Big Feelings… Real Tools

Lisa (00:00:00) - We as parents need to make the distinction between experiences that are uncomfortable for our kids and experiences that are unmanageable for our kids. Most of how kids learn to navigate the world is by learning to navigate difficulty.

Sarah (00:00:16) - Hey peeps, welcome to the Flexible Neurotic Podcast. I'm your host, doctor Sarah Milken. Yeah, you heard that right. I'm a real PhD doctor. Long, long ago, like last fucking year, I was sitting in the midlife funk wondering, was this it for me? That day, I realized I needed to get off my ass and start my midlife remix. I dusted off my PhD, wiped the menopause sweat off my forehead, grabbed my golden shit shovel, and started digging deep to all my midlife bitches. It's not just luck, coffee, and hormones that get you through your midlife remix. It's action steps. Let's do this. Hi peeps, it's me, Doctor Sarah Malkin with the Flexible Neurotic podcast, The Midlife Self Reinvention Podcast, where we talk about all the inspiring Uggs and fabulosity of midlife.

Sarah (00:01:12) - This is a new mini sowed golden nugget little little nugget episode for all of you. I go back and do some of my best episodes and take the nuggets that I just think are the most fabulous and important that we might have forgotten with our midlife brains. So you heard me right. I go into my midlife library of my past episodes and bring you golden nuggets about midlife motivation, empty nesting, health, wellness, all the things flexible, neurotic style. Okay, so today's a golden nugget from the flexible, neurotic archive that you will not want to miss. We are summarizing expert information on parenting teenagers, understanding their emotions and helping them to express and regulate themselves. This is an important one. And those of you with teenage kids, you know how crucial and at times this can be so difficult. This episode was so, so informative for understanding how our kids are feeling and supporting them through such tender and hormonal times in their lives. While especially for us, if we're going through midlife at the same time, my guess is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association.

Sarah (00:02:24) - She's a best selling author, speaker, and podcast host. Her name is Doctor Lisa Damore. She knows so much about parenting from her own research and experience as a mother raising two teenagers herself. She has her own clinical practice and specializes in child and adolescent development, family mental health, and adult well-being. This episode was packed with amazing information that all parents should hear. Make sure to check out the full episode. Midlife parents managing the teenage buffet of, quote, big feelings and real tools, which is also linked in the show notes. So let's get into it.

Lisa (00:03:02) - But I will say, and I'm sure you saw this also in your work, it feels like this was under way before the pandemic, that one of the questions I raised in the book is whether the wellness industry doesn't have a heavy hand in this of kind of marketing the idea or selling the idea that there is some emotional Zen out there, and you can get there and your kids can get there, and then you can stay there.

Lisa (00:03:22) - And I think that that may have set up an unrealistic and actually hugely unhelpful understanding of where emotion fits into our lives, and especially where negative emotions fit into our lives. And so I think that we were underway with this idea that, you know, you know, you're mentally healthy if you feel good. And so you got to try to feel good or not get upset. This book, if I if I had one thing I would say that I'm trying to do in the book. I'm trying to bring negative emotions back into the fold. You know that they are welcome. First of all, they're arriving whether we want them or not, but to treat them as, not something we need to be scared of as parents, not something we need to actually work to try to prevent or quickly banish, but to understand where all emotions and bluntly, especially the negative ones, where they fit into our lives, where they fit into our kids maturation, and to have a good set of strategies for handling them.

Lisa (00:04:13) - So we don't have to be scared when they come along.

Sarah (00:04:15) - Oh my God, we have to unpack that. There's like 17,000 good points in there. And I'm like, oh my God, I live that my whole life. I think what's also interesting is that, you know, when I was growing up and I failed the test or bombed a quiz, I couldn't text my mom like we had payphones. Yeah. And so I think this immediate and 24 hour access has really changed the way we process information. Like, I would have to sit with that all day, get through my day, go to the rest of my classes, chit chat with my friends, or go cry in the library or do whatever I needed to do. Otherwise I was in the courtyard like putting money in the payphone, trying to call my mom, which never really works like my husband. Sort of like, why are you so available all the time? you know, why are the kids texting you about things that are happening throughout the day that would normally be talked about at.

