Thanksgiving is in a few days, and Christmas approach. While the vacation are generally rooted in love, family and togetherness, it can also be a difficult time, as differences of opinion can cause discord, especially after a crucial election season. However, with healthy communication, understanding and active listening, the most difficult conversations can be approached with dignity and respect. Brit Barron, motivational speaker, teacher, and storyteller, is here to help us approach these difficult conversations while holding on to our deepest beliefs without losing the relationships with those we love. In his recently published book, Are you still talking to grandma?

Barron draws readers into this tension between relationship and responsibility by highlighting how we manage relationships with people we like and people we disagree with. Sharing painful experiences from her own life, such as her parents’ divorce and being part of a religious community that sided with forces that dehumanize BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people, she highlights the challenges and hopes of these relationships, showing that the best research points to humility, self-awareness, openness to learning, and remembering that others can learn too.

We spoke to Barron about how to safely deal with feelings of disappointment and frustration with people we love but disagree with. Read the rest of our conversation below.

ESSENCE: So why did you create this book and what was your intention?

British Barron: I started working on this project in 2021, and one of the questions behind it was: what’s on the other side of cancel culture? I saw a world in which we were encouraged to exclude everyone who disagreed with us, and I didn’t think that was the best way to move forward together.

In what ways could we still love the problematic people in our lives while having boundaries?

The first thing we can do to help ourselves stay in a relationship is to reject binary thinking, that is, the idea that there are black and white outcomes. You may be entirely on one side of the line, and someone may ultimately be on the other, and that reminds us that more than one thing can be right at the same time. And if we can keep that for ourselves first, then we can keep it for the people around us. The second most important thing we can do is restore empathy, first with ourselves. If we can empathize with the different versions of ourselves that we have experienced, then we can be good at having empathy for the people around us.

When should we exclude family members? Or should we ever resort to this?

Yeah, so obviously, yes, there are times when we need to avoid contact. There are times when a level of disrespect or abuse or a toxic environment leads us to do this. And I hope people can find out. I have family members that I have made contact with. I have friends who have done this, and it’s hard to do something that we should approach with a lot of intention, but there is absolutely room for it.

When it comes to being a Black woman, we feel a certain level of guilt when we bring up difficult conversations with our family members; as we talked about recently, we feel like we have a heavy responsibility to keep the family together at all costs.

We feel this more than other people and other members of our families, and it reminds us that our work is for ourselves first. Therefore, our boundaries, our empathy, our kindness and everything we give must take precedence over ourselves. When we can empathize with other people, we realize that we may not be the ones to get them where they need to go. So even with people in my life that I don’t talk to anymore, I still hope that someone will come into their lives that they can hear about because I’ve recognized that it’s not me. I can relinquish this responsibility while continuing to assist in any release that may come their way.

And what frameworks do you offer in the book that can help us approach difficult conversations?

Rejecting binary thinking, empathizing and establishing healthy boundaries are essential and necessary, as is stimulating curiosity. Let’s say you don’t want to have these conversations. In this case, I think being on offense and not defense and trying to set boundaries in advance to say, “Hey, I’m excited to be with everyone, but I don’t have it for political conversations. .” And if things start to feel like this, apologizing can help.

We recently talked about feeling comfortable with confrontation or direct communication. Is this important for family vacations?

It is imperative. Our ability to communicate directly, to not be afraid of conflict and not to be afraid of these things, but to see them as tools that can help us get to where we are going is very useful. And I think as black women in particular, we sometimes have specific ideas about how we want to, don’t want, to stand out, or ideas about these types of conversations, or about other people’s perceptions of them. subject. Yet I’ve spent a lot of time trying to undo the reality that if something is difficult, it’s terrible. I don’t think that’s true anymore. The things I enjoy most in life come the hard way. They had a difficult moment, a difficult conversation, an inner conflict, whatever it was. And so sometimes when a conversation feels like I need to be direct, it feels difficult to communicate. I remind myself that this doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong.

How can we safely deal with feelings of disappointment and frustration with people we love but disagree with?

We should allow ourselves to hold more than one truth simultaneously. Many of us, especially Black women, are familiar with this topic in many ways. Most of us understand this when we think about our feelings about America, don’t we? We hate it here. I have endless reviews of this place, and there are also parts that I love, and my job is not to determine which one wins. This is so that they are both true. So when we look at our family members as we head into the holidays, we have people who we love, who have been there for us, who have memories, and who have picked us up from school or helped us get ready for the ball. We are deeply disappointed by the way they voted or the things they said, and our job is not for one of them to win; it’s about allowing those two things to be specific and then shaping how we engage during the holidays.