Why Do I Get So Dysregulated? {EP 20}

Robyn: Why, as parents, do we get so dysregulated, so triggered, furious, or we shut down, or, I mean, insert whatever big feeling you're having in the face of your kid's dysregulation? And some of it, if we're honest with ourselves is pretty small stuff, right? Like these kind of mild bumps in the road can awaken huge feelings in us, a feeling that's so big that it's really preventing you from parenting in the way that you know you really want to and, of course, this doesn't mean that we don't set boundaries or have very legitimate feelings of frustration, annoyance, grief, I'm definitely not talking about that at all. I'm talking about these enormous feelings that aren't exactly proportionate to the problem that we're having, and then again, ultimately, are preventing us from really parenting the way that you want to. Of course, being ignored or yelled at or sworn at or disrespected or man, like a kid who's refusing to eat or eating too much, or sneaking or stealing or won't do a chore, or or or or, or or right? I mean, this list is is endless, and these behaviors are, of course, never going to feel great. I'm not asking you to or suggesting that there's a way that difficult behaviors suddenly become something that we don't care about, right? That's not it at all. But again, sometimes our brain goes into like, full-on attacking Watchdog mode, or full-on collapsed Possum brain, right?    

Robyn: When the reality is that our kids refusing to do a chore or ignoring us, or even yelling at us or being disrespectful isn't actually life-threatening. So the question then becomes, if it isn't life-threatening, why does our brain go into attack mode, a mode we really only need when we believe something is life threatening? We've spent a lot of time thinking about the arousal continuum with regards to our kids, right? There's a podcast episode on it, one of my earliest ones. There's a couple blog episodes about the arousal continuum. And then, of course, you know, my full parent course, Parenting After Trauma: Minding The Heart And Brain, is created and offered around the idea of the arousal continuum. So again, we spend a lot of time thinking about the arousal continuum with regards to our kids, but my dear friend Eileen Devine, who was a guest on a previous podcast episode as well. What Eileen says, is the brain, is the brain, is the brain. And you mom, you dad, you grandma or aunt or uncle, you teacher, therapist, whatever role, whatever hat you're wearing as you listen to this podcast episode, you have a brain too, and so do I right? 

Robyn: So why does our brain go into attack mode, a mode we need when things are really dangerous, life-threatening or potentially life-threatening, if we aren't actually in a life-threatening situation, because, again, as much as it feels like your child refusing to go to school or your child yelling at you or ignoring you, right? those things can feel life-threatening but rarely are those behaviors actually life-threatening. We're going to talk about two main reasons in this episode. I'm sure there's a lot more reasons, but we're going to focus on these two reasons today, in today's episode, and then, of course, I have a corresponding blog post on this topic, so you can head over to robyngobbel.com/blog, and check out that blog post.    

Robyn: The first reason we're going to look at today that leaves us having huge, kind of, like life-threatening reactions to situations that aren't exactly life-threatening is that we as parents, caregivers, helpers and healers, we have a pretty narrow window of stress tolerance. So when I teach about the window of stress tolerance, just as a quick aside here, I teach about it as the space in our nervous system in which we can tolerate stress without freaking out. And you and I know that our window of stress tolerance varies a lot, right? Like it varies day to day, can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, it can vary based on what behavior we're presented with. There's a lot of different things that can kind of close up our window of tolerance. There's a lot of things that can widen our window of tolerance. But without a doubt, a lot of us are walking around the world with a pretty narrow window of stress tolerance right now, right? I mean, we're about to hit the year anniversary of here in the United States, at least, of going into pandemic lifestyle, right? This is a year into economic uncertainty. This is a year into for some of us, virtual schooling our kids, a year into life having been completely flipped on his head.    

Robyn: And I know some families of kids or the history of trauma, where these new circumstances have actually been helpful when considering their kids behaviors, there's been ways that really closing our kids worlds up and making them smaller and not leaving the house very much, has decreased our child's level of stress, so their behaviors are actually a little bit better right now. But I also know that there are plenty of families out there where the exact opposite is true, that families that are parenting kids with trauma-related behaviors, and we're couped up, right? We've lost our respite. Maybe there's, you know, a limited access to services that were limited before that for some of our families, the pandemic has wildly increased our kids stress levels, or really decreased the kinds of things that helped keep their stress levels at bay, extracurriculars, maybe or playful experiences that were supportive of them, or therapies that were that were helpful.    

