Resentment & Parenting {EP 213}

Robyn: It's been pretty universal in my clinical experience when I worked as a therapist, and now as I've kind of shifted the work that I do and work with families in a different kind of way, the feeling of resentment is a pretty universal experience, and today we're going to talk specifically about resentment in parenting. But I've also observed that as our window of tolerance gets smaller and smaller and smaller, resentment with all sorts of things can get bigger and bigger and bigger. So you might be noticing some feelings of resentment specific to parenting, or you might be noticing resentment with other aspects of your life, and it could be sort of peripherally related to your parenting journey, because parenting a child with a vulnerable nervous system maybe has kind of shrunk up your window of tolerance a bit, so that the feeling of resentment is maybe more likely to crop up or pop up in some other situations, most folks I know have grappled with a feeling of resentment, whether that be just in life or again, specific to parenting a child with some behavior based special needs, very little about the parenting journey in general goes according to plan.    

Robyn: Some of us had a lot of hopes and dreams with regards to parenting, and we're really aware of what those hopes and dreams were. And some of us had hopes and dreams that kind of lived below the surface like you might not have even realized you had these hopes and dreams until they started to go unmet. But humans, the human mind, is always anticipating the future. The human mind is always creating a story or a narrative about what's going to happen next. We actually talk about this a lot in the episode called all behavior makes sense, or no behavior is maladaptive. I can't remember. It's called one of those two. It's not a very old episode. It was in the high 190s so you don't just scroll back too far to find it. But yes, the human mind is always having anticipation about what's going to happen next. It's a very, very normal, very important thing that the brain and the mind does. So don't try to stop it. It is going to happen, but what then can be a byproduct of that is resentment cropping up right when things aren't going according to plan, and we feel really committed to that plan, we can start to have that experience of resentment and so very little. I mean, the reality is is so very little if anybody's parenting journey goes according to plan, but certainly parenting a child with special needs, with behavior based special needs, with this vulnerability in their nervous system, with what we might look at as kind of an invisible special needs, like you don't notice it at first, right? It's not a physical special need. It's more of an invisible special need that comes out with behavioral symptoms and then is often accompanied by a lot of judgment and, frankly, not near enough support.    

Robyn: So the journey's not gone according to plan. You're not getting the support that you need. And one of the ways that y'all, y'all who are listening to this podcast have attempted to navigate this journey is to really dive deep into the neuroscience of behaviors and the neuroscience of the nervous system, specifically as it relates to behavior. And you've done a lot of really hard work, the never ending work, really, of rewiring the things that we thought we knew about behavior, right? We came to adulthood. We came to this parenting journey with a whole lot of ideas and beliefs about what it means to be human, how to parent, how to have a family, right? And again, a whole lot of expectations. And some days we tackle this parenting thing. We tackle this raising a family thing with all in stride, right? We're not even giving it a whole lot of second thought. It just is what it is, and we're doing what needs to be done. And then some days, we're noticing a lot of resentment, a lot of anger, right? That that thought of, 'this isn't what was planned' is coming to the surface more frequently, right? There's more awareness, more conscious awareness of how much work this is and how much extra work this is, compared to maybe some of your peers or friends or colleagues or siblings and their parenting journey.    

Robyn: And the reality is, is that this can feel like a very, very big burden. It's a huge burden on your nervous system, right? Not only are you learning all the things, and you're relearning what it what it means to be human, but you're also having to be as regulated as possible. And there can be this sense of, Well, hey, wait a minute, who's going to take care of me? Who's going to co regulate me? Right? Like, if my kid needs all this co-regulation? I mean, ultimately we get to the point where we realize, ah, I need that too. I need the same thing my kid does, and who's giving it to me, who's going to co regulate me, and that resentment just inevitably creeps up, and then what happens next can make that resentment even worse, and that's so so so often we shift into shame, and we shame ourselves for our feelings of resentment, or we resent our resentment, or we use our resentment to protest all the changes and the sacrifices that we've had to make, which sometimes is super useful, right? Sometimes a feeling of protest is extremely important. That feeling of protest kind of invites us to call a pause and go, Hey, wait a minute. Like that, all this stuff that I'm doing, do I need to be doing it? Do I want to be doing it? Is this working for me and working for my family? Right? So sometimes that protest is super important. It really forces call a pause. But sometimes that protest, the protest of all these changes that we've had to make, and all these sacrifices we've had to make, sometimes that protest just really can fuel our resentment and keep us stuck. We have to use the protest. We have to use the protest to call a pause and kind of look around and and say, Hmm, is there any changes that I can make or need to make? Sometimes we don't call that pause, and that protest just keeps fueling our feelings of resentment, right? It really just keeps us stuck.

