← Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
Emotional Regulation: The Skill That Makes Parenting and Marriage Easier
00:19:04
Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hi, this is the Love youe Life show with Susie Pettit, Certified Life and Wellness Coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let's go Warriors.
- [00:14]
B
Hello warriors and welcome to episode number 394 of the Love youe Life Show. I am so glad you are here whether it is episode one or 394 for you. Thank you for clicking clicking Play I especially with this episode. I guess before I dive in, I want to share a little bit about why this topic matters so much to me. Especially if you're listening to the first time. I am Susie Pettit. I'm sorry if I already said that. I forget I'm 54. I have some brain fog because of perimenopause. That's good to know. And I do this work and host this show because for most of my life I was the kind of woman who paid for far more attention to what everyone else around me was feeling than to what I was feeling. I watched my kids closely, I watched my ex husband closely. And long before that, growing up, I watched my parents closely. Because growing up I learned the rule that if other people around me were happy, if they were okay, I was okay. It was like an outside in living. If the things happening out there were okay outside, then inside I could be safe. Inside I could be happy. But if they weren't, whoa. Well then I wasn't. I definitely wasn't good either. And I'm wondering if you can relate and if you can guess what. I know you we get really good at reading a room, right? And noticing shifts in the mood at adjusting ourselves to keep the peace. Like we can tell when someone we love walks in the room. We're like oh okay. It's like we got this emotional sensor with them. We learn hyper Vigilance early. We are really good. We learn to look outward for cues that everything was okay. To pay more attention to what other people were thinking and feeling than to what we were thinking and feeling. And my dear listeners, while that adaptive pattern may have helped us feel safe when we were young and it becomes maladaptive as an adult. Really like hit 20 and onwards. We want this. Hyper vigilance is reading the room. Paying attention to what everyone else is doing often turns into exhaustion, anxiety and resentment. Especially once we're parenting or in long term relationships. Which is why since this episode is dropping in the middle of February, the month of love, I I want to talk about something that might not sound very romantic at first, but I truly believe is one of the most loving things you can ever do for your relationships. And that is learning how to emotionally regulate yourself. Not just so you feel better, although that for sure matters to me, but for the health of every relationship in your life, your marriage or partnership, your friendship, your relationship with your kids, whether they're cute little things, not so cute, teenagers or full grown adults. Because here's the truth. We weren't taught growing up that our most important job as a parent, and honestly as a human is not to make the people around us feel comfortable. It's not. They were well served for us to have that belief. It is. Our most important job is our ability to build our emotional resiliency, to learn our emotional intelligence, to raise our eq. Whatever age you are, as you listen to this, I implore you to make this your year. To build your ability to feel internally safe when the people around you are upset or feel uncomfortable. It helps so many. Most of us were trained early on to look outside of ourselves, to decide how we're doing. Okay, if everyone around me happy, calm and okay, then I can relax. If someone around me is upset, struggling or disappointed, then my nervous system goes on high alert. We learned it was our job to fix that. I do want to say some of this. You know, a lot of us have had some complex PTSD and some complex childhood trauma, which I have. And so I don't want to just skip over this. If this is your new episode, I absolutely can help you this with one on one coaching. I don't want any shame here. This episode is more about just sort of looking. It's like, was this me? Like, did I feel like if everyone around me was happy and calm, then I can relax and do I still sort of feel this? If someone is upset around me, struggling or disappointed, is my mind on them? Is my system on high alert? Am I still thinking about them long after they've left the room? It makes sense. We learned it was our job to fix it, to smooth it over, to make it better, to take responsibility for other people's feelings. It made sense. It helped us feel needed, helped us feel like good moms, good partners, good humans. And it is exhausting and we need to draw a line, okay? It does not actually create emotionally healthy relationships. And it is not how we, my dear listeners, move into our emotional adulthood. Okay? So when the people around us are feeling big emotions, our instinct is often to rush in and try to change those emotions. We want them to feel better so we can feel better. Okay? That is Looking that outside in, if we create the outer in. But emotional regulation is about inside out, creating inner calm. And those are very different things. First of all, we often can't. Like, we might be able to talk someone into something eventually, but, like, we cannot control those other humans out there. What can we control is us, right? When your child is melting down, when your teenager is angry, when your adult child is struggling, or when your partner is stressed or grumpy, that's their experience. That's their emotion. Yet we see it, and it's almost like we swallow it, right? It's like. It's like it's out there, and then we, like, take it inside of us. We internalize it. There's not much. When I'm doing this, there's not much of a line, like, between them and us, all right? It's not like their nervous system's there. It's like, no, their nervous system is part of mine. It's like, what is theirs is mine. This meshed. And the discomfort you feel in your body is real. I know it because I felt it. And most of us were never taught to do with that, what to do with that discomfort. And so we react, we lecture, we fix, we minimize, we jump to solutions. We say things, that's not that bad. Or, here's what you should do. Or, wait, you did that here, maybe do this. It's not because we're bad or uncaring, but it's because we are dysregulated ourselves. We see them in their dysregulation. We become dysregulated, and instead of fixing our dysregulation, we try to fix them.
