Hidden Conflict: Why Your Family Feels Tense Even When No One Is Fighting

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Conflict, disconnection, family relationships, emotional distance, quiet conflict, avoidance, self-awareness, repair, honesty, family dynamics, healthy relationships, parent education, family estrangement, communication, emotional tension.

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

I want you to picture this. You just left your adult child’s house. The visit was just fine. Maybe it was even a good visit, you know? You could have had hugs at the door, you know, some some goodbyes of saying I love you, talk to you soon. And then you start driving home, and something is just sitting on your chest and in your mind that just is not feeling right. It’s a little unsettled. Maybe you replay a comment that they made. It wasn’t anything dramatic, it was just a little flat, or maybe it had, you know, a little affect in it that you didn’t quite understand.

Tina Gosney  00:37

Maybe they were a little distant, and you start telling yourself you know it’s nothing, it’s I’m probably just making things up, but that nagging voice in your head does not quite go away. Maybe if you’ve had a version of this, you know, a phone call that ended politely but left you feeling kind of unsettled, or a holiday that went smoothly, but you were exhausted, not just physically, but emotionally.

Tina Gosney  01:06

After this holiday is over, and you just don’t know how to explain that. Maybe it’s not even a drive home, maybe it’s the end of the holiday gathering. Everyone is hugging, everyone is saying the right things. The dishes are done, everybody helped out, the kids had a great time, and got loaded into the car, and you waved at them from the porch until they turned to the corner. You couldn’t see them anymore. And then the house is quiet. You sit down, and you’re feeling just really tired, and that tiredness does not match the way that the day went. It’s not physical tiredness. If you’ve ever driven home from a time with your child, or you’ve sat down after they left, and you thought, well, that was fine. So, why do I feel like this?

Tina Gosney  01:53

If this sounds familiar to you, then this episode is for you. And there is something that I want you to consider. Just because you’re not fighting with your adult child does not mean that there’s not conflict. Conflict does not always mean there is fighting or angry words.

Tina Gosney  02:13

Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships podcast. If you’re a new listener, then welcome. I’m so glad to have you here, and if you’ve been here with me for a while, you know you keep clicking on these episodes repeatedly. I am so grateful for you. Welcome back. This podcast, lately, the last few months has been growing exponentially, and I know it’s because those of you who are resonating with these episodes, you are sharing it with others, and I really want to thank you for that. That is the biggest compliment ever.

Tina Gosney  02:44

I’m Tina Gosney, a family conflict coach, and I also educate parents on what healthy families look like, and I use the latest research in family science and what it says about parent and adult child relationships, and family estrangement, and family dynamics, and healthy family bonds. So, because our, you know, our families are being torn apart right now, I could just list a few of the reasons, and these might sound familiar to you, things like politics, social issues, religious issues. Those are just some of the big ones, but there are so many more reasons that we need education more now than we have ever before, and we actually need more than that. We need to know how to apply what we’re learning, what this education is telling us. How do we do it? So that’s what I’m doing on this podcast. I educate, and I give you a few ideas for implementing what you’re learning.

Tina Gosney  03:42

If you love this podcast, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or whatever you know podcast platform you are using. Some of those smaller podcast platforms don’t allow for reviews, but the major ones do. So, if you have, you know, just even less than five minutes is all it takes. If you have less than five minutes, just go click on one of those major podcast platforms and leave a review, even if it’s just, you know, a few stars or writing something really quick, just to let others know how you’ve benefited from this podcast. Your reviews help other parents, just like you to find this podcast and to find this information.

Tina Gosney  04:24

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Tina Gosney  04:53

Now let’s get back to the information on this episode about conflict, most of. Us, we’re taught to recognize conflict just one way, you know. Voices get raised, doors get slammed, somebody storms out of the room, maybe it even gets physical. That’s the version of conflict that you grew up watching on TV, or maybe you watched it in your own family. If that’s not happening, many times we just assume that things are okay, but there’s a, you know, a truth that I really want you to sit with today.

Tina Gosney  05:27

Conflict is not about noise, it’s not about raised voices, it’s about disconnection, and disconnection can be incredibly quiet. In fact, some of the most painful relationships that I see in my work are not the loud ones, they’re the quiet ones, the ones where everyone is being so polite. From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything is wrong, but if you look underneath, there’s distance, there’s walls, there’s a version of this, these relationships where everybody is pretending to be close instead of actually being close.

