Episode 153 – The Benefits of Going Beyond a Surface Level Relationship
Close relationships are what make us happy – now and in the future. But they require effort and intention over time – sometimes over a long period of time. Listen to this episode to find out why you want to put in that time and effort, and a few things to focus on to get started.
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Full Transcript
Tina Gosney 00:05
Are your family relationships feeling disconnected, maybe contentious? If you’re ready to begin repairing relationships and connect on a whole new level so that you can feel more peace and love in your family, then come with me. I’m going to show you how. I’m Tina Gosney, a certified life and advanced relationship coach, and I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s get started.
Tina Gosney 00:30
I want you to imagine, just for a minute that you want to plant a tree, and you’re going to do it from a seed. You find the perfect spot that will have lots of sunlight, or it will have some great fertile ground to grow in, where it’s free from any debris, and it’s just going to have lots and lots of room to grow. And you have found this perfect spot, and you plant the seed, and then you start to water and fertilize and weed around it and make sure it has optimal conditions every single day. And you continue to do this day after day after day.
Tina Gosney 01:15
Let’s just imagine that you did that for six months. You’re not seeing anything pop above ground. There’s nothing coming above ground. In fact, everything indicates that there’s nothing happening with that seed, but you continue to water and fertilize and make sure that it’s free of weeds and that it’s getting everything that it needs to to survive and thrive.
Tina Gosney 01:36
Do you continue to water that seed after six months? Do you continue to water it for a year if you still don’t see anything pop up above ground? What about two years you are showing up every day, watering the seed, making sure it’s got lots of nutrients, taking care of it, nurturing it. You see nothing. It’s been two years? Would you keep would you keep watering it? Would you keep showing up every day? What if it was three years? What about four years?
Tina Gosney 02:11
I don’t think most people would continue to show up and water a seed that they saw no visible signs of life for four years. I actually don’t even think most people would do it for even six months, but that’s what this tree does. This is the Chinese bamboo tree.
Tina Gosney 02:30
Now, if you don’t know what the Chinese bamboo tree does, if you don’t know that that’s normal for that seed, then you would probably stop watering that seed. You would probably stop watering, and then the seed would die. And you would say, see, I’ve got proof. Now that was just a waste of my time. I never should have put in all that effort. That was just a waste. Or maybe you would have dug up the seed to see, is anything happening down here, and then that would have killed it.
Tina Gosney 02:59
The Chinese bamboo tree is an amazing tree, because in the fifth year, it will grow up to 90 feet in just six weeks. This is really cool. You can even watch YouTube videos of the Chinese bamboo tree growing. Did it grow? Did it just decide, after five years, oh, I think that they’ve put enough time in now I’m going to start growing. No, it was growing the whole time. It was just underneath ground. You couldn’t see the growth. And those roots were going so deep and so wide, deep and wide so that it could support the growth that happens in the fifth year. Without that foundation, it would never be able to do what it did.
Tina Gosney 03:50
What does this have to do with your family? And why am I talking about the Chinese bamboo tree on the Coaching Your Family Relationships podcast? Because relationships need to be watered. They need to be cared for and fertilized, and we need to nurture them.
Tina Gosney 04:08
Harvard, years ago, in the 1930s they started a study. In fact, this study is still going on today. It’s the longest running study to date, and this is called the Harvard happiness study. They studied a lot of different things. They wanted to know what makes people happy, what really creates true, lasting happiness in our lives. And they they studied a lot of different things.
Tina Gosney 04:34
They started out with over 700 people that they were studying, and they grabbed half the group from Harvard, and they grabbed half a group, half of the group, from the slums of Boston, where people were very disadvantaged, and they had a very different life than the men who were at Harvard, and they studied a lot of different things about their lives. And I’ve talked about the Harvard happiness study before in this podcast, so I’m not going to go into depth into it, but what they found was that the number one thing that creates a happy, fulfilled life is close relationships.
