Conflict doesn’t have to be a dirty word and signify something is wrong with your family. It can be an opportunity to get to know each other better and create stronger bonds in your family. But, for that to happen, you need to know where to begin and what tools to use. This episode will help you to know where to begin.
Do your holiday family get-togethers get a little (or a lot) dramatic and difficult? If they do, you’re not alone. I’ve created a free pdf guide called:
The 3-Step Process to Keeping Your Cool Around Family Holiday Drama
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE
You can’t change your family members, but you can manage yourself around whatever happens. This guide will help you to feel more in control of your thoughts and emotions no matter what happens.
Full Transcript
Tina Gosney 00:00
The holidays are right around the corner. If you haven’t noticed, you probably have. It’s there’s signs of it everywhere. I’m wondering how you’re thinking about your holiday celebrations with your family this year. I’m wondering if there’s any thought in your mind about how those get togethers and those celebrations are going to go is there any part of you that might be a little worried about what will happen? Is there any part of you that just wants everyone to get along and everything to go smoothly and fine and have no hiccups, and then you could just kind of breathe a sigh of relief?
Tina Gosney 00:56
Well, if you said yes to any of that, I think you’re probably pretty normal. I think that’s how most people want to experience the holidays. But I don’t think they always do. Sometimes we just try to manage other people. We’re trying to just make sure that nobody says anything mean, that no one does anything that hurts another person’s feelings, that no one gets offended, that everything is just smooth and everything can be fine, and if that happens, then we can enjoy the holiday. Well, how often does that happen? Probably not very often.
Tina Gosney 01:29
And if you’re waiting for everybody else to do the things that you want to for those stars in the sky to just align in that perfect formation, so that you can have a great holiday. You are going to be waiting for, maybe ever, maybe forever. You are giving your freedom, your peace, away to everybody else. You’re counting on them to come through for you, which you can’t do that always. If you want more peace, you want to feel more flexible. You want to go with the flow more no matter what happens. You want to be less rigid and holding to a set view of how the holiday had to look. And maybe go with the flow. Be more flexible, be happier, be less frustrated.
Tina Gosney 02:16
Then I’ve got something for you, and what this really is, is helping you to be an agent in your own life. Instead of you being acted upon, you are the one that is acting you’re in charge of your experience. No one else is. And so this helps you to be in charge. It helps you to take your responsibility back from other people and put it in your hands.
Tina Gosney 02:43
This is a guide. It’s just three steps that will help you to keep your cool, to keep your peace during the family holidays, I’m going to walk you through a process that you’ll feel prepared for whatever will come and when you feel more in control of your own experience, and you don’t leave it up to other people to show up a certain way and provide that for you. That’s freedom.
Tina Gosney 03:09
Now I’ve used this process before. It’s really, really helped me just like you. I am a work in progress, and there are steps that you can take that will help you to keep moving forward. I don’t think that we ever get to a place in our life where we are just perfect at relationships with other people. There’s nothing else for me to learn. I’ve achieved it all. I know it all. I’m perfect in how I show up. I don’t think that’s possible. I think we’re always all a work in progress.
Tina Gosney 03:40
So you don’t have to be stuck in the way things are today. You can move forward. Go download that link in the show notes. It’s called the three step solution to keeping your cool during family holiday drama. That is short guide for you to take advantage of. So go take advantage of it.
Tina Gosney 03:58
Now, while you can have you noticed that families are becoming more divided than ever? Have you noticed before, the last, I don’t know, 15 or so years, that it’s before, it seems like that division was outside our homes, and now it feels like it’s moving inside of our homes. I just was thinking about, what are some of the things that really divide our families, that are really kind of tearing us apart? And I came up with politics. I think this year in particular, politics is a big one.
Tina Gosney 04:37
Religion is another big one. It used to be that children, as they grew up and formed their own families, that they would follow in the family tradition of religion and church. That’s not so anymore. That’s really becoming less common than not.