Sarah (00:05:13) - Dinner time. And he has a really good point. Not everything needs to be solved at that very second. What are your thoughts on that book.

Lisa (00:05:21) - Is kids talking with us or kids talking with us about what has made them upset? Is one solution to helping them manage upset feelings. It is one of many, many, many possible solutions, and it's often not the best option. And that idea that getting your kid to tell you what's wrong and then you trying to help them with it should be put on equal footing with 20 other options for helping kids feel better, and some may be better. That idea also has sort of disappeared from the culture. What I am taking care of parents all the time, and I and what I'm hearing all the time is like the solution is my kid is upset. My kid tells me what's wrong. I help my kid with what? Not a bad solution. Crying is a form of expression that brings relief. Talking to your friends about it, finding a way to like crack up about it.

Lisa (00:06:09) - Like there's all of these other I'm going to call them regulatory strategies, right? That's what the whole book is about helping kids regulate emotion, but they get shoved to the back by a kid's interest in discussing it with the parent. And also our belief is parents like, oh, this must be the best solution. And so it's one of many. It has its place, but we don't want it to become the default for our kid or for us when it's time to regulate an emoji of teenagers, right? The beauty of teenagers is that once they get past 14, they have the cognitive capacity to have that conversation where we're going to talk about my anxiety about how you were going to react to what I needed to tell you. And they can do that. They can stand back from themselves. They can stand back from the situation and observe it from me this way. And one of the things I've observed, and I feel like I've observed it more in recent decades, is teenagers asking to be excused for behavior, or parents excusing kids behavior because there's a big feeling behind it, like I said, that a horrible thing because I was mad and that that somehow I think in some situations, people the kid feels or the parent feels, well, if you were angry, then we can't touch what you did right like that.

Lisa (00:07:24) - I'm not going to question your feeling, and what I would say and what you did in that interaction is there's the feeling and there's how it's expressed. So all feelings are welcome, right? We can't get around, you know, feelings are going to happen. How they get expressed though needs to be managed. So your kid can be super mad at you, but they cannot trash you. Your kid can say, I'm really angry or I'm not in a position to talk right now because I'm so mad at you. That's completely acceptable. But you can't trash people. You can't hit people. There's all sorts of deeply upset. The issue is not the emotion the issue is about. So it's not like it's okay. You know? It's not like there's trauma or nothing. The kid is very upset for some reason or another. And we have lots of ideas about why people have various abilities to cope with difficulty. He got upset, but he was able to cope with it. He was able to soothe himself enough, or he was able to distract himself enough, or he was able to comfort himself enough that he got through it without feeling shattered by the experience.

Lisa (00:08:24) - Whereas the kid who comes back traumatized, something was, you know, the nature of his endowment or something about him or the experience, maybe mapping onto past experience bursts. And so what we want to be mindful of is situations we don't like for our kids to be distressed, but actually our kids can handle usually quite a bit of distress and learn to cope with it and even grow through that. But we don't like trauma. And the reason that comes up in the book is that I am really trying to make the case that most of the time, it does not harm your kid to be distressed. The exception being if that distress is happening at such a scale that it causes trauma and trauma does harm people. It makes neurological changes. It can have lasting effects. It also is something people can come back from, right? We know that we are great at treating it. We understand it much better than we used to. But there is a critical distinction between upsetting and traumatic in terms of its impact on the individual and how anxious we as parents need to be about our kids experiencing distress.

Sarah (00:09:26) - I think it's amazingly important to really see that difference because like as a mom, like when I would get those letters from sleepaway camp, right? Or I'd have like my call, that's once every two weeks or whatever I would be like at a level ten as soon as I heard something negative and my husband's like, what's wrong with you? He said the kid was mean. He didn't say the kid was like terrorizing him. But I think as a parent, it's very hard to turn off that all red flag button or all the the emergency button, especially, I think, as a mom, because you hear somebody being mean to your kid or your kid doesn't feel comfortable and your immediate response is, let me save that.

