Relationship Health 101

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm so glad you joined me today. I'm your host, Corinne Powell.

I help people pleasers find happiness, embrace courage, and experience peace of mind through inner child healing. If you're desperate for change and not sure how to make it happen, I'm here to guide you along the way. In this space, you'll find motivation to live a life full of joy and resilience.

We will talk all things inner wellness with spirituality interwoven at times. Being a mom to three, parenting will be a topic of conversation for sure. So happy to have you.

Enjoy today's episode. 

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Let's talk about how to create relationships within our family unit that are healthy, deep, and full of loving connection. And that is not perfect.

All those things that I mentioned don't only come from a perfect relationship. They come within relationships that have their difficulties, that have their struggles, and their conflicts, because that is a part of relationship. To have struggles, difficulties, and conflicts is a necessary and a normal part of relationships.

Also, to have that and to have the loving connection, the depth, and the good relating is possible both in tandem. And I wanted to mention that because I feel like sometimes we either think a relationship that's perfect and what is perfect, but we think relationships need to be perfect or we have this definition of what perfect is. 

And I think perfect is messy and beautiful and all together. So my daughter today, one of my daughters was saying how it's so hard like relating with other people in the house. And I said, yeah, I totally get that. It is. It's really hard relating to other human beings. 

But I mentioned as much as it's difficult, it also creates a beauty in our life to have connection with other people. So yes, brings with its challenges and brings with it its joys and beauty. It adds beauty to our life. And it's just the nature of it. 

So how do we create connection within family that is happy and manageable even amidst the difficulties and the challenges? And, you know, this is kind of tying in to the last two weeks conversation about how to create depth and connection in relationships.

Because as I mentioned, even though there's specific tools and tips I gave you to connect with different people in the way that they relate, here's the thing that I wanted to bring out that goes across the board. We create beauty and depth and closeness in our relationships when we left the other party now that we understand. We care about where they're coming from.

We hear what they're saying and it matters to us. And as I mentioned previously, we can disagree with somebody else's viewpoint. We can even disagree with like what they think of the situation.

That doesn't mean we can't validate how they're feeling and their experience within it. So you and I could have different views on things and I could still understand and empathize with you in how you're doing and where you're coming from. I don't have to agree and you don't have to agree with me.

That's the beauty of it. And that also creates a depth and a connection in relationships that is vital to going deeper, to expanding the relationship. So at the core, you want to be able to make the other person know.

And when I say make the other person know, I mean you want it to be authentically flowing out of you that you're going to hear what they have to say and you're going to let their feelings be their feelings. You don't need to change their feelings. You don't need to fix their feelings.

You can let them feel the way they feel, even if it makes you uncomfortable and you can recognize that that's their stuff and you get to feel however you will feel. And remember, sometimes we feel a certain negative, uncomfortable way because we're triggered and the other person is saying or doing something that reminds us of past experiences we've had that were difficult or traumatic and it's stirring up certain emotions in us based off of our beliefs that were formed early on in our life through the experiences that we had. 

And as a child, when you look at the way life is happening and the way that your brain processes what's happening, it's not the same as an adult. So we create beliefs and ways of thinking when we're kids that may not be accurate to what's happening, but it was through our eyes and our perception said that to us. 

For example, one of my kids, I might say something that I don't think is going to hurt them, but they take it a certain way and it causes them to think I don't care. If that child continues to believe that people do not care and when that child speaks, they feel like their words are invalid and they're not recognized and understood.

They can start carrying that through life and really be hearing other people speak and be thinking that the people don't care when they do care. So my goal as a parent is to help my kids be able to catch right now at a young age that their words have value, that I care about what they have to say, that my facial expression or my response might have been because I was hurried and I was busy and I was preoccupied and to make sure they know it's not because what they were saying didn't matter to me and to even apologize that, hey, I'm really sorry that I just acted like what you had to say wasn't important. It's not that.

It's that I'm hurried and I'm overwhelmed and I have a lot going on right now and I'm feeling stressed out. It's really a beautiful thing when we can help the other people in our life know that sometimes and oftentimes it's not them. It's our stuff that's coming in the way of our relationship with them and they don't have to feel like we don't care or that we're invalidating them or their experiences or their feelings and it's basic.

It's simple. Sometimes it's just through communicating that. It's just through our simple awareness of, wait a second, what I'm doing right now is adding a level of toxic energy to this relating and I either need to change what I'm doing or I need to express to the other person, hey, it's not you. It's me. I hope that makes sense. 

You know, a part of me says it's so basic. It's so simple. But really, I'm not going to change that that's how it feels. It does feel basic and simple.

It is in some regards, but then the practice of it can be challenging and difficult, especially if it's something we're relearning or just learning for the first time. If this isn't how you normally relate to people, if you normally don't communicate how you're feeling and how that's affecting your interaction with another person, and that's going to be something new you have to learn. If you normally don't validate people's feelings and their experiences, or you feel like you need to change how they feel so that you can feel okay, then this is going to be a new thing you need to practice.

So, my encouragement to you is to start practicing whatever jumped out at you, whatever I said that you thought, you know, that makes sense. I'm not doing that. I should start doing that.

Just start practicing. Every day, small incremental changes will bring about a bigger change in the end. You'll be surprised when you look back and you'll say, wow, I'm doing life differently. I'm relating to my family differently. 

And they'll be able to feel it. So, I don't think change is overnight, but I think gradual changes bring about a big change in the end.

[Ending] I want to close out today's episode by thanking you for being here with me. We've made it to the end, and I hope what I shared has been helpful. If there is anything I've mentioned that you want to talk about in more depth, I would be so glad to connect with you.

You can always find me on Instagram at ⁠@corinne_changeradically⁠, or go directly to my website, changeradically.com. Of course, within the show notes, there's other ways that you can connect with me. And if there is someone that you think would benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. To help my podcast get more growth and reach more people, please subscribe, review, and rate it.

And until next week, I'm wishing you the very best.