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Moving Through Family Conflict - Most Popular Episode of 2024

• Tina Gosney • Episode 166

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Episode 166 – Moving Through Family Conflict – Most Popular Episode of 2024

Conflict is inevitable if you belong to a family. It’s the price you pay for being close to other people – and we all have a need to be close to other people. 

What you do with that conflict will either divide you further and weaken the family, or help you to know each other better and strengthen the family. 

The most popular episodes of 2024 were – Moving Through Family Conflict, part 1 and part 2. Even though these episodes were just released a few weeks ago, I’ve combined them here in one episode to help you with the conflict that might be going on in your family. 

Use these episodes to help you move through the conflict instead of getting stuck in it. Trust in the process and be patient while you wait for your family dynamics to begin shifting. This is not something that will change overnight, but with your consistent effort and determination to create something different, change will begin to happen. 

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If you have a relationship with an adult child that is suffering, download this free guide:

5 Steps to Reconnect with Your Adult Child

You’ll begin healing the hurt you’re carrying, and your heart will feel lighter and more hopeful. You’ll begin taking a different road to building that precious relationship instead of walking on eggshells and riding the roller coaster of disconnection and frustration. 

Click Here to Download the Guide

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.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

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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. This is the final episode of 2024 and if you've been listening the last couple weeks, I've been reposting some of the most downloaded episodes. This today is the most downloaded episode of 2024 and I thought it was very interesting that this was the most downloaded episode, because I only released it a few weeks ago, and it had far more downloads than other episodes that have been out much, much longer. Now this is actually two episodes, because it was a part one and part two. It's moving through family conflict and now, but there was a part one and a part two that I posted in November, and here we are just in December. That's how short of a time it's been now I've just combined both of those episodes here. I was trying to decide part two had a few more downloads than part one, but they just both had so many downloads that I just said I'm just going to combine them into one episode and put both of them into the most popular episodes of 2024. We all have a way that we show up in the world. This is just the way that our we've learned how to do it from the time we were little kids, and we've just kept repeating this, the same patterns, over and over again. And so our brain tells us, well, this is the way that we are, this is the way that the world is, and this is who I am. It's easy to keep doing things the way that you've been doing them. The only reason that you keep doing things that way is because you keep telling yourself that's the way they should be done, or this is the way that I am. And our brain actually encourages us to do this. It tries to tell us that there is not another option, that this is just the way that I am. If somebody else doesn't like it, then they can deal with it, right? But that's actually a lie. Our brain encourages us to keep doing things the same way, because if we do things differently, it's going to require a lot of energy and a lot of effort because we have habits built up that just support us and keep us doing things on autopilot. When our brain exerts a lot of energy and trying to change things, it uses up a lot of calories. Did you know our brain actually is one of the major calorie consumers in our body, but when our brain uses a lot of calories, it just thinks of that as a threat to its survival. Because calories, we have to conserve calories. Calories are a way that we keep our body alive, and our brain does not want us to use up those calories on things that it thinks that it ours has already figured out. It's like we've already figured out who we are, we've already figured out the way that the world works. We've already figured out how to relate to other people. So why do anything differently? It's just the way that I am. But this is all a lie. Life is not black and white. We create who we are. We don't just get it given to us. We always have more options than our brain wants us to see. And this is especially relevant in the topic of family conflict, because if we have a family that is related to each other, historically, like my parents, this is when my parents did it, and that's when my grandparents did it. And historically, you have a lot of conflict in your family, whether that is like out and out conflict with you know, we can see it just yelling at each other or throwing things or arguing and fighting or saying whatever is on your mind, that's just the apparent conflict. But there's a lot of back room conflict too, right? With gossiping and back biting and passive aggressiveness, that's just the more subtle conflict, but it's still conflict, and if we have a history of family conflict, then our brain is going to tell us this is just how my family is, and I can't change it, because that's how my parents did it, that's how my grandparents did it, that's how I'm doing it, and I don't know how to do anything differently, so I'm just going to keep doing things this way. I want you to listen to these episodes, and I want you to really listen to the things that I tell you that you can do differently, some ways that you can start breaking those patterns. If you're having trouble seeing how you could implement some of these things, if they seem too far out of reach for you, then let's just ask yourself this question, what if it were possible that I could dosomething different. Here's the question again, what if it were possible that I could do something different? When we ask ourselves a question like this, it