Boundaries with Your Adult Child: Stepping Back When You’re Used to Being Needed

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Over functioning, family systems, parental anxiety, trust issues, resilience, emotional support, adult decisions, relationship dynamics, intervention strategies, self-care, parental control, child autonomy, emotional regulation, family conflict, relational therapy.

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:00

You know, sometimes you just call to check in, and somehow you end up doing their laundry list of problems in your head, spinning out in your head for the next few hours. You give advice. They don’t take it. You give it again, maybe a little bit louder, maybe a little bit more urgently. You lie awake at night replaying a decision that they made like a job, they didn’t take a person that they’re dating, money that they spent, and you’re thinking, if I could just get them to see what I see, then everything would be fine. You’ve rearranged your life, your finances, your emotional bandwidth, your entire nervous system around an adult who doesn’t live under your roof anymore, and then somewhere in the back of your mind there’s this voice. It’s really hard to listen to sometimes, but it wants to whisper. Is this even working? Is any of this actually working?

Tina Gosney  00:55

If any of this sounded like something that you’ve been through, this podcast is for you want to welcome you to coaching your family relationships. If you are a new listener, welcome I’m so glad to have you here. And if you’ve been here with me for a while, welcome back. I am so glad that you’ve come back. I am Tina Gosney. I’m a family conflict coach and a family life educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confused or even painful, and we do it through a family systems lens. Because here is the really the thing that I want you to hold on to is that when one person in a family becomes more steady, more calm, more grounded, the entire relationship system, the entire family, can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney  01:51

Today we’re going to talk about and go deep on one of the most painful, misunderstood under talked about dynamics in family life, which is over functioning parents of adult children. These are not I’m not talking about the helicopter parents of teenagers or small children. I’m not talking about hovering over homework. I’m talking about the parent who has a 25 year old or a 32 year old, maybe even a 45 or a 55 year old, and they are still managing, fixing, rescuing, advising, worrying, and maybe even quietly controlling, often without even fully realizing what they’re doing. By the end of this episode, I want you to understand why you’re doing this, what it’s costing both you and your child, and most importantly, I want you to see what it looks like to actually prepare your child for the road of life, instead of trying to clear it out for them.

Tina Gosney  02:57

So let’s get into this, whether this is your first episode, or you’ve been a listener for for a while, I want to say something before we dive in. If you are an over functioning parent, I need you to know something before anything else. You are not a bad parent. Full stop. In fact, you’re here listening to this show, and that shows that you have already you’ve already questioned, you’re already curious, you’re already open to maybe seeing something differently. And that takes genuine courage. That is a difficult thing to do, because these relationships are so important and precious to us, and it’s hard to let go, but I’m also not going to let you off the hook today, because love is not enough of an explanation. In fact, love is what motivates over functioning. It doesn’t explain it. It definitely doesn’t justify it. So let’s be honest together.

Tina Gosney  03:58

Okay, today’s episode is structured into four parts. Part one is what over functioning actually is what it looks like in families with adult children. Part two is four hidden drivers, the real reasons that parents are over functioning, most of which are invisible to the parents themselves. And part three, the core truth of this entire conversation, you cannot clear the road of life for your child. It was never even possible to do that, and the cost of trying to do that is enormous. Part four is, what does the shift look like if we do it slowly and perfectly, but we are very relational about how we do it, about how we are going from road clearing to road preparing. That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Tina Gosney  04:48

And I want to be also super honest right up here with the front I am a recovering over functioning parent, so I resonate very deeply with the things that I’m going to talk to you about. Because this is something that I had a lot of trouble with in my younger years. Okay, so here’s part one. What is over functioning? What does it look like? Well, this term over functioning comes from Bowen family systems, and that was developed by a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen in the mid 20th century. It’s this concept about how that changed how therapists and coaches understand families and family relationships. We’re not a collection of individuals that just happen to be either living together or related to each other, but the family functions as one system, an emotional system, a relational system, and systems have patterns and pressures and these kind of invisible rules and expectational pools that keep everybody in their role. They keep everybody in their place, and they keep patterns in place as well.

