Why You Can Know What to Do and Still Not Do It?! {EP 150}

Robyn: So to get us ready for the book to come out. We've been doing a podcast series that mirrors the same arc of the book. So we started talking about why it's so important to understand the neuroscience of behavior. And we did that several weeks ago. And then we looked at how to kind of quote-unquote, fix those behaviors by growing what I call is the Owl brain. Right? That's strategies and tools that are focused not on responding to challenging behavior, but instead on growing our kids' window of stress tolerance, their regulation, and their felt safety, right? So that their baffling behaviors will happen a little less often. Then last week, that's when we did an episode about actually responding to– although sure sometimes it's more like reacting to those baffling behaviors, so actually responding to and calming those Watchdog and Possum brain behaviors and connecting with our kids when they're far down the Watchdog or the Possum brain pathway with strategies that are focused on regulation, connection and felt safety. If you've been following this series, you've heard me talk about the subtitle to my book, Brain-body-sensory Strategies That Really Work. And just what my feelings have been around that subtitle, if you haven't heard me talk about that, go back and listen to like the previous two or three episodes. But the piece that I just mentioned, the chapters focused on responding to our kids when they have behaviors that are letting us know they are down that Watchdog pathway or down that Possum pathway. Those strategies are focused not on stopping behavior, they're focused on bringing regulation and connection and felt safety to our kids so that they can return back into what I call connection mode because that's where the behaviors, that frankly we're hoping for, that's where the behaviors will emerge from. And so that's how I've really made peace with that subtitle, Brain-body-sensory Strategies That Really Work. And that my offering to everybody who reads the book isn't, of course, a promise that they're going to work. Because I can't promise that, but that when we keep ourselves focused on what the real problem is, the regulation, and the connection, and the felt safety that's underneath the behavior, that's when we can explore the kinds of strategies that actually yeah, will really work. 

Robyn: So anyway, the book kind of goes through this arc, because it's the arc that the parents that I work through, tend to go through, like, we start off talking about the neuroscience of behavior, and really reframing behavior. And then we move into talking about strategies and tools and practical things we can do. And it's really important that those two things go together, right? That the understanding of behavior and the tools; that they kind of emerge together instead of just random tools being used at random times, right, because that really keeps us in that Whack-a-Mole place. We put together the neuroscience with our toolbox full of regulation, connection, and felt safety based tools. So then, oftentimes, when I get to this spot in my work with parents– we've done the neuroscience, we've done the tools, parents will almost inevitably have a moment where they're looking at me and they're like, “I know all of this now, how come? I'm not doing it? How can I know what to do, but still not do it?” And y'all, I love that question. And I love it for so many reasons. One reason I love it is because it tells me a little bit about where we are in the kind of trajectory of change in not just the child but also in the parents that I work with and their neurobiology. Because by the time you get to this part of my book, you're gonna see that although I'm really helping parents develop parenting strategies, at the same time I'm also thinking about how to help the parents in neurobiology change. How to help their window bow window of tolerance change and grow. And kind of the exact same way, we're hoping that their child's window of stress tolerance and stress response system will change and grow. So when parents get to that point when they're asking, “How can I know these things but still not do them?” That's information to me. That's a clue about the progress, the shifts that have been made inside that parent's brain and that parent’s neurobiology. I also love this question, because it helps us understand our kids a lot better. Because our kids almost always know the right thing to do you. But are they doing it? No. That's why you're listening to this show. Right? This is true about all humans, like humans constantly know really lots of cool, great stuff to do, and are they always doing it? No! Like, I make a living out of, you know, regulation and connection and felt safety based relational experiences. And do I always relate to people in that way? Oh, my gosh, absolutely not. Do I always parent that way? Oh, my gosh, absolutely not. Am I always in relationship with my husband that way? No. So my point right now is welcome to having a deeply universal parenting experience– a deeply universal human-ing experience, that we can know what to do and still not do it. 

