Dating, Marriage and Divorce Conversations (DMD)
Strengthening Family Dynamics: The Power of Spousal Connection in Parenting
Have you ever wondered how the strength of your spousal relationship impacts your parenting and family dynamics? In today's episode, we shed light on this crucial connection and introduce our upcoming Parent Empowerment program, a six-part series designed to fortify the foundation of your family through the relationship of the spouses. Discover the concept of Mirroring and its potential to enhance understanding and communication in your partnership, as well as the significance of spending meaningful time together as a family.
We also dive into the importance of understanding and empathy in all types of relationships, including parent-child and romantic bonds. Learn about the consequences of not being seen and understood, and how this can lead to destructive coping mechanisms. Uncover the three stages of effective communication: mirroring, validating, and empathy - and how you can apply them in your relationships. Lastly, we discuss how effectively communicating with your spouse translates to effective communication with your children, and how integrating Torah philosophy into your parenting approach can make all the difference. Join us on this journey to enhance your relationships and leave a lasting, positive legacy for your children.
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Have you ever wondered how the strength of your spousal relationship impacts your parenting and family dynamics? In today's episode, we shed light on this crucial connection and introduce our upcoming Parent Empowerment program, a six-part series designed to fortify the foundation of your family through the relationship of the spouses. Discover the concept of Mirroring and its potential to enhance understanding and communication in your partnership, as well as the significance of spending meaningful time together as a family.
We also dive into the importance of understanding and empathy in all types of relationships, including parent-child and romantic bonds. Learn about the consequences of not being seen and understood, and how this can lead to destructive coping mechanisms. Uncover the three stages of effective communication: mirroring, validating, and empathy - and how you can apply them in your relationships. Lastly, we discuss how effectively communicating with your spouse translates to effective communication with your children, and how integrating Torah philosophy into your parenting approach can make all the difference. Join us on this journey to enhance your relationships and leave a lasting, positive legacy for your children.
Start for FREE
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Hello and welcome to dating, marriage and divorce conversations where we analyze, navigate and troubleshoot all stages of your romantic life. I'm your host, igor Meistelman, a divorce attorney turned relationship coach.
Speaker 1:Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. This topic sometimes for people is surprising, get a little bit of a staring eyes, confusion, even wondering is this really true? And the topic has to do with what is it like when we show up to our children as spouses, not as parents? So just give me a minute let me explain what I mean by showing up as spouses. Well, the reality is that a family system isn't just parents and children. Family system is parents, children's, and then the relationship of those parents, that's right. The relationship itself, the marriage of the spouses, husband and wife, directly impacts big portion of the upbringing of the children and the influence that the parents energy, dynamic, space the day hold for each other directly flows downwards towards the children and the impact has on the children.
Igor Meystelman:And I could personally testify to this.
Speaker 1:After practicing divorce law for over a decade, i could tell you the impact I saw that children endured, absorbed, experienced as a result of the interactions that they witnessed between their parents, or the toxicity, negativity, tension, resentment, all of these things, the way they transferred onto the children and the deep impact that it made on those children. And that's why today I want to hone in on this nuance and discuss how much it's not just how we parent and all the good techniques we could learn and all the wonderful books we could read that are out there about parenting itself, that direct interaction that exists between me and my child, but there is another dimension altogether that operates in a much more subtle way, almost lives in the shadows, and that is how do I treat my spouse?
Speaker 1:in private or in front of my children, and how that shapes my child. So let's begin. I want to talk about a very exciting upcoming program that I will be running, a six part series that I'm calling parent empowerment, and the purpose of it is to actually take a look at chinuch, at upbringing of children, through the lens of an empowered relationship between spouses. Because, after all, if we fortify the foundation, if we fortify what the building rests on, then the rest of the building could safely stand and withstand all sorts of storms of life, but if the foundation is shaking well, the building has a much higher chance of collapsing. So we look at this beautiful edifice that we will call our families And when we take these beautiful pictures and simple as an event, and what meets the eye is disappearance of a beautiful edifice, but only we as families know the deep struggles, tensions, difficulties we endure behind the scenes as we try to do the glue holding together these seeming beautiful edifices.
