Parenting on Autopilot... #55

In this episode, Jon explores why parents often find themselves reacting on autopilot—saying things they swore they’d never say, in a tone that feels uncomfortably familiar. Centered on the idea of “factory default settings,” he explains how stress, fatigue, and old neural pathways quietly take over, even when our values are different. Parents will leave with relief, self-compassion, and practical nervous-system tools to interrupt inherited patterns and respond with more intention when it matters most.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Old Scripts Reappear
• 3:40 A Mario Moment And Atoning
• 7:50 Hidden Stressors Fuel Reactivity
• 14:38 Mary’s Question: Mom’s Voice Slips Out
• 20:36 The Brain Hack: Tone And Tempo
• 26:51 Jason’s Question: Does Intensity Work
• 33:26 Replacing Yelling With Clear Action
• 37:18 Lauren’s Question: Body Leads The Meltdown

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

If you've ever heard yourself say something to your child and thought, wait, where did that come from? You're not alone. So many parents have that moment when the phrase or the tone or the reaction slips out and it sounds a little too familiar, like something you grew up hearing. And then afterward, you're left wondering why it showed up, especially when it doesn't align with the kind of parent that you're trying to be. In today's episode, we're talking about why inherited parenting scripts sometimes resurface under stress, what's actually happening in our brain and nervous system when that happens, and why this isn't a sign that you're failing or turning into your parents. We'll break down why stress, fatigue, and early attachment patterns quietly take the wheel, as they say, and what it takes to respond differently in those moments when it matters the most. Let's get into it. This is definitely an episode that I relate to because, man, do I ever sound like my dad when I get stressed? Uh, I uh talk about my dad not that much on the pod, but occasionally I'll mention him. Uh, he passed away nine years ago, almost almost nine years ago. And it's been a journey to kind of reconcile that. And we had a pretty good relationship, especially at the end of his life, but we didn't always have the perfect, a perfect relationship. And certainly he did not parent in the way that I talk about. Uh, not always. He actually did a lot more when I was older, but not when I was a little kid. And sometimes when my kids are acting up, or especially when I'm stressed about work and stuff, I just start doing this thing. And I sound just like him, and I say the same type of stuff, but actually it's more the tone than anything. And I found myself doing that today. Uh, me and my son were playing video games, which is something that we do together. We are like, he'll be playing a game, and I'll be sitting next to him and trying to like guide him through it. We're playing this game, and it's probably a little beyond his capacity, but it's like kind of providing him good stress. And uh again, this is something we do together, and so I'm not particularly worried about it, but it does present some challenges where he has to respawn and restart over and over when he fails at missions. And this is, you know, it's like a Mario game, it's not anything too too big of a deal. But um, when he's playing this Mario game today, he just like was not doing the right pattern of buttons that that we had worked that he was working on, and that I had seen him do like a million times. But under stress, like it just became more challenging for him. And so he was struggling, and and we got so close to completing uh this level that he had been struggling on and this little sequence that he had been struggling on. And I know it's like not the time when you'd think that bad parenting comes out, but it's a stress environment. I was being competitive, he was being competitive. We're not playing against each other, remember? We're playing against the computer, but he's the one holding the controls, which is its own level of frustration because I just want to do it for him, and he doesn't want me to do it for him. And he used to want me to do it for him, but he doesn't anymore. Now he just wants to do it himself, and he was struggling, and I was just like, press L and R together, push L and R together, press and I'm getting like more and more like frantic, just press L and R at the same time.

SPEAKER_00: 3:39

You're so close, it's over. You just gotta do it really quick and then you're done.

