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your “buttons” are your nervous system and a “trigger” is anything that revs up your nervous system and makes your buttons bigger, brighter, more sensitive, and way easier for your kids to push.
Do you really want to hinge your sanity on the behavior of someone who licks walls and melts down over the shape of a piece of toast?
Once you can clearly see the ways that certain situations or experiences activate your nervous system, you suddenly feel a lot less triggered.
it is not your job to get them to stop pushing. Your job is to teach them, again and again, to notice and respond skillfully to their triggers (which, for the record,
The secret to staying calm is self-awareness; it’s about noticing you’re about to explode and giving yourself a chance to calm down.
What you need to remember is that (a) losing your shit is an emotional reaction, not a rational one, and (b) we don’t have nearly as much control over our feelings as we’d like to think. We can’t force ourselves to feel a particular way; all we can do is notice that we’re actually having a feeling so we can choose how to respond.
In most cases, melting down is an unconscious process beyond your control, one that can often be traced back to your childhood and the ways your parents lost their tempers with you.
Your explosions are a predictable outcome of developmental, neurological, and biological processes, rather than logical decisions.
may have nothing to do with our kids. Whatever it is, and whenever it happened, identifying the thing you are reacting to is crucial.
Toxic explosions are unpredictable, disproportionate reactions that can include angry words, physical outbursts, personal attacks, shame, and blame. The moment feels out of control. Toxic outbursts happen when we are triggered, and they continue to trigger everyone involved. Examples may include screaming at your child over spilled cereal, exploding because he’s taking too long to put on his shoes, or angrily berating a daughter for forgetting her homework. These reactive explosions can rupture and weaken the connection between you and your child.
There are Big Feelings involved, and our behavior is Automatic, Reactive, and Toxic.
As a clinical social worker, I worry more about the folks who say they never fight than the ones who acknowledge and own the tension that exists in their families.
Even if you have absolutely no clue how to respond to your kid’s offensive or obnoxious or only-slightly-irritating-but-you-just-can’t-handle-it-today behavior, I promise that anything you come up with from a place of relative calm will be more effective and empathic than whatever knee-jerk reaction you bust out with when you’re freaking out.
Over time, your explosions will literally rewire your brain, and not in a good way. The more you lose it with your kids, the stronger and more connected your “lose it” neuronal pathways will become, allowing your brain to freak out more quickly and easily in the future.
Our tantrums can leave our kids feeling anxious, ashamed, scared, and disconnected, which makes it harder for them to learn and integrate new information, tolerate new experiences (whether it’s a new food on their plate or the first day at a new school), and generally function well in daily life.
Each time we lose it, we may be unintentionally wiring their brains and nervous systems to freak out in a similar way whenever they’re triggered, perhaps by something that happens at school, at home, or inside their tiny little brains and bodies.
We’re demonstrating the very behaviors we’re trying to decrease and we’re modeling a relationship style we surely don’t want them to repeat later in life.
They’re wired to trust their parents and caregivers because we’re the ones who are supposed to keep them safe. As a result, when we lose our shit with them, they tend to blame themselves because that’s easier than questioning or doubting the person who keeps them alive and runs their lives.
The reality is that our children learn more from what we do than from what we say, and their little kid brains don’t necessarily make a distinction between our smart parenting moves and our terrible, impulsive ones.
Telling yourself that the reason you keep exploding is because you’re a bad parent or you have a bad kid is an unhelpful story because it doesn’t offer any options for change and growth.
You’re doing an incredibly hard job, and you’re doing it without the right information, support, resources, and rest.
You’re not a bad parent, and while your shit losses are absolutely your responsibility, they’re not your fault. This is a crucial distinction that bears repeating: There’s no reason to blame yourself for your temper, but it’s time to step up and make some changes.
If parenting and life are feeling particularly challenging for any reason, it’s not always because you’re doing something wrong. It’s because hard is part of the deal for everyone, no matter how good they make it look on Instagram.
Whether you’re home full-time, working outside the house, or doing some hybrid of the two, you’re absolutely running a marathon every day, and you need as many hours of rest and recuperation as you spend parenting. (HAHAHAHA *SOB*)
The current American system has very real implications for our lives; the daily grind of rushing from childcare drop-off to work and back again, perpetually on the verge of running out of time and money, is stressful and exhausting.
We are often unaware that this level of exposure to all of the terrible things that are happening in every corner of the planet is incredibly anxiety-provoking.
Some problems are just part of the imperfect life we imperfect humans are living, and the best we can do is muddle through, ideally with a hefty dose of compassion and the help of a good friend who will make you a snack and keep you laughing even when it feels like it’s all falling apart.
your prefrontal cortex (PFC). This lives right behind your forehead, and it’s the part of your brain that comes online when you’re adulting.
First, it gets tired when it has to work too hard for too long, which is why it can feel impossible to figure out what to make for dinner at the end of a long day. Second, certain practices (which generally fall under the umbrella of self-care) will make your PFC more effective and efficient so it can get you through the day without falling apart.
Your kids don’t really have one yet. The latest thinking is that the PFC isn’t fully developed until the early twenties, which is why even college students are still lighting stuff on fire for no good reason.
The limbic system takes over when your PFC goes off-line for any reason, including exhaustion, Big Feelings, real or perceived threats, being overwhelmed, or having your buttons pushed.
maximally effective at all times. It was designed (a) to keep us alive, and (b) to plan and remember and worry and anticipate and imagine and fantasize and think and react, mostly in the service of (a) keeping us alive.
Your brain (and thus, your nervous system) is not self-sustaining. It requires sleep, nutrition, exercise, stimulation, fun, and downtime to function well.
point: While your brain is not a muscle, it’s useful to think about it as if it is. The more you use certain parts, the stronger they get, and the more likely they will be to come online the next time you need them.
The less frequently you activate certain parts of your brain, the weaker and more rigid they become. This is why it’s harder to learn an instrument or language later in life; the neuronal pathways we need are just too rusty to make those new connections quickly and easily.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Freak Out.
Our survival system evolved in response to physical threats such as the aforementioned woolly mammoth, which is why our reaction is almost entirely physical.
our nerves and brains and everything in between haven’t quite figured that out, which is why we still have physical reactions to situations that pose no physical threat at all.
When we’re calm, fed, well rested, appropriately caffeinated, etc., our buttons are small, dim, less sensitive, and generally less vulnerable to being pushed.
we’re exposed to smaller triggers over time, and our buttons slowly get bigger, brighter, more sensitive, and easier for our kids to push.
But if we don’t take care of ourselves properly, our buttons never really power down.
There are lots of Big Feelings involved, and our behavior is Automatic, Reactive, and Toxic.
Screwing up and being awesome are not mutually exclusive.
The daily grind of caring for infants and toddlers is absolutely a crisis, and a brutal adjustment for most folks, including yours truly.
Sleeping again was the first crucial step toward getting my shit together, because it gave me the energy to take the next steps.
a trigger is anything that makes it more likely that you will lose your shit with your kids.
As I’ve said before, hinging our sanity and functioning on someone else’s insane behavior is a losing proposition. You cannot hold other people responsible for what you do or don’t do, especially when those other people happen to be your offspring.
you need to set limits, hold boundaries, maintain expectations, and teach them about appropriate behavior and self-awareness and indoor voices, but you’re not doing it so they’ll stop triggering you.
we also need to accept that we can’t control every aspect of their behavior.
The first step, the one we’re going to explore in this chapter, is identifying our triggers. Many of us walk around lit up, freaked out, or pissed off to some degree or another, without even realizing (a) that it’s happening or (b) that it makes it much more likely that we’re going to lose our shit.
