Karen Part 3 of 3: When You Feel Like Parenting Should Be Easier

Picture this, you have three children, it’s summer vacation and all the routines have changed and now your extended  family is coming for a visit. Sounds great and getting irritable and frustrated is also really understandable.  In today’s third and final session with Karen, who is a mother of three children, she is asking herself  the question: Shouldn’t this be easier?   The discussion also focuses on understanding the "people pleaser" the sensitive child, and some of the myths that we believe about ourselves and others.   Karen and her husband are bothered by her son's passion for watching animals fighting which is something we unpack through dialectic thinking and curiosity. 

Time Stamps

3:22 Understanding factors contributing to a parent’s irritability and frustration and what to do about it

5:00 How to respond to stress and anxiety?

6:49 Take a look at your “core beliefs” which can be myths or mistaken beliefs.

8:15 Parents have an opportunity to break a generational cycle of judgment or shame

10:46 Do you believe everything you think?

11:16 Shame and Blame often go hand in hand.  

• Shame makes us feel vulnerable and blame can be something we do when we feel vulnerable
• The urge to hide is associated with shame
• Anger is a secondary emotion to the shame

13:28 Guilt vs Shame distinction

15:10 People pleaser don’t want other people to get upset (another core belief)

• People pleaser who worries about judgments
• Challenging our mistaken beliefs 

20:05 A thought substitution is a way of changing your perspective 

22:25 “Finding another interpretation” game

26:36 Coping skills can “calm you down” and distract you

27:00 The difference between distress tolerance skills and emotion regulation skills

• Distress tolerance skills - go slow  - tolerate the emotion without making things worse
• Emotion regulation skills - check the facts skill and challenging myths skill

28:05 When the environment doesn’t fully understand a sensitive person it can feel invalidating - 

30:52 Discussion about her son who watches animal fighting videos and what that means

• Ask the question…when does it work? and when does it not work?
• Physical touch, compression can be soothing to a child’s nervous system
• Go below the surface to understand your child’s interests and behaviors

38:20 Discussion of vulnerabilities and prompting events

39:20 A DBT Assumption:  People are doing the best they can with the skills they have in the present moment AND people need to do better

40:45  Finding balance between acceptance and asking what can I/you do differently next time?

43:28 Compassion and gratitude are essential for parents.

Leslie-ism: You and your kids are doing the best you can with the skills you have at the present moment.

Resources:  

Kristin Neff’s video: The Three Components of Self-Compassion

Tara Brach’s Resources and Meditations on Gratitude

For a full transcript of this episode and more information about the host visit https://lesliecohenrubury.com/podcasts/ . You can also follow Leslie’s work on Facebook,  Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Join the conversation with your own questions and parenting experiences.

Credits: Is My Child a Monster? is produced by

Transcript

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

0:00  Karen: I feel like it shouldn't be that hard. That's another thing that bums me out. I feel like it should come easily, and this should be fun. And, you know, sometimes it's not.

0:21  Leslie Cohen-Rubury: Parenting should be easier. Wait a second, that's a judgment about yourself, and it's a mistaken belief. In what world would this be easier? I'm Leslie Cohen-Rubury, and this is Is My Child A Monster?, a parenting skills podcast where you get to listen in as real parents and caregivers share their trials and tribulations in coaching sessions recorded live. And no, your child is not a monster, just misunderstood. 

Today is my final session with Karen, who has three kids: ten-year old Kate, eight-year-old Vivian, and five-year-old Owen. Shame has come back once again. Earlier in the season, we heard that Sarah felt it, Kevin and Scott felt it, and yes, Karen also feels it. 

This session starts almost like individual therapy. She's a people pleaser, and she's feeling agitated about her family coming into town to visit. So we talk about her shame and unpack her feelings of inadequacy. And all that ties back into parenting, because if we feel shame, then we may end up blaming others. Or we can internalize it and feel like a constant failure. And even if it's not that severe, you might second guess yourself or feel judged by others. 

We also talk about her son, Owen, watching videos of animals fighting, and what that does and doesn't mean about him and his relationships. We review some distress tolerance and emotional regulation skills in this episode and when to use each type of skill. 

So now as a reminder, all the names and identifying information have been changed. And though I'm a licensed clinical social worker, this show is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapeutic intervention. 

So let's begin.

2:33  Leslie: Hi, Karen.

2:34  Karen: Hi, Leslie.

2:36  Leslie: Welcome, and it's good to see you again. 

2:39  Karen: Thank you for having me.

2:41  Leslie: All right, so I'm going to let you get started.

2:44  Karen: Perfect. So we're in summer mode, like we said. I feel like I'm more anxious, and I'm very glad that I got the coping skills, but I feel like I haven't been able to use them enough. Even my husband's commenting. He's like, You seem very, like…and maybe because we're going on a big trip. So that's another reason why it's kind of stressful getting the time and balancing work and their, you know, summer activities. But I just feel like I'm kind of more bickering at my kids and kind of not being the best. I have these great intentions, but I'm getting more frustrated with them.

