Two Communication Habits that Hurt Your Family Relationships

Episode 199: Two Communication Habits That Hurt Your Family Relationships 

Are your efforts to connect actually driving disconnection? 

In this episode of the Coaching Your Family Relationships Podcast, Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and family life educator, unpacks two common communication habits that silently sabotage family trust and closeness—Unbridled Self-Expression and Punishment and Retaliation. 

These habits often come from a place of deep hurt or high expectations, but they rarely get you the connection you want. Instead, they keep you stuck in frustration, resentment, and miscommunication. 

You’ll learn: 

• Why “speaking your truth” might be crossing a boundary
• The emotional cost of spilling your feelings without filter
• How our childhood home dynamics still shape how we show up in adult relationships
• What passive-aggressive behavior really communicates—and why it never works
• How to stop letting your feelings control your words and actions
• A better way to respond when you feel hurt or disappointed by a family member

This episode is especially helpful if you've ever thought:
 

• “I don’t know how to talk to them anymore”
• “Everything I say gets taken the wrong way”
• “Why do I always end up being the bad guy?”

You don’t need to yell, shut down, or “teach them a lesson” to be heard. There is another way—and it starts with understanding what’s not working.

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.

Grab your copy here: DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE

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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Connect with us:

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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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: 0:40

It's very common for people to have had a parent or a grandparent or a sibling run the atmosphere in their home with how they let their words or emotions come spilling out, I want you to think who was that for you? Maybe it was you. Maybe it was someone else, but who was that in your home? What I talk about in this podcast is all coming from positive psychology concepts and tools, and positive psychology, concepts and tools that are really prevalent today. We talk about them a lot today, but they were not even created until a few decades ago. I'm talking like the 90s, the 1990s a little bit back into the 1980s and into the 2000s if you have a parent that taught you the tools that I've talked about in this podcast, then you are one of the rare few. These things were not known and they were not taught in our homes generally. So we just accepted, oh, this is just the way things are. Oh, this is just the way that person is. And it was also pretty taboo until recently, to see a therapist and get help. If you did see one, you didn't talk about it. Or there was that person that sees the therapist, there's something wrong with them. It was talked about in a shameful way, right? If you had to go see a therapist. So when I ask, who was it for you that ruled the home with their words or their emotions. I know that because of what I just said, that most of you are going to have at least one person come to mind. And I don't say this to throw that person under the bus. I just want you to have an idea of what unbridled self expression looks like, because that's what we're talking about today, unbridled self expression. And this concept of unbridled self expression is not confined to the home. I remember years ago, and this was the early 2000s one of my kids had a friend that came over, went to a different school, different classroom, different school, but they're both in third grade. And this friend of my child was telling me about their third grade teacher, and she said, Oh, we always know if her boyfriend called or came over the night before, because if he did, then she's really happy, and she smiles a lot, and then we get extra privileges in class, and she said we also know if he didn't call or come over the night before, because then she's really sad, and she tells us about how her boyfriend didn't contact her last night, and she's kind of cranky with us and we don't. She takes away our privileges, and sometimes she yells at us. And this is what this little nine year old was telling me, that also is another example of unbridled self expression, right when what we're feeling, what we're thinking or we are feeling, comes spilling out into the world around us, and we all have difficult situations in our lives that are handed to us. Sometimes they're handed to us, sometimes we create them. But what do we do with them? Do we spill them out into the world and want everyone else to experience them with us? Or do we have the ability to deal with our disappointments in a mature way that invites other people in to connect with us instead of driving them away? Terry real, the one that developed these losing strategies, calls this unbridled self expression. He says, because I have a thought, I should get to express it. Because I have an emotion, I should get to express it. He calls this the barf bag approach to relationships. We have no boundaries. People who have no boundaries are enmeshed. They are codependent. They are not able to hold on to themselves. They are boundary less, and we all want to belong to ourselves. It's very difficult to belong to