The Holidays and Depth Psychology: More Joy & Less Stress

Are the holidays stressful, sad, joyous, exhausting, overstimulating, or a combination of all of these? 

In this video, I teach you how to apply four depth psychology concepts to have a more joyous holiday experience this year: 

(1) The four conversations happening between you and other people;

(2) Recognizing projection in yourself and others;

(3) Finding the complex behind the projection; and 

(4) Psychological type. 

To learn more, visit http://deborahlukovich.com/ to access free resources or book a holiday session with me. 

Deborah Lukovich, PhD

P.S. My memoir is available! Read views and purchase my crazy story here: https://www.amazon.com/When-Sex-Meets-God-Unraveling/dp/B0FY1WSSJZ

#holidays #holidaystress #jungianpsychology #depthpsychologycoach #projection #complexes #psychologicaltype 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to Dose of Depth Podcast. I'm your host, Deborah Lukovich, and I invite you to explore what's beneath the surface of all sorts of things, including your own life. Through conversation, stories, and education, you'll see what you couldn't see before, find new meaning in old events, and even discover a new sense of purpose out there in the world. Let's get started. Today I want to talk about the holidays. It's that time of year, and there's a lot of excitement and a lot of stress. And I want to teach you how to apply a depth psychology lens to your experience of the holidays. And no matter what it usually is, these thoughts, these concepts, this approach, this lens will help you get more out of the holidays, more of what you want, actually. So uh I'm Dr. Deborah Lukovich. I am a depth psychology coach, author of a couple of books, including my latest book, A Memoir, When Sex Meets God, and I'm the host of Dose of Depth, a podcast. And I love teaching, and I'm pretty obsessed about applying depth psychology to everything. I'd love to start with a question uh and get some engagement in the if you're watching this on YouTube or other platforms where you can share a comment. Uh, which of these scenarios describes you when it comes to the holidays? Or you dread it. And you know, you could dread it because there's sadness uh from a death around the holidays, and each time that time of year comes around the corner, it's just sad and there's melancholy. Or you dread it because it's just so stressful. Your family is stressful, the expectations are stressful, and you maybe don't even want to come, or you don't want to even go to your family for the holidays, but yet there's this guilt and you don't feel like you can just skip it one year. Or the other scenario is um, you know, you enjoy it overall, but certain family members get pleasure out of being belligerent or sarcastic or passive aggressive, or you know, your uncle always says that thing that he knows is going to trigger you. Or you're the kind of person that projects a lot onto the holidays. It's like a savior, like, ah, and your expectations are really high around maybe the experience you want to provide for your family, for your grandkids. And maybe it doesn't usually go that way because the expectations are about perfecting and um controlling the experience to make you feel better about yourself, or maybe it's just a lovely experience, but leaves you drained and overstimulated, and then you feel guilty that you didn't have as good of a time as you did, or or maybe it's just lovely overall. And even in that case, I'm going to teach you how you can deepen and enhance your experience of the holidays. So I have a couple of so first of all, you the question which scenario describes you? And uh here are some quick answers, and then I'm going to share some concepts with you about how to look at your experience of the holidays in a different way. So if the holidays are dreadful for you, shake it up, skip it one year, tell your mom you're not coming. And if you're afraid to do that, well, then maybe I can help you as a deaf psychology coach because you ought not to fear setting a boundary with energy of other people that deplete you. And uh another answer is um understand yourself better so that you can detach from the emotional experience that sweeps you up. And if you can do that, then you can see the truth of what's really happening, and it's never what you think it is. So then you can understand other people better and what is their deeper motivation of doing what they're doing. And uh, and so those are some quick answers, but how do you do that? So I'm going to teach you how to be a detective this year, how to be more of an observer of your experience of the holidays, and how to be an observer of the dynamics that are going on. And if you can slip into in spiritual talk, we talk about slipping into the role of the observer because we are not our thoughts and emotions. We're not even this body, we're an essence that is inhabiting this body. And so we have these things called thoughts and emotions. And when they're causing us distress, we confuse the truth. The truth is that we are not. Those are just things that we can take a look at, we can get some distance from. So slipping into the role of a detective, gathering intelligence is automatically gonna reduce your stress of being in that experience. And even if it's always a lovely experience, uh, you know, stepping back and observing more of the dynamic happening, um, you know, your small collective is a microcosm of larger collectives. So uh I'm gonna share four concepts to help you accomplish this. And the first concept would be that family is, like I said, is kind of a microcosm of the world. Even though we're part of the same family, we're all different. And it's interesting that we get along as well as we do, actually, when you think about it. So Carl Jung would say between two people that even between me and you watching this video, there are four conversations happening. And one of the conversations happening is between our minds, our conscious awareness. So I think I know what I'm communicating to you, and you are finding meaning and what I'm communicating to me, and maybe you think you know what I'm trying to communicate. Uh, and then the other conversations are my mind is speaking to your unconscious. Your unconscious is getting different things out of what I'm saying. And then the same thing when I'm with another person, uh their speaking to me is being absorbed by my unconscious and learning something different than what my conscious mind thinks