#13 - Reducing Parental Stress with Jackie Hall, Parental Stress Centre

In this episode of the 'School Can't Experience Podcast,' host Leisa Reichelt speaks with Jackie Hall, founder of the Parental Stress Center. 

Jackie shares her journey to understanding the four ‘stressful thinking lenses’ that can make difficult parenting situations much more stressful, and how we can shift our mindset to alleviate distress. Jackie emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and challenges traditional beliefs about parenting and child behavior. 

Jackie also offers practical advice on finding moments of joy and reframing negative experiences to boost our emotional resilience. 

Recommended Resources

• Parental Stress Centre - https://www.parentalstresscentre.com/
• Beneath Behaviour Podcast - https://www.parentalstresscentre.com/beneath-behaviour-podcasts-with-jackie-hall/

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast. I'm Leisa Reichelt, and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who is struggling to attend school can be a stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. Today we're talking with Jackie Hall, who is the founder of the Parental Stress Center, about ways she teaches parents to shift how they think, feel, and behave in order to reduce stress and increase the peace in our lives. Well, let's get started then. And I would love to start just by you giving us a little introduction to Jackie. Like tell us a little bit about your background and how you've come to be doing what you're doing now.

Jackie Hall: 0:49

Okay. So my business, the Parental Stress Center started 17 years ago, when my son was about two and a half, and my other son was about six months old. And I was going through my own parental stress difficulties and had what I call my breakdown to get my breakthrough. I'd done heaps of personal development stuff before, but never thought to apply it to parenting'cause I was too busy trying to get it right and hating myself for getting it wrong. And so after I had my mini breakdown, I kind of applied everything I'd been learning and started to, write as if I was teaching it as I was learning it and applying it myself. Now I've written 15 online programs, five books, supporting general parents. in between all of that time I also got, qualified as a professional counselor. I did residential youth care work. I've worked in drug and alcohol retreats, and so bring family dynamics, sensitive and trauma informed approaches can look at it from that perspective of anxiety, depression, and basically that has always fueled me to help people to never have to feel the way that I did. in the last four years. in addition to helping general parents, we've also been helping parents of autistic children, understand what's going on for their child and, and have a neuro affirming approach. But generally at the heart of everything is a sense of self-awareness from the parent to kind of look at, what must I be thinking to feel the way that I am., Whenever we're trying to change behaviour, we have to look at, the parents and their response and the child and their response. And we have to look at them independently and look at them together. So that's in essence where we come from when we're helping parents at the Parental Stress Center.

Leisa Reichelt: 2:34

You just said helping parents think about what must I be thinking to feel the way I'm feeling? Did I get that right?

Jackie Hall: 2:41

Yes, that's exactly right. to understand what must I be thinking, to be feeling the way that I am or to be behaving the way that I am.

Leisa Reichelt: 2:48

Yeah. I would love for you to unpack that.'cause I think that's, often not the first place that we go to when we're trying to like make ourselves feel better or work out how to deal with situations. But I think it's at the heart of it, isn't it?

