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
#164 – Being Defensive is a Losing Strategy – Most Popular Episodes of 2024
It’s easy to see when someone else is getting defensive, but when we get defensive, it feels justified. Being defensive, no matter where it is coming from, will often begin a trajectory of downward spiral in a relationship.
The way your brain is interpreting what the other person is saying or doing will create a reaction in your body, especially when it is perceived that they are trying to hurt you. When you are aware of your own reactions, and you choose to respond with intention, you begin to have more freedom and less suffering in your life. And your relationships will be much less likely to spiral downward.
If you have difficult family members, or a difficult situation going on in your family right now, it’s easy to be anxious about what might happen when you all get together. That anxiety overtakes you and your peace during the holidays.
I’ve used this guide, and the process I walk you through and it has really helped me to feel more in charge of myself and my emotions. I feel more confident in myself and more forgiving of others and myself when I use it.
This guide will be your holiday lifesaver.
The 3-Step Solution to Keeping Your Cool Around Family Holiday Drama
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.
Tina Gosney:
Tina, welcome to the coaching your family relationships podcast. I'm your host. Tina Gosney, the family conflict coach. This is where we talk about how messy family relationships can be. If you want to change in your family dynamics, let's start working from the inside out. Here we are in the last two weeks of 2024 and I'll be posting, releasing three of the most popular episodes of the year for the podcast, the most downloaded episodes. And I gotta say, I was surprised, but not surprised at the same time, about which episodes were the most popular and the most downloaded. This one defensiveness is part of the losing strategy series. It was actually the number seven losing strategy. And I think that whole series is really great. So go back to the I think it was like in February or March of 24 if you want to listen to the whole series. You can find all the episodes there. But why defensiveness? Why would this one be the most downloaded of all of those losing strategies? I think one reason is that it's really easy to see when someone else is getting defensive. It's not really easy to see in ourselves, because we feel super justified, right? We get defensive. It doesn't feel like defensiveness. It feels more like justification. But if we see somebody else get defensive, it's real easy to pinpoint, oh, they're being defensive. Right? Now, when we feel justified in the way we respond or we react to them, we say things to ourselves like, well, they shouldn't be talking to me that way. That person is being a jerk. Who do they think that they are? They can't treat that they can't treat me that way. They can't talk to my kid that way. They can't talk to my husband that way. We see what the other person did, but we don't see ourselves getting defensive as a reaction to the thing that that person did. Really common when we hear an episode like this, that we're going to have someone, at least one person, come to mind, and we're going to think, oh, that person needs to listen to this. Maybe even have more than one person come to your mind about, oh, those people, they all need this episode. Maybe I should send them a link to this episode. Well, if that happens while you're listening, just be aware that this is just something that your brain is telling you, and I want you to say to yourself, you can write this down now, if you like, my brain is telling me that that person needs to hear this episode. It's possible that I'm the one that needs to hear this. Okay, write that down. My brain is telling me that that other person needs to hear this. It's possible that I'm the one that needs to hear this. I say this with all of the kindness and compassion because what our brain tells us can cause a lot of painful feelings inside of our bodies, painful thoughts, painful feelings. What we want to do is to get in the habit of noticing the thoughts that are happening inside of our head. They are not automatic. They are not out of our control, but we want to start noticing them, and then we want to start choosing, on purpose, to look at them from a different perspective. This is where our greatest freedom lies, by being able to consciously look at our own thoughts, consciously direct our own brains, and when we do that, we have less suffering. We're not going to get out of this world without pain. We don't have to suffer as much as we do, and it starts by being aware of what we are thinking and feeling defensiveness is an easy one to identify in other people. Let's start identifying it in ourselves now, whether it's in us or whether it's in another person, whenever we get defensive, it does not build close relationships. It does not build up our relationships. It tears them down. Sometimes it even begins a trajectory that might spiral their relationship down no matter what someone else does or says, you are responsible for you, and let's break that word up for a second response able. You are able to respond. You have a choice. You don't have to match their energy. If someone is coming at you, trying to be hurtful, trying to say something that's judgmental or unkind, or act in a way that is hurtful to you, you do not have to match that hurtful energy to hurt them in response. You don't have to match that hurt. Energy to hurt yourself as a response. You don't have to hurt you or them when you do, that's a reaction. Reactions are