Do you avoid expressing yourself from fear of disapproval, rejection, or conflict? If so, you’re not alone.

In my Illumineering Coaching practice, I work with high-functioning, successful people doing interesting things in the world. And yet, the majority of them were conditioned to believe that saying no, setting boundaries, or sharing real feelings and needs will threaten or even extinguish relationships.

Most grown-ups are children in adult bodies. They may have lived 20, 50, or 80 years but the thought, behavioral, and emotional patterns habituated in childhood continue to run their lives.

When we’re born as healthy human beings, we have the innate ability to experience the complete range of human emotions and to express ourselves fully and spontaneously. Absent is the fear of judgment or rejection, or feelings of unworthiness or shame. Then the life conditioning process begins. Our interactions with our caretakers and environment determine how we think about ourselves and others, and the behaviors that are most likely to get our needs met. As dependent little beings, our very survival relies on our adaptation to the overt and covert norms of the family system into which we are born. These patterns of thought, behavior, and emotion are continually reinforced and become habit, developing into what I call the default operating system.

Why do our limiting beliefs have such power over us? How much does our early life conditioning affect our lives today? Trance states provide some interesting clues.

Although I was first introduced to the concept of childhood trances during my psychotherapist training in Germany in 1993, it wasn’t until I did a workshop with Reichian therapist Stephen Wolinsky several years later that I was struck by how our childhood experiences and subsequent trance states drive the fears that hold us back as adults.

In his book, The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Wolinsky describes a trance state as the mechanism through which we disconnect from our current reality and allow the emotions from our old reality—from our childhood or earlier life—to take over. A trance state is a situation in which we experience that emotional disconnect. It’s as if our emotions are hijacked by our unconscious minds. According to Wolinsky, age regression is the most common trance state.

Tomorrow will be my sixteenth motherless Mother’s Day. And while it had gotten easier over time, the absence of my mother feels now like a wound opened anew. Exacerbating these feelings are the demise of my fourteen-year-old dog seven weeks ago, day seventy of coronavirus social distancing, and the loss of intimate family relationships—all in the midst of an unprecedented transfiguration of life as we knew it.

With both parents gone, I currently reside full-time on the other side of the parent-child equation. Among other things, this includes my being on the receiving end of behaviors I once directed toward my own parents. As a family-systems-trained psychotherapist and coach, I have seen these types of multi-generational pattern replications frequently in my practice, as well as being an active participant of their playing out in my personal life.

Living solely on the parenting side of the parent-child dynamic has taught me a lot about myself as a child to my own parents. This is especially true regarding my mother, with whom I shared a life-long relationship riddled with mutual disappointment, judgment, and resentment. Despite my unsuccessful attempt to achieve closure with her when she was dying, it wasn’t until the roles had flipped with my own children that I was able to release the hurt and anger I carried toward my mother, replacing them with compassion, forgiveness, and love.

To what can we attribute feelings toward our partners that are emotionally overpowering? And why do we often react so strongly to the end of a relationship?

Carl Jung wrote that "...it is the strength of the bond to the parents that unconsciously influences the choice of husband or wife, either positively or negatively." As my own divorce drama unfolded, it became clear that there were deeper issues between my husband and me than appeared on the surface. As I explored Jung's premise that who we choose as partners is greatly influenced by our past experiences with our parents, I realized the tremendous influence our upbringing has on our adult relationships.

Habitual negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many chronic and destructive behaviors, a form of addiction.

An old acquaintance of mine recently wrote an article about positive thinking—a subject that is often misunderstood. For many years I, like many people on the personal-development path, believed that by writing down and repeating affirmations (positive statements written in the present tense as if they were already true), I would think more positively and the changes I sought would happen automatically. I hung these inspiring statements all over my house, memorized them, and repeated them out loud, sometimes as much as 100 times a day. But it seemed that no matter how many times I said them, the changes I hoped to achieve eluded me.

Out of all the relationships we have in our lives, the ones we share with family members can be the most challenging. And there’s nothing like holiday stress to trigger the old wounds and unresolved issues that plague so many families.

Sharing close, loving, and supportive relationships is a basic human need, yet many of our family relationships fall short of this ideal. Most families have some level of dysfunction, with each member playing his or her part. Becoming aware of your own family dynamics—and consciously changing behavior patterns that create conflict—will help you avoid the interpersonal “land mines” that are often triggered in the midst of holiday stress. Below are some practical tips to help you make the holidays a time of joyful celebration, instead of fodder for unpleasant family feuds.