Tina Gosney 05:18
Now you don’t need a lot of relationships. You just need a few, a handful of close relationships where you can really care about someone and they can really care about you, where they know that if they hit hard times, if they need help, you’re going to be there for them, and vice versa, you’re going to be able to call on them to help you when that happens to you. And they found that those close relationships contribute to the health of our bodies, to the health of our brains and to the quality of life, and it actually extends our life to have quality close relationships.
Tina Gosney 05:56
They also found the opposite was true. To prove the opposite – chronic loneliness kills. It is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese. That’s the effect that it has on our health and life longevity. So relationships create happiness, but they have to be close, supportive relationships.
Tina Gosney 06:22
And I recently heard, I forgot where I heard it. They called it a friendship crisis. We’re in the middle of a friendship crisis right now, which has been exacerbated since covid. And used to be that people had a group their people, or they had a handful of close friends. Now it’s common to hear I have a friend, and it’s even more common to hear I don’t have any friends.
Tina Gosney 06:47
So why is this happening? Because we are not equipping ourselves or our families to go deeper, to develop deep, deep relationship roots. We’re staying on the surface of our relationships because it’s safer to be there, and our brain will always prioritize the safety. We get very vulnerable when we go deep and we let somebody into our inner world, and when we try to enter theirs.
Tina Gosney 07:20
And I think a lot of times we think that we already know what someone is all about. We just observe from the outside. We see what they do and the things that they say and the ways that they act, and we think we know them, when actuality we’re probably wrong. And we also don’t know how to talk about difficult things. We’re not spending enough time and effort that we need to nurture and care for a relationship that will let roots run deep.
Tina Gosney 07:54
We’re expecting more quick, quick results and results that we can see and measure and that we can count on. We are not counting the time and effort, just like the Chinese bamboo tree that it takes you’re watering year after year after year, and you might not see the results for a while. I think one of the main reasons that we are trying to stay on the surface of relationships is because we can’t know someone else at a deeper level than we know ourselves, and we’re very blind to ourselves.
Tina Gosney 08:31
It’s very hard to know yourself as much as we think we know ourselves. We know very little of ourselves, and so we continue to stay on surface level relationships.
Tina Gosney 08:42
Years and years ago, my husband and I had a tree in our yard, and I don’t know what kind of tree it was, but it had really shallow roots, and those roots started rooting up the sidewalk, and they started creating a problem. They were coming up in the lawn. They started creating plumbing problems for us, but those roots were shallow. Those trees grew really fast, but the roots were very shallow.
Tina Gosney 09:08
And where we lived, we had a lot of summer monsoons, as we called them, but they were very, very violent, sometimes wind storms with rain and just like really intense summer storms, and after those storms, you would see a lot of those same kind of trees had fallen down, or they had lost a big branch, maybe it fell on somebody’s car, or it fell on someone’s roof, and, you know, damaged their house.
Tina Gosney 09:39
But how often does that happen with us in our relationships? We stay on the surface of things, we don’t go deep. And then when a storm comes, when something really difficult happens, everything kind of falls apart, and we leave the relationship. We don’t know how to handle that, and it gets really difficult, and then we just abandon it, or we don’t know how to be there for each other. There. And so even when something’s difficult, we still stay on the surface. We don’t know how to sit with someone who’s going through really difficult things and just be there with them in that experience.
Tina Gosney 10:12
And we can get lonely. We might have a lot of people around us, but we can get really lonely in a big room full of people. So where do we start to grow those deep roots? How do we start nurturing relationship seeds, even when we can’t see the results? How do we do that?
Tina Gosney 10:30
Well the number one thing I want you to think about is to get curious. Like I said, you can’t go deeper with someone else than you’re willing to go with yourself.
Tina Gosney 10:39
And this might sound counterintuitive, but when you focus on yourself, you will improve your relationships with other people.
