Today, we’re wrapping up the 3-part series on Internal Family Systems (IFS). This episode is all about being what your kid needs, with lots of strategies to show up as the calm, connected parent you want to be.

You’ll Learn:

• The 4 parts of emotional literacy
• How to let your child “borrow” your nervous system as they build their own emotional strength
• 3 things all kids want to hear from their parents
• 7 strategies for leading your child toward emotional health

Note: If you haven’t listened to the first 2 episodes in this series, I recommend you go back and do that. There’s a lot of background information that will help this all make a lot more sense.

------------------------------------------

Preventing Childhood Trauma

A lot of parents come to me with the goal of not f*cking up their kids. They don’t want to do something that creates trauma in their children. But when you are parenting from a place of reactivity, insecurity, stress, or overwhelm (your wounded parts), you may end up accidentally injuring parts of your kid. 

Trauma happens when we have a difficult experience and the emotional pain is not processed. It gets stuck inside of us. If your child’s pain is not validated and seen by the grown-ups in their life, they may end up confused or thinking that something is wrong with them. They might feel worthless, unlovable, or shameful. 

One common example of this is bypassing emotion. It can look like rescuing, jumping quickly to logic or a solution, bribes, looking to the future. Doing this can give your kid the message that their emotion isn’t okay or valid. 

If you’re sitting there thinking, “Great, I’ve already done all these bad things to my kids. I’ve already created trauma,” take a deep breath. Your children are still children, and they’re still processing their feelings. 

You can start now being that compassionate leader for your family. I’ve seen it thousands of times. Mom changes >> Kids change. They heal in real time. It’s incredible and so, so beautiful. 

Compassionate parenting is not about making sure our kids don't ever feel badly. It's helping them learn what to do with those bad feelings when they happen (i.e. growing up to be emotionally healthy).

I think of emotional health in terms of emotional literacy:

1. I know what I’m feeling
2. I know how to talk about my feelings
3. I know what to do with my feelings
4. I can recognize and understand how others are feeling (aka empathy)

And just like literacy in reading or writing, these are skills that can be taught and must be practiced. 

Being What Your Kid Needs

Ultimately, your kid needs you to be available to help them process their big feelings and provide a model for emotional health.

Once you’ve begun to step into your SELF energy (like I talked about in the last episode), you start leading your life from a more grounded, calm place. You become less reactive toward your children. 

Here are some ways to bring that SELF-led energy to your kid.

Be a witness

It can be difficult to be around someone who is very emotional and activated. Your child’s big feelings might trigger emotion in you (that’s your amygdala at work). A lot of parents fall apart when their kids fall apart. And this is actually pretty terrifying for the child. 

When you are willing to witness your child’s pain and help them process it, it can be released. Your kid needs you to be the grown-up in the room. And they need to feel safe enough to express their authentic pain, desires, and whatever else is going on inside of them - their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, the circumstances or situations in their life where they're being hurt. 

A witness is not a participant. You are not participating in your child’s pain. You’re holding the energy that they are going to be okay.

This isn’t about being dismissive or bypassing their pain. It’s about you being in your SELF energy so that you can be a witness to their pain without getting sucked into it. You've been through hard things, and you know that they pass. So when your child is struggling, you can have the perspective that this difficult moment won’t last forever. 

Not sure if you’re in a place to be what your kid needs? Ask yourself a few simple questions:

Am I calm? 

Am I able to witness this pain right now without needing to fix it?

Can I be curious and compassionate right now?

If the answer to these questions is no, and you’re stuck in your own feelings, take a pause break, soothe yourself, reset, and try again. Remind yourself, “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”

Model emotional health

Your responsibility as the parent is to model the experiences that our kids need, and this includes emotional health and regulation. 

When you’re in SELF-led energy, you can let your kid borrow your sense of self, your strong, calm, grounded center - until they get better and stronger at tapping into their own. In IFS, this is called being a “hope merchant”.

Get curious

Kids give us clues about how they’re feeling through their behavior. Supporting them requires you to get curious about the feelings that are driving the behavior. Why are they acting the way they are? Do you notice any patterns, like times of day they tend to act out or certain circumstances that trigger them? How can you support them and help them process their big feelings?

Curiosity is also a clue that you’re tapping into SELF energy, that you are getting closer to being in that truly compassionate, connected space with your kids. 

