E58: Afraid to Say It? Exploring Why We Avoid Difficult Conversations with Eve Stanway

Ever been faced with a situation you simply cannot resolve because you have no idea how to handle the difficult conversation needed.

You are definitely not alone in that!

In this episode I'm joined by Eve Stanway, a divorce and breakup coach, psychotherapist, and author of the book 'Conversations at the Shoreline.' 

We dive into the inspiration behind Eve's new book, which offers guidance on handling difficult conversations effectively. 

Eve shares her tips on the importance of open communication, especially during divorce and family upheaval, and talks about the common issue of silence used as a form of protection. 

She also introduces her concept of the 'Magic Three' for handling tough conversations...clarify, communicate without blame, and correct through repetition. 

Whatever difficult conversations you are faced with you do not want to miss this one!

Who is Eve?

Eve Stanway is a divorce and breakup coach, psychotherapist, and author of Conversations at the Shoreline. With over 25 years of clinical experience, she helps individuals and parents navigate separation, difficult conversations, and emotional overwhelm with calm, clarity, and confidence. Her work bridges psychology, philosophy, and real-world communication tools to support healthier relationships and stronger boundaries. Eve works internationally via Zoom, offering coaching, courses, and therapeutic support. She is a regular media contributor and speaker, known for her warm, grounded presence and practical wisdom. Based in London, she lives with her two children and their beloved Border Collie, Skye.

Find out more:

https://www.evestanway.co.uk/links/

Buy Conversations at the Shoreline:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conversations-Shoreline-Navigate-Toughest-Confidence/dp/1917534027/

Want to connect? Find me here:

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

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-hine

Website: https://www.emmahine.co.uk

You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/@EmmaHineStrategy

Transcript

 Hello & welcome to Dream Business Dream Life, helping ambitious people, like you, to grow a business they love.

 I’m Emma Hine and I’m on a mission to show you that it is possible to grow a business without sacrificing your life.

 Having experienced the rollercoaster of making millions of pounds, but feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and totally unsuccessful, I know first-hand the importance of growing a business on your terms.

 On this podcast I'm going to share with you lots of tips and advice that will enable you to grow a business that gives you the financial freedom to live the life of your dreams while sharing with you some inspirational growth stories from other fabulous business owners.

 Ready to live the dream? Then let’s get stuck in…

Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Dream Business, dream Life. Today I'm joined by Eve Stanway, Eve's divorce and breakup, coach, psychotherapist, and author of Conversations at the Short Line, which by the time this goes live, we are super excited because it will be out there. We're gonna talk lots about the book today, but for now, hello Eve.

How are you? Very well. Thank you, Emma. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm really looking forward to it. My absolute pleasure as ever. I'm gonna dive straight into this and I'm gonna hand straight over to you, Eve to tell us a little bit more about who you are and what has got you to where you are right now.

So I am a psychotherapist and a and divorce coach. I've been a psychotherapist for 20 and the last, probably realistically the eight or nine years as a.

I suppose to explain where I've got to right now is to, I'll partly talk about my kind of wider personal journey, but partly it's, it's really, um, instruction from the client space, if you like. Um, working with people in a one-to-one basis. You have this wonderfully privileged. Set of conversations that you have with people about their lives, and it became more and more clear to me that people were coming to me with anxiety and relationship problems and worry thoughts and all sorts of different things, but at the heart of it, there was a desire very often to speak about their experience and share what their needs were, share what their thoughts were.

They would be quite anxious about doing it. They would be scared that it would be confrontational. Even coming and seeing somebody that was especially there for them to speak to became, it was difficult for them to do that. And I started to think, um, before I got into background in philosophy. And the way we think and the way we speak.

And I started to think what's going on here? And what I realized was, first of all, an awful lot of the trouble stem from childhood. Um, we've now got a generation who very often has grown up in a separated household one way or another. It's much more familiar now for children, sadly. And so many of those issues.

Um, of being, finding it difficult to talk about things came from people not in there. Were, there were periods of their life during the time that their parents were going through breakup where they were unclear, like no, nothing was said to the children. They didn't know that part of their own history, and often it had been quite frightening and quite insecure and quite argumentative and or silence.

