Respond to Your Family Members Intentionally, Don’t React from Automatic Programming

Episode 155 - Respond to Your Family Members Intentionally, Don’t React from Automatic Programming

Everyone is capable of learning to control their reactions to other people and situations. No one needs to take on the identity of a person who can’t control themselves. Learning to manage your own responses to the world is a skill you can learn just like any other skill. It takes consistent effort over time. Learning to manage your own responses to others is your responsibility, not anyone else’s. 

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Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She helps her clients move past contention in their homes and move into connection. Developing healthy family relationships can change lives.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
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Transcript

Unknown: 0:05

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. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. I'm Tina Gosney, your family relationship coach, and I've got a story for you today. I do always try to give you a story. I can just relate better to stories, and I know most people are that same way, so I do try to give you a story at least one each week. But before I do that, I really want to let you know that if you want some bite sized help in your inbox each week with your family relationships, you know, some real ways that you can start to move the dial and connect more and do some of the things that we're talking about on this podcast. Then I want you to sign up for my email list. I promise I don't bombard you with emails. I'm not one of those people that sends, you know, email after email, and you're gonna be deleting all of them because they're just so many coming in. And I also keep my emails really short. I've signed up for someone's email list before, and immediately they start sending me long, detailed, confusing emails, and they just look at it, and I'm like, I don't even want to read through this whole thing, so I end up deleting it. And then I start not opening their emails. And then pretty soon, I have taken myself off their list because I just don't want to see their stuff anymore. I don't do that. My emails are only long enough to give you something to think about, some reflection point, or to give you just something small that you can do, just a simple, easy thing that you can start doing that day. You can read my emails in a minute or less. They're so short. So this is a also a really good way for you to know what I have coming up. As far as you know, classes, webinars, any offerings that I'm giving, something that you might be interested in being a part of. There's a link in the show notes. I'd like love for you to go and just sign up for the email, and I look forward to connecting with you there. Okay, let's get on to the story. Years ago, I had a client, and anytime I share a story about a client, it's always done with permission. By the way, I had a client who was we were working through some things with one of her children, and she was telling me how she grew up in a home with a parent that was really explosive. You never knew when this parent was going to just start yelling and kind of lose their control, lose their cool, lose their lose all control, and you never knew what was going to happen. And so she grew up in this home, not knowing that that wasn't a normal way for your parents to act. And then she fast forward, fast forward, and we go to the time where she's married, she has her own children, and she starts doing the same thing. Isn't this just what we usually do? We repeat the patterns that we saw our parents do. We will do that because it becomes automatic programming. We start repeating things that we saw. And so she started repeating, being an explosive person, someone who might just let loose with their words, or maybe throw something, or just have some way of becoming unglued. And she said she did this one day, sure her child was in the kitchen with her. They were fixing dinner. She got upset about something, started yelling, turned around this child, I believe, was about 10 years old, if I can remember correctly, and she saw a look of terror on that child's face, and she said, "I just stopped my tracks. And I remember how I felt when my parent was doing that, and I promised myself I would never do that again, and I haven't." That's amazing! That's what we call legacy work. Legacy work is breaking the patterns of generations and not passing them down to your own children. It's a very difficult place to be, because you're breaking one set of automatic programming, but trying to create a different one, and you're kind of caught in the middle. It's difficult work, but it's so meaningful. But this is the work that she was doing. She had a reactive parent, she became a reactive parent and then decided to intentionally stop and do something different her parent in in reactivity forms, looks like yelling and screaming and and losing control. But reactivity does not always look that way. Sometimes it looks like getting caught up in your own thoughts about a situation and then catastrophizing it. Sometimes it's going silent. Sometimes you're trying to punish somebody, or you're trying to just avoid a conflict. So you're going silent. And maybe you numb out with you know, you get on your phone and just tune everybody else out. Get on your phone, or drop into social media, try to numb out the world. Maybe you turn the TV on or the radio on, or you're just, like, really busy, so you don't have time to deal with each other. Or maybe you don't even talk to each other in person, like you won't talk to that person and that person in face to face anymore. You might just text or email or maybe Marco Polo, but you can shut others down, and you can shut others out. Maybe you try to take control. When you get really reactive, you're feeling all that anxiety, that emotion pumping through your blood, you get really controlling, and you're trying to take control of things that are not yours to take control of, because you think that other person can't handle it. Maybe you get mad at a sibling, and instead of talking to that sibling, you go to a second sibling and you talk to them about the first sibling, complaining and criticizing. Maybe you try to make other people feel guilty. Maybe you say something like, "Oh, you deserve so much better than me. I am a terrible person. I can't believe you have to put up with me. This is awful for you." Now I've just named a handful of things. Reactivity can look many, many different ways, and I'm going to show you what it is in just a minute, really where it comes from, but that's just a handful of ways that reactivity might look. What is less common