Use the Connection Tool

The Connection Tool is made up of 3 parts:

1. Narrate the behavior you see.
2. Name the feeling. Try saying, “I wonder if you’re feeling…?”
3. Now what? Validate the feeling and ask what they want to do now (or give some ideas of what they can do with the feeling).

Walk your child through this process to help them work through their emotions.

Create a positive vision of the future

It can be really challenging to listen to your kid’s pain without trying to fix it, especially because you love them so, so much. When I’m worried about my kids, I actively think positive thoughts about their future. 

If you want your kid to believe that they’re going to be okay, you have to believe it first. You are the light in their life that offers peace and perspective. 

Give it some time

If you’ve been reactive or tried to bypass your child’s emotion in the past, they might not trust this new calm energy right away. Allow time for them to learn that you’re not going to fall apart, you’re not going to jump into the fix it/change it/stop it/solve it energy. Show them that they’re safe with you. You’re ready, and you can handle it.

Keep working on your relationship with your SELF. 

When you notice that your inner voice is critical and negative, that means there’s a part of you that is trying to protect you from pain. Ask that voice if it would be willing to be quiet. Get curious about what it's worried about. What's it protecting you from? Can you soothe that? Can you let that part of you know it's safe? 

The more you can tap into your SELF energy, the more your children will be able to access their whole SELF, as well.

Resources:

• Episode 183: Internal Family Systems, pt 1
• Episode 184: Finding Your SELF (Internal Family Systems, pt 2)
• How To Heal series
• Episode 3: Connection is Key to Improving Behavior (learn how to use the Connection Tool)
• Learn how to take a Pause Break

Get your copy of the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet!

In this free guide you’ll discover:

✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet here

Connect With Darlynn: 

• Book a complimentary session with Darlynn
• Learn about the different parenting programs at www.calmmamacoaching.com
• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips 
• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host, I'm Darlin

Childress, I'm a life and parenting coach. And this episode

is part three of a three part series I'm

doing about internal family systems. So if you haven't

listened to part one, which was episode 183,

I suggest you go back just to get a background on what

I'm talking about. Because I am introduce the concept

of parts like your exiled parts of

you, your wounded parts of you and your protectors, your

managers, your firefighters, the parts of you that react

and try to protect you from experiencing pain.

And sometimes the way that those parts of us react are

in maladaptive strategies that hurt us.

So it's a little bit complicated. I go over the whole thing

in episode 183. So I suggest you go back and listen

to that. That in today's episode. What I want to talk about

is being what your kid needs. And

I want to talk to you about this concept of self

led energy that I talked about last episode about how to

tap into your inner voice and how to lead

your life from a grounded, calm place.

And that way you become less reactive towards your children.

You don't have to show up in such a hyper vigilant state or

you know, that reactive yelling, fight, flight, fix it,

change it, stop it, solve it. Like that energy that can be

so destructive for us and for our kids,

how to get to that deeper level of calm. And I give you a bunch

of strategies and ways to tap into that and to know when you are tapped

in and when you're not. Now on this episode, what

I really want to do is break down down for you what

it looks like to become

the self that your child needs from you.

So I'm going to go back now and just kind of slow things down. I

just wanted to give you a heads up. If you hadn't listened to the last

two episodes, you may want to go back, but I'm going to anchor us

into these. This concept about how

trauma happens to us and

how to prevent that trauma happening to our children

using this concept of self led energy.

Now, a lot of parents come to me and their biggest hope,

right, is that they don't fuck up their kids, right? They don't want to mess

up their kids and they worry that they will

do something that creates trauma in their child.

They don't want, obviously you don't want that. You don't want to hurt your

kids. I know you don't. Right. And when you

are parenting from a Place of reactivity,

from insecurity, from stress, from

fear, from overwhelm, you may end

up accidentally injuring

parts of your kids. And I want to talk a

little bit about what that looks like and how

we can avoid doing that. So when we think about

not messing up our kids, what you really are saying

that you want is to raise emotionally healthy

kids. So what is an emotionally healthy person?

