How to Love Yourself No Matter What · Episode 318

Navigating Family Drama Like a Pro: Patterns, Pleasing, and Perception

Episode transcript

It is summer in Canada, and one thing that I know weighs so many women down is dealing with family — weddings, graduations, vacations, visitors, expectations, drama. And I really want to talk about this today, because the issue isn’t really the events we have going on. It’s not even necessarily the family members, although it could be.

What I really see being the issue is the patterns. Because a wedding is not just a wedding, right? Family is steeped in patterns. We have the same fights with the same people about the same things, and you can almost predict the whole thing before you walk in the door. You already know who’s going to say what, who’s going to be talking about politics, who’s going to be pissed off about whatever’s happening at the time, who’s going to have beliefs that differ from everybody else, who’s going to be loud, who’s going to be passive-aggressive, who’s going to have a problem.

We know. You already know who’s going to say the thing. And you know how you’re going to feel in the car on the way home. The thing is, these patterns we’ve established with our family — these things baked into our family units — they aren’t random. We don’t even do it on purpose. It’s really just that your nervous system learned how to handle this young, and in all honesty, this is where a lot of people-pleasing and hypervigilance gets wired in. Family is ultimately the original space where we learned how to cope with these experiences, with these people, with these emotions.

And what happens is that when you walk back into family scenarios, your body really does time travel. You’re a grown adult, but your nervous system just drops into the old role. The pattern isn’t a character flaw — it’s just that your nervous system is doing what it was trained to do.

The pattern is simply something that’s been established with time and practice, and to an extent, it kind of works. Everybody is basically playing a part in the same play. That’s why we’ll see it repeated again and again and again. It’s normal. So when someone is talking to me about how a family barbecue is going to go, or how a wedding or a memorial or a family vacation is going to go, as your coach I’m looking at it curious about what you’re making it mean — what you make your relationship with those people mean, what you make the interaction mean, how you’re taking care of yourself, how you’re thinking about yourself, how you’re coaching yourself through that scenario.

There are a lot of moving parts, but what’s so fascinating is they always seem to move the same way, because there’s just this pattern. And in order to break a pattern, what really needs to happen is we need to learn how to put down blame. We need to stop blaming them — blaming your mom, your mother-in-law, your sister, your sister-in-law, your dad, your father-in-law, your brother, your cousins, your grandparents.

You need to stop blaming them, because when we do that, we’re waiting for them to change so that we can feel okay. We do not want them to be in charge of us feeling okay — and what we don’t realize is that when we place blame on them, that’s essentially what we’re doing. We also need to put down the blame of blaming yourself.

Blaming yourself is people-pleasing, to an extent. If I’d have been quieter, if I’d have been better, if I hadn’t brought that up, if I could just remain calm, if I could just not have lost my shit, if I could, if I could, I wish I would. What it does is it keeps you small. It keeps you on guard. It keeps you in the scenario of there is a problem.

When we engage in blame — either blaming them or blaming yourself — it feels like doing something. If I blame you, it feels like I’m doing something about the scenario. If I blame myself, it feels like I’m doing something about the scenario. The problem is that neither type of blame changes anything. What they actually do is keep the pattern going. They keep it the same.

So I want to tell you a story I walked through with a client recently. My client walked into exactly the kind of weekend we’re talking about. It was a family event, and the whole extended family was there — including a sister and a cousin she used to be close to who, in her words, had formed a family alliance against her. And the old pattern was right there.

The taking of sides. The “did you hear what she said about you” type of scenario. The defending of yourself to other people. The vigilance of: what are they doing? What are they saying? What’s happening? What did she say to you? The truth is, a year ago, this client would have gotten pulled in. I call it picking up the rope.

She would have walked into that event believing other people were talking shit about her, that this was a problem, that other people believed it, that this was somehow going wrong. When I say picking up the rope, what I mean is she would have picked that up as the truth and started to pull against it — started a tug of war inside herself about it — and she would have come home really upset. It would have felt like a disaster, because the emotional roller coaster would have been exhausting.

What was different was that on the drive up, she and her husband actually got themselves ready — not from a guarding, get-ready-for-a-fight perspective. Instead, she reminded herself and him that they’ve built the kind of life they want, that they have everything they need, that they’re exceedingly happy in the life they have. So they decided together that they would not engage, and that if someone started something, they’d simply agree not to talk about it.

You might hear this and think, “I do that too, but I’m still hating it.” The difference is really a shift in mindset. She decided who she was going to be beforehand — how she was going to show up, how she was going to think about it — instead of just letting the emotions lead and reacting in the moment. There was actually drama that weekend. There was even a blowup. But she didn’t have to take that on. It didn’t bother her. It didn’t consume her. She woke up in the morning and felt phenomenal. She had a real weekend with people who truly matter to her.

