit here and have my hurt feelings. I'm not going to tell them that. I'm just going to get through this. That's self knowledge, right there.
Speaker 1:Practical application of knowing or coming to know yourself and how your psyche works. Self-awareness is allowing yourself to become aware of those feelings, aware of those thoughts. I'm sitting here, I'm having the thought like I'm just going to stand up and say, well, if you're going to be that way about it, I'm going home. That's my thought, and my feeling is outrage, indignation. That she would tell me, mom, stop doing that or don't do that. Okay, I know, I am aware of that. Now I'm going to apply my self-knowledge to say and the result of that is going to be a fight.
Speaker 2:And what do I?
Speaker 1:really want here. I want my relationship with my daughter. So what's my option? Sit here and feel hurt and carry on as best I can and worry about what to do about it later, but at least don't do those other things.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. As you know, at the end of every episode, I ask my guests to leave our listeners with two things they want them to take away from this episode. What would those two things be from you, Dr Gibson?
Speaker 1:and self-knowledge, that you're improving your self-worth, which is going to make you a steadier, more desirable partner in any kind of relationship, is dependent on you putting the time into your own self-development, getting to know yourself and getting to have a feeling of compassion and self-worth about yourself. That's going to make you a kinder, gentler person with your adult child. And then, secondly, I would say, how would you treat a newfound friend that you wanted to keep in your life? Just think of it that way. This is not your kid.
Speaker 1:There are two things wrong with that phrase my child and your kid. Yeah, my, they're not yours. You gave birth to them, you put them through college, whatever, and they don't belong to you. And child, they're not a child anymore. We have a word for parents. We have a word for children. We have a word for adolescents. We have a word for young adults.
Speaker 2:We do not have a word for adult child, you better come up with one. That's your next book.
Speaker 1:I would love to come up with it Once we sort of redefine what we're doing as trying to keep a good friend or trying to make a new friend. We're maybe limited to things like if we think of them as this cherished is separate and individuated from ourselves, and that's really where you want to get to in order to have that adult relationship with them.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. You have no idea how great this is going to be for my audience. You really sum things up in such a beautiful way, so thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much for having me Total pleasure.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a wrap. Wow, I learned so much from this episode. I think all of us. It's hard, it's hard work, but I think she makes a lot of sense and I've always wondered why we can't just be ourselves and be real. But our kids don't belong to us and they're establishing themselves as separate beings, separate families, and learning how to nurture those relationships and not take things so personally and work on our self-awareness and self-knowledge seems to be the key. We have another episode we're going to be recording very shortly, and it's with another person I'm very excited about.
Speaker 2:I read an article in the New York Times called what I Tell Mothers who Feel Rejected by their Adult Children, by Rachel Glick. It was in the Wall Street Journal. I love this article and I'll share it when we talk to her, but I can't wait for that episode too. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and I hope you'll enjoy our coming episodes. As you know, once again, we're not dropping regularly, just when we found great people to talk to. Follow us on social media. Please send us your questions and possible guests to biteyourtonguepodcast at gmailcom. Visit our website at biteyourtonguepodcastcom and please think about supporting us. We're keeping all our episodes live. We pay for all the platforms, we pay for our recording platforms, so any little bit of money helps. If you go to our website biteyourtonguepodcastcom, you can find the donate or sponsor us and you can also send by Venmo. Thanks so much for listening and, as you heard from this episode and many others, sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.
