You’re Not Doing It Wrong {EP 135}

Robyn: If you are brand new to the show, and you are not so certain about that word trauma in the title, I want to invite you to just stick around, give us the benefit of the doubt, stick around for just maybe even a few more minutes and see what you think. My experience as a therapist is with kids and families who have histories of complex trauma, developmental trauma, attachment trauma. So my experience is in how do traumatic experiences ongoing inside relationship attachment experiences contribute to sensitized stress response system, and that vulnerability in the nervous system? And then ultimately, yes, those like, baffling, like what on earth is going on kind of behaviors. And what has been so increasingly clear to me over the last many, many, many years is that there's a lot of families with kids with vulnerable nervous systems and big baffling behaviors. There's a lot of grownups with the vulnerable nervous systems and big baffling behaviors. And maybe it doesn't feel like the word trauma totally resonates, and it all can still apply. Because the bottom line is whatever those experiences are, whether it be traumatic experiences, or living in the world, as somebody with some neuro divergence, or sensitive sensory system, or some giftedness, or neuro immune disorder, like Lyme, or PANS, or PANDAS. Whatever the experience is, that's contributing to that vulnerable nervous system, the outcome is the same, which is we're navigating these big, baffling behaviors. And so on this show, we aim to put on our x-ray vision goggles and look past those behaviors, to what the kind of quote unquote real problem is. We want to stop playing behavior whack-a-mole. And we want to do that by truly seeing our kids and ourselves for who they really are, which are kids, humans, who are precious and wonderful and overflowing with infinite worth, yet struggling. And we want to help folks struggle less. 

Robyn: In addition to this podcast, I am about to bring into the world my very first book called Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work. That's happening in September. And I have so much fun and goodness in store for you between now and then. As we celebrate the podcast, we celebrate the book, celebrate all these ways that we are connecting families all over the world. Families like yours, who are overwhelmed, confused, baffled by what is happening in their home and maybe in themselves. So I'm thrilled you're here. It's so awesome to watch this community just grow, and grow, and grow, and grow while we come together to try to make sense of these big, baffling behaviors. And I know so many you've written in and said even though this podcast is about parenting, you're learning about yourself, you're learning about partnering, you're learning about being a friend, you're learning about what's going on with the people just out in public or you know who are ba- baffling us, right? That even though we're talking about parenting here, it all applies and I love that. Y’all are part of a really important movement. 

Robyn: A question I've been watching folks ask a lot lately, and I see this question come up a lot in The Club is folks will talk about some challenges that's happening in their family, and then they'll sort of end it like summarize it with, what am I doing wrong? We've been talking about this so much in The Club, and since it's something that is kind of like right at the tip of my tongue, I wanted to just bring it to all of y'all as well. Let me just be really clear. You're not doing anything wrong. Well, I mean, like, no more wrong than anyone else is doing. Okay? I've probably been asked this question like, what am I doing wrong, approximately 5 trillion bajillion 967,000 million 999 times. That's not a real number, but you get it, right? I've been asked that question a lot. And frankly, I asked myself that question a lot. I ask that question in my parenting. I asked that question in my marriage. I asked that question in my like, self perceived, quote, unquote, lack of progress and my own personal therapy. I ask that question when something kind of goes awry, which it does sometimes, inside my programs. Inside The Club or inside Being With, you know? I'm so quick to say, what am I doing wrong? And I'm getting quicker at reminding myself that that is a question from my watchdog brain. That is a question that comes from a nervous system in production mode. It's a question that makes the assumption that if I was, quote, unquote, doing it right, we wouldn't have this problem, whatever this problem is. My child wouldn't be acting this way. My life wouldn't have unfolded this way. My own therapeutic progress would be faster, right? Because all I have to do is just get it right. 

