The holidays are a time of celebration and family, but sometimes the spirit of Christmas can cast the reality of family or friend dysfunction in painfully sharp relief. In this episode John discusses the Easy Way Out of valued, long-standing relationships that have grown toxic or always were.
Other topics discussed:
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To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
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Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
The holidays are a time of celebration and family, but sometimes the spirit of Christmas can cast the reality of family or friend dysfunction in painfully sharp relief. In this episode John discusses the Easy Way Out of valued, long-standing relationships that have grown toxic or always were.
Other topics discussed:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
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John Oakes: [00:00:00] Well, hello. It's nice to be in your year holes again. It's been a little while, so why don't we start with an update. Gosh, I could tell you a whole story. A whole story of trials and tribulations and overcoming
the,
John Oakes: the triumph of the human spirit really is the story of the last three months. But mostly that would just be making excuses for the fact that I haven't been posting podcasts.
Now, I don't feel bad about that because I did what I did for a reason, and I think it had a good impact in that it caused people to re-listen to older podcast episodes. If I'm putting out podcast episodes every single week,
it almost disincentivizes people to. Go back and re-listen to older podcasts. And I think that these podcasts have
a lot of value. And I think based on the stats after the first week or two after being away from the podcast, listens and views obviously went down a ton, [00:01:00] but they stuck at a moderate level and have never gone down because even months later, people are still going and listening to old episodes.
So it was really cool to see people continually coming back and also telling me. A few people reached out and asked when the podcast was gonna be out again,
you, and said, Hey, I've gone back and listened to every episode multiple times. , I'm ready for some new, new.
so Fair enough. I,
I agree. It's time. I would say overall teaching is taking a bigger and bigger role in my work. I'm trying to reach more people in 2023, so that is going to mean teaching more in the form of courses and live trainings. I've started teaching in the Facebook group every Saturday at 9:00 AM Pacific. I'm gonna keep that up for the next few weeks and see if maybe these free videos [00:02:00] end up being part of a beginner sequence for the Facebook group or perhaps a.
A sort of mini course for people who are just looking for a, a primer in how to get started the right way, the smart way. So be sure to show up on Saturday morning if you can, for those live trainings because not only are you getting incredibly valuable information and perspective,
I'm also there to answer any questions you have about the material live.
In 2023. I am planning on expanding my ability to coach more people that came out a little bit redundantly. I am expanding coaching in 2023. Right now, I can only take on about three people a month.
And that's assuming that nobody stays on. And I've had enough clients now for long enough that those three spots a month are probably gonna be taken up. Two, if not [00:03:00] all three of them are gonna be taken up by existing clients. Because most clients sign up for six months at a time so that their spot basically comes open again in six months.
And I only have 18 spots total. That's my cap of what I think I can responsibly manage. More so just based on my energy,
not so much time.
So what's gonna happen here pretty soon, I'm not gonna kick out my existing clients who , these are my right or dies. I'm gonna stick by them as long as they want me to. But there just needs to be more opportunity to work with me. So just between you, me and the interwebs, I am tentatively planning the release of.
a hybrid, one-to-one group coaching program. Now, the term one-to-one group coaching sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. I've been [00:04:00] a part of one of these programs actually learning how to do them and it's very interesting. You can actually learn so much more by being present for other people, asking their questions and getting their issues taken care of. And obviously it's a safe place where everybody is respectful of one another cuz everybody there is going through the struggle. They're in it and they're invested in their freedom.
So these are not, these might start off as strangers, but my hope is that by bringing in more group aspects we can have more people involved in coaching and actually have more impact.
Because it was cool in, in the group calls that I'm a part of, I oftentimes don't even ask questions. I'll just sit there. Sometimes I'll just listen and I'll get so much out of it because someone asks a question and I'm like, oh, I didn't even think of that. That's a really good question. And then I get the answer to that and I didn't even have to come up with the question.
