Strategies To Help Parents Manage Emotions

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Hi everyone, welcome to the show — I am Dr. Nicole, and today’s show is going to be focused more on the emotional experiences of us as parents, specifically difficult or uncomfortable emotions that we may experience in relation to our children or just the parenting process, and strategies to help manage those emotions better. I talk often about how a prerequisite for helping our kids to manage their emotions is for us, the adults, to be doing a good job of being aware of and managing our own because that allows their children to manage their emotions better. And I think that this is something that even if we’re experienced as parents — we’re always working on and always getting better with as we go along on our parenting journey.

So my guest today is a good friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Joan Rosenberg. She’s a psychologist who specializes in helping people identify and manage unpleasant feelings more effectively. So let me tell you a little bit more about her — Dr. Rosenberg is a best-selling author, consultant, master clinician, media host and a cutting edge psychologist who is known as an innovative thinker, speaker and trainer. She’s a two-time TEDx speaker and member of the Association of Transformational Leaders. She’s been recognized for her thought leadership and influence in personal development.

Dr. Rosenberg has been featured in the documentaries ‘I AM’, ‘The Miracle Mindset’, ‘Pursuing Happiness’ and ‘The Hidden Epidemic’. She’s been seen on CNN’s American Morning, The OWN Network and PBS, as well as appearances in radio interviews in many major markets. She’s a licensed psychologist in California and speaks often on how to develop confidence, emotional strength, resilience, achieving emotional, conversational and relationship mastery and integrating neuroscience and psychotherapy in suicide prevention. Joan is also an air force veteran and a professor of graduate psychology at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, California. Her latest book, ’90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience and Authenticity comes out February 12 and I’m excited to have her on the show today to talk about the book. Welcome to the show Dr. Rosenberg.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Thank you so much, Dr. Beurkens. Thank you so much, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I’m so excited, your new book is coming out like right now — tomorrow. And I’m excited to be able to share what you focus on in this book with my community and my listeners. While you didn’t write the book specifically for parents, the reality is — as parents, we experience such a wide range of both great and joyful emotions in parenting and also the stuff that we don’t often like to talk about, are the more unpleasant and challenging emotions that go along with parenting any child — especially when we’ve got a child that maybe has some disabilities, some behavioral challenges, you know those kinds of things. So I’m really excited to dive in and have you share the information, the strategy because I think this is going to be really helpful to our listeners. So I want to start out with this idea that you talk about in your book that there are 8 specific unpleasant feelings that all of us experience. And when we learn to be aware of those, we can manage them better, is that right?

Dr. Rosenberg:

Yes. I definitely agree with that. So let’s dive into that right away. And it’s not that we just have 8 unpleasant feelings, we have far more than that. I have chosen the 8 that I will touch on in a moment because they’re the most common feeling reaction to things not turning out the way we need or turning out the way we want. So the 8 feelings are: Sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment and frustration. So those 8 are common to almost all of our experiences.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And even as you’re saying those, there’s such a — there’s a feeling that even comes over me listening to you list off those 8 emotions. I think those are things we all can really say — Yup, I experience those. It’s kind of a visceral reaction we have to even hearing you mention those 8.

Dr. Rosenberg:

I believe that. And sometimes what it does is it calls up memories and so obviously we get a little bit flooded, bodywise with the reaction. Makes sense to me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So I think I’m putting my parent hat on now, and thinking — yeah, I’ve experienced all 8 of those in relation to myself as a parent. Either feeling those things about myself as a parent or my skills and things I’ve done as a parent and also feeling those things in relation to my children and things that are going on with them or ways that they are interacting with me. So I think that parents can definitely relate to those. Why is it important to kind of hone in on those and be aware of those? You mentioned that these can be sort of the underlying feelings that we’re experiencing that maybe can lead to some of our behavior. Why is it important to be aware of some of those as they come up?

Dr. Rosenberg:

You know there are so many answers to that question, let me see if I can touch on a couple, especially as it relates to parenting. Think of your children as developing to your emotional range. So if there’s an angry parent in the home, or a rageful parent in the home — at some point, the children growing up in that home are going to learn that they too can go to that range. Or if you have a parent that is more depressed or sad or withdrawn, then they learn that and they kind of learn the constricted nature of expressing oneself.

