Exhale #20: Self-regulation and getting called out on your shit
Last night I gave my son, Shai, a bath, and he was not happy.
For some reason 1 out of every 10 baths he just freaks out. I checked the temperature, I made sure the water wasn’t flowing directly on him, but he just continued to lose his shit.
I took him out for a bit, he calmed down, and then when I put him back in he lost it again.
But he was absolutely filthy, and I had to clean him.
I think that when he is going through these moments there is probably some part of the issue that is “solveable,” a need that I can help him meet, and a part of it that is just him already being triggered and needing to allow the emotion to move through his body.
I’m learning that when you have a child, and you have a healthy relationship with him or her, you form a deep attachment just like you did with your parents when you were born.
One by-product of a healthy attachment is a deep empathy – feeling what he or she feels to a certain extent.
As he was sitting in the tub screaming and scared or just really uncomfortable, I felt like my heart was being wrung out like a soaking wet towel. Tense and knotted up and climbing up into my throat. It hurt me to see him hurting.
I thought to myself things like:
“Something is wrong.”
“He’s just being defiant”
“Please fuuuuuucking stop!”
This can happen when my wife is going through intense emotions as well. When she is feeling angry, afraid, or sad, I am impacted.
Unless you’re a psychopath (seriously), then you might experience this to a certain extent in any relationship. With friends, colleagues, FAMILY MEMBERS, etc.
Learning to be with these emotions without trying to control or fix him or her has been and continues to be one of the biggest lessons of my life.
One of my superpowers as a human being is self-regulation.
Because of my ability to stay calm, to stay aware of my thoughts and emotions without being controlled by them, I am able to be a strong grounding force for others.
Here are several things that I’ve been working on doing that relate to this.
Self-regulation and supporting others
I’m noticing how my desire to “fix” my own emotions influences how I interact with him.
The first, and most important, piece of being supportive to others is to regulate myself first. To regulate my own thoughts and emotions.
All of that internal chatter about my son being defiant and that discomfort of feeling his anger is 100% about me.
I cannot ground him if I am ungrounded. I cannot truly be there for my wife when I’m caught up in my own head and emotions.
The algorithm I’m running in my head, the sequence of steps looks like this:
Notice the thought and/or emotion. Some people call this “becoming the watcher.”
Remind myself that I am not that thought or emotion.
Take an intentional breath with a deliberately slow exhale.
As I exhale I visualize tension leaving my body and mind.
I continue focusing on my breath, bringing my level of overall tension to a manageable level so that I can effectively be helpful to the other person.
I try to tell myself something like, “The seeds of independence sprout from the soil of safety.”
I think I just made that up.
It’s the belief that in order for my son to one day develop independence, my role as a father is to really let him depend on me right now.
As Gabor Mate puts it in his book, Hold on to Your Kids, as parents our responsibility is to show up for our kids’ dependency needs, and nature will take care of the independence piece through the natural developmental process.
One of my primary goals in life is to be a place of refuge for my son and my wife. A place where they can literally lose their shit. Where they can break down, where they can feel completely lost and confused and still feel held emotionally and physically. Where they can depend on me.
Outside of regulating myself here’s what that looks like:
When he’s freaking out I will sometimes lay my hand firmly on his chest and talk very slowly and calmly.
I intentionally take massive breaths with extra long exhales so he can see, feel and hear the rhythm. I’m both regulating myself and teaching him how to do it himself at the same time. Adee also taught me to raise my hands above my head on the in breath and down on the out breath to make it even more obvious what I was doing.
If I could speak to him in terms he could understand I would be saying,
“Hey baby, I know you are upset right now. While I try to figure out what can help you feel better, I will breathe for the both of us. I have so much extra capacity for self-regulation that I will do it for me and for you. I’m right here with you.”
I try to just give him space
I just try to give him the space to feel what he’s feeling without trying to “fix” it. I do this by being really patient, speaking to him softly, and doing my best to pay attention to what he’s asking for.
One final thing that helps me with all of this is the belief that feeling challenging emotions like this is a completely natural part of the human experience.
We’ve become overly focused on always needing to be happy to consider our lives well lived. When I recognize that we are here to experience a much broader spectrum of emotions, I don’t feel like there is anything to fix (I forget this often!).
I also understand that this is crucial to my son building self-esteem, which is the belief in our ability to cope. Part of what my son needs is to have challenges and to cope with those challenges.
A couple other things that have been bouncing around in my head…
Value people that gracefully call you on your shit
Because doing so demonstrates the deepest level of care. They care about you so much that they are willing to risk you lashing out, getting defensive and potentially even “retaliating” by aggressively pointing out their flaws.
One of my closest friends, Mansal Denton, does this with me with the most consistency.
Recently he told me that he had some feedback for me, if I was open to hearing it.
He told me that he noticed a pattern of me making jokes at other people’s expense while they weren’t around.
That immediately resonated as true. A very reliable way to get some laughs, and not at all the type of person I want to be. He knew that and let me know.
It felt like shit to hear this from him, but this feedback and others like it help me live with integrity – who I say I am and how I actually behave become more closely aligned.
And that gives me inner peace. And that shit is so hot right now!!!
Teaching is the highest level of understanding
I’ve been a huge reader for most of my life.
Yet, what I’ve come to believe is that reading is a relatively shitty way to absorb information if that’s all I do to learn. In fact it’s one of the poorest ways to learn overall as described in the concept of the “cone of learning.”
It’s what we do during and after reading (or listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos or taking online courses) that really matters.
One thing that I’ve found to be really useful over the past few years is to teach the information I’m learning as quickly as possible in person, on podcasts or in writing.
Teaching things to others fosters and demonstrates the highest level of learning. To do so we have to sit with ideas for longer periods of time and figure out how to explain it to others, usually in a really condensed way.
Reading, watching or listening alone does not require us to learn the material. In order to teach the concept to someone else, we have to grapple with it until we understand it enough to communicate it to another person.
If you have a team of people working for you, then teach what you just read to them. If you are a solopreneur or work as an employee, then teach it to a colleague or just to a friend. Anyone that will listen and be interested in what you have to teach is perfect.
Peace,
Michael