SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Family conflict, Adult children, Attachment theory, Unresolved experiences, Repeated stories, Emotional regulation, Parent shame, Relationship repair, Effective listening, Emotional safety, Family systems, Communication patterns, Empathy building, Conflict coaching, Feeling validation

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

Recently, I had a parent that told me about a family Sunday dinner. She said things were going pretty well. They were going, everybody was having a nice time, and it was going well right up until her son, just out of the blue, brings up a comment that she made 15 years earlier about his college major. She doesn’t even remember the situation that he was talking about, but he remembered it and he recited it word for word and explained it in very great detail. And she said to me, “She said it’s not like it’s just one thing. It’s just that we can’t have a single visit or a conversation without him bringing up the past. She said, “I’ve apologized. I’ve explained. Nothing makes him let go of it and makes it stop. And then she paused and she said, “I don’t know how to hear one more thing about how I have failed, without falling apart a little bit each time.

Tina Gosney  00:57

Now maybe that sounds familiar. Maybe for your adult child, they don’t just tell you a story one time. Maybe they tell you it three or four times, or they just have this rotation of stories that they keep showing up with. And these stories show up in conversations. Sometimes they just come out of nowhere, and maybe more than anything, you’re just wondering what this means about you, and what it means if this is the way that your child sees you, and you don’t want them to see you this way.

Tina Gosney  01:28

Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney. I’m a family conflict coach and a parent educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, or confusing, or painful, and we’re going to do it through a family systems lens. That means that we’re going to look at more than just one conversation, one event. We’re going to look more at the entire relationship. We look at the whole system, and this gives us a lot more information about what’s happening underneath the surface that you can’t even see, because I really want you to hold on to this hope that when one person in a family becomes more steady, more grounded, the entire relationship system can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney  02:18

Now, this episode is not about giving you, you know, three steps or five steps to make something solve some problem in your family. What I hope it gives you instead is a little more understanding. If this is your situation where your child just keeps bringing up the past and they keep telling you the same stories over and over again, I hope you get some understanding about why this is happening, so that it begins to feel a little less confusing, and you feel a little less like something’s being done to you on purpose. So let’s get into it. If your child brought up a hard memory one time, you might feel bad about it. You might sit with it, and then you know you could apologize. You could move on.

Tina Gosney  03:08

Repetition, though, does something different to a parent because by the third, fourth, or 10th time that the same story resurfaces, it stops feeling like it’s this memory, and it starts feeling like they’re accusing you of something, or it could even feel like something heavier, like proof that look, nothing you ever do is going to be enough, as if there’s one more place in this world that, and one more person telling us and pointing us towards us not being enough, like now our child is doing it too, right? So the fact that a story comes back on its own is not proof that your child is holding a grudge, or that they enjoy relitigating the past, or that they’ve decide decided somehow to punish you, this is not proof also that they’re right about it, or that there’s something wrong with them or wrong with you. So it doesn’t say any of those things. That’s what it feels like, but it doesn’t say that. Something usually more human is happening, and it has a lot more to do with how unfinished experiences move through our brains and in our relationships than it does with your child’s character or your character. So here’s a distinction that you can hold on to. Okay, a story that gets told once and then you know rests.

Tina Gosney  04:42

It usually has found a place to land. That story is complete, and then your child can let it go. A story that keeps circling back, different conversations, different situations, sometimes without even an obvious trigger, is. Usually, still looking for a landing place. It’s looking for that completion. The repetition in itself is not the thing that you need to solve. It’s just kind of like a canary in a coal mine. It’s it’s more like a signal. It’s quietly pointing you towards something that has not landed or settled yet.

Tina Gosney  05:19

So before we talk about where this pattern comes from, let’s just slow down for a minute and talk about something that happens inside of you, because as a coach, this is my main one of my main focuses. It’s a really big top three main focus. For a lot of parents, it’s it isn’t just that the story is annoying to hear again. It’s that somewhere in the retelling of it, you catch this glimpse of yourself through your child’s eyes, and it’s a version of you that you don’t recognize or that you don’t want to be true, and it can really hurt because there’s a part of you that says, you know, this is how they see me, and that version of you that you see reflected in their eyes doesn’t feel like an accurate portrayal of who you know you are, but it still hurts because you’re like, this is how my child sees me.