ourself when we are boundary less. Unbridled self expression happens when we do not know how to belong to ourselves outside of a relationship with another person. So we try to get in control of this relationship by using our words and our emotions without keeping ourselves in check. You think about this. Kids really just do this naturally. This is a developmental stage for children we cannot expect. Expect them to know how to maturely handle their thoughts or emotions. This is a developmental stage. They do not know who they are except as they see themselves through the eyes of their parents or their peers or their siblings or even their teachers. But the problem is, is that many, many people never outgrow that stage because they don't know that there's another option for them. So what we end up doing is we end up blaming our feelings on another person. But think about what that means, if someone else can control the way that we feel, then the opposite is also true. I can control someone else's feelings, that's a lot of power that I have in somebody else's life, and very little power that I have in my own life. But neither of those things are true. It's a very common misconception that someone else can control our emotions, and that we are able to control another person's emotions. We certainly can have influence. I think we can have a great deal of influence on how someone else feels, and someone else has a great deal of influence on how we feel, but they don't have control over that. We don't control each other, each person, you and me and the person sitting next to you. We each create our own feelings. If you've never been taught differently, it's very, very easy to get over identified with those feelings, and it's very, very easy to get over identified with your own thoughts. It's so easy to do this, but it gets us into trouble, because our brains are very easily confused. We think that because we think something, that it's true, just like a podcast I did a couple of weeks ago on needing to be right, how our brain loves to be true. If you're wanting more on that, just back up a couple of episodes and go find that one. But we'll take our brains, we'll take a handful of incomplete facts that we can see, and it will string them together in a way that makes sense in our own brain. It will tell us that that story is true very, very little evidence, and sometimes that evidence that we're using is very inaccurate, but when we are over identifying with those thoughts and we're creating those stories and believing that they are true, we're probably over identifying with our feelings as well, because when we see our thoughts like I am, My thoughts, we see I am, my feelings, those two go together. When we don't know how to handle our own emotions, that can be a problem for us. Almost every client that I've ever worked with at some point has said, Man, I wish that I would have learned this stuff when I was a kid. My life would have been so much easier. What I've never had a client tell me is that they had a parent that taught them healthy emotional management, because almost all people don't know how to handle their emotions. We over identify with them, and then we don't know what to do with them, and so they come spilling out. We say things like, I'm angry, I'm so anxious, I'm so sad. What we don't say is I'm feeling really angry right now. Oh, I'm feeling very anxious. Oh, I'm experiencing some anxiety. My body is experiencing some anxiety. I'm feeling very sad, the way that I rephrased those is a very subtle and small shift, but it takes out the over identification with the thought and the feeling. It makes us experiencing something instead of us being something. We also have the tendency to get really justified in the way that we are responding to someone, and this just comes from our own getting caught up in our own thoughts and our own stories about a situation. Just because we're thinking something does not make it true. But since our brain loves to be right, it's going to tell you that all your thoughts are true. And it's also going to say, You know what, we experienced this similar thing in the past, or maybe the same thing in the past, and we solved it by doing this and this and this. And maybe one of those things was being very overly emotional, or by using harsh words with another person. So of course, maybe I'm going to, I'm just going to do that same thing again. That was a good solution. You know, we don't consciously think through this, but our brain does this. It finds a solution at one point to a problem, and it wants to repeat that same solution over and over and over again. Our brains are pretty lazy. Don't like to do new things. It takes. Takes a lot of calories to do new things, to think of new things, so it just wants to repeat the things that we did and learned years ago without coming up with new solutions. Even if those old solutions are not effective, we still keep creating them and doing the same thing over and over again. But when we give our responsibility to manage our own thoughts and emotions to someone or something else, we blame someone else for the way that we're feeling. We give them a lot of power in our lives, we become a victim in our own life, but most of us are not true victims. We have created our own victimhood. So our thoughts should be questioned and our emotions are our teachers. You don't have to believe everything you think and solve every emotion you have, and not