Dr. Joshua Coleman
speaker
727 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Dr. Joshua Coleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Good Life Project · Healing Family Estrangement: What To Say, And What Never to Say. · 9 Jul 2026
podcast
But for the adult child, even if they're not being appropriate in their anger or how they're expressing themselves, for the parent to kind of meet them there, it really won't work.
A parent has to come from a position of loving or at least enough of an affectionate authority if they want to be persuasive towards a reconciliation.
If a kid gets mad at you and you get mad back,
you're probably only going to persuade them that you're not safe to be with.
They may not be able to take responsibility for the ways that they're being disrespectful.
Pause for a second.
Say that again, like that first part, because I think it's really important.
So if you're the parent and you're returning fire with fire, there's a huge threat to your child's feeling safe.
First of all, they may not be even aware that they're being as aggressive as they are or even how that's impacting you.
And so when you respond equally or even worse, that's just going to make them feel that much more threatened and unsafe in your presence.
And it's going to cause them just to withdraw even further.
They're mistakes that every parent makes.
It's what I call getting into the quicksand.
As soon as your kid estranges you or starts to estrange you, you're going to make all of them because you're just part of human nature.
And most parents haven't really been educated about how to talk in this way because it's a comparatively more recent phenomenon.
Completely, and particularly if you as a parent actually came from a truly traumatic background, you probably just don't have the reserves and the resources to respond appropriately.
Well, no, what I tell parents is you have to have one foot in radical acceptance and one foot in hope.
You know, hope statistically, something like 80% of children return to mothers, 70% return to fathers.
In a study I did with Phil and Carolyn Cowan at Berkeley, we found that couples who stayed married had a better chance of an eventual reconciliation than those who weren't.
So a significant percentage of young adults who cut off contact do eventually come back into the fold.
Showing 201–220 of 727 · page 11 of 37
← Previous
Next →