Secret Feelings: Opening ourselves to the tough emotions of parenthood

Hi, it’s me, Kendra Wilde. Welcome back to A Little Easier – I’m so glad you’re here.

Last episode we covered a lot of territory – we learned where psychiatric diagnoses come from, why parents tend to focus on fixing and why that can lead to burn out.

this episode we’re going straight to those mixed up and tough feelings we all have. I call them secret feelings, because we don’t always want to share them. But today we’re bringing them out into the daylight so we can deal with them.

We’ll meet Merriam Saunders, a mom-turned marriage and family therapist who knows what it’s like to raise kids with challenges, and Jackie, whose three kids all struggled with mental illness, For more insights, we’ll turn to Dr Marc Brackett founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence who will explain what it means to give ourselves permission to feel –

Episode 2: Secret Feelings

Kendra: How is being a parent supposed to make you feel loving, happy, joyful?

Merriam Sarcia Saunders: I felt like I had this big dark secret that I wasn’t enjoying this. And I think I’m supposed to be enjoying this. And I think I’m also supposed to like my kids a little bit more than I do. Um, which felt like something I could never say out loud. I mean, that makes me an absolute, terrible person, but that was the reality of how I felt.

So, my name is Merriam Sarcia Saunders. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, residing in California. I specialize in childhood ADHD.

Kendra: That’s right. This person who has this deep, dark secret about parenting, she became a therapist. As we’ll find out that was directly because of her experience, raising her own kids and those feelings that she had.

Oh, and one more thing you should know about Merriam:

Merriam: I’m an author as well. I have two picture books for children. The first is called My Whirling Twirling Motor, and the second is My Wandering Dreaming Mind, and both feature children with ADHD.

Kendra: Would you read a little for us?

Merriam: Yeah, sure. I do have it right here. I’ll just start with the opening pages. I have a spinning motor inside me that buzzes and whirls and hums. I can’t turn it off. It made me play with my dinosaurs instead of getting my shoes on this morning. “Hurry. We’re late for school.” At school, my motor made me wiggle too much during story time. I touched the teacher’s scissors and I talked out of turn. Whirling spinning humming…

Kendra: So author, counselor, therapist, there’s lots of reasons we wanted to talk to Miriam about the secret feelings of being a parent.

Merriam: But the biggest credentials really are the fact that I’m the mom of three now young adult children who arrived into this world with a varying cocktail of, uh, ADHD, autism, auditory processing, anxiety, uh, dyslexia…

Kendra: She says right from the start, her kids were struggling and she was exhausted.

Merriam: What would it have been like to just be able to put my children down to sleep and have them sleep? Or have them eat what I offered? Or have them, you know, listen the first time I asked? Or enjoy school, make friends easily? You know, all of the things that my friends’ kids seem to be able to do pretty, fairly effortlessly. Like, you know, not with the consistent kind of gut-wrenching struggle that I seem to be going through. So I felt pretty sorry for myself!

Kendra: You’re listening to A Little Easier. I’m Kendra Wilde. Today we’re exploring “secret feelings” – those dark unwelcome emotions that can come with parenting in any family, but which are magnified when your kids struggle. You should know that we’ll hear some difficult stories this time around, and some of the details might be hard to hear. But that’s part of what we’re doing here. We’re digging into those feelings and letting them out.

Merriam: I looked at everyone else and thought, what am I missing here? Like, what am I doing wrong? Why is this not fun? There’s not a lot of joy happening. This is really hard. Um, especially before any kind of diagnoses happened.

Kendra: One of the biggest things for Merriam, at least at first, how could she talk about how she was reacting to being a parent?

Merriam: What do you do with feelings like that? There aren’t a lot of places where you can express them, where they can be normalized, where, you know, it’s okay to have a part of you not like a part of your experience or your child.

Kendra: How she felt directly affected her relationship with her kids.

