#162 – Moving Through Family Conflict, part 2
When you’re in conflict with another person, that’s normal and should be expected. The way you handle that conflict is important and can either damage the relationship or strengthen it.
This episode goes into the tools of Differentiation and how we can use these tools to navigate conflict while strengthening ourselves and the relationship.
If you dream of a PEACEFUL holiday season with your family, but someone or something always throws you out of peace and into web of stress, this guide is for you.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone would behave just the way you want them to?
It’s time to stop wishing for a miracle, and deal with the reality of your family dynamics.
This guide will be your holiday lifesaver.
The 3-Step Solution to Keeping Your Cool Around Family Holiday Drama
Full Transcript
When I was younger, I had really big plans every holiday season that came around, I just had big plans. I didn’t ever learn, it seems, from the holiday season from the previous year, but I remember really wanting to have this magical holiday season where I had these big, giant plans, these big, elaborate plans, and I did everything perfectly. Everything came off without a hitch. Everyone, of course, was happy all the time. And not only could I pull off these big plans, but I also had enough energy to do that, and I got to have plenty of time to sit back and enjoy everything that I had planned and all my creations Well, never turned out that way. Not one time I really wanted it to and I kept thinking I could make it happen, but something always went wrong, which means it was not following the plan that I had created in my own head, because someone was always unhappy with what I had planned, and I always greatly overextended myself, and I overestimated what I could do and how much energy I was going to have.
01:31
And then by the time the holidays came, I was exhausted, I was stressed out, and I was resentful. So if any of this resonates with you, if you ever done anything like me, then I want you to download this guide that I’ve created for you. It’s how to keep your cool around family holiday drama. So even if that drama is of your own, creating, like much of mine was, this guide’s going to help you. It’s going to help you change things up this season, so that you can feel more peaceful, so you can let go of things that you can’t control. Anytime we create a plan ahead of time, and this is what is this guide will help you to do is to create a plan ahead of time for how you want to enjoy the holidays. You’re going to show up in a much more intentional way. You’re not going to let things crowd in and take over that without you actively saying yes to them.
02:30
So this guide is going to be your holiday life saver. I want you to go to the link in the show notes right now. Just pause this recording, go to the link in the show notes and go download that guide.
02:42
I have a parable for you today. This is called the parable of the porcupines. Did you know A group of porcupines is called a prickle? Isn’t that such a fitting word for porcupines? Porcupines are also pretty solitary animals, but they do like to get together in small groups, usually families, and they will sometimes travel with families.
03:07
Well, this particular winter was a very cold, bitter winter, and the porcupines were suffering. This prickle of porcupines was really suffering in this cold, frigid temperatures. So they discovered, if they huddled together, they could survive, and they would be warmer, and their closeness. When they got close together, it would provide enough heat for them, and it protects them from those harsh winter, cold temperatures. But there was a problem when they got so close together, because porcupines have quills, and their quills began to stick each other, and they were wounding each other. They were hurting each other. They decided that it was better for them to just separate, go their separate ways, instead of wounding and hurting each other. So they all went off on their own.
04:00
Well, it didn’t take very long for them to see that they were starting to freeze and die again. And collectively, they just got together and they said, okay, the wounds that we’re getting from being close together is a better option than dying alone and freezing. So they were just going to have to endure the pains of the wounds that they were giving each other, and they survived the winter, but they didn’t do they didn’t survive without each having their own set of wounds from being close together.
04:30
Think about this past week or two. Did you get needled by someone? Did you get a wound from someone?
04:39
Did you needle someone did you give someone a wound? So if we’re really honest with ourselves, we’re going to see how often we get needled and how often we needle.
04:51
Last week’s episode was about conflict. This week’s episode is about conflict. You don’t have to have listened to the one last week, but it would be helpful.
05:00
Well, if you did before you listened to this one, but this one can kind of stand on its own as well. I did talk about last week how our conflict usually happens because we each have needs that we’re trying to get met. I have my needs, you have your needs, and we each have strategies for getting those needs met, and many times, our strategies for getting our own needs met will rub up against someone else’s strategies for them getting their needs met the I think the tricky thing is, is when we are finding ourselves in conflict and our strategies are rubbing up against each other, we’re pricking each other with porcupine quills. How do we even know what our needs are? Sometimes we are not in touch with ourselves, and I think most of the time, we are not in touch with ourselves in knowing what we really need, in asking ourselves, what’s my real need here?
