When Your Adult Child Chooses Their Spouse Over You: How to Stay Grounded

Tina Gosney 00:00
I want to take you back to the beginning of this series for just a moment. Do you remember the parents standing in the kitchen staring at their phone, not even wanting to touch it? They’d been walking on eggshells for so long that even a text from their own child made their stomach drop. That parent was confused. They didn’t know what was happening. They didn’t know why it was happening. They just knew something in their family was shifting, and they knew that no matter what they did, they just kept making it worse.

Tina Gosney 00:28
And then that same parent tried so hard to fix it, they started turning the confusion inward they were started saying, well, maybe this is me. Maybe I’ve always been too much, maybe I’ve never been enough, or I’ve just been wrong in some way that I can’t see. So they started shrinking. They started editing themselves almost down to nothing. That’s what self blame looks like. And when self blame got too heavy to carry, they just swung it over the other way. They got defensive. They got tired of being cast as the problem. They got tired of explaining themselves, of being misread, misrepresented, and they got tired of being managed.

Tina Gosney 01:08
And then came the hardest part of all. This hardest stage was powerlessness, the moment they finally had to face the truth that they could not fix it. They couldn’t manage it, they couldn’t smooth it, they couldn’t love it into resolution. Their child is grown. Their marriage, their child’s marriage is not theirs to fix, and all that effort in the world had not changed anything that was a lot of groundwork to cover in the first four episodes in the series about what to do when your adult child has an anxious or difficult partner, and now here you are in Episode Five, which means you’re still here. You’re still showing up. You haven’t given up on your child or your family or yourself, and that matters probably a lot more than you realize right now.

Tina Gosney 01:55
So today I want to show you what happens next. This is not a pie in the sky fairy tale. This is not a promise that things get easier, but as a real, honest picture of what growth looks like for parents who walk through these stages and then come out on the other side as a different parent, doesn’t mean you’re perfect. It doesn’t mean that you are finished and you have nothing else to work on. It just means you are different, because there is a version of you, and that version, I know, is already forming.

Tina Gosney 02:26
It’s already beginning. That version can walk into a hard moment with your family and has the ability to stay grounded inside themselves. That version can get that cancelation text and feel the sting of it without letting them it pull them under that version can be misunderstood and not have to set the record straight. That version can love their child fully without making their choices mean that they are not worthy.

Tina Gosney 02:57
Welcome to coaching your family relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and family life educator. On this podcast, we talk about family relationships through a family systems lens, which means we pay attention to patterns and anxiety and what changes when one person becomes more grounded. And the what I hope you take with you from this podcast is that when one person in a family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal.

Tina Gosney 03:28
This is the fifth and final episode in our series for parents navigating an adult child difficult or anxious spouse. If you have not listened to the first four episodes, I highly suggest that you go do that and that you also check out the bonus episode that I released that explains what anxiety means and how we’re using the word anxiety in this situation. So now that we’ve walked through the full arc of this parent emotional journey, the confusion where you couldn’t name what was happening, but you could feel the ground shifting underneath your feet, the self blame, where you turned it inward, and you started carrying what was not yours to carry.

Tina Gosney 04:09
And then defensiveness, where you just were exhausted with the self blame. So you decided to start. You decided to start pushing back. And you started asking, Why am I the one that’s always adjusting? And then powerlessness, where you finally had to sit and realize the truth that you can’t control your child’s marriage, you can’t control their spouse’s anxiety, and you can’t control how any of this turns out. Those were not easy stages to move through, and if you’re being honest, you probably didn’t move through them in a straight line. You still don’t, you didn’t, and you still don’t. You circle back, you may still be somewhere in the middle.

Tina Gosney 04:45
Maybe you’re in the middle of two of them at the same time. That’s totally normal. These stages are not a linear line, like a staircase. They’re more like the weather you pass through them, and sometimes they just pass through again, but real. Growth doesn’t wait for you to finish the other stages. First. You don’t have to go through all of those stages before you can start growing. You can start growing anywhere. And this growth starts really small.

Tina Gosney 05:11
Today we’re going to talk about what growth actually looks like. But let’s start with what it is not, because I think there’s a version of this word that sets parents up for real disappointment growth is not meaning that your adult child will see you the way you want them to. It is not the holiday where nothing ever goes wrong. Everything goes smoothly according to your hopes and dreams. It is not that their spouse relaxes, or even the feedback texts stop, or that the distance closes all at once. Those things can happen over time, and sometimes they do, but they are not the growth. Those are indicators that something is shifting. They are outcomes, and outcomes are not in your control.