That's the benefit of group coaching. Somebody else asks the question [00:05:00] maybe they were ahead of me in the queue, and they asked their question and it's wow, I'm basically in that same place and they asked my question for me. Great. So both of us got the coach's help at that exact same time.
And then obviously people are gonna ask questions that. I'm not ready for personally, like that wouldn't have been my question this week. However, I'm like, yeah, I can see in the future how I would end up asking that question, and now I already have the answer when I get there. So it seems a little counterintuitive, but like everything I do , that seems to be the way forward.
So I've started experimenting with that I've started building the website infrastructure that would host that. I also, oh, other news is that I have a virtual assistant now, Cassandra. If you see Cassandra in the Facebook group, she has moderator status. She's the only other person other than me.
So if you see Cassandra posting in the Facebook group, it's most often a post that I helped write certainly have [00:06:00] signed off on unless she starts, getting in there and saying wildly anti-Semitic things. I don't think that you have to worry about whether or not Cassandra speaks with my proxy.
She does.
Oh, Cassandra and her virulent antisemitism. Just kidding. Cassandra's awesome. She's been a great help so far. And it's really cool having someone to do a lot of stuff for you when you are stretched thin. . It is amazing and she's a big part of the reason that I'm back here doing the podcast, to be perfectly honest with you.
So if you're happy to have me back, if you're happy to see me teaching in the Facebook group, if you're happy to start receiving emails again on the email list, all that stuff you can give Cassandra a big thank you for stepping in and,
and doing so with such a helpful attitude. She's really a gem and she's also in this process working through this stuff herself. So know that she is 100% one of us.
So I've started implementing [00:07:00] the group aspects. Right now I haven't changed the way I bring on clients. I just now have a client community where it's different from the Facebook group. It's not hosted on Facebook, it's hosted on a website.
So people who become coaching clients now have not only access to me, they have access to one another. And this is gonna be really fantastic. That's just the power of community and like-minded people coming together and sharing their struggles, sharing their wins, giving each other the support that they need.
And so it's just like you have this big family of people to well, family's kind of a loaded word as we get into the podcast topic. Let's say a team of people who are invested as you are in the same kind of journey and who are picking up all sorts of unique nuggets along the way. And I can attest, man, one coaching client compared to another can be a very different journey.
It's often a journey that runs through [00:08:00] the same themes and the same general progression, but the exact pathway is unique for every person. We'll see similarities between clients and that means that one person's journey is going to be relatable to other people, but also that they're gonna be picking up little gems along the way that other people didn't because they took their own journey.
So it's an ability for people to pool their resources and. And for everyone to become richer for doing so.
So yeah, it's great to be back on the podcast. I really do enjoy doing this. I've got a brand new shiny microphone, so hopefully my sound issues will be more or less ironed out. I think just the, my office is just echoy so that tin can sound probably isn't gonna stop unless I basically surround myself with like acoustic foam or blankets or something.
but my client who's like a studio [00:09:00] musician, says it sounds okay. So I guess I need to stop freaking out about it.
it's early December now and we're in knee deep in the holiday season and this is a hard time of year for a lot of people. And it has to do with nostalgia. It has to do with what Christmas means or what it's supposed to mean. I was talking with one client for whom Christmas holds special significance like it does for many of us, and we realized that for them, Christmas represented unconditional love.
And if you think about the origins of the holiday, That makes a lot of sense. And so we can have conflicted feelings about Christmas or the holidays in general. When we are gathering with our closest friends and relatives around the celebration of unconditional love, that can bring into sharp relief [00:10:00] some of the ways that we aren't feeling that unconditional love from these friends and family members who we are closest to.
Obviously holidays are hard for people who have lost loved ones and who really wish that they could still be there. And that's a separate issue from what I'm talking about today. It's something I am very compassionate toward. And it's a separate issue, but it runs into today's topic, which is.
What happens when you feel like being around friends or family is an active impediment to your growth and your healing?
