Emotional Wifi: How feelings and family wellbeing are connected

Dr. Bruce Perry: A lot of people don’t appreciate, sort of, the dynamic interactive quality of emotion.

Kendra: This is Dr. Bruce Perry.

Dr. Bruce Perry: When they think of somebody in their family who is struggling, they kind of focus on that person, you know, and they don’t always consciously recognize how their struggle is having this impact on everybody else in the family. 

Kendra: I like to think of it as if we’re all connected in a family like wifi. When one person’s signal is off, the whole system goes down, it affects everyone else. Bruce is a leading psychologist and neuroscientist. You’ve probably seen him with Oprah. In fact, they co-authored a bestselling book called What Happened to You? – which is incredible, by the way. I was really excited to talk with him about this concept, that we’re all connected, to see what he thinks about this idea of emotional wifi.

Dr. Bruce Perry: Your perspective is so spot on.  I think one of the key things that’s really important to remember is that human beings are, at our very core, interactive, interdependent and relational creatures. All of our sensory apparatus and the way our brains are organized are honed in on reading and responding to other people.

Kendra: It sounds kind of abstract, but if you think about it, you’ll recognize it in yourself. 

Dr. Bruce Perry: We’re always trying to figure out, Do I belong? Do I not belong? Am I safe? Am I not safe? Are they an ally, or are they an enemy? Are they angry at me? Are they not angry at me? How did that comment, you know, land with this person. So because of that, there’s this very, very sensitive set of, if you will, machinery in your brain, that’s contagious to the emotions of the people around you. 

Kendra: This is A Little Easier. I’m Kendra wild. Here’s the fascinating thing about how this emotional contagion works in famlies. 

Dr. Bruce Perry: Now that contagion doesn’t flow equally amongst everybody, it actually tends to flow down the power differential. And so the most powerful person in a group at any given moment usually will have the dominant, emotional tone. So if you have a parent who’s very dysregulated, very upset, very tired out, you can have kids that feel pretty good and they come home and pretty soon they start to feel not right. They don’t, they don’t feel regulated.

Kendra: So here’s the takeaway for us as parents and caregivers. 

Dr. Bruce Perry: We have these relational gifts, but a lot of people don’t, uh, learn how to use them. How can a parent who’s dysregulated regulate kids? And the answer is: you can’t. So the parent has to take care of themselves and, um, get to the point where they either are approximating regulation – You know, there’s times when we do, as, you know, people kinda laugh about that ‘fake until you make it.” There’s something to that. 

Kendra: “Fake it till you make it,” might not sound like it’ll work, but Bruce says, it’s a start. 

Dr. Bruce Perry: Now kids may sense that there’s something wrong, but you know, if you keep the family routines, if you keep some sort of predictability, structure in the way you act and behave within the family, that helps the kids stay better regulated. But if you are so dysregulated and so depressed, so exhausted that you don’t even like have meals ready or, you know, you don’t know what to do about dinner, or you don’t get kids up on time. That level of sort of exhaustion can really start to echo out to the kids. And so this is a roundabout way of saying yeah, you’re right. [laughs] It’s about the parents. 

Kendra: I mean, I’ve found that it really resonates with parents, that it helps realize that taking care of themselves isn’t selfish when they realize we are all connected. And I think of it as being sort of like we’re in this ecosystem in the family, like wifi, that, that we are connected like wifi, but it’s interesting to hear you say that sort of the most powerful person in that ecosystem has a heavier influence on the frequency that everyone else is picking up on.

Dr. Bruce Perry: Well, and that, and that’s, that tends to be true. And then there are exceptions to that rule where, if one individual in the family is so dysregulated, then that dysregulation can flow upwards. So anybody who’s had a child, any parent who’s had a child who’s really very struggling with, you know, regulation, you know what I’m talking about?

Kendra: Oh yeah. I totally do.

Dr. Bruce Perry: You can have a day where, you know, your child’s at school and you’ve been doing fine and you’ve had a good self-care plan and you went to your book club and all the stuff that helps make you stay regulated, and the child comes home and literally within minutes they can unravel the, the emotional climate.

So the kind of the rule of thumb is, the more extreme the dysregulation, the more the power is of that contagion So if it’s sort of mild dysregulation, you know, if it’s sort of everyday stressors and everyday challenges and episodic frustration, the tone at the top can really sort of contain and control. But if you’re, if you are on your own as a parent, and you’ve got a very dysregulated child, Mother Teresa wouldn’t be able to keep things calm.

Lovey Brown: Okay. My name is Lovey Brown. I am originally from the Bronx, New York. I am a proud father of three and a half. And when I say three and a half it’s cuz my daughter has a son. My first kid’s mother passed away of lupus when my kids were eleven and nine. So I’ve been, um, struggling through this single fatherhood since then…

Kendra: I wanted to talk to Lovey to find out more about how he tries to help his kids regulate their emotional lives and how those challenges affect him. 