what's happening from our automatic programming, our brain goes offline. Is just like an instinct. It's that primal instinct in us to go and to hurt somebody when we're hurt. Now, if you're getting chased by a bear, you want that automatic reaction to kick in and protect you. If you are walking across the street and a bus starts coming, and if you don't move, you're going to get hit by the bus, you want that automatic reaction to kick in and protect you. It is a very useful at times. It's a very useful reaction. It's a very useful response that our bodies gives us, but when we're having a conversation with your adult son or daughter or your spouse or your parents, and they say something that you find hurtful, that automatic reaction is not your friend, being defensive is not your friend being able to respond. Response able is your agency to create who you are and who will you be. This is always up to you. It is your choice to create who you are. Your agency creates you. Your choices create you. But until you recognize that you do have a choice, it's not a choice, you're at the mercy of that reaction. You're at the mercy of everyone and everything outside of you, giving yourself over to becoming a victim of the external world. When you do this, you are not taking charge of your response ability, and that is also a choice. You get to choose, am I going to take up this responsibility or not? In this recording, you're going to hear me talk about a class that I'm going to teach, and this class happened months ago. You're not going to be able to sign up for it, but I'll be offering more classes in 2025 I want you to check back here in the new year, and here you go, the third most popular episode of 2024 the losing strategy of defensiveness. Welcome to the seventh and the final episode in this series on losing relationship strategies. Now, just a reminder, the first five of these losing relationship strategies were developed by Terry real, who was one of my mentors and teachers the last two, the last episode and this episode were added by Jennifer Finlayson five, and she's also one of my mentors. And I just want to review the first six, because today we're doing part seven, like I just said. So the first one, number one is the need to be right. Number two is trying to control. Number three, unbridled self expression. Number four, Punishment and Retaliation. Number five, withdrawal. Number six, resentful and costly accommodation, and today we're talking about defensiveness. Now if you are familiar with the four horsemen from the gottmans. That's an idea that Gottmans have developed. They call it the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because once these four things show up in a relationship, it's it's a really bad sign, and defensiveness is one of them. And so defensiveness is something we really need to address, and of course, it's going to be a losing relationship strategy. Now I'm not going to just leave you this series with a bunch of losing things. These are all the things that you're doing wrong, without giving you another way to deal with your relationships and to come at your relationships from a different angle. I'm going to give you some winning strategies as well, and those will happen mainly in this class that I'm teaching called Healthy Relationships from the inside out. I will be going into more depth into how we use these losing relationship strategies, and not just in our intimate partner relationships. We use them in our family relationships, in our our work relationships, in our neighbor relationships. We use them all the time, because how we do one thing is how we do everything. We don't relate to one person differently, and use different relationship skills with one person than we do with another, because we have our skills, and we use them no matter where we are. So I want to give you some better tools and better skills. I'm going to teach you how to move, start moving past those losing strategies. I want you to start thinking relationally, not transactionally. And all of these losing strategies are very transactional. That starts with how you are dealing with. Self inside. That's why this class is named, healthy relationships from the inside out, we don't have control over what other people do, what they say, how they act, how they feel. We do not get to control that, and sometimes that feels like we are so powerless in our relationships. If we can, can't change somebody else, but that is so not the case. There is so much power you have by going inward and inside of yourself and dealing with what's going on in there to affect the relationship on the outside. So powerful. And I want to teach you this process, because relationships are so important in our lives. In fact, I like to call them our greatest teachers. I think they are human growing machines, and what we learn the best from them is when they're not going well. When we're everything is going well. We don't really look at any need to do anything differently. We don't grow when we are making lots of mistakes and things are not going well. That's a gold mine for growth opportunities. As painful as it is, it's a gold mine for growth opportunities. So I would love for you to come to this class. It's in just a couple of days. Please go. If you're interested, please go, click that link in the show notes and attend. Would love to have you there. There was a period of my life, a good chunk of my life, that I taught music classes to young children I see now. I see so many correlations between what I do now in coaching and what I did then in teaching music classes, I could do like a whole series of podcasts just on that, but I'm going to talk about just this one day that I had in