Episode 77: The Mistakes You're Making: Cleaning Up Thoughts & Feelings in Parenting

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This episode of The Peaceful Home Podcast delves into the intricate web of thoughts, emotions, and parenting. We'll explore how six common cognitive distortions can inadvertently sabotage your parenting efforts and discuss strategies for fostering a more adaptive mindset. Join us as we uncover these distortions and their impact on your interactions with your teens and tweens.

We dive into 6 Types of Cognitive Distortions that are creating problems in parenting and how these might look in your day-to-day life, as well as the impact of your thoughts and mindset on your parenting journey. 

Cognitive Distortions:

1. All-or-nothing thinking 

2. Mental Filter 

3. Overgeneralization 

4. Discounting the Positive

5. Catastrophizing

6. Personalizing

We explore how these might look in your day-to-day life and help you understand how cognitive distortions can directly impact your emotional state and, in turn, influence your reactions and interactions with your children. And explore the path to make the internal shift, so you can guide your adolescent as they grow!

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome back to the peaceful home podcast. My name is Pam and I am your host and this week. We are talking all about parenting parenting, your pre-teens in particular. And here's specifically what we're going to talk about. This struggle that we have as parents. When we allow our mindset, our thinking about our kids, the situation, the world around us to impact how we're parenting. And the effect that that has on your kids. So let's dive in. So I have felt really called to talk about this concept of mindset as it relates to parenting. We hear it a lot in the health and wellness world and the coaching world, where we talk about how you have to shift your mindset. You have to focus on what you want. You have to kind of tune your mind in. So that what you experience on the inside shows up on the outside that you attract in what you desire. But I want to talk about how this impacts your parenting. Because the thing about parenting and relationships in general, Is that. So much of that story, so much of your mindset in the context of relationships. Arises as a result of your own journey throughout your entire life. With the important relationships that you've had. So if you're a mom or a dad, And you're looking at your relationship with your own child. The thing that's going to come up for you is your relationship with your primary caregiver with your parents. With your mom or dad or grandparents or whoever was taking care of you. That's normal. It's normal to be like, oh, I'm, I'm making this connection. I remember when I was 10 years old and I have this experience and now my kid is 10 years old and is having a similar experience. Now the thing about thoughts. Is that they adapt based on our experiences. And they are the driving force behind everything we feel. Everything we experience, and this is why ready. This is how it goes. So an event occurs. Sometimes we call this a trigger. We've moved away from using that language because oftentimes when people think trigger, they think. Emotional trigger of a trauma or something, but an event occurs, something happens. Maybe your kid slams the door. Maybe you get in a fight with your spouse. Maybe your boss is a jerk. And the event occurs. And then from that event thought arises. Oh, God, what is wrong with my boss? They're always treating me this way. Man, my husband and I are my wife and I, we're just not getting along. Oh, here we go. I'm in a really difficult time with the kids. People always say, you know, the adolescence is so hard now I'm seeing it. These are thoughts that arise. Now those thoughts create or facilitate the movement towards an emotion. Most often it's not the slow. You're not like an event occurs. My kid. Runs up the door and slams their, runs up the stairs and slams the bedroom door and screams that they hate me at the top of their lungs. And then I think. Hmm. Okay. What is my thought? Man that kid, here we go. It's going to be difficult. Like it doesn't move that slow. It's more like Mm. And all of a sudden you're sucked into the emotion. And the emotion can be a lot of different things. So I just explained a couple of different scenarios. You might know exactly what the emotion or the feeling would be for you for some people to have your boss treat you poorly, it would make you angry. For others who would create a sense of disempowerment, a dissatisfaction, a sadness, an insecurity, a fear, right? All of these things, depending on what the thought is. So if the thought is, man, my boss is a jerk. You might be angry. If the thought is, God, nobody else has anything around here. You might be frustrated. If you're like, oh my God, I suck at everybody. Else's doing a great job. And my boss just told me, I suck. You might be afraid you're going to lose your job. So the fee, the emotion. Comes as a result of the thought you're thinking. So you could put 20 people in a room, all have the same experience, the same event occurring. They're all gonna have different thoughts. And as a result, they're all going to have different emotions. So from the emotion, from the feeling. Comes our response. Our response can be a reaction. Our response can be a physical response. Our response can be a behavior. It can be words, right? There's lots of things that our response can be. But it's in response to this. Event thought feeling cycle. So