Most people will say to themselves, right off the bat, we all, we know that the voice in your head says, well, you could, you could lose your parents, so you don't, you don't know how long you're gonna have them. So don't deny yourself a Christmas. So this is so much more important than that, right?
The holidays can magnify the importance and the significance of family, which weirdly disallows you [00:11:00] from establishing boundaries
or taking the space you need.
And kind of tries to make you feel guilty for even thinking of doing so in the first place. And so people get trapped. They feel trapped. They feel forced to interact with toxic relationships In a season that's all about unconditional love, but that leaves them routinely feeling hollow and far less than unconditionally loved, maybe not loved at all.
Christmas, for a lot of people, it's a religious holiday. And in the Christian tradition, you're told to honor thy mother and honor thy father. And this idea has a lot of merit. be good to your parents. They took care of you, take care of them. Your parents are older and wiser than you, right?
So honored I parents has a connotation of, hey, if you're smart you'll listen up. They've had some hard one wisdom for you. And now that I have kids, I [00:12:00] definitely see myself being like, why won't you let me help you? Why do you fight common sense so hard, . So on a foundational level, that notion makes a lot of sense.
However, because it's a, one of those big 10, top 10 commandments. It can be used as a , it can be used as a religious leverage point, a, a crowbar, certain parents can use to impose toxic, selfish, neglectful, and outright abusive
things on their children. And when their children try to push back and establish boundaries and say, no thank you. In fact, I dislike this so much, I'm going to step away. The parent can pull out the Bible and be like, [00:13:00] God says you have to do what I say, which, Is a, as old as human beings have imagined the divine, some are like over here, communing, relating in the deepest flow of spirituality and someone else's scratching their head going, how can I make this work for me
How can I use this to advance my interests? And this is stretches across every religion and belief system.
So there's this incredibly deep-seated, baked in notion that
boundaries and family aren't a. And they absolutely are. Every relationship in your life has a boundary. Whether you want to admit to it or not,
and being ignorant of something and something not existing are two very different things. Being neglectful of something and pretending that it doesn't exist are two very different things.
Boundaries exist and if you nurture them, they will nurture you.[00:14:00]
Pay attention to your boundaries, and your boundaries will protect you. They will keep people from WA stepping on your lawn.
Children aren't allowed to have boundaries, but adults are,
right. Children aren't allowed to say, I get to make all the decisions for myself. No, you're not old enough. Your brain isn't fully formed. You can decide what color. Shirt to wear to school. That's not a problem. We'll go ahead and hand it over that. We'll hand over the keys to that responsibility, right?
You slowly let your child earn by proving that they're ready, let them earn autonomy.
But if you, as a parent never hand your child the autonomy to de decide for themselves whether they want to be around you, then you have not, in my opinion, fully parented that child. You have not created an autonomous being,
and certain parents know that, Hey, I can continue to get what I need out of [00:15:00] this relationship as this person moves into adulthood. I can enjoy the benefits of having an adult child.
with far less responsibility because they're an adult. And yet working to some way
de-legitimize their autonomy, their independence, their ability to decide for themselves where the boundaries are. So what does this look like in practice and why is it a bad thing? Well, let's say that you show up for a Christmas celebration and your mom starts a fight with your sister and it doesn't need to happen, and people can say, Hey mom, why are you doing?
This does not need to happen. We don't need to be talking about this topic at Christmas. You could do this in private
and you say, you know what? If you're going to act this way during the holidays, I don't want to be around. And that parent [00:16:00] can cycle through a number of tactics to try and force you to stay around.
First. They'll tell you that you're making too big of a deal out of it, or that they didn't actually do the thing that they. Or they'll try to de-legitimize your way of seeing it in some way. Well, you just don't understand how you know what your sister did. You just don't understand. De-legitimizing your point of view so that you will stop criticizing them. And then if you maintain your stance that, no, here's what you did and here's why it sucks, then they start to ratchet up. And for every parent, or even, or if it's a sibling who does this to you or a friend, everybody's gonna have a different sequence.
