 Dealing with family members on Thanksgiving can be super super hard But in this video, I'm gonna help give you some clarity as to why these situations are so tough and what you can do about it To maintain your mental health through Thanksgiving. So stay tuned. What's up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution Thanksgiving's coming up and I've had a lot of requests to talk about How you deal with difficult family members There's a lot of arguments or sometimes there's not even an argument, but it's that tension in the room Maybe it's just someone in your family who really kind of irks you in the wrong way a lot of times We're dealing with anger or disappointment or just different types of emotions and yeah in this video We're not even necessarily talking about distant family members We're not talking about your aunt or uncle or cousin or grandma or whoever it is Sometimes it's your mom or dad or brother or sister. Sometimes it's these people in your life and there's one reason For this there's one reason why you get really upset But it lies under the surface and a lot of people don't realize it Personally, I've been through this. My family is out of their minds, but I love them dearly I was always told when I started working on my mental health when I was working with my mentor He was always telling me Chris It's a lot easier for you to fix you than it is to fix the rest of the world and it didn't make sense to me I'm like, what do you mean? It's a lot easier for me to fix the fix the rest of the world But it started to make sense because what I realized is all of these issues were coming from within me Me I can work on I cannot fix them. I cannot change them That is kind of the first tip. I'm going to give you it's just this acceptance that you are not going to be able to Change anybody. This is going to be an ongoing going fame on the rewired soul. So I hope it really sinks in I hope that you can realize that trying to change somebody or just going against the current Hoping that they will change it's going to lead up to a lot of very miserable and depressing Anxious and angry times so we need to start accepting the fact that we are not changing people But that's not the solution. The solution is to figure out why Why does this affect me the way it does and it can all be boiled down to one word and one word alone that word is Expectations now one of the reasons why I'm always trying to pound meditation and mindfulness into your head is because there's so many things Happening on the subconscious level that we never ever address Meditation and mindfulness help give us some clarity, but I'm going to teach you how to be more mindful even if you're not Meditating so let's talk about these expectations and how they relate to you every single one of us every person on earth We have expectations of different relationships, and here's what I mean by that. I Expect my mom to be a certain way. I expect my dad to be a certain way I expect my brother my sister you can even start talking about how you expect a Partner a boyfriend a girlfriend a husband or wife how they should be these are expectations that we don't know that we're Projecting on the people because it's happening Constantly right underneath the surface. This is the solution. I'm gonna give to you. It's gonna give you so much clarity I cannot even explain Okay, so what you're going to do you can take a notebook if you watch my other video about the three steps to Maintaining your emotional health on Thanksgiving. You should already have a notebook But either way you can do this on your computer or anywhere Just the act of writing this out is going to give you so much clarity on this situation So I will show you an example right now now my mom I'm going to go visitor over Thanksgiving with my son my mom and I we have a great relationship We're like best friends But I'm going to do this exercise with you to kind of let you know where I was at when I started working on these Things about my expectations. So what you're going to do is you're going to write down the person, okay? Mom dad cousin brother, whoever it is write down the person and Below that I want you to start every single sentence with what I have right here, which is a good blank should be Okay, right there now blank fill that in with mom dad sister brother cousin whoever it is Okay, a good blank should be and write this down write down a list write down these expectations This is going to give you a lot of clarity. So for example, what you're seeing here a good mom should Accept me exactly the way I am a good mom Should respect the choices. I've made in my life a good mom should Support me rather than put me down Let's use another example politics is something that's come up a lot lately people are worried about going into Thanksgiving with differing politics. So let's talk about this real quick. All right, so a good uncle should Be more liberal or conservative whatever your political affiliation is right a good uncle should agree with my opinion a good uncle should Understand my point of view a good uncle should Not argue with me over something that I know is right This is what I want you to do with anybody in your family who are your you are worried about dealing with Make this list. Okay, the word I want to stick out to you is the word should should Implies an expectation of what a person should be now when I personally did this exercise and I had a list of 133 people I wasn't just doing it for the holidays I was doing it for my entire life and I started realizing that I put a lot of Expectations on a lot of other people. I put a lot of expectations that I can't even live up to and that's We're really open my mind as I started doing this list I was like, holy crap My brain is telling me that people should be more accepting of my decisions and they shouldn't judge me But this entire time I've been judging them and I start to get this clarity of what these expectations are and then I start realizing that I have These are realistic expectations Why are they unrealistic because I can't expect every person on planet earth to be who I think they should be now Here comes the tricky part is When you start justifying your expectations All right, some of you are watching this right now and you're like but Chris a good mom should be this a good mom Should be that a good father a good brother a good sister. They should be these things and there is the should again Here's where mindfulness and meditation helps you it starts Making you ask the questions why or where where did this idea come from? Where did this idea that a good mom should be this way where this idea come from that a good father or brother or sister Should be this way. Where did that core belief come from? Once we start diving in a little bit deeper and asking ourselves that question We're starting to get down to the root of the problem We start finding that maybe we have fixed ideas based on something I'll be completely honest with everybody watching this right now When I started checking in with myself and saying where do these expectations come from they came from being raised by a television I was watching Shows like step-by-step family matters full house all these different things of these perfect perfect families And that's what trained my brain to expect all families to be like this So once I get down there I can start to remove the fog from these lenses that I've had and I can start accepting people exactly the way they are and That is how you're gonna start learning how to interact with your family in a new way because you start to realize the Expectations that you're constantly putting on other people and what we realize is that we don't want people expecting too much from us So why are we expecting all this from them? So here is the question of the day folks This is a question of the day that I want you to come back to this video and reply to What did you find out? What clarity did you get from writing down this list of the expectations? You have of friends or family members who are going to be there at Thanksgiving I can't wait to see what you guys find out about yourselves Thank you so much for watching and if you liked this video Please give it a thumbs up and if you haven't yet hit the little round subscribe button right there I'm always making videos to help you out with your mental and emotional health also to the left of me click or tap on one Of those videos. I have all sorts of good stuff on this channel. Alright, so thanks again, and I'll see you next time