Tina Gosney  06:17

So maybe they’re telling you, you know, you were not a parent that was paying attention. Maybe they’re saying, you know, you were a harsh parent, harsher than you remember being. Whatever the shape of it is, you know, it can feel like that story is really quietly, or or maybe not so quietly, asking you to consider that you failed at the one thing that you wanted to get right more than anything else, and if that lands somewhere soft inside of you, I want you to know how common that is.

Tina Gosney  06:51

A lot of parents describe something in the moment when this story gets retold again, like the spiral, this flush of shame comes over them, and their mind starts racing backwards through years, sometimes decades, hunting for evidence that either you did this or you didn’t do what you were supposed to do, or even worse, you find evidence that you did. You know, sometimes it shows up as a certain sudden urge to defend yourself point by point and tell them where they’re wrong, and sometimes it shows up as going quiet. You shut down inside the conversation because you know your mind and your feelings are somewhere else entirely.

Tina Gosney  07:36

Well, here’s something that’s worth holding onto with a lot of self-compassion. That spiral that you feel when the story gets bred up again-it usually isn’t really about the story anymore. It’s about you wrestling with your own fear of having failed at something that really matters to you. Your child brings up a memory, and somewhere in receiving it, you started carrying two things at once. You start carrying their pain, and your own pain and fear about what it means about you. That’s an enormous amount of energy and of pain to hold in one conversation. So no wonder it begins to feel like it’s too much.

Tina Gosney  08:23

This is actually what I built reset to connection to help with. This does not tell you a script to say in the moment, but it’s really more about working through that wave of emotion, the shame, the fear, the anxiety, the flood of old memories. So it doesn’t just take over and grab onto you and take you on a ride. Reset to connection will help you feel like you’re gaining your emotional ground again, because it’s really hard to be steady for your child’s story and to listen to what they’re saying to you when your own story is pulling you under, and you feel like you’re drowning. Learning to notice the wave and ride it, instead of being swept away or swept under by it, that changes what’s possible in these conversations more than just about anything else that I teach. So for now, here on in this episode, I simply want you to know that if you’ve ever felt yourself spiraling when an old story comes back around, that does not mean that there’s something wrong with you.

Tina Gosney  09:29

It means there’s something here that you really care deeply about, and you care deeply about being a good parent. That care that you feel is not your enemy. That care is what actually drives you to stay in the relationship and try to figure this out? You care so much about them, and this is what keeps you showing up, and this is what keeps you during the doing the work that I talk about in this podcast. That’s a very human piece of you, and today we’re talking about very human struggles.

Tina Gosney  10:01

Let’s just pause that for a moment because that can get kind of heavy. I want to talk about the research that’s behind this because I really enjoy diving into the research, and I think it helps us to understand what’s happening underneath the story. So this episode is leaning on attachment theory. Let me describe that briefly for those of you who haven’t come across it before. Although it is pretty, it’s pretty well known if you pay attention to these types of things like I do. But not everybody does. So if you’ve never heard of attachment theory, let’s just go over what that is. This theory grew out of a work of research by John Bowlby, and later it was explained and furthered by other people, including Mary Ainsworth.

Tina Gosney  10:47

At its heart, it describes how the early bond of a child and their caregiver shape that child’s sense of safety, and how they come to relate to other people for the rest of their life. It matters here because of one of its central ideas, and that is that experiences that are connected to that early bond, that early those early childhood experiences that never feel fully resolved, those don’t just fade away. They tend to keep resurfacing until they’ve been given the space to be understood and have room to settle.

Tina Gosney  11:26

For decades, researchers that are studying attachment theory have used this structured interview called the adult attachment interview, and that’s so that they can understand how people talk about their most difficult early experiences, things like loss and frightening moments or painful periods with their caregiver. What they found is that people whose difficult experiences remained unresolved, they tend to tell their stories in a particular way. The narrative gets stuck; it loses coherence in the middle. The person circles back to it, sometimes mid conversation about something else entirely, almost as if the story is trying to finish itself, but it just hasn’t yet.

