SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Ambiguous loss, Family systems, Adult children, Estrangement, Distance, Grief, Coping strategies, Emotional cutoff, Parent coaching, Relationship repair, Boundary testing, Disenfranchised grief, Communication, Family conflict, Mental health
SPEAKERS
Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney 00:01
Has anything like this ever happened to you? You get a message on a Wednesday afternoon. Standing, you’re standing in the kitchen. You know exactly what day it was, and where you were. And that message says, “I need some space right now. I’m not saying forever. I just need you to not contact me for a while. Please respect this.” You read it again and again, and you search every word for a clue. What does a while mean? What did I do? Is there someone that I can call that will tell me what’s going on? I don’t understand this.

Tina Gosney 00:36
Well, that was six months ago. You haven’t heard anything since. She’s working. She’s living her life. You see it sometimes on you know online with photos with her sister. Her sister posts them. She’s right there, and yet she’s completely out of reach. People don’t know what to say to you, and some tell you you know just give it time. Some tell you well she’s gonna come back around. Just wait for her to get more mature, and none of this helps because you can’t actually name what you’re going through. Well, what you’re going through is a kind of grief that most people don’t have a name for today. But today we’re going to give it a name.

Tina Gosney 01:17
Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney. I’m a family conflict coach, and I’m a parent educator. And on this podcast, we’re going to talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confusing, maybe even painful. And we’re going to do it through a family systems lens, which means we look at much more than just one event and one relationship.

Tina Gosney 01:41
We’re going to look at the entire system. It gives us a lot of more information about what’s really happening underneath the surface, and there is a hope that I want you to hold on to, and that is when one person in the family becomes more steady, the entire relationship system can begin to shift. We’re continuing the distance series with this episode. This is part four on a series of you know why giving your adult child feels space feels so hard.

Tina Gosney 02:09
So if you haven’t heard the other other episodes, I would encourage you to go back and listen because each one of them looks at distance for a different reason. They’re just different kinds of distance, and they have a different explanation for them. So, in part one, we talked about when you need to let go. When we talked about stepping back from helping and fixing and rescuing feels like you’re failing as a parent, and how our culture came to define good parenting and came to define good parenting as doing more and being more involved, and in part two we talked about when your child is just slowly drifting and we don’t know why. We talked about the quiet grief of a child who just slowly pulls away. There’s no defining moment. There’s no fight. No explanation, and there just isn’t a way to define this.

Tina Gosney 03:00
And so the not knowing of what’s happening can hurt sometimes more than the distance itself. In part three, we talked about when the distance comes through their partner, and we looked at why so many parents feel pushed out of their when their child gets married or they partner with someone, and it’s often what’s going on between the three of you? And this is a really big one that’s going on right now. And today, this episode, part four, we’re going to talk about maybe the most painful kind of space, the most painful kind of distance. This is when your adult child directly asks you for distance. They tell you I need less contact or I need no contact, and for longer than you can even bear to think about it.

Tina Gosney 03:49
So let’s start with you know that moment itself, because as I said at the very beginning of this episode, you know you know exactly where you were when you got that message, and in this story, you know, it was a Wednesday in the kitchen, but almost every parent that I work with, they they remember exactly where they were. So many details of when they get this message. For some people, it’s a text. For some people, it’s an email.

Tina Gosney 04:15
For some people, it’s even maybe a letter, like you know, the snail mail. For some, it’s a phone call that ends with “I just need you to give me some space.” Sometimes it comes after a big argument, but sometimes it comes out of what feels like nothing. It feels like a calm stretch, and that can be even more disorienting because you can’t you can’t put a a reason to it, you know, because our brain likes to put reasons to things. It likes to give explanations for things. So sometimes your child says they need space.

Tina Gosney 04:48
Clearly, they might say like, “I need a break for six months,” or “I only want to talk by text for now.” And sometimes it’s really open ended with no time frame and no explanation at all. And then let’s just talk for a minute about what happens inside your body, because a lot of parents describe it as a gut punch. It’s like you got hit, your stomach drops, your hands shake, you can’t eat, or maybe you can’t stop eating, you can’t sleep, or you wake up at 3o’clock in the morning, replaying that message through your head, and you can’t go back to sleep. This is not overreacting. This is your nervous system responding to what feels like a threat to one of the most important relationships in your life.