Tina Gosney  05:56

So in a family system, over functioning and under functioning are almost always paired together. There are two sides of the same coin. So when one person functions above their level, which means they’re doing more, they’re managing more, they’re worrying more, they’re fixing more. Another person in the system functions below their level, they pull back, they disengage, they let somebody else do the work. They let someone else carry the weight, and slowly, over time, they develop what we call functional helplessness. And here’s something that’s very critical, neither, the over functioning person nor the under functioning person usually chose their role consciously. It just gradually evolved over time, over years and sometimes even over generations. Once the system is established, both people keep doing things, behaving in ways that reinforce it. They keep doing the same patterns, even when both of them hate the pattern. You don’t have to. You don’t change something just because you hate the pattern. You just keep doing it because you don’t even see that it’s a pattern. So what does an over functioning look like when the child is now an adult. I’m going to give you some real life scenarios, and just see if any of these feel familiar.

Tina Gosney  07:29

Scenario number one, your adult child calls you with a problem, maybe something at work, maybe a conflict with their partner, maybe they’re under some financial stress, and with about 90 seconds, you’re in solution fix it mode. You’re googling stuff, you’re making calls, you’re sending them articles or podcasts. You drafted a three point plan. You’ve already thought about this problem more than they have their life becomes your project to manage. Okay, that’s scenario number one.

Tina Gosney  08:01

Scenario number two, your adult child never explicitly asks for help, but somehow you’re always there. You’re paying a bill they didn’t ask you to pay. You’re calling their landlord on their behalf. You’re reaching out to a friend that they have conflict with. Maybe you’re over their home, mowing their lawn or fixing something. You’re smoothing something over before they even know that it needs to be smoothed. You’re operating in the background, just quietly managing consequences before anything can come around. Okay?

Tina Gosney  08:34

Scenario number three, this is the advice repeater. You’ve given them the same piece of advice 15 times, you know you have, and yet that 16th time feels necessary, because surely if you say it right this time, if you have the right tone with the right framing, and you say the right words, they’re finally going to hear it, and this time they’re going to get it. So you say it again and again and again, you might even at this point, there might come a point where you stop giving explicit advice and now you’re just trying to get them to listen implicitly, because you do something like mention a podcast that you listened to, that you thought was really interesting, but your ulterior motive is to Get them to listen to the podcast, because, you know, they’re the ones who really need to hear it, and maybe they’ll listen to that other person, even if they won’t listen to you. Okay.

Tina Gosney  09:28

Scenario number four, this is the emotional first responder. Your adult child’s mood is your mood. If they’re struggling, you’re devastated, if they’re anxious, you can’t sleep, your emotional state is so entangled with theirs that you have essentially outsourced your inner peace to someone who is now a separate adult that doesn’t even live with you. They’re a separate human being, but when they hurt, you hurt. When they make a poor choice, you feel it like it has become like this. You know, physical injury to yourself.

Tina Gosney  10:08

Scenario number five, every time your child faces a natural consequence, maybe they paid a late a bill late, maybe they have a strained friendship, a job they might lose. You find yourself intervening. You find yourself rescuing. You make the problem go away. And maybe they ask you to, maybe they don’t, but the watching them experience the consequence of that choice is so unbearable to you, and so you step in and you’re their safety net. Here’s what’s important to notice about all five of those scenarios that I just gave you. In every single one of them, the parent is convinced they are helping, and in a very narrow, like immediate, specific way they are helping, at least they might be so the bill gets paid, the conflict gets smoothed over, a consequence gets avoided.

Tina Gosney  11:09

But let’s zoom out because we have a hard time when we are activated to zoom out because we want to zoom in. Our natural nervous system response is to zoom in. So let’s zoom out. Let’s look at this pattern. What happens over months or years? What is it doing to this adult human being? What message is being sent, not in words, but in behavior, about their capability, about their judgment, about their right as a human to stumble and make mistakes and recover on their own terms. We’re going to come back to that.