Tina Gosney  12:11

Let’s contrast that with people who have reached what researchers call resolution, telling the same kind of story. They tell it differently, so their story has a beginning and a middle and an end, and they can tell it one time and they can tell it with feeling, and then they can set it down and let it go. They don’t have to revisit the story all the time in order for it to feel like it really happened. When we’re looking at research and applying research, you need to know its strengths and its limitations. So we’re looking at attachment theory, which is a very, very well documented and implemented in its mental health practices, and we’re looking at the adult attachment interview to see how this applies to parent and adult child relationships.

Tina Gosney  13:00

Well, this body of work was built by studying how people narrate their early their own early attachment experiences in a structured interview setting. They were not measuring, you know, an adult child that is retelling a story at Sunday dinner to the parent, like that story that I gave you at the beginning, so nobody in that research was measuring whether a son brings up his mother’s comment about his child major at Sunday dinner. And when I bring this concept into a conversation about your family, I want to be clear that I’m applying a very well documented pattern about how unresolved experiences get narrated, but I’m not reporting a finding that was tested in this exact situation. But I think it’s an honest and reasonable thing to apply here. The mechanism that this research describes, which is an experience that keeps resurfacing because it has not found coherence yet, that is not specific to childhood loss or frightening events. It’s it’s a description of how unresolved material tends to behave in a story, in any relationship, at any age.

Tina Gosney  14:12

So while I can’t tell you that a study proved this is what’s happening at your Sunday dinner table, I can tell you the underlying pattern of a story returning again and again because it hasn’t found its ending yet-that’s pretty fair and well-supported idea to bring into this conversation. But that’s also different than pointing to proof that you know this is what’s happening for your child.

Tina Gosney  14:36

There’s also a second underlying piece of understanding that is worth looking at here, and this one comes from clinicians who work directly with parents and adult children, not from laboratory interviews. So this one points to something specific about what tends to help the the repetition, the story that gets repeated. What tends to help that. Finally, quiet down. Well, when a parent responds to a repeated story with an explanation, with reasons, with context, with the logic of why it happened, that story tends to come back again.

Tina Gosney  15:16

When a parent responds with acknowledgment of what their child felt, separate entirely from agreeing to every detail. Well, that repetition tends to settle. So when we take these two things together, they both point towards the same truth. Repetition usually isn’t about the facts of a story at all. It’s about whether the feeling inside the story, ever really had a place to land. Let’s talk about why this matters beyond just one repeated story. When a parent meets a repeated story with irritation, of correction of details, or simply a request to stop bringing it up. That feeling in the story for your child does not disappear. It usually goes quiet for a while, and then it tends to resurface later as a distance rather than the same story.

Tina Gosney  16:15

But these two things, you know, you correcting the details or requesting them to stop bringing it up or being irritated that they’re bringing it up, you’re probably not going to connect the dots between their distance and that conversation that you had. You’re probably not going to do that, but your child is. So a child who learns their memory is not welcome in the room with a parent, they don’t stop feeling that memory. They just stop bringing those memories to the parent at all. And a relationship where hard things can’t be spoken, it slowly becomes a relationship where very real anything gets spoken.

Tina Gosney  16:54

On the other hand, when a parent can stay close through the repetition, through the story that keeps getting repeated, long enough for that story to be received, something can often shift. No, that no amount of correcting their details ever could. The story stops needing to prove itself because it’s been heard. It gets to rest. It has a landing place. That’s really the heart of what’s at stake. It’s not whether the story is told exactly the way that you remember it. It’s whether that story ever gets a chance to finish and land. That’s the more important piece. Let’s get really practical for a minute and talk about, you know, what your child might be saying underneath bringing that story back up and up again. They might be saying, “I don’t think you really heard this yet. So sometimes the story gets told, and you might give a quick apology, or you might just brush past it without even really registering the weight of it or the weight that they’re carrying, your child can sense that, and without fully realizing why, they’re gonna bring it back up again until it lands the way that they need it to. They might be asking you to slow down long enough to really take in the gravity of what they’re saying and how they feel. They might be saying, “Hey, I need for this to be true for both of us, not just me. They might want you to agree with their version of what happened. If your response to the story has been mostly about explaining how you saw it, or you know, arguing about the details, you know, your child might feel like their version is not allowed to exist alongside yours, so they might be asking you, say, “Hey, let my experience be real here, even when it doesn’t match your story or your memory. Another thing they might be saying is, “This one memory for me is carrying a lot more than you know.

