Dr. Becky Kennedy on the Stoic Art of Emotional Regulation (and Raising Great Kids)

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2:30welcome to the weekend edition of the daily stoic each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage justice temperance and wisdom and then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:18Sometimes you read a book and it's just exactly what you need at the moment that you need it. Sometimes I read these books, like I've talked about my reading methodology before where I read and then I take notes as I'm reading and then I process the book. And then obviously my process has the added thing, which is then I use those notes or those ideas for daily stoic emails, for daily dad emails, for stuff from my own book. So there's this type of book that I read. And when it's so great, I'm almost, I'm not mad. I'm just dreading the amount of work that's going to be on the other side of it. And Rose book on Pontius Pilate was one of those books for me recently.

4:01Usually when I read a big biography, it's that way of like someone I'm really excited to learn about. But when I read Dr. Becky's book, Good Inside, A Guide to Becoming the parent you want. It was one of those books just filled with those. And the best kind of books where it's about one topic, but it's actually about a bunch of other topics. So you should listen to today's interview, even if you're not a parent, even if you have no desire to be a parent, because really, I think this is a very stoic idea that we talked about in the interview. You can't control your kids' emotions. You can't control your kids, but you can control how you respond to your kids' emotions.

4:36You can control how you respond to your kids. You can control, the example you set for your kids, right? So it's really about fixing yourself first. And the real theme of the book is emotional regulation, dealing with frustration, dealing with adversity. It's just awesome. I've loved the book. I've been raving about it, talking about it a lot. You can pick it up in the painted porch. I'm sure the audio book is great. You can grab that also. But I was really excited to have Dr. Becky Kennedy on the podcast. I was looking forward to this. We weren't able to do it in person, but we had a great remote interview.

5:08She's an American clinical psychologist, and she's been called the millennial parent whisperer. Her book hit number one on the New York Times list. She's got a great Instagram account. I know so many people that follow it. That's actually how I heard about it. My wife heard about her on Instagram. She read the book, and then I read the book. You can follow her at DrBecky at Good Inside. You can listen to her podcast, Good Inside with Dr. Becky, go to goodinside.com and I'll link to Good Inside in today's show notes, which you absolutely should read and pick up a copy from The Painted Porch.

5:48Well, I'm very excited to do this because I absolutely loved your book. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Well, you know, obviously it's a parenting book, but I got to say something that affected me the most in it and my wife and I noticed that we need it perhaps more than our kids. And it strikes me as a very stoic concept. Also, you talk about this idea of emotional vaccination, which is essentially, if I can summarize it, it's the idea that you're going to have big feelings or strong emotions about something, you know this. So instead of letting that catch you by surprise, letting yourself be defenseless against it, you sort of think about it in advance.

6:30You anticipate it. You prepare yourself for how you're going to feel. And then when it happens, it's less. Seneca says, he who has anticipated the blow takes some of its pain away when it lands. And I've just been, I don't know, just hearing you talk about that in terms of parenting has been great. But I feel like it's just a life skill. Well, I appreciate you drawing that connection because I do think that so many of the things I talk about good inside. Yes, the immediate application is for parenting, but our kids need what we need, what other adults need, what our colleagues need. We all tend to need the same things.

7:09The words might change a little bit on the surface, but the concepts are really universal. And that's amazing because as you know, as a parent, you don't have a lot of free time. So if we're going to learn a system, it should be a system that applies many areas of your life. for efficiency, right? And when it comes to emotional vaccination, yeah, I think we all on some level feel like our feelings are our problems, but our feelings are so rarely our problems. And in what we're talking about right now, being surprised by our feelings, that often is one of our problems because not only do we have the feelings to deal with, we have the surprise to deal with and humans don't like feeling out of control.

7:48And so when you do prepare yourself, even if it's, hey, I'm about to go into my house. And let's be honest, one of my kids is probably going to freak out. Okay, that's probably going to happen. I'm probably going to feel frustrated. We're going to get through it. You know, I can cope with it. When that moment comes, I actually think something amazing happens where instead of feeling startled and overwhelmed, you actually feel a little like a magician. You're like, well, I did kind of predict this was going to happen. And the same thing in marriage and so many other areas of life. Yeah, the Latin phrase is premeditatio malorum, a premeditation of evils.

8:23Obviously, evil is a strong word here, but I was thinking about it like I have a crazy travel day tomorrow. I'm leaving at nine. I'm doing something in the afternoon. And then I have like an hour to get to the airport to fly home. So if all goes as planned, I miss no time away from the family, really. But a lot has to go as planned. And we're entering fall slash winter. So there's weather delays, the holidays. So travel delay, like the chances of this going right, maybe it's better than even, but there's also a high probability that it won't go right. And then there's just the probability that getting it to go right is stressful and I have to run.

9:05And, you know, there's just all this stuff. Like I'm going to have feelings about this as it's happening. And I'm just trying to go, okay, what does it look like if it goes poorly, right? What's the worst case scenario? What's my backup plan? And then also, you know, reminding myself, hey, getting upset about it while I'm stuck on the runway doesn't make the plane go any faster. You know, being rude to the person behind the counter doesn't unlock, you know, the secret backup plane that, you know, some people seems to think it does. And so you just you just you think about it a little bit and you're vaccinating yourself.

9:40I think that's a really important word if you understand what vaccines do. You're vaccinating yourself so your emotional immune system is prepared for it when that enters your body, which it inevitably will. Yeah. And I think one of the ways I think about anxiety is it's some amount of uncertainty coupled with our underestimation of our ability to cope. And I think most of us, me included, we try to reduce anxiety from the uncertainty side of the equation. We try to make things more certain or we try to problem solve right away or right. But that actually doesn't work. And reminding ourselves of our coping ability is one of the most powerful things we can do to actually cope with feelings.

10:26And so when you do kind of emotionally vaccinate yourself, okay, I might be on the runway and then I'm going to end up being late to this meeting or I'm going to miss dinner. And even if you say nothing to yourself besides that might happen and I can cope with it, I'm not going to like it. Definitely not going to like it. And I can cope with it. You're not only vaccinating the situation, you're putting yourself in touch in advance with your ability to cope. And then when the moment comes, it's almost like we've pre-wired coping into the moment before it even happens. Well, you know, that's a good point because I have noticed that although I get anxious or stressed out when I'm inconvenienced at a minor level or things are not really in my control, I get stressed and I have trouble handling it and maybe I freak out or whatever.

11:12But I tend to, I don't think I'm patting myself on the back too much here, but I handle really big situations quite well, right? Like, like, it's like you freak out over a paper cut, but if your arm got cut off, your body would just you would go into such a state of life or death that you would figure it out. And so it's this, it's this weird paradox where we don't handle the minor inconveniences and the minor stresses pretty well. Because as you said, we underestimate our ability to handle that. And then we actually don't worry that much about the catastrophic stuff, because we know we're pretty good at those kinds of situations.

