Welcome. I'm Connor Beaton and we are going to do a little bit of a pre-holiday prep.

So many of you are heading home or heading to friends for the holidays and a lot of questions

come up right now about how to deal with challenging family dynamics around the holidays. There's a great quote that I posted

the other day by Ram Dass who said, if you think you're enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.

So the idea here is how do we remain centered? How do we keep a grounded footing in the core of our being, in what we know to be true,

in our love and compassion and strength and boundaries and awareness, in the environment that

maybe we grew up in that caused us some of our dysfunction, some of our bad habits or bad behaviors, some of our reactivity

and anger that can come forward in the challenging environments of family.

One of my clients recently this week, we were talking about them going home for the holidays,

and they said, you know, it's the strangest thing. I have a loud

voice in the presence of other people where I can share my opinion and I can speak my truth,

unapologetically, unabashedly, but when it comes to being in the presence of my father,

for some reason my voice just disappears. And I thought,

what an interesting, what an interesting concept. You know, I think that some of us can relate to that.

Maybe we have the boundary in mind that we want to set with our parent or a family member. Maybe we

know what we want to talk to them about over the holidays or

there's something that we've been wanting to get off our chest or just get into them with them

or something that we've been wanting to do or, you know, something that we've been wanting to

spend time with them working on. And yet when the time comes, that all seems to fall by the wayside.

So we're going to talk about a few simple

strategies that can support you if you are entering into a challenging family dynamic

over the holidays. And even if you are not, even if you are entering into the most loving

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