3:26  Leslie: Okay, so first of all, I want to acknowledge that you're in a transition. You said it's summer mode, but we don't just step into it. There's a lot of transition, changes in patterns, changes—my guess—in sleep cycles. Lots of new plans. A transition needs to be respected as: Wow, there's a lot going on, and you're probably the one juggling most of it. Is that true? 

3:54  Karen: Yes.

3:55  Leslie: Okay. So do you ever give yourself that compassion of taking a deep breath, slowing it down, even though things feel more crazy around you or more rushed around you? Do you ever take that deep breath just to settle yourself into the moment and say, Okay, this is a transition. 

4:13  Karen: No.

4:14  Leslie: So, your husband tried to acknowledge it. I really would say it would be lovely for you to acknowledge it yourself. And even out loud, whether you write it down in a journal, whether you say it to yourself several times a day, or whether you share it with someone else. Wow, I just noticed that I'm going through this transition, and it's not easy. It's not easy changing schedules, right?

4:43  Karen: Yes, I feel that way. So that's good.

4:47  Leslie: Okay, so I want to begin there. Let's just acknowledge that it's tough, no matter what. My next question is, what do you know about your own way of healing stress or anxiety, or change, for that matter? What do you know, historically? And it can go back to being even a child.

5:11  Karen: Yes, I definitely like to work out, and that helps me just kind of get in a better mindset. And I feel like in the summer the schedule is off, so that's not a priority. So that's one thing. Time definitely. As time goes on, I sometimes say, will this matter a year from now? No. So, those kind of questions. And then I do have, you know, the images you were saying, like, look at those images, or have a journal and stuff like that. But I feel like when I'm doing that, I'm letting the kids on technology. So it's a double-edged sword,

5:48  Leslie: Right. I get that that's tricky, that you're trying to make this time for yourself and help yourself. So that was an answer to the question, what are you doing to help yourself? And I get that there's a trade off, that if you take care of yourself, it feels like the kids go on technology. I get that, and that's a real problem. But I want to go back to: Do you typically feel anxiety during transitions? Or is anxiety just something you've dealt with all your life?

6:22  Karen: I don't feel like I'm anxious. But this trip, and we're going to go see my family—I feel like before trips, or when people come over, I do have trouble sleeping, and it bothers me.

6:36  Leslie: So let's just dig down. Whether you're a child and you're growing up, or whether you're an adult and you already have some what we call core beliefs, core beliefs about the world, core beliefs about yourself. So when people come over, or you're going on a trip, is there any belief that you have about yourself like, This has to be perfect, people will judge me, I have to make sure no one gets upset. Is there anything that you think about very subtly?

7:10  Karen: Yes, it's probably like, This has to be clean. This has to be like, I don't want to forget anything. I feel like it's, it's me taking on all that.

7:19  Leslie: So, there's a lot of pressure of getting everything just right and ready, whether you go away or whether people are coming… 

7:27  Karen: Yes. 

7:28  Leslie: Okay, that's a lot of pressure. Do you feel that you will be judged? Or do you think you will feel yourself incompetent? I really see parents struggle with this pressure to make sure I am the best and possibly even perfect.

7:50  Karen: Yeah, I guess it's a judgment thing, especially with my family.

7:55  Leslie: Family sometimes does that. Even when they don't intend to do it, we can feel that pressure tremendously. Do you want your children to feel that way when they grow up and you're going to visit them? 

8:08  Karen:  No. 

8:09  Leslie: So it starts with you to break the cycle, because chances are this is going on in generations. You're not the first person to feel this. And I just wonder if the same thing that we talked about in the previous session about not being comfortable with your own authority because maybe you didn't like to see your children upset, or maybe it was very hard to say what you mean, because what if I'm judged as being a bad mother or whatever? So all that judgment is about ourselves and the shame. And now it's showing up again when it comes to getting ready to go or having people over. It's a little bit of that perfectionism: I don't want to be seen as not good enough. 

8:57  Karen:  That hits home. 

8:59  Leslie: That hits home. It's so hard. That's called shame, and that is something, one, we don't want to pass on to our children, and two, we really want to heal that. That's like an unhealed wound that you carry around that I'm not good enough. Do you believe you are not good enough? What part of you believes you're not good enough, and what part of you believes you are good enough?

9:29  Karen: I don't believe I'm not good enough. So I don't really know where it stems from.

9:37  Leslie: But it's making you upset right now, right? 

9:39  Karen: Yeah.

9:40  Leslie: There's no memory of childhood that is connecting you to that feeling of not good enough?

9:49  Karen:  Not really. So I feel like it got worse as I'm an adult.