But generally it moves into some kind of appeal to emotion. After that, once they've tried to gaslight you and just question reality, they might start [00:17:00] crying. Talking about how hard. Their life is basically making an appeal to pity pity me so that you change the context around what's happening so that you don't see it in the context of, I'm out of line and I need to change my behavior, that you see it as I'm a victim to this, that, and the other thing.
And it has to be this way.
And then if you don't fall for the pity, they might explain to you why it had to be this way. Logically, they might make an appeal to logic. Listen, if I don't do this, then this bad thing happens and the logic might be very fuzzy. If you point that out, then the guilt can start.
How dare you? Who are you to talk to me like this? How do you don't? You don't understand how hard I have it. Which I guess would again be an appeal to pity.
I work so hard for this family. No one appreciates.
That whole song and dance, and then you get red herrings. [00:18:00] What about the time you didn't take the trash out three weeks ago? It's an ad hominem attack, basically trying to cut down your credibility your place to criticize them again. Once you hold firm in your criticism,
they're cycling through every rhetorical technique in the book, every logical fallacy, it's very similar in how
totalitarian regimes use propaganda.
It is in a form brainwashing
and to me brainwashing is the use of intimidation, or force.
In order to change people's thinking.
Washing is such a gentle word. There's definitely some scrubbing involved. It's brain scrubbing at the very least.
A lot of times it's brain sandblasting.
and that's really where this eventually goes. The levels are different for every person. Exactly what order they can move through these things. But eventually if you weather the storm,
what [00:19:00] this type of person will.
Is level up into an outright attack. We're moving into violence at this point, whether it's spoken or physical or what have you.
This is where the real malignant narcissism kicks in. Being a sociopath or having antisocial personality disorder is not a level above or below narcissism. It's a comorbidity. It's a. It's another pathology that can exist side by side with narcissistic personality disorder.
So if you're dealing with a narcissist who has that antisocial aspect to their personality this is where this is where the incredibly violent expression of their desire to control others and to not conform, to criticism, to refuse to apologize, to refuse any social
critique. [00:20:00] or
what have you.
Basically, this kind of person will break you down until you are just a pile of goo. Until you quit. Until you quit. And as a kid, maybe you quit by running to your room, slamming the door. Maybe you ran away to a friend's house. Maybe you snuck your parents' favorite snacks. And you didn't realize that you were doing it as a form of retribution and that the reason you like Oreos is often about hate, not love
And this is why emotional eating can be heavily tied to toxic relationships that began in childhood. And that's where food can start to take on a [00:21:00] whole different meaning and layers of symbolism and ritual and can become a substance of abuse
because kids don't have access to black tar heroin, but they do have access to the.
That's a topic for another day
in childhood. Whenever the young child who's being parented by this sort of person,
whenever their psychological development runs up against the wishes, or the bugaboos or the annoyance of the toxic parent,
the toxic parent represses that development. They don't just repress a child's behavior, they repress their development. If a child is behaving in such a way, say asking questions, right? Why can't I do this? You let so-and-so do that, right? The child's brain is trying to establish fairness. [00:22:00] If they don't learn how to say, hold on, you're treating this person this way, but you're treating me in the exact same context differently.
This isn't right. We need tores. This, that is how a person learns later in life to be assertive and to make sure that they're being treated fairly. That's very important. If a parent gets mad at the child for pointing out that they're treating one child unfairly, and they repress that question and they punish it, they're also punishing that aspect of the child's psychological development.
Now, children are resilient, so if you did this one time as a parent, like I don't think you've scarred your child for life, but over time, if this is consistently done, Then that child's brain will not develop properly. Imagine a tree ring, right? Trees grow rings every single year.