Robyn: Behavior so very rarely comes from conscious thoughts. Very rarely are we pausing to think about our behavior before we have that behavior. Behavior is largely implicit, it's automatic. Behavioral impulses are firing in the brain long before we're having a conscious thought. And it is very hard to thwart a behavioral impulse that has been triggered. Now it's definitely possible. That's why we're here. Like, we're here to learn how to essentially widen our window of tolerance, grow our Owl brain so that those behavioral impulses fire in a way where we actually do have the capacity to pause and look and say, ‘Do I actually want to do that thing or not?’ Takes a lot of work. But it is possible. Y’all our Owl brains have so much great stuff stored in it, right? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, or you're in the club, or maybe you're even someone who's worked with me in the past, like, your Owl brain is full of great information. And maybe you're new here. And you're just learning about Owl brains and Watchdogs and Possums and all that kind of good stuff. So I'll just tell you, you're Owl brain is going to learn lots of really great stuff about what's happening in your child and what's happening in their nervous system and you're going to learn a lot of great regulation and connection and felt safety based tools and strategies that will help and support your child. And all of that is going to get learned and stored in your Owl brain. This means you are great at understanding your child's behavior, having compassion for them, staying out of judgment, and all those good things when your Owl brain is in charge, right? So much good stuff’s stored up there. You know what to do, and still struggle to do it because you're not in your Owl brain all the time, right? Well, of course not. I mean, you're listening to this podcast, because you are in relationship with somebody with a vulnerable nervous system and big baffling behaviors. So if you live with somebody who's pretty chronically dysregulated, and spends a lot of time in protection mode, that's traumatic, that is so hard on your nervous system. And I have an old podcast called When Parenting Is Traumatic. And if you are kind of wrapping your brain around that idea for the first time ever, I really encourage you when this episode is over to go back and check out that episode. And if you did listen to that episode, but it's been a while since you listened to that episode– I published it like last October so it's kind of old, maybe go back and listen to it anyway just as like a little refresher, a way to get a boost of compassion for yourself. It's a moment of bringing your Owl brain back and strengthening your Owl brain yourself when you can really validate, and see, and reflect on your experiences, your very valid experiences that have left your nervous system extremely vulnerable and leaves your Owl brain, you know, at the ready to just fly away in the face of even relatively small stressors. Your window of tolerance is small and your stress response system is sensitized, just like your child. 

Robyn: So that means that little stressors and obviously sometimes not-so-little ones– sometimes the stressors in your family are enormous, right? Sometimes those stressors will take you straight down and like, all the way down that Watchdog and that Possum pathway. That means you're going to respond to your child's behavior from a place of protection, not from a place of connection. That's normal. Plus, when we are stressed, we default to kind of older, more well-worn neural pathways. Like for many of us using consequences, it’s a very well-worn neural pathway. Maybe that's how we originally parented and for most of us, that's how we were parented. So yeah, it's a super well-worn neural pathway. The more stress we get, the more likely we are to kind of default to these old neural pathways. Plus, just in general, the further we go into protection mode, the more controlling we get, the more rigid we get, the more we're going to try to control our kids with maybe punitive consequences. Again, that's just normal that's being human. The more dysregulated we are, the more unsafe we feel, the more controlling we get, and the more we're going to try to control other people's behaviors. And we're going to do that in ways that feel to us most likely to, you know, work in the moment. And yeah, that's going to be punitive consequences, yelling or even more intense dysregulation from us, right? So in the book, I walk you through two different ways to approach this. One is developing like kind of like an exercise regime of sorts, an exercise regime that's really intended to widen your window of stress tolerance. You can think about it like exercising that muscle, strengthening your stress response system muscle. And I give you so many ideas, so many pretty– you know, really practical and accessible ideas in the book. I focus on these four categories that are categories that I have found to one, have kind of the most bang for their buck like they make the most impact, but also they're the most accessible. Like you don't need a lot of money, you don't need a babysitter, you don't need to set time away for these kinds of things. And the things that I focus on in the book are connection, play, self-compassion, and this technique from Dr. Rick Hanson called noticing the good.