Tina Gosney 05:34
And then you know there’s the flood of questions that you ask yourself: What did I do? Was it that one conversation was I too involved? Was I not involved enough? Is someone influencing them? Are they okay? Will I ever see my grandchildren again? And then the hardest question of all is, is this forever? So if you’re living this right now, I want you to know a few things before we go any further. First of all, you are not alone. A large national study, which was led by Dr. Ren Rezac, she’s a sociologist, and she found that one in four adult children reported a period of estrangement from their father at some point, and about 6% reported one from their mother, so these numbers are much higher than most parents realize, because nobody wants to talk about it.

Tina Gosney 06:31
The second thing I want you to know is that a request for space is not always the same thing as estrangement. Some children are asking for a pause, some are asking and saying, “I need a different kind of relationship with you,” or they might be asking for less contact or different rules between the two of you. Some are asking for no contact, and a lot of times, you know, these adult children they don’t fully know which one that they need. So the label that you put on it today might not be the same label that it carries a year from now. The third thing I want you to know is that whatever you’re feeling right now, whether it is shock, or grief, or anger, shame, that, or maybe even that desperation to want to fix all of it, all of those emotions make sense, and today we’re going to talk about why those emotions make sense. In part two of the series, this distancing series, I introduce you to the work of a family scientist. Her name is Pauline Boss, and she had this idea called ambiguous loss. It remain. It just means a loss that remains unclear, a loss with no clear ending. You don’t know for sure what’s been lost or whether it’s ever going to come back.

Tina Gosney 07:51
So Pauline Bost, she describes two kinds of ambiguous loss. We talked about in episode two. We talked about the kind that she calls goodbye without leaving when someone is still physically in your life but something of the relationship feels gone. That’s what the drift feels like. And when a child asks for space, especially for no contact, parents are living with the other kind of loss. And Pauline Boss calls this leaving without goodbye, the person is physically gone from your life, but they’re still very, very present in your mind and in your heart because you think about them constantly. You wonder what they’re doing. You hold on to hope, but you can’t reach them. In 1984, Pauline Boss and her colleague Jan Greenberg, they shared a set of questions that Boss had come to develop as a measure of this kind of loss.

Tina Gosney 08:46
She first used these questions with wives of servicemen who were missing in action. These were women who did not know if their husbands were alive or if they would ever come home. So I want to be super clear that you know your child asking for space is not the same thing as a missing soldier. But when I read some of these questions, I think you’re going to maybe see yourself in some of these, recognize yourself in some of these, especially if this is your situation. So I’m just going to slightly change the questions so that they fit our situation right here. So here are the questions. I continue to keep alive my deepest hope that He will return. I think about Him a lot. I feel it will be difficult, if not impossible, to carve out a new life for myself without Him.

Tina Gosney 09:36
Listen to the angst in those questions. This is the kind of this is what this kind of loss does, it keeps one foot in hope and one foot in grief, without fully letting you stand in either one. You can’t grieve because your child’s alive and they might come back. You can’t move forward because you don’t want to give up. So boss describes that as getting frozen. And she says, you know, she makes this point that I think every parent in this situation needs to hear. She said, the struggle doesn’t come from something being wrong with you; it comes from the situation itself. Anyone in this situation with a loss that is unclear would struggle.

Tina Gosney 10:17
So here’s there’s another idea that helps here because there’s a researcher, he researches grief, and his name is Kenneth Doka, and he coined this term, disenfranchised grief. That means grief that other people either don’t recognize, or see as valid, or they don’t even know how to support. So when a parent dies, people send cards, they bring food. They reach out and they check in how you’re doing.

Tina Gosney 10:46
And when your child stops speaking to you, Hallmark does not make a card for that. And on top of the grief, many parents carry shame because they don’t know what to say when a friend or a coworker asks, “Hey, how are your kids doing? And you know we’re coming up on the holidays, so they dread holiday letters and the photos of these nice family, happy smiling families, and they worry that people are going to assume that since their child is not speaking to them, that they must have done something terrible. So many parents in this situation end up grieving silently, and that silent grief makes everything heavier.

Tina Gosney 11:28
There’s been a lot of research on parents and adult children who are estranged just in the last 10 years than you know more in the last 10 years than all the years before. So I want to share some of those findings with you because I think it can help just help you to make sense of you know what you’re going through. So I’m going to keep it really simple, and I’m going to tell you what each one of these things mean for you.