introduces to our brain a possibility that things don't have to stay the way that they were, and sometimes that is the first step to change is just to introduce our brain to our brain that there is possibility that things can be different, and more importantly, that are the way our family is, the way I am is not cut and dry, but I can decide what to think, feel and do. Those are all choices, and I can choose differently if I want to. That's the sometimes. The first step is just introducing the possibility. We're not saying that we're going to do it yet. We're just saying, like, what if it was possible? Let me do some brainstorming. What would be different? It's that simple. Now it's that simple to just introduce that to your brain. The implementation, though, is not an easy thing. The decision to choose differently is a simple one. So just if you're having trouble trying to wrap your around your mind, around the things that I say in this these two podcasts, then just ask yourself that question before we get into those episodes. I do want to let you know I have a new guide for you to download. This is an amazing, amazing guide you're going to want to get it for sure, it's five steps to reconnecting with your adult child. There are so many parents who are being blindsided right now by their adult children cutting them out of their lives or giving them ultimatums. They're just they're saying things like, I thought we were fine and that all of a sudden they hit me with this thing. They just exploded like this one little thing happened and it just everything went crazy and fell apart. I'm hearing this more and more every day, and I've talked to many parents recently who this has actually happened to. If this is you, I want you to know that healing is possible, but we're going to have to get into some things, doing things differently, right? Just like I was talking about with family, conflict with the boots, start doing things differently, and downloading this guide is going to help you see where to begin doing that. Now. I hope you get some new perspectives with these two most downloaded episodes of 2024, moving through family conflict part one and part two. Have you noticed that families are becoming more divided than ever? Have you noticed before, the last, I don't know, 15 or so years, that it's before, it seems like that division was outside our homes, and now it feels like it's moving inside of our homes. I just was thinking about, what are some of the things that really divide our families, that are really kind of tearing us apart? And I came up with politics. I think this year in particular, politics is a big one. Religion is another big one. It used to be that children, as they grew up and formed their own families, that they would follow in the family tradition of religion and church. That's not so anymore. That's really becoming less common than not. And then there's life choices. We don't agree how other people live their life. How was the last time that you looked at your brother or your sister in law or your parents or one of your kids and you're like, I just can't get behind what they're doing. I just don't agree with how they're living their life. They probably there's probably someone looking at you saying the same thing. So that's something that tears us apart and we have differing values. Think about what values are. Those are the things that guide us in our lives. We live and make decisions and choices and go in certain directions because of the values that we have, and if those values are very different from the people in your family that can feel really, really hard. It's like you don't you're missing each other. You don't understand, really, why anyone's doing anything and the choices that they're making. And this, all of this, is creating conflict in our families, and just because you have conflict in your family relationships doesn't mean something bad. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with your family. Think about this, if you have conflict in your family, it means those relationships are important and you want to stay. Stay in them. They're meaningful, they're important, they're precious. I want to stay in them because I'm trying to resolve something. If we didn't care about the relationship, it would be so easy to just get up and walk away or to give it no mind at all. Conflict is like, it's like going to a fancy restaurant where you have a delicious meal and then you have to pay the bill. There's always two sides to everything. If you didn't have precious, wonderful, important relationships in your family that sometimes feel like a warm, delicious meal, then you wouldn't have the conflict. You wouldn't have to pay the bill. If you never sit down and eat the meal, you don't ever have to pay the bill. The benefit of paying that bill is having that delicious meal in the first place. What is conflict anyway? If you give it a definition, if you said this is what conflict is, you probably have an idea of what that looks like. And I think everybody might have a different view of what conflict looks like, although maybe similar, but I think a little different according to, you know, your life experience. But as I looked at what conflict is in general, I think it's really mismatched expectations. We all have things that we want. We have needs that we want to take care of for ourselves, and we have strategies. We employ strategies in our life to meet those needs. And often, when you're in conflict, your basic needs and the other person's basic needs are in conflict. They're not meshing the way that you're trying to take care of getting your needs met and the way they're trying to take care of their getting their needs met is not going together. It sometimes is even hurting and clashing against each other, kind of like rubbing up against each other in a painful way. We will often expect people in our lives, especially the people that we care about and that we are in close relationships with. We want them to see the world the same way that we do. We want them to have our same values, to agree with our decisions and agree with their decisions and agree with the way that we want to take care of the things in our lives and solve problems. When we have significant things like values that are clashing