Tina Gosney 10:48
Getting just being willing to know yourself on a deeper level, who are you really? Not someone, not the person that someone told you that you were, or who you believe that you are, or your accomplishments or your titles or your talents or your roles that you play, but who are you really?
Tina Gosney 11:10
I heard this from my one of my mentors, Thomas McConkie, and he said just about every idea that you’ve ever had about yourself is fundamentally inaccurate. And I have come to see that firsthand in myself, because most people are going to just go off of what everybody else tells them that they are, and they’re going to take that in and say, define themselves by that. But that is not an accurate view of who you are. You are so much more than you know, and so much more than you give yourself credit for. You are an amazing, amazing soul, and you’ve got some work to do.
Tina Gosney 11:53
There’s some thoughts that you’re thinking right now. There’s some things that you’re doing, and there’s some there’s some garbage going on in there. That’s not great. It’s not great for you. It’s not great for anyone else. And if you’re going to go deep with yourself, you can’t ignore that piece. But most people will either ignore that piece that they don’t want to see, or that’s all that they think about. And it’s like two extremes, but let’s try to meet somewhere in the middle. You are an amazing, wonderful soul who has some work to do. Both of those things can be true at the same time. So let’s find a balance, and let’s live from both of those ideas.
Tina Gosney 12:35
I want you to be curious with other people. Just maybe ask yourself a question like, hey, what would help me get to know this person more? I want to be closer to this person. And we’re just going to say in my family, I want to be closer to this person in my family, just for the sake of this podcast.
Tina Gosney 12:51
Well, brainstorm some ideas. Journal about it. Journaling is a great way to get some insight into things and to go deeper with yourself too. Journal about some things that you might want to do. Experiment on some things. Maybe just ask them questions. Be curious by asking them questions that you wouldn’t normally ask.
Tina Gosney 13:10
Last Christmas, one of my kids gave me a mom and me journal where, where you both write in. It has two pages of pretty much the same questions, and you’re both writing in it, one is for the mom and one is for the kid, and we’re trying to do a couple of pages together each week. We’re not perfect at that, but we are plugging and keeping going with this. I really love that this child of mine took the initiative and wants to connect with me more.
Tina Gosney 13:41
I think that shows such maturity, especially for being such a young age, we are spending a few minutes each week just getting to know each other better, and it’s there’s been some surprises that I think we’ve both had as we have filled out these journal pages.
Tina Gosney 13:55
So I also want you not to just get curious with yourself and with other people, but let’s get curious about our emotions. Let’s make friends with our emotions, because often we are creating a just making them be a problem for us. They aren’t supposed to be scary or overwhelming or a burden. They’re just part of being in a human body, and it’s an uncomfortable part. Sometimes we have to experience a lot of uncomfortable emotions that we don’t want to but it’s just part of being in a human body. It’s just your body’s reaction to something that is happening and the whatever you’re making that mean.
Tina Gosney 14:37
And the reason I bring this up is because when you go deep with someone, when you’re trying to go deep, develop deeper roots and trying to get them to know get to know them better, that’s going to bring up some difficult emotions. You’re going to find out some things that are difficult. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not easy. It’s just normal and it’s just part of the process. But then you because you learn things that are difficult, you also have difficult emotions that go along with that.
Tina Gosney 15:09
So here’s the question for you on that one, when you have some difficult emotions show up and it’s hard, do you pull back and say, I’m done, I’m not doing this anymore, or do you remind yourself that all of this is just part of the process that is a deciding moment for you, and when we start to get to know people better, we start to they start to reveal more of their mind to us and their internal life.
Tina Gosney 15:39
Conflict is going to happen. Conflict is not absent in close relationships, and it’s not supposed to be. The more important thing is, do you know how to repair Do you know how to disagree? And do you know how to repair the conflict? Most people don’t know how to disagree without bringing in contention, and they don’t know how to or the importance of repair.