Tina Gosney  06:08

Many of the parents that I work with thought that everything in their family was fine, until one day it all blew up, and they felt like they were hit out of nowhere. They missed those signs that were brewing underneath the surface, because they thought, you know, if we’re not fighting, then that’s connection, and we’re, we’re great, we’re getting along great, right? Everybody is close, but this is just not true. And here’s something I hear a lot: it’s almost said in the way of, like, we would wear a badge of honor, and that is, oh, we never fight, we never fight ever, not even once. I understand why that feels like good news.

Tina Gosney  06:48

And in a lot of families, including the ones that we grew up in, fighting often meant danger, and so it’s very normal to just try to avoid it, but it thinks you know it meant things were about to get bad. So when we say we never fight, it feels like that’s proof that everything is okay, but when you say we never fight, that can mean two very different things. So, let’s go into those two different things.

Tina Gosney  07:13

The first one is that it means that a family that’s worked through hard things and is able to be authentic and real with each other, and they also know how to repair and come out the other side. They are genuinely at ease with each other and feel safe with each other. They can disagree, and then they can repair their relationship with true safety. This makes the relationships stronger.

Tina Gosney  07:36

The second way that we can, you know, never fight this was another thing that it can mean is that our family does not have hard conversations at all. We learned a long time ago which topics are safe and which ones are not. We learned how to act and behave and perform in front of each other, so that we can be safe with each other. Everyone has this quiet way of steering around the things that are unsafe and topics that are unsafe, and we all learned this a long time ago. Okay, so from the outside, both of these families might look the same, no fighting, lots of smiling, and the family photos. Only one of those families is actually connected.

Tina Gosney  08:17

If you are listening today, I want you to set aside if you’ve been one of those people that says we don’t fight, chances are you might not be listening to this episode, but you’re probably the one that needs to hear it, but if you are listening to this episode, I want you to put that little, that little saying aside, so that question, you know, whether we fight or not on its own does not tell you very much.

Tina Gosney  08:42

The more useful question is the one that we’re going to spend the rest of this episode exploring, and that is, where in this relationship have we quietly agreed to not go? What do we not talk about? What do we avoid? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode.

Tina Gosney  09:01

Think of your relationship like a house, a really big blow up, a real big fight. You know, that’s like a storm that hits from the outside of the house. There’s the wind that can kind of, you know, knock things around, maybe the windows rattle. You can see this, it’s very apparent, and you know that it happened, and often after that storm passes, you know you’re going to go outside, you’re going to clean things up, you’re going to repair what’s broken, and then you’re going to move on.

Tina Gosney  09:30

But hidden conflict is different, that’s like a crack in the foundation of the house, you’re not going to notice it right away, there’s no dramatic moment, there was no storm that you could point to, but just over time, slowly things start to feel off. Now, there’s a door that you know used to close easily, but now it sticks, and a floor that used to feel solid. It’s even uneven, and it might even creak when you step on it.

Tina Gosney  09:56

So, very slowly, without realizing it, you start adjusting to how you live. Of inside this house you might avoid that one room because it’s really drafty, maybe you know the wheel, the windows need to be sealed up again, and you haven’t even noticed that, maybe you stop using that one door because it’s hard to open, and so you really evaluate whether you want to go into that room because it’s really hard to open the door, but this is what a quiet conflict does to a relationship, you start avoiding certain rooms, like certain topics, certain versions of honesty, and the relationship can look like it’s standing up, it’s like it’s just fine, while the foundation underneath it is just really quietly shifting.

Tina Gosney  10:42

I’m going to give you some examples of what this looks like, because I think examples are how we really start to understand something.

Tina Gosney  10:49

Okay, so this is the first example, and I’m going to describe a version of what I hear all the time. It’s like, you know, we just don’t go there, we don’t talk about those things. So a mom told me once we have a really great relationship, we just don’t ever talk about anything real. She didn’t say it with sadness, she said it was just like, you know, a fact of life, like that’s just the price we pay for peace in our family. So maybe you recognize some, you know, some thoughts or some, some sayings like this, you know, we don’t. We just don’t talk about religion anymore. We don’t talk about politics at all. We avoid this and this and this to talk about, or we just keep things light because it makes it easier on the surface. That feels really peaceful.