with somebody else's, it's really easy to have conflict with somebody, but I want you to start thinking about conflict differently. Conflict is not bad. Conflict helps us. It really helps us to wake up to who we are. We don't realize how often we are just sleeping in our own lives, not paying attention to what is going on deep down, inside of our soul, inside of our brain, inside of our spirit. But conflict can help us to wake up and start noticing that, and it helps us to get to know other people better, the people that we care about. It helps us to get to know them better. But our first reaction when conflict happens, our immediate reaction is to say, This is bad. This is not supposed to be happening. It might look like, Oh, I'm such a terrible person that I'm thinking this way, or that I reacted that way, and we internalize that badness, or we can often look outside of ourselves and point a finger at somebody else and say, I can't believe you're doing this. You're a bad person, and we externalize it, and usually this paired with this is not supposed to be happening. I don't like this. I don't want it to happen. It's really common to point a finger inward or outward and begin seeing ourselves or other person is bad. I want you to think of a recent time when you were in conflict with someone. What were you thinking? Do you remember what the thoughts were that were going through your head? This person is bad. I'm bad. Why did I do that? Why are they doing that? This shouldn't be happening. Did any of those thoughts or similar ones go through your mind? If they you said, yes, you're pretty normal. Think of a time when you had a real conflict with someone, and you worked through it, and then you had an even closer, a stronger, more trusting relationship with them after the conflict. That's what conflict can help us do. It can help us grow in intimacy, and intimacy is knowing ourselves better. Or knowing someone else better, letting them know us better. That's what intimacy is. It's the willingness to know someone at a deeper level and to let them know you on a deeper level. If we just looked at an example of recent conflict in the world, or mainly in our country, but I think it goes beyond that. Let's just pull up the election. I mean, that's a really hot topic these days. I'm recording this podcast right after the election. I've heard a lot of stories about family members fighting, really, being very unhappy with each other, fighting a lot of conflict, not even to the point of not speaking to each other because they were voting for different candidates. A lot of hurt feelings, a lot of fighting about who was right who was wrong, saying we don't even have the same values, and that leads us to re evaluate the relationship in a way that you're thinking like, I don't even know who you are. How could you vote for that person? We've lost the ability so often. We've lost it to be able to be together and to be different the same time, sometimes really significantly different. We have these shattered expectations of each other, and we don't know how to put them back together. I don't think we have a whole lot of role models that are showing us what that looks like. Think about when you are hurt because you've been triggered. Something happens you're in conflict with someone. Think about what happens inside of your body. Your body goes into fight, flight or freeze. Those are all survival modes in your body. Think of our ancient ancestors out on the tundra being life threatened, and they have to either get ready to fight, they have to run away, or they have to play dead. Well, we will do the same thing. We view these contact, these conflicts, as a threat to us. Our body and our mind are interpreting them as threats, and so then we start acting in order to protect ourselves, but think about being disagreeing with someone is not a threat to your life, but your brain and your body are interpreting it that way. It's saying you need to protect yourself right now, you're in danger. Are you actually in danger? Probably not, most likely not. So who are you protecting yourself from? You feel like you have to protect yourself from that other person. And if that other person is in your family, that person becomes the bad person that you're pointing your finger at. I do want to take just a pause here and give this short, important disclaimer, if you are being abused, if your life actually is threatened, if you're being abused in any way, you actually do need to protect yourself, and so your number one job is to Get yourself to safety, and I want you to stop listening to this podcast and go get yourself to safety if you're not being abused and your life is not in danger. I really hope you'll listen to the end of this podcast. I think I've got some good things in store for you. I've been working with parents for a long time now, and mainly the parents that I work with have children that are late teens, 20s, sometimes enter their 30s or 40s, and I see how these parents love their children. They love their children. I understand that I feel the same way about mine and those parents, they love those children even if they're not getting any love back. It's easier to love them if they're getting the love back. But that's not a requirement. They would do anything for these kids, and the things that they've shared with me let me know that sometimes that kid is not feeling the love from the parent, and sometimes it's because that parent is so stuck in being right and not differing in their views, and not being willing to open up their mind, crack open their mind and see what they're missing, or they're so stuck in their own hurt from how their child has hurt them, that then they turn around and they act in ways that hurt their child. The parent says hurtful things because of their hurt. There's really something to that little saying that says, hurt people. Hurt people. Now it's really difficult. It's a really difficult situation when the parent is seeing the child as someone they have to protect themselves from. And it's also a very difficult situation when that child sees their parent as someone they have to protect themselves from. How do we stop doing this? The very first thing we have to do is get our body out of fight, flight or freeze mode, nothing