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In Part 4 of Storied Parenting, Chris and Beth give 3 "steps" to respond well when your adult children come to you with feelings and memories of your failure. Beth also shares an exciting adventure she is leading into the stories of women past.
Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant storywork counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the ReStory Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the ReStory Podcast.
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We've been in a series on story-based parenting. We kicked it off with Mom's story journey and really the five stages of walking through a more integrated, holistic way of viewing your story and how it shapes your parenting. And then we dove into Awaken, kind of our core.
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parenting perspective and how it's a complete paradigm shift. And then last week we talked about story-based parenting around the sexuality conversation with our kids and where our own story around that is present. And this week, our last in the series is, what do we do when our kids are now adults and they are beginning their own processing?
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They are in their own journey of restoring some of their childhood narratives and you are at the center. What then? What does that look like? And this comes up a lot. We just had this question asked by a couple of different people at the marriage conference we spoke at in October. Some of you are not yet there, but you are the adult children.
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wanting to go back to your parents and have this conversation. Some of you are those parents. And so for, for wherever you fall in this, it's going to happen. Why is it going to happen, Chris? Well, I just want to name that we are those adult children that want to go back and have some kind of reconciliation, some kind of awareness, some kind of acknowledgement that our parents weren't everything that they needed, that we needed them to be. So that's us currently. And I deal with that a lot in the counseling room.
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people needing to have those, you know, rectifying conversations with their parents. The reality is what we're talking about is that our children at some point may need to and probably will want to have those conversations with us. The reality is that none of us were born in Eden. None of us were born in the Garden of Eden and therefore all of us living outside of Eden have some level of brokenness.
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And no matter how hard we've tried as parents, no matter how much work we've done on our own lives and our own stories, how much parenting books we've read or whatever, no matter how good of a parent we were, because we do not live in Eden, there is brokenness. There is failure. There are misses. There are times when we weren't everything that our child needed.
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And that is the first thing that we have to acknowledge. We have to acknowledge and be prepared for the moment that our child comes back to us and says, you weren't what I needed in this moment or that moment, or this way or that way. And it's the last thing that we want to hear. It's the last thing we want to hear. And it's really the furthest from what we would like to believe. We might know areas where we were weak, where we failed, where we're ashamed.
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but we don't want our kids to actually remember that. Right? We hold onto this hope that perhaps that- Perhaps they've gone through life unscathed. Perhaps. Or perhaps they just were too young to remember or notice, right? Like it's a hard thing to hear. But to prepare for that conversation as a parent, as an adult is so vital because the more that we can acknowledge that we-
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failed in whatever ways we failed in, we can own that and we can rustle through that. And in the midst of that, find the grace of God for ourselves and for our failures as we've attempted to do the best that we can with our children. The more that we can do that work before the adult children come home, the better that conversation is going to go.
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It makes me think of the first episode in the series, the story journey and how when we get to stage four and we are able to give ourselves empathy and then we have more empathy to give our child. That is so important right here because there is a level of, okay, we failed and there might be some big F failures that we need to seriously own. But.
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Can we offer ourselves empathy? So what does that sound like, Beth? What does offering ourselves empathy sound like? Well, I don't think it sounds like a conversation we actually have with our kid because that ends up sounding very defensive. All of the excuses, the justifying, let me just explain what life was like for me then.
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None of that. That's not what I'm talking about. In fact, I would say that if the first thing we need to do is recognize we did fail them, the second thing we need to do it when if and when they come to us is to just listen and validate their experience without defending our own. So it's not defending and explaining away. In our
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own time, our own journal, our own counseling session, our own processing over coffee with a friend, it might sound like I hold so much grief over this and how Johnny was affected. I'm just, I'm so saddened and I don't know what to do with that.
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And perhaps a friend or a counselor or a spouse can offer back to us. And were you doing the best, you know, how to do right? As Brene Brown teaches us. Um, and so it, it looks like taking all of that processing to someone else and coming to a place of being able to let ourselves off the hook a little bit and to forgive ourselves a little bit.