Robyn: So a few things to kind of deconstruct here. And one is for me, and this is maybe not true for everyone, I don't know. But for me, I learned when I was very small, how things changed when you got it right versus when you got it wrong. And frankly, I got very, very good at getting things right. I got so good at it, that my very young, magical thinking brain believed then that I had like the power to make life easier, to regulate other people better and then myself, if I could just get it right. And because I was just little, the brain makes connections out of things that don't really belong to each other. And the truth is is that I was just a little kid, I didn't have the kind of power that I thought I did, by getting things right. And now I'm a grown up who knows that I do not have that kind of power. But if I get dysregulated enough, I fall back into all old, well worn neural pathways. That's true for all of us. That the more dysregulated we get, the more stressed we are, the narrower our window of tolerance, we are much more likely to default to, kind of, old neural pathways. Which is why changing things, or healing, or whatever language you want to use, is super nuanced. That in addition to having new experiences and having new thoughts and essentially forming new neural pathways, we also want to widen our window of stress tolerance because the wider our window of stress tolerance is the more, let's just say kind of like the more choice we have in which pathway our brain is going to change, when which pathway our brain is going to go down, sorry. When our window of tolerance is very narrow when we have a significant amount of stress happening, our brains because they're so smart and wanting to be very energy efficient, our brains decide that the most energy efficient, the smartest thing to do is to use those very well exercised neural pathways. So the more stressed I get, the more I'm likely to feel like it's true that if I could just get things right, other people's behavior would change or get better. 

Robyn: Now, in last week's episode, we talked a long time about this belief that a lot of us have that we have the power to control other people's behaviors. So I'm not going to rehash all that, you can go back and check out that episode if you missed that last week. But these are old beliefs that we learned a long, long, long time ago. And we have very deeply embedded neural pathways of these beliefs. And so when we get stressed, we kind of go down that pathway again. And a brain and protection mode, so the watchdog or the possum pathway. A brain and protection mode believes in the dichotomy of right versus wrong. The owl brain feels okay with uncertainty. Now, sometimes we confuse the owl brain with the like, the smart brain who is logical and linear and knows how to do math, essentially, right? Major oversimplification. That's not a full picture of the owl brain. The owl brain is able to use like its highest cortical skills, like its most thinking brain, but the owl brain is also connected, and relational, and feeling safe. And when we feel safe, we feel okay with uncertainty. So the owl brain feels okay with uncertainty, whereas the watchdog or the possum believes that there is a right and a wrong. It's one or the other. The owl brain knows that the brain is taking in 11 million pieces of data per moment. And using all of that data to decide, am I safe or am I not safe? And from there, behaviors of connection or protection emerge. The owl brain knows that there are only so many of those 11 million pieces of data that are possible for me to impact for someone else, right? Like if how the nervous system is determining if it's safe or not and therefore behaviors of connection or protection emerge. Then when I'm thinking about someone else, and their behavior, and I'm thinking about the 11 million bits of data that their brain is processing, I think it gets a little bit more clear that there's only so many of those 11 million pieces of data that I could possibly be in charge of, that I could impact for someone else. It’s a very small amount. I am mostly out of control of someone else's experience of felt safety. They are their own human with their own way of being in the world. 

Robyn: The owl brain knows that my rightness or wrongness isn't what determines someone else's experience of felt safety, and therefore someone else's behavior. Now I know that this concept can feel a little I think kind of cloudy or fuzzy. Like here we are. 140 or something like that episodes into a podcast, all about helping parents. Right? I have a big community that offers education for parents. I teach professionals how to support parents. And I think it would be easy to make an assumption that that means it's because parents could do something right or could do something wrong. That would then and be what changes their child's behavior. And that's just simply not true. Remember, we have a lot of influence over someone else's experience of safety. We do not have control. And that means we have a lot of influence over the way other people are in the world, but we do not have control. And we don't have any right to try to be in control. And my owl brain is okay with that. Again, my owl brain knows that my rightness or wrongness. So again, we're thinking about that question of what am I doing wrong? The owl brain knows that it's not my rightness or wrongness that's what's determining somebody else's safety or behavior. 

Robyn: The watchdog brain is afraid, and wants to believe it's that binary. It wants to believe it's that simple. If it's that simple, then we have so much more hope, or it feels like we have so much hope that things will change. Because there's this implication that things are more likely to change if I can be in charge of them. It is far less vulnerable to believe that things change because I'm in charge of them. It is far more vulnerable to realize things are happening all the time that I have absolutely no control over whatsoever. 

