January 30, 2023 • 28 mins
Hilaria shares her emotions and gratitude for all the support her family has received. Dr. Hillary Goldsher joins Hilaria and Michelle to discuss parenting through challenging times and how to take care of not only your kids but yourself during them.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Which is anonymous, with the Laria Baldwin and Michelle Campbell
Mason and I heart radio podcast. It's Hilaria. Hi, guys,
It's been an emotional time for my family and I
do so want to express to you how grateful I
(00:22):
am for your support and your kindness and your reason.
Quite honestly, I think without it we would crumble. So
thank you so much for being our rock right now
because I don't feel so strong. Kids are sponges and
(00:43):
all certain conversations are not always age appropriate. We cannot
deny that they don't feel the energy and pick up
on certain things in the family and at home. Also,
parenting little people can be stressful regardless of added stress.
So today we are speaking with Dr Hillary Culture about
(01:05):
how to take care of our children and ourselves when
times are hard. This is which is anonymous. I'm Michelle
Campbell Mason and I'm LARRYA. Baldwin and we'd like to
welcome Dr Hillary gold Scher. Hi. My name is Dr
Hillary Culture. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills
and I specialize in parenting as well as trauma, depression
(01:28):
and anxiety. Welcome. Thank you for coming and talking with us.
I feel like so many of us have a certain
amount of gasoline and our bodies every single day, regardless
of added stress in our life. What would you say
is a a tool for maintaining our energy every single day?
(01:51):
This is the ubiquitous question that we ask as as
parents and certainly as as moms constantly. But I think
we have to get past this to like cliche of it,
like how do we self care and really dig into
what that looks like on a day to day basis.
The notion of like moms have to take care of themselves,
the mental low, the logistics, the sort of primitive edict
(02:12):
to take care of littles is all there, and we
can only do it if we're regulated ourselves. We can
only regulate our children if we regulate ourselves. And I'm
always careful when I talk about this topic to understand
people's relative differences and ability to self care. The help
you have, the resources that are available to you, the
(02:33):
literal time um that is available in the day that
you don't have your kids around, but whether it's a
five minute meditation, uh ten minute journaling in the morning,
a call to a friend, going in the bathroom and
closing the door and deep breathing for a few minutes.
We have to have a practice to self regulate, and
(02:54):
with self regulation comes not just a containment of sort
of bodily responses to stress, but also comes the messaging
to ourselves, the reinforcement that like we we matter, how
we are doing matters, that we are the heart and
the compass of our family. And without being diligent with
(03:15):
self care, there's just fill over. There's emotional rent to
pay for not just us, but our entire family. So
it's to me, it's really about the practice, the dedication
to a practice, if it's a couple of minutes or
an hour every day, depending on what you have available,
but making it deliberate, purposeful, intentional. I have a really
(03:35):
very strict morning routine and I think without that, you know,
the hardest times in life are virtually impossible. But I
also feel like with so many parents, it's a it's
a gift to have those moments um are there. I mean,
do you recommend people just get up earlier, try to
carve it out or hide in a closet or you know,
kind of how do we how do we get that
if we're constantly you know, in being requested. Yes, yes,
(04:00):
that's the question, A fair question. Now I recommend what
I practice, which I meditate a couple of times a day,
and I wake up, you know, five or ten minutes early,
and I added on again for a round two before
I go to bed. And so if I don't have
room for anything else in my day, I have that
as bookends to my day. So, yes, I think you
(04:20):
have to be deliberate. It's so hard for us to
give up an extra five ten minutes of sleep. It's
so hard for us to lock ourselves in the bathroom
without being distracted, but just trying to find and usually
it's after the kid has go to sleep or in
the morning before they wait, just trying to find a
time to breathe and sort of connect with yourself because
it's so easy to not self check, to to sort
(04:43):
of look at yourself and figure out how am I,
how am I doing, how are my feeling, and what
do I need to do to sort of address any
outstanding stressors are worries and how is that impacting my family?
And how do I communicate to myself, to my partner,
to my kiddo's about sort of the emotional compass of
where my family is right now, because our kids feel
(05:05):
like I mean, our kids feel what we are. I
was given great advice many many many years ago, which
is um had, which had nothing to do with parenting,
but they said to me that the key to anything
successful in your life is to be inside and outside
at the same time. You want to be inside your
(05:25):
experience to be able to feel the passion, and you
want to be outside to sort of see the perspective
and check yourself as you as you use that word
you know, and I think being as I know in
my experience being a mom of so many, even though
I have you know, school and resources and you know,
the ability to have friends and people who work with
(05:46):
us to help us, I still don't have a lot
of time to myself. And so what I've learned is
practicing on the go sometimes, you know. And and it
didn't where when I had few children, I may I
may have had more time to do the self care
that I would love, of meditating and stuff like that.
(06:07):
And now I find that a lot of it is
being in the moment of noticing my shoulders checked, noticing
my brow check, noticing my jaw check, and constantly scanning
and of course I'm very yoga yoga connected, um, but
it allowed me to get away from the excuse of oh,
(06:27):
I don't have time for that. It's like, well, the
time is now when you're living. Yes, you're talking about
a notion that I talked about a lot with clients.
I believe you have to tell me if this resonates
the idea of the difference between being sort of inside
your feelings and an observer or a witness of your feelings, right,
and that is something you can sort of practice and
(06:49):
do on the go, albeit it's quite difficult to do
all the time and to do successfully. And what I
mean is being inside a feeling looks like we're angry,
we're sad, and we're acting from it, you know, we're
just standing in it and we're acting from that feeling.
