Pam Tronson on adult daughters, accountability, and letting go
There’s a moment in every mother’s life when the job description changes and nobody sends the memo. This week’s guest lived it, worked through it, and now spends her career helping other women do the same.
Pam Tronson built her entire coaching career on the belief that she had no real wound to work from. She had a good marriage, two daughters she adored, and nothing “primal” to unpack. Then an email from her own adult daughter landed, and the ground moved.
What followed wasn’t a quick fix. It was a full year of going back through her own certification program as her own first client: staring in the mirror, opening the metaphorical closets she’d rather have left shut, and asking herself one hard question over and over. Who does she need to be for this next phase of the relationship?
In this conversation, Pam and Jackie get into the parts of this work nobody puts on a coaster. Jackie’s own plate-throwing story, and what happened when she finally owned it out loud to her kids. The difference between accountability and self-flagellation, and why the second one is just as unhelpful as denial. The buzzword “no contact” and what’s actually underneath it for the women Pam coaches. And the line Pam says changed her own life more than any other: what else could be true?
This one’s for anyone who’s ever reread a text from their kid four times trying to figure out what it really meant.
In This Episode
– Why Pam went looking for a niche and the universe handed her an estrangement instead
– The concept of neuroplasticity, and how Pam used it to ask who she needed to become
– Jackie’s plate story, and why owning your worst moment out loud can matter more than never having it
– Why “having your own back” is not the same thing as letting yourself off the hook
– The difference between raising kids and raising adults
– What’s really behind the “no contact” conversation, and why it’s rarely as simple as social media makes it look
– Why sitting on the sidelines with pom-poms might be the hardest and most important job a mom of adult kids has
Meet Pam Tronson
Pam Tronson is a certified life coach who helps mothers navigate one of life’s most emotionally complex relationships, the one with an adult daughter. Through her workshops, coaching, and signature Bridges & Bonds program, she’s helped thousands of women move beyond fear, overthinking, and walking on eggshells so they can rediscover their confidence and build healthier, more connected relationships with their daughters. Her compassionate, practical approach is informed by both professional expertise and her own journey through estrangement and reconciliation, giving her a perspective that is both deeply personal and deeply hopeful.
Pam is running a free three-day workshop starting July 29th at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET each day for moms who are second-guessing themselves with an adult daughter and are ready to find their footing again. Replays available if you can’t make it live. Details and registration can be found HERE.
Complete Transcript
Pam: The highest form of achievement is when our kids no longer need us. What? No. No, I want to be needed. Because it’s kind of like a drug. It can be. There’s something that feels really lovely for us as moms, especially for those of us who kind of took on everything.
Jackie: Yeah. It’s our identity. So if this isn’t my identity anymore, what is? And therein lies the work, my friend.
Pam: Therein lies the work.
Jackie (VO): Here’s something we often forget about motherhood. The goal was always for them to leave. Not to need you less because you did something wrong, but because you did the job right. That’s supposed to be the win. So why does it feel so hard?
I’m Jackie MacDougall, and this is The Grown-Ass Woman’s Guide.
Pam Tronson is a certified life coach who became her own very first client. After a very difficult confrontation with her adult daughter, Pam rebuilt that relationship from the ground up, and now she coaches other moms through the exact same rebuild.
This episode is for anyone who’s ever reread a text from their kid at least four times, trying to figure out what it really meant.
Jackie: So you’re living your life as a life coach, and one day you’re like, “I should help moms with daughters…” That could not have come out of thin air. Where did that come from?
Pam: It’s funny, because when I finished my certification as a life coach, everybody was like, “Okay, let’s pick our niche. What’s your niche? Who do you really want to work with?” And I wasn’t really sure. A lot of people pick their niche depending on challenges they’ve had in their own life.
And I’m like, “Well, I kind of like my life, my marriage is going well, I’ve got these lovely girls, we’ve got everything together, and I’m really not sure if there’s anything primal that I’m having to work through.” And the universe went, “Oh, she wants a niche? Oh, we’ve got something for you, girlfriend. Just hang on.”
One day I woke up to an email that was pretty challenging to read, and so started the journey.
Jackie: From your daughter specifically, the email?