Robyn: Here's something though about the watchdog brain, right? The watchdog brain believes that if things are binary, things are simple, there's more control over change. What the watchdog doesn't know is that the owl feels hope too. Even when the owl wisely acknowledges it's totally out of control of someone else's behavior. There is still so much hope. Humans are complex systems. Complex Systems, we're going to move a little bit out of like the mental health field or the psychology field or even the behavior field, complex systems in the field of like math, and y'all, I'm a social worker. So that's all I'm gonna say. Complex Systems are always moving toward coherence. Complex Systems are always wanting to move towards organization. Now, pause for a second and ask yourself, the baffling behaviors in your child, or in yourself, or in your partner, do those behaviors feel like the words coherence and organization match those behaviors? Even if you don't really understand what that means, like what does it mean to be coherent? Even if you don't really know what that means, just pause for a second and say, well, this behavior in my child or in myself, that's feeling so baffling, is it coherent? And the answer is no. It's not. It's not coherent. It's not organized. It's not integrated. It's not flexible. It's not adaptive. All these words that I could come up with from the field of IPNB, interpersonal neurobiology, that helps us understand humans as complex systems. The kinds of behaviors that are prompting you to listen to a podcast like this aren't coherent. Okay? And we know that humans are complex systems, and that complex systems are always moving towards coherence. Apparently, that's sort of like mathematical kind of constant. 

Robyn: So how do we make sense of that? How do we make sense of these behaviors that are so baffling, so confusing, and also make sense of the fact that humans are complex theory systems that are always moving towards coherence? Let's just kind of hold that thought for a little bit. Okay, so simply because I said, you probably aren't doing anything more, quote unquote, wrong than anyone else. Than I am, than any other parent. I mean, none of us are doing everything quote, unquote, right. Like if we could ever right or a wrong binary. It would be impossible to do everything right. And we've talked before that that actually wouldn't even be good for our kids. But even if we just acknowledged that. It's not about being right or wrong. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways that we are probably contributing to our kids' struggles. And if we could shift those things a little, they might shift as well. I definitely contribute to some of the way my kid struggles. Some of those ways that I contribute are really obvious. They're obvious to me, they're obvious to anyone who really knows me. But also, a lot of the ways that I contribute to my kid’s struggles are a lot less obvious, right? In the ways that my own implicit world, my own implicit memory shows up. And then kind of by definition, our implicit remains outside our conscious awareness. And so there's so many ways that I know, I am not even aware of how I kind of show up and my parent child relationship in ways that are not ideal for my kid. 

Robyn: Parents have a lot of influence over their kids in great ways and in hard ways. I mean, research is super, super clear about that. That's why this podcast exists. I mean, if parents didn't have any influence over their kids, why would I podcast about parenting? So let's go back to that original question. Right? That question of, what am I doing wrong? Can we see together take a step back from what am I doing wrong and instead ask, are there ways I could offer my child more co-regulation, more connection, or more felt safety? The very act of taking a step back, the very act of seeing all of our options, the very act of having a curiosity instead of a demand, right? Like, what am I doing wrong? There's urgency in there. There's demand in there, and y'all there's no judgment in me towards asking that question. I asked that question a lot as well. Okay? So there's no judgment here. It's just, we're just defining it, right? There's a lot of j- there's a lot of urgency, right, there's a demand in that question. Whereas taking a step back and saying, I wonder what I could do. Right, there's a question of curiosity, I wonder what I could do to offer my child more co-regulation, more connection, and more felt safety. 

Robyn: The goal of this way of parenting, regardless of how vulnerable your child's nervous system is, how baffling their behaviors are, if they have a history of trauma or not. Right? The goal of this way of parenting isn't for our kids to never be dysregulated, or never have baffling behaviors. In fact, our kids must bring us the dysregulation in the nervous system, so that their dysregulation can be touched by our regulation. That is quite literally how change happens. Scientists call it the disconfirming experience, and it changes memory networks. It is the agent of change. Always receiving what's unexpected dysregulation, expects dysregulation. So when our kids can bring us their dysregulation, and we connect with them with regulation, not necessarily with calm, but with regulation. That's how the nervous system changes, that doesn't necessarily mean that in that moment, their behavior is going to change. But it does open up the possibility for the nervous system to kind of metaphorically unlock, and shift, and change. And now we're thinking about long term, real change in the nervous system, which is much more exciting to me than short term behavior change. 