Tina Gosney  11:35

There’s no arguments. The tension is under the table. But here’s the thing, that is not peace, it is avoidance, and avoidance signifies disconnection somewhere inside. You know the difference, because you can feel it. Real connection requires honesty, even when it’s hard. It doesn’t just require politeness, it requires difficult honesty. When entire parts of you, entire parts of them become off limits, that relationship gets starts to get smaller every every day. It still exists, but every day it becomes a smaller version of itself. And the part that’s really easy to miss, you know, this list of these things that we don’t talk about, it rarely gets decided in one conversation. In fact, it’s often not even ever discussed out loud. Nobody sits down and says, okay, let’s agree never to discuss this and this and this again.

Tina Gosney  12:35

It just happens one small moment at a time. A topic goes up, comes up, that conversation goes badly or awkwardly, and afterwards nobody says anything, but you just quietly agree, like, yeah, we’re not going to go back to that conversation again. If you do that enough times over enough years, you’re going to end up with a relationship that has a lot of rooms that nobody walks into anymore.

Tina Gosney  13:00

Here’s another example. I call this walking on eggshells. So, this one tends to be quieter. It’s a little harder to name and harder to pinpoint, but it might sound like I have to be really careful about what I say, or I don’t want to trigger anything, or even it’s not – it’s just not worth it. Bringing it up, and so when we start going there, we start to filter ourselves.

Tina Gosney  13:26

We run things through this mental checklist before we ever say them. We make sure we soften and carefully pick our words. We might leave things out. We’re really managing the conversation, like, you know, a piece of equipment that might break if you press the wrong button, it’s going to break, so you got to make sure. Oh, I don’t want to press that button. I talked to a dad once who described it like this. He said, every time I’m with my daughter, it’s like I’m walking through a room full of glass that’s all over the floor, just trying not to step on anything. Well, that’s exhausting, and that is not connection, that is fear.

Tina Gosney  14:05

You’re trying to keep the relationship from breaking, and this – there’s something really sad about it. The very thing that you’re doing to protect the relationship, that you know, that careful filtering, the walking on eggshells, that’s often the thing that’s quietly wearing the relationship down because the relationship does not get to be real, it’s getting managed, and managing something is exhausting in a way that being in a relationship with someone is not supposed to be. You can usually feel the difference in your body because of visits that used to feel easy, now it feels like you have to prepare for them.

Tina Gosney  14:40

You’re going to find yourself rehearsing what you’re going to say or what you don’t say before you ever walk in the door, before you ever pick up the phone and hear hello. So, why does this keep happening? Why do so many of us end up here in relationships? They look fine, but they feel hard. Here’s what. Come to understand both through the research and my training, through years of sitting with parents that are in these spots. When people avoid hard conversations, that discomfort does not disappear, it just moves.

Tina Gosney  15:15

So, instead of being tension in a conversation, it shows up as tension in your body before a visit, it shows up as replaying conversations in your head for days afterwards. It’s like there’s this low hum of anxiety that’s always there, even when things are calm, and over time that shows up as emotional distance. It’s really hard to name that, but you can feel it. It also shows up as resentment, that’s these are the kinds of things that you would never say out loud, it just kind of sits there in the background quietly building, and neither one of you want to name it until someday it might just explode, and that’s what I’ve unfortunately heard from so many parents.

Tina Gosney  15:56

Here’s the part that, though, that I really want you to hear, is that our bodies and our brains are wired for to want safety in our closest relationships, and safety does not come from everything being smooth, it comes from things being honest and clear, it comes from knowing how to repair and practicing repair when misunderstandings happen, and when you don’t agree, and when honesty is missing, even if everything looks calm on the surface, there’s a part of you that stays on edge and a little braced, and that bracing, that is the cost of keeping the peace. There’s something else that we’re is worth knowing, is that if this pattern feels familiar to you, like you’ve been here before in some form, even before this relationship existed, even before maybe your child was born, that is not a coincidence. A lot of us learned how to do this a long time before we ever became parents ourselves.

Tina Gosney  16:59

We learned it as children in the homes that we grew up in. Nobody actually taught us this on purpose. It was just how things were done, you know. Certain topics were off limits, or conversations, difficult conversations, were avoided, or we didn’t actually ever repair anything. Maybe certain feelings were not welcome at the table. Maybe we were expected to be a certain way and to show up a certain way and to follow a certain life path, and then we adapted just the way our kids have by learning what was safe and what wasn’t, like I can do this in this family and in this relationship, and this is what I cannot do, so if you find yourself doing the same things now with your own adult child that you did as a child, then please hear this. It does not mean that you did something wrong, it means you learned a pattern a long time ago, and that is still running the program.