11:51Yeah, probably in those situations, we have less of an, we're aware that we're not in control. So our body isn't anxious. We probably just go into problem solving mode, right? But you're right. In the smaller moments, we forget. And this is one of my most helpful things I say to myself when I remember is just, Becky, wait, like I've done hard things before. I can do this hard thing again. There will be a moment. I don't know when it is where this thing will feel easier. And even if I don't know exactly what to do, I do feel like I just go from like a nine and a half to like a seven. And at least at a seven out of 10, many more things are possible than at a nine and a half.

12:24That's something that Marks really writes to himself in meditations. He goes, how will you meet the problems of tomorrow? He says, with the same weapons you met them with today. The idea being that, yeah, you've gone through a lot of hard things. I mean, we just lived through a global pandemic. Like I've thought about this. it's like we would ask our grandparents, like, what was the depression like or World War II? Like, what was it like to live through history? Well, we just did that. And most of us did pretty good. Right. And, and we were strong. If you had asked us in February of 2020, how could you handle even like one 10th of what transpired over the next three years, you would have been like, no way I'm out.

13:05Like I couldn't possibly do it. And then what did most of us do? We did it because we didn't have a choice. And parenting does that to you too, right? If you were like, okay, you're not going to sleep for the next two years. You'd be like, well, obviously that's physically impossible. So I should just die right now. But you handle it pretty well. You muddle through it and you figure out a way to survive. And then somehow still though, the uncertainty of the future feels very intimidated as if, as if you didn't just get through a trial by fire. Yes. And I think that's one of the things I, I really like kind of equipping parents with early on kind of what I was saying earlier that I think we're fed this idea of kind of aging in our kids.

13:52Like we have to learn something new every year. And we're, I think we're fed it starting at least for me in pregnancy, like I'm, Oh, what, what happens at this week? And what happens at this week? And what do I need to know when my kids four months versus four and a half months and five months. But to me, a very kind of different system is what are the things that matter? Okay. And they're always the same. They're actually always the same for kids. Kids need the same thing when they're infants and when they're teens. Now the language looks different for sure. The situations are different. But when you can kind of learn that like system, okay, how do I feel connected to my kid?

14:21How do I set boundaries? Do I even know what really boundaries are? Okay. How do I validate someone's feelings even when I set a boundary? Okay. How do I repair? Like if you learn some basic, I call them like pillars or like we call them like good inside essentials, then actually every year we're not saying, how am I going to get through this year? Because like, okay, what do I know? What do I already know? I probably already know so many things and what needs a tweak or an application to my six-year-old, but actually the things I've learned and what I know is already inside of me. That feels, you know, way less anxiety producing to me.

14:51And that's what I want parents to be equipped with. Well, isn't that kind of the, the sort of meta skill or the most important skill of them all is emotional regulation, like to be able to regulate your emotions, whether it's a three-year-old throwing a tantrum or a 13 year old, you know, uh, screaming that they hate you. It's still fundamentally the same. Don't take the bait, you know, empathize with the, what the person is going through your child in this case. But the idea, the meta skill of just being able to deal with your emotions and to not be overwhelmed by somebody else's emotions is kind of the meta skill of them all.

15:35Yeah, I think that's the meta skill of life. I think it's actually the foundational skill in any area of our life. It's why what I love to do is help parents learn to regulate their own emotions, because that's always the first step to then what I think is the most important thing of parenting is teaching our kids to learn how to regulate the widest range of emotions as possible. To me, that's the biggest emotional privilege, at least you can go into adulthood with. Yeah, I mean, going back thousands of years, Epictetus says the chief task in life is to separate things into two categories, things that are up to us and things that are not up to us.

16:12Obviously, this is also expressed in the serenity prayer, you know, which remarkably isn't invented until like the middle of the 20th century. It seems like a timeless idea, but that exact wording is new. But the idea of like some stuff is up to you, some stuff is not. You don't control what happens. You control how you respond to what happens. It's both very rudimentary and simple and then also extraordinarily complex and difficult to do in practice. Yeah. Well, it comes back to our earliest wiring and how we were raised. And we were probably raised with people who were doing the best they could with the resources they had available, but probably also maybe weren't given the best models of emotion regulation by the people they were raised from.

16:59Right. And then there's this intergenerational transmission of all of the feelings that feel impossible to manage. And I think right now, I think something so hopeful is there's just millions of parents everywhere who are saying, wait, like, I actually, I want to be a cycle breaker in that way. I want to learn how to manage my emotions. That's the best way to show up, you know, to my kids. Yeah. I think about that a lot. I go, what would my, it's actually been very healing for me as a person to think about how my parents would have treated me if I was doing something that my kid was doing. And I go, oh, this is why I have this problem is because this four-year-old is freaking out and they're getting hit upside the head or they're getting berated or they're getting made to feel like they're weird.

17:46Or, you know, any of the ways that we were responded to, you sometimes don't, because you were a kid when it was happening to you, you didn't understand that there was an appropriate or a healthy or a more regulated way to deal with it. And it's not till you get a second crack at it that you go, oh, I could actually teach this skill to them and to myself at the same time. Yes, that's right. There's so much bang for your buck. And for everyone who's thinking, I don't remember. I don't remember how my parents responded to my tantrums, or I don't know what happened when I was rude to my parents or when I was sad that I didn't make the soccer team.

18:23But I go back to this couple I used to see in my private practice. And it was the husband who'd say, I don't remember. How am I supposed to know? And I think our sense of memory is very, very limited. And that one version of memory, for sure, are things that we have an image of or a story of, and then we can put to words. Like, oh, I remember my parents did this. I have an image of it and I can explain it. That's only one form of memory and is actually not even the most common. You know, and what I said to this, this dad in my practice, and we had a nice jovial relationship, I said, Oh, come on, you've described to me exactly how you respond when your son has a tantrum.

18:55Like, I can say with almost 100 % certainty, I know how you were responded to, because your body remembers, your body remembers so many of the things that were never put into words for us. And then we respond with our reactivity, right? We respond, how long is my circuit for my kid's tantrum? Tells me a lot about how my parents, who again, were probably doing the best they could without a doubt with the resources they had, responded to my tantrum. And when you start to look at memory as your body's reactions and triggers, then all of a sudden you can be curious about so many more things that we confront in parenthood.

19:30Yeah, traumatizing is probably the wrong word, but that it has been a weird part of having young kids for me is that I don't have a strong memory of, of my childhood, which is probably in and of itself a bit revealing that I don't, I don't remember that much about it. It's kind of, I remember myself being like some version of me now. Like I remember a teenage me or a middle school me, but before that I don't have a strong sense of like who I was or how I felt about things. And then as I've had kids, like now, you know, now I have a four-year-old, a five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, I go, a lot of that stuff came flooding back, right?

20:09Or to see my parents interact with a four-year-old or a seven-year-old, you go, oh, this is how you, this is, this is the limitations of your toolkit being bumped up against. And so it's this kind of, it's this wonderful experience because you're, you're getting to experience having a kid, but it's also a sort of a reliving of your own childhood, which isn't always, wasn't always the best. I think that's exactly it. You know, I think when, when you have a partner and yourself, right, you kind of watch your partner's childhood come alive as they parent. You're like, oh, I'm learning so much about when I'm in your home.