We're yelling or disregulated or slamming a door and being
(07:09):
outside of feeling. And this is I say it as
if it's easy, and there's a few things harder from
an emotional psychological standpoint, but being outside the feeling and
being able to narrate. I'm really angry right now. I
feel my body getting tense and hot. I'm going to
go into the other room and take a break. That's
something you might say to yourself, That's something you might
(07:30):
say to your child. I literally said that to my
eight year old either last night the night before. So
there's a version of self care we can do in
real time, And not only is it good for ourselves,
but it's good for our children to witness us managing
tricky feelings because being inside of it almost always ends
up with us showing up in a way that we
(07:53):
don't feel best about. Being outside of it gives us
more opportunity to think and to choose yes, Garta said,
I have the ability to escalate a situation or de
escalate a situation. And that's always where I'm like, Okay,
I have a choice with this, and I don't always
make the right choice, but I try to because and
(08:15):
that's also just like the beauty of having the liberty
within your mind to say, I can take a pause,
I don't have to react, I can take a breath,
I can wait five seconds, and like what that does
to your nervous system. I have a question about like
(08:35):
the physical um response to trauma. Obviously we all we
all feel it, and you know, it's just a fact
that when we are mind revisits trauma, how it affects
our cortisol levels, and how that completely throws off our
nervous system. Is that something you can speak to a
little bit, because I think a lot of people forget
how much our thoughts affect, you know, the science of
(08:58):
our bodies. That's right, And I think this goes along
nicely with the notion of being inside our feelings are
outside of them. A trauma response and slightly oversimplifying it,
but a trauma response is our body responding to something
from the past in the present, right, And so it
takes on sort of a fight or flight mode, and
(09:19):
that can show up in different ways. We might feel
a racing heart, we might feel shaky hands, we might
feel hot, we might shut down, we might flee, either
emotionally or literally. It is a response to a sort
of current stimuli as if it is a past traumatic stimulus,
and so it can be intense and quick and overwhelming
(09:40):
and unpredictable, and the two collapse together, so you're responding
to the moment as if it is a threat when
maybe it's not. You know, we the kids are hanging
all over us, and um, we have a trauma response,
and we yell or screaming away that is disproportionate to
the situation at hand, right, And so a few things
to do. One is to understand this generally speaking, and
(10:03):
we're having this discussion right now, that like, oh that's
what that is. That happens to me sometimes, and employing
like deep compassion and empathy. That's a very primitive edict.
That doesn't make anyone sort of a bad person. It
just makes us all human, particularly if you've had past trauma,
and most of us have in one way or the other. Right,
So being able to just understand that paradigm is useful.
(10:27):
And then when it happens, it's like not if it's
when you know, we're not going to get this acent
of the time, right when it happens, employing the practice
of being able to recognize, oh that just happened. You know,
it's just pulling on my shirt because they're tired and hungry,
and I responded in a way that was disproportionate hat
trauma response. And again so in the moment, empathy and compassion.
(10:50):
And then I mean, depending on the logistics, I want
to always acknowledge like sometimes we can't step away or
sometimes we have lots of other kids they are we're
in the middle of something, but if possible, being able
to take a minute, do some deep breathing and sort
of employ that compassion I'm talking about, Like, Wow, I
just had a response to something somewhat innocuous, stressful but innocuous.
(11:10):
That must mean I'm coming from like an old wounded
part and starting hand on heart, like I I'm just
a person trying to manage really really difficult feelings from
my past right now. And then when my favorite things
is repair, repair, repair, It's one of my favorite tools
as a parent. And maybe it sounds obvious, maybe it
(11:30):
sounds revolutionary or somewhere in between. But we're all going
to show up in ways that we don't feel good about.
We just are. This is what I do for a living,
and I do right and and so one of my
favorite parenting tools is to go back and and and
go to your kid, to go to my kid and say, mmmm, Mom,
we just got really angry back there, didn't I I
yelled and I slammed the door. And that must have
(11:51):
felt scary. That must have felt hard to see. I
know it did for me. And that had nothing to
do with you. Yeah, I needed you to sit down
for dinner. That's still true. But Mom is gonna work
really hard on kind of managing her tricky feelings when
I have them, and and and and and try to
do a bit better next time. We all have tricky feelings,
do don't we? And your kid, Michael, thank you so much.
Your kid might go like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the
(12:11):
point is is you're infusing a narrative into your kid
that says like, tricky feelings are okay, it's okay to
feel disregulated, and here's what it looks like to try
to repair and to work on sort of containment next time.
I love that. That's something that we do a lot
at our house. And one of the things that I
always try to drive home is that no one should
(12:35):
ever treat you that way, and you shouldn't treat anyone
that way because I you know, especially I'm One of
the things I think as a parent is I'm afraid
that they're going to experience things and then they're going
to end up in a relationship when they're like twenty five,
and that's what it's going to be like, you know,
and so um, you know, saying that this is normal,
and this happens doesn't mean it's okay. And then I
(12:56):
try on top of them and wonder how you think
about this? I try on top of that. You know.
The other day, um My, my son Leonardo was having
a really hard time and he didn't really understand why,
but it's just you could tell that his nervous system
was too much and moving his body and crying and
trying to fight and a bunch of different stuff. And
he's a really sweet kid. He's really the sweetest of
(13:17):
all at my kids. And so I said, what do
you need? And I took him out, just the two
of us so we could talk, and we just went
downstairs and then he said, I really want to go
to the store and I want to buy balloons, and
I want to buy balloons for all of us, and
I you know, So we went to the there's like
this little party dollar store to box from my house,
(13:39):
and we went there and he picked up seven balloons
and it was a really quick trip and by the
time he was home, he was in a different place.
And he came and he wanted to give a balloon
to each one, including our four month old um and
it was just so heartwarming, but he needed us an
extra tool because reason doesn't work with a six year old.
(14:01):
That's right, that's right. I love that that came to
you both, you know, sort of organically. That is correct.
And you're bringing up another really important dynamic is that
education and rationality around feeling management does not happen in
the moment of an upset or a tantrum. It just doesn't.
And so in the moment of an upset or a tantrum,
(14:21):
go to tool, in my view, is empathy is validation, acknowledgement.
It's so hard right now. You just wish that you
didn't have to leave the play date. You just wish
you could keep on staying. I know it's so hard
to leave, so difficult. You're so angry. I see you
punching the seat, I see you grabbing at the blankets.