everything needs to come spilling out into the world. In the healthy relationships class, I'm going to go deeper into ways to manage your own thoughts and emotions. You're going to leave this class with a plan to start working on this and today, here's one thing that you can do to get started, because I want you to get started now in being really aware of what you're doing and what's happening in your life, I'm sure to ask yourself, did I have a parent, a sibling or someone else in my family who ruled the environment and the atmosphere through their words or their emotions? That just some examples of what that might look like would be anger, sadness, depression, victimization. It's very common to have someone in your past who controlled the atmosphere in your home with their mental or emotional state. Do you know what expectations really are? Another term we could use is premeditated disappointments. Every experience in your life was first created mentally with a thought, because things that exist are created mentally before they are created physically. When we don't realize this very simple but profound truth, we let our egos take over, and we can become victims of our own lives, sometimes of ourself and sometimes of people in our lives. We become someone who is being acted upon instead of acting we don't become an agent in our life. This losing strategy that I'm going over today is Punishment and Retaliation. This is the fourth strategy in the losing strategy series. The concept of these losing strategies was created by Terry real. He's one of the mentors that I've had in my life, that I have learned a lot from. And like I said, this is Punishment and Retaliation. And in effect, it's saying, If I don't get what I want from you, I'm going to make you pay for it. I'm going to punish you in some way. So our human egos are very much in play. When we use this losing strategy, we can make somebody pay in kind of a passive, passive, aggressive, covert way, like if I don't get what I want from you, I'm going to withhold affection and approval. For example, if you criticize what I'm wearing right before we meet friends for dinner, I'm going to tell a story during dinner that paints you in an unflattering light, or you didn't tell me you loved me this morning before you left for work. So when we see each other tonight, I'm going to withhold affection from you, or even something like, if you didn't help me, put the kids to bed tonight, I'm going to go to bed without speaking to you. There's also that's very passive aggressive, right? That's very covert. It's just like letting somebody know without letting them without saying it. It's like sneaking in being mean under the guise of being a victim. There's also a very overt punishment that is a lot more apparent. So you turn me down when I want to be intimate with you, so I'm going to turn to porn instead. You didn't help me pack the car when we were getting ready to leave town. So I'm going to yell at you and tell you all the things that you're doing wrong as we take our road trip. I mean, those are really obvious ways of Punishment and Retaliation, right? And that is where abusive behavior comes into play. There's actually a desire to harm and cause pain and suffering. At its core, this losing strategy of Punishment and Retaliation has a desire to hurt someone, and that hurt comes from putting ourselves in a victim position. It's like we're saying you harmed me first. So I have a right to what I'm doing. You did this, so I get to do that. It's very self centered and selfish. When I look at these behaviors with my clients, and we put everything down on paper, we put it all out for us to look at right where we can see it immediately. It doesn't align with who my client wants to be. It's very eye opening. It's a behavior, of course, it's a behavior that we want to change right now, once we see it in relationships, we all have two basic human needs. We are designed biologically, we are designed for connection, to be in connection with other people, and biologically, we are also designed to want our independence and our agency. We don't know how to do both of those at the same time. So when we play out this losing strategy of punishing or retaliating, we don't get either of those. We don't get connection, and we don't get independence and agency. We think that we do, but we're actually turning ourselves into a victim. We're being acted upon. We're driving the other person away, but at the same time, we're giving them our agency and turning ourselves into the victim. I'm not talking about people who are true victim domestic violence or abuse. That's a different topic that I don't address on this podcast, but this losing strategy does include things like that. I want you to imagine that you were going to your 20th high school reunion. You've put on a few pounds in the last 20 years. Like most people, you're trying to lose that weight before the reunion, and you've lost some, but not as much as you would have liked. And you have a new outfit. You get dressed, you look in the mirror, you're like, Hey, I didn't lose all the weight, but I'm still looking pretty good, feeling pretty good about yourself. About yourself. You get to the reunion, having a great time talking with some old friends, reminiscing, telling stories, and then in comes an old friend that you haven't seen in 20 years, since high school, and she looks really good. She's thin, she's beautiful. Her clothes are awesome, and