What My Four-Year-Old Knows About Healing That Most Adults Don't

In this episode, I share a personal (and slightly unconventional) parenting story about letting my 4-year-old son practice walking on our roof. As risky as it might sound, the experience brought three profound lessons about healing: the importance of practice, the power of pacing, and the value of having support.

Join me as we explore how these lessons apply to your journey of emotional regulation and self-healing, especially if you didn’t grow up with the tools or guidance to navigate your emotions. Together, we’ll uncover a framework for building self-compassion and moving forward in a way that feels intentional and supportive.

Key Takeaways:

1. It’s okay to practice. Let yourself be bad until you're not anymore.
2. It’s okay to go slow. There’s no rush to get it “right.” Moving at a pace that feels safe and manageable is how real, lasting change happens.
3. It’s okay to ask for support. It’s actually essential – we’re here for you.

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• Book a FREE consultation for RESTORE, our 1:1 anxiety & depression coaching program.
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Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

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Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Let me just say that today's story involves me sharing some potentially questionable parenting choices. So go easy on me as I choose to share these in the context of the profound lesson about healing that I think it illustrates. I will say this over and over and over again, but my children are my greatest teachers. They have been such a catalyst in my own healing journey. They also obviously push more of my buttons than any other humans in the world, but I am just forever grateful for the tiny humans that I have been blessed with. And my hope for you today is that this conversation can help you, first and foremost, access a deeper level of self compassion and understanding for why you might be lacking in nervous system or emotional regulation skills, and maybe this will provide some elements of a gentle framework for what you want to do about that moving forward in your healing journey. 

Now, for some context for the story that I'm about to share with you, we live in a smallish one story home, and we are currently having solar panels installed on our roof. And at the time of this story, my husband was walking on the roof to check out the progress of the installation, while also casually using the leaf blower to clean out our gutters, because we are obviously the classy neighbors that everybody wants. And just before my husband was going to get off the roof, my four year old son, I had both my sons in the front yard. We were doing other gardening, raking things. My four year old asked if he could go on the roof. He has been weirdly obsessed with talking about him walking on the roof lately, so I decided to go out on a limb and say yes. Now the ground rules were that you had to listen to Dad while you were up there, and you're only ever allowed on the roof when dad is up there and you ask first, and we say yes, my questionable parenting choice is that I let my four year old walk on my roof. 

So the story continues, my son climbed with the ladder. His dad was on the roof. He took his hand and walked him across the roof, holding his hand. And as I am watching them, I hear my son say, I want to practice so that when I'm a grown up, I can do it on my own. Now I heard this, and I quickly pulled out my phone, pretended like I didn't hear him, asked him to repeat himself, and so this is what it sounds like with his little voice saying that.

And this is lesson number one for today. There are three lessons in total, so I'm going to come back to Lesson one in a moment. Once they reached the end of the roof, they turned to walk back towards the ladder and Cade. My son asked if he could do it on his own without holding his dad's hand, and we let him. And what I want to play for you is another little audio clip of what he said as he was taking the tiniest, slowest steps that you can imagine. And hopefully you can hear him in between my other sons yelling. But this is the audio clip of what he said as he is just taking these like little, tiny shuffling steps across the roof.

In case you couldn't hear what he was saying, he said, quote, I'm just going to walk super slow since I'm not holding your hand. And then my husband gave him some instructions that it's easier to balance if you take your hands out of your pocket. And he made sure that he was. Always walking on the outside of my son just in case, just in case. 

So this is lesson number two and number three. 

So lesson number one was his little quote, I want to practice so that when I'm a grown up, I can do it on my own. Lesson number two was his little word, saying, I'm just going to walk super slow, since I'm not holding your hand. And lesson number three is that he had an adult there providing feedback, tips, protection and support. 

And I want to expand on how each of these lessons might apply to your struggle and to your healing journey. 

So lesson number one, I want to practice so that when I'm a grown up, I can do it on my own. When I heard my son say this, I was struck by how beautifully simple and profound it was as adults, we sometimes expect ourselves to just know how to do things. Think about it for a minute. How often do we expect ourselves to just know how to navigate all of the hard things, emotions, relationships, past trauma, setting boundaries, grief, without realizing that maybe no one ever taught us how to do that in the first place. No one ever taught us the skills that it takes to do those things. Maybe it applies to you to think back on your childhood for a moment when you were overwhelmed with big emotions or maybe going through a hard thing for the first time feeling angry or anxious, maybe deeply sad. Did you have somebody there saying something like, I see that this is challenging, let's practice how to handle this together. Or was there somebody there modeling for you how to move through those emotions? Well, I think for many of us, the answer is no. Instead, we might have heard things like, stop crying, get over it, knock it off. Maybe we were sent to our room until we could calm down. Some of us had parents who were themselves, so overwhelmed that they couldn't help us navigate our emotional world. How could they teach us skills that they never learned themselves, and just like my son understood he needed to practice to safely walk on a roof, I need to practice this skill as a kid so that as an adult, I can do it on my own. We also need to give ourselves permission to be beginners now as adults, if we didn't get the practice as kids, we need to give ourselves permission to be beginners at emotional regulation, at healing, at nervous system work, because I think many of us didn't have that opportunity in childhood. Maybe again, it was because our caregivers didn't model it. Maybe they were struggling themselves, or because we grew up in environments where survival took precedence over emotional development, and now as adults, you are standing on this metaphorical roof of life just trying to figure it out. And what I want you to take away from this lesson is it is okay to practice, whether it's practicing self compassion, setting small boundaries, learning to notice when you're triggered. These are not things that you have to master overnight. I don't even know that I would say I'm a master at all these things, and I teach people how to do these things for a living. But just like my son wanted to practice walking on the roof so he could feel confident doing it alone, someday you have permission to take small, intentional, supported steps to build confidence in your healing journey, you might be learning today what others learned decades ago. And that's a bummer, and it might be your reality. And it makes sense. It makes sense you don't know how to do something now that you weren't taught how to do that. 

