Family conflict is painful—but it doesn’t have to define your story. On Coaching Your Family Relationships, family conflict coach Tina Gosney gives you tools to take back your peace without trying to control the people around you.
This podcast is for women of faith who feel like their family is falling apart and don’t know how to hold on. Instead of waiting for others to change, you’ll learn how to lead with integrity, grow your emotional resilience, and trust the long game of connection.
Rooted in Bowen Family Systems and the Crucible Effect, each episode helps you navigate hard conversations, shift unhealthy patterns, and become the steady, loving presence your family needs—even when life doesn’t look the way you thought it would.
Start with the free guide: 5 Things To Say (and Not Say) to Your Adult Child After Conflict Visit: bit.ly/sayafterconflict
Episode 156 – How to Take a Time Out That Really Works
When you get emotionally flooded, that is a signal you need a time out!
This week’s episode outlines Terry Real’s 10 New Rules of Time Out
1. The time out is a circuit breaker
2. Take your time out from the “I” position.
3. Take distance responsibly.
4. Use the phrase “time out” or gesture the T signal with your hands.
5. Don’t let yourself get stopped.
6. Use check-ins at prescribed intervals.
7. Remember the goal.
8. Return in good faith.
9. Have a 24-hour moratorium on the original topic.
10. Know when, where, and how to get help.
Get some help from Tina
If you are feeling stuck, not sure how what you’re hearing on this podcast can work in your life and aren’t quite sure how to create that future vision for yourself, let’s talk. I offer a handful of free calls each month and they are snatched up quickly. Set up your free call today so you can feel better about what the future holds for you.
Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with mothers and parents who are experiencing difficult relationships with their adult children, and they want to work on creating more authentic connected families. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach. Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.
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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 everyone, this is Tina Gosney. I am so glad that you're here with me today on the podcast. There's a doctor that I follow online. Her name is Dr Becky Kennedy, and I love her work. She's, I've noticed that she's been getting more popular in the last year. Well, I think that's because she wrote a book that she put out, and she's kind of been doing, you know, the whole book tour circuit and promoting her book. And I had, I had not read her book. I've been following her online up until a few months ago, I had one of her client, one of my clients, say to me, Hey, have you read Dr. Kennedy's book? It's called Good Inside. And I said, Actually, no, I haven't read it. And this client said, we should read it. It's really for parenting small children, but it's really good for everybody. It's good use and good information for everybody. I think everyone should read it. So I got the book, and love the book, and he was right. This is information that everybody can use. And I love her premise that she goes from it's why it's actually called good inside, is because she says we're all really good inside and on the outside we're having a hard time. Because she says we're all good inside. We are all good people that are having a hard time. And I believe that, I believe that we're all good people that are having a hard time. So if you're wanting a good read, you're running something that really gives you some really helpful tools and helps you to know what to do when you're having a hard time. Go get that book. It's awesome. It's called Good Inside, by Dr Becky Kennedy. She doesn't believe that time out is really effective, like, we shouldn't be punishing - timeouts are not effective. This episode, though, is about a timeout, but it's a different type of time out. It's not like, I'm gonna go put myself in a corner or I'm gonna make somebody else go to a corner, like to punish them. This is not a form of punishment. This is all a way of gaining control back over ourselves when we've been emotionally flooded. You know, when you're emotionally flooded, when your emotions take over and your brain stops working, that's a big clue. You're emotionally flooded. If you feel like you're out of control, then it's time to take a time out. So timeouts are not just for little kids. We all need timeouts. Sometimes teens have temper tantrums. Those are pretty easy to see. Adults, though, also have temper tantrums. They're a little bit more disguised, and sometimes they're more subtle, and sometimes they're not and we all need to learn to take a time out, and we need to learn to listen to our body and respond to that as it needs us to this episode this week goes right along with last week's episode on being able to respond instead of react. And so this is all about learning to control our our emotional reactions to the world and other people and all the things in the world. So those two episodes go really well together. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, I suggest going and listening to that one as well. It's really easy to see tantrums and when someone needs a time out, when they're a child or when they're a teenager, but what happens is we don't learn if we we very rarely learn how to handle our emotions as a child or as a teenager, and so we grow into adulthood, and we don't just automatically learn how to handle those emotions. We might mature physically and in other ways, but we do not mature emotionally unless we intentionally create that maturity ourselves. It takes intentional effort over time, because you know you can see it. Adults will mature physically, without any intentional effort, but not emotionally, and often not relationally as well. If you're not maturing emotionally, then you are probably not also maturing relationally. We have to put in the time. We have to put in the effort to grrow in those areas. Because what's the alternative trying to control everybody else and the world around us? We don't