Merriam: I was constantly giving my children the message that they needed to be different. That I felt disappointment. You know, even if I thought I was masking it, I’m sure because that was how I felt deep down, that they got that message.

Kendra: Those feelings of disappointment and frustration, it was because she didn’t know how her children’s brains and bodies work.

Merriam: At the time, I didn’t understand that this was neurological, that it was physiological, that a lot of their really difficult behaviors were things that were just so outside of their control. It felt to me like they were just blatantly disrespecting me and the behavior was at-will. And that, you know, would anger anyone. “Why won’t you just listen? What’s wrong with you?”

Kendra: But with more knowledge and understanding came more difficult feelings for Merriam.

Merriam: Well, especially later when diagnoses happened and I came to learn and really understand like, oh my goodness, for all of those years that I kept asking you to control something you couldn’t. It was like, I was punishing you for your inability to build a rocket ship.

Kendra: And then of course, those feelings continue to go around in a circle.

Merriam: How guilty I felt for the damage that I must have caused for those demands. And how confusing it must have been for them to not be able to do as I asked and to frustrate me. And no wonder they got frustrated themselves, and defiant, and lied, you know, I mean, they probably felt they had no other choices than to react that way.

Kendra: We’ll come back to Merriam in a bit to find out how she made a breakthrough in her feelings about parenting. But first let’s hear from another family with a completely different diagnosis, but with all the same difficult feelings.

Jackie: I never in a million years thought my first question to my kids would be like, “are you safe?” but that’s one of my first questions.

Kendra: This is a story about a family struggling with mental health.

Jackie: Hi, my name is Jackie. I am a mom of, um, three kids. My oldest was diagnosed with significant depression and anxiety at the age of 12, and was in and out of hospitals for most of his seventh grade and eighth grade year.

Kendra: Jackie and her husband also have two younger children. She describes their oldest as really happy when he was a little kid, but his issues came on suddenly.

Jackie: Our first experience with this was a visit to the emergency room, because school felt that his anxiety had led to suicidal ideation very quickly. And, um, I felt like my whole world had turned upside down.

Kendra: They were sent home from the ER with a recommendation for therapy, but ended up right back in the hospital just weeks later.

Jackie: At that point, they admitted him for a hospitalization and um, yeah, it was, it was tough.

Kendra: The primary emotion: fear.

Jackie: I was scared to death. The factors that come into play with depression – whether it’s genetic or environmental – I was scared I was going to lose my child.

Kendra: And that meant she poured every ounce of energy into trying to help him.

Jackie: That just became like a 24-hour job. I would, he would sleep with me. Some, some nights I would lay in bed with him. Um, I would take him in the car and drive around. I mean, this is a 12 year-old. We would drive around until he felt better because I just, I couldn’t leave him alone. It is absolutely exhausting. It just, it, where it wears you out. And then I think, you know, there’s definitely a sadness. Um, not, I guess kind of, I don’t know much for myself, but for him, that just like life is so hard.

Kendra: As they began to untangle the depression and anxiety. Jackie also learned her oldest wanted to change genders. It was a lot to wrap her head around – and her heart.

Jackie: I do remember feeling very angry at my oldest for just bringing all this into our house, even though it wasn’t his fault. But there’s definitely, um, there’s definitely a feeling of anger that I think, you know, you have, you have to work through. And with him, I mean, it brought on so many different things. You know, when he wanted to transition from a girl to a boy, I mean, we went through, oh my gosh, all my emotions. Um, I. Didn’t I didn’t handle that as well as I probably could have. My husband handled it well. I did not. Um, because that was just, you know, when you say grief, that was, um, definitely sadness.

Kendra: And then there was the impact on Jackie’s two younger children,

Jackie: I remember at least once or twice leaving, you know, kids – not little kids, I mean, they were preteens – by themselves while I went to the emergency room because my husband was traveling. Or frantically, you know, looking for friends that could, you know, take my littlest for the day, with not knowing when I’ll be home, or what do I tell my youngest?