And so what becomes really important for kids in relation to their parents and parents in relation to their children is to have that broad range of feelings that doesn’t go to either extreme where somebody is shutdown and withdrawn — because then the children will learn that strategy as a way to manage their experience, nor to go to this other extreme of raging and explosive anger. And so it’s super important for parents to modulate that so that children can develop, if you will, a nice, healthy range — the pleasant and the unpleasant. That would be one big answer for that. A second has to do with that it’s also important for parents to model that. We also want parents to regulate well because we want them to be able to create a safe space for their children to grow up.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I think that there are several things that you touched on there that I want to unpack a little bit. One is that when we as adults allow ourselves to experience the range of emotions, that gives kids the space to feel like that’s okay, and for them to experience their emotions. And I think that’s really critical. A lot of times, as parents or just adults — our kids expressing or expressing unpleasant feelings makes us uncomfortable, right?

And I liked what you said there — you said kids need to be able to experience the range of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions because that’s a part of life, and sometimes I think as parents we get sort of confused or overly invested in the idea that our kids need to be in this pleasant range all the time. And if they’re not, if they’re experiencing unpleasant things — it makes us really uncomfortable. And what you’re saying is no — we all actually need to be able to recognize and embrace the full range of emotions, right?

Dr. Rosenberg:

Absolutely true, yes. So let me take that one step further with you. So not only do I want a parent to be able to, in the moment, be able to handle their unpleasant feelings. I also want the parent to have access to the things that caused them pain when they were younger. And the reason for that — It’s not so they’re overwhelmed and blown over by it. But the reason for that is so that they actually can develop a greater empathy for where their child is. So again, it allows them to model tolerating pain and it helps them develop a capacity to empathize more deeply. And to your point of not wanting to shut down on a child’s feelings, or they should just be always in a pleasant state — I will tell you that I see the kids in adulthood that didn’t learn to manage their feelings well as kids.

There is an experience that psychologists like to call frustration tolerance. So think, it’s the ability to go through things that leave someone feeling sad or angry or disappointed. Some of the feelings I’ve already named. And if a child doesn’t learn how to handle those feelings when they’re young — then there’s a carry-over effect into adulthood. Then they don’t handle relationship breakups well, they don’t handle things happening in employment settings well. You can imagine all the different ways this plays out where a child who didn’t learn this stuff with their parents in childhood now has the carryover effect into adulthood. So now this becomes a very important thing for parents then to be able to tolerate someone else’s emotional discomfort.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yes, so it’s sort of a double challenge for us as parents, right? We need to be able to recognize and learn to tolerate our own uncomfortable or unpleasant feelings and we need to be able to recognize and tolerate and actually embrace our kids’ unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings. And some parents might be listening and going, “Oh my gosh, I’m not good at that for myself — I’m definitely not good at that for my kid.” And I know you have lots of strategies that you teach people and work on with people for how to do that, right?

So let’s get into that a little bit because I want to give people some practical things. And you talk in the book about anxiety and ways to manage that because if there’s one thing that I hear a lot of parents in my work talk about, it is this sense of feeling really anxious around their role or their job as parents — Am I doing this right? Am I screwing my kid up? Am I cut out for this, is my kid ever going to be okay? On and on and on, there are so many uncertainties with parenting and it creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear in people, especially if parents already were more prone to that before they became parents, right? There’s nothing like having a kid that will take a higher anxiety level that you already have and exponentially ratchet that up. So share some ideas or some strategies about how parents can be thinking about or handling their anxiety better — or maybe even how that can work on experiencing less of it.

Dr. Rosenberg:

I want to back us up one step and then take us to the anxiety question. And that has to do with how do you manage the feelings in the first place? So I’ll try to do this super quick so I can get us to the anxiety question. I think of using a formula to be able to manage your emotional state. And the formula is one choice, 8 feelings, 90 seconds. So the one choice is an openness and a willingness to be aware of and in touch with as much of your feeling experience as you can bear or is possible. So the whole idea here is you’re leaning into awareness and you’re moving away from avoidance. Awareness over avoidance. That’s the one choice.