When I define emotional health, I use the language

of emotional literacy. I've talked a lot about it

on this podcast. So I'm going to give you a little bit of background about

what emotional literacy is and then how we develop

that in our children. So emotional literacy

is the ability to know

what I'm feeling, to talk about that feeling,

to know what to do with that feeling, and to be able to do that

for someone else. So emotional health is

this four part process and it really is

literacy in that you build it and learn. Just like you learn how

to read, the first thing you do is learn your letters, you learn

your sounds, you learned how to put those sounds into words, and then

slowly you add your vocabulary and then you can put

words together on your own and learn to write. If you

think about that concept of reading literacy and writing

literacy, it's similar to emotional literacy. The

first thing I have to know is what things are called, right? I have to

be able to name my emotion to know

what I'm feeling. We all have sensations,

energy, and motion within our bodies. And that energy

is, you know, a feeling, right? And then we try to put

words to describe it. So if I describe the word

sadness, I say I feel sad, you are

probably able to understand what I might be going through.

If I see, if I say I'm angry, if I say I'm excited,

if I say I'm disappointed, you understand what

I'm talking about. But first I have to understand

what I'm feeling, and then I need to communicate it.

So that's that first part is know what I'm feeling, know how to talk

about it. So I can say I am sad,

I am hurt, I am disappointed, I am overwhelmed,

right? I can describe my feelings. The third part is I

know what to do with those feelings. When I am sad, I know how to

take care of myself, I know how to release that sadness.

When I am angry, I know what to do with my anger.

When I am overwhelmed, I know what to do.

Now, a lot of times we might not know what to do with our feelings.

And one of the things that we can always do with our

feelings is to tap into Self energy

to connect within the internal wisdom

of us, the part of us that is

willing to be a witness of our pain. So if you think

about this internal core self, that

self is willing to be a witness of your pain.

And to help you process your pain, we have

to be able to feel our pain in order to

release our pain. So the three parts, right? The first

parts of emotional literacy is I know what I'm feeling. I know how to

talk about it. I know what to do with it. So sometimes if I'm

mad, I might need to take a big fat walk, right? Long, fast

walk. Or I might need to go exercise. Like, I need to move my body

when I'm angry. Sometimes I need to just ignore my anger for a minute,

let it dissipate by doing something else, like a task. Sometimes when I'm

sad, I need to distract myself, but sometimes I need to sit in

it. I need to lay in my bed and I need to cry a little

bit. I need to journal. I need to talk to a friend. I need to

let someone witness my sadness. When I'm

overwhelmed. I might need to outsource some of my issues. I might

need to make a list and prioritize, right?

I have all sorts of tools. You do, too. You are a great

person. You already are super equipped. No one who listens to this podcast

is like, I don't know how to do any of this emotional health stuff, right?

You are good. You have been. Especially if you've been listening to this podcast a

long time. You have so much wisdom inside of you of what to do with

your feelings, Then that fourth layer

of emotional literacy is the ability to do that for someone

else. That is empathy. So if I'm

able to recognize someone's emotion based

on the way that they're acting or looking, you know, or their face

or body language, right? I can read their emotional energy of others.

I can help name that for them. I can help them figure out

what to do with their big feelings, right? Like, if a friend comes to

me and starts, you know, looks sad, I might say, hey, what's going on?

And you look a little bit sad. Are you doing okay? And then they

might talk and I might be able to say, like, yeah, that makes sense. I

mean, have you. I might offer advice or I might just listen, right? A lot

of times, all a feeling wants is to be felt. All a

feeling wants is to be seen to be validated.

Validation is so powerful, and we can just let it

go once it's been felt. A lot of times in this,

you know, gentle parenting model or this emotionally connected

model. Parents will often get stuck with this concept of, like,

okay, well, I've said, like, yeah, you're sad. What else am I

supposed to do? Like, you want to fix it, right? You want to make it

better, Better. And I want to offer to you that really what

every feeling needs is to be felt, is to be validated, is to

be seen. And if you can offer some soothing,

that's great. Soothing can sound like,

oh, that makes sense. Would you like a hug? Or, I hear

you. That's frustrating. And, you know, maybe you want

to go and deal with that problem. Like, go talk to your friend. Or,

you know, we can offer some advice, we can offer some soothing,

but that's not what we're there for. Compassionate

parenting is not about making sure our kids don't feel

badly. It's helping them learn how to deal

when they do feel badly, what to do with those bad feelings.

The way that trauma happens, the way that

emotional pain gets stuck inside of

us is when we have an

emotionally difficult experience,

and that pain is not processed.

It's kind of like, I think of it a little bit like digestion. Like, I

need to eat something, and then I poop it out,

right? But if I don't go to the bathroom, I'm gonna get constipated. It's gonna

get stuck inside me. It's gonna get toxic. Not to be

too gross here, but it is helpful to think about

feelings as something that just comes in and goes out.

