The third Losing Relationship Strategy in this series is – Unbridled Self-expression. When you were growing up, was there someone in your home who ruled the atmosphere of the home with the way their words or emotions came spilling out? What was that like for you?
When we allow ourselves to let words and emotions come spilling out onto the people around us, it drives people away, and it gets us the opposite of what we want. Unbridled self-expression is an attempt to get control in a relationship, but if we end up with any control at all, it is a surface level control, not a more connected relationship.
If you want to begin learning some winning relationship strategies, register for my upcoming class:
If you don’t want to wait for the class, schedule a Strategy Call with me. This is a one-time introductory coaching call, not a sales call. We’ll spend about an hour discussing your issue and you’ll leave with at least one, probably two or three strategies to begin using in your relationship
Tina Gosney is a certified life and relationship coach. She helps her clients move past contention in their homes and move into connection. It all begins with you and that's the best news ever, because that's the only person you have control over. You can be the person who directs your family to a new way of relating.
Tina is a positivity practitioner and a trauma informed coach. Visit tinagosney.com for more information
The third Losing Relationship Strategy in this series is – Unbridled Self-expression. When you were growing up, was there someone in your home who ruled the atmosphere of the home with the way their words or emotions came spilling out? What was that like for you?
When we allow ourselves to let words and emotions come spilling out onto the people around us, it drives people away, and it gets us the opposite of what we want. Unbridled self-expression is an attempt to get control in a relationship, but if we end up with any control at all, it is a surface level control, not a more connected relationship.
If you want to begin learning some winning relationship strategies, register for my upcoming class:
If you don’t want to wait for the class, schedule a Strategy Call with me. This is a one-time introductory coaching call, not a sales call. We’ll spend about an hour discussing your issue and you’ll leave with at least one, probably two or three strategies to begin using in your relationship
Tina Gosney is a certified life and relationship coach. She helps her clients move past contention in their homes and move into connection. It all begins with you and that's the best news ever, because that's the only person you have control over. You can be the person who directs your family to a new way of relating.
Tina is a positivity practitioner and a trauma informed coach. Visit tinagosney.com for more information
Tina Gosney:
Relationships are people growing machines, they are our greatest teachers, especially when they're not going well. But we can't learn from them unless we are aware of what we're doing. Welcome to the coaching your family relationships podcast, where we work on building a stronger you so that you can survive and thrive. No matter what is happening in your family. I'm your host, certified family relationship coach, Tina Gosney. Let's get started. Well, welcome back to the podcast, I'm so glad that you're here. And if you are a first time listener, then I am so glad that you're here. And welcome to the podcast. This is part three in a series on losing relationship strategies. This is a I think, a very, very useful series that I'm going through, that will help people see things that they've been using that might not have been super effective in the past. And we need to be aware of what we're doing before we can, we can do anything different, right? We can't change something that we're not aware of. And you will see a lot of yourself and other people in this series, this releasing a relationship strategy series. This is a concept and some tools that were developed by Terry real. He's a mentor of mine, I followed his work for a while now. And he developed these losing relationship strategies. And we all use these losing relationship strategies, which is why I've created a class healthy relationships from the inside out. And it helps us go into winning relationship strategies. We don't just want to talk about how we're losing, we also want to find out okay, how do I do something different? I see what I'm doing now that maybe this wasn't very effective. But how do I do something different? In this class, I'm going to go more into depth about those losing strategies and how they affect our ability to be close to the people that we want to be close to. They really keep us from having true and connected, loving, intimate relationships. I'm going to teach you how to move past those losing strategies. And I also call them transactional strategies. Because we don't want to think transactionally we want to think relationally. How do we start thinking relationally? Because relationships, our relationships with other people are so vitally important to us. They are our greatest teachers, our relationships with others, those are our greatest teachers, especially when they are not going well. Because if they're going well, we don't really need to change anything. We don't see the need to change anything. And sometimes we think they're, they're going well, just because we're repressing a lot. Have you ever noticed that the absence of disagreement does not mean that we're loving and connected in our relationships, it could mean some very different things. But we can't learn from our relationships until we learn what we're doing until we are aware of what we're doing. And I want you to have the advantage of learning from what you are doing. We all do or have done some variation on these losing strategies. And when we begin to wake up to ourselves, we can begin to change them. And we can turn our losing strategies into winning strategies. And so that is what I'll be teaching in this class, healthy relationships from the inside out. There's a link in the show notes, there will be a replay available, but I would really like you to try to attend live, if possible, you're gonna get so much more out of it if you attend, live at the class. And as a bonus, if you attend live, I'll be doing a q&a after the