Good reminders to guide us through the Holidays
I recently came across a fantastic TED talk by another doc, Lissa Rankin, who uses slightly different language to emphasize similar concepts. This is a worth while review before the Holiday Season.
I like how what she calls our “inner pilot light” is our strong and healthy self, and what we call the two-by-four fairy or a growth spurt, is her “perfect storm”. The idea of how our body will get louder and louder if we don’t listen is the same though, as is the importance of listening and trusting our strong and healthy self.
This will be especially important through this holiday season, when we tend to be around more people, and are often around the people we have the hardest time being authentic with, like parents, siblings, childhood friends. This tends to be more difficult because they tend to see us as we WERE, which is not necessarily as we ARE.
REHEARSING how we will handle these interactions based on our values can make a BIG difference, so can SELF-SOOTHING, ANCHORING and using DEFUSION STRATEGIES. Also feel free to re-read the 3 Questions to Keep Yourself Emotionally Safe. Making sure we keep doing the things that make us feel strong will also make it much more difficult to go back to being a mouse when we are more strongly connected to our dragon. See The Dragon, the Mouse and Brene Brown for more details. Finally, leaning into feelings as they come up and being curious about what the avoided feelings are when defences come up can make a big difference. See The Triangle of Conflict for a review.
Happy Holidays to all of you! Let’s create holidays that will be the best ones yet! (Because it turns out we have a choice in that ;0)
Thank you to everyone who attended the Holiday Pot luck last night, I am still blown away by your skills at charades! Also please note the clinic is closed until Jan. 5.2015.