This is your go-to Podcast, where we help parents navigate the complexities of family life. Hosted by Ali Kessler of Greyson’s Choice, we’ll cover everything from understanding domestic violence to navigating the legal system, finding the right therapists, life hacks, family law, mental health, custody battles, and how to protect children in dangerous situations. 

In this episode of 'Grey Minds Think Alike,' host Ali Kessler dives into the emotional lives of parents with experts Hillary Jacobs Hendel and Dr. Juli Fraga. They discuss their new book, 'Parents Have Feelings Too,' which offers practical tools for parents to manage and honor their emotions. The conversation covers why parents often neglect their own emotional needs, the impact of attachment styles, and practical steps to bring calmness and joy into family life. Hendel and Fraga share their professional insights and personal experiences, emphasizing the importance of emotional education and self-awareness for the entire family's well-being.

Parents Have Feelings, Too book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/788442/parents-have-feelings-too-by-hilary-jacobs-hendel/

About Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW: Hilary Jacobs Hendel is a Certified AEDP psychotherapist and supervisor, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of the award-winning and acclaimed It's Not Always Depression, and her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, TIME, and Oprah.

hilaryjacobshendel.com | IG: @hilaryjacobshendel | Facebook: @AuthorHilaryJacobsHendel

About Juli Fraga, PsyD: Juli Fraga is a psychologist and parenting educator. She has contributed to national outlets like The New York Times, Parents magazine, and NPR. She is also on the medical advisory board of Baby Center and teaches classes for expectant parents at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) hospital.drjulifraga.com | IG: @parentshavefeelingstoo | X: @dr_fraga

About Ali Kessler: Ali Kessler is a writer, marketing professional, passionate parent advocate, and founder of Greyson’s Choice, a 501(c)(3) created to raise awareness about the risk of domestic abuse on children. Greyson’s Choice was founded by Ali Kessler in memory of her sweet, vibrant, and fearless 4.5-year-old son, Greyson, who was murdered by his biological father in a murder-suicide during an unsupervised, court-approved visit in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, in 2021. This came just hours after her petition for a domestic violence injunction was denied by a Broward County judge, citing that the “petitioner has failed to allege any overt acts by the respondent which would constitute domestic violence under Florida Statute.”

Ali’s advocacy efforts culminated in successfully passing Greyson’s Law during the 2023 legislative session. This bill now requires the court to consider threats against ex-partners or spouses when making child visitation and custody determinations in the court, expanding to include the following factors: evidence of domestic violence, whether a parent in the past or currently has reasonable cause to believe that they or a minor child is, or has been in imminent danger of becoming the victim of domestic/sexual violence by the other parent, even if no other legal action has been brought or is currently pending in court.

Contact Ali:

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Hilary Jacobs Hendel & Juli Fraga

"Parents have Feelings too. A guide to navigating your Emotions so you and your family can thrive." Hillary Jacobs Hendel is a certified psychotherapist. Psychoanalyst, author, and expert in emotions. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Time, and Oprah. Juli Fraga is a psychologist, writer, and parenting educator whose work focuses on mental health and wellbeing.

Because when parents thrive emotionally. The whole family benefits. We're going to talk about why parents often neglect their own emotional needs, how to break free from generational patterns and practical steps to bring calmness, connection, and joy into the family. All right, so let's get into it.

Welcome, ladies. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having us. Just to start, if you can each share just a little bit about your backgrounds and how you came together to write, parents have feelings, too. Awesome.

Juli Fraga: Let's see. I am a psychologist and I've worked with parents, gosh, for almost two decades. That's the specialization of my practice. But in terms of Hillary and I connecting long story short, 10 years ago I read an op-ed in the New York Times called, it's Not Always Depression that Hillary wrote, that I was just blown away with, just given my own knowledge about emotions.

And during that time, Hillary's first book, it's not always depression, came out that I read and was just also blown away by I am like, why doesn't everyone have these tools? Why doesn't everyone have the tool? Of course, that's also in the book. The change triangle. And Hillary and I just started talking, I think it was during the pandemic and talking about what if there was a guide for parents that really focused on parenting and emotions and brought these tools to the whole family, no matter how old your child is.