class. So you can bring any questions that you have, or that maybe come to your mind during the class, just write those down. And we'll spend as much time as we need to doing Q&A at the end. As I go over these losing strategies for the last couple of weeks in the next few weeks, if you see any of yourself in them. And you don't want to wait until the class next month to begin working on doing something different, that I want you to set up an introductory coaching call with me. I call it a strategy session. We'll spend an hour or so working on your problem. And then you come away from that call with at least one strategy. Most of the time, you'll have two or three strategies, ways and directions for you to focus on after this call, but at least one good solid strategy going forward. And don't worry, this is not a sales call. It's a one time code. You can call. So if you don't want to wait until the class next month, set up that strategy call with me. Now, it's very common for people to have had a parent, or a grandparent or a sibling, run the atmosphere and their home with how they let their words or emotions come spilling out. I want you to think who was that for you? Maybe it was you. Maybe it was someone else. But who was that in your home? What I talk about in this podcast is all coming from positive psychology concepts and tools, and positive psychology concepts and tools that are really prevalent today. We talk about them a lot today. But they were not even created until a few decades ago. I'm talking like the 90s, the 1990s, a little bit back into the 1980s. And into the 2000s. If you have a parent that taught you the tools that I've talked about in this podcast, then you are one of the rare few. These things were not known. And they were not taught in our homes generally. So we just accepted Oh, this is just the way things are, oh, this is just the way that person is. And it was also pretty taboo until recently, to see a therapist and get help. If you did see one you didn't talk about it, or there was that person that sees the therapist, there's something wrong with them. It was talked about in a shameful way, right if you had to go see a therapist. So when I ask, who was it for you that ruled the home with their words or their emotions. I know that because of what I just said that most of you are going to have at least one person come to mind. And I don't say this, to throw that person under the bus, I just want you to have an idea of what unbridled self expression looks like. Because that's what we're talking about today. unbridled self expression. And this concept of unbridled self expression is not confined to the home. I remember years ago, and this was the early 2000s, I one of my kids had a friend that came over went to a different school, different classroom, different school, but they're both in third grade. And this friend of my child was telling me about their third grade teacher. And she said, Oh, we always know if her boyfriend called or came over the night before. Because if he did, then she's really happy and she smiles a lot. And then we get extra privileges in class. And she said, we also know if he didn't call or come over the night before, because then she's really sad. And she tells us about how her boyfriend didn't contact her last night. And she's kind of cranky with us and we don't, she takes away our privileges. And sometimes she yells at us. And this is what this little nine year old was telling me. That also is another example of unbridled self expression, right? When what we're feeling what we're thinking or we are feeling come spilling out into the world around us. And we all have difficult situations in our lives that are handed to us. Sometimes they're handed to us. Sometimes we create them, but what do we do with them? Do we spill them out into the world and want everyone else to experience them with us? Or do we have the ability to deal with our disappointments in a mature way that invites other people in to connect with us instead of driving them away? Terry Real the one that develops these losing strategies, calls this unbridled self expression he says because I have a thought I should get to express it. Because I have an emotion I should get to express it. He calls this the barf bag approach to relationships. We have no boundaries. People who have no boundaries are in meshed they are codependent they are not able to hold on to themselves. They are boundary less. And we all want to belong to ourselves. It's very difficult to belong to our self when we are boundary less unbridled self expression happens when we do not know how to belong to ourselves outside of a relationship with another person. So we try to get in control of this relationship by using our words and our emotions without keeping ourselves in check. You think about this, kids really just do this naturally. This is a developmental stage for children. We cannot expect them to know how to maturely handle their thoughts or emotions. This is a developmental stage, they do not know who they are, except as they see themselves through the eyes of their parents or their peers or their siblings or even their teachers. But the problem is, is that many, many people never outgrow that stage, because they don't know that there's another option for them. So what we end up doing is we end up blaming our feelings on another person. But think about what that means. If someone else can control the way that we feel, then the opposite is also true. I can control someone else's feelings. That's a lot of power that I have in somebody else's life, and very little power that I have in my own life. But neither of those things are true. It's a very common misconception, that someone else can control our emotions, and that we are able to control another person's emotions, we certainly can have influence, I think we can have a great deal of influence on how someone else feels. And someone else has a great deal of influence on how we feel. But they don't have control over that. We don't control each other, each person, you and me and the person sitting next to you, we each create our own feelings. If you've never been taught differently, it's very, very easy to get over identified with those feelings. And it's very, very easy to get over identified with your own thoughts. It's so easy to do this, but it gets us into