The Special Needs Mom Podcast

Doing Hard Things Without Suffering

• Kara Ryska • Episode 164

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Hello and welcome to the podcast. Can you imagine navigating life's challenges without the constant weight of guilt, judgment, shame, and resistance? What if I told you suffering is a choice and you can learn to steer clear of it?

Join me as we delve into the difference between 'hard things' and 'suffering.' We'll unravel ways to identify these elements, bring kindness and curiosity to ourselves, and use a helpful script to get started. This episode is all about self-compassion. Along the way, we'll also take a look at our Pathway to Peace community - the perfect place to find and share collective kindness and compassion. I also share a small favor - if you could take a moment to rate and review our podcast, it would greatly help others on similar journeys discover us. Get ready for an episode filled with hope and a powerful message of resilience. Let's begin.

Full Show Notes


Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Cara, life coach, wife and mom to four incredible and unique children. It wasn't all that long ago that my son received a diagnosis that had my world come crashing down. I lacked the ability to see past the circumstances, which felt impossible, and the dreams I once had for my life and family felt destroyed. This forward has many years of surviving and not at all thriving, and you'll see a mom who trusts that she can handle anything that comes her way and has access to the power and confidence that once felt so lacking. I created this special needs mom podcast to create connection and community with moms who find themselves going trapped and with no one who really understands. My intention is to spark the flare of possibility in your own life and rekindle your ability to dream. This isn't a podcast about your special needs child. This is a podcast about you. If you are a mom who feels anxious, alone or stuck, then you are in the right place. Welcome, well, hello and welcome to the special needs mom podcast and episode 164. Actually, now that I realize it, I'm realizing I'm recording on the three year anniversary of this podcast. Wow, that's really cool. You can go all the way back to the first episode and listen to the story of why I chose this particular date, although, now that I think about it, I'm not totally sure I shared it, but it has significance. If you want to know, let me know.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about what I'm calling doing hard things without suffering. This is yet another conversation or topic that was inspired by various conversations inside of different coaching conversations that I have. I thought you know what this is a great concept to highlight and bring to you as a podcast episode. First, let's say well, what do I mean by hard things without suffering? We're going to start by distinguishing the difference between a hard thing and suffering. I think when you hear the distinguishment or the difference, you're going to realize oh my gosh, I'm doing a lot of hard things. It's really safe to assume that in our role as special needs mothers, we do really hard things. I actually don't know if there are that many hard things beyond harder things, I should say and I'm not a fan of comparison, but in this case I actually think it's valuable to really recognize wow, there are not a lot of things that are harder in our life, more emotionally confronting, than what we're being asked to do as special needs parents.

Speaker 1:

Think about what you go through in sicknesses, in surgeries and hospitalizations, navigating, growing to a new phase, moving from I don't know, tween hood to adolescence what's before adolescence, I don't know, but like going into teen years. That's a hard thing. I'm living that one firsthand. It's hard. The list goes on right. We can have the threat of harm or death to our child. I think we all know. Financial strain, that's hard. There's physical exhaustion, there's living traumatized, there's social alienation. I mean I could go on, but I think you get the point. These are hard things. They require us to be with, like I was saying, some of those most extreme and unpleasant emotions that we face as human beings. And my belief, my personal belief, is that as special needs moms, we are called to I don't want to say a higher calling but we're called to live with a very high gradient of needing to feel these unpleasant emotions. And we're not going to talk about that piece today. There's other episodes I have about feeling and processing emotions. So I want you just to acknowledge wow, you do a lot of feeling and a lot of it is very hard. So that's doing hard things.

Speaker 1:

Now let's talk about suffering. Here's where the suffering comes in. It's the guilt, it's the resistance, it's the shame, it's the judgment. And so you're like, oh yeah, I have all those things too. Yeah, probably, I think we all do. So let's just all raise our hands Like we are all technically guilty of this is something that many of us do, so there's nothing wrong with you. You're not not doing this well enough if this is happening to you, but the value in, like slowing it down, inspecting it, evaluating it, observing it, is very valuable. That's what we're doing today.

Speaker 1:

So this guilt, this resistance, like oh, I can't ask for help or I should be able to do this and I can't this is where the suffering comes in, and I think a clear distinguishment here is a hard thing. You generally don't have a choice in. These are things that happen even when, in all of our might and all of our efforts, we try to prevent them, like I could have done nothing to prevent the tumors that my son has had. So that, I think, is a clear thing that recognizing a hard thing, or what we're calling a hard thing, we're naming it, is something that we cannot prevent and or control. So I think the first error that we get into is when we try to control something that's not controllable. But we're not going to talk about that today either. We're going to really focus on this piece. So that's a hard thing, something we do not have control of, something that happens even when we don't want it to and we try not for it to happen.