for some people they say, oh, I felt really anxious. And then my stomach started to hurt. That would be a physical response. For other people, they might say. Aye. Got really sad and I just wanted to cry. And maybe I did cry, went into the bathroom and cried. For other people you might say I got angry. And so then I went and yelled at somebody. I punched a pillow. Whatever the case may be. The response can be something that we would call maladaptive, like doesn't work or something that's effective or appropriate. To help move you in the direction you want to be moving in. And that's the only reason affective inappropriate. That's the only reason those words come up is not because one's good and one's bad, but like what's the path. What's the road you want to drive down. And if the road you wanna drive down is I want to feel better. I want to feel calm and connected. To myself and the people in my life. Then we want to feel empowered. Who want to have experiences that move us in the direction of man. This is working well for me. So that's what that kind of language is all about a maladaptive. Strategy or response would be something that moves you away from where you want to be. Oftentimes these maladaptive strategies are things that like reactions that we had in childhood. So for instance, if you grew up in an environment where your parents yelled all the time, maybe like one of your parents yelled all the time and the other parent experienced a lot of fear as a result of that yelling. And so you now as an adult, recognize that when people yell. You go back to that place of being a powerless. Afraid child, because in that experience, you had the same experience you aligned with the parent. That was fear in fear, right? So a maladaptive strategy in this case would be somebody yells a spouse, your kid, anyone could be like, your boss is yelling at you, right? Someone yells, you have a thought and the thought could be something like, oh no there's gonna be a problem here as any conflict somebody's gonna get hurt. And then fear arises. And so a maladaptive strategy might be to withdraw or hide or run away. If it's your kid, you might like try to yell over them to get them to stop yelling. Those are maladaptive strategies because they're not effective. In moving you in the direction that you want to be moving in and moving towards your goal. And oftentimes things like, you know, feeling big emotions is overwhelming and I don't like it. So I drink alcohol to numb, or I eat food to numb or whatever other things we're doing to stuff our emotions and numb. Those would also be maladaptive strategies. So maladaptive can be coping strategies that are moving us more in the direction of problem than solution. Okay. So the issue here is that. We all have this lens at which we see the world with and not every lens is the same. So I could have like five different pairs of glasses, all different color lenses, all, not every lenses, the same. I'm going to see what's on the other side of that lens differently, depending on the lens that I'm using. Now, there's this thing in the thought process, cognitive world that we call cognitive distortions. And that just means. They are the lenses that changed the appearance of the event. Cognitive distortions are normal. And when I I'm going to go through some of them and explain them. Because they are linked to our mindset and thinking, and we'll come back to them in a minute, but I want you to understand that. If you have an experience where you're like, oh my God, I do that. It's fine. It's when you're like, I do that all the time. That's the only way I see the world or here's two only ways that I see the world and it's getting me into more trouble understanding that, oh, okay. There's some space for work here. So when you go back to this concept of mindset in our thoughts, cause our mindset is just a collection of thoughts. A collection of beliefs and beliefs are thoughts. We have thought over and over and over again that have stuck around that. We now think are truths. So our mindset is like the, the view or the view of the world through that lens, through the lens of our thoughts and our beliefs. All right. So how does what you're thinking. Your mindset, right? The lens at which you view the world. Impact. How you manage or interact with your kids? How are you parenting? Well, first it's important to. Kind of think about that model of an event occurs a thought. It shows up as an association of that event and emotion happens. And then we have a response to that emotion and there's maladaptive. And affective strategies that we use to move through those emotions. So what we want to be doing. His, we want to be moving in that effective. Healthy. Direction. Now what falls into this category or this thing that we call emotional regulation. Regulating our emotions, allowing ourselves to feel them and work through them and regulate our nervous system so that we don't move into a maladaptive strategy to manage. We don't yell, we don't punish our kids. We don't try to control or manipulate them. And. We're not like losing our shit on them on the daily. You've heard the expression. Rose colored glasses. Like they're seeing that through rose colored glasses. Rose colored glasses is a cognitive distortion, right? It's a way in which a lens at which we are viewing events. That's all a cognitive distortion is it's something that adjusts our view. Of the event. And like I said, these are common. We all do them. We all have these experiences. It's when. These distortions. Create. Maladaptive strategies to manage. That