productive will happen in that relationship until we can bring that response down. That involves calming your body and quieting your mind. Some of the ways that we can do that is to breathe. We slow our breath down, especially focusing on a longer exhale that will quiet, that will quiet that brain and that body down even faster. Focus on the exhale,ground yourself. Somehow, sometimes we need to take a time out, and we just need to excuse ourself from the situation physically and go to another place. Here's what's not helpful to calm your body and quiet your mind, is to go get on your phone and numb yourself, or to go into the pantry and find something to eat, or just get on the computer and mindlessly scroll or watch some binge some Netflix show. Those things might temporarily move the situation down the road, but they are not helpful in calming your body and quieting your mind. Those are not helpful activities, really being in it and helping our body to learn how to calm down. That is helpful. If you know Brene Brown, who is amazing. If you don't know her and her work, I suggest looking her up. She's got some great books, some great videos online, but she talks about having tools in our toolbox, and how we need more than one tool in our toolbox. Well, this calming your body and quieting your mind is a big tool. There's a lot of different types of ways you can do that, but this is a tool that it's like in your toolbox. It's like the hammer. What use is a toolbox without a hammer? And what use is anything to help your relationship if you don't know how to calm yourself down, that's how important it is. It's always the first step. Next, after we've calmed ourselves down and we've brought our thinking brain back online, we have to take back our responsibility. So when you see the other person as someone that you have to protect yourself from, you've actually turned yourself into a victim. What if you're not actually a victim? What if you do have power to decide how you want to respond. To do that, you have to move your thoughts from being wrapped up in all that emotion. You have to move them into the front of your brain. This is called your prefrontal cortex. Your that part of your brain is the higher thinking brain, and that brain has the ability to reason, to see different perspectives, to respond in a responsible way. You want to see, where is my responsibility? Where is my ability to do what I need to do to take care of myself right now, because remember, we're trying to get our needs met, and often the ways that we're trying to get our needs met are bumping up against the way someone else is trying to get their needs met. So how do you get your needs met? Are you able to give them to yourself and step away from trying to get the other person to give that to you. How do you give it to yourself? Doing this process is going to help you move from being rigid and contracted into flexible. We want to think of having a firm back but a soft front. We don't want to be so rigid that we don't let anything in, and we're never challenging any view of how we're seeing something and we are shutting other people out. That is a sure fire way to damage a relationship and to keep people away from you. You want to be flexible. When the winds, the storms come and the conflict comes. You want to be flexible. You want to go with the flow, but still be deeply rooted in how you are managing yourself. If you are wanting some help with this, there is some help in the guide that I was talking about earlier in the podcast. It's going to help you. To learn how to keep your cool. It's going to help you walk through a process to create a plan ahead of time, which is also one of the great things that our prefrontal cortex can do, is to create a plan ahead of time. Our emotional lower brain that just reacts to everything doesn't have that ability, but when we plan ahead of time, that's using our higher brain. So go download that, that free PDF. It's pretty short. You can get through it in just an hour or two. Now, if I was listening to this podcast a few years ago, I would have said something like, why is it just my job to always be the responsible one? Doesn't that other person have any responsibility here? Are they just allowed to continue to do whatever they want and to continue to hurt me, and I'm the one that has to do all the work? Yeah, I would have said that. And I think there's probably people listening right now that are saying the same thing. When you begin to take responsibility for yourself, when you start taking a step back, you calm yourself down. You take a step back, you are actually taking care of yourself and your own needs, and you become more firmly rooted in you know that tree that I mentioned before that has the deep roots. Your roots go deeper, and you are able to more easily speak up for what you want and what you need, and sometimes the other person will still be unwilling to give that to you. That's okay to put some healthy boundaries into place when you need to, but when you speak up for yourself, your roots are growing deeper every single time. I also talk to parents who have this thought in their mind, they say, I just want everyone to get along. I just want everything to be peaceful, to have a good time. I'm so I end up walking on eggshells just to make sure that the peace is there, but that nobody gets upset. And I'm constantly putting out the little fires and trying to manage everybody Well, that's exhausting, first of all, and it's not really possible. Pretending that there isn't conflict is not going to make it so it just makes your family. It just makes that environment an unsafe place to express what you're thinking and feeling, and I'm going to show you an alternative to that in a minute. But stick with me here, because when we try to push away conflict and just manage everybody else so that we can feel like our family is great. We get along just fine. It becomes like an iceberg. Think of an iceberg, and there's the part that's above the water, and there's a part that's underneath the water. There's a portion of it that you can see. This is the relationship that you see that looks so peaceful. It looks like everybody's getting along. It looks like we've got great relationships. How much of the relationship exists under