The 3 Minute Life Hack To Move Alienated Parents Out of Negativity

You are listening to the Beyond the High Road podcast with Shelby Milford, episode number 143. Stay tuned. Welcome to Beyond the High Road, a podcast dedicated to healing your heart and life following the grief of alienation. I'm your host, Shelby Milford, a twice certified life coach specializing in post-traumatic growth. If you're experiencing the effects of alienation and you're ready to heal, then this show is my love letter to you. Stay tuned. You guys, look what I have. If you're watching, oops, if you're watching, then if you can see what I have in my hands here, right? Is a baby little duckly. Do you see how adorable? Look at my nails cuz I just took everybody all them off. Isn't this

the cutest little thing you've ever seen? It's a whistling duck. It's so I this is the second time we'll get to the episode in a second. This morning I was walking came coming home from the my walk with the dogs and it's like 7:30 in the morning and I'm right in front of my house. I'm living on one street. It's a like a little guess like a private drive-ish. And uh we were coming up on my house and like from the side of my house and waddling over the street was this little baby ducky. And I have no idea where it came from because it it doesn't make any sense like where I live. I mean it's got to be there are whistling ducks everywhere. But anyway, long story short is like I read this

happens to last year. The exact same thing happened not in front of my house but around the corner when I was walking my dog again and it was running out onto the really busy highway like the state road and so I ran it was like running for me. I was like it was so cute and then it just kept running. It was going to run out to the Anyway, so I got it and then I luckily that time I found I think it's its mom and the babies and I patted it on its butt. This was an hour later found it by some water. Then I read that you can't you're not supposed to just put ducks with any mom and and baby. So I read that after the fact and I kicked myself for I don't know how

long afterwards. And anyway, long story short is now I have this duck and people keep telling me just put it back outside and the mom will find it. Okay, but I have a cat outside and I know that there's another cat across the way and my cat is a hunter. So anyway, so I have a baby duck. I went to the bead store today and got it supplies at least for the time being. I don't know what I'm going to do with it because I'm not set up to have a duck for the course around here. But anyway, it's a little itty bitty ducky. I'm going to go put it back under its little heat lamp right now, but I had to show you. Okay, hold on. Okay, I'm back. So, I today want to talk with you guys about

when you feel like you're surrounded by negativity, you know, like that it's just all around you. Like no matter what you do, how you change, try to change your surroundings or whatever, it seems like negativity kind of follows you and like all of your interpretations about your past. You feel like the only way to think about them is negative because hello, what you've gone through has been, let's face it, negative in your mind, right? Um, and the reason this came up for me actually today, I had this like idea to basically go through situations that we experience on the rugg as alienated parents and provide you with solutions, right? This one is just overbearing for all of us on so many

levels, you know. Um, I felt like it was inescapable that all the negative around me was it was just it seeped into every fiber of my life and of my being. Um today I was going through looking at some old writings I had again, but this time these were writings um documents that I've created in the over the past six or so years for clients of mine like that were um either it was one-on-one programs that I was making or I made and had them do or it was for the group coaching program that I did, you know, a couple years ago back in 23 and 24. um 22 and 23, whatever that was a couple years ago. So, and I came across this one about looking at your past, right? Looking at the stories that you're

telling yourself, of course, right? Because that's really everything. The one that I found was uh I had put examples of stuff that I was going through at the time that I wrote this one. It's kind of like a 30-day program. It brought me back to a time when my perspective, even though I was writing this for somebody else, uh my perspective was still kind of set in the negative, at least about this one story. Anyway, so I just brought to light how negative, how disempowered I felt. So, I'm going to tell you about the example in a second that I was using. But as alienated parents, I know that every single one of us has felt at some point in our journey after alienation began has felt like

negativity was a fact. I felt like it was a curse that I was inescapable. I could not get out of the negative feeling negative because negative was always happening around me. negative was always happening at me to me because of me in spite of me however you know when alienation begins we have usually there's bigger events that happen sort of lifechanging roleing events that happen and then we also have a lot a lot of these little nuanced offenses if you will that happen along the way that put together when It's all piled on top of each other feel like these huge monumental offenses. On top of that, because we as alienated parents are usually working from survival mode,