Robyn: So we're living in a time of increased stress, increased isolation, increased overwhelm, right? Our kids experience a felt safety, many of us, many families, their kids experience and felt safety has really been rattled. Right? What this means then is that some of our kids, you know, their trauma-related dysregulation and challenging behaviors, are at an all time high, and we are at an all time low with our ability to, you know, regulate through these behaviors, tolerate through these behaviors, we're not getting any breaks. There comes a point where there's just only so much we can take chronic stress and overwhelm, even when it's not life-threatening, causes our window of stress tolerance to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, right? When our window of stress tolerance is nice and wide, we can tolerate stress done without freaking out, right? So we have a feeling that matches the level of stress that could be frustration or annoyance. You know, I really want to emphasize that when I say, you know, widening our window of tolerance or not responding with such dysregulation, I'm not suggesting that somehow, you know, difficult or challenging or troublesome behaviors don't bother us and we don't have valid reactions or frustration, annoyance, irritation, a little anxiety even, that and definitely not over here talking about, you know, kind of toxic positivity or pretending we don't have normal human feelings.    

Robyn: But when our window of stress tolerance is wider, we can have feelings of frustration, have feelings of annoyance and irritation, nervousness, sadness. We need to have those feelings without completely losing our minds and totally flipping our lives, we can stay connected to the emotion and then use the emotion to help us know what to do next. Frustration and annoyance are feelings that often suggest we need to set a boundary that what's happening is beyond what our boundaries are okay with. Frustration and annoyance is information, feelings are information, they help us help guide what are the next steps that we can take, right? But when our window of stress tolerance is too small or really, really, really narrow, right? These molehill size problems become mountains, teeny, tiny, little stressors feel like we're being chased by saber tooth tigers, and we can't have feelings of frustration or annoyance and stay connected to those feelings and regulate through those feelings and use those feelings to help guide us of what to do next, because we go immediately to a huge, huge, huge feelings blown totally outside our window of tolerance, and now we're yelling or screaming or threatening or being totally overwhelmed and shutting down.    

Robyn: Okay, so a narrow window of stress tolerance is one reason why we are flipping our lids in the face of behaviors that really don't need a flip-lid reaction, right? So the next question is, of course, well, how do we increase our window of stress tolerance? Great question. I've blogged about this a little bit already. We'll do more episodes about this in the future. In the meantime, you can head over to my blog and I'll put these links in the show notes, but I have a blog on finding play and playfulness for us as adults, because playfulness is a really great way to widen our window of stress tolerance. A lot of parents tell me that they've really lost their playfulness. That's just an indication that we are having a really narrow window of stress tolerance that we're experiencing the impact of trauma ourselves in our own nervous systems, so finding ways to reconnect with or rediscover play or playfulness in our own lives. I'm not necessarily talking about playing with your kids, but playfulness for ourselves is a way to increase our stress tolerance. And then, of course, you hear me talk over and over again all the time about increasing self-compassion, because the more compassion that we can have for ourselves, the wider our window of stress tolerance becomes.    

Robyn: So again, I'll put some direct links down in the show notes, but also you can go find those blogs over at robyngobbel.com/blog or kind of scroll back through previous podcast episodes, and you'll see podcast episode about self-compassion. I also would love for you to check out the club, which is my virtual group of education, connection and co-regulation for parents of kids who have experienced trauma. But the club, in this virtual way, definitely kind teaches some good, cool, important things that parents are finding really helpful. But my focus in the club is really more about facilitating and offering connection and co-regulation because actually those things change the brain even more than the education does and without the connection and co-regulation and how that raises our window of stress tolerance. All the education in the world doesn't even matter because we can't stay connected enough to kind of our thinking brain or our owl brain to use any of those cool things that we're learning about. So Robyn gobbel.com/theclub is where you can learn more about the club, and see if that's a good fit for you or your family to get the connection, co-regulation and increase your own window of stress tolerance.    

Robyn: There's another reason I want to talk about today that, in my experience, impacts every human on the planet, certainly every human I've ever met and is related to why we have these, you know, mountain out of a molehill reactions to our kids behaviors. And that is the idea of implicit memory and implicit memory awakenings and us as the parents, I talk about implicit memory awakenings and how that's related to behaviors, in my free video with accompanying ebook on trauma, memory and behaviors, which you can find out Robyngobbel.com/videoseries, that video series is all about implicit memory and our kids and how that's related to the behaviors that you see in our kids. But this is true about us too, as adults. Early life experiences shape the way we perceive the world and our expectations about how things are going to go next.    