Speaker 1:And so I would like to just lay out some of the principles, concepts, ideas that I'm hoping to explore with families that will be signing up to do this parent empowerment series And to give a flavor and introduce some of the concepts with a little bit more in-depth understanding, and what's going to be very unique and special about the series is not that you'll be signing up to come once a week for two hours to listen to me speak. Actually, most of the time will be spent the couples speaking to each other And as I'm trained as a certified Amago facilitator using modality of Amago therapy, the training, the baseline of Amago is to empower people to incorporate, integrate these tools into their own lives And therefore you're not here to listen to me lecture and then we'll leave empty-handed.
Speaker 1:The goal of this experience is to help you acquire the tools you need to be able to work on your relationship, and so each of the ideas that I will share today really can be built around your own skills and tools you would like to achieve and, ultimately, the transformation you would like to go through in order to be able to show up successful spouses and then parents. So let's begin with mirroring What is mirroring. So, besides basically practicing to be a parrot and repeating the words you're hearing from the other person, mirroring is actually a deeply powerful tool.
Speaker 1:You see, we live in a world where there is constant misunderstandings, misperceptions and, ultimately, this overall feeling are not being seen. Now, i wish I was making that up, but you actually heard my almost three year old standing on the other side of the door, like he does when he comes back from his play group, asking begging. Can you please come to your office? So much for making time to record a podcast in the middle of a work day with the kids around. He's such an angel. He actually asked me from time to time can I have a meeting with you? Because all the other kids have been telling him that when I'm not available, it means I'm in meetings. So he's asked me can I have a meeting with you?
Speaker 1:And so you imagine, right, i talk about living. What I preach making sure to make time between sessions, the evenings, to sit down and have quality time, like we all should and we'll talk about today. That's one of the key, important ingredients of being able to raise healthy children is meaningful time together. So let's continue with mirroring. So, besides the fact that I need to be able to repeat the words to you so I could be able to tune to you so I could actually know what you're talking about and be able to confirm that I'm keeping up with what you're sharing with me.
Speaker 1:Besides, that part of mirroring is also to experience some basic connection, that we are speaking to each other same language. We're actually understanding what goes on in the other person's world, rather than our own interpretation of what we think is going on in the other person's world, which is something that we do very frequently. Somebody talks to us. We can't wait to already give feedback. The first thing that that indicates to me when I sit down with a couple or family, is that I wasn't really listening to you. I was busy preparing in my mind my response. After all, it would be pretty difficult to actually listen to you, take in your world and then, at the same time, already be preparing my responses. I suppose maybe some genius or high functioning intellectual can do that, but an average person can only do one at a time. I can either listen to you or I can listen to my own voice, and I have to choose which one I'm listening to at any given moment. Now, as we continue in the empowerment program, the next thing we're going to do is during parenting dialogue, and the reason that's very important is because, as it says in the opening, the first foundational concept and principle we need to have a really good handle on this. What is our goal? Have we actually defined our goal? Are we sort of sort of stumbling and fumbling along in hopes that we arrive somewhere decent, somewhere that we feel some degree of accomplishment? And there's no reason to live that way. We can pause, define where we want to go, what is our trajectory, and then we could create for ourselves a roadmap. What will our teamwork look like? How will we support each other's spouses in our journey as parents, once again leaning on their foundation? the relationship foundation is a way to become healthy, proactive, influential, impactful parents, and that's what would happen in second module. Then the journey will take us into a fascinating world of biochemistry and neurobiology, and the reason we will go there is because there's been some fascinating work that has been done by a number of people, but one of the really big names It's somebody named Daniel Siegel, who is a Harvard train psychologist specializing in understanding the human interactions, not only from place of emotion, but actually understanding, on biochemical and neurological levels, what takes place to us. It's something that we don't really give much attention to, but it actually is fascinating, not only just intellectually and information-wise. It's actually fascinating because, if we actually have a good handle on just basics of how humans work. So let me just give you an example.
Speaker 1:What would happen if I sat down to have a conversation with you and in the course of that conversation, i bang on the table? I think a normal person is going to say they're going to have some kind of a reaction, they're going to recoil, they're going to retreat, they're going to feel that there's a need to go into some place of safety. Well, if I need to retreat and go into safety, that also means that I'm not really available to listen to you anymore. Why is that happening? That's because we have a nervous system. Our sympathetic nervous system is designed to protect us. It's designed to flag danger, to flag a lack of safety, and if I perceive lack of safety, i perceive danger. The first thing my system is wired to do to protect me is to signal to me get away, get away, run to safety, go into the cave. Well, if I retrieve the into my safety cave, then how much am I available now to Macabre to receive information you want to share with me? I am not so available anymore, and the opposite is also true.
