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- [00:00]
A
This is Building Resilience podcast, episode 217, emotional regulation in Neurodivergent Families, with guest Emily Hamblin. Welcome to Building Resilience, a podcast where theory, practical strategies and inspiring stories show you how to unlock your best life. I'm your host, Leah Davidson. As a certified life coach, speech language pathologist, and nervous system resilience expert, it is my mission to teach you how to be more resilient to life's adversities. I will show you how to manage your mind, befriend your nervous system, process your emotions, and even eliminate stress. It's time to do more than just survive. It's time to thrive. Let's get started. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Building Resilience Podcasts. Before I introduce my guest today, I want to just remind you that my guided journal is available on Amazon both.comand.ca for my Canadian friends. It basically takes everything that I teach here and puts it into easy to follow steps and exercises. If you want to go even further with your nervous system or learn more about what I teach in the book, then I also have my monthly membership connections, which is currently closed, but you can get on the wait list, so. So links for all of that are in the show notes. So today, Emily Hamblin is here to talk to us about emotional regulation, which, as you listen to our episode, you might be thinking, well, that sounds a lot like nervous system regulation, which it's true that many of the tools are quite similar. Now, as I explained in the episode, we need to think of it like your nervous system as the umbrella, because your nervous system flavors everything that you do. So it's going to flavor your thoughts, your. Your emotions, your actions. So emotional dysregulation happens when someone's nervous system is dysregulated. Your CEO, your frontal lobe plays a large role in emotional regulation. But guess what? You can't fully access her, your CEO, if your nervous system is dysregulated. So today, Emily is going to be talking to us from the perspective of neurodivergence and emotional regulation in families. So let me introduce her. As a certified teacher. With years of experience working with kids all over the globe, Emily Hamblin was sure motherhood would be a breeze. Except it wasn't. It took years for Emily to learn how to not only help her four kids, including several neurospicy ones, find healthy ways to handle their big emotions, but to handle her own neurodivergent brain's intense emotional responses, too. Now Emily hosts the Enlightening Motherhood podcast and runs the neurodivergent Survival Kit for Moms. Through her work, Emily helps parents transform their relationships with their kids, bring more peace into their homes, and create brighter futures for their families. Because she knows firsthand just how challenging and rewarding this journey can be. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome, Emily. I am so excited to have you here. Could you take just a moment to give an introduction of who you are and what you do and who you help?
- [03:15]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Leah. As you said, my name's Emily Hamblin. I'm a mom of four. They're ages 3, 9, 6, and let me think, 13. What I didn't know for years was that we're a very neurodivergent family. And it kind of blindsided me because I have a background in education. I had multiple teaching degrees before I realized my kids were neurodivergent, and before I realized that I was neurodivergent. I thought it was really normal in college that everybody kind of had to get on a treadmill in order to read a textbook or pace around a room and read the textbook out loud in order to pay attention to it. I honestly thought that was normal until I had graduated from college. I was teaching college. I was dating my. Who's now my husband, and he just sat and read this boring history textbook and didn't move. And I said, are you paying attention to that or are you reading the same line seven times?
- [04:09]
A
Yeah.
- [04:09]
B
And he was like, no, I can pay attention. I like, I had literally traveled the world and I didn't know that my brain was very uniquely wired. So it wasn't until years later with my own kids, when we were really struggling, not with academics, actually, and not with the hyperactivity or the unattention, but with their emotional dysregulation, I was sure being a parent would be easy. I always wanted to be a parent. And when I became a mom, my kids emotional dysregulation and my own emotional dysregulation was just headed on a path that I did not want to stay on. So I became passionate about learning how to regulate my own emotions, how to help my kids manage theirs. And now I help other parents do the same.
- [04:53]
A
Oh, I love that.
- [04:54]
B
Yeah.
- [04:55]
A
And I think it's amazing that we start with building awareness. And awareness is something that is slow moving, that in hindsight you can start putting pieces together, but sometimes when you're in it, it's very hard to be in it. And then to be able to recognize it in our own kids. I think that's often what happens is we build awareness when we see something in our own kids, and then we can realize, oh, it's kind of a reflection of me. And I wonder where this is coming from. So what are some of the extra challenges that you think, you know, face parents as you're trying to raise family? And, you know, yes, when somebody has neurodivergence more in their family. But I would say just in general, emotional regulation is a big thing that we need to be working now. I know I the way I teach it. So to put the format of nervous system regulation is the foundation, and the state of your nervous system is what flavors your thoughts, feelings, and actions. So your emotional regulation is going to be very closely tied to your nervous system. If you don't regulate your nervous system, it's very hard to regulate your emotions because you have to get that baseline. So that's how I teach it and share. So I'm curious, how do you help people with emotional regulation?
