3 Shifts to Begin Solving Family Conflict – Even if You’re the Only One Trying

Episode 195 – 3 Shifts to Begin Solving Family Conflict – Even if You’re the Only One Trying
 
Is your relationship with your adult child strained, tense, or completely shut down? You’re not alone—and you’re not powerless. In this episode, I’m giving you the three foundational shifts that begin to heal family conflict, even when the other person isn’t willing to engage. If you’ve been trying to fix the relationship by focusing on them, this episode is your invitation to turn inward and start creating change that lasts.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why looking at your own role in the conflict is a powerful first step
• How to manage your emotional reactions in the heat of the moment
• The impact of unspoken expectations on family dynamics
• Why discomfort is a sign you’re on the right path—and how to handle it with strength
• The ONE shift that opens the door to real healing in your relationship

Download the Free Guide:
 “The 3-Step Solution to Keeping Your Cool Around Family Holiday Drama”
 Holidays can stir up old patterns and emotions—this guide will help you stay grounded and respond with grace.

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Ready to learn how to manage your emotional reactions? Calm Core is your guide:

Being able to manage your emotional reactions to others is a vital step in repairing family relationships

CLICK HERE TO SEE CALM CORE

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:08

Why does it feel like no matter how hard you try, things never get better with your family? Maybe you have just been walking on eggshells trying to manage and make sure everything is okay for everybody else, and they're still pulling away or shutting down, maybe they even stop talking to you, and all you're trying to do is fix it so we can reconnect and we can feel close again. The truth that most parents never hear is this, you can't repair a relationship by focusing on what another person is doing wrong. I'm Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and family life educator, and I help parents like you rebuild trust and connection with your adult children without using guilt manipulation or control. In today's episode, we're getting into the three core shifts that start the healing process in any family conflict. These are the things that you can actually control, and when you put your focus here, everything starts to change, even if the other people in your life are not really willing or ready to meet you halfway. So let's get into those three core shifts. Okay? Shift number one, own, your own contribution to the conflict. This one's going to sting a little bit, but please stay with me. When your adult child pulls away, when someone cuts off contact with you. It's supernatural to say, what, what did I do? What's What are they? Why are they doing this? And what's wrong with them? But a better question is, what part Am I playing in this dynamic, even if it's unintentional. Now I want you to hear me very clearly, I am not saying this is all your fault, and I am definitely not saying that people in your family are justified in treating you poorly, but what I am saying is that every relationship is CO created. You are not powerless in this dynamic. But first you need to see what your part is in that creation. Here's an analogy that I like to use with my clients. I want you to picture this relationship like a dance. You do this, you move this way, and then they move that way, and you move that way, and then they move this way. You're pretty good at this already, because you've been doing this same routine with this family member for years, maybe even decades, and you could probably predict what they're going to do when you do whatever you do. It's predictable, it's familiar, it's deeply ingrained in the way that we develop our family systems. But if you suddenly change your steps, the dance is forced to change too. They can't keep doing the same steps if they're not getting the same steps back from you. This is the power of taking responsibility for your own part. It interrupts a pattern. And when we interrupt a pattern, everything has to reorganize. It creates space for something new to come in. I want you to ask yourself, do I jump in with advice when all I want to do is vent? Do I get defensive when they bring up something uncomfortable for me, do I have unresolved hurt that is then leaking out into the relationship in subtle ways, like guilt tripping or passive aggressive comments? Now maybe none of those related to you, maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but what would a question that you could ask yourself be that would apply to your situation. It might actually be easier to see this if I give you an example. So a let's just say a wife is managing her husband's outbursts, also known as angry reactivity, by managing what's going on in the house and managing the children and managing everything in his life. Okay, so if it's the children, she's trying to keep them quiet, or she's saying, Don't tell your dad this. Or if one of the kids did do something, she's saying to them instead of the Father, she's saying to the child, look what you've done now. You've upset your father. Instead of holding the husband accountable for managing himself and his anger, she is enabling him, because she's allowing him to keep showing up in an immature way, with immature behavior. She's not allowing him to take responsive. Ability for his own emotional reactions, and she's managing his life so that she can keep things calm and he doesn't explode. It's like a ticking time bomb. She might think this is easier, but this is the dance. When she changes the dance, meaning she stops managing him, it changes the system of the family. Or let's just reverse this example. Let's say maybe you're