← The Baffling Behavior Show {Parenting after Trauma}
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Robin Goble
I finally get to share with you something that I've been working on for a while. Making Sense of Baffling Behaviors is a free audio training for professionals who work with the families of kids with big baffling behaviors. This four part free training is delivered to you again for free, right in your podcast app, the one that you're using right now to listen to the Baffling Behavior Show. If you work with high intensity families with a lot of dysregulation and baffling behaviors, you might occasionally, or yeah, maybe even a lot of the time, feel overwhelmed or even burned out. Making sense of those baffling behaviors, the kids, the parents, and yes, your own, is the first and most non negotiable step in decreasing burnout, being more effective at your job, and yes, even loving your work again. If you join this training, you'll also get access to a discussion forum that I'm holding over on Facebook and 2 live Q& A sessions with me. This is a pop up audio training, meaning it's time limited. It will start May 5, runs throughout the week and will be available to listen to you until May 12th. That's one week total. I mean, there's really no reason not to sign up. It's free, it's offered in a podcast app so you can listen whenever you want. There's no live commitment, just those bonus live Q&As. The link to register is down in the show. Notes robingobel.com bafflingbehaviors Y'all, this is one of my most favorite weeks of the year and I cannot wait to share it with you. Now let's get to that episode that you pressed. Play on. So when your kids behave, your is baffling. And yours is too, sometimes. Yeah, I know. Let's take a break from all the man boozle here on the Baffling Behavior Show. Well, hey, hey, hey everybody. It's me, Robin Goble, the host here at the Baffling Behavior show or the podcast formerly known as Parenting After Trauma. So it's mid December and my team and I are on holiday break. Over the next four weeks between mid December and mid January, we will be playing replays. And I try to choose replays that I think could be helpful to you during this stressful time of year. I know for many of you your kids are off school or they're fixing to be off school. There's, you know, relative visits, there's maybe holidays. Some of you are celebrating. There's just a lot going on at this time of year. So while I get to take a little break, I kind of curate some episodes that I'm hoping will be supportive of you during this stressful time of year. So today's replay is a replay of episode 162, which is part two of a three part series about felt safe that I aired in January, I think of 2024. It's been almost a year. Yesterday, Tuesday, episode one was replayed. Today we're doing episode two and tomorrow we will replay episode three. Now, felt safety all can be a pretty confusing concept, a confusing topic. It's often conveyed as meaning only something about relational safety and because it gets scary, conveyed that way. That of course leaves y'all parents, caregivers feeling blamed and as though you're at fault for why your kid might be struggling with felt safety. But the truth is, is that felt safety is much, much, much more complex than relational safety. And it's really important that we understand the three streams of safety so that we can stay curious about what might be helpful interventions that could invite your child's nervous system into safety, into connection mode. Now, I also do have a free multi page downloadable infographic over on my website. The link for that is in the show notes of today's episode. Okay, so let's get going with part two of this series on felt safety and come back tomorrow and press play on the podcast for episode three. So in last week's episode it was number one of this three part series on felt safety. And in that episode I went over what felt safety really is, some of the common misconceptions in felt safety. And then we explored in depth felt safety cues that we get from our inner worlds, from our internal experience. So head back to that episode for that topic, specifically felt safety from the inside. That actually is the one that gets overlooked the most when we're thinking about felt safety. So it's a pretty important one. I'm going to give you just the briefest summary about what felt safety is and why I'm doing this big series about it. Like, what are some of the misconceptions about felt safety? Felt safety is language that's used to describe a subjective experience of safety that someone is having that they're experiencing based on on cues that they're receiving from inside their bodies, from the external environment, and from their relational experience. Deb Dana, who is a clinician who's really known for taking polyvagal theory and helping it translate it for regular folks like me and you, she uses the language inside, outside, in between, and that's language that I also use in my book. There's some pretty big misconceptions about felt safety. And the only reason it matters is because it makes it hard for us to have a conversation about felt safety if we're not all talking about it the same way. And I talk about felt safety so much that if we're not all in agreement about what felt safety means, that can get a little bit tricky. So often people kind of conflate the concept of felt safety with relational safety. And so when I start to talk about