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Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
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Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
Speaker 2:Hey, there it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. Yes, it is really me, and I'm so glad to be back here with you. I'm just going to apologize at the outset here for my voice. I just cannot shake this cold. It's the second really bad cold I've had in six weeks and at some point I just got to get back to putting out content for you and accept that it's not going to sound perfect. So here we are. At least I feel better than last week. So if you listened last week, you know that I lost my voice completely and was just absolutely terrible. So thanks to the wonderful podcast editor, slash husband of mine, kevin, for doing a great intro and bringing back for you one of my most downloaded episodes from the past. So hopefully you took a listen to that. If not, take a listen, it's got some great stuff there this week.
Speaker 2:What I want to do is share with you a story of something that happened in my family with my kids. That really nicely illustrates what it looks like to allow a painful or negative emotion versus avoiding it, resist to get it, trying to solve for it, et cetera, and one of the reasons I specifically wanted to share this story with you now is because it really fits nicely with the topic of my recent webinar, which I actually finally got done a couple of days ago, after having to postpone it as well for illness, and the webinar was all about how to cure headless chicken syndrome. And even if you don't really know if you have headless chicken syndrome or that just kind of sounds silly, I want to be sure that you know that. What happens on the webinar is I talk about headless chicken syndrome, what it looks like, and then I talk about what causes it, which is running away from negative emotions or avoiding them or trying to prevent them, and so then we talk about how to cure quote unquote cure headless chicken syndrome, which is really the skill of allowing negative emotion, and so I talk in that webinar in a lot more detail about the specifics of how you can begin to allow your negative emotions. I don't give this story that I'm going to share here in the webinar, but it just really aligns together. So if you didn't get to check out the webinar and you wanted to be sure to go to my show notes and click on the link and you'll get the free replay right away when you register, or if you kind of listened to this episode and you want to dig a little bit deeper into this topic or whatever, that would be a great next step to take. Okay, all right.
Speaker 2:So with that out of the way, let's talk about this experience that happened with my kids. I'm going to just tell you the story first, and then we're going to talk about it. So a couple of months ago, it was my son's birthday and he was having friends over and my daughter was very excited. She loves birthday parties and so she was helping to get the house ready for him. Ironically, you know it's his party, but she was more excited about it. If you have a boy and a girl, you might have this dynamic sometimes too. It seems to be the case.
Speaker 2:He was kind of like just I don't know, almost even like a little bit bored and grumpy, waiting for his friends to arrive, and she was helping us with all these things and decorations. One of the things that she did was she went over to our couch in the front room and it worked really hard to fold up all the blankets on the couch. Okay, so it is almost house decor at the, and my daughter is seven and a half. It's not the easiest thing for her to get the blankets folded. She has this perfectionism sometimes where she gets frustrated that they don't line up perfectly. So she worked really hard to fold up the blankets and she had a certain vision for how she wanted to drape them all around in our front room on the couch. My son was not in the room when she did that. He was kind of in his own world. I think he was having some sort of debate with Kevin and I about something and whatever. But I knew because I think I was there with her or maybe she asked me help or something. So she had it in the other room and it was doing something with me.
Speaker 2:My son, after being frustrated with us about something I don't know what, was trying to calm himself down and he decided to go into that front room and sit on that couch and snuggle with our dogs which is often what my kids do and they want to de-escalate themselves. And then he pulled one of those blankets off of the couch, where my daughter had put it so perfectly and spent so much effort, and draped it over himself and the dog and he was perfectly happy. And at some point in the next few minutes, my daughter came over and saw that he'd done this and became extremely mad at him. She started crying and she said you ruined it. She was just beside herself and she ran off in the other room and then he was mad at her and she was mad at him, this whole thing.