Nothing said. Happen and it caused me to reflect back into my own childhood. My parents separated when I was about seven. Know anything about it. I mean nothing. I had the vaguest ideas. Um, and then very sadly in 2017, my own long marriage came to an end, and my children were of an age where they were, they were trying to get on with their own lives.

They were still young and living at home, and I didn't really know how to handle that. I didn't know how much to tell them. And so when you kind of putting all these bits and pieces together, I started to think, gosh. How we have those conversations about how we're thinking about how we're feeling, about what we need, about what's happened to us, um, or about what we wanna know.

People worry that that's gonna lead to conflict or it's gonna lead to shaming or blaming or overwhelm or shut down and all these negative things. And I thought, Hmm, I am very interested in this. Um, because this isn't about whether people are good or bad people. People's behavior can get terrible. When they're in this situation and I decided I'm gonna retrain as a divorce and breakup coach and this book idea that I'd had in my mind for years and years about being, helping people explain how they were feeling.

Kind of, it went through many versions, but it came together as the book that I've written now, which is how, not just that we need to hold boundaries or not that we need to have difficult conversations actually, how. How do you do it? Because it's all very well to know that you have to do something, but we need to know how to do it.

It's been a long journey. Lots of turns, but it's kind of landed almost as if this was the target that was always intended, which is bizarre. The world does that sometimes doesn't. It just brings us back to the place and you think, haha, this is it. This is where I was always heading for, this is the direction I was supposed to be going in, and now I've found it.

And I think you've hit the nail on the head In so many situations there haven't we that as humans, our natural instinct is to avoid something rather than to actually go and. And deal with what we've got to deal with. And that is because we just don't know how to handle it. We don't know what to say. We don't want to upset people.

We think we're protecting people by saying nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. I think that definitely stands out with children and divorced, doesn't it? Because I also came from a, a family that was, you know, my fam my parents were divorced. Mm-hmm. Um, and I equally had, there was no conversations had with me around it.

It just sort of happens around you, doesn't it? Um, it does. And, and, and I think we probably just wanted to know what was going on, how it affected us. Yeah. How, you know, how life was gonna change for us. And, and if someone had just been honest with us as children, it would've made such a difference, wouldn't it?

I think it really would. Uh, you know, children very much observe their parents, um, and are.

There's so many ways that change and turmoil happens in a family life. It be, could be because somebody loses a job because somebody's ill, because we lose somebody. Um, because a relationship breaks down or is difficult. And for children, um, you know, a lot of the people I work with, they're worried about whether their children are gonna be okay and it matter, but.

Our children's okayness is down in part to our ability to manage in a, um, calm way. Some really difficult conversations during the marital, uh, marital breakdown, but also being able to hear our children's complaints. And that's what I see a lot. I think a lot the fear of difficult conversations or the worry that it lead.

Are so good at asking questions. You know, meet a 4-year-old and you meet somebody who's got a lot of questions about a lot of things, and those questions can vary very easily. Become annoying if we're irritated or if we're distracted because we are going through this really difficult conflict with a partner.

We're worried about money or health or whatever it is. And so what happens is that the child can get shut down. And quite a lot of what, what I talk about in the early chapters of my book is the way that silence becomes a kind of protection. That it initially is a protection to just be quiet and not say anything.

'cause you don't wanna upset your mom or your dad or you shaming or complain or whatever it is. And then that silence, what it ends up doing is actually, it starts as a form of protection and then eventually it becomes a barrier. We can't get beyond. We don't know how to go past that. And I think a lot of people who are scared of speaking, it's because when they were children, they may have been scared of what was gonna happen.

So they were scared to talk about it. You know, children are really superstitious. Children worry loads. Um, children often have a lot to say. And if they don't feel that they can say it, what happens is they're incomplete thoughts because they're not adults and car brains are different than adult brains.

Their incomplete thoughts kind of turn inwards and they turn into perfectionism or unworthiness, or a sense that they're at fault, they've caused it, they've done something bad, and it's very, very easy for children to pick that up. So parents will often say to me, well, I'm just gonna tell my children that everything will be okay.

