Month: November 2023

As we embrace the holiday season, filled with its customary warmth and family festivities, it’s essential to recognize that this time can present unique challenges for parents and adult children navigating estrangement. If you are in this situation, please know you’re not walking this path alone.

This holiday season will be the fifth year of my being estranged from an adult child and his family. My husband and I have come a long way since our first missed holiday. As you know, if you are reading this, the grief comes in waves. Some days, I am on the acceptance train, and others – tumbling once again, but for only enough time to get back up. My heart goes out to everyone who hurts and is cut off.

I often hear a spectrum of closeness and coldness, guilt, anger, regret, remorse, and lots of pain. The good news is, if we work at moving forward, one foot in front of the other, we feel less distressed. We learn much about ourselves and others and gain insight into self-compassion and empathy. Wherever you are on the spectrum, I hope you find joy despite the condition of your family.

Here are some heartfelt suggestions to help parents and adult children gracefully navigate the holidays with self-compassion. Remember, support is available every step of the way.

Give Yourself Permission to Feel

Embrace the ebb and flow of emotions during the holidays. Allow yourself the space to feel and process emotions – sadness, grief, or a hint of anger – without judgment.

Share Your Emotions

Contact your trusted circle – friends, family, or therapists. Engaging in an open conversation about your feelings can be like lifting a weight off your shoulders and providing valuable support.

Reevaluate and Modify Traditions

Some traditions may feel burdensome. Please take a moment to reconsider and adjust them to better align with your emotional well-being.

Introduce New Joyful Traditions

Inject joy into the season by creating new traditions. Whether volunteering, exploring your creative side, or spending time with supportive friends, make sure these activities bring a sense of fulfillment.

Surround Yourself with Support

Seek the comforting company of friends or family who understand. Share your feelings with those you trust, allowing them to be a source of warmth and understanding during the holidays. Be sure to arrange holiday plans with those who love and value you. You can tell a friend you would like to join their family celebration.

Join Supportive Communities

Consider connecting with online communities or support groups for parents and adult children facing similar experiences. Sharing with others who understand can offer insights and a sense of solidarity.

Prioritize Your Well-Being

Put yourself first. Whether immersing yourself in a good book, taking serene nature walks, or enjoying quiet moments, dedicate time to activities that bring you peace and relaxation.

Set Clear Boundaries

Establish boundaries to safeguard your emotional well-being. Communicate your needs – whether it’s avoiding specific topics or deciding on your desired level of social engagement.

Practice Mindfulness

Incorporate mindfulness techniques to stay grounded. Activities like meditation or mindful breathing can be your anchor, helping you savor the present moment.

Celebrate Your Resilience

Acknowledge your strength. While the holidays may accentuate what’s missing, they also allow you to celebrate your resilience and find joy despite the challenges.

Consider Therapeutic Guidance

Reach out to a therapist or counselor if needed. Their professional guidance can offer tailored coping strategies and a safe space to explore your emotions.

Reflect and Plan for the Future

Take this moment to reflect on your personal growth. Set intentions for the upcoming year, align your goals with your well-being and focus on positive steps forward.

Embrace this time, as the holidays are uniquely yours, and there’s no universal way to navigate them. Extend warmth and compassion to yourself, recognizing that this season holds the potential for healing and personal growth.

Estrangement can be a decision you made for your well-being, or you may be cut off not of your choice. You can choose to create a nurturing narrative moving forward during the holidays. Some may desire a departure from the usual holiday traditions.

Participating with others during the holidays might bring you comfort.

Whether it is your first holiday or it’s been years of being estranged, you can navigate towards moving forward by honoring your strength and resilience.

Many adult children and parents who grieve over the loss of the relationship status hope for the repair of the relationship. Unfortunately, this outcome is rarely possible due to the history of abusive behavior of their family members. In other cases, hope remains that someday, as others have reconciled, so could they. Whatever the history and details of the family breakdown, we can enjoy the company of others and holiday traditions.

Likewise, we gain insight by moving towards simultaneously grieving or longing for someone and embracing joy in ordinary moments.