Lisa (00:10:10) - Yeah, absolutely. We're wired for that. Right. We're wired to protect our kids, and there's value in that if there's real danger afoot. The challenge and the difficulty, and I'm hearing this from educators everywhere, is that most of how kids learn to navigate the world is by learning to navigate difficulty.

Lisa (00:10:29) - And we, as parents, need to make the distinction between experiences that are uncomfortable for our kids and experiences that are unmanageable for our kids. If we are stepping in and preventing uncomfortable situations, or solving them before they arise, or solving them for the kid, here is the net effect. The net effect is our kid ends up with very little freedom and very little autonomy. And the reason for that is, if I am a kid who feels like I cannot handle discomfort, or I need to know everything is going to be okay before I take it on, what is available to me becomes extremely narrow. I can't do a lot of things. I can't go a lot of places, I can't try stuff this unfamiliar, and my world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Whereas if as parents we can think, okay, it's uncomfortable, not unmanageable. So my job is actually to help my kid build distress tolerance, right? Do this thing and actually build coping and build the ability to withstand it. And I have two entire chapters on how to help your kid build with the stress tolerance.

Lisa (00:11:36) - The gift you give your kid is freedom that they're like, I'm going to go to this place I've never been before, and it might be lousy, and I'm just going to take that chance because I can tolerate lousy, right? Like, that's that's really the gift we want our give our kids. So I say that all by way of saying when we're trying to get our kids out of uncomfortable situations, it's a loving gesture. It is a well-meaning gesture. And what I just want to help, like, kind of just spin out a few more steps is it's a well-meaning gesture with unintended consequences. And so what's the other well-meaning gesture that we could use in that moment instead? And that is really can my kid handle it or can I my kid, handle it with my help? And if they can, then my well-meaning gesture is to confer the capacity for tolerance, tolerating distress which comes with.

Sarah (00:12:23) - Hey peeps, it's me again, okay? That conversation was such a good reminder for even me. Even as a half empty nester with a 17.5 year old daughter still at home and a 19 year old in college.

Sarah (00:12:35) - Teens and young adults are up against a lot, which can cause stress and tension that leads to a whole range of emotions. The important thing in Lisa's practice is encouraging kids to express how they are feeling, and letting them know that their emotions are not bad. Even the quote negative ones. I love when she says that crying brings relief. It does. I mean, come on, you guys know with midlife brains and hearts and emotions, it's a release and it's a natural expression. It's the opposite of suppression and a crucial part of the equation when it comes to emotional regulation. I mean, I've already cried today. So talking to your friends, learning to laugh about something that's all important for these teenagers, it's all about the solutions and making sure our kids are aware of the options. This is why I love Lisa's work so much. It's so practical and so straightforward. She reminds us that all feelings are welcome, and it's important for our kids to know this. It's how the emotions are expressed that gets tricky.

Sarah (00:13:33) - This is the part that needs to be managed. This is where we need to guide them by teaching them options for this. If they are angry, it's okay to take a minute to cool off, but it's not okay to hit people. And again, it's not the emotion, it's how it's expressed. Giving kids tools to navigate their emotions is giving them tools to navigate difficulty, and this is sometimes what will set them up for success throughout their entire lives. Lisa reiterates that his parents. It's our job to teach our kids the distinction between experiences that are uncomfortable and experiences that are unmanageable. If something is unmanageable, of course we need to step in and help, but we cannot save them from learning to manage their own emotions. Mid lifers, don't worry about digging through your old notes from all this amazing info we got today. You can go to my website at dot. The flexible neurotic.com search Lisa Damour and there's a full set of show notes and you can listen to the full length episode there too.

Sarah (00:14:31) - Stay tuned for more golden nuggets that you probably forgot in the midst of midlife parenting. Teens becoming or maybe already are, an empty nester career and so many other things. Okay, there are three things you can do. First, subscribe to the podcast. Second, share it with some midlife friends who might like midlife shit. And third, write an Apple review. Writing reviews is kind of annoying. It's an extra step. I totally get it. DM me, you know, I always respond. And of course follow my Instagram at the flexible, neurotic duh. Love you talk soon.