especially in the beginning, your brain is conditioned to look for the negative, to look for the danger, right? And then on top of that, the stories that you tell yourself already and the what is fresh in your mind and my mind when I was there too is all of the negative stuff. So I was talking with a client earlier today after my whole duckling situation and we were talking about something away from alienation. Actually, we're talking about her mom has been in and out of a rehab facility uh after being in the hospital for initially a fall and whatever. She's elderly and she's having problems like now being able to make it on her own at her house. So, client is still coming of

course coming off of alienation as well and has these themes going on in her mind. she tends to uh veer towards by default the negative, right? Which is so common for us as alienated parents or coming from unhealed trauma in any way. We have these preset notions or ideas about how life works for us. Our brain and central nervous system will want to lean into the negative totally unconsciously. So, I noticed that today she was talking about lawyers and the will and things like that and she kept saying that this is just all awful. This is just a terrible situation that she's going through. And I absolutely 100% feel for her because she is it's all new territory. And of course, it's never

comfortable. It's not a joyous occasion to see our parents aging, you know, changing and needing help more than we've ever seen them need help, right? So, it makes sense. and coming from also feeling alienated and having your own child and not necessarily being able to contact or call or love on parent in the way that you otherwise might. This client actually her son is now well into his he's 21 I think or 22 years old now. Um, however, her and her son were really close for really close for at least 14 years of his life. And so, she's grieving the loss of that, but also grieving the loss of her mom before she's actually passed. But you you get what I'm saying, right? So, mom has been

in a facility. They were looking for the will. The will is nowhere to be found. And so, they're having to hire this attorney. And though my client actually was thrilled that mom was did go back into a rehab facility this week, she didn't notice that she was kept saying that it was an awful experience. This whole thing, this whole hospital readmitting to rehab was just terrible. It's an awful thing. And by the way, I need to start hiding money so that the the nursing homes will come after the accounts. So, she's in full paranoia survival mode right now. And so I I was helping her to notice like, hey, you know, you're telling yourself that this is an awful situation right now. But I

also know because we've talked about this that I think you feel good and you feel way less anxious cuz she had already said it now that she's somewhere being cared for than you felt when she was at home alone just last week by herself. you were a worried wreck last week because you weren't sure if your mother was safe. Now she's safe and you're still telling yourself it's an awful situation. Now, of course, there's the nuance like there's the parts of the situation she may not like, but overall the first priority is mom's safety, right? We'd already gone over that and she was didn't realize that she was still telling herself that the whole situation was just awful. It was, you

know, catastrophic. but it really wasn't. And she was just unaware of the theme that she had going on by default in her mind because and that's exactly what we do you guys. And this is why I was sharing this. It's nothing profound or particularly moving this story that I just was talking about with my client. But the theme that we carry with us is something that I know that each and every one of us can relate to in some way or another. Whether you're aware of it or not, it's happens with all of us where we develop sort of a default way of thinking, default interpretations on our world. My mother was just in town this weekend. This is just off the top of my head. And I I noticed with her

too, she, you know, she's gets politically like activated, right? News, depending on what station, news it's on. I try to keep it off the news in this home, you know, but she she's got has a preset to go and find all of the danger danger sort of news so that she can yell back at the TV and express her own emotions about it. Right? I'm not saying that we shouldn't stay aware of current events, but she has a preset for what she looks for and the danger in her mind that she wants to lean into on the everyday basis. It's sort of an addiction that we all are susceptible to, I guess, not just with politics, but with anything in our lives, but it's whatever we believe we want to find the

evidence for more of, right? We talk about this all the time. It's it's confirmation bias. And when the brain gets so comfortable and used to thinking and believing in a certain way, it wants to find more more of that information. We all do it to what degree depends, right? But with alienation, many times that course, that preset is rooted in negative because we feel like so much negative has been done to us in our situations of alienation with our relationship with our kiddos. We start looking for the negative everywhere. We develop an idea that it's a rule set that everybody treats us terribly, that we're being taken advantage of, that we aren't being heard, that we you know how

