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23: How to Parent Yourself First, with Bryana Kappadakunnel, LMFT
147 Plays1 year ago
Founder of Conscious Mommy, Bryana Kappadakunnel, LMFT, joins us today, speaking with pure passion about what it means to parent with consciousness, and what it means to "Parent Yourself First" <----- her new book releasing SOON!
You can connect with Bryana on instagram @consciousmommy and her website www.consciousmommy.com, where she hosts an online community of new parents striving to be the calm, confident, and connected parents they want to be.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- What it means to parent yourself first
- The 3 Cs of effective discipline that she teaches to the families she works with
You can learn more about Rachel's California-based group therapy practice and how you can work with her at www.racheldaggettlmft.com or on instagram @rachelscouch
Follow along with Bloom After Baby for all things maternal mental health: Instagram @bloomafterbaby and website bloomafterbaby.com
** Don't forget to leave a rating and review if you enjoy this Podcast! Thank you so much! 🥰 **
*Please note that this podcast is intended for educational purposes only, and is not a substitute for seeking individualized care from a mental health or medical professional.
Parenting Millenial Parents Motherhood Fatherhood Therapy
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Bloom After Baby'
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Bloom After Baby, the podcast. We're your hosts, Rachel Daggett and Jen Jordan. We're a therapist and a doctor and both moms of two. We're here to discuss the mental health and wellness needs that are unique to motherhood. From confusing hormone swings to your expanding body to boundaries and tricky relationships, we'll give you the information you need to experience motherhood in a way that feels good to you.
00:00:30
Speaker
Thanks so much for tuning in. Let's get to it.
Introducing Brianna, a Perinatal Mental Health Expert
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello friends, this is Rachel today. I'm so glad that you are tuning in today and joining us here at Bloom After Baby on our podcast. Welcome. And today I get to have this amazing conversation with a friend and colleague of mine, Brianna. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She has her master's degree in clinical psychology. She's also an infant.
00:01:02
Speaker
family early childhood mental health specialist and a perinatal mental health specialist. And from my knowledge of Brianna and her practice, she worked with children, like I said, infant early childhood specialist. And when my practice used to be LA based up in Hermosa Beach, I knew Brianna as like,
00:01:24
Speaker
one of the core main amazing child therapists, therapists that specialize in young children like zero to five and parents of those young children. And I also knew that she ran some mommy and me groups. So that's always been my knowledge of her and her practice and her focus.
00:01:44
Speaker
And more recently, I moved my practice down to Orange County. You know, moved about an hour south of the South Bay of Los Angeles, which in California, in SoCal with the freeways here, that feels like worlds away.
Brianna as 'Conscious Mommy' and Her Book
00:01:59
Speaker
But I still was keeping up with Brianna and what she was doing via mostly through her Instagram, which is Conscious Mommy.
00:02:08
Speaker
And just seeing all of this work she was doing on parenting and being more outspoken about conscious parenting and about gentle parenting and nurturing parenting and
00:02:23
Speaker
I mentioned in my combo with her mutual friend of me and Brianna's, Amy Quinn, who I also did a podcast episode with a few months back. It was on our Bloom After Baby podcast episode 10, how to connect with your soul self, a body gratitude practice.
00:02:43
Speaker
So Amy and Brianna are pretty close friends and they work closely together. Anyway, as I was seeing what Brianna was doing online, I was so intrigued by seeing how much her focus was on the parents. And like I said, parent yourself first, which is actually the name of her book that will be on pre-order hopefully this summer and will be
00:03:05
Speaker
out and launched early next year, I believe. So she's been working really hard on this book and hustling over on Instagram. And she created this incredible online community for parents. I wanted to have this conversation with her to share with us her philosophy and her approach around parenting and what her definition and understanding is of parenting yourself first.
00:03:30
Speaker
And I'm so excited for you to hear this. You know, I walked away from this conversation feeling honestly a little bit speechless. I mean, Brianna is an incredible speaker and she is full of so much spirit and has so much to offer us. I admire the gentleness and compassion and grace that she brings to the table, along with the strength and fire and passion and directness that she brings.
00:03:55
Speaker
So let's go ahead and jump into the conversation. And again, thank you so much for being here
Community and Lifestyle Differences: Orange County vs. LA
00:04:00
Speaker
with us. And you can find Brianna at her handle Conscious Mommy, and you can find us at our handle Bloom After Baby. Let's jump in.