Now, there are always places where we get drawn in. What I say to my clients is what I’m going to say to you right now: you are a human, not a robot. You’re not going to do this perfectly. She actually got pulled in. She got pulled in because her mom was believing the sister’s version about her, and even said to her at one point, “How am I supposed to know what’s true about you?” For my client, every cell in her body wanted to defend herself, to prove it, to set the record straight.

But defending yourself in that moment is simply a manipulation to make yourself feel better — and it’s important to know that, because it doesn’t even work. What I said to her, and what might help you, is this: it’s like arguing with a flat-earther. You can show them satellite images, decades of science, and they’ll call it fake. It’s not winnable, because the other person doesn’t want to change their mind. So the real conversation isn’t “let me prove I’m a good person.” It’s “I’d hope you’d want to believe the best in me, and the fact that you don’t is the actual problem here.” And then you can walk away.

Being the better person here is really not for them. It’s for you. You’re the one who has to live inside your brain after the weekend is over. That’s the elevation. This isn’t about being better for them — it’s about staying in alignment with you.

The other thing I really want to address is the story we tell before, during, and after. Because two versions of every experience exist, and you get to decide which one you’re going to tell. Your brain is listening to the version you choose to say out loud, and it will hyper-focus on whatever you feed it. This client could have told the story that her sister ruined the weekend. She could have said it was dramatic and difficult, and her mom just doesn’t get her. But that’s not the story she told. The story she told was, “We had a great time with the people who matter.” Both stories could be true, but one of them kept her free.

When we’re telling the story of ourselves, of our lives, of what we’ve experienced, we must have discipline. Not discipline in what we do and don’t do, but discipline in what we think. We want to be disciplined about the roads we let our brain walk down. If you allow your brain to perpetually go down the road of “these people don’t get me, these people don’t like me, these people don’t appreciate me, there’s a problem with these people,” it will create emotions that make you feel frustrated, angry, resentful. And when you feel those emotions, the actions you take will be the ones you don’t want to be taking.

They’ll also devolve internally, because then you’ll have the dissonance of: “I didn’t show up the way I wanted to show up. Why do I always react? Why do I always engage? Why do I let this happen?” That’s the wrong place to focus. Versus: “I belong here. There’s not a problem here. This can be a great weekend. People like me. People want me to be here. I have my own back. I tell the story of me, and I assume everybody else wants to know that story.” This is a very high-level coaching concept.

Learning how to be disciplined in how you think about these things will allow you to show up in a completely different way. It will create a much different vibe in these scenarios. It will allow you to have a totally different experience with everybody else not needing to be different at all. And you get to walk through that experience feeling proud of yourself. You get to take the nuggets that were there for you and leave the rest behind. You’re not arguing. You’re not defending. You’re not trying to change the way people see you. You don’t need that. You need to decide what you’re going to think about you.

As I said, this isn’t really about being perfect. It’s about learning how to interrupt the pattern. So while this is all going on, we’ve got to make sure we’re allowing emotion. We have to learn how to let waves of emotion pass through while doing nothing. We need to understand how to regulate our nervous system before we respond to anything — nervous system regulation in our weekend, before our weekend, after our weekend. And we need to rewire. We need to rewire ourselves to do the different thing, to think the different thing, to believe the different thing — to grab a hold of something that’s for us. To believe the best in ourselves, to believe the best in other people, but also to stand up and say, “That’s your problem to figure out. My problem to figure out is how to think about me. Your problem to figure out is why you want to think shit about me.”

You get to decide. I don’t need to fix that for you. This isn’t even necessarily something you have to say out loud. It’s just something you need to own. You’re not going to fix your family this summer. That’s just not possible. But what you can do is arrive regulated. You can choose to do what you do differently. You can choose to have your own back. You can choose to be the person who believes the best in an experience unless you’re given direct evidence to prove otherwise.

You can decide who you’re going to be before you walk in the door. It’s going to change your whole summer. It’s going to change every event. It’s going to make everything easier. It’s going to make everything better.

So if you’re interested in learning more about this, I want you to know I’m teaching a class on this inside my coaching program. I’m teaching it in about a week, and if you want access to that class, the way you can get it is by becoming one of my one-to-one clients. My one-to-one clients get all the classes I do, and they have the opportunity to come live to every single class I do, every single month. So if you’re curious about that, you should book a discovery call. If you go to amandahess.ca/bookacall, you can book a discovery session. We can talk about you, what’s going on for you, what’s going on in your family events this summer. I’ll help you see where you can create some serious change with everybody else not having to be different. And we can talk about whether coaching would be a good fit. If you decide to go forward, you get this class included. All right, my friends — that’s what I’ve got for you. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I’d love to see you on that call. Bye for now.