is to pause and say: 7:15

"I am feeling really emotionally flooded right now. I gotta calm myself down, because I am not seeing this rationally." So that takes a lot of maturity and a lot of self discipline and a lot of control. Some people never do this. Some people do this some of the time, and very, very, very few people do this most of the time, but you're going to repeat what you saw in your home growing up, or your parents did, or your caregivers did, unless you intentionally do something different, like my client did. So what kind of home did you grow up in? Chances are you identified with at least two or three or maybe more of those things that I listed just a minute ago that your family might do. And maybe it's not just you, maybe you see other people doing it too that you do when you get emotional. When emotions run high in the family, it's really common for one member of the family to rule the emotional temperature in the home. I did a podcast episode about this earlier this year. It was called it was one of the losing strategies in that series. It's# 128. Came out in February. It's called Unbridled Self expression. But that's what it is. It's not controlling yourself and just letting yourself go wild - unbridled. So like I said, it is common for one member of the family to rule the emotional temperature of the home, and that is the person that is the most reactive and the most demandingly reactive. Who in your family does not know how to control themselves. We're not talking about small children, because small children automatically don't know how to control themselves. We tend to not grow out of this and learn the skills that it takes as we grow up, but your home will revolve around that person and what their mood is, and then they just kind of tend to rule the home with that emotional temperature. Anxiety was not something that was talked about much. I don't remember it ever being talked about when I was growing up, and I know just a decade or two ago, it started getting more traction in mainstream society and mainstream talking, and now our younger generation is very familiar with anxiety and what anxiety looks like and feels like, and anxiety is actually a totally normal reaction in our bodies. We all experience anxiety, even if we don't acknowledge that we do, we do. I've heard it said that there's really only two emotions, and that is love, or fear. And if you aren't feeling love, which comes from a calm, responsive, higher brain functioning place, then you're feeling a form of fear, and we can also call that anxiety, so anything that doesn't feel loving and calm and peaceful can be labeled under that emotion called fear, and anxiety falls under that label. We are such a bunch of anxious people, I didn't realize until you know, anxiety started getting more of a mainstream and society of looking at myself and thinking I don't have anxiety, and then realized I have a lot of anxiety. It just doesn't look the way that I have typically thought that it is supposed to look like, because it does not look one way. And I didn't look that way with my anxiety, because I looked on the outside like I had everything put together, and I was really calm and collected most of the time, but internally, I felt those sirens going off like I felt all that turmoil inside constantly. And our families are full of anxiety. Some members will carry it more than others. Some show it more than others, but everyone carries it. So even that person who looks like they have everything put together, like they've got it all figured out, even they have anxiety. It just manifests itself in a different way than you think it does, or maybe in a different way than it manifests itself in you, but our family systems are run on spreading anxiety. This is what we do. We spread the anxiety around. Because no one lives in a bubble without being affected by the entire system, our relationships are systems, and everyone is affected by the system. No one person lives in a bubble when it doesn't affect everybody else. We just go around and we pass around our fears and our big emotions to other people in our family, because we are repeating a system that we've been involved in for so long, and we don't know what else to do, unless you're very practiced in how to manage anxiety, you're going to feel like it's too much for you to handle by yourself. And so you go around distributing it into the family unit, and it often looks like not knowing how to calm yourself down. And so you bring in other members of the family in on that anxiety, and you hand part of it to them, and we think this is just the way that I am. I just can't handle this. I can't control it, and that's not true. But when we do this, when we think that we are out of control and that we can't handle things ourselves without passing them on to other people, we get thrown around in life, it feels like wear a feather in a windstorm. That is a terrible feeling, like you have no control over yourself and you're just being thrown around. That out of control feeling is awful. Do you know who Viktor Frankl is? He was a psychotherapist that lived in the time of Hitler and the Nazis and the Holocaust, and he actually spent some time in a concentration camp. He survived because he wrote a book after that called Man's Search for Meaning. He was an observer. He spent his time in the concentration