Ep46: From Triggered to Steady: The Self-Regulation Shift for Parents

Hi, I'm Ashley Chandler, here to guide you to the soul-to-system support you both need to thrive from the inside out. This is the Teenage Guide Podcast. All right, real quick before we get started, I recorded a live workshop for my Thrive members that is available to you as a workshop in a bundle. And I'm going to be sharing details about it at the very end, along with different ways that you can work with me or go deeper, have more access to what I'm sharing inside this value-packed Reset Series. All right, so let's do this. Welcome back to the Reset Series. If you have not listened to part 1, go back and listen to that. This is part 2 in my 3-part Reset series for any parent or caregiver who is stretched thin, who is stressed, who is looking for a very tangible way to hit the reset button and start to tune in to what genuinely works to create the kind of relationship with yourself that you want, the relationship with your teenager that you want, and to experience life the way that you want to be experiencing it. Everything inside this reset series is the foundation of what I coach my clients through every day, and it will change your life. In the last episode, I talked about self number 1, which is self-awareness, the ability to observe yourself and your thinking and your actions and your experience, your perceptions, how you feel, your state, so many things about yourself. But here's the key. It's through a nonjudgmental, curious lens. Oftentimes we may think we're self-aware, but chances are we know ourselves through one perspective and we're pretty judgmental with ourselves. So the invitation here is to be able to observe yourself nonjudgmentally, with curiosity. And with that, what you do is you expand moments in time where you have more awareness of yourself, you have more awareness of your impact, and it is life-changing. So I highly recommend you listen to that one if you haven't already, and just know that we are building on that inside this episode today. Today, we're gonna go one layer deeper, and we're gonna be talking about self number 2, self-regulation. And so I wanna start with a question that I get all the time, which is, if I know better, Why do I keep reacting in the same way? You've done the reading, you've listened to the podcast, you may have done years of therapy, and then your team does something or someone externally does something. Something happens outside of you and you get triggered and suddenly you're right back into that place that you get to, that very reactive, maybe it's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We get into reactivity where we get defensive, Where we lash out, where we snap at people, where we wanna run away, we freeze, we people-please. These are all conditions that we want to move out of. They are reactive conditions and experiences that we recreate because of patterning. And that's what I'm talking about today with self-regulation. Because reacting from this place, from that conditioned place, it's not a willpower Yes, we wanna become aware and have self-awareness, and that can start to shift our perspective, but willpower alone will not shift this reaction. This is a nervous system problem. So today we're gonna talk about what that even means. What is a nervous system? Why it's happening and what you can do about it. Okay. I wanna break this down in the simplest way possible because It is in the ether now. Everyone's talking about it. If you wanna change your life, you gotta heal your nervous system. I love it. It's true. It's absolutely true. And one of the things that I love to do for my clients, parents, and teens is take these concepts that are out here, right? And make them really tangible in your life. So I'm gonna start off with what is a nervous system? Your nervous system, really simply put, is your brain plus every nerve in your body. It's all connected. They are in constant communication with one another. It is your operating system. So, you know, we all have operating systems on our smartphones and they need updating, right? Otherwise, the hardwiring of it gets slow and sluggish and the apps don't work right. The same thing is happening with your own nervous system as your operating system. We need to update it to match the response and the experience that you want to be having in this present daytime, in the future, who you're becoming. This operating system, your brain and every nerve in your body communicates all the time together. It tells you what to perceive, what to believe, How to be and what to do all the time in constant communication. It will perceive threat with something that's not actually threatening. It will perceive a fire to put out. There's an emergency and there's not really an emergency. But this is what the power of understanding neuroscience and blending it with human behavior and behavior change and relationships does, is we start to understand A lot of these unconscious or subconscious experiences that we have are the result of our wiring and all of it's running underneath the surface with our nervous system. Your nervous system was conditioned. It was originally patterned through your upbringing, through your relationships with your parents and their relationships with their parents. Your experiences growing up, all of it conditioned your nervous system to respond to your life from a certain place. It learned what felt safe, what felt natural, what felt like home, and also what felt threatening, what wasn't safe. Over time, it developed patterns of when to release cortisol, when to release dopamine, when to focus, when to tune out, when to shut down, and when to go into overdrive or overcompensating. And those patterns got wired into your nervous system deep. The thing is, is that those patterns were formed a long time ago by a child, you, wanting to feel safe and loved and seen. And so they were patterned and responded to the environment that you grew up in. And at the time they kept you safe. They did their job. The nervous system did its job. Those patterns made total sense then, but they may not be serving you now in your relationship with your teenager or anyone in