The second is the 8 feelings. Now I’ve mentioned the 8 feelings, so I don’t think I have to go back over those. And then the 90 seconds piece is to understand that basically we know what we’re feeling emotionally through bodily sensation in our bodies. So think of face flush and feeling the redness or the heat that comes with embarrassment. Or think of sadness. And with sadness maybe there’s a dropdown feeling in the chest or a heaviness in the chest. Or disappointments, heaviness plus the dropdown. Or something else. It’s different for every person, but if you think of when you feel something pleasant or unpleasant, it shows up in your body first. We get this kind of experience here and then a nano-second till we give a name to it, and then we know because of that heat in our face — we feel embarrassed.

So the whole key here then is to ride the waves of these feelings, these bodily sensations that are being activated by a rush of biochemicals into our bloodstreams. And what I want parents to understand or everyone who is listening to understand, is that this rush and then flush out of the bloodstream of these biochemicals lasts roughly around 90 seconds, or an upper range of around 90 seconds. Most times, it doesn’t even last that long. Now, trauma and tragedy — separate from that. But everyday common reactions, think 60-90 seconds at best and then a strategy you can use is just stay present to the feeling, notice you are having reaction and then just notice what you are experiencing in your body and the key here is you’re really tolerating the bodily sensation — and it’s the bodily sensation that typically is hard for people and that’s why we want to move away from feeling. So that’s the switch I want people to understand: If you can handle your bodily sensations, you can handle the feeling.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I love that, that’s such a powerful framework for thinking about that, because it makes it feel doable. You know in the moment — when we’re experiencing unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings, you’re right, that our first knee-jerk reaction is: Avoid this, make this go away! And you’re saying no, be aware with it, sit with it and know that it’s not going to last forever, because in our minds we tell ourselves a story that how I’m feeling right now in this moment, this uncomfortable bodily sensation or whatever feeling I’m experiencing — that that’s never going to go away, and what you’re saying is that no, it’s really 60-90 seconds and if we can just ride that out, we can see that through and come out on the other side.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Absolutely true and the benefits are many. You’re more congruent, you feel more authentically yourself, it actually leads you to feeling stronger and you gain insights. So sometimes if you allow yourself just that pause and stay present to what you’re experiencing and the bodily sensations that you want to move away from, stay present to that and you actually start to gain insight — sometimes on what a decision you need to make, on something you want to express or an action you want to take. So That’s the important thing there. So I just want people to start out with the strategy.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

What I’m thinking about is how important this is as parents when we are in a situation with our kids, where whatever it is that’s going on is eliciting one of these unpleasant feelings in us and how when we react in the midst of that bodily sensation, that’s when we tend to say and do things that later on we recognize, that really wasn’t how I wanted to handle that with my kid — and it’s occurring to me as you’re talking that one of the really great practical outcomes with our kids of being able to ride these 60-90 seconds waves, to do what you said — to pause there, let ourselves come through that and then respond or engage or whatever needs to happen with our kids, and that we’re much less likely then to regret how we handled that. Does that sound right?

Dr. Rosenberg:

Oh, a 100%, spot on, Nicole. And the key here is, in fact I talk about this in the book, that you don’t — especially if you’re angry, you don’t respond until… as opposed to… most parents are responding up here (hand motion to high range wave) when they’re in the intensity of the anger. And my view is hang tight, you don’t open your mouth until you get here. (hand motion of low range wave) So yes, if a parent can pause long enough, and again most of the time it’s not even in the 60-90 seconds — it’s brief. You move through it but you don’t open your mouth until you’re on the other side of the wave.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I love that.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Yup. Mouth closed, 90 seconds — 60-90 seconds, talk when you’re at the bottom of the wave. And it’s understanding that it’s one or more feelings, it’s not all eight at once. Maybe it’s one or more, it could be sadness and anger, disappointment and anger or whatever it might be, but it’s not going to be every one of the 8 feelings, every time. But let me go back to your anxiety question. I have 8 different ways of looking at anxiety. And most of the time, I consider anxiety not anxiety. So that’s the first thing for a parent to understand.

And I would actually encourage people to start using more accurate language because if we use better language for our feelings, then we actually feel differently. It gives a different meaning and the meaning elicits something different for each of us. So fear is danger in the moment right now. So if somebody isn’t facing that lion or that tiger in front of them and they’re not really in danger, I would rather a parent not use the word fear, and not teach the child fear. If we’re truly in the face of danger or life-threat, then of course we’re going to feel fearful. And it’s a natural reaction, it’s nothing I’m going to take away, it’s normal for every one of us, it’s part of how we survive.

