Parenting and the Nervous System
Welcome everybody. How are you today? We’re going to talk about healing our nervous system today. Kind of a big deal.
The nervous system, which includes fight or flight response, our subconscious beliefs, the filter through which we see our surroundings and the perception we have. The state of your nervous system directly affects the state of your parenting.
That’s why it’s so critical that we talk about and learn about this. You need to be aware of your beliefs and thoughts and how they affect your nervous system. You need to pull them out of your subconscious.
The more you understand the nervous system and the impact it has on yourself and your children, you will be able to see how it’s going to impact your ability to change the way you parent. We’re going to drop into our body today and look at parenting from a different perspective.
Mindset is critical. We all have emotions which are happening whether you like it or not. They’re a result of the thoughts you are thinking that in turn cause a chemical reaction in your body. That’s the emotion. It’s happening in your body, but most people aren’t taking the time to feel them. Those situations outside of you that activate you, something inside your body sees them as a threat.
My kid’s messy room, for me, was a huge threat. Or the kids fighting felt like a threat. These threats are things that your nervous system perceives as not okay, not safe or not something you want to be happening.
Because of this people tend to go into protection mode, which is a beautiful thing. You want your body to function like this, it’s a heavily engrained protection mechanism that kept your ancestors alive. We might judge our bodies and say, what is going on? I really wish my body wouldn’t perceive the kids fighting, the messy room, the sink full of dishes, or the kids not listening to me as a threat. But this has served humans for generations. It’s kept us alive.
The problem is that those dangerous situations often aren’t dangerous. But your body has been trained to think of them as scary, dangerous, unsafe, or just problematic. So it kicks in the sympathetic nervous system, which makes you have a flood of emotions. Maybe we’re feeling fear, anxiety, worry, concern, anger, whatever it is.
After the threat is over, theoretically you should be able to feel those emotions and then let them go and you’ll go back to an emotional equilibrium, or the parasympathetic nervous system. I’ll switch it back and forth between the scientific language and the layman’s language, but this parasympathetic nervous system should, theoretically take over and you should be able to calm down.
Emotional Equilibrium
You go from mad to sad. I’m going to use mad as my chosen word to represent whatever negative emotions you might feel and sad for the equalizing emotion. Once you go from mad to sad your body calms down enough to realize that the threat’s over.
But that all happens because of your ability to consciously feel your unconscious flood of emotions. You have to notice, see, and perceive the emotions, not judge them, only feel them. When you do that, the emotions metabolize and you are able to move on.
These principles of nervous system activation and emotional regulation are the root of what is causing most parents to react in a certain way when their kids do something. I haven’t met a parent that hasn’t acknowledged that they have patterns, triggers, and certain situations that activate them.
The goal is not to solve these problems immediately, but to understand them and the reasons why you might feel triggered by a certain situation.
I want to just remind you that emotions are very important. They have a very important purpose. They move you into action. Emotions are the things that fuel you to make the decisions and take the actions that you do. As a parent, you want to know exactly what emotions are fueling your life, because if you’re going to move from correction to connection, you need to be fueling yourself with good fuel. Just like you want to fuel your body with good food, so that you can have the kind of energy that you want to move throughout our life and be healthy and not get sick.
You want to do the exact same thing with your emotions. Let me be clear, all of your ‘negative’ emotions aren’t really bad. They’re just there to teach and guide you away from unhealthy or counterproductive situations. It is important to notice those negative emotions, because they can be huge catalysts to motivate you to actually start changing the way you are showing up.
To recap, there’s no such thing as a bad or a good emotion. All emotions are just there. They all have an important purpose. They’re all information saying, “hey, this is what’s happening in your body right now. Just in case you didn’t know.”
It’s your little indicator. They are there to protect you. They are there to give you a more full experience of your life. Your job as humans is to master the art of feeling emotions so you don’t get stuck in activated nervous system that leads you to stay in that fight or flight mode.
Nothing Is Wrong With You As A Parent
When you’ve been frustrated, when the kids are fighting, when you’ve gotten overwhelmed by the dirty house, it makes sense. There’s nothing wrong with you. Those situations and emotions are just your body sending a signal to you saying, “hey, there’s something happening in here. If you’ll just take a second, I’d love for you to understand.”
Your nervous system is actually responsible for the success of your life. All of the different parts of the nervous system, the activation, the fight or flight, all of it is there to serve you and can be credited for the success of your life. The more aware you become of it, the better you become at understanding why you’re having the responses, the better you are going to be able to show up as that connected, calm, confident parent.