And that's how the book was born.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Awesome. Hillary, go ahead.

Juli Fraga: Yeah, I

Yeah. I was raised in Nebraska. Yeah. So very different backgrounds and. Which yet, when we come together and write, it's like a lovely, it just works and we just are, we always agree and our writer just have great synergy together. So, the writing has really been wonderful. And I guess the only thing that I would add about myself.

Is that I went back to school when I was 39 to become to go to social work school and become a psychotherapist. And by dumb luck, I ended up at a conference on emotions and trauma and was presented. Saw this triangle that I ultimately became so passionate about sharing because I had the best education in psychology and science at.

And that just to shove them down and shove them away and get on with life. And I went through two clinical depressions. I didn't know why I went on Prozac, got over them. But when I saw this triangle, which explained how emotions work in the mind and body, the change triangle I had one epiphany after another and it helped my mental health from the moment I saw it.

And right there I thought, why didn't I get this in high school bio, you learn about, you have a stomach and a heart, but we have emotions all the time, every day, and life is hard and full of suffering. Why wouldn't we learn? How to deal with our emotions instead of burying them. And then, fortunately, many years later, I started writing 'cause I actually had something to say for the first time in my life and it was my pet peeve about not getting any emotions.

Education really had developed into a moral outrage and so I thought, let me try to share some of this with the public and see what happens.

So I love that this is actually about the parents, because it's like when you're in an airplane and now they say they drop the, put the oxygen on the parent first before you can help anyone else. So I feel like that's this for parents.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: That's a, it's a perfect analogy. Perfect. Exactly. I was so sad that I didn't have this information when I was a young mother would've really helped right.

Me in so many ways. I know Juli. Yeah. And, like I said, I,

Ali Kessler: I deal with so many parents that are navigating, I guess just difficult, maybe family dynamics and family maybe divorce or, things like that. Family court and their emotions are, erratic to say the least.

One of them said stretch back to your childhood and think of a time you felt alone or scared. And it's just so interesting 'cause I was, I put myself back there and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then I'm like, how did I deal with that back then? I don't remember.

And how would I have done dealt with that today? I have no idea. So I guess let's just, start with why do you think so many parents overlook or suppress their feelings? Juli, do you wanna

Juli Fraga: begin? Sure. I think there's so many reasons. One, I think that a lot of parents probably suppress or, block their emotions because they didn't have caregivers or parents who were tuned in with their emotions so they couldn't pass on the skill, so they're merely doing what's been modeled in their own families, which is maybe they were told they could think their way for an emotion, or maybe emotions seem dangerous because whenever they came up, maybe they were shamed for having them.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Good answer.

Juli Fraga: Oh, thank you.

Ali Kessler: So many parents overlook or suppress their own feelings when focusing on their children. And I can only imagine it's because you have children there and you have to worry about them all the time, and you have to worry about your husband or other people or your family.

You probably, last

Children have their emotions, and then there's the relationship, how these emotions ricochet back and forth and affect behaviors so that I never wanna blame parents. I wanna say that they didn't get an emotions education as well, so there's really so much we don't know that is available. It's really a crime. So like even to give an example that it used to be that a lot of people accused me of having like a nasty tone. And I would say, that's just the way I am. I can't change that tone. And then I learned about emotions and I learned that these things called core emotions like anger or fear, right?

Okay. And I think that's what we're trying to cultivate is a sense of really like affirming our emotions and validating emotions so that we can become curious about the things and the behaviors and ways of thinking that aren't serving us or our children. And are open to the idea of change or healing, which is completely possible 'cause the brain changes from the time we're born till the time we die.

So it's a very hopeful model of understanding themselves. So I'm

Ali Kessler: curious, when someone does have a tone, like you said, that was, harsh or whatnot, what is, what's the emotion behind it? Is it. Sadness.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: It and then Juli, you can add to this. It could be anything because when, what the change triangle shows you, and for those listening, you may wanna Google it if you're not driving and look at a picture.

