Coaching with LDS values

Episode 112: Emotional Self-Care This is Bonnie Lyman, and you're listening to the podcast, loving On Purpose, episode 112 Emotional Self-Care. Welcome to the podcast, loving On Purpose. I'm your host, Bonnie Lyman. If you're having trouble navigating through your relationships with your adult children, if you are struggling to connect with them. Or having specific challenges, you're in the right place. Hey there my friends. How are you doing this week? I am still on the beautiful island of Oahu in Hawaii, and I can't tell you how good it feels to have all this sunshine and ocean and. I appreciate it. Now, I know that within a few months I would start taking it for granted and want to be in my home and around all the beautiful pine trees. In my native Northwest of Spokane, well, I guess it's not my native. I wasn't born there, but I feel like I've lived there for a hundred years. But thank you for listening another week. Thank you. For those of you that have given me reviews and given me feedback, I love feedback. Even negative feedback helps me to be better at helping you and. If you're not on my email list, you really need to get on that. I feel like I give some pretty good tips and insights about getting along, not only with your adult children, but everyone in general. It is the same tools and. You perhaps learn that if you listen to last week's episode on marriage, and today is my fifty-third wedding anniversary to my husband Jeff Lyman, who is golfing right now. And I am really glad he has this passion and I am very fortunate to have him be the father of my children. And of course, I tell him all their faults they inherited from him. Of course. Right. But anyway, I just love that guy a lot. And I may have mentioned before that when I pray for something that's a little extravagant maybe something that I shouldn't pray for. But I really, really hope that I die before he does. I just can't imagine my life without him. And if you haven't listened to that episode. There are parts at least I think you'll glean from. It doesn't always come out exactly as I want it to, but I, I really feel that it's important that. We work as much, if not more, on our relationships with our spouse, our significant others, more than any other relationship that we work on. But thank you for listening. Thank you for the comments I get. From responses to my emails, and if you wanna. Do sign up for my emails, just go to www.BonnieLyman.com. And there's a couple ways offered to you to do that. But thank you, thank you. Thank you for your kindness and your kind thoughts and for sharing my email. My emails, yes, and my podcasts with others. So today I originally was going to name this Freedom to Be Free, but I changed the name at the last moment 'cause I thought it covered the topic a little better. Named it better to call it emotional Self-Care. And so we talk about self-care a lot. In just in improving our lives. We talk about even improving our emotional health by eating right and getting exercise. But I'm going to focus today more on the. Thinking side thoughts to have that I'm gonna give you permission to have so that hopefully you will feel better about yourself and your emotional. Self-care will improve. I, I feel like our physical health and our mental health are intertwined. And if there's something lacking in one, there's going to also be lack in the other. Sometimes when I ask my client how they want to feel about a unfavorable circumstance in their life, something their kids are doing, that they have told me that they, they don't like that they're doing it, or most of the time it comes down to whatever they did, it hurt them. They sometimes can't answer the question of even how they wanna feel. They know what they don't wanna feel, but they can't really identify what they wanna feel. And if our thoughts cause our feelings, it is gonna be pretty hard to feel that new feeling unless we know what feeling that is so that we can have thoughts that create that feeling. But it's okay and it's natural that we can't identify this feeling. Because we didn't know we had a choice that we could feel any way we wanted about any circumstance in our lives. Much less have control over being able to choose our thoughts, thus choosing our feelings. Sometimes they'll reply, well, I wanna feel happy. And I go, yes, we all wanna feel happy, but we don't wanna feel happy about the behavior that our children are doing or the way they're treating us that we don't like. We don't wanna be happy about that. But when all the mess of life that goes on, how do we wanna feel? And number three, which makes it difficult, it's not easy to do, to feel differently. Than what we're feeling when we feel hurt, when something outside of us has happened because we have been raised to believe that we don't have any power over how we feel, because we have just assumed that what's happening in our lives is the cause of our suffering. But that is not the case. As I talk about on just about every podcast I've recorded, it's the thoughts a what's happening in our life. It's about what we're making. Those happenings mean. Our life and it's when we put meaning to those situations that's making us feel something we don't want to feel, then we feel the suffering and bottom line. All of us. All we really, really, really want. We just wanna feel good. You can call it contentment, you can call it peaceful, maybe even to go as far as neutral. Or impartial. That may be in a case of, oh, well, as my husband says, many times when I tell him about something that somebody else did or one of our kids did that. It wasn't necessarily the best choice. And when he says, oh, well, it