I know you don't want to leave. It's so hard,
(14:43):
and we still set the boundary and we do have
to go. So either you can walk out the door
and mom is going to grab you and help you
out the door. But being able to start with empathy,
and you're right, sometimes if we have the ability or
luxury of like a little time switching landscapes, witching. Having
an emotional outlet in a different space can change how
(15:06):
our child is moving through the moment quite significantly, and
you kind of organically. And it's hard. It's hard because
and I've gone through phases where I was like, all right,
go into your room or time out, or how dare
you do that? You know, I mean, that's shaming you
go through because you're just like, why are you doing this?
I do not understand. And then that gets to a
(15:27):
big part of what I want to talk to about today.
They feel what's going on in our home. That's right,
that's right, that's right. There's no question. I mean some
of what you're describing responding to our kids. How dare you?
What's wrong with you? Go to your room? You've just
lost X, Y and Z, etcetera. All have those moments,
and sometimes those things are appropriate sort of a firm,
(15:48):
hard consequence or boundary, right, But that's secondary, that's not
the headline. The headline is some version of validation and acknowledgement.
You're hurting right now. I see you, I hear you.
It feels so hard right now, You're so angry. I'm
gonna sit here with you until it until it passes,
and you know what, I'm still going to sit here
(16:09):
with you, right and talking about extending it to the
notion of what's happening inside a household. If a household
is going through a particularly difficult time, you know, related
to I don't know, challenges at school, family illness, uh, separations, divorces, etcetera.
Being able to say that out loud to a child,
not in the moment of upset, because again, no education
(16:31):
or information is really seeping in, but later, maybe at bedtime.
My favorite time to deal with my older one who's
more mercurial, is to say something like, wow, I was
thinking about earlier you wanted to have a second dessert
and you were so mad and sad that I wouldn't
let you have it. Yeah, that was really hard. And
then if something's going on in the household, I might
say something like, gosh, you know, we just we've been
(16:52):
looking at a different schools for the last month. I
wonder how that feels inside your body or inside the house,
like a change is coming and it's kind of scary,
a lot of unknowns, and maybe you feel that um
and that's normal. I feel it a little bit. I'm
a little nervous about where we're gonna end up, where
I'm going to make new friends, how it's gonna feel,
and being able. You know, my my eight year old
(17:14):
will be like, oh yeah, yeah, stop talking. You know,
my little one would engage forever, but my my older
one is going to deny any complicated feelings, even though
he's a son of a a psychologist. But right nonetheless, I
know that that narrative is getting in there that I'm
providing him guidance and insight, you know, sort of goal
posts if you will, about what's happening in the house.
(17:36):
It's not you. There's there's a feeling going out inside
the house that's hard. Right now, we all feel it.
What about when it's not age appropriate to have certain
conversations with them? How and that they can feel it
(17:56):
and you're trying so hard to mask it and you're
trying so hard to in a smile on your face
and like everything's okay. There's joke in my house where
I was like it's all great, yeah, great, like literally
I'm poppy in uh in trolls where like every and
she's like I'm gonna get back up again. You know,
people joke and we joke on the house that that's me.
(18:16):
But it's like, you know, what do you do when
you can't actually explain to them? Such a good question.
I'm so so happy that you asked it. You can
still have a conversation. And I know we imagine that
our kids are going to sort of be like, no, no,
but what is it? What's going on? You have to
tell me, please fill in the blanks. It's not really
really what kids are interested, and especially little ones, what
they want to know is that you're okay and they're okay.
(18:39):
So I would still say some version of like, I
think it's been feeling a little tricky in the house,
like some worry and some difficult feelings like frustration or sadness.
I felt that have you. Well, they might say yes, no,
or nothing, and that might feel really hard. It might
feel a little bit different to be in the house.
That might make you sad or mad. And I want
(19:00):
you to know that sometimes families go through times where
those kind of feelings are are more present than other times.
And I'm here and we're all together and you can
always talk to me and we'll all work through those
things together, right, So you don't have to say to
them that anything specific is going on per se and
if something specifics going on, uh, there's an illness or something,
(19:21):
but you're not wanting to get into the details of
the severity of the illness or um or what's going
to happen. You can say like, oh, Grandma's sick and
that's and that's felt a little bit hard for all
of us. We're not sure how she's doing every day
and we're wondering about her and thinking about her, and
that's hard, right, So you can just do like really
age appropriate general stuff. I think there's a feeling or
(19:44):
a poll that we have to fill in all the blanks.
And really, our kids, as I said before, just want
to know we're okay and they're okay, and to acknowledge
what they're experiencing. Naming it is so much more containing
than suppressing and denying it. And we know that has
grown ups. Right. If you think about your friend, your sister,
your partner, if you're feeling upset and angry and you
(20:04):
share that in your partners, like oh my god, you're fine,
You're always fine, like you always figure out a way
through it, that doesn't feel as good as when our
partners says, Oh my god, I'm so sorry you're feeling
that way, like it's been such a difficult week, and
you know what, I felt it too. Kind of thing, right,
it feels so much more containing and relieving. Our feelings
can come up and out instead of stay stuck inside.
(20:26):
So don't be afraid to go towards the tricky feeling,
you know, inside ourselves, and definitely not with our kids. Yeah. Absolutely,
As a parent, we we want to protect our children,
make it like everything is fine, even when it's not.
That's right, it is. It is a primitive edict that
we all have to be conscious of and sort of
fight against. I mean, not not to overstate it, but
(20:48):
we are not serving our children better by keeping them
apart from the exposure and management of tricky feelings. There's
there's no escape from tricky feelings as little ones are
as adults, and so we want to be able to
say we all have this, and here's what it looks like,
and here are ways to cope with it, and to
notice that our bodies always regulate to another feeling state.