Kendra: Eventually both Jackie’s younger kids would also be diagnosed with depression and anxiety.

Jackie: If you’re the sibling, that’s the, the target of, um, you know, a really depressed older sibling, I think it just, it wears you down after a while. I saw some of it and I just never to the extent thought how much it really would affect her.

Kendra: I’m hearing, um, another kind of feeling that you haven’t said out loud, but we haven’t talked, we haven’t talked about guilt.

Jackie: Oh, yeah. I have a ton of guilt. I didn’t say it out loud. That’s funny that didn’t, that didn’t cross my mind initially, but I do. Yeah. I still carry a lot of guilt. I don’t know. I have, I have guilt that my oldest got sick. I have guilt that… what my other two have been exposed to. I don’t know. Guilt is the hardest emotion .

Kendra: Jackie’s oldest has now grown, left home and established life on his own, but that doesn’t mean his difficulties or Jackie’s difficult feelings are over.

Jackie: There’s so much stress, and unfortunately I don’t know that it ever goes away, especially with mental health. Even today, like when he calls me and, you know, “mom, I need, I need help. I’m not doing well.” I immediately go back to that, that feeling of, “Oh my gosh, we, we cannot do this again.” Alls it takes is one phone call to kind of send me back into this, um, this feeling and, um, stress that I’ve always had. I don’t know if that makes sense…

Kendra: It totally makes sense. I’m just wondering what, what helps.

Jackie: Oh, yeah. I don’t know. Um, well, um… what helps? I think in those moments, I take a step back and, um, yeah, I just, I kind of have to reenter and say, “I don’t know, it’s gonna be okay. And if it’s not okay, it is what it is.”

Kendra: Clearly along with the bright spots, there are a lot of big and difficult feelings when you parent a child who struggles. Grief, anger, guilt, shame, sadness, envy… Let’s delve, a little deeper into the psychology behind those feelings.

Dr. Linda Budd: When we have a child, we have a dream of who that child would be.

Kendra: This is psychologist, Dr. Linda Budd.

Dr. Linda Budd: We had a dream of who we would be as parents, and we have to be prepared to lose that dream, to greet the person that we have in front of us. And that is grief. That is loss. The loss of that dream.

Kendra: Linda has worked for more than three decades as a marriage and family therapist. She’s seen many families coming through her practice who grapple with grief and accepting their child as they are, challenges and all. She told me the story of a mother in her practice who had to reconcile with this diagnosis of bipolar disorder for her son.

Dr. Linda Budd: “What did I do wrong, Linda? What did I do wrong?” And my heart just clenched. You didn’t do anything wrong. This is biochemistry. Bipolar is inherited. It’s genetic. You didn’t do a thing wrong. But we have a society that implies there’s a way to do it right.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Logic may tell us one thing, but there is nothing logical about the parent brain.

Kendra: It turns out there’s quite a lot of science behind our inability to adapt when our kids struggle. Dr. Rita Eichenstein specializes in pediatric neuropsychology. She’s based at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Parents are really essentially wired to be caretakers. Everything changes, male, female, gay, straight, gender – does not matter. Adoptive, natural – does not matter when you’re a parent, your neurotransmitters change.

Kendra: Your whole brain-body chemistry changes.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Particularly oxytocin increases. Vasopressin in, uh, whoever’s the, the “Papa bear” increases, which is the protective sometimes sort of aggressive “protect the cave” thing. The oxytocin. Your level of compassion. If you’re nursing, you’re prolactin, increases. And all of these things set the stage for mothering and parenting.

Kendra: And what does that mean for our logical brain?

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Now your frontal lobe takes a backseat. Your frontal lobe is where we’re mostly wired to work from these days, which is logical planning and reasoning. And in parenting, that totally takes a backseat. And you’re going to see it everywhere if you open your eyes. Of course, as babies, you’re going to see frantic parents, in the doctor’s offices. On the soccer field. If you look in the stands of parents sitting there, you’re going to see shouting, illogical, aggressive parents. You’re going to see unbelievable emotional parents.

