If you feel powerless in the face of your adult child’s estrangement, that’s understandable. You can't force your child to return your texts, let alone reunite.
It's a horrible feeling, to have so little power over something so important.
At the same time, powerlessness is a dangerous place to be for your mental health. Every one of us needs to feel that we have some power and control over the most basic aspects of our lives. Like being able to spend time with family.
For your mental and physical health, it’s crucial to recognize your power as a person, and especially as a parent. Because you do have more power than you might realize. Yes, even when you're unwillingly estranged from your adult child.
In this empowering episode, Tina offers seven different ways parents can take their power back, from being strategic about the estrangement, to being accountable to yourself in small ways every day.

Your adult child, who’s always been such an empathetic soul, has ruthlessly cut you off. How can such an empathetic person have no empathy for the parents who raised him? Doesn’t he care that he’s hurting you? It seems like a mystery. The problem of empathy is that it can’t coexist with estrangement. To be empathetic, you have to stop being estranged. But if contact is painful for you, then it’s a win-lose situation. Either the parent “wins” because the child is back in contact, or the child “wins” the prize of the distance she desired. In either case, someone loses. Tina explains this painful dilemma in this interesting episode.

When your child decides to distance himself from you, whose problem is it?

If you’re like most parents who are unwillingly estranged from adult children, you walk through life these days feeling as if you have a big weight on your shoulders.

But feeling the weight of a problem is not the same as owning it.

In this episode, Tina explains why taking ownership of a problem is a necessary step toward solving it.

Our brains look at problems differently when we “own” them. We’re in a much better position to creative and proactive, according to Tina.

Taking ownership, she points out, is not the same as taking blame. It’s just a mental shift that will enable you to better solve the painful problem of estrangement.

Your child is not the expert on how to fix the situation. If she were, she wouldn't be estranged in the first place.

Let this episode inspire you to find your power again.

It’s painful when estranged adult children don’t respond to invitations at the holidays. At this time of year, even a video chat would be meaningful in lieu of a family gathering.

If you’ve issued an invitation and not heard back, you have plenty of company. It’s frustrating and hurtful. Why do they do it?

In this episode of the podcast, Tina suggests three reasons why an otherwise polite adult child might fail to respond to invitations during estrangement.

If you haven’t already sent one out, Tina recommends not issuing invitations to estranged adult child. However, she does give two exceptions to this general rule.

Parents of estranged adult children often end up sending gifts into a void. Not just at holidays, but all year long. Their giving is not boundaried, nor does it necessarily respect the wishes of their child, who in many cases has asked for no contact.
If you’ve listened to Episode 10, you’re already familiar with five reasons NOT to send gifts to an estranged adult child. But you might be left wondering, still, whether you can ever send anything again.
With the holidays approaching, if gifts are on your mind, listen to this episode to find out what Tina means by “healthy giving.” And hear 4 types of healthy giving suggestions for this season and beyond.

When you go in for a vaccination, the nurse might tell you to relax just before he gives you the needle. Obviously, relaxing is not natural in a situation like this. And yet resisting the needle creates tension, and may even make the shot more painful. Resistance is not only futile, it often creates more pain than does acceptance. Thus, acceptance of a painful process can actually make it less painful than resistance. There’s a lesson here for parents of estranged adult children. They naturally resist silence, the inherent rejection, and the estrangement itself. Importantly, parents also resist their estranged adult children’s versions of the relationship. They defend themselves against unfair or inaccurate depictions of themselves as parents and as people. And while this is natural, it may not be the best response to estrangement. Nor is it the best response to any unwanted situation. In this episode, Tina urges you to embrace the current reality of estrangement from your child, in order to find peace and freedom in an otherwise losing battle with reality. She explains why acceptance doesn’t mean giving up.

For more on handling estrangement from your adult child, see Tina's book, Reconnecting With Your Estranged Adult Child: Practical Tips and Tools to Heal Your Relationship.

Does your estranged adult child have a personality disorder (PD)?
If so, how much does it matter?
Armchair diagnoses of PDs such as Borderline PD or Narcissistic PD are often flung back and forth between estranged adult children and rejected parents, to explain the problems between them.
Often, it may simply be that parent and adult child don’t see eye to eye.
But some PDs are real.
What do you do if the person estranged from you is suffering from a genuine, properly diagnosed PD?
The first thing to do, according to Tina, is to get clear on what you really want. If your child has a PD like Borderline that makes him so difficult to deal with, how close do you want to be?
Assuming she were willing, how much time would you want to spend around an adult daughter with full-blown Narcissistic PD?
In this episode, Tina gives a brief sketch of what PDs are, what they’re not, and some implications for estrangement and reconciliation.

It’s not unusual at all for an adult child to cut off parents after getting into therapy. And the cut-off may extend to other family members and even old friends. When this happens, it’s tempting to blame it on therapy. Your child was fine and so was your relationship, until he went into counseling. If it seems your child has been brainwashed by a counselor or therapist and that’s why she’s become estranged from family, that’s understandable. But there are underlying assumptions there that might simply not be true. One is that your child’s therapist is not an ethical professional. And another is that estrangement is not your child’s own idea. Both of these are statistically questionable, as Tina points out in this informative episode.

You raised your children the same. They knew they were loved. You did your level best by each and every one of them…

So why does one adult child become estranged, claiming an unhappy childhood, while their siblings are perfectly fine? 

Can both or all of your kids be right about their childhoods if they claim different things?

The surprising fact is, no two children have exactly the same upbringing. In this episode, Tina shares 5 factors that make each childhood different and unique, even among kids growing up in the same household.

Will your estranged child send you birthday wishes this year? Should you celebrate your child’s birthday even though she’s not currently speaking to you?

How do you survive not only your own birthday without them, but theirs?

Estrangement doesn’t respect birthdays. In many or perhaps most cases, you’ll be disappointed if you expect your child to contact you on your birthday, or answer a text from you on theirs.

For tips on whether to send something on your child’s birthday, listen to Episode 33.

This episode (#59) is all about how to survive the day well, and even have a good and meaningful birthday, while you’re estranged.

The key is to take responsibility for your own experience, and plan ahead.