225. “Protecting themselves from what?”

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:05][music] >> Welcome to the Reconnection Club podcast, the show that helps parents heal troubled relationships with their adult [music] sons and daughters.

[00:00:13]I'm your host, psychotherapist Tina Gilbertson.

[00:00:17]Each week I'll offer you compassion, [music] clarity, and personal development tips designed to help you reconnect not only with your child, but with yourself. Now, let's get started.

[00:00:32]According to estrangement research, many adults describe estrangement from their parents as an act of self-protection.

[00:00:39]And this idea of protection is often met not only with hurt, but with genuine confusion from parents who did not physically or verbally abuse their children.

[00:00:50]"Protecting themselves from what?" these parents ask.

[00:00:55]This episode is my attempt to begin to address that question by offering a few possibilities.

[00:01:02]And there's a bit of a preamble here before I get to those, but please bear with me because this first part provides the rationale for everything that follows.

[00:01:11]If you're a parent who did not abuse your estranged adult child, you might still need to be able to make sense of the estrangement as self-protective in some way so that you can respond appropriately and take steps toward healing instead of assuming that you're being accused, attacked, or punished and just feeling powerless.

[00:01:34]To help you understand self-protection in the absence of abuse, I'm going to look at three factors that parents can easily miss when they look at their relationships with their children.

[00:01:46]Please note, these three factors are not the only possibilities to explain your estrangement.

[00:01:52]There may be much more or less to your story.

[00:01:56]But I hope that my discussing them might at least begin to open something up for you.

[00:02:02]Even a child who appears to have been given everything they could want or need could be protecting themselves from one or more of the relationship factors I'll describe. These factors tend to operate silently in the background, at least for parents, until they become too much for adult children to bear and lead or contribute to estrangement.

[00:02:25]Which may be the first indication parents have that anything was seriously wrong.

[00:02:31]Keep in mind, there could be lots of good stuff that was and is in place in your relationship with your child, but the invisible issues I'll talk about can be significant enough in impact to outweigh all the good stuff combined, at least for a time.

[00:02:49]The first factor and the one where you can potentially have the biggest influence is emotional safety.

[00:02:57]Many adults who are estranged from their parents cite a lack of emotional safety as a factor in wanting to keep their distance.

[00:03:05]You may or may not have heard the term emotional safety before, but as a human being, you instinctively know what it is, especially when it's missing.

[00:03:15]Most of us can imagine what it feels like when, for example, people are talking about us behind our backs and not in a good way.

[00:03:23]That feeling is just one example of not feeling emotionally safe.

[00:03:28]It's very unpleasant. We might be physically safe, but emotionally, it's like we're being chased by a mob with pitchforks. It feels dangerous.

[00:03:40]It's the same when you're being unfairly or harshly criticized, not believed, or not trusted, or ridiculed for your opinions or preferences.

[00:03:49]Even the fact of being estranged from the child or children you raised might feel emotionally unsafe.

[00:03:56]For too many of us, estranged or not, that lack of emotional safety is normal.

[00:04:02]It's our baseline in most or all of our relationships.

[00:04:06]What we don't have in our lives is regular, reliable emotional safety.

[00:04:13]Many of us don't know what it's like, for instance, to be deeply seen, understood, and appreciated.

[00:04:20]To be accepted exactly as we are, even if we're different in certain ways.

[00:04:25]We don't know what it's like to receive compassion and kindness when we're unhappy, instead of being told to get over it.

[00:04:33]If we lose a favorite scarf, umbrella, or something else that meant something to us, we don't know what it's like to be met with sympathy instead of indifference.

[00:04:44]We may not know how it feels to be able to disagree without being criticized or rejected.

[00:04:51]In other words, we don't necessarily know very well what emotional safety feels like.

[00:04:58]And if that's true, we can't possibly provide that safety for others.

[00:05:04]It seems that emotional safety can't be conveyed just in words.

[00:05:09]We broadcast our own level of safety unconsciously through our physical posture, the pitch and tenor of our voice, the degree of tension in our muscles, and in the rhythm and tone of our behavior, especially under stress.

[00:05:25]Even if we want to provide emotional safety, we simply can't give what we don't have. It's not a moral question.

[00:05:32]It's a question of capacity.

[00:05:35]The good news is capacity can be expanded.

[00:05:39]So, if your estranged adult child has ever mentioned a lack of emotional safety as a reason for keeping their distance, a first step in responding to that could be to examine your own sense of emotional safety and begin to shore it up if it needs shoring up.

[00:05:57]And over time, you can create more emotional safety for yourself and others through specific intentional behaviors.

[00:06:05]I listed 10 of those behaviors in episode 164, Emotional Safety, which you can find at reconnectionclub.com/164.

[00:06:15]In the next episode, I'll describe two more invisible factors that can cause adult children to feel self-protective to the point [music] of estranging their parents.

[00:06:25]Until then, remember that you are a loving, lovable, and still growing human being.

[00:06:31]So, please [music] take good care of yourself.

[00:06:34]Bye for now.

[00:06:37]If you've enjoyed this episode of the Reconnection Club [music] podcast, I invite you to check out reconnectionclub.com.

[00:06:44]The Reconnection Club is for parents [music] at any stage of estrangement from their adult child or children.

[00:06:50]So, whether you've just realized there's [music] trouble between you, you've been living with estrangement for years, or you're newly reconciled [music] but still walking on eggshells, the Reconnection Club is your essential resource for information, support, and continued personal growth. With our courses and workshops, expert interviews, monthly [music] Q&A calls, and a friendly active community, the Reconnection Club is a wonderful place to be for [music] anyone suffering the pain of estrangement from an adult child or children. So, check it out [music] at reconnectionclub.com.