Free Training Transcript

Hi everyone! So if you are here, it's likely because you found your way onto my website and are highly considering joining a type of program that's going to help you feel better about yourself as someone who lives with chronic illness. And the reason why you want to do that in the first place is probably because it feels like your relationships, or your relationships actually are suffering because of the hardships and the complications that come up as someone who lives with a chronic illness. I will start off by saying that I've been there um, I still have bad days, bad days don't go away, but you do learn how to manage them a whole lot better than you currently might be doing.

So right off the bat, the six components that make up a healthy relationship with your partner, your friends, your family, and most importantly yourself, is the ability to remain present, feeling clear about your values, a willingness to take committed action, ability to see yourself and others objectively ability to detach from specific outcomes and focus on the journey and process, and a willingness to feel any and all emotions that arise without judgment.

These are the six core building blocks of Unburden Your Relationship. Learning these components takes time, but if you're anything like me and you live for personal development, then you've probably read all of the self-development books, you've probably heard all the podcasts and followed all the Instagram accounts, maybe even mine (instagram.com/the.chronicillnessthearpist).

And so, you know, better than anyone that while the work is hard, it's incredibly rewarding. We all want to be better partners, better parents, better friends. And sometimes we also want better partners, better parents and better friends. So while this program can't promise that you'll change the people in your life, in fact, that's, I promise that's probably not going to happen. Um, that's impossible. We can't change others, but we can show up differently every day so that the people around you have no choice, but to start responding differently to you as well, what that looks like will depend on your unique situation. But, um, yeah, you know, how do we do this?

First of all, we learn and implement the six core components, and there are certain skills you need to be working on while you're in this program. And these skills will be the foundation upon which all of your new habits and behaviors hinge. And so we'll be taking a deep dive into which role you play in your family, because this is critical to understanding the system that you're working within. So while we're focusing on you at the beginning of the program, there's no doubt that the work we do will touch every person. You know, because again, when you start changing the ways in which you show up the people around, you have no choice, but to respond differently.

This is a good thing. Even if it doesn't feel good in the moment, sometimes, it is a good thing, because change is what we're looking here for here. So the roles and the duties that can show up in a family include being a friend, being a lover, being a financial supporter and emotional supporter, being a parent or a child or a sister or brother. We're not supposed to be all of these things for someone and our partners are not supposed to be all of these things for us, so that's something that we really go over a lot in this program. Who's the appropriate person to get certain needs met in my life. Defining these roles for yourself can be tricky. And this is just one part of what you'll learn in The Unburden Your Relationship program. Learning to awaken and tune into new sensations in your body; learning to pause more and react differently; getting to know your inner child; reparenting that child; showing up as the adult you're proud of are the main ways we teach relationship happiness in The Unburden Your Relationship program.

We want someone who really knows us, right? That's kind of the end goal. Like we just want to be seen and heard, but do we really know ourselves is the question. This program helps you not only learn who you are at the core better than you did before, but it also helps you clearly articulate who you are to the people around you. Equally important is getting better at accurately listening to the people around you.

So often we get caught up in our own mind's perception that we project our thoughts onto other people. And this program shows you how to compassionately manage those projections. When we feel hurt by the people in our lives, we often retaliate with punishment of some sort it's sometimes that punishment as a simple, as giving the silent treatment, sometimes it's much more like name calling and yelling and things of that nature.

You're going to learn about the four ways in which our relationships are often killed, and the four ways are resentment defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling. These are really popular concepts that were coined by Dr. John Gottman, and they're really foundational when it comes to learning how to be not only a better partner, but to show up better for yourself.

You'll learn the antidotes to these relationship killers, as well as how to bring playfulness back into your mind, body and soul. We incorporate how to listen to your body and how to be playful in each section. And we also talk a lot about being willing to walk away from what doesn't serve you. This doesn't mean that if something is not feeling good, You just let it go.

No, we, we talk a lot about working through issues and, um, resilience and, and learning how to stay in hardship when it's important and necessary. But if it's not important and necessary, then we learn how to let it go.