Jackie Hall: 3:01

Absolutely, because often when we have an external problem or something that's happening in our life that we don't like, we think that we have to change what's happening out there before we can feel better within here. And sometimes you can do that and sometimes you can't, but you can always change what's going on in here and by being self-aware of what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, and how I'm behaving and altering that it's gonna change how you're perceiving that event. How you're feeling about that event and how you approach that event. Because when we're thinking through what we call our stressful thinking lenses, where we're thinking in this right versus this wrong path, that there's a right way to do things and a wrong way for things to happen. And if things are going wrong, then my life's going off track we'll have all these ideas of what life is supposed to look like or what experiences are supposed to look like. And we get attached to these ideas. And if they're not going to plan, I then go into a missing out lens. Or I feel like there's some sort of lack void or some sort of loss in an experience I'm supposed to have. We go into blame where we think I should be behaving differently or someone else should be behaving differently. And then all three of those lenses, right versus wrong, missing out, and could have, should have all spiraled down into the core belief. Where we're always asking the question, what does this mean and what does this mean about me? So I'm always personalising what's going on in that external environment. And so the more we think through these lenses, the more we find evidence of those lenses. And we just keep playing this narrative over and over again. how we think is gonna influence how we feel and how we feel is gonna influence how we behave. And they all interact together. So when we're challenged by a situation with our child, if we're in the world of us rolling around in those lenses. Then it's difficult for us to jump outta the world of us and into the world of the child to ask what must they be thinking, to be feeling the way that they are to be behaving the way that they are. So we have to get clear on our narrative and change that narrative to come to a place of neutrality where we can go, okay, the reality is. This is what I'm experiencing, so what can I do about it and why is it actually happening? And look at it with curiosity instead of personalising it and going into resistance to what's happening. There's one thing that I often say is that all emotional stress is a conflict between belief and reality. So the reality is my child's not able to go to school right now. The belief is they shouldn't be feeling this way. I should be able to get them to go to school. It's wrong if they don't go to school, I'm gonna get in trouble if they don't go to school, they're gonna be missing out on all the things that they need for their quality education. And there's this, this whole narrative is just gonna find more and more evidence and all your attention's over here stuck in a story that's in conflict with reality. So if we can change how we are thinking about it and change how we're feeling about it and change how we respond to it, then it's gonna change the conversations that you have with your child. It's gonna change your understanding of what's happening for your child in order to get to the heart of what's going on for your child, to be able to put the right strategies in place, if that makes sense.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:26

It makes sense. It sounds great in theory.

Jackie Hall: 6:31

I always make it sound so easy, right?

Leisa Reichelt: 6:33

Yeah, because I think also in practice, if I go back to what were some of the most difficult times? I had a full-time job. My husband was working. there was a lot going on in life. There was mortgages to pay, you know, the financial pressure, there was busyness and my child not going to school. Yes, I felt bad because what kind of a parent am I that I can't even get my kid to go to school? What am I doing wrong? How do I do it better? You know, that was where my headset was at, but I'm also like, I've got a meeting that I need to get to. I'm letting people down everywhere at the moment and you're just caught in this absolute, maelstrom of stress really, and thinking of this has not got anything to do with how I'm thinking about things. This is about logistics. This is about finance. This is about like day-to-day life stuff. You must meet a lot of parents who are living this experience,

Jackie Hall: 7:31

Absolutely. Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 7:32

How do we make the journey from the panic and chaos of day-to-day sort of logistical life and you know, dreading nighttime and dreading morning and everything right, to being able to step back and think about it differently.

Jackie Hall: 7:47

All of that is often got this undertone of it shouldn't be happening. It's supposed to be different. I'm supposed to be experiencing life differently and you may want to experience life differently, and that's why we're trying to find solutions, right? But the reality is you're not there right now. All it is, is you're experiencing all of these events with a lot of resistance and thinking that I'm supposed to be somewhere else than where I am on my life journey. Sometimes we've gotta look at that bigger picture where the reality of life is not this straight line. And that's often what we're indoctrinated to believe, is that we're supposed to be ticking all these boxes, getting life right, and life's supposed to be easy. But the reality, and this is that conflict between belief and reality, is that sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes we don't have the answers. Sometimes we're in the unknown of not knowing what the answer is and not knowing where the answer's gonna come. That's the reality. It's not the event that triggers the stress or the several events that you just mentioned. It's how I perceive those events and what I perceive it to mean about me. So I'm personalising it because a lot of the time the narrative is I should be able to be everything to everyone at the same time, and that again, is in conflict with reality because you can only do the best that you can. If you've got meetings you've got to go to, this is not you actively letting other people down. If you could get to those meetings, you would get to those meetings, but the reality is you have to prioritise certain things and your child in that moment had to be prioritised. The hardest thing, is to surrender with all the balls you've got up in the air and pick up one at a time and recognise that I cannot hold all of these balls in the air right now, so something has to drop and maybe there is a solution, but right now, in this moment, I don't have that solution. So all I can do is the best I can with the information that I have. And then when I've got through that moment, it's about reflecting on it and go, okay. What was going on in that moment? What was happening for my child to not be able to go to school? Could I have done it any differently? And not from the perspective of blame or shaming yourself for making the decisions that you made, but just looking at it and learning from it. Because as we're going through these highs and lows, we're all living, learning, sharing, growing, and evolving. And that's the whole purpose of life. We're taught that we should be attached to this right path. You can want a certain pathway. You can pursue a certain pathway, and you can see that you are not on that pathway and try to understand it and correct it. None of your goals and expectations are the problem. The problem is that we are personalising it when you are not there yet. You think that life is going wrong because you're experiencing challenges, and that is, it's difficult to experience in them. So I don't in any way wanna trivialize all of those balls that parents have in the air because it is hard. But hard doesn't mean wrong, hard doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. That's the important distinction to make, that's gonna alleviate your stress. It may not mean that you are all peace and mungbeans about those situations, but if you're not personalising it, the level of ability that you will have to be solution focused or to be curious about what's going on will be so much better and so much stronger because you're not rolling around in this lens of this means something about me. This means something about my life. So you keep looking at what's going wrong. You're not looking at what's going right. If you're looking at what you're missing out on, you're not looking for the opportunities. So this is why we've gotta look at that mindset and come back into alignment with the reality. This is what I'm facing, so let's get curious about it, try to understand it, and try to do the best that I can with the knowledge that I have put things in place to resolve this issue as best I can. But in the meantime, I have to surrender. I don't know all of the answers, and maybe I just haven't found that possibility yet, Does that kind of help a little bit?