Tina Gosney 04:55
And then there’s life choices. We don’t agree how other people live. Life. How was the last time that you looked at your brother or your sister in law or your parents or one of your kids and you’re like, I just can’t get behind what they’re doing. I just don’t agree with how they’re living their life. They probably, there’s probably someone looking at you saying the same thing.
Tina Gosney 05:17
So that’s something that tears us apart, and we have differing values. Think about what values are. Those are the things that guide us in our lives. We live and make decisions and choices and go in certain directions because of the values that we have, and if those values are very different from the people in your family that can feel really, really hard. It’s like you don’t you’re missing each other. You don’t understand really, why anyone’s doing anything and the choices that they’re making.
Tina Gosney 05:52
And this, all of this is creating conflict in our families, and just because you have conflict in your family, relationships doesn’t mean something bad. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with your family. Think about this, if you have conflict in your family, it means those relationships are important, and you want to stay in them. They’re meaningful, they’re important, they’re precious. I want to stay in them because I’m trying to resolve something. If we didn’t care about the relationship, it would be so easy to just get up and walk away, or to give it no mind at all.
Tina Gosney 06:32
Conflict is like, it’s like going to a fancy restaurant where you have a delicious meal and then you have to pay the bill. There’s always two sides to everything. If you didn’t have precious, wonderful, important relationships in your family that sometimes feel like a warm, delicious meal, then you wouldn’t have the conflict. You wouldn’t have to pay the bill. If you never sit down and eat the meal, you don’t ever have to pay the bill. The benefit of paying that bill is having that delicious meal in the first place.
Tina Gosney 07:09
What is conflict anyway? If you give it a definition, if you said this is what conflict is, you probably have an idea of what that looks like. And I think everybody might have a different view of what conflict looks like, although maybe similar, but I think a little different, according to, you know, your life experience. But as I looked at what conflict is in general, I think it’s really mismatched expectations. We all have things that we want, we have needs that we want to take care of for ourselves, and we have strategies. We employ strategies in our life to meet those needs. And often, when you’re in conflict, your basic needs and the other person’s basic needs are in conflict. They’re not meshing the way that you’re trying to take care of getting your needs met and the way they’re trying to take care of their getting their needs met is not going together. It sometimes is even hurting and clashing against each other, kind of like rubbing up against each other in a painful way.
Tina Gosney 08:21
We will often expect people in our lives, especially the people that we care about and that we are in close relationships with. We want them to see the world the same way that we do. We want them to have our same values, to agree with our decisions and agree with their decisions, and agree with the way that we want to take care of the things in our lives and solve problems when we have significant things like values that are clashing with somebody else’s, it’s really easy to have conflict with Somebody, but I want you to start thinking about conflict differently. Conflict is not bad.
Tina Gosney 09:08
Conflict helps us. It really helps us to wake up to who we are. We don’t realize how often we are just sleeping in our own lives, not paying attention to what is going on deep down, inside of our soul, inside of our brain, inside of our spirit. But conflict can help us to wake up and start noticing that, and it helps us to get to know other people better, the people that we care about. It helps us to get to know them better. But our first reaction when conflict happens, our immediate reaction is to say, This is bad. This is not supposed to be happening. It might look like, Oh, I’m such a terrible person that I’m thinking this way, or that I reacted that way, and we internalize that badness. Or. We can often look outside of ourselves and point a finger at somebody else and say, I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’re a bad person, and we externalize it, and usually this paired with this is not supposed to be happening. I don’t like this. I don’t want it to happen.
Tina Gosney 10:19
It’s really common to point a finger inward or outward and begin seeing ourselves or other person is bad. I want you to think of a recent time when you were in conflict with someone. What were you thinking? Do you remember what the thoughts were that were going through your head? This person is bad. I’m bad. Why did I do that? Why are they doing that this shouldn’t be happening? Did any of those thoughts or similar ones go through your mind? If they you said, yes, you’re pretty normal. Think of a time when you had a real conflict with someone, and you worked through it, and then you had an even closer, a stronger, more trusting relationship with them after the conflict.