Well, what if there's an immovable object [00:23:00] on one side of the tree, and every year that the ring grows, it grows in a very diminished fashion, if at all, right up against that hard place, the rest of the tree grows, rings, and it's every other aspect of life. The maturity is there but in one aspect or another, it could be.
Not there at all, or it could be missing in certain quadrants of life. People listening to this podcast often come to me through TikTok, where I mostly talk about weight issues. So this would be that quadrant of your life around food, where, hey, you can manage your finances, you can have positive relationships, but when it's just you alone that's when you get hurtful and the person you hurt is you, and the way you choose to do it is with food.
Again, there's a lot of interesting characteristics of that kind of person. It's interesting to note that they're hurting themselves, they're finding a way to be abusive, but that doesn't hurt anybody but them.
[00:24:00] Basically, the abuse of the parent is going to be expressed. Via the child. If you allow a child to be a child and do childish things and ask kid type questions and do the annoying things kids do as they push up against you in order to form their own identity and consciousness yeah, they're gonna start wearing, they're gonna wanna wear makeup and one's gonna become a goth.
And I already know which one too. It's pretty obvious. And they're gonna do stuff that makes you scratch your head, but the more you fight it, the more they're gonna have to rebel in order to express their individuality. Teenagers do not need to rebel. Teenagers need to express their individuality. If you repress their expression, they need to rebel.
There's nothing about the. A well-developed child that is [00:25:00] inherently rebellious, absent of oppression.
You can't rebel against a system that is caring for you, meeting your needs and allowing you the space to be yourself. There's not a whole lot to push against.
And to be fair, sometimes kids will make up stuff to push against to give themselves something to rebel against. It's fairly, I guess that side of it is natural.
We've all seen the Caucasian male teenager, , driving down the street in his parents' Escalade blasting, hardcore rap written by people who grew up in a very different context because he wants to identify with struggle, right?
We all need something to push up against. So that's why you'll get suburban white kids really embracing that life and really looking up to those sorts of entertainers because of the lifestyle and the struggle they represent. [00:26:00] And there's nothing wrong with that, but it just shows that we will seek out struggle and we will attach ourselves to struggle no matter what.
And to be fair.
This is why you ever you ever around someone and they start talking about how hard they had it growing up. And like every bone in your body wants to, it wants to be like, oh, you had a hard, well, let me at least, let me at least put my cards on the table.
Not that we wear these things as a merit badge but we do definitely
Well, maybe we do wear 'em as merit badges. Every time, back in the old days, more than eight years ago every presidential candidate had to prove that they were the son of a turd miner, right? I forget what show that they were making fun of that. It's who's whose dad had the worst job.
And that's supposed to like, lend you more. If you can prove that you came from less, then it makes your accomplishments seem that much more significant and impressive.
So let's bring this back around. Let's say Cindy is 46 years old. [00:27:00] She's eating herself to death and she doesn't know why. She knows she doesn't want to do it, but she also is terrified of not doing it. She feels stuck in a prison of her own design. She doesn't remember when it was built, cuz life has always of been this way, but she doesn't feel like it's really expressive of her or her true identity.
But when she asks herself, well, what is my identity? She's I don't know. So she sticks with the prison because, hey, if it's the prison or the void, any sensible person would pick prison. And so Cindy goes to be around her family at Christmas time, and she's being belittled, she's being emotionally dumped on.
She's having to feel gossip and drama that it just doesn't interest her. She's being included in other people's drama and she doesn't want to be. Family members are criticizing one another to her as if they want her to do something [00:28:00] about it or misery loves company, or they want her to bandwagon and join them with them and be like yeah, that person is the problem.
You're right, they're the problem. Basically fishing for codependent, agreement with them in the Game of Thrones, like struggle inside your household.
And Cindy gets this feeling of, I don't want to be here. This isn't for. I don't feel good when I leave here. I like, I look forward to Christmas every year, and then I dread being around my family. And then by the time Christmas is done, I'm like, thank God. And you tell yourself that you love Christmas because you do.