Anxiety — psychology likes to talk about diffused apprehension of the future. But most of the time, when we talk about — it’s an uncertain future, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Most of that time, we’re actually feeling vulnerable, which means I could get hurt. And so I would rather a parent use the word vulnerable, especially when they’re parenting children. That the child’s not fearful — again it’s common to use the words fearful or anxious, but they might be feeling vulnerable, they might be feeling like they could get hurt. And the beauty of understanding — kind of the way I laid out this 90 seconds approach is: If someone can handle the other 7 feelings that I named, then they can handle vulnerability, which is the 8th — and that’s in circumstances which we don’t have control over and it’s in circumstances which we choose in to.

So let’s say for instance I’m parenting a young child who is going out for a team sport and the child has to perform at a certain level, but they haven’t quite hit that level yet and they’re angry and they’re sad and they’re not sure if they’re going to make it — well now you’re helping the child handle, in this case, the vulnerability — I could get hurt, it might not work out, which means I might get disappointed, or I might feel sad, or I might be angry or embarrassed. And if you know that that child can handle those other feelings, then the child can go pursue what they want. So think of anxiety, I’m circling all the way back, think of anxiety as a cover for unpleasant feelings. The first unpleasant feeling it covers is vulnerability. But sometimes if people are expressing themselves, then it’s covering maybe disappointment or anger or sadness. So let me stop there and see if there’s something you want to add to this.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

That’s such a great and helpful way of thinking about that, that really, we put a lot of things in this overarching term of anxiety, and what you’re saying is let’s dig down and get to the root of what that really is. And that vulnerability and that sense of being able to be vulnerable, and to open ourselves up to feeling some of those unpleasant feelings.

And I know, I can relate to that personally, professionally, as a parent — and I think everybody can, that even a lot of times with our kids, there is that sense of immense vulnerability in a lot of ways, because we can only control ourselves, we can’t control our child so the whole thing feels like an exercise in vulnerability and putting ourselves out there and not knowing exactly what’s going to happen.

Especially those of us who are parenting kids who have challenges, and that vulnerability on “What are people going to think of me?” Or “How is it going to go if I take my kid to the store and maybe they have a meltdown or a temper tantrum?” Or “My child is getting in trouble at school, and now I’ve got the school calling me.” It’s just that sense of what you are talking about with that vulnerability being at the root of that, that really does resonate.

Dr. Rosenberg:

And it’s understanding, yes. And I also hear another piece in what you’re talking about. So vulnerability is one big aspect of that. And in certain cases, when your child isn’t who you want your child to be, in whatever moments those are, then I think it activates some grief. So yes, I think of parenting as an experience in vulnerability, period. End of story, right? It just intensifies our own vulnerability and it’s just considered exponential when you have one or more children, right?

So we have the vulnerability, and if the child doesn’t then behave the way we want them to, the way we think they ought to be — again, they’re going to be embarrassing, I think parents go through a little bit of grief. And here I think of sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment, one or more of those four when things aren’t working out well. The parents actually wrestling with those feelings as an undercurrent underneath whatever is going on.

So there are a couple of points there. The other is something that you mentioned — parents question themselves, like am I really doing a good job? What if? And one of the things I talk about also in the book around this, on the chapter on anxiety is I would like parents to switch up their language. So we get embedded into what I call the Am I, Can I, Will I, Do I questions. Am I good enough at this? Will I be able to handle the change? Can I do this well enough? And whatever combination — what I’d like parents to do is to switch their language and switch the order of the words. So those questions, Am I, Can I, Will I, Do I — foster doubt. If we just switch the order to I can, I will, I am, I do, it actually fosters more of an experience of confidence.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I love that, such a simple but powerful shift in just moving those words around, and I think that that gets at something else that I wanted to ask about that you talk about in the book, which is resilience because I think that plays into that, right? That we need to learn how to be resilient. I talk about this a lot in my work and a lot with families at the clinic — that look, challenges are going to be there in life. There’s never going to be a time where we’re not going to have challenges, where we’re not going to experience unpleasantness, especially if you have a child who experiences a lot of challenges or has some pretty significant disabilities — those things are going to be there.