that goes. We could go into just depending on what you believe about the alienator. We sometimes transfer that over to the rest of our life. Not always, but there might be one or two areas outside of alienation that you are carrying on with that theme. Here's the problem with that. Most people would say, "Oh, yeah. Well, that's just being smart because we're just not going to be had like we've been had in the past. So now we're just going to protect ourselves. But living in that causes you to terrorize yourself on the everyday all the time. It steals your joy. It's a trap looking for. And most of us do it, like I said, unconsciously. My mom was doing it unconsciously all weekend. She

would yell at the TV and have no idea she was yelling. It was just thoughts going on in her head. She was completely not aware of it. And the same thing with my client. She had this whole it's awful, life is awful, everything that's going on right now is just awful attitude. And so even the things that she wanted to feel good about, like happy that mom is safe, she was still labeling it awful. So how do we not do that? Well, first it takes your willingness. It takes your willingness to be aware, make yourself aware of your negativity bias where you tend to lean towards the negative or look towards your past in a negative way and use that to make sense of your today and hold you

back in your future. It takes you deciding and saying, "Hey, it's more important that I experience joy and that I create a life for me moving forward that's better than where I am today." it's important to me because I want to model to my children from afar. Whatever it is, you know, like I was talking about last week, know your reason why. And stay committed to that rather than what your habit brain is going to want to do is going to want to keep cutting you off and saying, "Yeah, but you should watch. Don't forget how your past has hurt you, harmed you, and how it continues to harm you in today." So you have to keep making yourself aware and have the willingness to see things

differently, right? That's the first thing. If you want to change whatever negative you see in your life, you have to be willing to not see it negatively. I mean, that's pretty simple. But when we're in it, it's harder than it sounds. It can be easy if you just keep reminding yourself that how you're seeing things now is not serving you. Like if you feel locked up like you're stuck because there's negativity everywhere and they've victimized you and you have no moves to make and all the things then from there you say okay well if I want to have a better life create a better life for myself moving forward I'm going to have to do something different than I already have

or else everything's going to stay the same. So to me it's an easy choice to make right? Like I'm willing to see things differently if that means that I'm going to be happier. if that means I'm gonna get the things done in my life and stop feeling like you know? All right. So, now that you've become willing to see things differently, the next phase is for you to develop a starting point. Like, see what you've been working with. What's your current model of the world? What are you saying to yourself about your past? What are you saying to yourself about why you're stuck or what the alienator has done? What are you saying to yourself about how the alienator is blocking you or

keeping you, you know, at a standstill? With most clients, I think I've probably shared this with you guys recently, but with most clients that sign on, new clients, one of my favorite questions to ask them is, if you were to title a book right now after your life, what would it be called? And then, if you were to title this last chapter of your life, what would that be called? Then, of course, what would the coming chapter be called? this next chapter of your life be called. And this way it helps me to distinguish or illuminate where the negativity bias is for them in their life. Having clients tell me the first thing that comes to their mind about how

they're summarizing their whole life and then also the last chapter or two gives me a very good idea about what we're working with and where we need to go. just so that I can kind of get an idea of what negative things might be going on with them, like where they believe that they're stuck right now, so that I can help them best. Right? Also though, with many of my clients, um, if they're having difficulty with the negativity of their past and feeling like they're still a victim to it, what I will do is have them write out what got them here today. What started this all off? I have them go into it like, "Do all the judging. Tell me how you feel judged. Be

catty. Be petty. Give me all of the dirt on why you're here today." Like resentments. Just throw it all out. Get the negativity out of them. Because if it's still there, if the negativity is still there, then it's really helpful to know it, to face it. Right? Just like how I was talking about with I think it was in the podcast that I was talking about with thought downloads. Same thing. You don't want to censor them. You just want to get it out so that you can now face it, see it, and then eventually drop those thoughts, right? Same thing here, but we're doing it with your whole life. The negativity is already bouncing around up in your brain in in all of these stories and

substories about how your world works for you. Yes, it is a little uncomfortable to face it and write it all out. It's not fun. And I know I've shared with you about story work before how helpful that is in developing a new narrative. But yeah, writing your whole story out is really helpful to start just to see the themes that are happening. And from there, what I have my clients do is then we'll get back together. It's a week later, right? Cuz I see them wiggly. Usually the story writing you can get it done like in one sit down, right? One maybe two sit downs depending on how much you feel is pertinent to write down. So a week later we'll get together and we will pick out