it becomes a huge problem. And this is what mindset is all about. So I want to dive into some cognitive distortions and how they might show up in parenting. What that might look like. Now the very first cognitive distortion I always talk about because people are familiar with it. Is this idea of all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking. We get to one extreme or the other. It's all good or it's all bad. These are the individuals who struggled to see that shade of gray in between. That someone is not all good or all bad, for instance. Just because I don't do well on one test. Doesn't make me a bad student. So if I got an F on a science test, And an all-in I think thinking would say. See, I'm a bad student because I'm failed this test. Therefore I'm going to fail the class. There is no in-between. I can only get an, a. A plus a hundred average in the class. Or if nothing else matters. I have a friend who her job, what she does is she teaches women about binge-eating and have stopped binge-eating. And so she talks about all in our thinking all the time. Cause all or nothing thinking in that context is like the well I'm on a diet and I already ate cake for breakfast. So I might as well just say screw it to the rest of the day and I'll start my diet over again on Monday. And. With our kids. We tend to not say, well already yelled at them today. So I might as well just yell at them for the rest of the day and start again tomorrow, but all or nothing, thinking this polarized black and white thinking. Definitely can drive the bus. When you're dealing with behaviors with your children in particular. So that's one. But another one that shows up a lot is this concept of. Mental filters are filtering. And what this is specifically is it's clearing out, getting rid of all of the positives in a situation. Instead, only focusing on the negatives. Even if there are some positive aspects in a situation, you exclusively focus on the negatives. So there could be. 20 things that happened in a conversation and 19 of them are positive. One of them is negative. You walk away with a negative, right? It's when you're get a review from your manager and they talk about all the amazing things that you're doing and they give you one. Thing that you could be working on to improve and that's all you can focus on. That's all you can see and you forget about all the other positive experiences. The same holds true from a mental filtering perspective with our kids. So one bad behavior, one lying incident, one hanging out with a friend that you don't really like. And all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, there are bad. You know, it's never going to get better. Here's this thing. Next up is this concept called overgeneralization. Overgeneralization means you take an isolated negative event and you turn it into a never-ending pattern. We've all used this one. And let me give you an example. When you turn to your child or your spouse, and you say, why is it that you never clean up after yourself? Why is it that you never do the things that I ask you to do? Why is it that I have to do everything? And you do nothing. You know, those arguments those times where you get so frustrated that you slide into this overgeneralization, they didn't pick up their socks in the living room. Today. So therefore they're never going to pick them up again, and it's always going to be your job. Or you let them slide. This is the other way it shows up. You let them slide on a chore. Like for instance, your child's job is to unload the dishwasher and they come home from school. And you. Say, Hey, I need you to unload the dishwasher. They say I have a big project, all these things that I'm working on and you say, great, you need to unload the dishwasher. So they go, okay, I need to work on this stuff first. Hours go by dinner happens. Dishwasher's not unloaded. You are sure that if you unload the dishwasher, they will never do it again. That you wash all the dinner dishes by hand. You refuse to take anything out of the dishwasher, right? If you ever have this experience, this is a battle that happens to my husband and daughter a lot. And I often say just because she forgot doesn't mean she's not going to do it. You can reminder. And just, even if you decided today to help her out, it doesn't mean she's never going to do it again. It's okay. So we get into this trap of like, it's always going to be like this. Oh no. Now what. Another cognitive distortion that shows up a lot is discounting the positive. Now I know we've had this experience and this might be your regular. It might not. This is similar to mental filtering. But it tends to fall into, like, somebody gives you a compliment versus something nice about you and you discount it. You discount it by saying like, Oh, they always say that. Or they're just being nice. Or this one. How about this one? You're only saying that because you're my mom, or you have to say that because you're my mom. That is discounting the positive. When you give someone a compliment and they minimize it or discount it, when you say. Hey, I love that dress on you. And somebody says, oh my God, it's you? Well, it's the only thing I could wear because of gain 10 pounds. And, and they start talking about all these negative things in their life and how terrible and how the dress doesn't even really look that good. Or it only fits because of whatever other thing, the thing to understand. Is that. Like I said, These cognitive distortions show up in everyday life. And it's not a huge problem if you're like, oh yeah, I say that