20:47And I think we do the same thing for ourselves that, and I think there's a way if we look at that critically, or we feel very defensive and shut down, like, oh, you know, oh, did I have a messed up childhood? Or is it saying I'm a bad parent? No, like not at all. Every parent, if they're open to it, can learn more about themselves while they parent their own kids than probably any other part of their life journey. Because you do, your body comes in contact with things. When your kid has that tantrum or has a sleep issue or gets left out, your body kind of scans itself. And it's like, well, what do I know about these types of situations?

21:20And you have encoded memories. They happen not to be your child's. They were your own. And if you can differentiate those, okay, well, wait, this isn't my kid, but this is knowledge. This actually is useful information for me to reflect on. Then yes, you can show up with increased regulation, sturdiness, and intentionality in how you want to show up to your kids today. This idea of being able to regulate your emotions, which is different than suppressing your emotions, obviously, and the ability to deal with frustration as the sort of most important skill. it strikes me as a reframing from how most people think about most things, right?

21:57You say this in the book, like people want their kids to be happy. I would say most of us want to be happy. That's what we sort of think we're aiming at. But then you sort of say, well, actually maybe resiliency or dealing with frustration or having flexibility, having a sort of self-awareness, that there are these other skills that actually allow happiness to happen. And in fact, if you are aiming at happiness, you're probably not going to get it. I can flesh that out a little bit more because, you know, so many of my ideas around parenting, right, to give some background, actually came from all the work I was doing in private practice with adults, young adults, older adults, and started to see these patterns.

22:40It's like, okay, kind of the things I knew about their early years, the struggles they had in adulthood. and it allowed me to wonder like, well, what happened here? And what kinds of things might have led to different outcomes? And what will help these adults kind of rewire in a way that helps them live in a way that's more in line with their values? And what if we reverse engineer that information to parents today so you can just start out? And I think this was a big part of it, this like, what is resilience versus happiness? And, you know, a lot of these ideas, you know, came from working with this set, honestly, for a period of my private practice, I've seen like all these late 20 year olds, let's say, who look, all of them, and I'm in New York City.

23:16So there was a little bit of homogeneity to their stories. Like they went to some, you know, they went to Harvard, they went to Yale, they went to, you know, whatever college, the college, okay. Then they graduated top of their class. Then they got a job as, I don't know, an investment banker. Like, you know, they kind of like checked these boxes of these things that are external markers of success, supposedly maybe make people happy, right? And then they were like all 28. And they came to me in my private practice. None of them knew each other. It's just this collection of, you know, people feeling completely empty, completely unable to function in like really adult life.

23:51Um, they didn't find relationships that were meaningful. Um, and they were really, really lost. And, and even would say to me like, they felt very fragile. Right. And I was like, wow, there's this huge gap. What is this? And when I started to do some like data collection, okay, well, where did this come from? Let's figure this out. I really did hear her remarkably similar stories about their childhood. And they'd say to me, like, I know I'm supposed to say in therapy, like my parents messed me up. They're really uninvolved. That's not my story. Like my parents are always there. I felt so loved by them.

24:21I felt so supported by them. And then I, you know, kept doing some digging. And a lot of the things I heard was that happiness was a real goal for their parents in raising them. Like happiness as a goal in childhood. And I know people hear that. They're like, okay, sorry, what's the problem? Like we want our kids to be happy. What's wrong with that? But if I give some examples, right? Like, okay. Didn't make the soccer team in my town. Okay. Like my, and I remember this, this guy is like, my dad worked a million hours a week. He came home early that day. He found another soccer team. He drove me two days later to the tryout.

24:56We were, then he was coming home from work early. He was driving me 45 minutes to be in a different soccer team. Right. Or, oh, I was crying that I didn't get the thing I wanted at the toy store. And yes, then my parents found it immediately. online somewhere else. And it was at my house two days later. Right. And like, they always wanted me to be happy. And then I kind of had this aha moment, like, okay, wait. So what happens in childhood when we kind of really orient toward our kids happiness is any moment where our kid has intense distress, we believe we have to exit them out of distress and enter them into happiness.

25:30And so what's happening in their body is I feel frustrated or sad or let down or less than all feelings we all feel throughout our lives. There's no way out of those feelings. And what their body is learning is when I have that feeling turn on, I then have next to that, the expectation of that feeling turning off and happiness turning on. And if I fast forward to adulthood, I just think that's like, it's a really, that's a really hard expectation. And like, I think most of us know in adulthood, when you get fired from a job, which can happen to anyone, like usually the next day. You don't turn that feeling off and turn the happiness of a new job on.

26:09Or when you... I don't know, anything, even small, like I'm in traffic. Well, guess what? The best thing to do when you're in traffic is cope with traffic. There's no immediate exit to not traffic. And so what I saw was a real inability to cope with anything distressing and almost an expectation that happiness should be around the corner, which leads people feeling very paralyzed. And actually what we were saying earlier, Ryan, totally unable to feel capable in a time of stress because they were never taught to tolerate stress. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic.

26:52So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically 8 Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately. It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm.

27:35And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you wanna survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, head over to eightsleep.com slash Daily Stoic and use code Daily Stoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it. But I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash dailystoic. You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck.

28:17That's the sound of no crowds, no alerts, no distractions. And no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.

28:43What's it like if your definition of happiness is everything going the way that you want it to go, you will be happy if you are lucky enough to live in a world where more often than not, everything goes the way that you want it to go. And sometimes you're lucky enough to be that person or you're lucky enough to be that person for a long time, but everything regresses towards the mean. And so a better definition of happiness, I think, is the ability to adjust and adapt and accommodate, you know, the fact that the vast majority of things are outside of your control. So that, that word acceptance, which is not a popular word these days, or has an almost immediate, you know, negative connotation for people is probably one of the more important characteristics of a happy person, but we train people to fight against that idea.

29:42Yeah. And I think as parents, it can be very relieving to say, like, I don't need to be the architect of my kids' happiness when they're young. In fact, you know, I often think with my own kids, like, of course, I'm always going to be in their lives and want to be very involved. But at the same time, I think to some degree, I'm working myself out of a job. Like, I will be very proud if my kid calls me from college and says, this not so great thing happened. It really stunk. And like, OK, here's what I did. And here's where I am now. Like, wow, look at that. Right. And so if we want our kids to feel capable when they're frustrated and learn that, yeah, sometimes things in life don't go well.

30:19Well, we have to help them build that circuitry, which is basically the complete opposite of having an immediate exit into ease or contentment. Yes. Yeah. The ability to figure stuff out is another meta skill, right? So you get fired. Somebody says something mean to you. Your teacher doesn't like you. You don't make the soccer team. These are all things that are going to happen in the ability to figure out what to do about them. That's actually the more sustainable path to happiness, not, well, let's go undo that or let's go find a different way. Let's let's go, you know, not undo it. But as you said, like, well, I'll get you on a different soccer team or whatever.

