Helping Siblings with Verbal Aggression {EP 191}

Robyn: If you're new to the podcast, I want to give you just a few ideas about how to use the podcast, because, y'all, we're approaching 200 episodes. It's a lot. And if you're new, it might feel a little bit overwhelming. So I do have a podcast, separate podcast feed that's called the Start Here podcast. I created that podcast feed in response to the question, where do I start? See what I did there. I created the Start Here podcast. All I did was take the 10 episodes that I think are the best first 10 to listen to. I put them in order and I put them in a separate podcast feed, so you don't have to scroll around or search or keep another list handy or anything like that. The only thing that's unique about that podcast is that you have to subscribe to it. You're not going to find it by just searching for it in your podcast app. So you need to head to my website, robyngobbel.com/starthere. Sign up for that podcast, and then you'll get this separate, curated podcast feed. It's just 10 episodes. That's where you start. The other thing you can do is go to robyngobbel.com/podcast and use the search bar. You've noticed podcasts aren't very searchable, like right in your podcast app, and hopefully one day podcast technology catches up for now, the best solution I have for that is that you go to my website, robyngobbel.com/podcast, and you use the search bar, then the episodes that come up have an episode number, and that number will be an easy way to then come back to the podcast stream and just scroll until you find that number, because, of course, they are in order.    

Robyn: This is episode six of a six-part series on supporting siblings. So we are wrapping up this series. I know y'all that there are about 1 million more topics we could address with regards to supporting siblings. These are the six that we tackled this time around. I'm sure we will address siblings again in the future here on the baffling behavior show. So we have done five episodes where we really looked at, how do we help siblings who are struggling with their sibling who has a vulnerable nervous system? How do we help siblings who feel like the way you're parenting their sibling is unfair? How do we teach kids about Owls? How do we teach siblings specifically about Owls, Watchdogs and Possums. How do we help them with their grief, right? What do we do to help them when we are dealing with their sibling who's super dysregulated? What do we do when we have many kids who are dysregulated at the same time, and then now today, Episode Six is, how do we help the siblings of kids who are just plain old, not very nice, mean, verbally aggressive, rude, say things intentionally to be hurtful. There are two things we need to think about when supporting the siblings of kids who are mean saying mean things.    

Robyn: The first one is we need to help the siblings. We need to help our kids who are on the receiving end strengthen their own psychological boundaries, which basically means, having a psychological boundarys basically means someone can say something mean to me and it can hurt my feelings. But instead of believing that the mean things they say might be true, I see them as symptoms, right? I see them as symptoms of their nervous system dysregulation. So we can teach our kids to have the same X-ray vision goggles that we are trying to have with our children with dysregulated nervous systems. Okay, so that's number one, we can actually teach our siblings how to have stronger psychological boundaries.    

Robyn: Number two, and we're not going to actually talk about this one much in the podcast today, but I want you to know that this is a big piece of this puzzle here. The second thing is that we have to help our kids who are being verbally aggressive and even abusive, find more effective ways to express their feelings. So if you know about the Watchdog pathway, I usually put verbal aggression in the back off level of the Watchdog pathway. When you have a kiddo in the back-off level of activation, the focus is on creating safety, helping with regulation, right? Not changing the behavior, per se, but on creating safety and creating regulation. The reality is, if you have a child on the back off or attack level of the Watchdog pathway- when we are responding with our best Owl brain, right? We actually really don't even want to try to change behavior, which is really hard. But when we're responding to that level of activation, the behavior kind of becomes secondary, while we just focus on safety, connection and co-regulation. And then once the activation comes down a little, then interventions might be helpful. So if you have a very verbally aggressive kid in the backoff or attack level of the Watchdog continuum, the Watchdog pathway, the focus is on bringing down the dysregulation. But if your verbally aggressive kid is being verbally aggressive in lower levels, there are some things that we would start to do, things we can start to do to help your child more accurately express what they're feeling.    