Robyn: One of our brains primary jobs is anticipation what's about to happen so we know how to react to it or respond to it really, really, really quickly, right? So we're not always learning and reinventing the wheel. The brain becomes this organ of anticipation, right? And we also adapt to early, painful experiences in a really brilliant, heroic ways that help us meet our needs the best way we knew how, right? When we were small, and these early, hard experiences happen to us, and then we develop ways to protect ourselves from experiencing overwhelming and often not co-regulated, painful experiences. So as an example, maybe when we were really small, baby, toddler, or preschooler, our own cries and our own needs when unanswered and maybe this happened a lot, and when we were small, having our needs ignored a lot is actually life-threatening, right? Our brain experiences the lack of response as something very, very, very dangerous. Because when you're a tiny baby or a toddler, if we can't rely on or trust the grown-ups to hear our voice, which is often a cry, and then to meet our needs, this is experienced as life-threatening, because we can't meet our own needs.   

Robyn: And now that we're 40 or 50 or 25 or whatever, now that we're an adult, right? And we have kids who are ignoring us. We aren't in a life-threatening situation like we were when we were small, and being ignored was life-threatening, right? But because of this very intricate, brilliant, heroic protective system that we all have, that's always, you know, looking for how to prevent negative experiences from happening again, right? This protective system is doing its best to keep us safe in the here and now, but oftentimes this protective system is really stuck in the past. So even though now we're an adult and now being ignored by somebody, even our kids, isn't life-threatening, right, we have this young part of ourselves that is still on the lookout for being ignored because it used to be life-threatening, and then we have this really young part of ourselves that get, you know, notices when we're being ignored, but doesn't notice that we're adults now doesn't notice that we have different ways to be safe or different ways to be okay in the world, and these really young parts of ourselves like jump to the rescue to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is life-threatening danger, right? So we're adults now, and we're being ignored by our kids and our own child parts of us say, hold up, being ignored is life-threatening. And so we have a reaction that's huge, a reaction that's in response to something that feels life-threatening, or maybe when we were very, very, very small, very young, ignoring our parents was very dangerous, right?    

Robyn: We learned that if we didn't have immediate responses and immediate responses in ways that satisfied the adult, I mean, as little kids, we're not all usually very sure what that is, but man, do we try in order to keep the stress down in the house, or in order to keep us safe, or our siblings safe, or whoever, we would have never dreamed of ignoring our parents, maybe, maybe we would have, like, just jumped to it right away, right? And we did this in an attempt to stay safe, so that we didn't get hurt, physically or emotionally, or other people in our house to get physically and emotionally but now maybe we're 50 or 60 or 25, or 30. Now we're adults, and now, when our kids ignore us, our own very wise and still on alert, but stuck in the past protective system, is actually trying to protect our children by having an enormous reaction that then gets a response from them, right? We feel like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it's not safe to ignore and I don't want my child to be unsafe when they ignore me. I am terrified for their safety, and so I'm going to spring into action so that they can't possibly ignore me. And oftentimes what that might look like is screaming, yelling, having this huge, huge, huge reaction that's pretty hard to ignore, right?    

Robyn: Truly, I understand that this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, practically speaking, but it makes perfect sense to our implicit memories. And sometimes those implicit memories take over and take charge, right? I mean, we're not consciously thinking these things through. We're not consciously thinking, Oh, when I was a kid, ignoring my parents was extremely dangerous, and I want to protect you from that extremely dangerous experience. So when you ignore me, I'm going to react in a way that would make you not able to ignore me, and that's my way of keeping you safe. No, no, obviously we're not thinking all of that through, right? We're responding way faster than we could consciously think all of that through. But here's the thing, behaviors are mostly part of our implicit and that means unconscious world. We like to think that that's not true. We like to think we have a lot of control over our behaviors, and sometimes we do, and we can certainly work to have more control and more explicit awareness and to slow down our behavioral responses to things. That's an absolute goal we can have. But also the reality is, a lot of behavior is implicit, and behavioral impulses are triggered in the brain way faster than our conscious, explicit memory could stop them or pause them. Okay, so consider a behavior in your child that has awakened something really intense in you. Do you guys hear my roosters growing?   