But if it doesn't go out, it will create problems.

We can't. Like, sepsis and all those things. Like when the body's not

processing all of the fluids and. And

food and all the things that it's supposed to do, and the blood's not flowing,

like, things aren't flowing within our body properly.

The lymphatic system, like the cardiovascular system, we

have so many systems within our body that really need to keep flowing,

Even perspiration, right? We sweat. Like, this is all stuff that

our body does naturally. And our emotions are able to do it

too. But it's often

difficult to be. For one person to be

around somebody else that's very activated, that's

very emotional. A lot of times, someone's emotion might

trigger emotion in us. That's what the amygdala does.

The amygdala reads the energy of the room.

And if somebody is activated, then we get

activated. That's panic, right? You think about, like,

mob mentality, right? Or if a stampede,

right? Everyone Starts running, it's like we become a little bit

animal, like and we just start going with whatever emotion is the

most dominant. So as a parent,

if your child's emotion is leading you,

we talked about this in child led parenting versus value led

parenting. If your child's emotion is

leading you, you are going to get stuck a

lot in reactivity and in people pleasing and

in codependency and you're not going to be able

to witness your children's pain and discomfort from a

neutral, compassionate place.

So I say neutral because I'm detached. I am

not personally invested in my

child's current state of emotion.

This is why as the leader, as a

human who's been through a few hard things, right, you

have to, I know that hard things

pass. So when my children are struggling with

something and they're going through something difficult, I

have perspective. I am eternally wise

and I've got some years on me so I can look at

my 16 year old, my 20 year old, my 14 year old, my 9 year

old, my 2 year old, and know, hey,

you're gonna be okay. Now, we don't want to be dismissive,

right? We don't want to bypass that emotion. Being in

self led energy is being willing to be a witness of that pain.

Be willing to dig into it a little bit, explore it a little

bit, turn it around a bit, like tenderly,

you know, touch it. And I'm using my fingers to like kind of

explore with my hands, like I'm imagining an emotion

inside my palms that my child is so

gently holding. And I'm willing to take a look at it too

and to turn it around and see it from different sides and different

angles. I'm willing to just be in it,

let that feeling be seen and felt.

I don't plan to get stuck there. I'm not gonna

let us get stuck there. I am the leader.

So when you think about self healing that I've

talked about in that whole Hierarchy of Healing

series that I did in February and I talked about it last week,

this concept that we can heal ourselves through a

relationship with ourselves. When I talk

about self energy, I'm talking about for you to tap

into that within yourself so that you can heal yourself.

Now when I talk about it as a parent with your child,

I want you to bring the same energy. Let your children

borrow your sense of self, your

strong, calm, grounded center. Let

them borrow yourself until they get

better and stronger at tapping into their own. Our

children, they borrow everything from us

until they're independent, right? So they're dependent on us

for, obviously money. And we understand time,

we understand how cars work. We understand a lot of things.

They're borrowing practical stuff from us, but they're also

borrowing our nervous system. A little baby.

Their nervous system is not well tuned

yet. It fires up easily. It gets dysregulated

easily. It can't quite soothe itself.

That's why parents exist, right? We soothe our children with

the goal of them learning to self soothe. So they

borrow our nervous system. We regulate them until they're

able to self regulate. So the parent,

Your responsibility is to model

the experiences that our kids need. Not model for yourself.

Yes, do that, but also be the experience

with them. Come alongside of them. When your children

need to learn to fall asleep, right? We stay with them until they're

able to fall asleep on their own. And then we teach them that they can

do it. And we teach them to be calm and confident and tap

into what they need inside of them to feel safe. But the first

thing we do is teach them that they are safe, that it's okay to

be scared. And we know how to help them be scared. It's okay to be

sad. We know how to help them be sad. When you think about

trauma and you wonder, how does trauma get

created? Like, where does it come from?

It comes from these injuries as a

child where hard things happen and the

grownups around us don't help us with them.

So if we experience neglect, attachment injuries,

boundary violations, like if somebody touches my body in a way

that's not okay. If

I have a need, an emotional need, and that need is

dismissed. If I'm given any feedback,

like I'm getting rejected because of the way I'm acting. That's why

timeouts can be so dangerous, because we are often

communicating. Go over there and come back

when you're good, right? Instead of saying, you look like you're having

some trouble, let me help you figure out what to do with this

feeling or this desire or this unmet need.