Remember, you’re not alone in this journey; warmth and support surround you.

Cheers to a cozy and supportive holiday season!

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What will you do differently this holiday season? What new holiday traditions can you engage in this year?

There seems to be some confusion surrounding who should be the pursuer when you’re dating at this stage of life. Men love women who make the first move, and many women love the feeling of being pursued. So how do you meld these two concepts?

Make the First Move

One of the main reasons men love women to make the first move is that they are deathly afraid of rejection. This is something that men have been dealing with since puberty, and they want to avoid at all costs. So much that in some cases it keeps them from taking any type of action at all.

Women always set the pace of the relationship and once you understand men’s fear, you can create an experience that will be a win-win for both of you, and it’s not that difficult to do.

So many of my female clients tell me they are tired of driving the bus by themselves. They are looking for a man with a plan so they can lean back and have more fun. They did all the planning when they were younger, and they want someone with whom to share this responsibility now.

I totally get it and feel the same way. It’s a good rule of thumb too, because once you take control of a relationship, it’s almost impossible to give it back. If you start managing your dates at the beginning, you’ll be managing your dates throughout your entire relationship should one develop.

The Choice Is Yours

So how can you lean back, which is feminine energy, by the way, and still be the first one to reach out? It’s not as complicated as you may think.

It doesn’t matter if you’re dating online or meeting men in real life, you can still make the first move without taking control of the relationship by simply creating an opportunity for the man to step up. Now that you know how serious men feel about rejection, you know you could be waiting a long time if you wait for him to approach you. I almost always reach out first when I’m dating online.

I empower my clients so they feel comfortable doing the ‘picking’ rather than wait around to be ‘picked’ by a man who may or may not be a good fit for them. When you do the picking, you get to choose who you invite into your world, and it saves you time and frustration.

But Let Him Plan

The way I teach my clients to do this is simply to show their interest, and then lean back and let the man plan the date. This is what it sounds like when you’re texting or talking on the phone.

“Bob, it’s been great texting with you, and I feel like you’re someone I’d like to talk to. I’m happy to send you my number, what do you think?”

“I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you tonight and love that we have so many things in common. I’d be interested in learning more about you over a cup of coffee. How does that sound to you?”

These simple statements show him you’re interested and eliminate his fear of rejection while they volley the next steps back to him. Once he says, “Sure,” then you can simply tell him what days you’re available and ask him to pick a time and place to meet.

If he has trouble coming up with a location, some women offer a couple of options while other women simply tell them nicely to figure it out. If you give him options, you still want to want to leave the final decisions and planning up to him.

“I like ____, ____ or _____ and I’ll leave in your hands to pick the best place.”

Again, you’re creating the opportunity for him to take the lead. If you like being responsible for everything, you would probably simply give him a time and place to meet. This may be a little off-putting for him if he’s a masculine energy man. This type of man likes having a job to do and may feel a little out-of-sync as a result.

This Is Our Time

This is a beautiful chapter of life. We’re old enough to know what we want, and confident enough to ask for it. This is an empowering time, but it does come with some responsibility. We do need to be considerate of the men we invite in our lives. They are much more romantic and sensitive than we’ve been led to believe and words do matter.

If you want more step-by-step coaching so you can date with clarity and confidence, check out
The Perfect Dating Guide for Women or 50.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you approach men first, or do you prefer to be chased? If you make the first move, what do you say? How has this strategy worked for you?

Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Let’s not just get through the difficulties of our challenges and our adversities, let’s grow through them. Otherwise, what a waste to have them!

The old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” is one of the wisest truisms to live well by. Once we unfortunately get them, let’s use them towards enhancement. We can look to turn pain into new purpose and meaning so that our challenges don’t make us smaller; so that we don’t succumb to them but rather we expand around them.

When life throws us an out-of-left field curve ball, we are knocked over in disbelief and shock. Like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, we stumble and flop down and wobble our way to eventual standing. Unlike Mr. Scarecrow, who gets restuffed and then is good as new, we have to cope and work at it before we regain some sort of footing.