Speaker 1:When we set a tone that is fun, playful, energized with enjoyment, creativity. It's so much easier to experience a learning environment. A learning experience, it's being able to give over information from one to the other. Well, that means that the receiving vessel has to have capacity to hold the deposit of what is being shared by the one who is giving over. And no wonder then, why. There's just occurred to me, there's places in the Talmud where there's discussion of how a rabbit, before starting his class, would make jokes. Why? Because the jokes remove the parasympathetic nervous system. They bring us back into equilibrium and state of safety, state of relaxation, and then complex, difficult concepts can be explored, examined, discussed, and that is one of the fundamental ideas not to be discussed at length now, but that often is lacking in the classroom. Classroom settings are not designed to build safety. They're designed to build discipline, rules, barriers that designed for we will catch you if you've done something wrong. And the more that that energy is present, the more the child's parasympathetic system is there to guard them and protect them from being receiving Right.
Speaker 1:Whenever I would hear a parent share with me the interaction with the kids of any age, and when it sounds something like this you never listen to me. When are you going to listen to me. They never stop to also ask themselves the following question Why is it that my child is not listening to me? Maybe there is a reason. Maybe the way I present doesn't create environment of safety. Maybe the way I present causes my child to say I'm being judged right now, i'm about to get into trouble, and then you know what happens I'm going to be out of control as a child. Then a system that God put into me, my nervous system, my biochemical responses all kick in, telling me this is dangerous, this is not safe, and I now retreat. I retreat, rather, i withdraw and I go into hiding And I'm no longer available to listen to you, to Macabre, to receive from you, to take in really anything you want to share with me. And the only way you're going to bring me back, you guessed it restoring safety. That's why I think it's so important to restore safety.
Speaker 1:But first we have to understand what we're looking at. We will become a little bit like doctors, as an x-ray machine where we can see ourselves and each other, and by practicing it as spouses, we can then say, ooh, that's so interesting. I understand now why. When I get healthy and puffy, when I get dysregulated, when I get angry, upset, mad or, worse, reachful in front of my child, i should have expected very much positive feedback or compliance, because I am causing my child to become dysregulated from my own dysregulated energy. We communicate with each other through these invisible bridges Where we pass our energies to them, they then pass it back to us And then off.
Speaker 1:We go into these never-ending spirals where we just live in power struggles, in tensions, in a state of tension, a state of disconnect. And those are the places that are so painful, both for us and our children. You know what? As a child, it's doubly painful because I also have nowhere to go. You are meant to be my support, you are meant to be my savior, my rock, the thing that I can lean on, and you are no longer available because you are dysregulated, mom, dad, and I am left not to fend for myself. How will I do that? The best that I can.
Speaker 1:Very often that involves developing coping strategies, checking out technology, drugs, disconnecting from genieism, from Yiddish kind. I will talk a little bit why. That's why one of the modules is called parenting as an opportunity to emulate Hashem's Meadows, because the child is constantly flagging how we behave as a way to identify and define their own identity. About that in a few more minutes, but I think general idea is being conveyed and so we understand. These are the biochemical reactions that are taking place in our brain and in our bodies when we become dysregulated, when we become upset, angry, sad, depressed, reachful. All of that dysregulation travels through an invisible bridge into our children and the dysregulation in our children travels back to us.