So we really can create

emotional pain for our children by our behavior

or when they are having emotional pain.

If we are not willing to teach them in real

time how to deal with that pain, it can get stuck.

So this burden in internal family systems, it's called a burden.

But if you just think of it as emotional pain. Emotional

pain comes when children's feelings or their experience

isn't validated or seen. When their child's not allowed to express

the feelings that they have, they may end up having

thoughts about themselves that something is wrong with them.

They're so confused by this messy emotional life.

I'm confused. Sometimes as a fully actualized adult,

I can also get overwhelmed with my own feelings and

senses and thoughts and feelings and all of those things.

So a little kid will also have that. But if no adult is helping them

narrate what's happening to them, name those big feelings,

giving them ideas of how to deal with those big feelings,

setting boundaries and keeping those boundaries through limits. When the

adults around us aren't in their leadership energy,

it can create emotional pain

for the child. They may end up feeling

worthless, unlovable, shameful. I don't want to go through

it all because you know, those are your fears.

Now. Some of you right now are thinking, holy shit, I've already done it. I've

already done all these bad things to my kids. I've already

created trauma. Maybe, I don't know.

But your children are still children and they're still

processing their feelings

now. And they still need you to be a emotional

witness for them, and they need you to help

them when they have emotional pain.

How do we know if our kids are struggling? How do we know

if they need support? They give us a

clue through their behavior. When I say that

behavior is the clue to your

children's feelings and that feelings drive

behavior, this is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about learning

to look at your children's behavior, getting curious about it,

being like, what feeling could be under this?

What emotion could be driving this behavior? Why are

they acting this way? I always say parents are like, why are they been acting

out? Why are they acting this way? And they're like, really angry. I think, okay,

take your emotion out of it and get into some deeper

curiosity which is tapping into your own self energy

and ask genuinely, why are they acting this way?

What could be going on for them? Your kids,

they. You can repair. We can talk about repair

on another podcast episode, but really what

they need is for you to show up today in this self energy.

I'm going to talk more about what it actually means. But

if you've already created some attachment

disruptions and neglect and rejection and lack of attunement

with your children, you don't have to do

a massive, like, big, huge thing. You can

start now being that

compassionate leader in your family, and you will. I've

watched it thousands of times now in my practice with my

mamas. Mom changes, kids change,

mom and dad change. Kids change. They heal in real

time. It is incredible. It's so, so beautiful.

And it doesn't Take a ton of work. You don't have to go to therapy.

I mean, you may have to. If you're not able to tap into the self

led energy, you might need help getting into it. You might

need help having your childhood wounds

witnessed and healed so that you can tap into

more and more self led energy so you can experience what

healing feels like for you and what it feels like to be

witnessed. Maybe you need a therapist or a coach who's willing to

witness your pain and heal that pain

so that you stop showing up in that negative energy with your kids.

I do this all the time in my practice. It's so amazing to

watch a. I primarily work with women, a

mom heal herself of all sorts

of different insecurities and wounds. And just in the

process of mom healing, the whole family dynamic changes

and the kids start to heal. It's so

beautiful. So I want to encourage you to not beat yourself

up. Don't use this podcast episode as evidence that you've already

done too much damage. That is not true.

Ironically, my mom started to heal

herself around 50 years old and I

was already an adult. And in her

process of healing I was able

to build a different relationship with her, heal my relationship with

her because she was open to that. And through

my healing with her, I healed all these childhood

wounds. Not all of them. I have a lot, we know that.

I have an ace score of 9. I've healed from tons and tons of

trauma. But with my mom, her,

her process of getting to deeper levels of self

energy within her made it

accessible for her to witness my pain and

to be willing to take a look and support me. And I

began healing. I think I was 19

and she. And that's like the age that I started to change my life

and really, you know, grow.

So when your childhood wounds happened to you,

you were probably not witnessed, right? There was not an

adult that was able to narrate and name what was happening for

you. And so you may have become disconnected

from your self. You might be

acting out or protecting yourself from getting pain. So you

might be rejecting your children to protect yourself from earlier

rejection. You may be over parenting because

you were under parented. You might be very, very

uncomfortable with your kids feelings because you're not comfortable

with yours because those feelings haven't been witnessed yet.