00:04:11
Speaker
Okay. Hi. Hello. I am so happy to be doing this with you. Me too. I can't wait to hear about everything you're doing. Oh my goodness. I would, it's crazy. That's a little too much, but it's okay. Yeah. And I saw Amy recently and she said for a hot second you were going to be moving.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to... But now you're not. Now we're not. I wanted to move. I desperately want to be out of Los Angeles, desperately. I feel that. I want to be back in Pittsburgh. I want all the weather. I want all four seasons. I want the small community. I want the old ladies with their babushkas sitting on the porches watching the children. I want kids walking everywhere instead of parents being chauffeurs. Just what I want.
00:04:59
Speaker
I just want community. I want slow. I want still. I want peace. And yes, you can have community here. Are you still in LA? Are you down in OC now? I am in OC and I love this conversation so much because I feel like we've gotten a taste of that moving here and we're in San Clemente, a very small town.
00:05:18
Speaker
It's like the southest you can be in Orange County. So we're like right before Camp Pendleton just open, right? And right it is we moved here right before we had kids. So like I don't think we even knew what we were doing at the time because before we had kids living in LA was great. Like it was so much fun. There was always something to do.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, of course. But now it's so kid friendly here. It is everywhere you look. Our neighborhood is kids running around in the street all day long playing hockey, basketball hoops. Like it is a little bit of a taste of what you're talking about in Pittsburgh. I know it's not it's not as much like I crave to live on a farm with land and having animals. And that's what I really want to convince my husband to do. But anyway.
00:06:04
Speaker
I feel that when we go back to the South Bay, I'm like, now we're so accustomed to this slower, more open life. And yeah, so anyway, I hear you. It's hard. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard too, just because it feels like LA's not really set up for children. Like it feels like children are like an afterthought and an inconvenience.
00:06:27
Speaker
And I hate to speak out so generically and so generally, the South Bay is great. Like there's nothing wrong with it. It's fantastic. I absolutely love it. But I do think that when you live in Los Angeles, you don't realize that like life exists outside and it exists differently. And it's just as good in some, in many respects, even better.
00:06:51
Speaker
And I think that we get really like delulu here in thinking that this is the only way of life that like stress as your baseline, busy as your baseline, normal. What are you doing if you're not stressed and busy? Like it's that's just the energy of it. No one's saying that.
00:07:11
Speaker
Nobody is saying that with their words. We're all just frazzled and chaotic and on the move constantly, never time for each other, carving out time for each other. And this is especially true in motherhood, right? It's like, oh, we've got to get together. And it's like six months later. So glad we did this. We should do this more often. And then another six months goes by. And I'm just like,
00:07:35
Speaker
What are we doing? We cannot function like that. When we prioritize the children and our identity as mother over every other thing that we've got going on, we lose so much. But when we prioritize all the hats that we wear, we have so much to gain. You know what I'm saying? Yes.
00:08:00
Speaker
So girl, I have just been on like a spiritual journey of just like, how do I get that in my being? How do I embody that? Like someone who is so busy and that's truly my trauma response. And it's just how I go about life, just like always on speed, always doing things.
00:08:19
Speaker
How do I get stillness in? How do I slow down? How do I connect to myself, to nature, to the people around me? How do I stop hinging my worth on what I'm doing and what I'm achieving and think about my worth in terms of it just being this immutable quality that I have because I have it and there is no qualifier for my worth? How do I get there? So that's been just where I have been.
00:08:47
Speaker
Oh, you're speaking my language. And I feel like I was on that path prior and being therapists, you're propelled into that journey, whether you want to or not, when you go through your training, if you're getting good training. But Parenthood has just made that so much more on my face because
00:09:06
Speaker
I've been so convicted by wanting to parent that way, wanting to teach my children that. But then, of course, there's a mirror in your face of like, are you doing that, right? And what are you hinging your worth on when really having to practice what you preach in parenting, which is why I'm so excited to talk to you about your book and all the work that you're doing, because this whole idea of re-parenting and parenting yourself and
00:09:30
Speaker
all of these things that I thought I understood and could intellectualize until I was actually in it. It's such hard, deep work. And I feel like in this society that is structured in the way that it is, what you're speaking to of constantly being busy, constantly looking for the next thing, looking for the next thing to achieve, making the next plan, it makes it so much harder to parent in this conscious, this conscious way. Oh, yeah. Has that been
00:09:58
Speaker
a part of what brought you to want to write your book and do all this work. I mean, so much has led me to writing this book. I didn't know that this was going to be a book about parenting yourself first.
Brianna's Personal Journey in Parenting
00:10:13
Speaker
I didn't know that. I thought that I was writing a book that was teaching parents how to connect with themselves and how to connect with their children and how to prioritize true connection.
00:10:28
Speaker
And it was in the development of the book that my editor was like, this book really feels like you're teaching parents how to parent themselves first. And we were all just like, that's it. Like, that's the title of this book, parent yourself first.
