When Your Adult Child Slowly Pulls Away: What Parents Need to Know.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

adult children, ambiguous loss, family systems, distance drift, boundary ambiguity, grief process, relational issues, anxiety management, emotional separation, differentiation self, pursuer distancer, emotional cutoff, family stress, intergenerational stake, relationship connection

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

You noticed it at first with the phone calls. She used to call every Sunday, and then it started being every other Sunday, and now it’s been three weeks. And the last time you called, she said she was running out the door and she would call you back, and she still hasn’t called. There’s no fight you can point to. Nobody said anything hurtful. She still announces your texts eventually, and she came home for Thanksgiving and stayed for two hours. So you go back and forth. You know, some days you tell yourself this is just what it looks like to have an adult child. She’s busy. She has her own life, and that’s what I raised her how to do. And then other nights you lie awake. You know, going through every conversation that you’ve had in the past year, looking for the moment that you got something wrong. The hardest part isn’t the distance; it’s not knowing what the distance means.

Tina Gosney  00:51

If your adult child has been slowly pulling away and you can’t tell whether something is wrong, or whether this is just the way things are now, then stay with me because this is your episode. Welcome to coaching your family relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and a parent educator. And on this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained or confusing and sometimes even painful. We’re going to do this through a family systems lens, which means we look at much more than just one event and one relationship. We look at the whole system, and this gives us a lot more information about what’s happening underneath the surface of the relationship. And there is one hope that I want you to hold on to: when one person in a family becomes more grounded and steady, the entire relationship system can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney  01:44

This is part two of a five-part series on why the space between you and your adult child feels so hard. In the last episode, we talked about how you give space when you are overfunctioning, so that your child can grow. Today we’re looking at a different kind of space, and this is the kind that nobody actually chooses on purpose. Nobody asks for it, nobody decides on it, and nobody has actually even said a word about it. It just happened. Let’s start by naming what this is like, because a lot of parents going through it have never heard anyone describe it out loud.

Tina Gosney  02:22

The drift doesn’t come with an event. There’s no argument you can go back to. There’s no door that was slammed. No message that said I need space. It’s more like a tide going out every week, a little less. Shorter calls, longer gaps between texts, plans that stay vague, you know, saying like, “Oh, we’ll see, or maybe next month, and visits that feel polite instead of warm. And because there’s no event, there’s nothing to point to when you try to explain it. If you tell a friend, they’re likely to say, “Oh, she’s probably just busy. Mine’s the same way, and that might be true, but it doesn’t really fix the ache that you’re feeling because something that you used to have is not there anymore, and you don’t know where it went. Many parents in this situation tell me they feel even sometimes a little ridiculous for being so upset. They say nothing even happened, or she’s fine. We’re fine. Why does it? Why do I feel so bad about this? Here’s what I want you to hear. You may be grieving, not a death, not an estrangement, but a real change in a relationship that matters to you than almost anything else.

Tina Gosney  03:35

This is the kind of grief our culture has almost no language for there’s no ritual for it there’s no card to send no one brings you a casserole because your daughter stopped calling on Sundays the good news is that there is actually language for this and a family scientist named Pauline Boss spent her career studying exactly this kind of experience, she called it ambiguous loss. Once you understand what it is, a lot of you are going to start feeling like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. So Pauline Boss is now a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

Tina Gosney  04:13

She’s one of the most influential people in the field of family science, her work started back in the early 1970s. She was observing family therapy sessions, and she noticed something: there were fathers who were physically present in the home, but psychologically absent. They were there, but they were not there, and their families were struggling with the kind of loss that no one had a name for. Over time, she developed what she called the theory of ambiguous loss.

Tina Gosney  04:48

In 2007, she wrote an article in the journal Family Relations, and she describes this very simply. She said, “Ambiguous loss is a loss that remains unclear. She describes. Two types of this loss. The first is when someone is physically gone, but still very present in your mind. This is like families of soldiers missing in action, for example. Families have described this type of loss as like leaving without goodbye. The second type of loss is the reverse. Someone is physically present, but psychologically absent. Maybe a loved one with dementia is the classic example. Families have described the second type, this type of loss, as goodbye without leaving.