camp observing people, because that was his life's work. It was his life's work to be a learner of people's behavior and why people do the things that they do. And he noticed something in the concentration camps. He noticed that some the guards could take away everything they had control over everything except one thing, and that was the ability to control your thoughts, the ability to choose the attitude that you approach life's circumstances with. And this is a very famous quote of his, he said, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I'm going to read that again because I think it is super powerful, and I don't want you to have to back up the podcast to listen again"Between stimulus and response. There is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." There is always a space. Some people that space is a millisecond. Some people have minutes. Some people have much longer than that. That space is what you're going for. That space is your goal, to create more intentional space between something happens and then I respond to it. But most people will not see that there is a space. And until you see that there is a space there you will remain a prisoner of your reactions to whatever is happening, because that space is our ability to pause and to choose. We choose from a place of being intentional instead of reactive to our emotions. And to do that, we have to pull apart the circumstance, the situation, and my thoughts about it, and how I feel about it, to pull all those things apart. I've been working with several clients lately to pull apart, to work on pulling apart that stimulus and their response. Because your response is how you think about it, how you feel about it, and then what you do. But until you see that you have a choice there, it's not a choice. It is automatic programming. You have to interrupt that automatic programming. And all of us have automatic programming, and until we find that space, we will feel out of control. We will blame other people for our choices. We will try to control other people so that we can feel better we don't experience the growth and the freedom that happen from knowing how to handle things internally, instead of trying to handle them externally, and being a slave to our gut reactions is a miserable place to be. You feel so out of control, and that is a powerless position. Nobody wants to feel powerless. We do not need to be a slave to our reactions. There is another option. A reaction comes from being out of control. A response comes from being intentional, of giving yourself time, of calming yourself down, of not reacting to automatic programming. Now your reaction does come from your automatic programming, but that doesn't mean you can't reprogram. Reprogramming takes intentional effort over time. It is a skill to learn how to do this, just like any other skill, this is something that you can get better at as you practice it over time. You have to keep with it and be consistent about that practice, and the first step is just to be intellectually aware that you have a choice. And when you are intellectually aware of something, you don't really know how to do it yet. You just know that it's something that's possible, but you haven't learned how to move it into your life yet. So that's knowing something on an intellectual level. The second step though is to just kind of observe yourself, observe what you do in different situations. And a lot of times we're doing this after the fact, because, remember, we don't know how to do this yet in our life, we don't know how to stop and give ourselves some space. And so we're still reacting and not giving ourselves space between stimulus and response. We're still reacting, so we have to look at it in hindsight. We have to look at it after the fact. And when we do this over and over again, it starts actually getting moved into our life, and it gets moved into something that we then have more freedom with in our everyday interactions. So what is your go-to response when you're feeling anxiety? How are you trying to spread it into the family system? That is what you are looking for when you are observing yourself. And by the way, we take this with a point of view of a neutral scientist who is gathering data. No judgment for yourself, no judgment for other people, because as soon as you start noticing what you do, you're probably first going to notice what other people do, and you're going to want to judge all of you, everybody involved. We have to let that go. We're just gathering data because all of us are reacting, remember, to automatic programming. There are so many people who say, "I can't help it. That's just the way I am. I can't control that." You know, we're a generation away from thinking that either you're born being able to control yourself or you're not. But that's just it was just a faulty belief that you know every generation before this one had. You don't have to accept an identity of a person who can't control themselves. You are choosing your own identity, and you can choose whatever identity you want. And that also is something that you practice over time to be able to shift into a new identity. So if you are thinking that you are out of control, I can't control that. It's not something that is that is in my power to change. It's just the way that I am. I want you to practice some sentences like