(21:10):
I'll say that to my kids a lot that like,
did you ever notice that that a feeling that one
particular feeling never stays, it always changes, it always goes away. Right,
So if you're feeling said, you kind of know that
at some point they'll feel different, right. So, and that's
true for all of us too. We don't always have
just one feeling state and be able being able to
sort of teach our kids that through our own management
(21:32):
or our tricky feelings and through the room. Yeah, we
aside from like say, ensuring your children that the feelings
do transmute and become something else eventually. Um, are there
any other little tips you have? Like I always think
with kids like box breathing very simple, you know, techniques
that just kind of immediately calm the system. Are there
(21:53):
any that our top of mind for you just we
could recommend? I think breathing is an excellent tool. We
do either breathe four times, hold and then breathe out
for four times. We do rainbow brass where the kids
sort of hold their hands and do some version of this,
which can be really useful. We sometimes draw out feelings,
like you're feeling so frustrated. I wonder if you can
(22:16):
make a picture of that or tell a story around it.
My older one really likes what but I would say
the primary thing, and this feels paradoxical, so paradoxical, is
to just sit with our kid in the feeling, to
try to name it and sit in it. Because more
we try to make it go away, the more persistent
it is. And we notice that with ourselves. If we
(22:36):
feel anxious but we try to push it away to
suppress it, it it like shows up some other way now
a sudden, are tummy hurts? Or you know, our shoulders
are tight, right, but though they are in a supported environment,
it usually dissipates. So I know it's not always possible,
but to the extent it is to be able to
just sit with a kid and like you're you're so sad.
(22:57):
Nothing feels good right now? Right? No, I tell I
teach my kids that, yeah, well, or or at least
you can work with it. I teach my my children
that your your body has a physical reaction to all
of your thoughts and emotions. So once we have that,
we think about, okay, well, how are my thoughts affecting
(23:18):
all of my muscles? You know what? It makes sense.
When you're in love, your belly is full of butterflies.
When you're scared, your mouth is going to go dry.
When you're stressed, your neck is gonna hurt. I mean,
it's it makes sense. And so to teach them that,
I mean, I always say I'm going to be a
successful parents if I can teach them to be good
little problem solvers. I want them to be like, Okay,
(23:39):
this is the issue. Let me weed away all of
the stuff that I just is not helpful and that
is tension in my job that is not going to
make the situation better, and then I can really focus
on on what needs to get done and how to
solve this. And I love what you're saying as well
about you know, making teaching them things that they're temporary,
(23:59):
things are tem bory because as you know, as adults
that's difficult, and as children that's extraordinarily difficult. And that's
where you know, when you talk about child suicide rates
and stuff like that, a lot of it is not understanding,
not being in that outside looking in saying this is temporary,
this is going to go and I have the ability
(24:22):
and the resources to get out and not being afraid
of the feelings. And you know, one one concept I
like to think about is is it's not about sort
of guiding our children to make their feelings go away.
It's about getting them better to feel the feelings right,
and so having a narrative around that. I know it,
(24:42):
it's so hard to feel this you just wanted to
go away or but being able to say, like, sitting
in your feelings is part of how we help them
go away, talking about them in a safe environment, feeling
them in your body and letting them come up and out,
not being afraid of the feeling and not being afraid
of how it feels in your body. And I love
that you have that dialogue with your kids because oftentimes,
(25:04):
as I work with adults all the time that have
a um sort of a traumatic response to a bodily
sensation that's related to a difficult feeling. Right, so they
feel shiky or their chest titans, and that feels traumatic
because it feels like it's dangerous, and that fight or
flights sort of false alarm threat kicks in as opposed
(25:24):
to like, Okay, something something hard or scary or difficult
or worrisome has has come into my head or in
my environment, and like, how do I take a moment
and breathe into it and figure out what my next
move is? You know that difference between being like in
the feeling and then outside of feeling. Thank you so
much for joining us today. We could continue this conversation
for a very long time, and I think one thing
(25:46):
I'd love to take away from this is how we
know how to explain it to our kids, but we
still have the same responses and how to integrate that
into our practice. So thank you for that reminder. Thank
you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Michelle. One thing I really love about that
conversation is, you know, I went into it with this
(26:07):
idea of, oh gosh, how do I protect my kids
from just all of this growing up and the negative
things in life and hard times? And I just do
want everything to be sunshine and rainbows all the time.
And one of the things that I really appreciated that
Dr Gilshaw told us is that sometimes teaching them not
(26:30):
to be afraid of the emotion and not to be
afraid of the pain, and you know, not to be
afraid of going through hard times, that actually is such
a gift because it's going to teach them to be
resilient and understand that feelings are temporary and that you
know better times can come again, and when when the
fear no longer elicits fear, then there's a there's a
(26:52):
lot of freedom too, because fear is the most paralyzing
thing any of us go through. I mean, I was
thinking about what she said about the trauma response and
how you can have a reaction that's almost out of body,
and I was thinking about about a year ago, I
was arguing with someone pretty intensely and I got so
out of my body that I made the uber pull over,
jumped out of the car and started running down the street.
(27:13):
It was such a wild reaction and it was such
you know, deeply seated trauma response. And it was kind
of interesting to have her say that, because you know,
we're all subject to a children, adults, everyone, and so
it's it's it's a nice reminder that we're not alone.
And the body is so complicated in the mind, you know,
it can take us, you know, to the most highest
(27:34):
highs and the lowest lows, and that we all just
need to be patient, breathe through it, feel the feelings,
and there's it's got to be a way out. Yeah,
And I'm seeing the humanity and other people as well
and understanding that they might be going through something as well,
and so being kind, being patients and being good, you know,
(27:56):
friends to as many people as we can. You know,
what's that, I don't know, let's blow but that idea.
You know, everyone you meet is going through something, right,
So just having that kind of approach a little gentler
absolutely all right, guys. So that's it for today. Thank
you so much for for listening, and thank you again
for all of your kindness and support
Which is anonymous, with the Laria Baldwin and Michelle Campbell
Mason and I heart radio podcast. It's Hilaria. Hi, guys,
It's been an emotional time for my family and I
do so want to express to you how grateful I
(00:22):
am for your support and your kindness and your reason.
