TUYT 62

Amy Hoyt18min

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

00:02

If you're irritable with family members, because they're not keeping the house clean a certain way, that means you have expectations.

Amy Hoyt

00:16

If you've enjoyed our episode, or the content that we provide on the universe is your therapist, check out our signature program, the whole health lab, in the whole health lab. We walk you through healing from trauma, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you're wondering if you have trauma, go to many trauma.com/quiz. Take our quiz, and you'll be able to determine if trauma is affecting your life. If it is, and you find that you want to go further, we would love to be your guide as you recover from trauma. Hi, and welcome back. Today's episode we thought would be very beneficial as we go into the holiday season. And this conversation is going to be about how to set ourselves up for the holidays in a way that is intentional, so we can reduce our stress and our overwhelm that is very typical around this time of year. Yes,

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

01:13

that is a great idea. And I think it's, it's so counterintuitive, because many of us look forward to the holidays as a time to celebrate and reconnect with loved ones and that sort of thing. And we don't always remain conscious of the fact that connecting with our loved ones can also bring up old triggers from childhood. And we also don't always realize consciously, that we have our own set of expectations about what the holiday should look like. And because of that, we tend to focus more on the appearance of the holiday or getting certain things done. And that's very, very common, but having a conscious awareness of that and making a decision about how to mitigate that can help with stress levels during the holidays.

Amy Hoyt

02:10

Absolutely. I find that I as you said, I look forward to the holidays immensely. I love. I love the change of season. I love the gathering, I love my family so much and especially gathering with the family we have here in the Ozarks. It's truly such a joy. And with the holidays comes for me stress about making sure I'm that I'm remembering everyone. So am I being intentional with remembering all those that I love and making sure that I acknowledge that through, you know, something small a token of some sort, whether it's cookies, or whether it's a small gift is you know, a lot of people, it's very financially challenging during the holidays, because there are expectations. And even though it's so wonderful to give, it can be stressful to add that to your budget. But I think that one of the biggest services we can do to ourselves as we approach the holiday season is, as you said, develop awareness of what our expectations are. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that about some of those expectations that we typically aren't conscious of, and how do we become aware of them so that we can then set ourselves up for success?

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

03:40

Sure. And I think this ties in with our, the work that we've done in the podcasts that we've done that work we do in our program with our clients, with the awareness that we have two major drives biologically, and those are the drive for connection and the drive for safety. While the holidays, it activates both of those drives. And if your nervous system believes that it can only be safe that you can only be safe. If you please everybody, then you will not have the ability to enjoy the holidays, the same way that you would if you understood that being somebody being pleased by what you're doing, saying are giving has less to do with you and more to do with them and their own expectations. And so we want to connect with people we worry about what people will perceive in terms of our gift giving or the way we invite people over to celebrate and those things can be very burdensome, and I would say it can raise to toxic stress. If we're not careful. I think it's windy are one of our CO founders, I think it's her one of her family, they have a rule that all the kids and they brought them up with this rule that all the kids give each other gift, but it has to be homemade. And I think that's a great approach. I think it's probably not very practical for many families today because of how busy everyone else. But the other thing that I think is really fun is I've heard of it would depend on your family if you have addiction in your family or mental illness that this may not work, but kind of a re have fun re gifting holiday party, where you bring a group of people together and you rummage through your, your things at home or your closet and take something that you bought that you haven't used, or something that somebody gave you that you aren't going to use and your gift. And then the other thing that can be really fun is a white elephant party, and that can relieve financial stress. But what it might do is it also might spike your anxiety if you have family and friends with high expectations for gift giving. And so keeping that in mind, do what will help your nervous system be a little bit more calm, whatever that is.

Amy Hoyt

06:19

I love those suggestions. Let's go back a little bit to how you can cultivate awareness that you have expectations. So if you know for years, I didn't know I had expectation, right? So it was very difficult to then go into the holidays and be disappointed and then have to backtrack and realize, Oh, I thought it was gonna go a certain way. How can we help our listeners develop some of that awareness? So they're being more cognizant of their own expectations?

Processing audio...