- [07:39]
A
Them.
- [07:41]
B
The path to emotional adulthood then, my dear listeners, is twofold. It's in our thinking and it's in our feeling. So it's in our thinking and realizing their problem is not our problem, we learn how to practice loving detachment, what I call popcorn parenting. Put that episode so you can listen to that after this, that's in our thinking, and then it's in our feeling. Secondly, it's in our feeling. We have to learn how to feel our feelings about them being uncomfortable so that we can be that sturdy, solid adult they can lean on. Okay? Have you ever heard that, like, well, we can't tell mom because she'll get upset, or, I didn't want to tell you because you get so worried, right? If that's something you've heard before, no shame. But that is just a good sign that these are skills we want to learn on. They are aware that when they tell you things, you take it on. It just makes our relationships more dramatic and heavier than they need to be. So let's do something different, warriors than the generations before us. Let's learn how to think differently. Like if my kid is upset, it doesn't mean I have to quick do something to make them not upset. I can change my thinking and remember that being upset is a part of life. And I can change my feeling. I can get better at letting them be upset without me. Also my nervous system rushing into this maladaptive pattern of also being upset. As a parenting and relationship expert, my dear listeners, what I know is that when someone we love is having big feelings, they don't need us to make those feelings go away. Feelings are looking for support, not solutions. Write that on a sticky note. What they need most from us is space to have the human experience they're having. Let them feel their feelings they crave to feel seen, heard and safe. I know I do when I'm emotional. I don't want someone to tell me what to frickin do. Can you just tell me? You just validate me. Be here and empathize with me. And this starts with us regulating us. Here's another thing to write on a sticky note. When emotions are high, thinking is low. So that goes to figure. If they come in with high emotions, us going in and doing all our lecturing and stuff, it doesn't land. So when their emotions are high, let's not meet their high emotional state with our own high emotional state. Don't meet their dysregulation with your own. Be the person who learns to stay grounded. When emotions are high, your calm becomes the container. I feel it every day. Not by forcing calm onto them, but by finding calm within yourself. And this is a skill we build. It's not something we have or don't have, like hazel eyes or, you know, brown hair. It's something we practice. I practice it every day. I help people practice it every week in coaching and in the Love youe Life school. It's not something we have, it's something we practice. Your job is not to make the people you love feel calm. Your job is to learn how to stay calm when they are not. This is emotional resiliency. And it's one of the greatest skills for us to learn and the greatest gift we can give to our relationships. When we can tolerate discomfort, when we can sit with someone else's feelings without trying to change or fix them, we send them a powerful message. If there are kids, we show Them, you can handle this. It's a building block to raising confident and resilient kids that I talk about in my parenting teens class. We teach them, you can handle this. We don't need to rush through it. So it builds our emotional resiliency and everyone else is involved. Here's the thing. Kids don't learn emotional regulation from what we say. They learn it from what we model. If every time they're upset, we get frantic, the message's feelings are dangerous. If every time they're upset, we rush to fix, the message is feelings need to stop. Not safe here. Yet when we pause, breathe, and meet their big emotions with our inner calm, we teach them something so different. My dear warriors. We teach them that feelings are tolerable. They might feel uncomfortable in their body, but they pass. They don't have to be emergencies. Since it's the month of love, I want to give you this acronym I heard somewhere. I did not come up with it, but I do enjoy this. This helps me. You can write this one down too. For when people around us are having big feelings. Think of the word love. L stands for listen. O observe. V validate. E empathize. We listen to understand, not to solve. We observe what we see without judgment. We validate their experience without needing to agree and empathize by staying connected. I