9:54  Leslie: Okay, and maybe that's some pressure you put on yourself because you have an image of what a good parent or good person looks like. 

10:06  Karen: Yeah.

10:07  Leslie: So let's just take the one that you brought up last time, which is, your child shouldn't talk back to you and say mean things to you. Where did you get that belief? Because good parents have children who talk back to them all the time.

[Laughter]

10:20  Karen: I don't think I did that.

10:23  Leslie: So it's new. That's interesting, yes, so you didn't do that, so if your child's doing that, there must be something wrong with you. 

10:32  Karen: Yeah.

10:34  Leslie: Right… Do you believe everything you think? 

10:37  Karen: No.

10:38  Leslie: “No.” Okay, but you're believing this. 

10:42  Karen: Yeah.

10:43  Leslie: It's so hard. You've given your children permission to express themselves, and so some of that expression is about you. And it's not so nice. But like I said last time, it's your son, specifically your son, who's expressing anger towards you. He's also the youngest. Often, when I hear a blaming child, I connect blame to shame. They often go hand in hand, because the child or the person that doesn't feel good enough inside will often blame someone else when they feel really vulnerable. 

I didn't say anything last time, but you mentioned that your son, when you ask him to get off the technology, and he really doesn't want to get off technology, he sometimes goes and runs to the corner. Does he sort of hide?

11:53  Karen: Sometimes. He'll leave and he'll say, “Don't look at me,” or something like that. Or “I don't want to be around you.” “Don't look at me. I don't want to be around you. Go away. Go away.”

12:09  Leslie: So when I hear someone wants to go to a corner, when I hear someone, he didn't say he wants to hide, but he did say, does say to you specifically, “Go away. I don't want you to see me,” that urge to hide is shame. So for some reason, when you ask him to get off technology, and he feels an uncomfortable emotion of disappointment or anger, he goes into shame. 

But that's so uncomfortable for him that he actually gets angry on top of it. Anger, my guess in this case, is a secondary emotion. And when your children get uncomfortable, in his case, I'm saying he feels shame. He'd rather not feel shame, although he goes and hides. He'd rather get angry, because that's more powerful. We feel powerful when we have anger. We can feel very weak and uncomfortable when we feel shame, we feel vulnerable, so he's just protecting himself with his anger.

13:08  Karen: That makes sense, because I think he feels guilty that he's not getting off. And then I feel guilty that I'm not having him get off and he's not listening, and then he's mad at me.

13:20  Leslie: So I've talked many times about shame versus guilt. Guilt is when you're going against your values. Yes, he wants to be a good little boy and listen to you. He wants to do what you say. But you and I all have a difficulty getting off technology. And so he thinks he's bad because he can't do what you're asking him to do. So it could just be that his personality is very sensitive and he feels the shame. Or it could be generational—he's picking up on shame that's being passed down, and it could almost be passed down genetically or through learned behavior.

14:00  Karen: It was interesting. Today I dropped him off at a new camp they'd never been to. I feel like all my kids are not shy—they walk in, they want to go to sleepovers. But he was sad and didn't want to go and didn't know anybody, and was clinging to me. And I guess that's normal for a five year old, but I'm just used to the other two always going. So I was like, Wow. I think he really is a more sensitive being, which I consider myself that, so..

14:32  Leslie: So maybe what we're seeing is a real parallel between you and your son. You said you never spoke back—did you ever feel like you wanted to speak back to your parents?

14:47  Karen: That's the thing. I'm a pleaser. So I kind of did my own thing. I'd play outside and I’d clean my room and I’d just do it. That's how I've always been.

15:02  Leslie: Yes, but people pleasing is to make sure that you don't get other people upset. Not always, but most of the time, we people please so that other people don't get upset. Do you worry about people getting upset with you? 

15:16  Karen: Yes, definitely. 

15:18  Leslie: Okay, that's a core belief as well, and it might be a mistaken belief. Do you believe that you are responsible for other people's emotions?

15:29  Karen: I can see the logic, that that's not true. But, in the moment, I do.

15:35  Leslie: So, your reasonable mind, your wise mind, says: No, people are allowed to get upset, that's their right. And your emotion mind says: Better not get other people upset, that will be uncomfortable. So your emotion mind can sometimes take over and dictate how you behave. And there comes in the people pleasing behavior. Or the stress you feel trying to get ready for company or going somewhere, I've got to get it all right. I don't want anyone to be upset. That make sense to you?

16:13  Karen: I know they don't care fundamentally; I mean, not enough to really not come over or whatever.

16:21  Leslie: So we might challenge our thoughts or challenge the belief. If the belief is, It's not okay for someone to get upset with me, where's the evidence that it is okay for people to get upset with you? Give me an example with your son, for example: Where is the evidence that it's okay for people to be upset with you?