Robyn: Here's another tricky thought that maybe you're gonna feel like what, nobody ever told me this! But sometimes the truth is, is that the more co-regulation we offer our kids, the more they bring us their dysregulation. And over time, they are weaving into their own neurobiology, our regulation. Our regulations will start to live inside of them. Then that's when their dysregulation might start to decrease. So here's my invitation to you. Remember, I am always no shame, no blame. Well, when I'm in my owl brain, I am no shame, no blame. And I mostly bring my owl brain to work. Right? I bring my owl brain to the microphone, I don't always bring it all the places in my personal life because I'm just human as you. But- but my work is grounded in no shame, no blame, right? That doesn't mean we don't have compassionate boundaries, it just means we don't shame and blame to get to boundaries, okay? So when I invite you to get curious, when you ask that question what am I doing wrong? I'm not asking you to get judgmental at yourself for asking that question. Just notice it. Just notice that you've asked it, like when you hear that those words inside your head or come out your mouth, what am I doing wrong? See if you can go, oh, that's information. That's telling me my nervous system is in protection mode. That's hard. It's hard to be in protection mode. Take a breath. See if your owl brain can come back, and invite your owl brain back by asking the question, what could I do differently that would be offering co-regulation, connection, and felt safety to this child? The owl brain is okay with the answer that maybe in that moment, the answer is nothing. Because what we offer, we are not in control of being received. Okay? I can't control if my child, my partner, my friends, whoever are able to receive my offerings of safety. I'm only in control of my offerings of them. Okay? So when I pause to ask the question, What could I be doing differently? That would be offering connection, co-regulation and felt safety is very possible, the answer is nothing. 

Robyn: Now, if I was in protection mode, and asking the question what am I doing wrong? Then chances are there probably is something I could be doing differently. And it could be just as simple as taking that breath. And allowing your nervous system to shift back into connection mode. Right? And yeah, it could be way more complicated than that too. Like, there could be so many more ways we could explore that question of what could I be doing differently. But that's the curiosity that we want to bring. That's the curiosity the owl brings. Because it's not about what we're doing right or wrong. It's not about living in that binary. It's not about believing that we have the power to be in control of somebody else's behavior. That's a question from the watchdog brain. And that's a question that says, hey, I'm hanging out in protection mode right now. And I'm not judging myself for that. But it's hard to live there. So can I do anything to invite my owl brain back, so that I can continue to offer without any expectations of how it's received? Can I continue to offer connection, correlation, and felt safety to my kid, to my partner, to myself, to whoever. 

Robyn: And y'all I know that those of you listening to this show, have kids with really extreme behaviors, really out of control behaviors, right? So in no way shape or form, especially if this is your first time tuning in, please hear me that I am not suggesting that all we're going to do is like shift our own nervous system and shift our own thoughts and beliefs. It’s a crucial piece of it, it's not the totality of it. So there are so many practical tools and things that we can do not to change our kids behavior, but to offer connection, co-regulation, and felt safety. To strengthen their owl brain, to help bring regulation and safety to their watchdog and their possum brains. So if you are hoping for those tools, know that they absolutely exist. Keep listening to the podcast, scroll back in the podcasts. I think it's kind of easy to tell based on the title like, if it's an episode that's like really about concrete tools, or if it's an episode more like this, where we're kind of talking a little bit more philosophically. Right? So there's plenty of episodes about tools. 

Robyn: You are going to get oodles of tools in The Club. If you want to come join us in The Club, RobynGobbel.com/TheClub. The Club isn't always open. We're in a pattern right now of opening probably about every two-ish months or so. So you can come join us there. And without question, Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work, that's my book that's coming out in September, also full of tools. I also am training more folks, so that they have the skills to work with families of the most vulnerable kids to have a whole year long program where I train professionals. And you can see a list of those professionals over on my website. You can see a list of professionals who have earned the licensing rights to use my materials in their work. And you can also see a list of professionals who are teaching the parent course that I've created. So all of that is over on RobynGobbel.com. 

Robyn: We are working tirelessly, my team and I and the professionals who are bravely invulnerable- vulnerably trained with me, we are working tirelessly to make this world a safer place for you and your family. To be the ones with the privilege of safety, to who are doing the hard, hard, hard work, so that we can offer safety to your family. Okay, so just head to RobynGobbel.com, explore all these resources. And then just keep coming back. Keep pressing play on the podcasts. 

Robyn: Alright, y'all, you're definitely gonna want to press play on the podcast next week. Because something really exciting is happening next week on the podcast! Staying in line with our mission to support as many kids and families around the world as possible. We have a big, fun, important change on the podcast that we're going to be celebrating next week. So if you haven't already hit subscribe to the podcast, be sure to do that. And if you have a moment, I'd be so grateful if you would go and either rate or review the podcast in whatever way your podcast app invites you to do that. Ratings and reviews are by far the most impactful way to help other families find this podcast. And y'all know that there are so many families and so many professionals that we want to find this podcast. The more people who find this podcast, the more grownups in the world are seeing kids in this way and that's good for you and your kids. Okay, so rate and review the podcast is super helpful. And I'm gonna see you here next week with a really big fun announcement. Bye bye!