Tina Gosney 11:51
In 2015, a team of researchers that was led by Kristen Carr. It looked at what nearly 900 estranged parents and adult children said about why the estrangement happened. These were not parents and children from the same families; they were not matched pairs. But the patterns were striking. The adult child most often said that they felt unsupported or unaccepted, and they described hurtful behavior from their parents that they believe their parents could not or would not change. The parents most often pointed to something outside their relationship, like who their child was involved with, or they said their child felt entitled. And parents were much more likely to say that they simply didn’t know why it happened.

Tina Gosney 12:39
Here’s what that might look like in real life: a mother might say, you know, everything was fine until he started seeing that therapist, and her son, if you ask him, he might say, “I’ve never really felt like my mom accepted who I really am, and I finally stopped pretending that it didn’t hurt me.” Well, I’m not saying that the parent is wrong and the child is right, both people are describing something very real to them, and I’m sharing it because if you truly don’t know why your child your child has asked for space, then you’re not alone, and that not knowing is a big part of what makes this so painful.

Tina Gosney 13:19
It also suggests that your child might be carrying a story about your relationship that you have not fully heard yet. That’s not a reason for shame. This is a reason for curiosity. Okay, so let’s go to a different research project and different researchers. This is a Danish team led by Andreas. I don’t know how to say the last name, maybe Nikolasen, N-I-K-O-L-A-J-S-E-N. Okay, so probably Nikolasen.

Tina Gosney 13:46
They studied older parents who are estranged from adult child. In a 2026 study of parents in their 70s and 80s, they found that sorrow and mixed feelings were both very common. What was not common was relief. Mothers were more likely to describe sorrow, and fathers were more likely to describe mixed feelings. What does this look like in your real life? Well, you might miss your child so much that it physically hurts, and in the same afternoon you might be so angry that they could do this to you. You might long for a phone call, but also dread what they would say if they actually did. You might feel love and resentment in the same sentence, and if you’ve been judging yourself for feeling two opposite things at once, please know that the research says this is one of the most common experiences that estranged parents have.

Tina Gosney 14:43
Let’s look at another study with that same researcher team. So they interviewed older estranged parents in depth about how they cope, and they found three main ways. Some days parents focused on trying to reconcile. They were thinking about what can I do, what can I say to reconnect. Other days, they simply worked on accepting the solution and building a life around it. And sometimes they just simply avoided thinking about it at all because it just hurt too much. And here’s the important part for you: parents did not stick with one of these coping strategies, these coping directions, and and stick with it. They just didn’t pick one and stick with it. They moved back and forth between them. So if on Monday you’re drafting a letter in your head, and on Wednesday you’ve decided to let it go, and on Friday you can’t even bear to look at a picture of them, you’re not doing this wrong. That’s what this kind of grief looks like.

Tina Gosney 15:43
Grief researchers have found that moving back and forth between facing the loss and taking a break from it that’s a really normal and even healthy part of grieving. The same research team compared older parents who were estranged from a child with parents who were not estranged from a child, so the estranged parents reported lower well-being, a lower sense of purpose, less less purpose in their life, more symptoms of depression, and more loneliness. Now these were older Danish parents, so it doesn’t describe everyone. It doesn’t fit all of our cultures, but it does tell us something important. This isn’t something that you should just push through on your own. Your health and your sense of purpose really matter, and they deserve care during this time.

Tina Gosney 16:32
Do you remember the study I I pointed to earlier by Rand Rizik and her colleagues? Well, they didn’t just find that estrangement is common. They also found that most periods of estrangement actually end eventually. About 81% of estrangements from mothers and about 69% estrangement from fathers had ended at the time of the study. Now, it doesn’t mean every relationship goes back to the way it was, and it can’t predict what’s going to happen in your family, but it does tell us that a request for space is often not the final chapter.

Tina Gosney 17:08
Many families find their way back to some kind of relationship, and researchers who study family distance have noticed that it moves back and forth over time, rather than following a straight line towards the end, let’s look at this through a family systems lens because it helps to explain why both your child maybe have asked for space and why your reactions feel so strong. In family systems thinking, every family has a certain amount of emotional intensity and how much they can bear. So, how closely is everyone tied together? How much do does one person’s mood affect everybody else? How much room is there to disagree? And when the intensity gets really high, people need a way to manage it. And one of the ways that people manage it manage it is by putting distance between themselves and the person they are that is most tied to that emotion.

