Communicate While Minimizing Conflict - 7 Keys to Staying Grounded

Episode 175 - Communicate While Minimizing Conflict - 7 Keys to Staying Grounded

If conversations with your adult child feel tense, emotionally draining, or full of misunderstandings, you’re not alone. In this episode of Your Family Relationships, I’ll walk you through seven key principles of grounded communication that will help you navigate difficult conversations without losing yourself in anxiety, guilt, or defensiveness.

You’ll hear real-life examples of how these principles show up in parent-adult child relationships, and I’ll hint at the solutions that can help you transform your interactions. These strategies will empower you to communicate with clarity, emotional balance, and integrity—no matter how your adult child responds.

Want to go deeper? Download my free class: Healing Your Relationship with Your Adult Child. It’s packed with practical tools to help you shift from conflict to connection.

Click here to access the free class!

Real-Life Examples Shared in This Episode: 🔹 What to do when your adult child says they don’t want to come to family events anymore 🔹 How to handle a conversation when your child blames you for past mistakes 🔹 The right way to respond when your adult child expresses anger or pulls away 🔹 How to set a boundary around financial support without damaging the relationship 🔹 Why rehashing past conflicts keeps you stuck—and what to do instead

Take the Next Step: Healing your relationship with your adult child starts with how you show up in conversations. If you’re ready to learn more about self-regulation, setting healthy boundaries, and communicating with confidence, download my free class: Healing Your Relationship with Your Adult Child without Guilt, Anxiety, and Walking on Eggshells

Get Instant Access to the Free Class Now

This class is designed to help you shift from frustration and heartbreak to a relationship built on mutual respect and connection. Don’t miss out!

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.
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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: 0:00