31:02that that is a way of just deferring or avoiding feeling the feeling of I didn't get the thing that I wanted yeah and just to be clear is there a role at some point to say hey you didn't make the soccer team there's a soccer you know team a couple towns away yeah I'm not trying to say I don't want anyone to be like oh no I messed up my kid forever that's not what I'm saying but our kids can't learn to tolerate feelings that we don't tolerate in them yes hard stop they are learning that in their childhood? Like what is tolerable? And it's interesting. I think so much of confidence actually isn't even learning to figure things out.

31:39It's learning that it's okay to be you when you haven't yet figured things out. Like I think like confidence isn't feeling like the best at things. It's learning it's okay to be you when you're not the best at something. And so that moment that you're, let's say kids like, I didn't make soccer. Like you can make it really concrete. You can be like, okay, I know there's another soccer team. I'm just going to wait 48 hours, 48 hours. Okay. I can do anything for 48 hours. Okay. So for the next 48 hours, instead of being like, look at this. And by the way, we're going to get you this private tutor.

32:01And by the way, let's go practice. And right. Okay. No, I can just say very simple things to my kid. Like you really wanted to make that team. Oh, you thought you were going to make that team and you didn't, you didn't want that to happen. That's one of my favorite lines. You didn't want that to happen. Oh, I can see you're really upset. Oh, your two best friends made it. And you didn't. Yeah. I get, I get that going to school tomorrow is not going to feel so great. And what I'm doing is I'm basically saying to my kid, I still like you when this happens to you, because I'm willing to talk to you and engage with you.

32:29I don't need to exit you from this road. And so let's like allow ourselves to feel this way for a little bit. That's actually building resilience. And then sure, if I have the random rule, 36 hours, 48 hours later, I might say, Hey, you know what I'm thinking about? There's this other team. Is that something you want to, we can make that happen, but it's not, it's not the number one for strategy. Well, there's this profound misconception, I think of stoicism, that stoicism is the suppression of emotions with the elimination of it. But actually it's like, Hey, I am angry about this, but I am not going to do something out of anger.

33:00Right. Or I am, I am feeling this, but I don't have to act on that feeling. I can think about it, talk about it, channel it. I can just wait. You know, the Stokes talk about taking the emotions and kind of putting them up to the test, thinking about them, questioning them. So, So, you know, you why do you feel so bad not making the soccer team or somebody saying something mean to you or, you know, being dumped? You feel bad because your first view is that it says something about you as a person or it says something about your future, which is now you're going to die alone. Now you'll end up as a loser, you know, any of this.

33:41But so much of that's not true. So if your instinct as a parent or as a person is just to magically make the situation go away, what you're not developing is the ability to question your own emotions or sideline the emotions in the sense that I'm feeling really pissed off, but I don't have to throw a punch or write a mean email that dumps those feelings on to someone else. Yeah, it reminds me of this image I think a lot about and I'm very influenced by internal family systems and it's a big IFS idea that our feelings or any any thought is a part of us and not all of us and kind of what you're saying about feeling anger versus doing something out of anger.

34:23Our feelings don't give us problems as long as they're passengers in our car. Our feelings give us problems when they take over the driver's seat. Same with any thought or urge. And if you think about that visual, what a lot of us do, me too, is we take we look at the in a passenger in the backseat. Maybe it's like anger. And we're like, we just try to throw it out of the car. We do. We're just like, get out of here. I don't like having you here, which only adds more energy to it. And then it feels like the only way it can get our attention is by taking over the driver's seat. It's like, you know, and if you think about it as our kid, if while our kids are young, we make it a habit of taking all of their passengers, the feelings that are hard, frustration, sadness, and throwing it out of their car.

35:00Well, we're actually only setting them up when they're older for those passengers to take over the driver's seat because we can't forever make sure that our kid never feels those feelings. Or to go to your metaphor of vaccination, you're basically sending them out with a suppressed or weakened immune system that doesn't have the ability to deal with anger, frustration, sadness, depression, jealousy, inadequate, you know, all those emotions. You've never really felt them before. And so when you feel them in a professional context or God forbid you feel them, I don't know, a reporter writes a negative article about you.

35:40Like now you're doing it at some stage where other people are looking or, you know, it really does matter. You're just going to be totally ill-equipped to handle that. And I said like in my private practice, when adults came to me for therapy, I never met an adult who said, Becky, I have to tell you right away. My parents did an amazing job. They just got the frustration and the sadness and the jealousy out of me. They just got it out. You know, that's never happened. But what I think every adult almost says, even though they don't say it with their words, but with their, you know, experiences and stories is I really don't feel any more prepared to deal with jealousy and frustration and sadness in my adulthood than I did when I was a toddler.

36:18But like you said, Ryan, the stakes are higher. They're a lot higher. Isn't it weird though? Like putting aside whether parents sufficiently prepare their kids for those things. There really is no mechanism in society or culture to deal with those things. I mean, yes, some religions say this is a sin. Don't do that. Even beyond that, I think this is what philosophy was designed to do in the ancient world. And maybe you could say psychology and therapy is one of the only tools that we have for doing it. But it's not like we have a process or a culture that teaches people how to do that or that, that those are, that those are skills.

36:56We, we sort of just expect you're going to figure it out. And if you're a kid who didn't play sports or, you know, didn't, uh, didn't have like a really strong mentor in your life. I mean, you're just going out in the world dealing with these things for the first time when, you know, a lot is riding on it. Yes. I mean, I think it's something I feel so passionately about changing, right? Where I think the reason there's no mechanism, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. One thing is emotion regulation. It can't be taught didactically. It can't be learned in a book. It can't be learned intellectually.

37:35It's absorbed through relationships. And that doesn't mean if you didn't get it in your earliest relationship, you can't get it. That's why, you know, over time people, people go to therapy or people have mindfulness, right? But, but it's absorbed in the context of a relational experience. And so like we were saying, well, we have generations of people who were never taught how to regulate their emotions. They're now parenting the next generation, right? And so it's hard to absorb regulation from an adult if that adult was never taught that to them in the first place, right? And that's why I think, yes, the beauty of saying, wait, maybe this is the biggest gift I can give my kid.

38:09And by the way, it's the biggest gift I can give myself being an adult who's more able to regulate your emotions than you used to be. It's like the whole world is your oyster. Now you're like, wait a second, like so many things are possible. And it's really concretely helpful. And to do that at the same time, I think is like the most rewarding part of being a parent and the hardest part. Well, it's a process, just like you don't go to therapy one time, and then you're fixed, just like you don't read one book, and then you know what to do. It's this process of getting the information and then applying it and then seeing where it helped and where you didn't go far enough.

38:46It's this sort of process that you really engage in in your whole life. And to think of philosophy and therapy and parenting as this sort of ongoing thing that you're doing where you're learning and improving and you're evaluating. I think this is why journaling is so important because you get to kind of turn it into a conversation with yourself or a progress report that you're dealing, that you're writing to yourself. It's not this transformational epiphanous thing. It's a process. Yes, it's a process. It's a practice, like you said. Exactly, right? Like I'm not like so big into yoga, but people I know who are really into it, they're not like, I did it.