Tina Gosney  05:34

Now, a parent whose adult child is drifting is not in the same situation as a family waiting for news about a missing soldier, or a spouse caring for someone with Alzheimer’s. I want to be very clear about that. But Boss did make an important point. She said both types of ambiguous loss can happen at extreme levels, like in disasters or tragedies, or in the simple everyday life. Drift is one of those everyday versions. Your child is still here. They’re still in your life technically, but something of the relationship, like you knew, that that feels it just feels like it’s gone. It’s a small, quiet version of goodbye without leaving. So why is this kind of loss so hard? Well, boss explains that the ambiguity itself is what does the damage when you don’t know whether something is lost or not, you can’t grieve it, and you can’t move forward from it either.

Tina Gosney  06:28

In her words, the ambiguity freezes the grief process, and it blocks coping and decision making. Closure is impossible because there’s nothing clear that you need to close. That’s exactly what the drift feels like. You can’t grieve because nothing has definitely been lost. You can’t fix it because you don’t know what’s wrong. You can’t decide what to do because you don’t know what’s true. So you stay stuck and you keep going back and forth day after day. Well, there’s one more thing that Boss says that I think every parent in this situation needs to hear. She writes that ambiguous loss is a relational issue, not a psychic dysfunction. So the symptoms can look like anxiety or depression or grief that will not settle, but the cause is not something wrong with you.

Tina Gosney  07:15

The cause is a situation you’re in that would be hard for anyone. She also notes that because these losses are unclear, that people around you don’t often know what to do or say, so they do nothing, they say nothing, or sometimes they do things that minimize it. You might have heard some of these things. You know, somebody you share your your pain with someone, and they say, “Well, at least she’s not in trouble. Some parents would give anything to have your problems, or kids are like that at that age. She’ll come back when she has children of her own, or well, at least you get to see her at the holidays, or maybe you just need to let her live her life, and maybe you’re reading too much into it, and even well, I’d love a little more peace and quiet for my kids.

Tina Gosney  08:02

Most of the time, people say these things because they care about you, and they want you to feel better. And some of them even have a little bit of truth in them. But notice what each one does. It skips right past what you’re feeling, and it goes straight to why you shouldn’t feel it. When someone says at least that phrase it tells you that your loss doesn’t count because somebody else has it worse. When they say she’ll come around, it asks you to wait instead of to grieve. Or when they say you’re reading too much into it, it suggests that the problem is your perception.

Tina Gosney  08:37

And after a few conversations like that, many parents just stop bringing it up at all. That’s how families end up carrying this kind of loss, mostly on their own. If you have ever felt alone in this, that’s part of the reason why. It isn’t that your feelings are too much. It’s that the people around you don’t have words for this loss that’s unclear, and without meaning to, they end up asking you to fix yourself and set it aside.

Tina Gosney  09:04

In 1984, Pauline Boss and her colleague Jan Greenberg published an article in the journal Family Process about a related idea called boundary ambiguity. A boundary ambiguity is when a family isn’t sure who’s in the family system and who’s out, or what roles people are supposed to play now? It sounds a little technical, but it describes something that’s very familiar. This thought of is my daughter still part of the everyday life of this family, or is she more of a visitor now? Am I still someone that she turns to, or am I the someone she checks in with? And the problem is no one’s told you, and you don’t know. Here’s the central finding of the work from Pauline Boss and Jan Greenberg, and it’s an important one.

Tina Gosney  09:49

They wrote that it’s the ambiguity rather than the event itself that predicts the level of family stress. Think about what that means for you. It’s not only the distance that’s. It’s the not knowing. A clear loss, as painful as it is, gives a family something to adjust to, but an unclear one keeps everyone suspended. You know, waiting to find out what’s real. Here’s what surprised me when I read this article: is that Boss and Greenberg didn’t only study crisis situations; they looked at one of the most normal transitions in family life, when a young person leaves home. They created a set of questions that measure boundary ambiguity in parents whose teenagers had just moved out. And I want to read a few of these questions because I think you’ll recognize yourself in them. These questions are things like, I find myself thinking about where my child is and what they’re doing. I have difficulty accepting that they’re grown up. I continue to keep alive my hope that they will return home to live. I think about my child a lot.