Jon @WholeParent: 3:44

And he was not doing it, he just like panicked and finally he did it in the moment, and I was like, ah, you're stressing me out, buddy. And he was like, I did not like that, I did not like how stressed you were. I did not like this, is that was not fun, dad. Don't do that again. And I had to, you know, apologize and say, Yeah, that was not ideal, that was not good. And I give you that example because it just happened like an hour ago, right? But I could give you other examples, probably not from today per se, but certainly from days previously where I just it just comes out. My kids say something and it's frustrating, and it just I just snap. And it's not even like it's in always the worst moments, in fact. Like I just shared, it's sometimes it's just in the moments where I'm not really thinking. And I say stuff to my kids that I just wish that, and like I said, it's mostly the tone in which I say things. It just I wish it wasn't a tone that I possessed. But it's something that I inherited, it's part of my journey. And so I've done a lot of work to know when I'm climbing the mountain. If you've ever attended one of my How to Stop Yelling at Your Kids workshops or breaking the yelling cycle workshops, you've heard me talk about climbing the mountain. I've done a lot of work to try and catch myself when I'm climbing the mountain, but it's when those things happen out of nowhere now that that aren't really, like I said, they're not really frustrating and like anger-inducing. It's like they just they slip past my defenses and I don't realize that I'm escalated. And it's probably today the reason why that happened this evening is because of other things that are going on. So uh just share something unrelated to parenting. Uh, my computer was filled up today, and I part of it's that I've been recording so many podcasts and the way that I record them, they're like four or five gigs when I record them. You're like, John, it's just audio, it's not that big of a deal. No, I record all these as video just so that someday, you know, if I ever want to put them out on YouTube or something, I can. And I record them very high quality because I have the capability to do it, and so there's huge files. And then when I edit them, they're like huge again because I edit them in video too, so that I don't have to go back and do that someday. And so uh giving you lots of insights into what you know, how how big my computer storage is. But basically, I clicked one wrong button today and I froze up my computer. I accidentally downloaded like a patch of files that completely exhausted my storage. And then in trying to fix it, I accidentally deleted basically everything related to whole parent that I'd worked on for the last three years. Forever. And some of the stuff I had saved other places or whatever. And you might say, like, John, isn't this all backed up? Like, some of it, but I haven't done that as much as I ought to. Certainly have not been nearly as diligent as I need to be. Partially it's because the way that I have stuff, I way that I back stuff up. Um, usually the I bypassed like my safeguards in order to do this. And I was just kind of being cheap. I just didn't want to pay for additional cloud storage, and that really psyched me up. I also have had some issues with the marketing company that I've been working with. So there's a lot of like unrelated to parenting stuff that has come out and has reared its head. And I think that's sometimes why I can go zero to 60 on really simple, easy things is because that's all going on behind the scenes. So anyway, um I want to jump in. I know that that's been a super long intro. I want to jump into our first question. It comes from Mary, and I'm gonna kind of go quickly today because I don't have a lot of time to record, but I think that that maybe that'll make me answer these questions in a little bit more of a succinct way. So maybe it's a good thing. My first question for Mary says, I keep catching myself saying things like, I swore that I would never say, literally hearing my mom's voice come out of my mouth, stuff like, I'm not asking, I'm telling, or what's wrong with you right now? Which I hate. And then the second it's out, I feel sick. It's usually at the end of the day when everyone's loud and I'm touched out, and my five-year-old's asking 900 questions, my two-year-old is melting down on the floor, and I just snap. I don't even think those things. I certainly don't believe them, but there they are. Is this just what happens when you're tired? Or does this mean that I'm secretly more like my parents than I want to admit? Mary. Uh, do you know that in Hebrew and Aramaic, the word Mary, the name Mary, the well, it's not actually Mary, but like the name that we translate into Mary for the Bible means bitter. And I don't want you to be bitter, Mary. I do not want you to be bitter because it is not what you believe, and it's not that you're more like your parents than you think. It is that your nervous system reacts viscerally to certain types of stimulation, and you go back into just patterns of mirroring what has been modeled. And I don't think that it means that you're like them. I think that it means that you still are building new