Coaching with LDS values

Episode 105:  How Cleaning Out Your Mind Can Improve Your Relationship With an Adult Child Hey there, this is Bonnie Lyman, and you're listening to the podcast Loving On Purpose Episode 105, How Cleaning Out Your Mind Can Improve Your Relationship With Your Adult Child. 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. Hello, my friends. Welcome back and welcome to anyone that's listening for the first time. Thank you for feedback I've gotten from some of you of how these podcasts have helped you and if there's ever anything that you would like me to address any particular topic I'd be glad. To do that, this is a time of year where we're decluttering our house by taking down Christmas and often just kind of going through closets in whatever and getting rid of stuff that we, we haven't worn in a while. We, one of our goals may be to simplify, and I would sure like to do that in my life. I leave my tree up with all the lights on, no ornaments, for quite a while, probably through February, because there, it's just so cheery, and it's, I call it my mental health tree. So, I leave it up, all the lights. Lift my spirits on some pretty doomy foggy days we can have here in the Northwest. So I want to talk to you today about cleaning out your mind and how important that is and how the clutter in your mind. Those unnecessary thoughts that don't serve you, that don't help you be more loving, but keep you in judgment toward your adult children that maybe aren't doing things the way you would like them to be doing, or they aren't treating you the way you would like to be treated. And so cleaning out our minds. And getting rid of these thoughts that don't give us the feelings we want to feel. We first have to remember though, we have a false tendency to want to be happy all the time. We Brooke Castile refers to it as we want everything to be sunshine and daisies. And it It just doesn't happen that way. Life is 50 50, meaning 50 percent of the time it's good, 50 percent of the time, I'm not even going to say it's bad, but challenging. This doesn't mean 50% of the time we're euphoric, and 50 percent of the time we're miserable. It just means we're going to have some good times in our lives, and hopefully some really good times in our lives. And other times we're going to have some hard times. Maybe some really hard times. Things that we wouldn't wish on anybody. But I I feel that by taking time to clean out our minds, we the hard times or the miserable times or the times of disappointment times of disappointment The times that we're disappointed in how our children, are treating us and because it comes from our thoughts, it comes from our minds. We can kind of clean these thoughts up, these thoughts that don't service. And so I refer to cleaning out your mind. It is. What I call a thought download when you have five minutes or more where you are undistracted, I suggest you get a pencil and paper, not your computer, but a pencil and paper and write down everything that's on your mind at that particular time. Don't, don't try to edit anything, the spelling, the words, the thoughts that maybe don't even pertain to the topic that you were first thinking about. And at first, within the first minute or so, it may take you a bit of time to get the hang of not editing and just being, able to let everything just spill out on that paper and it will come and And all these thoughts that you're having will come quite quickly because you'll just be focused on the thoughts that are going on in your mind and not whether you're doing the assignment right. And pretty soon your pencil won't be able to keep up with your floodgate of thoughts. So write down everything that comes into your mind, even the irrelevant thoughts or the ones, as I said before, that have nothing to do with the relevant topic. You may have a thought of, oh, I think we'll have for dinner tonight, spaghetti. So just write it down. Just dump it out. We want it as unedited as possible. Possible. Then when you have done that, go back and underline all the thoughts that are negative. Remember, there's no bad thoughts, but there are negative thoughts and there are thoughts that don't serve you. Next to each thought, write down the negative emotion that that thought causes. And then you, you need to decide. Whether you want to get rid of that emotion or not. And I'm thinking most of the time our negative emotions we want to get rid of because we humans don't like feeling negative emotion. But we got to feel the negative emotion because that's part of enjoying the whole human experience. So you read that negative thought and you've identified the negative feeling. And so just be willing to feel that negative feeling for a couple of minutes. And the right way to do this is by describing where it is inside your body. And what it looks like, what is its shape, does it have a color, how big or small is it, is it hot or cold, is it moving, is it jiggling, is it vibrating, just describe that feeling of what it looks like, what it's doing inside your body, and then we just share it. Be with that feeling. We just sit with it until we feel it starting to fade. What we usually do when we have a negative feeling that we don't like, is