trouble. Because our brains are very easily confused. We think that because we think something that it's true, just like a podcast I did a couple of weeks ago on needing to be right how our brain loves to be true. If you're wanting more on that, just backup a couple of episodes and go find that one. But we'll take our brains, we'll take a handful of incomplete facts that we can see. And we'll string them together in a way that makes sense in our own brain, it will tell us that that story is true. Very, very little evidence. And sometimes that evidence that we're using is very inaccurate. But when we are over identifying with those thoughts, and we're creating those stories, and believing that they are true, we're probably over identifying with our feelings as well. Because when we see our thoughts like I am my thoughts, we see I am my feelings, those two go together. When we don't know how to handle our own emotions, that can be a problem for us. Almost every client that I've ever worked with, at some point has said, Man, I wish that I would have learned this stuff when I was a kid, my life would have been so much easier. What I've never had a client tell me is that they had a parent that taught them healthy emotional management. Because almost all people don't know how to handle their emotions. We over identify with them, and then we don't know what to do with them. And so they come spilling out. We say things like, I'm angry. I'm so anxious. I'm so sad. What we don't say is, I'm feeling really angry right now. Oh, I'm feeling very anxious. Oh, I'm experiencing some anxiety. My body is experiencing some anxiety. I'm feeling very sad. The way that I rephrased those is a very subtle and small shift. But it takes out the over identification with the thought and the feeling. It makes us experiencing something instead of us being something we also have the tendency to get really justified in the way that we are responding to someone. And this just comes from our own getting caught up in our own thoughts and our own stories about a situation. Just because we're thinking something does not make it true. But since our brain loves to be right, it's going to tell you that all your thoughts are true. And it's also going to say, You know what, we experienced this similar thing in the past, or maybe the same thing in the past. And we solved it by doing this and this and this. And maybe one of those things was being very overly emotional, or by using harsh words with another person. So of course, maybe I'm going to I'm just going to do that same thing again. That was a good solution. You know, we don't consciously think through this, but our brain does this. It finds a solution at one point to a problem. And it wants to repeat that same solution over and over and over again. Our brains are pretty lazy. Don't like to do new things, it takes a lot of calories to do new things to think of new things. So it just wants to repeat the things that we did and learned years ago, without coming up with new solutions. Even if those old solutions are not effective, we still keep creating them and doing the same thing over and over again. But when we give our responsibility to manage our own thoughts and emotions to someone or something else, we blame someone else for the way that we're failing. We give them a lot of power in our lives, we become a victim in our own life. But most of us are not true victims, we have created our own victimhood. So our thoughts should be questioned. And our emotions are our teachers. You don't have to believe everything you think and solve every emotion you have. And not everything needs to come spilling out into the world. In the healthy relationships class, I'm going to go deeper into ways to manage your own thoughts and emotions, you're going to leave this class with a plan to start working on this. And today, here's one thing that you can do to get started, because I want you to get started now, in being really aware of what you're doing and what's happening in your life, I want you to ask yourself,"Did I have a parent, a sibling, or someone else in my family, who ruled the environment in the atmosphere through their words, or their emotions?" That just some examples of what that might look like would be anger, sadness, depression, victimization, it's very common to have someone in your past who controlled the atmosphere in your home with their mental or emotional state. After you've identified who that was, I want you to ask yourself this question."What was it like for me when that happened?" And write it all down, if you want to, or you can think it through. Every week during this series, I've been giving you questions to think about, these are questions that are helping you to become aware of what is happening in your own life. And if you're taking these questions and using them, you're going to be an advantage. When you come to this class I'm teaching next month, Healthy Relationships from the Inside Out, we'll be talking about our own tendency for unbridled self expression. We're going to be talking about how to move from a transactional relationship to a relational relationship. We're going to move into relational thinking. There's a link in the show notes go get signed up today. And just again, that question for you to think about, because I want it to be on your mind."When I was a child who ruled the atmosphere in my home, with their unbridled words or emotions, what was that like for me?" And here's a reminder for you, content consumption does not make changes. To really make the change you want come to Healthy Relationships from the Inside Out. There's a link in the show notes. I'll see you there. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, and you want to take the next step, set up a strategy call with me. I offer a discounted coaching call for first time clients. This is perfect for you if you're wanting to try out this coaching thing and find out what it's all about. Or if you're someone who has this one relationship issue where you feel stuck, and you just need some help with it. The price for these calls will be going up in April of 2024. And for the first quarter of 2024. I'll be offering 24 of these calls at the current price of$25. These calls will go fast and when I've done 24 of them, the price goes up. Schedule your call today before they're gone.