A Life-Long Child Issue

When I found out that my middle daughter would have life-long neurological issues, intense bitterness, anger, and a brick of sadness that sat crushing my heart brought me bumbling into a therapist’s office. ‘Why me?’ was my embittered rumination. ‘Why bad things happen to good people?’ became my existential perennial question.

I was stuck in the muck of profound grief; grief over the loss of the normal, healthy baby that is naturally every mommy’s dream and expectation. When that bubble is popped with a diagnosis that would entail a very different type of parental roadmap and a different type of child, adjusting to a new reality becomes a work in progress.

Another Health Crisis

Fast forward to a more recent adversity in my life: being told I had a large mass sitting on three organs. And I had gone to the emergency room thinking I was dehydrated and simply needed fluids. The unexpected diagnosis had me in stupor.

Once I started treatment for a ‘better’ cancer than was originally thought, I went along more like the Tin Man, without much feeling. That’s what shock can do sometimes, numbing one’s heart. My guidepost here, much like a horse with blinders, was putting one step in front of the other, looking straight ahead to what’s right in front of me and doing what I had to do without much thinking or feeling.

No turning to Google to look up side effects and end up with all of them, or statistics to compute my case, or anything else. Just keeping on keeping on.

Post Traumatic Growth

In the middle part of my life between these two major challenges, I studied positive psychology where I learned the concept of post traumatic growth: change and growth that can be experienced after a life crisis. It’s important to know that this is possible. It is then something to go after which is life-enhancing.

I always had a proclivity towards the idea that I have to do something with what I’ve been given; that the way to live well despite our challenges is through growth.

Picking up the pieces and resuming never sat well with me. Something good must come out of the bad. All living things have a natural inclination towards growth, but when something terrible happens that brings us to a halt where coping is our main task, what we must do to keep afloat, the idea of growth is out of our purview…. for the time being.

It’s when we settle into our situation, when the acute critical period is over, that we can look to reflect and evaluate. New terrain, new landscape requires new seedlings, new plantings, new growth.

There are actually five areas of growth that have been determined to be indicative of post traumatic growth:

Greater Appreciation of Life

Do you appreciate life in a new way? Feeling more gratitude? Reveling in the ordinary? Deciding to live more fully engaged?

Improved Relationships with Others

Have your relationships deepened? Are you seeing more of the good in others? Are you looking to spend more time with loved ones and prioritizing relationships?

New Possibilities in Life

Are you looking to do different things or opening up to new ideas? Are you seeking new opportunities to enrich your life? Are you daring to step out of your comfort zone?

Personal Strength

Do you recognize your strength in how you went through the difficulty? Do you feel a sense of self-pride? Are you more willing to tackle difficult things knowing you’ve done it before?

Spiritual Change

Are you examining your beliefs and values about things? Do you feel a greater connection to something beyond the self? Are you questioning your place here in this life – your purpose, your existence, the meaning?

These are some signs that growth is happening.

What I Learned

Through these two major life crises, I have to say my life has become much richer. I have taken on life with a greater sense of urgency, am more intentional of living into my values and what’s important to me, have a much greater zest and enthusiasm for life and oh so much more.

I used to want something big and concrete to show for my trials and tribulations, like starting an organization or foundation. But what I’ve come to see is that my growth has been more internal in the way I live my life. Now that I learned this model, I see so clearly my growth in all of the five areas.

My learning has skyrocketed as I wish I had five lives to live and learn and do all that I’d like. My new work is now on my inner world, doing a deeper dive into myself (with an amazing Jungian therapist), getting at those old cobwebs of past hurts, disappointments and resentments, and replacing them with newfound inner healing.

You may also like REBUILDING LIFE AFTER A CRISIS.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What life trials have you faced? Are any of the recent? Have you tried to pick up the pieces – or to grow from each adversity? What strategies have you tried that worked for you?

Don’t you hate it when suddenly, mid-sentence, you’re not able to access a word from memory? It feels like the word is on the tip of your tongue, yet it’s just beyond reach. Noticing my friends and I experiencing this frustration more often lately, I wondered, what gives?

