Ep 65: Parenting with Feeling: How to Regulate Emotions While Teaching Your Kids to do the Same.

Have you ever heard a parent say, “Brush it off, your okay,” when their kid is crying? Did you know that the real message here is “Your feelings don’t matter…”

Most moms are not interested in discounting their kid’s feelings, but we do it anyway, thinking we are helping them. That this is the path to regulating emotions. 

Don’t feel too big, suck it up instead…

But instead, you are teaching them to numb, stuff and allow first emotions then disease to rule their world.  You are teaching them not to trust themselves and rely on those outside of them to tell them how to feel. 

In this episode, we are talking all about how to instead cultivate a healthy relationship with emotions and allow that healthy relationship to be the cornerstone for lasting emotional regulation. 

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Transcript

Pamela: 0:00

Welcome back to The Peaceful Home Podcast. My name is Pam, and I am your host. And today we are talking emotions, but we're really talking about how to emote and how to encourage your kids to emote. This is really important stuff because when we don't experience our emotions, when we stuff them, when we limit our ability to feel, when we numb, The body takes the toll, and we have a saying in this house. when you don't feel you can't heal and when you can't heal. You get cancer. My daughter's 14 years old and we have a long family history on both sides of cancer. And so we talk about what are the risk factors, and one of those risk factors is numbing. It's not feeling, it's stuffing emotions. And so we'll talk about that a little bit today and we'll talk all about how to encourage your kids to feel even if they've already learned how to numb. So let's get to it. At 14 years old, Marley has already lost some significant people in her life. When she was seven, my best friend from college who had been a part of Marley's life for her entire life, passed away after a 10 year battle with cancer. And when Christa died, Marley was sad, but she didn't. Express the emotion, the way that adults express emotion, especially with grief. Grief is one of those funny ones, and she didn't come to the services with us. I didn't take her to the celebration of life because she was seven, and I didn't feel like that was the thing that I needed to do at that time. And then when my dad passed away, Marlee was 10 and my dad and Marlee were pretty close. But for Marlee's entire life, my dad had been pretty sick. She was the kid that was. There with me taking care of him when she was in kindergarten, right? This has been as far back as she remembered. Grandpa had been sick, so when he died in December of 2019, Marley felt sad again, and I think she cried a little bit, but it wasn't the same level of emotion that I normally see from her. She's a pretty emotional kid and she emotes pretty well. And she has this running joke that usually she cries about things like food dropping on the floor or something that is seemingly ridiculous, but has a big impact on her and other things. She just holds stoically. So this past week we buried a dear friend of mine. And Mattia and I have been friends since sixth grade. We were figure skaters together. She was a light, she was hilarious, and she struggled. She's somebody that struggled for her entire life with anxiety and depression and And she had a battle with alcohol and she's an amazing human being who was getting it right. She was working on doing the things and her body apparently decided no more. So Marley came to these services with me because this lovely friend of mine also has a seven year old daughter who Mar knew was going to be there. And she was like, I need to be there for her. And I said, okay. And what I witnessed was a seven year old who went through the same process of trying to understand what was going on. And this is when I realized that what was actually happening was she didn't get the permanency of what was happening, of what was going on, what the service was all about. She knew her mom had died, but she didn't understand all the components of it. And as I sat next to Marley, I went up and gave a speech. Shared some stories and came and sat back down and she was crying and I was like, Hey, and I held her and like she sobbed. And one thing that I did differently this time than I've ever done before is instead of saying, you're okay, or It's okay, it's gonna be okay. What I said to her was, yeah, cry. Keep crying. Keep crying until you're done. And she did. This is what we have to do with emotions, guys. It's not enough to say you have to feel feelings are good, and let's be honest, for most of us, we don't feel that way. This is what we need to start doing with emotions. This is how we need to encourage our kids to feel as a therapist for over two decades. One of the things that I did often with children and adolescents is I allowed them to get to a space where they could feel, and I encourage them to continue to feel. Now they're not gonna feel that way forever. And this is our fear, right? It's like the same fear of, your five year old wants to sleep in your bed at night, so you think, oh my God, when they're 25, they're gonna still wanna sleep in my bed. Which realistically we know is not the case. But we say things like, I have to get them to sleep in their own bed. And we believe there's a subconscious belief that if our child loses control or if we lose control with emotions, meaning we allow ourselves to just feel, and it gets big and overwhelming and lots of emotions come out that it's never going to stop. And grief can feel that way, right? Pain can feel that way. But here's the really cool thing about emotions. if you imagine a container like a