05:57
Want to give you four basic needs that we all have, and most needs will fit into one of these. We call them our energy centers. And when our energy centers are triggered, when we feel like this need is not being met, and it triggers just an automatic response in us to then go into kind of a fight or flight state. So the first one is we need to be safe and secure. We all have a need for safety and security. In fact, if you were deprived of safety and security at some point in your life, usually early in your childhood, which most people were, even if you were had all the resources in the world, there is some way that you were deprived of safety and security. That’s going to be a big one for you.
06:53
The second one is we want to seek pleasure, avoid pain. This is actually a natural thing that our brain does, and when we are trying to get the pleasure or avoid pain, and someone is in the way of that, that can be a big energy trigger for us.
07:09
The third one is we want to be able to control things. We want to have certainty in our lives. We want to know what we can count on. We want to know that we can, by sheer force of will, our own will that we can make something happen that we want to have happen, and when things seem out of control or someone is in the way of me getting what I want, that is really hard.
07:32
The fourth one is we all want esteem and affection. We want to be looked at and admired by other people. We want to be seen as worthy and valuable. We want them to reinforce the way that we want to be seen to us, and when we’re the way that we want to be seen is not being reinforced by someone that can be a big energy trigger. So all the needs, almost all needs, are going to fit into one of those four categories, if you’re trying to figure out if you’re in conflict with someone, and you’re trying to figure out, what do I really need go into those four categories, see if it fits into one of those categories.
08:11
For you, we all have two great relationship needs. We have the need for autonomy and the need for connection. So autonomy is the relationship that we have with ourselves. We want to belong to ourselves. We want the freedom to find and seek happiness, to be authentically who we we feel that we are. We want to live a pain free life. We want to explore in the world and find out who we want to be. We just want to be able to actualize and grow and have a strong self esteem.
08:50
And our second need is to be in community. We want to be a part of a community. We want to have other people know us and we want to know them. We want to be able to give and receive love. We want the safety of being part of a group that values us. Then we have the need for someone to witness our life. We want to be seen, heard and valued. But these are like the porcupines, right when we’re close to other people, we wound other people, and they wound us. And when we’re on our own, we don’t thrive. And if we cut off contact with all the people who love us and just people in general, we can go downhill very quickly.
09:34
So when we prioritize our need for autonomy and we try to cut off our need for community. We’re like those porcupines freezing out in the cold all by themselves. And what happens usually is we’re going to start to blame somebody else for how we’re feeling. We’re going to hold on to being right, and we use that to feel more in control of our own life. And this is just natural reactions from our survival brain.
10:01
But our survival brain is not the same as our relational brain, because when we’re in survival mode, our focus gets really narrow. We start feeling a lot of tension in our body. Last week, I talked about the fight, flight or freeze response, and that is a survival response, and our narrow vision happens on purpose, because our body is helping us. Thinks that we really need to survive, that we’re fighting for our life, and it’s prioritizing those different types of things in our bodies to make that happen for us. When we prioritize our need for community, and we cut off our need for to be a self for autonomy. We get deeper wounds. We move in closer to other people. We start getting deeper wounds. We stop giving ourselves what we need, and we’re trying to get it from somebody else, and in the process, we start wounding other people too. We start internalizing blame. We start saying things to us like, oh, there’s something wrong with me. And then we can get really needy, and we start trying to get what we’re supposed to give ourselves. We try to get it from somebody else, and that never works well.
11:15
A few years ago, my husband and I decided to start really working on this, that this, this balance, the need to be individual selves and to come together as a couple. And we started taking courses. We started doing coaching. We started reading a lot of books together. We have a lot of discussions, most of the time, most of the time, difficult discussions, not always, but a lot of them were very difficult, and we each had to be willing to look at ourselves with more honesty, and it’s made a huge difference in our relationship.
11:51
And this is called we’re working on differentiation. And now my husband is a firm believer in differentiation, and he will tell anybody that wants to talk to him about it. He says, differentiation is the secret to life. You need to learn how to do it. You need to learn how to do it now. But this is really something that we are a work in progress on, and this is the work of a lifetime becoming differentiated. None of us that are living on this earth are perfectly differentiated. We all struggle with this, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.