Tina Gosney 11:08
That’s what conflict can help us do. It can help us grow in intimacy. And intimacy is knowing ourselves better, knowing someone else better, letting them know us better. That’s what intimacy is. It’s the willingness to know someone at a deeper level and to let them know you on a deeper level.
Tina Gosney 11:34
If we just looked at an example of recent conflict in the world, or mainly in our country, but I think it goes beyond that. Let’s just pull up the election. I mean, that’s a really hot topic these days. I’m recording this podcast right after the election. I’ve heard a lot of stories about family members fighting, really, being very unhappy with each other, fighting a lot of conflict, not even to the point of not speaking to each other because they were voting for different candidates, a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of fighting about who was right who was wrong, saying we don’t even have the same values. And that leads us to re evaluate the relationship in a way that you’re thinking like, I don’t even know who you are. How could you vote for that person?
Tina Gosney 12:31
We’ve lost the ability so often. We’ve lost it to be able to be together and to be different the same time, sometimes really significantly different. We have these shattered expectations of each other, and we don’t know how to put them back together. I don’t think we have a whole lot of role models that are showing us what that looks like.
Tina Gosney 12:53
Think about when you are hurt because you’ve been triggered. Something happens you’re in conflict with someone. Think about what happens inside of your body. Your body goes into fight, flight or freeze. Those are all survival modes in your body. Think of our ancient ancestors out on the tundra being life threatened, and they have to either get ready to fight, they have to run away, or they have to play dead. Well, we will do the same thing. We’ve view these contact, these conflicts, as a threat to us. Our body and our mind are interpreting them as threats, and so then we start acting in order to protect ourselves. But think about being disagreeing with someone is not a threat to your life, but your brain and your body are interpreting it that way. It’s saying you need to protect yourself right now, you’re in danger.
Tina Gosney 13:56
Are you actually in danger? Probably not. Most likely not. So who are you protecting yourself from? You feel like you have to protect yourself from that other person. And if that other person is in your family, that person becomes the bad person that you’re pointing your finger at.
Tina Gosney 14:17
I do want to take just a pause here and give this short, important disclaimer, if you are being abused, if your life actually is threatened, if you’re being abused in any way, you actually do need to protect yourself, and so your number one job is to get yourself to safety. And I want you to stop listening to this podcast and go get yourself to safety if you’re not being abused and your life is not in danger. I really hope you’ll listen to the end of this podcast. I think I’ve got some good things in store for you.
Tina Gosney 14:54
I’ve been working with parents for a long time now, and mainly the parents that I work with have. Children that are late teens, 20s, sometimes enter their 30s or 40s, and I I see how these parents love their children. They love their children. I understand that I feel the same way about mine and those parents, they love those children even if they’re not getting any love back, it’s easier to love them if they’re getting the love back, but that’s not a requirement. They would do anything for these kids, and the things that they’ve shared with me let me know that sometimes that kid is not feeling the love from the parent, and sometimes it’s because that parent is so stuck in being right and not differing in their views, and not being willing to open up their mind, crack open their mind and see what they’re missing, or they’re so stuck in their own hurt from how their child has hurt them that then they turn around and they act in ways that hurt their child.
Tina Gosney 16:06
The parent says hurtful things because they’re hurt. There’s really something to that little saying that says hurt people. Hurt people. Now it’s really difficult. It’s a really difficult situation when the parent is seeing the child as someone they have to protect themselves from. And it’s also a very difficult situation when that child sees their parent as someone they have to protect themselves from. How do we stop doing this?