class with this one particular student. So these classes were group keyboarding classes, and these were very young children. These were five and six year olds now teaching Keyboarding in a group setting to very young children can be challenging. And some of these kids, they excelled right away. They picked it up right away, and they were loving what they were doing, and they didn't struggle with any of the material that was presented with them on a weekly basis. Some of the kids were the exact opposite. Some of them struggled from day one, and they it was never easy for them. It was always a struggle, and they got really frustrated. Well, on this one particular day, I was walking around, we were all playing a song together. We try to play songs She was really struggling, and I spent a little bit more time with her than with anyone else, not not something that I thought was very noticeable, but that I think she picked up on and as together, and I was walking around as we're singing, and soon as that song was over, this precious little girl, she burst into tears, and then she pointed her finger at me, and she said, Miss Tina hates me. I was shocked. I was so surprised. I was thinking, What did I do to make her think that I hate her? I was racking my brain, thinking, I can't think of they were playing their keyboards and were singing along anything that I did. I couldn't see how I had done anything that would have caused her to say this, because as a teacher for young children in music keyboarding classes, you have to muster all of your patients with that class and positivity to feed that into those kids, right? So I was being a very patient and kind teacher, and I realized that she was noticing that she was not keeping up with the rest with them. I was trying to help each child notice where each of the class, and that I had spent more time with her than I did with anyone else. When she pointed her finger at me and said, Miss Tina hates me. That was a defensive move for her. If she could take the attention off of her and put it on me, then she was able to feel better about herself. She was thinking child was and what they needed help with with that song. And I she needed to blame someone else for the situation, and she didn't want it to be her. She was not able to tolerate blaming herself, and so it's easier for her to deflect that blame and to put it onto me. She's only five years old. She was this precious little, struggling five year old that was feeling so bad about herself, isn't it interesting that even at five years old, we. Use these losing strategies that we get defensive, and we can't always spent a little bit more time with the kids that were take the blame. We can't take the responsibility for something that we've done, and so we push that blame off onto somebody else. Want you to think about, what's the problem with being defensive? What does the what really is the problem with it? Well, when we get defensive, we don't look inward, we're pointing outward, just like this little girl did. We do not self struggling than the kids that were not struggling. On that confront. We don't see how what we have done has contributed to creating the situation. We don't see our own part. So it says, I'm going to defend myself, I'm going to blame you, and I'm going to deflect all of this badness and this terribleness I'm feeling about myself. I'm going to push it onto you. Byron Katie, and this is a quote of hers that I have said many particular day, there was one girl who she tended to struggle times on this podcast. She said defense is the first act of war. Think about that. When we are going to war and we're going on the defense. We're getting out our weapons. It's sometimes we're saying, like, I'm going to drag up all your past failings and all the ways you've let me down. Sometimes we use that weapon. We drag up all these things from the past. Sometimes just generally all the time, but she had not practiced the week we drag out the weapon of you hurt me, so I'm going to hurt you. I'm justified in hurting you, and we go there, but we're what we don't do is we're not willing to take an honest look at ourselves and see what's true about ourselves, because we're only focused outward. We are not dealing with ourselves and how we are showing up in their relationship, and we're just saying, like, I'm not willing to look at what is true for you. before, and so she was having a particularly difficult time that I'm just trying to protect myself, and I want to keep my own reality. I'm not willing to look at things from your reality. This is the way that we do not deal with ourselves and we do not look in the mirror. This is called self confrontation. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Self confrontation does not sound like a pleasant activity to do, and it's not super pleasant, I gotta tell you, it's not. I've done a lot of it, but day. I've done a whole if you want more on this particular idea, I have done a whole episode last year on this. It was in the first part of 2023, so go back and look for that episode. But yeah, if you're wanting more information on self confrontation and you're ready to go there, you're like, I want to get rid of this defensiveness, then I suggest that you go listen to that episode. That's going to be a super great place for you to go and get more reference and more information about self confrontation. But what we do when we get defensive is we start pouting. We start acting hurt. We start telling someone else, this other person, you're causing harm to me, instead of you looking in the mirror to see if what they're saying is true. You're just saying you're harming me, and you're not looking at to see is there any truth, truthfulness