Robyn: Now what's super tricky is that for a nervous system in protection mode, all of those things feel maybe hard.. maybe all the way to like feeling dangerous. I know that's been true for me, like when I, for example, first learned about self-compassion. I mean, it actually felt dangerous to try to apply some of those ideas to my own life, like I believed in the neuroscience, and I understood the neuroscience enough to be like, okay, yeah, this whole self-compassion thing makes perfect sense. But it's still felt really threatening and dangerous. So one, I want to just like offer that up there as that's really normal. A nervous system that spends a lot of time in protection mode is going to find those things; connection, play, noticing the good, and self-compassion, really hard, if not even all the way to just actually feeling dangerous. So what I advise you to do is just start with whichever one feels the easiest, or whichever one feels the less hard or the least threatening. And then practicing, like really, truly look at it like an exercise regime. These aren't things to do in the moment, like when you're facing extremely baffling behaviors and you're flipping your own lid. These are things to do outside the moment so that you can grow your window of stress tolerance, and flip your lid, go all the way down the Watchdog or the Possum pathway less frequently. Now equally as important to that, like to the development of an exercise regime, but probably actually much harder to even do is to develop ways to hang on to our Owl brain in the moment, right? In the face of being triggered, in the face of facing these most baffling behaviors. It is really hard to do that and it's essentially impossible to do that until we've done a little bit of work on increasing our own window of stress tolerance. The stronger your Owl brain is, the more you'll be able to notice your experience, notice your reaction to your child's baffling behaviors, and then that means you'll have more of an opportunity to not judge yourself, but instead to offer yourself compassion. And y'all that begins to change just everything. 

Robyn: I know for some of you listening, that that feels impossible, like the idea of having self-compassion, the idea of being able to pause, the idea of being able to stay regulated, though not necessarily calm in the face of your child's dysregulated behavior, that feels impossible, and I totally get that. Remember, a couple of episodes ago when I told you about how the book follows a fictional character named Nat? Nat comes to me for parent coaching and the book follows Nat through a year of parent coaching. And in the book, I do this in a way where I have these sections of each chapter that are coming from me in first person, right? So you as the reader get to really see inside my mind as I am working with this parent who is really, really struggling. And slowly over time– slowly over the year of our fictional work together, and slowly over the book, Nat does build her window of stress tolerance. And this helps to keep her Owl brain around just a little bit longer in the face of her child's Sammys biggest, most baffling behaviors. Now, Nat didn't come to me to get support for herself, at least not overtly, she came to me to get support for helping to, you know, navigate what was happening with her child and her child's really baffling behaviors. And like, I would say with every parent I've ever worked with, there does come a point where the parent realizes like, oh, actually, they did kind of come for themselves and actually they're getting as much from our work together for themselves, as they're getting for their, you know, for their child. So there's this moment in our work together, where Nat comes to me really frustrated with herself and she even says, like, “I'm beginning to wonder if I'm really the one with the problem here, you know, not my kid.” And, y'all, you know, I wrote that into the book. Because if I told you the percentage, a number, of parents who said almost the exact same thing to me over the years, I mean, it's probably close to 100%. This is such a common moment for me to have with parents, this place of them noticing, like, uh oh, actually, it's me who's really dysregulated. This is really inevitable and unavoidable and actually, I know it's a painful, but it's a wonderful part of the journey. As your Owl brain grows and especially as it grows in its capacity to stay even slightly regulated when your child is like off the charts dysregulated, your awareness of yourself and your own behavior is also growing. And there's always this moment of, ‘oh, my gosh, I am freaking out as much as my kid is.’ So in my work with clients, there's always been this spot. And again, it's a pretty painful spot, of being able to see, and being able to be self-reflective, and noticing of self and noticing what's happening for us, wanting to do different, even having some of the tools to do different, but still not quite yet having the regulatory capacity to do it different yet. I mean, it really, it would probably really be accurate to say this happens in 100% of the clients that I work with, the way it's demonstrated is in slightly different ways and even when I'm working with folks that have nothing to do with parenting, there's this moment of enough Owl brain, enough self-reflection to go, ‘oh, my gosh, I am in so much pain, but I can't– I still can't stop it or change it. You know, I know I'm learning all these tools but I'm still not capable of implementing the tools yet.’ 