39:29I did it. I'm done. You know, because actually, I think what ends up happening, actually, this is really true with how I think about parenting and hopefully want to inspire other people to with yoga or working out like people start with an outcome in mind. But I think the people who really get into practice get kind of more addicted to the practice than any outcome. Right. And then they just love having that as a part of their life. Well, this is this is almost the problem with books. And obviously, as someone who loves books, I feel weird saying this. But the problem with a book is that a book has a beginning and an end.

40:03And then you say to yourself, I read that, right? As opposed to I am reading that, right? It's not a thing that you finish. It's a thing that you do. So, you know, it's this idea that Stokes talk about lingering on the works of the master thinkers that it's this, you're reading and rereading because when you come back to it, you are different, even though the words are the same. And so fundamentally, I think even in parenting books and in a lot of self-improvement stuff, the problem is you go, oh, I bought it and I read it. I did the thing. You're reading about things that you haven't experienced yet and it's not until you experience them that you can fully learn the lesson.

40:46And so I think this is why I tried to do, I did the Daily Dad, which is a page a day, and the Daily Stoke, which is a page a day. The idea of this is an ongoing thing that you're reading and learning about is probably the better way to think about it. Yes. Yes to that. And we have members in our membership who said, I've watched certain videos 10 times. Yes. And they say, I really get something different every time. And I said, yeah, well, you're evolving, you're changing. And if you think about, some ways I think about good inside like a language, right? Like most of us, the language of parenting we know is the language we were parented in.

41:25And I think a lot of people think, okay, either I want to change lots of things about that language, or at least I want to change a few things. Well, guess what? Like if you, I only speak English from, right? That's all I speak. But if I wanted to talk to my kids in Mandarin, I think I'd say that's totally possible, Becky. And like, I'm sure I have to practice Mandarin And probably in high stress moments, I'm probably going to go back to English. But that doesn't mean I am not actually making progress. It means, OK, I take a deep breath and then I go back to my Mandarin work. And as I get further in Mandarin, I'm sure I'm going to learn something I learned the first year that's going to seem so much more useful.

41:59And I think like thinking about it in a language in that way really de-shames kind of the learning process. Yes. And there's this idea that we don't step in the same river twice, right? Right. Because, you know, and and I think learning is like that. You can't learn things until you're ready to learn them. So you can have the vague you can have a familiarity with something, but it doesn't fully get unlocked until you have the experience that allows you to see where that applies. And then and but that's why it is important to have read. And because then you go, oh, I know exactly where that she has a chapter about this.

42:41Right. I'm going to go back to that thing. I have that book on the shelf or I'm going to pull up a video about it or I'm going to, you know, the ability to find the information that you know is out there, that itself is a form of knowledge. You said something in the book that also struck me as a sort of a life philosophy way beyond parenting, but you said sort of on the surface, you see a behavior and beneath the surface there as a person, right? And having kids and learning that, you know, 90 % of the time they're hungry or tired or the routine was disrupted. And that's the way they're acting because you know, your kids are good inside.

43:23As you say in the book, you know, your kids are good. So you, you quickly look for a reason that they're behaving the way that they are, right? Because you know that they're good. So you're not going, they're doing a bad thing. They are bad. You know that they're good. And you're seeing the behavior as something different than the individual, or you see that there's an explanation for the behavior. And if you address that, the behavior goes away. If we could go through the world this way as people and understand that even the person who's driving poorly in front of you is going through X or your boss is going through Y or the political party that you disagree with is getting this information instead of that information.

44:10The ability to separate the behavior from the person is, you want to talk about ways to happiness or surviving in the world, understanding that is such a powerful thing. Huge. And I think that's, that was one of the core things that led me to kind of put all these ideas down, right? Is that I was, I was really trained in the parenting world from a very different perspective. Right. At the time, I want more parenting kind of guidance, you know, training. And so I went to the institution that all my colleagues talked about, and it was all about timeouts and punishments and sticker charts. And, and no one ever, no one ever really voiced the assumptions in which that was based.

44:48But I do think in a lot of those more behavioral approaches, there is a collapse between the behavior you see on the surface and the identity you assume underneath. Like the only reason I'd punish my kid is in some ways like I thought, OK, well, they were rude to me and they know better. They know better and they could have done better and they purposely chose not to do better. And so I'm going to I still don't know why punishing them would change. But I know when I get in that mode, punishment makes sense, right? Because we see our kid as the antagonist, as the enemy. And I think I'm a pretty first principles thinker.

45:19And I was like, wait, none of this makes sense. It kind of came to me in this moment, you know, in my practice. I was like, wait, I'm sharing advice with parents. And I actually said to them, I was like, had this huge sensation in my chest. I was like, no, no, no. Timeouts, this doesn't even make sense. And I said to them, I was just like, I don't even believe what I'm telling you. I'm really sorry. Like, don't do what I'm telling you. They were like, what? And I was like, I just know there's another way. Come back to me in a few weeks and they didn't come back, which I don't blame them for. But I just really like stripped things down in my head.

45:47And I think what I was left with the singular thought I was left with was kids are good inside. Adults, I believe are too. Kids are good inside. And then I started to build up a building there. And I said, wow, there's a gap. There's a literal gap. And for anyone listening, I encourage you to actually assuming you're not driving. But if you're not driving to like separate your hands, and to like really look at one of your hands and say, Okay, this is my kid. this is who they are. This is their identity, right? One hand. This is who someone is identity. My kid is good inside. They're inherently good.

46:14So that's our identity. And then you look at your other hand and put it very far apart and just say, this is what my kid just did. They just hit. They just said, I hate you. They just looked at me when I said, stop jumping on the couch and double jumped on the couch. Right. Right. While making eye time, whatever it is, that's their behavior. And that was not so good. Okay. So there's a gap between good identity and bad behavior. And in all of our most frustrated moments with our kids and our spouses and our colleagues and ourselves, there's no space between those hands. Like, I'm going to clap them together.

46:44It's just that's what happens. And when you're able to separate your hands and say, wait, I have a, and to me, this is a key phrase. I have a good kid who's having a hard time. Then we start to see their behavior as a sign of their struggle and as a sign of their needs and as a sign of the skills they need to build instead of as a sign of who they are. And that framework shift leads to 180 degree different interventions. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck.

47:31What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck.

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48:51We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. and then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner, Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds.

49:25Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. Yeah, someone told me your kids aren't giving you a hard time. Your kids are having a hard time. Yes. Right. And the understanding that your kids are having feelings and most people are having feelings and they don't even understand that they're having those feelings. Think about depression, right? How long it's taken us as a society. And then just think of any one individual to go, oh, you know, I realized I had depressive tendencies in my 20s or 30s or 40s. Right. And then you're expecting this 11 year old to know something about what they're they don't have.

50:08They don't know they're depressed. They don't know they're angry. They don't know they're scared. When did you learn about the concept of stress? You know, like stress as a thing that is making you feel and act a certain way, being caused by the outside. Like that's a concept that you learned much later in development than your child currently is at this moment. Or then this person who's bothering you is in their own development. And so they can't even articulate to you what they're going through because all they know is that they don't feel good or maybe they don't. They don't even know. They just think this is what life is, which would be weird and disorienting.