Tina Gosney  18:59

Sometimes a single story becomes the container for a much larger, hard to articulate feeling, like not feeling prioritized, or not feeling emotionally safe, or not feeling supported or heard, and that can you know go across a much longer stretch of childhood. Their underlying ask in this one could be understanding that standing inside the story is something bigger than I have not been able to talk about yet. Another thing they might be trying to tell you is, you know, I’m testing you to see whether this conversation goes differently this time. So each time they retell the story, it might be an unconscious way of checking in with to see, you know, is my parent able to finally hold this story and really give me the attention that I’m asking for? They could be just wanting to know if the story can land and. Differently this time. Another thing they might be saying is, “Hey, we started something here, but it never really got finished. Sometimes we find that in the past there was a partial repair, an apology with that you know, with never any change was followed up with it, or maybe even it felt like a token apology to them, or maybe an acknowledgement that never really turned into anything different, and that’s what they were really asking for, and so this story just keeps returning because the repair, that process never was actually completed, and the underlying ask that might be present here is, hey, this still feels unresolved, and I need to revisit it. So none of these underlying messages mean that your child is choosing to stay stuck, or that they’re trying to punish you. They might mean that the story is not found in ending yet, and that’s what it’s been looking for. That’s hard, but it’s also workable. This is not a permanent condition. Now, as I said before earlier in this podcast, I am not going to give you some three-step formula or the perfect words to say the next time you hear the same story repeated. This is not about solving this in one conversation. It’s just about a few small shifts that tend to help a story move a little closer to a resting point. So these are offered to you as a starting point, not as a finish line. First, when you notice yourself wanting to explain or defend, try pausing there just for a moment instead of following your urge, that urge is completely understandable, especially the third or the fourth or the 10th time you’re hearing the story. But when you explain, even when it’s accurate, that’s going to tend to keep that story circling around rather than letting it land and rest. So even a small pause, taking a breath-that is often enough time for you to choose something different. Second, try leading with the feeling rather than the facts. Stay a little more curious about what else could be underneath this. Something like, “I hear that that stayed with you. I want to understand what it felt like, not just what happened. Saying something like that can go a long way. You don’t have to agree with every detail to let their experience be real in the room. And if you sense the story might be carrying something bigger than itself, or if it feels like something from before never quite got finished, then you can really ask about that. It’s fair to ask about that too. Be very curious about that. Okay, the third thing that you can try is to let your response actually be a little different than it’s been before, and give it time. So if every past telling has met with the same explanation, or the same quick apology, or the same irritation, the story hasn’t learned yet that anything changes when it’s told. Even a small, genuine shift in how you respond really matters, and a story that’s been circling around for a while, and you know it might still come back once or twice more, even when you’re doing all these things and you’re doing them well. You know that’s not failure. That’s just how things that have been held for a long time. They just take time to loosen a little bit at a time. So give it some time and let it let it marinate and loosen over time.