have that kind of control. That's actually what we cannot control. We don't have control over anything but ourselves, and often, unless you've done this work, you also don't have control over yourself. But what if you don't believe that you can even control yourself? Then you believe the entire world and your reaction to it is not controllable, is not in your control, and that's sad. Do you remember when you were in middle school or junior high. You know that that space between the elementary kid years and the high school teenage years kind of that weird space in between. It's such a weird age, don't you think where you're not a kid and you're not an adult, you're in this body that's changing, and you don't know what to do about it, and first time, you're really attracted to other people in a like a romantic way, and your friendships are so important that it's almost a life or death situation if you're accepted, or if you're not accepted, and you're just all sorts of things happening inside, and you're just a mess. And then you get into high school, and high school is a little bit better, not much better. You're still trying to figure a lot of things out. You're still not an adult, not a kid closer to adulthood well, and you expect people. You expect teenagers you know as they're learning through middle school and high school, you expect them to be immature sometimes, and to have temper tantrums and to not know what to do with themselves. But then, when you're an adult, you expect people to act differently, and sometimes we do, but we're so often, we're so immature with each other, especially when we're not getting what we want. You know, it's so easy to be mature when everything's going your way, and everything's happening just the way that you want it to. And it's easy to think, Oh, look at me. I'm such a grown up. I'm so mature. And then, you know, something doesn't go your way. That's actually the true test of your maturity is if, how do you act when things don't go your way? A true test of how mature you are is how you act when things are not going the way that you want them to. You're not getting what you want. So when things don't go the way we want, and we get emotionally flooded, and our brain just kind of goes offline, and it's then, it's just anything goes that is a difficult place to be, that is a place where we will say and do things that we regret later, sometimes two minutes later, sometimes two years later, but we usually end up doing or saying things that we regret later. And so I want to, I wanted to share with you this, these 10 rules for a productive time out. And these come from Terry Real. He's been one of my mentors and teachers, and he his work also is amazing. I really love learning from him. And so these are his rules for a productive timeout. And the first one is to use it as a circuit breaker. So a timeout is like a rip cord to stop stop a runaway train. You're emotionally flooded. It's so easy to feel like you're on a runaway train and you have no control to stop that. But this is the rip cord. It stops that interaction. It stops right before it has crossed a line, or just after it's crossed the line. It has one job, and that is to stop an unproductive, unconstructive interaction between you and another person. So that's what you need to think of a time out as. It's not a punishment. It's stopping an unproductive, unconstructive interaction. So first we have to stop. The next rule is take your time out from the I, as in capital I position. You recognize your own feelings, you acknowledge that you are not in a good place to continue. So this is not telling the other person to take a time out. This is saying I am not ready to continue this conversation. I need some time. I need a timeout, so I'm taking one. The next step is take distance responsibly. So timeouts are a way of distancing ourselves from each other, and you can do that in a responsible way, or you can do that in irresponsible way, and most people, I believe, do it irresponsibly, which is, I'm just going to get out of here, and I don't know when I'm going to come back, and I don't want to talk to you anymore. That's what irresponsible looks like. But our relationships are so important to us that that type of irresponsible distance taking creates a lot of anxiety for the other person when they don't know when they're going to hear from you again, or if they're going to hear from you again, or even if they're if, maybe, if you're living in the same house, how to react and act around you. So timeout is a way of distancing ourselves. Let's take it responsibly. And that one says, Hey, this is why I'm leaving, and this is when I'll be back. We can have prescribed intervals like, Hey, I needed, I need to take some time. I'm not really in a good place to speak about this right now, I'm going to check back in with you with 20 minutes. Is that okay? Let's check back in 20 minutes. Let's just say you checked back in 20 minutes and you're not in a good place still. Well, let's get together in an hour. Let's check it in an hour again. You check back with the other person, and if you're not both still in a good place, then check back in three hours and a half a day, and then in a whole day, or maybe the next day, but keep checking in and keep telling each other, this is when we will check back in with each other and see if we're ready to resume this conversation or this interaction. Respect is so crucial. Respecting another person's feelings and their responses to this, to what's happening also is so crucial. So using those prescribed check ins is really, really helpful. Sometimes we will take that distance and we'll just say, Hey, I just have to leave this conversation. And we leave it open, and we never go back and have the conversation, because we calm down, the other person calms down, and then it's just easier to not ever get back together and talk about it again. So we just kind of let it go by, and we can do that over and over again, and then things start to build up. That's not good. So another thing that we can do is use the phrase timeout, like I need a timeout, or we can even gesture with the T symbol, with our hand as an abbreviation. So