Parenting

I feel like the highlights reel on my social media has been alive and well the past little while which mostly leaves me feeling if only people knew. I think it’s really important that people do actually know so in the spirit of pulling back the curtain I’m going to share a few behind the scenes moments to go alongside the celebrations.

I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like to see some of the things you have only ever dreamed about start to become a reality. It’s strange, I imagined in those moments I would have a sense of amazement and accomplishment but the reality has been far from what I had imagined. Truth be told, most of those moments have been me trying to catch my breath, needing space to cry and process and realise just how much I still have to grow myself up personally to be able to not just survive but thrive.

What I’m learning as the days, months and years tick over is that as challenging and impossible as business can be it’s got nothing on navigating the heart and mind and growing those up.

Never in my life have I ever felt as pushed to my limits personally than over the past 12 months. I have been confronted over and over with the stories I have been telling myself my entire life about who I am, about my limitations, about what others think of me and it’s been a daily battle to try and process that and keep going.

For me ParentTV has been the perfect storm to pinpoint my vulnerabilities while subtly, and at times not so subtly, applying pressure in all the perfect places.

If I’m going to be honest the truth is that for most of my adult life I have never really felt like a grown up. Even though externally I do all of the grown up things reasonably well, internally I have felt like a child. Though on some level it’s fun to feel like you are still 14 years old the truth is I have felt a lot of shame and embarrassment about it on the inside.

I have been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by the most extraordinary educators on this ParentTV journey who have shared so much wisdom about navigating parenting and this has been my saving grace.

I have Dr Vanessa La’Pointe ringing in my ears on a daily basis about the first step to being a great parent is having to grow yourself up first. I can tell you from personal experience there are no truer words spoken and this isn’t just about being a great parent it’s about having peace in your heart and mind with who you are really.

With this in mind about 12 months ago I started the journey of intentionally trying to grow myself up. Clearly I wasn’t busy enough trying to build a company and be a wife and mother to 3 children so I thought I would add onto the pile a little challenge to process my childhood because you know … no big deal!!! I knew there was no way I could move into my future without simultaneously working both of these challenges out side by side and I was right. What I have learned is that things can happen to us in our childhood which get us stuck. If we didn’t have the right support to help us process some of these things then what we tell ourselves in those moments can become truths that we hold onto into our adulthood. Hence the feeling like I never grew up because truth be told in some ways there were parts of me that never did.

There were many truths that I told myself as a child that got stuck. I love solving problems, it’s my favourite, and I can tell you hands down that trying to solve this problem has been the hardest, most challenging, traumatic and therapeutic journey I have ever been and am still going on.

When you decide that this is the plan and you welcome it with open arms, with only a few clues on what you should try doing but trusting that unless you work it out you will forever be stuck feeling things you only dreamed could be different you need to strap in for a wild ride.

What I really want to do is share 2 key learnings that have become the basis of me starting to experience progress and ever so slightly feeling like maybe, just maybe, I’m finally growing up.

Both of these things are also, funnily enough, the 2 core teachings nearly all of our ParentTV experts share over and over about how to best support our children and ironically these have been the same 2 core things that are little by little changing my life.

The first one is allowing myself to feel the feelings.

I have spent most of my adult life not feeling all the feelings and was very selective about what I let through. I was still a human so there were days when I was happy, sad, angry etc but as described by someone close to me I could be a bit of an ice queen at times.

Never in my life would I have ever thought that I was an emotionally sensitive person but what I realise now is that I actually am and I’m quite attuned to feelings. As a child I now realise I was quite sensitive and needed some help understanding how to regulate and understand those emotions but I didn’t really get that so I learned how to survive my feelings.

The past year I have come to realise that feelings can be so incredibly extraordinary and a little scary all at the same time. I have also learned that they can be a superpower that fuel you and give you a strength you never knew was possible. Once you realise that they don’t have to own you but you can own them it’s a game changer (I’m not there yet but on my way).

The journey to getting there begins with giving yourself permission to get curious and get a bit messy. I have found myself crying more in the past 12 months than I have in the past 37 years.

But here’s the thing! I have been a bit messy but out of the chaos for the first time in my life I feel like I am understanding who I am and am able to get a handle on myself and grow myself up. I am responding to situations rather than just reacting and am becoming less impulsive and better with my boundaries. Never in my life have I felt more alive and connected and human. I have spent so much energy trying to shut off parts of me but now I just let it flow.

I will admit there are times I feel a bit embarrassed by this. Telling myself the story that people will think I am high maintenance, emotionally unstable and too much work but I am choosing to call bull shit on that story and am giving myself the freedom to be me. It is one of the scariest things I have ever done … allowing myself to be truly seen.