16:43  Karen: Even with the technology thing, I realized that's more him getting angry. And, like I said, initially, I was like, that doesn't really matter to me. So that's an example. But I mean, people can get upset about, you know, traffic, and that has nothing to do with me. People can get upset about a grade they got—my daughter, if she didn't do well, she gets all emotional, but has nothing to do with me. So, I mean, there's a variety.

17:10  Leslie: There's a lot of evidence against the belief that it's not okay for people to get upset. How about the belief it's not okay for people to get upset with me?

17:23  Karen: With me specifically…I can't even think of what…[Laughter]...so that's where I need to grow.

17:35  Leslie: You can't think of any evidence to say, no, that's not true? I'm going to help you out. When your son gets upset with you, and he says, “I don't like you, you're so mean, you're the worst mommy in the world,” he's saying all that stuff, and he is upset with you. And two minutes later, he's fine: “Mommy, can I have a cookie? Can we go out? Can we play this game?” Isn't that evidence that it's actually…

18:06  Karen: Yes, all the kids with what they say, and then, you know, they don't mean it.

18:12  Leslie: They get over it, and you're okay, but it doesn't always feel okay. So here we have to acknowledge the difference between what you can use your wise mind to understand, which is: It is okay when they get upset with me. Or, let's say you have visitors—your family comes over and you're worried that you haven't cleaned enough of the dog hair up (I don't know if you have dog hair, but that's a typical thing). Or you haven't made the right salad dressing, or you haven't set the table just right. And the question is, they may judge you. And can you handle that? Do you get over it? Can you survive it?

18:57  Karen: I can. 

19:00  Leslie: But it hurts. 

19:01  Karen: Yes. 

19:04  Leslie: So this is where it makes so much sense, that this hurts you and that you would try to prevent it. And that's the stress you feel every single time you have people coming over or going somewhere, or if your children get upset. Although you did a great job changing your perspective with your son getting upset.

19:25  Karen: Yes. I feel like I can rationalize that.

19:30  Leslie: Well, you have a new perspective on that. It's okay for him to get upset. It's not about me, is what it sounds like you're saying.

19:39  Karen: And the whole part of teaching him his emotions, I really like that. I like the fact that this is his emotion, he has to deal with his anger, versus believing that it's my fault because I turned off the TV.

19:52  Leslie: So that's your new…we can call it a thought substitution. He's learning about his anger; you're substituting that for the mistaken belief, it's not okay for him to get upset with me. You've changed your perspective, and that's what we're going for. So if it hurts you when you're getting ready for people to come over, or you’re going somewhere, there's a mistaken belief that might need to be changed. What do you think that might be, when people are coming over?

20:31  Karen: Even if they judge whatever is wrong, they’re judgmental…not me.

20:37  Leslie: Yes, I love that. So someone's judgment is a reflection of them. Now, when you say that, to what percentage can you believe that you might not believe it fully yet?

20:52  Karen: Now that that's pointed out, actually, I do believe it a lot [Laughter], because I know these people.

20:57  Leslie: All right. So that's what we're doing here, and you can do it for yourself. And even though I'm taking the time to teach you how to change your thoughts, put another thought in there which affects your perception and your beliefs, this is also what we want to teach our children, because they may have beliefs. Your son might have that very sensitive belief, I'm not good enough. And you might say that to him, “Hey, bud, do you ever think: ‘I'm not good enough? Do you ever think I'm bad?’” And my guess is, kids often have that thought. And you can say, Okay, you could do what I did with you. “Where's the evidence that you're bad? Where's the evidence that you're not good enough? Where?” 

And sometimes I go so far as to say, Well, if we were in a court of law and there was a judge here, would that judge say you were guilty of being a bad person? And I have fun with it, because the truth is, you might have trouble turning off your technology, but that doesn't make you a bad person. All it means is that you have difficulty turning off technology. We can teach him that one thing doesn't mean the other. We can help him. 

We can say, “Well, what else can you think instead? Let's see if we can flip what you're saying to yourself. Let's put another thought in there.” And there's a game I play with kids called, Find Another Interpretation. It's actually a Dialectic Behavior Therapy skill, but finding another interpretation is I'm bad as one interpretation to I don't like to turn off the technology. I like to keep playing. 

And we just look for other interpretations, because that first one doesn't make us feel good—I'm bad—and does some damage. It's not really good for us to tell that to ourselves. We're hurting ourselves. Instead, we want to have a more neutral thought., I don't like to turn off technology. It's really hard for me when Mommy asks me to turn off technology.

23:11  Karen: But we still have to do it,

23:13  Leslie: Yes, in that moment. I set the limit when I want to make sure that that's the goal of my behavior, which is we need to set a limit right now. But there are times when I'm just talking about something, and in this case, I'm just trying to teach him to practice other thoughts, to have other interpretations. If I'm doing that, I'm not setting the limit at the same time. 