your life. Okay? I want you to sit with this because it explains so much. Again, taking that thing that's kind of out here, this concept, and making it real in your life right here, right now. You've probably heard of the phrase, People would rather live in a comfortable hell than an uncomfortable heaven. And when I say this, what comes up for you? Well, on a high level, it means people are more likely to stay where they are because it's comfortable than go out of their comfort zone, even if it would be so great, even if it sounds like heaven. Right? What this means for a lot of us is that dysfunction, overcompensating, people pleasing, feeling responsible for other people's emotions, dysfunction in all forms feels like home. It feels comfortable. We know what that feels like. Chaos feels quote unquote normal. Constant busyness Feels safe because that's what our nervous system was calibrated to do. That's how it was patterned. That level of cortisol, that level of tension feels normal. It feels like you are accomplishing enough. You are enough. So when there is quiet, we feel really uncomfortable. Gotta be doing something. When something is easy, That means some of us might try to make it difficult because then it's worth it. When there's peace, we question it. Like, it can't be that simple. What our nervous system is signaling to us is this is unsafe. This is your comfortable hell. This is your uncomfortable heaven. And so unconsciously we recreate the familiar. We stir the pot. We might Try to get into an argument or poke holes in someone or become defensive. We may create chaos where there doesn't need to be any. We may overschedule ourselves and feel stretched really thin because then we'll be productive. We can find the drama, not because we genuinely want to, but because this is what our nervous system was conditioned to do to survive. It is running on old programming. So does any of this sound familiar? I'm raising my hand over here. I am right there with you if this sounds familiar. I like to call myself a recovering people pleaser, a recovering perfectionist, and a recovering overcompensator. Like, I have to do it all or it might as well not be done. I might as well be perfect or not try at all. It's all or nothing. And it creates that state of constant stress when what you really crave is peace. Okay. So here's what I believe about midlife. And a lot of people in the parenting space don't talk about, but I do, which is when you are parenting an adolescent, you are going through so many of the same things. Only in reverse. Your hormones are changing. Your identity is shifting. The way that your brain functions is shifting. It's also an incredible opportunity. And so what happens is a lot of people refer to it as like a midlife crisis or a midlife reckoning. And what's happening on a deeper level is we start to wake up in a way where we are not willing to show up the way that we have been showing up. We have less tolerance. For BS, for people pleasing, for defensiveness. Our bar starts to get raised where we start to think, man, I don't want to spend the next half of my life like the way I've spent the last half. I believe that midlife is our body and our soul's way of talking to us and saying something along the lines of, hey, how you doing? Do you really want to keep living this way? Because you're at the halfway point. And life is precious. You feel it all the time, not in a precious, like, oh my precious, I can't drop this glass egg, but like, time is precious. Like, that's what we've got, people. Right? So how do we want to be living it? Because our hormones are shifting and our eyes are opening to the ways that we've been repeating cycles that we are not proud of. It can feel like a dark night of the soul. Which I have been through myself. It can feel like a crisis, but I wanna question that a little bit because it's not so much of a crisis as it is an invitation to step into who you are meant to be. This time is an invitation to rewire and self-regulate. So in this midlife season, you have a particularly unique opportunity With your teenager to create a whole new normal, to build a new baseline, a new normal, not just for yourself, but for them. And honestly, it's for future generations because the way that you show up, if you practice showing up regulated, if you rewire your nervous system, it impacts you, yes, tremendously. It will change your life. But it changes their lives and it changes your grandkids' lives and it changes your great-grandkids' lives. It changes generations. When people talk about healing generational trauma, this is a big piece of what they are referring to. Is it easy? No, it's not easy. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it's easy. But it is very simple. It's way less complicated than you might think. I have hundreds of tools that I use every day with my clients, but today I'm going to be walking you through a simple practice that you can start to implement right away. So what's really cool about the nervous system is that the language of the nervous system, in other words, how we communicate with the nervous system is through our sensory experience. It is often a somatic experience, a felt, lived, tangible sensory experience to be able to regulate our nervous system. Okay. So our sensory world, our sights, sounds, textures, temperatures, right? And when we tune into our sensory world, what we do is we create a signal That surpasses the mind and it enters the body and the soul. It signals to our nervous system, oh, there is no fire. Oh, there actually is no emergency. I'm safe. Because you wanna interrupt the threat response and tell your body, I'm safe. I'm okay. There is no emergency here. 