78. That family-political drama

"Breathing in I calm my body and mind. Breathing out I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment." This quote from Thich Nhat Hanh starts us off today as we talk about cultivating ease and how to navigate holiday time with family, where you might be struggling to have an aligned vision. 

I answer a listener question about choosing to spend time with family. You always have options! You don't have to see family! If you decide to go, I have some idea for navigating conversaitons.

And we take a deep dive into how we can remove a layer of struggle by letting go of certain thoughts.

Transcript

 Breathing in I calm my body and mind. Breathing out I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment. This quote from Thich Nhat Hanh starts us off today as we talk about cultivating ease and how to navigate some future holiday time with family, where you might be struggling to have an aligned vision. 

Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast. This is for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. Through our conversations and creative insights, I'll give you the art and the science, plus simple tricks and practices that will help you take the mystery out of the creative process. I want you to start each day feeling empowered and creative and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started. I got a great question from a modern creative woman in my DMs this week, and I wanted to share with you the question from J. And my answer, and I would love to hear from you about other ways that you could answer this question. Her question is any tips on dealing with family members with opposing views politically, with the holidays coming up? I feel like it sits differently. Such an important question. So I want to first of all give anyone permission that needs to not be with family this year. If there are people who are invalidating your existence and your presence, it may be just safer, more comfortable and wiser for keeping your mind at ease to do something different. You are not obligated to go to a holiday with the same people every year. So I just want to remind you, you don't have to force yourself. If you do decide that there are people you want to spend time with who have opposing political views from you, and it's worth your while to go spend time with them, then I have some answers. I'm coming from a position. I grew up in, a family where everyone had different political beliefs. Four different political beliefs in four different people, and that gave me a lot of perspective on what what I could talk about, what I didn't want to talk about. And I also can fall back on this funny phrase that I picked up somewhere along the lines, probably from my grandmother, who said it might be rude to talk about politics and religion, and I can always fall back on that, that it might be rude for me to bring things up if I'm going to be with family, and I want to talk about things that we can all agree on, then I don't want to bring it up. So if you decide it's worth it to go be with family and you want to be able to engage, I have some tips that are more about just sort of being graceful and bobbing and weaving rather than, um, how to have a conversation. I think that's extremely personal to who you are and who you're talking to. But I started thinking about the idea of showing up prepared with things to talk about so I could say something like, well, let's talk about this. And if you have some pre-planned topics that might really help you feel comfortable if you decide to go. And so that could be some fun, happy memories. It might be that you bring a game like a board game that people like or when they've never heard of. I've had some really fun times where I just went to target and picked up a like, maybe not that interesting of a game, and it turned out to be really fun to just because we were all engaged. I find if you talk about family members like kids, either yours or someone else's, and just saying really great things and how proud you are of them, everybody can gather around that. And people do freely feel good about kind of the legacy of their family. And so if you can think about kids. If there's kids, they're really, like helping everybody focus on the pleasure of the kids. You might have maybe some, like neutral or boring stories planned as well. Like you can talk about the birds in your backyard if you wanted to, just things that are really neutral, or maybe just not even that interesting to some people, but that you could talk about, you can ask people about what happens in their yard. Do they watch the birds or the squirrels? Depends on where you live. You can. If you want to respond to someone's comment, you can say, I don't feel that way. You can excuse yourself. You don't have to participate in the conversation. You can say things like, I don't know about that or I don't care about that. To express that you're not interested in those conversations if you need to redirect. And all of that, again, depends on your feeling safe enough to say anything to be around people that have opposing views. I think another thing that you can do is set some personal limits. If you decide you want to go, you don't have to stay for the entire day. Or if dinner is over, you can have other plans. You can decide you're tired, you want to go back home or to your hotel. You can make plans with friends. You're not, like, stuck there. So just to recap, if it's not worth it to spend time with people that are going to make you stressed out, you have permission to give yourself other opportunities, other things to do. If it's, you know, kind of doing all this management in your, um, thinking process just to kind of cope with it, you have to decide if it's worth it. Once you decide if it's worth it, I think the some of these ideas could be really helpful so that you have other topics planned. You have other ways of leaving and setting boundaries around how much time you spend. I hope that's helpful. I'm just telling you my perspective on it. I'm a person who, like I said, I grew up in a house with many different opinions and viewpoints. I'm also here to understand people, and that's my job, my professional job. My role is to be around people. And maybe I can change an opinion. Maybe not. But I really do want to stay present, notice my own reactions, and feel okay about how I behave. That's my goal. I encourage you to get support. Have people you can call that you can maybe share check ins with. If you're going to a place that feels really uncomfortable, let me know what your ideas are. I would be more than happy to keep passing on ideas so you can direct message me in Instagram. That's the easiest way to find me and you can find that in the show notes. 