Lovey Brown: Doing homeschooling and being a single parent has been a blessing in my life. My, raising my kids helped mold me into the man I am. And my father was an abuser towards my mother and us. So I took an oath. You know, when I have children, I’m gonna be the opposite of that, man. 

Kendra: He set himself the challenge of breaking a generational cycle of emotional dysregulation and violence. Lovey’s been taking a class run by Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence. Back when we talked about “secret feelings,”  we met Marc Brackett who founded that Center. 

Lovey Brown: Being part of this RULER class has shown me how to identify and how to address my emotions and feelings. 

Kendra: RULER. It stands for recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate.

Lovey Brown: Some things that, you know, we never had, especially I’ve never had as a young man growing up, showing how to identify feelings and how to identify emotions. And it helps me with my day to day living with my son, cuz we’ve got trauma that comes behind being a father. And you know, just trying to be a black man in America is hard enough. Trying to raise a young man in this is even harder. I’m a mirror. And, and anything that he sees in me is a reflection.

Kendra: That’s yet another way of looking at the emotional bonds in a family. To me, it’s emotional wifi. Bruce likes to think of it as emotional contagion. And to Lovey, he’s a mirror. 

Lovey Brown: So if, if, if that mirror isn’t straight, guess what’s gonna come out of that? I have to put every ounce I have in my body to, to keep me straight, to keep him aligned and try to keep me in an optimistic state of mind and be a realist at the same time. So when I recognize something that triggers my emotion, I know how to desensitize better. I know how to, alright, let me walk it back. Okay. I see this is, this wants to take me to the moon. Let me bring it back to the earth a little bit. Because it’s hard for us to have any type of rational talk or rational thoughts when we’re emotionally driven. 

Kendra: Amazingly this emotional wifi within families can exist even when the family members involved are no longer with us. It can be generational. Aditi Subramanian is a specialist in infant mental health. She often works with families to repair relationships so that parents can support their children’s healthy, emotional development.

Aditi Subramaniam: This is a family I used to see when I was doing home visiting as an Early Intervention provider, with her little like less than 22 month-old girl. And mom’s biggest concern was behaviors. Like she was really concerned about behaviors you know, biting and hitting.

Kendra: The mother she was working with really just wanted some tips and tricks to stop the troublesome behavior.

Aditi Subramaniam: And we all know, um, it’s not a magic wand. And how do I pay respect to this mom’s real desire to figure out what’s happening in their relationship. You know there were pieces that they really wanted to work on and there were moments of joy, right? So there’s intervention. And also like where were moments of thriving? Like how, what are some moments where both of them really enjoyed each other?

Kendra: She made a breakthrough when she began to talk with the mother about how her daughter’s difficult behavior was making her feel. 

Aditi Subramaniam: So I just noticed her do this, what was that like for you? Have you noticed that? Like, tell me more. I wonder when she does this, what comes up for you? 

Kendra: Aditi was able to use the child’s behavior as a way to unearth some difficult experiences from the mom’s past.

Aditi Subramaniam: For this mom, the biting and the hitting was not only biting and hitting, but brought up for her, her own experiences of trauma being parented, um, which, which really physically in her body brought up a space where she was like, “I will shut off because I have a visceral response to this.” And so her, her little two year old – pretty developmentally appropriate right? Two year olds when they don’t have enough language, how do I get a toy? I will bite. I will hit. Right? – And so, but I could never say to this mom, she’s doing things that are developmentally appropriate, it’ll go, I would’ve lost. Like they would’ve just, “please don’t come back to our house ever again.” And so, um, really using like ways of understanding what this child is bringing into this relationship, what is happening for mom? Like where, where, what are, what are the experiences from her past that are impacting the current relationship? 

Kendra: This approach to partnering with parents helps strengthen the whole family.

Elizabeth Larson: My name is Elizabeth Larson, and I am a pediatric occupational therapist by profession. And right now I am an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in the occupational therapy program. 

Kendra: As we’re thinking about how emotion operates within families, I wanted to talk to Beth Larson because of some of her research into parental wellbeing.

Elizabeth Larson: I did a study where I talked to 50 mothers and I asked them about wellbeing, cuz I realized at a certain point -, everybody studies, stress, and depression. We know about that, but the opposite of addressing stress and depression is not wellness. And so I was like, well, okay. So what would wellness look like?

Kendra: And here’s one of the really revealing findings from her study. 

Elizabeth Larson: The thing that was interesting to me that I didn’t know is that mothers described their wellbeing as relational. Meaning that, it wasn’t mine alone, but it was in relation to my family that what is important. So is my family today, harmonious? Is anybody fighting? Are things going smoothly through our daily routine? So that was really interesting to me is that mothers could not separate their wellbeing from their family. It was integral.