'Cause here's the thing, we all know this. When there's traffic, when there's a thorny person, when your teenager triggers you, your nervous system Signals that as threat. We can become defensive. We immediately become reactive, annoyed, right? What starts to play is a narrative. We go into protection mode and safety mode. But chances are, if your teenager triggers you, you're in the car or you're in your living room or you're in the kitchen and there is no fire. There is no wild animal that wants to hunt you, right? There's actually no threat to your survival in that moment. Your kid is just being a teenager. And the work of self-regulation is you training your nervous system to know the difference. And I've said this before so many times, but there's nothing on the internet that you can buy right now. There's nothing, there's no gadget, there's no quick fix, no perfect planner that's gonna solve this for you. The cool thing is, is that you have access to this right here, right now. Self-regulation again is this felt somatic Experience. It is an embodied practice that goes hand in hand with the other 2 selves. The first one, self-awareness, and the last one I'm gonna be sharing in the next episode. They all are best friends. They work together. So we become aware there's a trigger, we practice self-regulation, and we practice the final self. And this practice starts to get easier. The more you practice, the more you think through this, the more you can expand time, the clearer the path becomes. Your nervous system gets rewired to new conditioning and creating the heaven that you genuinely wanna experience. So I wanna give you a tool right here, right now, one that you can use the next time that you're in a triggered moment, no matter what that looks like. But in this instance, I am gonna use the example that our teenager says something snarky to us. Okay. So said teenager, your teenager says something snarky. And meanwhile, and it's about dinner. Oh, I don't want that. You know, I don't like that. Meanwhile, you have been working for the last 45 minutes on making a nice meal. Okay? So there's the trigger. And in that moment, you become aware, you expand time. Right? This is called Havening. So Havening, you go ahead and simply massage one hand with your other hand. Okay, just start rubbing that other hand. My left hand's rubbing my right hand. Make sure you're breathing while you're doing it. You're not holding your breath. And you might be thinking, oh, this feels good. Hmm. I want you to drop into the moment. And I want you to start to notice the texture of your skin and the temperature of your skin. And go ahead and move to your fingernail and notice the difference in texture from your fingernail to your finger. And the bones in your hand. Go ahead and switch hands for a second. What you just did is you signaled safety to your nervous system. Why? Because you noticed your sensory world, particularly the texture of your skin, the texture of your fingernail, the bones on your hand. The temperature. And as you're noticing that, you are signaling, I'm safe. Because if there was actually a real threat, right now it's a perceived threat, like our teenagers being snarky. Our mind immediately goes to the worst-case scenario and a negative narrative. Okay. So what we do is we signal, I'm safe because I'm noticing all this sensory experience in my hands. There's no way I could notice those things if I was genuinely under attack. If I was genuinely under attack or there was a real emergency, I would never notice the texture of my skin. So hang out there for a second and let that sink in. When you can access self-regulation from this place, again, you expand time, you sharpen your self-awareness, you get perspective, you bring oxygen to the logical, wise, intuitive perspective-taking part of your brain that can start to see beneath the surface of your teen's behavior. It can see beneath the surface of any triggered moment. It gets perspective. What you're doing is you're activating the parasympathetic nervous system and cortisol drops. Your thinking brain comes back on, and from that place, you access choice and logic and intuition and perspective-taking. So this is just one tool. I have dozens of tools out there that help you learn to self-regulate in the midst of life's stressors. You are creating a new baseline with this practice, not just for you, but for your whole family. In the final episode of this 3-part reset series, I am sharing with you the final self, which is Self-compassion. And this is the one that most people skip, and it might just be the one that changes everything about your relationship with yourself and your relationship with your teenager. Because if you still feel like something's missing, you're practicing these tools, it's because you haven't learned to be on your own side in the middle of whatever experience you're having. And like I said, Just a few days ago, I ran a live workshop called the May Reset, where I walk you through this 3-step process even deeper, in addition to giving you some of my top time and energy-saving methods, because we all know that during any busy season, what we really want is more time and energy to actually be able to enjoy and celebrate the season. Also in the May Reset bundle is a Teenage Guide to Finish the School Year Strong. It is my best study, Mindset, time management practices where I walk your teen through exactly step-by-step how to study in ways that work for their brain, how to manage their time, how to prioritize, whether it be through finals or any sort of intense, we gotta close the year up season. It's invaluable and it's a video and workbook guide in 1 hour where I'm coaching your teen directly. You get that in the bundle, in the May Reset Bundle. And you also get 10 days of access to Thrive, which is my parent membership and community and my entire program. It is so value-packed. You get access to group coaching and also some guest speakers in there who are absolutely incredible. So I encourage you to check out the May Reset. The link is in the show notes, and you'll find other ways that you can work with me there as well. So remember, in all of this, When the world tells you, you gotta focus on the teen. If only you'll buy this, if only you'll do this, then everything would be okay. I want to invite you to never underestimate the power that you have as the parent. I know you have limited time and energy, so thank you for being here and kudos to you for investing this time in yourself and Your team. If you enjoyed this episode, please continue the ripple effect and like, subscribe, review, and/or share with a fellow parent who could benefit so more people can find my content.