all the facts like the hard true neutral facts and circumstances of their situation. We then decide how they want to think about it. There's more that goes into that but that's the gist of it. Right? Then we decide, all right, are you do you like the current story that you're telling yourself? The first draft, is it serving you? Does it help you feel good and get you to where you're going, or does it hold you back? Right? And then from there, we take the facts and we're like, "Okay, these are the facts." And usually the facts are so few and far between, like when we're pulling them out of the first draft story, that it usually only takes a like a five minutes to scan through and find

all the facts. It's super easy and quick and then from the facts we then build out the story that they want to take with them start practicing and telling themselves from here moving forward depending on how they want to feel develop story that they want to feel you know empowered at peace centered determined guided or supported or connected whatever it is then we supports that and then move on. So, if you have not done that yet and you're feeling like crap about your past and about everything that's happened so far, this is a really helpful thing to do. So, that's just step one to get that out of the way. After the whole duckling situation, I happened to be going

through previous courses that I had written for my one-on-one clients. I used to do things in like 30-day increments. And so I came across an old course that I'd written back in like 2020 2021 where I had clearly done a lot of work on my own thinking and my own situation of alienation but I still had a good way to go. Of course like and even now where I'm sitting I still have a good way to go. We all do, right? But I could see in this course, I was at the time trying to give them examples that they could model their life examples after. I think one of the questions, I don't have it in front of me right now, but pick one event, negative event from your past that you can't get over and

write it here, right? What happened during that? What would you want to change about that event? Right? Tell me, write it all down. And so my example was I might have shared this with you guys a while back but in the beginning well maybe it wasn't the beginning of alienation but it was like the beginning of the end of suffering for me back when my daughter was still in grade school. I always get those years mixed up because of what was going on back then. She had just started a new school that year. So it must have been second grade. It was the same year that uh the square dancing thing happened where I went to the school for my daughter's pioneer day and

I had made her this stuff and um then I I went to the event and the stepmom took my daughter from me in the gymnasium for the square dancing event. That same year towards the end of the year was May. Um, I went up to school one day to pick her up cuz it was my day. And when I got to school, I noticed that the stepmom was already there. She had gotten to school and sat in the front too, just spaces away from me, sort of facing me with her older son, that's hers, and her younger, the daughter, that's my daughter's halfsister. She had her phone out and she was recording me, followed me into the school or up to the door, filming me. She was like in my face the whole

time, asking me a bunch of questions, just being really aggressive and like verbally aggressive. It rattled me 100% rattled me. I didn't understand what she was doing, why she was doing it, but I knew she was up to no good. And so when I got my daughter, Scarlet, I said, "Hey honey, your stepmom is out front, so we're going to go to the back and we're just going to call an Uber." And that's what we did. But when the Uber came and picked us up, we were passing my car and we saw all these cop cars. I was driving my now ex's Tahoe that day because he for whatever reason took my car to the airport that very morning. There was cops peering into my window there. I had

and he just gone grocery shopping and all the things. But so I took the Uber back over to my car at the airport and picked it up and came back to move the Tahoe. Anyway, when I left the Tahoe, there was um a unmarked car that followed me and unbeknownst to me, I had a suspended license. I think what got them to pull me over was an expired registration. My bad. Right. Long story short is I was handcuffed in front of my daughter and taken to jail right in front of my sweet, sweet child's face. And the other thing is is the policemen on duty, they of course had to call somebody to come pick up my daughter or they didn't have to call anybody. I could have called a number of people. My

neighbor being one of them, very close neighbor friend who was home. But they ended up calling my ex's wife. How they had her number, who knows, but she was screeching in on two wheels to pick up my daughter within 5 minutes of them calling her. And the stepmom was visibly happy as a lark. and off I went to jail. Back then I called it a sting operation. It felt so negative. I felt so victimized and powerless and felt awful for my daughter. My daughter saw her own mother get taken away in handcuffs and this was clearly all planned out by her stepmother. So how could I see that positively? In what world would I ever want to see that positive? So that was my example for an event that I