glass or a vase, and you think of this as existing inside your body, when your nervous system feels. When you have an experience, and remember our last episode, I talked about our thoughts. So your thoughts happen, an event happens, you have thoughts, and then an emotion arises. Those emotions get poured into this vase or this cup. And the idea is like when you stick a vase or a glass underneath the faucet and you turn the faucet on, you let it pour in. What starts to happen is the container fills and then the water starts to pour out of it. Our emotions are like that as well. But when we try to stop the influx of emotion, meaning we stuff it, we tell ourselves we're not allowed to feel feelings bad, hold it together in this situation. I don't wanna cry here. I don't want people to see me cry. Then we just fill our emotions into this container and then we leave them there, and then we move on with life. And we pretend like they don't exist. Like they're not there, but they are. And they're always impacting us, always impacting us. You know, Those moments where like somebody does or says something. Or you're watching a commercial or you're watching a movie and all of a sudden you're crying and you're like, why am I crying? What is going on here? And I know a lot of people that will say, oh, I need to watch like a sad movie or something, and then I can just allow myself to emote. And that's because your logical brain is saying to you, Hey, there's a good reason here. This thing that you're watching is sad, but there's also a good reason when you experience things in your life. You have a right to feel, and when you keep those feelings stuffed away in that glass or in that vase, it only builds and builds in the body and it starts to leech into the tissue of the body. So we'll start to have pain and discomfort, and that pain and discomfort is something that we call acute inflammation, short term based on an event or an incident. And then what starts to happen from there when emotions aren't processed, meaning felt. So when we talk about processing emotions, we're talking about feeling emotions. When we talk about clearing and healing emotions, we're talking about feeling emotions. If you've ever done anything like ef t tapping, one of the things that is required for clearing out the emotional state that you've experienced based on the work that you're doing. Is to feel into the emotion. And when you feel into the emotion, you feel it in your body. You know what it feels like emotionally, you clear it out through tapping, and then there's actually a relief. But what we tend to do is as emotions built as that container inside of us gets filled with emotions and they start to get near the top of the vase. They're getting near the top of that container and they're ready to bubble over, which is when we emote, when we cry, when we scream, when we have a meltdown. Whatever other ways in which we emote. This is the timeframe when we start to stuff. I don't wanna feel this, this isn't the time or place. Have you ever had that experience where maybe you wanna cry at work, or maybe you wanna cry with a significant other. Maybe you're on a date or you're with somebody that isn't really treating you well and they say something to you and it makes you want to cry or feel big, and instead you numb, you use humor, you stuff it down. You pretend it's not there. This is restricting your emotions. And if you think of emotions like a wave, so the energy of the wave builds, that's the emotions building. That's the container filling. And then as it gets to the top, you start to see the white on the wave. So if you're surfing, that's when you catch the wave and start care coming in with it, right? So the emotions start coming to spill over the top a little bit. Now the emotion. Recedes when the wave crashes. So we go through this big buildup period and all this energy, and then it just crashes and we feel relief. You know this, if you've ever watched a sad movie or what done whatever, to allow yourself to just feel. And I hear people say all the time I just needed a good cry. The reason you needed a good cry is because you don't allow yourself to feel when you're feeling, and we cannot teach this to our children. It is damaging. And I know I said in the intro, I said, one of the things we talk about is cancer arising when you don't process your emotions, when you hang onto them. And this is that whole journey of cancer's not the only disease, but acute inflammation. To chronic inflammation, right? I keep stuffing the emotions. I keep not allowing myself to feel chronic inflammation occurs. I have more and more pain, more and more issues arise. And then what happens from that, from that state of chronic inflammation, which is our chronic stress response. What happens is disease and cancer is one of those diseases. So are things like diabetes, autoimmune diseases. Heart issues, lung issues, right? Pulmonary, cardiac, kidney, liver, right? Any organs in the body? One system in the body that is hugely impacted by emotions is the entirety of your digestive system, any part of it. So this could be heartburn. This could be food allergies. This could be something like celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disease food related autoimmune disease as the result of celiac, right? It could also be things like diverticular and I b s. And Crohn's disease. These are all illnesses that arise as a result of chronic stress, chronic inflammation in the body. Now, this is just how the entire system works, and if you're like I have all of these illnesses, I have all these diseases going on, the chances are you've stuffed a lot in your life. But we know better, so we need to do better for our kids. So how do you want yourself Allow yourself to feel now regardless