Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Relationships
Nov 13, 2025
Hi, I'm Julie Hawkes. Welcome to The Laws of Peace, where you will learn how to understand and apply God's laws in simple ways so you can take small steps to create big changes and miracles and become the person you are always meant to be.
The answers are in the scriptures. Let me show you how to find them. Today's episode is called Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Relationships.
And I'm going to warn you right up front, this one is going to be controversial. You're going to want to throw tomatoes at my head. That's okay.
And before we begin, I want to bring something up really important. The concepts that we are discussing today do not apply to abusive relationships. In those instances, other action and solutions are required.
Today, I am talking about regular, everyday relationships that sometimes suck. I want to start with telling you a little bit about me and my husband.
We have been married for 33 years, and I am the kind of a person who is a little bit anxiously attached. I sometimes can be hypervigilant. I worry.
I make things up in my head. And for years, every time my husband was a little bit grumpy, I can't believe I'm confessing this, every time my husband was a little bit grumpy, then I would think there must be something wrong with me.
I would think to myself, oh, he's mad at me. Oh, I've done something wrong. And I would start to get really scared and really nervous.
And none of it was true. It could have been that he was just having a bad day. It could have been a lot of things.
But that's where I was. About a year ago, we had an experience where we were driving along in the car. We were out running errands, and all of a sudden he snapped at me.
I can't even remember what he said, but he was really grumpy and he snapped. And my first thought was, I remember just looking at him and thinking for a second, and I looked at him and I thought to myself, you must be having a bad day.
And then that's the last thing I thought about it. I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything.
I just thought, he's having a bad day. And then I didn't give it another thought. Well, that night before we were going to bed, he comes to me and he says, Julie, I'm really sorry.
And I'm like, what are you sorry for? And he goes, I was rude to you in the car. I'm like, oh yeah.
Hey, thanks for apologizing. But it was the super huge victory moment for me because I realized all of a sudden that I had shifted my thinking, that I had not taken personally what he said.
All of a sudden, I wasn't the same as I had always been in the past, where I'm like, oh, I did something wrong. He's mad at me. I had decided not to take it personally.
I decided to look at it from a different perspective, and it shifted and changed everything for me on the inside so much so that I actually forgot that he had even done it.
And that's what I'm talking about is we want to shift some of those things, but here's where it gets really controversial.
It's easy to look at a relationship and see the problem as the other person. I should be mad at my husband because he snapped at me, right? But the real problem is you.
Let me explain. I read a book once that absolutely changed my life, and it made me so mad, I wanted to throw it across the room. It's called Leadership and Self-Deception, and the person who wrote that book also wrote The Peace Giver.
His name is, I think, is James Farrell. And basically, the premise or the idea that he teaches in both books is that a lot of what's happening in our relationships is happening in our heads.
It's happening in our thoughts, and he calls it getting in the box about somebody. And when we're in the box, we're focused on our needs. We blame others for our problems, and we fail to take responsibility.
It's his fault. It's her fault. She did this.
He did this, and it becomes very self-focused about what I need and what's going on with me, or even just taking things personally. It could be a part of that, right? Satan is in the business of destroying relationships.
That's his job. And the destruction starts with your thoughts, and the stories you're telling yourself about your relationships. So that brings me to the question.
What thoughts are you currently thinking about your relationship that is causing you pain? Now, remember, a couple of episodes ago, we talked about that. James Allen said that suffering comes from the thoughts we're thinking.
If we're suffering, it's because we're believing something that isn't true. And when you start thinking these thoughts, what are you making them mean?
In Mosiah chapter 4 verse 30, it says, If you do not watch yourselves and your thoughts and your words and your deeds, you must perish. And now, O man, remember, remember and perish not. Now, a lot of times we read that, and it just makes us mad.
We're like, Oh, God, just expect so much of us. I can't even think anything. That's not really the intention behind it.
He's teaching us a principle, and he's teaching us about universal law, law of attraction, basically, in some ways. And this is what Catherine Thomas said about this.
She said, We realize that it's not so much that God is punishing us for our unloving thoughts, but that by these thoughts, we create hell for ourselves and others. That's pretty powerful.
She continues, We see that the principle of restoration is indeed a principle of creation, because what we do must return to us in some form.
What we do, that is, our thoughts, our speech, and our actions, these create what is our present and our future must hold.
You guys, thoughts are so powerful, and what you're thinking about in your relationships can cause you a tremendous amount of pain. And then she continues, in Alma 4115, for that which you do send out shall return unto you again and be restored.
To change all of this begins with changing our thoughts about the other person, about the situation, about what's happening, and about the part we're playing in the pain that we feel. In Helaman 1430-31, it explains to us that we get to choose.
And now, remember, remember, my brethren, that whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto himself. Like, it's your fault that you're going to be miserable. It's basically what that's saying.
And whoso doeth iniquity, doeth it unto himself. For behold, you are free. You're permitted to act for yourselves.
For behold, God hath given unto you knowledge, and he hath made you free. He hath given unto you that you might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that you might choose life or choose death.
So what choices are you making in your thinking that are causing life or death, or causing suffering, pain, or causing peace?
And then the rest of the verse goes, and ye can do good and be restored unto that which is good, or have that which is good restored unto you, or you can do evil and have that which is restored evil unto you.
We're going to talk more about this when we get to another law, but it's basically this idea that what we put out into the universe, we get back, and we just saw a couple of scriptures about that.