I'm hearing. And then the most interesting conversation is happening between the unconscious of two people. It's like a playground in there. And um, sort of that sort of leads to another concept, a framework I developed called the three P's of relationships, and that there's a hidden purpose between why we're even having a conversation together, why we're together in the first place. And often the triggering, the emotional reaction is the point. It is to get you to explore something so that you can release the root of whatever is causing you distress. So that's the first thing is to realize that between you and each family member, you and your mother, you and your father, you and each sibling, there are four separate conversations going on. So when you put all of them together, all of you together in a room, woo, then you can understand like how that energy can feel very intense, even if it's happy energy. Okay, so concept number two is really important, and that is the concept of projection. So each of us looks at the world through our unique experience of being human. We can't help it, but what we can do is be aware. So, you know, for example, some people think that everybody sees something the same way, that something is self-evident, is obvious when that's only based on their subjective experience. So, truly, there's really nothing purely objective. There is only our subjective psychological experience of what the experience is. So, knowing that, then you can see how you get a bunch of people together who maybe grew up obviously in the same family, but they have different ways of experiencing the world. So many of us project a lot onto the holidays that we want it to be a certain experience for our children, for us, for our parents or grandparents or whatever. And that collides with other people's experience and other people's projections. So that's the first thing to recognize. And another concept that relates to that, so how do you how do you figure out, like, well, what am I projecting? And how do you become more aware? Because most of it's unconscious. So science even affirms that up to 90% of your experience is influenced by mysterious unconscious forces. So we're not aware of most of our deepest belief systems. And so, in order to become aware of what we're how why we're projecting certain things, we have to find the root of those patterns that we maybe haven't even identified, or maybe we have identified, yeah, whenever Uncle so-and-so says that, oh, this is my emotional reaction. And you're not really mad at what you think you're mad about. You're mad at something that is very old, and he just brings it to the surface. And it's being brought to the surface through your unconscious for you to find the lesson, to find the root so that you can expand your consciousness. So, complexes are another concept of Jungian psychology, and that's just a complex is a pattern. It's a parent pattern of reacting, a pattern of responding, a pattern for how we see the world. For example, do you see things through an optimistic lens or a pessimistic lens? Well, why? Why, why one over the other? Well, it's because way, way, way, way back when you were a child, there are certain things that you did that got a good result and a bad result. And so we always want to get a good result. So going back and finding the root, and we call this our our initial patterns and complexes, parental complexes, because our earliest patterns were developed in response to our earliest experiences with our major caregivers. So maybe they're not a parent, but they're a grandparent or you know, or or whatever. So we've got the concept that there's a lot of conversations happening that you're not aware of. Uh, the concept of projection, we're projecting, other people are projecting, and then the concept of complex, which is like, why do I project what I project? Why do I need Christmas to go the way I want it to go? Why do I feel so controlling about it? Why am I always acting, you know, why does Uncle So-and-so say something? Fine, like, yeah, I get it, it's annoying, but why do I get triggered by it? And then the fourth concept, uh, which you could get at more on your own without a depth psychology coach, is your psychological type. So uh Myers Briggs, you might have heard of, that's based on Carl Jung's. Uh, he's one of the founders of depth psychology, the psychology of the unconscious. He, through his work, his personal observations and all his work with thousands of patients, he developed this theory, this theory of psychological types. So it is not to put you in a box or label you or is just preferences that he noticed that certain people have. So there's a lot to this, but I'm going to give you kind of a reader's digest version. And then you can go to 16personalities.com to do a quick questionnaire and you'll get your four letters. I'm not interested in the rest of what they do on that site because now you're starting to be reductive in categorizing people, but the four letters are true to Carl Jung's theory. So the first letter is are you introverted or extroverted? So introverted doesn't mean you don't want to be around people, but introverted means that the external world and uh engaging with it depletes your energy and you are re-energized by going inside. And in order to go inside, it's kind of hard to do that in chaos. So often introverted people will, you know, after a busy day of team building activities, they'll want to go debrief with a glass of wine and maybe do some journaling about their experience. And an extroverted person, they'll go out and party after a day like that because they're energized by people. And actually, extroverted people can be vampires of introverted people's energy. So, you know, just knowing that will help you. So you might be able to observe as a detective over the holidays who's really energized and sort of feeds off of other people's energy and who's maybe gets overwhelmed. And like me, when I would go up to my in-laws and there were like 24 people there, you would see me reading a book in the other room, and nobody would really notice and they weren't mad at me, or I would go upstairs and take a nap. And then I'd come down and I'd engage and play puzzles or Jenga or whatever. But that's sort of how an introverted person. Now, if you've got a complex that prevents you from advocating for your needs, you're going to become very depleted and you may become irritable, and then you may emotionally react when somebody says something. So if you're