Quite honestly, I think without it we would crumble. So
thank you so much for being our rock right now
because I don't feel so strong. Kids are sponges and
(00:43):
all certain conversations are not always age appropriate. We cannot
deny that they don't feel the energy and pick up
on certain things in the family and at home. Also,
parenting little people can be stressful regardless of added stress.
So today we are speaking with Dr Hillary Culture about
(01:05):
how to take care of our children and ourselves when
times are hard. This is which is anonymous. I'm Michelle
Campbell Mason and I'm LARRYA. Baldwin and we'd like to
welcome Dr Hillary gold Scher. Hi. My name is Dr
Hillary Culture. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills
and I specialize in parenting as well as trauma, depression
(01:28):
and anxiety. Welcome. Thank you for coming and talking with us.
I feel like so many of us have a certain
amount of gasoline and our bodies every single day, regardless
of added stress in our life. What would you say
is a a tool for maintaining our energy every single day?
(01:51):
This is the ubiquitous question that we ask as as
parents and certainly as as moms constantly. But I think
we have to get past this to like cliche of it,
like how do we self care and really dig into
what that looks like on a day to day basis.
The notion of like moms have to take care of themselves,
the mental low, the logistics, the sort of primitive edict
(02:12):
to take care of littles is all there, and we
can only do it if we're regulated ourselves. We can
only regulate our children if we regulate ourselves. And I'm
always careful when I talk about this topic to understand
people's relative differences and ability to self care. The help
you have, the resources that are available to you, the
(02:33):
literal time um that is available in the day that
you don't have your kids around, but whether it's a
five minute meditation, uh ten minute journaling in the morning,
a call to a friend, going in the bathroom and
closing the door and deep breathing for a few minutes.
We have to have a practice to self regulate, and
(02:54):
with self regulation comes not just a containment of sort
of bodily responses to stress, but also comes the messaging
to ourselves, the reinforcement that like we we matter, how
we are doing matters, that we are the heart and
the compass of our family. And without being diligent with
(03:15):
self care, there's just fill over. There's emotional rent to
pay for not just us, but our entire family. So
it's to me, it's really about the practice, the dedication
to a practice, if it's a couple of minutes or
an hour every day, depending on what you have available,
but making it deliberate, purposeful, intentional. I have a really
(03:35):
very strict morning routine and I think without that, you know,
the hardest times in life are virtually impossible. But I
also feel like with so many parents, it's a it's
a gift to have those moments um are there. I mean,
do you recommend people just get up earlier, try to
carve it out or hide in a closet or you know,
kind of how do we how do we get that
if we're constantly you know, in being requested. Yes, yes,
(04:00):
that's the question, A fair question. Now I recommend what
I practice, which I meditate a couple of times a day,
and I wake up, you know, five or ten minutes early,
and I added on again for a round two before
I go to bed. And so if I don't have
room for anything else in my day, I have that
as bookends to my day. So, yes, I think you
(04:20):
have to be deliberate. It's so hard for us to
give up an extra five ten minutes of sleep. It's
so hard for us to lock ourselves in the bathroom
without being distracted, but just trying to find and usually
it's after the kid has go to sleep or in
the morning before they wait, just trying to find a
time to breathe and sort of connect with yourself because
it's so easy to not self check, to to sort
(04:43):
of look at yourself and figure out how am I,
how am I doing, how are my feeling, and what
do I need to do to sort of address any
outstanding stressors are worries and how is that impacting my family?
And how do I communicate to myself, to my partner,
to my kiddo's about sort of the emotional compass of
where my family is right now, because our kids feel
(05:05):
like I mean, our kids feel what we are. I
was given great advice many many many years ago, which
is um had, which had nothing to do with parenting,
but they said to me that the key to anything
successful in your life is to be inside and outside
at the same time. You want to be inside your
(05:25):
experience to be able to feel the passion, and you
want to be outside to sort of see the perspective
and check yourself as you as you use that word
you know, and I think being as I know in
my experience being a mom of so many, even though
I have you know, school and resources and you know,
the ability to have friends and people who work with
(05:46):
us to help us, I still don't have a lot
of time to myself. And so what I've learned is
practicing on the go sometimes, you know. And and it
didn't where when I had few children, I may I
may have had more time to do the self care
that I would love, of meditating and stuff like that.
(06:07):
And now I find that a lot of it is
being in the moment of noticing my shoulders checked, noticing
my brow check, noticing my jaw check, and constantly scanning
and of course I'm very yoga yoga connected, um, but
it allowed me to get away from the excuse of oh,
(06:27):
I don't have time for that. It's like, well, the
time is now when you're living. Yes, you're talking about
a notion that I talked about a lot with clients.
I believe you have to tell me if this resonates
the idea of the difference between being sort of inside
your feelings and an observer or a witness of your feelings, right,
and that is something you can sort of practice and
(06:49):
do on the go, albeit it's quite difficult to do
all the time and to do successfully. And what I
mean is being inside a feeling looks like we're angry,
we're sad, and we're acting from it, you know, we're
just standing in it and we're acting from that feeling.
