Work Family Conflict 200822

0:00 [Music] hello and welcome to the your parenting mojo podcast regular listeners might remember that a few months ago we talked with listener kelly and dr moira mikeljack on the topic of parental burnout and we discussed how parental burnout is a constellation of symptoms that can include mental and physical exhaustion and emotional distancing from children loss of feelings of being effective as a

0:31 parent and it can lead to an assortment of risks for both the parent and the child including shame and loneliness and the risk of neglect of the child or violence towards the child and the feeling that the situation can only be escaped through divorce or abandonment or suicide and we talked about how one of the big causes of parental burnout is the unrealistic expectations that we put on mothers to somehow sacrifice everything for their child and also lead

0:55 a fulfilling life for themselves in the show notes i gave a link to an assessment that dr michael jack and her colleagues developed to help you figure out whether you might have burnout because it might not be as obvious as you think and after the interview i emailed with her and we discussed how powerful self-compassion can be as a tool to deal with burnout more recently i was listening to a podcast that i really enjoy called

1:16 psychologists off the clock which features four psychologists discussing the principles that they use in their clinical work and how they can help the rest of us to flourish in our work and our parenting and our relationships as well and one of the hosts is dr yale schonbrunn and she's here with us today dr sean brown is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice she's also an assistant professor at brown university and she is writing a

1:38 book on the topic of work family conflict which can be an important precursor to parental burnout which is how these topics are connected so i got to chatting with her about this via email and i realized that not only are a large proportion of my listeners working parents but the ideas that she's thinking about are actually applicable to anyone who feels tension between their family and some other aspect of their life so she's going to talk us through this

2:02 and also give us some new tools to deal with the days when our lives just seem a little bit out of control so welcome dr sean brent thank you so much jen for having me and i just want to take a quick moment to compliment your podcast which is awesome i love that you integrate data and compassion for parents and the work that you put out there is amazing i'm really honored to be a part of it

2:22 oh thank you it's great to have you here so um so i uh i'm always the first to admit as far as working parent working parenthood goes i have it pretty easy even when i had a day job i worked from home and so i never had that struggle of the commute time and the physical rushing from one place to another that i know a lot of parents and families find really stressful and even though i no longer have a

2:49 regular day job as it were and the podcast and and this business is my work i sometimes feel really conflicted because i really really really love doing this work and i also really like spending time with my daughter but sometimes i feel distracted when i'm with her often because i'm thinking about the writing that i could be doing or i should be doing if i wasn't out collecting pill bugs in the garden and now that she's not in

3:14 preschool for nine hours a day and so i wonder if you can maybe help us to understand why why is working parenthood so hard yeah well i think it's great that you're pointing out that not all working parent challenges are created equal some of us really are more privileged than others but it's also helpful to point out that the vast majority of working parents do experience challenges just as you're describing so it's a great question why is working

3:39 parent parenthood so hard for so many of us and the way that i frame my answer is a little different than the way the popular press typically talks about it so i sort of look at it from two different directions the first is from the outside in and the second is from the inside out so i'll tell you a little bit more about what i mean by that so the outside in is the part of the

3:58 dilemma in working parenthood that has to do with challenges that exist outside of us that leak into our individual lives so these are factors like how flexible and supportive your workplace is and whether your colleagues and work environment support balance between work and non-work time whether you have a partner and if you have a partner how supportive he or she is capable of being or willing to be in sharing child care and household responsibilities and in supporting your

4:24 professional efforts whether your kids have special needs or physical or mental health issues things like whether you have financial stressors or whether you live in a country with reasonable family leave policies and so on so the outside in factors matter deeply because when those kinds of structures aren't in place in ways that are reasonable and humane we're going to encounter painful often insurmountable challenges and that tends to be what gets talked about most of the time in the popular press

4:49 and in most of the books that are out there about work family conflict but as a clinical psychologist i tend to emphasize the importance of the other direction so this is from the inside out so these are factors that exist inside of each of us these are human psychological elements things that make each of us tick and i often like to quote sigmund freud here because he famously said love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness and i like this quote

5:12 because it really symbolizes the fact that most of us feel a drive to engage deeply in relationships and most of us feel a drive to engage in some kind of productive or skillful enterprise you know not necessarily paid but something that is sort of outside of our private family lives and these are both wonderful drives and they're both associated with positive affect with healthy bodies and minds and they're both individually and jointly able to create rich meaningful rewarding lives so

5:38 they're both important but each tends to demand a lot from us and to demand things that sort of pull in opposite directions and which interfere with one another so for example work really wants us to engage in future thinking to be competitive to be ambitious to get things done whereas parenting really requires us to be present and connected and very patient and then of course both roles require an intense amount of time and energy so by the fundamental nature of being

6:04 human and wanting to participate in both work and love most of us are going to experience conflict between those two roles and so what a lot of my work focuses on is making sure that we aren't trying to solve inside out problems with outside in solutions because that tends to get us into trouble and ends up making us feel more conflicted more frustrated more guilty more overwhelmed um yeah and i think that that import that distinction is so

6:27 important and and that they they can affect each other it's sort of like the yin and the yang right that the work that we do internally is what shifts our culture our culture isn't some kind of nebulous thing that's out there it's a collection of how we all interact with each other how we think and how we interact with each other and that by doing this internal work we can actually shift our culture even if it might not go as fast as

6:51 some of us might hope yeah yeah i love that you just mentioned yin and yang because a lot of my thinking about work and family conflict and work and family enrichment which we'll get to is really informed by dao's thinking about yet and yang and i love that you're pointing out that it's not just the system that affects us but we affect the system but yes it can be slow progress and i think that can be immensely frustrating

7:13 i certainly feel that frustration too yeah well that leads us into your story right i mean you got here uh by a path that had you exploring how how these tensions exist in your own life right did you want to spend a minute telling us about that yeah sure so i was on the tried and true academic path and i was a researcher and before i had kids i was really hell-bent on staying on that tried and true path i

7:43 really i love science i love psychology i was um at a wonderful institute i'm still actually there um and when i became a parent um to my first son who is ten i now have three boys and i was just sort of shaken because i it was sort of surprising how hard it was to stay motivated and focused on my career and yet i didn't want to back away from my career because i i really did

8:08 love it but i also wasn't comfortable sort of maintaining the same kind of position that i had had before and i it was surprising to me because i'd always been surrounded by amazingly brilliant academics who were also terrific parents it wasn't like a judgment of how anybody else was parenting it was more that i didn't want to be away from my kid for 40 to 50 hours a week and so i went through this long year of

8:32 really painful self-reflection and using a lot of the skills that i talk about in my writing to really dig deep and figure out what was possible you know given my situation given the financial constraints of my life given my partner's work and given who i am which is an ambitious person who really likes to be creative in the outside world and use my intellect in ways that for me are interesting um but also you know a person that

8:59 really wanted to be really deeply engaged as a parent and at the end of that year i ended up backing down from sort of pulling back a little bit in my effort in my academic work and um that was a really difficult position to be in too so it was really privileged because i had supportive mentors and and colleagues who um were totally fine with me pulling back a little bit but it ended up being really hard for me socially because i

9:28 didn't really fit in anywhere in academia you don't have part-time people and there's a good reason for that i mean academic work is really intense you have brilliant people working day and night to make progress and and part-time effort really doesn't cut it is the reality and so i i wasn't doing as well as is the truth and i felt that and i also socially felt kind of out of it like i wasn't really inside of the academic world as

9:52 much as i used to be and i also wasn't at all a stay-at-home parent and so i didn't really fit in there so socially it was really interesting and so as a but i did a lot of thinking and a lot of sort of um again reflecting on my values and which way i wanted to go i ended up in 2014 writing an essay about it that landed in the new york times totally a random lightning strike of

10:13 luck it was i actually wrote it during my kids i at that time had two kids i wrote it during their nap time and then at the end of them that time as i heard them calling i i googled um submit op-ed piece and at the top it said you know instructions to submit to the new york times and um amazingly got in and it sort of just opened up this new uh career path of writing about working

10:38 parenthood from a kind of a combined academic scientific and scientifically informed perspective but also one that was really clinically informed as well as personally informed mm-hmm okay and so i know that you now have a private practice and you're also in academia and you're also a parent it's as i know it can be you know it doesn't take any time no no yeah

11:09 um and so in a way it seems like you've kind of multiplied the kinds of conflicts that have the potential to exist in your life i wonder if we can is there a way to segue from your the tensions that you've experienced into kind of uh the more general topics that or ways in which families experience with work-life conflicts which of those have you experienced yeah all of them all of them at the same time yeah

11:34 at the same time well and interestingly i mean i think you're pointing something out that is really true which is i do experience a lot of work family conflict and i also experience this other phenomenon that i write a lot about which is called work family enrichment i experience both um and what is i think under discussed in in the public sphere is how parenting and professional roles can really complement one another and that doesn't mean that they don't

12:01 also conflict i mean that that is a true reality and jen i hope it's okay for me to disclose we this is our second recording of this episode because what happened in the first recording is i botched it and the reason i botched it is i tried to do it at home it it was kind of a gamble i put my three-year-old to bed at nap to nap and i told my oldest if he's not sleeping can you just take care of it

12:24 because i need some quiet to do this interview and he did take my oldest took care of it but my three-year-old had to go to the bathroom and i heard the shuffling in the background it was really distracting and i couldn't focus there's just some times where i do it very badly is is the truth and i i think um this gets to something that you said in your introduction which is the role of self-compassion and so i engage a lot of self-compassion

12:47 when things don't go well and i hope that you at some point have an entire episode dedicated to self-compassion because it's such a construct yeah but in brief it has three components so the first is mindfulness so kind of making space for whatever it is that you're feeling in my case embarrassment and sort of frustration and disappointment and sometimes kind of anger like i wish i had more help with the kids especially now that we're in a

13:12 pandemic and child care has gone out the window and so the first component is mindfulness the second component is self-kindness so saying the kinds of things to yourself that you would say to a friend who is struggling so you wouldn't call up a friend who had watched an interview and say wow you did a really bad job you should really be embarrassed and um you know have your tail between your legs you'd say you know what

13:36 we're all human like you were carrying a lot that day you did as best you could forgive yourself you know see if you can re-record you'd say kind supportive encouraging things and so if you can say those kinds of things to yourself and and it is like a muscles i think for a lot of people who have that really critical voice it's a really hard thing to do but it practice and and it becomes easier and

13:58 then the third component is common humanity so remembering that many working parents i would say i would venture to say all of us especially now have had those really hard days like you're not alone sometimes you feel alone when you're having a rough day but just remember you know this is the plate of the working parent we're all in this soup together and knowing that really does ease some of it and it doesn't undo it but it makes it a little easier

14:22 to tolerate and then it makes it easier to sort of connect back in and figure out what makes the most sense to do with whatever the frustrating experience is so that's kind of on the side of work family conflict but on the side of work family enrichment you know i think i'm really fortunate i'm incredibly privileged because all of my roles really do feed one another like my academic and scientific background helps me do better clinical work my

14:45 clinical work helps me to do better more applicable sort of digestible writing um and my writing helps me to do podcasting they all really feed each other and i think my parenting and my perspective on parenting and my interest in parenting and in my professional work helps all the roles as well yeah yeah and and that i think is a really important thing to recognize that it can feel as though we're being torn in 15 different directions and in some

15:14 ways we are and you know if there's um work family conflict from the number of hours that you're working and um or i guess that's in the that's referred to as family to work conflict isn't there and then there's also work to family conflict where you may be uh having demands from child care or elder care and that's impacting your family um but also on the flip side of that maybe your spouse has a suggestion for how to

15:41 deal with a scenario that you're facing at work that you wouldn't have come up with by yourself and that your role as a spouse can then benefit your role in your work world and that there are a bunch of ways not just in yours that happens to line up pretty neatly but for for any any parent who can learn a conflict resolution strategy uh in a course at work and then apply that to conflicts you're having with

16:04 your child um there are a whole host of different ways that these things can fit together to actually benefit us right absolutely yeah you're referring to this i mean whenever i read these studies and jen i sent you a bunch but it always kind of hurts my head a little bit because it's work to family conflict family to work conflict work to family enrichment family to work enrichment and then they there there's all these um really complicated

16:28 models but the basic idea is that they all impact one another in both positive and negative ways and you are right i mean my my life just does kind of neatly um fit in together but i conducted a like i think i'm at 50 interviews right now for this book project that i'm working on and i had the opportunity to interview people that whose lives don't as neatly add up as mine does um and even like for example i interviewed a woman

16:57 who works in customer complaints at a utility company and she talked about how that taught her patience which really helps her to parent better and i talked with um a woman who's an exotic dancer and she teaches her daughter about feminism so there's there's just really cool ways that whatever your professional sphere is and however you approach parenting they really can help each other and i you know it doesn't sort of it sometimes it happens on its own but the

17:23 way that i write about it and the what i'm hoping to communicate is that if we get really strategic we can really magnify the way that we allow work family enrichment to happen and that's kind of my hope and through my writing and through um the messages that i try to communicate out to the public yeah yeah and my my broad smile for those who are watching on youtube was when you mentioned the customer service i one of my first jobs here in the us

17:46 was working in customer service for a waste management company listening to people complaining about their trash eight hours a day five days a week right after a price increase had been implemented that was it and how did that teach how did that inform your communication skills and your patients you know i i had not thought about it in that way but it certainly i would say it actually did have an impact yeah um on on just the power of of

18:14 listening to somebody and and now when i when i see that a customer service rep is listening to me is taking on a conscious effort to understand the perspective i'm coming from when i'm frustrated with their service then yeah it helps me to connect with them and to um to not feel angry at them or at the company uh but to work towards a resolution so yeah yeah i mean i think one of the things that i write about is

18:37 this idea that we are more likely to build emotional intelligence and practical wisdom when we have these com this complex array of roles in our lives and so i think that we build it in parenting because parenting is definitely some a role that requires you to learn to listen better to communicate more effectively to be patient to be compassionate and similarly jobs i mean especially jobs that are really hard on the interpersonal front right they're they're rough and i'm not

19:06 saying you know it's a great thing to have a job that you don't like but it does those kinds of jobs often do offer that skill and especially if you can frame a job that you don't like is something that's offering you you a skill set that is going to benefit your family it it becomes a little bit easier to see the silver lining of it and tolerate it better and i don't mean to suggest there that you know if you're being

19:35 treated badly at work that it should be okay it's not but it is it is a way that you can use one role to benefit the other yeah yeah and so shifting gears a little bit i think one of the ideas that i really loved about your work was how you pull from so many different sources of information and not just the research literature and i've been studying buddhist principles a lot over the last year or

19:57 so and i've read a lot about the idea of struggle and how just being alive represents a huge struggle because we have this natural tendency as people to want stability and security and we think oh if i can just get through this busy period at work then things will be better or when my child gets through this particularly irritating developmental phase then things will be easier and if only i can get the promotion i've been working for at work

20:23 then we'll have enough money and i'll finally be able to relax and actually if any or all of those things happened then the dishwasher breaks or somebody gets sick and there's this whole host of other things to to uh worry about and to deal with and and more struggle with it and so i'm wondering i don't know if you have an opinion on this but why do we find this so hard to accept why can't we just

20:46 take on that yes life is trouble and and we do it anyway and it's okay yeah well i mean i think it's largely our wiring we're wired to you know be motivated for things to feel more comfortable i mean it's an interesting thing from an evolutionary perspective because our human biology has evolved much more slowly than our culture has and as a result you know we're still wired to try to get enough caloric intake to make sure that we're

21:15 comfortable to make sure that we're safe and those kinds of things for the most part obviously there are certainly some people who are you know struggling to make ends meet and to put food on the table but for the most part most of us don't face imminent danger on a day-to-day basis but our wiring doesn't know that and the human brain doesn't distinguish between imminent threat and social threat and you know so for that reason we're just kind of

21:40 oriented to want to push towards things being more comfortable and knowing that i think is really empowering because it doesn't mean that we can undo those internal urges to move towards greater comfort but we can respond to them differently so the kind of treatment that i practice which is called acceptance and commitment therapy which has a huge empirical database supporting it um really highlights that you know we don't try to change emotions because we can't and we can work with

22:08 our thoughts but we often can't have perfect control over them but what we can do is we can change our relationship to our internal experiences um both at the thought level at the you know perspective level and use that to inform what kinds of choices that we make um but what yeah what we can't do is sort of undo the fact that we're gonna be uncomfortable at points that that is just a part of the human experience but

22:33 it isn't something most people like yeah and so i i wonder now if we can spend some time discussing uh acceptance and commitment therapy because i know it's such a cornerstone of your work and it's going to help us understand this issue a lot better and actually this do-over gives me a nice opportunity because last time we did this interview i kind of framed it up in a way that made sense to me and then halfway through it was clear

22:57 you were seeing it and ordered a bit differently and it sort of made for a bit of an odd transition midway through so let's just go with your way of thinking about it maybe you can tell us the the framework and how the pieces fit together and then we can see how to apply it to the issues that we're talking about here today with work family conflict sure well if i understood your confusion um correctly i think that it was that

23:20 you were prioritizing one element of the core processes of acceptance and commitment therapy and that element is values which are enormously important and values are what i write a lot about so it might have been me sort of misleading you into thinking that was like the core process so there's there's six core processes in acceptance and commitment therapy and i'll all sort of run through them but what i will start off by saying is that they

23:43 all sort of converge on this skill that psychologists call psychological flexibility which is an enormously important construct and has been studied and found to be associated with all sorts of importantly positive things like mental health physical well-being good parenting skillful work and the way that we define psychological flexibility is the ability to be self-aware the ability to have clarity in what matters most to you the ability to stay in touch with the present moment even when it's

24:12 uncomfortable and with all of that in hand to choose behaviors that help you become the person that you'd most like to be and to move as you move your life in directions you find meaningful so that's a really long sentence but it's basically like to do what makes the most sense that allows you to do what matters most to you in a flexible way and the the skills that help you to become more psychologically flexible are as

24:38 follows so being in touch with the present moment so that's kind of that mindfulness construct acceptance with equanimity of whatever thoughts emotions and experiences that you might be struggling with being aware of your thoughts and your story so kind of what what it is that your mind is telling you and then and then the the second three are are the more active ones so learning to unhook from thoughts and stories when you get caught up in them

25:05 gaining clarity on the values that matter most to you and i'll define values in just a second and then the last one is kind of obvious and actually quite hard to do but it's taking committed action to move your life in directions that matter to you so just a quick side note on values because i think a lot of people get values and goals and so i use a lot of acceptance and commitment therapy practitioners use the metaphor

25:32 of a life's journey so in a life's journey and in a journey your destination would be the goal so it's things like getting a promotion or earning a certain amount of money or having your kids you know be excellent at soccer and but your values are the way that you take the journey it's kind of like the adverb so um because we don't have perfect control over arriving at our goals values are actually a more useful thing

25:57 to focus on so it's like as a parent i want to stay compassionate as a worker i want to stay focused as a working parent i want to stay patient with the process or look for balance day-to-day knowing that you know any given moment i feel really imbalanced in one area so the values are really important just as a compass for how you take your journey knowing that you know hopefully you'll get to your goals but

26:24 irregardless of whether you get to your goals you have a lot of control over how you take the journey yeah yeah i i think an expert or a metaphor i guess that i saw in the book that i had read sort of the intro to acceptance and commitment therapy was um that it's like taking a walk with a friend or a hike with a friend and you're aiming for a peak and and you might make it to the peak

26:47 and you'll be able to see amazing views in all directions and that will be awesome if you do uh but the values are more about well how how are we going to be on this walk are we going to talk amongst ourselves are we going to have a deep conversation are we going to look at the things we see along the way both the scenery and also maybe you know the flowers that are at our feet what what what are the choices

27:07 we're going to make about how we're going to be on this walk as we're moving towards the top of the mountain that we're aiming for which i found yeah i love the way that you describe that and what you'll notice is that if you're really paying some attention to your values as you're taking this walk with your friend you're still keeping in mind your goal but you're not allowing the goal to sort of take over because if

27:28 if you sort of over focus on where you're going you miss the flowers you miss the conversation with your friend you miss the opportunity to savor that togetherness and that sunshine on your face and so you know it really is keeping that goal in mind but really putting a lot more emphasis on the moment-to-moment way that you take the journey yeah okay all right so so let's go into some of the other components of it and

27:52 just kind of tease those apart a little bit mindfulness was the first one that you would mention and i should mention i don't know if listeners are hearing this through my fancy pants microphone but i just heard something crash in the next room my daughter's supposed to be hooked up to earphones watching octonauts right now because i had thought that she and my husband would be out of the house by the time we recorded and they are not

28:10 and i am noticing a certain sense of irritation rising in myself as as we're having this interview so i'm being mindful of that and um i know that in acceptance and commitment therapy there is this focus on paying mindful attention and i noticed when i was reading about it it was very much around mindfulness to your thoughts like what's happening in your brain and i'm wondering if also there is a focus on uh the body and noticing what's going on

28:35 in the body as well as in terms of signaling oh something's happening i need to pay attention to yeah yeah i mean the mindfulness component in act really does act as is sort of short form for acceptance and commitment therapy um and by the way for just for listeners who are interested um i can send you the link a couple of links to episodes that we've done that really deep into acceptance and commitment therapy some of the core components

29:00 um but mindfulness really you know there's a lot of attention paid to what the stories that our mind tells us the stories that we get hooked into so i do a lot of couples therapy so the exam the examples that i often give are sort of like you know my partner is late and i think oh it means that my partner doesn't care about me that i can really get fused with that story and that will really

29:20 inform if i'm if i if i don't unhook from that story that'll really inform how i respond to him when he comes home and so there is a lot of attention paid to what goes on in the mind the stories the thoughts the words but there's also a lot of attention paid to what happens in the body but also what's happening in our environment so it's it depending on what's going on and what it is that you

29:42 tend to get fused with it's it there's really a lot of flexibility in this kind of approach you might focus on trying to be mindful of some of the things that get you hooked and sort of cause you to walk away from your values so that's kind of the trick it's like you want to be mindful right there's so many stimuli in our world which is partly why our attention gets so narrowed and sometimes on the things that aren't

30:06 terribly helpful and that this approach doesn't undo any of that but it sort of gives you a little bit of a guide as to like what to pay attention to and in terms of what gets you in trouble if you can pay attention to and be mindful of make space for the kinds of experiences at internal or external so you know your emotions your physiology your fatigue i mean for me i have to pay attention to my fatigue because when i

30:29 get really tired that really causes me to walk away from my values especially as a parent and so that's something that i pay a lot of attention to um and has become a practice of mine because i know that it can get me into trouble in terms of behaving in line with my values does that make sense i just did a couple of metaphors there but i i stuck with it yeah and and if listeners are thinking hmm left brain

30:54 stories you may be thinking back to a recent episode with dr chris niebauer where we we talked about that in depth and this idea that that was a terrific episode oh thank you yeah i i really enjoyed actually his book is uh is is very well written and easy he also got a great title right no no no self no problem yeah yeah there was a funny story about it actually he told me after we finished recording

31:20 that a uh a student was in a course somebody he didn't know was in a course uh and the they had been assigned the task of uh finding the worst named book that they could and he had self-published this book under a different title i don't remember what it was and uh the student proposed it and the guy teaching the course was a publisher and the publisher reached out to chris nieber and says hey your book has a terrible name but it's

31:47 an awesome book and we should publish it awesome yeah i love the name yes yes um and so the whole premise of that book is that um we think of of the the stories that we tell ourselves about oh my partner's late that means they don't care about them as being reality as being the truth when actually this is our left brain uh saying it's kind of making up this uh this

32:17 version of the truth based on the facts that it has available to us about the current situation about things that have happened in the past and one of the things that dr nieber's book does so deftly is pull together so much of classic psychological research to show that these stories are not based in reality the vast majority of the time um we just we just make stuff up that fits a story that feels right to us

32:42 and if we can unhook as this therapy teaches us to do from that story then it frees us to react in a different way and even to not react but to respond in a way and and i think that goes to another key point about acceptance and commitment therapy right the the choice point um can you can you talk us through the choice point and and what implications that has so the choice point is uh i'll just

33:06 sort of start with like the graphic so imagine that there's kind of a circle with two arrows coming out of it one going sort of up into the left and one going up and to the right and the circle at the bottom connecting the two arrows is the choice point and that is the point where we're making a behavioral choice so we're always making a behavioral choice to do something you know even if the thing that we're

33:27 choosing is to stay in bed all day and not to move at all um we're always making a choice you know to eat something or not to eat it you know when it's even when it's put in front of us so we often have this feeling like we're not making a lot of choices but if you sort of really you know take shred things down to their bare minimum we're often making choices even if they are more passive choices

33:47 so the idea of the choice point is that sometimes we do things that move us toward the person that we want to be and the kind of life that we want to live and those are towards actions so that would be one of the arrows and sometimes we make choices that move us against the kind of person that we want to be these are the away moves and the idea of the choice point is that it's much easier to move

34:08 towards the kind of person that we want to be when we're not hooked into the thoughts the feelings and the situations that sort of feel really true to us as you were just talking about you know we sort of buy into these narratives but when we can kind of take a step back and say you know that's just a thought that my my brain is telling me as opposed to that is the truth then we have more flexibility

34:31 right that here comes the psychological flexibility construct to make that more intentional choice of moving towards our values or away from our values the example that i often give in therapy is one that i think most people can relate to but it's um like after a long day of work you know if you sort of have this value of trying to get healthier you might have a plan to go to the gym and at the end of a long day of work a

34:55 lot a lot of people will say to themselves or their minds will say to them i can't i absolutely cannot go to the gym i'm too tired so that thought i can't is not actually true i mean you you could you might make a choice not to but that is a choice and so by taking a step back and recognizing that short sentence i can't as a thought that we're fused with and then deciding to kind of take a step back and

35:24 really tell yourself like okay that's just a thought i'm telling myself but really what do i want to do right what would be a value driven action and what do i feel like you know i can be capable of doing today to move myself more towards the kind of person that i want to be now that isn't very easy right that's sort of like committed action when we're really not in the mood is very very hard to do

35:45 but once we unhook from the thoughts and the feelings we have more potential to make those kind of choices which again doesn't make it easy but it just gives us more options so that's um hopefully a good explanation of the choice point but i i will say it's actually nice to look at it in the visual so maybe i can link you to a visual of that choice point because it's a really nice way to sort of boil

36:06 it down to um you know how do you get more psychologically flexible in the face of being hooked with thoughts and feelings yeah but i think the the idea itself i mean even without the the explanation i can imagine thinking okay i i just can't go to the gym right now but then that creating that space that um that unhooking then allows me to create options like well what can i maybe i could go for a walk maybe that

36:30 would feel good maybe that would help to clear my head um in a way that going to the gym wouldn't right now and also it helps me to get closer to my value of getting more exercise or whatever the value is that we're working towards absolutely yeah and taking it back to the working parent sphere i do think that a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves about working parenthood sometimes don't allow us to be our most

36:54 valued selves now again like working parenthood is very hard and and many of us working parents are tired and we're just you know depleted and and that is a reality and a situation that i think we need to be mindful of like when really depleted is not the time to say like okay now i'm gonna go do a whole bunch of things because that would be value consistent it might be time to elevate a different value like for example self-compassion

37:15 but some of the stories like um you know that like some of the headlines that are going around right now i think are terribly unhelpful like saying that working parenthood is untenable is unsustainable i think isn't helpful because we we need to sustain so in in my opinion and again i don't want to um invalidate anybody's experience like honestly i feel almost on a daily basis like it's unsustainable but because we do need to sustain i'm not

37:41 sure how helpful it is to be confused with that narrative and instead i think it is more useful to take a step back and say you know this is very very hard what do we each need and then you know to really push on the infrastructure around us to provide more of it but also to look within our communities within our families and for the kind of help that we need and and honestly to give ourselves a break as

38:05 often as we can because we do need to sustain i mean that that is that is um i to me that feels more true than we can't sustain right because we have to yeah there is yeah there is there are not many other choices let's put it that way yeah um yeah so okay so one thing i do want to explore is that we've we've sort of talked about this in a little bit in isolation when

38:28 we talk about the example of the gym i choose if i'm going to go to the gym or if i'm going to go for a walk or something else but so much of what we're talking about here is not just concerned with me and the decisions that i'm making but how my decisions and my traumas and my stories interact with other people's issues and traumas and stories and so i can kind of see this playing out in in two ways

38:50 either i realize i'm about to make an unskillful choice that isn't in alignment with my values and i unhook and i make the skillful choice and then maybe my my partner's experience and their traumas shape their responses to mean that the my my skillful choice doesn't actually result in my better well-being because of the way they interacted with that that's that's one potential way i could see this breaking down and then another way maybe something i'm doing is not a

39:18 skillful choice um and it isn't bringing about greater well-being for me but it's helping me to cope with some aspect of my life that maybe i can't change right now and it's keeping me functional um what what path forward do you see in those kinds of situations is it are the ideas linked enough that there is a single thing we should be doing or are they is it completely divergent yeah i mean so when i hear you describing these

39:42 complicated scenarios i i think first of all i just want to say like life is complicated and i do think that it's easy you know in writing or in a blog post to say you know our goal is x you know our goal is to um have good well-being or to have healthy kids or to have a sustainable job or an economy let's do it yeah but the reality is so much more complicated like i often will tell

40:07 you know i'll be doing parent coaching with some of my couples and they'll say you know that sounds really good in here but when i do it at home it doesn't really work and i i say you're right right like in here in this quiet environment where we're just chatting it's much easier so on the ground things just are more complicated and so what act helps you to do is to clarify you know when things get complicated

40:31 what do you want to stand for and act also again and and i will always come back to this really highlights the importance of psychological flexibility so you know when you feel like things are going bad you had been elevating the value of engaging with your partner you know to do something cooperative and somehow it triggered him or her um then you pivot right you sort of take that information right that's sort of the awareness the mindful awareness

41:00 piece um you assess it you sort of check internally like and then you wonder to yourself okay given that this has happened given that things are going south in a way that i didn't intend what value do i want to stand for now right to sort of get myself into a position where i can feel more value aligned and it might be okay now instead of cooperative action i'm going to engage compassion right in this kind of instance where my

41:26 partner is clearly feeling injured what i want to stand for is being a compassionate and caring partner and so you do that pivot you make you sort of engage your psychological flexibility and and and then you know manifest some kind of committed action that's more in line with that second value i mean one metaphor that act practitioners sometimes use with values is like you can only be looking at one side of a rubik's cube right to solve it

41:51 at a time right so you can only really do one value at a time but any time you decide like okay like i've i've gotten about as much as i can get out of this face of the rubik's cube return it and you work on a different side and being able to make that transition can be hard but the more that we practice it again the more skillful we become this is all about growing the kinds of skills that help us

42:13 to be more effective and part of the skill as you know effective people in relationships and complicated lives that have multiple roles is being able to transition roles but also being able to transition values okay you know i was trying to be compassionate to my kid and they were pushing the line too much now i need to sort of engage my firm value of you know lovingly but firmly setting a boundary and being able to make that you know

42:38 carefully that make the transition carefully allows you to continue to be effective as a parent it doesn't make you inconsistent it makes you flexible yeah i love that i so often uh i think solutions for problems parents are facing uh are presented as this this is the way and you will implement this and you will do it and then everything will be fine and then the parent tries it and it doesn't work and they don't have any direction on

43:02 where to go next or how to adjust their approach and and you do need to adjust you need to be flexible and and see what worked in the moment and what didn't and and pivot and even if something it seems like it's working and by working i mean it's it's making the situation easier for both parties involved to deal with in this moment um a week from now it may not work anymore for both parties and you may

43:26 have to go through this process again in a flexible way absolutely i mean when it comes to kids development like that that couldn't be more true right right so it requires a lot of flexibility and i actually think that's again one of the ways that family roles can really enrich professional roles because as a parent you certainly have to learn how to move with your kid depending on where they're at developmentally or personally or you know in their social life or

43:54 academically and skillful parents are able to do that to sort of meet their kids where they're at and i think the same is actually true in professional spheres but we we tend to get sort of like rigid and and you know stuck in a particular way but once we get that skill more um beefed up we're able to use that i think a lot of individuals really use that to their advantage and i think again that that's

44:17 one of the ways that parenting can really help your professional life mm-hmm okay all right so thank you that that hit the first half of that and then the second half was the you know if i'm doing something that i'm recognizing is not skillful but that it's helping me get through this this difficult situation i'm in right now um wait what do i do in that kind of situation again i think that becomes a question of

44:38 what do you want to stand for do you want to stand for just making it through or do you want to stand for something else like you know making the world a better place like um you know in this pandemic i think a lot of us and i include myself in this lot um are are largely just trying to make it through like i i'm i you know working on social justice has always been important to me but the reality is my

45:03 days are long and exhausting and i just don't have as much to give as i would in other circumstances which doesn't mean i don't but it's probably not as high on my list as it might be at another time and you know others might judge me for that and and that has to be something that i can live with because right now i'm you know i need to sort of make sure that the needs of my kids are met and

45:26 that my professional demands are are not left by the wayside and i think the same thing goes for anybody in any given situation is that we have to sort of figure out like what's the most important thing is it just getting through the moment and coping without losing your mind or is it you know prioritizing the care of somebody else or is it um you know growing a skill or is it uh you know something else entirely i i

45:53 sort of think about this sometimes in the morning i'll have an hour to to myself because i wake up early a whole hour really early um and in that hour i mean it's like my one precious hour of the day that the kids are not awake and i there's so many things that i want to do i want to go for a run i want to meditate i want to stretch my body i want to do some reading i want to get

46:16 some work done there goes your hour right it's like and and so i can choose to get a lot of things done a little bit or i can choose to get one thing done a lot i mean an hour's not actually that much time but you know i think the same thing goes for the dilemma that you're expressing which is like if you're if you feel like you're harming somebody by taking care of yourself then you might want to sort of strike a