wanted to change. And when it came to pulling the facts out, those facts seemed very, very negative to me. And I didn't know how I could interpret it otherwise. And my response actually kind of showed it because what I wrote was that I was just trying to develop some compassion for her. like she must have really had a hard life in order for the the stepmom must have had a really hard life in order for her to go to these lengths to get what she wanted which still was kind of rooted in negativity and judgment. Today I I would have a different takeaway and that takeaway would be some pe there are people who do things with ill intent. Yeah, it definitely caused a

lot of pain for me. But my takeaway from that is I make sure that my license back then I started checking it like monthly. Um, in fact, for a while there I was checking it weekly, sort of paranoid, but I always was checking to make sure that my license was valid from that point forward just because this was crazy. You know, of course, this case got thrown out, this license, whatever. But for years I felt victimized as a result of it cuz now my daughter has this in my mind I thought that she had this seared in her brain for the rest of her life. Shume I don't know but I also know that in the end like to me today sitting here yeah that event really sucked but what I have made out of that

event and all the other negative quote unquote negative events is so much better and greater than I ever would have had had it not happened. Right? I hope and trust that that's truly what will happen with my daughter as well. I can't speak for her now and I don't know. But I know that who I am today as a result of all of the events that have happened is not just so much stronger but so much more layered and my life is so much more rich because of all of that quote unquote negativity, right? All of the heartache that I experienced as a result of somebody plotting to do terrible things. But today I don't focus on the somebody plotting. Today I focus on my actions and my responses and the

story. I don't even ever tell that story to myself clearly because I wasn't that definitely wasn't practiced. I can't it's awkward story for me to tell in the negative. Most stories these days are very awkward for me to tell in the negative because I don't carry those with me anymore. And that's the whole point of this. you have to reprogram your brain to go to the positive or even the neutral to go into something other than the negative. Um, and once you do that, then that will be your default way. But so the way that you get there after you look at situations and events that have happened in your life that seem only negative, you start retelling those negative events in more positive

ways. Maybe you don't want to see the whole situation as a positive. Maybe it's still all pretty negative to you. But when you start telling yourself that maybe it's possible that there is some positive out of this or just like how I told you the growth that I have been doing as a result of this negative is of course making a lot of this very positive for me. But it's you challenging your belief that everything is negative is really what it is. I'm basically bringing you through the little 30-day program. The next thing that you do is every day you pick an event that happened the day before. This is how you would do it for you guys if you're in your everyday life. Like

commit to the next 30 days of spending 5 minutes a morning or night, I don't care any time of the day to look at the previous days events, things that have happened throughout. And number one, what was amazing about the previous day? If you're doing it in the evening, you could always do the day that you just had, right? Some people's short-term memories aren't so great coming from the trauma. So, you can do it however you want. But what was amazing about your day first? That's your first question. And then you write down, it can be one or two sentences. And then your second question is, what wasn't so great? and how can you change it in your mind to make it great? How can you tell the

story so it truly was good? We're not doing this to distort reality or lie to yourself. We're doing this so that you can start poking like open the walls of negativity that might be in your mind set as default and toying with the idea that maybe even the negative can be positive sometimes. Okay, doesn't have to be set in stone, but just how else could I view this negative event that happened yesterday in a positive way. So then you want to take the thought that makes it not great, like your negative view, the shitty view. Let's say um somebody cut me off in traffic yesterday and they got into an accident and it made me late to work. And people suck at driving. Most people are shitty drivers.

So that's my takeaway from that whole thing. That thought, most people are shitty drivers, is going to cause me to feel annoyed. Every time I get in the car, I'm going to mostly feel annoyed. Here I go back into traffic again. People are shitty drivers. It's a theme. Just like I was talking about earlier with my mom and with my my client, right? It's just every time I enter the car, ding. The habit brain says, "Oh, right. People are shitty drivers." That's how I start my day with shitty drivers everywhere. And so the actions I take is I'm going to go into the back of my head and look at how every ride into work has been shitty or how traffic is terrible. It's always clogged up. I'm

going to look at how the lights aren't changing on time. I find all the things that are shitty about my drive. So what do I do from being annoyed? I maybe am driving and I don't let people in my lane in front of me. I get pissed and I speed up when people try to get in. Right? innocent drivers just trying to go with the flow and I'm like, "No, people are shitty drivers and they're not going to get me into an accident. They're not going to make me late." And maybe I am already so annoyed because of the theme going on in my head that I get a little road rage. Maybe I start scrolling while I'm sitting in traffic looking for other things to entertain me and and get me out of feeling annoyed.