Tina, welcome to your family relationships Podcast. I'm Tina Gosney, the family conflict coach, and I help mothers who are feeling heartbroken and disconnected from their adult children. I help them find tools to heal their relationships. If you have ever found yourself in a conversation with your adult child where emotions were really running high and maybe you were walking on eggshells, or you left feeling unheard and misunderstood? Then this episode is for you. I'm talking to you today. Today, we're going to talk about how to communicate from a grounded and centered place, so you can show up with strength and clarity and emotional balance even when you're having a difficult conversation. And this is one of the key foundational skills that I help my clients develop as we're working to become a more differentiated self. Most of the women I work with have a really hard time communicating without their emotions taking over or just being able to get the words to come out of their mouths. The thing is, we don't have to be confident in order to speak up. That's a very big fallacy that most of us have in our minds is that I'm not confident enough to speak up and say anything, so we don't speak the truth is that we develop that confidence through the speaking up. And that is an important distinction to remember. This is a skill. This is something we develop as we keep showing up and practicing it. So I'm going to walk you through today the key principles of a grounded communication, a grounded conversation, and I'm going to give you examples of how this plays out in real life. Maybe some of these solutions can help you shift your relationship dynamics. If you want to go deeper into this work, I want you to stick around, because I have a free resource that will help you begin healing that relationship with your adult child today. Let's dive in number one, self regulation first. That's always going to come first, because when your emotions are high, your body has likely gone into fight or flight, and you're not seeing that adult child as a person that you love. You're seeing them as someone you have to protect yourself from. It's very easy to react from our automatic programming instead of respond from our higher thinking brain. When we react from our automatic programming. This happens without us consciously thinking. It's our gut reactions taking over and that's in charge and rarely, rarely does it lead to a good outcome. When we ground ourselves, we have to start with self regulation. That means calming yourself before you engage in a difficult conversation. So example, one, you get a text from your adult child. They're saying, I don't want to come to family dinner anymore. Your heart pounds. You start feeling your face turning red, and you immediately you want to just type back. Well, why not? What did I do wrong? But instead, instead of reacting like that, you pause, you take a deep breath, and you sit with your emotions before you respond. Example two, your adult child is saying all the things they want to tell you, all the things, all the mistakes that you made as a Learning how to manage your nervous system and respond from a calm, intentional place changes so much. Nervous System Management is something that takes practice, repeated practice over time, and when I work on this skill with very in depth with my coaching clients, we start learning the patterns parent, and you get feeling really defensive and you just of our own body and what calms us down, because our bodies will register danger when there isn't any. It's an automatic reflex that takes over we need to know how to calm our own bodies down. It's not someone else's job to make us calm down. It's our job to make us calm down. And when we give ourselves more space to think before we respond, we get better at calm ourselves down. Number two, I want you to have clarity on your own intentions want to justify your actions. So instead, you're recognizing, oh, and what is important to you. So before you step into a conversation, it's important to know what matters to you. Are you trying to connect through this conversation? Conversation? Are you trying to control an outcome? Are you speaking from your values, from integrity and who you want to be? Are you speaking from fear? Example, one your adult child tells you, I need space. I just need you to leave me alone. I need space. Your first instinct I've got this tension building up in my body. My breath is is to beg them to reconsider. But then you stop, and you ask yourself, is my goal to make them stay close out of guilt, or do I need to respect their needs? So you choose to say, you know, I want you to do what feels right for you. I love you no matter what. Example two, a disagreement is escalating, and you catch yourself trying to win the argument. You're trying to be right and prove your point. And you pause, and you remind pretty slow. So you remind yourself, I need to calm down. I yourself, you know what my goal is, not being right. My goal is to connect. And so you pause, you shift your tone, and you say, I really want to understand where you're coming from. And you listen. So why? Why do we use this? Because understanding your deeper motivations helps you to communicate with integrity. So often we don't even know what our deeper motivations are. So if we don't know what those are, how can we need to breathe deeply. And you say, You know what, I am not in live from them? Number three is own, your own emotions. You are the one that is responsible for your emotions. You are not responsible for managing your adult child's emotions. This is a really hard one for us to wrap our brains around, because we've been told probably our whole lives that we can cause someone else's emotions, and that they could cause our emotions. But this is just not true. We do not create an emotion for someone else. Every one of us creates our own emotions, and we have a a place to talk about this right now, but I'll listen, but I'm responsibility to the relationship to show up with integrity, because we the way we do show up, can influence how someone else feels and how they show up can influence how we feel, but it does not cause our feelings, and we do not cause someone else's feelings. So we need to own our own emotions. Example, one your adult child says, You always make me feel so guilty, and you're tempted to either throw it back at them, really not in a place to talk. Or maybe you're not even in a like I do not, or you're tempted to apologize excessively. But instead you're pausing and you recognize you know what their emotions belong to them. So you say, I hear you. I really wasn't intending to make you feel guilty, but I do want to understand more, so please tell me more. Example two, you feel really angry when your child is not responding to your messages, your text messages, instead of place to listen. Maybe you say, I'm not ready for this sending this guilt tripping text, you take a moment you process your feelings. You recognize my emotions are about my expectations, not about their behavior. You choose to focus on