Now let's dive in to having a sense of ease, even when you are feeling emotionally triggered. So I'm going to talk a little bit about flight and fight and freeze and fun and all the ways that we respond to distress. And then I'll, I'll share some ways that you can navigate those biological responses. Living your purpose happens more naturally when we're you're able to make full contact with the present moment and really drop the struggle that's internal. There's enough struggle on the outside that we don't need to add to it with our thinking, and so we can choose thoughts that give us ease. But I want to talk about the the struggle. That seems automatic. We might travel down that path kind of habitually. And then I also want to talk about the biological struggle that can happen to us the fight, flight, freeze or fawn when we're faced with traumas. And if we've experienced those in the past, upsetting things in the present can have those reactions pop up again automatically. Those negative thoughts and emotions, traumatic memories or ongoing systematic discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, those kinds of experiences that are ongoing can bring up that struggle more immediately. So originally we thought of flight or fight, and that's what I learned about, you know, in biology class that it's a biological response to fearful situations. All animals have it. Then they started talking about freeze. Some animals will freeze. They'll hold still. It's generally whatever is most biologically adaptive. Can the animal run fast? Well, then they'll probably run. Can they fight? Well, they'll probably fight. If they could blend into their surroundings and be camouflage, then they'll probably freeze. It's really this universal response that mammals have a biological reaction to a physical threat. And as humans, we will fight, run away, will freeze, or will fawn. And I'll get to fawn in just a moment. We're biologically primed to try and get away from an unwanted experience or from a threat. It could also be a perceived threat later on. We can have that reaction because we're perceiving it in our mind because of memories. So the idea of fanning as biologically adaptive certainly fits for human beings. It fits particularly well for women to try and smooth over a situation, give, um, deference to someone to try and stay highly attuned to social cues in hopes that the stressful situation will pass, that there's some smoothing over or smoothing of feathers that we can do to stay safe. And so I'm not totally sure that it's a biological impulse as much as socially conditioned. We've learned over time as human beings to placate. However, upon reflection, considering what animals will do in terms of placating the alpha member in that moment. Um, a dog rolling over on its back. So there's these other biological ways that do exist that science is really cued into. What I'm talking about is an urge to smooth things over, make things okay in the room in that environment. And many people have learned to do this as a survival strategy. So there's nothing terribly wrong with it because it has allowed so many people to survive. The problem is, when we start applying our strategies all over the place, even when we are safe, we keep responding in habitual ways. In acceptance and commitment therapy, we talk about avoid control and escape, and those are the things that we do to get out of feeling uncomfortable when we've generated it in our mind, ourselves. We try and avoid uncomfortable feelings, we try and control them by getting rid of them, discharging them. 