12:26
Now, what I’m talking about with my husband, of course, is a marriage a partner relationship that’s very different than a friendship relationship or a parenting relationship or a sibling relationship, and when you are in those other types of relationships, well, actually, even when you’re in a marriage relationship, you can’t count on the other person doing working on differentiation with you. Most of the time, you’re not going to be able to count on someone else doing it with you. Most of the time it will just be you, which is good and good news and bad news, right? It’s going to be great that you get to have control over what you’re doing. You have the ability to control you and decide what you how you are going to show up, and nobody else gets to decide that for you.
13:19
And that’s the good news, and the bad news is the other person is probably not going to understand what you’re doing and what you’re trying to do and why you’re changing things, because they’re used to you acting a certain way, and now all of a sudden, you’re acting differently. And that can cause friction, especially in the beginning, and when we see that friction, which we could also call conflict. We don’t like that, and when we start getting pushback from the other person, it’s really easy for us then to revert back and do things the way that we used to. Like this isn’t working. It’s just causing more problems. Why am I trying to change anything? I’m just going to go back and do things the way I used to so common. It’s actually a sign that things are working and that you are moving forward.
14:08
If you hit that friction, that conflict, it shows you that you are doing something different, and you’re going to have to go through some messiness before you get to a more peaceful side. But before we get to that, it’s really common to flip back and forth. I’m going to prioritize myself, and then that doesn’t feel good, so I’m going to prioritize my relationships with other people, and then we get wounded by each of side, and we just keep flipping back and forth from my relationship with me, and I got to prioritize me to I got to prioritize my relationships with others, and until we start learning how to work both of these at the same time, incorporate them. Have them work together, bring them closer together.
14:57
We’re going to be wounding and being wounded, over and over again.
15:02
This is differentiation. It’s being more mature in our relationships by taking ownership of our own thoughts, feelings and actions. We want to know how to be our authentic, strong, flexible self and stay in a relationship with another person, especially when it’s difficult.
15:24
There’s four steps. These are the steps that I work on with my clients. The first one is we need to build a more solid version of ourselves, solid, but flexible. And this is what I mean by that we do not know ourselves very well if you haven’t purposefully worked on getting to know yourself and gone deep with yourself, you don’t know yourself very well.
15:50
So you have to know who you are. What are your values, what’s important to you? Why do you have the patterns that you do? Why do you show up the ways that you do? We need to know all those things we need to be honest with ourselves, and so often we are not honest with ourselves because we have this thing called an ego. And the ego we can we’re just going to say that is the it’s the stories that we have about who we believe that we are, the way that we want to see ourselves, and our ego brain is really, really strong. It just tries to reinforce this view that you have of yourself, and it’s going to keep you blocked from seeing anything that doesn’t reinforce that that view.
16:31
So when you’re trying to move past the ego, that can be really tricky to do by yourself, because you’re literally being blocked from seeing things that your brain will not let you see so by being honest with ourselves, being honest with others, we really start developing a more solid self. We need to be flexible. We need to be flexible in letting that view of ourself change over time as we gain more information.
16:59
Second thing we need to do is we need to know how to calm ourselves down. There’s this quote that I’d like to I just love this quote by Viktor Frankl, and I’m just going to paraphrase it, but he says, between stimulus and response, there’s a space in that space is your ability to choose your response, and that’s where you’re going to find your growth and your freedom.
17:22
The Gottman lab. Now, the gottmans are a couple that run the the they’re relationship experts. They run this lab in Seattle, where they have people come, couples come, and they watch them. They hook them up to monitor so they can see what their bodies are doing and how they’re responding to what’s going what’s happening around them. And they have them in this lab. They have lots of video cameras up, and they’ll run different experiments. And there was one experiment that they had where they brought couples in, just one couple at a time, but they did this so many times, where they would bring in a couple. They would hook them up to these monitors. They would have all these video cameras around, and they would give them a difficult topic to discuss.
18:11
And because they were hooked up to these monitors, they could see how their bodies were reacting when certain things were talked about and brought up in a discussion. Just as their bodies were getting heightened in their response, they would tell the couple, oh, sorry, we’re having some technical issues. We need you to pause this conversation. Would you go into that room over there? And you go into that room over there? We’ll let you know when we’re ready for you to come back. So they had each person separate into a different room for at least 15 minutes and then, and that’s all that they told them. And then when they came back, their bodies were actually more calm. They were able to continue that discussion in a more calm manner than they that they would have been if they had not stopped them. So that’s the space that was a 15 minute space, and that space was not their choice. It was what they were told to do, right?