Tina Gosney 05:59
The growth that we’re talking about here is an internal shift. It’s the change in how you carry yourself inside a hard situation. It’s the space that opens up between something happens and then I respond. It’s the space in between those two things. It’s that moment when you feel trying to get yourself getting pulled back in like you need to chase them or fix something or explain or defend, and instead, you pause, even if it’s for just a second, and you ask yourself a different question than you used to ask In family system terms. This is called differentiation, and at its core, differentiation means your sense of who you are, your sense of self no longer is dependent on how other people treat you or what they believe about you, including your own child.

Tina Gosney 06:58
Differentiation means that you stay grounded and emotionally connected, even when things are hard, this is a significant thing to develop. It does not happen from reading about it. It happens from doing and practicing over and over in small moments, the text, the visits, the cancelations, the silences. You are there to practice one interaction at a time. Differentiation is what I specialize in helping my clients reach here’s what I want you to understand about how anxious family systems work, because this is the insight that makes everything else make sense in an anxious system, everyone organizes around emotion, usually reactive emotions until someone decides to break that cycle and organize around their values.

Tina Gosney 07:49
Instead, when anxiety is high, everything becomes reactive. Someone interprets something as a slight or as a criticism. Someone panics, someone cuts off in distances, someone over functions and tries to fix everything. Someone demands reassurance and tries to move in closer. And everybody responds, not from who they want to be, but from what they’re trying to stop feeling, which is the anxiety, trying to stop the emotions. Everyone just passes it on to each other. This is what keeps the cycle going. Reactivity feeds reactivity pebbles dropping into the water from every direction until no one even can remember what it felt like to have the water be calm when you stop organizing around your emotions, when you can give yourself space and you can pause and name what you’re feeling and start to choose what you want, how you want, to respond from your values instead of your emotional reactivity.

Tina Gosney 08:52
Something shifts in the system. It does not usually shift dramatically, and it does not usually happen all at once, but the cycle loses one of the people that were participating, and in a family system, it has to change when one person changes their input, and you can be the person that stops feeding the system. This is why emotional management is so central to growth. So I don’t want to use it to suppress your emotions. That is not what I’m talking about. I want you to feel them, to own them, to manage them yourself, rather than asking people around

Tina Gosney 09:30
you to manage them for you, because that’s what happens when we don’t manage our own emotions. We chase closeness with somebody else so that we can feel okay, to soothe our anxiety, we defend ourselves so that we can soothe the shame that’s happening inside of us. We over explain so we can soothe our fear. We get sharp with our words to soothe our own feeling of helplessness. And every one of those moves asks someone else. To do something to make us feel okay again.

Tina Gosney 10:04
Growth is when you can say, my emotions are real and they’re mine to manage. They are not my child’s job, they are not my spouse’s job. They are no one else’s job. They are mine. There’s a second truth that lives inside differentiation, and this is when it takes a while to build this, and that is that your worth is not determined by how your child treats you, about what they believe about you, or what the story that their spouse has written about you. And I know cognitively, this sounds simple, but I want you to watch how easy it is to slip into the opposite pattern without even realizing it.

Tina Gosney 10:52
Okay, so when your child is warm and close, you feel like a good parent. When they’re distant, you feel like you failed when they side with their spouse in a conflict, you feel rejected, not just hurt, but like fundamentally wrong, like there’s something broken in you. When their spouse tells a story about you and your child doesn’t correct them and push back, you feel erased. That is what happens when your worth is being carried in someone else’s hands, as long as it lives there in their hands, you’re going to be relying on them seeing you a certain way, them telling you a story about you and the way that you want it to be told. You’re going to be relying on them showing up a certain way for you to be steady. You will rely on them for your emotions. You will always be one text away from falling apart, or one great, warm visit from feeling okay again. You’re going to be pulled into the emotional weather of the system.

Tina Gosney 11:58
Differentiation is the work of taking your worth back. This is not hardening yourself. This is not cutting them off or pretending that it doesn’t hurt when they’re distant. This is building an internal foundation that holds you steady regardless of how they respond. This sounds like I can be loving even when you’re upset with me. I can be honest even when you disagree. I can be consistent when you don’t respond. I can be steady even when I’m misunderstood. This is not coldness, this is emotional maturity, and it’s what makes you safe to be around for your child and eventually maybe even for their spouse.

Tina Gosney 12:41
I do need to say something here that I think is really important, especially for parents who are really hard on themselves. You are going to slip. You are not going to be perfect at this. You’re going to have a moment, and you’ve been practicing being steady. You’ve been doing so good for weeks. And then there’s a moment that will come, you know, a comment, a cancelation, a text that sounds like it’s everything’s exploding. And then you’re going to react, and you send the long message. You say the thing that you swore you were never going to say. You go quiet in a way that communicates hurt, even though you were trying to stay neutral. And then you’re going to feel like you’re back at square one. All the work that I’ve done is it’s all come undone. That is untrue. You’re not back at square one.