Robyn: Ideally, emotions have flow, both what we would maybe call positive and negative emotions, and I don't like to look at emotions as having like a value judgment to them. They're not good or bad, positive or negative, but we do kind of tend to group certain emotions and label them positive and group other emotions and label them negative. So just for the sake of us using language that everybody's on the same page about, I'm going to go ahead and just use that language positive and negative emotions, like like joy, you know, contentment, that those are positive emotions. You know, oftentimes folks will label things like anger or sadness as negative emotions, again, there's not a value judgment with them, right? But both kinds, positive or negative emotions have movement. In fact, motion is the majority of the word emotion. Emotions and feelings have movement. They have flow. And resentment is an experience that can really thwart the flow of emotion. And in fact, in many ways, I think that's one of the primary jobs of resentment.    

Robyn: Resentment can really keep us from connecting and being with emotions that we are avoiding with all our might, emotions that feel bigger and more terrible than resentment. And a lot of times I see that, especially with regards to the emotion of grief. Sometimes resentment is a way of letting us know that we're betraying ourselves by letting our boundaries be violated without enough of an attempt at either upholding them or adjusting them, or As we'll talk about later in the podcast, at the very least, acknowledging the truth that our boundaries have been violated, like giving giving words and noticing and just being with that truth. Okay? And we'll talk about that in a little bit. So let's talk about both of these things, right? Resentment as a way of letting us know we're betraying ourselves by letting our boundaries be violated, or resentment as something that's keeping us connecting with and being with other emotions. And let's talk about that one first.    

Robyn: When hard feelings feel too hard, different kinds of feelings will jump in front of them to keep us from feeling what's hard. So for example, do you remember the original Inside Out movie? Okay, good grief, it's 10 years old at this point, it's a decade old the original Inside Out movie. And there's this scene in that movie where the character Bing Bong has to watch the rocket wagon get pushed into the memory dump. Okay, now if you didn't see it, and like those words made no sense, Bing Bong, rocket wagon, memory dump. Okay, so if you didn't see it, let me try to kind of set the scene up for you. And there's a character who watched a very, very hard thing happen and then felt very sad. So there's the sadness that comes from the character Bing Bong and the character, Joy in the movie, Joy, the character tries really hard to cheer him up, like she's really uncomfortable with the sadness, so she's silly, and she tries to distract Bing bong and and she kind of tries to move in with This sense of exuberance, right? Joy, tried really, really hard to cover up the sadness, but it didn't work. Bing Bong was sad. He was still sad.    

Robyn: So sadness, then the character in the movie sadness had to emerge for Bing Bong to be able to keep moving. And in fact, that's literally what happened in the movie. Like Bing Bong sat down, it was kind of stuck and inert. Enjoy feeling a sense of like we gotta go. We gotta go right. Tried to like, distract him, cheer it up, but he just was stuck. And sadness came in, and eventually Bing Bong was able to keep moving. And y'all, I know this is a cartoon movie, but it's pretty darn close to how feelings work. When a feeling is experienced as too hard another feeling kind of jumps in and tries to cover it up, but that never really works. The feelings just get stuck, and then that cover up feeling has to work even harder, okay? And those cover up feelings, they come from protection mode. In fact, if you did see that movie, we saw that if you saw inside out the first one from 2015, in that scene, you would 100% feel, especially now that you know the words connection mode and protection mode, you 100% feel that joy is in protection mode. It's not real joy that flows and connects. It's like this forced uncomfortable like Joy look alike.    