Tina Gosney 16:39
The very first thing we have to do is get our body out of fight, flight or freeze mode, nothing productive will happen in that relationship until we can bring that response down. That involves calming your body and quieting your mind. Some of the ways that we can do that is to breathe. We slow our breath down, especially focusing on a longer exhale that will quiet, that will quiet that brain and that body down even faster. Focus on the exhale ground yourself somehow, sometimes we need to take a time out, and we just need to excuse ourself from the situation physically and go to another place. Here’s what’s not helpful to calm your body and quiet your mind is to go get on your phone and numb yourself, or to go into the pantry and find something to eat, or just get on the computer and mindlessly scroll or watch some binge some Netflix show. Those things might temporarily move the situation down the road, but they are not helpful in calming your body and quieting your mind. Those are not helpful activities,
Tina Gosney 18:01
really being in it and helping our body to learn how to calm down. That is helpful. If you know Brene Brown, who is amazing. If you don’t know her and her work, I suggest looking her up. She’s got some great books, some great videos online, but she talks about having tools in our toolbox and how we need more than one tool in our toolbox? Well, this calming your body and quieting your mind is a big tool. There’s a lot of different types of ways you can do that, but this is a tool that it’s like in your toolbox. It’s like the hammer. What use is a toolbox without a hammer?
Tina Gosney 18:43
And what use is anything to help your relationship if you don’t know how to calm yourself down, that’s how important it is. It’s always the first step next, after we’ve calmed ourselves down and we’ve brought our thinking brain back online, we have to take back our responsibility. So when you see the other person as someone that you have to protect yourself from, you’ve actually turned yourself into a victim.
Tina Gosney 19:13
What if you’re not actually a victim? What if you do have power to decide how you want to respond. To do that, you have to move your thoughts from being wrapped up in all that emotion. You have to move them into the front of your brain. This is called your prefrontal cortex. Your that part of your brain is the higher thinking brain, and that brain has the ability to reason, to see different perspectives, to respond in a responsible way. You want to see where is my responsibility? Where is my ability to do what I need to do to take care of myself right now? Because. Remember, we’re trying to get our needs met, and often the ways that we’re trying to get our needs met are bumping up against the way someone else is trying to get their needs met.
Tina Gosney 20:09
So how do you get your needs met? Are you able to give them to yourself and step away from trying to get the other person to give that to you? How do you give it to yourself? Doing this process is going to help you move from being rigid and contracted into flexible. We want to think of having a firm back but a soft front. We don’t want to be so rigid that we don’t let anything in, and we’re never challenging any view of how we’re seeing something and we are shutting other people out. That is a surefire way to damage our relationship and to keep people away from you.
Tina Gosney 20:55
You want to be flexible. When the winds, the storms come and the conflict comes, you want to be flexible. You want to go with the flow, but still be deeply rooted in how you are managing yourself. If you are wanting some help with this, there is some help in the guide that I was talking about earlier in the podcast. It’s going to help you learn how to keep your cool. It’s going to help you walk through a process to create a plan ahead of time, which is also one of the great things that our prefrontal cortex can do, is to create a plan ahead of time. Our emotional lower brain that just reacts to everything, doesn’t have that ability, but when we plan ahead of time that’s using our higher brain.
Tina Gosney 21:44
So go download that, that free PDF. It’s pretty short. You can get through it in just an hour or two.
Tina Gosney 21:52
Now, if I was listening to this podcast a few years ago, I would have said something like, why is it just my job to always be the responsible one? Doesn’t that other person have any responsibility here? Are they just allowed to continue to do whatever they want and to continue to hurt me, and I’m the one that has to do all the work? Yeah, I would have said that. And I think there’s probably people listening right now that are saying the same thing.
Tina Gosney 22:23
When you begin to take responsibility for yourself, when you start taking a step back, you calm yourself down. You take a step back, you are actually taking care of yourself and your own needs, and you become more firmly rooted in you know that tree that I mentioned before that has the deep roots. Your roots go deeper, and you are able to more easily speak up for what you want and what you need, and sometimes the other person will still be unwilling to give that to you. That’s okay to put some healthy boundaries into place when you need to, but when you speak up for yourself, your roots are growing deeper every single time.