neural pathways. And that is not uncommon for parents. It's certainly the truth for me, and I have been doing this for nine years. Sounds like you've been doing this for about five years. You have a five-year-old and a two-year-old, which means really you've been only been doing it for like four years, right? Because you haven't, or even three years, because you haven't really had to do the parenting work of like emotional regulation and discipline until your kid is two or three years old. And so I would say that doing it for three years means that you still have a lot of growth that has to happen. And it's not growth in this philosophy of parenting, and it's not growth in the ethics of parenting. It sounds like it's growth in the practicality of rewiring neural pathways to respond differently. And so I have a brain hack that you can use that I use because this is almost exactly what I was talking about in the intro. It's almost exactly what I was talking that I talk about all the time and break the yelling cycle. Uh, and it's that you we respond by just do going back into our default factory default parenting settings when we are tired, when we are overwhelmed, when we are overworked, when we lose all the files on our computer, when we are having trouble with a company that we're working with. We go into kind of our our most base level. And that is the place where stuff comes out that we don't really mean. And I don't want to say that you're always going to do that, but those neural pathways that come from our childhood do run very, very deep. And so this is not something that's going to change in a day or a week or a month or even three years or five years. This is something that you're going to continually work on. And the the key here, as I give you the brain hack, is that you want to practice this. And then you want to track your progress, right? Anything that you care about, you should measure. So track your progress literally in your notes app on your phone. How many times did I yell at my kids today? Track your progress and then track it longitudinally over time. And what you'll notice is that you're not going to stop yelling at your kids altogether in the first day with this or with anything. But when you look back, you'll realize, boy, I yell a lot less. Also important to note is that your kids are at an age where they're you now have two kids who are triggering you. And this means that there's twice as much to be triggered about. And so also, you know, the this kind of multi multi-factor here. It's not only that you are going to get better at being triggered and respond, also at the same time, there are going to be more things that trigger you. So it's going to be just a dance of retraining your nervous system to respond differently. And that is a challenge, but it is totally a challenge that you are up for. And I can just tell by the way that you're saying this. So just understand, first and foremost, you're not your parents. You don't, you're in, and because of neuroplasticity, I should have said that earlier, because of neuroplasticity, your brain is not fixed. You can grow in this way. Like you can actually rewire your brain to respond differently the first time, but it's going to take intentional effort, and that's not going to happen overnight. So, what I would do if I was you, because I I am you, what I do, because I am you, Mary, um, is I try and drop my voice, first of all. I try and just change the way in which I talk. Because, and and I think that I don't say this enough. What you say is important. How you say it is more important. What you say is important, but how you say it is even more important. Let me give you an example before I go on. If I said it's time to it's time to leave. It's time to leave. It's time to leave. It's time to leave. All of those sound different and they're the same words. Those all mean different things. Like, it's time to leave means we're going to something exciting. Get ready, get your shoes on, it's gonna be great. It's time to leave means, or it's time to leave means, you know, maybe there's gonna be a little disappointment about leaving, but it is time to go, and I'm gonna hold this boundary. And if you want to listen to the episode about boundary holding, that was the last one. Sometimes they're gonna be frustrated about it. It's okay. You can just listen to the last episode, even if your kid hates you in the moment, they won't hate you forever. It's time to leave. That's just a way to trigger a kid, right? That's frustration, that's anger. That is going to immediately send them into their fight or flight. So all of these are the same phrase, but how we say it matters so much more. And so I think over time you can rewire your brain to change what you say. I think right now, the more important thing is to rewire your brain and how you speak. And some of it is that we work ourselves up. If we start with aggression, we are signaling to our brain that we are in an aggressive posture, and more of the negative phrases are going to follow. Not just the phrasing, but the phrases. And so as we kind of spiral into our cortisol stress sympathetic nervous response to our kids, when we're in fight or as in fight or flight, when we're in our fight