The holidays are upon us! Time for turkey, presents, and LOTS of time with your family. The counseling and coaching sessions I'm having with my Denver clients recently have focused on how to handle "family time." 

The truth is that everyone wants to have a happy holiday with their family. It's also true that many people look forward to time with their parents with a mixture of excitement... and apprehension. Particularly during the holidays, with all the forced together-time, it's easy for tensions to flare and wreck a nice day pretty fast.

So today I'm re-issuing the "How to Deal With Difficult Parents" edition of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast, in order to remind you of the mindset to cultivate in order to genuinely appreciate your parents for who they are, and have a good time together.

I hope these ideas help you have a happy holiday. And Happy Thanksgiving! xo, Lisa

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Do your parents make you crazy? You're not alone! Even as adults, our parents can have a unique ability to trigger familiar old frustrations, hurts and resentments. Or maybe they're just annoying. Maybe, as in my own case, you're still a little upset with your mother for not being Hillary Clinton.

On this episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast I talk about how to deal with your parents, as an adult. Listen, and learn why you get so triggered by your parents, and the steps to create a healthy, peaceful and reality-based relationship with the parents you have.

We'll talk about the stages that we all move through on the path of "individuation" including disillusionment, distance, healing / growing, and reclaiming. You'll learn how to shift from being a child in relation to your parents, to an adult. Finally, you'll learn how to appreciate your parents for who they are, forgive past mistakes, set healthy boundaries, and start actually enjoying your relationship with them. Listen now....

"Follow your feelings" is the punchline of countless self-help books, and the focus of many therapy sessions. We can spend years in therapy or counseling learning how to respect and obey our emotional guidance system, which will often lead you in the right direction. But the truth is that not all feelings are the same. Sometimes, listening to your emotions will absolutely wreck your life. How do you tell the difference between healthy and unhealthy feelings?

Healthy emotions are like your sense of smell. They provide you with information about the world, about yourselves, and other peoeple. Your feelings help you make decisions, and know when to move closer to something (or protect yourself). 

At the same time, we're all vulnerable to unhealthy feelings: Feelings that are rooted in depression, anxiety, low self esteem, trauma or impulsivity. And if we listen to those feelings we will almost invariably experience negative consequences. 

But the big problem is that our feelings always feel true, no matter if they are "healthy" or "unhealthy." It's therefore very difficult to differentiate between feelings that we should respect and obey, or feelings that we should over-ride. 

On today's episode of The Love, Happiness and Success Podcast we're talking all about feelings - and how you can determine which ones to listen to and which ones to let go of. 

It is 1:19am. You have to be up and at ‘em at 5:30am. I don’t have to remind you of this. I’m sure you are very, very well aware that you are awake, as the minutes drip by.  As a matter of fact, I’m sure it’s all you can think about.

And this episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast is for you, my dear insomniac.

Sleep. It’s so important. It is quite literally a foundational building block for a healthy and happy life. And yet when we need it most is when it is most rebellious and oppositional. When we're lying awake at night we're like anxious parents of teenagers waiting up in a dark living room, thinking "Where the hell is Sleep? It needs to get it's butt home so we can both get some rest."

I don’t know exactly where your Sleep has run off to. It might be careening around with a carload friends playing mailbox baseball in the middle of the night, or hanging out in someone’s smokey rec room listening to ancient Black Sabbath records in the dark, but figuring out where it’s gone is not why we’re here today.

What we're here to talk about how to create the ideal conditions in both your body and mind to make it want to come back home again. And turn out the lights. And carry you both into dreamland. Listen now, to this episode of The Love, Happiness and Success Podcast -- and get some rest.