Ep8- How to repair when you've lost it at your kids

Foreign. Hello, and welcome to episode eight of Unmasked Minds, the podcast. To be honest, still can't believe we're already at episode eight. We launched on New Year's Eve of 2025, and we are now getting towards the end of January. So quite a lot has been going on, and I'm just so grateful and thrilled that you guys are all here and continuing to listen and continuing to share my podcast with people. I'm getting wonderful feedback, and apparently if you make it to 10 podcast episodes, you're doing really well. So we're getting really close. And I wouldn't be here doing this without all of the fantastic feedback you're giving. So keep it coming, keep the ideas coming. I am really enjoying being able to bring this to you guys. So on that note, today's episode is kind of inspired by one of my most liked and most shared Instagram reels. And it was a reel where I sort of started with saying, hey guys, I lost my shit as a mum today and let me talk to you about how to repair it. But obviously that was only two or three minutes long, and so many of you resonated with that on Instagram. So I thought I would expand on that a little bit today. So today's topic is how to repair rupture with your children in a way that serves you and also them right. So the topic of today's episode is how to genuinely repair rupture when you've had an argument or when you've done something with your children that needs correcting, and how, if you do that properly, it can actually build more resilience and a stronger relationship between you and your children. It is not the end of the world. Now, the first thing I want to start with is just normalizing that. We all make mistakes. We are all human. I think one of the reasons that real got so much engagement is because as a psychologist, I was able to sit there and go, I do it too. I lost my shit at my kids this morning. And it just makes people realize that even with all the tools, even with all the skills, all the education, all the knowledge, sometimes for many reasons, we are just unable to apply those things. And we all make mistakes. Okay? Now, most of us know that when we yell at our kids, you know, there's a whole spectrum of what yelling is. There's raising your voice, and some people feel really terrible if they do that. And there's up the other end where you're really sort of losing it at your children. And this applies to all of that along the spectrum. I can certainly tell you I have behaved along that entire spectrum. And I think it is less about what you did and what you said. And I mean, I don't want to normalize that. It's okay to lose your shit all the time as long as you're repairing. We need to be working on our shit for us, but also for our children. But in those moments where you do make a mistake or get it wrong or behave in a way that you're not comfortable with, the importance then moves to repair. Now, one thing I always say is I don't get super guilty anymore or feel so terrible if I do make a mistake with my children because I think it is also very. Whilst it's very important to nurture their nervous systems and to role model what healthy regulation and response and behaviors are, I also think it's really important to role model being a human being as a parent and just being a human overall and letting my children know that we will make mistakes and they will have emotions that will sometimes get the better of them. But no matter what they do, no matter how they behave, no matter how much they hurt people, they will always also have the skills to repair. Okay? Now one of the biggest problems I see and hear about when it comes to repairing is, is the typical one where a parent might say, hey, I am so sorry for yelling at you this morning when you wouldn't put your shoes on. But if you only put your shoes on when I asked you the first 10 times, then I wouldn't have got cranky at you in the first place. That is not an apology and that is not repair. Essentially that is saying to the child, I was unable to regulate my emotions and that's your fault. I yelled, I couldn't keep my cool, I couldn't manage myself. But you are in charge of that. If you behave the way I want, I will be okay and then you will be okay. And that is a lot of pressure to put on our children. And I know so many of us parents these days are a product of that. That's what we experienced as children and that's what can be really hard. We know the consequences of that on our own self esteems and our self worth. But when we are in those situations, we are repeating the same cycles. So that is the first thing that I want you to start to be aware of. Are you actually apologizing or are you deflecting and putting your behavior onto your child as their fault and giving them the control? Here is the control. Your behavior will dictate my mood for the day. Now we are going to talk about how do we have the conversation around getting change in behavior from our children. Because this isn't about all parents going, all right, kids, just run wild and do whatever you want and it'll be okay, right? There's got to be this middle ground where we are able to teach our children responsibility and accountability for their behaviors, but also take responsibility and accountability for our own behaviors and actions. So the first thing I say to clients, and I do myself, is when I am in conflict with my children. And it usually starts with someone being in a bad mood, someone doing something, voices getting raised. All of a sudden, we're all yelling at each other. I'm yelling at my daughter, stop yelling at me. She's yelling, you're yelling at me. And we are all in fight or flight mode, right? Depending on your past and your experiences, that will sort of play a major role in how your nervous system responds to certain situations. And, you know, that really helps to explain why some people get really triggered and get really fight or flighty in situations where other people are able to remain calm. And I think that's a really important thing to acknowledge. Some of us have lived lives that mean we have triggers and we have trauma. And even though we may have been working on them in therapy, sometimes in certain situations, they may still get triggered. And you know