There's two. Kind of categories and these inhibit, the ones that are good at pushing our core emotions down are things like anxiety, guilt, and shame, which we're all familiar with. So we would get a tone. We might get a tone when we're angry, and we might want a tone to show that we are using our anger wisely and we're asserting with our children.

But those are, that's mostly the kind of things that create a tone and speed us up and make us have outbursts and behave in ways we later feel guilty for. So my tone was really about. Managing several emotions by trying to push them down and be perfect. And of course that doesn't work 'cause there's no such thing as perfect.

Ali Kessler: Do you think most of that is learned from your childhood? Like maybe you, you're, you weren't taught to express yourself and you push them down as you say? Or is that something that develops later or both?

Juli Fraga: I think that it can be a combination, but I definitely think, and no fault to any parent because when were they learning these tools and skills?

And then we live in a fast moving society and there's so much stress out there for parents, and you combine all of that and you get a perfect kind of. Or imperfect for more accurately said imperfect storm of kind of ways not to, handle emotions. 'cause nobody's really learned a different way.

And I don't know if Hillary wants to.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Yeah. Like we can all reflect on what emotions our parents were comfortable with and what emotions they're not by the way they responded. So again, for example, I was very lucky, I had a really wonderful mother loving and patient, but she didn't. Like sadness.

I couldn't say I'm sad. I didn't know how to be with my sadness. I thought I had to fix it. I thought I couldn't feel sad, and I thought if somebody else was sad, I had to take away their sadness. And again, just learning in one lecture that we can't avoid sadness. That sadness is there because when you love somebody and you lose them.

You feel sad and if you didn't feel sad, you really couldn't love because you couldn't experience loss, if that makes sense. So it's what connects us to the things that we cherish. And I also didn't know that sadness was an emotion, that if you felt it came as a core emotion comes up and out like a wave and that.

Of the emotion and the energy that all core emotions have with them. Because core emotions are basically a biological program to make us do something that's adaptive for survival. The easiest way to understand it is fear makes us run. So if a wild animal came into the room right now, we'd all run before we even knew we were afraid.

It would just happen rapidly and without conscious awareness. So that's a great example of the purpose of emotions. They just happen and we can only be with them after they have ignited in our body, then we have control over how we respond to emotions. But we can't stop them in their tracks before they happen.

It's biologically impossible because that's how humans evolved for millennia to be able to it's adaptive for survival to have emotions even though they're painful and uncomfortable.

And then I come back in, and then I do work, and then I, might laugh from something on tv and then I'll think about something again. I literally go through every gamut of emotion. All day long. So I totally get that. And I guess I just live with it and I deal with it because I know, like you said, grief means love.

I have so much love for my child that I don't try to fight my tears. I try to actually sit in with it because I want to feel it, because otherwise it's like it almost never happened.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: And that's, I see you even, I feel, I can see the feeling in your face as you're sharing that alley and also, so that's one reason.

We feel so much better when we do that a little bit afterwards if not

Ali Kessler: right away. Yeah. And I feel, I always feel like I'm like, you know what Greyson deserves. He deserves me to be thinking about him and remembering, and sometimes it's a happy thought. It's a happy emotion. I laugh, but yeah, I go through the gamut of emotions.

So I guess, can you walk us through the main framework or approach that. You use to help parents navigate their emotions, because I sure can use this one.

Juli Fraga: Have you answer this, Hillary, because I think you can answer it so well. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure you could do

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: a great job, but I'd be happy. As you can say, I'm very happy talking about this, my favorite subject.

And this type of therapy that I was trained to do after I was trained conventionally is all about helping people feel connected while they feel feelings. And it's, this is a good time to point out that with children. When babies and children are born, they need their caregiver to help them process or move through emotions or regulate their nervous system.

So they can't do it alone until their brains become more mature. They need us to help them name what they're feeling and make sense of it without being too intrusive, of course, but same thing with therapy. So with an adult, I do teach the change triangle to everybody because it's a basic education and emotions that.

Our body based sensation building emotions, right? Because the goal of a core emotion is to make our body move, like fighting when we're angry, running from danger, jumping for joy. Those type of things. They're all physical. And when you say emotions are physical, most people like shake their head. We all know it, although no one has ever told us that before.