We're yelling or disregulated or slamming a door and being
(07:09):
outside of feeling. And this is I say it as
if it's easy, and there's a few things harder from
an emotional psychological standpoint, but being outside the feeling and
being able to narrate. I'm really angry right now. I
feel my body getting tense and hot. I'm going to
go into the other room and take a break. That's
something you might say to yourself, That's something you might
(07:30):
say to your child. I literally said that to my
eight year old either last night the night before. So
there's a version of self care we can do in
real time, And not only is it good for ourselves,
but it's good for our children to witness us managing
tricky feelings because being inside of it almost always ends
up with us showing up in a way that we
(07:53):
don't feel best about. Being outside of it gives us
more opportunity to think and to choose yes, Garta said,
I have the ability to escalate a situation or de
escalate a situation. And that's always where I'm like, Okay,
I have a choice with this, and I don't always
make the right choice, but I try to because and
(08:15):
that's also just like the beauty of having the liberty
within your mind to say, I can take a pause,
I don't have to react, I can take a breath,
I can wait five seconds, and like what that does
to your nervous system. I have a question about like
(08:35):
the physical um response to trauma. Obviously we all we
all feel it, and you know, it's just a fact
that when we are mind revisits trauma, how it affects
our cortisol levels, and how that completely throws off our
nervous system. Is that something you can speak to a
little bit, because I think a lot of people forget
how much our thoughts affect, you know, the science of
(08:58):
our bodies. That's right, And I think this goes along
nicely with the notion of being inside our feelings are
outside of them. A trauma response and slightly oversimplifying it,
but a trauma response is our body responding to something
from the past in the present, right, And so it
takes on sort of a fight or flight mode, and
(09:19):
that can show up in different ways. We might feel
a racing heart, we might feel shaky hands, we might
feel hot, we might shut down, we might flee, either
emotionally or literally. It is a response to a sort
of current stimuli as if it is a past traumatic stimulus,
and so it can be intense and quick and overwhelming
(09:40):
and unpredictable, and the two collapse together, so you're responding
to the moment as if it is a threat when
maybe it's not. You know, we the kids are hanging
all over us, and um, we have a trauma response,
and we yell or screaming away that is disproportionate to
the situation at hand, right, And so a few things
to do. One is to understand this generally speaking, and
(10:03):
we're having this discussion right now, that like, oh that's
what that is. That happens to me sometimes, and employing
like deep compassion and empathy. That's a very primitive edict.
That doesn't make anyone sort of a bad person. It
just makes us all human, particularly if you've had past trauma,
and most of us have in one way or the other. Right,
So being able to just understand that paradigm is useful.
(10:27):
And then when it happens, it's like not if it's
when you know, we're not going to get this acent
of the time, right when it happens, employing the practice
of being able to recognize, oh that just happened. You know,
it's just pulling on my shirt because they're tired and hungry,
and I responded in a way that was disproportionate hat
trauma response. And again so in the moment, empathy and compassion.
(10:50):
And then I mean, depending on the logistics, I want
to always acknowledge like sometimes we can't step away or
sometimes we have lots of other kids they are we're
in the middle of something, but if possible, being able
to take a minute, do some deep breathing and sort
of employ that compassion I'm talking about, Like, Wow, I
just had a response to something somewhat innocuous, stressful but innocuous.
(11:10):
That must mean I'm coming from like an old wounded
part and starting hand on heart, like I I'm just
a person trying to manage really really difficult feelings from
my past right now. And then when my favorite things
is repair, repair, repair, It's one of my favorite tools
as a parent. And maybe it sounds obvious, maybe it
(11:30):
sounds revolutionary or somewhere in between. But we're all going
to show up in ways that we don't feel good about.
We just are. This is what I do for a living,
and I do right and and so one of my
favorite parenting tools is to go back and and and
go to your kid, to go to my kid and say, mmmm, Mom,
we just got really angry back there, didn't I I
yelled and I slammed the door. And that must have
(11:51):
felt scary. That must have felt hard to see. I
know it did for me. And that had nothing to
do with you. Yeah, I needed you to sit down
for dinner. That's still true. But Mom is gonna work
really hard on kind of managing her tricky feelings when
I have them, and and and and and try to
do a bit better next time. We all have tricky feelings,
do don't we? And your kid, Michael, thank you so much.
Your kid might go like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the
(12:11):
point is is you're infusing a narrative into your kid
that says like, tricky feelings are okay, it's okay to
feel disregulated, and here's what it looks like to try
to repair and to work on sort of containment next time.
I love that. That's something that we do a lot
at our house. And one of the things that I
always try to drive home is that no one should
(12:35):
ever treat you that way, and you shouldn't treat anyone
that way because I you know, especially I'm One of
the things I think as a parent is I'm afraid
that they're going to experience things and then they're going
to end up in a relationship when they're like twenty five,
and that's what it's going to be like, you know,
and so um, you know, saying that this is normal,
and this happens doesn't mean it's okay. And then I
(12:56):
try on top of them and wonder how you think
about this? I try on top of that. You know.
The other day, um My, my son Leonardo was having
a really hard time and he didn't really understand why,
but it's just you could tell that his nervous system
was too much and moving his body and crying and
trying to fight and a bunch of different stuff. And
he's a really sweet kid. He's really the sweetest of
(13:17):
all at my kids. And so I said, what do
you need? And I took him out, just the two
of us so we could talk, and we just went
downstairs and then he said, I really want to go
to the store and I want to buy balloons, and
I want to buy balloons for all of us, and
I you know, So we went to the there's like
this little party dollar store to box from my house,
(13:39):
and we went there and he picked up seven balloons
and it was a really quick trip and by the
time he was home, he was in a different place.
And he came and he wanted to give a balloon
to each one, including our four month old um and
it was just so heartwarming, but he needed us an
extra tool because reason doesn't work with a six year old.
(14:01):
That's right, that's right. I love that that came to
you both, you know, sort of organically. That is correct.
And you're bringing up another really important dynamic is that
education and rationality around feeling management does not happen in
the moment of an upset or a tantrum. It just doesn't.
And so in the moment of an upset or a tantrum,
(14:21):
go to tool, in my view, is empathy is validation, acknowledgement.
It's so hard right now. You just wish that you
didn't have to leave the play date. You just wish
you could keep on staying. I know it's so hard
to leave, so difficult. You're so angry. I see you
punching the seat, I see you grabbing at the blankets.
I know you don't want to leave. It's so hard,
(14:43):
and we still set the boundary and we do have
to go. So either you can walk out the door
and mom is going to grab you and help you
out the door. But being able to start with empathy,
and you're right, sometimes if we have the ability or
luxury of like a little time switching landscapes, witching. Having
an emotional outlet in a different space can change how
(15:06):
our child is moving through the moment quite significantly, and
you kind of organically. And it's hard. It's hard because
and I've gone through phases where I was like, all right,
go into your room or time out, or how dare
you do that? You know, I mean, that's shaming you
go through because you're just like, why are you doing this?