the surface that we're not willing to look at? Every time we push away conflict and we walk on eggshells and we try to manage somebody else, it's like that water level rises and more of the relationship gets pushed underneath the water where it can't be addressed, and less and less of that is above water. The real health of the relationship exists underneath. When you're willing to go underneath to water level, you're really approaching working on a healthier family, healthier family relationships. The goal is not to never have conflict or to brush it under the rug. It's the goal is to help the family learn how to move through it and to grow closer because of that. Now, if you have tried this, if you have tried if you have people in your family that are in conflict, and you've tried to bring them together and that didn't work, or maybe you're in conflict with someone, and you tried to address it and it didn't work, maybe it's getting worse then. I just want to let you know that everyone comes to their desire and their ability to let go of being a victim in their own time. Not everyone is ready to let go of that. Not everyone is ready to take responsibility for themselves right now today. Sometimes it happens next week, next year, 10 years from now, sometime it will happen after they leave this earth. Some people will never be ready to let go of that until they leave the Earth. But if this is what you want for your family, you want your family to learn how to move through conflict. You're tired of brushing things under the rug. Work, then you can be the one that leads out and shows the example. It's really hard for people to do what they have never seen done before, and most people have never seen this done before. They've only seen examples of everything that we're not supposed to do with conflict. But if you want your family to head in a different direction, you can give them a model. You can show them a model to pattern themselves after, and then when they are ready to let go of being a victim and take responsibility for themselves, they know what it looks like because they've seen you do it. You are the Pioneer. You are the one that is riding that difficult row. You're going off the main path, and it's going to be rough, because anytime you go off the well worn path, you're going through lots of, you know, trees and grass and rocks and fallen logs and whatever, but it's just a rougher road, and just be prepared for that, but you can be the one that leads out. Here's my takeaway for today, conflict and challenges are an opportunity to learn and grow, as long as we use the tools and we're learning to move through those. And we're using healthy relationship tools. I teach you so many of those tools in this podcast. And if you need a refresher, if you want to go remind yourself of some of those, just about any episode that you click on will be helpful for you. But I just pulled out a few recent ones that I thought, you know, I'm going to send them to these ones, because I think they'll be really helpful. That's number 133 which addresses conflict or contention. Which one is it? Number 144, about healthier boundaries. Episode 155 responding, responding intentionally and not from automatic programming. And then episode 158 seeing what's in your control and what isn't. Family. Conflict is difficult, and it's normal. If you have conflict in your family, nothing is wrong. It's just showing you. It's like shining a flashlight on where your work is. I have a parable for you today. This is called the parable of the porcupines. Did you know A group of porcupines is called a prickle? Isn't that such a fitting word for porcupines? Porcupines are also pretty solitary animals, but they do like to get together in small groups, usually families, and they will sometimes travel with families. Well, this particular winter was a very cold, bitter winter, and the porcupines were suffering. This prickle of porcupines was really suffering in this cold, frigid temperatures. So they discovered, if they huddled together, they could survive, and they would be warmer, and their closeness. When they got close together, it would provide enough heat for them, and it protects them from those harsh winter, cold temperatures. But there was a problem when they got so close together, because porcupines have quills, and their quills began to stick each other, and they were wounding each other. They were hurting each other. They decided that it was better for them to just separate, go their separate ways, instead of wounding and hurting each other. So they all went off on their own. Well, it didn't take very long for them to see that they were starting to freeze and die again. And collectively, they just got together and they said, okay, the wounds that we're getting from being close together is a better option than dying alone and freezing. So they were just going to have to endure the pains of the wounds that they were giving each other. And they survived the winter, but they didn't do they didn't survive without each having their own set of wounds from being close together. Think about this past week or two. Did you get needled by someone? Did you get a wound from someone? Did you needle someone? Did you give someone a wound. So if we're really honest with ourselves, we're going to see how often we get needled, how often we needle. Last week's episode was about conflict. This week's episode is about conflict. You don't have to have listened to the one last week, but it would be helpful if you did before you listened to this. One, but this one can kind of stand on its own as well. I did talk about last week how our conflict usually happens because we each have needs that we're trying to get met. I have my needs. You have your needs, and we each have strategies for getting those needs met. And many times, our strategies for getting our own needs met will rub up against someone else's strategies for them getting their needs met the I think the tricky thing is, is when we are finding ourselves in conflict and our strategies are rubbing up against each other, we're pricking each other with porcupine quills. How do we even know what our needs are? Sometimes we are not in touch with ourselves, and I think most of the time, we are not in touch with ourselves in