felt safety, folks can feel a little. I don't know what's the right word, A little defensive. Like I'm suggesting that there's something wrong with the relational experience or that they're doing something wrong. And first of all, I never talk like that. Nobody's ever doing anything right or wrong. There's always things we could be more aware of. And that includes the safety that we're offering inside our relationships. That doesn't make anyone doing anything wrong necessarily. But even more than that, health safety is just much broader than that. It isn't only about the relational experience. It's about cues of safety that are happening in our internal worlds as well. Illness, having to go to the bathroom, all sorts of things. I talked about that last week and just of course, there is an aspect of felt safety that is about relational safety. We're going to talk about that next week. This week we are going to talk about felt safety cues of safety that we are able to experience or receive from the environment, from the outer world. Now, one more thing before we really dive in the science of felt safety, how that's actually determined based on the data that we're getting from the world. You know, what we're neuroceiving, how we make these types of interpretations. I actually go into that in a pretty old podcast episode called Connection or Protection. It's way back at the very beginning of the podcast. I'll make sure that there is a link to it in the show. Notes if this is kind of your first time hearing that language. Connection or Protection? Or how the nervous system shifts in and out of these two different states. Connection or Protection? I do suggest going back to that episode when you are finished with this one. And then of course, if you want to dive even deeper into the science of safety, you can grab a copy of Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors, which was released in September of 2023. And the audio version of Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors was released January 18, 2024. So lots of ways you can access that book. All right. Cues of safety that are coming from the outside, coming from the external world. So not inside our own bodies and not in the relational experience. Although yes, that is in the external world. But that goes in another category. We're going to talk about the external world and the things I'm going to specifically talk about in this week's episode are cues of safety from the environment, cues of safety from the sensory world, which yes, if you really kind of speak sensory language, you know that those things can't be untangled. The environment and the sensory world are essentially the same thing. But there's a couple things I want to say about them uniquely. So I'm separating out the environment, I'm separating out the sensory world and then I'm also going to talk specifically about structure and predictability. And then we'll talk a bit about environmental demands as we start talking about the environment. Let's remember that health safety is not only about physical safety, that there are many aspects of, of our environment that are sending cues of safety or not and that really don't have anything to do with physical safety per se. Why is this important? Why are we getting into the nitty gritty of this? Because if, if you have a child who's regularly seems to be in protective mode, right. They're regularly down the watchdog or the possum pathway and we're trying to brainstorm why. Right? We want to get out of behavior, whack a mole and just respond responding to behaviors. And we want to get curious about why, what's, what's happening that's leaving this individual vulnerable to shifting quickly or staying for a long time on the protective pathway. And if some of those things have to do with felt safety, they might be some things that we can tweak. And especially it feels like for the most part this is, is I'm sure not totally true across the board. But environmental cues of safety or danger can be pretty low hanging fruit, meaning there's a lot of parts of our kids inner world, a lot of parts of our kids experience on the planet that we really can't control. But there might be some environmental things that we could make an impact on. Again, it's kind of low hanging fruit and might then help increase the size of their window of tolerance, decrease some of that sensitivity or vulnerability in their nervous system. So even if it feels like your child has stressors that aren't related to the environment at all, if we can help the environment be a place where our Kids are experiencing a lot of safety from that's only going to increase their ability to navigate challenges and other aspects of their lives, places that we might not be able to have a lot of impact on. So again, obviously there's, you know, objectively unsafe environments that are going to be considered, considered cues of danger. Think about kids who, you know, live in places where there's actual danger happening, whether that be, you know, trauma, abuse, neglect, not having their needs met or cared for, being present with violence, not having anybody care for them at all. Right? These are all going to be environmental cues of danger. And they're pretty easy to identify or at least understand why they are cues of danger. And then we also want to remember that there can be things in our current environments that aren't objectively dangerous but are awakening memories where those