I do not understand. And then that gets to a
(15:27):
big part of what I want to talk to about today.
They feel what's going on in our home. That's right,
that's right, that's right. There's no question. I mean some
of what you're describing responding to our kids. How dare you?
What's wrong with you? Go to your room? You've just
lost X, Y and Z, etcetera. All have those moments,
and sometimes those things are appropriate sort of a firm,
(15:48):
hard consequence or boundary, right, But that's secondary, that's not
the headline. The headline is some version of validation and acknowledgement.
You're hurting right now. I see you, I hear you.
It feels so hard right now, You're so angry. I'm
gonna sit here with you until it until it passes,
and you know what, I'm still going to sit here
(16:09):
with you, right and talking about extending it to the
notion of what's happening inside a household. If a household
is going through a particularly difficult time, you know, related
to I don't know, challenges at school, family illness, uh, separations, divorces, etcetera.
Being able to say that out loud to a child,
not in the moment of upset, because again, no education
(16:31):
or information is really seeping in, but later, maybe at bedtime.
My favorite time to deal with my older one who's
more mercurial, is to say something like, wow, I was
thinking about earlier you wanted to have a second dessert
and you were so mad and sad that I wouldn't
let you have it. Yeah, that was really hard. And
then if something's going on in the household, I might
say something like, gosh, you know, we just we've been
(16:52):
looking at a different schools for the last month. I
wonder how that feels inside your body or inside the house,
like a change is coming and it's kind of scary,
a lot of unknowns, and maybe you feel that um
and that's normal. I feel it a little bit. I'm
a little nervous about where we're gonna end up, where
I'm going to make new friends, how it's gonna feel,
and being able. You know, my my eight year old
(17:14):
will be like, oh yeah, yeah, stop talking. You know,
my little one would engage forever, but my my older
one is going to deny any complicated feelings, even though
he's a son of a a psychologist. But right nonetheless, I
know that that narrative is getting in there that I'm
providing him guidance and insight, you know, sort of goal
posts if you will, about what's happening in the house.
(17:36):
It's not you. There's there's a feeling going out inside
the house that's hard. Right now, we all feel it.
What about when it's not age appropriate to have certain
conversations with them? How and that they can feel it
(17:56):
and you're trying so hard to mask it and you're
trying so hard to in a smile on your face
and like everything's okay. There's joke in my house where
I was like it's all great, yeah, great, like literally
I'm poppy in uh in trolls where like every and
she's like I'm gonna get back up again. You know,
people joke and we joke on the house that that's me.
(18:16):
But it's like, you know, what do you do when
you can't actually explain to them? Such a good question.
I'm so so happy that you asked it. You can
still have a conversation. And I know we imagine that
our kids are going to sort of be like, no, no,
but what is it? What's going on? You have to
tell me, please fill in the blanks. It's not really
really what kids are interested, and especially little ones, what
they want to know is that you're okay and they're okay.
(18:39):
So I would still say some version of like, I
think it's been feeling a little tricky in the house,
like some worry and some difficult feelings like frustration or sadness.
I felt that have you. Well, they might say yes, no,
or nothing, and that might feel really hard. It might
feel a little bit different to be in the house.
That might make you sad or mad. And I want
(19:00):
you to know that sometimes families go through times where
those kind of feelings are are more present than other times.
And I'm here and we're all together and you can
always talk to me and we'll all work through those
things together, right, So you don't have to say to
them that anything specific is going on per se and
if something specifics going on, uh, there's an illness or something,
(19:21):
but you're not wanting to get into the details of
the severity of the illness or um or what's going
to happen. You can say like, oh, Grandma's sick and
that's and that's felt a little bit hard for all
of us. We're not sure how she's doing every day
and we're wondering about her and thinking about her, and
that's hard, right, So you can just do like really
age appropriate general stuff. I think there's a feeling or
(19:44):
a poll that we have to fill in all the blanks.
And really, our kids, as I said before, just want
to know we're okay and they're okay, and to acknowledge
what they're experiencing. Naming it is so much more containing
than suppressing and denying it. And we know that has
grown ups. Right. If you think about your friend, your sister,
your partner, if you're feeling upset and angry and you
(20:04):
share that in your partners, like oh my god, you're fine,
You're always fine, like you always figure out a way
through it, that doesn't feel as good as when our
partners says, Oh my god, I'm so sorry you're feeling
that way, like it's been such a difficult week, and
you know what, I felt it too. Kind of thing, right,
it feels so much more containing and relieving. Our feelings
can come up and out instead of stay stuck inside.
(20:26):
So don't be afraid to go towards the tricky feeling,
you know, inside ourselves, and definitely not with our kids. Yeah. Absolutely,
As a parent, we we want to protect our children,
make it like everything is fine, even when it's not.
That's right, it is. It is a primitive edict that
we all have to be conscious of and sort of
fight against. I mean, not not to overstate it, but
(20:48):
we are not serving our children better by keeping them
apart from the exposure and management of tricky feelings. There's
there's no escape from tricky feelings as little ones are
as adults, and so we want to be able to
say we all have this, and here's what it looks like,
and here are ways to cope with it, and to
notice that our bodies always regulate to another feeling state.
(21:10):
I'll say that to my kids a lot that like,
did you ever notice that that a feeling that one
particular feeling never stays, it always changes, it always goes away. Right,
So if you're feeling said, you kind of know that
at some point they'll feel different, right. So, and that's
true for all of us too. We don't always have
just one feeling state and be able being able to
sort of teach our kids that through our own management
(21:32):
or our tricky feelings and through the room. Yeah, we
aside from like say, ensuring your children that the feelings
do transmute and become something else eventually. Um, are there
any other little tips you have? Like I always think
with kids like box breathing very simple, you know, techniques
that just kind of immediately calm the system. Are there
(21:53):
any that our top of mind for you just we
could recommend? I think breathing is an excellent tool. We
do either breathe four times, hold and then breathe out
for four times. We do rainbow brass where the kids
sort of hold their hands and do some version of this,
which can be really useful. We sometimes draw out feelings,
like you're feeling so frustrated. I wonder if you can
(22:16):
make a picture of that or tell a story around it.
