WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WHY IT DOESN’T WORK
I’m going to go over all the things we’re told or think we should be doing and why they don’t work. The overall message is still because all these things are symptoms of the root cause, your nervous system.
So I want to start with the concept of having ALL of these tools, but no toolbox.
If you have no toolbox, which is the foundational understanding of how your nervous system works and what’s happening in YOUR body, you’re not going to know what tool to use or when or how or in the best way. So that’s a big piece…I think with all the information we have access to and people that are trying to help, but we get it into much of a general form, like if you find someone who does breathwork, that can help the nervous system. Or you heard about the vagus nerve and you found a practice on youtube. You’re just gathering all of these tools, with no toolbox.
And this leads you to no real solution, but also where you end up just feeling really defeated and like you’re the failure and nothing works for you.
There is no one size fits all. You have to know what works for you. And you have to try these tools in the right conditions.
Let’s say you try breathing. If you are in one state, but you try a breath that doesn’t work for that state, then you think breathing doesn’t work.
If you’re dysregulated in an anxious state and your thoughts are running through your head and you sit down to meditate, you’re not going to be able to silence those thoughts. So meditation doesn’t work.
If you think you need to move, so you go run, but you’re in a dorsal state, which means your body’s shutdown, that’s just going to dysregulate more and make you feel worse. And so then moving your body doesn’t work.
The right tools are helpful to support you and help retrain and connect to your body. But tools aren’t something you’re going to need for the rest of your life. Yes, you’ll need to stay connected and take care of yourself. But your baseline will be a flexible, resilient system.
So let’s go through some of the BAND-AIDS.
The first would be anything to do with your mind. You might think it’s a willpower issue or you need a better mindset. Or you need to talk to someone and go to therapy. Or you need to practice mindfulness or meditation. You can not talk or think your way through what has to happen in your body.
You can’t just tell yourself to be calm. Anytime you suppress what your body is feeling or trying to express, you’re adding to the dysregulation because you’re working against your body. You’re working against the energy that is trying to protect you.
Willpower is not the same here as self control. And it’s not good because you just beat yourself up all the time. This is why you can wake up every morning with the best of intentions, but if your body is already stuck in a state or doesn’t have much capacity, one loud noise at 8 am and you’re done for the day! Because you’re now stuck in a state you don’t even know you’re in and you definitely don’t know how to get out of it. And as moms, most of us are stuck in these chronic stress states and it doesn’t take much at all for this to happen.
The next band-aid is medication or thinking it’s a health issue. What this is again is feeling like we need someone or something to help us feel better. I remember googling, after already having anxiety and taking medication… Am I highly sensitive? Am I an empath? Anything that could explain or validate it for me. It’s so you can identify yourself in these symptoms so then you can hopefully find the answer somewhere.
Anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, stressed, irritated, panic, anger. These are all feelings of being in a hyper state. Fear, sadness, numb, exhausted, drained, depressed are all feelings of being in a hypo state.
Any of these feelings are at their core, nervous system dysregulation.
But…you’ll go to the doctor and it’s like the same list of symptoms for everything, but they just add a name at the top, could be chronic fatigue, thyroid issues, adrenal burnout…
So they can take that label and prescribe you with something they claim helps those symptoms. No, your doctor didn’t try to find out why your body is giving you those feelings. But we think this is how we can solve it.
The other part of this is even if you go the holistic route. It’s still the same.
Yes it’s great it’s not a pharmaceutical, but you’re taking a supplement.
A supplement, it’s supplementing something in your body, that you need to find the root cause of why it needs help and can’t do it on its own.
On top of all of this, to me you’re wasting money. I did it, with every diagnosis, for so long!
It’s not even really able to be supportive. If your body is living in a stressed state, it is not healing. So whatever you’re taking that is supposed to say support your adrenals. If your body is stuck in survival mode, it’s not using those supplements, it’s energy and all of your bodily processes are still focused on protecting and not at all healing you. You can’t use a pill to get somewhere your system needs to get on its own.
If these pills actually spoke in some form to your body and it translated that you were safe, then they would work, but that’s not what they’re doing. They are targeting the symptom.
Again and always, root cause! Anything to do with your health, please find the root cause.
Another band-aid is trying to find ways to control our child’s behavior.
First you have to reframe behavior. It’s not intentional or a poor choice or a character flaw.
It is a stress response. It is an impulse. It’s literally the energy in their body that is moving them from threat. It makes it that much easier to understand biting or hitting. Their body defaults to the fight state. They don’t want to hurt someone, they are protecting their life! That’s all this is.
When you parent from a nervous system perspective you don’t have to follow a style or a strategy. You don’t have to yell or manipulate or bribe or reward. You don’t use these in the moment, tips or tricks or tactics to stop what actually needs to happen. It has to happen so that their system learns in that moment and rewires so they CAN do better next time. So they receive co-regulation and move closer towards their own self-regulation each time.