- [06:23]
B
Well, this is a lot. First of all, the challenges that parents face. Moms of neurodivergent kids, or moms of kids who have intense emotions, or moms who have intense emotions themselves. Right. We're kind of having a few different buckets. We're talking about a family that has extra challenges with emotional dysregulation. It can be hard because we live in a society where Daniel Tiger's mom is animated and she doesn't have a nervous system, and she always answers everything so perfectly. And we want to be like her because she's so inspiring and amazing. And then we're not like her. And then we wonder why, and we start to think something's wrong with us. So we have the guilt, we have the shame, we have the stories that society tells us about what a perfect parent is like. And we'll never match up because none of us are perfect. We're all human. Right? And so that's a really big challenge, particularly if you feel like your family doesn't fit into a parenting mode where a lot of the more popular advice that's out there or the advice that everybody has heard just doesn't work right. You start to feel very isolated. You start to feel very judged. If your kid is screaming in the middle of the grocery store, whether or not people are looking at you, you really are feeling a lot of eyes on you, whether or not they're there, then you start to become hypersensitive. You second guess your parenting. You wonder if you just don't have what it takes, or maybe your kid is just doomed to be a psychopath. Like, yeah, they're probably not going to be a psychopath, but that's where our thoughts go to. Right? And it can be challenging. And not only that, but the day today, just trying to get things done, trying to get through a meal without somebody screaming, trying to get the kids out the door for school, trying to get them to come in from the car. Like the day to day things can be really hard until we find we're not just kind of in a survival season, but we feel like our life has become survival mode.
- [08:15]
A
Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is a lot of the challenge. And as you're talking about it though, it sounds like, yes, this puts me into a place of dysregulation, but how do we fix that? How do we fix our kids? How do we, you know, I was that my kids are all older now, but I was that mom many times where my child was having a meltdown and the shame and the guilt. I'm a terrible mother and, and I got divorced when my kids were really young. So of course that must be the reason that, you know, my kids are acting out, which to a certain degree likely was because we were all dysregulated going through that piece. So what do you do? What do you say? How do you support that parent who has that child who's having the meltdown in Walmart?
- [09:03]
B
Yes. Okay. This is fantastic. And it's very much in line with what you're asking. When your child's melting down, there's some things we can do in that moment, but most of what will help you in that moment of the meltdown is what you're doing outside of that moment of the meltdown. And when we talk about emotional regulation. I love Mona Delahook's turn Brain Body. And so I borrow that a lot in my own programs that we have a connection between our brain and our body. And so I know everybody listening to your podcast knows that the body is the 80%. Right. But that we use both. We're going to work on identifying our thoughts, the stories that we're telling in our heads, the mindsets that we have that are in our way. We're also going to work on taking care of our body.
- [09:45]
A
Right.
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B
This could be self care, which is become a four letter word to some people. But yeah, you don't have to think of it as getting facials and going to spa days unless you really want to. That's fine. But we talk about it more of, how am I replenishing my own body's needs so that my body budget is nice and high for when these stressors or challenges come, that I have the reserves I need to give to my children.
- [10:10]
A
Yeah. So what are some of these things that we can be doing outside of the moments? Because I totally agree with you. That's what I say as well. When people talk about being in a crisis, they may say like, well, I tried that technique and it didn't work. I tried that technique, and it really is. Because it's almost more important what you're doing outside of the crisis moments where you're building up your foundation, where you're replenishing yourself so that you have something to draw from. So what can you do? What do you recommend?
- [10:39]
B
Well, we won't be able to answer that in a short podcast episode. I'm sure that's what we really delve into in the neurodivergent survival kit that we really go into all of that. But I feel like outside of the moment, a really good starting place is to find some of the beliefs that might be in your way. I call them mom myths or roadblocks that a lot of parents have that are getting in the way from them making the emotional growth that they want. For example, a lot of parents feel like they're a failure if they get help in their parenting. They think getting help means I'm a failure.
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A
Yeah.