Tina Gosney  10:56

Now those statements were written more than 40 years ago, about completely ordinary families going through a completely ordinary family transition-that tells us something. Even when everything is going fine, even with a normal, healthy launch of a child, parents still feel this. They feel that pull. They feel the wondering, the not able to let go. The article also quotes the family sociologist Ruben Hill, who said that boundary problems are most likely to show up when a family is launching its young adults into jobs and marriage. He said, because of the uncertainties of the precise obligations of their attenuated membership in the parental family, which that’s a mouthful.

Tina Gosney  11:39

So let me translate that a little bit. Attenuated means thinned out. Your adult child is still a member of your family, but their membership has thinned out, and nobody knows the new rules. How often should she call? Should you call her or wait for her call? Is it okay to stop by? Should you ask about her relationship or is that intruding? None of this gets written down and talked about. Every family is making it up as they go. When there are no clear rules, every quiet week becomes something that the parent interprets. If you listen to part one of the series, you may remember that we talked about something called family development theory and the launching stage. Well, this is the same stage, the same launching stage. We’re just going to look at it from a different angle. The launching stage does doesn’t only require a parent to step back. It requires the whole family to redraw its boundaries, and the drift is often what that redrawing feels like from the parent side, well, there’s another part of the research that I think really helps here because because researchers who study families across generations have found something that they call the intergenerational stake. That idea goes back to the work of Vern Bengston. I think I said his name okay, and that’s from the early 1970s, and it’s been studied many times since then.

Tina Gosney  13:02

It says that parents tend to be more invested in their relationship with their adult child than the children are in their relationship with their parent, and the parent tends to describe their relationship as closer than their child does. Now, this is not because adult children don’t care; it’s because the relationship with you holds a different place in their life than it does in yours. For you, your child might be one of the very central relationships of your life. For your child, you’re one of many important relationships that, and their relationships that are important are growing. They might have a partner. They might have close friends. They have coworkers. Maybe they even have their own children now. So this is worth considering.

Tina Gosney  13:48

The drift that you feel so strongly may not be a drift to your child at all. To her, it may might just feel like life got in the way. That doesn’t make your feelings wrong, but it may mean that the story that you’re telling yourself about what the distance means is not the story that your child would tell. One more distinction can really help here. Researchers who study parent and adult children point out that there are there are several ways that families stay connected. How often you stay in contact is one. How close you feel is another. How much you agree on things is another. How much you help each other is another. You know these things do not always move in the same way at the same time. Contact can go down while affection stays the same.

Tina Gosney  14:35

A daughter who calls less may still love you just as much. Fewer phone calls is not the same as less love, even though it might feel exactly the same. So let’s look at what’s happening in your family system, because I think that helps to explain why drift is hard to handle very well. In Bowen theory, anxiety moves through family like a weather, like the weather. And one thing that reliably raises anxiety is not knowing. Boss and Greenberg cite the sociologist Ervin Goffman, who observed that when people face ambiguous situations, they tend to feel acute anxiety, and then they try to resolve it quickly by searching their surroundings for clues.

Tina Gosney  15:22

Does that sound familiar? Have you reread their last text and tried to figure out what tone they wrote it with? Have you noticed that she answers her sister’s text in about five minutes, but it took two days to answer you? Have you checked their social media to see if they’ve been out with friends on the weekend that they told you they were too busy to see you. Have you replayed the last visit? Looking for the moment that something changed. This is checking your surroundings for clues. That searching is not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that’s trying to get out of an uncertain situation as fast as it can.

Tina Gosney  15:59

But in a family system, it tends to create more of what you’re afraid of. Now, Boston Greenberg described two different ways that families tend to respond to this ambiguous loss, and I think both of them show up with drift. The first is to search harder for information. In a parent, this might look like pursuing them: more texts, more calls, more questions like, “Hey, is everything okay? You seem distant. Did I do something? In Bowen theory, this sets up what’s called the pursuer-distancer pattern. One person pursues more, the other person feels pressure, and they pull back. And the more the other person pulls back, the harder the first person pursues each side’s move makes sense to them, and each side’s move makes the pattern stronger.