Tina Gosney  11:48

But first, let’s talk about why parents over function and why it’s almost never what it appears to be on the surface. So there are four hidden drivers of over functioning, and if you ask most over functioning parents why they do what they do, they’re going to give you some version of this answer, because I love them, because I want what’s best for them, because I care so much about them, and I understand that so well, That love is real, it is genuine, it is deep. And take this from one over functioning, recovering person parent. I know how much you care, and I know that you want what’s best for them, but love is the fuel, and it’s not the engine. If we really want to understand why a parent is over functioning with an adult child, we have to look at the engine. We have to look at what is actually driving the behavior, what’s underneath that love, what’s underneath the good intentions, what’s underneath that saying of like, I’m just trying to help.

Tina Gosney  12:56

Based on the clinical literature, on family systems, on attachment and on anxiety. I want to walk you through the forehead and drivers. And these are the real reasons that parents over function, and they just exist below the surface. We’re rarely conscious of them. So the first one is that we don’t trust that they’re going to make the right choices. And it’s really painful to name, so I’m just going to name it. It’s significantly a part of over functioning is a lack of trust in their judgment. So that might be earned. You might have seen them use poor judgment in the past, and so maybe they earned that way that you’re thinking about them. Maybe they have really made some genuinely concerning choices there, maybe there have actually been really dire consequences, real messes and real moments where you thought, see, they can’t do this without me. They need me to guide them.

Tina Gosney  13:52

But here’s the thing about distrust in family systems, it tends to become a self fulfilling prophecy when a parent consistently communicates through their actions, maybe sometimes through their words, but definitely through their actions, like I don’t trust you to make the right call. And their adult, adult child receives that message whether they even know that they’re receiving it. Sometimes they just feel it and it becomes internalized without even like having it be a conscious thought. They respond to it in one of two ways. They will either internalize it and begin to doubt themselves, like they genuinely struggle to trust their own instincts because someone that they love and respect has spent years sending signals that your instincts are not reliable, or the second thing that they do is they rebel against it. So making choices, making their own choices, feel like they’re asserting their independence, even when they know that those choice those choices, are not the best ones, because part of them is just not making a life decision. They’re making this statement like you don’t control me. I make my own choices, so need. Their outcome is what the parent wants, but both are predictable.

Tina Gosney  15:04

When distrust is underneath the relationship, it’s like that undercurrent in their relationship. So here is the harder question, how much of your distrust in your child is actually distrust in yourself, and this is where family systems get really honest, because over functioning parents will often grow up in systems where they were not trusted. This is how we pass things down from generations. Someone else manage your choices and your instincts and your capabilities were overridden, or maybe they were never You were never given the space when you were younger to develop your own instincts, and now unconsciously, you repeat that dynamic, either because that’s the only template and example that you’ve had, or because part of you has not really ever resolved your own relationship with your own trust and your own autonomy, so developing the ability to trust ourselves and exercise our own autonomy. These are really vital things to human development, and we can’t be a really healthy human being unless we have spent the time developing the ability to trust ourselves.

Tina Gosney  16:17

So here’s hidden driver number two, we don’t believe that they are capable of making adult decisions. This might sound like the same one, but it’s not. And they’re related. I want to show you why they’re related and not the same. So distrust is about judgment, like you might choose wrong, but this one is about capacity. You aren’t equipped to choose at all. So it’s very insidious, because it lives underneath this genuine love and care, and they’re usually the most devoted attentive, present parents that you’re ever going to meet, which is exactly the problem. So when a parent is so deeply, deeply involved in managing every dimension of this child’s life, from childhood and into the the late elementary years and early adolescence and the late teen years, and it carries over into adulthood that child never gets the opportunity To develop the competencies that come from navigate navigating difficulties and making mistakes.