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B
When that's not true. Not only is that not true, but it's in your way of making progress. If we can flip that to believing, getting help shows I care.
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A
Right? Right.
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B
And it's so fascinating that our society has kind of painted this because humans used to live in villages, and we were constantly getting help with our parents. Parenting, it was like, 24 7, there was this village helping raise our child, and now we're so much more isolated, and we think we need to do it all alone. And if you talk to join a class to learn yoga skills or you want to learn a class to write calligraphy, people are like, all for it. And that's great. But if you say, oh, I want to join this program to help me with my parenting, we feel this shame. Yeah. We feel like, why are you doing that? We have to pause and think, oh, this is a sign that I care. Like, I'm willing to invest in my parenting. It shows how very much I care about my children.
- [12:04]
A
I think a lot of people will also feel like, well, you shouldn't have to take a class on parenting. It should Be something that you just come natural to you, and if it doesn't come natural to you, then you just don't have that nurturing spirit or you're just a bad person. But it is. It's kind of incredible that parenting is the one thing that you just don't need license for anything. I was talking to a neighbor just right before we recorded this actually, and they were talking about they were trying to adopt a cat or rescue a cat and all the hoops they had to jump through to rescue this cat. And he said, it's kind of ridiculous. Like, I can go out and I can have, you know, he has children. I can go out and I can have children. I can do whatever I want essentially with my children, but I have to go out through these hoops to take a rescue cat in. And I was like, yeah, we do have this perception we can go out and do something, but that doesn't mean we're naturally always going to be good at it. And why not tap into the resources like you said, we used to have generations of support around us, but now we're trying to do it in isolation and in private. And I don't want to read anything. I don't want to take a course because I should know what to do.
- [13:21]
B
That is interesting about the cat. I've not heard of that.
- [13:26]
A
Maybe it's just in Toronto that we have strict rules on adopting a rescue cat. I really love to learn. I love to read. To me, it's exactly what you said. These children, this family is the most important thing for me. I want to be able to show up as the best possible mom, wife, stepmom that I can. What resources can I have and what tools can I introduce into my life so that I could do that?
- [13:55]
B
That's so great. I love it.
- [13:57]
A
What about on your own journey? So you shared that yourself. Neurodivergent and kids neurodivergent. Was there a moment where you sort of realize, oh, I have to sort of take care of my own emot emotional growth if I'm going to be able to help my children with their own emotional growth?
- [14:15]
B
Yes. Excuse me in advance if I cry because I can't tell this sometimes without tearing up. I just remember this moment so clearly. It was a foggy morning, one of those mornings where everything felt heavy and we had eaten cold cereal for dinner again the night before. I was kneeling on the cold linoleum floor of the rental home that we lived in at that time, trying to convince my son to put his shoes on I was holding his blue Velcro shoes in my hand, right in front of him, just begging him for probably the fifth time to please put his shoes on. His ride for preschool would be coming at any moment. But my 4 year old just sat there with his toy truck, rolling it back and forth on the brown shoebox, watching the wheels turn. Now, I had no idea what neurodivergent meant. Even with multiple teaching degrees, I didn't know that I was neurodivergent, that my kids were. All I know is that the traditional parenting advice was not working. And I was trying to use everything I'd learned up until that point to get him to just put his shoes on. And he wouldn't. Finally, I became a little bit more abrasive. And how I asked him, please just get your shoes on. And that sweet four year old turned to me and screamed. He began to melt down. So I got in his face, obviously not even thinking here. I got in his face, inches away from his nose, and I screamed so loud and so terrifyingly that he began to cry. He was terrified of his own mother. The sweet little boy that I love more than anything in the world was terrified of me. And right then, of course, the preschool ride pulled up and you're thinking, I.
- [16:00]
A
Hope they didn't hear that.