if you're at the point you might want to use this, if you're at the point where, if you open your mouth one more time, that you know, you would not have control over what comes out of your mouth, use the hand signal, because that is much better than, you know, saying I need a timeout, and then just letting things spew out of your mouth. So use some type of signal that says, hey, I need a timeout. And this next one can be kind of difficult, because you don't want to let yourself get stopped. You're not asking permission to take a timeout. You're just telling the other person that you need a timeout, and you're doing that responsibly. So to do that, you want to leave the room. You want to leave the the home. You want to go somewhere else and do something else to clear your head. Don't stay in the same room. Don't stay in the same room as the other person. Don't stay in the same room that the that the conflict happened, happened in you want to leave that space. I did have a client once whose spouse followed her as she was trying to take a time out. Followed her all around their house and as she consistently asked for distance and time, that limit was not respected, and she actually had to leave, get her keys and leave the home. And hopefully this doesn't happen, but sometimes that might, where you have the other person that won't let you stop the conversation, and at that point that's a boundary violation. But this is not asking permission. This is telling the other person, this is what I'm going to do. Another thing we want to do is to remember the goal. So the goal of a timeout is to stop emotionally immature, destructive behavior in its tracks, right? We don't want to have that happen. We want to improve the communication. We want to be able to communicate when we're not in an immature, destructive mind frame. We want more emotional presence. We want more emotional sharing. And that cannot happen unless we are in our wise, adult self, and when we are emotionally flooded, we are not in our wise adult self. Another thing Terry says is to return in good faith, so the timeout ends when both parties are grounded enough in their adult selves to have a positive interaction again, that means you are no longer holding the other person in contempt, you don't have a chip on your shoulder, you aren't stuck in shame. You're not coming back so you can argue more. It means you're able to peacefully stay on your side of the street. This sometimes is one of the most difficult things to do, is to stay on your own side of the street. It's something I work with my clients with quite a bit, because we're constantly trying to jump over to the other person's side of the street, but we own our own side, and we want to keep it clean. So we've got two more. The first one is a 24 hour moratorium on the original content and any other high conflict topics. So if the topic that got you or the other person flooded highly emotional, you don't want to come back and talk about that for 24 hours, because if you don't, it's very easy to restart the conflict. You know you can come back together in 20 minutes if you're not emotionally flooded, if you're both in a wise adult self, but don't come back to that original conversation, back to that original topic for 24 hours. Let yourself have 24 hours to process, to clean up your side of the street, and then you can come back to it much better, productive use of your time. The last one is, know when, where and how to get help and actually use it. So if there is a topic that is consistently getting you dysregulated, consistently, every time you try to talk about it, you're getting emotionally flooded and you're emotionally dysregulated. You want to get some outside help. Get a therapist or a coach. You may need some relational help and care for yourself and for the other person. So if the situation is about money, get a financial planner. If the situation is about spirituality, go to your faith leader. If the situation is about health, seek out a medical professional. Just get some help from someone who knows something that they can provide an insight for you and the other person to help you resolve the conflict. So these, again, are Terry Real's rules for taking an effective time out. And I know that if you follow these rules, that conversations are going to go a lot better. Conflict is going to be more manageable. It won't feel like it takes over and is not able to be then come back and addressed, because we're just going to start fighting again. What if we actually have rules and we expect conflict to happen, we expect ourselves to get emotionally flooded, and then we have rules to handle that? Here's my takeaway for today, if you're feeling emotionally flooded in a situation and you are not responding from your wise adult self, take a time out. Time outs are for everyone, not just for kids. They help us think, feel and act in a way that helps us heal relationships instead of hurt them. What did you take away from this episode today? Because your takeaway might be a different one than mine. Maybe one thing stood out to you more than another. If that is the case, then send that to someone say, Hey, this is what I learned on this podcast today. Because when you share what you learned with someone, it becomes more internalized in you and what you know and what you're able to do. And when we internalize something, it's much more likely to show up in our life than if we just learned some knowledge that we kept inside of our head. So if you have listened to today's podcast and last week's episode on responding versus reacting, and you're wanting to learn how to respond instead of react and to how to effectively take a time out when you need it, then let's have a conversation. Let's talk about what this might look like in your life and what you are needing help with if this is you, then set up a call with me. I offer just a handful of free calls each week. There's a link in the show notes you can set up a free call. Let's get that conversation started. I look forward to seeing you there, and I look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast you.
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