Episode 18 – Mindful Monday: All Relationships Can Heal
All Relationships Can Heal.
That’s right.
It’s a profound statement to make and yet it is important for you to hear.
If you have a relationship that doesn’t feel good, that causes you distress, that wakes you up at night, please know that healing is waiting to happen.
Sometimes what you’re experiencing is transgenerational. Patterns are passed from one generation to the next and you’re trying to do something different, something that is emotionally healthier than what those who came before you knew how to bring into being. Changing generational patterns requires us to see them and to have enough support to choose a different path. When we make these changes, we’re changing the course of life for ourselves and our children.
This is healing.
Sometimes what you’re experiencing is a difficulty from something that happened in your lifetime or your child’s lifetime. It could be a traumatic event, abuse, separation, divorce, a loss, a death. Maybe you’re looking to support your own healing after something happened to you. Maybe you’re looking to support your child’s healing. Perhaps you’re trying to heal the relationship with someone with whom you had or have a difficult relationship, whether the person is living or not. When we acknowledge these relationships that aren’t working, we begin to change things within and then outside of us.
This is healing.
Sometimes the relationship just doesn’t feel good and something needs to change. But what you’re doing isn’t working and you’re not sure what else to do. Find a way to move forward through the pain, to reconnect with yourself and your own knowing, to resource yourself, so healing can begin…
This is healing.
The beautiful thing is that we’re going to be exploring what healing looks like in your life- together. The old story most of us have been living is that we have to keep it to ourselves or we need to figure it out on our own. Or we need to just “move on” and pretend it didn’t happen. But that’s a recipe for dis-ease and passing unhealthy patterns on to the next generation. The new story is that we need each other. We can support one another as we find our way. And through this podcast, you’ll about listening, how to offer real support, and how to receive it.
If you’re expecting someone else to tell you what to do, this may not be for you. But if you want to feel truly empowered to make a difference in your own life, to utilize tools that will support you to make the changes you need to make for yourself and your family to heal your relationships, then this podcast is for you.
Healing looks different for all people and all families. We’re going to be exploring what that can look like through real stories from real families who have healed, families who are no longer dragging around the pain of the past and have truly forgiven those who need to be forgiven. Sometimes healing looks like a reunion and deep healing happens in the relationship. You’ll hear lots of stories where that’s what has happened. And you’ll hear stories where the healing looks totally different and the healing that happens is within. There is no right or wrong way to heal.
Thank you for joining us. It’s going to be an important journey for you and your family. And we’re going to do it together.
Mindful Monday is about being aware of our relationships and honestly assessing what is working and what’s not.
I’d like to share my first guiding principle for the All Relationships Can Heal podcast and book, All Behavior is a Communication. We’ll be learning more about the guiding principles and how they can help us all to heal over the coming weeks and beyond. We need to shift the way we’re looking at relationships and the relationships can begin to change. Spend some time with this idea over the next week and see what you observe about yourself and your loved ones, whether it’s a relationship you need to heal or not. We need to first really understand whether behaviors are really communicating the disconnection before they can start to change.
Principle #1- All behavior is a communication. Behavior is about how you’re feeling about yourself, what’s happening with your body, brain, and nervous system, and you’re going to act out of the place. It may or may not be conscious. It may or may not have anything to do with anyone else. It’s what belongs to you and you are communicating sometimes without saying a word, through body language, facial expressions, sounds made.
At the same time, behavior can be a communication about the state of the relationship. If there is a connection in a relationship, you’ll see behaviors of connection- eye contact, touch, tone of voice that is friendly. This is communication that your relationship is in a connected place. If there is a disconnection, you’ll see behaviors showing that- lack of eye contact, avoidance, not talking, harsher tone of voice and volume. Our relationships live in the space between us. How does it feel when you think about the space between you and another person?
This is true regardless of age. A parent and baby can be connected or disconnected. A couple can be connected or disconnected. A parent and older child can be connected or disconnected. It will look different in each situation, but if you’re paying attention, you can begin to see the communication of the behavior.
We tend to judge behaviors as right or wrong. What happens when we begin to shift to recognizing the communication of the behaviors and ask, “Is this a behavior from someone who is connected or disconnected from our relationship? Is this behavior about me or about what’s going on for them? What does it bring up for me? What’s the story I’m telling about this behavior?”
We’ll be back tomorrow with more another important way to look at our relationships that can help us begin to heal. I’m Rebecca Thompson Hitt and this is the All Relationships Can Heal Podcast.
