I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello. How are you doing?

Today I want to get into a very important topic,

family estrangement, and this is a topic that applies to everyone.

So if you're thinking, oh, I need to skip over this episode,

please hang on for a bit.

Because, do you know what?

This is that time of year I refer to as the 12 weeks of self-esteem torment.

Because from around sort of early November time,

lots of people start to experience low level or what might be quite heightened anxiety about

various things that are coming up, the season ahead. If you're in America that's Thanksgiving. It could be Christmas or whatever it is that we celebrate.

So there's an anxiety about potentially being around family. There's also like the end of the year coming so we start looking

back on the year and by gosh that's going to be an interesting one this year and

then it's the new year so then we're looking ahead and then there's Valentine's so these 12

weeks can be quite hard on some of us in terms of our self-esteem.

Loneliness can be very very heightened around this time of year.

And I think that it's going to be particularly exacerbated

thanks to the Rona.

And so it's time to talk about something

that I have actually talked about a lot, particularly on the

blog.

I've been very, very candid about my experiences of estrangement.

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