Are you Dealing with Difficult or Toxic people? // Here Are some SUPER helpful tools for Setting Boundaries during the holidays! First and foremost it is important to identify the difficult people that you will be encountering during the holiday season. You can never know for sure who you will run into, but you can probably estimate pretty accurately some of the particularly toxic people that you will be encountering during holiday events.

 

This could be toxic family members that you may see at holiday gatherings or simply difficult people that you work with at holiday events. If you want to learn more about how to spot difficult people namely energy vampires here is a video that will help you with that - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPSZ9... Either way it is important to recognize theses difficult relationships in your mind before walking into these dynamics, and yes I said Difficult relationships. The reason for this is because putting all the blame on someone else and simply regarding them as a toxic person, is a disempowering way of perceiving the situation. The truth is that even though this difficult person may be highly toxic, until you are willing to take responsibility for your own actions and perspectives, you will simply be feeding the fire. While it is important to set physical boundaries with difficult or toxic people (express that it is unhealthy to share the same space or even communicate with each other) True empowered boundary setting starts with you taking responsibility for your own negative thoughts and emotions, in other words setting boundaries starts internally. It may feel like a toxic person is responsible for creating your negative emotions but the truth of the matter is that no person is forcing you to feel the emotions that you feel. You are feeling emotions because of how you are interpreting the situations that you are in and while you cannot change someone else, you can change the way that you relate to your relationship with them. The first key to setting healthy boundaries is choosing to reinterpret the relationship in a way that is empowering. This is most helpful when it is done in your mind before you find yourself in front of the person that you have a difficult relationship with.

 

This is called priming, you are priming yourself to perceive things differently by training yourself to perceive thru a new interpretive lens. This video explores more about this and about how to use this technique to set Boundaries in a healthy and empowered way as opposed to just running away from difficult people and situations. Thanks for tuning in!!