things in the environment were dangerous. So very, you know, easy example is if I was in a car accident and hit by a red car, I might experience in, in the future in my here and now, right? Red cars is dangerous. Now, red cars aren't objectively dangerous, but because in my experience and in my memory networks red cars were linked with danger, then that is going to be an environmental cue of danger. So couple things to think about here. One is be super open and curious about that. Think about your child's unique history. Think about some of the more stressful times of their histories. Think about if your child has a history of trauma, some of those traumatic experiences, experiences, and imagine for a moment what may have been occurring in the environment during those experiences. I mean, it really could be things like maybe the phone rang, right? Maybe it was dark out. Like there's so many, like such a huge wide variety of potential of environmental cues that aren't objectively dangerous but were experienced at the same time as danger was in the past. And now those environmental cues are felt as dangerous. So be open to that. Be exploring that. See what you can do to kind of piece together that story, if possible. Of course, a lot of you listening that that feels like an impossible task. Like maybe your child experienced danger in their pre verbal years of life, right? And so they can't give you a narrative or they can't tell you about it even if they were verbal, right? Even if there was a traumatic experience that happened when they were seven years old. There's probably a lot of that experience that hasn't been included in the narrative, right? Because there's so many things that are happening when I retell a story or I tell somebody about something that happened to me. There's a lot of pieces that are getting left out. So they're very likely are cues of danger that we're just really not aware to. We have to kind of put our detective hats on. Look for themes. Like, I've known families who have realized that one of their child's teachers, maybe it was a paraprofessional, was wearing a scent, a perfume or a shampoo. I don't remember the details, but a scent that was a trigger, an environmental trigger from a time in their lives that was dangerous. There's so many things. It could be like the color of clothes. It could be what somebody looks like. It could be sounds. It could even be ambient sounds that we're not really even paying that close attention to. So my number one suggestion is be a detective. Be really curious. See if you notice any themes. And when you're looking for themes, right, Try to really open up your perspective on, like, what you're actually noticing. Meaning there's just so many things that we don't even pay attention to and we forget is still, you know, sensory stimulation. Like maybe your kid is at school and there's a common school sound that we wouldn't even think about, like, you know, the teacher picking up their keys or, you know, something like that. So in kind of direct contradiction to me telling you to be a detective is the other side of this, which is sometimes we just have to jump off the trigger train, that we can really tie ourselves into absolute knots, obsessively looking for the trigger. It can be helpful without question to figure out what a trigger is, because we might be able to adjust it and we might be able to prevent our children from, you know, getting those evocative cues that are popping them into protection mode. Very helpful. And there comes a point where we have to remember, and I talked about this in Connection versus Protection, that episode, and I talk about this in my book as well, that in every unfolding moment, we're all taking in and processing 11 million bits of data. And the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of it is all unconscious. There's so much unconscious data that we're constantly processing that could be a cue of danger. And there comes a point where we have to acknowledge we couldn't possibly be aware of all the potential cues. But what we can do is trust the nervous system. And so if you have a child whose behaviors are clearly in protection mode, right, we want to make sure we're not saying something like, but nothing's dangerous. Surely it might be true that from the outside looking in, there's nothing to identify as objectively dangerous. But when the nervous system's in protection mode, that's kind of all we need to know about the fact that that person is indeed neuroceiving danger. So sometimes there comes a point where we just have to trust the nervous system. Sometimes I'll say something like, when our children are telling us that they're not safe, it's our job to believe them. And telling, quote, unquote, telling us rarely looks like them saying, I don't feel safe. Their behaviors tell us that they're not feeling safe. Okay, so that's the environment part of this episode. Let's talk about in the environment. Go a little more specific here and talk about the sensory world or sensory cues or sensory triggers. Quick review. Our five external senses, our sight and sound and smell, or our olfactory sense, touch, and taste. Now, any of those could be an evocative cue of danger. Something that was experienced as dangerous in the past or was experienced at the same time as danger in the past and now is experienced as the nervous system as danger because they got tied together, right? That's my red car example when we were