Robyn: I want you to hear me that this is normal– it's painful, it's normal. It's not the end of the journey. It's just a place on the journey and you're gonna keep going. Part of what can be helpful is exploring the way our implicit memory is impacting how our stress response system gets involved. Our implicit memory can cause us to flip into protection mode when it's really not technically necessary based on what's happening objectively. I mean, you know, I know, all behavior makes sense, no behavior is maladaptive. Our protective parts of our nervous system only come online when our neurobiology truly believes it's necessary. But we can also look at those moments with, you know, some removed objectiveness and say, like, ‘Oh, yeah, sometimes I flip into protection mode when maybe it's not technically necessary based on what's actually happening in reality.’ And one reason for that could be that our implicit memory can cause us to flip into protection mode when it's just not necessary– it was necessary in the past, that's why it's stored in our memory. It's just not maybe necessary now. So we develop our mental models in our first like 12 to 18 months of life. And all of that is stored as implicit memory. And we continue to deeply encode implicit memory, you know, throughout our whole life. I mean, implicit memory is really designed to help us create predictions and expectations about the world. And our brain is exceptionally concerned with predicting what's about to happen next. I mean, it's really, its number one priority is, what can I predict accurately what's about to happen next so that I can stay safe and connected. And adding onto that, 80% of how we experience reality is based on memory and what's happened in the past. Okay? So exploring our past experiences and our memory, and our implicit mental models, especially as they relate to parenting which also means the mental models we developed from having been parented. Exploring all of that can be really, really helpful. I mean, I absolutely have had to do that. My husband had to do that. We've really supported each other. Snd trying to really deconstruct what we came to adulthood with, like, what we came to parenthood with, what baggage we came with, what beliefs we had, what implicit memory we had, that weren't going to serve us in the way that we really wanted to parent. And it's taken a lot of very active work. Now, if you're feeling a little confused about what I'm talking about with implicit memory, a couple of places you can go– I do have a podcast series that was about memory and we one whole episode was about implicit memory. And then in the book! All of Chapter 10 is exploring implicit memory, our mental models, and how that relates to our parenting because we're vulnerable to getting swept away by some of our implicit memory, and then our Watchdog or our Possum brains can take over. And then we end up maybe parenting in ways that we wish we hadn't or ways in which we regret. 

Robyn: So when you hear the voice in your head, “I know what to do, how come I'm not doing it?!?” I want to invite you to just notice it. And then I want you to pause, okay? I don't want you to move into judgment, in fact, I don't want you to move into anything yet. I want you to notice it and then just be with it, acknowledge that truth. Acknowledge that you know what to do, and you’re not doing it and you're frustrated, like, just be with that truth for a moment. Okay? Don't judge it, don't shame it, don't talk yourself out of it. Then you'll be in a space to maybe be able to shift into a moment of self-compassion. You might be able to say to yourself something like, ‘Yep, there I am being human again.’ Or maybe something like, ‘This doesn't mean I'm a bad parent, this just means I'm really stressed right now and that makes perfect sense.’ So just like your kids, regulated, connected parents who feel safe, parent the way that they want to, and just like your kids, focusing on growing your Owl brain and responding to your Watchdog and Possum brain with regulation, connection, and felt safety towards yourself and compassion towards yourself. That's the path y'all, just like our kids. So really seriously, truly, like one of my favorite things about working this way, is it's the same. Like you learn about your kids, and then you apply it to yourself. Like it's the exact same thing, you don't have to learn anything new! You can apply it to yourself and then yeah, you can start applying it to others as well. 

