This past week has been a fascinating week in my coaching practice and in my personal life. A lot going on with the holidays, and the things people believe about the holidays, which causes them pain, drama, and uncertainty.
This week the holidays in my coaching practice has come up quite a bit and then of course, like many things they have shown up in my personal life. A lot of my clients this week have been worried about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. A lot of my clients do not have their children this year for the very first time on Thanksgiving. And some of my clients are experiencing the holidays with their children without their spouse or significant other for the first time. People are worried about spending the holidays alone, and people are worried about changing the way the holiday will be they are experiencing lots of anxiety and stress about having a different experience for Thanksgiving.
All stress, which is a secondary emotion of fear, comes from a decision forming incident in our past that has created our limiting belief systems. For example Thanksgiving holiday in your family could mean the entire family gets together parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc to share a day and a meal. For some people this is a joyous occasion and for others not so much but because it’s the way that they’ve done it their entire lives they feel this is the way it should be, and when we live in the shoulds, we live our lives in limiting belief system.
It’s important to remember that we have a choice on how we live our lives and how we process the information from our past and how we allow it to impact our present. An examples with regard to the holidays, I am a client who is spending her first Thanksgiving alone with her children, her extended family is dysfunctional wrought with alcoholism abuse and neglect she’s made the decision for her family but spending the holidays with them is too painful for her. She is now processing to her lower self of guilt because she has two children who love to spend the holidays with their cousins and to see their grandparents. She is feeling alone and guilty, and like she is a bad mother. I’m sure many of you can relate to this and maybe not the exact situation but a situation very similar and are not sure how to process through it.
One of the most important things to remember in a situation like this is that you are processing through a button or what I like to call a decision forming incident from your past which is controlling your thoughts and emotions and behavior in your present. Because this particular woman had experienced Thanksgiving with her entire family her entire life and has made a decision that it’s just not what she wants to do any longer she’s feeling horrible about it she’s processing through her lower self and then she starts to think about it which is her middle self trying to rationalize her decision and yet because she hasn’t learned the skills on how to recognize where all this pain and stress and drama are really coming from she continues to slip back into her lower self thinking and get stuck.
With this particular client and with many others we worked on recognizing the decision forming incident from her childhood that is causing her all of her pain in her present. We worked on creating new traditions and positive belief systems from here and moving forward. This Thanksgiving my client is taking her children to Disneyland for Thanksgiving. They’re having dinner with the princesses, she does not have to cook, which of course means she does not have to clean up afterwards, and she does not have to deal with any of the abuse that’s constantly thrown at her from her family. She’s consciously made a choice to do something different and create fun lasting memory in her life and the lives of her children. This decision forming incident was from her old mindset that Thanksgiving is a time for family to get together and then treat each other horribly. She had accepted this as reality for her entire life until this year. Making the decision to process through your higher self is a choice. Making the decision to do something different and create new memories in your life is a choice. Making these choices is not always easy, but more often than not one of the most rewarding things you can do for yourself and for your family.
This Thanksgiving I am alone. My children will be with their father and I found out last night that the man I’m dating and his two children won’t be here until seven o’clock Thanksgiving night. I felt all of my own fear well up inside of me, stress, sadness, and my greatest fear of being alone was engulfing me at the moment I found out. I was completely processing through my lower self and wanted to project that out onto him as he was doing something to me when in reality I was really just processing from my limiting belief system. I have re-created the Thanksgiving holiday for myself, my kids are with their dad I would travel and when they were with me I would have family and friends over to the house and we’d make a big dinner to pull out my tree to decorate it. This year I was again going to do something different and when I found out that I was truly going to be alone for the majority of the day I really started to panic. My mind was racing all the way back to my original decision forming incident my original limited belief which was that I had to be surrounded by people on Thanksgiving because that’s the way I was raised I started down that road of feeling bad for myself and being upset with the man that I love. But now that I stepped back and realized that I was processing through a button I almost chuckle to myself in realizing that we are all a work in progress. We all processed through our lower, middle, and higher selves all the time. I want a button is pushed we easily slid back in to our fear-based lower self thinking.
When I realized where I was at and from where I was processing I just as quickly and easily made the decision that this is not where I wanted to operate. So I shifted from feeling sorry for myself and being alone to doing something I have always wanted to do for Thanksgiving which is head down to the homeless shelter and feed the homeless a warm holiday meal. This certainly puts it all into perspective for me. I am also making a plan to accept the invitation from my ex and head over to his house for a few hours to spend time with my girls. I will make my Thanksgiving dinner, however I will change the tradition from watching football and eating a turkey dinner at around one o’clock to eating that lovely meal with the wonderful man in my life and his children in the evening.
Sometimes things don’t always work out the way that we planned, sometimes things don’t stay the same, sometimes we are alone during the holidays, and sometimes were surrounded by people we love. What’s important to remember is that Thanksgiving, Christmas, really any holiday is just another day. You can create new traditions new ways of spending your holidays and new ways of spending your days in general by changing the way you think about them and truly by making a choice to do something different.
I am grateful this Thanksgiving season for the abundance of joy, peace and happiness I achieve on a regular basis. I’m grateful for all the wonderful people who impact my life every day. I’m grateful for the negative situations in my life for they afford me the opportunity to react or not react, they afford me the opportunity to learn expand and grow. I’m grateful this Thanksgiving holiday for my parents, neither of which I have a tremendously fantastic relationship with, however both have brought difficulties and challenges and love into my life in ways that have allowed me to have tremendous purpose in this lifetime and to be the voice and force of change for so many families globally. I am grateful to have a wonderful loving partner in my life who loves me for me and puts up with my workaholic behavior and all of the quirks that make me who I am. I am grateful for my ex who has let go of some of his anxiety and anger and has invited both me, and my beloved to his house for Thanksgiving. I am the most grateful for my children, they are my inspiration, they are a beautiful example of love and light in my life everyday. They keep me humbled, real and always striving to be a better person and example in the world.
Thank you for reading if you have created new traditions in your family for the holidays I would love to hear how you have moved from being in the negative mindset to creating some new and positive memories.
With a grateful and loving heart,
Happy Thanksgiving…
Dorcy Russell
http://www.ConsciousCoParentingInstitute.com