sometimes, or, oh, I remember saying that in the past. If you, if your reaction to any of these is like, oh my God, I do that all the time. It's something to look at. Okay. Even if you're like, I do that some of the time or a significant amount of the time. Or here's two that I use all the time. Pretty regularly. All right. The next step. Jumping to conclusions. So jumping to conclusions, when you interpret an event or situation negatively without evidence. To support your conclusion. This might mean your kid comes home from school, kind of crabby. And so instead of. Supporting them. Or asking what's going on or. Trying to figure out, you know, what, what you can do in this situation. You decide that you're going to avoid them because you assume that they are mad at you or you did something. So you keep your distance, but really they just had a bad day at school or they have a conflict with a friend, the other thing that happens with jumping to conclusions, or we sometimes call it mind reading. Is that there's a persistent thought or concern that you have. That you're projecting onto the other person. So for instance, if you feel insecure in a relationship. And your partner. Has been distracted and busy and not really kind of giving you the attention that you would like in a relationship. You immediately assume that they're losing interest in you, that they're going to break up with you that they found someone else or whatever other things, we've. We've been in this place. This is happens a lot in adolescence where we have these feelings. It happens in adulthood as well, because it is a cognitive distortion. It's not developmental, it's a cognitive distortion. And this is why trying to mind read is dangerous. And making assumptions is dangerous. This, this is what I'm, this is what we're. Talking about when we say that stuff. Next up is catastrophizing. This cognitive distortion. Often comes with what if questions? What if she hates me? What if my alarm doesn't go off? What if I miss my test? What if I get fired? What if. I have nobody to sit with at lunch. What if I have no friends? This is the cognitive distortion. Where. We jumped to the worst case scenario. As a conclusion. To every scenario. No matter how improbable it actually is. As you might. Recognize catastrophizing creates a lot of internal fear. And the last one that I want to share with you is. One of the ones that comes up in parenting all the time. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes we make as parents is to fall into this trap, this cognitive distortion, and have it create the lens at which we see the world all the time with our children. This is a huge issue in our mindset, and that is personalization. Where we personalize. What the other person is how they're acting, how they're experiencing the world. The words are saying. Their behaviors, their attitudes. We personalize it. We make it about us. We say, oh man, they must be mad at us. We must've done something. Or we as moms in particular think, man, I've got to fix this thing. This cognitive distortion. Often results in feelings of guilt. And taking blame. For everything. So you might've grown up in an environment where you felt like it was your responsibility to take on everybody else's baggage. And now as a parent, you find yourself when your adolescent and your pre-adolescent. Is upset has an attitude tells you, they hate you. Slams the door talks back. Says no, or pushes back when you ask them to do something, it takes forever. You ask them to clean up their room and they spend an hour battling with you about it. And then you think. What is wrong with me as a mother that I can't get my kid to do this thing that I know other people are doing, this is what I teach, what I teach, how I teach you as parents, how to get your kids to listen, to cooperate. All without backtalk all without, you know, more conflict, more battles, back and forth. And so much of that. Sits in this cognitive distortion. If we can just learn to stop personalizing. Things get so much easier. Now, as you might imagine with any of these, there's a lens that you're seeing your interactions and your relationship with your own child. So now it's time to say, okay, so I personalize, I over-generalize, I definitely fall into the all or nothing thinking category. And then when you think about, okay, what's the mindset that goes along with that? From a parenting perspective. That is the lens. That is the mindset. That's the thinking that's actually getting in the way and creating more conflict with your kids. Kids. And while your thoughts are the problem. You know, in this scenario, your thoughts of the problem. The, your kid running up the stairs and slamming the door is not the problem. Because if I were sitting in your house, And you were sitting in your house. And your kid. Ran up the stairs and slam the door. You would have one reaction? I would have a different reaction. Same. If you came to my house, I would have one reaction. You would have a different reaction and that's not because of the different child. If my child runs up the door and runs up the stairs and slams the door to their room. I give her the space to do that. I don't expect when I like, when people say to me like, oh my God, your kid is, you know, perfect. She's not perfect. But we have a great relationship because I don't personalize her emotional story. So if she's in the kitchen, mad and slamming stuff around because something's not working out for her. I'm not like, oh my God, it's my fault. What did I do? How can I fix this? Therefore the conflict doesn't