Tina Gosney  17:25

So I want you to think of it this way. Competence is not a trait that we’re born with. We have it or we don’t have it. It’s actually a muscle, and muscles that they grow through resistance. Think about if you never work out a muscle, it becomes very weak. But if you work a muscle consistently over time and challenge that muscle, it grows stronger. When parents over functioning, they’re over functioning for their child, they are removing their resistance so they’re preventing the very experiences, the mistakes and the stumbles and the recoveries and the thoughts of like I got to figure this out. They’re removing those from their child, and that’s what builds adult capacity. And then sometimes that same parent looks at their child and thinks they’re not capable of handling this on their own, and they’re not. What they’re not recognizing is that that incapability that they’re seeing is at least in part, a direct result of their years of over functioning in their child’s life. This is one of the most heartbreaking loops in family systems. Works is you know, this over functioning parent has created the very thing that they were trying to prevent.

Tina Gosney  18:43

Here’s hidden driver number three, this I, you know, thought of like I am so terrified that you are going to make a mistake that will change the trajectory of your life, an irredeemable mistake, and this one is purely driven out of anxiety. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I think that’s the most honest driver and the one that parents are most ashamed of. And the fear, if we strip it down, it’s like, what if something they make a choice that ruins their life? What if they make a choice like the wrong job, they marry the wrong person, they get into the wrong financial situation, they struggle with something that damages them permanently. And I watched it coming, and I didn’t stop it.

Tina Gosney  19:29

That fear is not irrational. It totally comes from love. It comes from this parent’s deepest protective instinct. It’s that same instinct that made you hover over their crib and made you, you know, stand behind them when they were starting to walk, so they didn’t fall and hurt themselves. It’s that same impulse that made you, you know, grab their hand when they cross the street. But the truth is that anxiety doesn’t want you to hear this. Is that very. Few adult mistakes are actually irredeemable. And I want to say that again, because I think that you know, it gets lost in all that worry and anxiety is that very few adult mistakes are actually actually permanently, life destroyingly irredeemable. People recover from bad marriages. People recover after financial disasters. People change careers. They move to a different city. They change the direction of their life. People leave harmful relationships, people get sober, people go back to school. People find their way back to themselves after years or even decades of wandering, the human capacity for resilience is extraordinary. It’s one of the things that most consistently predicts whether someone can recover from a hard season, season of life, and that is backed by decades of resilience research, which is this secure sense of self efficacy. It’s this belief that is developed through experience, that I am capable of getting through hard things, that belief is built in the crucible, in the fire of difficulty, not in safety, that prevents the fire from happening when a parent’s anxiety drives them to prevent every foreseeable mistake, they are not protecting their child from a ruined life. They’re protecting their child from the experiences that build resilience and those experiences help us to survive, and then we become we gain the confidence to do hard things.

Tina Gosney  21:47

And the thing that no parent wants to accept, that we really want to avoid believing, is that we cannot protect our child from life. You can delay it, you can buffer it, you can soften some edges, but you can’t prevent hard things from coming to your child, because that’s not even possible. Your child is going to go through hard things, and are they going to face those hard things with the muscle memory of someone who has navigated difficulties before, or are they going to face them as someone who’s been protected and and buffered their entire life that hasn’t developed the tools to handle hard things? They don’t have a history, they don’t have internal evidence that they’re capable of getting through hard things.

Tina Gosney  22:39

Here’s hidden driver number four, and this is a really tough one, is this, the belief that their choice, their choices, reflect onto you. Nobody wants to say this out loud, and it’s real, and we have to name it, that some portion of that parental over functioning, and this percentage varies widely from one person to another. It’s about the parent’s own image. It’s about their reputation, about their sense of identity. So when your adult child is struggling, if they’re failing, if they’re making choices that you don’t agree with, there is part of the parent’s brain that translates that into what does this mean about me? How does this define my worth? Did I do the parenting thing, right? Was I a successful parent, or was I a failure as a parent? And what are other people going to think? What are the neighbors going to think? What will my family think? What does this mean about me? This is not a character flaw. This is a natural, profoundly human response, and it’s intensified in cultures that have very strong narratives about what successful parenting looks like. And we live in a world where parenting is heavily evaluated publicly, and where parents have absorbed this message over generations that your child’s outcome are a direct referendum on your parenting.