Robyn: Because the truth is, is that almost never is s aying something hateful, hurtful, mean, or abusive to a sibling, adequately expressing their feeling. And if we pause and consider that for a moment, you can kind of start to see how that's true. Like think about the last time you had a child say something really awful to another one of your children, especially if they didn't seem like out of control, dysregulated, right? But they're just like sitting at the table doing their homework, and they say something really nasty to the sibling, right? Whatever that thing was, it's almost never expressing what their true feeling is. So a lot of work with kids who say verbally aggressive things is, how do we help them express what they're actually feeling more accurately, and I talk a lot about in the club, how do we help our kids find their real voice and say what they really mean, so that they can get their needs met, instead of having everybody around them just react to the big, hurtful, hateful things that they say. So this is a two prong approach here, when you have a sibling who expresses a lot of verbal aggression, one is, how do we help their siblings, develop some stronger psychological boundaries, because you can't control what comes out of someone else's mouth. And then the second prong of this, you know, approach here is, how do we help the child who is saying really hurtful things? How do we help them begin to find ways to express what their real, true feelings are? Now I'm not going to address that much in this episode, because, as far as like, how to actually do that, because it would just become an episode that's like, 100 million years long. It's too much for one episode. I do have a master class on that in the club. So if you're hearing this episode at a time the club is open, which would mean you'd have to be hearing it in the future, because it's not open when this episode is airing, come check us out. Join the club. There is a master class all about how we scaffold that skill of helping kids express what they really want to express.   

Robyn: All right, y'all now at the risk of saying something really obnoxious, really obnoxious. I get it. The best way to help our kids strengthen their psychological boundaries is, drum roll, please, to strengthen our own, I know y'all. I know so obnoxious, it always comes back to that. I'm so sorry, but it just does. When we, the grown ups, have strong-ish psychological boundaries, work in progress. I'll be working on mine until like my last day alive. I'll be working on my psychological boundaries. But when we have strong-ish psychological boundaries, it means we can be with our kids in a way that helps their psychological boundary strengthened. And this isn't about necessarily overtly teaching things. This is about how nervous systems are kind of strengthened, formed, knit together. I guess this is a decent metaphor, right? Nervous systems are knit together, kind of based on the nervous system of the person or persons we spend a lot of time with. So if we have strong psychological boundaries, we are more likely to help our kids develop strong psychological boundaries too.    

Robyn: Part of what happens is that if we have good psychological boundaries, or let's not say good, let's say, if we have strong psychological boundaries. We're more likely to be able to be with our kids when they're dysregulated, right? We can feel their dysregulation without becoming their dysregulation. This is what strengthens their psychological boundaries, right? Having strong psychological boundaries ourselves means we can see our kids dysregulation, including their verbal aggression, as just information about what's happening for them in their nervous system. It means we feel pretty confident that it's not personal. That doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt our feelings. Our feelings can be hurt, and we can still be clear, my feelings are hurt, but also I know this isn't personal, right? And that means that we can feel our feelings, our hurt, without becoming those feelings, like our hurt and our offense, like they don't take over us, right? So our kids tell us things like we're fat and ugly and the meanest mom ever, but, but it just doesn't occur to us that any of those things are actually true, right? So we can hear those things and it can hurt our feelings, but at the same time, if we have good psychological boundaries, we know those things aren't true. We know they are just symptoms of our child's dysregulation, so we don't take it personally, and we can stay in connection mode and have good connection to our Owl brain.    

Robyn: When we can do that for our kids, they become more capable of doing that for themselves. Now to be clear, please do not confuse this with what we learned when we were kids, which was like sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Y'all, hurtful words are hurtful. Okay? I will never try to gaslight you, and I don't want you to try to gaslight your kids into believing that hurtful words aren't hurtful. It makes sense to be hurt by hurtful words, but strong psychological boundaries mean we can feel hurt without being over taken by it, and then without believing it or or without making a meaning out of it that has something to do with our kids, like they're just mean. No, they're not mean. They're just regulated and they're using any tactic they can possibly come up with in order to keep themselves safe.    

Robyn: So I have two episodes on the podcast on psychological boundaries and strengthening our psychological boundaries. They are both with my colleague and friend, Juliane Taylor Shore, who has written a book about boundaries. I also had Juliane as a guest in the club once, if you're listening as a club member, you can go to the library and check out that time I had Juliane come into the club, and she practiced with y'all, like exercise to help strengthen and grow your psychological boundaries. Juliane's written a book called, 'Setting Boundaries That Stick'. It's excellent. I was just talking to a friend yesterday, and she might listen to my podcast. So hey, there. We had a great time together yesterday, who told me that she's like, carrying this book around with her as, you know, her resource manual right now. So it's that good, right? Juliane's book. Is that good, I'll put a link to her book and a link to her the two other episodes I had on the podcast with Juliane down in the show notes. Because if you're going to strengthen your kids psychological boundaries, you need to know what psychological boundaries even are, and you need to be working on them yourself.    