You do love Christmas. You love what it represents. You love the decorations, the songs, but the family that exists at the center of this celebration just does not vibe with the reason for the season, right? And when you're around people who make you [00:29:00] feel lonely, that's a pain like no other.
And when you're celebrating a holiday of unconditional love in a context of highly conditional love,
In the context of neglectful love, abusive love, all of which are not love,
it becomes that much more clear that it's not unconditional love. Families being upheld as so important, and yet all the qualities that we're celebrating
at Christmas time are so different from how people are behaving.
It can be very hard to stomach and there's no time like the holidays for pointing out the difference between your imagined family and the reality of your family between the way you imagine your parents love you. between the bonds [00:30:00] you imagine and like to believe you have with your siblings the stories you tell yourself about what you're allowed to feel versus who those people really are, how they really treat you, what your relationship is really based on how it's a one-sided giver taker relationship or a co-dependent relationship that you don't want to be dependent on anymore.
That there's a different story to the one in your head and it's called reality,
and you know in your heart that you don't want to be a part of it anymore,
but you can't even fully digest the. Have the thought of stepping away because, well, in this season, above all, we value family. So the ostensible reason for the holiday keeps you [00:31:00] stuck in relationships that do not honor the holiday or what the holiday's about for you.
There's a lot of reasons to be depressed and feel icky around Christmas. This is a big one. This is a big one. and the one thing that our society does not allow for is saying, no thanks. I'm gonna pass. I'm gonna pass on this one. I'm just gonna take this year off.
I'm not gonna show up and I'm not gonna show up until a year where I feel like it.
You're not allowed to do that. In our culture, it is seen as a betrayal. Who would not honor their parents, who wouldn't go to Christmas dinner?
I can think of one person who maybe shouldn't, and that's someone who has no idea who they are and is on a one-way train.
[00:32:00] Physical complications. If they don't have them already, who's lost in a prison of worthlessness and helplessness is lost to compulsive eating or smoking or drinking, or any other working whate, whatever the compulsion is that's taking up the most weight in their mind. This person who doesn't know how to trust themselves, because at every turn their sense of self is being eroded because it somehow offended
the selfishness of the toxic person.
They don't know how to be motivated because they don't know what they want. They've never been allowed to want the things they want. So when motivation erupts up inside of them, they've already squashed it out before they even see it with their cognitive. , they think they have no motivation. They're not seeing it actively getting stomped out.
Their inner world has not been allowed to flourish. They have in so many ways, not been allowed [00:33:00] to grow up into fully formed functional human beings. And yet they're walking around in adult bodies with adult responsibilities, oftentimes with children of their own, putting up with behavior from other people that they know that they couldn't sleep a wink ever again in their life if they treated their own children that way.
And we have people showing up this holiday season to just get another buffet style helping of this incredibly one-sided toxic arrangement
when people can step away sometimes for good, sometimes. just at certain times of year or during celebrations where there's gonna be a certain cluster of people, maybe you can be around your dad, but you can't be around your dad and your brother because it's just a bad combination, one or the other, right?
Whatever it is [00:34:00] for you, whatever boundary you need
to be able to flourish, to be able to express more of who you are,
you deserve to take that. You deserve to have that boundary and make it work for you. If there's a relationship that's constantly keeping you at a disadvantage, you deserve to redraw the boundaries of that relationship to put you at an advantage.
. For a lot of people, the ability to walk away requires an increase in their autonomy, an increase in their ability to see the truth, their truth, and no one else's to trust. and to act accordingly in their best interests. That is one way of understanding what autonomy is.
So if you're at that point where you're even strongly considering drawing these boundaries, realize that, that is the result of being in this process for some time. And even if you just notice that, wow, this [00:35:00] isn't new for me, I've actually, it's taken me work to get to the point where I would even think about thinking about drawing this kind of boundary or removing this person from my life or this situation for this amount of time.