And my advice is. Tell them everything's gonna be difficult. Tell them everything is not gonna feel okay. Tell them that you don't really know what okay is gonna be. But what you are gonna do is that you're gonna be there alongside them throughout the whole process. That you will remain willing to listen to them, hear what they have to say, and share what they need to know.

Remembering that small children understand the world in one way. You know, children don't really know the, um, they don't really have a concept for time really until they're six or seven. They just know it in number of sleeps till Christmas. Yeah. Three people. Yeah. That's what they know. You know, how many, how many sleeps till my birthday?

How many sleeps till some holiday? Um, so they don't really have that concept of time. And that also means they don't have a concept of being able to look back and know it'll be okay. So the calmer and safer we can be, the better for them. And that's something I'm really, really passionate about because in every space I ever work in, if there are children, I always have, I always feel it's, there's a space within that room for the child whose voice may not be being heard.

Um, that doesn't mean you have to do everything your kids say by any means, but it does mean that we need to listen to them and let them know it's okay to speak. Um, and that's what I'm very passionate about. Yeah. Yeah. Being, I think that's all learned behavior, something that we all, you know, because I, I don't think any parent tends to be a bad parent, do they in the sense that, you know, they're hurting or upsetting their children?

No parent goes out with the intention of doing that. No. Do you think it's just because it's. What, what's happened to us, so to speak. So, you know, you come from a, a divorced family that they don't have those conversations with you. So you think that's the way that you do it. So you do the same thing if you go through divorce.

Yeah. Do you think that's where that sort of comes? I think a lot of things are, aren't it? I think it, I think it partly comes from that. I think it comes partly from the fact that children are really complicated creatures to raise. Um, it doesn't matter how many children you've got, they're all very different from each other.

They have very wonderful and unique characteristics. Children are very exuberant. They're very questioning. I mean, they're gonna become adult humans. And adult humans are pretty phenomenal. You know, we really are. You can look around the planet and see that, and I remember when I got my Border Collie, people were like, oh, border Collie will need lots of exercise and it be highly intelligent.

And I'm raising two children. Yeah, even more, you know? Um, and so I think throughout history, one way of dealing with children has been to require obedience and silence. Children should be seen and not heard that a child who talks back is being disrespectful. The child who complains is being ungrateful, that a child who is really struggling is being sensitive.

So I think unconsciously written into our language. Through no fault of anybody's, there is a, um, a narrative that somehow children who complain are misbehaving. And when the family is under stress, that becomes more so. And one of the things that's really important during divorce and breakup, which is why care about it so much, is it isn't just the.

It's the family that ruptures. There's a loss of grandparents. There's a loss of aunts and uncles and cousins. I've seen that in my own family. I witnessed it in my own upbringing that there is a loss of connection towards within the wider community. And I remember when my son was born, he was my first child.

And I remember sitting in the hospital thinking, LaMi, you don't know anyone. Yeah, that you don't know anyone in the world. You know me and you know your dad, and you're gonna get to know all these other people. Um, and then during divorce and breakup, that just breaks. Yeah. And you don't have that. Yeah.

Your normal has changed completely, hasn't it? And there's, there's a whole new normal that you've got to adapt to. Exactly. So silencing children who simply become too much, too vocal, too aggravating, too irritable, too whatever. Um. It's kind of easy and unconscious. And Alice Miller talks about it in, um, she wrote a book, which is a hard read, called For Your, for Their Own Good, which was about how children have been silenced, um, and all that.

Alice Miller is now quite controversial. There are, there's some, you know, there's some truth in that. So. What were you taught that you could talk back to your elders, Emma, when you were growing up? Oh, no, definitely not. No? Oh, no, no. And, and, and you know, being older meant that you couldn't talk back to. So it's quite natural that as adults we are gonna grow up fearing difficult conversations and fearing that it will lead conflict because our first experience was probably very one sided.

Yeah, true, true. So let's twist this right back to the book because I would love to talk lot about the book because it's. It seems weird saying this because we're recording this before it's live, but it is out there right now in the world for people to go and buy and we're gonna share all of the links so you can go and do that shortly.