taking care of yourself instead, and you don't need for them to behave exactly how you have outlined in your own mind so that you can control your own emotions. So when you take ownership of your emotions, you stop this cycle of blame and conversation. Give me a few minutes, or give me an hour, or resentment in this class that you have access to, you can download, you'll be able to download the replay from it. It was live a little bit ago, but it's not live anymore, so you can download the replay now. It's called Healing the relationship with your adult child. We dive deeper into emotional responsibility and how you need to show up with integrity, and how that can transform relationships. Number four, listening with openness so often and we don't even realize let's come back and talk about it tomorrow. But I'm not ready that we're doing this, we listen to respond. We don't listen to understand. We listen to respond. Grounded communication requires that we listen to understand, which means or being curious and we're being open. Here's an example. Your adult child tells you that they felt hurt by something that you said. Your instinct is to explain like that's not what I meant. You're wrong. You took that the wrong way. And you pause, and you say, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize that. Tell me more about how right now. that felt for you. Another example, you really disagree with your child's life choices, and you want to lecture them, but instead you get curious. You're saying, what led you to that decision? What made you decide that this was the way that you wanted to go? I really want to understand your perspective. When we learn how to listen without judging, it really strengthens their relationship, and it adds safety into their relationship. If we're not really listening, we're not really connecting. And if we're only listening to respond, we are not connecting. It's vital to learn this skill of intentional listening. Another thing we need to remember in a conversation is that we need boundaries. We need differentiation. You can stay emotionally connected without losing yourself and who you are. So let me tell you what I mean by that, but with through an example, your adult child refuses to speak to you unless you're going to agree with them. So but you don't agree with them. So instead of betraying yourself, you say, I love you, I respect you, and I respect your right to see things differently. Another example, what this might look like, your kid always is coming to you and wanting money and financial help, but you know that that's not the best thing for them. So instead of feeling guilty about it, which you know we're prone to feeling guilty, you want to set a boundary. You're you're like, I love you, and I know that this is hard for you to hear, but I'm not in a position to do that. So can we talk about some other ways that I can support you? Boundaries are really essential for a healthy relationship. In fact, the healthiest relationships have the strongest boundaries. Another thing you have to do when you are in a conversation is stay in the present moment, because your brain is going to want to drag you into all of the wounds that keep you stuck in the past. It's conversations do not happen in a bubble. It's never just about the conversation you're having right now. It's about all the things that have happened in the past, plus what you think is going to happen in the future, plus what is happening right now. So illustrating at this point you're in a conversation, and your child reminds you of all the things, the mistakes that you've made in the past. You did this and then you did that, and you didn't do this and you didn't do that, and instead of getting defensive, you say, I yeah, I regret those things. I am working on being a better version of myself today. Another way this might look is you get stuck in your head. You are replaying past arguments in your head while you're having a current argument or a current conversation, and instead of dwelling on those past arguments, you are able to have compassion for yourself. You focus on you know, I can't do anything about that right now, but I can show up differently in this moment when we live in the present that allows for healing. The present is the only time that we have any control over our brain, wants to constantly think about the past and filter everything through the past and then use that to predict what's going to happen in the future. But when we learn how to stay in right now present moment, we find that we're much more able to communicate with effectiveness and connection. Another thing that we need to do is to speak with integrity and courage. Communicating honestly without fear is powerful and it's difficult. It takes a lot of practice to be able to do that. So please don't be afraid of the practice. We have to be moving forward with courage. We're often so afraid that if we're honest about how we really feel, that we're going to cause a bigger problem in their relationships. So we're like, I'm just going to stuff that down and I'm not going to say anything. And do we need to share every thought and every emotion? Absolutely not. But we also don't need to sacrifice ourselves in order to keep the peace, especially when something really does need to be shared. So let's just imagine that you are afraid to speak up. You're walking on eggshells because you don't want to upset your child, but instead, you choose courage and honesty, and you say, I want to be real with you. This is how I feel about that. And you another example. You might also be tempted to sugar coat the truth, but you decide, you know I'm going to be I'm not going to. Be reacting from fear. Here. I'm going to speak with kindness, and I'm going to be very clear, and I'm going to tell them, I love you, and I really need to be honest about my feelings on this. When we speak with courage, that builds trust. I did an entire episode on courage and why courage is so important. That's episode 172 it was just a few weeks ago. If you haven't listened to that one, I really encourage you to go listen to episode 172 on courage. You're really going to gain a lot of insight on this important emotion as we communicate from a grounded and centered place that can change so many things, and one thing that it really helps you to do is to break free from these painful patterns, build a stronger, more connected relationship with your adult child. So if you want to take the next step, I want you to download that free class, the replay of that class, healing your relationship with your adult child, where I'm going to give you some practical tools. You're going to be able to shift your communication, manage difficult emotions, you're going to find ways to start healing that relationship today, there is a link in the show notes you can get instant access to that. I can't wait to help you on this journey to become more grounded in the way that you communicate. So until next week, take care. Keep showing up with love and courage and go download that class. You'll be so glad that you did.