of what's gone on in the past. And two, how do you help your kids feel? Now, first and foremost, you have to understand what you're experiencing as emotions. You need to know what you're feeling and what's arising and how it shows up in your body and what that feels like. One of the ways that we do this is using an emotional wheel. Something where you have the list of emotions that you can point to when you're feeling something. This is for us and for our kids. The better they understand what feelings they're feeling, the easier it will be for them to be okay with it. Cuz the issue is not about feeling. The issue is stuffing the feelings because what happened for us as kids? Was we were told to brush it off, suck it up, we're okay, get back on the bike. Stop feeling that thing, Carry on. And if you're doing that to your kids, you're teaching them how to create chronic inflammation in their bodies. That's what you're teaching them. You're not teaching them how to survive in a system that maybe doesn't approve of them crying in the middle of a classroom. You're teaching them that their are emotions or something to be ashamed of, and that as a result of that shame, they're gonna develop chronic inflammation. And remember, chronic inflammation leads to disease. So if that's what you want for your kids, cool, keep telling them to brush it off and suck it up and stop crying and I'll give you something to cry about. And. Are you bleeding? No. Then you're fine. Stop telling them that. Stop telling them their, their emotions are too big. Stop telling them that they don't have a right to feel the way they feel. Stop dismissing their emotions. Stop invalidating their emotions. Stop telling them that your emotions are bigger than theirs. Yes, there are parents that do this. You have to start by validating the way that they're feeling. And this means when you have an adolescent that is feeling pressured and stressed about getting out of the house and they snap at you, you have to create space for that. When your toddler throws themselves on the ground crying, that is not about you. That is about the feelings they're experiencing. So using the process of positive affirmations, if you'd you can start with yourself by just saying, I'm allowed to feel the way I feel I'm allowed to feel the way I feel. My feelings are not wrong. And then even creating a space for you to feel on a daily basis. Think about it as cleaning off your car after the pollen season or during the pollen season, right? That's where we are right now. Where I live, my navy blue car has been green for weeks on end cuz I've had no rain. And so every so often you pull out the hose and you rinse it off because you're like, dude, I cannot have my car be that green anymore. I cannot suck in that amount of. Pollen, which by the way, I'm allergic to, I can't do it. If you imagine that your emotions are like that, right? That your emotions are like the coating of pollen on your car and every so often you just need a good cleaning out. Schedule that in for yourself. Give yourself the opportunity to feel, And yes, I get it. Sometimes it's easier to watch a movie and allow the sadness of that event to allow you to feel. But what's gonna be more effective for you in the long term is if you sit down with a journal or a piece of paper, you don't have to even journal. You can just write it down. And start listing the emotions you've been experiencing, and then just feel into them. Ask yourself, when's the last time I felt that? What does that feel like? Think about the things that have created that emotion for you. So maybe it's sadness, maybe it's grief, maybe it's worry, maybe it's anger. Allow yourself to feel, allow yourself to get in touch with the thoughts that fuel that emotion so that you can feel it. And then allow yourself to emote from that place. That might be crying, that might be screaming, right? They might be going for a run through the woods and just allowing it to sweat out of your system. But what's really important is that you're not doing that as a means of numbing and not feeling. You're doing it as an opportunity to feel. And if you grew up in an environment where crying was really, really not okay, like you have a trauma response around crying. A really great place to allow yourself to cry is in the shower. Now, why do I say this? Because the tears running down your face loop in with the water running over your body, right? It's running, running over your head. Anyway, it's a great safe place to start. And then you can expand from there. You can allow yourself to cry in your room with the door closed, you can allow yourself to cry in your room with the door open, you can allow yourself to cry at the kitchen table. You can allow yourself to cry with other people around. There's a process that has to happen. So that's the undoing, right? The, the, all the stories that are in place. You've gotta undo those stories. In order to heal for your kids. You need to encourage them to feel, which means you don't say things like, stop feeling that way. Don't act that way. Don't react that way. You don't tell them what is the right way or the wrong way to feel or experience emotion. You ask them, what's going on? How are you feeling? Are you feeling any emotions right now? And if they're not if they're just not used to it, it's okay. You don't have to make them feel in the moment. What you want to do is you wanna start creating a container, a space in which they can feel. And so you let them know, Hey, I just need you to understand that when emotions show up, when you do feel it's okay to feel them, it's okay to release them. It's okay to cry. It's okay to scream. It's okay to throw yourself on the floor. It's okay. You are allowed to. And it doesn't matter if they scrape their