“Bonny, you would be so proud of me! I got to meet with my adult daughter and I listened. In fact, I am EXHAUSTED. Listening is HARD,” reported mom.
If you’ve followed me for very long then you know that I talk a lot about how to do “inner work”. I am always telling estranged parents that they have to do their inner work if they hope to reconnect with their adult child. But most parents are still asking, “What is inner work? What does inner work mean? How do I do inner work?”
This mom’s experience is a good example of inner work. We get to learn how to listen with compassion and without judgment and that skill doesn’t “just happen.”
When our adult child steps away from a relationship with us, we act very much like the swimmer who fears drowning. We grab anything and everything to not drown and at the moment, we don’t think of anyone but ourselves.
The same survival instinct surfaces when we are cut off from our adult child. We begin defending, explaining, blaming, shaming or apologizing to stop our adult child from leaving. Some parents blame therapy as the problem leading to estrangement. In that moment, our brain isn’t able to think of anything else.
How to Do Inner Work for Estranged Parents
The first phase of inner work is learning selfcare by being gentle with the brain that couldn’t stop talking and listen; the brain that won’t stop telling you how you’ve screwed everything up; the brain that keeps trying to figure out ways to fix everything so that it will go back to normal.
The second phase of inner work is awareness. We learn to notice what we think and feel and how those thoughts/feelings affect our interactions with our adult child. As we notice the silent messages that are rumbling around in our head, we are better able to not act upon the ones that don’t serve us.
The third phase of inner work is “becoming.” We begin to embody the gentleness of phase one, the awareness of phase two and we become more compassionate, more confident and calmer. In this phase, we are able to genuinely say things like, “You’re right. I can see how what I did was hurtful for you” or “I really want to understand your experience” without feeling like we’ll bust in two if we don’t get to tell “our side” of the story.
I want to mention what our mom said, “Listening is EXHAUSTING!” She is 100% right. Listening takes work: mental, emotional and physical work. But….in time….listening becomes easier because we “become” a good listener.
We have no control over our adult child and whether or not they will open up to us. We DO have control over ourselves and the kind of person we want to become.
In my experience coaching hundreds of clients, doing the inner work to show up more compassionately shifts the adult child relationship. Whenever we shift then the relationship shifts. The mom mentioned earlier had to shift from “wanting to know the reasons” to becoming a mom who could listen.
During the time spent with her adult daughter, mom showed that she could listen and the adult daughter interpreted the listening as “caring”. Compassionate listening is what opened the door a crack to future interactions with her adult daughter.
Private coaching is the quickest way to become the compassionate, confident, calm parent that you’ve always wanted to be. Book a consult to get started.