the explosive one, and maybe you have a spouse that's trying to manage you. We all have things that we do to contribute to our relationship issues. We Our job is to look at what our contribution to that relationship is. Now these behaviors are automatic and they're very deeply ingrained in us, but once we see them, we can begin to choose differently, but we can't begin to choose differently until we see them, and that's a really key point. These things can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see on your own, because your brain hides them from you. Kind of sneaky that way. You're also really good, and this is one of the brain's tricks. You're really good at creating an entire story, crafting an entire story that justifies why you do the things that you do. I suggest working with a qualified coach or a therapist that will be your mirror. They will show you the things that you can't see because your brain is blocking it from you. And I can be that coach for you. Maybe I'm the right person for you. Maybe I'm not. You can set up a connection call to see but working with a coach or a therapist here is really the effective way. It's going to be very difficult to achieve that. One without it. Okay, number two, shift number two, manage your emotional reactions. I'm going to be super honest with you in that family relationships are emotional. In fact, I believe they are our most emotional relationships, especially when things are not going well when there's conflict or distance that can be at a really emotional time, when someone says something really hurtful to you or rejects your attempts to reach out your nervous system, which is like your control panel, for your body for safety, it just kicks into overdrive. You might shut down. You might lash out. You might try to over explain yourself or justify yourself. These are all protective reactions, and they are totally normal. It's this happens because you're human. But these reactions rarely help. In fact, they usually make things worse. And when someone says to you something like you never listen to me, and you immediately want to defend yourself and say, That's not true. I've always been here for you, but from their perspective, you just proved their point. You are not listening. You are defending. You are more interested in defending than you are listening. And this actually goes back to number one shift number one, this can be a pattern we easily get into, is the defensive pattern when we manage our own emotional reactivity. This does not mean that we are suppressing our feelings and we're shoving them down. That does not work, because what happens then? Have you ever seen a beach ball? Have you ever tried to put push a beach ball under water and hold it there for a really long time. Well, that beach ball wants to it wants to pop up. The same thing happens when we try to push down our emotions. We're trying to push them down underneath the surface. And when we don't have the energy to push them down anymore, or something triggers us, they come up and explode. It can be very explosive. That's not a good thing. We are not trying to suppress them. We're not trying to pretend like we are not emotional beings, because we are. When I say, manage your emotional reactions. I want you to create space between your feelings and your actions that you can respond instead of react. Viktor Frankl, who was a psychotherapist, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. He was actually in the Nazi concentration camps. He was a prisoner, and he wrote this book while he was there. And this quote is from him. He says, between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and our freedom. Who doesn't want freedom? Freedom? From having other people and our emotions control us. The problem is we have not learned how to do this. We have not learned how to give ourselves space to choose. We react to our automatic reactions that we just learned a really long time ago. These are our triggers. These are our patterns. Instead of reacting to those. Try this. When you feel triggered, you're feeling one of those strong emotions, come on. I want you to pause and take a breath and don't speak right away. In fact, if you need to leave the room, leave the room. If you need to leave the conversation, then by all means, leave the conversation, and then, after you've given yourself a little bit of physical space, name what you're feeling. I'm feeling rejected, I'm feeling disrespected, I'm feeling really hurt. When you name that feeling, it shifts the way that you your brain is processing it, and then you can remind yourself I don't have to fix this right now. I can sit with this. I can be uncomfortable with this feeling, and I can figure it out, and I can respond from a grounded place later. That's what emotional maturity looks like. It is incredibly healing for you to find that kind of freedom in your life and for your relationships. It's very healing. Learn how to give yourself some space, and this is something that you really have to repeat. It's like a repeated practice over time to build this muscle. I do have a program. It's a very introductory program to processing these types of things. It's called calm core. This helps you to learn how to calm yourself down, to give yourself that space when you're feeling triggered. There's a link in the show notes if you want to look at more of that. Here's shift number three. This is a biggie. Examine your unspoken expectations. We're going to talk about expectations. These are not the ones that we say out loud. These are often not even ones that we like. Consciously recognize that we have. These are ones that we have in secret. They live in our subconscious mind. We're often we're not even aware of them until they are broken. Our rules are broken, and they usually carry a should with them, like my kids should call me every week. My