My older one really likes what but I would say
the primary thing, and this feels paradoxical, so paradoxical, is
to just sit with our kid in the feeling, to
try to name it and sit in it. Because more
we try to make it go away, the more persistent
it is. And we notice that with ourselves. If we
(22:36):
feel anxious but we try to push it away to
suppress it, it it like shows up some other way now
a sudden, are tummy hurts? Or you know, our shoulders
are tight, right, but though they are in a supported environment,
it usually dissipates. So I know it's not always possible,
but to the extent it is to be able to
just sit with a kid and like you're you're so sad.
(22:57):
Nothing feels good right now? Right? No, I tell I
teach my kids that, yeah, well, or or at least
you can work with it. I teach my my children
that your your body has a physical reaction to all
of your thoughts and emotions. So once we have that,
we think about, okay, well, how are my thoughts affecting
(23:18):
all of my muscles? You know what? It makes sense.
When you're in love, your belly is full of butterflies.
When you're scared, your mouth is going to go dry.
When you're stressed, your neck is gonna hurt. I mean,
it's it makes sense. And so to teach them that,
I mean, I always say I'm going to be a
successful parents if I can teach them to be good
little problem solvers. I want them to be like, Okay,
(23:39):
this is the issue. Let me weed away all of
the stuff that I just is not helpful and that
is tension in my job that is not going to
make the situation better, and then I can really focus
on on what needs to get done and how to
solve this. And I love what you're saying as well
about you know, making teaching them things that they're temporary,
(23:59):
things are tem bory because as you know, as adults
that's difficult, and as children that's extraordinarily difficult. And that's
where you know, when you talk about child suicide rates
and stuff like that, a lot of it is not understanding,
not being in that outside looking in saying this is temporary,
this is going to go and I have the ability
(24:22):
and the resources to get out and not being afraid
of the feelings. And you know, one one concept I
like to think about is is it's not about sort
of guiding our children to make their feelings go away.
It's about getting them better to feel the feelings right,
and so having a narrative around that. I know it,
(24:42):
it's so hard to feel this you just wanted to
go away or but being able to say, like, sitting
in your feelings is part of how we help them
go away, talking about them in a safe environment, feeling
them in your body and letting them come up and out,
not being afraid of the feeling and not being afraid
of how it feels in your body. And I love
that you have that dialogue with your kids because oftentimes,
(25:04):
as I work with adults all the time that have
a um sort of a traumatic response to a bodily
sensation that's related to a difficult feeling. Right, so they
feel shiky or their chest titans, and that feels traumatic
because it feels like it's dangerous, and that fight or
flights sort of false alarm threat kicks in as opposed
(25:24):
to like, Okay, something something hard or scary or difficult
or worrisome has has come into my head or in
my environment, and like, how do I take a moment
and breathe into it and figure out what my next
move is? You know that difference between being like in
the feeling and then outside of feeling. Thank you so
much for joining us today. We could continue this conversation
for a very long time, and I think one thing
(25:46):
I'd love to take away from this is how we
know how to explain it to our kids, but we
still have the same responses and how to integrate that
into our practice. So thank you for that reminder. Thank
you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Michelle. One thing I really love about that
conversation is, you know, I went into it with this
(26:07):
idea of, oh gosh, how do I protect my kids
from just all of this growing up and the negative
things in life and hard times? And I just do
want everything to be sunshine and rainbows all the time.
And one of the things that I really appreciated that
Dr Gilshaw told us is that sometimes teaching them not
(26:30):
to be afraid of the emotion and not to be
afraid of the pain, and you know, not to be
afraid of going through hard times, that actually is such
a gift because it's going to teach them to be
resilient and understand that feelings are temporary and that you
know better times can come again, and when when the
fear no longer elicits fear, then there's a there's a
(26:52):
lot of freedom too, because fear is the most paralyzing
thing any of us go through. I mean, I was
thinking about what she said about the trauma response and
how you can have a reaction that's almost out of body,
and I was thinking about about a year ago, I
was arguing with someone pretty intensely and I got so
out of my body that I made the uber pull over,
jumped out of the car and started running down the street.
(27:13):
It was such a wild reaction and it was such
you know, deeply seated trauma response. And it was kind
of interesting to have her say that, because you know,
we're all subject to a children, adults, everyone, and so
it's it's it's a nice reminder that we're not alone.
And the body is so complicated in the mind, you know,
it can take us, you know, to the most highest
(27:34):
highs and the lowest lows, and that we all just
need to be patient, breathe through it, feel the feelings,
and there's it's got to be a way out. Yeah,
And I'm seeing the humanity and other people as well
and understanding that they might be going through something as well,
and so being kind, being patients and being good, you know,
(27:56):
friends to as many people as we can. You know,
what's that, I don't know, let's blow but that idea.
You know, everyone you meet is going through something, right,
So just having that kind of approach a little gentler
absolutely all right, guys. So that's it for today. Thank
you so much for for listening, and thank you again
for all of your kindness and support
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A straightforward look at the day's top news in 20 minutes. Powered by ABC News. Hosted by Brad Mielke.
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2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
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3. Amy and T.J. Podcast
"Amy and T.J." is hosted by renowned television news anchors Amy Robach and T. J. Holmes. Hosts and executive producers Robach and Holmes are a formidable broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide. Now, the duo will get behind the microphone to explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture and everything in between. Nothing is off limits. “Amy & T.J.” is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robach and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. Follow @ajrobach, and @officialtjholmes on Instagram for updates.