Absolutely. So you said that this is all we'd been, what you'd got in your mind that you wanted to write this book? Why specifically this book? So. I was interest in writing this book. There was a point where I was written a version of what I thought I should write. I'd kind of, because I had a difficult upbringing in terms of schooling, I thought I'd better write something that looked very learned and it is learned my book.

But I felt that I was writing for this kind of fictional audience that was going to judge me. It's an audience think it probably will judge me. Yeah. Was in my head. Um, and so what, this book ended up this way because I. Pretty much deleted what I'd written up until early last year and started again because I realized that.

In order to really talk about difficult conversations, I needed to, um, a, be comfortable with my own voice, but also encourage people to be comfortable with their voices. And for that reason, although it is very much a conversational book about how to have difficult conversations, I've got a structure in there.

The magic three, which is clarify, communicate.

Communicate it without shaming or blaming or being critical and then correct, which means to repeat, not escalate, but repeat when the message doesn't get through. But I've also couched it in poetry that I wrote along the way and memoir about my life and case studies about the of people. And why I've done is because.

I want to encourage people to, to be able to relate to this as a very human need. It's a very, very human need. If we look through history, if we look at the way, even in this world, that people are silenced and their voices are silenced, the need to speak, the need to communicate, the dare to speak. So important.

And so it felt to me that when I was writing this book and when I really, really put my kind of heart into it, it was like, I'm gonna dare to speak and I'm going to dare to say that whether you are in business, whether it's your family breakdown, whether it's your personal life, whatever it is, whether you are talking to your older parents and you wanna find out about what happened when the family broke down, that this is a human.

Right at the heart with people. We're humans. Yeah. And so this book is born of that. Okay. Okay. So who's it for? Who, who is the ideal reader of this book? Who, who's gonna get the, the most juiciness out of it? Juiciness. Great word. The most juiciness. Um, so this book is for. I hesitate anybody, but it is for anybody because I've carefully written so it's accessible.

I haven't overcomplicated the language. I've kept things easy and simple and understandable because I want everyone to be able to access it. Even the poetry. I haven't kind of done cerebral poetry. It's just the poetry that came to my mind. I'm being clever with it. I've just been, um, caring with it. Um, so my ideal reader is a person.

Who has realized I'm silenced. I'm not living my life because I don't dare, or I dunno how to find the words to share what matters to me. Or somebody who realizes that they know somebody that they deeply, deeply care about and they don't know how to get them to speak about what matters to them.

Communication is intrinsically the person who speaks and the person who listens. So if a person wants to listen to someone else, I'm desperate to find out what you are thinking, what you are feeling. I need to know what my teenage child is actually worrying about because they're not talking. Yeah. Um, it is for those people, those people with a burning urge to communicate.

Don't know how to put together those early little ingredients of conversation to be able to say, I'm here.

So it's not specifically for breakup and divorce conversations around breakup and divorce. It is for, I just wanted to be clear on that. It's for any, yeah. Yeah. Difficult conversations between, so it could be difficult conversations in your business. It could be difficult conversations at home, it could be difficult conversations with team if you, if you work, it's difficult conversations.

False, it's. And what I decided to do with this one, and I'm ambitious. You know me, Emma. I do. I'm like this. Um, so with this book, I just wanted to set the scene using like really I've got a wide range of case studies, friendships where there's difficult conversations, siblings where there's difficult conversations, work colleagues, you know, work colleague who speaks over you or doesn't you, how you deal with.

My intention is to have this as a kind of base book, and then I suspect over time I will develop other resources. There are resources actually on my website where I dive much deeper into some of the case studies. Um, and to some of the, also, I, I've got my book quite a lot of grounding techniques of kind of how to calm our nerves because that's a real thing to have to do, like before coming on here.

Um, but I have also got some other books planned where I like kind conversations. In our lives, especially with the rising kind of memory loss and dementia and things like that, how we have those conversations as well as how we have those difficult conversations with our children, especially when they, you know.

Own children maybe get into a difficult relationship and you want to be able to say, I'm there for you, but you don't want to be telling them what to do. You want to be able to help them talk about how they're feeling in that relationship. So my idea is to expand going forwards. I fully intend to expand the resources going forwards to dive deep into all these difficult conversations because every conversation we can have.