So then I'm not paying attention to the road like I should when cars start to eek forward. So overall, what I'm not doing is I'm not paying attention to the road and actually looking for ways that things are fine. That look at all the good drivers on the road. Not everybody's a terrible driver. And so the end result of that is that I end up being the terrible driver. I'm not letting people in coming on from the on-ramps, right? I am already kind of road ragy. I'm scrolling trying to get out of the current where I am in present, right? And so it makes my negativity and my annoyance the theme moving forward for who knows how long, right? In my mind, people are terrible

drivers and I have to drive to work every day. Well, every day is going to suck probably if that becomes your belief. So, you kind of look at what the thought creates for you. What what do I feel when I think the thought? What actions do I take or not take when I'm thinking the thought and feeling the emotion? And what is the result that I create for myself by thinking a thought? Hopefully that makes sense. Then you want to take the good thought like let's replay the last thing. Somebody cut you off when there was an accident in front of you. My takeaway before in the shitty model was that most people are terrible drivers. I could take away, thank God nobody was hurt. I escaped with not a

scratch on me or on my car. I was being looked out for. That's what I could take away from that same same exact event. I was being looked out for. I got lucky. Thank goodness. Uh now I'll always make sure to stay the two car lengths behind the person in front of me from here forward. Whatever. There's so many different takeaways that you can devise from the same exact circumstance. Car cuts you off and there was an accident in front of you. you were late for work. Maybe another takeaway is that, well, I didn't have to do that one meeting with the person I was not looking forward to having a meeting with when I got to work because I was late, right? Didn't have to see that person today.

Fantastic. So, you want to just consider alternate takeaways and then start practicing those takeaways. Same set of circumstance happening, but just what could I find good from this? sort of training your brain on this like in an overexaggerated way to see also the positive. If I'm going to see the negative, if I'm going to say that people are terrible drivers, let's also spend I know I've talked with you guys about before uh like spending 50/50 giving equal time to both things. If I'm going to look at the consider the negative, I'm also going to consider the equal amount of positive. It helps you to even out neutralize your environment. the facts that you take away from any

given situation. Every story has a perspective and those perspectives are all choices. So basically for 30 days, what you're doing is you're answering the same question over and over again. What was great about the day? What wasn't so great? How can I see it as great? Write that all down. How can you tell the whole story so that it truly was a good experience? You don't have to take on that good experience one, but then it kind of shows you the difference between the negative and the positive. And maybe there's somewhere in the middle that you want to land on. Because every time that you commit to a summary, you're committing to that energy as a theme in your life. 3 to 5 minutes, 3 minutes

really every day of asking yourself, what was amazing about yesterday? What wasn't so amazing about yesterday? How can I see it? So, it was amazing. What's the takeaway here? What do I create for myself? How do I feel? What are the actions I take and don't take as a result of thinking negative thought? And then what actions do I take and don't take? How do I feel as a result of thinking the positive takeaway? What result does that create in my life? Which one do I like the most? Do I like the positive result or do I like the negative result? And if I've been getting mostly negative results in my life, then maybe let's try the positive result one. Let's just see if we could

maybe start to believe that. Look for evidence in your life that supports the positive thought. This is how you get out of negative default thinking is just challenging your day-to-day boring run-of-the-mill experiences, not the harder ones that yes, we will do. And I actually went through it earlier about like what you're telling yourself about your story. But do the dayto-day things. This is where you can make the habit happen is in your day-to-day. When you look in the fridge and you see a banana, milk, and juice, what do you think about that? You could think, "Well, great. I'm going to starve." Or you could think, "Well, I've got something to drink for