mode and our polyvagal red, what's occurring in our brain is that we're actually priming ourselves to say the more aggressive thing. This is also good, by the way, parent uh partner advice. This is good marriage advice too. So we're gonna when we are in going into our relationship with our kid, we are going to step one drop our voice to below our normal speaking register. So if this is how I'm talking normally, right? If I started to get louder, and I can see myself peeking on my microphone when I do this, if I started to get louder, that's above my normal speaking register as far as loudness, decibel level. And if I just speak a little bit quieter, this is below. So step one, go below, aim low. Step two, dodgeball reference, by the way. Speak more slowly. We tend to speed up when we talk to kids when we're frustrated, and their brain doesn't speed up to compensate, and so we need to speak more slowly. So you can say the same thing, but you're gonna slow your speech literally by half. Just speak more slowly and quietly. That may sound strange, but three things are going to happen. Thing number one, you're probably not actually gonna speak that slow or that low, even if that's what you're aiming for. Because you're naturally when you get triggered and frustrated because it's the end of the day and married, I everything that you said here I relate to. It's the end of the day, your nine-year-old or your uh five-year-old's asking you 900 questions, and usually it's just why, why, why, why, why? And your two-year-old is melting down because they're exhausted and you're all touched out. I have been exactly where you are. Although I tend to not get so touched out, I'm a very touchy-feely person. My wife, though, gets real touched out. Mostly just when it's me touching her, to be honest, though. She can she can usually tolerate one of my kids, except for when they sit on her while she's eating. Anyway. Um, so drop your voice below normal register. And when you're escalated, it's probably gonna raise up a little bit, but by intentionally going lower, you're probably gonna wind up just at the normal range or a little bit below it, and that's the goal. You're going to try and speak at half the tempo. I can't even do it when I'm doing the podcast, but even trying to speak at half the tempo, you're gonna speak faster than half the tempo. This is another place where we're aiming one place, and so the result is you wind up speaking at a normal volume or a little bit, you know, 90% of normal volume, and you wind up speaking at 80% of normal speed because you tried to speak at 50% of normal volume and 50% of normal speed. So that's thing one. You're just gonna speak better. Thing two, your kid, you're not going to trigger your kid, which means that they're not going to respond by being triggered by going into their fight or flight polyvagal red, which means that they're not gonna further trigger you. So you're going to break this the nervous system response and kind of feedback loop that you're creating with your kid. So they're gonna respond better, which is gonna make you feel more calm because now they're responding, and most parents feel more calm when their kid starts to comply. Now, I'm not saying your kid's always gonna comply with you, but they're way more likely to comply in a way that works well if you don't send them deeper into their fight or flight response, like especially long-term thinking. Third thing that's gonna happen is that by intentionally doing this for you and for your kid, you are gonna activate your vagus nerve in your tenth cranial nerve, not just theirs, but yours. And when you start to calm down and start to regulate, then it's gonna make you feel like you're more in control of what you're saying in your tone. So by intentionally doing this, right, it's kind of like fake it until you make it. You're faking it, and then your brain is picking up on those things like, okay, we don't have to freak out anymore. Let's regulate down. So this is just a practical step-by-step, exactly what I would do because I feel what you're saying and I get it, and it's normal. And you're not turning into your mom, I promise. But you are still gonna say the same stuff sometimes because that's your factory default settings. None of us get to choose our factory default settings, we only get to choose what we do with it. Good news, we get to rewire. That's called neuroplasticity. And how do we rewire? Exactly what I just told you. Okay, next question comes from Jason. And uh Jason says, This might sound bad, but I feel like my kids just don't listen until I get kind of intense. I don't want to yell, but also when they come when when I talk calm, they just ignore me. Then I hear myself sounding like my dad, real sharp, real serious, and suddenly they're paying attention. I hate it, but it also works. So I don't know what to do with this. Are we just kidding ourselves, thinking that kids will listen without fear? Or am I missing something here? Jason, you are not missing something, not at all. You are experiencing uh the doom loop of yelling at your kids. And that is, and I'm not saying yelling, right? Because you're just saying intensity, but I'm just saying yelling. I'm saying yelling. You're not saying