And then the question becomes how do we become more resilient around that? Because we can’t wave a magic wand and change everything about our circumstances and make life perfect — there’s no such thing, so we need to get better at riding those waves, at bouncing back and being more resilient. So what are some thoughts that you have around that for parents, about what it takes to develop resilience or how parents can use these ideas to become more resilient?

Dr. Rosenberg:

The first thing is to understand that I think that the base is to be able to manage these 8 unpleasant feelings, to be able to experience and go through and be able to express unpleasant feelings as a key part of feeling capable. And I see that as one key aspect of resilience. A second is to understand that resilience is actually quite learnable — if learnable is a word here. It’s teachable. And think of much of resilience as being tied to attitude. So one attitude is: I’m open to change. And change is the constant in life. So having an openness and willingness to face change is a key aspect. Understanding that failure is a key aspect. And look at failure as a learning opportunity, that’s it — and then understand that most of us fail our way to success. So that we build in this idea that things are not going to go well for us and we build that into knowing that that’s just part of how life works, so we don’t get knocked over each time we are thwarted by an obstacle.

A third would be reaching out for help. What I call resourcefulness is another part of emotional strength and so a willingness to actually acknowledge our needs and limitations and to ask for help is another crucial aspect of resilience. And then we can go on to faith, we can go on to an attitude of I’m going to persist no matter what. Another attitude is I see every experience I go through as a learning opportunity. So that so much of resilience comes down to key attitudes or beliefs that we hold and then aspects of what we’re willing to do. Like one is to tolerate unpleasant feelings, two is to ask for help.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Two great takeaways for people that just being able and willing to acknowledge, experience and ride the waves of those unpleasant feelings is one piece of it and then asking for help — and boy, there are a lot of people listening who I’m sure can really latch onto those two things. Okay, those are two things that I can get better with and that I can focus on. And you said that resilience is a learnable skill — so if people are thinking, well I’ve never been resilient, I’m not good at bouncing back, I’m not good at doing that — what you’re saying is wait a second, we can all get better with that.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Totally, once you change your belief system and you change your attitude, the whole game changes. The whole game changes. There are a couple of things that I wrestled with in terms of my own professional career. And one was how to understand that asking for help is part of emotional strength. So again, in the book — I’ve redefined emotional strength as being capable, which means you can experience and live through those unpleasant feelings and being resourceful.

So one is internal, the 8 unpleasant feelings — that’s capable, and the other is resourceful which is external and it is acknowledging our needs and limitations so we can be more comfortable with the dependent side of our nature. And it’s not one or the other in life, it’s both. We need to be both independent and we need to be dependent. And so that forms the beauty of our life experience and so in the same way — we have kids that are dependent on us and then we’re fostering their independence, but we also want to foster our ability and their ability to be able to ask for help and understanding that asking for help is part of emotional strength and a key part of resilience.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Such a powerful concept and there are so many more things that I want to ask you about this and get into, that our time went so fast — I would love to have you back to expand on some of this and to talk more about how we can apply these concepts specifically with our kids, because I think this conversation was around how we can work at this as parents, which is the foundation — and then I think it’s helpful for parents to know how we can work on that with our kids too, so hopefully you’ll come back and share a few tricks with us.

Dr. Rosenberg: I would absolutely love that. Yes, thank you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Awesome. So I want to make sure that we have a chance for you to tell people where they can find more information from you online, and specifically where they can find your book because it’s an amazing book. I’ve had a chance to read it ahead of it coming out in print, and I’m really excited about it — and so please share with everybody where they can find that.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Well, thank you so much for your kind words. The first place to look would be 90secondsbook.com. Not only that — there a number of different places you can go, there are links embedded in that site that can take you to many different booksellers. There are also bonuses on that page. If you don’t go there, you can go to drjoanrosenberg.com and that’s the second place. There are a lot of resources on my website itself and the people, if they choose, they can go directly to the booksellers. So whatever bookseller they prefer and it launches at midnight tonight, so people should have access to it right away. And then there are lots of other places to find me. So I’m on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, etc. most of the handles are @drjoanrosenberg, so I can be found pretty easily.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And we’ll make sure to put all those links in the show notes — awesome. Easy for people to remember. Go there check the book out, it’s super exciting. Joan thank you so much for being here with us today, this was a wonderful interview, thank you.

Dr. Rosenberg:

Thank you, Nicole. I’m honored.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Alright, everybody, that’s it for this episode — I look forward to seeing you next time for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.