Coaching Your Family Relationships

From Victim to Empowered — How to Reclaim Agency and Accountability in Family Relationships

• Tina Gosney • Episode 193

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Episode 193: From Victim to Empowered — How to Reclaim Agency and Accountability in Family Relationships

In this second part of my conversation with Emily Layton, we explore what happens after awareness and acceptance — the critical next steps of agency, accountability, and action. If you’ve ever felt stuck in a victim mindset or found yourself waiting for others to change before you feel better, this episode will challenge your thinking and inspire powerful change.

We talk about the difference between blame and responsibility, how generational patterns keep us stuck, and what it really takes to step into your personal power — especially when relationships feel strained or disconnected.

Emily shares stories, metaphors, and practical wisdom that make this conversation rich and relatable. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of how to move forward without perfection, embrace mistakes as part of growth, and reclaim your voice in your most important relationships.

If you missed Part 1 of this interview, be sure to go back and listen to Episode 192 first.

Meet My Guest: Emily Layton

Emily Layton has a Master's degree in Marriage, Family, and Human Development from BYU. She is a certified life coach who focuses on identity integration and personal restoration, centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ and informed by interpersonal neurobiology.

Download Emily’s FREE graphic:
Steps Up to the High Brain

Learn more about Emily’s work at:
www.GrowintheLight.com

Schedule a free 30-minute discovery call:
Email Emily directly at emily@growinthelight.com

Ready to stop the cycle of disconnection in your family?

Join me for my next free workshop:

End Family Disconnection and Rebuild Relationships that Last
Date: October 9, 2025
Sign up here: https://www.courageous-connections.com/end-family-disconnection-event_oct-2025

You’ll walk away with a clear roadmap to begin repairing and rebuilding the relationships that matter most.

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.

Tina Gosney:

Okay, we are back for part two with Emily, and if you haven't listened to part one yet, highly suggest that you go listen to part one, because it will give you the lead in for this episode. But in part one, we did talk about awareness and acceptance and the part that those play in our lives and in our relationships. And we're going to get into two other a words in this one in this episode, Emily, I have been loving this conversation that we've been having, and we did talk about we left off talking about acceptance and what that means and what it doesn't mean. What's the next step after we we really tell ourselves where we are and accept that this is where I am. What happens next?

Emily Layton:

The next step is realizing that we have the power to do something about it, and that's that agency and accountability step, like I am the chooser in my life. I can choose to do something about where I am. This is like the part of us we talked about the GPS analogy of awareness and acceptance tells us where we really are, whereas agency and accountability is like I have the keys to this car and I'm going to turn it on and plug in my map, and I have the power to do something, to take me to where a different place, not where I am, but where I want to be.

Tina Gosney:

It's hard to take responsibility. Yes, that that means we have to take a really good look inside of ourselves, and we don't like to do that. We would much rather be a victim of a person, a situation, the economy. We would much rather be go into victim mode, because then we don't have to take responsibility.

Emily Layton:

Yeah, it's our way of avoiding responsibility. We've talked about about fight or flight. One of our stress responses is flight, and this is where we slide back down to the low brain, when we blame someone else or give them the responsibility of fixing our problems, we are fleeing from being able to escape the slow brain and return to our high brain. My friend Kaylee said, you can't rest your joy on someone else's choices. And I love that powerful Yeah, you can't rest your joy on someone else's choices. You can't give your hope to change, to be in a better spot to someone else by blaming them, because the reality is that person is not going to fix where you are. So if you want it to be different, that power resides with you.

Tina Gosney:

Absolutely it's hard to let go of the victim story. I noticed a few years ago that I was really good at being a victim. It was very practiced. And for me, it was, I think it was like a, like a, maybe a nervous system response, or just the way that I had learned how to cope, not taking responsibility for myself, but all the of these other things and all these other people, they're the ones. They're the reason that I'm acting this way, right? They would just be different, then I would be fine. And I think that's really a common story that a lot of people have, because it's very easy to be a victim and to be make somebody or something else into the villain.