Many people don’t treat themselves very well as their default. And in times of stress—in a global pandemic, for example—even those who are normally self-disciplined may find their self-care practices waning. They break promises to themselves, eat poorly, don’t get enough sleep, are self-critical, or fail to take good physical care of their bodies.

A great technique for treating yourself better is by developing what I call your Inner Nurturing Parent. Imagine you had a little child in your care. You’d make every effort to keep her healthy and safe; to support her; to be forgiving of her mistakes, to make sure she gets healthy food and exercise; and to let her know how loved and cared for she is. That’s what a loving parent does. Only, in this case, you’re the parent and the child. Below are some practical ways to strengthen your own Inner Nurturing Parent, and turn the goal of treating yourself better into daily, living action in 2020 and beyond.

Anger is a normal and very human emotion. But few people have been taught how to effectively express and manage anger. Instead we learn how to deal with anger by our parents’ role modeling, and by how our parents reacted to our own anger growing up. We may have been taught to rationalize our anger away, blame or verbally attack the person who’s made us angry, or withdraw and avoid the other person—and our anger—altogether.

In a Zoom coaching session a few weeks ago, a forty-something years old client referred several times to feelings of guilt. Not only had it been a familiar feeling since about the age of five, it had been a driving force throughout his personal life and career.

While guilt often gets a bad rap, in certain situations it can be helpful. For example, if you pay for coffee with a ten-dollar bill and the cashier gives you change for a twenty and you don’t say anything, you might feel pangs of guilt. Why? Because a part of you holds a belief that stealing is wrong, so you return the extra cash. In this case, the guilt motivated you to change your behavior in accordance with your belief that stealing is wrong.

Or you might choose to remain silent and keep the money. To relieve yourself of the “pain” of the guilt, you might tell yourself, “This is a big corporation; a little less profit won’t matter”, thereby changing the belief that stealing is wrong, allowing you to keep the money, lessen the guilt, and still feel like you’re a good person.

Guilt is a barometer that alerts us to behaviors that violate the “truths” of our conscious and unconscious belief systems. And while some of those beliefs are reflective of our authentic values, others are self-limiting ones that we learned and adopted from others.

Tomorrow will be my sixteenth motherless Mother’s Day. And while it had gotten easier over time, the absence of my mother feels now like a wound opened anew. Exacerbating these feelings are the demise of my fourteen-year-old dog seven weeks ago, day seventy of coronavirus social distancing, and the loss of intimate family relationships—all in the midst of an unprecedented transfiguration of life as we knew it.

With both parents gone, I currently reside full-time on the other side of the parent-child equation. Among other things, this includes my being on the receiving end of behaviors I once directed toward my own parents. As a family-systems-trained psychotherapist and coach, I have seen these types of multi-generational pattern replications frequently in my practice, as well as being an active participant of their playing out in my personal life.

Living solely on the parenting side of the parent-child dynamic has taught me a lot about myself as a child to my own parents. This is especially true regarding my mother, with whom I shared a life-long relationship riddled with mutual disappointment, judgment, and resentment. Despite my unsuccessful attempt to achieve closure with her when she was dying, it wasn’t until the roles had flipped with my own children that I was able to release the hurt and anger I carried toward my mother, replacing them with compassion, forgiveness, and love.

One of the ways I am nurturing myself during this time of social distancing, is by listening to music that lifts, moves, empowers, and inspires me. If you should have Pandora, here are 10 stations that are some of my favorites. As a former singer, you’ll notice that my taste tends to be pretty eclectic!

Keeping your immune system strong is especially important during times of stress. Toward that end, here are two of my favorite recipes that are not only delicious, but are also chock full of nutrients that can support and strengthen your body’s ability to ward off or recover from illness.

Today I’ve been reflecting on how, as in nearly all crises, there are opportunities inherent in the current global and massive pattern break from life as we knew it. We can experience deeper compassion for ourselves and each other, strengthen our individual and collective resiliency, re-evaluate priorities and lifestyle, live more mindfully, simplify daily life, define who we want to be as a nation and world, and enable our precious Mother Earth to catch her breath.