Speaker 1:

But suffering, I want to say, is optional. Now don't you go turn to this on yourself. Don't you say, oh well, now bad for me for doing this, no, no, no. This is the start of bringing kindness and compassion, because that is where we have a turning point. We can continue on the road of judgment and creating guilt, or we can stop, drop and evaluate and recognize that this is the time where we have an option to bring in just one percent more kindness and compassion. So first, you obviously have to notice that you're doing this Like. You have to notice that the experience that you're having is as a result of what we're calling suffering, and maybe we can even summarize it to say the turning on yourself. And this noticing can be the hardest part, because when we're in our own heads like, it feels very real, it feels very factual, it doesn't feel like something we're making up, it feels like this is the truth.

Speaker 1:

And just to give some tangible examples. The suffering flows out of thoughts like I should have. If only I. I can't, I'm not strong enough, I shouldn't have to ask for help. I'm just not working hard enough. This is a good one. Other people, other moms, could do this better than I can. I want to just walk away, never come back and gosh. That is a terrible thing to think and I'm a terrible person and or mom. So I can go on and on on these two. Right, there's so many thoughts that can pop up in our head that cause us to have an experience of shame, guilt, embarrassment and all of those things, and this is what I call suffering. This is not the part that you have to do, so let's actually look at two different examples to illustrate what it looks like to distinguish between doing hard things without suffering. So the first one is going to be totally unrelated to being a special needs mom and the second one will be, and so the first one I'm gonna use myself as an example.

Speaker 1:

I often do that the freshest in my mind, and I didn't update in this episode, but I'm sure you've heard me talking about my old remodel, doing a little house remodel, which I feel super privileged to be able to do, but it doesn't make it easy. Okay, so as part of this remodel, we thought let's do new floors. So our entire downstairs was like our whole house basically besides our bedrooms was removed and we had new floors and it looks gorgeous and something's wrong with it. I don't know what it is exactly, but I do know that something's wrong with it. It sounds like you're walking on like crunching things. When you're walking all over the floor, it's not just like one spot, it's like the whole thing, and it's very unpleasant. Like at night, I'm just like oh my gosh, like it feels like you're walking on like a board and it has like sand underneath it. It's awful. So I have to figure out how to deal with this.

Speaker 1:

That is what I'm calling the hard thing, and the thing I want to point out here is that back when I was getting bids and when I was considering who to hire and all the things that you do with remodel, I knew I was taking a little bit of a risk with this installer. Even though this person was referred to me like, my gut was like I don't care. Like the communication's a little concerning Like do you really feel like he's gonna do a great job. But I just said, nah, it's gonna be fine. I chose to just kind of go on. Why? Cause I was trying to save some money. But I knew, I knew deep down, hey, I'm taking a risk here, I have to own that. And you know I used to be in contracting, so I know you guys are all like here. I don't take the lowest bid. They're low for a reason, I know I know.

Speaker 1:

And so, like I said, the hard thing is that I have to remove my floors and reinstall them, and maybe on my dime if the contractor's not willing to fix them, and then this is a lot of dimes adding up. I might, you know, have to have that whole new floor on me. So hard ouch. I can fully say this sucks. But what I also can say is I can't go back in time and change what happened. Like, clearly I have floors now that are defective and so this is again. This is the hard thing.

Speaker 1:

The suffering would be. If I leaned into all the thoughts I could think about myself. Man, you're so stupid for not listening to your gut. How could you let this happen? Other people don't let this happen. Who are you Like why does this always happen to you? And so that's where I could easily go, and you can tell by my words. It would be easy for me to go there. It's not like I haven't gone there before and so I could go and I could turn on myself, and this is what my friends I would call suffering, because I'm taking a hard thing and I'm making it even worse by turning on myself. Yeah, ladies, I am still left with this hard thing, but I don't have to suffer through it, and what this for me led is to just acceptance.

Speaker 1:

Okay, it's money, it's money and inconvenience, but you know what, especially this community will understand, and I'd even told some friends I'm like you know what, with the perspective I have, like this isn't brain cancer, like it's not that bad, it sucks. I really don't want to spend the money, but like it is what it is, I can accept it. Don't get me wrong. There were certainly days where I'm like, oh my gosh, like this feels so bad. But I loud that and got through it. And now, kind of on the other side, I'm like, okay, one needs to happen.

Speaker 1:

And I want to point out the difference here between taking responsibility and blame, because you might have, you know, remembered me saying, yeah, like I knew this could happen, it's a risk I took, I chose, and I can see this part. Now I'm like, okay, I knew this could happen and it didn't work. And I can look at that and also say, hmm, also interesting, like you didn't necessarily trust your gut, okay, but I can bring curiosity and kindness. And back to what I was saying about responsibility. I can look at that and be like, yeah, I own that part. I didn't listen to my gut. But that's different than blaming myself for what happened, like for what the contractor did or didn't do. We don't know yet. Okay, so blame is different than responsibility.