Speaker 2:There was this initial response from us as parents that was along the lines of oh, charlie upset Nora by messing up the things she worked so hard on and that he should apologize or should solve for this problem or put it away or whatever. I don't know how much we really said or went down that pathway with him, but definitely the idea was we wanted that conflict to end and we felt like this was something that was not very thoughtful on his part, because obviously she worked really hard on that, et cetera, and almost this idea of that he caused her to feel bad by messing up the blanket. And you can even add on this layer, as grownups watching this happens really nice and sweet that she was doing this for his party, which he didn't even seem to care about as much, and he was not even aware of it really, or was aware of it and didn't appreciate it. So we can add all those layers on in our head, and I definitely noticed that in thinking myself. I think a couple of comments were made here and there by Kevin or me about that.
Speaker 2:But as all this chaos is going on in Charlie's meta, nora, nora's meta, charlie, everything pretty soon, coach Jenny is kind of in the back of my head and Coach Jenny says wait a second. What's happening here is actually kind of straightforward. My daughter is experiencing the universal painful emotion of being disappointed, or one might say devastated, about something that she worked hard on being ruined or broken. This is one of those examples of an emotion that is part of life. We don't like to talk about this a lot, but a certain amount of disappointment, devastation, frustration when unexpected things happen to something you care about is a part of the well-rounded experience of being a human.
Speaker 2:It is the other side of the coin of caring about something, of trying hard, of doing your best. You can't have one without the other. The only way for her to not feel sad about that would be to not care and to not have put the effort into it, and that would not be a full, well-rounded life either, and we're almost implying that her feeling that way is a problem that needs to be solved. We need to get rid of that feeling of disappointment, devastation, by either fixing it for her or telling her brother that it's his fault and having him apologize, or whatever. We are all of us being so up in arms about this is us trying to create a situation where she doesn't have to feel this very painful feeling. Okay, so we are essentially operating on this belief that her having this experience of being disappointed is a problem that needs to be solved and that she can't handle that emotion, that we have to solve it for her. That's also the implication, and so what I actually did was, while this was all going on, I had the thought wait, this is just very simply, her having a normal human experience of being disappointed, and, knowing what I've learned from coaching, I know that negative emotions are not necessarily going to kill you.
Speaker 2:They don't last forever, and so I just refocused myself. I went over to her and I just gave her a hug and I was like I named it for her. I said, wow, that is so disappointing. When you work so hard on something, it gets messed up. It's so devastating when you care about something and you do something nice for your brother and he doesn't even seem to appreciate it. So notice how I'm naming for her kind of my guesses as to what she's feeling and what she's making it mean. So she probably initially was disappointed and devastated that it was broken, but then probably a part of her is assuming that her brother knew why she did it and that she did it for him and that he knew that she cared about it and that he just disregarded it anyway and didn't appreciate it. And so now she's probably feeling some other emotions around that.
Speaker 2:So I just started, I just acknowledged all of those feelings, but I did not try to rush them away. I let her cry, I give her a hug. I didn't try to solve it, I didn't try to make anything better. I didn't go and say, oh, let me help you fix it. I know how to fix this, I can help you. I just let it be and I let it run its course, which wasn't very long. And then we said, after she'd kind of calmed down, I was like, would you like to fix this? Whatever we did, it was totally fine and I'm not going to say it was just all roses, rainbows and everyone hugged and made up and all the things. But it did really deescalate fairly quickly and everyone was happy with how it turned out and it definitely went a lot more smoothly than when, in the past, there's been this very clear cut like you messed this up and now I'm sad and you owe me an apology or you have to fix it. Or even Kevin and I getting in the middle and saying this is your fault, you hurt her feelings, or you hurt his feelings, say you're sorry. Whenever we've tried to do that, it just does not end well. It always escalates into a lot of blame and shame and tit for tat and all that stuff. So I do think this actually did go better.
Speaker 2:I don't necessarily know that if I always did this it would always go faster, but I think as adults we can take away a lot of really good wisdom as we think about what to do with our own moments of universal, normal human experiences that are painful, emotions that are painful. So just to list those through the first one is when we feel angry or upset, or this twinge of negative emotion, like really choosing to believe in that moment that it's not necessarily a problem that needs to be solved, it's not necessarily something that you need to blame on someone else or have someone else fix for you or go next time, go through all these extra layers of prevention to make sure it never happens again. Not necessarily the case with every time. We feel that. Sometimes we feel that and that is the normal part of life. Particularly when you love someone or care about someone, there are going to be times when you're going to feel sad or worried or stressed or disappointed or rejected. That's because you care and that's because you love them and that's actually a good thing. And it's the other side of that love.