Tina Gosney  23:39

You could be in a situation where a story keeps returning in a way that feels less like your child has an unresolved feeling that they need to have acknowledged, and it feels more like they’re reciting a script to you, you know, without you being open to anything that you try to do or any way that you try to resolve the story, if you’ve genuinely acknowledged the feeling, if you change the things that you could, and you’ve given it time to marinate so that the story could loosen up, but the story is still returning unchanged by anything that you’ve tried, that’s worth naming. But be careful about doing that until your child has been heard first. Seek first to understand, and then to be understood. This is one of Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and it’s always worth remembering. So make sure you go there first, possibly and probably more than one time. You might say something like, “I hear how much this mattered to you, and I’ve really tried to respond differently. But I’d like us to be able to talk about these things without it feeling like we’re having the same conversation every single time. Can we try that together? That is not you shutting down their story. That’s you protecting the relationship’s ability to actually. Move rather than to be stuck on replay. So most parents will move through something familiar when this type of story keeps resurfacing. First, there’s patience. Then there’s frustration. Then, if nothing shifts, most parents will quietly resign themselves, just resignation, and then the parents stops engaging with the story at all, hoping that if they just stop responding and they just give it silence, that it’s going to make it stop. There is a steadier path through this, though, and it’s not about winning the facts of the story or needing your child to admit that they’re exaggerating their version. It’s about becoming someone who can sit with an unfinished story, and with your own spiral when it shows up long enough for it to actually settle. And I really want to say kindly that being steady in the actual moment that this is happening is very, very difficult to do without support. It is not that you lack good intentions; it’s that often that you’re doing this alone, and you don’t have anyone to help you, or anyone to. You’ve never seen anybody do this. You don’t have models of what this looks like. So, trying to catch your own spiral and your own shame and your own fears mid conversation is really difficult to do. It’s really difficult to keep your footing in that type of situation if you don’t have help, and that is really what the heart of reset to connection is there for. It’s not about handing you a script for the next conversation. It’s a lot slower than that. It’s gentler work than that. It’s learning to notice the wave of emotion when it rises up in you, that fear, the shame, the anxiety, that urge to defend-you know-and then it’s about finding your way back to steady ground before your feelings and your spiral takes over the conversation. When you’re not being pulled under by your own emotions, you have so much more room to actually be present for their story and for your story. Now, if today’s episode is resonating with you, then that’s the place where we take it further. You’re going to find a link in the show notes that’s going to take you to a page that tells you more about reset to connection. But right here, right now, in this podcast, we’re going to start smaller than that, and this is where we’re going to start. So the next time the story comes back, notice the wave inside yourself first. Let it move through you, and then choose to meet your child with a little more curiosity and less defensiveness. Let’s close with you know a few of the mistakes that I see parents make, because I see these mistakes so often that I really want to warn you about them. Mistake number one: responding to the 10th telling of the story the same way you responded to the first one. Now, if your response has not shifted over many retellings, there’s a there’s very little reason to expect that the story will stop returning.

Tina Gosney  28:04

Something in your response has to move, even if that’s just a little bit. Mistake number two: treating repetition as proof that your child is choosing to remain stuck. A story that keeps circling back is far more often looking for somewhere to land than it is evidence of them holding onto a grudge or nursing a grudge on purpose. Mistake number three is correcting the details before acknowledging the feeling. Even a fully accurate correction, if you give it first, it can really quietly teach your child that being factually right matters more than their feelings and their experience, and you do not want to pass that along. Mistake number four: letting your spiral run the whole conversation without noticing that it’s happening. Your shame, your fear, your anxiety-those are all real and they’re valid. But if it takes over, your child ends up managing your feelings instead of being heard, and the story has even less room to rest. This mistake here is what reset to connection addresses. It’s helping you manage this emotional response, but if you’re not doing those mistakes and you’re getting it right, it does not look very dramatic. It looks like you know that story comes back again. You notice the wave in yourself before you act on it. It looks like leading with the feeling to talk to them about instead of the facts, it looks like letting your response be a little different this time than it’s been before, and then giving it time to loosen the story up. Do that with patience, and the story slowly finds what it’s been looking for all along, which is somewhere to rest. Here’s. What you can take with you today, a story that your child keeps bringing back up, is not a sign that you’re stuck. It’s not a sign that they’re punishing you, or it’s not a sign also that nothing you will do will ever be enough. It’s usually a sign that the story has not found an ending yet, and you are one of the people that can help it find one. You don’t have to remember the facts exactly as they do. You don’t have to accept every detail either as a fact, but you do need to be willing to let the feeling inside their story be real, even when you don’t fully understand or agree with all of it. Now, the fact that you’re here listening to this tells me that you really care, that you’re willing to look at hard things, and that matters so much. So let’s take a breath, let’s let the story land, and let your response be the thing that finally changes. This is Coaching Your Family Relationships podcast, and I’m Tina Gosney. This is where parents of adult children get the help that they need to find repair, rebuild, and strengthen their relationships. If this episode gave you a little more understanding today, would you please be willing to share it with another parent who also keeps hearing the same old story and they’re not sure what to do with it, because another parent just like you could use a little more hope and a little more help today. Thanks. I’ll see you next time.