50:50Yeah. Another visual gap I find very helpful over and over is like putting one of my hands high and saying kids are born with all the feelings and the other hand is low and none of the skills. Yeah. That's actually just a truth. I think they're born with all the feelings. They have every feeling I have and they have zero skills. If you think about that, what a terrifying existence, right? Because unlike physical ailments, not all of which, but a lot of which for kids have visible markers. Like when they skin their knee, they see a bruise or they see blood and they're like, oh, that's the thing that's happening to me.

51:22Not feelings. I mean, all of us know when you feel intense feelings, it takes over your body. It is so intense and there's no visible markers. So kids are just overcome with this thing that they don't understand, that they don't have visible markers for it. They have no skills. And so really, yes, their behaviors can be explained in that way. And I think there's, there's something I want to get ahead of because I'm such a pragmatist myself. And I hear the parent is like, oh, so then it's okay. So it's just okay that my kid's hitting. Like, it's not okay. To me, it's like, if I had a glass on the side of the table and it fell, because I knocked it over by accident, it shattered.

51:55And I didn't punish myself. I don't know if someone would be like, oh, Becky, so it's just okay that you dropped your glass? I'm like, I don't know if it's okay, but like it is, it happened. You're not going to put a glass there anymore. You're going to learn a lesson and not put a glass there. If I can take a deep breath and say, wait, Becky, I'm a good person who is having a hard time. I totally didn't mean, if I'm blaming myself, I can do no reflection. I'm such an idiot. I'm such an idiot. Who drops a glass? All that's going to happen is I'm going to put in the same place next time because I'm frozen with shame.

52:20But if I'm able to say, Becky, I'm a good person who had a bad accident. Okay, wait. And then I can be curious, which doesn't mean people mistake curiosity for approval. They're completely different things, but we mistake them with our kids. If I can be curious about my kids hitting, that doesn't mean I approve of it. It means I wonder when my kid keeps hitting her brother. Why does she keep doing it? Oh, well, she is adjusting to having a sibling. There might be some insecurity. She hasn't learned how to feel angry without turning anger into behavior. Okay. Now that I'm curious, maybe I'd say, you know what?

52:49I'm going to work with her. I'm going to actually practice with her when he's sleeping. Hey, what would happen if I had your favorite toy? How could you tell me you want it with, Ooh, stay a little further apart because I'm not going to let you hit, sweetie. Those interventions, which can, again, help close the gap between feeling and skills, not by getting rid of feelings, but by building skills, happen because I'm curious, because I'm able to see my kid's identity as separate from their behavior. My four-year-old was telling me that he could teleport. And so I was like, what do you mean? And he was telling me he thought he could teleport because sometimes he is in the car and then he wakes up in his bed.

53:28And I realized that he didn't understand that he was falling asleep in his car seat and then we were picking him up and putting him in his bed. So this is the mind of a child trying to make sense of a thing that it's too big for it to understand. And so this is what they're doing all the time. They're feeling things and trying to come up with explanations or strategies for dealing with them, I mean, they're not that bright. Like, you know, you said they don't have the skills. I mean, they have the mind of a four-year-old, but they are dealing with adult problems, right? They're dealing with the same problems and frustrations that we're dealing with with adults without any of the information or the toolkit or the skills.

54:16And so you can be sympathetic without making an excuse, right, or without approving it, as you said. And we can do the same for other people, understanding that they have different information, they have different experiences, they are under different stresses than us. It doesn't mean that you go, oh yeah, it's okay to do X, Y, and Z. This is why we have a justice system. This is why we have laws. This is why, you know, you can understand. I just went through this with someone. It was very clear to me that they had a lot of emotional issues that made it not a good fit for them to work at my company, right?

54:55This doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean that they're somehow fundamentally broken. They're just not a fit here. So I can understand and empathize and appreciate and still not approve of it in the sense that I just allow them to continue to get paid for something that they're not capable of doing. So you can very easily make that distinction, but it requires some empathy and the ability to put yourself in the rudimentary world of that other person and see why they do what they do. And I think it also depends on something I read a lot about in the book, this kind of two things are true mindset, which again is definitely a life idea, not just a parenting idea.

55:40It just comes up over and over in parenting. So over and over, I think we do have to hold our decisions as parents, decisions we make because we think they're good or they keep our kids safe. That's one thing that is true. And at the same time, hold us true our kids' feelings that are a reaction to those decisions. And we have a hard time doing that. Time to do that. We have a hard time doing that often, which leads to a lot of power struggles with our kids or a lot of resentment. So let's say I'm ending screen time. Okay. And I told my kid they could watch a show. I do the whole thing. I emotionally vaccinate.

56:12hey, you might want to watch another one when we're done, when we're done, you can tell me the one you want to watch tomorrow. I'm like, oh, I crushed that parenting moment. Still, though, my kid has a meltdown, right? In a two things are true perspective, like we'd actually, you can even say it out loud just to remember like, hey, sweetie, two things are true. Screen time is over and you're allowed to be upset, right? My decisions, the ones that even I feel good about don't mean my kid can't have feelings. My kid's feelings also don't mean I have to change my decision. We can just actually hold both of them as true.

56:41And I think that is, again, one of the principles that whether your kid is a toddler or a teen, over and over and over, the more you work, that two things are true muscle. I'm in charge of boundaries. My kid's in charge of the feelings that they have. One is not more right than the other. They're just both equally true. That is so fundamental to staying connected to our kid and honestly making good decisions as a parent. Yeah. And I think in past generations, they said something like this, probably not from the same place, but you know, they would go, you don't have to like it. Your kids don't have to like the decisions that you're making.

57:15And, and when you're making decisions that are less fun than they want to do or less accommodating to what they want to, of course, they're not going to like it. And you can accept that it was the right thing and upset that they're not going to like it. I mean, I don't, if I, if I'm on a diet, I don't like the things that I, uh, you know what I mean? Like I like other things better, but I know to get the outcome, you sometimes have to do things that you don't like. And I think this relates to emotion regulation, right? Because sometimes we don't realize as a parent, a lot of times we are, we are using our kids reaction as a barometer to either feel like a good parent or feel like we're making a good decision.

57:56And we want them to feel calm because it's the quickest and almost cheapest way that we can say to ourselves, I made a good decision here. You know, the other day I was talking to a friend who had to cancel her son's birthday party on the day of the party, because he woke up with a fever, right? No, that stinks. Stinks for everyone. She's like, what do I say? What do I say? You know, and I just, you know, we talked and I reminded her, first of all, like your job. And I talk about family jobs a lot in my platform too, because I think it's a way we all want to feel good at our job, but most of us can't define our job.

58:24So I don't think in any company, you can't be good at your job if you don't know what your job is. And parents, it's like, we have to know what our job is. So our job, part of our job is making key decisions that we believe are good for the family and for our kids, right? And for society. The other part of our job is that, yeah, society, right? Our kids' job is actually to feel their feelings because related to what we were saying, Ryan, if they don't feel their feelings when they're young, there's no hope of having coping skills for those feelings when they're older. And so what we talked about, she ended up saying essentially and using that language, My job is actually really helpful in key decisions.