Kendra: That’s worth repeating. Mothers in her study could not separate their own personal wellbeing from that of their families. 

Elizabeth Larson: Children are progressing, children were doing well wasn’t as important as you know, the other things.

Kendra: Beth says that question of, “How are my kids doing?” becomes even more important when the family is one with a heavy caregiving load. Many of the mothers in her study didn’t have as much time as they needed to take care of themselves. 

Elizabeth Larson: What I also found is that, uh, they were putting caregiving in front of their personal wellness. And because of the burdens of caregiving, many felt they didn’t have opportunities for wellness. So we really had to think about if we were gonna look at how to promote wellness – a program or an intervention that would fit in very small spaces in their lives, but still would help them. Having less stress and depression does not mean you have greater wellness. It is not a Teeter totter. And, um, just like having more negative emotion means you have less positive emotion. It’s just not a Teeter totter of experience. So, um, if caregivers are gonna be able to sustain their caregiving for many years, which in many cases, if you have a child that has certain kinds of needs, that may happen, you have to have an ability to do that.

You have to have wellness, um, and you have to take care of yourself. 

Kendra: And that means actually some very small interventions can be really important in sustaining parents and helping the emotional health of the whole family. 

Elizabeth Larson: The mothers, uh, I love some of the metaphors they use for that, um, that you have to take your oxygen first. And other, um, I have some other quotes from my research where the mother just says it. I’m not doing well, I’m not there. And that made perfect sense because the other thing the caregivers told me when they thought about wellbeing was they had wellbeing if they could be responsive to their families. So not that it was not just that it was relational, but also can I be responsive to the demands of my children? So that idea that you have to have a full enough tank to be responsive.

Randi Silverman: You can really cannot take care of your children if you’re a mess. 

Kendra: We met Randi Silverman back in our first episode. She had to cope through her son’s severe mental illness. She confirms what Beth is saying about the importance of staying regulated, so that you can be there for your kids. 

Randi Silverman: I mean, things were really, really bad with my son and I, I was really depressed and rightly so, cuz some things were really horrible. But I had two other children to take care of and it wasn’t fair to them. And so I, I did it for them. II went to therapy. I actually went on medication myself. And it changed my life. And it, you know, I, I take much better care of myself and I became a much better mother. 

Kendra: That’s a theme we’re going to expand on a lot in our next episode. And here’s the takeaway.

Randi Silverman: We always put ourselves last. And I don’t know if that’s a mother thing or a woman thing, but we really have to stop doing that. Um, we have to have boundaries even when our kids are sick. We need to set boundaries to have our own time, whatever that looks like. Some people like to be alone. Some people like to be with friends. Some people like to knit. Some people like to exercise, you know, whatever is your own time to rejuvenate reading a book. Yiu know, it’s okay to, to tell your kid, I need some time for myself and I’m going into my room for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, whatever you can do.

Lara Wilson: I remember this moment with my daughter who was frankly, the easiest child for a long time. And I was having a moment. I was just not in a good mood and I was just kind of grouchy. I was in her room and trying to clean up when she wanted to read a book, and I sat on the floor and I said, I’m sorry, I’m just so grumpy. And she came over and put her tiny little hand on my cheek and she said, you’re not grumpy, mommy, you’re wonderful. That child is 26 years old. And I’m still telling that story. 

Kendra Wilde: Lara Wilson has yet another way to think about emotion in a family. To her, it’s a story we’re telling. 

Lara Wilson: We are always telling a story through our actions. Our narratives are sharing our experiences with everyone around us. 

Kendra: Lara founded an educational mindfulness collaborative called Be Well, Be Here. She’s a writer and a teacher, and she’s practiced meditation since she was a teenager. She’s also a mom of four. Now that we understand a little bit about how our emotions are connected to everyone around us, I wanted Lara to give us some ideas on how we can apply those lessons in our family. 

Lara Wilson: We have to sort of understand that when we articulate where we are with our mood, and we share that with our children, they already know it. Inherently in their bodies, their bodies already feel the energy of our mood. They could tell you what your mood is without you saying anything. They really can, if we are going to take time to listen. So I bring that particular story up as an example of how we can try to express ourselves and accept ourselves by being real in the moment. By acknowledging this is happening to me right now. And rather than judge myself, and hide, and beat myself up about it, which humans are conditioned to do through their sort of primitive brain. We can say to ourselves, “This moment right now, I feel this.” And we sit with ourselves in this, in this case with my little one, and then we can sense the shift. We can bring that shift to us.

Kendra: It’s a lot like the story we heard last episode from Chris Willard, who explained so beautifully how he comforted his child, who’d just hit head on the cabinet door. It’s that same principle. It’s co-regulation.