The function of the nervous system is to perceive your environment and coordinate the behavior of all other cells. So the nervous system shapes and impacts the way you interact with the world, with other people, how you live your life and how you parent and as a result, it forms your reality.
You have specific thoughts and specific beliefs and specific emotions. All of those thoughts, beliefs, and emotions impact the way you react and act in your life. The way you act and react in your life directly contributes to the results you are getting in your life.
Your nervous system forms your personal reality, your perception of the world. It controls many things in your body, from your temperature and digestion to your eye dilation.
So, yes, you want to be aware of your thoughts. But as you’re doing your STEAR models, you also want to be very aware of your emotions. Choosing to think a new thought will not be enough if you don’t believe the thought, if your emotions don’t match your thought.
If you aren’t working alongside your nervous system, then you’re not going to be able to make the sustainable, permanent shifts that you want to. That’s why you can’t simply just think your way out of a situation, there’s more to it. You can’t out think your nervous system, you can’t out willpower your subconscious brain.
The Nervous System
The quality of your life is related to the quality and the health of your nervous system. So You want to take really good care ofy our nervous system.
The problem is, most of us have never been educated on how to take care of our nervous system. Today you’re going to bridge that gap. To do that, you need to not only go into the cognitive part of your situation, but the emotional, the feeling part of your body as well.
The most important thing you can do throughout this journey (and throughout life in general) is to provide safety for yourself, which will then allow you to create safety for your children, which allows them to grow up in a place that they’re fully seeing and processing and growing emotionally as well.
This concept is similar to when you are on an airplane in an emergency and you have to put your safety mask on first, before you try to put it on your kids. In order to help your become more emotionally intelligent and know how to process their emotions, you have to learn how to do it first.
You have to be the example, the model of emotional intelligence for your kids. When your kids are totally emotionally dysregulated, they need to have a certain level of cognitive ability to be able to self regulate completely on their own. Until then, it is your job to help them emotionally regulate.
It is your job to create a sense of safety and security for them to be able to feel their emotions in a place where it’s safe. You create that safety bubble. Within your emotional regulation journey, it is vital to give yourself compassion and to honor your journey and where you are so that you can learn to respond in a different way. You can’t make tangible progress until you have made peace with and are ready to move on from your current situation.
This is going to change your parenting. You have to make sense of why you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing. I want to just offer that everything that you have experienced in the past the perceptions you have about the messy bedroom or the kids fighting or the talking back or the temper tantrums, whatever it is, default perceptions, they are an adaptive response.
Beating Yourself Up About Your Emotions Is Pointless
Your body is trying to help you out, trying to cope with something that feels scary or dangerous. There’s this concept called neuro-ception within psychology. It’s a concept that describes what your body does when it’s surveying your situations and environment, looking out in the world for what’s wrong, what’s dangerous, what’s not working.
Your brain bases its filter (or its protocol) to decide what’s working or what’s dangerous on past experiences. This happens without you even knowing it, it’s a totally subconscious program running in your brain. So much of your life is on autopilot until you get conscious of it, until you stop and slow down enough, uh, to say, “okay, this is happening. This is my body screaming at me. I’m so anxious and so frustrated, I’m so angry. It’s trying to tell me something.”
It’s totally normal if at first you have a really critical voice, this is what I had. I was constantly beating myself up. I remember when somebody offered this idea that I could be gentle with myself and that would actually lead to change I totally rejected the idea. I knew what I was doing wasn’t working, but I was really, really critical and hard on myself.
I was very much a perfectionist, and I expected high things of myself. I was very critical of myself and really hard on my kids. One of the first things I had to change within myself to improve my parenting was that critical inner voice. I had to stop beating myself up in order to stop being critical towards my kids.
If you have a really critical voice, that is not actually a problem. It only becomes something concerning when you get stuck in that state, when you get stuck in the frustration or the anger, the fear, or the negative, self talk loops.
Human beings are supposed to fluctuate into different states of being. That’s normal. We’re just supposed to return to equilibrium after feeling those emotions. You’re not supposed to stay stuck in activated states for long periods of time. Emotions are supposed to help you, but sometimes they become maladaptive. That means it’s not the right response for what’s actually happening, or it lasts too long.