19:06
So it takes 15 minutes for those stress hormones when we’re we’re in a heightened state, it takes 15 minutes at least, for those stress hormones to run through our body so that we can calm down those people were not told to calm themselves down, they were just separated for 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you were purposefully separating and trying to calm down, and you had tools to do that, to deliberately calm yourself down? What a difference that could make in your discussions, in the way that you react to someone, in the way that you feel about yourself, because we don’t like ourselves when we show up in that survival mode.
19:53
This is another thing I work a lot on with my clients, is to know how to calm ourselves down.
20:01
And then number three is we need to know how to respond from a grounded place, keeping that calm in our body, which is tricky. It can be really tricky, especially when something else comes in and we feel triggered all over again. But we need better ways of talking with each other. We need better ways of communicating. We need better ways of taking care of ourselves and our own reactions when we’re in an interaction, in a conversation, in a situation where it feels like things are going out of control. But what we usually do is we start getting defensive. We start trying to protect ourselves. We try to prove that we’re right and keep pushing on the I’m right and you’re wrong button, we try to stay in control. Being trying to be right vertically does have us thinking that we’re more in control. If we can just prove to the other person that we’re right, then it keeps we can stay in control. But all of those things really escalate a situation.
21:04
So we’ll either do that or there are a lot of people that just try to smooth things over. They’re just like, let’s just forget it. Let’s just move on. Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway. And we try to smooth things over as quickly as possible, and we really miss the connection that we could create with another person, and then we just kind of push things down the road. Just because we don’t address them doesn’t mean that they go away. We push them down the road, and they tend to get bigger before they get addressed.
21:35
So responding from a grounded place, knowing how to do that, super important.
21:41
And the fourth thing that we need to remember and that we need to work on is being willing to stay in a relationship even when it gets hard, because we know we’re doing it for a reason. We know that there’s something on the other side of that that we really want, and so we’re willing to go through the hard parts of it to get there. This is the part of us that says I really care about you, and I really care about me, and I really care about this relationship that we have together, and so I’m going to stick in it. I’m going to stay in it for the hard stuff. This is exactly what our brain tells us not to do, because our brain will tell us when things get hard, you need to move away. It doesn’t say go towards. It says move away. Our natural inclination is to move away when things get hard or we see pain, and so we just need to develop this ability to to do hard things.
22:38
And I do want us to listen to ourselves. I think it’s important to listen to ourselves and honor what we need, but we also need to recognize when our brain is trying to sabotage us, and we need to recognize that we have the ability to tell ourselves that we are going to do hard things. And that doesn’t just apply to exercise, sports, diet, things like school, work, all those other things that we use. Usually apply that, saying to that I can do hard things. We don’t usually apply it to relationships. We apply it to all those other things. So those are the four things, developing a solid, flexible self, knowing how to calm our brain and our body, down, responding from a grounded place, holding on to that grounded place and sticking in it for the long haul, even when it gets hard, when you’re developing differentiation, it can be really frustrating if you’re the only one working on it.
23:38
But remember, this only takes you when you start developing this, you don’t actually need the other person to do anything for you to start being more mature in the way that you are handling yourself and in your relationships. When you start working on this, it helps you to develop as a person. It really is easier if somebody else is willing to be there and do it with you. It’s not necessary, but it does make it easier. But you don’t have to have buy in from anyone else to be able to work on this. And I want you to remember that it’s really normal to see this as something that is hard because it’s directly against what so many of us have done our whole lives. And so we’re going to get dragged back into old patterns quite often, especially at the beginning. It’s really normal to get dragged back into the things that we didn’t want to do. And what I want you to do is just notice when you get dragged back. Just take an honest look at what you could have done differently, and then just get back on and try again.
24:46
This is not about perfection. It’s about progress, because we never will get to a place of being perfect in differentiation on this earth.
24:56
If you want to start working on this now, I have the best place for you to go right now is to download that free PDF that I have for you and start creating a plan for the holidays. Right now is always the best place to start.
25:12
Here’s my takeaway for today. Conflict is inevitable. It’s just part of being in a relationship, the desire to be close to someone, and the desire to be undisturbed by them is one of the great polarities of life. As a human on this earth, it’s the journey of a lifetime to figure out how to integrate both of those desires. So give yourself time, give yourself compassion and grace, and you’re going to stumble your way through it, and that is perfect, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
25:47
That’s what I have for you today. I want you to remember that your family relationships are your own personal growth machine. Stay open to the process even when it’s messy.