knowing what we really need, in asking ourselves, what's my real need here? Want to give you four basic needs that we all have, and most needs will fit into one of these. We call them our energy centers. And when our energy centers are triggered, when we feel like this need is not being met, and it triggers, just an automatic response in us to then go into kind of a fight or flight state. So the first one is we need to be safe and secure. We all have a need for safety and security. In fact, if you were deprived of safety and security at some point in your life, usually early in your childhood, which most people were, even if you were had all the resources in the world, there is some way that you were deprived of safety and security. That's going to be a big one for you. The second one is, we want to seek pleasure avoid pain. This is actually a natural thing that our brain does, and when we are trying to get the pleasure or avoid pain, and someone is in the way of that that can be a big energy trigger for us. The third one is we want to be able to control things. We want to have certainty in our lives. We want to know what we can count on. We want to know that we can, by sheer force of will, our own will, that we can make something happen that we want to have happen, and when things seem out of control, or someone is in the way of me getting what I want, that is really hard. The fourth one is we all want esteem and affection. We want to be looked at and admired by other people. We want to be seen as worthy and valuable. We want them to reinforce the way that we want to be seen to us, and when we're the way that we want to be seen is not being reinforced by someone that can be a big energy trigger. So all the needs, almost all needs, are going to fit into one of those four categories. And if you're trying to figure out if you're in conflict with someone, and you're trying to figure out, what do I really need, go into those four categories, see if it fits into one of those categories. For you, we all have two great relationship needs. We have the need for autonomy and the need for connection. So autonomy is the relationship that we have with ourselves. We want to belong to ourselves. We want the freedom to find and seek happiness, to be authentically who we we feel that we are. We want to live a pain free life. We want to explore in the world and find out who we want to be. We just want to be able to actualize and grow and have a strong self esteem. And our second need is to be in community. We want to be a part of a community. We want to have other people know us, and we want to know them. We want to be able to give and receive love. We want the safety of being part of a group that values us, and we have the need for someone to witness our life. We want to be seen, heard and valued. But these are like the porcupines, right? When we're close to other people, we wound other people, and they wound us. And when we're on our own, we don't thrive. And if we cut off contact with all the people who love us and just people in general, we can go downhill very quickly. So when we prioritize our need for autonomy and we try to cut off our need for community, we're like those porcupines freezing out in the cold all by themselves. And what happens usually is we're going to start to blame somebody else for how we're feeling. We're going to hold on to being right, and we use that to feel more in control of our own life. And this is just natural reactions from our survival brain, but our survival brain is not the same as our relational brain, because when we're in survival mode, our focus gets really narrow. We start feeling a lot of tension in our body. Last week, I talked about the fight, flight or freeze response, and that is a survival response, and our narrow vision happens on purpose, because our body is helping us things that we really need to survive, that we're fighting for our life, and it's prioritizing those different types of things in our bodies to make that happen for us. When we prioritize our need for community, and we cut off our need for to be a self for autonomy, we get deeper wounds. We move in closer to other people. We start getting deeper wounds. We stop giving ourselves what we need, and we're trying to get it from somebody else. And in the process, we start wounding other people too. We start internalizing blame. We start saying things to us like, oh, there's something wrong with me. And then we can get really needy, and we start trying to get what we're supposed to give ourselves. We try to get it from somebody else. And that never works. Well. A few years ago, my husband and I decided to start really working on this, that this, this balance, the need to be individual selves and to come together as a couple. And we started taking courses. We started doing coaching. We started reading a lot of books together. We have a lot of discussions, most of the time, most of the time, difficult discussions, not always, but a lot of them were very difficult, and we each had to be willing to look at ourselves with more honesty, and it's made a huge difference in our relationship. And this is called we're working on differentiation. And now my husband is a firm believer in differentiation, and he will tell anybody that wants to talk to him about it, he says, differentiation is the secret to life. You need to learn how to do it, and you need to learn how to do it now. But this is really something that we are a work in progress on, and this is the work of a lifetime becoming differentiated. None of us that are living on this earth are perfectly differentiated. We all struggle with this, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. Now, what I'm talking about with my husband, of course, is a marriage a partner relationship that's very different than a friendship relationship or a parenting relationship or a sibling relationship, and when you are in those other types of relationships. Well, actually, even when you're in a marriage relationship, you can't count on the other person doing working on differentiation with you. Most of the time, you're not going to be able to count on someone else doing it with you. Most of the time, it will just be you, which is good and good news and bad news, right? It's going to be great that you