You hear the tone or see your phone light up as you get a text or a call from your struggling adult child. Either way, alarms go off in your head, and I'm talking really loud alarms. Many parents in this situation wrestle with what to think and how to react.
Just the other day, I conducted a parent coaching session with Lisa, who has a daughter, Casey, age 29 (names changed to protect privacy). They are a perfect example of that hypervigilant state of mind so present in parents of struggling adult children, and they're the focus of this post. To continue with this example, feeling an inner sensation of her blood pressure rising, Lisa tells herself to "just listen" when her phone lights up with Casey's call.
During that hair-raising call to Lisa, Casey right away starts pouring out, "I hate my friggin' job." (The f-word that was actually spoken is changed here to maintain a level of written decorum.) Casey continues, "Like seriously, Mom, my boss hates me and is giving me lots of crap. I can't take it anymore, Mom, I'm like falling apart."
So Much for Just Listening When Your Anxious Voice Is Inwardly Screaming
As Lisa is willing herself to "just listen" to Casey, she is distracted by loud alarms going off in her mind. Her racing thoughts include, "Should I call her brother who lives across town to check on her?" Or, "Ugh, hmm... maybe I should offer to send her money and tell her to quit." These thoughts start to gain even more momentum and traction as they race around in Lisa’s mind.
At our coaching session, which had occurred a week before this call, when Lisa shared her thought patterns (which, as she sounded out, were clearly overthinking loops) about Casey with me, something changed for her. Lisa gained insight in a way she never had before, which she applied in this call with Casey. In the words of physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, “A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience." Let's now look at the magic question Lisa asked herself to gain calm and clarity.
A Crucial Question for Any Anxious Parent Tempted to Jump In Too Fast
For some context here, Lisa and I had practiced having her ask herself several helpful questions in the face of those maddening, overthinking-laden thoughts that had been consuming her about Casey. So during that same phone call with Casey, when Lisa reflexively heard Casey, seemingly in crisis, she then asked herself a question that helped her slow down: "Is Casey in danger, or is she distressed?" That question helped Lisa realize, "Well, hold on, nothing really bad has actually happened to Casey; she is just really upset right now."
Clearly, Casey being upset and Casey actually being in a life-altering crisis are not the same thing. Sure, Casey was stressed, felt trapped at work, and was acutely feeling that she hated her job when she called Lisa. But Lisa realized that all those things could be going on without her needing to help Casey escape the situation.
As I discuss in my book The Rescue Trap: How well-meaning parents keep their adult children stuck, many parents don’t know how to step back and reappraise these situations with their adult children. Too often, parents hear what sounds like sirens, slip on their first responder uniforms, and then unwittingly give their adult child the message, “You can’t handle life on your own without me.”
A Better Plan: Use Empathy to Bring In Calm and Clarity
Let's go back one last time to that dreaded "distress call" to Lisa from Casey. Instead of immediately trying to rescue Casey, Lisa asked herself if Casey was struggling or in a true crisis, and then said to her, “That sounds really hard. I can hear how overwhelmed you are. Do you want me just to listen, or would it help to think through some options?”
Can you see how the shift that Lisa made really matters? Think about it: With that response, Lisa was still caring, and she was still emotionally present for Casey. Lisa, for sure, did not become cold, detached, or dismissive. Rather, Lisa resisted the urge to turn Casey’s distress into her own emergency. This was a huge victory for Lisa because she realized that for too long she was mistaking Casey's struggles for emergencies that Lisa had to eradicate.
Final Thoughts
As shown in the example of Lisa and Casey, when your adult child is hurting, your nervous system may start telling you that you have to do something right now. That inner voice of yours accordingly screams, "Fix this, or send money, or make a call" on behalf of your adult child (e.g., call their landlord). But do you really want to risk sending the problematic, unintended message: “I don’t think you can handle this on your own”?