Kendra: Yeah. I think we’ve all seen that. But what about when your kid isn’t the typically-developing baby or the budding soccer star?

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: The normal adult parent brain is a prediction machine. It likes to make predictions about what’s gonna happen and how to circumvent disaster next. And so parents’ brains, when you point out a problem about their child, they are going to by nature, become overwhelmed and saying, “oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Kendra: When your child is different from what you expected or they receive a diagnosis, it can send you into a process of acceptance that is actually grief. And Rita says it usually starts with denial.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein “No, no, no. Wait, this makes no sense. Wait, wait. No, this makes no sense.” What happens is that the circuits get flooded and you go into freeze.

Kendra: If you’re in this state, your brain is protecting you from information. You’re just not ready to process. For some parents, it’s easier to decide your child’s struggles aren’t real. Often denial can go along with the next common phase of grief.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: [Roaring sound] Anger. “Hey you stupid idiot. What the F are you thinking? You’re just an idiot.” Okay. And that is the anger phase.

Kendra: Anger with your doctor, your partner, the situation… Anger at the world in general.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: You get that rush of adrenaline. You’ve got your pulse. You’ve got your shortness of breath. The urge to shower, break something. You can get a stomach ache, headache. Urge to act but not thinking rationally. .And it’s not a joke because this is when marriages break up because someone has anger management problems. The stats show that kids, that special needs kids are at risk for some sort of abuse, which is a sobering statistic and why the anger phase scares me so much.

Kendra: The next layer is often called bargaining and solution seeking. Rita says it involves a mix of reason and emotion. It can feel good to take action, but you can wear yourself out on an endless quest. Bargaining is a stage where we think we can change reality, but you may be missing the real progress your child is making. You can guess where that leads.

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: We wanna mention depression. Because that’s the next phase – the isolation, the fear, not knowing what happens next. You can have a very dull feeling in your heart, like day after day. People have described it as Groundhog day.

Kendra: These phases can happen in any order, simultaneously or repeatedly for months or years until you come to acceptance. It’s a swirl.

Deborah: Familiarize herself with grief and the stages of grieving.

Kendra: This is Deborah Sweet – and she really is. Her oldest kids are now in their twenties and she’s been through a lot.

Deborah: We have an alphabet soup. I mean, we have dozens of diagnoses in this house, um, from behavioral, to neurological, to medical. it’s just kind of. We’re also a medical foster home, so it’s just who we attract and what we do.

Kendra: That’s why I wanted you to hear from Deb. She has a lot of wisdom gained over the years.

Deborah: A diagnosis is very much a point in your life where you will likely grieve. I remember reading a book, and it was meant to be a coffee table book of these beautiful photographs of autism, and one of the pages – and it’s so stuck in my brain that I can see that photo, and I can see the actual words on the page – and it was called “Death and the Diagnosis” and that has never left my mind because it really registered what I was going through and how it was okay, that it was normal to feel this overwhelming sadness and insecurity and, you know, irrational like fear and then feel like, “Oh, I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I can do this. I can do anything. Oh my God, I can’t do anything. I don’t know what I’m doing. Oh my…” you know, just kind of, because we know grief isn’t linear. That we go in and out of stages, we don’t go through them consecutively. Um, but give yourself time to grieve. That very first one was by far the hardest. I grieved that diagnosis probably for five years, and then kind of put it to rest and you know, moved on, and then something would happen and maybe a new diagnosis or, um, or somebody would be mean to him or something would just happen where I was reminded that his life is harder than I want it to be for him and I would grieve again. And you know what, 21 years later, I’m still grieving.

Kendra: What Deb is telling us is there’s no way to avoid the difficult emotions of parenting. The key is to recognize them and open up to them. There’s a freedom to embracing what is, it’s what Marc Brackett would call giving ourselves “permission to feel.”