I want to be clear: Why am I having this conversation with my son? Do I just want to play the other interpretation game? And sometimes playing the other interpretation game is over other things. You're watching a mother and a child in the grocery store have a tense interaction; and he might say, “Well, that boy is being really bad.” And say, “That's one interpretation. Let's find some other neutral interpretations,” and just make it up. “That boy's hungry. That boy just found out that his dog is sick. That boy just found out that his friend's not coming over. That boy just asked for cereal, and his mommy said no.” So we find other interpretations for that situation, for yourself and for your children.

24:28  Karen: Yeah. Good. 

[Music: In the forest by Music for Videos]

24:44  Leslie: Did you try any of the coping skills with the kids?

24:46  Karen: I did my oldest, because she can read well, we went over the list together. And I was like, “Which ones do you like of these, and which ones…” It's all new to them. She's like, “Oh, I like to write in my journal.” And she was saying, “You like to do this,” so we are going over it together. So that was nice. I feel like my middle one, she would really benefit from it as well. So that is the plan for her.

25:17  Leslie: Okay, so that's great. There's no rush. You've got 10, 15, 20 years to work on this. So you might pressure yourself. You might pressure yourself: I’ve got to do it all. I’ve got to do it all before my next session with Leslie. Did you feel any expectation that you would disappoint me coming to the session?

25:40  Karen: Yes, I printed off the list before I came. [Laughter]

25:44  Leslie: Interesting…

25:46  Karen: I printed it off specifically for this call—this session—because I had an original list that I couldn't find. So I was like, In case Leslie asks me, I’ve got to print it off again.

25:56  Leslie: So there's that people pleasing. And inside that people pleasing is a worry thought: What if I didn't do it right? 

26:06  Karen: Yeah.

26:07  Leslie: Any other worry thoughts?

26:09  Karen: It was basically, now that I have these lists, what do I do after with it? So I have the list and I can write in my journal. But what does that solve?

26:23  Leslie: So you had a question about it, which is a very good reason why you may not have been able to implement or use the skills. Because it's like, Well, wait a minute, I don't really know what to do with it.

26:34  Karen: I mean, it did…it distracted me and can calm me down, which I think is the intent. But I like what you were pointing out today, of the thought pattern, changing that perception and that part. Because that, to me, kind of solves the problem. It's easy to do a head switch, versus just be like, Okay, look at this picture and think about other things.

27:00  Leslie: So I'm going to explain in a moment the difference between distress tolerance skills and emotion regulation skills. Distress tolerance, we're looking to just tolerate the moment. And emotion regulation skills, we're looking to change, looking to create change. That's why you like that one. It's like, Good—that changes something. 

But I want to go back for one moment to this idea that there's a lot of pressure on you either be the good girl or do things right. And you probably wanted to make sure I was happy with you. 

27:41  Karen: Yep. 

27:42  Leslie: So there's a lot of judgment that lives inside your head and around you. And I can only imagine that that's painful and really stressful for you.

27:56  Karen: Yes, but I've been like that always, so I feel like…

27:59  Leslie: Okay, you might have been like that always because, a) you already said you're a sensitive one, like your son. And when sensitive people are born into this world, sometimes the environment, meaning school or family or parents or siblings or the people around us, the environment, doesn't always get us. And if they don't get us, that feels sometimes invalidating. Your parents may have been loud and boisterous and moving you along, and you're like, Whoa, whoa. This is too much for me. It's a transition, and this is hard for me. I don't know all the ways that you may have felt invalidated by being a sensitive person in the home you grew up in or in the environment you grew up in.

28:49  Karen: Well, my mom is very sensitive as well, so her goal is probably not to have me be sensitive, but she's like that. 

28:57  Leslie: So we want to honor the fact that, one, everyone's doing their best they can with the skills they have. And two, we do want to do better, because, as you can see, just genetically, there's a sensitivity that's getting passed down. And it may not be to all your children, even though it may be and it may be presenting in different ways. And at the same time, I think your oldest one, you said, may be more of a people pleaser,

29:32  Karen: She is, but she…I don't know. They each have parts where they do really care. But then other parts, they don't care at all. Hopefully they don't have it as much as I do.

29:45  Leslie: We just want to honor the fact that this is who you are, this is who your son is. And we do want you to understand how to be sensitive in this world; and look to heal the pain that may have happened as a result of growing up as a sensitive person, where the environment didn't always get you. So if we get angry with your son when he's trying to get off because he's yelling at you—”Don't yell at me like that. Don't say that to me”---and we go that route, then we may actually be missing the idea that actually he's already upset with himself. So your shift is going to help both you and him.

30:38  Karen: I think so. 

30:41  Leslie: It may not make it easier for him to get off technology. He may still have the emotional intensity, but that's due to his sensitivity, and he doesn't have the skills yet.