To their parent largely in nonverbal ways, and the parent who has learned about emotions will be able to tolerate the child's emotions and respond to them. But let's say you were raised in a family where if you got mad as a little baby, your mom got mad back, your brain would learn. It's not safe to feel anger and you would.

Then possibly grow into an adult that believed it wasn't safe to feel anger. And then when your child showed you anger, right? You would say, don't be angry. That's not nice. And then that's how the intergenerational trauma gets passed on of learning. Anger isn't nice as opposed to your anger is fine. We can validate your anger, but you can't hit your little sister, right?

That protect us from emotion and the anxiety, guilt and shame that also pushes down emotions,

Ali Kessler: right?

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: And these inhibitory emotions, which, if we go back to thinking about the triangle superimposed on our body with the point of the triangle, with the core emotions in the body, the top of the triangle, you can imagine hovering above your shoulders out of your body.

Because when we have learned as children that our emotions aren't welcomed. We use anxiety, guilt, and shame to push 'em down. And so many of the patients that I see come in because they have those bad, those feelings that don't feel good, and we help them get underneath that and back to their core emotions.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Yeah. To a large degree, yes. Anxiety is a part of life because emotions are a part of life and we're not in the business of getting rid of emotions and we can't what we wanna do, for example with anxiety is differentiate kind of anxiety that happens when you're trying something new or you're striving or you're doing something daring from anxiety, just trauma.

Trauma, anxiety. Yeah. Or from kids that really struggle to do things that are part of just growing up and being a functional adult. So anxiety, guilt and shame are, we need all of those in life. But guilt is, so we know when we're good people, we do bad things, we feel guilty, and when we do other bad things, we might feel ashamed of ourselves.

That might trigger fear in a mother or father that might kid will be ostracized, and therefore that fear. Instead of being worked on by the parent and understood and thought about, automatically translates to telling our kid, are you crazy? You can't be a ballet dancer. What are you weird? Are you strange?

And that type of thing creates like a toxic guilt or shame because now the child. Is being triggered into a state of feeling unacceptable, certain parts of them, and they have to hide those parts. And some parents may be out there saying, darn they have to hide those parts. But it can later manifest in, in, in difficulties like chronic anxiety or a sense of a loss of self with no confidence.

Core emotions and when you can feel the full range of your core emotions, that ushers us into what we call the open-hearted state of the authentic self. And that's when your nervous system is regulated and you can feel your feelings deal appropriately with your feelings, and connect to your family members and relate positively.

In quotes, whatever that means for the moment. It may be like yanking your kid away from a, an electrical socket, but whatever that means, what's adaptive for the family and the connections in the family,

Ali Kessler: right.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: So it's a complete map of where we wanna spend more time. And just as one last thing, we don't spend all our time in the open-hearted state of the authentic self.

To change and it's empowering for sure. And then parents can model this type of validating feelings while moving kids towards appropriate behaviors for their adaptive survival. And thrive.

Ali Kessler: So how do you suggest parents handle feelings like guilt or, shame, frustration? When sometimes it's like taboo to admit.

They have it. That's such a great

Juli Fraga: question. And I think the first part is, for them to even start to recognize, some people don't even know that they're experiencing guilt or shame. There's such kind of taboo emotions that they've come out. As Hillary said in these, they come out sideways in what we call protective defenses.

And then maybe I end up feeling even worse in a way. So it's, slowing down enough. To recognize the sensation and what's coming, and then just like we teach our kids, to name an emotion, to really just name our guilt or our shame, our frustration just to say, I feel guilty.

It sounds so simple. And yet we know just from the research and science of emotions, that emotion naming, affect labeling, it really sends a message, really for the brain and it gets that kind of limbic system or that, amygdala to calm down a little bit.

Ali Kessler: Right.

Juli Fraga: And then, we can I feel like

Ali Kessler: A parent would have to, like you said, recognize.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: That's exactly, so the first, someone has to want to build self-awareness, right?