Robyn: Ultimately, it's not until the true feeling emerges from connection mode that feelings can move and flow again and yes, yes, yes, negative, quote-unquote, negative feelings like sadness, can absolutely come from connection mode, right? Connection mode has flow. Connection mode has cues of safety. Connection mode is open and available for connection and in so many ways, one of the purposes of the feeling of sadness, you know true connection mode sadness is to bring people together so 100% sadness can emerge from connection mode. Lots of feelings work very hard to cover up grief. Grief is a big feeling. Grief is a feeling we don't connect with very well, especially in Western culture. Right? Grief is such an intense feeling that all sorts of feelings do, like mental gymnastics and cartwheels, essentially in an attempt to cover it up. And resentment is an especially powerful one. And I think it's actually especially powerful with this type of grief, the grief, the specific grief that crops up around things not going as planned, right, that life isn't going the way that we expected it to or that we want it to, and the grief of realizing that it might not ever go the way that we want it to.    

Robyn: Of course, resentment also feels very yucky, so it can seem confusing that we'd cover up an uncomfortable feeling like grief with a yucky feeling like resentment. But think about it for a moment, like resentment tends to keep our focus outward. It keeps us off what the grief is about, and it keeps us focused outward. And I think in a way, resentment kind of tricks us into feeling a sense of control. It tricks us into thinking that the thing that we're grieving could be fixed or changed, like if we could just refuse to acknowledge right that it can't be fixed. If we just refuse to acknowledge something can't be fixed, it's as if we convince ourselves that we can then hold on to a teeny, tiny bit of hope, that maybe, maybe, just maybe it can, right? There's this sense that we don't believe those two things can go together. We have the sense that if we grieve something, then we're relinquishing the possibility that it could ever change, which I don't think it's true. We'll talk about that in a moment, but parenting a child with behavior based special needs is, of course, full of grief. It's full of the reality that things aren't going the way we planned. Things aren't going the way we want them to, and they might not ever. So I have a lot of other podcasts about grief. I'll make sure those get mentioned and links down in the show notes.   

Robyn: We have a lot of ingrained beliefs about grief, right? And frankly, a lot of those beliefs about grief aren't true, but they get in the way of us grieving, right? Again, the belief that, like, if we grieve, we're giving a pope anything could ever change. Okay, that is actually not true, but we have the sense that it is true. True, right? And so kind of keeps us stuck right. Resentment sticks around so that we don't have to grieve, right? So, yeah, there's these beliefs, beliefs like, if I give, if I grieve, that this isn't the life I've planned. It I give it, I'm giving it up. It's never, ever, ever going to get better, or the belief that, if we acknowledge that there's grief that, that you know, always goes along with saying something like, I wish I didn't even have my kids, right? That those two things have to go together, but, but y'all, the truth is that grief doesn't mean any of those things. Grieving, your experience with how hard parenting is doesn't mean you didn't have kids. And actually, if we really pause and this kind of goes off track of what this episode's about, I have other episodes about this, but the reality is, it's in so many ways, it's not even your kids that are hard. It's that there isn't the supports in place to help you that makes it hard, right? It's that there's no services. It's that if the services do exist, they're too expensive or too far away, right? It's the gas lighting of professionals. It's you know that no other folks in your community are willing to acknowledge that you know how hard your parenting journey is, or that they blame you for being a bad parent, right?    

Robyn: So it's in so many ways, it's not even about what's happening with your kids that makes it hard. It's everything else that makes what's happening with your kids hard. I talk about these things a lot in a much older podcast called when parenting is traumatic, and I'll make sure that that gets linked down in the show notes as well. But y'all grief is about attunement with ourselves in one moment in time, we can grieve for our life as a parent, right? We can grieve for our unique life as the parent of a child with behavior based special needs or a child with a vulnerable nervous system. And we can do that and not be a terrible person. It doesn't make us a terrible person. It doesn't mean we wish we didn't have our kids, but, but maybe actually, that's true too. Sometimes with that we do wish that, that we do wish we weren't parents, or that we weren't parents of this specific child and y'all, that doesn't make you a terrible person either. It makes you a really struggling person who isn't supported in the way that you need.    

Robyn: It also doesn't mean that you're giving up grief isn't, you know, synonymous with resignation. You always fiercely advocate for your child. You know, to get your child's needs met, to get your needs met, to get the resources to need that you need to help your child, increase regulation, connection and felt safety. You can continue to do all of that fiercely while simultaneously grieving. They can go together. Resentment also is a feeling that really wants to blame resentment wants to make something someone's fault. Resentment wants to give your feelings to someone else and then work really, really, really hard to avoid the grief. If you're noticing this in yourself, you're noticing like, oh, I kind of connect with some of what you're saying. Please don't judge either your resentment or your grief. See if you can resist the urge to move into judgment. See if you can just notice, notice what's true without moving into any judgment. Just acknowledge like, Yeah, this is true. Assume that your body is processing grief and other emotions in exactly the way that it needs to, while simultaneously having a conversation with your grief that you can maybe handle it a little bit more, right? This conversation with grief might sound something like, Thank you grief for keeping me safe, right? Or I'm sorry- thank you resentment for keeping me safe. Grief is a really hard feeling.    