30:51  Karen: So this is another kind of random thing. When he is on technology, he watches these dinosaurs fighting. And so my husband and I are like, “That's not a good show. Choose another.” He's very boy and he likes to fight. And I'm curious what you think about that. Should we not have him watch it? Should we have him? Because he's going back to it every time—the algorithm serves them that.

31:22  Leslie: Again, let's sort of check the facts. When he watches those shows, does he start role playing fighting, and does he really start getting more aggressive in his behavior as a result?

31:33  Karen: Kind of. When friends come over, he'll be like, “You want to fight? You want to fight?” He's geared into that. And he'll say certain things, like, “Oh, this is where the animal's vulnerable. This is its strength.” And he'll be literally jumping at the TV, watching and cheering, like a wrestling match or something. We don't watch that, but I'm assuming that's a similar…

31:58  Leslie: So what is the problem here?

32:02  Karen: That he's…yeah, just that he's…like, he fights with his sister, he's trying to fight with his friends, he thinks fighting is entertainment, which I guess it is. But…

32:12  Leslie: Okay. [Laughter] So I want to say that fighting by itself is not good or bad. We want to jump to the conclusion that it must be bad, or it must be good. And there are people who go into wrestling. We don't know, is he going to go into wrestling? Is he going to go into fighting? Or it's just his energy and he enjoys that? I grew up with two sisters, but I loved to wrestle, and I had to find someone to wrestle with, because my sisters didn't want to wrestle with me. So I found a friend, and we wrestled, and those are my best memories.

32:53  Karen: See, I am not…I don't want confrontation…So I have a hard time understanding that.

33:04  Leslie: Okay, so it doesn't mean you have to become a wrestler with him. It doesn't mean you have to fight with him, but we want to honor the fact that this may be something important to him.

33:13  Karen: Definitely. Right now, he loves it.

33:17  Leslie: So let's make sure we're asking the question: When is it working and when is it not working? If he says to his friend, “Do you want to wrestle? Do you want to fight?” And they fight fairly, meaning they know not to go above the head, and they're playing, and it's really fair fighting—I support it. Move the furniture out of the way or get them outside. I mean, that's a wonderful thing. Kids like to roll around. They like to have that physical contact. 

Actually, fighting and touch may be very important to some highly sensitive kids, because ADHD kids and other kids, autistic kids, love the compression to their nervous system through touch. And compression actually calms their system down. It feels really good. I did not know this as a child, but I went on from my little wrestling days to become a dancer where the form is about touch and compression and lifting and a lot of weight sharing. That's the form of dance I still do at this age.

34:29  Karen: So there's a lot of parallels, 

34:33  Leslie: Lots of parallels. And he may just really love that kind of touch. So we want to ask: When does it work, when does it not work? If he's fighting with his sisters and he didn't ask permission and he wants to just rough and tumble or push them, then you get to say, “It's not exactly working. Can you check with your sister and ask if she wants to do play-fighting?” 

So again, I wouldn't say that what he's watching is good or bad. I would say maybe he's learning some good ways, maybe it is okay because he's learning what's fair fighting or where someone's vulnerable. Maybe he learns that the dinosaur has a weak spot. Well, guess what? Humans have weak spots, like, don't hit me in the face, don't hit my knees. And so he might be learning a lot, and we want to respect there's a reason why he's watching it. 

We want to do a little more going below the surface to understand him more. And is he someone who, just in general, if you go to bed, does he like the hugs? Does he like heavy blankets?

35:42  Karen: He does, yeah.

35:44  Leslie: It's one big picture, isn't it? 

35:47  Karen: Well, good. I'll let him fight with his friends, then. [Laughter]

35:51  Leslie: And if Dad likes to fight, great. If he just likes to fight with his friends, great. And then maybe rolling around, getting him a physio ball…have a beanbag chair when he's not feeling well. That takes me back for a moment. I do want to go back to… the distress tolerance skills that I gave you last time. First of all, I want to set the expectation that I spend 12 weeks in my DBT skills class teaching those skills. I gave them to you in one session. That's not 12 weeks worth of learning. 

So be really gentle with yourself and say, Okay, how do you use these skills? And what we're doing with those skills, as you said, is we're just distracting ourselves from the intense emotion we might be feeling so that I can tolerate that emotion without making it worse. And then I get to see if I can do some problem-solving after. If I even need to, maybe I just need to get through that big emotional moment. So these are skills to just help us sit with or… 

37:02  Karen: …take a deep breath.

37:03  Leslie: Yes. The other skills, the ones where you're changing the way you see the situation, are some of our emotional regulation skills, which are fabulous. One of them is called check the facts, where we use that finding-other-interpretations.

37:20  Karen: Perfect. Do you have more of those? 

37:23  Leslie: Do I have more of those? You're so eager to learn more. I really do like to look at our emotional myths. What are the things we believe about ourselves or about other people? Like, emotions are bad—that's a myth. Emotions are not bad. “Oh, it's a negative emotion,” I'm like: No. It might be an uncomfortable emotion, but it is not negative. It's not a bad emotion. 