If somebody is I don't. Like this stuff. I have no interest in emotions. They're not gonna be the people that are going to, it's like rehab, be interested in this. It's exactly like that. That's, yeah. But once let's say, what I always say is there's no downside to reading a. To looking at the change triangle and understanding of how emotions work on an intellectual level, and then you dip your toe in the water.

It's oh, this is interesting. What does it actually mean? Then maybe you read some of the stories in our book and it gives you like a little flavor and you get a little more curious and okay, I am gonna maybe print out the change triangle and put it on my bulletin board and look at it every now and then and see if I can map out, am I in the defense corner?

Some people do if you struggle with an eating disorder, but for example, that's a feeling inside the body. And most of us are happy to check in with our stomach and say, you know what? I want to eat. And then. They know they're hungry and then they go get a snack. So it's the same idea that you've, let's say you're going along with your day, like you said, and you see something like a butterfly, that triggers a memory and you feel that shift inside your body.

You feel a change in your emotional state. And then that would be the cue to be curious. So in the example we said, let's say your daughter says, can you drive me to the store? And you get that tightness, that shift because you really, you have something else you'd rather do.

That's letting the emotion lead you to the behavior. That's if you're playing the long game in kids' emotional and mental health, it's understandable. It could do a little better and that would be noticing that shift in the tension. Asking, okay, what just brought that up? My daughter just asked me if I take her somewhere, I don't really want to.

I'm feeling guilty. And then what can I do with this guilt? We teach in the book so many ways to manage each one of these emotions on the change triangle. But for example, I would acknowledge to myself that I really don't want to, and then I've learned to really say to my, I've learned to say no. 'cause if I don't, I get resentful.

So there's would I rather feel guilty from taking care of myself,

Ali Kessler: right.

You know what? It's okay. Don't have to be perfect. And it's much better that I invest this time for myself and having a date with my friend than right.

Ali Kessler: See, I'm going through something like that, but in the opposite way. My mom is older and she's actually in the hospital right now but she always needs help with things and needs to go to doctor's appointments and go to the store, help her just around the house.

Now that I know she's sick, I always just have guilt in the back of my mind. Should I be spending more time with her, should I be there? I call her every day, she lives nearby. I'm always thinking, should I do more? Or I have guilt about me not wanting to take her to the doctor. And then I get through this whole gamut of emotions, like, how can I even think like that if it were me, I would need someone to take care of me.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: right? Guilt is what makes us have, these are adaptive emotions, right? It's what makes us do the right thing to stay connected to the groups and tribes and communities that we need again.

So it's like the being able to work with the guild to think it through okay, if I go and take care of my mother. Am I depleting? Do I have zero fuel left in my tank and therefore I go, I'm short with her. I'm impatient. Maybe that's not so good. That's how it usually is. Yeah, I remember when my mother was sick,

but I would even say to her, she would wanna talk on the phone every day for a long time. And I would say, mom, you know me. It's if I can have the space to talk to you, I'm not gonna be impatient with you. I'm not gonna be short with you. I'll really be able to have a quality conversation.

And it's just so helpful for you can be kind and set boundaries too. That's a lot of these people get angry and so they set these boundaries in a sort of a hostile, contemptuous way. But if you work on your feelings and you calm them down a little bit before you just. Take that confidence that you can't do something, and you could say it in a sweet way.

I'm so sorry. I wanna see you. I wanna take care of you. But I trust, right?

Ali Kessler: Now my mom feels guilty. She feels guilty asking me 'cause she thinks I'm, I'm, it's a burden and I don't want her to feel that either. I'm like, of course I'm gonna do it. Don't feel burdened. This is, I'm your daughter.

And until we start thinking of them that way and accepting we're all the same when it comes to emotions. So there's it's no secret. You just have to be talk about them more. And that's another thing I love about the change triangle is it provides a language for everybody to talk about emotions, a common language.

That's

Ali Kessler: the next thing I wanna talk about because I was looking through the book and I noticed something, which is so funny 'cause I studied attachment styles but it for a different reason for relationships. Before I met my current boyfriend six years ago and we started dating and. I just felt like it was always a push and pull.