Pam: It didn’t start right away, because I reached out to therapists and a number of different sources to try to find my footing again. And what I found was that there are some great therapists out there who specialize in estrangement, but a lot of them, to me, didn’t have the experience I wanted. Not the experience as a therapist, but there’s a very special relationship between a mom and her adult daughter, and I wanted somebody who could understand what I was going through. Those people weren’t around, so I decided the next best thing to do would be to go back and become my own very first client.
It was a one-year program I’d gone through. I went back to day one and started working through everything. And it was one of the hardest and most challenging, but most impactful things I think I’ve ever done.
Jackie: You just decided, “I’m going to be my own life coach, and I’m going to coach myself in my relationship with my adult daughter.” You have two daughters. What did that look like? How was that challenging?
Pam: It was a lot of writing, a lot of staring in the mirror trying to figure out what my… truthfully, it was trying to understand my habitual way of living, of reacting, of acting, of thinking. All of my patterns, all of these things that were so unconscious throughout most of my life.
It was a time when I had to peel all that back and do what I could to make the unconscious conscious, so I could see my patterns, see my old programming, and have a chance to change things. One of the concepts presented to me, and I think it was a discovery maybe ten years ago, is that we do have the ability, in our brains, to kind of rewire who we are and how we think. The whole concept of neuroplasticity.
I latched onto that and started asking myself: who do I need to be for this next phase of my life with my girls? Who do I need to be in the relationship? How do I need to start showing up?
It was a process, literally, of going through all of the… I think of the closets in our house, the scary closets you don’t want to open because you don’t know what’s in them. I went through and opened a bunch of closets, looked in the corners, lifted the skirts on the bed, and went through so much of who I was. And then slowly, as I had a chance to rebuild the relationship with my daughter, I was able to use that new understanding of myself to be what I needed to be.
We got the ball rolling, and I’m delighted to share that I have relationships with both my daughters that feel fabulous and fulfilling, that light me up every single time I have a chance to be with them or share with them, which I actually do get to now, which is really nice.
Jackie: Man, spoiler alert. That’s the best spoiler ever, because I want to talk about how you got from there to here. But one of the things I have to point out is that you did not start this journey by blaming. Not for a minute did you share what your daughter did wrong. And I’m not suggesting it was all you and inner work, but that inner work, if I’m not wrong, is the catalyst to everything else. Even though two people have their own responsibility, that inner work is everything. So what did you discover? Move your daughter aside for a second. What did you discover about Pam in that time?
Pam: It’s interesting that you ask that, because I’m not going to pretend. In the beginning, it was dark. It was very dark. One of the most challenging times in my life. But what I came to realize was that me pounding my fists on the table, talking about how wrong this was, how disrespectful it was, all of those thoughts I had about it, that wasn’t shifting the relationship.
To me, connection begins with the story we tell. And I had to shift the story I was telling. I’m not going to pretend that in the beginning I was like, “Oh, this is a great thing that’s happening in my life right now. What a wonderful opportunity for me to learn and grow.” That was definitely not what my days looked like in those early years. But the shift, for me, was seeing it as an opportunity as opposed to a black mark on my reputation, which is how it felt.
There were so many things about me I had to go back to. I had the most amazing mom and dad, delightful human beings. I was the fourth of four, pretty sure I was an oops baby, my oldest brother is seventeen years my senior, so there’s a bit of a gap between all of us. And I sorted through some of the things I’d gone through in my childhood, not from a perspective of looking at all the things my parents did wrong, but I was able to see the times in my own childhood that may have led me to react in certain ways, to be defensive, or a little self-righteous, or controlling. Not the reasons, but it helped me go, “Oh, this explains that, and here’s this experience I had, and that makes sense that I might react like that.”
So what I started learning how to do, Jackie, and I think it’s one of the most important things for any mom going through something like this, is you’ve got to learn how to have your own back.
Jackie: How did… what does that look like?
Pam: The moms I work with are gracious, lovely, honest women who really want nothing more than to find a way to reconnect with their adult daughters. And there’s a tendency, when you start into the work, to look back at all the things you’ve done wrong, all the mistakes you’ve made. Part of that is sometimes because you have someone else in your life pointing those things out to you.