Leisa Reichelt: 12:04

It does and it doesn't, right? Because I think. When you're in the thick of it, especially in the early stages of the journey, I think the situation that you find yourself in, the trajectory that you're on, can seem intractable, right? We have all of these commitments that mean we can't entertain other options. And I am looking for what? What can I do? What's the technique that I can use that's gonna fix this? I think that's often the mentality that we have, isn't it? When we first run into these school attendance challenges.

Jackie Hall: 12:32

Yeah. And I think, something really interesting is that because we often have a picture of how we think it's supposed to be. Often even the opportunities we're looking for is still coming from that attached picture, that picture, that attachment I have to that picture. So, an example is that a friend of mine is trying to pursue something in his career and everything is getting in his way that it's not happening for him. I was like, if this is actually getting you what you want, but you have to go in a completely different direction to get it. But often, I've got all these other commitments that I can't change, and I would challenge you to actually look at can you change those other commitments? Because sometimes we get so attached to that, I can't change those commitments. That we're not seeing possibilities for you to maybe be able to change some of those commitments and go in a completely different direction that you hadn't even thought of because you are attached to, trying to make it work in this scenario. There's nothing wrong with that. it's not about right or wrong, it's about looking at it from different angles and going, am I attached to a certain outcome of how it should be? And is there another possibility that maybe that's not the outcome we need to pursue? And so an example in reference to school is often parents with 15 or 16-year-old kids, get attached to the idea of them finishing school. But at this age, there are so many other options that may help them pursue something that keeps them learning, in more of a practical way. But they haven't thought about that avenue because they think the only option is to finish school. the same can be said sometimes and not all times'cause everybody's situation's different. Sometimes that can be the same with the homeschooling route we're saying I couldn't possibly homeschool. Because I couldn't afford it. But that statement in itself can stop you from being able to explore whether you actually could afford it or there's some other opportunity to be able to afford it. And sometimes that means letting go of other lifestyle things that we're also attached to. So it's complex, you know, and that's why it's about being self-aware of what we're attached to and how we're seeing that situation if I wave my magic wand, what would I want here? am I exploring all of the options to get there?

Leisa Reichelt: 15:07

Yeah, I had all these commitments that I couldn't let go of, but I, remember my life as it was three or four years ago. And look at it today is so different. You know, I had a big job. I had a career. I definitely thought my two boys were gonna go through and get their HSC and go on and do, you know, probably uni, maybe something else. You know, we lived in a completely different place. Like we've had to, chosen to make so many different changes to how we live and how we think about what a successful outcome for our children is over the course of those years. But I think if you'd have told me that three or four years ago, I wouldn't have believed it and would've been horrified.

