Family Talk When You Are All Grown Up: Parents and Adult Siblings
October 6, 2015
Hosted by Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Closeness, rivalry, support, connection, control, criticism, jealousy, misunderstandings, misinterpretations of intent — what people want from family relationships and what they experience in them often fail to match. The way siblings talk to each other and listen to each other, or fail or refuse to do so, weighs heavily in how the relationships feel. What a mother says out of concern can easily sound like criticism to a daughter. Add the fact that men’s communication styles are very different from women’s, and you have the complicated, wonderful and terrible phenomenon of family. Dr. Tannen’s research shows how understanding the ways we use words can improve relationships among adult siblings and between parents and their adult children.
Family Matters
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Our goal is to share good ideas about helping all kinds of families handle the challenges and problems that are common in today’s world. We seek to help people heal, grow, and thrive in a culture in which marriage, parenting, and other family relationships are under great stress.
We will feature experts on a variety of family matters. Topics may include building and maintaining healthy relationships, family mediation, divorcing with minimal damage, strengthening marriages, LGBT families, forming and maintaining stepfamilies, single parents, creating constructive separation agreements, addiction, preventing or ending abuse, and other Family Matters.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D is an author, speaker, professional family mediator, Director of Colin Family Mediation Group, and a Founding Member of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM).
Having survived a nightmarish divorce, Dr. Colin actively supports divorce reform efforts, teaching people how to take a lot of the pain, financial cost, acrimony, and trauma out of divorce. She also loves learning and teaching about building healthy relationships and solving family problems long before anyone has a reason to consider divorce. She has been a foster parent, a married parent, a divorced single parent, and a remarried stepparent.
Formerly a research psychologist studying attachment and other aspects of human development, Dr. Colin has been providing family mediation services since 1999. She specializes in helping couples and ex-couples develop co-parenting plans and financial agreements that support their children’s security, self-confidence, and healthy development as well as their own adult well-being.
Dr. Colin has published two books, “Human Attachment" and "The Guide to Low-Cost Divorce in Virginia: How to Do It Yourself.” She has also written a variety of articles published in journals and on the Internet.