So that's another thing we look at, some of the beliefs we have. One of the things we do to help us understand our emotions, in order to change them, is we become aware of what happens before the problem behavior. That's very involved, but basically, we look at vulnerabilities…

38:15  Karen: …what's prompting this.

38:17  Leslie: Exactly. We look at the prompting event. And so last session, when we talked about taking your daughter to the grocery store, and she was exhausted from the day of swimming and being out in the sun and all that, and she had an expectation that she would be alone with you when you went shopping? That's our vulnerability, which is: How we can change our emotion? We address the vulnerabilities, we acknowledge that there are some vulnerabilities. So we look at the prompting events, we look at the vulnerabilities. We look at our thoughts and actions and urges.We look at all the different pieces that go into the problematic behavior. And we look at all those pieces as individual pieces that can be changed.

39:07  Karen: And another thing you've said: They're doing their best with the skills they have.

39:15  Leslie: It’s a great line from DBT. It's an assumption that we make. We truly believe, I truly believe, people are doing the best they can with the skills they have at the present moment. And the dialectic thought that goes along with that is: and they need to do better and improve. So if I yell at my child and I don't like that behavior, I can have compassion for myself that in the moment I was doing the best I can. I can have compassion that sometimes it's really hard to be a mom. Sometimes, I feel the tears coming up, because I can really feel like I I just was doing my best. But I yelled at my child, and I don't like that, so next time I'm going to want to do something different, if I can. 

So there's the dialectic we hold with two hands, the idea that I can have compassion and I can accept the moment as it was, which is I was yelling at my kids, and I can do better. I can take responsibility for it. I can tell them that that behavior is not okay with me, and I believe it had an impact on them. I can say what I would do different next time. And that's another thing to talk about: What can we do different next time? And I don't do that all the time. I really don't want to, because there's a balance between, I have to do better, with, I did my best, and it wasn't so pretty. And that's okay.

40:57  Karen: That's great. Choosing your battles—I feel like that's a big thing,

41:03  Leslie: Yes, and really giving yourself credit for doing this really, really hard job.

41:13  Karen: But I feel like it shouldn't be that hard. That's another thing that bums me out. I feel like it should come easily, and this should be fun. And sometimes it's not.

41:28  Leslie: There's a major myth: This should be easy. I should be better. If you can hear yourself, it's like, Wow, you are just trying so hard, and you are hard on yourself, and you have internalized a lot of judgments, because the should is a judgment. So now I imagine that the outside world still is judging, because our society is pretty tough. Our society is really tough. If your child's having a meltdown in the store—What's wrong with that person? Look at her dealing with those kids. 

We have lots of judgment out there around us. And so we’ve got to start being our own best friend. 

42:16 Karen: Good advice.

42:17  Leslie: And you might be scared to give yourself a break. This should be easier. You know what? You'll understand that when they are out of the house and they're living on their own. And you’ll say, “You know, I'm a really calm person.” During the day, I look at myself and I go, it's amazing. I'm really calm. Well, you know why I'm really calm? Because I don't have a dog and two cats and three children and a household to run and a full time job. No wonder why I'm calm. Was I a bad person? Because I am an emotional person. It did get to me. I was yelling. It was hard. Woo. It was really, really hard. 

42:57  Karen: My sister and I joke, she also has three kids. We're like, this is not what we thought it would be like! [Laughter]

43:05  Leslie: I truly don't know that people can understand what it's like until you get there.

43:12  Karen: I think another one of the coping skills is, like, some people have it so much worse. You can't take that for granted just because you know you're working through your own problems. 

43:23  Leslie: Absolutely. Gratitude comes with compassion. Those are two very beautiful foundations for grounding ourselves. They’re skills of gratitude and compassion. That so important, to be able to appreciate the moments, even on a really hard day. To appreciate that, yes, this house may not be perfect, and I'm going to appreciate that we're well and we can have company over. 

Five years ago, in Covid, nobody could visit anybody. So right now, I'm going to have the appreciation that people can come over and my house may or may not be in good shape. 

44:06  Karen: People are invited. 

44:07  Leslie: They're invited, and we can have time. So, having gratitude for very small things, not just that. My situation is not as bad as someone else's. That's fine. That's big ways of having appreciation. That's perspective, and that's very important. But we also want to have gratitude for the small things. 

44:29  Karen: That is great.

44:31  Leslie: In your situation right now, you have felt a lot of emotion in this session. You felt a lot of that internal judgment that hurts so much for you. And I want to say I have gratitude and appreciation and respect for the fact that you're willing to share that and that you can feel that. I meet a lot of people who are not willing to feel it and not willing to share it.

44:56  Karen: That's true. Everyone has their different gifts.