happen. She's given the space to experience her emotions the way she needs to experience them. And then she makes her request when she needs something. And she only makes her request when she needs something, because we continue to work on that. And we continue to this day, she's 14 and a half. We continue to this day to work on, Hey, if you need something from me, you just need to make a request. If you need something from dad, you just need to make a request. And we just, my husband and I just had this conversation this morning before she got up. That. She was baking some cupcakes yesterday for An event that she, you know, she has cupcake business. And the fondant was, it was warm in the house because the heat was on. And the fondant was much stickier than it normally is for her. And she was getting frustrated with it. And she was like, oh, because it was sticking to her roller. And. He wanted to like, let me see how I can help you. Like she's getting frustrated. I can see she's getting frustrated. And I was like, she is getting frustrated and she gets, she's allowed to be frustrated. You're allowed to be frustrated. I'm allowed to be frustrated. So we allow her to be frustrated and then she knows she makes her request when she needs one. And so I just said to her, because I was helping her with some stuff in the kitchen. I said, Hey. If you need some support. You just need to request it. And one of the things that I say often is can you turn that into a question? Like, can you make a request or turn that into a question? And so she said, I don't. I don't know how to make it stop sticking without putting powdered sugar or corn star Tronic. Cause she was trying not to turn it white. It was blue fondant. And I was like, try pushing a little bit less on the roller. And she was like, okay. And she was like, oh, that works. Okay. Thank you. Because she just couldn't see, she was stuck in it and we've all been there. Get stuck in the thing. This is never going to work. Overgeneralizing. This is never gonna work. So when you can separate step back and allow your child to have their experience. Things go much more smoothly. Now the problem here. Is that when an event occurs. Your child's storms up the stairs, Slims their door tells you they hate you or whatever things come out of their mouth. You have a thought. What is your thought? Now we can't change the thought. We can't change the thought. Not immediately. We have to recognize the thought's going to come in and the thoughts going to move us to a feeling and then we get to do something. Then the more practice you get out of it, the easier it becomes, the change, the thought. Because a thought will start to like bubble up and you'll go, oh, no, that's not the thought I want. This is why people use affirmations. Is to change the thought. The event happens, the thought occurs. What is your thought is your thought. That damn little ungrateful kid. I do so much for them. And how dare they? That might be one thought. Is your thought. Oh, no, I screwed up again. I'm always screwing up. What is wrong with me? I may be another thought. Is your thought. Oh my God. I just want to have a kid who listens. And so I'm going to do anything within my power, because I don't want people to think I'm a bad parent because if she's, or he is storming up the stairs. Stairs and slamming the door and screaming at the top of their lungs. It might mean that I'm a bad parent. How do I fix this? That's going to create another feeling right. Oh, no, somebody's screaming at me. That might and you, and that's an old story for you. That's going to create another feeling. So when we start doing this work, the work that we're doing is not change your thoughts, change your thought. Sure. Use affirmations, practice, gratitude, all those things that are going to help with the rewiring. However, the real work comes from regulating the nervous system. How we recognize I'm feeling this thing. And the action happens between the feeling. And the response. That's where the work is. That's where your work lies. There was an event. I have a thought, there's a feeling that arises. What is that feeling? What does that feeling leading me towards right. Am I going to scream at them? Am I going to ground them? I'm going to punish them in some way. Am I going to go into my room and cry? Am I going to withdraw? Am I going to you know, call there? The co-parent and tell them how awful their child is and they need to come handle this. You're gonna turn over the reigns. I have moms that say this to me all the time. Sometimes I just turn over the reigns to my husband because they handle it better than I do. And I'm like, okay, well, let's stop doing that. First of all, let's practice instead. So practice has to happen and we practiced by regulating our emotions. All the time. So we feel an emotion. We don't stuff. It, we don't hide from it. And believe me, I spent a very long time stuffing and hiding from my emotions. So if you're like Pam, you don't understand, this is programmed into me. This is how I grew up. I do understand I've been there. I'm even there. Sometimes there are still times that I'm like, am I. Regulating my emotions or am I just like stuffing them and not feeling them? I'm not really sure. And I have to like go and do some checks and understand am I allowing myself to feel, and I've just gotten good at regulating or am I falling back into an old pattern where I'm pretending like my emotions don't matter and stuffing them into a container, right? So this is the, this is the work that we're doing. How do you regulate