00:10:47
Speaker
And you know what really led me to, everybody has a story, right? And so what really led me here was being in relationship with a mother who did not parent herself first. And as a result, I specifically, there's four of us, but I'm the oldest daughter.
00:11:05
Speaker
I held a lot of her unprocessed pain and baggage and shame and wounds. And I did it naturally, not realizing that I was doing it, but I did. And it wasn't until I was in college and I would be talking, I would say something about my upbringing, like as if it was normal.
00:11:29
Speaker
And people would look at me with such a curious like, what is this girl talking about? That kind of got me thinking like, oh, did things happen in my childhood that other people did not experience? Right? I was like, is this why like I'm I feel so dark?
00:11:47
Speaker
Right? Cause I'm like not naturally, I'm not naturally a dark person. I'm actually like naturally a very sunny person. I am like a analytical person. I do like to analyze and make sense of patterns and things of that nature, but like my organic spirit is not dark, but like I felt so dark.
00:12:06
Speaker
So then it dawned on me that I'd been struggling with suicidal ideation for years. I'd been struggling with undiagnosed OCD for decades, ADHD for decades, trauma for decades, and had no real understanding. That's what I was experiencing until I, until I saw the mirrors of my
00:12:29
Speaker
peers showing it back to me like, oh, something's a little off. And that's what kind of kick-started this journey of like, how did I get here? What was going on with my mom? Oh my God, that led me to understand my nana, that led me to understand my great grandma. And I realized all of these patterns are just being passed down, the patterns of self-rejection.
00:12:47
Speaker
patterns of perfectionism, the patterns of self-minimization, the patterns of even like shutting down and then exploding, even suicidal ideation and depression. These things are all so cyclical in nature and pulling those apart over, it took me almost 20 years of therapy to start dissecting these and making sense of all of this with me and my own experience
00:13:13
Speaker
And then working as a therapist, hearing clients' stories and seeing very similar journeys of like whose words are those words? Whose story is that story? You're sitting here telling me that you are a failure. There is no evidence whatsoever prove that you are in fact failing yourself or failing your child. Where did you learn this? How did this come to be this idea that if you're not the best, then you are a failure?
00:13:42
Speaker
If you're not succeeding to some kind of degree that you have in your mind that you should succeed, that you are a failure. How did this come to be? So going on that journey with clients, doing that journey myself has led to so much personal healing. I see the healing it's done with my clients and that's what kind of motivated me to
00:14:03
Speaker
Get it all out on paper to the best of my ability and encourage people to prioritize being the parent that you always needed for yourself so that you can then become the parent that your child needs you to be. Not be who you needed for them, be who you need to be for you and become who it is your child needs for their unique journey in life.
00:14:31
Speaker
Such a beautiful process. It's intense. It's deep, but it's like a homecoming. Come back into yourself in such a beautiful way. I love how you say that. We skip a step. It's like, oh, I didn't get these needs met, so I need to make sure I do this for my child.
00:14:48
Speaker
But you're right, your child is not you. And they don't have the same needs necessarily. And then in many ways, we're just passing down our own unresolved trauma and our own stuff onto them. And then they end up carrying our stuff, which is what happened to you and what happens to so many. What do you, I think about this a lot, like just the differences in generations. Do you feel like
00:15:13
Speaker
the generation of mothers that came before us, the generations of mothers who mothered us, do you think it was a pattern in that time of the world for them to not know how to parent themselves or fill their own needs?
Generational Parenting and Martyrdom
00:15:28
Speaker
I definitely think martyrdom was the norm then. And I definitely think that the mothers who mothered us, every mother is doing their best. And I really do believe that was their best. And like my mother, she was a cycle breaker.
00:15:43
Speaker
Honey girl, she was a cycle breaker. There were some serious problems that I don't speak about because it's my mother's history. My mother is passed on and she wanted those things to go with her to the grave. And I'm going to honor that. But there were some unspeakable things that happened to my poor mother and she protected us from that.
00:16:01
Speaker
She was a cycle breaker. Yeah, her behavior in many ways was very harmful and was traumatizing and I've spent a lifetime working through it. But that doesn't take away from the fact she did do something to evolve.
00:16:18
Speaker
And I think that when we come from that deep place of compassion and awareness and understanding and even like appreciation for what they were able to evolve, while also holding the ways that we were harmed, the ways that we were hurt, and they don't have to erase each other.
00:16:35
Speaker
They can just both exist. And we, as the children of that, adult children now, we get to be able to hold onto that and do the work that our parents couldn't do, which is build emotional maturity. I do not believe that emotional maturity was a real value in the previous generation. My parents were boomers, right? They were raised by people in the Great Depression.