Maybe you need time away to develop the autonomy to, to raise that child consciousness through growth and new experiences and losing some weight, and, being better with your finances and being more assertive in your romantic relationship or whatever it is for you. That over time, that childhood consciousness could join you more in the present moment, leaving you less susceptible to anxiety, depression, lack of motivation, compulsive behavior, to the point where you actually feel like a more develop.
Whole human being. And it's not harmful for you to be around people who attempt to be toxic [00:36:00] with you. Because if they go there, you can be like, all right, we're not doing this. I'm out. If you're gonna be this way, I'm done. And there's no amount of screaming or whatever. Like you've seen the tricks you've seen behind the curtain, you've seen the , you've seen the wizard, right?
You're not gonna fall for it anymore. Why? Because you have autonomy. Abusers can only abuse you if they can fool you, if they can get you cornered, and if you never let them back you into a corner, they can't do anything to you. Now, for some people that they're never gonna get there because the wounds are so deep, so psychologically scarring that there is no amount of autonomy that's gonna fully take away the sting.
Of what an abuser's able to do to them. That is not a character flaw on your part that has everything to do with the sustained [00:37:00] onslaught you've experienced from this person or these people, or this group, or this institution, right? This could be a church. This could be a job. This could be a boss.
This could be any number of things. This could be a partner, this could be a coworker, right? This type of relationship, man, if you can take it back, if you can deal with mom, you can definitely deal with your coworker. You can definitely deal with your boss. In fact, a lot of your problems with your boss, hello, right?
A lot of your problems with your partner, they stem from this original inability to negotiate your own growth around what your parents would allow. Or what certain authority figures, religious figures, teachers, what they would allow, the things that they punished in. You are oftentimes the things that we still punish ourselves for the areas of life where we're too afraid to go because [00:38:00] just for the fear that we might fail and get that punishment.
This has far reaching implications for mental health and growth and the development of freedom. But you're never gonna be free until you believe that you're a good person. Because when you realize that you're a good person who wants good things and values connection, and then you can also still admit that I don't want to be around this person.
Maybe I don't even fully know why. And that's all you need to know. If you're a good person and you want good things and you need some time away, Then it's good to have time away and taking off one Christmas does not mean taking them all off. It doesn't mean that you've abandoned anyone. You can't abandon someone who is responsible for you to begin with.
But
If you need to step away at one Christmas, one Thanksgiving and it does end up needing to be all of them, then you'll find out. And in some ways, the way those [00:39:00] people react will tell you, some people they realize, wait a second, I'm 70 years old and my adult child is acting real weird.
I'm not used to this, but I value the relationship enough to. Maybe be real with myself that I could make some changes. They say it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks. However we know that this is l less true than we think. People at older ages can change the way they think. The brain remains remarkably plastic and changeable at all ages.
In fact, in some ways, the way to keep your brain healthy into old age is to con continue to challenge it.
So we're not trying to emotionally blackmail into any, anybody into changing because that's gonna be a waste of your energy. And that's not energetically where you want to come from. You just want to come from the point of view of I don't control other people, but I do control where I put.
I don't decide who's gonna start slinging arrows but I [00:40:00] can decide to not show up at the shooting range and stand right in front of the target with a blindfold and a cigarette in my mouth. someone's hooking knives at the wall. No thanks. I'm just not gonna do that. I'm not gonna play that game this year.
So if you are listening to this and this doesn't apply to you, congratulations . I'm very happy for you and I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons. But if you do have some relationships in your life that this feels. Similar enough too. I hope that this encourages you, that you're not alone.
You're not the only person. And when you get that horribly guilty feeling for doing what needs to be done to take care of yourself, realize that you're feeling guilty for taking care of yourself, because that's one thing that's never been allowed. [00:41:00] And if you feel guilty for taking care of yourself, that does not speak kindly to the influence that whatever person or people or institution we're talking about that does not reflect well on them.