emotions? Well, it's really important to understand how to regulate the nervous system, right? Because the nervous system is where the reactions come from. The bodily sensations that I feel nauseous. I'm going to throw up. Fists clenching. All of that kind of supports the emotion. So if I'm angry and I want to punch something, And my heart rate increases and my respiration increases and my fists ball up and I'm ready. The muscles are tense in my body so that I can fight. It's going to be much easier for me to just slide into that fighting. But there's also this really cool thing in our nervous system where we can at the body level. Calm. And that brings that message from the body, like from the arms, from the legs, from the hands, from the extremities, from the outer body. The muscles back into the central nervous system to calm us down. And sometimes you'll hear me talk about this as the Vegas nerve stimulation. Cause that is. A huge component. Of this. Piece of the nervous system, right? So these are things like ice baths, I just saw this Tik TOK, maybe I think it was the tick-tock the other day where this woman was sharing her journey. She's done a lot of work on her own like trauma triggers. And she was, she was doing ice bath therapy. Essentially. And so she inner bathing suit climbs into this ice bath and she's having this experience right. Fight or flight response kicks in. She starts to panic. And she's like, I can't breathe. And then she's got someone there that's talking her through. You can breathe, take a deep breath. Here's where to breathe. Send the breath here. This is what this is, feels like these things. Add this in, do this. Th like layering in with cold therapy, with cold exposure therapy. To find the strategies. To breathe through and saddle at the fight or flight response level, because that's really what a Mo regulating your emotions is all about. It's about learning how to pull yourself out of the fight or flight response and put you into what we call the rest and digest response that place of like calm. That place where when your kid runs up the stairs, slams the door and tells you, they hate you at the top of their lungs, you go. Yeah. It's hard to feel that way. Man, that's gotta be some big emotions. Some really big and overwhelming and hard emotions for my kid to be having right now. For them. And has really not feel heard. Because I know. My logical brain knows that they love me. They tell me all the time, here's all the evidence that tells me. They love me. And right now they're really looking to try to hurt me. Because they're hurting. And so when we can have that internal process where we go, man sorry, you're going through that. I feel awful. Is there anything I can do to support you? Then. We've gotten to the place where we're like, oh man, I can regulate my emotions in these situations. And some situations are going to be easier than others. Like you might be like, I don't care. When my kid runs up the door and slam Reno runs up the stairs. I keep standing, runs up the door, runs up the stairs, slams the door and tells me they hate me. I don't care. It doesn't bother me. If that's your reaction? I challenge you. To sit with. What it would feel like if. Your child hated you. How would you feel. What would actually come up for you because sometimes we go to, I don't care, do whatever you want. You're you know, you got an attitude. You're an adolescent. Doesn't matter to me. Screw you. Is a defense mechanism. It's a maladaptive coping strategy. That helps with our fear of rejection, I'm afraid of you're rejecting me. I'm going to reject you first. I basically wrote that story. Okay. All the way back in time wrote that story. That is my journey. You're going to reject me, maybe. I don't know. Maybe you're not, but you could. So in order to keep me emotionally safe. I'm going to reject you first. I'm going to say, I don't care. Fuck that no big deal. Whatever. Your problem, not mine, your loss, right? All those things that we say to try to feel better in those situations. Can eventually become a maladaptive coping strategy. What do we actually do? We allow ourselves to feel step one. Feel the emotion. An event. Occurs a thought occurs and emotion arises, feel the emotion. Where does it show up in your body? How does it show up for you get curious. And allow us to be a time of like curiosity and research, as opposed to a time where you have to focus on your kid, because here's what happens. When your child goes upstairs or upset with you, they hate you. They come back down eventually. They always come back. And. You have, you decide there needs to be a conversation and it needs to be some sort of something about this. If you ignore it, they get a message that they're not important. Don't just ignore it. If you harp on them and tell them they expressed it wrong, they hurt your feelings. And how do they think you feel now that they said they hate you and blah, blah, blah. Not effective. You've just made it all about you. Not about them. And what your adolescent, you've got to remember. We're talking like pre-teens teens. We're talking. Could be as young as six and seven at this. Day and age with technology, right? We used to say more like nine. Is going as young as six and seven. Where. Your child is just trying to say, Hey, I need something from you. And I don't know how to communicate it. So I'm going to have a meltdown so that you can help me. Manage what's going on. It's like, It's as if they're sitting down and saying, mom, dad, I really need your help. And I don't know how to manage them, having