00:16:59
Speaker
There was a lot of survival for them growing up. Both my parents grew up very poor. I know a lot of people across the country, that was how their parents grew up. And that pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, individualistic. You can do whatever you put your mind to.
00:17:17
Speaker
If bad things happen to you, it's because you created that mess, not because of systemic failures, not because of social problems, not because of systemic issues, not because of the laws, none of that. You are facing a promise because you did it. So you got to fix it. And you better figure that out on your own because this is a real world baby. Ain't nobody going to be there to help you out.
00:17:44
Speaker
And I think that was genuinely how they felt. I know for sure that's how my mother felt. She felt like she was on an island. So of course she was raising us, preparing us to know what it is like to feel like you are on an island and to feel so lonely. It didn't occur to her that, oh, this is a cycle. I need to help my children break. For her, it was, this is the reality, right? This is what it is. And let me get you ready for that.
00:18:11
Speaker
I know that there's like a big push right now for going no contact with families and cutting them off and really holding them accountable. It comes across in many ways as like blaming. Yeah, hold accountable. But if somebody's not willing to take on accountability, that's on them. And you can't let that interrupt your healing. You can't need that for you to move forward and for you to heal.
00:18:38
Speaker
No. Those are my reflections about the previous generation. I have strong feelings about the lack of accountability. I do feel strongly about it. It does hurt, but it also makes me feel curious. I wonder why. I wonder like what hurts are they still hanging on to that makes it so hard for them to accept that there were choices and things that they did that were harmful and they can't own up to it, right?
00:19:08
Speaker
that I feel like that's my the organic stage of healing being able to get to that point of like yes I feel that hurt but also I feel that curiosity and I feel that compassion and that's I want to stay in that instead of in the hurt.
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. And then as the adult children now, the millennials who are now parenting young children, I think where I see, where I've transparently struggled with and so many clients have is like, okay, how do I move forward now with that relationship? If cold cutoff is not the answer or doesn't feel right, what is the alternative and how do I move forward with like, accepting that they may not take accountability or responsibility?
00:19:54
Speaker
And I think the biggest, hardest thing is what happened to you as a child is not your fault, but it is your responsibility now as the adult and as the parent of your children to do your own healing, even if your parents didn't or won't.
00:20:12
Speaker
right?
Healing from Childhood: Adult Responsibility
00:20:13
Speaker
And that is a hard pill to swallow. But I do think once you have your own little ones in the picture, for me at least, that's where the humbling has come in where it's like, okay, it's not about them anymore, right? My parents and my grandparents and whatever these other generations went through and it is helpful to put it into context why they did things the way they did because you're right, they were
00:20:37
Speaker
doing the best with what they could, with what they had at the time. And they were doing things they had to do to survive, just like every type of human dysfunction, right? It's all, it all serves a purpose of helping us survive, but it doesn't mean it has to last forever, and it doesn't mean you're gonna need it forever, and it doesn't mean we have to continue that on. But breaking that is so hard, because you have to really let go of your ego, right? Of like, they did what they did, but I am responsible for what I choose to do.
00:21:05
Speaker
And now we are given, I think, a new permission. This is something I've talked about in other episodes. I think our generation of mothers have been given more of a permission from the research and the experts and the field of parenting now to nurture ourselves first, because they weren't given that. In many ways, they were shamed and conditioned to martyr themselves and told that that's what would make them a good mother.
00:21:33
Speaker
And that's what would fulfill you. Your whole life and your worth is in everything that you do for your children. This is why, you know, when children flee the nest, women have these huge identity crises and have no idea who they are.
00:21:54
Speaker
because there is this long standing social cultural tradition to lose yourself and to completely abandon yourself and to be comfortable with breadcrumbs of care for yourself. And this is why I think continuing to have these discussions to normalize
00:22:15
Speaker
The struggles, the normal, everyday, regular, hard struggles of what it means to be a mom, what it means to be a parent, what it means to be in relationship with children. And if you've got healing work, the way healing work complicates every single one of those things. We have to talk about that and make it a continuous discussion just as we are today.
00:22:37
Speaker
so that we do have that continuous permission to allow ourselves to heal, to allow ourselves to make sense of what happened and then decide what do I want to do moving forward. Let's say you had parents who never supported you, like they just neglected you. You needed help and you were on your own.
00:22:59
Speaker
Like, sorry, I'm not very involved with you. Like I'm doing my own thing, which I know was the case for a lot of, especially elder millennials and a lot of Gen Xers. We just like figured things out on our own without, with not necessarily a ton of emotional support, sometimes not even physical support. We just figured it out. That may make you now, when you see that your child is struggling, unable to tolerate your child struggling. You may feel flooded, overwhelmed, nervous, panicky.
