This is the Baggage Reclaim Sessions.

Happy New Year and welcome to a special edition of the Baggage Reclaim Sessions.

In this episode, it is all about New Year's. I'm Natalie Lou a writer based in

Southeast London who is dedicated to helping people to improve their emotional

and relationship literacy. Let's kick this off. I'm going to be

honest. I started 2015. How can we put this best off? That's not to say I hadn't had a good New Year's Eve and there were some highlights from Christmas,

but unfortunately my mother and mother-in-law had a pretty big bust up on Christmas day night.

The reverberations from that were felt for quite some time. I felt a combination of betrayal, disappointment, an element of

rejection. I just I basically felt quite wounded from the whole thing.

And as is the way with this whole Christmas New Year thing,

you have this kind of whole build up

and you have this whole like family

and let's do things and be fun and all the rest.

And so when that all sort of dies down if you've been

through something like what I did that Christmas you're left with the feelings and the

thoughts about that so I entered into the new year not

realizing that I was actually quite angry. The kids went back after school and

this feelings set in and I was fuming and I felt quite resentful as well.

And so I would say if I could sum up January it was anger, loneliness and discovering the need to, I don't know, be myself

and that included being a bit more mature. Let me quickly explain. In my anger in January I sort of retreated into myself because the

difficulty being that at the time my mother-in-law was living with us and in fact she did live with us for eight and a half

months and for at least half of that time it was a bit awkward. Due to circumstances

...