kids should invite me to the holidays, or they should want to come home for the holidays. They should appreciate everything that I've done for them. So lots of times, they hold a should, not all the time, but typically they do, and it's very human to want certain things from your family members. It's even okay to ask for them. But the problem is when we turn these expectations into requirements for us feeling loved or respected or connected, these unspoken expectations create invisible rules for people, and when those rules are broken, we feel very resentful, and we feel rejected, and we feel hurt, and that pain leaks out. Even when we try to hide it, we can't actually hide it. It does leak out. And so I want you to ask yourself, what rules Am I holding others to that I haven't even expressed? What am I making it mean when my family member doesn't act the way that I hoped that they would, what do I make it mean about me and how can I take responsibility to meet my own needs instead of waiting for them to meet my needs? One of the most powerful shifts that you can make is this. One is to let people be who they are, and then you choose how you show up in response, because literally, that's all you have control over. You don't have control over the way other people react or act or behave, but you do have control over yourself. When you drop the shoulds, you drop the pressure, when the pressure drops, you've created some room to breathe again, and you've created a space where connection can start happening again. These shoulds in our unwritten rule book. They're there because we have certain life experiences. We have certain beliefs. We've developed these over time. Other people have other life experiences and different beliefs, and even if we share a lot of those same life experiences or shame but same beliefs, then we still have different personalities to take into account for. We still have the fact that everybody processes experiences and beliefs differently. We want to give room. For difference in how we operate, in how we process experience and how we want to live our lives, when you notice that you have an expectation for someone, this is what I want you to do, and you might be telling yourself, of course, like a reasonable, reliable person would be acting this way, and this is the only acceptable way to be in the world. But you know what? They might be living in a different world than you. In fact, we're all actually living in different worlds. Instead of going to automatic judgment switch that expectation to appreciation. We really need to appreciate what we are offered. No one, even your family members, are required to do anything for you, and when you show appreciation for what is offered, there might just become a day when they're willing to offer more. Here's a bonus shift, a bonus insight. I want you to expect to be uncomfortable, because this is something nobody talks about when it comes to healing family relationships, it's going to feel super uncomfortable, really, really uncomfortable when you stop reacting the same way, when you start blaming and start looking inward, when you drop your expectations and turn them into appreciation, or when you try to do that, it feels very wrong. You feel exposed. You feel vulnerable. You feel like you're the only one showing up trying, and that feels unfair, but this is a sign that it's working. It is not a sign that things have gone wrong. Your brain is wired to keep you in familiar patterns, even when those patterns are painful. That is why real change feels awkward and unnatural at first, you are literally rewiring a relationship. Think of it like building a new muscle. At first, it hurts. It's shaky. You don't have a lot of strength there. You want to quit. It's painful over time, though, when you keep showing up and repeating and giving it care and then resting and then working it again and then giving it some rest, it gets stronger. It probably gets more stable, and you can rely on it when you need it, you become more resilient. The same is true for relationships. The more you can get comfortable with being uncomfortable, the more capacity you build for growth and healing and real connection. Let's recap those three shifts. Okay, this is how you begin solving family conflict with things that are in your control. Number one, look at your own contribution to the conflict. Shift from blame to curiosity. Change your step in the dance. Number two, manage your own emotional reactions. Pause, breathe, choose a grounded response over a knee jerk reaction number three, check your unwritten expectations, drop the shoulds and choose appreciation instead, and remember it's going to be uncomfortable, and that is okay. Discomfort is the doorway to the relationship you want, if this episode spoke to you, then I have something you're gonna love. I want you to download my free guide. You know, because the holidays are coming up and here's a here's your guide for the holidays, the three step solution to keeping your cool around family holiday drama, because, let's face it, this time of year brings up a lot of old triggers to the surface. You don't have to get pulled into those same patterns. In this guide, I'm going to walk you through some practical tools to stay grounded and connected and calm even when emotions are running high. You're going to learn how to protect your peace and protect your relationships by giving yourself some space. And if you'd like to check out the calm core as well. That link is in the show notes, along with this free holiday guide. So I want you to go grab your copy now. Go check out calm core. Start practicing these things now, because you want to give yourself some time to practice these before the holidays get here, before you're around your family a lot more. So go grab those now and start practicing now, and I will see you next week. You.