Speaker 1:

And back to the opportunity here, like, certainly I have an opportunity to learn from this, to really wonder like, okay, hmm, you did not speak up when you saw some things you were concerned about, and for me, where I'm at in this process is, huh, like that's not really like you Like wonder what was happening that had you so avoidant of conflict in this situation. And I don't know the answer to that yet. I'm still exploring it, but I hope you can hear in my voice there's a kindness. There's not a condemnation or a judgment. It's a genuine curiosity of like huh, this doesn't actually make sense and probably would be helpful to kind of explore that a little bit. That is my non-special needs example, and sometimes it's helpful to like go so far out of our world, to like see the concept, till we move into something that actually we're very close to, because sometimes we're so attached to how we see something it's hard to see.

Speaker 1:

We're going to use a school example because you know we just started school and it's kind of likely that you might be having some things start at school. So I'm going to use an example about some behaviors. Let's just say the hard thing that you're going through is that your kids have in some behaviors and they are hard to be with. They might be loud, they might be socially misunderstood. You know you might feel embarrassed. You know maybe they're like melting down every time you bring them to school and like they're hitting their teachers. Can you tell? I've had all these things happen. Let's just acknowledge that's a hard thing. It is a hard thing when you get those emails or those calls from school and you don't have the answers. Hard thing.

Speaker 1:

But the suffering would be where you turn on yourself saying things I should be able to control this, and I can't. Or deciding that your child's behavior, what they do, is your fault, is your responsibility. Now, teaching them is your responsibility, but them learning is their responsibility. Trust me, if we could make our children learn, if we had control of that, all of our children would be experiencing very different lives. Because guess what We've all tried, haven't we? I definitely tried to teach my child certain things that, for whatever reason, he has not learned yet, and what that doesn't mean is that I'm not trying hard enough. What it doesn't mean is that you're not trying hard enough or you're not competent enough, that you haven't cracked the code yet. It just means it's outside of your control. And so good to separate the difference.

Speaker 1:

Back to different examples of suffering. You know feelings of guilt or fear of like, oh, the staff is gonna think something of me or they won't wanna work with my child anymore. And this is why I think we really we get fancy is we start thinking what I call unpermissible thoughts about ourselves, telling ourselves that we don't want our children anymore or we wish our child was different, or really thinking some things that don't make us feel good as humans, about our children and our teachers or anybody, and then we start to turn on ourselves like, oh, what a terrible person that you had this thought. And so this suffering, my friends, is optional. And so that is the point of this episode.

Speaker 1:

I wanna help you learn the difference between hard thing and suffering, because, like I said, we cannot avoid these hard things, but we can avoid the suffering piece and it's enough to deal with the hard things, so we don't need the suffering. And I do wanna mention that this is exactly the work that we do in Pathway to Peace. It is like so much more fun to do this together and it takes the weight out, like the seriousness out of it, because it opens a space where, like, we're all acknowledging, oh, we're all actually doing this, we all get stuck on our suffering and we can kind of bring that collective kindness and compassion, which I don't know why, but it's so much more palatable when you're in this setting to bring that kindness and curiosity to yourself and to others, and I think that's a big part of it. Like it's easy to give it to somebody else because you like, look at their situation, you're like, of course they're having this thought, this is crazy hard, and then you realize oh huh, that's funny my life was almost exactly like theirs and so it's much easier to kind of mirror what you're feeling for them back on yourself. So if you find yourself suffering with these feelings of guilt and shame, exhaustion, dread, then just consider there's hope for you. Reach out to me. There's a lot of different ways Instagram you can find my information on the show notes and certainly I think you all know we are in the season of enrolling for the fall cohort for Pathway to Peace. So if you're like, yeah, I actually wanna learn the difference, I wanna really be able to understand how to separate and how to slow this down and how to bring this kindness and compassion, then consider that you are a perfect fit for a pathway to peace.

Speaker 1:

And as I leave you, as we wrap up this episode, I just wanna kind of restate and resummarize how to take this episode and make it actionable and tangible. So the thing I would invite you to do is start to see if you can identify and name the hard thing. Just identify it. For me, I'll use a flooring thing. I have to replace my floors and I might have to financially pay for it. It's gonna cost me a lot of money. That's the hard thing. And then notice the thoughts that come after that, notice how you feel and start to question and push back a little bit, like is this absolutely true? Am I responsible for this thing? Do I have control over this thing? These are the kind of questions that stem from this kindness and curiosity. But first the big step is distinguishing the hard thing and the optional thing, so that you can use that script to give it a start. Well, I'm very proud of myself for keeping this concise.

Speaker 1:

Next week we're gonna have the second part of a conversation with my dear friend Diane and it's not a conversation you wanna miss, so please tune back in and you know what?

Speaker 1:

Actually, I haven't asked this for a long time. What would really be appreciated? If you listen to the show, if you love the show, even if you just like it, I would appreciate you taking just a second to rate and review. Go on, either Spotify or Apple, give it however many stars you think it should have, but I do hope it's five. And if you have an extra second, just leave a quick little comment. It means so much to me when I get to hear back from y'all and those ratings what those ratings do is they just help other people find the podcast. So, like you, if you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I found this podcast, then let's help the other ladies find it. Let's be a light to others. All right, so go take a second rate and review. I would very much appreciate it and I do look forward to hearing from you and exploring Path of Adopies with you. We will see you on the next episode.