an introvert, the holidays are not designed for introverts. So you might have to advocate, and you don't even have to be understood by people, but you may want to say, I'm going to take a walk because I need to re-energize so I can come back and enjoy everybody's company. So the second two letters, N or S, intuitive or sensing. So how does this um, you know, how does this relate to the holidays? Kind of relates to your experience of things. So for example, um, sensing people are very data-oriented and they're five senses. And intuitive people, intuitive people call on this inner knowing, this invisible knowing. And often intuitive people may have conflict with sensing people because the sensing people they don't get the mystery, they don't get faith, they don't get the invisible forces that impact their lives. And so it can be frustrating for an intuitive person to explain why they know something and why they sense something, and that can cause conflict and friction. The next letter, thinking versus feeling. Feeling isn't about being emotional in this case, it's about just you have an inner, you have a feeling, a gut feeling, an inner moral compass. You just know something's right or wrong. And other people, they need like a reasoned approach. And so again, when you're having those arguments with family members and the lawyer person who is using the mind isn't able to sort of like, dude, I mean, there's deeper meaning to that than just, you know, two plus two equals four. That's really what's happening there. So as you dig into your psychological type more, you'll learn that um you need to be able to be fluid between those two things. And then finally, this last one can help, you know, on help you understand uh your experience of the holidays, whether you're P or J. J for judger doesn't mean judgmental. It means you're sort of purpose-driven and agenda driven, and that, you know, if you're too much J, like I am, uh, you forget how to relax and you forget how to just do things without needing a reason why. And a P, a perceiver, is somebody who can like meander through life, can just like chill and they don't need to get anything out of reading a book, they just do it for pure pleasure. And somebody like me is like, okay, now I read this book, how do I apply that to my life? Integrate that concept to make my life better, self-improvement, whatever. So, you know, just by knowing your psychological type and understanding all the functions, you now can sort of observe the deeper thing that's happening that you don't have to be emotional about it. It's just this is the different way that people exist as being human in the world. Okay, so those are the concepts that I hope will be helpful. So my next question for you, just to have some more engagement, is like out of those four concepts, what pops out at you as something that resonates? That's something you could dig into a little deeper. Is it the yes, I'm an introvert and yes, I love the holidays, but I get irritable because it's too overstimulating for me. And now maybe you have a way to think about that and a way to design your experience of the holidays so that you can stay true to wanting to be with loved ones, but yet go, you know, feel feel that you can give yourself permission to go refuel every once in a while. And then you'll overall you'll have a better experience of the holidays. So, what insight did you gain or what's resonating with you so far? If you don't mind, leave a comment and let's get some engagement. Uh, learn more. So you can learn about all these concepts by going to DeborahLukovich.com. I have so many blog posts, I don't know, hundreds, I think, that take on these different concepts. I have one book called Your Soul Is Talking. Are you listening? And here I talk about how the different ways your unconscious is speaking to you so you can become more aware. Uh, I have my YouTube channel where I have instructional videos, and I have a podcast that's called Dose of Depth, where I also read my blog, my uh blog posts for people who like to listen instead of read. And I also interview really interesting people and a lot of youngins. So learn more and um get your psychological type, 16personalities.com. Journal, journal, journal, journal, journal. Journal is a way to automatically get distance from your experience so that you can see it objectively, well, as objectively as you can, and you can start to notice things and go, oh, that's what's happening there. It's not what I thought it was. Also, when it comes to the holidays, let's say you've got like difficult people and you want to be able to respond to them differently, use my version of Start with Heart, my communication tool. You can get that for free on the resources page of DeborahLukovich.com. Uh, also book a holiday session with me. Uh, book one or a pair of them, and we can discuss this, and I can definitely help you prepare for your holiday experience. So if there's one difficult family member, we can have some fun. Because what's happening when people are triggering you is they don't really know why they're doing it. They know they get pleasure out of it, but they don't know the deeper reason why. And it's really a dysfunctional reason. It's out of their own sense of insecurity. They're not powerful when they trigger you at all. Because if they were secure in themselves, they wouldn't need to bring you pain and distress. So I could teach you how to like put that back on them and really disrupt that pattern and have some fun. And I love doing that with my clients. So we can discuss any of this stuff, and I can just help you strategize for the holidays, whether, you know, to make it a more pleasant experience, a more evened-out experience, or if it's already lovely, you can go a little deeper into the experience. So again, share your thoughts about, you know, do you find this video helpful for you and how? And uh like and subscribe, and subscribe to my website, and please share with others that this could be helpful too. And yeah, and I think that's I think that's it. Until next time, stay tuned. I'm your host, Deborah Lukovich, and you are listening to Dose of Depth Podcast. To get updates on new episodes, my writing, and how I teach my clients to get to know that deeper part of themselves, go to DeborahLukovich.com. Oh, and if you're not ready for a coach, learn what my clients know in my book, Your Soul is Talking. Are you listening? Five steps to uncovering your hidden purpose. You can check it out on my website or get it on Amazon.