Tina Gosney 18:09
So family therapists have a name for this when it becomes extreme; they call it the emotional cutoff. And here’s something important for you to understand: cutoff is usually not a sign that someone doesn’t care. It’s a sign that they care so much and they feel so pulled by the relationship that they don’t know how to be close to you and still be themselves. Distance sometimes becomes the only way that they can find some breathing room. That doesn’t make it hurt less, but it might change the way you understand it. Might change the story that you’ve been telling yourself about this experience.

Tina Gosney 18:48
A child asking for space might not be them saying, “I don’t love you.” They might be saying, “I don’t know how to be myself and be close to you at the same time right now.” So at the same time, the request sends a shockwave through the whole family. Siblings might feel caught in the middle; they might be unsure whether they’re allowed to stay in touch with their brother or sister. Grandparents and aunts and uncles might take sides, and very often the parents themselves end up on different pages. One parent wants to respect the request and wait, and the other wants to push for a resolution, to write them a letter, to show up at the door. And couples can end up fighting with each other without knowing how to handle this, which adds a second loss on top of the first. So this is where you’re going to see that natural pull to bring in a third person. You might ask your other child to pass along a message. You might ask a grandchild, “Hey, how is your mom doing? How is your dad doing?” You might end up talking to your sister about this for hours every day. Now, all of these things come because you will. And you’re worried, but they can put other people in the middle of something that is not theirs to carry. And if your child finds out, they might feel like their request is not being respected. It’s also worth asking whether this has ever happened in your family before.

Tina Gosney 20:17
Did someone in your own family of origin ever cut off their parents? Did your parents stop speaking to a brother or a sister? Families will often handle intense closeness in similar ways from one generation to the next. So seeing that pattern, you know, this is not so we can blame someone. It’s just to help us understand what’s happening. You know what’s happening now might have roots that go back a lot further than you thought. It might go a generation or two, or even more back. So, what does it look like to be a steady parent during this situation? Well, Pauline Boss, she has a phrase that I come back to over and over again with parents. She talks about both and thinking. With ambiguous loss, you can’t make it be one thing or the other. So instead, you learn how to hold both at the same time. It might look like this: you know, my child has asked for distance, and I’m still their parent. I’m grieving this relationship, and I have not given up on it. I respect what they’ve asked for, and this really hurts. You know, both things can be true at the same time. You don’t have to choose.

Tina Gosney 21:28
Respecting their request for distance and space, this is one of the most important things that you can do, and it’s also one of the hardest. If your child asked for no contact, that usually means no contact, even when everything in you just wants to send one message. If they ask for less contact, it means following their lead in how often and in what way that you’re going to have contact. Respecting that request doesn’t mean that you agree with it. It doesn’t mean that you accept every reason that they gave, it just means that you trust that they told you what they need right now, and that you’re willing to honor it. So over time, that’s often what builds enough safety for them to come back. So if this is pretty fresh and new for you, and you got a message you haven’t responded yet, then maybe a short, warm reply can help. It might look something like, “You know, I received your message. I love you. I’ll respect what you’ve asked. I’m here whenever you’re ready.” That’s it. No defending yourself. No questions they have to answer. Just a door that you leave open. Well, then there’s the question of what to do with your own grief and your own emotional experience. Boss points out that ambiguous loss comes with no rituals. No one holds a service. Nobody sends a card. So many parents find that it helps to create their own small ways of honoring the relationship, like light a candle on their child’s birthday, write letters that you don’t send, keep a journal of what you want to tell them someday. These can give your love somewhere to go when you can’t give it to your child directly. It also could help to get very gently curious about your child’s side. This is not to put yourself on trial. This is not for you to collapse into shame, but it’s to ask yourself, if my child were telling this story, what might they say? Now you might not like every answer that comes up, but that curiosity is often what makes reconnection possible later, if and when that door opens. And finally, this is really important: keep living your life. That might sound strange, but it really does matter. Keep seeing your friends. Keep doing things you love. Take care of your health. Let yourself laugh. None of that is a betrayal of your child. A parent who is still living a full life is a parent who is being more steady in themselves, and they’re more ready to to approach their child again if their child ever reaches out. So, when your child asks for space, almost everything feels out of your control, and honestly, a lot of it is. But the one thing that isn’t is how you carry yourself through the experience. This is the work that I do with parents. I help them realize and understand what is happening inside of themselves when that grief or the panic hits, and how to calm that reaction before it turns into a text or a letter or a visit that they regret, you know, or maybe a message that pulls a sibling somewhere into the middle. I help them look at the patterns in their family without drowning in blame, and help them build a life that can hold this loss without being swallowed up by it. And here’s what I see in parents that learn. How to do this? Their child’s birthday is still hard, but they can get through the day without falling apart. They stop checking their child’s social media every night. They can say to someone who asks, like, “Oh, my son and I are not in contact right now,” and you know, and they can say that without feeling like they have to explain or defend themselves. And if they’re married, maybe they even stop fighting with their spouse about what to do because they’re working from the same steady place. They can start sleeping again. They find their way back to friendships and interests that they’ve let go of. And the part that matters the most is that, you know, if their child reaches out, the parent is ready, not with a flood of hurt or a list of grievances, but with calm, warm steadiness and openness. And this parent is the kind of parent that a child can come back to.