58:59And she said to him, look, one of my main jobs as your parent is to make decisions in moments where I actually know you're not going to be happy. And yet I think that's best for you and, you know, for the people around us. And part of your job is that you have reactions. So actually, even though this is completely unpleasant, we're canceling your party. I get that you're upset. We're actually both doing our jobs. It's not easy. It's not fun. Just like some days at a company. They're not fun, but you do your job well. When if you think your job as a parent is to make your kid's life wonderful and fun and happy, then you can't make the hard but right decision for their health.

59:37And then also the health of all the people that you're inviting over to your house. Remember, we just went through a pandemic. You know, you can't make that right decision. And so life and leadership is a series of conflicting or overlapping obligations and priorities. And you have to be able to make that. And yeah, understand that their job is not necessarily to appreciate or understand or like all of those decisions, but it doesn't exempt you from having to make them. And in fact, to give them what they want in that situation is actually to deprive them of what they want and need over the longterm, which is to be given skills and to live in the house of a responsible adult and yada, yada, yada.

1:00:21Yeah. And I talk about pilots a lot because I think there's so many metaphors that really bring this idea of what I call sturdy leadership to life, which are the same principles that make a CEO really sturdy and, you know, definitely make apparent one, right? So imagine being on a turbulent flight, right? Imagine being on a really turbulent flight and, you know, you might make an emergency landing, okay? And all the passengers are, they're screaming because they're nervous. And let's say also, they're like, why are we, it's not that bad. We should just continue to go to Los Angeles and not have to wherever, Land in Missouri.

1:00:50Okay, fine. Let's say that's happening. So picture one pilot, right? Who essentially is saying, oh, okay. I mean, I guess we don't, I guess we don't have to make the emergency landing. Okay. We'll keep flying everyone. Like I, even if on the surface, I'm protesting for that. I think I'm pretty disturbed internally that my protest is enough to make the pilot change their decisions. Like, right. And yet if the pilot says, Hey, I know everyone's scared. I also know this is going to be terribly inconvenient. And my job is to make safe decisions for this plane. And even if no one likes it, I know we have to land safely in Missouri.

1:01:32It's okay if you cry and scream. It's okay if you write an angry review about, you know, our airline company. I'm going to do what I really believe is best. Like, I want that person as my pilot. I really do. I mean, this is the problem we're in as a society where we have elected leaders that seem to think their job is to do whatever their base yells at them to do, not what is actually right. You know, it's funny. You're talking about the screen time thing. What really hit me with that is the other day, my kids were asleep. My wife and I were watching TV and then I was, I was thinking in my head, okay, it's late.

1:02:03It's time for us to go to bed. And I just turned it off. And my wife was like, Hey, Hey, what are you, what are you doing? You know? And she was like, I need, you need, you got to give me a heads up. And I was like, you're totally right. Right. And I was like, if we feel because I felt the same way. Right. You know, when she's done it, it's like if I'm feeling it as an adult and I know that the TV is going to come back on some other time, you know, I know that it didn't disappear forever. what does a three-year-old think about this? So of course they freaked out when the iPad disappeared from view.

1:02:38I mean, they don't even have object permanence yet. The iPad could be gone forever. They don't understand. And so when you understand that, it allows you to one, respect or appreciate the freak out a little bit, but also prepare them in such a way that maybe you lessen it in advance. That's right. And this is, this is what I love helping parents with so much. Like whether I'm talking to parents or kids, I always think that it gets more powerful to teach people how to think than what to think. Right. So even the screen time example is a great one. And I always find coming back to my own adult life is useful, right?

1:03:13Cause we forget we're not that different from our kids and what they need. If I was sitting watching a show, let's even say it was by myself. Cause often our kids watch screen time without us. Cause we're like, okay, I'm going to use this time to do other things. Exactly. So my kid's watching something. And me too. I'm not at my best in that. I'm obviously like, cause I ended up feeling guilty in one moment. I feel like my kid has too much screen time. And then I react with such intensity. I'm like, screen time is over now. You know, cause I'm just like trying to manage my own guilt through my, you know, sudden decision-making.

1:03:39And I like take the iPad away. Well, if I think about how to think about this, okay. So I'm watching something I'm immersed in the show, right? I'm, I'm really involved. And all of a sudden the world I'm immersed in is yanked from me. Forget just the screen. That's like a pretty upsetting experience. And when I've thought through this to my own kids, I'm like, first of all, I should probably like tell them this is coming and not just manage it based on my own guilt. But I've actually started with screen time based on this idea of like, wait, they're just immersed in a world. I was like, what would happen if I forced myself 30 seconds before I end my kid's screen time, just sit next to them, put my hand on their back and like kind of join whatever screen time world they're in.

1:04:15So I can almost form a bridge that once I take away that world, then at least they're connected to me to kind of, this is what we say, rejoin the real world, which is like a crash. And it's been, I don't even know if that's some like proven strategy, but I'm like, right, they're immersed in a world, then they're alone. Okay, well, I know for me, if I was immersed in any world before it was yang for me, it would be great if there was like a human helping me, you know, bridge that gap. And it has, it's not like they never have a meltdown, but it's been a huge difference. Well, also, if you can't read or write, and you're two thirds of the way through a video that you randomly found, when your parents take that video away, it does disappear forever because you have no way to get back to that.

1:04:57And so one of the things we found is we go, Hey, look, I'm going to, I'm going to pause where you are. I'm going to take a picture of it. You know, they've never once asked to go back to it, but the fear that it is gone forever in that moment, which is clearly motivating a good chunk of the reaction. That has gone away. It's the same like when you're in stores, right? Like they have no idea how you got there. They have no idea that you might come back to Target on another time and date. And so they see this thing that they like and want and they have no, it's not like they can write it down in their journal or write it down in the notes app of their phone, right?

1:05:38So they're just worried that it's going to be gone forever and you're going to forget and you can just empathize with that and adjust for it. I think that also relates to what you're saying with feelings and how there's no visible marker. To some degree, I think kids are always asking parents without asking it concretely, like, am I real? The things I feel, the things I want, the things I'm curious about, are they real? And when you say to a kid, you really, oh, that toy looks fun. I'm going to take a picture of it so we can remember it for your next birthday. Meanwhile, the next birthday is like 11 and a half months away.

1:06:09But still, it's not just an easy way to get out of a tantrum. What you're really saying is the things you want are real. And I'm going to show you they're real. And I care about them. By taking a picture. And exactly. And I care about them. And the reason often kids don't ask about them again isn't because they just forget. It's because all they really wanted in that moment is to feel real. And when you give them the thing they really are looking for, guess what? Their needs are satisfied. So the most powerful thing in the book to me, as we wrap up, is maybe you're doing the opposite of these things or you've screwed up.