Speaker 2:Our brains don't always know that In the moment when we feel rejected and shameful and whatever else we might have to like, actually try to figure out ourselves. Wait, is this actually a problem or is this just part of like? This is one of those moments when I'm a normal human having a universal human experience that it's really sucky. That's the first thing. The second thing is, when you do notice those twinges of these emotions, notice that we often don't have great language for actually describing what's really going on, so we're much more likely, like my daughter, to just be like mad at our brother for doing this thing, but not noticing that what's underneath. That is just a genuine disappointment in the thing that you cared about getting messed up.
Speaker 2:I know that it sounds like I'm just talking about kids here, but I tell you people who study emotions will confirm this American adults are really bad at naming emotions Probably all adults everywhere. But I just happen to know, like in our English language and with our culture and everything, we are particularly bad. We don't have a really robust language for emotion. So what you want to do is kind of like what I did for my daughter is kind of stop for a minute and actually kind of like think what's really going on here and like what's the core emotion and name it to yourself, if you can. Oh, disappointed, it does have to be perfect. This is something you've practiced, but it's amazing how just name it to yourself can already bring it down, because, as we know, when you name something, it begins to kind of take, name it to tame. It is the phrase we use, and we see this with kids all the time, because they often don't have the words for their emotions and it can really deescalate them quickly when you just give them a word that they didn't have for it before. But that works for us too. So I've noticed this too for myself.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, when I at first I'm angry and sometimes I come across kind of harsh, people say I'm harsh, like if I pause for a second, I'll sometimes notice like no, I'm actually not, it's not really anger, although people think that I'm angry. What it is is I'm feeling misunderstood as a big one. For me and once I had that language for that feeling I got better at I would notice I was kind of coming across kind of intense or defensive, and then I would like pause for a second and I would just tell the person with, like I'm sorry, I know I'm sounding really angry. I just I'm feeling misunderstood, right. And so notice how that is me showing up with vulnerability and honesty about what's really going on, versus like being angry at them for judging me or whatever. Right, and it's a lot more effective. So you don't have to always say it out loud to other people. That's kind of an advanced thing.
Speaker 2:But, like for starters, if you're just not sure where to start, it's first of all being like, okay, maybe nothing's gone wrong here, maybe this is a normal human experience of a negative emotion. And then, just okay, can I name what's really going on. Right, it doesn't have to take extra time. You can do this in the middle of your day. And then the other part you can do is you can say to yourself kind of some of the same stuff that I said to my daughter like gosh, it totally makes sense that you would feel this way because this happened, or because you're thinking this like you can literally notice. Result makes sense that I'm feeling misunderstood or judged because you know I'm thinking they always say this to me, or because this happened or because I worked really hard on this and whatever. You can literally say that to yourself and you can normalize for yourself. It totally makes sense, it's part of the human experience, it's normal and it hurts. And then you can remind yourself it won't last forever, right, and I just kind of gave her some empathy and some physical support until it passed and ran its course. The other thing I want you to notice is that this is actually, in a way, easier and less stressful than what we usually do.
Speaker 2:If I had tried to solve for my daughter's problem in the moment and continued down the course of blaming my son and trying to make him apologize and trying to halt her from crying and be like, okay, don't cry. Don't cry, it's fine. I'm going to fold the blanket, it'll be fine, we'll make sure this is all right. That would have all been a lot of time and effort that I would have spent. It might not have even worked because she wouldn't have been hurt. She wouldn't have felt that I fully saw her and acknowledged it. Emotions always want to be heard and acknowledged.
Speaker 2:What I did was much less work. All I had to do was really stop trying to solve anything. I didn't have to. Actually, I didn't even have to agree with her point of view. I didn't have to believe that either Charlie did or didn't do it on purpose. I didn't have to understand. I was able to understand. But even if I hadn't fully understood it, I could have just been like oh gosh, that's really disappointing. You really cared about those blankets. I don't have to fully understand it or agree with it or solve it or blame someone else or believe their point of view about who did it on purpose or who didn't. I don't have to get in the middle of all that. I can actually have a better outcome by doing less. That's often the case with emotions. That's often the case with ourselves.
