Why do we yell at our children - even when we know we shouldn't?

Why isn't just knowing what to do enough to actually interact with our children in a way that aligns with our values?

For many of us, the reason we struggle to actually implement the ideas we know we want to use is because we've experienced trauma in our lives. This may be the overt kind that we can objectively say was traumatic (divorce, abuse, death among close family members...), or it may simply be the additive effect of having our needs disregarded over and over again by the people who were supposed to protect us.

These experiences cause us to feel 'triggered' by our children's behavior - because their mess and lack of manners and resistance remind us subconsciously of the ways that we were punished as children for doing very similar things. These feelings don't just show up in our brains, they also have deep connections to our bodies (in spite of the Western idea that the body and brain are essentially separate!).

If we don't decide to take a different path and learn new tools to enable us to respond effectively to our child rather than reacting in the heat of the moment, and because our physical experience is so central to how this trauma shows up in our daily lives, we also need to understand and process this trauma through our bodies.

If you need help understanding the source of your triggered feelings and learning new ways to navigate them so you can feel triggered less often, my popular and highly effective Taming Your Triggers workshop will be open soon. Sliding scale pricing will be available, and the community will meet on a platform that isn't Facebook! Join the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.

   

Jump to highlights:

• (01:00) This episode’s rationale
• (03:12) The two ways trauma shows up in broader family relationships
• (05:27) The separateness of the brain and the body has a long history in Western culture
• (06:05) Rene Descartes on the schism of mind and body
• (07:12) The held belief of the mind as superior to the rest of the body
• (08:09) The inherent bias of data
• (09:42) The lies our brain tells us
• (12:54) The so-called 4 ‘truths’ of the physical experience of trauma
• (16:22) When we are not attuned to the signals that our body is giving us
• (19:01) Difficulty in identifying feelings for people who experienced trauma
• (22:16) Saying OK when you aren’t really OK
• (26:19) The difference between reacting and responding
• (27:10) Using physical experience to bring order to the chaos in our minds
• (31:15) The first step to creating a safe environment for your child
• (33:26) The root of our inability to create meaningful relationships
• (34:18) Equipping ourselves with the tools to regulate our arousal

 

Other episodes mentioned:

• 113: No Self, No Problem

• 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma

• Responding to the U.S. Capitol Siege

• Dismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day

  Links:

• Taming Your Triggers Workshop

  Facebook group:

• Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. The topic of our episode today is the Physical Reasons You Yell at Your Kids, which is kind of a shorthand way of talking about how the traumatic events that we've experienced in our lives show up in our bodies, and how we can use our physical experience to start healing from trauma. As we do that, we're going to extend ideas we've discussed before on the show related to our experience of trauma and we'll link those to a series of episodes that's getting underway on how our physical experience in our bodies impacts our mental states and wellbeing and how our bodies interact with our brains to both receive and also give information, which is an area of study that's very often completely overlooked in psychology.   Jen  01:40 As we get better and better at producing large and expensive equipment that allows us to see how the brain works, we become ever more focused on finding the exact part in the brain that's going wrong when we have what's described as a mental illness or some kind of learning difficulty, when actually our brains are just a small part of the interconnected web of stuff that makes us up.   Jen  02:00 So those of you who have been listening for a while now will be able to trace the origins of this episode back to the interview with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci on the subject of intergenerational trauma. You'll also see links to the conversation with Dr. Chris Niebauer on his book No Self, No Problem, where we talked about the stories that are left brains make up to try to explain our circumstances. I started delving back into this material when I was researching content for my Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership on non-cognitive ways of learning or learning through our bodies as well as our brains.  And then I remembered the concept of implicit bias, and wondered how much of the ideas we form rapidly, which may seem to be what we think of as ‘gut feelings’ about a situation, do these really come from the gut? I dove into that research a few weeks ago, and I have an interview with Dr. Mazharin Banaji, Director of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the famous Implicit Association Test that you can take online to discover your implicit bias coming up in a few weeks, I really wanted to dig into can we actually trust these ideas that we think of as gut feelings. But before we get there, I wanted to spend some time thinking about the ways that trauma we've experienced shows up in our bodies, and what impact this has on our relationships with our broader families, but specifically with our children.   Jen  03:12 We do know that there are two ways trauma shows up in these relationships – we actually have evidence that trauma is passed on intergenerationally through our genes.  There isn’t a direct relationship between your parent experiencing trauma and that being passed on; it’s more like something in your genes is changed and when you find yourself having a certain kind of experience this turns certain genes on or off, so there’s an interaction between our experience and our genes that can result in a certain predisposition and personality.  And then the second way that trauma is passed on is through the way we interact with our children.  In some cases when we have experienced severe trauma in early life we may experience life-long abnormal physiological stress reactions, and measurable differences in the development of certain brain regions that are associated with attention, impulse control, and affect regulation.  This is why it can be so difficult for parents who experienced neglect or abuse to develop positive, trusting relationships with their children.  Even when the trauma the parent experienced was more modest in nature we may find ourselves having an outsized reaction to our child’s age-appropriate but perhaps annoying behavior – we go into fight or flight mode and we scream at our child or threaten them with unreasonable punishments or maybe spank them, or we go into freeze mode and we simply shut down.  We emotionally or actually physically just walk away.   Jen  04:23 So if you’re seeing that you’re having interactions with your child where you’re regularly feeling explosive or shut down, I’d encourage you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop which is currently open for registration right now through midnight Pacific on Sunday February 28th.  We’ll help you to uncover the true sources of your triggered feelings, which aren’t actually in your child’s behavior, and feel triggered less often, and respond to your child more effectively on the fewer occasions when it does still happen.  It’s a 10-week workshop with lots of support from me as you go through it, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the results can be incredibly profound if you really engage with it.  Participants regularly find that they can cope with difficult situations with their children in a way that’s much more aligned with their values even in high-pressure situations like when they’ve been at home with the children by themselves for weeks on end, and some parents find that it is one of the most profound experiences of their lives.  So I do hope you’ll consider joining me for that – sliding scale pricing is available for people who need it, and I’m using a new platform to host the support community, so you don’t have to be on Facebook either.  So, to learn more about the workshop to go YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers.   Jen  05:27 So one of the reasons that we have so much trouble with understanding what our bodies are telling us is because for centuries, we've denied there's a connection between our brains and our bodies. In his very readable book Intelligence in the Flesh, Dr. Guy Claxton traces this idea from the Greeks, who associated intellect with a higher form of being than physical athleticism.  Christianity adopted these attitudes, seeing the body as ‘sin’s instrument,’ as something lower down, associated with misfortune, breaking down, and the depths of hell.  Things that were higher, like our heads and brains, were bright, light, pure, and ethereal, and similar ideas can be found in religions from Buddhism to Hinduism and Islam.   Jen  06:05 Philosopher Rene Descartes took this idea and ran with it in the 1600s, saying “There is nothing included in the concept of the body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in that of mind that belongs to the body.”  Until we could properly understand how our brains and bodies worked, we couldn’t possibly have comprehended that they might actually work together in a dynamic, intricate whole.  The Descartes view of the brain is essentially of a CEO in a glass-walled office, issuing edicts that the robots on the factory floor must obey to keep the systems running.  This view sees the mind and the brain as inseparable, and any rational intelligent thought we have occurs in the brain.  Even though we can now see a great deal of how the brain works, we really don’t understand it very much better than we did 400 years ago.  And we do still see intelligent work that is seen as happening primarily in the brain as being more important and valuable than work we do primarily with our bodies.  We measure people’s intelligence by taking them out of the contextual environment they understand with their bodies and sit them in an examination room that is supposed to be neutral but is actually very stressful for a lot of people and ask them to manipulate relationships between out-of-context words and shapes.   Jen  07:12 And at the top of all of this, overseeing the show, is the CEO in his glass office (and yes, I’m going to say it’s a ‘he’).  The CEO is assumed to have an accurate perception of everything else that’s going on around (thanks to those glass walls) and can take on new information and integrate it with information he already has and then tells the robots what to do.  He might receive information from the robots about things like how much energy they have left and whether they’re short of other resources they need, but in general the instructions flow downhill. The CEO makes rational decisions by logically weighing the benefits of one action against the benefits of another action and reaching the most justifiable conclusion.  Most emotional or physical information that might enter this system is at best seen as something that is irrelevant, and at worst it’s something that is interfering with our ability to make a rational decision and must be ignored. It’s not a big leap from there to say that because women are presumed to be more affected by their emotions they must be less intelligent than men.   Jen  08:09 As a side note, this is linked to our reliance on scientific research to understand our world. True scientific research must be free of the bias of emotions, although in reality of course this is impossible so scientists just write in the third person to imply neutrality even though they can never truly be neutral. I sometimes get criticized by people who are reviewing the podcast because they say I'm biased, although the reviewers often say they're just here for the data, because the data themselves are presumed to be unbiased. When actually there's bias baked into every aspect of the scientific process, from how the research question is posed to the sampling method use to the data collection to the analysis to which of the results are discussed most prominently and make it into the abstract. So there's bias inherent in all aspects of this method. It's just that I'm honest about where mine are. And I'll do an episode with more detail on this at some point. So we presume that we can mostly make rational decisions based on the data that's available to us. But sometimes parts of the brain that we don't understand especially well how our unconscious bubbles up into the system, kind of like an employee who shows up drunk to holiday parties, we might be a bit embarrassed by their presence, and we often try to pretend they aren't really there. And we may try and find simple explanations for their behavior, but we shy away from asking them what's really going on with them to understand how this behavior is helping them to meet a need they have.   Jen  09:27 So in general, the ideas that my brain runs the show, and that I can understand and be mostly in control of my brain are ones that have actually gained strength in the 20th century as we became more interested in how the brain works and began using computers as a metaphor for this.   Jen  09:42 But it turns out that this view of how our brain works is really problematic.  We think of our brains as having a pretty accurate view of the world; that if we remember something happening then it must have happened in that way; our brains are like a video camera that is accurately perceiving everything that shows up in front of it.  But actually we don’t work like this at all.  You’ve probably seen the online game where you’re supposed to count the number of passes of a basketball between a group of people and you completely fail to see the person dressed up in the gorilla suit walking in between the players.  And you may recall from the No Self, No Problem episode that the left side of our brain, which is where all of this information is supposedly rationally processed, makes up stories all the time.  We cross a wobbly bridge over a deep gorge and our brain mis-registers our fear as attraction toward the researcher who approaches us on the other side.  Our friend doesn’t call us back to make dinner plans and we spin a story about how they don’t respect us or our friendship.  Or we fail to account for the stories the other person’s left brain is making up as well – my Dad is moving house and he recently texted me to ask if I wanted some old fabric scraps I’d left in his attic, and it brought back memories of how my stepmother had made some snide comments about my patchwork project.  I told him that she was kind of mean to me about that, and he replied that he thought she was jealous of the things I was good at, as well as my abilities at school which made her own daughter’s struggles seem much worse in comparison.  And when I saw that I just thought “huh.”  Obviously, I was the child in that interaction, and I didn’t have all of the information about the...