Dr. Marc Brackett: There’s no such thing as a bad emotion. In our society we’re brought up to think anxiety is bad, anger is bad, happiness is good.

Kendra: Marc calls himself an “emotion scientist.”

Dr. Marc Brackett: As a neurotic introvert, I can’t stand really happy people [laughs]. Who says that’s good? They drive me outta my mind. Like, wait a minute. There’s a pandemic. People are dying. What are you so happy about?

Kendra: Marc is the founder of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University and a professor in the Yale Child Study Center.

Dr. Marc Brackett: I’m a believer that all emotions are data, all emotions are information. Um, anxiety can be very helpful. It tells you there’s, you’re making predictions around a lot of uncertainty. Let’s figure out what to do to prevent that, right. Frustration is, is really good. It’s saying there’s obstacles in my way. Let me figure out how to get rid of those obstacles. Um, guilt is good. It says, you know, I have a moral compass. I’ve made a mistake. It’s time to apologize. Those are great things to experience. And of course we wanna experience a lot of pleasant feelings, but I think the goal of being happy all the time is ridiculous.

Kendra: Mark says, instead of the goal of being happy, we should set a goal of wellbeing. Here’s what he means.

Dr. Marc Brackett: Do you have a sense of like satisfaction with your life? Do you feel contentment? Do you feel like your life is filled with meaning and purpose? I’m adamant about these kinds of things, because I just think that we have made it so that when we’re not happy, it’s bad. And I just think that’s a really, uh, unfortunate way to think about our emotional lives.

Kendra: And if we agree with this reframing that all emotions are information and no emotion is purely negative, we’ve given ourselves “permission to feel.”

Dr. Marc Brackett: So now we gotta strive to be emotion scientists, as opposed to the “emotion judges.” And I have to tell you, like, we’ve all been around the judge of emotion, right? Like, “why are you so angry?” You know, like, “let it go, calm down.” It’s like, wait a minute here. Like, like “get over it.” Okay, dad, I’m gonna get over it. Like, why should I get over it? You know like, that was not really kind. So emotion judges like to do those kinds of things, right? They’re not gonna ask you how you’re feeling when you tell them how you’re feeling. They’re not gonna, not really know what to do with it. They’re gonna just say, get over it or move on. Check your feelings at the door. Um, where the emotion scientists is open and curious and reflective. Um, they wanna get granular, like, “Are you sad or are you disappointed? Are you frustrated or are you overwhelmed? Are you calm or content? Are you happy or are you ecstatic? That granularity, as it’s called around emotion, is really important.

Kendra: Marc’s system is called RULER: Recognize Understand Label Express and Regulate. Those are the steps towards emotional intelligence, becoming an “emotion scientist.” Later in this podcast, we’ll hear more from Lovey Brown, a student in one of Marc’s programs and learn how the RULER system helped him to forge a new relationship with his own emotions and become a better parent.

Kendra: So what can working through the swirl of grief and reaching acceptance look like?

Erin: My name is Erin and I am the mother of two daughters. They have a rare genetic condition called SYNGAP1. They are nonverbal. They had physical delays. Um, but the most important thing is they know love and they’re happy. So we deal with the rest

Kendra: SYNGAP1 is very rare. It’s not a diagnosis that most doctors have ever encountered. And even though it’s different from the kind of psychiatric diagnoses that we’ve been talking about here, her journey towards acceptance illustrates so much of what all parents go through. For Erin and her husband, it was a long seven-year journey just to find out what was going on with their kids.

Erin: When my nine-month-old was not taking food orally, um, she would only nurse. And when she wasn’t sitting up and she wasn’t rolling over, you know, you see all of your friends’ kids and all of these baby group babies starting to surpass everything. And everything you’re reading in the books. Um, It’s just not happening for your child. And, now all of a sudden, instead of playgroups and library story times, you have therapists in your home, you have medical appointments with specialists you never thought you would be seeing.

