Change Your Brain Every Day - How Do You Nurture Relationships With Ones Closest To You?

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

In the second episode of a two-part series on relationships, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen finish discussing their overview of the mnemonic “RELATING”, which gives powerful and effective shorthand advice for nurturing your relationships with those closest to you.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. So we're back with part two of the podcast on relationships. This is so much fun. So just to repeat these, so R is responsibility, E is empathy is empathy l is listening a is for appropriate assertiveness and one thing since you said does this have eternal value which is so important it's such a great question it's gonna matter and you know i love also is this gonna cause me short-term pain or long-term pain?

So if, yes, I have to deal with my son not doing well in school, that's short-term pain. It's going to cause unhappiness. But him dropping out is going to be long-term. Yeah, because there are things you are going to have to do. You don't let everything go, right? That's also not. We're talking about assertiveness. Right. Which is really important.

Sometimes creating boundaries is really important in a relationship. But is it short-term pain? And it could also be for short-term pain for long-term gain. Right. Right? It's like. I like that. Because boundaries are important too in relationships, right?

So sometimes that's painful to do and people are like, oh, you could take what I just said and go, oh, I'm going to let it go for the sake of peace. But that actually isn't the right thing to do all the time. Definitely not. The N in relating is notice what you like more than what you don't like because that's how you shape behavior is if you only notice what you don't like you're actually really good at that you're gonna get more of what you don't like you're very good at that and so but i had to work on it and it's the reason i collect peng penguins i got a whole bunch of them this Christmas from my patients. And the whole story, if you haven't read it, I have a book called The Most Important

Thing in Life I Learned from a Penguin, was how do they train animals? You don't train them by beating them or by criticizing them or being yelling at them you train them by noticing when they do the right things rather than noticing when they do the wrong things and i just heard the trainer for fat freddy died recently so fat freddy was the penguin in hawaii at sea life park who taught me about I went there with my son when he was seven and he was giving me a hard time and the penguin was more compliant than my son and I went to the trainer after the show and I went how did you get him to do all these really cool things and she said whenever he does what I ask him to do I notice him when he does it and you know I give him a hug and I give him a fish and I realized that even though my son didn't like fish especially that although Chloe likes raw fish that I wasn't noticing him when he did the right things and so he tended to

do the wrong the wrong things the g in relating this is new, you're going to like this. It used to be for groups, you know, hanging out with the right people. But I changed it to grace. Oh, I like that. And forgiveness. That's a really good one. And, you know, I did it because I was praying the Lord's Prayer. And it just came to me in the Lord's Prayer, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. So our salvation is dependent on our ability to give grace.

Well, our forgiveness is dependent on it. And forgive. Forgive us our our sins because this is how jesus taught us to pray and so as i was working on my new book and looking into the research on grace and forgiveness there it's great i mean the research is just so powerful on how it decreases anxiety, decreases depression, helps with sleep, helps decrease headaches. And there's a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He studied forgiveness for years. And I'll tell you a story in a second he had to use it for himself and he came up with what he called the reach model of forgiveness so the R in reach is recall the hurt but this time we call it differently without feeling victimized or holding a grudge. Try to actually see it from all sides.

Is empathize. Replace negative emotions with positive, other oriented emotions. So put yourself in the shoes of the other person. The movie, The Shack did a good job of that. So hard for me to watch. A is altruistic gift of forgiveness. So recall, empathize, altruistic gift of forgiveness.

Think about a time in the past when you wronged someone and that person forgave you. And notice how much freer you felt it's a gift c is commit to forgiveness uh and make a statement about that to someone else and h is hold on to forgiveness as opposed to hold on to the hold on to forgiveness to forgiveness. So in 1996, Dr. Worthington's research was put to the test, the worst test possible. His mother was murdered in a home invasion. Although the police believe they found the murderer, he was never prosecuted. Despite the awful tragedy, Dr. Worthington said, now he'd been working on this a while, so it takes. I had applied the forgiveness model many times, but never to such a big event. As it turned out,

I was able to forgive the young man quickly and not hold on to it because who hurts the most? You. So we did an entire podcast on forgiveness, and I highly recommend you, if you're struggling with this, that you watch that one on forgiveness. Because like you said, there's a lot of research on forgiveness. There's a doctor that deals with severe burns who actually studied forgiveness on his patients, and the ones who don't forgive actually don't recover. And so the ones who are able to forgive, he actually does forgiveness exercises. The ones who are able to forgive recover differently. Their immunity is stronger. He actually tests them.

It's really interesting. And it's because it hurts you when you don't forgive. So if you're not willing to forgive the other person, do it for yourself. And so it's really interesting. It's really hard sometimes, but it's worth working on. And so strongly recommend it. I mean, that movie movie the shack was really hard for me to watch but yeah that's my so and i love the interaction between you and claude i know

because you're a terrible person you just thought that was like justice or something oh i just thought it was i was so proud of her because she did all of the things we're talking about in this podcast. She's like not, sometimes I look at her, I'm like, where are you from? Like she is. She's an old soul. Yeah, she, yeah. So yeah, she looked at me because that's my one weakness, my biggest weakness. It would be if somebody hurt my child.

And I can't stand it when anybody hurts any child it's just something within me that just I have zero empathy for people who hurt children and I I could I can empathize with almost any other situation or I don't know about empathize with it but I can I can deal with it but but crimes, I just have a really hard time with. And so we were watching that movie and she looked at me and she said, I know that you would want to kill the person if someone hurt me. And she said, I'm just telling you right now, you can't. I'm like, take it back. Take it back right now. She goes, no, she goes, you can't because I wouldn't want you to. And she goes, that would just, she goes, it would ruin anything good that I like did when I was here.

And she said, it would just make me so sad if I were ever able to know about it. She goes, the only thing that would be meaningful to me is that you went on and were able to be happy and not hold on to that and not do something like that and not do something like that and make sense out of it. You were able to make sense out of it. I was so upset with her. I was like, it was bizarre. And I just had this huge smile on my face because that's love. The person who wants the person left behind to suffer because they miss them so much. That is the epitome of narcissism.

It's I'm so important that your life shouldn't be. Well, her feeling was my life wouldn't have made sense if you couldn't be happy. Yeah. Now, I'm so happy about that. So the summary is eight simple strategies to enhance all of your relationships. The first one is take responsibility. How can I respond in a positive, helpful way?

Two is practice empathy. Once a day, treat someone else as you would like to be treated in that situation. Three, in conversations, listen actively. Repeat back what you hear. Listen for the feelings behind the words. Then reflect back what the person is saying and in your mind what they're feeling. Check it out. See if it's right. Be assertive.ive say what you mean stick up for what you believe in a firm and kind way spend time with them i mean even just 20 minutes can make a huge positive difference one of the things i love is we often will have one of your pumpkin spice cappuccinos

in the morning and just sit and talk about and you're so cute because sometimes he almost you almost always call me during the day and you're like, did I tell you I love you this morning? And sometimes I'm like, no, you actually ran out of the house. We were really busy. I'm like, but you made me my cappuccino. Like that's love. That's telling you I love you.

Right. I is for inquire into the thoughts that make you suffer in a relationship. Write them down, ask them if they're true. N is notice what you like more than what you don't like. And G, give the altruistic gift of grace and forgiveness whenever you can. You're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way. Stay with us. Thank you for listening to The Brain Warrior's Way podcast.

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