Robyn: Sometimes it seems overwhelming like I can't handle it, and I believe that I can handle more connection to the feeling of grief. I think I can feel the grief and be okay. I trust my body to not overwhelm me with grief, but to offer me that grief in tiny pieces. Now, y'all, I've often wanted grief to be this, like, really big event, right? I mean, there'd be so many times when my therapist would say something like, you just need to grieve. Now she would never say that, but that was, like, what I was getting from it, right? Like that. There's all this grief that needs to be processed, and I would be like, Okay, fine. Tell me what to do, show me how, right, like, I just long to, like, just grieve and feel big, big, big feelings. And I don't know, like, maybe cry and scream and shout and like, super emote, right? And I believe that that's what it should look like. But my reality is that that just isn't how it works for me. It might work that way for you, but if it doesn't work that way for you, know that that's not abnormal, like for me. Grief has often come up in these like, teeny, tiny, little, bite sized ways sometimes, or maybe even most of the time, I hardly even realize that it is a moment of grief, right? I could kind of look back on it and be like, ah, yeah, there it was. There it was. But so often it's happening in such tiny, little micro moments. And those micro moments really add up just happening in such tiny, little micro moments. I don't really even notice it at the time. All right. But then eventually something will happen that shows me I've integrated a little bit of that grief just a little bit more.    

Robyn: So sometimes resentments about covering up another feeling we really don't want to deal with, like grief. And sometimes resentment is a way of letting us know that we're betraying ourselves by letting our boundaries be violated without enough of an attempt at either upholding those boundaries or adjusting them. Now for me, resentment can be a classic sign that I had a boundary. Sometimes I didn't even really realize I had it, and I've been really letting that boundary slide. So when I start to feel resentment, I try to get curious about that, have I been disregarding or ignoring a boundary, and has that come out in a way that I've convinced myself is like in service of others, like, oh, I can do this thing for someone else. Or, Oh, this is the kind thing to do. Or, Oh, right? And all of a sudden I realized, like, oh, actually, this is sort of pissing me off. Okay? No, I have seen again, kind of in my own personal life, but also in my work, back when I worked as a therapist, and now in my work with families, the way that I work with them. Now, I think this is a very common experience in relationships where one person has more capacity than the other, when one more person has more expectation of offering co-regulation and receives very little in return. This absolutely can happen in adult relationships, of course, but this definitely happens with our kids, because by default, we have more capacity, right? We are expected to offer more than we receive, and because of how our culture is so set up. We're not getting it from anywhere else, right? Because we are living in such isolated little pockets, because our communities aren't as connected as they could be, right? Because we aren't embedded in, you know, communities of care like I think humans are designed to be right, we find ourselves really pouring co regulation into our kids because we are the you know, have more capacity than they do, and we're not getting it from anywhere else. So resentment can be this little message that says your needs are going unmet.   

Robyn: And sometimes it's just really hard to acknowledge this truth, because there is no way for that to shift, right? There is no way for you to start getting those needs met. I mean, maybe you're a single parent and you've got several small children, and maybe all, or many of them, have big, baffling behaviors, and maybe you don't have a very big community, right, and you don't have any family that lives nearby, and you you don't have the energy to invest in friendships, right? And so you're just very, very isolated, and it is totally truth and that your needs are going unmet, and it feels scary to acknowledge that, right? It's hard to acknowledge that this thing is true and it's unlikely to change, right? But actually, y'all acknowledging something is a moment of we what we'd call coherence, making something makes sense. That's why we work so hard to make sense of baffling behaviors, because coherence is a cue of safety, okay, acknowledging that your own needs are being are going unmet, and maybe are going to for a very long time, that's a moment of connecting with yourself, and it's a cue of safety. Coherence is a cue of safety that's worked by we work so hard to make sense of baffling behaviors, right?    