Emily Layton:

And it's familiar our neurological systems like things that are familiar. It feels safe because it's familiar. It doesn't mean it's good, it doesn't mean it's healthy. It's not promoting growth, but it's familiar. So our brain's gonna say, keep doing that, keep blaming that person. So unless we make intentional efforts of taking accountability for it, we often will stay in those patterns.

Tina Gosney:

And these are not just patterns that we've established in our life. These are often intergenerational patterns. Totally we are repeating what we saw our parents do and the environment that we grew up in, and they are most likely repeating the environment and what they saw their parents do these things get passed down through generations.

Emily Layton:

I love that you say that that's true. And and Tina, where we actually met, was at an integral polarity of practice conference, right? And what that means is, is, is understanding that there are two sides, there are polarities, different extremes, and where we want to be as in that still point in the middle. And what we're talking about right now is the extreme of giving complete responsibility to someone else and blaming them for that that disables us, that. Makes us not be able to find progress. But there's also the other side that keeps us from progressing, and that is scrupulosity, or perfectionism, thinking we have to fix it all. We have to do it all, and if we don't do it all perfectly, this black and white thinking, right, that it's not going to be good enough, and we can't progress if we don't do everything and do it perfectly. Have you had experience with that?

Tina Gosney:

Oh, very much. So yeah, and it's a very much a fixed mindset that if, like, everything that I produce in my life is up to me, and if I don't produce the things that I want in the way that I want them, if they're not coming out the way that I want them to be, or getting the result that I planned on having when I put in all this effort, then that reflects on me. It means I'm deficient, something wrong with me, versus a growth mindset, where it's like I put in the input, I see my inputs, and I might not get the result that I want, but it doesn't define me. It just means that that was a different outcome that I didn't expect. Doesn't even mean it's a wrong outcome, but it means I can learn from it. We out in a growth mindset. We're always learning from our experiences whether they turned out the way we wanted them to or they didn't. I actually think that we have a lot more to learn from the experiences that don't turn out the way that we want them to, because those cause pain, and we pay attention to pain, we don't often pay attention to the opposite of pain.

Emily Layton:

Oh, and we'll get to this on the next step, talking about action and how being willing to make those mistakes, this is so essential for our action and for our growth. I love how you tie in growth mindset and fixed mindset. And when we think about the polls like the globe, the North Pole and the South Pole. How much grows in the North Pole and the South Pole?

Tina Gosney:

Not much. Not much about right? Not much at all.

Emily Layton:

These are our poles of we want to blame someone else completely for it. Is a one pole and the other pole is we want to expect perfection or nothing from ourselves but the equator, like we think about the equator of the earth, that middle part where there's there's sun and where these prolific forests are in this place in the middle zone, right? This is where our growth mindset is. This is where we're taking agency and accountability. And it's a big zone, right there. There's a lot of ways to take accountability for our own actions there, and a lot of ways to have agency, or to have power, to accept that, that we can be the choosers in our life. And it's that middle zone, it's that growth mindset zone that you talked about, and I think that's just a neat visual that we have to be careful not to fall into the zone of blaming someone else and giving them our power and not expecting perfectionism of ourselves and freezing ourselves out of having our power

Tina Gosney:

to I really love that analogy. I haven't heard that put that way before, but that's great. I think that's a visual that probably everybody can can understand, because we all, yeah, we all know that that's familiar everybody. So I love it.