Kendra: So Erin and her husband continued on the quest to find out exactly what was wrong. It took them many months and several rounds of genetic testing – and a lot of persistence when they ran into dead ends. Finally, the answer came.

Erin: It’s interesting because that diagnosis day is sometimes a sad one. We were thrilled. We were thrilled to have our “why.”

Kendra: The diagnosis might have been a relief for them, but it also meant a long, long road and a lot of feelings to process.

Erin: It’s hard. It’s hard to accept, you know, the significant disabilities. Um, but I’m there. I accept that my older child will probably never speak a word and that’s okay. She’s happy. She’s loving. She knows how to communicate with us. I’m still really sad.

Kendra: She says she’s learned over the years that the grief will swell at certain times.

Erin: Mother’s Day. Growing up. I have these memories of cooking breakfast in bed for mom and drawing cards and thinking of something special I can do for her. Or even as a teenager, just not giving her crap on Mother’s Day. Something. You know, something that would help mom. My kids don’t even know it’s Mother’s Day coming up. And they’re at that prime age, that nine years old and seven years old, where they would be drawing the cards and the hearts and trying to make the day special. And my husband does like, he, you know, he’s very good about that. But there’s something about that not coming from your children.

Kendra: And there are other traditions that Erin will never get to experience as a mom.

Erin: Oh, my, my youngest daughter lost a top tooth a couple of weeks ago and you know, everyone says,”Oh, is the Tooth Fairy coming?” No. No, the Tooth Fairy’s not coming. I, they don’t understand it. Why am I gonna throw in a Tooth Fairy? Like, by the way you lost a tooth. So now a fairy’s gonna come into your room and stick a, stick, a dollar under your pillow? That’s gonna freak her out more than anything else, you know, knowing that somebody might come in Um, and interestingly enough, my, my own mother said, “Well, it’s a rite of passage for a parent.” Well, that’s great, but it’s not, not for me, not for the children that I’m raising. So I’ve started shifting that grief into more celebrating who my children are. But the grief still fits there. It still bubbles. Um, and my husband knows that, so we kind of deal with it together.

Kendra: That’s really nice. It’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s true that I think, you know, and those traditions are one trigger. And then as time goes by and you start to approach these milestones where their peers, at least kids who are chronologically the same age are having, you know, prom and all these, whatever those firsts are.

Erin: Yeah. Yeah. It gets harder as they get older.

Kendra: To me, that was a huge breakthrough, just to even realize that it was grief, that that’s what this feeling was. Did you have that? Or how did you know?

Erin: I mean, I did, my therapist did bring that up to me and that was actually recent. That was probably within the past couple of months, because as these holidays start bubbling up and you know, the pressure for everyone to get together and put a smile on your face, when you know what, sometimes I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I just, I wanna sit here and enjoy my kids where they’re at. And so when my therapist said, “Well, you’re grieving.” I said, oh, so that is kind of an ‘aha moment’ because I do grieve. I grieve for the children that I, I don’t have. That doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate the children I do have.

Kendra: An ‘aha moment.’ So many parents who are raising kids with challenges talk about those moments of recognition. Remember Merriam Saunders, whose kids struggled with ADHD and other neurological differences? She says for her, it was thinking back on how she felt when she grew up.

Merriam: My ‘aha moment’ was, I just happened to be reflecting on how, when I was a child what I really wanted, like what filled my bucket was getting praise from my parents. You know, thinking that I’m getting a good grade or, or a good test score or something that I did right that they gushed over. I remember my mom bragging to a neighbor that I got, I was on the honor roll and I just was like, oh, I wanna keep getting on the honor roll. I love the, you know, this feels really good to have my mom. And I thought if only my kids, you know, were motivated by that. If only that mattered to them. And, and it just hit me all of a sudden, like, of course it matters to them! Like why wouldn’t it? I’m sure all they want is to do right by me. Like they, that I’m sure motivates them, just like it motivated me. And I was withholding that. I was always just focused on everything they were doing wrong, every single day. Please do this differently. Please listen. Please put your things away. Why aren’t you doing this? Well, you know, I was never focusing on what they were doing right. And they were doing things right. My heart broke for them in that moment.

