Mental Health Mondays #18: Working Through Childhood Experiences
A chat with my life coach, Lauren Handel Zander
I’ve written before about how I’ve been working with a life coach named Lauren Handel Zander for more than a year. I’ve made a ton of progress and one of the key reasons is because I started to reflect on and repair some of my closest relationships so that our communication was much more open and honest. I’m someone who mostly avoids confrontation. I will put off having a hard conversation forever if that means not being uncomfortable.
On a recent episode of my SiriusXM radio show I spoke with Lauren about the process we worked through and that she teaches in The Handel Method so that everyone can do the same thing with their parents or people who raised them. The process helps to identify patterns and personality traits of their parents and even their grandparents in order to take an honest look at your own life and figure out what needs to change. Depending on how old you are, it's also a moment to get real with the people who raised you about what their childhoods were like, what traumas they’ve lived through, and what shenanigans they got caught up in as young people long before you were born.
This was such an important part of the process for me because now that I’m in my 40s and I’ve already lost one parent, my relationship with my only living parent is that much more important. Here’s a portion of my conversation with Lauren about how to start the process of figuring out some of the traits of your family (both good and bad ones!) and how to work through some of the things that you may have been holding on to your entire life, like feelings of neglect or resentment, so that you can rebuild or repair a relationship or move forward and let go.
Community Question:
What traits have you discovered about yourself that come from your family? Let me know in the comments.