In this encouraging book, Sheri McGregor helps parents of estranged adult children break free from emotional pain and move forward in their lives. With the latest research, her own experience, and insight from more than 9,000 parents, McGregor covers the growing trend of estranged adults from loving families. Devastated parents can be happy again.

WORKBOOK of exercises to accompany the award winning self-help title: Done With The Crying: Help and Healing for Mothers of Estranged Adult Children by Sheri McGregor, M.A.

A guide for parents whose adult children have cut off contact that reveals the hidden logic of estrangement, explores its cultural causes, and offers practical advice for parents trying to reestablish contact with their adult children. “Finally, here’s a hopeful, comprehensive, and compassionate guide to navigating one of the most painful experiences for parents and their adult children alike.”—Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent's life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible. While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman's insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.

Parents whose adult children have cut off contact wonder: How did this happen? Where did I go wrong? What happened to my loving child? Over time, holidays, birthdays, and even the birth of grandchildren may pass in silence. Anguish may turn into anger. While time, in and of itself, does not necessarily heal, actions do, and while every estrangement includes situation-specific variables, there are practical, effective, and universal techniques for understanding and healing these not-uncommon breaches. Psychotherapist Tina Gilbertson has developed these techniques and tools over years of face-to-face and online work with parents, who have found her strategies transformative and even life-changing. Gilbertson cuts through the blame, shame, and guilt on both sides of the broken relationship. Parents will feel heard and understood but also challenged — and guided — to reclaim their role as"tone setter" and grow psychologically. Exercises, examples, and sample scripts empower parents who have felt powerless. Gilbertson shows that reconciliation is a step-by-step process, but the effort is well worth it. It is never too late to renew relations and experience better-than-ever bonds.

Are you struggling to connect with your child now that they've left the nest? Are you feeling the tension and heartache as your relationship dynamic begins to change? In Doing Life with Your Adult Children, bestselling author and parenting expert Jim Burns provides practical advice and hopeful encouragement for navigating this tough yet rewarding transition. If you've raised a child, you know that parenting doesn't stop when they turn eighteen. In many ways, your relationship gets even more complicated--your heart and your head are as involved as ever, but you can feel things shifting, whether your child lives under your roof or rarely stays in contact. Doing Life with Your Adult Children helps you navigate this rich and challenging season of parenting. Speaking from his own personal and professional experience, Burns offers practical answers to the most common questions he's received over the years, including: My child's choices are breaking my heart--where did I go wrong? Is it OK to give advice to my grown child? What's the difference between enabling and helping? What boundaries should I have if my child moves back home? What do I do when my child doesn't seem to be maturing into adulthood? How do I relate to my grown child's significant other? What does it mean to have healthy financial boundaries? How can I support my grown children when I don't support their values? Including positive principles on bringing kids back to faith, ideas on how to leave a legacy as a grandparent, and encouragement for every changing season, Doing Life with Your Adult Children is a unique book on your changing role in a calling that never ends.

In her classic books The Courage to Heal and Allies in Healing, Laura Davis helped millions cope with the trauma of child sexual abuse. Her supportive guide Becoming the Parent You Want to Be taught parents to create a vision for their families. Now, in I Thought We'd Never Speak Again, she tackles another critical, emerging issue: reconciling relationships sundered by betrayal, anger, and misunderstanding. With her trademark clarity and compassion, Davis maps the reconciliation process through gripping firstperson stories of people who have reconciled under a wide variety of difficult circumstances. In these pages, parents reconcile with children, embittered siblings reconnect, estranged friends reunite, and war veterans and crime victims meet with their enemies. Davis weaves these powerful accounts with her own experiences reconciling with her mother after a long, painful estrangement. Making a crucial distinction between reconciliation and forgiveness, Davis explains how people can make peace in relationships without necessarily forgiving past hurts. Step by step, she clarifies the qualities needed for reconciliation-including maturity, discernment, determination, courage, communication, and compassion. To help readers gauge their own readiness, she includes a self-assessment entitled "Are You Ready for Reconciliation?" as well as a special section called "Ideas for Reflection and Discussion." On each page of this inspiring and instructive book, Laura Davis offers hope and help for reconciliation between individuals, and in the larger human family, sharing essential keys for resolving troubled relationships and finding peace.

It is estimated that as many as 34 million people grew up in alcoholic homes. But what about the rest of us? What about families that had no alcoholism, but did have perfectionism, workaholism, compulsive overeating, intimacy problems, depression, problems in expressing feelings, plus all the other personality traits that can produce a family system much like an alcoholic one? Countless millions of us struggle with these kinds of dysfunctions every day, and until very recently we struggled alone. Pulling together both theory and clinical practice, John and Linda Friel provide a readable explanation of what happened to us and how we can rectify it.