How do you repair an estranged parent child relationship? Is it still possible to fix all the damages that were made? In this episode of Your SuperPowered Mind, host Kristin Maxwell talks with guest Tina Gilbertson about the factors that divide families — and how to repair those rifts. Tina also shares what parents need to understand before they reconcile with their children. Join Kristin and Tina in this episode to learn how to repair an estranged parent child relationship with the help of compassion in the process.
Hello, everyone, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m Kristin Maxwell, and in this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today, I am talking to Tina Gilbertson, about repairing estranged parent child relationships.
Tina Gilbertson, is a psychotherapist who helps families repair their distress relationships, especially those between adult children and their hurting rejected parents. She is the author of Reconnecting with Your Estranged Adult Child: Practical Tips and Tools to Heal Your Relationship, which provides a set of tools that helps parents find reconciliation with their adult child. Tina’s work has appeared in Forbes, Fast Company, Glamour, Real Simple, and Redbook. And Tina is the co-founder of reconnectionclub.com, an online forum where she offers education, community and support to help estranged parents repair their relationships with their children. Tina, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Well, thank you so much Kristin, it’s great to be on your show.
Yes. And I’m excited to share what you know because I know there are a number of people who are dealing with this estrangement issue. Before we get into that though, I do want to ask what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
Well, I’m still in the process of trying to master my mind and I’ll probably be doing that for the rest of my life, but if I do have a superpower, it might be something like self-compassion or compassion in general. I think compassion is a superpower because sometimes it’s the only thing that can solve an impossible relationship puzzle, where nothing else has worked in an intractable situation, compassion is the one thing that can sometimes shake things loose and lead to healing.
That’s very interesting, and I want to deep dive into that.
Sure.
I’m curious, I’m not going to ask it now, but on whether that’s compassion for yourself or compassion for the other person?
Okay. I look forward to addressing that.
Let me get back to that because that’s kind of interesting. So first of all, can you go ahead and I had the opportunity to read your book, which was great. And just tell us generally, what are the kind of relationships that you’re working with people around? What kind of estrangement would you say that is?
Well, I specialize in working with parents who have been unwillingly cut off by their adult children. So they find themselves suddenly with an adult child who no longer wants to talk with them, maybe it isn’t returning calls. And quite often the parent isn’t quite sure what happened or why it has led to something as what feels like extreme as estrangement, and there’s a lot to understand when someone cuts you off.
I work specifically with the parents because they have so much more power I feel than they realize much of the time, to make a difference, to make repairs, and to change the relationship for the good of themselves and their children.
Yeah. One of the things in reading your book, there are different types of estrangement. There’s the kind where they’re just not talking to each other anymore, at all?
Yeah. In the olden days, when my grandmother cut off her parents, it was kind of easy, easier certainly than today to just go radio silent and be gone for the rest of your life, there was no internet, phones were sparse, it was hard to track down somebody if they moved to another city. So that is one type of estrangement you can just say would be just total radio silence, total cutoff, that is intended to be lifelong, but that’s not the only kind of cutoff that happens in families and I don’t think it’s the most common at all these days. I think probably the most common kind is this on-again off-again relationship, where sometimes we’re talking and then sometimes we’re not again, so things are okay between us for a while and then one of us goes radio silent and we’re estranged again. So on-again off-again, also known as cyclical or periodic estrangement, may be the most common type, I don’t know because we don’t have enough research yet.
But there’s a third kind that I also encounter and that is what I call emotional estrangement, where parents feel their child has become a stranger, almost, maybe there’s regular contact, maybe they have coffee with their child or lunch, or maybe they go on vacation together even, but the relationship feels different, less close than it used to, they don’t feel they can talk in the same ways and they don’t feel like they are let in as much. So the estrangement, the distance between them is more emotional than physical or logistical. So I call that emotional estrangement and that’s very painful too, it’s just a different kind of pain.
Yes. Wow. Okay. I’m really curious to see how you start to help people untangle this, but we do need to go to a break. Before we do, can you let people know where they can learn about you and your book and all of that?
Sure. Thanks. I think the easiest thing is just to go to my website, tinagilbertson.com. And that’s where I talk about all of my services, and my publications, and anything you want to know.
Great. Thank you. Okay, everybody, hang on in a minute. We will go deeper into how is it that you actually repair an estranged parent child relationship.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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