Speaker 2:We often do so much work and effort, these mental gymnastics and ruminating and trying to solve everything and prevent everything or blame someone or send someone an email and try to force the person to see your point of view and agree with you. All of that, by the way, it's great if you can get it to happen, but often you can't and it actually is counterproductive, because what you really need to do is back all that off and take all those layers away and just notice your emotion and give it a minute to have it space and be heard and validated and normalized. Notice how much less effort that was for me to have a better result. Also, notice that I didn't go into this a lot, but it actually made me also able to better help my son, because as long as we were saying he was a problem and he should change and he should apologize, we weren't able to connect with him.
Speaker 2:As soon as we just focused on connecting and noticing what was really going on for her and she was calming down, I was able to circle back with my son rather from a blaming and shaming standpoint, which would have just continued him responding with defensiveness and he would have said, oh well, she shouldn't care about that and she's overreacting and all these other things. Instead, I was able to actually connect with him and be like hey, I don't know if you realize this, but she worked really hard on it and I was able to explain and bring up analogies, because I know he's the same way when something he cares about is messed up and ruined, he gets that exact same reaction. I said I think she's disappointed because she worked really hard and you've had that experience when the dog's not going over something you build. He was able to see a bit more of her point of view. Now I'm not going to say he just jumped up and said I'm sorry and fixed it for her, but they were able to actually create some connection and calm with each other because he could have some empathy for that. He wasn't able to see that when he was too busy being defensive because he was being attacked as the cause of something without his point of view even being hurt, we were all making a lot of assumptions about what he even knew, about, how much she cared about that thing and we were assuming that it was his job to fix that, which, I would argue, we often give our kids this message that other people need to stop doing something, that they don't feel this way and vice versa, that they should watch out for our feelings or other people's feelings and try to prevent them. It gets kind of messy and I think this really nicely illustrates how that just all became a huge mess when you dialed it back and just said okay, it's normal and okay and not a problem that Nora has this negative emotion right now. Let's sit with her, actually diffuse the whole thing On a larger scale. I also want to point out that what this does with your kid is now Nora has experienced feeling a negative emotion and sitting with it and noticing it doesn't kill her and noticing she doesn't have to make someone else fix it, and feeling better and it passing. She also has this language and understanding of what's hard for her. I personally believe that if we're able to find moments to do this with our kids over the years we hopefully will grow adults who actually are not so afraid of their own negative emotions and have these skills that we were not taught. I just offering that as food for thought.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying this as like Parenting advice for every situation. There are definitely situations where it makes a lot of sense to try to minimize pain and discomfort for kids, and it depends a lot on their developmental abilities their ages are bandwidth for sitting with emotions and their bandwidth for degrees of pain, all that stuff. But I do think that more often than not, we kind of err on the side of trying to prevent or avoid all of the pain that our kids feel, because we love them and we don't want them to hurt, and we become so busy trying to be the perfect parents who make life great for them that sometimes we miss these opportunities to actually back off and do less and allow them to learn the skill of sitting with their uncomfortable emotions. And so I think there are moments where that can actually be really good, and can be way over time, of building up these skills in our kids and can actually be something that we all learn together. That's what I do in my family is I am working on this for myself and I share it with my kids, and I think it creates a lot of connection and safety for all of us.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this, as usual, ended up being longer than I expected, but I hope that it brought up some really good points for you to think about and to consider as you begin to practice, allowing a few of your own uncomfortable emotions or noticing where these things show up in your life. And again, if you want to hear more about how this plays out in our lives and creates this feeling of headless chicken syndrome, and some of the other techniques that I use to help you with this, it's all discussed in the webinar that I did this week and the link is in the show notes, so go ahead and register for that. You'll get the replay and with that, I hope you have an amazing week. Bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at JennyHobbsMDcom to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five star rating so we can reach even more women like you.