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And then entering in with that conversation with our adult child and just listening and reflecting back, I hear you, I hear you saying that I was not all of who you needed me to be when you were 15. And I am so sorry. And I grieve with you for what that means for you. For what that means for what you lost then.
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and for how you continue to experience that now and to sit in that without trying to fix it immediately. And to recognize that they might have some work they need to do that you are not responsible for either.
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that there are some gaps in your parenting back then when they were 15 or 20 or 12 or three that they need to address in places that you can't actually fix. And that is gonna be something hard for you to hold as well that, ooh, there's something here that I caused and I can't fix. That's also empathy.
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because it's sitting in the tension of my powerlessness to change the impact of my failure. That's super hard. And that means, like you said, that work needs to be done away from your child and in a different space to process, like, what does it look like for me to hold that? And...
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then when you are with your child in that conversation, not to bring that to them. Right. I think that depending on whatever story it is, or series of stories that your adult child is coming to you with, to also, after you've validated and honored their experience, to allow them to lead the timing toward healing and reconciliation. And that might be a while.
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It might take a long time for them to sit with that discomfort, almost that unbearable feeling of recognizing mom or dad or both failed me and now I don't know what to do. I don't know how to be in relationship with you right now. There might be a distancing, a pulling away. And they need to come to a place, again, their own work, of being able to hold the tension, the both and, of they were not all I needed to them to be.
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and they were loving or I love them or that, you know, they were still this and this and can those two coexist and I move forward with a new version of my parents and therefore a new relationship is possible. Yes. And I just love that the fact that if they can come to that new version of their parents, which is us, right? If they can come to that, then it actually opens up possibility for them to be more human and have more
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to their own failures in their own lives as well. It's this cycle that we can just begin to like, we're all human here and we're all doing the best that we can and in that we are all failing all over the place, which I want to come back to something I said just a moment ago and that is, it opens us up even more so to the grace of God.
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Because the more that we can acknowledge the failure, the more that we can welcome his healing and his grace and his presence in our lives and our need for him increases. And that's where I wanna be. I wanna be even more dependent on the grace of God. So doing this work as a parent and recognizing that I have failed actually opens me up to a deeper relationship with Jesus and a deeper sense of my own heart and a deeper sense of, wow,
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us in this whole journey. So if the first response is to be able to own and recognize and sit with yes I failed and then secondly to respond with just a validation I hear you saying that and I'm sorry and sitting with that with your child. The third kind of step if there are steps to this at all would be
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And that's the question of, and so what would you like to do next? What do you need from me now? What do you need in other spaces and what do you need from me now? And they might not know that, as we talked about, they might not know that right away, but it's allowing them.
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to kind of take ownership of their own healing journey with regard to our failure and ask them, do you need space? Do you need closeness? Do we need to talk more about this? Do you wanna go to counseling together? Do we need to do that separately? Is there, are we good just with this one conversation? Has that healed what we need to heal? Do you wanna come to Thanksgiving or not? Those are the kinds of things that there's freedom here and permission for everyone to process and find a new way forward.
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And I get again, I think story-based parenting is a perspective where we're constantly Like lifting our eyes up and out to the bigger story at play and I think at this stage It would be curious to wonder Is this a story that has been? playing out longer than us Is there some generational? aspects to the harm
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that has been experienced between the two of us. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and the term for that is kind of generational sin, generational curses. I think in the realm of trauma, there's actually more research about the epigenetics of trauma and how genetics actually holds trauma and how our bodies hold trauma as it's passed down to us in our...
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DNA. So there could be bigger stories going on here. And this conversation could actually lead to generational healing because they have had the guts.