- [16:01]
B
I handed them the shoes, handed them his backpack, gently pushed him out the door, closed the door went. And I cried in my bed. And I realized I can keep going down the same road of trying to get my kids to change, or I can be the change that our family needs. And it hit me then that the key to helping your child thrive emotionally is to become an emotionally empowered parent.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I would love to say it happened overnight. And the next day I was emotionally empowered. It didn't. It was a journey, it was a process. I spent years really delving deep, learning about emotions, diving into the tools, experimenting with my own family and my own kids. There were lots of tools that didn't work. I let them go. Other tools that did. And I refined and I refined. And that's why I'm so passionate about what I do today.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because this doesn't mean I was the problem. It doesn't mean it's my fault that he wouldn't put his shoes on. It doesn't mean I'm to blame for that meltdown. None of that. But what it does mean is we influence our kids, of course. But the biggest force that we can do in our family is to work on our own emotional growth. And as we do it creates incredible ripple effects for our children. And then the next time, not the very next time, but as we become emotionally empowered, when situations come up, like our kid needs to put their shoes on and their ride is going to be there at any moment, we can maybe feel that frustration come, and we can handle it without exploding. We can think clearly through it as we access that prefrontal cortex. We can have new tools that we've developed and actually think of them in that moment. And hopefully we practice them out of the moment. Then when it comes, we have other tactics to use besides. I said, get your shoes on. Please get your shoes on. Yeah. And so it's been a journey, but it's been a beautiful journey. And I'm grateful for those times that were really challenging because they helped me make the changes I need in myself, and it's made all the difference for our family. Now we're. I would love to say we're a perfect family. And we're not. We're not. But the vibe in our home is just different. There's just a positive energy. I've always loved my kids. I've never worked with a single client that does not love their kids. That's not the issue.
- [18:20]
A
Yeah.
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B
But you can feel the love more because the emotional regulation is there. When my kids do become dysregulated, which is less often, but it does still happen. I can handle it. We can come back to a regulated state, and we're just all enjoying our family life more. And I'm enjoying parenting more, to be honest.
- [18:41]
A
It's very empowering, too, to know that there is something that you can do. You're not just at the mercy of the circumstances, the mercy of other people and how they react. And we can truly take ownership of our own emotional response. We can take ownership of how we want to be in that situation. And like you said, you can have all the tools in the toolbox and still have your days and your moments, and that's just simply being human.
- [19:08]
B
Yes. And I can juxtapose that same moment, though, with another moment years later, after I'd gone through so much of this journey. And I know it's. Honestly, I'm still on a journey. It's a lifelong thing.
- [19:18]
A
Yeah.
- [19:19]
B
But years later, when I finally had learned a lot of emotional empowerment, I had asked my child to brush their teeth. They were reading a book. They would not stop reading their book. So I kind of got their attention and said, hey, would you brush your teeth? The kids started to melt down, just like, scream, because I Asked them. And it was just like that. Would you brush your teeth? They were melting down. They. They went into the bathroom and they threw themselves down on the floor. Their hands were in their hair. Their eyes were bloodshot over brushing their teeth. And I stayed calm. Not just like pretending like, I'm calm. You know, I'm calm until I explode. No, I wasn't. It was like I was truly calm and I was truly compassionate. And then when my child got through that moment, I remember it because he said something that was key. He said, mom. It was like there were too many thoughts in my brain at once and they had to come out. Yeah. And I realized my kid did not want to melt down, but he had never realized that for himself.
- [20:28]
A
Yeah.
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B
Until I gave him the space for it. And I removed my own judgments and I controlled my own emotions so that he had space to realize what was going on for him. And because I was that calm presence in the room, the meltdown was so short lived. And afterwards, we were all able to go back to regulation quickly. He was brushing his teeth just a few minutes later.
- [20:51]
A
I love it. What a great comparison of similar scenarios. But your response was different. Having that regulation. I also realized when you were talking earlier that it might have been helpful to start off with sort of a definition of what is neurodivergence. So even though it's at the end, let's do that now. Because I do think it's a term that a lot of people use. And still I think there probably needs to be some clarity because it's not what we used to use in the olden days back I'm older than you. This wasn't a term that was familiar. So can you share with us, like, how would you define neurodivergence?
- [21:25]
B
Oh, this is a good question. And it's one that confused me for a while too. So if anyone's confused by it, it's totally fine. So neurodiverse just means differences in your brain. We are all neurodiverse. It's like a thumbprint. Like you say, our nervous systems, they're all unique. So all of us have a unique brain. So we are all neurodiverse. We have neurotypical, which is what most textbooks were written for. Most parenting advice is given for this is someone whose brain tends to follow similar patterns to most people. Right. We could say normal. What does that mean? I don't really know. But we have neurodivergent, which is where a lot of brain patterns divert from the neurotypical state. And so Technically, someone usually will need a diagnosis, according to a doctor.
- [22:18]
A
Right.