Robyn: Okay, so that's step number one, the next step in helping our kid's develop psychological boundaries, is really what we covered in episodes one and two of the sibling series. In episode one of the sibling series, we talked about making sure we are using this relational neuroscience approach to behavior on all humans. And number two is making sure that the other kids in our home, the siblings, have some understanding of the nervous system and have some understanding that of vulnerable nervous systems. Of course, the way I teach kids is owls watch tacos, possums. But that's not the only way. There's a lot of ways to teach kids, so the next step in helping your kids develop good, strong psychological boundaries is the things we talked about in episodes one and two of that sibling series. When we understand what behavior really is, it helps us make the right meaning out of that behavior, and when we can make the right meaning out of that behavior, we know it's not personal, it's just information. So really prioritizing teaching our kids about what behavior really is, and then giving them a framework for understanding where that behavior is coming from. The nervous system is a really big piece and strengthens psychological boundaries.    

Robyn: So if you've read my book, you know that this is the pattern my book takes too. Like section one is about understanding the neuroscience of behavior. Section two is all about, kind of stuffing your toolbox with tools that actually work. And section three is all about, you know, kind of focusing on ourselves, regulating ourselves, de-escalating some of our own triggers. And then when you push those three kinds of pillars together, those three sections together, that's where, you know, we start to really see a lot of improvement in our own capacity to navigate our kids baffling behaviors, right? So many parents write to me or tell me that just understanding the neurobiology of behavior has helped them be more regulated in responding to their kids, and then that means they're responding to their kids in a more effective way. But what they're telling me, right? When a parent writes in and tells me that is essentially what they're saying is, just by learning about the neurobiology of behavior, my psychological boundaries increased, right? Just by learning it, my Owl brain grew. Now it isn't enough, and that's why the book didn't only include the neurobiology of behavior, and it went on to give tools, and, you know, all this other stuff, it's not enough, but it is a crucial piece of it, and it does contribute significantly to strengthening those psychological boundaries. So prioritize it with the siblings in your family, whether they be our three or whether they're grown-ups right, three years old or grown-ups, right? Teach the siblings about the neurobiology of behavior.    

Robyn: So if we think about our psychological boundary as like a wall that we would build between us and somebody who's saying mean things we're talking about really building it from the bottom up. Okay, so the bottom is the, you know, the foundation of our children's psychological boundary. The bottom is our psychological boundary, and then we strengthen that foundation with the understanding of behavior and understanding the nervous system. So this isn't the only thing that's in the wall. You know the wall, the imaginary wall, like Juliane talks about her jello wall, that she uses as her image for a psychological boundary. So like the foundation and the parts of the wall that make it super strong are these pieces our own psychological boundary and teaching our kids about the brain and the nervous system and vulnerable nervous systems.   

Robyn: But of course, strong foundations aren't enough. We have to keep building, you know, what's on top of that foundation? So what do we do next? Look for opportunities to talk about your psychological boundaries. Don't try to pretend that you never get mad or never have your feelings hurt. You know. Talk about how your sisters said something mean and it hurt your feelings. But then you took a breath, and you invited your Owl brain to stay big and strong, and you imagined a big protective bubble around you. And those hurtful words stung a little, because that's what they do. You're never gonna not have that happen, right? But because you had your big protective bubble around you, you. You were able to know that those mean words she said was just because she was in her Watchdog brain, and you could let your protective bubble keep you safe and bonus, y'all, and we talk about this a lot, in those episodes of psychological boundaries, we set better boundaries with people when we have strong psychological boundaries.    

Robyn: So it's not that our psychological boundary means we kind of just let people say nasty things to us. I mean, with your kids that sometimes there's not a ton of options, but with another grown-up relationship, your strong psychological boundary keeps you regulated enough to set a good, solid, compassionate boundary with your Owl brain and let whoever you're in relationship know that that's not the kind of relationship you're interested in being in. And while you can have, you know, compassionate understanding for how they got dysregulated and that they said those kinds of things to you when they were dysregulated. It's crucial to you to be in relationship with people who are working really hard to stay more regulated so they don't say such mean things to each other, right? That's a compassionate boundary. And so you can, you can narrate all of this to your kids, and you can do it in really age appropriate ways. So you can talk to five-year-olds about this stuff. You can talk to 25-year-olds about this stuff, you're just gonna change like the intensity or the depth of the language that you're using, and also probably your tone of voice a little like how I talk to how I talk to my son when he was five, versus how I talk to him now when he's 18, are different, but we're talking about a lot of the same stuff. It's just at a different kind of intellectual level, and my tone of voice is different, and it's more, you know, dyadic and back and forth and things like that.    