Being able to walk away from what doesn't serve you means you have to have a true inner knowing about what doesn't serve you. And it's hard to know what our needs are when we have a really strong inner critic, because that inner critic is constantly telling you that you don't need anything or your needs are wrong, and then we kind of have this self fulfilling prophecy and find ourselves surrounded by people that minimize our needs. What I want more than anything is for you to be able to say, this is what I need and stand confidently in that need, and sometimes we might overcompensate for that by kind of digging our heels into the sand and saying like, no, this is my need.

And I can't be flexible until I get it, and it has to be this way, and if it's not this way, then that means my needs. Aren't being met. That's not what you'll learn here in Unburden Your Relationship. Instead you'll be learning what it feels like in your body to genuinely trust yourself, and in turn teach others how to trust you too.

One of the biggest fears that shows up for clients when it comes to listening to their needs is that they're going to need too much, too much sleep, too much emotional connection, too much food, too much anything. We have a huge problem in our culture where we think that the enjoyable things in life are a luxury, and I'm here to tell you that they're not, I know it feels like. But truly they're a necessity. And without them, life feels really hard and boring and honestly, sometimes impossible. You are not too much. And when we've been restricting the things that we need from our lives for a long time, sometimes we do come out kind of strong when we start to first try to embrace them.

If you've dieted your whole life, and then you start learning how to eat intuitively there's a high chance that you'll start to binge-eat, and as you keep working through intuitive eating protocols, your body starts to feel safe around food again, and ironically, you don't even have the desire to binge anymore,

and that's exactly what's happening here. Emotional restriction works exactly the same way. When you start to learn how to express your emotions, you might have an increase in emotions before it levels out, but it will level out. This is a coaching program, not a therapy program. So it's important to, constantly be checking in with yourself and checking in with me, and if you do feel like depression is really getting the best of you, then we talk about that and we find you a therapist in your state. Therapists can only practice in the states in which they're licensed in. So it is very important that you know, that this is a coaching program and not a therapy program.

I take what I've learned from psychology, and from research and I have implemented it into a program, that's good for you if you are someone who knows that you can handle what life has thrown at you, but you could just use a little bit of help and kind of getting over these hurdles and these humps. Maybe you just, you haven't quite figured out how to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and that's what you're here for. You're just trying to figure out "okay, I know that I can have a great relationship. I know that my partner loves me and supports me, and I even know that there's a part of them or all of them that wants to support me. They want to learn how to be better and do better." And this program helps you teach your partner how to do that.

I want you to think about how you currently right now connect to people. How do you attempt to connect with people? In order to answer this question you may need to define what connection even looks like for you. When you leave an encounter with someone, do you leave feeling full of joy and lighthearted, or do you leave feeling drained?

Now, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of times where I leave encounters feeling drained and it's not because the relationship was bad or, you know, they needed to change anything. Sometimes we're just tired. And especially if you have a chronic illness, you know, that feeling all too well. But what we're trying to learn here is really how to get in tune with what we want when it comes to connection. A lot of times it's hard to identify what we want because we don't think we can get it, so our mind just literally blocks out that part of our brain that can give us the answer. And through some of the practices that you learn in Unburden Your Relationship, that's what we're kind of, that's exactly what we're doing. We are trying to unblock certain parts of your brain so it can tell you exactly what you know you need. No more guessing, no more trying to, you know, give other other people what they need and hope that that will make you happy.

You know, if you can just make everyone happy around you, then you will be happy. I know from personal experience that is just not true. Instead when we learn how to really get to the root of what makes us happy and what brings us joy, the people around us start to respond to us in a way that's like, they actually want to give that to us more.

And how great would it be to, to live amongst friends and partners and family members who all just want to make each other happy in a very healthy way? Not in a co-dependent kind of way, but in a way that's like, we all know how to take care of our own needs and therefore we can also help take care of others' needs.

I promise if this sounds like a utopia to you that can never exist, it can exist. I never ever thought this would have existed for me 10 years ago, I grew up in a family that loves each other very much, but does not know how to take care of their own needs, and so I grew up very much the same way, thinking that the only way I could be happy in a relationship is if I just give, give, give, make other people happy, and then I'll be okay.

And it doesn't work like that, so I spent a long time just struggling with wondering why my relationships never felt fulfilling. So again, this is what we learn in this program. We learn about the inner depths of what you want, and then we learn how to get those things.