Another part of our life. It's like knocking a door into another room in your house and being able to go in there. It's just magical. And how lovely would it feel to know that you could wake up in the morning and that you could go and tackle those conversations that you've, you've been putting off for some people's case years and years and years.

Isn't it things that people actually want to do and say? Um, so that is, that is amazing. I can't, now I wanna say something really like, something really important as well, which is if you know how to have a really difficult conversation. And you really, you, you all the planning, you read the book, you use Magic three, and the other person absolutely doesn't wanna listen.

They wanna shut you down by talk in the book that sometimes we just gotta walk away. Like, it's okay. Like if you really, really, and it's so important to say this, this isn't about like, oh, we're gonna make every relationship work. No. It is about knowing that we've done our best and actually I need to leave now.

I need to walk away from.

Amazing. Amazing. So let's talk a little bit about, that's a lot about the book, hopefully that yes, everybody knows that they need a copy of this 'cause it's gonna affect all of us. We all have these difficult conversations we need to tackle. So let's talk about launch day. I know launch day will be been, it's the 10th of June, which is, this will be out on the 11th of June.

So technically we're recording this before it's happened. But tell us about Launch. What does Launch look like? Because Launch isn't just, there's the book and that's it. Is it, let's, tell me about what's, what's the plans for this book? So I, I've had quite a few people say that launching a book is like giving birth, and I think it is actually, and I've realized is there life after?

I hadn't really kind of fully got to grips with that, but there is life after launch, there's all the other things that are happening. So launch day is gonna be a full day of events. I've tried to make it spread out throughout the day so that there's lots going on so people can be involved. It'll be overall, the social media are things on YouTube and on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

And probably, if I can on my. So those things and Instagram, those things will be going on. And then afterwards I've got various different events. I'm gonna be talking at some bookshops. I've got a live launch party to coincide with my birthday party on the 21st of June up near where I live in East London.

And then I'm gonna be talking at Impact Live with Nicola Rail and all of that team. And then I've got. Happen later on in the year at the big and at your own? Well, in December, which I'm really, um, so there's a launch is gonna keep going. And what I'm hoping is that after the book launch, I can, I can engage a much wider audience and really encourage people to kind of come forwards and start really talking about these difficult conversations, um, and how we have them.

That's what I want to do. I just wanna start this movement where it becomes okay, instead of this kind of binary conflict that we see a lot of at the moment where people are being called names and they're this and they're that, um, of actually how we, how we resolve those situations. I. Because there's so much at the moment about finding our mission, finding our purpose, finding our values, and so much of that is being visible and so much of that is being heard.

So that's my plan for the launch, is to, if I could start the conversation that goes on. And such an important conversation, isn't it? And, and I think what you've just said there is absolutely key in, in anything we do in business really. It's, you know, you launch something and that's not the end, is it?

It's not, oh, I've done it now. I've written the book, I'm an author. Yay. Um, it, it's what you then do with that because that is where the impact happens, isn't it? The impact happens when more people read the book. More people learn from the book. Um, and more people can come into your world and you can support them in different ways.

So how can you support people? So I am, at the moment, I'm still doing quite a lot breakup and divorce coach, and I work a lot with men, a lot with women. And weirdly as a breakup and divorce coach, I do a lot of saving relationships. It was a, who knew? I didn't know that that would be the case, but I actually worked to help so people could work with me on a one.

My ideal way and the way that I've tried to make it really simple and easy to reach more people, because as I say, that is what I'm interested in. I am interested in growing this idea of conversation where we can deescalate conflict and start to create connection. Um, an understanding between people because we've all got something going on in our head, and ideally we wanna be able to share that with people around us.

So the ways, the ideal ways that people will be able to work with me is that I'm starting to produce some courses. So I have a course Navigating with the Heart, which is specifically for parents who was supporting their children through separation and divorce. And that was the first course I did because it just, it, it's just such in my heart to make that.