a feeling on the inside. I don't know how to manage it. And can you please guide me? Can you please help me manage this emotion? Can you help me feel it and walk through the journey of it so that I can come out on the other side, a healthy adult. The good news is this is not a one and done thing, right? So you get to practice, you get to screw up a lot, but you get to practice. Because we're really looking at, like, I want you to be a healthy 35 year old. And if you're still pissed at me when you're 16 that's okay. It just tells me all right. I have this opportunity to do some practice here. So we have this journey. We go through this journey. If your kid could effectively communicate those things, then you would be like, oh yeah, sure. Here are the things. And you might be. Like. More rose. And Schitt's Creek when she's trying to teach David how to cook a recipe. And she's telling him to fold in the cheese and he doesn't know what that means. And she doesn't know what that means, so she can't explain it and they get in a fight and he storms off. If you've never watched Schitt's Creek, it's hysterical. And if you're parenting an adolescent and you've never watched Schitt's Creek. You need to go start watching it because you'll be like, oh my God. Even though the children in this show, Our adults. There's so much of like what happens in parenting and adolescents. So side note But it's like, you're trying to teach them something that you don't actually know how to do. If you can't regulate your own emotions, even if your child came to you and said, Hey mom, I really need help with learning how to sit with the feelings and regulate my emotions so that I can be a happy and healthy adult. And you're like, dude, I haven't figured that out yet. You can't teach them until you do the work yourself. And we'll oftentimes what happens. As a therapist for 20 plus years, what happens is parents send their kids to therapy to learn how to do this. Here's the real problem with that. The real problem with sending your kid to therapy, to learn how to regulate their emotions and manage their internal world is yes. They learn that and then it highlights for them. That you are incapable of that. And it creates more disconnection. No, I'm not saying don't send your kid to therapy. I was a therapist. I think it's a great idea. If your kid needs therapy and you feel like this is a great space for them to learn some tools. Awesome. But at the same time, you have to be doing the work as well. You can't just pawn the work off on them. You can't just be like, I didn't feel like doing that. I didn't feel like learning that. So I'm going to pawn this off on you. You figure it out. Good luck. Because what we're seeing now in 2023. Is that there are a lot of millennial children. Who are now parents and a lot of cases that are going to. No contact with their own parents. Because you might be a millennial child going. Yeah. There are plenty of things that I feel like, man. I wish I could go no contact with this. Wish I didn't have to continue to, to deal with this struggle with my own parents. And this is like the direction we're moving and this is what the world is now. We are teaching our young people. And it started really with us. We're teaching our young people. That they're allowed to have a voice. And having a voice is important. If you're here listening to my podcast, then you probably believe that too, which is amazing. And. When you allow them to have a voice. They're going to call you out. Which means you have to do the work, learn how to regulate your emotions. You have to understand what is my cognitive distortion. You have to understand what are the. The triggers for me. What are the events that keep getting me stuck? What thoughts did that create? What are the feelings it leads to and how do I move into a healthy response? So nervous system regulation, emotional regulation is one of those ways and that's actually, I have a new. Program. That is dropping, dropping in the middle of October. So like two or three weeks. It's called the calm project and it is. Four modules teaching you how. All the science and all the practicalities of regulating your own emotions so that you can teach your kids. And this will be available in mid-October. If you want access to it, like hit me up. Let me know on Instagram, send me a DM. My Instagram link is linked up in the show notes here. And I invite you to join me. I have a live workshop coming up. That's all about helping you. Learn how to get your kids to listen without losing your cool. And I'm going to highlight and share in that live workshop about the CALM project. And I would love to have you, so that is linked up in the show notes as well. It's a live webinar. There'll be replays. You can watch it whenever you want. It doesn't matter if you're online or not. That's the beautiful thing of technology, right? So if I'm doing it at 12 o'clock on a Tuesday and you're like, I have to be at work. You can watch it later that week. You can watch it in the evening. When you get home, you can watch it during your lunch break. If it's already. If it's already happened at that point, guys. We've got to do better for our kids. And this is the opportunity. When you start to understand yourself better, when you understand how your thoughts, your mindset, your emotions. How they all work together to create either. Connected and calm journey. Or. The perfect storm for destruction. You get to decide. The choice is yours. Which one are you going to choose? Let me know. And I look forward to seeing you guys next week. Take care.