Tina Gosney  24:06

But I want to tell you something, and this is really important, when your primary motivation for intervening in your adult child’s life is a management of your own image or your own reputation. You are no longer acting in their interest. You are acting in yours. And that is not love. And they feel that your adult child feels that even when they can’t put their finger on it, even when they don’t have you know the words to define it or express it, they feel the difference between my parent is intervening because they’re afraid for me, and my parent is intervening because they’re afraid of the mistake, of my mistake, and how it makes them look so the second one breeds resentment, and very deep resentment, and that can erode the relationship quickly or very quietly over years.

Tina Gosney  25:01

So here are the four drivers, distrust, doubt of their capability, fear of irredeemable mistakes, and the protection of your own identity. And the most important thing I want to say about all four of them as they’re almost never about your adult child. They are about you. They’re about your history, your anxiety, your your unresolved fears, your unmet needs, your unexamined beliefs about what it means to be a good parent. And as I say that, I want to assure you that this is not an accusation. This is an invitation, because the moment that you recognize that you’re of over functioning is about you and not them, then that becomes something that we can work with. There’s a path that becomes more clear to us.

Tina Gosney  25:49

I want to tell you something that I think is the most important sentence in this entire conversation, in this entire podcast. Are you ready for this? You cannot clear the road of life for your child. It is not possible, and it never was. This is not a metaphor. This is the literal truth, no matter how much money you have, no matter how well connected you are, no matter how smart, how devoted, how sacrificial Your love is. You cannot remove the difficulty from your adult child’s path. You can surely postpone it. You know you can delay it, you can relocate it, but you cannot eliminate it. And every moment that you spend trying to clear a road that cannot be cleared is a moment that you’re not doing the one thing that would actually help them, which would be prepare them for the road that they’re going to travel.

Tina Gosney  26:48

So let’s make this more concrete, clearing the road looks like paying off debt so they don’t have to face financial consequence, calling their boss, their landlord, the professor, the friend, whoever, to fix the problem before they have to giving advice so persistently and repeatedly that they don’t even hear their own voice anymore, making a hard decision for them so they don’t have to sit in the discomfort of having the uncertainty of not knowing what to do and even stepping in before they’ve been given the chance to step in for themselves.

Tina Gosney  27:21

Okay, so those are all examples of what the road when it looks like when you’re trying to clear the road, this is an example of what it looks like when you’re preparing them for the road. You sit with your own discomfort long enough to let them sit with theirs. You ask them, What are you thinking about doing instead of telling them what to do, you let them make a choice you disagree with, and you stay present to support the aftermath rather than prevent it. You say, I believe that you can figure this out, and you even mean it. You’re not pretending that. You mean that even when it’s so hard to say that and you trust that that difficulty that is in their life is for them and not happening to them.

Tina Gosney  28:09

So clearing the road and preparing for the road, these are not the same thing. They require completely different things from you as a parent, road clearing requires effort, resources, energy, control, fixing, but road preparing requires something so much harder, restraint, trust, tolerance of your own anxiety, and ultimately it requires a lot of faith. So I want to tell you about a metaphor I came back to often when I worked with over functioning parents.

Tina Gosney  28:44

I want you to think of the process that a butterfly uses to emerge from its cocoon, from its chrysalis. That butterfly, I used to collect butterfly cocoons and put them in an aquarium when I was a child, and I loved so much to watch that butterfly come out of its chrysalis and spread its wings, and then I would go take it outside and set it free. The butterfly has to struggle. It has to push. It takes a long time. And if you’re watching this, it could look like they’re suffering. And there were times when I was a child that I really wanted to, just like, help it to come out, you know, to just like, open up that that cocoon a little bit. And that’s what we do as parents. We’re so well meaning and loving, and we think I can help them. So it would be so easy for me when I was a kid to take a small pair of scissors and just like, gentle, gently, you know, lovingly, open this chrysalis.