what? That's a part of life. That's a part of being human. And learning to show ourselves some self compassion in those situations is really, really important. The first thing to do is recognize we are all escalated here. Or even maybe just you, maybe the child is not escalated, but you are noticing it, right? Notice your fight or flight symptoms. The behavior is yelling, but what is happening in your body? Typically the heart is pumping, it's racing, we're getting hot, we're getting sweaty, we're getting angry. We can feel that cortisol and adrenaline running through our body because something has put us into fight or flight mode and we are fighting with our children. Now. Nothing good happens when you're in fight or flight mode. And that is the first thing that I want you to think about, removing yourself from the situation. Sometimes we can get so caught in the situation and of getting it right and of proving ourselves and of fixing it right now to remove the discomfort that we just end up fight mode versus fight mode, and nothing good happening. So the first step is removing yourself from the situation and doing something to calm yourself down, to regulate yourself and to put yourself into a calm state so that you can work out the next steps, the second step, and only do this once you've started to calm down. Because one thing we know is when we're in fight or flight mode, we're operating from a different part of our brain. We're operating from our amygdala and our limbic system in the back of our brain, which is survival. And emotional decisions and thoughts are driving us. We want to be able to calm our nervous system, get out of fight or flight mode, and access our prefrontal cortex, which is where all of our higher order thinking happens. It's where we go to therapy and we make all these wonderful plans. Next time the kids do this, I'm going to respond this way. But then hang on, I'm all of a sudden my amygdala's going off and I'm responding in the way that I had tried not to respond to. So once you are calm and you are able to gain access to all of your beautiful brain, the second part is to ask yourself, what happened? Yeah, it's not about the shoes that they didn't put on that you asked them to put on 15 times. I get it. Right? I get it. I've got four kids. But what happened in me? Why did I yell? Why did I get angry? Am I tired? Am I running late? Is there just a lot going on? Is that just the straw that broke the camel's back? They haven't been listening to me all day. Am I actually pissed off at my husband who didn't help out this morning? And that's why there was all this pressure. Have I got so much on at work today that my mind wasn't clear? What was it that caused you to be in a state where you couldn't regulate your own emotions? Okay, once you can recognize that, the third step is to ask yourself, what did I do? And how could I have done it differently? Okay, so I recognize that I'm just at capacity. I had a bad night's sleep. I'm just unable to regulate myself at the moment. And then the kids wouldn't put their shoes on, which I asked 15 times. And so I yelled, what would I prefer to do? You know what I'd prefer in that moment to recognize that I'm human and I'm at capacity. And I would have preferred to just walked away. I wished that I'd noticed myself getting elevated. I wished I'd removed myself from the situation and then come back and addressed it when I was calm. And that might have stopped me from yelling. Okay, and so While you are calm, getting a good understanding of what you did and why you did it so that you can create repair is really, really important. The next step is doing the repair. So going back to your children and not only making sure that you are calm, but making sure they're calm as well. Because if they're still dysregulated, it's not necessarily going to be very effective. So what can we do to calm them down as well? Should we go for a little walk? Should we go outside? Should we go for play? And when you're feeling like the timing is calm, we go in and we take responsibility. I guess this is step four. We take responsibility for what we did. Now this is the bit that can be so hard for so many of us because it wasn't role modeled to us. So many people at this point say, my parents never apologized for anything. So no wonder it is hard for us to do it when we've never seen it done in a healthy way. So what that can look like is, hey kids. Mum just wanted to sit down with you and say sorry for yelling at you this morning. I shouldn't have yelled at you and I apologise for that. You know, you might say it in a bit less formal sort of thing. Mummy got really cranky today and I just wanted to say I'm really sorry. An important part of the apology is to create space for them to respond. You know, create space for it to be a two way repair. Not you just saying, we are fixed now, we're okay, move on, you know, I'm really sorry. Opening up that space. How did it feel? Well, Mum, it was scary. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that would be. I'm really sorry. What do you need right now? Do you want to cuddle? Right. How can we help them? Especially if they're still heightened? How do we help them to regulate themselves? Because we've regulated ourselves. We're coming back to repair. They may not be that far along. Would you like a cuddle? Would you like to do some breathing with me? Would you like to tell me how you feel? Yeah. So I am sorry for what I did. It was not your fault. It shouldn't have happened. And let's create this repair together. Okay? Now what we don't do, or what I tend not to do in this moment is talk about exactly what happened, you know, because it has the risk of retriggering or re flaring up the situation, you know, and if the child says something like, yeah, but I just, I was trying to get my Shoes. And I just couldn't. You can just simply say, I know, darling. I just want to say that no matter what happened, I shouldn't have yelled at you like that and I'm sorry. Okay. Once everybody is calm and it may be in the same moment, or you may actually say, let's come back and talk about that later, depending how everybody's feeling, but the next stage is talking about what happened. Right? And like I said earlier, this isn't about just