Jackie Hall: 15:50

you know, what you've highlighted there is that, you had to drop some of your expectations. You had to make those changes and pivot. Sometimes when we've created an ideal of our life, in terms of career and what we're doing on a day-to-day basis, we had no idea what parenting was gonna be like, and no idea of these challenges. We get attached to the identity that's associated with that lifestyle or that career or that person that I am in this circle. it's easier to say I can't get out of that circle and I have no options than it is to actually go, maybe there's another way that I can feel as good as I do in this circle by pivoting and changing certain things in my life. And I don't know what that is for every single individual unless we had a conversation about your specific circumstances, but it's just another example of how the brain can lock us in to a fixed way of viewing things that prevent us from seeing other opportunities.

Leisa Reichelt: 16:56

no, that's very true. And I have to say, with regret, I look back now and I see the level of distress that my son had to get to before I was able to really contemplate those significant changes

Jackie Hall: 17:10

But let's, unpack that a little bit because a lot of parents do that where they reflect back on something and they go, I should have done it differently, or I should have done it earlier. The reality is, firstly, you couldn't have done it differently because you were operating with the information that you had in that moment, and you were making decisions based on those priority beliefs in that moment, not knowing what the outcome would be, thinking that you were doing the best by him and the family and the situation at hand. So firstly, you couldn't have made a different decision. But secondly, it's okay to feel that sense of remorse that, Hey, if I have my time over, I'd change things. But the reality is you didn't, we can't assume that because you didn't back then that his life is now going wrong and you didn't say that so I'm not saying that's how you think, but often parents think, because I didn't make a different decision back then. Now they've got all of these mental health challenges and life is going wrong. But you are assuming again, that life had to be like this for your child. But the reality is they are always experiencing those highs and lows and you don't know that those challenges that he has experienced isn't exactly what he needs in order to be able to be the. that he's gonna become and pursue the desires that he's gonna have because of those unwanted experiences. Because if you look back through your entire life, there's experiences that you've had that you wouldn't have had had you not gone through those unwanted events. So it's not that we're gonna deliberately put our kids in harm's way, or we're not gonna keep trying to advocate for them or help them or get them onto our perceived right path or theirs. Its that if life does take this dip, regardless of what you try, it doesn't mean their life has gone wrong. It doesn't mean their life is worth less. It's just an experience that we can learn from, grow from, and that we can use in our life. So we don't go into that missing out lens about what they've lost. We start to look at it from that perspective of what have they gained or what we can use moving forward.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:18

Yeah. I do think that by the time my son gets to the other end of this, his level of emotional maturity is gonna be so far beyond what mine was at his age because of everything that he's been exposed to and what we've had to work through. Yeah.

Jackie Hall: 19:34

And it's not fun. Like, let me just put that out there, that it's not that we're saying all of this and we're feeling great about it. And that's another misconception is we often think that we have to always feel good about things and you're not going to, if you are seeing your child struggling, that doesn't feel good. You don't want them to struggle and you'll do whatever you can to help them not to have to struggle. This is not about going, oh, well, he's struggling. I'm gonna feel happy about that, it's about one not personalising it, and two, keeping that perspective that it's just part of his life. It's not his whole life and even that part of his life that he might be having difficulty with at school. He's got other aspects of his life that aren't difficult, that are fun. So during the lows are also highs going on around somebody We can use those as opportunities to find easy things to feel good about so that we're not getting so bogged down in the things that are hard. And that goes for parents as well. If you are going through a lot of stressful things in your life, it's important for you to find easy things to feel good about, to be kind of like a buffer to the things that are really hard right now.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:41

What are those kinds of things? Because I know like we hear from a lot of our School Can't parents that their kids don't find easy ways to feel good at the moment. A lot of them are in darkened rooms doing very little at all because they're extremely burned out. A lot of parents, don't have income and career anymore. They can't leave the house because their kids need them close by, like it's. It can be hard to have those easy moments of joy.