yelling, I'm saying yelling. The doom you loop of yelling at your kids is that when you yell at your kids, they will stop doing whatever they're doing because they are so afraid of your yelling at them. And so because they're so afraid of your yelling at them, they stop doing what they're doing and you feel like it just worked. What I kind of highlight in the book, my book, Punishment for your parenting, in the first chapter, is that while yelling and other forms of punishment gain temporary short-term compliance, they shut off the part of our child's brain that learns, which then means that our kids wind up doing the same stuff that we just yelled at them at about again and again and again. And I apologize, my cat is really needy today. She's just all over me and meowing. And I don't know exactly what she's needy about. Perhaps we've locked her food away from her again. Her she's fed uh behind this door that sometimes gets closed when my kids are playing. So she may just be annoying me until I go downstairs. And I want to yell at her, but I also know that that's not effective cat ownership. I don't want to wake up my kids. So what do you do about this doom spiral? Well, you have to be less effective or feel less power in your parenting for a short period of time in order for your kids to listen to you again. So the truth is, um, you are probably in a place now where your kids are only listening to you because you yell. And that is because they've learned to not listen to you when you don't yell, because they're just waiting for you to yell. One of the things that we have to remember about kids is that kids want control over their environment at basically at all cost. And the reason why they want control is because they want it to feel predictable. And the things that we feel we can control feel predictable to us. And so kids will, if you're if a parent yells at a child, a kid will kind of wait for them to yell because that's how they know when the parent is being serious. They don't know when the parent is being serious unless the parent yells, because sometimes the parent yells. And so kids literally learn, we scanned their brains and we've seen this, they learn to filter out our natural patterns of speech, normal patterns of speech, until we listen to them. By the way, cats, interestingly, have evolved to do this. They've evolved to make their meowing sound like baby whining. And the reason that they've done this is because it makes it harder for us to filter out. See, adults can filter out background sounds too, just like our kids can filter out us talking to them. Cats can, or we can also, adults can filter out things like the, you know, humming of the air conditioner or, you know, the background noise happening outside of a busy building, right? Like just like people walking up and down the street. We learn to focus past those things and kind of block them out, for lack of a better term. But there are certain sounds that we make that are very, very physiologically difficult to block out. Like they just affect our brains in different ways. And different people have different sounds. Actually, we know that men are affected by different sounds than women. But one of the sounds that's most effective to everyone is whining. It really, really drives people nuts, whether they have kids or not. And crying, like babies crying, especially affects women, it seems, but uh according to like this one study that I was reading about this, but it can affect everybody. And so the reason if this is another kind of study that I read, or it was a it was an article about a study. I didn't actually read the study itself, was about uh this how cats have evolved to make the sounds that are associated with human responsiveness. So it's a great example when my cat comes up and she meows and she throws me off my game. Lots of things are happening around me all the time on the porch. And even though I'm ADHD, I block out most of them. Cars driving past and police sirens and things. There was a couple episodes ago, uh, a person singing outside in the middle of the night. It was very strange. I didn't filter that out, but it's really hard for me to filter out my cat because she she meows, and that's a hard sound that's hard to filter. Kids, it's very easy for them to filter out our normal speech pattern. It's very hard for them to filter out our yelling. And so our kids actually become conditioned, right? Like classical conditioning. They come become conditioned to wait on our yells, which means that they only respond when we yell. Well, the only way to fix this is to stop yelling because that's the only way that they're gonna build back the ability to listen to us and respond. And so instead of saying yelling is the only thing that works, are we kidding ourselves that our kids are only gonna listen when they yell? I'm here to have as evidence to tell you that my kids listen when I don't yell because I've stopped yelling. So it's kind of chicken or egg, it's a little circular, but here's what you can do instead. Number one, say it once. If they're not listening, say it a second time. If they don't listen the second time, then you're gonna get up, you're gonna physically engage them, and you're gonna move them. So, for