So our kids, they need us

to be willing to have self energy

around their pain so that they can heal their

pain. When we are willing to have our

kids pain be witnessed and

processed, it can be released. They are kids, they need us to Be

the adults for them, the self energy

that is willing to be a witness. Just

like take a look at it, tell me what happened. That makes sense,

right? To have them feel safe enough that they can express

their authentic pain and self desires,

whatever's going on inside of them, their thoughts, their

feelings, their beliefs, the circumstances, the situations in their

life where they're being hurt. We want to be able

to have a energy within us

that's okay. Being around our kids when they

are in pain so that we can help them make

sense to what's happened so that their pain doesn't get stuck.

We need to give them words. We need to let them know it's safe to

talk about these things. And we want to have that self

energy. So when you're in

self energy, what does it look like? Right. That's what you might be asking.

And it is the Connection Tool. If you're new to my work,

go back to the early episodes where I describe what the Connection Tool

is and I talk about how our job

as parents, when you're trying to show up as a compassionate

parent, you may not know what to do. Right. So the

connection Tool is narrate name now what? Those are the three

parts. So we're narrating the behavior we see. I see you

are hitting. I see you are crying. I see. I see you are

throwing your stuff around. Whatever behavior.

I see that you're not doing your homework. I see that you haven't put your

socks and shoes on. I see that you are jumping out of bed.

I see that you are crying and saying you don't want your

teeth brushed. So we're narrating what they're

saying, what we're seeing, what they're doing, and maybe

some of the circumstances that are happening. Yeah,

it's bedtime. You don't want to go to bed. It's like it's such a

sad time of day. It makes sense that you would not want to, you know,

get your teeth brushed or get your pajamas on and you're acting really silly.

Then we name their feelings. So we narrate what's happening. We name their

feeling. Like, I wonder if you're feeling sad that it's bedtime.

I wonder if you're feeling confused about what you're supposed to do right now. I

wonder if you're feeling overwhelmed. So

narrating, naming and then giving them some options,

validating, that makes sense. Makes sense that you would feel that way. Of course,

this is a hard thing. And then.

But. But Right. Or. And you can set A

limit. Or you can go into some options of,

like, different perspectives. Like, the cool thing is that once you go to sleep and

you wake up tomorrow, we'll have lots of time to play.

So you can offer them perspective, you can offer them the future, you

can offer them a little bit of hope that things won't always be this

bad. If a kid is having trouble with friends,

they're really, really sad. You get to say, yeah, you know what,

it's really hard when you feel like you've lost some friendships or

friendships have changed. That makes sense that you would feel sad.

And I know that you're a really good friend and you're going to be able

to find new friends and that sometimes this happens with friendships.

They go through hard times, but

you're gonna be able to handle this. And then you can say, what do you

want to do right now? Do you want to go for a walk or

have a hug? Right. So we are witnessing

and we are offering them perspective.

And sometimes we have to put a boundary if we need to.

But for today's episode, I want to focus just on the energy that you're

bringing to the conversations. When you're using the connection tool,

you are naming that feeling. And I like to

say, I wonder if you're feeling sad, like asking it as a

question to build a conversation. So if you

think about self energy within a wounded part, the

self energy would ask a question. It would be curious. Tell me

more. What's going on? Describe this feeling to me.

What would you call it? Now it's hard if you say,

what would you call it? And your kids are little and they don't have words

yet. So you might give them a couple of examples. It looks

like sadness. Is it sadness? I wonder if you're feeling sad.

So we're teaching that emotional literacy while

modeling it. Some kids, they won't trust this

energy. Especially if in the past you've been a little bit codependent

and you've been like rescuing and trying to like bypass their feeling

so they're like really sad. And you're immediately go to like,

well, don't be sad because tomorrow we're going to be able to go to the

park, right? If you're too quick for

solution or in the past you've said, well,

the reason why we can't go to the park is because, look, it's raining. That's

why if you're not validating their feeling and you're

going to solution, you're going to logic, you're going to promises you're

going to bribes, you're going to future. Your children

will notice that you are bypassing their negative emotion and they might

get the message that their emotion isn't okay, their

emotion isn't valid. So you're going to

start validating your child's emotion, which is amazing,

but your child might not trust it yet.

So allow for that. Befriending

is what they call it in internal family systems. Allow time

for your children to learn that they can trust that you're

not gonna go into your fix it, change it, stop it, solve it energy that

you're not gonna go into your negative. You're not, you're not gonna fall apart.