Robyn: Okay, so this is a great place for me to end today because next week I'm going to talk even more about how you can extend love and compassion and connection to your Watchdog and Possum brain and what that might look like. And of course, that's not the only thing to look forward to next week! Next week is the official book release week!! I can't even believe I'm saying these words out loud. Y'all. I turned in my manuscript over a year ago. I submitted my proposal to my publisher and started to move towards being under contract with them like two years ago. So here we are. I really am actually saying, like, next week, and if you've pre-ordered the book, it's very possible you may have already gotten it. And if not, you might be getting it soon, you just might get it before the 21st. I'm not guaranteeing that. I've just known that that could be possible. Now, if you have gotten it, oh, my gosh, I was like– I can't– I mean, as I tried to imagine you like opening your mailbox and pulling out this book. I don't know, y'all. I, I don't know– I'm really kind of speechless, which is really saying something right? Here's what I would love so much for you– from you. Oh, my gosh, take a picture, take a picture of you and your book, take a picture of your book, quote-unquote, “in the wild.” We've been talking about that, like, where can we find Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors, out in the wild? Take a picture, send it to me, post it on social media, and tag me! That will make my day to see this starting to arrive in people's mailboxes and starting to be helpful, like, all of this work that I've done with this book for it to finally be in your hands, oh, my gosh, I can't wait to see it! So yeah, take a picture, put it on social if you want to, I'd love to see it! 

Robyn: Also, some other things you could do that would be helpful into spreading the word and getting the book into more people's hands is if you have a Goodreads account you can go there and rate and review the book. That's really helpful! And once September 21 comes out, you– or passes, you know, once we get past September 21, official release day, you will be able to leave a rating and review over on Amazon, that's also really helpful! You probably know this, that reviews are one of the most important things, and you know, getting somebody who is new to me and new to my work to buy the book. And when I think about what could be different for your kids– like when I think about how you might be able to stop listening to this podcast. Like if all the adults in your world knew this about your child and their unique nervous system and their vulnerabilities and they were able to be with your child in this way, you wouldn't have to work so hard at it because you'd be so supported. So when I think about it like that, that's when I think about like, how many people can we get this book to? How can we get– how many people can we get this information into the hands of? And yes, ratings and reviews are the best way that somebody who doesn't know me would, you know, risk their time and their money to read the book. Same with the podcast, actually. And for some folks, a podcast is a much-preferred way to learn. The one thing I think about the book that is really helpful is just how it's organized, right? Like how in order it is and it's step by step and the podcast is not ordered, you know, organized that way really I just kind of turn my mic on to start talking. The podcast is of course another really wonderful way to expose other people to this relational neuroscience approach to understanding kids with vulnerable nervous systems and big baffling behaviors. So same! Rating and reviewing the podcast is really, really helpful. Oh my gosh, y'all I’ve been so focused on the book that there are two other big things to tell you about that I keep forgetting. 

Robyn: Number one is the club will be opening soon! I'm anticipating opening the club on September 26th. So if you're a parent, and you're looking for more support, and you're looking to be in community with other parents, and you're looking to have, you know, one-on-one access to me in the club, which we do in a forum, as well as in live meetings, you get to connect with me and ask me your questions. If you're looking for that sort of experience, come and check out the club! Again, I'm pretty sure it's September 26 that it's going to open and I’ll probably leave it open for new members for about a week! robyngobbel.com/theclub. And if you're listening as a professional and you'd love to work with families in this way through this lens and this paradigm. I'd love for you to consider joining us next year in Being With! Being With is a year-long immersive program for parenting professionals, you get access to all my materials, you get access to a parent course that you can teach, worksheets, all sorts of goodness. And we are in the application process for Being With! So Being With registration doesn't actually close until mid-November. But we do have applications open. So if you wanted to consider Being With for 2024, head over to robyngobbel.com/beingwith and you can fill out an application. All right. I think that's it. Oh my gosh, y'all. I'm gonna see you here next week! Next week's book release week and we're gonna celebrate together and I just simply cannot wait. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do. Thank you for continuing to hit play on this podcast to keep showing up for these kids and showing up for yourself and inviting me on to this part of your journey. I'm so grateful and I'm so honored. And I will see you next week.