Tina Gosney 23:10
I also talk to parents who have this thought in their minds. They say, I just want everyone to get along. I just want everything to be peaceful, to have a good time. I’m so I end up walking on eggshells just to make sure that the piece is there, but that nobody gets upset. And I’m constantly putting out the little fires and trying to manage everybody. Well, that’s exhausting, first of all, and it’s not really possible. Pretending that there isn’t conflict is not going to make it so it just makes your family. It just makes that environment an unsafe place to express what you’re thinking and feeling, and I’m going to show you an alternative to that in a minute.
Tina Gosney 23:51
But stick with me here, because when we try to push away conflict and just manage everybody else so that we can feel like our family is great. We get along just fine. It becomes like an iceberg. Think of an iceberg, and there’s the part that’s above the water, and there’s a part that’s underneath the water. There’s a portion of it that you can see. This is the relationship that you see that looks so peaceful. It looks like everybody’s getting along. It looks like we’ve got great relationships. How much of the relationship exists under the surface that we’re not willing to look at? Every time we push away conflict and we walk on eggshells and we try to manage somebody else, it’s like that water level rises and more of the relationship gets pushed underneath the water where it can’t be addressed, and less and less of that is above water. The real health of the relationship exists underneath. When you’re willing to go underneath to water level, you’re really approaching working. On a healthier family, a healthier family relationships. The goal is not to never have conflict or to brush it under the rug. It’s the goal is to help the family learn how to move through it and to grow closer because of that.
Tina Gosney 25:17
Now, if you have tried this, if you have tried if you have people in your family that are in conflict and you’ve tried to bring them together and that didn’t work, or maybe you’re in conflict with someone and you tried to address it and it didn’t work, maybe it’s getting worse then. I just want to let you know that everyone comes to their desire and their ability to let go of being a victim in their own time. Not everyone is ready to let go of that. Not everyone is ready to take responsibility for themselves right now today.
Tina Gosney 25:56
Sometimes it happens next week, next year. 10 years from now, sometime it will happen after they leave this earth. Some people will never be ready to let go of that until they leave the Earth. But if this is what you want for your family, you want your family to learn how to move through conflict you’re tired of brushing things under the rug, then you can be the one that leads out and shows the example. It’s really hard for people to do what they have never seen done before, and most people have never seen this done before. They’ve only seen examples of everything that we’re not supposed to do with conflict. But if you want your family to head in a different direction. You can give them a model. You can show them a model to pattern themselves after, and then when they are ready to let go of being a victim and take responsibility for themselves, they know what it looks like because they’ve seen you do it.
Tina Gosney 26:59
You are the Pioneer. You are the one that is riding that difficult road. You’re going off the main path, and it’s going to be rough, because anytime you go off the well worn path, you’re going through lots of, you know, trees and grass and rocks and fallen logs and whatever, but it’s just a rougher road, and just be prepared for that, but you can be the one that leads out. Here’s my takeaway for today, conflict and challenges are an opportunity to learn and grow, as long as we use the tools and we’re learning to move through those and we’re using healthy relationship tools. I teach you so many of those tools in this podcast, and if you need a refresher, if you want to go remind yourself of some of those,
Tina Gosney 27:51
just about any episode that you click on will be helpful for you, but I just pulled out a few recent ones that I thought, you know, I’m going to send them to these ones, because I think they’ll be really helpful. That’s number 133 which addresses conflict or contention. Which one is it? Number 144, about healthier boundaries. Episode 155 responding, responding intentionally and not from automatic programming. And then episode 158 seeing what’s in your control and what isn’t family.
Tina Gosney 28:25
Conflict is difficult, and it’s normal. If you have conflict in your family, nothing is wrong. It’s just showing you. It’s like shining a flashlight on where your work is.
Tina Gosney 28:37
When you stay in your family relationships, those are your personal growth machine. So stay open to that process, even when it’s messy. I’ll see you next time you.