If you’re always stopping this process. It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to get rid of the behavior from happening, over and over. You’ll just keep living in the cycle of using those methods to stop them in the moment.
And your child is never going to receive what they need to ever learn self-regulation. Ever! This is the only way they learn it. Through their body. From us.
The whole idea of punishment I feel is because we can’t deal with it and we don’t know what else to do. When our kids are freaking out and their yelling is freaking out our system, we react in the same childlike way…we just feel like yelling back or running away. We don’t want to deal with it. How do we control how they’re feeling? We want it to stop because it’s now dysregulating our system. So we want them to go away. We want to just put them in their room. And not even out of punishing them, but that we just need space from their energy. We need to be away from them so we can get our regulation back. For our body it doesn’t feel safe to be around them and that is THE HARDEST part of being a parent. We have to know our nervous systems. We have to be able to regulate our bodies because it is our responsibility to be the pillar for our kids. They are learning from our bodies. All of this is happening between our bodies and we don’t know it.
Also this idea of a script or a skill or whatever they want to call what is going to fix that certain behavior for you. It’s always about safety. Nothing you learn, no skill that you store in your brain, is going to work when your brain is offline. When all of your energy is being used to move your body and not to fuel your brain. None of this works unless you’re regulated and that’s not when you need to use them. The nervous system undermines our parenting. All the advice goes out the window when your stress response kicks in.
Ok so those were the band-aids. Now I’m just going to touch on some things you also might be doing…because I did them and I want you to see all these places it could be hiding in your life. They seem small, but when you look at it from a new perspective, it can make a huge difference.
So at one point…I got really structured…like around a schedule and timing. If they did this for 5 minutes and this for 10 minutes and I set timers and everything was out and in its place for them to do. Then nothing could go wrong, no one would ever have an emotion or an opinion or need to say anything because they just had to do what they had to be doing in those time frames. It was like my body felt like it was walking on eggshells and I just didn’t want that one little thing to happen to throw me into a bad mood for the rest of the day. So if I could at least control the hour before school, I could possibly feel good.
Like that’s how I thought I was going to have to live. Not knowing I just needed to work on my nervous system.
This is an example of how we live in these stress states and our thoughts perpetuate from it. Even saying that made me start to feel anxious again.
A huge piece I want you to understand is that your thoughts come from your state. It’s not the other way around…it’s not what you’re thinking puts you in a bad mood.
Now I’m going to talk about how we’re told we have to make time for self care. This one is funny to me because it seems great and it makes sense, but what they’re telling us, which again is to find something outside of ourselves to really just take a break or escape.
But going to get a pedicure doesn’t do anything for a long term effect and it’s over when it’s over. And you may not even be able to enjoy it because you go when you’re already dysregulated.
When we approach self care…we’re really doing it more because we want to feel good.
To put it simply, when you feel good you are regulated.
When you don’t, you’re dysregulated.
Here’s the new concept. It’s not about feeling good. It’s about safety. And this is where we’re approaching it wrong.
The nervous system’s job is to keep you safe, not to make you feel good.
Your job is to show it, it’s safe.
So when you can do this, you can access feeling good any time.
My take on self care is 10/10.
10 minutes a day with yourself in stillness and silence.
This is about connection. Creating a relationship with your body. So that you can be IN your body again and find safety there. That’s what needs to happen first. And then you can have the capacity to feel and hold more emotions and stress.
This isn’t about meditation. It’s not about trying to shut off your thoughts or feelings. It’s simply about sitting with yourself.
You have to build this trust, that you’re going to show up and listen and be with what your body needs, consistently, every day!
And the other 10 minutes is for movement. This is however your body wants to move. Again not overthinking any of this, just letting your body show you what it wants. You listen. You follow your intuition. You let your body move.
We have stress every day. And we are not completing these stress cycles and that energy is getting stuck in our bodies. And then you’re stuck in these states.
So it’s not an option. You have to move the energy every day!
I break both of these down in detail in the Simple Spiral Steps, which is free on my website at themomspiral.com.
One more thing we’re not really taught. At least I remember only learning about 5 senses in school. And not even to the depth that you need to get those to understand your body. We have 8 senses and those other 3 are so important in knowing what your triggers are.
You most likely have so many triggers that you have no idea about. It could be lighting, it could be a smell, it could be a similarity to a past memory, it could be a tone of voice or a look, it could be internal or external or unconscious. A lot of it is hidden. So it helps to find these for yourself and your kids. That way you can really prepare and understand what’s truly happening for everyone.
Ok so now you can look at your life and see all the band-aids. But you can also stop feeling guilty and confused and hopeless that they’re not working because you understand why! You can get rid of words like handle, or deal or get through, because there is one answer that solves all of these symptoms. You just have to foundationally understand your nervous system.