Tina Gosney  18:00

It’s a program that your computer, your brain operating system learned how to run a long time ago, and you’re still running the same program. It hasn’t been updated. Patterns that were learned can be noticed, and patterns that are noticed can be shifted, but that shift has to begin with seeing it. So that’s what we are starting to do today.

Tina Gosney  18:20

Let’s go into a third example, and this is the we’re fine trap. This is one of the most common patterns I see. I call it the we’re fine trap. We’re fine, everything’s good. Oh, it just is what it is. You know, these phrases get said so often that they start to feel true, and maybe on some level they really are true, things are not in crisis, no one’s yelling, no one is like, you know, estranged from the family, they’re all still talking to each other, but what is underneath that fineness, that feeling of fine, you feel disconnected, you feel like you don’t fully know this person and they don’t really know you, and maybe you’ve never really felt safe truly being yourself.

Tina Gosney  19:08

Here’s what fine often actually means. I’ve adjusted to less than what I actually want, that means less closeness, less honesty, less of a real relationship, but fine is so much easier to say out loud. It’s so much easier to look at than the rest of those things. So, here’s a metaphor for you. I want you to just give you one more way to picture this. Have you ever been on a phone call where you had really bad reception, all that static in the background or constantly breaking up, you can still hear the other person, mostly sometimes, and you can still have a conversation, but it’s really, it takes a lot of effort, you miss things, you miss words, you can’t hear them, every few sentences you have to ask, like, wait, what did you say, I couldn’t hear that, or you cut out.

Tina Gosney  20:00

Sometimes you just get tired of saying that, and you just don’t even ask, because you’re like hoping that it wasn’t something important that they just said, and then at the end of the phone call you’re so tired, not because the conversation was hard, but because you spent the whole time just straining to hear through static, or through the cutting out in and out, so that that static, that that cutting in and out, that’s what unresolved conflict sounds like in a relationship. You’re still talking, you’re still shopping, showing up, but there’s this background noise. It makes everything take more effort, and over time that effort can be exhausting, so people start to dread that phone call or the visit, not because something bad is being said or happening, but because of the static that’s underneath it.

Tina Gosney  20:51

And the tricky part is that static doesn’t always get louder over time. Sometimes it gets quieter, and that’s actually worse. You stop trying, you don’t even stop, you don’t even keep trying to hear through it. You stop asking what did you say, and you just let more and more go. You don’t even think it’s worth asking anymore. So, the calls get shorter, the visits get more scripted. This is not because something dramatic happened, but it’s because everybody got really tired of straining to hear each other through the noise. Here’s what I want you to take from this podcast today.

Tina Gosney  21:28

Conflict does not always look like fighting, and conflict is not bad. It’s actually inevitable, and can be a really good thing, but it’s inevitable when you’re in a relationship with another person, when conflict creates distance and disconnection, this is when you don’t know how to repair. That’s it. This conflict does not require yelling, it doesn’t quite require a big blow up. It can be as quiet as a topic that you both avoid, or a feeling that you both pretend is not there, and that’s why naming this matters so much, because if you don’t name it, you can’t change it, you can’t repair a crack that you’ve convinced yourself is not there.

Tina Gosney  22:09

Go back to that house for a second. Nobody calls a foundation repair company because the house just feels a little different lately. They call it because they finally let themselves admit this door is not closing the way it should be anymore, and this floor is really uneven, and this is not in my imagination. So, when we admit that that’s not the repair, but that’s actually that self-awareness is what makes repair possible.

Tina Gosney  22:39

Now, I do want to be really honest with you about something is that when you start to see this kind of quiet conflict, once you start noticing those topics that you avoid, you know, the eggshells that you’re walking over all the times that you’re saying, “Oh, we’re fine, I’m fine, that can feel like a lot. It’s almost like you can’t unsee it, and so I want to offer you something that’s not a fix, but just a way to hold on to what you’re noticing.

Tina Gosney  23:05

In the way that I work with parents, I often come back to this four points of balance framework that it’s called HEAL, H E A L, and I want to be very clear, this is not a checklist of things for you to do, it’s more like four directions for us to keep checking in with ourselves and to notice as we begin to work from the inside out to make our relationships more connected. So, the first H stands for Honor Humanity, that means remembering that both of you, you and your adult child are both humans, flawed human beings, doing the best with what you know how to do. In practice, that might sound like reminding yourself, you know, they’re not trying to hurt me, they’re just trying to manage their own life, just like I am. This is not about excusing harm, and it’s not about just reducing either of you into a villain or a victim.