Robyn: It doesn't have to be scary to be with the truth of my needs are not met, and they are unlikely to be met by anyone other than myself. It feels like that could be scary. I mean, I think that there's just so much grief underneath that, right? And it can feel like this again, like kind of this giving up, or like really coming to terms with reality, can feel so, so, so scary, right? But remember, acknowledging the truth of something doesn't mean you won't keep trying to change it. You're not giving up. In fact, Owl brain connection mode, which is what's invited when you have a moment of coherence with yourself. Owl brain connection mode isn't give up energy at all. It's, 'I can be with reality, even a reality I don't like.' I can stop raging against that reality and just being so mad that that reality doesn't exist. I can also continue to have hope it could change, and I can continue to do things that support that change. Oh, y'all. And I say that out loud, this is a really big one for me. I often find myself realizing that I'm mad that I can't make my preferred version of reality exist, and I keep expecting a reality that past experiences have been very clear isn't going to happen. My expectations don't match reality. They don't set me up for anticipating reality, and then I'm mad about it. So when I find that resentment is creeping in, this is one of the places I personally first look. Am I expecting reality to be different than what it's proven it's going to be? And kind of like I actually just mentioned, ultimately, y'all this is about grief, too, the grief that reality isn't what we plant.    

Robyn: And as odd as it sounds, sometimes it's that reality can't be shifted in our minds. Sometimes, our mind believes that if we think something should happen, that it definitely should happen. Sometimes this is our minds being just completely normal human minds, and actually, sometimes this is rooted in some of our own early, early attachment trauma, right? The this, this hope that so many of us don't even often realize we have this hope that just by thinking reality, we can make it so, and then when it's not that breeds resentment, and again, some of that is just pretty normal human behavior, but some of it really is rooted in our own early, early attachment trauma. It is rooted in the beliefs that kept us really safe when we were small. So y'all here's what I want you to take away from this episode. And like I said, it's not about shaming yourself about resentment or unprocessed grief. Okay? It's not that you're doing it wrong or creating your own resentment because you're refused to process grief. No, no. What I want you to take away from this episode is curiosity. I want you to put on your X-ray vision goggles for yourself. Look at resentment as like a trailhead. See if we can be brave and curious to find out where it leads, and if you can't, if it's too scary or if you're like, Never mind. I'll just stick with resentment, just notice that and be gentle with yourself. You're not weak or lazy. You are brave and wise. So very brave and wise.    

Robyn: Trust your nervous system while also continuing to be with your nervous system in a way that helps it know you might be braver than you think. You might be able to risk it, but if you can't, you also understand and you can be with those parts of yourself and the way that you would be with a. A friend or someone else that you really just wanted to soothe and say, of course, you're doing the very best you can. This makes sense. It's painful, but you are doing the very, very best that you can. If you are new here to the Baffling Behavior Show, welcome. We tend to have sort of a variety of episodes. Some we talk a lot about specific strategies. Some we talk a lot about putting our X-ray vision goggles on to kind of decode our kids baffling behaviors. Sometimes we put those X-ray vision goggles on to notice our own experience and our own big baffling behaviors and see how we can tend to ourselves with regulation and connection and felt safety, right? So that we can spend more time in connection mode, we can grow and strengthen our own owl brain, and that's good for our kids, of course, but really, y'all it's because it's good for us. There are well over 200 episodes here on the Baffling Behavior Show.    

Robyn: So take a moment scroll back see what other topics there are that might interest you. You can also go to RobynGobbel.com/podcast and use the search bar that's at the top of the podcast page and search for a topic, and then you can take note of what episodes I have that are related to that topic. Write down the number, then come back to your podcast app and scroll until you find that number. Y'all, I wish podcasts were more searchable. I wish I'm not in charge of that technology. So I've numbered podcasts and put a search bar on my podcast website to make it as easy for you as possible to find support for the specific topics that you're looking for, be sure to go to RobynGobbel.com/freeresources to see all the free resources that I have available for you. And if you haven't yet checked out, Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors. That's my book that came out about a year and a half ago, USA Today. Best selling book, Amazon best selling book. You can find a Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors. Really, wherever you buy books online, it's available in audio, in ebook and, of course, in paperback. Y'all as always such an honor and a privilege to be with you here in this episode of The Baffling Behavior Show. Make sure that you subscribe to The Baffling Behavior Show in your podcast app, and I will see you back here again next week. Bye, bye!