example, uh, and and you can replace the you don't have to be intense, you can just replace it with clarity, right? So if you're you can instead of screaming at your kid, like, okay, it's time to put your shoes on, hey buddy, you need to put your shoes on now. Buddy, buddy, pay attention to me. It's time to put your shoes on. Now you can see where the intensity's coming up. Shoes on now! Put your shoes on, we're gonna be late. By the way, I've been exactly there like not that long ago. So I hear that. You can literally just say, Jackson? Making up the kid's name. Jackson, shoes on. I'll wait. No response. Wait, wait, wait. Let him actually take it in. Let him try and respond. No respond. Jackson, shoes on right now. I'll wait. So no response. Stop saying it. Walk over, physically move them toward the expectation. Say and you you don't even have to say it a second time. You can literally go to a a you know, replacement behavior where you say it once and you expect for them to respond. And it may be that they respond with, I can't right now, I'm working on this, or I'm doing this, I'm just they might, you know, uh push back. They might have their own autonomy, they might say no, as we talked about in a couple episodes ago. They may do, they may not like it, right? But they won't ignore you because you know that you are, you know, going to carry them to the car and put their shoes on in the car once they're in their car seat if they don't respond to the you know first thing. So you just stop, you know, say it once or at most twice, then physically stop talking and physically move them toward the expectation. I'm not saying that you have to be violent, but absolutely don't be violent. You can just, you know, put a hand on your shoe and put a hand on their back and slowly move them towards the door, and then put shoes on, out the door, right? You can be still gentle, but don't become a person who gets yourself to that place where you're yelling because you're asking the same thing over and over again. And that's super triggering to us. So just get that. I've sent her away finally. I give her the ps, which is my sign that she's about to get banished. So she runs away. Let me take a break and then we'll come back with our last question. Last one comes from Lauren. Says, I don't know how to explain this without sounding dramatic, but sometimes when my daughter is melting down, it feels like my whole body is the one freaking out, not my brain. Like my chest gets tight, and I just need it to stop. And I hear myself being way harsher than I mean to afterward. And then I'm like, why did I act like that? I grew up in a house where emotions were basically a problem to be solved as fast as possible. So maybe that's it. I don't know. Is there a way to stop the reaction before it takes over? Because by the time I'm there, it's already too late. Yes. And this is where I'm gonna plug again. If I do the the workshop, the stop yelling workshop, Lauren, it would be perfect for you. Because what you're describing is the experience of being at the top of the mountain and being pushed off down the hill. What we need to get you to is understanding what it feels like to climb the mountain before you're at the top falling off. And so you need to label those experiences of tight chest, hot face, fast art as physical sensations that you can identify rather than like viewing them as only a response to your kids' dysregulation. It's kind of a complicated way of saying it. I probably said that the wrong way. But basically, you need to learn that those experiences that you're having in your body, you need to first of all learn when they're happening so that you can regulate yourself with a grounding exercise, 54321 grounding, where you look for five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things that you can feel, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste, um, or or some other grounding exercise similar to that before you get to the point where you're snapping off and and flying off the handle. And then you need to label those experiences in your mind so that you can identify them and go to that grinding exercise before you go to yelling. Let me say that maybe in a clearer way. Learn to recognize those experiences and just name them for what they are. So if you're feeling your chest get tight, say, I can feel my chest getting tight. Not you're making me mad. You feel what I'm saying? Learn to name I can feel myself getting heated up. Not I'm about to, or you can say I'm about to blow, but not this person is just not listening and it's so frustrating to me. You see, when we do this, when we identify the physical sensations for what they are, we can realize that it's not actually a threat to our person. It's not actually a threat that our kids are having a big emotion. And eventually I'd like to get to a point where we can have our kid have a big experience, have our kid have big emotions, and not immediately go to that place of melting down dysregulation ourselves, not immediately fly off the handle ourselves. So identify when you start to feel those things and then move out of that experience. And that sounds like maybe that's not the full answer here, but you identified it, you hit the nail