Tina Gosney  24:05

The second letter -e, stands for expand self awareness, and that’s what we’ve really been focusing on in this episode today. This is simply about noticing, noticing the eggshells, noticing the topics you avoid, notice what saying we’re fine is actually covering up awareness without judgment, is what it is in practice. This might look like catching yourself mid sentence, softening something before you say it, noticing how you’re interpreting something, noticing your own emotion, your emotional reactions to something, and then just noticing those things, not actually changing them yet. We’re just noticing the third step.

Tina Gosney  24:46

A stands for authentic alignment. This is about, am I showing up in a way that matches what I actually want and value? If I’m just pretending and performing. The fineness to be fine, while I’m feeling a lot of agitation, there’s a gap, and I don’t have to react to that agitation and anger. I can be grounded, and I can be authentic. So, in practice, this might sound like asking yourself, How am I going to respond to things that are difficult?

Tina Gosney  25:22

The fourth letter, the L is to live in integrity. This is about about furthering that action in a way that is consistent with who you want to be in this relationship, regardless of what the other person does, and we’re doing this long term. In practice, this might mean deciding that you know, even if a conversation goes badly. I still want to be that kind, honest, and authentic person side of it. I can be at peace with how I show up, even if the way I showed up was not received well. And this is not a, you know, hey, this is just how I am, and they can take it or leave it kind of attitude.

Tina Gosney  25:58

This is taking all of those three previous points of balance, and showing up all together, putting them together as a version of ourselves that is more mature and grounded in our values, no matter what, and doing that. You were not running a sprint, we’re running a marathon. I’m not actually going to unpack these four steps anymore today, but I did want you to have them, because as you start to notice that quiet conflict in your own relationship this week, you might find yourself naturally bumping into one or more of these, and if you ever want to go deeper into this heal framework, this is something that I use with my parents that I work with, and we go through it step by step, and we evaluate situations through this framework step by step, but for today we’re just going to simply focus on the second step, which was expand self-awareness.

Tina Gosney  26:51

We’re just going to look a little closer at noticing and expanding self-awareness. So this week, here’s how you can implement this. Don’t do anything. I really mean that. I don’t want you to fix anything yet. I don’t want you to bring anything up. I don’t want you to send a text, and I don’t want you to have a conversation. I just want you to get honest with yourself, very quietly and privately honest with yourself. Ask yourself, where am I avoiding instead of engaging, where am I keeping things fine instead of real? Where do I feel distance, even if nothing looks wrong on the outside? You might notice it during a phone call, you might notice it on the, you know, a drive home after a visit. You might, you know, the way that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, you might notice it in a topic that, as soon as it gets brought up, you want to change the subject, but those are good things for you to notice.

Tina Gosney  27:48

So, write it down if that helps. Don’t try to fix it yet, you’re just noticing. You don’t even have to have a special journal or a perfect format to write it down. You can just make a note on your phone. This is just quietly getting out of what’s sitting inside of you, outside of you. We want to look at it from the outside, and if you notice yourself wanting to jump straight into trying to fix it and saying, okay, I noticed this, and I’ll know, how do I fix it? What do I need to do? Then that’s okay. It’s a very natural pull towards that direction, but I do want to see if you can just set it down for now and just notice, because there’s going to be time for fixing, but this week is just for noticing. Self-awareness is where all of this starts.

Tina Gosney  28:36

Here’s what I want to leave you with today: the quiet conflict, like the avoided topics, the walking on eggshells, the saying we’re fine. None of that means that you’re a bad parent or that your relationship is broken. It just means there’s some cracks in the foundation that have been asking you to pay attention, and they’re asking for you to notice them. The good news is that cracks and foundations can be repaired, but only when you acknowledge that they’re there. If this episode brought up something for you, you know, a relationship, a topic, or a feeling that you’ve been quietly carrying, that is not a sign that there’s something wrong with you, it’s a sign that you’re paying attention, and that’s good. That’s exactly where this starts in the next episode, I’m going to build on what I’ve done today.

Tina Gosney  29:26 So, next time we’re going to look at this a little differently, and some of the most powerful forms of conflict don’t look at, look, look like conflict at all, they look like love, and it can be so confusing. That’s what we’re going to go into in the next episode, I’m Tina Gosney, and this is Coaching Your Family Relationships. The next episode will be part two of this series on conflict. Until then, be kind to yourself and be kind to others, and I’ll meet you back here for part two.