Kendra: Yeah. That just hits me in the heart too. I have had, you know, similar experience and it’s just so hard because you have to start where you are. And just forgive yourself for all the things you didn’t know, but it’s painful.

Merriam: It’s never too late to start. Um, when I shifted my attitude, everything in the family shifted. And I thought at first it felt really overwhelming. How, how could I possibly parent any differently? But I thought, well, could I try for a month just responding with laughter?
Like, let’s just let everything go for a minute. It’s okay if we’re late for school, it’s okay if the room doesn’t get cleaned, it’s okay if you don’t sit down at dinnertime. You know, all of the things that I normally was so wound up about. What would happen if I just let it go and, um, and laughed? And it was a gift to me really, because I, I could find that joy in parenting for the first time, because I let everything else go. I like to say, instead of swimming against their current, I got into it and swam alongside.

Kendra: In Merriam’s book, My Whirling Twirling Motor she ends with a little ritual she calls “the Wonderful List.”

Merriam: Uhoh, will she tell me all the things I did because of my buzzing motor? I bury my head under a blanket. I wish I could turn off the motor. She takes out a sparkly red notebook and reads from a list. Wonderful List: Took your cereal bowl to the sink without being asked. Said thank you when I gave you a glass of milk. Your teacher said you sat still during spelling and finished your math. You shared markers with Isabelle and Miles. You held the door open for Hayden. You ate all your peas and broccoli. And you put your blocks away. You got into your jammies for dad much quicker today. You brushed your teeth the first time I told you to. I’m very proud of you. My buzzing twirling humming motor settles to a quiet per and a warm, cozy yumminess spreads. I like this feeling.

Amelia Nagoski: Emotions are tunnels. You have to find your way all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

Kendra: Next time on A Little Easier we’ll find out what can happen to your physical health when these difficult emotions linger.

Amelia Nagoski: Emotional exhaustion happens when you get stuck in the tunnel. So when you have the fight-or-flight response and you just smile and nod and continue to be polite and to deal with the problem, but never, you never crawl your way out of the tunnel completely.

MicroAction Moment

Kendra: Coming up, we’ll dive into the phenomenon of parental burnout. But for now, our micro action moment comes from Marc Bracket and it’s his tribute to Thich Nhat Hanh the Buddhist monk, Zen master, and peace activist who passed away in 2022.

Marc Brackett: On a retreat with him 20-something years ago, we just did a basic breathing exercise. And it had like these four kind of two-part phrases. And I’ve used it literally almost every day for the last 20 years, whether it be, I can’t fall asleep at night, whether it be I’m coming home and I’m like not focused.

It goes like this: Essentially, as you’re breathing in, you say a word, and as you breathe out, you say a word together. So on the breath IN, we say “in”. And then we say “out” on the exhale, let’s do that one more time, in and out.

And then we say the word “deep” on the inhale and “slow” on the exhale.

And then the word “calm” on the inhale, and the word “ease” on the exhale.

Then we put a little smile on our face as we inhale, and as we exhale, we just say the word “release”

To remember: it’s in – out, deep – slow, calm – ease, smile – release.

Kendra: I’m Kendra Wilde and this has been A Little Easier. The show that was created to help you find more joy and resilience when parenting is extra challenging. Thank you so much for being here. Make sure you’re subscribed to A Little Easier in your podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. And while you’re there, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast, share it with family and friends. Thanks!

We’re an independent show focused on elevating parents because you’re the most important force behind your child’s. Well, Visit a little easier.org for show notes and discussion questions. Plus resources on parental burnout and resilience. Building a little easier is written by Harriet Jones and co-produced by Harriet and Ray kreitz sound design and original music by Ray.

This podcast is brought to you by wild peace for parents and me, Kendra wilde.