Tina Gosney 16:05
So if you expect conflict to happen because two people are never going to agree on everything, you’ve got two different brains going with two different life experiences and two different ways that they’ve made sense of those life experiences. So of course, they’re not going to agree on everything. But when you’re willing to stay in a in the conversation while you’re disagreeing and like I said, like I wanted you to remember before, to be curious, that shows maturity, and that actually shows growth, surface level relationships will avoid conflict, or they only deal in conflict and they never do any repair.
Tina Gosney 16:46
So surface level relationships thinks that, oh, because we don’t have conflict, we have a great relationship. Well, that’s not really true. It means it’s a surface level relationship and you don’t really know each other, but when you only deal in conflict, and then you just never go back to repair anything that’s also a problem that’s not a close relationship either.
Tina Gosney 17:07
Intimate relationships expect conflict, and they know how to use it to deepen the level of connection, because they know, because they get to know each other better. And when I say intimate relationships. I’m talking about the willingness that you both have to get to know each other on a deeper level. You let them know you, and they let you know them. That’s more intimate when we go deeper.
Tina Gosney 17:36
But conflict does not have to be contentious. If you’re confused about the difference between conflict and contention, go listen to episode 133 which is called is it conflict or contention? That is going to give you a much deeper dive into this cons, into this concept. But contention really treats the other person like there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with you for the way that you’re thinking. There’s something wrong with you that you just did that. It treats the other person like there’s something shameful about them. And contention has this underlying note of shame, and it’s directed at the other person, and we and the person holding the contention has this need to be right and to control the situation and to try to get the other person to agree with them, or just to dismiss them altogether.
Tina Gosney 18:27
But conflict doesn’t do that. Conflict is curiosity. Conflict uses curiosity. It helps us get to get to know each other better when we find ourselves in conflict with another person, and we stay in the conversation, we actually get some benefit from it, because we get to evaluate some thinking that we have, that we maybe have never evaluated before. Sometimes we just adopt these ideas without ever challenging them, and then somebody challenges them in us, and it can create some conflict, and we feel that is kind of threatening, but it’s actually a blessing, because it gives us a chance to look at that idea and say, Is that really how I want to think? Do I really believe that? It just gives us an opportunity to evaluate our own beliefs and it lets us know ourselves better.
Tina Gosney 19:18
So sometimes we get into this conflict with another person, and we’re trying to hold on to this idea that we’ve never really explored or even questioned or thought about. So in that case, conflict can be a gift, and we get to develop some critical thinking skills, but conflict can also be and most of the time is uncomfortable.
Tina Gosney 19:39
So again, going back to those emotions, we got to get comfortable with those uncomfortable emotions in order to stay in the conflict and to question our own beliefs and to take them out and evaluate them. So building deep roots in a relationship takes time. It takes consistent effort over time, and I don’t know if it. Takes one year or three years or five years or 10 years. Everybody’s different. Every relationship is different. You’re not always going to see immediate results from your efforts, just like the Chinese bamboo tree.
Tina Gosney 20:11
You’re not always going to see something immediately pop up and reward you for your efforts, but you have to keep showing up and putting in the time and reaching out for that emotional connection that it requires, there’s always benefit, even if you’re not seeing the growth something is happening. There might just be those deep roots going down deep so that later on, exponential growth can happen.
Tina Gosney 20:38
So here’s my takeaway from today, your important relationships will pressure you to grow. You can either stay on the surface of those relationships, or you can develop deep roots that will support you and others around you when difficult times come. It takes more work to do this. It takes more mindset vulnerability and tension, to cause your roots to go deep and to nurture their relationships so that those roots can go deep.
Tina Gosney 21:10
When you put in all that hard work for your roots to go deeper, on the front end, you’re going to reap the benefit from all that hard work and effort sometime in the future.
Tina Gosney 21:22
So what is your takeaway today? Share your takeaway with somebody else. That’s how I want you to pay it forward in this podcast today. That’s all I’m asking for you is to go share this with somebody else. Share with them what you’ve learned from this podcast. It’s been great being here with you today, and I will be back with you next week.