Robyn: You can also support kids and strengthening their psychological boundaries with things like stories and art and play kids, and kids, y'all, of all ages. So, teens, teens will do this too. I had worked as a therapist with all ages of kids for 15 years, and I learned very early on not to assume that teens wouldn't want to engage in certain activities because they were too childish or too young or too babyish. So many of the teens were so delighted, well, delighted to strong word, so many of the teens were willing to participate in some of these experiences or activities, right? If we'll just sort of kind of push through maybe some of their initial reticence, you know, because they want to look cool, or they don't want to do something that's babyish. If we kind of, you know, kind of roll with that resistance, eventually a lot of the teens, even the most resistant or the most too cool teens, will begin to engage in some of these activities. So just because I'm talking about play doesn't mean this doesn't apply to older kids. Okay? So kids and teens can do things like draw pictures of themselves with like bubbles around themselves, and the mean words can be outside the bubble, right? So they can, like, draw this boundary that they have that keeps them safe from absorbing those mean words. They still hear the mean words, and they might even still hurt their feelings, but their psychological boundary, their bubble, or whatever it is helps them not absorb those mean words.   

Robyn: You can give kids a pool noodle sword or something playful to use as a sword, or like a bat, right? And they can, like, hit away wadded-up pieces of paper that have mean words on them. So you can, like, write mean words on pieces of paper and scrunch them up and then toss them at your kid who has this pool noodle or something else. It's like a play bat. And they can, you know, bat them away. You can take sidewalk chalk and draw a picture of your child on the driveway, and then put a big, big, big circle around it, and then write the mean words outside the big circle. And then, because you didn't just sidewalk chalk, you could maybe, like, take a hose and wash away the mean words. There are so many ways you can draw or use art or play to make those psychological boundaries feel more solid. You can play with an Owl puppet and have the Owl say quote-unquote, true things to your sibling. Not to your sibling, but you know what I mean, to the children in your home who are the sibling of dysregulated kids. 'You know the Owl brain say true things to them, like those words hurt your feelings, but they aren't true. That's your brother's Watchdog brain, right?'    

Robyn: Puppets and pretend play and giving your kids something that represents their Owl brain, an Owl stuffed animal and Owl puppet a stuffed brain, right? It can be anything but giving your kids or having something that's like tangible that you can touch, that represents that wise, connected, compassionate part of their brain that still has boundaries, right? And then kind of playing around with it and being silly can be a great way to grow that psychological boundary. Now this episode isn't about teaching kids how to get help when they need it, or how to disengage from their sibling, but teaching about psychological boundaries often naturally leads into helping them know what to do, how to respond, right? Once they put up their psychological boundary, that's not the end of things. What do they do next? When do they go for help?    

Robyn: Okay, so the last thing I'm going to touch on really briefly here, and I'm just going to touch on it. We're not going to do a whole episode on it, because it would just become too long. But if you have a child who is regularly dysregulated enough to the point where they're regularly being verbally aggressive and mean or using bullying words with their siblings, it is important to help those kids practice using the words they really mean. Now, like I said at the beginning, this isn't something we do when a child is in like back off or attack level, but when there are lower levels of dysregulation, or when they maybe even have their Owl brain nearby, you can help them learn how to express their real feelings that are negative without being mean. Almost never is the mean words they're saying accurately expressing their true feelings. So for example, you have a child who, you know, calls their sibling a stupid poopy head, right? Or insert whatever things your kids actually say, but I can't say on this podcast without labeling the podcast explicit, right? Like you're a stupid poopy head. That's not their actual real feeling. That's not what they're really trying to say. They're really trying to express something like I'm really mad, or this is super unfair, or I don't like the thing that you're doing, or I don't like that you get to XYZ, or I feel like mom likes you more, right? That's what the real feeling is. And then the being mean to somebody else, the projecting onto someone else is their attempt at making that person feel bad because they feel bad. We really want to help people, kids, get better at expressing their real feeling. So help your kids say what they're really feeling even if that real feeling still leaves you kind of cringing. So here's an example. Your kid sits down at the dinner table and sees food that they don't like and calls you stupid and the worst cook in the whole world, okay, that's mean, and also not expressing their real, true feeling, which is, I don't think I'm gonna like what you're serving for dinner. So we have to create spaces for our kids to see their real feelings, even if they're still things that hurt. So it has to be okay for your kid to sit down for dinner and say, this looks gross. I don't think I'm gonna like it.   