talking about the environment just a second ago. But also, sensory experiences can be experienced as unsafe. They can be cues of danger if there are too much or too little sensory experiences, sensory data, sensory information based on that individual's unique sensory thresholds. And also, this isn't consistent. One of my cues and clues that I'm getting really stressed out is that all of a sudden, it feels all of a sudden, at least auditory cues, auditory information. Sound overwhelms me. And that isn't a common for me. That's not cons. I guess the word is consistent. I'm not always overwhelmed by auditory cues and auditory data. In fact, I in general, am not overwhelmed by sound. I live in a very loud family. There's only three of us. We're all exceptionally loud people. We are big people. The three of us make a lot of noise. And generally speaking, that's wonderful. If anything, it regulates my nervous system. But when I stop, start to get really overwhelmed by sound, or I want to tell people, like, you have to stop talking. Or when I feel like all the noise needs to get turned off, right? We got to turn off the music. We've got to, you know, everything just needs to stop. That's a really big cue for me that I am really stressed out. So I'm already probably in protection mode. My window of tolerance is small. And now auditory information becomes a additional cues of danger. My threshold has changed, and now this auditory information is just simply too much. We all have unique sensory thresholds in these five categories. And I think actually the most helpful thing to do initially is think about your sensory preferences in all of the different categories. Sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. What do you like? What do you not like? What do you gravitate towards? What do you not gravitate towards that's giving you information about your sensory preferences and your sensory threshold. And if we think about it in ourselves first, it can then help us then think about it through the lens of our kids. Now, if you are listening and you're a member of the club, I actually have a video in the video library that goes through all of the different sensory categories, right? Sight, sound, touch, all of those. All of those. And we look at it through the lens of both, like at home and at school, common sensory experiences where your kid, based on their own unique sensory preferences, might be experiencing too much or too little. So if you're in the club and you want to dive a little deeper into that, head to the video library. If you're not sure what video that is, ask and we will direct you to it. Just a real quick interruption. If you're loving the podcast, you should go right now to my website. Check out all my free resources. There's webinars, downloadable ebooks, and a huge amount of infographic cheat sheets on so many different topics. Felt, safety and boundaries, how to handle lying. What to do if you have a child who seems always dysregulated. How to not flip your lid when your kid is flipping theirs. Steps you can take when your nervous system is fried. What CO regulation really looks like. And y'all, that's not even all. There's more. And my team and I add at this point about one new free resource a month. So you're going to want to check in regularly, see all those free resources, and download exactly what you want@robingobel.com freeresources. Let's go back to the show. So the two things I really want you to take away from this aspect of external cues, outside cues, is that we all have different sensory thresholds and can move between too much sensory data or too little sensory data could be sending cues of danger and leaving us in protection mode. And also that they're not consistent, that they can change. So if you have a kid who seems pretty stuck in protection mode, do a quick overview, look at their environment. Like, what is their room like? Is it, you know, what are the colors in it? How Organized in it, is it? What about the rest of your house? What does it smell like? What does your home smell like? What does their bedroom smell like? What does it sound like? Again, my house is very loud. And see if you can then, you know, look at some of these cues through the lens of is it possible that any of this is actually too much or too little for my child? And then are there any adjustments that we could make to that? So again, if you're in the club, there's a whole video about that, of course. Also come talk to us about it in the forum. Also, for folks who are learning about some of the sensory stuff, you can check out the book by my friend and colleague Marty Smith. She's an occupational therapist and she's written the fabulous book the Connected Therapist that might give you some ways to start thinking about your child's sensory world through a slightly different lens. Okay, so another aspect of our kids environment and safety or not, is like their structure, routine and predictability. Generally speaking, the brain neurosieves the experience of not knowing what's about to happen next as dangerous. Okay. The brain is mostly interested in predicting what's about to happen next. Okay. It is one of the brain's like primary jobs because it is a way that the primary way that we stay safe and out of danger, predicting what's about to happen next. And this helps us stay safe, but it also helps us in relational experiences. It helps us have like this fluid serve and return in relationships. You know, that