So I'm just curious. Obviously this isn't about relationship a different type of relationship. How do attachment styles affect parents and children relationship? That's

Juli Fraga: such a great question. I think attachment styles, even if we don't know our attachment style it's the blueprint in terms of how we relate to other people and how we relate to ourselves, so attachment styles oftentimes get passed down, especially when people aren't aware of them.

Absolutely. And so their style is to stay in their protective turtle shell and to just. Keep to themselves because if they keep to themselves and they rely on themselves that kind of keeps their own in their family of origin too. Probably the family's equilibrium. Going on. So you fast forward, but if they're not really aware of that, they might do the same thing.

Feel like know in my

Ali Kessler: relationship. Yeah. He doesn't talk about his feelings. It's like pulling teeth. Yeah. So I know for men, men and women obviously process feelings differently. So I guess how, if they do, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with the different types of processing?

Because I know if, let's say me and my boyfriend both read the same, exercise here, we would have very different responses. Fine. Kind

Maybe they're given messages that emotions mean you're weak or they're they mean that you don't have it together. And so sometimes I find in entering a conversation about emotions was then to bring in the kind of the science and the biology, that it's just. They're inborn or something that we can't live without.

We can learn to work with them and ways that help us really thrive in our relationships thrive with other people. And then when we get down to, the bottom of the triangle, we're really talking about being connected. Maybe with our kid, with our partner, curious about ourselves and about other people.

Having compassion for ourselves. Having compassion for others, being in a state of calm, that we're at a place then where we can communicate in such a different way. Maybe starting point for somebody, maybe within avoidant attachment. It's interesting just, maybe I'm, maybe my husband won't appreciate that I'm saying this, but my husband was looking at the book, and doing some self-awareness stretches and he's yeah, I recognize this.

We can see where the conversation goes that way, and then people aren't connecting. They're moving further apart and communication is breaking down.

Ali Kessler: And then it all goes back to the attachment style again.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: And the attachment and emotions go hand in hand. And the ability to connect to our own emotions and the ability to tolerate other people's emotions, including relational emotions like love and longing and desire and need, these all go hand in hand.

Do you remember that category called Earned secure, where you work on yourself enough and you work on some of the fears by just articulating what is it? What does it mean if I say I love you? For some people that can't say that, what does it bring up? You don't have to even share it, but to consider on yourself.

It's really data that we wanna use, the emotions that we have plus. Our thinking brain and rational brain together. To come up with the best solutions for life and one without the other. Too much emotion without thinking is no good and too much thinking without feeling. We've lost one of our main compass or sales for sailing the ocean of life.

Ali Kessler: Now, I'm curious for, when I said why a lot of our listeners are going through divorce or co-parenting and some of them are in like high conflict custody battles or just a very non amicable divorce. How? And obviously that brings on a lot of emotions and it affects the children.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Terrible situation, really hard.

Juli Fraga: I think it's such a tough situation and I think it's because like it can feel, for, people I've worked was going through that just so all consuming and it can be really soul crushing, especially things with custody and you want your child, maybe you want more custody.

Maybe there's something going on with, the partner that you're separating from where you don't deem them to be, maybe, safe to be around the kids, you're also bumping up against the law and how do you navigate all of those really big feelings. And there's oftentimes more than one at the same time.

And maybe in your community, all of your friends are married and you don't even have a friend going through this. So you don't even know where to find support. And you feel like you've lost your, community in a sense. Who could really understand you. And so I think finding a place of support is so important.

We look within, learn how to look at what's coming up for us emotionally and ride the wave of that emotion. And when we do that, we can at least in that moment get to calmer waters. If I'm calmer, maybe I can identify more of what I need. Maybe I know I need to reach out to that friend.

Maybe I know that, you know what, I can't take any more stress today. Yeah, normally my kids only watch an hour of tv, but I really can't deal tonight. Yeah, they're gonna watch a little bit more tv. And you know what? I'm gonna just order a pizza for dinner. What can I take off of my plate? What does self care mean?

Ali Kessler: Yeah, I had so many horrible emotions when I was dealing with my son's father because he just he was narcissist and obviously he had mental health issues.

