Gen X Mom Shares What She Learned After Her Gen Z Son Gave Her An Ultimatum — Go To Therapy Or We Go No Contact
Tough love goes both ways.
Daisy Daisy / Shutterstock.com It seems as though everywhere you turn these days there's a new story about millennial and Gen Z adults having no contact with their parents due to their unwillingness to work through the issues of the past.
But one mom on TikTok took her son's ultimatum to heart. And though it wasn't easy, it ended up changing everything.
The Gen X mom shared what she learned from her Gen Z son's ultimatum: Go to therapy or we go no contact.
Many therapists and mental health experts believe that parent-child estrangements have reached an all-time high in recent years, and the trend appears to be growing.
Some recent studies have placed the number of adult children estranged from their parents as high as 25%.
At issue are therapy-informed shifts in mores that leave adult children and their parents with very different ideas about boundaries, and what are and are not not appropriate dynamics. And sometimes, obstinance on the part of older parents makes reconciliation difficult if not impossible.
TikToker Fabulous Fifties was one of those parents. As her handle suggests, she's a Gen X mom in her 50s with a Gen Z son who recently gave her an ultimatum: Go to therapy or we go no contact.
The Gen X mom said at first she found her son's no-contact ultimatum 'abusive' and offensive.
When a commenter on one of her previous videos said they felt like ultimatums of this nature were abusive and disrespectful, Fabulous Fifties immediately recognized the sentiment.
"I so get this. Because when I started this journey, I thought that same thing," she said, adding that even when she relented and agreed to go to therapy, she expected some kind of reward from her son for doing so.
"Fine, I'll go get help," she said. "But when I get into therapy and I start doing things a little differently, I want something from my kids, too. They need to step up."
That all changed when she actually began therapy and started learning about her own trauma.
Fabulous Fifties said she began therapy wanting to talk exclusively about her son. But as happens in therapy, her therapist wanted to talk about her instead. "I said, no, you don't understand. I need to fix this relationship with me and my son … And she goes, 'I get it. We're going to fix you.'"
The mom backed down and let the therapist lead the way, and it wasn't long before everything in not just her relationship with her son but also her own life began to fall into place.
"We started digging into my trauma, and I went, oh, wait a minute, my mom was traumatized. And then she handed it down to me, and then I handed it down to my kids. And now the relationship between me and my kids is like this. Why is that?"
She stressed that this is the source of the disconnect between younger and older generations that is fueling estrangement. "[Our kids] have access to mental health information that I didn't have access to," she said.
"They know what toxic is. They understand what trauma is. And even if they haven't worked their way out of that trauma yet, they know what a toxic mom is."
The mom said that learning about how trauma works healed her relationships 'naturally.'
"I start healing myself. I start healing my own trauma. And as I do that, my relationship with my kids does this naturally," she said, making a gesture of her hands coming together to illustrate.
It also taught her that labeling her children's confrontations as "abuse" was a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. "My kids have trauma — it's not abuse. They weren't abusing me. They were coming from a place of pain."
And she now understands where that pain came from. "The choices that I made in raising them, in not recognizing their emotional needs as much as I could have; I caused my children trauma."
Her new understanding has allowed her to break the cycle of generational trauma, and it's begun to heal her relationship with her own parents.
Fabulous Fifties recounted a conversation she recently had with her son about the strict, rule-based, authoritarian parenting style she used on him. It made her realize that the way parenting has changed in recent years, with the advent of new approaches like "gentle parenting," has everything to do with what she's learned about trauma.
"Yes, we all need to learn to follow the rules," she said, "but if we're teaching our kids to follow the rules at the expense of their emotional safety, emotional intelligence, [and not] teaching them emotional regulation, they're going to have trauma."
Being willing to listen and work on these things led to her healing, and that healing changed everything. "It all stopped. I broke the intergenerational trauma," she said, "and in the meantime, I'm healing my relationship with my parents."
What Fabulous Fifties may not realize is that she's healing complete strangers, too.
At the risk of sounding overwrought: As a person whose mother severed ties rather than discuss issues like these years ago, Fabulous Fifties' story has given me a sense of hope. Not for my relationship with my own mother — that ship has sailed — but rather hope that other parent-child relationships can still be salvaged.
Confronting your traumas and mistakes can be terrifying work (as someone who's been in therapy for 10 years, I know all too well). But this woman's experience shows what can happen when you steel yourself and do it anyway.
Here's hoping her story encourages more parents to dig into that process. Because as hard as it is, it's absolutely worth it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.