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B
To be considered neurodivergent. I have a lot of parents work with me whose children don't have any sort of diagnosis. And they say, I don't know what's going on. We'll end up getting an evaluation eventually. I just know my kid is not acting the same way that I would expect, especially parents that have, like, two or three kids, and they're like, oh, exactly. This third kid, like, there's something going on. They're not acting the same. For me, I have several kids that are neurodivergent. And so for me, it was all. It was like, oh, this is normal. This is normal. And then I would talk to my friends, and I'd say, how did you get. You've just asked your kids to clean up the room? And they stopped playing, and they started to clean up their room. What's happening? And she said, oh, I just. Ever since they were little, I've included them in all of the chores that I do. I'm like, okay, me too. And she says, oh, I always try to connect with them and tell them how loved they are. And I explained the importance of working together as a family. And I'm thinking, me too. And then I said, okay, so what happens when they just can't stop playing and they just keep on going? And she's like, that doesn't happen. Or if they do, then I just get a little firm. Like, okay, so you. You get a little firm, and then they scream at you, or they start throwing things or they're melting down. Then what do you do? And I just remember this look of almost terror on her face. And she was like, that doesn't happen. She had five kids, right? And she was like, that. That doesn't happen in our house.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And at that moment, this is before I knew what I know now. I felt like an utter failure.
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A
Yeah. What did I do wrong?
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B
Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we're broken. No, we're not broken. And we just need a different approach. And so, to me, neurodivergent, technically, we could get into, you know, adhd, autism, dyslexia, pediatric feeding disorder, sensory processing, ocd. We could keep on going with what it means, but to me, it's. If your child doesn't seem to respond to typical parenting, then I recommend a neurodivergent parenting approach.
- [24:23]
A
I love that. Thank you. I'm glad that I asked that question for you to clarify, because we do wonder, and I love. We're all neurodiverse we all have our own differences but our society is set up for neurotypical our education system, how we do things, our expectations, all those things. And you can start to see with your own children sometimes, like you said, sometimes you look and you think, hmm, this is not working the way it worked previously. I wonder what's going on. And I do think that because we still have a lot more understanding to gain that sometimes we are judgmental on the families. That must be a family that doesn't have good discipline. That must be a family that doesn't have enough connection or enough love. Now we know things like connection, all those things make a difference and co regulation and so forth. But I think also understanding that many people are neurodivergent and the typical things aren't going to be as accessible.
- [25:27]
B
Yes, I love it. And I also want to add this doesn't mean it's hopeless. Right. It doesn't mean that nothing will help or nothing will work. It might just mean that you need a different or a more uniquely tailored approach.
- [25:39]
A
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. To emphasize that that there it does not mean like oh, you're not going to have success or something. It just means the path from A to B is not the right path. But we're still going to be able to get there. We're just going to take a different path. Maybe it's A to Z, A to whatever it is. Depends.
- [25:58]
B
It feels like A to B to C to D. But exactly.
- [26:01]
A
Yeah. Going around going through different pathways to get there. But there's lots of hope and lots of encouragement. Especially though I think finding somebody who can be understanding of your journey, who's been there a little bit. Which brings me to asking you to share with the listeners where people can find you, where they can learn more. Because I know that this is the area that you really specialize in, in helping families who are neurodivergent and helping learning more about emotional regulation. So where can people find you?
- [26:33]
B
I would love for them to come connect with me if they head to my website. Emily-hamblin.com that little hyphen is important there. So emily hyphen amblin.com they can grab some free conflict resolution cards for kids. So these are things you work with out of the moment with your kid. Like this one says your classmate laughs at your drawing. What could you say to express your feelings? So it's going out of those hard moments to practice with our kids and teach them how to handle it so that when the moment does come, they're not so blindsided. They help all kids. They're especially good for neurodivergent kids because they need practice with the hard stuff.
- [27:13]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [27:14]
B
You can also come listen to my podcast, Enlightening Motherhood. Find me on Instagram lighteningmotherhood.
- [27:20]
A
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and being a source of light for people. I really appreciate it.
- [27:29]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I always love chatting with you.
- [27:33]
A
Thank you for listening to the Building Resilience podcast. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about managing stress, building resilience, and leading a more purposeful life, then make sure we're connected on Instagram and Facebook at Leah Davidson Life Coaching. You can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter at www.leahdavidsonlifecoaching.com newsletter. Looking forward to connecting.