have plenty of episodes on all of that sort of stuff. I have some great podcast episodes. I think it's just smbwell.com mom with some of my top podcast episodes, but anyhow, I will put links below in the show notes, but that's a good one to remember. Okay, the acronym for love. Notice what's missing from that list. Listen, observe, validate, empathize. I don't have give advice, offer solutions, lecture, nag. They don't need that when they're emotional and their brain can't even take it in. The only reason you're trying to do those things is because you're feeling emotional. So beep pattern, interrupt time. Stop the old way, practice a new way instead of using them to regulate yourself that outside in. Learn to love. Listen, observe, validate, empathize. Learn to love by regulating yourself. Practice building this skill. How to calm your inside when the people outside of you are not calm. I promise you, it's not about saying anything out of your mouth to that other person. Our work is internal. And to get started, you don't need 10 tools. Hey, definitely listen to my other podcast episodes, but choose one you can use today. You're a smart person. How can you calm Your body when other things are not calm outside of you. Maybe it's slowing your breath. Take one intentional and breathe in deeply. Exhale deeply. Maybe it's grounding your feet, pushing your heels into the ground when you're listening to them talk. Maybe it's putting a hand on your chest, reminding yourself, I am safe. I don't need to fix this. Today I want you to hear the importance of breaking this exhausting pattern that's not helping us or our relationships. The pattern of needing everyone else to be okay so we can be okay. They won't be okay. Life is topsy turvy. Teenagers have moods. Our adult children make choices we don't like partners and husbands are grumpy. Okay, this happens. The solution that changed everything for me, that helps me feel so much lighter and not responsible for everyone else's feelings and lives, is to learn to create. And this calm inside of me, no matter what the heck is going on out there in the lives of all the humans I love, they're all doing their best and they're all messing up all the time. They're just going to have all their experiences just like me. And when we're practicing loving, detachment and popcorn parenting and popcorn living, we get to feel calmer. So you can do this too. Start small this week. Practice once a day. Instead of saying the thing out of your mouth, practice saying the thing inside of your head. Learn to create calm on the inside. One breath at a time and you break generational patterns. It changes everything. It changes how safe your relationships feel. It changes how connected your kids feel to you. It also changes the story we're modeling. We teach the people we love. They don't need to be fixed. They don't need to be these emotional calm people only for us to love them. We teach that feelings are allowed and that discomfort is not an emergency. This is emotional resilience. This is emotional intelligence. And we're learning emotional regulation, all of which feels like love to us and to them. So what if the most loving thing you could do for your relationships this month is. Is not doing more for others, but building your capacity to be with yourself, to stay present, to feel uncomfortable, to regulate your own nervous system, to become a safe place for you and for them. I'm filled with love thinking of you out there, practicing this inside out living. I really am. So if this episode resonated with you, let's call it there.
- [17:58]
A
Okay?
- [17:59]
B
I'll do another episode on validating and all that. Make sure you you click the follow button on the show please. Okay. And if this resonated with you and you want more, you want to learn more about emotional regulation, emotional intelligence, please, I would love to support you. I help people every day with this. See the show notes for ways to work with me for sure. Get on my weekly newsletter and just sign up for a coaching session or join the Love youe Life School for a month. I am so glad you're here listening in. I will be practicing my inside out living this week too and so I send love from my heart to yours. I love that you're the type of person who listens to podcasts like this. You, you my dear listener, are changing the world and I'm grateful you're here. Big hugs to you.
- [18:50]
A
Thank you for listening to the Love youe Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on itunes. Also leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get them warriors.