this: 20:15

"I'm learning to manage my emotions. I'm a person who's always trying to be better today than I was yesterday.Hey, I didn't do great today, but tomorrow is another chance I get to try again." You know, if you are saying these kinds of things to yourself, you would not be holding so tightly to an identity of someone who can't control themselves. And if you're consistent, over time, you're going to see your ability to manage your own anxiety increase, and you're going to spread less of it to other people, because you know how to handle it yourself. And this is hard. This is this is hard because it is automatic programming. It becomes something that's so ingrained in us that we have a belief that we don't even we don't even question beliefs. We just think that that's the way that the world is, and that's the way that I am. So look what happens when you are trying to interrupt that automatic programming. You are already believing that you don't have control. You're just doing things the way that you've always done them, and your messages that your brain and your body are giving you that tell you that that's the way that you are, and you see other people doing the same thing. You know that makes it harder to to interrupt that automatic programming. But we can do hard things. We teach this to elementary school kids, right? I think we need to remember as adults, as teenagers, even teenagers can learn how to do this. We can do hard things. Just because something's hard doesn't mean it's impossible. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. We don't become adults and then stop trying to do hard things. And if that is an idea that your brain has had, like, I stopped all my learning when I was like 25 if that's an idea that your brain has had, then that's just a thought error. Your brain is just confused. Because we continue to learn our entire lives. Our brain is very plastic. It is not rigid and set in stone unless we refuse to do this work. The longer we refuse to do this work, the more rigid it becomes, and when we can start to internalize that fact, we can get past the point of thinking that we can't do hard things, and this is just the way that I am. Another thing we try to do all the time in order to, like, you know, escape our own culpability, or our own responsibility, is that we just have this strange idea, totally normal, but also strange. "If things would just be better in my life, then I could handle it better, or if that other person would just do something differently, if they would change, then I wouldn't have to act this way." We require a different set of circumstances before we think we can do anything about it. Well, that is just letting other people and other things be in control of you. You are giving away your agency and your choice, and you become that feather in the windstorm getting blown around by whatever the direction the wind is blowing. And if this is the way that you've lived your life in the past, it would make perfect sense that you are waiting for everything and everyone to line up in just the right way so that you can start to do this, so that you can be more in control of yourself, but if that is the case, you're going to be waiting a really, really, really long time. Maybe that time will never come. So what do you want to do? It's your choice. Here's my takeaway for today, no matter what you've thought in the past, you do have the ability to control yourself. No matter what is happening, it is not anyone else's job to control you. It's your responsibility to figure out how to manage yourself, and you can do this. This is where your growth happens. This is where you find freedom. Yes, it's hard, but you're moving towards a hard that takes you to a different place, and that place is freedom and growth, and that is so much better than the hard of being stuck right where you are. What is your takeaway today? Send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram. If there's a way you can share your takeaway with somebody else, then do that. Because do you know what you're going to learn more by sharing what you've learned, then you will by just listening to me. One thing I work extensively with my clients on is learning how to find and claim their freedom in their lives, and we do this by working from the inside out, not outside in. Our relationships are important to us. They help us in our thriving, our health and our well being on a biological a cellular level, but it's often the place where we suffer the most and we feel the most inadequate. If you want to start finding your own freedom, let's have a conversation on what that looks like for you. There's a link in the show notes, go and click that and I will see you there.