us taking responsibility for everything. We want to teach our children accountability and responsibility, but we need to do it when we're all calm. So then we want to have a conversation around what happened. And we need to make sure we are nice and regulated and everybody feels safe when we have this conversation. And it might go something like, okay, darling, so this morning when the shoe situation happened, what do you think we could do to avoid that happening in the future? What do you think I could do? What do you think you could do? What can we do as a team? Because we both want to not be in that situation again. And let's say they don't know what to say. You might say, I know I could have taken a few deep breaths when I was getting angry. Yeah, Mum, you could have taken a few deep breaths. Okay. Could you have taken some deep breaths? Yeah, Mum, maybe we could have taken deep breaths together. Okay, so we're talking about noticing that we're getting angry at this point. We might say, what if we put the shoes in a different spot? What if we get the shoes out the night before? What if we have a chart? What if next time mum asks, you know, you try and do it straight away. Is there anything stopping you from doing that? Yeah, mum, it was just that you were asking me to do that and there was all this other stuff that I was trying to do as well. Ah, okay. So mum won't ask you to do too many things at once. Yeah, you're right. I did do that, didn't I? I had a lot going on in my head and I. I projected that onto you. Okay, thank you. However it plays out, this might seem like a really, you know, simple example, but it's about repairing together, not dictating the terms of the repair. And one of the reasons it is so important to work on this stuff is children's brains are not as developed as adults brains. And one thing that they always do is when there is something going wrong, they will internalize it as their fault, you know, and it will affect their self esteem and their self image if they are constantly told, you are making mistakes, you are doing things wrong, and you are making mum cranky. Okay? So we need to really find that right balance for them and for us. And again, that's often why we do this, because that happened to us. And one of the other things I talk a lot with clients about is this is not easy if it wasn't shown to you. This is all new. And often when we're learning how to repair, we get re triggered and we, you know, we start off really well and then we end up getting angry again and we got to keep coming back to it. But it is worth coming back to it. It is worth it because we feel better when we repair, because we're not then walking around carrying all this extra guilt and shame for how we've behaved with our children. But it is also making sure that they're not internalizing all of this stuff as their problem as they're at fault. You know, and the long term effects of that can be really, really damaging for children if they are just constantly led to believe that all conflict is because of them every time mom yells and it is their fault and they just need to do more and be better or be more or be less of themselves and then there will be no conflict. The other thing that children learn when we repair in this way is that conflict doesn't end relationships. And that's something that, you know, people of my generation really struggle with sometimes. There's this kind of pattern with a lot of adults these days where if we don't agree, it is over and one of us is wrong, which is you, and one of us is right, which is me. And we. There are so many patterns of relationships just ending because we don't have the skills to work through it and recognize that conflict is just conflict, you know, and it is human to feel certain ways and feel different ways about situations. And we need to learn the skills to discuss and repair and work through that if we are going to have healthy relationships. Conflict is a part of a healthy relationship. It's how we do it that matters. And I probably should do a whole episode on repair and conflict in relationships, but this one was specifically focused on with our children. Another thing that I think is really reassuring to hear is the fact that you are a parent that is worrying about this. You know, I'm getting the repair wrong, I'm apologizing wrong, I'm stuffing my children up. It just does. Just tell me that you care and that you are moving in the right decision. And so for me Just taking a moment to really allow your humanness and ask yourself, why do I want to do this? So I guess my closing message on this one is, conflict happens. We are human as parents. We lose it sometimes and we make mistakes, and that is okay. It is actually necessary in life and relationships. It's what we do after that matters. It is how we repair, and it is how genuine we are in that repair. It is how much we are prepared to take accountability and responsibility. And when we do it well, our children respond in a way that makes them feel safe, that makes them know that our love isn't conditional on their behavior. And it also shows them and normalizes for them that it is okay to have emotions, but it is also necessary that we make an effort to repair afterwards. One thing that I see a lot with my children, because I really consciously do this a lot, is sometimes if my child has been completely dysregulated and has come in and essentially picked a fight with me, is they now? And I'm talking mostly about my younger two, who are almost six and seven. They have these skills already where they might, you know, walk away, storm off to their room, and then come back and gently knock on the door and say, hey, Mom, I'm really sorry for yelling at you. And then we can sit in that safe space together. Hmm. How did that feel? What happened? Yeah, I found that a little bit scary as well. And we can talk through it, which is so, so important. So we're gonna leave that one there. Thank you so much for listening, as always. Jump into Instagram and ask me questions. Give me feedback on the podcast. I'm so interested to hear it. And I use the Instagram sort of reels and updates to choose the next topic. So let me know what you would like to hear me talk about. And thank you for being here. Talk soon.