doesn't mean he doesn't care. It just means he understands that he doesn't have control over it. And deep down what it means is it's not going to affect his love for them. So I think to have this default of being able to understand that circumstances are neutral and that we have a choice to change our thoughts, I think we can. Put deposits into our emotional health that will cause us to not take things so personally when these unfavorable circumstances come before us, of the happenings in our lives of things, our children. Have said to us or how they act toward us, and I've used this example before, but I had a situation for a number of years where my son ignored me all the time. He would still come to family gatherings, but there, there wasn't any. Any exchange of even eye contact unless it was completely unavoidable and my thought was I repulse him. And so I never go to thoughts like that anymore. Do I still get angry? Yes. But when it comes to my children, I. I am, I'm pretty consistent in being able to choose love because I have worked hard at it. I have worked hard to have this bank of empowering thoughts of to have a a, a desire. To understand why they are doing something and to have compassion and love rather than judgment and resentment, but it's taken practice. But here are some of the things I wanna share with you that you can put into your emotional. Bank that will help you to get stronger at dealing. With the negative things in your life, and also to keep from taking things so personally, especially from your adult children when something is said or done. Or something that's been neglected that you feel is the cause of your hurt and pain. So the first one is stop resisting the negative. We know that there's opposition in all things and people are going to say things. Especially when they're not their best selves that are going to hurt us. They, they are, are going to say things maybe intentionally. To hurt us in that moment, but usually there is something behind their intent to be unkind. There's something else that is bothering them, but anytime we resist something, it just intensifies. So if we resist. That the idea that negative things are going to happen in our lives, then the negative is going to be more intense, and your emotional health is not going to be as strong as it could be. Another one is like I described with my husband, and I won't say a whole lot more on that, but we need to learn to just let things go. I believe that because what somebody says or does, I believe tells more about how they feel about themselves than how they feel about us. So whatever was done or said that caused us to feel hurt if we just let it go. Yes, you're going to feel the prick. I call it the sting. The pain of hearing those words thrown at you, but you just feel it for a little bit and then you let it go. Another one is be willing to be wrong. Maybe it was very therapeutic. For somebody to blurt out something to you, it was therapeutic for them to get that out. Yes. You could have everybody agree that it was not said in the most appropriate way or in the most we call adult way. But at that moment, be willing to be wrong, that your way was the right way. And this comes down to judging people. Let's just say how they should act when they come to a family gathering. And if, if they're not helping clean up, if they're not offering to help, if they're on their phone the whole whole time, whatever may seem to you to be inappropriate, be willing to be wrong about that. Be willing to have the thought. That there's something going on in the way they're acting is fulfilling a need that they have. And so we're a little more accepting people. We want people just to be themselves, not who we think they should be. Another idea is plan ahead. How you're going to feel in a difficult situation. So say you have this daughter-in-law, that is always. Difficult when she comes to these family gatherings. Decide ahead of time how you want to feel about her, and that's pretty much all you have to do, and your brain will help you find reason to feel that way about her. Another good emotional self-care tip is give yourself permission to do something that's semi-irresponsible. Give your permission yourself permission. To skip your exercise routine, give yourself permission to eat a dessert when you're trying to lose weight. Give yourself permission not to read your scriptures today. Give yourself permission not to change the sheets. This week or next, or how often you change them, give yourself permission to serve cereal for breakfast because none of those things matter. It's how we treat others. And treat ourself that is important. And by giving yourself permission to do something a little bit bad, and that is in the words of Jodie Moore, my daughter, but it gives you permission. To not seek perfection. It gives you permission to accept yourself that you are a human. And if we're not hurting somebody else intentionally, it's okay to do, but that will just lighten you up and that will free you up from having a check-off sheet of all the things you should be doing to be a good person. Okay, this next one is one of the hardest things for my clients, and that is to stop thinking, you know what someone else is thinking. We don't know what someone else is thinking. And when we go down that rabbit hole. They did this because they were thinking I didn't like them, so they keep deciding to decline my dinner invitations. I'm thinking of an adult child or better yet. It's the daughter-in-law's fault. She thinks we don't like her or she's keeping my son from coming to family dinners. And that would be assuming you knew what your son was thinking. We have no idea