00:23:27
Speaker
empty, hollow. You may have reactions to it that don't really make a whole lot of sense to you, but something comes up. And what do you do with that when you see your child struggling and you're having this reaction? Do you have been and try to fix? Do you project your powerlessness, your helplessness by
00:23:44
Speaker
trying to be the competent one, the one who was almost over involved, over parenting, over doing it to compensate for ways that you felt you were not being attended to. And if that's the case, parenting yourself first is going into that feeling, being with your own discomfort of what it's like to feel helpless, sitting with that and finding the inner child within
00:24:11
Speaker
which we all have, who is just saying, hey, is anybody there? Is anybody listening? Can somebody help me? I need some support. And you now bringing that energetic support to that little child within. Now, people ask me, how the heck do I do this when my kid's like flipping out because they can't tolerate their frustration. You're actually showing your child how to, you're actually modeling how to tolerate frustration when you're just doing this internal regulatory work in front of them.
00:24:40
Speaker
Maybe you say like, gosh, it feels so helpless to let your child know that you see what's going on for them. Gosh, I just would love some support. Yeah. You're talking to the child in front of you, but really you're healing the child within you when you're having these kinds of dialogues. Yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
And you provide that comfort and that soothing and suddenly that hollow feeling or that anxious feeling, that nervous feeling, am I all alone feeling, starts to dissipate and you come back into your body a little bit more whole than you did the moment before. And then from there, now I can really connect with what is going on for my child, right? You are struggling, honey.
00:25:19
Speaker
And this is so hard. You've really, it's not going the way you want it to. Ugh, yuck. That's a tough one. Now, instead of hopping in and overcompensating by being the perfect parent who fixes, which ultimately sends a message to the child that they're not competent and they're not capable and they need to be rescued from their emotions. I am now, because I've parented myself first, I can now actively teach my child how to be with their own emotions.
00:25:49
Speaker
breaking that cycle of abandoning yourself and teaching the child how to be with your actual experiences, how to interpret them, and how to move through them without it having to be so complicated and difficult.
00:26:05
Speaker
It's such a beautiful process. And as I don't know if you know this, but I'm trained in infant mental health, infant family, early childhood mental health. So the bulk of my training has always been child intervention, helping the child with it. And one of the ways that we would do that is by telling the parent, here's what you do in that situation.
00:26:26
Speaker
Here's what you do for the child. And what I found, thank goodness for the pandemic because I wasn't working with kids in the pandemic. I was only working with parents. Thank goodness for that because that really helped me realize this is a band-aid on a broken leg. This isn't helping anybody.
00:26:42
Speaker
I'm just creating codependency with you and me. You now have to come to me and rely on me to be the competent parent for you. I want you to develop the voice of a competent, mature, confident, high-esteem parent within yourself. And that starts by you learning and knowing how to nurture your child within and how to regulate yourself.
00:27:07
Speaker
in how to change the way you're viewing what's happening around you so that you can then hop into your child's mind. I don't know. It all makes sense to me. Does it all make sense to you? It does. It does. It's object relations. It's psychodynamic psychology. It's all, they're internalizing us as the object of attachment in many ways, right? Yes. They can't develop that unless we show them how to do it. And it is really that simple, but
00:27:37
Speaker
It's been so complicated, I think, with behaviorism and being more behavior focused. Right, right. Behaviorism has just like, it's just killed the relationships that we need to build with children because we're not like behaviorist human, like humans are not based solely on behavior. We are a relational creature.
00:27:59
Speaker
And how we are developing relationships, how are we developing safety within ourselves, safety within each other, safety within our community. It's not about behavior. It's always about what is beneath the behavior. What are the feelings? What are the needs? Is connection happening?
00:28:17
Speaker
That's what parenting is. And you're right, behaviorism has really over, it's just taken over parenting. And I think it sucked the soul out of it a little bit. Totally. I totally agree. A lot of this really came, I started to understand all this a little bit more when I did my EMDR training. And we learned about the triune brain and the reptilian brain and the mammal brain and the human brain.
00:28:41
Speaker
And the reptilian brain being your basic needs for survival, fight or flight, like physical safety, am I safe? Then the mammalian brain being, am I loved? And then the human brain is the intellectualization and our ability to use our cognitive thinking brain. But that cognitive thinking brain can't, like that's not in the driver's seat.