And what we think about in our thoughts leads to our emotions, which leads to our actions, which leads to our results. And that's going to need to shift.
And we need to take responsibility for the pain we feel in our relationships and how much of that is based on what we're thinking and the stories we're telling us that's causing us to show up in a certain way.
So the first thought that we need to change, are you ready for this? Because this is going to be super controversial. The first thought we need to change is that you don't need an ideal relationship to be happy.
This goes against everything you see on social media. People don't need to show up in a certain way for you to feel good. In fact, I want to share this quote from Katherine Thomas.
You can tell she's my favorite. She said this, and I'm going to go slow because it's so important. How should we ever learn Christ-like love unless we have the chance to practice it in the face of opposites?
Every disrupted relationship, whether in our own home or within a particular group or community, is a chance to forge the divine nature in ourselves. It would appear that all the people in our lives are there for important reasons.
We stand in a sacred relationship to them because we and they cannot be made perfect without each other. Nevertheless, we remember that seldom are they given to us to satisfy us.
Rather, they are given to us to make possible a much greater love than we would have ever been capable of in a situation where everybody agreed with us, everybody loved us, everybody saw everything the way we do.
These abrasive people in our lives are friends in disguise. They are there to teach us to perfect love in ourselves, not to perfect them. We don't need ideal relationships in order to be happy.
We can live happily with less than the ideal because each precious relationship can be made more tender and sweet, and can be enriched with that spirit of atonement that changes everything around us. She continues. This is important.
I did not see a relationship between the way I treated other people and the way I felt inside. I thought that what they were doing made me unhappy, but actually it was how I was treating them that made me unhappy.
Is it possible that much of the emotional pain we have comes not from the love we weren't giving in the given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present?
With respect to many relationship trouble, there is a stunning insight to process. If there's trouble, each person in the relationship has contributed to some part of the problem.
Therefore, each one has something to repent of as well as something to learn from the experience and saw also some new choices to make with respect to the relationship.
We can't begin to heal a relationship until we've acknowledged our own part in the dysfunction. If we don't like what we're getting in a particular relationship, we may need to check out what we are sending into that relationship.
Again, that's from Catherine Thomas in her book called Selected Writings. Lots to think about, right? And it all begins in our thinking.
So I want to talk about some solutions. Okay, this is interesting. This is fascinating.
You may or may not agree with me, but what do we do about it? So let's talk about three solutions. The first solution is to remember and to shift our perspective and our expectations.
You don't have to be in the perfect relationship, or I guess a lot of us wouldn't believe it has to be perfect, but we don't even need an ideal relationship.
Like people don't have to show up a certain way for us to be happy, and we need to let go of that. That's the first piece. The second piece is that we need to stop taking everything personally.
Most of what's happening on an everyday basis really doesn't have anything to do with us.
And when you think about yourself and how you're just trying to get through the day, you're trying to solve problems or you're trying to get done what needs to get done. You're not really focusing on what somebody else is saying or doing.
You're just doing what needs to be done, right? That's how most people are. So we need to stop taking everything someone does and says personally.
And there's two ways that we can do that. The first is stop making assumptions. Somebody does or says something like for me.
Remember at the beginning when I told you this story about anytime my husband was grumpy, I'm like, I must have done something wrong. He's mad at me.
I assumed that his funny look or his deep sigh meant that I had done something wrong, and that caused me pain and suffering. When the reality is he probably just had a bad day at work, or he was overcome by a responsibility he needed to figure out.
I made assumptions based on what was going on in my head, not based on any kind of truth. So stop making assumptions. And the way we do that is get clarity by asking questions.
And that feels uncomfortable, but it needs to be done. And the next part of that is just make up your mind that you're not going to take it personally.
When somebody does something, or even if somebody does something offensive, or says something offensive to us, we can go, wait a minute, this doesn't have anything to do with me. This has to do with them. And in that we find peace.
And then the third thing is I want you to start looking for the good in the other person and showing gratitude to them and for them. Not only in your prayers, but also to them, showing them appreciation. Because what we focus on grows.
And when you start looking for the good in the other person, you're going to start seeing more and more of it, and it's going to create a soft heart in you. So let me review these really fast.
And I want to point out how every one of these has to do with your thinking. First, shift the expectation that it needs to be an ideal relationship.
We learn best and grow best and have the deepest connection when we work through the challenges that come in relationships. It doesn't have to be ideal to be a good relationship. We don't need it to be ideal to be happy.
That's the first thing. Again, that's in our thoughts. We change the expectation.
Number two is that we stop taking things personally. Well, where do we take things personally? In our thoughts, in the stories we tell ourselves.
So we shift that. And then the third thing is that we focus on the good and we show gratitude for them and appreciation to them. And as we do that, again, that's in the thoughts.
It begins in the thoughts.
And so as we shift and change our thoughts about our relationships, and then we start to shift and change the relationship, because I promise you, if you're thinking good things about that other person, if you are not taking it personally, if you are
not expecting them to show up a certain way, so you can be happy, you are going to find relief, you are going to find peace, and it's going to be way easier for you to connect to them emotionally. So this week, I invite you to practice this.
See how it feels. Do an experiment. Try it out and notice the difference that it makes for you.
Thank you so much for being here with me today. I appreciate you taking the time to listen. It means the world to me.
I am grateful for you.
Again, thank you so much for being with me today.