Tina Gosney  16:50

The second response is almost the opposite. Boston Greenberg describes some families as closing rinks, about closing out the person who’s leaving, sometimes before there’s really even a reason to, in a parent, it might sound something like, “Well, fine. If she doesn’t want to be part of this family, I’m not going to chase her. So the parent withdraws first, and this usually is a way of protecting themselves from being hurt. So in family systems, this is called the emotional cutoff, but it’s coming from the parent side instead of the child side, notice that both of these responses are trying to do the same thing. They’re trying to end the uncertainty. Pursuit tries to force an answer.

Tina Gosney  17:30

Closing the door yourself tries to decide the answer. So at least you’re not waiting around anymore. Both are anxiety looking for relief, and both can turn a normal temporary drift into a lasting distance. There’s another way anxiety tries to find relief in a family, and that’s through a third person. Bowen calls this a triangle. When the tension between two people gets uncomfortable, one of them brings in somebody else. With drifts, this often looks like you asking your other child, “Have you talked to your sister? Is she okay? Is she mad at me? Or talking about it with your spouse again and again and again, trying to figure it out together.

Tina Gosney  18:15

It feels like you’re gathering information, but it can also put your other child in the middle, and it keeps everyone focused on the drifting child instead of your own steadiness. And here’s one more idea that matters-one that we talked about in part one. Emotional separation is not the same thing as emotional distance. Sometimes, what looks like drift is your child doing the normal work of becoming their own person, building their own life, creating their own rhythms and their own, maybe even creating their own family, that is a healthy part of differentiation. It does not mean the relationship is failing. Sometimes, of course, the drift does mean something is wrong-that someone was hurt, that something is unresolved, something your child has not found a way to tell you yet, and the hard part is that from where you’re standing, you often can’t tell which one it is, and that is exactly the kind of ambiguity that we’ve been talking about.

Tina Gosney  19:12

It’s also worth asking, you know, how did your own family handle this type of thing when someone in your family of origin pulled away? What happened? Did people chase them? Did they get written off? Did anyone ever talk about it? This is called the multi-generational transmission. This is the way your family handles distance get gets passed down, often without anyone noticing, and the way you instinctively respond to your child’s drift have may have been learned by you long before your child was ever born. So, what do you do with a loss that you can’t define about a situation that you can’t clarify?

Tina Gosney  19:53

That’s a lot of ambiguity. Pauline Boss asks a question I think is the most helpful questions. You know, when a parent is going through a situation like this, so instead of asking, “Well, what’s the truth? she asks, “How do people manage to live well despite not knowing? That’s a different goal. It’s not about solving a mystery. It’s about finding a way to be steady while the mystery is still there. One of the ideas that Boss is best known for is what she calls both and thinking. Most of us want things to be one way or another. Either my daughter and I are close or we’re not. Either something is wrong or some everything is fine. Well, Boss suggests that you know with ambiguous loss, holding both at the same time, is what helps people to stay resilient. In her words, she said, “It’s the ability to say something like, ‘My loved one is gone, but they’re also still here.

Tina Gosney  20:54

For a parent facing drift, it might sound like this: My daughter is less present in my everyday life than she used to be, and she is still my daughter, and our relationship is not over. Both of those things can be true. You don’t have to choose. Boss also talks about ambivalence, and I think this piece brings a lot of relief. She explains that an ambiguous situation creates mixed feelings in the people that are living through it, you might love your child and resent them at the same time. You might hope that they call and then dread what you’re going to say if they do. You might miss them so deeply and also feel this flicker of relief when the weekend is quiet. Boss is clear that these mixed feelings are not a disorder. There doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. This is a normal response to an unclear situation. If you’ve been judging yourself or feeling two opposite things at once, just set that down. There’s something else in Boston Greenberg’s work that really gives me a lot of hope for parents in this situation.