But he just made me feel so horrible all the time, and I didn't want my child to feel that or see that. And sometimes I felt like I lived double life. Like I would, be mom and be happy mode and then I would, when he was asleep or whatnot, or now I would just be a whole different person. So it's sometimes just learning how to turn it on and turn it off.

And like you said, I showed grace. Did I give him my iPad to watch his, shows while I took care of work or cleaned or, did things. Yes. And you know what? I was raised in front of a TV my entire life, and I went to college. I have a degree. I'm okay. Yes. You do what you can.

Every parent. Does what they can,

Do yet for, again, whatever reason our, the society that just deemphasizes the importance of emotion still, even though there's so much science, there's like huge bodies of science that help explain this. It's cordoned off, but be that as it may, just a place to bring the rage of being mistreated or the despair or the hopelessness just creates a little more room to go back out there and live another day through it.

Ali Kessler: Absolutely. So I guess if a parent is listening to this right now and they're feeling hopeless or stuck in a negative pattern, what words of encouragement would you give them? Just to know that there's light at the end of the corner?

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: No. One that most things in life are temporary. True is the great mantra.

Ali Kessler: Right? And

Even though it may feel so alone, it may feel so desperately alone. And that's maybe. The hardest part for people that feel so alone is to just catch your feet, to walk somewhere where you have to go or to make that phone call in spite of every bone in your body telling you not to do something or that it's shameful or that nobody can understand to fight against that.

Yep.

Ali Kessler: There's always tomorrow. So where can everyone get your book? Parents have feelings to and connect with you both for more resources?

Juli Fraga: Yeah, for the book. The book can be ordered right on the Penguin Random House website. Okay. And then in terms of social media, people can connect with us on our at Parents Have Feelings to Instagram, and also at Hillary Jacobs Hendel on her Instagram, Hillary's Instagram, and also for many great resources on emotions, education on Hillary's website.

Ali Kessler: Okay, I'll put

Juli Fraga: all of that in the show notes

Ali Kessler: as well for people.

Ali Kessler: about

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: depression?

Yeah, it's called, it's not always Depression. And the difference is it goes deeper because you can't think your way through an emotion when you're trying to teach emotions. Education, how do you help people have an experience of an emotion? So lots of deep stories from my therapy practice where you get to be a fly on the wall.

See what trauma work or wounding work from most of these people. Like all of us have wounds from our childhood that then turn into symptoms later in life. And it's really how you work the change triangle and because in A EDP, we record sessions as part of our training. I had really verbatim transcripts that we turned into stories with the random house editor. So that's if you read parents have feelings too, and you even wanna learn more and do a deeper dive, it's not always depression.

But maybe there's more of a root cause,

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: that's the thing. We were told that depression is oh, you take a pill or that there's something wrong with your chemistry and also with chronic anxiety. You'd think they would tell us that there is a root cause and it's blocked and buried emotions, and that depression is a defense from emotions and that it shuts us down.

It works very well, but you can't function. Just like drugs. A fabulous defense. They really work to stop those emotions. But when you do it for long term, it really messes up your life. So we wanna use our defenses minimally and flexibly and have control over which ones we use, not automatically use these defenses.

Yeah, on dealing that

It's unbearable to up to a point.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: That makes so much sense. You've been through the worst and it'll

Ali Kessler: probably get better as you. I hope so, because I have to drive on ramps and I have to go and I have to do all the things that I need to do without feeling anxiety and without taking pills, 'cause doctors are just like you've been through so much. Here's this. What do you want? Here's a prescription for this. Exactly. And I don't want that because I'm trying to feel healthy and I'm trying to feel whole again.

Because I'm always looking for ways to deal with my emotions.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Yeah. Yeah. There's someone down there I know actually there's more and more people.

Florida had very few therapists that knew how to work this way until recently it's picked up.

Ali Kessler: Alright, great. I'll definitely, yeah. Yeah, connect with you about that, and I thank you so much both of you, for sharing and talking with our listeners and about the importance of dealing with our feelings and emotions and not just everyone else's.