Robyn: Okay, let me say that again. Consider a behavior in your child that seems to awaken something really intense for you. Maybe you have a child that is shut down and you would label lazy. I don't really believe in the label of lazy, but that's something we'll talk about a different time. So maybe when you are small, achievement is how you stayed safe or created your identity or got seen by other people, not being seen and not having an identity, actually can feel annihilating. That's that's life-threatening, right? So maybe your child gets really rude and sassy and just downright disrespectful, and I agree with you that it's super important to speak to others with respect, so I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a reaction to disrespect, but when we react with intensity or anger or our own shutdown or, you know, or our own ignoring behaviors, we aren't really going to help the real problem, which is supporting our kids and expressing their needs and feelings in appropriate, pro-social ways. That's our goal, right? And so screaming and yelling or shutting down or ignoring, right? None of those reactions from us kind of support what our end goal is in supporting our kids, right?    

Robyn: Our reaction to their disrespect touches into our own painful past, implicit memories, right? When we learned to toe the line, never express any negative feelings so that we could keep the peace as much as possible, or we were treated with such our own extreme disrespect, right? But we were young and small and little kids, and we couldn't have the boundary to keep it from happening again. So our boundaries or our bodies and our implicit selves, I want to react with all the power that we couldn't react with when we were small. Now, obviously in this episode, I just took one, you know, really thought about one kind of trigger and one potential reaction, the possibilities here are endless. You know how we, our own implicit selves, developed this way of protective behavior, and our children's behavior sometimes awakens those implicit memories, and then we respond in ways that are implicit selves and our child-selves believes are helpful in keeping us safe, when ultimately they're really not, right? So this pulls us back to this belief right, that no behavior is maladaptive, all behavior makes sense. This is true of our kids, and it's true of us.    

Robyn: If you want to learn a little bit more about the science behind our implicit awakenings and how like the stream of the past comes together with the stream of the now, I do have a blog about that, and I've also done a previous podcast episode about it. It was one of my very first early ones. So I'll link to the blog in my show notes, and then you can scroll back in this in the podcast to see that episode called, No Behavior Is Maladaptive. And then again I mentioned already, but there's another way to deep dive into memory processing theory, which happens to be one of my most favorite things to study with regards to trauma and how trauma impacts the brain. But I have a short video series, as well as a free ebook that comes along with it. It's all free, and it's all created in a way that takes this complex memory science and makes it make sense. So you can find that at Robyn gobbel.com/videoseries. So both of those resources are written with our kids in mind, like from a parenting perspective, but see if you can read the articles or watch the videos while thinking about yourself, including yourself as a child and yourself now, understanding the science a little bit more might help your own behaviors make some more sense to you, and when our behaviors make sense, we can have more compassion for ourselves. When we have more compassion, we create the opportunity for integration in the brain, compassion is the neurobiology of change. When we can hold ourselves in compassion, we create the opportunity that the stream of the past and the stream of the present can come together equally, instead of the stream of the past flooding us, which would if they came together equally, that would increase the likelihood that we could respond in a way that matches the present situation, not in a way that matches our past.    

Robyn: I'll be sure I put all of these resources into the show notes, so you can really easily just click through and go right to them on my website. In addition to everything I've already mentioned, I have over 40 blog articles at Robyngobbel.com/blog as well as a page full of free downloadable resources, videos, PDFs, all sorts of cool stuff. robyngobbel.com/freeresources. If your family is in need of even more support. Again, I'd love to invite you to join the club, a virtual community of connection, co-regulation and a little education for parents just like you, parents in the club are saying things like, I had no idea how helpful it would be to feel less alone. Undoing aloneness changes the brain, and changing the brain means you feel better and then parent the way that you want to. Over at robyngobbel.com, you can get on the list for the wait list for the next time the club opens up and it's opening up again soon. Robyngobbel.com/the,club. Also over on my website, you can get immediate access to short webinars on pretty narrow topics like lying or opposition or food challenges, or you can get instant access to my deep dive, completely comprehensive online parenting course, Parenting After Trauma: Minding The Heart And Brain. If you are loving this podcast, please share. The sooner the whole world understands a neurobiology of being relationally, socially and behaviorally human, the sooner our kids will live in a world that sees them for who they really are, completely amazing, sometimes struggling and sometimes struggling a lot. Thank you for tuning in today. I will catch you next time!