Speaker 1:And as long as we are not paying attention to or we're not identifying, what we see is just like a ping-pong bouncing back and forth but we're not able to really take in and to see and then really appreciate how we can diagnose what's really taking place, which is, one of us became dysregulated that caused the other one to experience the same and then, as a result, we now go off into this cycle, power struggle and anything of that sort that keeps us trapped, the place of disconnect, the place of not really seeing each other, not really understanding each other. And so the more we can understand and appreciate how this works, the more we can understand how we can tap into even our neurobiology and how we can use the skills of a MAGO, the real tools of communication, to neutralize, to perceive the danger, to help restore the safety and bring us back into a safe place where we now could again rebuild the connection, restore effective communication with each other, and we could do all of this through first empowering our relationship as a couple. The next module is validation and empathy, but this is deeply, deeply important, important to cause for children until certain ages and for some even into adult lives. This is in some ways even more soothing, healing and helpful than mirroring, except that we cannot jump to validation and empathy without good mirroring. And so the way the journey really goes is we first mirror to establish that the two mint were now connected, we have arrived in each other's world, and then we're now able to do something even deeper. See, besides my need to be seen by you, to be acknowledged by you and you could do that by making sure that you mirror me, you're demonstrating to me, you're really trying to enter my world but there's also something else. Very often I need from you, i need to feel you really get it what it's like to be me.
Speaker 1:For some reason, we have this very deep need to be understood. Kyrsy, somebody who writes a lot of our personality types one of the most famous personality tests, it's called Myers-Briggs personality test, wrote a book called. Please Understand Me. There's some universal need. We all have to feel understood, especially in romantic relationships, and you know, with the next relationship where there's a deep need to be understood parent-child relationship Children have very, very deep need. They didn't plan for it. Achean made us this way, they didn't calculate for it, they didn't instill it in themselves on their own. It is something they simply live with.
Speaker 1:And when they don't feel seen and understood, that's when we do things like acting out, being destructive, being annoying to siblings, being hurtful to their parents and, worse, being hurtful to themselves. Because as a child, when I didn't feel seen and then I experienced pain, isolation, suffering, i didn't know how to deal with such intense feelings. So I needed to find a way to escape them. So I create coping mechanisms. Some might be productive. Maybe. I do a lot of sports, i obsess with sports. There are kids like that. Some become destructive. unfortunately, they turn to technology, to inappropriate things in technology, and they turn to all other kinds of things, substances, etc. And that's why, once again, in order to be able to do this effectively with our kids, the first place we can do it is effectively with our spouses.
Speaker 1:Let's practice. How can we be validating and empathizing? So what does validation do? that mirroring doesn't Mirroring. I just convey to you that I see you. I see you, not just like in some dismissive. I got it, i got it. That's not the conversation. I really see you. Thank you so much for sharing with me what goes on for you. But now watch the pivot with validation as it goes on our one level higher.
Speaker 1:It says you know, it makes so much sense to me that this is why you feel the way you do. It makes so much sense that it will upset you. When I did xyz, you know you make so much sense that when I didn't show up on time, it left you really confused or hurt. You make sense. Now notice something very important. I don't have to agree with you. I don't have to give you stamp of approval. I'm not saying that whatever you're telling me is the truth and I now have to abide by it. What I am saying is that I accept that it's the truth for you, because it's one thing for me to say. What I'm hearing you say is you're upset, what happens? But you're gonna be left wondering. He must still think I'm crazy, even though he's mirroring back to me. He can do a really good job as a parrot. But once I say you know, it makes so much sense that this is how you feel Because this happened.
Speaker 1:Is that what it's like for you? That sets a totally different energy into that invisible space, that invisible bridge that we're building, that holds us up together in our relationship. An empathy is that ultimate arrival that we sometimes are able to experience, and that is not only do I see you, not only do I want you to know that you make sense for being you. I actually feel what you feel. I really could now sense just how painful that was for you. The new cry, i cry Right. The famous story, robahari Levine walking into the hospital and telling the doctor when his wife hurt herself, he said our leg hurts.
Speaker 1:We can hit that level of empathy because that is ability that was granted to us as human beings. It's a divinely inspired ability that I can be with you where you are, just like Hashem tells us, i'm with you in your struggles. We also can be with others. What will it take? leaving our own world, putting aside our own egos, our own agendas, and just leaving for a few minutes the safety and comfort of our own world and going into leaving and traveling over that invisible bridge into the world of the other. We start with our spouses and hopefully then we can do it even for our children.
Speaker 1:We can see that for children, this is oxygen. I cannot stress this enough What the child experiences when you look them deeply in the eyes, when you slow down and instead of offering our solutions and our advice as the wiser, older parent with experience and we could just sit with our child and say what I'm hearing you say, is it's really hard for you when that kid bullied you. Is that what it was like for you? I know it makes so much sense that it upsets you so much when this kid bullied you. Wow, this must be so painful for you. Is this what it's like for you? If you notice, i literally just walked through all three stages. I mirrored.