to what this person is telling me. I know this is really difficult, but when we're in a conversation with someone and they're telling us something that's very hard for us to hear about ourselves. We stop listening. In fact, we only listen long enough to find something that we disagree with, and then we fixate on it, and we think of all the things that we want to say to them. It could be at that point we either interrupt them and don't let them finish and we tell them how they're wrong, or we just stop listening, and we wait for them to stop speaking, and then we tell them how much, how wrong they are. But we don't. What we don't do is say, how are they right? This is a common communication error that so many people have. We just stop listening, especially if we're feeling defensive. A defensive person does not want to be known. And when I talk about being like willing to be known or willing to know another person, that is the definition of intimacy. And this is not intimacy in a sexual way. This is intimacy into the very core of who I am, I'm not willing to look at the core of who I am, and I'm not willing to look at the core of who you are. Defensiveness blocks intimacy because intimacy, because intimacy says I'm willing to know you. I'm willing to be known by you, even when it hurts or it's very difficult, and defensiveness stops intimacy in its tracks. It also resists change. Defensiveness resists our human our very human need and desire to change. It resists us looking in a new direction. It resists looking in. Word and is just focused outward. And if you are wanting to grow as a person and you're only focused outward into things that you see outside of yourself, then you are not going to be able to grow. You have to be willing to see what you don't see, our spouses, our children, our neighbors, our friends, they all see us better than we do, and sometimes they try to tell us things that we don't want to hear, that are difficult, but we don't want to hear them when we get defensive, because our ego will take over. Do you know what your ego is? We could do a whole other series on ego, but our ego is a collection of stories of who we think we are. That's basically what it is, but those stories of who we think we are are so true and we will defend them to the death. Sometimes we think any perceived calling out of our weakness is an attack on our self worth, so we really fight hard to defend ourselves against it. That is an ego move for sure. Sometimes we are not strong enough in our own self esteem, especially when we someone is telling us something that we can get defensive about, and our self esteem is not strong enough to support us instead of looking inside, we will defend we will go to war instead. And when this class and the healthy relationships from the inside out class, I'm going to go into depth, into self esteem and why, where we get it, how we develop it, where it comes from. It's so important to our relationships that I'm going to have a whole section on self esteem, because the way that we think about ourselves affects every part of our life. We need to have a healthy, strong self esteem in order to have a healthy and strong relationship. We can't have one without the other. And when we don't have a healthy self esteem and we let our ego take over, we're not willing to look at ourselves in a true light. We believe our own blindness. Did you know that we are all blind to ourselves? It's where like we're all living inside of a box of our own life, the directions to our life. Live on the outside of the box, but we live on the inside of the box. So other people outside of us see things much more clearly regarding us than we do of ourselves. We are so blind to ourselves, but when we know that, we can address it, but when we get defensive, we are not willing to look at that. We're not willing to say somebody else might see me better than I see myself in the healthy relationships class. I'm going to go deeper into this defensiveness losing strategy. You're going to leave this class with a plan to start working on this. You know, when we self confront, we are the most appealing to other people. We actually build trust in a relationship. When we release the need to be defensive and we self confront. Here's one thing that you can do to start doing that. I want you to ask yourself this question, what would it be like to be in a relationship with me? I've asked my clients that question before, and it usually will stop them in their tracks and is very eye opening. So if you're willing to go there, that can be a difficult one. But what is it like to be in a relationship with you? I hope you enjoyed that episode, that you learned some new things and that you'll be trying out some new things this holiday season. Now, if your family tends to have a lot of drama, if you have tend to have some conflict during the holidays, I want you to go download my free guide. It's three step process to getting rid of that holiday family drama of not getting sucked up into it, but you need to have a plan ahead of time, so make sure you're downloading that before the holidays. Well, the holidays are here, but download it before you have to go to whatever it is that you're going to get sucked up into with the drama. And if that's already happened, it's going to be just a great resource for you to be practicing these same skills that I teach in that guide. You'll be practicing them all through next year, because it's not just at holiday time, right? It's all the time that we could use those types of skills. You'll find a link in the show notes. I'll see you here next time for the second most downloaded episode of 2024
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