Now, whenever we try to implement something new, we tend to visualize perfection. We visualize the end result and it's way too far away from our current reality to even think that it's possible to achieve it, or when we start trying to achieve it and we don't get there right away, we think we're never going to go.

So we have to give ourselves time to explore and observe rather than set some like outcome-based goal.

So for example, having a nighttime routine instead of committing to go to bed, At 9:00 PM every night and just, you know, it's like a hard and fast rule. Like I have to go to bed at 9:00 PM every night. The first step you would take here, if you really wanted to do that is to make the goal of going to bed at nine every night, if that's kind of where, where you are and that's what you want to do. But then for the next two weeks, we just observe, we kind of have in the back of our head, like "I'd like to go to bed at nine," but as the night gets closer and closer and you're realizing like, oh, you know, " it's, it's 8:30 and I still have to do X, Y, and Z," or "I'm not tired at all, there's no way that I can go to bed at nine." Then I want you to just kind of observe what happened. What was your day like what happened in your day was your day full of stress and you slept a lot that day or full of stress and you didn't sleep at all and maybe you're kind of still wired. Maybe you, um, drink too much caffeine and maybe it has nothing to do with caffeine.

Maybe your brain just doesn't shut off at night. Keep in mind that there's always more than just one thing at play here. So, you know, especially like when it comes to sleep, maybe you work with your doctor and get some testing done on your hormones and cortisol levels and things of that nature so that you have more information coming in when you're trying to accomplish these goals.

And it's not just like, "oh, I didn't go to bed at nine, so I guess I'm a failure. I can just, that's just never going to happen for me."

So along with doing some of that, that work with a medical professional, my job here is to help you stay open to observing. Can you observe what's happening without judgment? And without the message of like I failed or I succeeded. You know, if you're constantly in this, like I'm doing this right or wrong succeeding or failing... then you prevent yourself from being able to troubleshoot and that, that is the case. We want to be able to troubleshoot and to figure out, okay, you know, what is wrong? What can I change to make this more feasible? The problem is that many of us associate failing with pain. When we were kids and stakes often meant that we were reprimanded in some way, you know, you, you dropped a glass of milk on the ground and parents yelled at you, and you know, it was a mistake because as a kid, like you just don't have the dexterity that you might have as an adult. And hell, I've dropped a glass of milk as an adult, so it's not like that's even realistic to expect a tiny kids to just never make a mistake. But oftentimes we are repremanded pretty harshly or it may not even be harshly and may just be again, reprimanded, and as a kid, it doesn't make sense to you, but all you know is that you tried something and you didn't get it right, and then you were punished and we, we hold on to that. We don't realize it, you know, in our head, we don't have like the memories aren't quite there like that, but our bodies remember that. And instinctively, we always want to avoid pain, that's just an evolutionary development. And so we also tend to avoid trying new things. It's a mixture of like evolution and how our bodies want to avoid pain mixed with our early experiences as children. And what pain meant to us back then.

Part of this program is actually going to be learning how to choose easier and more effective options for getting your life to a place where you want to get it to, you know, we will be working on things like, uh, lifestyle habits and decisions, but not in the way that you might be used to. Many times when you are trying to figure out like how to sleep better, how to eat better, how to do these things, um, you know, it's like, okay, come up with a plan and I'm going to follow this plan. And that, that's great to a certain extent if it works for you. But a lot of times it doesn't, especially when you have a chronic illness and there's always something popping up and getting in your way. And the reason why this is lumped in here with a relationship course is because it all connects.

The way that we live our lives on a day-to-day basis is so intermingled with, with our relationships and how happy we are and how content we are, and it's really important that we go with what's easier to accomplish in our day to day, despite what you've probably been told your whole life about valuing hard work. And the reason why this is true, that it's better to work with what's easier to accomplish is because we actually have an innate desire to constantly improve.

You don't have to work insanely hard to improve a lot of us think that if we're not just pushing through and, and, and doing the hard thing that that means we're weak and we're lazy. And you know, we're not doing enough. And I'm here to tell you that truly doing less helps you do more over the long run.

If you accomplish the easy tasks, your body learns to do those things without much effort, and then your mind and body allow you to kind of move onto the next challenging thing, because it knows that you've built a foundation of ease underneath this.