Speaker 1:I validated, and then I just did my best to arrive in empathy. The next module. This is fascinating. This is now trying to merge together all of the work until then into now integrating Torah philosophy, which all begins with why is there even this concept of children And why is there a concept of parents? Why does this thing exist? What is it giving us opportunity to do? Couldn't we just find these things in a cabbage on a tree? Why do we have to go through these periods of bringing a child into a world and then experiencing these relationships and the challenges and struggles and difficulties that come with these relationships?
Speaker 1:Well, i believe that one of the reasons is because God wanted to give us an opportunity to actually practice and live out What he commands us to do, which is to emulate his ways. And God manifested himself in this world through his 13 attributes of mercy and, As famously the Rabbi's teachers, those attributes were not just to be on the display for us to say, oh, nice ideals, not for me, but nice ideals. No, they were put into this world and God revealed them to us to tell us these are the things that are within your reach, these are the things that I'm gonna put in you in a state of potential and I want you to now work on actualizing them. And Not only that. I'm gonna give you children who are gonna be like a honing device. They are going to almost act like your mirror. Obviously, this point I'm talking outside of Khusvashalom a child with special needs or child that's struggling. I'm just talking about when our kids do funny, tough, difficult, annoying things. They're not doing them to drive us crazy. They're doing them to give us an opportunity. God is channeling opportunities through our children to help us live in the laboratory of becoming light.
Speaker 1:Him. He didn't just give us these attributes to read about, to study in a, a educational setting, in a library. He gave him. He gave us these things to live. And the way he also blessed us with opportunity Was to do it with our children, and certainly with our spouses, and so to go through the process of understanding Even some of the most basic concepts that I want my child to be graceful, i want my child to be kind, i want my child to have a certain sense of mercy, certain sense of Modesty. These things aren't gonna just sprout on their own. They're gonna come to them through osmosis of watching us live those qualities, and the more we can manifest in those ways, the more they will simply inhale them from us, and that's what earlier I refer to them as oxygen, and that's what makes this job almost doubly difficult. Not only we trying to teach our children and educate and train them in these things, but also in order to do that, we have to go through this difficult journey of acquiring them, practicing them and then Demonstrating them by modeling.
Speaker 1:Becoming merciful is not something that I could teach a child by explaining the concept. The way to teach a child to become merciful is when the child sees me being Merciful. This is very, very important. Me being modest is how the child will want to become modest, not me telling them to be modest. It's not my actions that influence the child in this realm. It's how I Exist that influences the child in this realm.
Speaker 1:We'll know this kind of familiar thing right don't do as I say, don't do as I do. The problem is it doesn't work. It's exact opposite. Children do as we do, not as what we say, and that's why it's so important that the more we can become godly human beings, the more we will simply, by as Moses, be able to teach our children that there are plenty of things we need to teach our children profession, torah. There's plenty of information and data points that need to be transferred from us to the next generation. If there's something that could be taken off our plate and that could be transferred simply by being, isn't that a nice gift? That's one less thing on my plate.
Speaker 1:The trick is I first. I first have to become that type of a being, and The place where I can practice is through my relationship with my spouse. And then, finally, as we will move through all these phases, we of course have to leave room To continue the real journey that matters, and that's the journey of Transformation. This is not a get-together for a classroom experience. This is a get-together for you to feel. By the end, you've become in some way a different person. We all become in some way different than when we started, and that's what's gonna be so important.
Speaker 1:Take time to reflect, to share, and I strongly believe because I've seen that over and over again That's something about a group environment. Environment also gives us physical, it gives us strength, it gives us encouragement, it gives us a sense of belonging and part of a community. I'm with people of my tribe, people on the journey just like me And I don't have to be alone and I could reach for these other people. With home, i can be part of this community to continue to work on myself, work on my marriage or my relationship, so that, ultimately, i can pass on the best legacy possible To the next generation, which is my children. Thank you for joining today.
Igor Meystelman:Thank you for joining us today. For questions, comments, topics You'd like to hear more about, or to try out a 24 week relationship challenge, email us at relationship Reimagined at Gmail.