00:29:03
Speaker
the other two. Certainly not when we're stressed out. No. And yeah, I feel like behaviorism really put this, that human brain on a pedestal a little bit and ignored the needs for physical and emotional safety in parenting and in human development and relationships in general, but especially, especially in parenting.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yeah. And this kind of loops back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of our connection to community that is watching after us. That is such an essential element to feeling safe, is living within community where there are, like someone is thinking about you, that all this pressure and all this responsibility
00:29:47
Speaker
does not fall solely on your shoulders.
Community Support in Parenting
00:29:52
Speaker
That has been lost in our generation. Whatever we had a little bit, and then COVID hit, and we are all very much rebuilding the idea of community, even four years.
00:30:06
Speaker
later, but we used to live closer to families. We used to live in intergenerational homes. We used to do aloe parenting. Dan Siegel is who talks about this. We used to do aloe parenting. It was village parenting. You lived off the land and you lived in community. There were 30 to 50 different families and everybody, when the children were born, everybody flocked around the immediate mother and child.
00:30:34
Speaker
And everybody did what it was necessary to really nurture that child up in a really supportive way and working with mothers and working with families. I work with mothers who go 10 hours.
00:30:49
Speaker
They'll be completely alone with their children for 10 straight hours. Will not receive the help or the support of another person. And the fact that is normalized. We normalize. That's just what it is. No, it is what it has become. Right.
00:31:06
Speaker
It has become that, but that is not what it is. That's not healthy for us. That is serious isolation. Isolation affects our nervous system. It keeps us out of this human brain, as you're saying.
00:31:22
Speaker
It activates these other parts, these safety survival parts of ourselves. It makes us feel lonely and disconnected. And if you have inner child wounds, it's very likely to bring forth those inner child wounds. Am I bad? Is there something wrong with me? Am I lovable? Am I wanted? If you have a history of anxiety or perfection, what do I need to do to be able to get this? How do I fit in?
00:31:47
Speaker
How do I belong? We start to question these things about ourselves. And if we're not mindful of it, if we're not making the connections, those wounds will start running the show. This is why I have women on my couch with them when they have three, four, five year olds who are feeling like epic failures.
00:32:06
Speaker
They're feeling like they're not enough. They're feeling like that there isn't anything that they could do that would improve their situation. The level of burnout is so intense and they're so drained because of our social and cultural expectation that this is just what it is. You're just alone all day and you're overwhelmed and you're overworked.
00:32:31
Speaker
And you don't get much support. And if you ask for it, good luck. And if you do have it, it's because you are extremely privileged. Yeah. Because you're lucky. Because you're lucky. You're lucky and privileged. Honestly, it's because you could afford it. Right. Yeah.
00:32:46
Speaker
Think about that. We live in a society that says, sure, parents, you can have support. You just have to be able to afford it. Even support, when we know the human condition relies on community and support, even support is behind a paywall. Isn't that funny? And then we wonder, why are the statistics so high? Why is mental illness? Why are the children hurting so much? Why is adolescent mental health so horrible?
00:33:15
Speaker
I would be so interested if researchers actually did some longitudinal studies and see, is there any correlation between how much support parents have and mental health issues? I think that they, gosh, I don't want to misquote it, but I think I did see that there was a research study on child abuse and they saw that child abuse decreased significantly while we were all in the home during the pandemic.
00:33:42
Speaker
And the only factors that they could find that were different is that parents had more support. Parents had more financial support. There were a lot more handouts. Parents had less. There were the mortgages and different like rent freezes and different things like that. Like people had a little bit more breathing room and they could commune and connect in ways that were more tangible.
00:34:03
Speaker
They weren't as stretched thin with all their schedules, and we saw less child abuse. And as soon as we returned back to life, guess what? Child abuse went right back up. We took away the supports, put the stress back on, child abuse went up. Yeah, I would be so interested to see if they can show a correlation. Parents need support, and children benefit when parents have that support. This is part of parenting yourself first, by the way, is really going inward. What do I need?
00:34:33
Speaker
to feel good in my own being and to feel good in my own essence. What is missing from my life? What do I need to cut out from the busyness of my life to make room for me to do that? Do you get pushed back from people on your Instagram or even on your couch who feel like the way we are trying to parent now is coddling?
00:35:01
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Not so much on my couch because people who are coming to therapy for me, they know why they're ready to work with me. But definitely online. And I can actually understand why they think that. I think people misinterpret a lot of these discussions to mean a couple things.
00:35:19
Speaker
that it's so parent focused that you're not providing any direction or guidance to the children or you're just letting the children off the hook, if you will, because it's developmentally normal. And this idea that they're just going to outgrow it so there's no use addressing it. I think people make those assumptions. That's what's being said. And honestly, I do sometimes hear
00:35:41
Speaker
folks misinterpret the literature and say those things without actually understanding that we're really having to hold both, the parent and the child. And what we are actively working on, at least I myself as an infant mental health provider and early childhood mental health provider, is the relationship. What is happening between these two people? And how do we set that relationship up for as much function as possible?