Emily Layton:

And the next step of that is, I am such a proponent of growth, right? That that in order for growth to happen, you think about plants, they need sunshine and they need oxygen and they need water, right? And just like that, research shows again and again from lots of different fields that we need agency and autonomy. We need belongingness and we need confidence or competence. That certainty of knowing like that, security those three things are, what we need to grow, just like a plant needs sun and water and oxygen. We need those things, and so taking accountability that in my life, I do need those things, and it's okay and to pursue a path, and also to hold space for someone else to be able to grow in that way that we are accountable for what we need for growth and and pursuing path and making choices in our lives that are going to help promote growth by providing those things,

Tina Gosney:

it's really difficult to allow ourselves to make To give you the space to make mistakes, yeah, promote those and to not then make failure mean something. Because I think in our culture, in our society, we make it mean something when somebody else fails, we look at them and make it mean something about them. And if we do that to somebody else, then we are also. Doing it to ourselves.

Emily Layton:

Let's tap into that the fourth step on the steps up to the low brain. Once we take accountability for the power to act and have the keys and the cars on, we put it in gear and it moves. This is the action step. This is where we actually do something. And you make such an important distinction there that just because we're making action doesn't mean the outcome is going to be what we want, right? I had a neurological bleed back in 2021 March of 2021 and did a bunch of occupational therapy and physical therapy after that, and I learned the principle of error augmentation. And what they taught me is that the best place for your brain to be growing and to have that neuroplasticity happening, that sweet spot for the brain is that you are making mistakes 40% of the time and succeeding 60% of the time. So she didn't want me to succeed all the time. When I would be doing my walking things on the treadmill and and be able to do that, should put a rubber band around my waist, and she'd pull me off kilter, like while I was walking, so that I was making mistakes or that things were happening I couldn't predict so that I would have to compensate and adjust for that, and it helped my brain to grow faster when I was making more mistakes. But we don't have that same mentality in our culture. We want, like 98% success rate to think we're okay instead of this, like 6040, giving ourselves space

Tina Gosney:

for error, I think it's, I think I'm gonna go back to the belonging aspect. Yes, we have, let's just say we have a failure in our life, something that's really, really difficult, our first, usually, our first thing that we do is hide then, yeah, other people because we don't, sorry,

Emily Layton:

embarrassment, yeah,

Tina Gosney:

we're hiding from other people because we don't want them to see. I'm not perfect. I don't have it all together. I made a mistake, or this thing is happening in my family. It's the shame and embarrassment at the very time that we really need connection and we need belonging. We're having the most difficult time. We're pulling away from the thing that we need

Emily Layton:

most, yeah, that connection to really this, this ties back to our acceptance, right? If we're hiding we've slid back down, and we need, we need acceptance again to accept it is what it is. I did make a mistake, and the acronym for this action step is AAA, act, assess, adjust. And my son attends a STEM school, and they teach him at the very beginning this process of having a prototype mentality and what they going into it, they know this first model that I make cannot be my last one. When, when they're doing projects, they are required to make certain certain different iterations of the process or project and adjust it and adjust it and adjust it, and make changes like, what did you learn? What could be better? Change it. What did you learn? What can be better change it like they're not allowed to get it right the first time. And I love that attitude of having a prototype mentality about ourselves. I'm not going to get this relationship, I'm not going to get this discussion with my child right the first time, right, and that's okay. I'm going to move forward and act and then afterwards, I'm going to assess what went well, what didn't, and then I'm going to adjust what needs to be different next time. Or what do I need to go back and say, You know what? I'm really sorry that I reacted in that way next time. I'm going to do this right as we do that we hold space a prototype mentality, space in this action phase for ourselves and and we become much more successful and much more willing to not be frozen, much more willing to act because we're not afraid of failure, because we don't see failure as failure. We just see it as an opportunity to grow, to improve.