Jackie Hall: 21:07

Yeah. And I think a lot of parents, when we are talking about moments of joy, they're still thinking about the big things. And it can be the accumulative little things that make such a difference. Playing music that you like and literally moving your body dancing to the music. It can be, watching some comedy on TikTok, just like a five minute reel where it makes you smile or watching an uplifting video. It could be that you're playing a board game or doing something that you like, some sort of hobby or interest that you like. It can just be sitting outside with a cup of coffee. It can be meditating, just doing conscious breathing, and you can do that at any moment of the day. A lot of the time when we think, oh, I feel bad about my life. We're trying to find big things, big external things to feel good about my life as opposed to accumulating lots of little things that might just make me feel better. And there may be so many things going on that you just can't feel great about your life, but you can feel better. You can take charge of feeling better about things. And what am I gonna do in this moment that will move me towards a better feeling place? Stop putting the emphasis on being happy, joyful right now. Because a lot of people try to feel good about the thing that they feel bad about, and it's too hard. There's too much momentum. It's like going, I've got all of these balls up in the air and life is not gonna plan the way that I want it to be, and I dunno what the solution is. And it's really hard. And I feel really down about that. But I've just gotta change my thinking to be in alignment with reality. And that's why probably when I'm saying this, you're kind of going, well, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And you wouldn't have been. There's too much momentum. So often you have to go and do the things that are easy to feel good about, find the things in your life that you already feel grateful for, and you can already generate an elevated emotion, pay attention to that emotion. Milk it, stack it up. Just like you stack up those lenses in order to feel crappy, you can stack up all of the great things in your life or doing things that make you feel better and stack all that up to get to an elevated state of feeling that you can then look at that difficult area of your life because you are coming at it from a different energetic feeling space that's gonna influence how you think and how you behave. When we talk about thinking, feeling, and behaving sometimes the entry point of changing how you think is the hardest one, it's easier to do something to change how you feel like meditation or breathing or just sitting in nature or change how you behave, which is going for a little walk outside or watching a YouTube video of something funny that lifts your emotions whatever it is for you. Those little things can help elevate those emotions to just get you to a place where maybe you can look at the challenges and try to come at it from either a thinking, feeling, or behaving space. any one of those entry points can trigger the other two to change as well.

Leisa Reichelt: 24:04

Okay. So we are doing things to try and make ourselves feel a bit better, and we realize that we have to change how we are thinking about things in order to sort of make progress on solving these problems. How do we enter into that process of starting to think differently, Challenge those previous ideas.

Jackie Hall: 24:25

so we have what we call upgrades as well. So there's four upgrades to the four, stressful thinking lenses, When we're stuck in our stressful thinking lenses. We're in a very narrow box. We're only finding evidence of what's going on there, and it's a very small kind of, viewpoint. What we needed to do is kind of expand out to the reality of the situation, the reality of parenting, the reality of life, where we're noticing that think life is going right or wrong. But the reality is life's just a story of experiences. You have a lot of evidence that life's going wrong, and that it should be going right. you might have had, months, years, decades of thinking that way. And some of this will go back to childhood belief systems because that's where we set up our sense of self and our identity of what I need to do in order to be worthy. That's why all three of those lenses always spiral down to what does this mean about me? We have to get to know ourselves and understand the narratives and self-worth attachments that I have to these stories so that I can then challenge that thinking with these upgrades by looking at, if I'm going through this challenging situation. Its only part of my life, not all of my life. And if I looked back over the period of my life, I would see that some things I liked, some things I didn't. Some things went to plan, some things didn't. and you'll see this pattern of highs and lows, the lows led to the highs. The highs led to the lows. And when you are 80 something years old, you're gonna look back on your life. And it's just gonna be a series of experiences. Some I wanted, some I didn't, some I liked, some I didn't. Everything has value. So we're looking through this missing out lens going, if life doesn't go to plan, I've lost something. There's a lack in my life. But the reality is there's value in everything., Sometimes it's about looking in your past and going, well, this unwanted thing happened, but I can see the value in that. I can see what I learned in that. So this is another scenario where, yes, it's tough right now. But it's gonna be part of this journey that I'm going through. It's gonna be, who knows what's coming next. I don't know what's coming next. I can just do the best that I can with what I have.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:40

So in the, the context of School Can't and education, the black and white, right and wrong thinking would be'going to school is the right thing to do' and then if my child doesn't go to school and finish school, then they've missed out on something. So we wanna sort of upgrade that by saying there are lots of different pathways to achieve education and do well in life. And the fact that we are gonna have to go on a slightly different path than maybe what I originally planned for has probably got a whole lot of value coming with it that I don't even know what that is right now. I can't anticipate that before it happens. Is that a good way of sort of grounding.