Lesson number two was, I'm just going to walk super slow, since I'm not holding your hand. And this might be my favorite lesson, because it demonstrates such a beautiful self awareness and self regulation. My four year old instinctively knew that when he had less external support, he needed to adjust his pace and approach. Think about what a gift that awareness is, and how many of us don't offer that to ourselves. Don't know how to offer that to ourselves, and many of us didn't receive that lesson as a child. Maybe you grew up in an environment where you had to be quote on all the time, where slowing down wasn't an option because you were carrying adult responsibilities, or you. Be even navigating unsafe situations. Perhaps you learned that you had to handle everything at full speed because there was nobody there to help you pace yourself. Some of us grew up feeling like we always had to be running, running from emotions, running towards perfection, running to caretaking someone else, running to keep up with others expectations without ever learning that it was okay to slow down in healing, this translates to honoring where you are in the process with honesty and gentleness. And this is going to ebb and flow. Sometimes you're going to feel strong enough to process big emotions or confront difficult memories, and other times you will need to slow down, take smaller steps or even pause in your healing journey completely. This is not a weakness, it's wisdom. If you find it challenging, to give yourself permission to slow down, this is my reminder that you might be healing from a childhood where slowing down wasn't an option. You're not just learning to regulate your emotions. You're also learning that it is safe to move at your own pace, to move through the world at your own pace, to move through your healing at your own pace. 

And lesson number three is the part of this where my son had an adult there providing feedback, tips, protection and support, and I want you to take a moment and just pause and reflect in your childhood, in your young adult life, even now, right here, now today, do you feel like you Have a safe other adult in your life to help provide feedback, tips, protection or support is in this story, while my son was practicing his independence, he wasn't alone. His dad was right there, offering guidance when needed, and ready to catch him if he stumbled, and maybe this kind of supportive presence was missing for your emotional development, for any number of reasons, and if you find it difficult to ask for or accept help, now consider that this might be because you learned early on that help wasn't available. It wasn't reliable. Maybe it came with strings attached. Maybe you grew up in a household where the adults were so consumed by their own struggles that they couldn't offer the emotional scaffolding that we needed, that you needed. Oftentimes, the present day fear of depending on others has roots in those early experiences where we had to be our own emotional support system. In this little story, my husband gave specific feedback to my son about taking his hands out of his pockets to help with balance that simple, practical guidance that made the task easier and safer. Now, imagine how different your relationship with emotions might be if you'd had somebody offering that kind of gentle, practical guidance when you were learning to navigate your own inner world. And the good news here is that it is never too late to receive this kind of support. I've received it through various coaches, therapists and friends. It's the only reason why I can do the work that I do now, why I show up in the world in the way that I do now in our healing journey, we need people who can offer both emotional support and practical tools. 

This is at the heart of our methodology, at rise as we is giving you the education, the information to understand your psychology and physiology, to make sense of your symptoms, to come away from the story that there's any brokenness within you, and then in those one on one coaching calls, you receive emotional support and practical tools to navigate your world, to learn these skills. 

Now I want to bring all of this together as I watched my son on that roof, what I saw was such a pure example of what healing can look like when we strip away all of our adult complications and expectations. He showed us that it is okay to be a beginner, to need practice, to go slowly, to accept support along the way. And if you are finding these things challenging, please remember that you're not failing at healing. You are working to learn skills that you may never have been taught, and that takes immense courage if you are struggling with your own healing right now, I invite you to approach yourself with the same gentle curiosity and acceptance that my son showed that day. Can you view yourself as somebody who is learning and practicing rather than somebody who should already know how to do this? Can you give yourself permission to slow down when you need to? Can you allow others to support you while you build these skills? Because just like walking on a roof, emotion. Regulation and healing are learned skills. They take time and practice and support to develop. You weren't born knowing how to do this, and maybe you weren't given the chance to learn it gradually with support in childhood, and while that has come with some additional challenges, it's okay. You're not behind, you're not broken, you're not doing it wrong. You are simply in your own process of learning and growing and healing, and this is the work that we support our clients with every day inside our one on one coaching program that allows you to heal at your own unique place, in your own unique way. 

Healing is not about reaching some perfect state where you never struggle again. It is about building a toolbox of skills and supporters and self knowledge that helps you to navigate life's challenges with more flexibility, more resources, more self compassion, and just like my son will eventually learn to walk confidently on our roof, I know with every fiber of my being that you too can develop the skills that you need to learn to live a more regulated life, one slow, supported step at a time. And if you are looking for a new kind of support, I would love to connect with you in a completely free discovery call. And you can always find the link for that in the show notes. 

Now for today's three takeaways. 

Number one, it's okay to practice if you didn't learn this as a kid, it makes sense that you suck at it. Now, let yourself be bad, but let yourself keep trying. 

Number two, it is okay to go slow. There is no rush to get it right. There is no even such thing as one way that is right. In healing, it is so, so important to move at a pace that feels safe and manageable for your nervous system, and that is how real and lasting change happens. We often say, especially in trauma, healing, work that slower is faster. 

And number three, it's okay to ask for support. You do not have to figure this out alone. I want to encourage you to find the people and the places that feel supportive for you and lean in as always. 

Thank you for being here, for letting me anecdotally share so many micro moments of my life with you in a way that I hope resonates and feels supportive for your healing journey.

And until next week, I'm sending hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai