Reparenting Ourselves to create Empathy in the World

0:00 [Music] hello and welcome to your parenting mojo podcast today we're here with a parent amy who in many ways feels like a kindred spirit as anne of green gables used to say way back when i was still working in temp jobs amy was graduating from college and she actually had a plan to go and work on wall street and disrupt the patriarchy from the inside out

0:30 unfortunately that ended up being a little bit more difficult than she had planned and then after her mom died she ended up taking over the family business and now she's married to a black man and she's raising biracial children as she runs that business as well even though i'm in an interracial relationship as well there was much less pressure on me as i went through this and became apparent to confront my own racial privilege because my daughter's

0:55 mostly white presenting and so the world is set up to make things relatively easier for me as a white parent of a white presenting child and amy really sees how white supremacy caused her parents to project this image out to the world of a happy loving family but behind closed doors she tells us in this conversation that things were anything but that it was kind of a volatile and scary place at home and she learned early on that certain behaviors were

1:20 acceptable and certain behaviors were not and you shouldn't show those unacceptable feelings or behavior because you would be reprimanded you would be guilted you would be shamed um and so it really isn't a massive surprise i don't think that she went on to portray this kind of super mom image like i'm the one who's got it under control at all times i should never ask for help and i should certainly never accept help so fast forward to a few months ago and

1:46 amy is now the parent of four children under the age of 10 including a new baby and even though she already had a lot of knowledge on uh how to disrupt patriarchal power structures and she knew that this was super super important to us she could see the harms that white supremacy had wreaked on her own family of origin there was a massive gap between the values that were so important to her as a per as a person and as a parent and

2:13 the way that she was able to show up in difficult interactions with her children and so as you'll hear in the conversation there was a specific incident that really stuck out in her mind where her two of her older children were fighting and she separated them pretty roughly and she is yelling at the older one saying why are you doing this even as she's seeing the fear in her child's eyes and so i i see this often with the

2:38 parents that i work with amy is not alone in this by any stretch of the imagination and i think it's super super common to hold these values and to know what's important to us as parents and yet have this huge disconnect between the ways that we want to show up for our children and the ways that we're actually able to do it in the difficult moments particularly when we have so much stress going on in our lives right now so if

3:01 you are finding yourself in the same boat and you want to learn new tools for navigating these situations that you're finding yourselves in then i invite you to join my taming your triggers workshop registration is going to be open between february 13th and 23rd and we will start together as a group on monday february 28th and when you enroll in that each week for 10 weeks you get an email with super concise content it's not super

3:27 long and i will give you a new perspective some new tools for ways to understand why you're feeling triggered in the first place and also to help you show up in these difficult situations differently with your children but even more than that content because in our culture we're typically taught that if you just know what to do you'll be able to make that change so yes we provide the information but more important than the content is the

3:51 community the community of parents that are going to be alongside you on this journey processing this information with you asking questions that you didn't even know you had and working together to answer them and and to really take this learning and not just have it be something that happens in your mind but something that is embodied something that you take on in your body and you can also have the opportunity to be paired up with an encounter buddy so

4:15 that you can have a one-on-one relationship that really forms this sort of safe nurturing space for you to learn and grow alongside each other so you can find more information on the workshop and also if you want to go ahead and do that now go ahead and sign up to receive updates when it's when it's going to be live and available for enrollment you can sign up at your parentingmojo.com forward slash taming your triggers and if you do that before

4:38 we open the doors we'll send you a discount coupon when the doors are open on february 13th so let's go ahead and meet amy and i should let you know before we start we actually recorded this interview twice because the first time we did it you will hear we'll we'll talk about it as we go uh she was sort of in this super mom mode she had her her baby in her lap and there was construction going

5:02 on in the house and she was very much in the sort of i have it under control and i'm going to show up in this and and everything's going to be fine and everything kind of wasn't fine and she was trying to power through it and we realized that the experience of the conversation was actually a kind of a metaphor for the transition that she's making in her own life so we decided to come back together and re-record so that she could

5:25 really be fully present in the conversation and take a deeper look at some of the shifts that she's seen in herself as well as in the ways that she's been able to show up for her children so welcome amy it's so great to see you again thank you likewise so i wonder can you start out maybe by telling us a little bit about you and your family and i don't know what some of the stressful things that are going on that

5:49 led to the last time we talked being a little bit challenging so our last interview i was nursing a baby um and occasionally there'd be this like hand reaching up from my throat there were electricians literally drilling in brick like right outside the room i'm sitting in um we have four kids so it's always beautifully chaotic and noisy in our house um yeah there's a lot going on and

6:21 and despite all that i i was feeling you know i am sometimes i internalize the role of being super mom and in this case being the gentle parenting super mom um and so it's like i'm gonna model a growth mindset for my kids i'm gonna do this even though it's hard and i was i was it was very hard and so um part of part of the journey of kind of parenting in a different way is not

6:47 getting it right the first time but having the opportunity and the insight to kind of go back and and reflect and think about what happened and um so here we are now round two um because we both gotten to reflect yes and and show up in a very different place i think from where we were a few days ago so um so tell us a little bit about your family where you are in the world all right um

7:13 so we're now in what's known as boulder county colorado um the unseated traditional homelands of arapahoe you and cheyenne people this is where i grew up but the story kind of the who am i story um i'd like to start with my grandparents my mom grew up in pittsburgh and she i guess my grandpa they were irish catholic recently immigrated and my grandpa was the oldest of five boys and when he was

7:44 10 years old with four younger brothers his his father who'd been a bootlegger in prohibition was found murdered so he became the the man of the house at the age of 10. and a few years later went to the south pacific on a boat and was shot down in world war ii and survived and went home and married my grandma when he was just a kid so my mom was the oldest of six and

8:15 and she became a parent i guess their parenting role very very young caring for her younger siblings because my grandma was in the hospital for a lot of that um i remember the story my grandpa or he got out of the war and the us government handed him this booklet saying like you don't how to integrate after the war you don't talk about your experience um my mom there's also a baby in the family that had died at like a couple days old

8:47 and i knew this baby's name but we don't talk about this you know we never talked about my great-grandfather who was killed so that context no one in my mom's side the family really knew how to talk about difficult things or sort of heal from these very real traumatic events so they just kind of ignore them my dad's side of the family he he was the youngest of five kids even

9:17 though my grandmother had gotten married at like 16. by the time they had him they were middle-aged he was a very unplanned um last child and that has its own challenges um so my parents we had my dad was kind of white protestant um descended from puritans who came to the united states by choice seeking religious freedom and with all the puritan work ethic and everything involved in that and then my mom was irish catholic so there was kind of a

9:48 class difference and they they got married it was like vietnam my dad did not get drafted um but he had a backup plan in case he did he he had the privilege to to um you know get a deferment if he needed that so they came to colorado and my sister and i were born maybe 10 10 12 years later after they were married and my parents started businesses they started a business um they were both white and were able to

10:19 get loans and advanced phds or master's degrees um they were able to get mortgages they were able to buy a house in a neighborhood with a really good school district and on the outside you know we we were able to maintain this appearance of being this um good whole great family but the real story was that things were really really chaotic and

10:50 volatile and a lot of just violence and just kind of painful memories and you know my parents they they had a lot of stress um not the stress like do we have enough to eat you know can we pay our food bill and our electricity that so many people do face um but they they didn't really know how to they didn't have tools for that i was a very very spirited and high needs child um i was i have a four-year-old now

11:21 who's also very spirited and i wonder how much i was like that um because i i made a lot of noise i was good at meeting my needs and i was often kind of shamed for always having to have the last word or kind of told that well someday you'll make a great prosecutor you know trial lawyer or something um as if the value i had in being this you know with this undesirable

11:52 quality of wanting to be heard um that that could be monetized into something that could support me someday yeah and it has no value or a place here in this family now right because your parents didn't have any tools to or skills to deal with it so it had to be of course maybe there'll be something you can get out of it in the future this thing that's really central to who you are um well i love words i mean i i have

12:17 used kind of words and kind of intellect to kind of protect myself and i was a good student and i was a good athlete and the people who knew me um really thought kind of i had my stuff together um but when i went away to college which i wanted to go as far away as possible right around that time my parents finally separated and my dad expatriated to costa rica for for i guess you know basically my whole

12:43 20s and after college i was i was a women's studies major at a women's college and i decided that i was going to go work on wall street because i was going to dismantle the institution of patriarchy from within so very very well intentioned i'm going to change the world and i found it to be a really toxic place no surprises there but it also it i learned a lot about

13:16 myself i learned a lot about what it means how to continue creating sort of this outward appearance of how i show up as a woman what it means to be taken seriously as a woman on wall street um that i basically i would be listened to for as long as it took someone to basically assess what kind of um what kind of role of white womanhood am i presenting so i realized that kind of

13:48 this outward appearance or outward presentation was a tool that protects me that i can be a straight a student in high school i can be you know our i haven't the privilege of um sort of conforming to or conforming to our culture's kind of standards of like beauty right um and that's a privilege um and then now even how

14:19 i sometimes have the desire to kind of have this outward performance of being the super mom that i've internalized this like i can do it all you know when people tell me like oh you have four kids you make it look easy it's like ta-da you know um that's that's been a really self-protecting thing to do um but during this time on wall street i well there was also you know past kind of sexual assaults and traumas and um

14:49 within wall street this was before the metoo movement um when i really it wasn't until 2 movement you know many years later that i started to even think about my experience and just the i didn't have words at the time to kind of talk about like wait a second what's this is really this isn't okay um so so i took all of that knowing that like something something i wanted something to be different something to change

15:18 and i had a spiritual and religious conversion experience um because i i was really deeply seeking belonging and community and safety stability and all these things that that felt really elusive growing up and um but you know again these basic needs so within a period of about two years i left new york and moved to boston i made a online profile

15:49 um i met my husband and we got married i decided to leave wall street and become a home birth midwife and i began taking courses to be a midwife um we got pregnant with our first child and then my mom was diagnosed with cancer so we packed up everything and moved from boston to colorado to be close and then she died so that was the first two years where that was like a two-year span of a lot

16:17 happening in a short amount of time um all of that kind of moving towards wanting to build a build a connected you know belonging secure family um and when my mom died she she had she'd been able to accumulate you know a lot of um opportunities that passed on to us at a very kind of young age relative to our

16:48 marriage so we had a house we um we got a lot of choices um because it's very easy to sort of be an intentional parent when all of your needs are met and you know we can spend our emotional energy today having conversations about you know the division of household responsibilities so that both of our needs are met as opposed to how do we talk about really really tough hard things together so that's that's kind of

17:17 experience growing up into kind of early adulthood um it's okay you can just pause [Laughter] and we can just edit a little piece out so take your time um so now we we have four kids as i mentioned we are in the same area where i grew up which is kind of boulder county area and our oldest is 10 we have a seven-year-old a four-year-old

17:48 and a six month old and um life is busy and chaotic and wonderful um as i sort of mentioned earlier or it's obvious for those in the video i'm a so-called white woman of mostly irish and english ancestry and my my partner my husband is a black man originally descended from africans who were enslaved and and so i say that because

18:18 it's part of our story in recognizing that we have a tremendous amount of privilege um you know even my husband's side of the family you know his family both sides kind of came north in the great migration my husband has as many degrees as you far too many so there's been a lot of you know educational privilege and the opportunity to kind of access this myth of you know upward mobility

18:49 you know to ascend to the middle class or or beyond and um and when my mom died that became very apparent to us because the sort of the ladder to ascend had been placed really directly in front of her in a way that um that we didn't do anything to deserve but it changed our lives in a way that gives us opportunity now to parent in a really intentional way and kind of build a lifestyle that

19:19 that we can be home together i mean my partner has the kind of job where he's gonna get to work at home for as long as he chooses to um so there's a lot going on and i have always just desired to just be a really attuned attached attentive person i mean so many books of red and and all these things but our our culture you know we often

19:51 think about the knowledge of um well it's just knowledge is like we can put this in a worksheet with these five things you do and then you know once you do this you will have attained this like commodity of knowledge and i found that sort of this this knowledge of knowing how to show up as a parent in the way that i really wanted to you can't really learn it or you can't you know open your mouth and pour it

20:19 down your throat yeah yeah it's and and coming from that whole history of trauma i mean the fact that you know all the way back to your your grandparents your great grandparents of the kinds of traumas that have been present in your family that even though you are a white uh financially relatively well-off person there is still all of this stuff that has come down and impacted the way each

20:50 generation was parented the way that you were parented the way that you were allowed to show up in the world as a child and i think you you really put a point on it when you said sort of the search for belonging i mean that's what you were always searching for right you were is a child trying to assert your need for belonging and having that you know no you're rejected the the way the way you show up

21:16 in the world amy is not a way that we can accommodate you don't belong with us until your behavior matches what we're able to cope with and so of course you become a straight a student of course you become the model of success because that's how you how you uh deem or how you become deemed worthy of belonging right yeah yeah it's so profound it really is and also i think for really high spirited children were

21:44 and i have a high spirit child and i have a lot of resources to um like workshops and books and i still need a break from my high spirited child and so sometimes it's just too intense i mean i wish she had a little dial that i could switch to like soft jazz because it's it's her her default mode is is pretty much dead yes and um so so i think what happened is you know my

22:14 parents they just needed to kind of like shut down the noise in a way that i can very much relate to and so what happens in that when you're come told your needs are too much you're too much or you're you know it's too intense just simmer down now um that i learned to [Music] i learned that you know are my needs needs are they needs question mark and so i grew up um you know really wanting

22:41 to with this ideal view of changing the world you know wanting to advocate for the needs of other people but it's like how do you actually meet other people's needs when you're like i have needs question mark so that's kind of where i found myself just not not knowing anything i needed but finding finding myself constantly in this very reactive place um so

23:12 tina payne bryson dan siegel a lot of their work on a whole brain kind of yes brain integration we've talked about this and kind of repackaged our own understanding but fear the reaction of fear that led to anger was really really familiar for me um it was familiar for my parents um for my dad i think for most white men um there's a different sort of acceptance of anger as an okay

23:43 emotion for a man to be feeling a white man to be feeling um a few other emotions are sort of allowed um but my mother she she before she died she had cancer and i remember her sharing with me once um a kind of a connection that the anger that she had felt just bottled up for so many years she felt like that caused her cancer and um and so i think i have a lot of fear around even

24:14 the anger i experience because i know it's toxic but i can also see that it takes a lot of skills and work to know how to to let out those big feelings in a healthy safe way and my parents didn't have those skills most of us don't and it really it really takes some kind of deep personal work to do that um yeah yeah and so i remember experience

24:44 this summer so i just had fourth baby like postpartum sleep deprived i mean all of the things it was just in tents and um maybe my older daughter and the ten-year-old and four-year-old had a squabble resulted in the older one hitting or hurting or something you know the younger one i don't even remember because i i just exploded with anger and you know i remember pulling pulling them apart and

25:15 in not a gentle way and i was standing over my daughter yelling i mean this you know why did you do that which is such a interesting question because i think most of us well if someone asks me why i did something when i'm like reacting at a big anger nobody can answer that question it's like that's the whole point but i remember just you know being so angry at my kids hurting one another and and

25:42 seeing seeing my daughter just kind of like almost um like crawling away from me just with this terrified look on her face and it really just really broke my heart to see she's afraid of me that that my anger is so scary to her and it brought back a lot of just painful memories of ah yeah i used to feel really really scared by my parents big volatile i mean explosive

26:16 feelings and that the people that is as children that we look to to keep us safe and soothe us and kind of comfort us when we're afraid are the ones like causing this fear and so it's really painful to see that ah i'm causing this fear because that's not the kind of parent i wanted to be and it's not it's not the way i want to show up in any of the relationships or i mean relationships i'm thinking of the

26:45 people that i'm in relationship with but it's it's actually i don't want to show up with anybody on the planet like that yeah so there's this huge discrepancy right between your beliefs and your values and and your hunger for belonging yourself and and how you've seen that play out throughout your life and then what you're actually able to do on the ground with your real kids in your real life in these difficult moments and i see that is so many times

27:15 that parents hold these deep values about trust about belonging about safety about uh justice and and valuing everybody and then it just falls apart in these difficult moments what what what is that like for you just to hold those two things together and to know what's important to you and to see what what was happening in those moments ah um well seeing that discrepancy is what

27:46 what kind of led me here in the first place um it's it's really uncomfortable but i also i also recognize i mean i i used to think it was about like if they would just stop fighting if they would just stop doing these you know if my if my partner would just stop doing these obnoxious things then like i wouldn't i wouldn't get mad and we'd all be good um so so it's it's a it's it's a challenging duality to hold

28:18 but but it's also it's it's kind of a reminder that you know it's not this or that it's not one extreme or the other i mean we live in the nuance in between and so again it's the objective isn't to get it right every time but to move towards showing up with my children you know my partner just the world in a way that really kind of honors and values that every single one of us is

28:49 made in the image of our creator and truly worthy of respect and dignity and that includes myself too as worthy of the same respect and being cared for um so so throughout this process of being in the workshop and kind of beyond and i think it's important to distinguish that it really is a process there's no kind of before this happened and after now um because i i have big feelings every day still

29:22 um but i'm learning to learning not only what they are but just how how how i interact with them you know how the way i was parented kind of plays with that and and how kind of these cultural factors of you know patriarchy and white supremacy and colonialism and you know public school education sort of indoctrinated me maybe that's a very strong word but just um how i internalize or sort of engage with those systems and kind of

29:54 recorded those messages it's like ah this is how this is who i am this is how i'm showing up so there was a time there i guess recently i mean this is this is kind of like one story but it's like stories that happen every single day so i maybe come downstairs in my bare feet baby in my head and step in a blob of oatmeal and um ah like the the blob of oatmeal i mean

30:26 first of all the like sensory sensation of stepping in that blob is like i find myself you know fist balling up like tightness just like shoulders way up here you know my heart's beating like ah you know why don't these kids clean up after you just you know as if it's his personal insult um line that i heard a lot growing up was when someone created an accent accidental mess it was oh look look at

30:57 that more work for mom so so you know in stepping in the blob of oatmeal it's like there we go again more work for mom that's all people do just you know scheme and think about how can we really make mama just fly off the handle today oatmeal on the floor bare feet um so so part of this kind of change and sort of transformation is is again it's not you know all of a sudden i'm okay

31:28 stepping in oatmeal because i'm really not that still bothers me but just just being able to kind of slow down the whole experience a couple weeks ago i took these slo-mo videos of my kids running and jumping in a big pile of leaves and when it's in slow-mo you know you see like every motion every sort of movement and thing going on and so that's that's kind of what's happening in the transformation the ongoing kind of

31:58 process of changing is we hit the slow-mo but doesn't mean i don't still react but i can kind of see what's happening in slower than real time and often what's happening is there's i have physical needs um so you know when i stepped in the oatmeal i've i'm like cold and sweaty because i've gotten up to take care of myself i've worked out but i haven't drinken water yet i haven't eaten

32:29 and so i'm like clammy and nobody likes that feeling and um and i find that i often go to this role of the resentful murder um i remember even the other day just like wailing you know nobody's fed me it's two in the afternoon and nobody's fed me anything and i haven't eaten today because nobody made me food and people did offer to make me food but i i wanted like something else and so and then i also

32:59 i i um hesitated to ask like oh can you make me something to to you know ask my children hey i'm nursing the baby can you bring me some water because i have this awareness that hey they're children let them be children you know i don't need to make them into little parents um but it's really interesting to think about ah what's going on that i be i take on this role of resentful martyr that i'm not

33:26 i don't know how to meet my own needs i don't even know that i have needs i just have an adult tantrum because i'm hangry um so that's that's happening at the same time maybe there's this like physical sensation that's causing kind of a reaction i remember seeing the cast iron pot soaking in the sink so [Laughter]

33:58 but what i want to do is as i said before that i was you know often receive this message that like you know you you you can use words and so words and intellect i mean that's kind of when something feels threatening i can go into i go into my warrior mode and i fight and sometimes i i mean there's different ways of fighting but like i'm really good at fighting with words so so when i see a you know cast iron pot

34:28 soaking the sink and i've just stepped an oatmeal and i'm hungry and thirsty what i want to do is just like march my little feet to my my husband's you know the door like bang on the door it doesn't matter what he's doing and just you know come in and just deliver this compelling speech as if i'm like a roman senator on the floor then like might drop and be like boom and by the way how could someone so intelligent as my

34:55 husband like possibly do something that unthinkable i mean water in the cast iron um i mean this after i've sent him two videos two youtube videos um and so yeah like i want to control when i have a big reaction where for some reason something feels so threatening it's of course we want to control and nobody likes to be told what to do like that um

35:25 and and so so um it's not about the cast iron it's it's about you know this big feeling coming up and um and going into warrior mode because i perceive a threat um and also in that same dynamic oh yeah and when when i go into warrior mode and want to just like march in and like deliver a speech and like mic drop and

35:56 like leave i i'm learning instead to kind of pause um and in that pause you know literally we talk about our sort of yes receptive yes brain as it takes a little longer to power on as if it's a computer than just turning a light switch and having your reaction place your brain kind of light up so you have to kind of slow down and when i slow down i tend to be able to see that oh right so

36:27 okay here's here's actually what's going on cast iron is in the sink however last night at dinner after dinner i went upstairs and i was holding the baby and i was nursing and i was reading a book and the light was soft and comfortable and i was i was i had a moment to myself and my partner i mean i could hear them downstairs they're doing like family cleanup cleaning the kitchen they're like singing songs and playing and then you

36:56 know he takes them all upstairs gets them ready for bed he's reading to them so that i could have this moment because you know we are having these conversations about you know trying to meet each other's needs and trying to understand what they are um but sometimes we miss that when we go to that kind of reactive fear place and it seems like the the only thing that can happen is somebody needs to change their behavior and it's not me

37:25 my partner needs to change their behavior my kids need to change their behavior if they're the ones fighting but but it's certainly not my behavior it needs to change well everyone else needs to stop doing things and make that make me mad um and going back to the idea of like the resentful murder i mean i kind of have these two sort of false selves i mean the resentful martyr and and then also just like protective warrior and

37:53 when i think both of those both of those came about you know out of a need out of a need to kind of all right well how do i take care of myself i mean this how do i um how do i make my body strong so that i can like literally protect my body you know i i will be a fighter i will be a warrior i will protect um and so i want to protect a lot of people

38:15 and solve a lot of problems that aren't necessarily mine to solve and and so you know it comes from a good place in the same way that you know the things each of our parents have done come from a good place we just we just continue kind of learning same thing about the resentful murder i mean a lot of that like there's some sort of gender roles about who does what um i mean i i'm nursing a baby and that's i get the

38:46 nighttime parenting and it's not just nursing a baby but it's also our four-year-old who often wants to come in our bed and so sleep is a really precious commodity that i don't usually get as much as i'd like and and then there's the the sort of messy things that you know maybe on the way to the bathroom someone had kind of like missed the toilet and so there's just this like assault on my nostrils you know that's

39:15 that's like well either i clean it up or i just live with it and and um and so it makes a lot of sense when you kind of really unpack and slow down the whole the whole situation see what are all these things happening you know what what are the needs going on i mean who's is it is it that my kids just make messes just to kind of plot against me and you know my husband like how dare he

39:42 let the cast iron pan soak like just to like make me angry or is it that you know ah these are a lot of like sensory overload there there's there's a lot of factors going on that maybe my kids are really needing to build the skills of like well what are the expectations for eating breakfast and putting away our dishes all by our own selves yeah and and i think that uh that pause

40:14 is the critical critical moment that allows you to to do something different to make a different choice and one other thing i want to pull out from what you said is is these false selves and anyone who's listening to those thinking false self well that's what kind of hippie was that um i i think that so often our left brains are the parts of ourselves that tell these stories that get into this well my my i see a

40:41 cast iron pan in the sink and therefore my husband is he doesn't care about everything other thing that's important to me and he's he might be lazy and all the rest of the stuff that we or the story that we start telling ourselves um and and oh and now it's my responsibility and i get to be the one else to clean it up and so so you you have this uh this now this narrative about you as the martyr

41:04 and so what i love about giving it a name i see i see this often happens with people if you give that thing a name uh sometimes you can even give it a humorous name uh yours is not so humorous but i've heard of people using uh cartoon characters for for their sort of their their narrative name that they find themselves dropping into that when you see that you can say oh yeah hello resentful of martyr

41:31 i see you there i see you telling me the story and i see that it's a story and thank you i know where this came from i know that you're trying to protect me from the situation that came up over and over and over again and now this story isn't serving me anymore and so i'm just gonna gently set you aside and i'm going to make a different choice here in this situation that that's what that kind of

41:50 thing allows us to do and then you get to create to make a decision that's actually based on your values instead of that's the story that you it's almost like you drop the needle into the record and the only place it can go is around in the same old circle right you're putting you're turning the record over and playing a different song that's interesting that you you brought up the the sort of the naming things um

42:13 because so we in our family we also learn together at home and i've been reading aloud um just some indigenous authors just stories so joseph ruchak and louise erdrich and we've been having these really juicy conversations about kind of the names of characters i mean sometimes you have like a really just an adjective and a noun just really descriptive and sometimes it's an action verb and so we've been looking at this and so

42:45 so as i'm kind of practicing these skills of trying to find the pause i i noticed that i would like balance on one foot and um kind of like a flamingo and i'd put my hands here and in realize and i did it intentionally and i kind of talk out loud to myself i'm balancing on one foot because i'm in my red zone i'm i'm having a really intense feelings i'm really angry and i know that if i balance my body

43:11 then i'm gonna help balance my brain and so i was just kind of talking through with myself what's happening um but we made it into a pose called fluid flamingo floating um we also we love just a good alliteration as well so um so so having having kind of a named tool to kind of go to in those tense moments i mean again it doesn't mean that i'm not triggered it doesn't mean that i'm not you know sometimes um reacting instead

43:41 of sort of slowing down and responding but even after the fact it's like all right i'm recognizing that my my nervous system my body is something's going on that i'm feeling fear and so i'm often responding with anger reacting with anger what's happening here i'm gonna do my fluid flamingo floating and just stand here until i feel like my head's on a little more straight and i have a little more

44:12 balance and there's just there's no more wobble that's an interesting uh parallel between the physical pose with no wobble and the the sense of knowing what your values are and then parenting in line with those values without wavering from it that's a really interesting interesting way of putting that and and so you were in the taming your triggers workshop recently and i know you had an encounter buddy as you went through that and i'm

44:43 curious about how that process of having somebody to check in with and to learn with worked for you because i know some parents who are listening and who may be thinking about joining the workshop are thinking i don't know this person doesn't know any more about this than i do how could this possibly help can you just tell us about what what it was like for you how you found this person and uh and what you were able to process maybe

45:09 differently through that relationship than you would have done by yourself just reading the materials yes so my my account to buddy uh the workshop's over and we're still connecting and accountable to each other um pretty much on a weekly basis because we realize what a what a gift it is for each of us so we we kind of found each other um my accountability is a woman named sarah and she's in canada and she is a mother of three boys and

45:38 she she homeschools as well um and like like our family she's in a kind of cross-cultural but there are cross-cultural dynamics in her family as well so we can kind of relate to a lot of things um she's of the muslim faith and so we had just a lot in common on sort of wrestling with big questions of of having you know a spiritual belief in connection and again that desire for belonging and what does that look like in how we show

46:08 up with our parents or as as parents how we show up in our relationships um so we started well one time we did like a live zoom chat where we kind of shared our sort of family stories together but most the time we just send each other little video clips on whatsapp and what was really interesting is we we were kind of off sync or asynchronous i guess is the term you know the term that we use these days

46:38 um but she would she would send a video and i would feel it i would when i watched it i would feel it and it truly kind of made me a better listener so you know we built a friendship without ever seeing each other you know truly face to face we've never met each other in person but there's kind of this time delay in in receiving and hearing her story and really really listening and just just

47:03 you know connecting like uh you know i get that um and then later in a different moment me being able to send a video and respond and be really honest you know just you know today at the pumpkin patch you know when i lost it and my kids i mean it's really uncomfortable to share those kind of the way we feel we fall short as a parent i mean again this there's there's a lot of cultural

47:33 messages about what kind of parents we should be and um you know i've reflected on my identity as a white woman and just what what what value i have as in motherhood right and that's um being a parent who looks like they have it together and so having a safe place with each other to to really be honest about when we don't have it together in the moments we're really struggling with is um

48:05 is was really powerful and what was really great about you know being in a different time zone and different country and having this friendship built on sort of a time delay is there's this kind of inherent pause which is a really appropriate metaphor for sort of how we are also at the same time learning to kind of receive observe with our senses kind of have this insight you know what's going on with us and then respond

48:33 sort of after the fact or not in the heat of the moment and so um so my my account about even sarah and i i would call her dear friend um i'm gonna show you i'm wearing this little turtle necklace and um she she sent me a picture one day she'd got this turtle necklace as a reminder that even though we're moving slowly we're still moving and that this this

49:03 this is a long journey and um it doesn't have to go fast and so we just kind of shared with each other what a metaphor that is for how we're learning i mean it again neither of us are moving quickly and in fact this is not the kind of process that one wants to move quickly through because it it takes a whole lot of um going back and saying so even though i you know got really upset in this moment if i

49:34 wish i could if i could go back i would respond this way you know i see that you were wanting my attention here and it must have felt like i wasn't listening and so we can kind of repair and connect and so sarah and i have gotten to kind of learn that alongside one another in in a way that's been it's just felt really safe i mean there's there's it's made space for just a lot of

49:57 vulnerability and it's hard to do really deep work on ourselves without being vulnerable so um so we were able to kind of build that alongside each other yeah and that's really the gift that you gave to each other right neither of you brought any specific knowledge any specific skills to this that um that helped you to get the the answer that's going to help the other person the miracle that you're going to be the one who finally gets

50:26 them to see how why they're doing this wrong and what to do differently it's totally not that kind of role it is your gift to them and their gift to you is you're showing up with your vulnerability and just being raw and being honest with each other and from there is where the learning happens and and that learning yes your your accountability might study something that shifts something for you or it helps you to see things in a different

50:50 way but a lot of the time it's you writing this stuff explaining this stuff to this other person that then it's like oh yeah now i see wait is that is that the kind of experience you had yeah yeah well it's interesting the the thought of being able to hold space for each other i mean that's maybe kind of a loaded term but we were able to listen to each other without needing to fix and so that's

51:16 something that's something you know again this mentioned um my family's story and kind of having this protestant work ethic um where not only is um you know on the floor like a sign of morality um and and virtue to have a clean floor but also this idea that we work hard and we fix things if there's a problem we fix it and that's that's you know my parents are really

51:47 really good at solving problems and fixing things and finding solutions and that's an important skill and we want that and my my partner is also very very good at this and i'm also very good at this but one thing that's really hard for probably most of us is knowing when it's our responsibility to fix and solve our children's conflicts or whatever it might be or tell our husbands how to you know wash the cast iron versus

52:13 to step back and and just no i mean i i never questioned that sarah could figure out what she needed to figure out in her relationship with her boys when they had a tough moment it i never questioned that and and so so the the relationship with an accountability kind of gives us an opportunity to start start learning that nuance of of when when do i come in and fix versus when do i just stand back you know the work i'm

52:46 doing that's helping my children is actually just standing in my fluid flamingo floating saying in my place where even if i'm having these big feelings bottling up i'm breathing i'm checking in with my needs i'm slowing down i'm you know hitting the slo-mo buttons so we can just kind of you know before we go marching in you know banging on the door to like get out our big feelings and have the last word we're we're just kind of checking in all right

53:18 what's what's actually happening here can this can they solve this and so um with with my accountability we we didn't ever have the desire or the impulse to try and fix anything that was happening and that made a huge difference yeah it really does um and before we move on for that tuffy i just want to acknowledge that you told me earlier you had talked to sarah and that she had said it was okay to share these stories

53:43 so yes i want to make sure folks who are listening know that so um okay so so you uh i mean you went all in on this workshop you process verbally and i mean i can't tell you how much it helped other people in the workshop in every in every workshop there's somebody who processes very verbally and everybody else looking on is kind of like whoa oh oh yes it's the same for me too and i

54:05 didn't even know it until you said it and you were one of those people in the workshop this time around and so so we kind of got to uh to go with you through this journey and i think it's fair to say that you've kind of been in something of a liminal space for a while now right a space where you're almost like you're inside the cocoon and everything's kind of mushy it's not it's not the caterpillar

54:26 anymore but it's not the butterfly yet either and not that we're going towards the butterfly and then everything's going to be perfect but that we're we're in this space where we're not quite sure what's coming out um i wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that and and if you're seeing signs of what's coming out and what that's like what does that feel like where are we going uh liminal space um i first heard that

54:49 term a couple days before i gave birth to our fourth and just you know thinking about this time during the pandemic is this this it's like the the shore and the beach between what was and what will be and what was i i can't go back to kind of um the reactive way of just sort of repeating i mean if um feeling these big feelings of anger not knowing how to

55:21 help my children who are clearly having a hard time and like whacking each other and you know i don't i don't want to be the parent you know shouting at them and that they're frightened and terrified of me but i'm still sort of figuring out well how how do i um you know encourage my partner to um give them the freedom to choose how many crackers they want on their plate without you know let me send you a

55:45 youtube video on that too you know so so it's it's a lot like labor um and again i all of our babies have been born at home and even though i'm the one who carried the baby our family has given birth so it's it's like it's my journey but it's actually kind of all of our journey and you know each of our children were present at the birth of their later siblings and and so that that's

56:15 been kind of a transformative sort of theme in our family and um and so it's like we're not we're not there and i think maybe that's kind of an idea that i would attach to kind of like white supremacy is like if only i get there you know once i have it figured out then life will be good and and i know that that's never the case but what's been really really profound about this experience is

56:41 seeing that the growing the changing is not just happening in me but it's happening with my children my family and and how we're kind of engaging in the world um you know with my children they have big feelings too just like i do and i i was noticing that kind of my triggers and their triggers were like buddy buddy um you know i would often find myself feeling these big feelings because they were struggling with big feelings

57:12 and so you know i want to help or fix or just make the problem go away and in this process of kind of learning alongside one another we're we're sort of all learning that like ah okay let's um well i've everything i've learned i'm sharing with the people who are around me as we're going on this journey i've been really incorporating and including my whole family and everything that i'm learning um

57:43 so we i recently been reading the yes brain so we came up with this idea of these magic mindset goggles and so we'll use those words we like drew pictures of it and so our magic mindset goggles we have our insight and so that's that's paying attention to what's going on inside here um you know maybe your brother takes an object of great desire and you're feeling these big feelings or maybe you step on a blob of oatmeal on

58:07 the floor and you're having these big feelings but it's just kind of building an emotional vocabulary and tuning in and understanding what's going on inside us and then the other part of that is this other site which is often referred to as empathy and it's putting yourself in the perspective of another to see the story through their eyes and once we do that then we can say oh okay so you know you have needs i have needs

58:36 let's move to the place of the win-win you know where we can both get our needs met um you know so even though i'm this this workshop has really been about my experience of changing changing how i respond to situations that challenge me we've all kind of built skills along the way and you have just been able to reframe i mean things like oftentimes we'd hear you know so and so won't let me you know so and so gravity

59:07 won't let me stand up i mean really ridiculous almost you know the baby's not letting me you know do this and being able to reframe that in into this kind of receptive place of ah we we actually just need some new ideas you know maybe um papa came up with one idea and and it doesn't work for you so now you come up with an idea and so which ironically as as my children have learned these

59:38 skills of kind of tuning into their own feelings and really really learning empathy which i used to think like empathy was like a worksheet that you could like learn um as opposed to a practice that you practice every day as my kids are building these skills they're learning how to solve their own conflicts and so you know i used to get really really triggered by you know my seven-year-old my four-year-old

60:10 getting into this you know cartoon chase scene where they are just tormenting each other and know exactly how to press each other's buttons and so that smoke's coming out of their ears and the four-year-old thinks it's quite funny to do something you know to make the seven-year-old just kind of go up a wall and and so as we've been learning these skills for kind of slowing it down you know they're also learning that ah okay it's not that

60:38 we we can reframe this we can come up with solutions and you know they're kind of actually learning to problem solve and when they're solving those kind of problems all of a sudden i'm no longer i'm no longer you know freaking out because they're chasing each other around the kitchen counter and there's like cutting boards and knives and hot liquids and um so so it's um you know it wasn't about changing their behavior but interestingly as

61:07 i have been changing i'm seeing changes in them um and very much in my partner as well he's he's on his own journey and he he's he's um learning to empathize and to connect and to you know solve problems just changes that i'm noticing in my children i'm seeing a lot of really cool things happening with my partner and

61:39 that's obviously impacting our relationship in a really positive way an example of this was as we mentioned earlier this is our second round of the interview um we we never facetimed or zoomed or anything before the pandemic so this is kind of like a new area for us and so when my kids my kids were very excited to meet jen and say hello because jen is a household name and they hear you know jen lumen lawn says this and so they

62:06 they know you and they wanted to meet you and so they they wanted to come in and um say hello and then they had a plan to go downstairs and watch a show they were very very excited for and so so my partner you know he he he works from home and often has meetings where he's wanting a clear boundary that children don't come in and interrupt and so so he sees the kids coming in and he's like

62:36 i must hurt them out i must get them out i must get them out of here and and then all of a sudden i'm like oh i'm so anxious and didn't really understand what was going on that i was having all this anxiety until we had our little postmortem um about the experience and realized wow there was a lot more going on and so you know what was really going on is that my partner is wanting to help me set a boundary and

63:06 is wanting to keep this space sacred for you and i jen to have this conversation because he knows how how meaningful and important it is and so you know he's thinking i must keep the kids out of the room and he sees me executing my plan to you know how how are my kids going to learn how to sort of uh show up appropriately on a computer screen with other people you know realizing that it's really hard to hear

63:36 when all of them are talking at once um so i'm we kind of talked about it ahead of time to come up the plan that they'd say hello and then they'd go and so you know at first he didn't see that he all he saw is like wait a second i thought we were setting boundaries and consistent limits and you know it makes it really hard for me to set a boundary and a consistent limit when you know

63:57 they're in here and i'm confused and and so we um one of the tools in the module is this communication process called nbc or non-violent communication um which it really is a terrible name because it's so much yeah it's just about that too yeah it's it's basically yeah communication where you're starting with your feelings and and then you're you're meeting each of your needs and so so we were able to kind of slow down

64:27 after the fact and talk about oh yeah this is what this is like for you this is what you were observing this was what you were wanting to support and help with you know this is what it felt like for me you know i had this value of you know how how how can i incorporate the kids so that they can come in say hello to jen and learn what adults do on zoom calls because it's

64:51 really fascinating i mean i guess sort of it's fascinating to a child who doesn't have their own computer um and and so we were able to like ah right okay so what is it that you're needing and this past week we just had this amazing insightful discovery um and all of this is coming from this like as opposed to scarcity mindset of you know my family's not letting me you know the electricians are not letting me have

65:21 this this time you know this um things are chaotic ah my needs aren't being met um we kind of shifted this approach to okay well what other resources we do have what what do we know what can we do um we have this little saying that anything possible is possible and so it's like all right well what's possible and it turns out some of the things we have is our six-month-old baby is really just an easy going mellow personality

65:51 we have a very comfortable baby carrier and my husband when working at home he has a standing desk and so we realized like oh yeah he can work holding the baby my hands are free and so so what all of that kind of boils down to is we learned in our sort of learning how to meet each other's needs based on what we do have as opposed to kind of what we don't have um

66:22 and all of that is sort of mirrors this approach of how how are we our kids to grow up into the kind of world we want to have because it's really easy to get just to feel a whole lot of despair about everything that's not going well in the world and and i feel that deeply and it's it's hard to kind of wrap my head around i mean with

66:53 you know race and um and just some of the very salient things that we think of as being an interracial family in a community that's like one percent black and and it also just exploring the journey of what it means to have received a lot of unearned opportunities and based on um things that happened that were really unjust for other people um and so you know how do how do we go

67:25 how do we shift how we kind of show up in the world and and a lot of that i believe is starts with moving towards well what are we moving towards what are the values i mean how how are we wanting to what kind of world are we wanting to build i mean if this idea of belonging is at the core of it how are we building and creating belonging together in our interactions in a small family and then

67:52 going outwards and and through that has has given me the opportunity to realize how much how how truly deep my influence as a parent is i've heard the term a lot like parenting is an act of resistance and i i very much relate to that but i've realized it's kind of more than that because i don't i want to do more than just resist what's not working and what's out there because i spent i spent my life

68:23 you know resisting you know trying to resisting the things that i knew from my childhood and from you know the the cultural expectations that were kind of placed on me by you know patriarchy and you know my parents dynamic and their stresses and all these things i can resist against that but it's so much more powerful when we think about ah parenting is actually an act of like persistence and you know perseverance and you know sustenance and nourishment

68:55 and realizing that as i'm i'm re-parenting myself as i'm learning how to be a different sort of parent to my children and i hold on to the belief that that's that's moving us in the direction of sort of building that kind of world that i would really hope that every single human being can experience where where each of us is valued and respected and um truly treated in a way that

69:27 reflects the dignity inherent in each of us yeah i i 100 agree and it's it's such a profound shift right i mean just tracking the course of uh of the things we talked about in the last hour or so um coming in thinking if you all would just stop doing these things drive me nuts then i wouldn't need to be angry you oh okay i'm learning some new tools how about we all learn them together okay now i see when i show up

69:58 differently in my relationship with each child they can show up differently and also now i can see whoa they're starting to do this between themselves they're starting to take on these ideas and look to understand what is the other child's needs so then they're not fighting as much anymore and they're not fighting over the thing it is that they're trying to get immediately they're also not fighting to get your time and attention because they know that they don't have to pick a fight to

70:28 uh to be the squeakiest wheel to get your attention that you're that you see their needs and you're trying to meet those needs as well um and from there to the broader vision of yes we're doing this for you so you can show up as a whole person in the world yes we're doing this for your children so they can show up as whole people in the world but we're also doing it for so much bigger reasons we're doing it so

70:51 that everybody can show up as whole people in the world and um i i don't know that we we fully know how to get there yet i know that i don't but i i am pretty sure that this is a really solid step in that direction we want to go not just oh and i'm i want to resist that that doesn't yes bad but this is a solid step to where i think we want to go yeah yeah

71:17 and here's another really quick example so my two older kids have birthdays two days apart and then the four-year-old is a month later so the two older kids and their cousins gave them lego sets so they each got a new set of legos and the four-year-old didn't get anything and has to wait an eternity an eternity yes yes i mean that's yes that's in truly that's unfair i mean it's you know we can look at this as

71:46 adults and kind of judge a child's perception of fair unfair but from her perspective there is nothing fair about that and i wouldn't like that either and and so so it took once we sort of had the opportunity to practice you know for them to really kind of have that other site of like what what would that feel like for my younger sister you know she didn't get anything and i just got this and this and then they go out and they

72:15 they're like let's let's get let's put together some legos for her too you know she loves legos too and so they they shared with her because they realized what that felt like and if it seems to me like we have to be able to do that with each other first with your siblings in order to be able to to say you know now is another sort of chapter of our sort of family exploration is learning about the history of um

72:47 the land that we're currently living in where you know the u.s government um um forced the arapahoe and cheyenne people off the land and it wasn't by choice and then you know then there was they were massacred at the sand creek massacre under the protection of the government and truly to be able to empathize what does that feel like what must that feel like um because you can't sort of empathize with

73:18 other people without first empathizing with the people close around you and so it seems to me like a necessary step but is instead of saying like wow that's so big like how do we how do we move into right relationship and correct you know hundreds of years of um sort of oppressive policies and things that you know maybe we didn't personally have responsibility for but we also still have the opportunity to be part of kind of the

73:49 reconciliation and they hear the healing and i believe that has to begin with empathy and so when we really truly practice and learn empathy within our own small bubbles and families we build the skills the capacity to be able to do that in the rest of the world and and also i mean the the whole thing about like thinking about our needs like if i if i'm

74:20 39 and a half i'm still learning how to identify and name my own needs and truly acknowledge that like oh yep yup yup every single day nourishing myself is a need period if once i can start recognizing and honoring my own needs that you know just as much as any of us were made in the image of our creator that i'm also worthy of being cared for and i begin to kind of care for myself

74:51 then then i can also begin to truly truly care for others and see the needs of others in a way that kind of leads to kind of meaningful change so that's the that's the kind of hope i'm moving forward and operating out of well i am going to bring your father's prediction true and give you the last word on that because i don't get any better so yes thank you thank you so much for being here and

75:21 uh and and really sharing how deep this work has been for you because it's it's true it's it's obvious how deeply this has touched you and and the kind of transformation that you're seeing in your family and how that fits with your values and how you're taking that out into the broader world as well um it it makes me so excited to see so thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with us

75:45 thank you and so if you would like to take the team in your triggers workshop as well or just find out more information about that you can do that at your parentingmojo.com forward slash taming your triggers [Music] you