Tina Gosney  29:43

But if I did that, the butterfly can come out easily with no struggle, but then it dies because the struggle, that resistance, that they have to go through, that effort to push through the cocoon and the chrysalis is what pumps the fluid into. Of the butterfly’s wings, and without a struggle, those wings do not develop, and without a butterfly’s wings developing, they can’t fly, and there’s they can’t live. And so the difficulty was not a mistake in the design. The difficulty was the design the same as with us. Your adult child’s struggles are not evidence that you failed. In many cases, they are evidence that the process is working exactly as it is supposed to. Your job is not to cut open the chrysalis. Your job is to trust the process, to be there, to stay in the relationship, but to let the struggle do its necessary work.

Tina Gosney  30:43

Now I do want to be honest about something, because I don’t want this to become a simple, a simplistic, you know, okay, just back off and let them fail message, because that’s not what I’m saying. There are situations, there are genuine crisis, mental health emergencies, addiction, abusive relationships and danger where parental involvement is not just appropriate, but it’s necessary. And I am not talking about those situations here. So if that is the situation you are in, I am not talking to you.

Tina Gosney  31:13

I am actually talking to the ordinary, grinding daily, you know, accumulation of small interventions that you know taken one at a time, they seem harmless and even loving, but if we take them as a pattern over time, they communicate this devastating message that you know I don’t believe that you can handle your life. And there is the message that your child receives when you over function, and it’s not that I love you and not that I’m here and not that you matter to me, but the message that they receive, the one that is delivered, not in words, but in your behavior, is that you are not capable. You cannot be trusted with your own life and without me, you’re going to fail. And receiving that message over and over and over, over time, over years, does so much damage, and it does more damage than the very mistakes you’re trying to prevent.

Tina Gosney  32:09

So let’s go to part four. We’re going to shift from road clearing to road preparing. This is the part you’ve probably been waiting for. So okay, so what do I do with all of this? And I want to start by saying something that actually runs counter to most self help content, and that this shift is not a technique, it’s not a script, it’s not five steps. This is an internal shift. This shift begins inside of you, in your relationship with your own anxiety, your own history and your own definition and beliefs of what good parents do, you cannot manage and checklist your way to differentiation. You have to grow your way there by going internally first. That said growth has starting points.

Tina Gosney  32:59

I want to give you some honest, practical, psychologically grounded starting points for this shift. So point one is get honest about whose anxiety you are managing. The next time you feel the urge to intervene, so to call somebody to fix, something to advise, to rescue. I want you to just pause, just for a moment and ask yourself, Wait, whose anxiety Am I trying to manage right now? This is not a rhetorical question. You actually want to ask it. So is this intervention for them? Would it actually serve their long term development, their autonomy, their capability, or is it for you? Is it to relieve your own anxiety, your worry, your inability to tolerate the uncertainty of watching someone that you love so much navigate something difficult? That question is not designed to shame you. It’s designed to locate you, because when you can see clearly that urge to intervene is about your anxiety, not about their needs, then you have a choice. You can act on your anxiety, or you can sit with it. And sitting with anxiety is not a comfortable process. It does help us to grow, and it is necessary for growth for us to sit with our own anxiety and learn how to manage our own anxiety, and to learn how to do that from within, and not to try to manage everything outside of us.

Tina Gosney  34:33

One of the most important distinctions in this entire conversation is the difference between support and management. So support says, Hey, I’m here. I love you, I believe in you. I’m available if you want to talk. And management says, I’ve already decided what you should do, and I’m going to tell you over and over again until you do it, because I feel responsible for the outcome. Either way, I’m going to feel responsible for it.