Tina Gosney 13:26
Growth is not a straight line, and it never has been. The stages in these series, confusion, self blame, defensiveness, powerlessness and growth. They are not a linear line, a staircase that you climb and then you just never go back. This is terrain that you move through, and then sometimes, there are times when you get pulled back. What changes as you grow? And that is not that you don’t have hard moments. What changes is that what you do after that? Do you spiral into shame? Or can you say that was a hard moment, and I didn’t handle it the way I wanted to. How can I repair what can I learn? What do I want to do differently next time that after response is differentiation in action, and it’s way more important than the moment itself. So if you sent a reactive text last Tuesday and you’re sitting with it, the weight of it right now, that’s okay. You’re not back at square one. You’re just in the middle of it, which is exactly where growth happens.

Tina Gosney 14:31
I’m going to tell you about a mom that I worked with. I’m going to call her Renee, and a reminder that this is not a individual person, but a compilation of many people. Renee had a son who married someone who was very easily threatened, and she was highly anxious. Almost after every visit, Renee would get feedback from her son in a form of a text. Jordan felt judged. Jordan felt dismissed, Jordan felt excluded, and every time Renee was spiraling, she. Was apologizing, she was trying to explain. She said, I’ll be more careful next time she was exhausted trying to manage someone else’s emotional experience. And it was not working anyway.

Tina Gosney 15:11
So when we started working together, the first thing that we did was slow everything down. We stopped trying to figure out how to respond to the feedback text, and instead, we got clear about who Renee wanted to be in their relationship. What were her values? What did she stand for? She chose three. She said loving without chasing respect, without self erasure and honesty with kindness. Then we practiced what would it look like to respond from those values instead of panic and fear?

Tina Gosney 15:46
So the next time her son texted and he said, Jordan felt uncomfortable when you asked her about school, old Renee would have written a really long apology and said, I will never ask another question again. But the Renee who was responding from her values, the value driven, Renee wrote back instead, she said, Thanks for telling me. I understand how she might have taken that personally. My intention was just to show interest in her life, not to pressure her, and I will be more mindful of that. I also want you to know I’m committed to having a relationship with you where we don’t have to be afraid of normal conversations. I love you.

Tina Gosney 16:29
You see how she owned what was hers. She didn’t collapse into shame, she didn’t fight the interpretation. She just stayed anchor in her values. She just stayed anchored in her values, and she kept the relationship open. Now, did the spouse instantly change? No, and I want to be honest about that, because I think that really matters. The spouse’s anxiety did not disappear. There are still hard visits.

Tina Gosney 16:54
There are still moments when Renee slips back into old patterns and she has to repair but over time, the feedback text become less frequent because she was no longer an easy source of shame. Her son couldn’t use her guilt to stabilize the anxiety in his marriage anymore. She had stopped handing it over, and slowly her son started calling her more not to relay complaints, but just to talk. Renee didn’t have a healed family. Overnight, she got something quieter and more durable. She became a safe place, and that is what started to change the system.

Tina Gosney 17:33
I want to address a question that I know is probably underneath this, because I hear this from almost every parent, pretty much every parent that I work with, does it actually get better? Here’s my honest answer. It depends on what you mean better. If better means the anxious spouse becomes easy and warm, and the family gathers, gatherings don’t have any tension, and your adult child is fully present the way they used to be. I can’t promise you that the out that outcome involves people who have choices that you don’t control.

Tina Gosney 18:09
But if better means that you stop dreading every interaction. If it means you get a when you get a cancelation text, you can feel the disappointment without it taking you down. If it means you walk into visits with your feet on the ground instead of your whole nervous system on fire, if it means that you have a life that is full and meaningful even when your child is distant, then yes, that gets better. And I’ve seen it happen over and over again. And here is something else that I’ve seen that when parents genuinely change, not performing calm, like pretending to be calm, but actually becoming steadier. Adult children notice that it might take months and it might take longer, but they notice that you’re not chasing them anymore. They notice that you’re not collapsing when they pull back, they notice that you’re not demanding their loyalty or their reassurance, and something in them then is able to relax towards you, even if they don’t consciously know that, and even if they never say it out loud, when you become the steady place In a world that, for them probably feels very unsteady. That is a gift, even when they don’t acknowledge it, even when it’s slow.

Tina Gosney 19:28
This is a real and lasting gift. Here’s the mindset shift for this final episode in the series. Let’s move from what will keep them happy to what will align with my values, because their happiness is not something you can control, but your alignment is and when you live from alignment, you stop being pulled in every direction by other people’s reactions.