Jackie Hall: 27:20

Absolutely. Because we presume that one way is, or our way is the right way for our child's life to unfold. But who are we to say that that is that path for them? There are so many different pathways these days And we all know that the schooling system is very outdated and it's not accommodating where current society is at. And that's got nothing to do with the teachers. That's not saying that the teachers are doing a bad job, or principals are doing a bad job. They're trying to work with an archaic system that just doesn't meet where we're all at. It wasn't even created in the digital world. So where we've got access to information and options, and we can do different things that align more with our highest excitement, you know, so. I remember seeing something from a professor at a university said that he could teach somebody the easiest of math to the hardest of math in one year if they loved it. Because we can always learn something if we're interested in it. And once we kind of get those basics of reading and writing and the general things, we can use that in so many different ways to learn other things.

Leisa Reichelt: 28:31

I think one of the other challenges potentially with that as well for families with School Can't kids, is you feel very isolated from society right? You lose your connections into the school. You've got lots of people who you can't talk to about it because they don't understand it they, Just think you should try harder as a parent. Often getting out and about is more difficult. You've got less money.

Jackie Hall: 28:50

Well this is again where we have to reframe our own narrative about those things, and this is where it becomes even more important have that healthy mindset because people are gonna have their opinions of what you're doing. When people behave a certain way, they do that because of their beliefs. So they're judging, criticizing, or saying those things because they have certain beliefs that they're attached to. They're still running those four lenses. Their behaviour comes from their beliefs, but your reaction to their behaviour comes from your beliefs. They only trigger something in you that already exists. And that would more likely be that you are already questioning your own worth because of the decisions that you've made. You are already judging your situation as wrong. You are already looking through that missing out lens because the missing out lens only comes when we think it's supposed to be different, and we think we're missing out on that right path we're supposed to be having. This is where the majority of your work in a stressful situation is within you because people are gonna judge, haters are gonna hate. But they can't get you unless you already entertain those belief systems

Leisa Reichelt: 29:59

That's just slightly confronting, isn't it?

Jackie Hall: 30:04

I know when you start to realize that how you feel is a hundred percent your responsibility, it changes the game. And it's not about blame. When I say responsibility, it's not about blame. It's about giving yourself the grace to explore who you are, who you want to be, and training yourself to think and feel differently. Like these unwanted situations, they force us to change how we are looking at things, the way that we were looking at things was all externally validated. if we're gonna rely on, only when life goes to plan will, will, I feel good. It becomes chance that you ever feel good about life because you have to rely on things to go the way you think they should. But if you surrender to the reality of these highs and lows and you learn to go with it, and you learn to that, it's not wrong. It's just part of my story you start to go, okay, what do I want? How do I get it? What's my plan? And you give yourself grace in that journey and not know yet, and to see all of the great stuff going on around those challenging times so you don't get bogged down in this big thing. You then start to become responsible for how I feel. And so you, it changes how long you feel down for because you are training yourself It's like working a muscle.

Leisa Reichelt: 31:24

I wonder whether you would say that sort of a, a grieving period is grief is part of the process as well,

Jackie Hall: 31:31

Grief is the missing out

Leisa Reichelt: 31:32

I.