46:40 different balance of choosing a value that that is more balanced like you know something that doesn't totally misalign you but also doesn't totally misalign them so self-compassion combined with compassion for other might be a good combination or you know pausing to listen but not offering yourself up too much in terms of you know you know your opinion might be a way to balance that but you know finding a value that that you know aligns with what you want

47:08 to stand for in that complicated moment and and really bringing self-compassion along for the ride because sometimes it really is just incredibly complicated mm-hmm yeah and and i think you're you're opening up for where i wanted to end up with uh this conversation was around the social justice elements of this because yeah it's so important right now yeah yeah and and has been uh for a long time but not all of us myself included have been aware of that for as long as we

47:33 should have been aware of it absolutely yeah and and so i i always whatever i'm looking at i'm i'm trying to examine well what are the social justice implications of this thing that we're looking at and so when i'm when i'm looking at acceptance commitment therapy um i'm thinking okay well so much of this is in recognizing you have a choice and deciding which choice you want to make and so it reminded me of the quote

47:57 from the austrian psychologist victor frankl and he lived through several concentration camps and i see you smiling because i know that you are a fan of his as well and one one of the things he said was when we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves everything can be taken from a man but one thing the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances

48:19 to choose one's own way between stimulus and response there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom and in some ways i i really agree with what he's saying here because we do all have a choice in every situation in every moment even even if we're told we're going to be killed in the next minute we can choose to approach that death with our head held high or

48:45 low but at the same time it seems as though it puts an awful lot of onus on the individual in much the same way as the research on grit and growth mindset is applied in schools and the children of non-dominant cultures are told well if you just have a growth mindset and if you're just more gritty you'll be a better student you can get out of your bad neighborhood you can have a better life um instead of addressing the root issues

49:09 of poverty and systemic racism that these children are experiencing all day every day even in schools and so what i'm worried about here is that we're in danger of doing that with parents of all races who are living in this patriarchal system that tells them well you must sacrifice everything for your child and also you have to be a productive worker and be self-fulfilled and then especially with parents of non-dominant cultures who also have to do this i mean frankly

49:33 while they're in fear for their lives and for their children's lives um and so i'm wondering if i'm asking well how can we balance this idea that we all have a choice with the idea that there are some choices that we just shouldn't have to make but i don't even know if that's really the right question so i'd love to hear your thoughts on that if you if you don't mind yeah i mean i i think it's a really

49:55 important question and i think it's a very broad question so i'm i'm not going to be able to answer it in a few minutes but i think it's important to be asking it and my answer in brief kind of comes back to what i was describing in the very beginning of our episode which is that i really believe that these challenges exist in two directions from the outside in and from the inside out so it's not either or it's both and

50:23 right so we both need to work at the systemic level to make changes to make things you know more feasible right for for working parents like if i have to work full-time and parent full-time and teach my kids there are just limits to what's possible and i'm in a privileged position where i have some flexibility you know individuals who are you know encountering racism and and fear and and not able to keep their jobs if they don't

50:51 show up full-time but have young kids and you know are living in unsafe neighborhoods it's just not possible but where the choice does exist from the inside out is to choose the attitude to pick your values and and maybe your value is you fight for justice you you know take to the streets in ways that are as effective as you possibly can make them you collaborate with other people you join the movement you make your voice heard as much as you can you

51:20 gain allies and and i think that's a part of the inside out work that helps the outside in get better they they help each other right it sort of gets back to that yin yang idea that we talked about in the beginning that it's both and and by working it from both sides we not only make working parenthood more possible we make it richer and more satisfying for everybody and that that would be the goal um but yeah i think at your point that

51:49 we don't want to suggest that it's all on the individual working parenthood to just make it happen and make the best of it because it that that isn't that's not possible um you know there there do need to be supports in place that make working parenthood possible and and humane and at the same time we can be working from the individual side of things from the inside out to you know carve our own unique paths that are maximally

52:18 successful and enjoyable yeah yeah thank you for that uh conclusion i think that that that really gets to the heart of the work that we need to do is the work that we need to do within ourselves um that by extension shifts our culture and uh shifts the way that our culture uh supports everybody hopefully more in the future than it does right now so um yeah so thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about the sort of

52:50 the theory of the work family conflict but also the the concrete tools that we can actually put to use i mean i'm hoping that what parents got out of this when they're hearing this is okay i can see when i'm at a choice point and i can see that i need to unhook and i can think through well and understand what are my values and how can i make a choice in that moment that is better

53:11 aligned with the value that i want to have so um i think this has been super practical for parents so thank you so much for bringing all that to this this interview oh my pleasure thanks so much for having me on so i'll put all of the links to dr schoenberg's website as well as any other resources you can make available to us related to acceptance and commitment therapy and the articles that you've had published in various places

53:31 they will all be at your parentingmojo.com forward slash work family you