Tina Gosney:

I heard once that I think this is a genius, that a father, this woman that I knew she was telling me about her dinner her dinner table was like growing up with their family. He had a bunch of daughters, and he would say, What did you fail at today? I. Uh, and they were so excited to tell him his their failures. And the first time I told this story to somebody, they looked at me like I was nuts. Like, what are you talking about? Why would you celebrate failures? The reason he was celebrating failures because they it meant that they had pushed themselves beyond their current abilities. And so if we're only celebrating successes and good grades or, you know, things that turned out the way we want them to, where we could very likely not be pushing ourselves to grow and to go beyond our current abilities into a whole new set of abilities, we're most likely holding ourselves back, if we're requiring perfection and success all the time,

Emily Layton:

that is totally true. I have posted over our sink in our kitchen is this little graph, because I'm a nerdy mom like that, that shows the comfort zone, but it's also called the stagnant zone. Like it's very comfortable, but there's no growth there. But then this next zone is what is unfamiliar and what is uncomfortable, and that's where the growth happened. And then at the top is the unsafe zone. We don't want to go into situations that are going to make us unsafe. We need to trust that that boundary between it's uncomfortable because it's not good for me to be here. So we don't want to go into the unsafe zone, but we don't want to just live in that comfort zone where we want to live is in that middle zone of unfamiliar, uncomfortable, right, right? So that we can keep growing.

Tina Gosney:

Yeah, absolutely. And I like that you pointed out, like we can push ourselves so far in trying to do this, that then we are not safe. So I totally pointed that out, that we want to go just beyond our ability, into the uncomfortableness. Not I'm kidding. Yeah, exactly.

Emily Layton:

And you know what? It's different for everybody. This image that we have over the sink has four different examples of this, of this graph, because everybody just defines what's come their comfort zone and their unsafe some differently and and our responsibility to our fellow men is to respect how their neurological system has defined it. If something is safe for me, it doesn't mean it's safe for an introvert child that I have, right? And I need to honor their definition of safe, we need to have this discussion of where's your growth zone, and let's stay in the zone that is your growth zone. And I'm not going to push you too far so that you feel unsafe, but I am going to push you out of your comfort zone, right? And so to figure out what that looks like for ourselves and for others, so that we're safe still

Tina Gosney:

while we're girl, yeah, I do like to tell my clients, like uncomfortableness is good, like I'm going to make you uncomfortable, and that's different than you feeling unsafe. Yeah, let's make sure that we understand the difference between something feeling not safe and then something just being uncomfortable, because maybe I haven't done it before, or it's challenging a little bit of the way I'm thinking, or or it just like I feel like I'm putting on somebody else's clothes. I'm not sure that this is right for me. You know, that's not unsafe to put on someone else's clothes, usually, but it feels uncomfortable. So sometimes we're just trying on somebody else's clothes to see if maybe I like a new style, maybe I want to change something up in my life.

Emily Layton:

Yeah, I think a part that we need to honor as well is that we don't have to live in that growth zone like our brains have a comfort zone for a reason, and going back to the we grow best when we have a home base that is safe and secure, where we are seen and we are soothed, and we all need that warm fire, fuzzy blanket, cozy jammies kind of feeling, so we can grow in that growth zone, and then to give ourselves that grace and space of going back and enjoying the comfort zone and getting refilled and getting rested, and then venturing back into that growth zone, right? That there's a rhythm

Tina Gosney:

there. Yeah, I watch my two little grandsons do this with their parents, my daughter and her husband, because they're they're just young kids. They're 18 months in four years, and especially the 18 month old he will he's just loves to go play. So he'll go out into the yard and venture out there and go do things, and then he wants to come back in and just go check in with mom, like, he'll go touch her or, like, want to sit on her lap for a minute. And then he's like, Okay, I'm gonna go do something else. And he goes out and he does something else, and then he comes back and he checks in with her again. So it's like, I'm gonna have the safety to go and venture out and try something new, and then I'm gonna come back to where I can just know, relax and know that I'm safe. And my mom's going to be here, and then I could have the courage and the energy to go back and do it again, but I think that's what you're talking about. Like we all really it.