get to have control over what you're doing. You have the ability to control you and decide what you how you are going to show up, and nobody else gets to decide that for you. And that's the good news, and the bad news is the other person is probably not going to understand what you're doing and what you're trying to do and why you're changing things, because they're used to you acting a certain way, and now all of a sudden, you're acting differently. And that can cause friction, especially in the beginning, and when we see that friction, which we could also call conflict, we don't like that, and when we start getting pushback from the other person, it's really easy for us then to revert back and do things the way that we used to. Like this isn't working. It's just causing more problems. Why am I trying to change anything? I'm just going to go back and do things the way I used to, so common, it's actually a sign that things are working and that you are moving forward. If you hit that friction, that conflict, it shows you that you are doing something different, and you're going to have to go through some messiness before you get to a more peaceful side. But before we get to that, it's really common to flip back and forth. I'm going to prioritize myself, and then that doesn't feel good, so I'm going to prioritize my relationships with other people, and then we get wounded by each aside, and we just keep flipping back and forth from my relationship with me, and I got to prioritize me to I got to prioritize my relationships with others, and until we start learning how to work both of these at the same time, incorporate them, have them work together, bring them closer together, we're going to be wounding and being wounded over and over again. This is differentiation. It's being more mature in our relationships by taking ownership of our own thoughts, feelings and actions. We want to know how to be our authentic, strong, flexible self and stay in a relationship with another person, especially when it's difficult. There's four steps. These are the steps that I work on with my clients. The first one is we need to build a more solid version of ourselves, solid, but flexible. And this is what I mean by that we do not know ourselves very well. If you haven't purposefully worked on getting to know yourself and gone deep with yourself. You don't know yourself very well, so you have to know who you are. What are your values, what's important to you? Why do you have the patterns that you do? Why do you show up the ways that you do? We need to know all those things. We need to be honest with ourselves, and so often we are not honest with ourselves, because we have this thing called an ego. And the ego we can we're just going to say that is the it's the stories that we have about who we believe that we are, the way that we want to see ourselves, and our ego brain is really, really strong. It just tries to reinforce this view that you have of yourself, and it's going to keep you blocked from seeing anything that doesn't reinforce that that view. So when you're trying to move past the ego that can be really tricky to do by yourself, because you're literally being blocked from seeing things that your brain will not let you see. So by being honest with ourselves, being honest with others, we really start developing a more solid self. But we need to be flexible. We need to be flexible in letting that view of ourselves change over time as we gain more information. Second thing we need to do is we need to know how to calm ourselves down. There's this quote that I'd like to I just love this quote by Viktor Frankl, and I'm just going to paraphrase it, but he says, between stimulus and response, there's a space in that space is your ability to choose your response, and that's where you're going to find your growth and your freedom. The Gottman lab. Now, the Gottmans are a couple that run the the their relationship experts. They run this lab in Seattle where they have people come, couples come, and they watch them. They hook them up to monitor so they can see what their bodies are doing and how they're responding to what's going what's happening around them. And they have them in this lab. They have lots of video cameras up, and they'll run different experiments. And there was one experiment that they had where they brought couples in, just one couple at a time, but they did this so many times, where they would bring in a couple, they would hook them up to these monitors, they would have all these video cameras around, and they would give them a difficult topic to discuss. And because they were hooked up to these monitors, they could see how their bodies were reacting when certain things were talked about and brought up in a discussion, just as their bodies were getting heightened in their response, they would tell the couple, oh, sorry, we're having some technical issues. We need you to pause this conversation. Would you go into that room over there, and you go into that room over there, we'll let you know when we're ready for you to come back. So they had each person separate into a different room for at least 15 minutes and then, and that's all that they told them. And then when they came back, their bodies were actually more calm. They were able to continue that discussion in a more calm manner than they they would have been if they had not stopped them. So that's the space that was a 15 minute space, and that space was not their choice. It was what they were told to do. Right? So it takes 15 minutes for those stress hormones when we're we're in a heightened state, it takes 15 minutes at least, for those stress hormones to run through our body so that we can calm down. Those people were not told to calm themselves down, they were just separated for 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you were purposefully separating and trying to calm down, and you had tools to do that, to deliberately calm yourself down, what a difference that could make in your discussions in the way that you react to someone, in the way that you feel about yourself, because we don't like ourselves when we show up in that survival mode. This is another thing I work a lot on with my clients, is to know how to calm ourselves down. And then number three is we need