If they fall apart like that, you're showing them. Listen, you

can trust me. You're safe here. I've got you. It's okay to

fall apart here. I'm good. I'm ready. I can handle

it. So your role is to like be

that witness. When I think about

a compassionate witness, I really think about how a

witness is not a participant. So if I am

witnessing my child's pain, I'm not participating in that

pain. I can't give perspective and clarity

and calm if I'm stuck in their big feeling cycle

or if I'm trying to stop their big feeling cycle. If I'm

coming from my energy and my need, like

my emotional dysregulation and I come to that

moment with my kid, then I'm not going to

be in that self led energy. Self led energy is

calm, it has clarity, it's confidence,

it's curiosity, it's

compassion. Right? I'm not a participant. I'm not having an

emotional experience. I'm witnessing the emotional experience.

I've seen this a lot. A lot of parents fall apart when their kids fall

apart. That's terrifying for a child. So if

you've been doing that, it's fine, forgive yourself. But try to

be stronger. Sometimes your job is to just be a

hope merchant. That's what it's called in internal family systems. Just

offering the idea to your child that things won't always be

this hard and that they can handle this feeling.

So giving them the possibility that they're gonna grow up

and it's gonna get okay, it's gonna be okay. Someday you're gonna get through

this. You're strong. You I can trust

that you're gonna be okay. Kid, I believe in you.

I always say the three things that kids want to hear from their parents. I

love you, I'm proud of you, and you're gonna be okay. So in this

energy you're holding the you're gonna be okay energy.

And it requires true calm, right?

Compassion. That fourth step of emotional

literacy, the ability to witness somebody else's

pain, to help them process their pain means

that I have to be able to process my own pain

and not be overwhelmed by their pain. And that is

challenging for parents for sure. Especially because we love them

so, so much. Right. It can be very difficult

to listen without trying to fix it.

The way that I do that for myself when I'm with

my kids and I know that they're struggling or I'm worried about them

is I do, I cultivate trust. I

actively work on my belief around my children.

I actively think positive thoughts about their future

because I can very easily go to the negative in the future. I

do like a lot of future tripping and it's like worst case scenarioing

and that's not helpful for my children. I need them

to believe that they are going to be okay and that they're going to grow

up and they're going to figure it out and they're going to solve these problems

and it's not always going to be this bad for them, especially in adolescence.

And so they have to borrow my belief because they're

young, they don't have belief yet. They don't have perspective.

They're looking at me wondering am I gonna be okay?

And if I'm looking at them thinking, holy shit, I don't think

you're gonna be okay. That's a really difficult place

for kids because then they can really

get scared. And that's when they get that

emotional pain. That's where they get those burdens. Learning

to witness your pain. I was thinking about the whole like

the self energy is the sun and parts of us and

pain, those are like clouds and weather. And the sun is always there.

And sometimes we can see the sun like during the day and sometimes it's

nighttime and we can't see the sun, but we know it will

come again. Right? The sun always rises because the world

always turns. So as a parent, you

are the sun. You are the

light in their life that offers that peace and that

perspective. And you are witnessing their pain as if

it's weather, as if it's a darkness, like a

nighttime thing. And you know it's temporary,

right? You're observing their storm, but you're the sunshine above

the clouds. I really hope to that you can tap

into this energy that I'm offering for you

when your kids are in their big feelings when

they're struggling, when their behavior's out of bounds, when you're not sure what to do,

get curious. Curiosity is the

beginning of that process towards

compassion. I call it the journey of

calm. And it's really about I start out in my

feelings, my judgment, my fear, my worry, my criticism. I start

out in my emotional experience and I move to

a place of neutrality towards curiosity. If I'm

starting to be curious about my kids feelings and their

experience, I know I'm tapping into self energy.

So curiosity is a clue that you are getting

closer to being in that true, compassionate,

connected space with your kids. So if you're trying

to figure out am I calm? You can just ask yourself,

am I calm? Am I curious? Am I

compassionate right now? If you're not, no problem.

Take a pause break, take a beat, connect with yourself,

soothe yourself, reset, let

yourself know, hey, it's okay, we're going to be okay. And then you can bring

that energy to your children. So asking yourself, am

I able to witness this pain right now without needing to fix it?