Emily Layton:

That's such a perfect example, because nobody taught that child to do that intuitively, we will do that right. But we talked in the other episode how we are so separated from our intuition, but having this rhythm of of engaging coming back and touching in, engaging coming back and touching in, they call this pendulating, and this is a beautiful step of acceptance to understand this too, is just like a pendulum goes back and forth. We can lean forward into the difficult and do that, and then we get saturated, and we need to pendulate back. And our body and our brain is going to tell us this, and if we honor this, then we can pendulate back, get refilled, get recharged, like your grandson, touch Mom, get a cookie, get a drink, and go back out for the next adventure, right? And then we're we're more equipped, and we grow better under those pendulating rhythms. But in our society, so often we say, I just need to push through. I just need to make it happen. I need to be superwoman. I need to stay busy. And that's why we get so burned out and so weary and so dissatisfied, we miss out on the joy because we're not letting ourselves pendulate in that action stuff.

Tina Gosney:

We are such doers in 80 we value doing and we have a lot of people have a great deal of shame around rest,

Emily Layton:

yes, yes. So I really want to emphasize in this action phase, yes, take initiative and act and then come back and be still. Stillness is a choice for action, right, go and do, then come back and just be and go and do and come back and just be. There's a beautiful rhythm that keeps us in our high brain, and that's where we want to stay, this wholeness, this whole brain living, has this beautiful rhythm of growth and comfort of initiate and stillness of action and peace.

Tina Gosney:

I love that you think about even a machine like a car, it needs to rest. It's a mechanical instrument. It needs to have rest in order for it to really last longer and to do what it was functioning, to do, or what do you know to fulfill its function in life. I want to go back to something I think that we skipped in the agency section because we didn't talk about ego. Important one to touch on. I think I might have pulled you too far into action before we agency. So let's go back and catch that one.

Emily Layton:

I love to say, ego is our growth pirate. It's the pirate of our growth. Ego wants to be right. Instead of growing. I should have thought about that.

Tina Gosney:

I think that we all want to be right. I think that is a we like the certainty is you said one of our basic human needs, yeah. And so our brain likes to tell us that we have the answer, that we already know the answer, and life is the way that I see it, and if somebody else doesn't see it, then they're wrong. My brain loves to tell us that, and so I agree that it's just a natural way for our brain to hold on to its perspective. Our brain, our ego doesn't like to grow. Our breath to grow, but our ego, ego doesn't like to grow. It likes to hold on to the same stories. And so when we can just say to ourselves, I might not be right here, yeah, I could be wrong, and I have gotten into the habit of now saying when I'm talking to someone, I'm like, I'm going to tell you this. From my perspective, I'm probably wrong somewhere in this please feel free to tell me where you see that I'm wrong, because I would really like to know, but this is how I'm seeing this right now.

Emily Layton:

Yeah, and it may not even be your that you're wrong, like, how many colors are in a crown box? You just are sharing one perspective, one color, and it's right, it's totally for a screen. But there's like, macaroni and cheese orange that that is also true, right? And so one phrase here that helps. Spell the ego is, help me see my blind spot. Every single car, no matter how expensive your car is, is going to have a blind spot. You need mirrors, or you need to turn. You need to be able to see what you can't see, if you just keep your gaze forward, right? We are humans, and we are going to have blind spots. Ego thinks it's like the owl that can turn its head in 360 degrees, but we can't. And so to hold that space of help me see my blind spot. That's such a beautiful phrase of being growth minded, instead of fixated in our ego.

Tina Gosney:

And we will, at times, fight to the death to be right. I think of it like, like, when we're trying to be right in a conversation or in a situation, it gets to be like we're in a tug of war. And so you've got two parties, you know, pulling each on the end of a big rope, trying to pull each other over to convince the other one that they're wrong and I'm right, but when you do that, somebody's falling flat. Always, you know that's what happens, is someone falls flat. But if you can finally get someone to agree with you in this tug of war, you haven't really won anything except damage for the relationship, yeah, because they might agree with you, but you it came at a high cost. And let's go back

