Is your child throwing therapy-speak at you?

Hey {{ first_name | default: Reader }},

Last week, I shared my Instagram reel about the 5 phrases adult children use to shut their parents down. Click here to watch.

The comments were flooded with one single question, asked a hundred different ways: 

"Okay, Richard, so what do I say back?"

So let me answer properly, because words matter in these situations. 

I want to start with the elephant in the room: these phrases are infuriating. When your own child reaches for "abuse," "gaslighting", or "toxic" to describe an ordinary disagreement, it is maddening and unfair. I am not going to pretend otherwise. 

The hardest thing about the tools and phrases I’m going to give you is that it asks you to be the bigger person, to take an unfair hit and not swing back. That is a big ask, {{ first_name | default: Reader }}. I am only making it because, as far as I can see, it is the one thing that actually works. And when I say “works”, I mean it helps you maintain a healthy relationship with your child. 

If you just want to ‘win’ the argument, then these may not be the tips for you. 

Quick recap before we get into it. Here are the 5 phrases:

1. “That’s triggering”

2. “You’re invalidating my lived experience, and that’s gaslighting”

3. “You’re crossing my boundary”

4. “This conversation is unsafe for me.”

5. “That’s my trauma response.”

Here’s the trap when it comes to your reply. Every one of those phrases works the same way: arguing with it proves it. 

Your daughter says, "You're invalidating me." 

You say, "No, I'm not." 

Suddenly, you just handed her the evidence. 

The key is to stop playing on the given terms and change what you are responding to. 

You can do it in 3 moves:

The instant one of these 5 phrases lands on you, your body treats it as a threat. Your instinct is to fire back in the same second. Almost all of the damage happens in that reflex. 

So the real skill is simply not responding straight away. Put a beat between what they said and what you do.

Now, I am the Breath Geek, so hear this clearly. Breathwork earns its keep over time. Regular practice builds a steadier baseline and gives you more control over your reactions, widening the gap between what someone says and how you respond (Laborde et al., 2022). I have created a powerful guided breathwork experience you can purchase here for £10 (around $13).

You train in the calm so you can find a moment of choice in the storm. 

The fastest way to make this worse is to answer moral language with more moral language. When your son calls you "abusive", and you fire back that he is being "manipulative" or "cruel," you have matched him, and that is fatal to any resolution. 

Moral framing converts a practical disagreement into a verdict on who is good and who is bad. You can compromise on plans, on money, on who calls whom. You cannot compromise on "are you an abuser," because once something becomes a question of right versus wrong, the middle ground vanishes (Skitka 2010). Two people trading moral charges have nowhere left to move. So drop the labels and get descriptive. 

Describe the behaviour and its effect in plain, specific words, and leave the verdict out of it. "When the call ended suddenly on Sunday, I felt shut out" gives your child something real to respond to. 

Last week, I wrote a whole newsletter on how unreliable memory actually is.

The short version still holds: their memory can be wrong, and so can yours. Memory is reconstructive. People recall events with total confidence that never happened, and emotion subtly rewrites the tape (Loftus 2005). 

Arguing about whose version of something ten years ago is "correct" goes nowhere. But here is the harder half, and I would be letting you down to skip it: If underneath the therapy-speak, there is something you genuinely did that hurt your child, the annoying packaging does not cancel it out, and it is worth sitting with honestly. Don’t use their irritating vocabulary as a reason to wave the whole thing away. 

On the other side, there’s a trap that is just as unhelpful: collapsing into "I'm just a bad mother/father, I ruined everything." It feels like accountability, but it actually makes the moment about you and skips the actual work. 

Real reflection is far more specific: Ask yourself, “What, exactly, might I have got wrong here, and what would I do differently next time?” That is the version that rebuilds something.

So why take all this on the chin while you are the one being unfairly accused? Because the prize was never winning the conversation, {{ first_name | default: Reader }}. 

Across 148 studies and more than 300,000 people, those with strong, close relationships (like family) had roughly a 50% higher likelihood of survival, an effect on par with the major medical risk factors we all worry about (Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010). Research shows that relationships, just like the one you have with your child, are among the most powerful health factors. 

Joshua Coleman, the psychologist who wrote the book on estrangement and watched his own daughter cut contact for years before they found their way back, saw the same pattern repeat in his practice: reconciliation tends to follow the parent who stays reachable and steady, even when they are certain they were wronged (Coleman 2021).

It takes real strength to stay steady while you are the one taking the hits. But it is the move that keeps your child able to find their way home, and keeping that door open is what my whole book is about.

I’m deep in the second round of book edits now, gathering more research and stories from people affected by this estrangement epidemic. I can’t wait to share the finished version with you when it’s ready.

👉Join the waitlist to be one of the first to read it. 

Hold steady,

Richard

Over 4 million people have had the same lightbulb moment.

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I was recently featured on the ‘Still Here’ podcast, where I discussed the issue of family estrangement. Click here to listen.

References

Coleman, J. (2021) Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. London: Sheldon Press.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B. and Layton, J.B. (2010) 'Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review', PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

Laborde, S., Allen, M.S., Borges, U., Dosseville, F., Hosang, T.J., Iskra, M., Mosley, E., Salvotti, C., Spolverato, L., Zammit, N. and Javelle, F. (2022) 'Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: a systematic review and a meta-analysis', Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 138, 104711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104711

Loftus, E.F. (2005) 'Planting misinformation in the human mind: a 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory', Learning and Memory, 12(4), pp. 361–366. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.94705

Skitka, L.J. (2010) 'The psychology of moral conviction', Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, pp. 267–281. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00254.x