on the head. When you were growing up in a home, emotions felt unsafe to your parents. They felt unsafe, and so they were immediately solved. And so you probably have learned to suppress some of your emotions related to feeling escalated. So when you start to feel upset about the fact that your daughter is melting down, and or you know, and we can go back to Mary's original question here with you're probably tired, you're probably overwhelmed, you're probably touched out, you're probably, you know, whatever. You go to an adjacent question. You probably have repeated yourself five times already, and and they're not listening to you, and now you feel like you have to resort to yelling, and now they're you do, and then now they're melting down, and then you feel overwhelmed by that. Like there's a million different reasons why emotions come out. But what I find in parents who grew up in homes where emotions were dismissed and not processed is that they have a much harder time recognizing when they're experiencing the physiological symptoms of emotions that could give them an insight into the fact that they are about to lose it. And you want to get to the point where you can stop before you need it to stop. So at this point, what you're you're getting all the way to the point of that where you're dysregulated instead of kind of seeing your daughter as being dysregulated and identifying and saying, oh wow, this person seems really frustrated right now, but that's not a threat to me. And uh it feels threatening to you because emotions feel threatening to you. So it's a kind of like two things happening at once. One, you grew up in a home where emotions were not where emotions were a problem to be solved, your words, not mine. Um, a problem to be fixed, I think is exactly what you said, right? Uh I were I grew up in a house where emotions were basically a problem to be solved fast. Your words, not mine. That means, one, you've learned to suppress your own emotions so that you were not a problem for your parents to solve. Two, you are mirroring in the same way that all of us do our parental, what we experienced as children. And mirroring that looks like shutting down emotions for your daughter. And so it you you have to learn to identify your own physiological meltdown and and feelings before you get to that point, because you don't want to pass that on to your daughter, and you don't want her to be grow up in a home where emotions are something to be fixed. Because right now, what it sounds like to me, and I don't mean this to sound critical or judgmental in any way, it sounds to me like your daughter is kind of growing up in a house where emotions are a problem to be solved too. Because every time she has a meltdown, it's not her problem, it's your problem. It's a problem that happens in your body. And you can, again, back to neural plasticity from the beginning of the episode. You can do better. Like all of us can do better with our brains. We can build new neural pathways, we can build new ways of relating to the world and our own emotions, and seeing our emotions not as problems to be solved, but our superpowers. Again, phrase from the book our emotional superpowers, our ways of experiencing the world and getting information about the world, becoming emotioned detectives rather than emotion judges, all of that stuff. I hope that that gives you some idea. But just name those feelings in yourself. Name name the experiences. I feel like my heart rate is speeding up, I feel like my chest is tight, I feel like I'm heating up, not as like this person is coming at me because they're not. Those are your maladaptive responses to somebody else's dysregulation. And you don't have to respond that way. You can name those things and do a grounding exercise and then get to a place where you don't have to be so triggered by everything that your daughter does. That's all the time I have for this episode. Uh, thank you all for listening. I hope that you took something away that you can help you to not be as reactive, to not sound like your parents, to not parent on autopilot, to not fall back to those factory default settings. Just remember what I've been saying for the whole episode. This is a slow process. Building neural pathways is a it's like forging a new path through the woods. The first time that you do it, it seems impossible. The second time, it's a tiny bit easier. By the thousandth time that you forge that new path, it's like the trail was always there. And that whole time, those old neural pathways are being pruned. New foliage is growing in their places, and soon those disappear, and it becomes obvious which path you want to walk down. And it becomes natural to walk down the right path. And so that is what it is like for you. It's going to be a lot of bushwhacking, it's going to be a lot of pushing your way through those pathways, but I promise it's worth it. You'll get there. That's what I got for you today. Bye for now. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. 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Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast, sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing. to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.