You know, children, parents, it, it is just so hard during divorce and breakup when you're worrying about your own children and that they're gonna be okay. Um, so, and that's an online course where people can access all the videos, they can access the audio files. I've got workbooks so that they can work through.

And I've also got a community that people can join where I'll be jumping on once a week. So there's still that access to me and we can talk about live situations. And then I'm developing as well. A course, which is in the back of the book, um, and off the back of the book, which is specifically how to understand your own voice, how to create a foundation for the difficult conversations you need to have, how to hold a boundary without becoming difficult or angry or aggressive, and how to have these difficult conversations.

It's how to do it and that is what I going more resources for. Um, how we do it. Yeah. And that's really important, isn't it? If you wanna reach more people, impact more people's lives. Mm-hmm. You have to do it in a way beyond one-to-one support, because you can only help. And that's what I realized. You just, yeah, you can, you can only really help.

I mean, you can. Realistically as a coach or a therapist, real, you're kind of 15 to 20 hours a week is really all you can manage and offer a really high value service to people. And as I say, I am ambitious and I want, I want to encourage more people, um, because I just think that's, I think our lives get so bound up in conflict and in the end that anybody else, and we don't live long enough to waste too much time in.

We absolutely don't, and it's not a nice place to be, is it? It really isn't a nice place to be, so, um, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So sounds like you have some really exciting things to come in the course of the next, I say the next few weeks, but, and then beyond as well. Um, so we are gonna share in the show notes, links to everything that Eve has got.

Right now, um, which will be different in a week's time when this goes live. Um, so we're gonna share those in the show notes for you so you can go and learn all of that information. But before we come to an end today, and I hate coming to an end 'cause we could literally talk about this all day, share with us Eve, what would your top tip be for people who perhaps are in a position where they need to have that difficult conversation?

So the, my top tip really is to. Recognize that calmness in ourselves. If we can become emotionally regulated, what we, what? My top tip really is that when we are facing a difficult conversation, we create a story in our head, often with one person as the badie and the other person as a goodie. Okay. And that's very unhelpful because there's a tendency to really build up the other person as the baddie, or very tragically to build ourselves up as the baddie and stepping away from that.

Two, these are just two people, two people, two humans outta the many humans. Difficult to say and perhaps something difficult to hear. And if in the end we can think about it as just two people, one person might have been quite mean to the other person. The other person might have been quite mean back, but meanness never won anything.

It's about can I calm myself down to think about what is it I really wanna say? And can I say that and can I do it calmly? When it doesn't work, because I say when, because it never does work. First time it just doesn't work. First time, what am I gonna do next? Am I gonna stay calm and repeat or am I going to escalate or get frustrated or annoyed?

And these are choices with every breath we take. We have a choice. Um, and the choice to stay calm, to say what we wanna say, and if we really can't get any traction on it. That's a relationship that is not gonna last. So we can just smile and walk away and that's okay. It's okay too. Amazing. Love that tip.

Remembering you've got choices. So finally, if our listeners want to come and learn more from you, which I'm absolutely sure they will want to do, where's the best place for them to connect with you? So there's a QR code behind me. If you shine your phone at the screen, unless you're watching this on your screen, on your phone, you will be able to connect there to my website, which is full of choice, uh, choices of things to look at, case studies and resources.

And you will also find a link to pre-order or order the book. 'cause it will be an order the book by the time this goes live. Um, and that's where I. Within my website, which is always changing, it's always being updated. Um, you can also find me on social media, find me on, as I say, Instagram, Facebook, um, and LinkedIn.

They're the main ones that I go to, but find me at my website and from there and YouTube as well, because I'm going to really start putting more and more stuff in YouTube and kind of grow that. So I share more tips. I.

Amazing. Amazing. And what is your, what is your website name? Oh, my website. It's um, ww dot eve stanway do co.uk. There you go. Super easy. So thank you so much for joining me today, Eve. I have absolutely loved our conversation and I hope you have too. And thank you to everybody else for listen. Sorry. Thank you everybody else for listening.

We will see you next time.

You have been listening to Dream Business Dream Life with Emma Hine. If you want to know more about how I can help you to build your dream business and your dream life, then visit my website emmehine.co.uk. Until next time remember you really can have it all!