knee or if they're sitting at a funeral service with you and emotions arise. It is your job as their mother to create the space for them to feel. And you do that by simply saying, yeah, keep feeling, keep crying. Go ahead. Keep going. Keep feeling that way. Get it out. Get it out. It's better out than in right? Get them to clear it out. This is not gonna create a kid that's having meltdowns all over the place. This is gonna create a kid that has the ability to regulate their emotions. Really, really effectively, because the reason we can't regulate our emotions ready for this one is because we've filled up the damn vase or container that lives inside of us with emotions from 25 years ago, and we don't even understand how to process them because some of them we don't even necessarily remember. We just know that this container is all gunked up with old emotions that we were not allowed to feel. And so as a result, we keep trying to pour in and it keeps overflowing. And then we cry about things that seem like not a big deal, but they are a big deal. And the reason that they're a big deal is because what normally might just fill up a little centimeter or an inch or so of water, of emotions in your vase. Has the vase overflowing over and over and over again. That's why, that's why emotions are big. It's actually the reason we have the impulse to numb and not feel is because we've numbed and not felt for so long that our container is full up. Which is why when we do this deep work, When you sit with me and other moms and the membership that I offer, or you sit with me one-on-one and we clear out the emotions that you're experiencing, we dig into that vase and we look at what are the thoughts, the fears that are rooted in those emotions. This is the work my friends. And if you can start teaching your kids now to feel, don't comment on them. Being overly emotional, having big emotions. Recognize that their emotions are trying to tell them something, and by extension, trying to tell you something. So after they've felt, see if they wanna talk about it. See if they wanna tell you what's going on, what do they need, what are they experiencing? This is how we teach them the process, right? An event happens, a thought associated with that event arises. We experience emotions. Emotions get big. We allow ourselves to feel them, right? So let's just use crying for an example. We allow ourselves to feel them. We cry on the other end of that instead of having a behavior. Like yelling at someone or snapping at someone or getting in a fight. We have a behavior like sitting quietly and allowing ourselves to calm, allowing ourselves to settle and ground. That's what emotional regulation is. It's the ability to see our emotions for what they truly are. Information. And it's so imperative that we do this with our children. I remember years ago, I had in the backseat of my car, one of my daughter's friends and her younger sister, who was a couple years younger than her. We were, I think, going to Marley's birthday party. And for some reason, I don't remember the reason the younger sister started crying in the back of the car. And her older sister said to her, Hey, remember what dad says about crying? Don't, and it's totally fine if that's what dad says about crying and that's their story. Great. But I looked in my rear view mirror and I looked at this kid who was sobbing and I said, Hey, you are allowed to feel any emotions that you want when you're with me. And I'm cool with crying. If crying is how you're feeling right now, in the moment, do it. I'm okay with it. You don't have to stop yourself because that's what you have to do at home. You can always come to my house and cry and she cried a little bit more and she okay. From that day forward still, when I see this kid. Which is not very often, but still, when I see her, she's so excited to see me. She wants to come, gimme a hug. There's all sorts of interaction. Tell, she tells me all the things that are going on in her day and it's because of that moment, it's because of that experience where I was like, yeah, feel, totally feel, because before this time she knew me as Marley's mom, her sister's friend's, mom, but she didn't really know me. Beyond that, I'm definitely that person. I'm definitely that person. If you send your kids to my house, And they stub their toe. I'm gonna tell them to cry. I'm gonna tell them to feel it. We'll all do it together and put together a production if that's what needs to happen. Because I recognize the negative impact that stuffing emotions has. And if you're sending your kid to my house, I don't actually give a shit what you're doing with them at home. I'm gonna do with them at my house, what I do with my own kid. And if you don't like that, then don't send your kid to my house. That's the bottom line. You're allowed to be you at my house. That's just the way that it goes. You're allowed to be you at my house and I will tell you, it's why all the kids come to my house. So take it for what it is. Okay guys, and that's all we have for today. As this episode is coming to an end, I would love it if you would just take a moment and go back to where the show notes are. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and there's a space for you to write a review. Write a review. Please, please, please. That helps me share the podcast. With other people. It's just the way it works. So thank you so much guys. If there are things that you wanna talk to me about that are happening in this episode, feel free to send me a DM or a message me in the podcast post@pamgodboiscoaching on Instagram. You can also find me on other platforms, and those are linked up in the show notes as well. Okay, thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you guys next week. Take care.