then all of a sudden, you're feeling really bad in your own clothes, and you're feeling really bad in your own skin. What happens next? Well, when you're using this losing strategy Punishment and Retaliation, you'll start doing things like you tell yourself and other people, oh, she's too thin. I don't like her dress. That's ugly. Maybe you talk with her, you might try to find fault in what she's saying or discount what she's doing in her life right now. And if somebody else says something nice to her, you'll try to contradict what they are saying. All of this is coming because you're not feeling good about good about yourself, and now you're trying to get this other woman to feel the same way about herself that you feel about yourself. Another thing that happens when we do this is that the Punishment and Retaliation isn't just turned outward toward the towards that woman, it's actually turned inward towards ourself. You start being really unkind in your thoughts about yourself, because before you saw her, you were feeling pretty good about yourself. If you continue to feel good about yourself, you wouldn't have needed to try to punish her. But you start being very unkind, and your thoughts about yourself, and your thoughts about you become very punishing. So we can become a victim of ourselves, and we are all the time. We have a really strict inner critic inside of our own heads. In this example, that woman didn't do anything except what you thought was look better than you thought you looked it was your own thoughts about yourself that you thought were too difficult to handle. So you become a victim of your own thoughts. But the punishment was directed towards someone else. I would also say the punishment was directed towards you because you probably ruined your own experience of that reunion, and then you're punishing yourself internally as well. You know, our fight or flight kicks in so easily, kicks in several times a day, way more than we realize. We have a nervous system response. We can't control our nervous system, and it kicks in, and we become very reactionary our fight or flight, sometimes a fawn or freeze, if you're familiar with those, also those terms fawn or freeze, those responses kick in automatically. We can't control this, but we can learn how to manage it with the right skill set, and that's one thing that we'll be talking about in the healthy relationships class, we will also recreate whatever we saw our parents do. Our parents modeled the relationship model for us as we were growing up. So as children, we learned how to be in. In relationships with other people depending on what we saw going on in our own home. Lots of times, that's the way we think everybody relates to each other. And if we don't know that, there's another option, we literally don't know what we don't know. But when we're children, we think everyone's house is like our house, and everyone does things the way my family does them. And when we grow up and we get out of our house for the first time, like maybe going away to college, we start seeing that other people do things differently. First we notice things like Bill they do the laundry differently than me, or they do meals different than I do, or they do chores different than I do. But what is not as easily recognized is how other people do relationships differently, like how they do relationships in their home versus how our family did relationships that's much harder to see and distinguish so unless we are very intentional about doing something different than we had modeled for us, we will repeat the same relationships that we had modeled for us as children. Maybe that was a great example for you. Maybe it wasn't. But if you're not intentional, you will repeat whatever you saw as a child, and you won't even know that you're doing this. We are all so blind to ourselves. It's like we're living inside of a jar of our own life, and the instructions on how to live that life are on the outside of the jar, but we're inside. We can't see the label, we can't see the instructions. So other people can see it, and they see us much better than we see ourselves. Have you ever noticed that it's so easy to look at someone else and know exactly what they need to do to fix their problems, but when it comes to your own life, you feel really stuck, like I just don't know what to do, and I've heard that so many times, when we get stuck in this losing relationship strategy, the Punishment and Retaliation, we get super justified in our position, and that's our ego. Our ego wants to hold on to being right, to being in control, to getting what we deserve, and so it tells us that we're justified in our losing relationship strategies, especially when we are in that fight or flight. We cannot see things clearly, and our ego and our body are just taking over, but the Ego is the Enemy of intimacy and connection in our relationships with ourselves and with others, because we can't see things clearly. As long as we let that ego be in charge, we will not really get what we want, remember, which is to feel like we are independent agents in our own life and be in connection with other people. So instead of looking inward to deal with ourselves, we look outward and we put expectations on another person that they may or may not fulfill. And if we are truly being honest, we would probably say that most of the time our expectations are not met. So expectations are just premeditated disappointments.