Emily Layton:

to that belonging and confidence. Right is you did it, you got what you wanted, and were right, but at the expense of the belonging and the connection and really that doesn't grow our confidence. I want to, I want to differentiate something here, or divide out, untangle that there's a big difference between confidence and ego. Ego is just pride. Wanting to say it already knows. Where's the confidence can look I can say, with confidence I have learned this, and I'm certain of this. I can also say with confidence I know that I have a blind spot. Will you help me see it? That can be a very confident statement, right? What our souls need is confidence, not ego. We don't need to be right, but sometimes we haven't matured to the point that we understand that being right is not the same thing as being confident. We really need to be confident. And confidence is so much. It's learning and growth. It is, but it is also meekness. And I love the definition of meekness being a confident growth, minded humility. So meekness is a confident growth, minded humility. It's willing to say, You know what? I'm not sure, but I want to grow. Will you help me? And I'm confident that that's a really good path. Yeah, yeah. So our society hasn't taught very much that meekness is an admirable quality, even more so than being right.

Tina Gosney:

I think that word meek just it. We have associated it with words that don't really belong with it, yeah, like weakness and totally Yeah. That's why I

Emily Layton:

want to reclaim it. I'm going to say it again. Meekness is confident, growth minded, humility. We all want to be confident, and we all want growth, right? That development and meekness can be that spot that that sweet spot that helps us move forward in a different kind of confidence, instead of ego being our growth, Pirate

Tina Gosney:

growth priority. I love that, and I did just, just a couple weeks ago, I had a friend that told me about that new meaning, or the the hijacked meaning of of meekness. So I love that you brought that in, because I just learned that a couple weeks ago. I love learn the true meanings of words, rather than how they've been hijacked, and we use them now. But you're reminding me of something else in that I have noticed that the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know, yeah, and I've just gone through this process so much that now I learned something, and I'm like, Okay, this is how I understand it today, but you know, next week, it might actually be different. So I'm going to leave myself open, so that I can not think that I know everything and like, this is solid. I'm gonna leave some of this open for more knowledge to come in, because I know that it's out there, I just haven't found it yet.

Emily Layton:

Oh, I love this, Tina, and this is so much like as we zoom back a big picture of our whole discussion here is love the process, not. Outcome, like love, love, the growing and not that you got there, because there's always going to be another there to get to. And if we just are emphasizing like a destination, or we know it all now, then we're missing the fact that the real joy in life is the process, is this voice, is the growth, is the relationship along the way, is the is the view that you see driving from California to New York, not just getting to New York, right, right, yeah, and that's the steps up. Is it from from our low brain to a high brain, whole brain way of living. It's learning to recognize what wholeness feels like and how to claim it. In our lives, we are always going to get triggered back to the low brain like even as much as I teach this and live this like almost every day, I find myself there in the low brain, and if I judged myself that, oh, here again. How stupid of me to be here again. If I was outcome oriented, that would be frustrating, but it like, ooh, here I am, and this is an opportunity of growth, and I know what to do, and I'm going to choose that and the process or the movement and the growth is what fuels my soul and fills my cup in a way that that lets me be awake and alive in my life, to have joy and delight in my life. And I think that's what most people are looking for. They just don't know sometimes what it is they're looking for

Tina Gosney:

that is beautiful. Emily and I was going to ask you another question, but I think that we should just end right there, because I think that was a perfect ending to these two episodes. Thank you so much for being here and having this discussion with me. Emily and I meet quite regularly on Zoom because we live in two different states, and we just decided, like, we love our conversation so much that other people need to hear them. So that's how, that's how Emily ended up on the podcast. And I think that you have so much wisdom for the listeners on this podcast. I just just really wanted to share you with them. So thank you so much for being here, wonderful.

Emily Layton:

Everybody just gets to keep growing, right? You are a growing friend with me, and that's a beautiful friendship.

Tina Gosney:

Thanks for being here with me today. I appreciate it. I hope this podcast, these two podcast episodes, have helped you to know how you can bring more light, love and life into your own family through focusing on your own personal development, you can find out more about Emily with some links in the show notes, thanks. I'll see you next time.