00:36:09
Speaker
Yes, we are coddling children when we do too much for them. Yes, we are coddling children when we indulge emotions, when their emotions run the show, when the child makes a demand and we drop everything that we're doing to meet that child's demand. Yeah, we are coddling the child. We are not teaching that child to tolerate their frustrations, to learn how to wait patiently, other important developmental things.
Guidance vs. Coddling in Parenting
00:36:33
Speaker
when we just throw our hands up in the air, isn't there a toddler, toddler's hit, it's fine, whatever, they're gonna outgrow it. We're coddling that child, right? We really gotta Mary Poppins it when it comes to parenting, right? High standards, reasonable expectations.
00:36:48
Speaker
I'm absolutely going to have a high standard that you're not going to hit. I don't care if you're too. My standard is high. We do not hit. That is the standard. Now, of course, I have reasonable expectations. I know that two-year-olds are impulsive and they hit. So my expectation is going to be when that happens, we're going to take a pause. We're going to practice using gentle hands. We're going to read the book Hands Are Not For Hitting. And I'm going to continually to reinforce for you that I have very high standards that we do not hit.
00:37:17
Speaker
We might have high standards around how we express our emotions. Be angry. Be upset. Have all of that. That is perfectly appropriate. We can't throw. We can't scream some kind of obscenity or knock somebody else down because we're feeling bad. We still have to be mindful of the words that we say.
00:37:41
Speaker
Those are my high standards, right? And my reasonable expectations is that I'm going to teach you how to effectively express your emotions. Our children need that guidance. And so I think when people think that we're coddling kids, they are seeing that some children are not actually getting the guidance. There's a lot of messaging. Well, you just need to model it. Just model it, parents, and then your children will eventually get it.
00:38:06
Speaker
In a perfect neurotypical society, modeling is going to send all the message. But like, no, modeling is a third, but we also have to instruct and we also have to guide. We have to do all of these things. And we have to have the three C's of discipline, which I talk about in my book. We have to be clear.
00:38:28
Speaker
We have to be consistent and we have to do this in a connected way. I know for sure that I'm not teaching parents how to coddle children. We're not protecting children from hardship. No way. We're not protecting children from pain. We're not protecting
00:38:47
Speaker
children from struggle, they're going to have all of that. And if they don't, then we didn't do the damn thing well, because that's part of being human. It's having the whole breadth of experience, all the ups, all the downs, all the highest highs and the lowest lows. I mean, that, you know, you've lived a good life when you've got that kind of story to tell. And so protecting children from that protects them from really living a good life.
00:39:14
Speaker
They need to learn how to have it, how to be with their pain. It was, I think I heard Brene Brown say that once. It always stuck with me. Children, I can't take your pain away from you, honey, but I can teach you how to be with it. What a gift. And if we're struggling to do that, it's because we don't know how to do it for ourselves. And that's where the parent yourself first framework comes back. Learn to do it for yourself so that you can then model, instruct and guide for your child.
00:39:43
Speaker
That's it, simple. One of the biggest things I'm hearing or I'm not hearing, but that I think is missing from this is the punishment.
Empathy over Punishment in Parenting
00:39:54
Speaker
That's I think what is the biggest difference in the parenting approach is that I think sometimes the punishment piece and the punishing discipline aspect is that's perceived as the way to instruct.
00:40:10
Speaker
Right. Right. And if we're not punishing them, we're coddling. Exactly. This is the shame legacy that's been passed down to us. That's all punishment is. Punishment is just shame and humiliation and forced making you feel badly with this belief that if we do that enough, then you won't do it again. And we will have control over you. It's a way to overpower. It's a way to control.
00:40:35
Speaker
It's not a healing way to be in relationship. So yeah, yeah, I'm coddling children then. I won't be a proud coddler. I am doing what I can to protect my kids from punishment. Now, children won't be completely protected from punishment. They will feel punished because there are many aspects to society in human behavior that is punishing, but nature itself is not punishing. Nature is neutral, right?
00:41:05
Speaker
The world itself is fairly neutral. And so the idea that like, oh, there's punishments in life. So you want to teach your kid how to deal with punishment. Let's actually be more accurate. This might be my neurodivergence, but like, we need to be more accurate here. There's punishment in human behavior. Humans have evolved with this tool of punishment to coerce, oppress and control their subjects.