You can literally just ask yourself that question while your

kids are complaining about something, griping about

something, going through something hard, having a, you know,

bedtime meltdown or whatever it is, thinking,

can I witness this? Those are the questions you want to be asking

yourself is, you know, can I

be curious right now? Am I curious? Can I be curious

now? I think about some of the obstacles, right, that come up is like, we

don't know how to do this for ourselves or we're overwhelmed or

our life is too stressful and it's very hard to get to that place

of calm. So the practices are

pausing when you notice you're reactive, literally

taking 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 40 seconds.

It doesn't require that much time. I read somewhere that it takes

45 seconds to reset the nervous system and get

the parasympathetic nervous system. It doesn't take that long,

which is fascinating to me, especially if we use our body

right? So the pause break is really important. I have a lot of episodes

on that, especially in the beginning of the podcast.

You know, how to take a pause break and what to do when you're

pausing, how to reset your body, reset your mind, reset your heart,

connect with yourself. That's finding that self energy.

And then another strategy is just keep working on calm,

just keep working on building a better relationship with yourself. When you

notice you're critical and your inner voice is

negative, that means there's a part of you that's trying to protect

you from pain. Ask that voice if it would be

willing to be quiet and get curious about what

it's worried about. What's it protecting you from?

Can you soothe that? Can you let that part of you know

it's safe? It's okay. The world's gonna be

alright. Be the parent to yourself that you wish you

had. Be the parent to your children that

you wish you had. So as you parent yourself in

those hard moments, you'll tap into better tools to parent your kids.

The other little tip I have on this is to look for behavior

patterns in your kids. Notice their behavior strategies. Like,

notice times a day that they act out. Especially like in the

mornings or right before you drop them off at school or camp,

right after school, right before dinner, right at

mealtimes, right before bed. Like noticing

these patterns and you might be able to then narrate the

circumstance to your children. Narrate how they act at certain times of day,

name some of the feelings they might have at that time of day, and then

gives them some tools to deal with those feelings in different

strategies. So looking for patterns can be really

helpful. And when you are looking for patterns from curiosity,

it will help you be more neutral when you see them.

So instead of being like, oh my God, every night right before bed, my kids

completely freak out. And it's like such a shit storm.

It's like, okay, let's find out what time of day

is that? What do you think is going on for your kids? Why do you

think they're acting that way? Getting curious, doing that

connection tool in advance. So patterns are really

helpful because we can do our thinking when we're not in our reactive

state. And then when the thing happens, we're able to go to our kids and

be like, hey, I've noticed that every time I say it's time to eat,

the two of you start fighting. Like, I wonder if you feel

sad that I'm stopping playtime in order for you to

come eat. Yeah, that makes sense.

So what do you think you could do instead? We do have to eat. How

can we make it a little more pleasant? What can we do instead?

So just being very curious, being the leader and connecting with your

kids instead of from that reactive state, from that calm,

connected, compassionate space.

Okay,

yeah, listen, curiosity is your clue. When

you get to curiosity about your kids, you know, you are in that

energy and you're on your way to compassion. So

just kind of work at building your natural curiosity. Why

do my kids act that way? When do they act out? What could be going

on? Getting curious and then connecting the dots

for them. That's all you're doing with this self led energy.

All right, if you want support, I would

love for you to join me in the calm mama club because this is

the work that we do in there. We look for patterns

in the behavior. Moms come, they're like, hey, this is what's

happening. What do you think is going on? And I'll ask a couple

clarifying questions and then the mom will be like, oh yeah, okay, this

is what I think is happening. And then we get really curious. The mom goes

back, has a connection conversation. Honestly, behavior

improves so much when we connect the dots for our kids.

The dots being the feeling inside to the behavior

and then giving them new understanding about those feelings and new strategies

to deal with those feelings. It's miraculous. Sometimes we have

to set better boundaries so that they pivot their behavior.

Sometimes we have to do consequences so that they understand the

experience, that negative behavior. It's a Beautiful

Club. It's $30 a month. It's like basically,

you know, a subscription to, you know, Disney plus or whatever. But

you get to talk with me and the group every week on Tuesdays

and there's a whole online course and a handbook and tons of

resources. I highly recommend you joining hanging

out with us in the club. You can sign up on my website under

programs and you'll see that. Okay.

I really have loved talking to you about internal family

systems and talking to you about your self energy.

And I hope you tap into it more and more so that your children

can have access to their whole self as well.

Alright mama, I will talk to you next week.