Tina Gosney  21:57

They propose that a period of ambiguity is not always harmful. In the short term, it can give a family time to take it in the fact that something has changed. The problem is when the ambiguity goes on and on, and the family is not able to adjust to the new way it needs to be reorganized. And they point out that families can redefine their own boundaries, even when they don’t know all the facts. You don’t have to wait for your child to explain the distance before you start to adjust to it. This is what differentiation of self looks like in a situation like this one. It means you can stay connected to your child without needing an answer from them, so that you can feel okay.

Tina Gosney  22:45

You can keep your own life full. You can keep reaching out in ways that are warm and don’t come with pressure, and you can do all of this while the question is still open. It doesn’t mean that you never ask. There’s a big difference between pursuing and asking once with calm curiosity. You know, something like, “Hey, I’ve noticed we’ve been talking less, and I miss you. I’m not upset. I just I want you to know that I would love to hear from you and how you’re doing whenever you have time. Well, that’s an invitation. It doesn’t demand an answer. It does not carry an accusation, and then the hardest part is left to you. Let them respond in their own time.

Tina Gosney  23:30

Pauline Boss points out that one of the hardest parts of ambiguous loss is how isolating it is, because the loss is unclear. The people around you do not know how to help you. So many parents end up carrying this all by themselves, and they end up waking up at 2o’clock in the morning and turning it over and over in their minds. That’s a big part of why I created Bridge to Connection.

Tina Gosney  23:55

Parents come into Bridge to Connection feeling exactly that way, really confused, sometimes embarrassed about the grief that they’re feeling, and really unsure about what to do. They don’t know whether to reach out or to back off, and and that uncertainty is normal. And through the online lessons, you learn how to understand patterns underneath the distance. And then we do a lot of group coaching, where you can find out that you’re not the only one, because other parents inside this program are experiencing this too, and have just as much uncertainty and grief as you do, and in the one-on-one time with me, we look closely at your specific family and your history, so that you can reach towards your child in a way that invites connection instead of adding pressure.

Tina Gosney  24:41

So if you’re living with a kind of distance that you can’t quite name, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Tina Gosney  24:48

Let’s talk about three common mistakes that I see with the drift. These all come from a loving parent and from the very natural desire to make the uncertainty. Stop.

Tina Gosney  25:01

So, mistake number one is becoming a detective. You check their social media for clues. You compare how fast they answer you with how fast they answer other people. You ask their siblings what’s going on. It feels like you’re gathering information, but it mostly feeds your anxiety, and it can pull other family members into the middle. The more energy you put into investigating the distance, the less energy you have to commit to your own steadiness. Mistake number two is turning up the pressure. More texts, more calls, more comments like “Well, I guess you’re too busy for your mother these days, or “Nice to finally hear from you. You know these usually come from hurt. Those comments come from hurt, but they tend to land as guilt, and guilt makes conflict contact feel like an obligation rather than something that they really want to do. That’s the pursuer distancer pattern, and it always makes almost always makes the distance bigger. Mistake number three is closing the door first. This is a quieter mistake, and it can be a very costly one. And it’s that deciding, you know, if she wants a relationship, she knows where to find me, and then going silent.

Tina Gosney  26:16

It protects you from the hurt of reaching out and not hearing back, but it also turns a temporary drift into a standoff, where each person is waiting for the other person to move first. Your child might read your silence as confirmation that you’ve stopped caring about them. Staying warmly available, even when it feels one-sided for a while, keeps a door open that’s much harder to reopen once it’s been shut. Here’s what you can take with you today: If your adult child is drifting and it’s hurting more than you think it should, you’re not overreacting. You may be living with ambiguous loss. This is a real loss that has no clear shape and no clear ending. And as the research shows, it’s often the not knowing more than the distance itself that causes the most stress. You don’t have to solve the mystery to find your footing. You can hold both things at the same time that something has changed and that the relationship is not over. You can let yourself feel mixed feelings without judging them, and you can stay steady, warm, and available while you wait. Next time in this part three of this series, we’re going to look at the kind of distance that feels even more painful and confusing, and that’s when the distance seems to be coming through your child’s partner. This is coaching your family relationships, and I’m Tina Gosney. This is where parents of adult children get the help they need to repair, rebuild, and strengthen their relationships. See you next time.