without even realizing it, we are making guesses about what's going to happen before it even happens. And we are adjusting ourselves and adjusting our behavior again before it's even happened. So knowing what's about to happen next is very important to the brain. Think about that through the lens of what kind of information can you give your child about what's about to happen next? Whether that be in your routine, in your family, your morning routine, your after school routine, bigger picture stuff like what's happening to tomorrow. It also can help us understand why social exchanges can be really hard for some kids if they are having a difficult time kind of guessing what's about to happen next in this social experience. So again, look for ways you can help your child know what's about to happen next. Again, generally speaking, increasing structure, increasing routine and increasing predictability helps with felt safety. Now structure, routine, appreciability is not about rigidity. Generally speaking, rigidity is in response to feeling unsafe. Rigidity is a cue of danger. Structure, routine and predictability actually opens up the possibility of some flexibility. I have lots and lots and lots of examples of this in the book Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors. If you're in the club, you can check out the Creating Felt Safety video because there's some additional exploration of this concept in there. How can we look for ways to increase structure, routine and predictability? And how can we do that, especially if we're not very structured people ourselves? I am not a very structured person myself and I got real lucky and that my kid doesn't need a ton of structure. If he did, I would have to make some adjustments to how our lives unfolded so that he could have the structure, routine and predictability that he needed for her nervous system to feel safe and settled. So just look through your life. Look at tiny micro moments like the transition from waking up to going to the bathroom to having breakfast. Look how much structure, routine and predictability is in that with all while also being flexible. But also look at bigger picture stuff in the overall structure, routine and predictability of your family or your child's schooling environment. My kid has been in several different kinds of schooling environments. One in particular was very loosey goosey. There was very little structure, routine and predictability. He's been in another setting where there was intense amount of structure, routine and predictability. So that's going to vary just because humans vary and organizations vary. And just take that information in when considering what could possibly be contributing to your child. Maybe tipping more towards protection mode. Now, ironically enough, for some folks, too much structure, too much routine, too much predictability actually could be interpreted as a demand, an environmental demand, and that could actually be experienced as a cue of danger. I see this both in the folks I know who have a identify as having like a PDA pathological demand avoidance profile. But this is also a very common experience for folks who have experienced complex trauma, relational trauma, or just for whatever reason their nervous system has spent more time in protection mode. Historically, that it is very common for those folks then to begin to experience environmental demands. Structure, routine and predictability. The feeling that the environment is telling them what to do. Right. That could be experienced as a cue of danger. So y'all, that brings me back to the core of what we talk about here, the core of relational neuroscience, that there is a lot of tools that I can give you. There's a lot of things I can put in your toolbox and I can really load you up on understanding things like felt safety and what you might be looking for from the inner world, from the environment, from the relationship you know, I can really load you up with so much stuff. But the bottom line is that no two people are the same. And nothing, nothing will overpower the need for relational attunement. That your child might not need as much structure, routine, and predictability as another child does, because they experience all of that structure as demands, as rigidity, as someone else telling them what to do. And as most of you listening already know, this is also not consistent across time. Right. Like, maybe yesterday your child needed a lot of structure, routine, and predictability, but tomorrow they don't. I wish our kids were completely predictable. I wish we were completely predictable. I wish the people we were in relationship with were consistent, predictable. But we're just not. And so that then brings me back to the same idea, which is attunement over everything, being with what's happening in the here and now. Yeah, yesterday, maybe this one sensory, you know, experience wasn't overwhelming, but today it is. And we just have to believe that that's true. Yesterday, maybe your kid needed that much structure, but today it's feeling overwhelming and like, too many demands. And we have to just believe that it's true that. I know that it would be so much easier if we could say, well, yesterday or, well, last week or in the past. Yeah, that would make things so much easier. And it's just really not how any human works. Okay, so real quick review here, and then we'll look ahead to next week. We're looking at felt safety. Today's