Lara Wilson: One of my children was just having a rough day, really young, five years old. And. went in the room, the child’s, you know, sobbing, but standing stiffly on the bed. And I said, what’s going on? And the words were, I’m so sad. Ugh. You know, it;s like an arrow to the heart, isn’t it. 

Kendra: It’s a scene that’s familiar to any parent. 

Lara Wilson: So what do you do with that? You cannot fix it or take it away. So you just embrace that child. “You’re so sad.” That’s what there is. And we all know what, an hour later, the child’s out running, playing with a friend, whatever. But that moment to honor the sadness. To honor the anger and the frustration. It can be such a simple practice, something it’s such a gift to give your child when they’re reactive to just say, I see you.

Kendra: That’s such an important point. We all feel all kinds of emotions. Part of what you can do for your child is just to acknowledge that and be present. 

Lara Wilson: And yes, we do all think that we can sort of fix and, you know, treat our children and control things. We all know when we get to be a certain age, that that’s a fallacy. We, we know that we can’t do those things. Yet we try because we want to spare our loved one’s pain. But pain is part of life. We can’t, we can’t remove it, but we can be present with somebody. We can stand in our own non-reactivity.

Kendra: That’s your role at that moment. To be solid ground for your kid. To be sturdy.

Lara Wilson: And if we can just stand there and feel in ourselves, our feet on the ground, that groundedness in the moment of the other person spinning helps that person feel like the spinning isn’t going to be out of control. I’ve even experimented with sort of sending my energy of sitting in a grounded way out there and watching the change, like a ripple effect, like the energy levels kind of slowly decreasing. And I’m not telling you this because I have some magic power and it sounds super woo-woo I’m sure. It isn’t that at all. It is this force of like, not everybody in the room is going to jump into the vortex and whirl around with this kind of wild energy. Somebody can be a stabilizing force. 

Kendra: It can take time and practice to find the tools and the techniques that work for you. But Lara says we shouldn’t be discouraged. 

Lara Wilson: Parenting is hard, it’s really challenging. And so, find ways. I would encourage people to find ways to soothe yourself when it gets rough. Find these little practices, these micro actions as you call them Kendra. Or these mindful moments. Invent them, play with them, experiment with them. Experiment with them with your kids. Say, Hey, you know what? I tried this thing. Wanna do it with me. 

Kendra: This is using mindfulness as an opportunity to get creative with your kids. Get curious, figure out what works for you guys. 

Lara Wilson: You’ll be surprised what happens when you invite them. And then they can, they can be the expert of experience, of their own experience. Invite them. Show me one. What would you do? What’s your idea? Something that I like to invite parents to do is this idea that we can partner with our kids in a particular way. We can collaborate with them. Because we’re doing that all the time whether we like it or not, anyway. We’re built to sort of figure ourselves out, or not. And work with others, or not. So which way would we rather do this? Fighting against it or trying to work through it in a collaborative way? You know, we’ll have a stronger relationship with our children if we say to them, all right, let’s collaborate. So in this way, we’re collaborating, with love and compassion and this really deep feeling of being human. And that’s really what we have. That’s it.

Kendra: So far on this journey, we’ve had little glimpses of how we can take time to care for ourselves, those micro actions that we can use to help ourselves recenter. But next on A Little Easier, we are all about self-care. 

Caroline Welch: When I would ask about self care, I would hear things such as, 

“Oh, I’m not even on my own to-do list” or “that’s not me, I’m not selfish.” 

Kendra: Why you should be on your own to-do list. That’s coming up. And to get us ready, here’s your micro action moment for this episode. This time from Lovey Brown.

Lovey Brown: I have this notion and this thing that I do with my son. You know. I have something on the mirror “I love me some me.” So every day we go to the mirror when we’re brushing our teeth, you know, “I love me some me” –  three times. That’s part of our ritual. I love football. Football was one of my first loves. Terrell Owens is a football player. Um, he used to play for San Francisco, used to play for Dallas Cowboys, he played for Philadelphia Eagles. And he was a real cocky, arrogant person and he made a touchdown and, you know, everyone’s congratulating and he’s like, you know, “I love me some me, I love me, some me.” So ever since he said that, I was like, man, I like that. So I took that and just stole it and said, you know what, I’m using that as a kind of inspirational. So that’s where that’s the origin of it. And that’s where I kind of twisted and made it my own. We have to wake up in that morning. Look in that mirror. Love you some you and go tackle the world.

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.

We’re an independent show focused on elevating parents because you’re the most important force behind your child’s wellbeing. Visit alittleeasier.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 Rae Kantrowitz, sound design and original music by Rae. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Peace for Parents and me, Kendra Wilde.