to buffer it with something else. Like alcohol, or drugs, or pornography, or in my case, I want something sweet. Boy, if I'm in the store, I want a donut. But we could even buffer it with something healthy. Like taking a walk or a run, calling a friend. Reading our scriptures and all of those buffers give us a dopamine hit for a very short period of time, but what they do when we buffer, it just causes us to resist the negative emotion. We resist recognizing it and feeling it. That negative feeling just wants some attention, just like a toddler that is crying because it needs a diaper change. Their crying intensifies until you give that child some attention and help. Perhaps remedy the problem now, in our case, this child is not having thoughts and we know, I mean, if we can, like in this case, change the circumstance, that's putting a clean diaper on them or like If we're cold, we go get a coat, but a toddler doesn't have the capacity to understand that it's their thoughts that are causing their discomfort. In this case, it's a sensation like lack of sleep or hunger, or in this case, an irritated little bum. But most of our feelings come from. our negative thoughts that we're having, and if they're ignored, they will only intensify when you give it proper attention. it will start to fade. Next, you want to go back and take that negative thought and ask yourself, is that thought true? Is it absolutely true? Then ask yourself, what is another perspective I could have on this particular situation or circumstance? I could have thought, my child never tells me. when their child's soccer game is. I must annoy them when I'm around them in public. Then you would ask yourself, is that thought true? Do I really annoy them when I'm in public? Do I know that's absolutely true? Does that cause me to love my child more? Or does it cause me To judge the hymn. A new perspective could be I wonder if my grandchild gets nervous to have his grandparents watching him play soccer. That thought could be untrue also, but it causes me not to feel unwanted feelings and it causes me not to judge my adult child. I feel empathy, understanding, and love. which is much better than taking it personally. The positive thoughts, and we can't prove their truthfulness either, but it doesn't matter because they make us feel good. So we just keep on thinking them. We can leave them in our brains. The ones that don't make us feel good, we need to first be willing to feel the negative emotion for a bit that came from the negative thought. And oftentimes, then, when you feel the feeling fade, you'll come up with a new thought that is more positive, or you can choose a thought to change that makes you feel good. It's just like cleaning out a closet. We take everything out, and we only put back the things The more we can practice this, the shorter the time the negative feeling stays with us. I don't mean the more you can practice cleaning out your closet, but the more you can practice cleaning out those thoughts in your brain that don't serve you. Cleaning out our brains on a daily basis is one of the most beneficial things you can do to have good mental health. When I have an adult child criticize me, it always hurts. I feel the hurt caused by the thought, you shouldn't be talking to me that way. But then, after I feel the pain, for just a moment now, for a couple minutes, then I go to my bank of new thoughts. And they may be something like, I wonder if they had a bad night's sleep. I wonder if they are stressed about their job. I wonder if they just had a fight with their spouse. In any case, a new thought, and if you can even go to curiosity. Like I did in both examples, you are going to feel better. So cleaning out our brains. is getting rid of the thoughts that don't service. There are no bad thoughts, but there are thoughts that make us feel good, and there are thoughts that don't make us feel good. And sometimes it's necessary to feel those negative thoughts as when we're grieving, but we don't want To continue the rest of our life, that it changes our life, that we can't live the life we want to live. I hope you'll take away from this episode four things, and maybe there's some other things you took away from it. Also, 50% of our feelings are going to be NA negative, which enables us to experience the whole human experience. Negative feelings are meant to be felt. not ignored. Number three, resisting feeling negative emotions only intensifies them. And number four, we have the power to choose any new thought about the given. circumstance that will cause us to feel a positive feeling even if we don't know that thought is true or not. We can create a life that we want to live if we're willing to take the effort to understand how our mind works. I truly believe that love always wins and the closer we can get to knowing. And practicing what love would do gets us closer to having that life. If you like this, this episode, and you felt it was of benefit to you, I ask you to share it with somebody. 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. 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 is 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 one's. 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. .