44:59  Leslie: Yes.

45:02  Karen: Well, this is the perfect timing, because I feel like I needed this. 

45:07  Leslie: Beautiful. So take those two words and play with them. Look them up, play with them, talk to people about what that means to them. And see if you can incorporate those a little bit into your life as well to help ground you in this really challenging job called parenting.

45:24  Karen: Thank you. I think the compassion element…I try to find the gratitude—I've heard that. But then I get mad at myself for not finding the compassion… [Laughter]

45:36  Leslie: We need to bring compassion into the picture. Because you keep knocking yourself…you stand up, and then you knock yourself down, and then you stand up and knock yourself down. It's okay if that continues, and just a little compassion for that whole process of being human. 

45:55  Karen: Thank you. 

45:56  Leslie: Oh, such a pleasure. Karen. You take care and have fun this summer, and enjoy your travels. 

46:01  Karen: Thank you.

[Music: Nature Walk by Folk Acoustic]

46:07  Leslie Cohen-Rubury: First, I want to thank Karen for showing up and being her vulnerable self. I enjoyed these conversations. And I want to highlight the question that Karen asked me about emotional regulation skills and distress tolerance skills. She was eager to get lots of skills, but she wanted to understand the difference between, how do you actually stop the emotion, not just delay the emotion, or not just ignore the emotion? And that's a really great question, because distress tolerance skills are the skills that help us cope when we're not doing so great because our emotions are high and we don't want to make things worse. So they help us tolerate the emotion. 

They don't fix the problem, they don't change the problem, they don't change the way we see the problem. That comes in when we are dealing with our emotional regulation skills. So her question was great, and it's a really important difference that I'd love everyone to think about. There's a time when we want to change our emotion—there's the one side of the dialectic—and there's a time when we need to accept our emotions. That's the acceptance side. 

So the change side is using your emotional regulation skills, the distress tolerance skills are about accepting the moment as it is. Both are necessary, and I really enjoyed the fact that I could highlight those differences. Thanks, Karen, that was a great question. 

So one of the things I want you to do is keep questioning, as you do this thing called parenting. Your questions have the answers inside of them. But the questions are so important. It makes your parenting intentional, and that's a really great thing. 

Another way to look at parenting is two topics that come up often in our children and as adults, as parents, and that is the relationship between shame and blame. So many parents have come to me and said, “My child just blames everything on everyone else.” And they worry about that behavior, which I get—I get why you don't want a child who blames other people. We don't want adults who are blaming other people. And at the same time, there's a very direct relationship between blame and shame. Shame is that feeling of not feeling good enough. And when you feel really vulnerable, you want to protect yourself. And when you protect yourself when you're young—actually, people do it when they're older, too—when you don't like feeling vulnerable, you might blame others. So in order to stop the blame, we need to have a compassionate look at the shame, the feelings of I don't feel good enough. And in this episode, Karen really opened up and actually got emotional about the feelings that she's carrying around, of shame of I'm not good enough, what if I'm a failure? What if I'm not a good enough parent?

49:11  Karen: I came feeling very vulnerable, and I was feeling like I was being pushed over and I wasn't establishing boundaries. And I really have noticed a difference, taking it and making it not about me, and really finding the lesson in it, and changing the perspective. We've kind of stuck with our guns with limits on technology, and it actually is going very, very well. The five-year-old, he is no longer getting as angry. We're working through that emotion. He's growing up, maturing. And I guess I'm not giving it power as well, so that's helped. And then again, just having kind of that whole personal journey of that self-compassion piece has really made a big difference.

49:57  Leslie Cohen-Rubury: So take the time to heal the shame that you might be feeling. And if it comes up because you notice yourself blaming, add a lot of compassion. In our society, blame and shame are really, really prevalent. And there's an antidote. Besides healing it, there are things we can do about that blame and shame. Compassion and gratitude are two things that we can add that really will help us feel better and find more happiness by being present in our life with the gratitude and the compassion that we can bring to ourselves. 

I am not saying that that will heal your shame, but it certainly will help. So this week, here's a compassionate thought. You and your kids are doing the best you can with the skills you have at the present moment. 

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

And next week, join us for our final episode of the season. It's our 100th episode, and my daughter Dale is back to talk about validation and how to prioritize relationships with six types of validation. Come celebrate with us and listen to the 100th episode of Is My Child A Monster? 

You can also subscribe to Is My Child A Monster? wherever you get your podcasts. And if you feel so inclined, please rate and review on Apple podcasts, because it really does help spread the word. You can also find a full transcript of this episode, or sign up for my newsletter at  ismychildamonster.com. The Is My Child A Monster? team is Alletta Cooper, Camila Salazar, and me. Special thanks to Eric Rubury. Our theme music is by L-Ray Music. I'm Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Thanks so much for joining me. 

Transcribed by Eric Rubury