breakfast, and I've got the makings of a banana smoothie." It starts with that basic stuff. So, doing this every day and just questioning, challenging your takeaways, becoming aware of how you're summarizing each and every event that happens in your life. I still find myself, my subconscious trying to pull things over on me all the time, like the takeaways that I have from a conversation that I had with my mother or something. I still find myself going to the negative. Sometimes it takes some misery before I start to see, oh wait, this is my perception. How else could I see this situation? How could the opposite be true? Even if I don't believe it right now, what would

somebody who wanted to see the the positive out of the situation, what would they say about it? And could I maybe adopt part of that? Or it's possible that that is a belief that could work for me. You know what I'm saying? So that's how you do it. It's really just becoming aware and then training yourself to look at the opposite of what you're already believing. That just reminded me of George Castanza. He just decided to do the opposite of everything. I think I've given this example before, but it always comes up for me anytime I think about opposites. I think of George Castanza and how it worked for him when he was Art Vanderlay, whatever that was. But

yeah, how could the opposite mature? And would that in the end if you play it out like if I believed the opposite and the opposite is positive more positive than not negative that I was already thinking how would that play out in my future? Would that work for me? Would that help me to create better things moving forward? Would it help me to create something rather than nothing when we're coming from a negative? So, you know, I think the last thing I'll say about this is that I think that a lot of times we're, and this goes into what I was saying earlier about me being so committed to being wronged, I was so committed to only seeing the negative because it actually created the

dissonance inside of me that if I saw something as positive, even a situation that was happening with my situation of alienation, if I dared to think of it in a positive way, it was out of character for who I identified myself as being, you know, like I'm a victim. I'm a mom who has been wronged. And so if I see this positively, then what does that make me? It didn't fit with my current model of the world and how I fit into the world. It felt wrong to me. And it also felt like I was maybe like betraying my role as a mom and really betraying my daughter. Like if I saw this positive, then what am I am I saying that this is okay that they're doing this? And let me just tell you

right now that you can absolutely believe that what they're doing is wrong and has harmed you 100%. But what I'm talking about here is more of a personal takeaway. This is something for your personal growth. You don't have to announce it to the world that, yeah, maybe this alienation thing was a good thing because I grew from it. You don't have to go there, but it's just in order for you to not be locked in your own personal cell of hell. It's helpful for you to look at how things might be different than how you're currently seeing them so that you can like loosen yourself, right? Unlock yourself from the stuckness and from the negativity. Just consider how different

possibilities might create a better reality for you in the long run. And that's really that's what complicates things is if we're so committed to the victim role. um into that the wronged parent, wronged mom, wronged dad role and showing that to the world, you're going to find yourself in a lot of sicky places. And I get it for if you are committed to spreading awareness, but there's a way that you can spread awareness and not spread victimhood. You can absolutely have a huge impact in the world, much bigger impact if you ask me when you are have been through it and can see the positive from the negative. Think of do we ever have a TED talk where somebody is still in it and

feeling victimized? Never. There's never been never never been a great motivational speaker or or a speaker that brings awareness who is stuck in the negativity and feeling completely handcuffed by abuse. No, it doesn't. But we think that at the time like we think that we need to appear as the wounded bird or the wounded soul in order for people to notice, but it's not nearly as effective as you finding your own strength through it. and still standing to say look at the impact it did cause and what it's continuing to cause for all the children that it's happening to you know so that little whatever that is tendency for us to stay in the negativity because we

think that people will hear or people will listen it's not rational if you ask me it's not effective and it also causes you to stay like sick mentally physically even uh emotionally, right? And so it's at your own detriment and also the detriment of your children because then they're seeing you staying in the negative which um you know has its own negative negative effects. So hopefully that helps is you guys just like I said look at your current summaries of your days. Start there. How do you summarize your everyday situations that are happening? And how can you summarize them in an uplevelled way and make that your habit? Which by the way, not only are you going to be

more productive in your life, but it changes your entire experience of all the little events that happen in your everyday. You know, you feel lighter, free. It is so much less taxing, tiring, you know. So take that all the energy leftover energy you do have and you can put it into doing great things. All right. So happy writing. Take care. Thanks so much for listening today. If you like what you're hearing and you'd like to hear more, please make sure to click subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Also, for byte-size clips and tips, be sure to find me on Tik Tok or Instagram. See you next week.