episode was about cues of safety or danger from the external world. And we talked about the environment. We talked about environmental cues that maybe were tagged in the past as something unsafe or dangerous. And so, objectively speaking, you know, this. This environmental thing, like a red car, doesn't seem dangerous by itself, but because of past experiences, it's being experienced as dangerous now. We also talked about our sensory thresholds and how the sensory world can be giving us too much or too little based on our own sensory threshold. And that could be tipping us into protection mode. And we talked about structure, routine, and predictability, and the importance of structure, routine, and predictability, because the brain really likes to know what's about to happen next. It's one of its primary jobs. And then we talked about how sometimes too much structure, routine, and predictability is a cue of danger also. All right, so I'm going to start to bring this episode to a close with just a reminder that this varies in everyone. Right. Go back and listen to the episode. Connection or protection or pick up Raising kids with big baffling behaviors to review how we're all always creating our own reality based on what's objectively happening in the here and now, but also based on everything that has happened in our pasts. And none of us have identical pasts, right? So none of us are going to have the same cues of safety or cues of danger. It's so easy to project our own experience of safety onto others. Totally normal, totally human. But when we understand more the science of safety and how we're all creating our own experience of safety, it allows us us to project less, be more curious about our kids or, or whoever we're in relationship with. Okay, so this is a three part series because felt safety is taking cues of danger or safety from three places. Inside, outside, or between. Last week we did inside, this week we did outside. Next week we'll talk about between. That's the relational space. And how our kids are taking in cues of danger or safety based on the relationship that they're in in that moment. I am so, so happy to be back with you here on the podcast and be sitting behind the microphone again and be imagining the folks all over the world who are tuning in. That creates such a sense of connection for me. But I also love imagining these connections between all of y'all who are listening to the podcast. I just think when we think about how things are going to change, when we think about creating more safety not just for our kids, but in the world, that is key. Imagining and then creating these safe connections with folks all over the world, whether they're folks we ever meet or not. Thank you. Thank you as always for tuning into the show, for sharing it with your friends or your family or your colleagues, for wanting to show up in the world in a way that is cultivating more safety for you, cultivating more safety for each other and for our kids, it really, really matters. And I love that this is job. I love that I get to walk with you on this journey. So thank you so much and I will see you back here next week. I hope that you loved that episode of the Baffling Behavior Show. If you did and you're wondering where can I go to learn more or get more support? Or maybe you're a professional and you want to be able to bring this work to your overwhelmed client. I have got three places for you to go next. Number one, my USA Today best selling book, Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors. A year and a half after publication, Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors continues to exceed our wildest dreams. Breaking sales goals and getting feedback that it is changing people's lives. Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook, which I read wherever you buy books online. The second way to get more support is to come and join us over in the club. It's an online community of connection, co regulation and yes, even a little education. We have over 500 members and you'll gain support from the wisest, most compassionate, most in the trenches with you parents in the world. You'll be able to pick my brain, watch over a hundred different videos and Download the over 50 resources that are unique, uniquely developed just for the club and just for you to bring owls, watchdogs and possums into your family. And if you're a professional like a therapist or a coach, a teacher, an educator, maybe an occupational therapist, a daycare owner, anyone who supports the parents of kids with big baffling behaviors, hop onto my waiting list for the 2026 cohort of being with. It'll be our fifth cohort of our year long immersion into the neurobiology of big baffling behaviors and the science of connection, safety and co regulation. You'll grow your capacity so that you can hang in the hardest places with families of kids with vulnerable nervous systems and you'll finally get the professional support that you need and deserve to work with the families who keep being told by other professionals that they can't help them anymore. One of my goals is that families never hear that again. We'll be opening applications in the late spring or early summer and we'll be opening those applications only to folks who are on the waiting list. So be sure to add your name to the waiting list over@robingobel.com beingwith y'all. I'm so grateful to support you and be with you on this journey. Till next week.