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to come to you and say what they need to say. And you've had the guts to respond with empathy and kindness. Now we're in a whole new territory of what could be possible for generations to come. Right, and there is so much written about that. I mean, I think about my grandmother's hands by Resma. Oh, how do you pronounce his last name? I'm forgetting. And he talks about clean pain and dirty pain.
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and that if we are not actually processing and working through and talking about trauma, then it's gonna come out sideways, it's gonna come out as dirty pain. But we all hold pain.
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And when we can metabolize it and digest it, it can be processed cleanly and then lead to healing. And so I think about that when you're talking. I have a very simple mini-course again, that I prepared for the women in my community called charting your female legacy that really guides you to go back and just to begin to actually visually chart what you know of the generations.
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where you see broken relationships, where you see patterns and themes at work and what that might tell you that could be helpful. Reading more about epigenetics, right? And trauma could be helpful as well. We can list some resources in the show notes. But that would be, I think, a ways past the actual conversation you have with your hurting and harmed adult child.
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a beautiful part of the journey. Well, in that, in that vein, Beth, I would love for you to, uh, tell our listeners right now what you're doing in the other spaces that you're in. Cause I think beginning to look at what is the history, where have we come from actually helps us know where we are going.
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And so tell us a little bit about what you're doing on the Fierce and Lovely podcast and in the other Fierce and Lovely spaces. Well, I am committed to kind of curating the feminine story. And that has at times been mostly focused on raising strong young women, ours first and then others and helping mothers.
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parents out of a well-informed story, right? And in that, it has led me into this journey of other women, global women, the stories that shape us all. And I have loved curating their stories. On the podcast, I've gone through seasons of, you know, on the road in Scotland or in France and kind of talking about women and stories that I was learning about there.
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I've interviewed in the past strong women who are doing amazing work here in the States and abroad. Right now on the podcast, you can actually hear the interviews that I've had with experts around issues that our girls are facing this month. You can hear disordered eating and self-injury, self-harm, cultivating friendships, and you'll...
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get to hear all of those in the next few months. But my personal sites are set on leading a group of women, 10 women will get to join me on a journey to Turkey this summer, which is a journey back to our roots in so many ways. But far past that, we're going to be looking at the women who have shaped our faith.
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who have shaped the nation of Turkey, and in doing so, discover more of our own story. It will be a storied trip to a land like no other. I am so jealous that you're only taking women, and I would love to come and I bless you and send you in.
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go and be and it's going to be such an amazing trip. You guys can't even understand. Like Beth is sitting here smiling. Her, her face is beaming. And when she gets into this, like curating the feminine voice mode and the stories of women, she will be, she's just lost in her research. And then in giddy little school girl, school girl when she finds these amazing little nuggets of stories. So this trip is going to be amazing. And I just,
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I wish I could come. Well, if any of you are looking for a last-minute Christmas gift idea, this would be it. There's actually an early bird offer to the first three who sign up $400 off and spots are going to go fast. So this would be an incredible gift to an incredible woman. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's someone in your life. Maybe this is a healing story.
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that you take with your own mother. So I can't wait. Yes, well, thanks for all that you do Beth in this space. I think we've needed someone like you to listen to the voices of women throughout history and into today to honor the voices of women and the important role that they have played throughout history and all of our lives. So yes.
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Yes, and you can find that on FierceAndLovely.org along with the many courses I've referenced, along with a new workbook that I've just put together from the 19 curated guides that I've led moms and daughters through over the last year and a half through COVID. That's now available all contained into one easily accessible workbook. Yeah, and that is my heart story-based
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Living is my heart and all of that can be found not only at Fierce and Lovely, but anywhere on the Restory Universe, which is why it was so important for us this month to really talk about other, another aspect of the universe that has the same ethos of Restorey and our approach toward it all. So with that we will say thank you and from our home to yours, Merry Christmas and we hope you have a fantastic celebration.
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with your families and a blessed new year. As always, you can learn more about everything we've referenced in the show notes. And as Chris said, Merry Christmas. We hope you join us in 2022. Until then, story well.