to know how to respond from a grounded place, keeping that calm in our body, which is tricky. It can be really tricky, especially when something else comes in and we feel triggered all over again. But we need better ways of talking with each other. We need better ways of communicating. We need better ways of taking care of ourselves and our own reactions when we're in an interaction, in a conversation, in a situation where it feels like things are going out of control, but what we usually do is we start getting defensive. We start trying to protect ourselves, we try to prove that we're right, and keep pushing on the I'm right and you're wrong button, we try to stay in control. Being trying to be right vertically does have us thinking that we're more in control. If we can just prove to the other person that we're right, then it keeps we can stay in control. But all of those things really escalate a situation. So we'll either do that or there are a lot of people that just try to smooth things over. They're just like, let's just forget it. Let's just move on. Oh, it doesn't matter anyway. And we try to smooth things over as quickly as possible, and we really miss the connection that we could create with another person. And then we just kind of push things down the road. Just because we don't address them doesn't mean that they go away. We push them down the road, and they tend to get bigger before they get addressed. So responding from a grounded place, knowing how to do that, super important. And the fourth thing that we need to remember and that we need to work on is being willing to stay in a relationship even when it gets hard, because we know we're doing it for a reason. We know that there's something on the other side of that that we really want, and so we're willing to go through the hard parts of it to get there. This is the part of us that says I really care about you, and I really care about me, and I really care about this relationship that we have together, and so I'm going to stick in it. I'm going to stay in it for the hard stuff. This is exactly what our brain tells us not to do, because our brain will tell us when things get hard, you need to move away. It doesn't say go towards. It says move away. Our natural inclination is to move away when things get hard or we see pain, and so we just need to develop this ability to to do hard things. And I do want us to listen to ourselves. I think it's important to listen to ourselves and honor what we need, but we also need to recognize when our brain is trying to sabotage us, and we need to recognize that we have the ability to tell ourselves that we are going to do hard things. And that doesn't just apply to exercise, sports, diet, things like school, work, all those other things that we use. Usually apply that saying to that I can do hard things. We don't usually apply it to relationships. We apply it to all those other things. So those are the four things, developing a solid, flexible self, knowing how to calm our brain and our body down, responding from a grounded place, holding on to that grounded place and sticking in it for the long haul. Even when it gets hard, when you're developing differentiation, it can be really frustrating if you're the only one working on it. But remember, this only takes you when you start developing this, you don't actually need the other person to do anything for you to start being more mature in the way that you are handling yourself and in your relationships. When you start working on this, it helps you to develop as a person. It really is easier if somebody else is willing to be there and do it with you. It's not necessary, but it does make it easier, but you don't have to have buy in from anyone else to be able to work on this. And I want you to remember that it's really normal to see this as something that is hard because it's directly against what so many of us have done our whole lives. And so we're going to get dragged back into old patterns quite often, especially at the beginning. It's really normal to get dragged back into the things that we didn't want to do. And what I want you to do is just notice when you get dragged back, just take an honest look at what you could have done differently and then just get back on and try again. This is not about perfection. It's about progress, because we never will get to a place of being perfect in differentiation on this earth. If you want to start working on this now I have a the best place. For you to go right now is to download that free PDF that I have for you and start creating a plan for the holidays. Right now is always the best place to start. Here's my takeaway for today. Conflict is inevitable. It's just part of being in a relationship, the desire to be close to someone and the desire to be undisturbed by them is one of the great polarities of life. As a human on this earth, it's the journey of a lifetime to figure out how to integrate both of those desires. So give yourself time, give yourself compassion and grace, and you're going to stumble your way through it. And that is perfect, and that's the way it's supposed to be. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here with me in 2024 I am really looking forward to 2025 because I know it's going to be this amazing year full of joy and sorrow, highs and lows, success and failure, because that is how life is supposed to be. I'm inviting you to be here with me and to join me on the podcast in 2025 and I'm inviting you to download that guide, the five steps to reconnecting with your adult child. Because if you are disconnected from one of your children, I know for sure that your heart is really hurting, and you might be stuck in trying to force them back into the way that they used to be. You might be feeling hopeless, maybe you even have given up. But letting go of trying to control that situation does not mean you're letting go of the relationship. It just means you are opening up your heart to new possibilities, because you get to decide who you want to be in this situation. This circumstance does not have to decide who you are. It does not control you. You get to decide who you will be in this situation and in every other situation. This is your agency, your right and your responsibility. I'll see you in 2025 you.