Tina Gosney  35:00

It supports the relationship, and it keeps you connected with your adult child without controlling them. Management is more like coercion, even when it comes from love, because it communicates you know your autonomy is less important than my need to see you do the thing that I think is right. So here’s a simple test. When you reach out, when you offer something, when you have a conversation, are you leaving space for a different outcome than the one you already decided should happen? Or have you entered a conversation with your mind made up about what should happen? Because if your mind is already made up, then that is management, and management, even though you want to say it’s coming from love, is not respectful.

Tina Gosney  35:49

So here’s a third starting point that you can that you can go to so and this is argue, arguably the hardest one, because one of the deepest functions of over functioning parent is that it gives us a sense of control in the face of uncertainty. Parental anxiety at its core is this unbearable uncertainty of you know, I love this person more than I love myself, and I cannot guarantee their safety or happiness, and that is terrifying. That has always been terrifying. From the very moment that you became a parent, you signed up for a relationship where your love is so enormous and your control is so small, over functioning is an attempt to close the gap, to make the control match the love to do enough that the uncertainty becomes manageable, but it doesn’t work. That uncertainty does not go away. It just gets temporarily masked by the activity of management, and what you’re left with is an adult child who has not had the room to grow, and a parent that has more and more anxiety, because the system requires you to keep over functioning and be constantly managing to keep that illusion of control alive.

Tina Gosney  37:15

This antidote, you know, it’s about developing your own capacity to tolerate the not knowing. This is the inner work, and it may involve coaching. It may involve therapy. It may you know it’s probably going to involve examining the stories that you tell yourself about what is going to happen if your child fails. And it’s almost certainly going to involve sitting with this feeling of helplessness and grief, because accepting that you cannot control someone else’s life involves a real loss, and that is a loss of a fantasy, that fantasy is the love, that love is enough to protect someone else from difficulty, but it’s not and accepting that is genuinely painful. But on the other side of that is something really remarkable, which is freedom, and it’s your freedom and their freedom.

Tina Gosney  38:17

Here’s a fourth starting point, is that you need to start investing in your own life. This might sound really frivolous in the context of this conversation, but I promise you, it’s not over functioning. Parents are often parents who you know gradually, without really even noticing it, they allowed their own life to become smaller and to shrink. Their interests, you know, their relationships, their sense of purpose, their inner world, all of it has slowly been put on to their child and their child’s life. And this happens because, you know, sometimes managing someone else’s life is a way that we don’t fully confront our own life. So I want to ask you, what are you afraid of? What if your days? What would your days look like if they weren’t focused on their days? What wants to grow in you because of all that dormant energy has been flying outward towards them? This is not a judgment. It’s just a question that could be worth sitting with and asking yourself, because one of the most important things a parent can do for their adult child, one of the most concrete ways to shift this over functioning dynamic is to build a life that is yours. Build your interests, build your friendships, build your creativity, your creative side, build a spiritual practice, build your a way of you. Care for caring for your physical self, build something that matters for you, because when your life is full, the urge to vicariously live through or manage their life just naturally diminishes, and you’re not pouring your need for meaning into their choices, because you have your own.

Tina Gosney  39:57

There is a completely unintention. Intentional gift in this too, it’s and that is the gift of your adult child, being able to watch you build a full and meaningful life, watching you reinvent yourself after your active parenting years are over, you can show them what it looks like to keep growing, to keep choosing and to keep living a life with intention that is preparation for the road, for showing them how to do that when they get to that point in their life. This you don’t have to give them advice, you don’t have to intervene. You just model what that looks like for them. Here’s a starting point.

Tina Gosney  40:34

Number five is that you can repair the relationship, and you should repair the relationship before you repair the dynamic. So for some of you, that over functioning has gone on so long that the dynamic is entrenched enough that there’s a real relationship repair that is needed. And your adult child may be really angry. They may be withdrawn. Maybe they, you know, engage with you sarcastically, or they just just disengage. They might have stopped telling you things because they know it’s going to result in a lecture, or you’re going to try to fix something, or you’re going to try to rescue them.

