MOMENT | Why ignoring your anger doesn't work - and what does with Sarah Ockwell-Smith

0:03Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's Motherkind moment, your place on a Monday for calm, connection and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing that play button. This week's moment is with the lovely Sarah Ockwell-Smith, mother of four and probably one of the UK's best known parenting experts. In this short clip, Sarah shares her realisation that all her life she had been a good girl, pushing down her emotions and keeping busy doing what she thought she was supposed to do. And I know lots of you will relate to that. Sarah bravely shares how realizing that she was being this good girl and changing her behavior around it set her free to experience way more joy, calm presence and connection with herself and everyone else in her life.

0:59Here it is. When you had that enforced stopping, sometimes life sort of shakes you to wake you, doesn't it? And I feel like I've had that in my own life where just dropped, but in order to wake me up to something that otherwise I just wouldn't have wanted to look at because it's painful and it's hard. What did you begin to uncover behind that anxiety, behind that busyness, behind those anger and that withdrawing? What was there and how did you start to do that? I mean, this is exactly where the book starts. You basically can't talk about the present without talking about the past. so in how to be a calm parent I literally start with shadows from the nursery so how our upbringing impacts us you know like I think we all know about ourselves deep down we just bury it so I had a really lovely upbringing I have really loving parents I came from a very kind of privileged middle-class background but my mum had struggled really badly with postnatal depression and she had a stillbirth after me.

2:05So she was emotionally in quite a fragile headspace. And then when I was nine, I think she was also diagnosed with cancer. So I basically grew up being a good girl. Like I realized that I couldn't really bother my parents with all my emotions because they were going through so much stuff. I was an only child as well. And I grew up very quickly. I was very quickly sort of doing all the chores around the house and caring for my mom when she was terminally ill. And I was always the dependable one, the reliable one. And I seemed, I guess, if you were looking in, like I was coping with everything really well.

2:44But I think I basically grew up for almost my whole childhood, keeping these emotions inside because I didn't want to be naughty and I didn't want to be a bother. And as I say, I was incredibly anxious, but I think my whole family kind of perceived that as me being really shy and sort of socially awkward. And I guess I am like I'm introverted. I am socially awkward, but the underpinning of all of that is anxiety. So I've realized I started creating these strange behaviors to help me cope with the anxiety. And what I really needed was a therapist or the doctor or something. Basically, I spent my childhood being the good girl, being the quiet one, not causing bother.

3:21And as a stress response, I was very much kind of fawning to people. And I never learned healthy ways to let difficult feelings out, basically. So as I grew into adulthood, I carried on, you know, I'm a horrible people pleaser and I carried on doing that. And because I never let anything out, it all just sat there. And that was fine because I became really good at holding onto a lot of stuff. But then when something triggered me, I would explode like a volcano. So what I've basically learned, the fact that I know that I do that and I need to let it out more so that I don't explode.