00:41:31
Speaker
And in the traditional paradigm of a child-parent relationship, parents are the authoritarian leaders and children are their subjects. Children are not seen as fully human in the traditional child-parent dynamic. Parents are seen as their own gods. They're the god of their own little universe and their family.
00:41:56
Speaker
And so in this more evolved way and what I'm hoping to be a part of in terms of encouraging humanity to continue to evolve the way that we view ourselves and our children, we are not in this hierarchical structure. We are actually teammates. I am the leader of the team.
00:42:14
Speaker
If we're all in band together, I'm in first chair. You're still a part of the band, but I'm in first chair. We're going to take my lead on things sometimes, but your contribution helps make this orchestra sound absolutely exquisite. Your contribution child makes this family run well and it's meaningful and it's valuable. It's a completely different mindset. I can't have that mindset if punishment, making a child feel pain and shame is a part of it.
00:42:44
Speaker
Right, because that's going to automatically separate us and put me on top of the child because children can't punish parents. They can't do it willfully. Maybe a teenager might be able to punish parents in some way, but you have to have power, really, to be able to punish.
00:43:02
Speaker
So really, punishment is just an extreme, egregious abuse of one's power over somebody that is so innocent and so vulnerable and so dependent on your leadership and on your guidance. So if we're stuck on, if we're stuck on punishment, we've got a shame legacy. We must heal that shame wound. We must work with it. We must learn how to sit with the desperation of that. Find compassion, really compassionate empathy are the antidote.
00:43:31
Speaker
to shame and then start pouring compassion and empathy into our children. And I can guarantee you that when you do that, you will see changes in your child's behavior. You will see more connection. You will understand each other better. And guess what? They're going to want to be a teammate.
00:43:47
Speaker
Because they want to work with you. All the evidence shows. All the evidence shows that children want to be on the same team and they want to cooperate. They want to collaborate with parents. It's just when they feel toppled on for years after years, you had a boss that was constantly putting you down, walking all over you, making you feel like something is wrong with you. Would you feel really motivated to work with that person? Probably not.
00:44:16
Speaker
So we have to be aware of that. We have to be aware of our power and how easy it is to abuse your power in your relationship with your child. Every single one of us are at risk, myself included. Every single one of us are at risk of it. That is a cycle I think our generation is working hard on breaking.
00:44:33
Speaker
I agree. I totally agree. Oh, okay. I can't wait. I cannot wait to read your book. So tell us what else what else do we need to know about parenting yourself first about conscious parenting?
Parenting as a Continuous Journey
00:44:45
Speaker
And when can we get your book?
00:44:47
Speaker
pre-orders, I don't know when those are going to go. So hopefully sometime this summer, but it will come out next, they're thinking like either next January, February, or March of 2025. But what we need to know about this idea, about this concept is it is a journey. It is not about the destination.
00:45:05
Speaker
Parenting is never about where you're trying to go to. It is about each step that you are taking along the way in being in the moment and trusting in the process. And so being open to the journey of it and really learning how to be gentle with yourself and compassionate with yourself and bring more attention to the critic that controls you.
00:45:30
Speaker
And work on that. That's what I have found to probably be the most healing thing for myself and for the families that I work with. How do I accept myself more and reject myself less? And that naturally organically pours into the child.
00:45:47
Speaker
So that's really my message. And yeah, people can continue to learn inside. I have a community, so people can come and learn more inside the community, and they can read the book. And we can just keep growing together, be open to the growth of it all. So you and your community is online, and we can access it through your Instagram.
00:46:08
Speaker
You can find everything on Instagram or just at consciousmommy.com. Everything is also there. Okay. Beautiful.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:46:14
Speaker
Thank you so much, Brianna. You just took me to church. I feel like I have something to like sit here and like simmer for an hour. Just being in this.
00:46:23
Speaker
the thick of this with my four-year-old and one-year-old. I've gained so much from this conversation, and I know our listeners well too, and I just appreciate the work you're doing and the work you're helping us all do so much. So thank you so much for sharing that with us.
00:46:39
Speaker
It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me and I'm so glad I got to see your beautiful face. Thanks so much for tuning in with us today. If you enjoyed this episode and feel like it brought you value, don't forget to rate the show and leave a review. Your feedback means the world to us and helps us know which conversations you are needing the most.
00:46:59
Speaker
And we'll keep bringing you new episodes every week, so hit subscribe so you don't miss a thing. Also, be sure to check out the show notes for any links or resources that we mentioned. We're on this journey with you, so be sure to find us on the Gram and TikTok. Plus, go to bloomafterbaby.com and grab our free guides on all things motherhood created just for you. Breathe, be well, and keep growing, Mama.