1:06:43You haven't been the way you want it. You say to yourself, it's too late. And you have a great passage in the book where you basically go, it's never too late. and what struck me about it is the reason i know it's never too late is like there are still things that i would like my parents to fix or to talk about that would make a huge difference to me if they could just bring up in one fucking conversation like if they could just address it one time uh it would be this huge weight for me it was huge a healing process and those things were 30 plus years ago. So the idea that you can't fix something that happened three days ago with your kid or 30 days ago or three years ago with your kid, you have a really good, you have really good proof that it's not too late because it's not too late for you and your own childhood issues.

1:07:39That's right. And that's, I ended, which was amazing. I did a TED talk this year and did it on the topic of repair and ended with a kind of experiential moment in the audience and it's online too, of going through kind of imagining your parents calling you or opening up a letter and exactly what you're saying, Ryan, having a repair, right? And it actually, you know, makes me think what we were just talking about, Ryan, like if our parents said, which I think we all want, if one of them called us, or again, if they're both deceased and you happen to read a letter that said, Hey, you know, even just in general, there were, there are so many different moments in your childhood that probably felt bad to you and they weren't your fault.

1:08:16And I want you to know that. And if you ever want to talk to me about those moments, I'll listen. Right. I think it goes back to realness. The reason we still want that repair is it's like the things I felt and noticed, please just tell me that they were real. Because if it's like a shared experience of that reality, it feels so much less painful than if I'm the only one continuing to hold that. And whether I'm 10 or 40 or 60, the things that we have stored in aloneness, they are so painful. We just want the aloneness removed. We know they can't be fixed, but we can always remove the aloneness.

1:08:50And if you think I say this in my TED talk, no matter how old any of us are, what's always mathematically true is our kids are younger than we were. Okay. That is definitely true for everyone. Okay. I can say with certainty. And so if it would still make a difference in our life for our parents to have some version of that recognition repair with us. It is to me, the only proof we need that is never too late with our kids. And so whether you're right, it was three days ago, three years ago, a pattern of things for the last 20 years to go to your kid. And, you know, in my, um, in the book and definitely in the Ted talk, there's the scripts, like, I think like having words like, Oh, here's how I could start that conversation.

1:09:24Here's how I can open that door. Um, it is never, ever too late. And I do think our body is always seeking connection for the moments that were stored with a lack of connection. I really am. I don't know if I'm like an optimist. I just, I believe that. I think that's always true. When repair is such a powerful word, I think, because in and of itself, it implies something was broken or not done right. You know what I mean? Like repair, reconciliation or whatever, It doesn't necessarily imply a break or an error. And repair implies I didn't do something right or I didn't do enough. And I'm acknowledging that, which in and of itself is meaningful and it allows someone to feel seen.

1:10:15Yeah. And I think also what's really important is to me, fault is like, it doesn't matter whose fault it was. to me, the thing that was kind of broken, if you think about broken, it's a lack of connection. That's really what broken is. That's the visual. And a lack of connection can happen for so many reasons. Often it happens from two people who had good intentions, where just something was off, where a moment was missed. That's fine. And so just to acknowledge that something was held in that brokenness to me means that aloneness. It's aloneness. When you're repairing something, it was a moment that was stored in your kid's body in aloneness.

1:10:48They were never talked to about it, right? That's what, that's what I always like want so many parents to know. Events aren't what like quote traumatized kids ever. Events don't bring trauma. Events that are stored in aloneness are what stay with kids in a state of trauma because the trauma is the aloneness in an overwhelming, distressing event, not the event itself. And I think so many times parents feel so guilty about the event that they don't talk to our kid, the kid about the event, but the event wasn't the thing. It's actually the thing that stops us from connecting with our kid. That is the thing our kids want to avoid.

1:11:20Well, and the source of so much, I think, ongoing tension or conflict inside families is a disagreement over what happened. Yes. But I've come to understand it's been a struggle for me, but it's like people aren't wrong about their feelings. Like they feel that. So even if they're understanding their interpretation, what they made up about intentions or what happened, even if all of that is wrong, it doesn't change the fact that they feel hurt under, like they feel what they feel. And so in that sense, it's, it's real, you know? And so you have to repair that, not what you think. And, and so, so this, this, I think very boomer tendency of like, that didn't happen.

1:12:10What are you talking about? You know, um, it doesn't make it go away because even if you are right and they have an imagined memory or they were fed incorrect information, you're not going to be able to argue them out of their feelings. They still feel it. You have to deal with the feeling. You can't unfeel a feeling. Either the feeling becomes understood by someone or it's alone. Those are the only two options. And I think this, again, there's so many full circles and this is what I hope feels obvious to people listening. It's like, wait, it's the same stuff over and over, which is good because again, we don't have to learn a million systems, right?

1:12:45When we won't repair for something because we think we're right, right? It's, it's, it's two, it's two things that have collapsed. It's a one thing is true mentality instead of a two things are true mentality, right? It's like, okay, well, I can actually think that that whole experience went down very differently. And if I say to myself, Becky, I really believe that's true for me. Okay. Okay. And oh, wait. And the two things that are true. The second is, oh, my daughter feels very hurt. Okay. Can I remind myself, I have my story and that feels true to me. And can I open myself up to the possibility that felt very different for her.

1:13:16Right. And I think the other thing that's collapsed again, is behavior and identity. We're often the reason we don't repair with other people is because we fear that if we listen and understand the thing that feels true for them, it means I'm a bad person. It like, right. Versus wait, I'm a good person who never intended to hurt my son. I'm a good person who believed I was doing the best I could do. And, and my son has a bunch of moments he would like me to listen to and understand, not prove against, just better understand. And that again, does not mean I'm, I was a bad mom, right? The more I can validate my own good identity to myself, the more open I am to hearing about a whole range of behaviors that felt bad to other people.

1:14:02Yeah. And yeah, full circle. If you can accept that your kids are good inside, even when their behavior demonstrates otherwise, you also deserve the same treatment slash gift, which is you are not always the parent you wanted to be or the person that you would like to be. But inside you are good. You just didn't always do good things. and addressing or apologizing for or acknowledging those behaviors. It not only doesn't change the fact that you're good inside, it's the only way to get closer to bringing the inside stuff on the outside. It's a way to become more consistently that thing. That's right.

1:14:48And I always think, especially for anyone listening who has older kids, and it's true for younger kids too, but when older kids, and Ryan, even kids like our age, right? We're older kids, right? kind of have things that we're like, we'd love acknowledged or at least listen to when considered by our parents. To me, what we're saying to an adult is I'd like to form another way of connecting with you. I'd like to like open a door and like actually bond with you around that. I'd like to be connected. I'd like that not to exist outside of our relationship. It's actually an invitation to get to know someone better.

1:15:17And like, if you think about all of the parents who have kids who are older, who say, wait, so if I go to my kid and say, Hey, there probably were things that didn't feel good to you. And I'd like to listen to understand and just to learn more. What I'm really saying to my kid is I want to get to know you better. I want to get to know more of you. It's such a beautiful act of relationship building. It's lovely. And I loved the book so much. You can see I took quite a few notes. Those are all the pages full. So I loved the book and thank you so much for writing it. And it's really, it's really wonderful to talk.

1:15:48Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you for all the work you do. It's so nice to have this conversations. Thank you. Likewise.

1:16:05Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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