The Basement Flooded And So Did My Nervous System

Your kid forgets the assignment again and suddenly your chest tightens, your voice speeds up, and you’re giving a speech you promised yourself you wouldn’t give. We’re talking about that exact kitchen moment and why it turns into lecturing so fast, even for parents who care deeply about connection, gentle parenting, and raising emotionally healthy kids. The surprising truth: what looks like “not listening” is often nervous system defense, and once your child is bracing, your best points can’t land. 

We go underneath the behavior to the meaning we attach to it. A missed homework turn-in isn’t just school, it triggers fear about the future, responsibility, and whether we’re doing enough as moms. When fear comes out sideways it sounds like control, frustration, and urgency, and our kids feel our state before they hear our words. We also get real about a painful story where my kid flooded the basement, I lost it, and the fallout wasn’t better behavior, it was less honesty. If you’ve been stuck in yelling, snapping, or “authoritative voice” mode and hate how it feels afterward, you’re not alone. 

From there, we shift into practical mindful parenting tools: noticing constriction in your body, slowing the pace of the conversation, and asking what you’re feeling and what you’re afraid of before you react. We share a formative lesson from my dad about letting a kid sit in the discomfort, and why that pause can be more powerful than any lecture. If you want better parent-child communication, fewer power struggles, and a home where truth doesn’t feel dangerous, press play. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a review, what’s the moment you most want to handle differently next time?

Thanks for listening! 

Go deeper and continue the conversation with me on instagram: @theburnedoutb

I'd love for you to message me what you thought, what it made you think about, your reflections, and of course what’s been coming up for your or causing you to feel ungrounded lately. I will never share your name or info unless you say it’s okay!

Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey mama, if you're exhausted from reacting to the world instead of shaping it, you're in the right place. This is Mama. Where we stop parity from party, and we stop partying from honesty. Let's see the future of our family. So no pressure. But also kind of pressure. Let's do this consciously. Welcome back to Mom Bomb, where we know that a more beautiful, more just world starts at home in the conversations we're having every single day with our kids. And if you're the kind of mom who really cares how you show up, who wants connection with your kids and is really trying hard to do this differently than the way that you were raised, but you still have moments where you lose your patience, you start lecturing, and then you walk away thinking, why did that just go like that? Then this episode is for you. Now, this might feel a little collie outy, but I would encourage you to really listen until the end because I think it's going to make you, no, I know it's going to make you think a little bit differently about how some of these more confrontational situations with our kids go. You don't actually think that lecturing works. In fact, you know it doesn't. You can literally see your child stop listening while you're talking. And yet we keep going anyway. Because in that moment, it feels like the only thing you have. Let's go into one of those moments. So envision yourself, you're standing in the kitchen, and you have just found out that your kid didn't turn the assignment in again. By the way, this is incredibly common with middle school age children. But back to our kitchen moment. You can feel it building in your body, the tightening in your chest, your jaw starting to clench up, your thoughts are speeding up. There's frustration, disappointment, and urgency that this really matters. You start explaining, then emphasizing, repeating, and suddenly you're not having a conversation anymore. You're performing a monologue and they're just waiting for you to stop. You can feel that too. I know that you can. You think that you're teaching them, but they're not learning, they're bracing because the moment that conversation gets even a little bit tense, your child's brain shifts. It shifts out of thinking, out of reasoning, out of understanding, and it shifts into protecting, defending, and shutting down. So when you're saying I need you to take this seriously, their brain is hearing, I'm not doing enough. And once that happens, well, the rational thinking is out the window. And if we're really being honest with ourselves, we're not feeling calm in that moment either. We want to be that grounded parent, the patient parent, the parent who is heard, and the parent who makes an impact until that moment actually hits. And suddenly our tone starts changing, our pace speeds up, and our bodies are definitely tightening up, tightening up. If you haven't already noticed that in those moments, I want you to notice like when you start to feel that coming on, when you start to feel that frustration, that is a tightening in our entire bodies. And then now, now what we have are two dysregulated nervous systems in one conversation. Nobody is leading there. And then here's the part that changes everything. You're not just reacting to your child's behavior. You think that you are that one event that happened that it was frustrating in that moment, but we're not. You're reacting to what it means to you. And I guarantee it means something entirely different to you than it means to them. It's not just they didn't turn in their homework. To us, well, to them, it's that they just like, I forgot. Like, what's the big deal? Like, I'll get it, I'll get it next time. But it's not that to us. To us, it's what does this mean for their future? Are they gonna struggle? Am I missing something? Are they are they not gonna remember to pay their water bill if I don't call them every month and tell them, like, hey, today's the day, go pay that bill. Well, what's going on inside of our bodies at that point, it's just fear. So when it comes out of our mouths, when that fear comes out of our mouths, it sounds like frustration, it sounds like control, and it sounds like a lot of urgency. But when we just stop, when we pause for a moment and we go deeper than that, underneath that fear is trying to take control of the moment. And we can feel that. We feel the constriction, we feel the tightening, we feel the pressure. It's what makes our authoritative voice come out. And there's something that we don't talk about. Your kids feel that too. Not your words first, they're not feeling your words first. They are feeling your state of being, they're feeling your energy. I remember my own mom telling me that she felt like she could watch this, like it was a sheet of plexiglass that came down in front of my face, and like she could still see me, I was still there, but entirely unreachable. And that is exactly what's happening inside of those moments. And here's the hard truth we're doing that to our kids, and it's not because we're bad parents, it's because we're activated. Okay, we're activated in our nervous systems, we are entirely ungrounded. So, what do we do about that? At any moment in that conversation, we have to be asking ourselves, what am I achieving here? Am I making progress? Or am I blowing off the own, like my own steam? Am I blowing off my own frustration, my own irritation, my own fear? Because progress and blowing off our steam are not the same thing. They just aren't. And this is where we're gonna we're gonna open the book. I'm gonna get really vulnerable and give you one of my worst parenting moments and how I reacted in that moment. My kid flooded the basement. My kid flooded the basement because she just wasn't paying attention to the fact that while she was showering, her bathtub wasn't draining, and that in fact it got to the point where it was overflowing. And just like let that settle in for a moment because I know that you can understand, that you can hear, that you can probably feel if you put yourself in those shoes, like how insane as a parent that seems. So I had a moment, I had a full knee-jerk, fear-based reaction, and I lost it. I lost it. And yes, that got a reaction out of my child. She felt scared, she felt like she'd done something really wrong. She felt like she needed to shut down to protect herself. So if we're keeping score, I got the reaction, I blew off my steam, but did it fix the behavior? Absolutely not. Because here's what actually happened next. Was that the next time something wasn't working? She didn't tell me because she was afraid of my reaction. So let's take account for a second. I lost my shit, I released my fear, nothing changed in her behavior, and now communication was blocked, secrecy was created. Should she have responded like that? I think that like any parent would be like, no, of course, you should just come tell me the next time. But like, what do we, our actions create something entirely different there? When our kids feel judged, they stop telling us the truth. And I don't think that any one of us can say that our initial inclination to being judged would be any different. And the irony is that they're learning, and that's the whole point. None of us learn well under judgment. The brain doesn't work like that. So we say we want connection, but then when we're overwhelmed, we default to control. And not because we're bad moms or bad parents, but because no one ever showed us what to do instead or told us what was happening in our physiology that was creating that. So you've been taught to fix behavior, but behavior isn't the entry point with our kids. Emotion is. Emotions are not the obstacle, they're actually the way in. And this is where we shift. So instead of talking more, what if we started noticing more? And not just our kids, but us, you, your body, because that is where the real work is, and that is the real work that actually causes the real magic. Okay, so what if we started to notice in our bodies? Am I in a state of constriction and tightness? Or am I in a state of openness and ease? That is your signal. That is your moment. And there are very specific ways to slow down the conversation, how to shift your words so that they land, how to shift your tones so that it lands, and to help your child feel safe enough to actually hear you. And it works whether or not you've already lost your shit. It works whether or not that has been your pattern, or maybe you don't fully lose your shit, but like you have to lose your shit. There is a way to change this cycle. But most parents are doing the exact opposite without even realizing it. So the next time that you feel yourself about to go into that spiral, pause and ask, what am I feeling right now? What am I afraid of right now? And if you're afraid that you are gonna lose the moment in that pause, I promise you, you are not. If you want your child to get a message, letting them sit in it before you respond is one of the very best ways. And this is actually one of the very uh formative parenting moments that I learned from my dad, because here's what happened. I wasn't allowed to drive my friends around in my car. It was like right when, you know, there had been that restriction put in like at a state level where you couldn't drive your friends around for like six months. And my parents wouldn't have any ways, right? They're like, you need to pay attention to the road. Well, here's what happened: was I did take my friends to lunch one day, one day. This happened the one day that I did it. And as we were sitting in the McDonald's drive-thru, my dad, I saw him pass by going the opposite way on the road. And I saw him, he saw me, he knew that I saw him see me, I knew that he saw me see him see me. And then, and this is masterful, he let me sit in it. He let me sit in it for like two days, and I can't even tell you what an impact that that had on me, sitting there waiting, knowing that I had done something that I had ought not to do, and that he was waiting to decide how he was going to respond to that. So ask yourself Am I about to react or am I about to actually choose how I show up? Because this is the work. It's not controlling your child, it's learning how to stay aligned in the moment where you usually lose yourself. And when you can do that, you don't just change the conversation, you change the pattern, and this is how we heal generations. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I could see myself in a little part of this. I see it, I feel it, and I don't want to keep showing up in ways that I'm not actually proud of, then come deeper with me on Patreon. That is where we go into the awareness behind these moments, the patterns that we're carrying, and how to actually start shifting, how you're showing up from the inside out. Not perfectly, but honestly. That's all for today. I'll see you next time, bees. Remember, the world doesn't change from the top down. It changes from your kitchen table out. If this hit, subscribe. If it's tricky something, sit with it. And if it's how much table, that's how we see next time.