Tina Gosney  41:10

Okay, so if this is the case, please don’t start this shift by withdrawing without an explanation. There is a version of this story where the parent hears about everything that I’ve talked about today and decides to stop over over functioning and simply just go silent and stops calling and stops offering and stops being present, and then their adult child, who has been sending signals for years, like, I need space. I need I need you to let me make my own choices. You know, suddenly this parent is absent, and they don’t see that as respectful. They see that as abandonment, because the child who was over functioned with has. They have their own complexity, their own internalization of this dynamic. They have may have come to rely on that over functioning parent even as they still resented it. They might feel. And this is kind of paradoxical, that if you stop showing up in the ways that you have that it means you don’t love them anymore, because that’s the way that they thought you showed your love for them.

Tina Gosney  42:11

So this shift needs to be named, and this is not this doesn’t have to be a dramatic confrontation, but just as a conversation, it might look something like this. You know, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I realize I’ve been showing up in your life in ways that have not really benefited you, and I really want to do things differently, because I love you so much, and I want you to know I’m still here, but I want to trust you more too, and I want you to lead more of your own life and your own story. So that conversation, you say it simply and humbly and without an agenda for how they respond that itself is an act of preparation. It’s saying, hey, this road ahead in your life is yours to travel, and I think that you’re ready for it.

Tina Gosney  42:59

We’ve covered a lot of ground today, so let’s just kind of wrap it all up over functioning in a family system is not a character flaw. It’s an anxiety management strategy that became a relationship pattern, and it usually comes from love, but it is sustained by fear, fear of your child’s judgment, their capability, their potential for irredeemable mistakes, and yes, sometimes even your own reflection in their choices. But underneath all of it is this kind of magical thinking that if you do enough, if you manage enough, if you worry enough, if you give enough, that you can clear the road so they won’t have to go through hard things, but that’s not possible. The road cannot be cleared, but it can be prepared for. And what the preparation actually looks like is not you intervening. It’s a relationship, and one in which your child, your adult child feels to their core, down into their bones, that you believe they are capable. You trust them to run their own life and that you’ll be there when they need you, and you trust them to know when that is that’s the parent they need. They do not need the parent that clears the road. They need the parent who prepares them for it.

Tina Gosney  44:26

Before I let you go, I want to leave you with a question. This is not an assignment. It’s just something that you can think about, you know, as you are driving or doing dishes or or doing something else this week. So this question is, if you truly believed all the way down to your core that your adult child was capable of navigating their own life. What would you do differently? Would you stop doing something? What would you start trusting? That’s your question to think about. Thanks for being here with me, and thanks for your on. Misty and listening. I know this was probably a difficult one for many people, but if this episode resonated with you, I’d love if you shared it with someone who needs to hear it, maybe a co parent, maybe a sibling, maybe a friend. These conversations are hard to start, and sometimes an episode like this is the way to open the door, or at least to, you know, to crack the door open.

Tina Gosney  45:21

So if you’re navigating a particularly complex family dynamic, I want to be really clear. A podcast can be that you know that crack in the door, but a therapist or a coach, particularly one that is trained in family systems, relational therapy and Bowen theory, can walk you through it. So please don’t do this alone. If you don’t have to those happens to be and those things happen to be the things that I’m trained in and the things that I specialize in. And I would love to support you in this. If this feels like a like something that you are called to, I would love to have you reach out.

Tina Gosney  45:55

In the next episode, we are going to talk about the other side of the coin, the other side of this dynamic, what under functioning actually looks like in adult children, and why it’s not laziness or indifference. And you know how, how does this over, or how does this under and over pattern get passed down in generations? You won’t want to miss it, and until then, stay curious about your family system, because it has a lot to teach you. Thanks for being here with me today. Remember you don’t have to do this perfectly. Just keep showing up and learning, because when one person in a family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal. This is coaching your family relationships, and I’m Tina Gosney, I’ll be here with you next week with the under functioning adult child.