We try to somehow escape them by checking out in some capacity. Now our brains want to avoid, control, or escape the feelings that are associated with a perhaps a past trauma. And then our thoughts become more and more focused around the trauma. And and things begin to revolve around trying to avoid feeling uncomfortable. And I think socially, I want to address some of the parts that are natural, normal, part of the human condition versus a trauma reaction. And it's kind of usual to think that it's something's bad or wrong when we feel sad, but that is part of the human condition. So that's not what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about traumas, we often think that there's something wrong with us when we have negative thoughts about ourselves. But again, that's part of the human condition. To often judge ourselves, we often avoid experiences that might make us look silly to other people or embarrass ourselves. We try and get rid of negative emotions as fast as we can, and all of that is part of the human condition. And there are parts of our brain that are just making this incredible effort to help us feel safe from threats. Or anything that they think might be a threat, and our brain might, um, go through a memory of something that was unsafe and perceive that as a threat. So that's more at the trauma end of things. Everyone engages in experiential avoidance. And that's what happens when we're trying to avoid, control, or escape our present experiences. And to be honest, none of us want to feel crummy. We want to feel good most of the time, but we have thoughts and feelings and memories which are a certain category of thought. And we have physical sensations that feel bad or uncomfortable, and we all use experiential avoidance to try and relieve this short term discomfort. But it doesn't work. We can't regulate our emotions. They're just allowed to be there. I think there's a significant cost to experiential avoidance, and in the psychological literature, it's associated with a whole range of psychological problems, including anxiety and fear. At an extreme end, it's an anxiety disorder or a post-traumatic stress disorder. But when we're avoiding feeling our feelings. We increase our fears. We become more worried about a negative evaluation. We have more symptoms that are somatic expressions of worry. We might become fearful of the significance or the meaning of our thoughts. Well, I keep thinking it. It must be true. It's not true. That's just another thought. We can have contextual stressors where the same thing stresses us out over and over again, and more feeling unable to do something different about it. And another price we pay for experiential avoidance is the sense of procrastination. And procrastination can be, of course, a symptom of depression. It can be a symptom of many things, but when we're avoiding our feelings, we'll start to procrastinate a difficult conversation or will procrastinate taking steps forward in our career. So there's a real cost to trying to get rid of uncomfortable feelings. Now, experiential avoidance can show up in a whole variety of ways. I gave you some examples, but let me give you. Kind of the significant payment that is required of us. It leads to misunderstanding and loneliness. Instead of connecting with people we love. When we avoid our feelings, push them down, avoid control, or escape them. Were we pushed down many, many feelings, not just the ones we don't want? And that leads to loneliness for sure. Pushing down feelings and avoiding also creates these internal barriers that somehow we just can't seem to break through is what it feels like. But it's an internal barrier. It's not safe to try that because you'll feel bad. It's not safe to take a risk because you'll feel bad. And we set these inner limitations that sometimes we're not even aware of. Experiential avoidance leads to increasing discomfort with the matter of feeling uncomfortable. It's normal to feel uncomfortable sometimes, and it's normal to have a full range of emotions. And the more we try and push away certain emotions, the less able we are to deal with them, and that can lead to an overuse of passive communication apathy. A why bother attitude can also lead to overusing aggressive behavior. Shutting down and avoiding our feelings can lead to inaction, as I mentioned, but it's also can lead to this overreliance on perfectionistic thinking. So what can we do differently to stop our human habit of experiential avoidance and step more fully into our lives? How do we drop the struggle? It's like we're in a tug of war with our uncomfortable emotions, and we're pulling back and forth and back and forth on this rope, and we think we're about to lose. And then we realize there's another way that we can drop the rope. We don't have to engage in this tug of war with our mind. Dropping the struggle is what you're doing right now. Listening to this podcast, you are doing your very best to make contact with the present moment. You're dealing with what is, and you're striving to deal with what is instead of what you think it should be. I would say half of my internal struggle. Is trying to deal with what I think should things should be, rather than things as they are. Another thing that we can do to drop that tug of war rope is observe our thoughts. You can do a five minute painting exercise with watercolor and just notice what thoughts come to mind. You can write down all your thoughts. You can talk all your thoughts out loud. It's finding some space for a little bit of quiet to do any of those ideas and just observe. Get in contact with the part of you that is observing. I've talked before about noticing yourself as the context of your life. You are the context for your life. Thoughts come and go. People come and go. Feelings come and go. You move around in the world, but you are the context that is experiencing all of these things. You are the unique person who is aware of feeling something. You're the unique person who is aware of whatever you're doing right now, sitting or walking or doing the dishes. You are the context. Everything else is what's happening on the outside. And another way to drop the struggle is to focus more and more on taking action. That's in alignment with what's important to you. It might be volunteering. It might be donating money. It might be talking with a friend, connecting with family, walking your dog, doing the things. Fully present. Focusing on that rather than taking your focus to what you're trying to get away from. Focus on what you're going towards. Bringing this back to the question we started with. How can you spend time with people who have strong opinions that go against your sense of social justice and fairness? If you've determined that your values include spending time with someone and that it feels important to you, then you can determine what actions what words you would feel most comfortable with for yourself in that time. If the value becomes feeling safe because it's an unsafe environment, then the actions become finding something else to do for the holidays. So if you're walking into a situation where conversations might be tense, you can recognize you've made that choice to do so. You always have options. You can always leave. You can always not go. But once you've made that decision, then you can start thinking about how you want to drop the struggle, to not brace yourself for the pain of it, but instead to not try and avoid, control or escape your feelings, but to plan to behave in ways that you feel good about and whatever way that is, to be with family in the way that you want to be with family. Please message me if you have other ideas, other ways of taking care of yourself in stressful family gatherings. And we'll talk more later in the year about how the holidays have often. Pulled us away from our values and how to bring your wishes for who you want to be with, as well as how you want to spend your time and your money. We'll talk more about that. I want to wish everyone safe and healthy and empowered conversations. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. 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