This brings me to the second thing I have learned.

You can’t go on this journey alone.

There have been moments I have found myself lost in feelings I could not find my way out of. When I say this I don’t mean I was suicidal or experiencing a serious mental health episode what I mean is I was feeling big feelings that were very overwhelming. I wanted to understand what was happening for me and I wasn’t able to do this alone.

This is where understanding co-regulation changed my life 🙂 I have come to understand the concept of co-regulation through ParentTV. Anyone who is a parent or has ever been around children or teenagers knows that their emotions can get way out of control. The emotions part of their brain is not fully developed yet and one of the key ways they experience emotional regulation is through co-regulation. It’s your job as the parent to come alongside them as they feel the feelings and be that source of co-regulation. This is how our children’s brains develop the neural pathways to learn emotional regulation.

This isn’t just true for kids it has been true for me as an adult too. I have realised that I am not an island and that for me to be the best I can be I can’t do it alone. That the key to unlocking and healing the parts of me that never grew up was about having the courage to feel the feelings and to reach out and ask for help when it was too much for me to process alone.

This is a lot harder than it sounds as it can evoke feelings of embarrassment and shame (particularly when you are an adult asking for help and behaving like an emotional 14 year old) but it has been so critical in my journey.

To the people in my life who have accepted me just as I am, shown up in those moments I have needed some co-regulation and helped me change the stories I have been telling myself for a very long time … thank you!

One thing I know more than ever is you can’t grow a company or yourself without a team. This being human thing is a team sport!

Last night as I sat on my couch and watched the 60 Minutes story about parents becoming the school bullies I just felt sadness. When is this all going to stop? Will we ever find a way out of this mess? No one is winning or really getting what they want and it seems we are all getting angrier, more disillusioned and lonelier than ever.

One thing I can tell you above all else is that the parents of this generation really, really love their kids! I should know as I am one of them myself.

The question I have been trying to answer over the past 8 years after running 2 online parenting communities with 650,000 parents is how is it that a generation of parents who fiercely love and protect their kids in ways we have not seen before is resulting in a generation of children experiencing mental health issues like never before including suicide as the leading cause of death amongst our young people.

What is happening and where are we getting it wrong because the truth is we are getting it wrong and although everything in me says you can’t write that Sam, that’s not helpful for parents they already feel like victims and everyone is blaming them, they are going to stop reading this now because it’s not them (which includes me) it’s society and schools and the media doing it to us.

And this is the key to where I believe we are getting it wrong.

We have lost that sense of we are all in this together and have become an us and them society. A society that says every person for themselves.

I was reading an article the other day written anonymously by a mother whose daughter had died by suicide. She was talking about some of the shame around that and trying to process what had happened. She wrote these words that I will never forget:

“If it takes a village to raise a child does it take a village to kill a child”

Here’s the thing, this every person for themselves approach is not really working for us. We as humans are biologically wired to exist within a community and as the grown ups it’s our responsibility to show our kids what that looks like.

There is a generation of kids out there broken, scared, angry, experiencing levels of anxiety like never before, taking their own lives and they are our kids.

We can no longer bury our heads in the sand or point our fingers at who is to blame, we have to educate ourselves and find out what is going on so we can turn this around.

We live in a world of judgement, whether it be the reality TV shows we watch, our instagram or Facebook feeds, we have been wired to judge nearly everything we see or experience and that comes into how we parent.

The problem with judgement is there is a good and a bad which means someone is to blame.

When you walk this line of good or bad one of two things happen.

You either tell yourself a story trying to process a situation which makes it was someone else’s fault OR
You tell yourself a story that you are worthless and it’s all your fault which is also not helpful.

What is happening with our kids is actually no individual person’s fault it’s a village issue. The only way we are going to find our way through this is to stop approaching it as an us and them and to start getting on the same team.

If you are reading this and thinking … “things are out of hand these days, luckily I’m not one of those people”, the truth is you actually are. I say that because I am too. It’s all of us, it is the culture we live in and it’s become our norm and this has made us blind to who we are and who we are becoming.

I believe education is the key for us to find our way out of this mess. Education is not about judgement it’s about understanding. We as parents really need to understand what is happening to our kids so we can do something about it. Getting angry as schools and teachers and other parents gets us nowhere. It just teaches bad behaviour to our kids.

I’m not saying people or institutions are perfect and don’t need to be challenged on how they are approaching situations when it comes to our kids. I’m saying we have to be clear that we all need to get on the same team … our kid’s team!

We are the grown ups, we have the adult brains, it’s time that we start to educate ourselves about what is happening because our kids are suffering and as hard as this is to say … that’s on us!