Tina Gosney 19:54
Here’s a practice, simple practice that you can use in real time, and this is just being able to pull. Pause and check in with your values. It takes about 10 seconds, and you can do it before you respond to a text, or before you walk into a visit, before you pick up the phone. So this is something you can use in real time.

Tina Gosney 20:13
The first thing you’re going to do is name what you’re feeling you’re not going to say I’m fine, because that doesn’t really mean anything I want you to name it. I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling shame, I’m feeling sad, I’m feeling angry, I’m feeling afraid. Just name it, because that is the first step towards not being controlled by that emotion.

Tina Gosney 20:33
Second Step Ask what you need to manage in yourself right now? So maybe you need to take three breaths before you type anything. Maybe you need to put the phone down and take a walk. Maybe you need to visit a friend first. But whatever it is, do that before you respond.

Tina Gosney 20:51
Step three, ask, what value you want to lead with? Do you want to lead with kindness, honesty, steadiness, respect, whatever is the most true for you in the moment and in the relationship.

Tina Gosney 21:04
Step four, ask what the next clean step is, not the perfect response, not the response that fixes everything, just the next clean values guided step might just be a simple reply, a boundary that you express kindly. Maybe it’s an invitation offered without pressure. Sometimes you don’t even need to respond.

Tina Gosney 21:30
I want to make this really concrete, so let’s walk through an example. Your adult child cancels again and they say, send you a text that says, We can’t come. Jordan’s feeling overwhelmed. Your fear says, Oh no, they’re pulling away. Tell me what I did. How do I fix it? You act from your values, love, steadiness, self respect, maybe something different. Your response becomes, thanks for letting us know we’ll miss you and we love you. The doors open whenever it’s doable. This is a growth move. You put the phone down, you manage your emotional wave without making them responsible for it. You take a walk, you call a friend, you write in a journal, you stop and you take a few deep breaths, and you remind yourself their cancelation is information. It does not determine my worth. That sentence practiced over and over again is different differentiation, and that is growth.

Tina Gosney 22:28
So this is the last episode in the series, and I want to close it the way that I think that this episode series deserves to be closed. Think about where you started. Maybe you came into this series because something in your family felt wrong and you didn’t know why. Maybe you were already, like deep into self blame or so exhausted from trying to be perfect. Maybe you were angry and defensive and ashamed of being angry and defensive. Maybe you were sitting in the hollow, that quiet hollowness of powerlessness, wondering if anything was ever going to get better, but you kept listening and you kept showing up. That is not nothing, that is not a small thing.

Tina Gosney 23:12
It takes a lot of courage to keep moving towards something that hurts, to keep asking, Okay, what is here for me to learn? Instead of just waiting for someone else to change. I do want to remind you you are not going to be perfect at this. You are going to have hard days. You are going to react when you meant to pause. You’re going to over explain when you meant you just should have stayed quiet, and you’re going to feel the grief of this over and over again, just on a random Tuesday, even when you weren’t expecting it. But you’re also going to have moments, and these moments will increase over time, where you begin to feel steady inside of something that would have knocked you over before, when you get a hard text and you don’t spiral, where you sit in that visit that feels really tense, and you feel your own feet on the floor when you send a response that is kind and is clear and is honest, and you don’t spend the next three days wondering if it was the right thing. Those moments are growth, and they happen quietly.

Tina Gosney 24:23
They don’t, you know, make a big announcement. They’re real. They accumulate. And over time, they change, not just how you show up in your family, but they change how you think about yourself, and they change how you deal with your own self. And here is what I want to leave you with, and this is the thing that I most want you to carry out of this series, you can be a calm, steady, loving presence in your family, not because everything’s resolved, not because all the anxiety is gone, not because your child has just seen the light and they’ve come back all the way, but because you decided to be. Become that person. That decision belongs to you. No one else can make it for you, and no one can take it away. And that decision alone is enough. It is more than enough.

Tina Gosney 25:11
I want to thank you for being here with me through this whole series. I know this was not easy listening. I know some of these episodes were probably really difficult for you, for you to listen to, and I’m really grateful that you trusted me to take you through this series. This is a really important series, so please, if this series really resonated with you, please share it with another parent who’s walking through something similar. They might not even know what they’re feeling. They might not know that it has a name or that there’s a path through it, but you could be the one that hands them that information, education has so much power in our lives.

Tina Gosney 25:53
Remember, you don’t have to do this perfectly. I just want you to keep growing, 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 am Tina Gosney. Thank you for being here, and I’ll be here in the next episode with you.