And that yes, they've had hard times. Yes, the yes you can explain away their struggle, right? You can explain why they are the way they are, but if deep down, it doesn't matter how hard you've. Would you turn around and treat anybody else the way they're treating you? If the answer is no, then you have every right to step away and you can silence your phone.
You don't have to listen to it. You don't have to listen to the manipulation tactics. You don't have to engage. You can just walk away. This podcast is called The Easy Way Out.
There's a famous Paul Simon song called 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. He's basically saying, listen, there's a bunch of ways to do this, but if you're in a bad [00:42:00] relationship, just get yourself free that sometimes the easiest way out is the front door and not looking.
It's kinda some heavy stuff, but hey, I guess that's what's been brewing . It's a heavy season for a lot of us and yeah, I just hope that despite kind of the heaviness of the topic, I hope that this was helpful and I hope that this puts a lightness in your spirit cuz that is ultimately the goal. We are pursuing freedom and we are pursuing growth, and I wanna see your wings stretch out as big and wide as they can in 2023 and beyond.
And if you think I can help you do that in a one-to-one coaching capacity, let me know. We can do a free consultation. I can tell you about coaching, can tell you all about it. And you can decide if that excites you and that's part of your way forward. And if it's not, that's totally fine, but I would advise that you do that quickly because if you wait till the beginning of the [00:43:00] year yeah, that's, we're gonna get inundated.
So the options at that point are gonna be very slim and you might end up waiting far into the year or until, I launched the other sort of hybrid group program. Either way. If you're ready to make changes now, then you know, let's get you started now.
Like I said, we have the client community.
We're trying to improve the coaching experience and give it more and more value all the time.
But if coaching isn't, for you I hope you'll continue to take advantage of my free resources. I'd love it if you showed up live Saturday morning if you can. And as I'm doing these Facebook trainings, , if you have specific problems that you would like help with, you can always email or sign, make a suggestion in the Facebook group for Hey, does anybody else have this problem?
Because if people do, then I can put that on my radar as maybe the topic for a course, mini course, short book, or, if it's something I can handle in [00:44:00] an even shorter format. Something like a free, podcast episode or YouTube video or TikTok series, what have you.
If you are on TikTok, I'm making a push getting back on there. So if you see my TikTok s you know, run across your for you page, I'd appreciate it if you put your phone down and let that run repeatedly. , I'm just kidding, but it'd be really nice if you could make a comment say hi in the comments, say thanks for the message.
Like it save it, share it. Like this is really gonna help me get TikTok up off the ground again. And hopefully n never really let it die down again. So yeah, I think that's all for now. I'm not gonna try to fit everything into this episode because, hey, guess what? I have more to say.
Let's just do another episode, I don't know if I'm gonna continue with a weekly schedule, but I think I am gonna do these weekly for the foreseeable future. So you should be hearing from me in about a week.
If you ever have a question that you'd specifically like to write into the podcast, you can write [00:45:00] me@johnoaksweightloss.com. That's O A K E S weightloss.com.
And I'd be honored if you would share the podcast on your social media. Tell friends about it. I can tell you that my highest episode was like 300 and some downloads, which is really respectable for our brand new podcast. But let's see if we can start hitting 500 an episode, that would be really cool.
And I'll let you know as we do because, I think people are pretty invested in this podcast and if they're invested in the message here, they're gonna be invested in helping other people and helping me expand the reach of this thing. So yeah, let's see if we can get up to 500 downloads in an episode.
That'd be really cool. Thank you for listening. I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you got a lot outta this. If you did, please tell me cuz I don't know otherwise. And if you're on TikTok, you can make a TikTok and tag me in it and tell everybody else at the same time. Same thing if you're on Instagram or YouTube, Facebook, whatever.
Thank you very much and we'll talk to you again [00:46:00] soon.