It's a concept called scaffolding. We don't just throw a shoe at a kid at a toddler and say, "here! Tie your shoe." No, we sit with them and we let them watch us and we tie it for them. And then once we realized that they've kind of, they've mastered that a little bit, they've really, you know, they've watched us enough, then we say, "okay, here's this part of the lace, can you do it this way?"

And then we teach them little bunny ears and we help them do it like that. And we might even hold their hands a little bit. And then once we realized that they're kind of doing it on their own, we take our hands away, but we still watch them, right? So we're not just leaving. We watch them do it. And we're kind of helping them in that way so that they still feel connected to us, and they still feel like somebody's got their back. If they start to slip. And eventually that toddler is tying their own shoe. And it's because we didn't force them into something that was just way more than their body and their mind was capable of. So that's kind of what we're doing here. We're going back to the basics, which feels sometimes so hard as an adult, because it feels like we shouldn't be there, we should be way beyond this. But if you lived a whole life where you kind of were always pushing yourself, it's actually a lot harder to like, bring it back and try to, to do less. So again, that's what we're learning here. This is the foundation of Unburden Your Relationship. Can you do the small, but incredibly important things every single day. Can you learn how to connect to people when you're in pain rather than isolating?

Isolating is what we're used to ' cause that for most of us kept us safe growing up. If we isolated, it meant we didn't get in trouble. We didn't get reprimanded. We didn't get criticized.

So we isolate and sometimes that's okay. We all deserve a lone time and we deserve to not talk to anybody, not explain ourselves to anybody, none of that. But the goal is to be able to come back each week, each day. If, if that's where, if that's what you're feeling and to come back to connection,

This program teaches you how to be consistent with your actions, but in a highly flexible way. Consistency without flexibility is just rigidity. And if you've ever been around someone who's like super rigid and there's, you know, it has to be exactly in this box, in, and these lines and you cannot deviate.

And that works if you and the rigid person has the same rigid structure that you have in your, in your mind, it works. If you both want exactly the same thing, but if you have a rigid person and a non rigid person or two rigid people with different expectations and needs. That's a different story. And that's what most of us find ourselves in.

I think we find ourselves when you have a chronic illness, we tend to be pretty rigid with certain things in our lives, because that's, again, what keeps us safe. Sometimes that's our diet. Sometimes that's with our energy and what we will and won't do. That's okay. We're not going to take away the things that keep you safe, but we are going to find a way to implement those things in a way that helps you connect to other people instead of isolating from one another, especially in your partnerships and your romantic relationships at home.

Right. We need connection.

So I hope that you'll join me in The Unburdened Relationship program, because this is literally my entire life's work around learning how to find connection in really difficult times, because that's really when we need it the most, when we need connection, when we're hurting. But for so many different reasons, we tend to isolate when we're hurting. And that's what we want to change here. This program starts off with teaching you how to find some safety in your body through the lens of a concept called somatic experiencing, you may have read some books by the founder, Peter Levine waking the tiger freedom from pain. These are really great foundational books, but they can also be really hard to implement on your own, and so that's what, again, this program is, it's not just about me teaching you something.

You can go read all the books and you can go read all the blogs and you can, you can find answers. I'm sure you've been searching for answers, and that's probably how you landed on my page. My page isn't just about teaching you and then telling you to go off and do it on your own and then to come back next week and tell me how you did. No, we're going to be troubleshooting together. I'm going to be helping you tie that shoe in the beginning, right? I'm going to be showing you what to do, and then we're going to be working through that together in sessions and through conversations until you feel comfortable enough to go out and try it. And then once you try it again, I'm going to be right there with you, and as you're trying these new things, and you start to feel like you're floundering or feeling, or, or, you know, not getting it right. I'm there with. And eventually by the end of the program, things might still the hard, but they feel manageable and doable. And that's the key, not promising that life will just all of a sudden magically feel easy and effortless and wonderful.

But what I can promise is that when you feel capable of dealing with the challenges that you currently feel incapable of dealing with, your whole perspective starts to change in your whole world, opens up to you. So if you're ready, click the button below and sign up with me today. If you have questions, you can leave your questions in the message box below, or you can DM me on Instagram. I am available. Um, sometimes it takes me roughly 48 hours to respond, 'cause I do have an infant right now. So again, consistency with flexibility... that's what we're really learning here at the foundation of unburden your relationship.

I hope you'll join me.