Wise Decisions

Chapter 10Transforming Your Family Story with Your Trained Inner Voice

Y.O.D.A. is a powerful tool in establishing a new 2.0 family narrative, whether change is merely a few tweaks to an otherwise healthy story or it breaks a seemingly intractable negative multigenerational cycle. By accessing our wise and trusted trained Inner Voice 2 to manage family dynamics in ways that promote mutual respect, heartfelt dialogue, understanding, and unconditional love, we can write and then live our way into the updated narratives we choose and deserve.

By introducing healthy new behaviors, mindsets, and traditions into the family milieu, we infuse a new and improved sense of togetherness, the joy and comfort of what it means to be a cohesive family. The goal: managing difficult decisions, arguments, differences of opinion, emotional flares, and other typically challenging family dynamics in a flexible, adaptive manner, rather than being entrenched in the black‐and‐white rigidity that characterizes families in which the next emotional eruption is one inadvertent comment or innocent overlook away.

Any way you slice it, parenting is hard work, and markedly more so for those whose childhoods were marked by unresponsive caregiving, emotional turbulence, lack of safety, or trauma. But here's the good news. Despite childhood adversity, as pointed out in previous chapters, our brains are dynamically rewiring each moment of every day, at all ages and stages across life. This means that even if your ...