If you think you are enlightened, go home for the holidays. Well, at least that was the joke they told us in grad school. Family has a way of pushing our buttons even if you believe you are an ascended master.

After years and years of personal growth, I recently went home for the holidays and had a great time! Am I enlightened? No, far from it. I still had my anxieties, hurt, and shame. Now, after you say what you would like, then you switch chairs, take on that person’s point of view, and talk back to you. Then it is back and forth, allowing yourself to free your mind of all that garbage you’ve held onto for as long as you have. And what a great format to rid yourself of pent-up frustration. Does this sound bizarre? Of course it does, but that’s how emotional tools work. Simply stated, our emotions have a language all their own.

Because we cannot think our way out of an emotional wound, emotional tools are needed. That is the beauty of psychology. It gives us creative ways of releasing issues.  

It is easy to judge people but how often do we own that judgment – or basically realize that they are reminding us of the darker parts within ourselves? Take the time to list out all your judgments towards friends and family, the next step is to realize that these judgments are also the judgments you have towards you. Yes, this can be difficult. Who wants to consciously put themselves down? However, if you are honest with yourself you can admit that you too are at fault – so to speak. Now, you can make believe you are perfect and remain with your judgments and upset, or, use the owned projection as a starting point to your own healing. The next step after owning the projection is to work on improving these judgments in you.

The only person we can change is ourselves. This frustrated the hell out of me when I was taught this in graduate school but soon realized that that was true. Even though I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that that particular person was bad and wrong I still worked hard on improving that in myself and learned to let go of my attachment to making them change. Why did I always focus on changing them? It might have been that was the way my family taught me. In fact, a major part of psychology is working hard to unlearn the conscious or subconscious teachings of our family to be our own person.

Here is an interesting concept – “We are all doing the best that we know.” In learning new concepts and ways of working on yourself, the better odds you have in living a great life. To me, education has been the key. This doesn’t mean you need to go to school, but reading self-help books, or watching YouTube videos can be of huge help. All I knew was I was sick of being angry, critical, and always having to be right. In fact, I always had to be in control and one of the first things I did for my own growth and development was to let the other person be right. I let go of my habit of controlling conversations, listened to the opinions of others, and realized that this was important to them. Did I want to be right or did I want to be in the loving? There was no possibility that I could change their beliefs but now I was fascinated by the way they thought and this showed me who they were deep inside. Did I agree with them? Well, at this point it didn’t matter because who was I? Some God? Nope – far from it. From this point I was just one person listening to the character of another – having no judgment, only taking information in. This took a lot of pressure off of me, who in the past would argue until they saw the light – my light – which now seems ridiculous, but that’s how I was.