Robyn: Most of us would react pretty negatively to a child who said that, you know, it'd be like, that's rude. Don't say things like that. But the reality is, when we stifle kids from expressing their true feeling, there's nothing wrong with having a preference about food, it escalates until they say things that aren't very nice and are personal, right? Because the this feeling is like looking for a way to get expressed, and it's just going to escalate and escalate and escalate. So your child's real feeling might be, my life was easier before you joined our family, and I'm mad about that. Or your child's real feeling might be, you never get in trouble, and it feels like you're the favorite, and I hate that, right? Those are still words that are probably hard to hear, but they are accurate and honest words, and so we want to take a step back and look for ways we are unintentionally squashing those honest feelings, because they still are making us uncomfortable, and therefore we are actually kind of increasing the verbal aggression. Now I'm not saying it's anyone's fault. This is nobody's fault, but we can look at these kind of more nuanced situations. And if we want our kids to stop being verbally aggressive when they're not at like the back offer attack level, if we want them to not say such mean, hateful things, we have to teach them how to express the things they're really feeling, even if what they're feeling makes us very uncomfortable.    

Robyn: All right, that's all I'm going to say about that. Again, we could do, obviously, a whole episode on that I do have, I think I already mentioned this again, actually, remember, I do have a master class in the club about helping kids find their voice and teaching them how to say what they're really feeling so that they aren't using verbal aggression, or they're not shutting down things like that. So that might be something that would be helpful to you. Now, of course, sometimes your kids are saying mean, hurtful, hateful things, not because they're feeling anything particularly negative towards their sibling, but simply because they feel really yucky and bad on the inside, and they're holding a lot of chaos or trauma or dysregulation in their bodies, right? And so their real feeling might be kind of hard to find, because it's not actually anything to do with their sibling at all. It's just that they're taking their yucky feelings on the inside and sort of like, kind of like puking them onto their sibling. And if it feels like that is a more accurate description of your of your child who is verbally aggressive, that child needs help. You know, processing and navigating the intensity of their own inner world, and maybe they have a trauma history, so they need some help, you know, navigating that trauma experience.    

Robyn: But this isn't specific to their relationship with their sibling. This is about what's happening for them, and they need some support with that, and in the meantime, because that's not a quick fix, right? In the meantime, we work with our other kids, with their siblings, on strengthening their psychological boundaries. And as our kids get older, we talk to them about how when we have relationships with people outside our family, like friends or people who are building relationships who aren't our family members, we get to choose, like we can still see their behavior as an expression of the state of their nervous system, and we can see that and not judge them for that. And we can choose, do I want to be in relationship with that person? We can't really do that with our siblings, but we can do that with other folks outside our family, and that's how we help kids know that simply because they can understand people's bad behavior, it doesn't mean they should be in relationship with people with bad behavior, right? So we can work all of that in there as well.    

Robyn: All right, y'all, I need to take a breath like, good grief, this sibling series has been a lot. We did six episodes. We covered six pretty intense topics. The topic is intense in general, because feeling unable to protect our kids is really painful, and then feeling unable to protect our kids from our other kids is extra painful. So this might be a six episode series you sort of bookmark or save in your podcast app, and maybe keep coming back to because, as you know, this is not a challenge in your family that's going to be instantly fixed. You are going to be navigating this challenge for probably a long time, and you might need to come back and get a little burst of of co-regulation by re listening to the series. So y'all in the next two weeks, I'm actually going to take a little podcast break and offer you some replays so that I can have just a teeny, tiny, little summer break before we head back into the hustle and bustle of the fall and all the great things that got planned for you this fall, so next week and the week after will be replays. Might also be a good time to kind of head back and listen to some of those sibling episodes if you miss them or re-listen to some of those sibling episodes, and then I will be back with a new episode in early September, y'all, thank you.    

Robyn: Thank you for everything that you're doing for yourself, for your kids, for your other kids, and actually, y'all for humanity. And I know that's not why you you're doing this. I know you don't come and listen to this show and work really hard on growing your Owl brain, and really hard on your own regulation, and really hard on seeing your kids behaviors through the lens of the nervous system. I know you're not doing that because you have, like the greater good of humanity in your mind, because you can think about that kind of stuff. You're thinking about your family, but it does matter, and I just like to remind you of that, that this really, really, really, really hard work that you're doing, it matters not just in your family. I believe it matters globally. I believe it matters globally in the way that we show up on this planet and see one another through eyes of compassion, to see one another through the lens of regulation, connection and felt safety. I believe it really matters. So thank you. Thank you for continuing to come back, for pressing play and for working so hard to show up for yourself and your kids. I'll be back in a couple weeks with a new episode. Bye, bye!