Not surprisingly, most commonly refer to these moments as “tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) phenomenon or state. Encyclopedia.com describes TOT state as the experience of feeling confident that one knows an answer, yet cannot produce the word. William James is the first psychologist to describe this state back in 1890, minus the modern label.

Other technical terms used to describe what I’ll collectively refer to as TOT episodes are Lethologica and Lethonomia. Both are modern words derived from classic Greek. Letho meaning forgetfulness, logica meaning word, and nomia meaning name.

Should I Be Worried?

The good news is TOT moments are not necessarily a sign your memory is failing. Lethologica or Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon is discussed at VeryWellMind, providing the following information about TOT (sources cited in the article):

Tip-Of-The-Tongue Phenomenon Is Universal

People from all over the world report experiencing moments where certain words seem momentarily inaccessible.

These Moments Increase with Age

While young adults might experience tip-of-the-tongue moments once a week, older adults generally experience these incidences almost daily.

People Often Remember Partial Bits of Information

For example, they may remember the letter or the word they are searching for begins with or the number of syllables the word contains.

Proper Nouns Seem to Present the Most Difficulty

When it comes to which words seem to escape memory most, proper nouns take the top slot. This includes remembering a person’s name or the name of a specific place or thing.

What’s Causing the Glitch?

There are many theories regarding why TOT states occur. It is believed the left temporal and frontal areas of your brain are affected, temporarily unable to work together to retrieve words or names stored in your memory. If you’d like to further explore these theories, this Wikipedia link goes into great detail regarding the same.

All said, most agree that multitasking, fatigue, anxiety, and the natural aging process contribute to the occurrence of TOT states.

What’s the Best Way to Manage TOT Moments?

Personally, it’s hard for me to relax and stop searching for the elusive word during a TOT moment. Instead, I’m likely to continue trying to recall the word. If that doesn’t work, I’ll often pull out my phone and refer to Google to help solve the mystery. If all else fails, most of the time it comes to me soon after I stop thinking about it.

What’s the best approach to handle it? No consensus on the answer, but most agree it’s important to remain calm during a TOT moment. Try to avoid becoming anxious or triggering a full out panic response. This will only compound the problem.

Here are a few suggestions I found from various sources that may help you manage or resolve a TOT state.

Stop Thinking About It

Probably the best advice is to stop thinking about it! The word may pop up in a moment or two. If not, it’s likely to reveal itself, eventually.

Don’t Struggle to Find the Word

Repeatedly coming up with wrong answers may contribute to learning the mistake. Rather, look up the correct answer and repeat it a few times to help with encoding.

Your Brain Links Related Words Together

If you know the first letter of the word and talk about it or related facts, you may recall the word. Example: “You should watch this movie I saw! Dang, what was the name of it? I think the first word of the title starts with an F. You know, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played a young Irish immigrant couple struggling to save enough money to head west for the Oklahoma land run? I know this.”

Tap into Your Brain’s Phonological Network

This network is a bunch of words stored close together because they are similar or sound alike. For example, if you’re trying to remember a certain baseball player’s name that is one syllable and starts with J, say names like Jim, Jack, John, and Josh out loud.

When Should I Seek Help?

The general advice is to contact your doctor should you experience TOT states more frequently than your norm or they become troublesome. Also, if you are experiencing adverse cognitive issues besides TOT episodes, it could be a sign of a more serious problem.

Here are a few examples of adverse cognitive issues.

• inability to remember recent events
• confusion
• inability to concentrate
• behavior changes
• apathy
• withdrawal
• depression

What’s Worse Than a TOT Moment?

Well, lots of things! TOT moments are no doubt frustrating, but luckily, the phenomenon is universal and seems harmless. Except, perhaps, to your ego, which might get a little bruised!

Let’s Have a Conversation:       

Do you experience TOT moments? How often? Have they increased with age? Based on your experiences, what actions have helped you resolve TOT moments?

Originally posted at: Leva Bonaparte’s Grey Check Print Blazer