Jackie Hall: 31:33

whether we're grieving a loved one, whether we're grieving life plan that we wanted, it's still that missing out lens. And I have to adjust to that new reality. And when somebody is ready to do that, it's not about saying that, if I'm in grief, it's wrong because it's not, emotions are not right or wrong, they're just, it's about cause and effect. When I think a certain way, I'll feel a certain way. It's very kind of mechanical in that way. when I think a certain way, I produce chemicals in the body. I get used to how that feels and I label it. So it's just that thinking, feeling, connection. And so when we're wanting to change that, it's about when people have like, I don't want to grieve that anymore, then we've gotta look at how we're perceiving it. Some people will be attached to the vision of my family life that I thought we were gonna have. The vision of the relationship that I thought I was gonna have with my child, the vision of the career that I thought I was gonna have while my children were happily at school. These are the things that challenge us to rethink who I am, who I wanna be, and how I'm gonna express those goals in my life now that I'm faced with this curve ball and I can no longer do it the way that I thought I would. And it's surrendering to, if you can't do it the way you thought you would, then you have to pivot and the brain doesn't like pivot. It likes categories. It likes rules. It likes reference points because that's what keeps it safe. And anything new feels unsafe and anything new feels hard. And that's why when you go to change those thought processes, the brain's just gonna go, nah. You're gonna have to labor for finding evidence of those upgrades because you don't have to labor to find evidence of the stressful thinking lenses. We get that all the time.'cause the first two weeks of our program is always about the parents and their mental health. And we're looking at the lenses and we're looking at the upgrades. And all the time parents will be like, oh my God, that's me. I can see those lenses. Oh wow, I didn't realize that I was doing that. I'm doing that everywhere. And they're so engaged. And then the second week, you're just hear crickets. And you'd be like, this is because it's hard. And most people won't challenge those belief systems and won't do the work with repetition and consistency to retrain the mind and the body to think differently, feel differently, and behave differently because it's too hard.

Leisa Reichelt: 33:54

Yeah. When we came to talk about parental self-care. I think I maybe imagined that this episode would be a bit more about bubble baths and, you know, walks in the forest and various other things like, sounds like bloody hard work.

Jackie Hall: 34:10

Yeah, and this is why you need those behavioural buffers, right? The walking in the park, the bubble baths, the meditations. You need those things because they are easy, right? But the real work comes with the internal conversations you're having with yourself. this is growth, this is evolution., Because science is giving us new information about how the brain works, how the body works, how the nervous system works, and we are realizing that it's all within us, that we have the power to control how I feel and how I run my life. But we have to go through a process of letting go of the old so that we can start to surrender and practice the new. Some people are holding onto that with as much resistance as they can, and other people are just embracing it. Sometimes you'll just swing between the two.

Leisa Reichelt: 34:57

Amazing. Just to wrap up, Jackie, if people who are listening, want to learn more about these lenses and the upgrades and all the work that you're doing, where's the best place for them to find you?

Jackie Hall: 35:08

They can find us at parentalstresscenter.com. We also have a podcast called Beneath Behaviour, so you can jump onto any of your YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and listen to my podcasts as well, where I talk a lot about these lenses and upgrades.

Leisa Reichelt: 35:24

Amazing. Thank you very much, Jackie. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Jackie Hall: 35:28

Thanks so much for having me, Leisa. Appreciate your time.

Leisa Reichelt: 35:32

Well, there we go. That's a massive challenge for all of us to make sure we're looking at life in a way that is aligned with reality and not unnecessarily causing stress. It's hard work, and I wanna take a moment to recognize all our School Can't parents who are having to make massive changes in our thinking and feeling as well as very often in the way that we live our lives. There are so many of us who have had to and will have to make massive life changes to support our School Can't children. We see you and we thank you for what you do. If you have some other topics you'd like us to cover on the School Can't Experience Podcast, or you have a School Can't lived experience that you'd be willing to share, please drop us an email to schoolcantpodcast@gmail.com. We would very much love to hear from you. I'm gonna put links to the Parental Stress Center as well as to Jackie's podcast Beneath Behavior into the episode notes. I am also gonna put a link to the School Can't Australia website as well as to donate to School Can't Australia. Your tax deductible donations assist us to raise community awareness, partner with researchers, produce resources like webinars, and this podcast which assist people who are supporting children and young people experiencing School Can't. If you are a parent or carer in Australia and you are feeling distressed, remember you can always call the Parent Helpline in your state. A link with the number to call is in our episode notes. Thank you again for listening. We'll talk again soon. Take care.