Let’s say something happens to you. Maybe you get pushback from the kids, or they give you an attitude, or you feel threatened or uncertain about something. If your brain is going into fight or flight mode in response to those situations, that is likely a sign that those emotions have become maladaptive. If this keeps happening and you keep perceiving the situation as problematic, you don’t fully regulate from the experience, then it becomes maladaptive.
From those maladaptive emotions, it is easy to start living in a near constant state of alert or alarm. thinking you are almost constantly in a threatening situation. The emotions get stuck in your body if you’re not fully feeling them. The thoughts become programmed in your subconscious mind. You’re not really aware of this consciously, but your body, your nervous system, is using those memories as filters through which you see the world.
As your nervous system is on the lookout to protect you, it’s using these old memories to gauge how to respond to the world, how to decide if it’s safe or not. In a situation like this, you have a faulty neuroception, and it can tell you that lots of things are a threat or unsafe.
If your subconscious believes that you aren’t safe that you definitely aren’t perceiving the world in the way you want to so that you can stay calm and connected and confident as a parent and show up the way you want to for your kids.
Moving forward with these subconscious beliefs in your life, many things become unsafe. It’s all because you have this maladaptive/neuroceptive response. When this happens. for example, you might know cognitively that the messy house is not as important as your relationship with your children. You know this consciously.
But that conscious knowledge is often not very helpful in the moment. You lose your cool again, and you yell after you’ve promised yourself that you’re not going to do it anymore. you yell again, or you ground them, or you get passive aggressive, or you throw up your hands and go buy some ice cream and watch tv all day and give up on the whole thing, even though you promised yourself you weren’t going to do that anymore.
This doesn’t happen because there’s something wrong with you. Not at all. It’s because your body is trying to take care of you. It makes total sense. Your nervous system is trying to fulfill its purpose. The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment, and then based on that data that it’s stored away in our brain, make an assessment, is this situation safe or not?
There’s a reason why your nervous system reacts the way that it does. You don’t always have to find out the exact reason. But just knowing that there is a reason is extremely validating. Then you can calm down and stop beating the crap out of yourself for having responded again in a way that was inconsistent to the way you want to show up.
The work you want to do is first, become aware, shift our awareness, and provide a new perception for that situation. You want to create lots of safety surrounding that situation for yourself so that in the future, that situation will be perceived as safe to your nervous system.
Be at peace and be kind to yourself and realize this is normal, this does not mean anything’s wrong. You are not crazy. You are not flawed. There’s nothing inherently morally wrong with you. This is just your body trying to keep you safe. Awareness married with compassion is the first step towards lasting progress.
You have to be really kind to yourself to be able to shift anything. If you’re judging yourself and you’re beating yourself up, you definitely aren’t putting enough energy towards creating lasting change in your life. Drop that judgement so that your nervous system can calm down.
Drop The Judgement
Once you’re in that place of acceptance, your nervous system is calm. Your prefrontal cortex, which is the conscious part, your logical thinking, can stay online. You can now start to look at the situation and emotions from a new perspective. You can start to intentionally get present and provide safety around the situation.
None of that can happen without the awareness and the safety. Kids can scream and cry. They can be so upset when we take away their xbox. They can break curfew. They can yell at each other. They can keep their rooms messy. With this new sense of safety and awareness you can stay regulated and feeling safe as you perceive all those situations and respond exactly how you want to.
You’re not just going to let them get away with the bad behavior. You’re going to let them experience you in a new way. You’re not going to become a passive parent. You’re going to allow yourself to experience those previously triggering situation differently and interact differently and have beautiful boundaries and beautiful limits from a place that’s truly connected. When you are in a place of safety, you are connected to your highest thinking, your highest version of yourself. So now you can go in and connect with their highest version.
None of that’s possible if you are activated. This is how you make the shift. This is how you experience these situations different. You get a new set of lenses to look through. You do this through an increased awareness and the shifting of the mind and the body.
To recap, your bodies have surveillance systems to make sure you are safe, to make sure you stay alive. This happens unconsciously and looks to your past to create the lens through which you see the world, your measuring stick to know when you are safe and when you’re not.
Your surveillance system might not be adapting correctly to measure when you’re safe or when you’re in danger. It happens to every human on the planet at one point or another, I promise. And in order to course correct, you just need to check in with your body and feel these emotions so that you can process them and start responding in an adaptive way instead of a maladaptive way.
I’m going to end this post differently by just saying goodbye and wishing you all of the best with your parenting today. We’ll see you next time.