Tina Gosney 25:49
If you want help getting there, you want to find out how to work with me. There’s some links in the show notes so you can go explore those pages. Let’s talk about the some common mistakes that I see when your child asks for space. I’m going to name four mistakes that I see pretty often, and I know that every one of them comes from love and pain at the same time. But also, every one of them tends to make the distance last longer. So the first one, mistake number one, is a long explanation letter. This is the letter, or an email, or a text where you explain your side. You walk through the history. You give them some context. You correct their memory of what happened. You list everything that you did for them. At the end, you ask them to respond. This is so understandable. You want to be understood, but a child who just asks for space, to them this usually feels a lot like pressure, and it feels like proof that you didn’t hear their request. If you ever do write something, so keep it short, warm, and free of any demand, or even asking for a reply. Don’t try to correct their version of anything or defend anything that they’ve said. This is super important because you want to do all of those things, but I guarantee you they will not have the effect that you want them to. Mistake number two is asking their sibling or someone else to pass along a message. Maybe asking a grandchild about their parent, reaching out to their friends or their partner, posting something on social media that you hope that they will see. All of these are ways of getting around a request without technically breaking it, and your child will almost always see it that way. It also puts other people in the middle of a really hard spot, and you don’t want to do that. Mistake number three is testing the boundary. This could look like sending a text that says, “Hey, just checking in after they ask for no contact,” or maybe a birthday gift that shows up at their door, a card that says, “I know you said no contact, but I just had to say,” and then you tell them what you wanted to say. Well, each one of those feels really small and loving to you, but to your child, it can feel like they don’t honor my request. Anything I ask does not really count, and that tends to make them hold that boundary more tightly, not loosen it up. Okay, mistake number four, final mistake that I’m going to go through today is this is a quiet one. It’s waiting by the phone and putting your life on hold, turning down invitations because you might hear from them, letting your health, your friendships, your marriage slide while every bit of your energy goes into waiting. This makes sense, but it also leaves you depleted and alone, and it means that if your child does come back, they’re coming back to a parent that is barely holding on. And so, living your life is not giving up on your child or their relationship. It’s making sure that you’re whole, a whole human living person, when that door opens again. Here’s what I want you to take with you today. When your child asks for space, the pain that you feel has a name. That is ambiguous loss. This is a loss that hasn’t ended, and it may not end the way that you fear. It’s a kind of grief that the people around you may not recognize, and that’s part of the reason why it feels so lonely. You’re not alone in this. Mixed feelings are normal. Moving back and forth between hope, acceptance, and needing a break from all of that’s all normal. Research tells us that families do find their way back, usually to some kind of relationship.

Tina Gosney 29:36
You can still respect what your child is asked for, and still be their parent, and grieve, and and still hope, and you can also take care of yourself so that you’re ready if that door opens up to you again. Next time in the final episode of this series, we’re going to turn things around. We’re going to talk about what happens when you, the parent, is the one that needs the distance. And how you could make that choice without drowning in guilt. This is coaching your family relationships. I’m Tina Gosney. This is where parents of adult children get the help that they need to repair, rebuild, and strengthen their relationships.