people's motives and their thoughts that make up their decisions. Let's just accept them for who they are and choose love over judgment or how about curiosity? I wonder. Why they didn't come. I wonder why they said that. This next one, somebody told me a long time ago, and it has served me very well, assume everyone is doing the best they can. Now, I'd changed that statement because my husband said nobody ever does the best they can. So I'm going to say assume everybody is doing the best they can in that moment. We just don't know what battles people are fighting. We don't know what's troubling them, even if it's something that never troubles us. And the same happening comes up. We all process and think differently, and that's what makes us so amazing and makes our communities and world so amazing is that we all have this individuality. Another one is your past does not define you. There is nothing so bad in your past that you can't be forgiven for four and usually. The forgiveness takes place by everybody but yourself. Your past is your past. Go back to the second idea I gave you of Let it Go. There's no going back and redoing it. Just be better than you were. If you didn't like the way your past was. Learn from your. Mistakes or learn from your situations. I can't remember if I mentioned this in my last podcast, but I had a fairly unhappy child-rearing experience, and I can see now that my parents were doing the best they can. But what I learned was how not to be a parent. Now, my kids will tell you I've made mistakes, and I know I have, but I know they weren't some of the faults that I experienced as a child. So I wonder about. Those kids that were raised in idealistic situations have how hard it must be when they go to compare. This is not what was happening in the family. I was raised in. So your past is your past and we need to move on, and we can still live a very satisfying life. The next emotional thought for your emotional self-care is the part people don't like about you. But you like means something about them, not about you. And I've talked about it before. Not everybody is gonna like peaches, and you could be the juiciest peach on the tree, but if there's a part of you that you don't like. Then yes, certainly work on that. To change that. If after examining it, it's something that needs to be changed, or is it something you just need to let go? Empowering yourself. Is how we gain emotional good health. And we do that by the things I mentioned and also taking back the power to the person you want to be. You decide who you want to be, don't let others tell you. I think there's more gaslighting going on between people, not just adult children to their parents, but probably some parents to their adult children, and probably a lot going on between spouses, but gas gaslighting is. Is making people believe that they, that the person is doing something that they're not doing. But you have the power to decide what kind of person you want to be. And be that person. You have the capacity to not let happenings in your life take the power from you to feel the way you want to feel when you are experiencing emotional good health. When you are practicing emotional self-care, you will become more and more free from needing approval of others and even from yourself, just as. I talked about give yourself permission to do some irresponsible things. This is talking about being a good person without somebody, or even yourself recognizing that patting yourself on the back. That's a way to get there to recognize when we do something right. And I like to tell myself good job, but I don't need that all the time. And having emotional good health frees you. From being a victim to your circumstance, because when you're a victim, you need a villain, and usually you will pick somebody to hurt That doesn't make you feel good, so I hope that you'll maybe listen to this podcast again. And jot down some of those things that you wanna work on because I think we all deserve to have emotional good health. Now there are hormones and anomalies and things that come into play that cause depression and. Anxiety and ADHD and whatever, bipolar, you know, all those things that we've heard about that yes, they, those need some attention and probably some medication from a professional doctor, but these other little things. That when we're highly functioning humans, that if we practice doing these things, practice emotional, self-care, we're going to live a much happier life. I would love to help you with this. I would love for you to create a life you would like to create, and I believe that we all have the capacity to do that. I hope you have a great week, and I look forward to talking to you next week. If you like this, be this episode and you felt it was of benefit to you, I ask you to share it with somebody that perhaps it could also benefit. But if you're still feeling kind of stuck in that you don't know how to apply what was talked about or. Where to start on, on changing your thoughts, on changing your perspective, on bettering your relationship. Get on a call with me and we can have a discussion and I can tell you how to apply it and where we start. And then you get to decide what you want to do about this relationship that maybe you're struggling with with your adult children. There's no reason to go on the rest of our lives struggling with our relationships with our adult children. Let's assume the best. Let's assume that we all love each other. And we're just trying to figure out how to maintain our own boundaries and respect another ones, but I can help you with everything. So just go to BonnieLyman.com and book a call. I can't wait to hear from you. .