TUNED IN MODULE 2

Transcript

Welcome to Module 2, Understanding the Body and the Brain. In my opinion, this is one of the most important modules in the course, although there's a lot of amazing parts of all of them, because often when we're in relationship to our highly sensitive child, or in relationship to anyone for that matter, it's really easy to get stuck in emotion, and to really be in a stuck place of emotion where we're not thinking clearly or logically,

and so to understand the nitty gritty of what's happening in the brain and the body and the connection between both, in both ourselves and our kids, we have more access to ground into what's true in the moment, and make a choice or make a plan and follow it that's actually useful and effective.

So an overview for today. First, I'll give a little intro of why this matters and an example where it would come up. Then we'll talk about details of what's happening in the brain, especially during moments of dysregulation, moments of tantrum, as well as the nervous system and how the nervous system works in moments of relaxation and the opposite stress and disrupt this regulation.

We will bring it back to the heart a little bit by understanding the importance of healthy emotional release, and how to do that from both a brain and body based place as well as a heart based space.

And brain stuff like brain stuff acts. Just understanding recent research on the brain, the nervous system, highly sensitive kiddos, so that you feel even more on board to take this journey. What we're doing is we're convincing your brain that this is a good idea.

And this is worth your time and that you will see results from learning all of this material. Okay, so it's important to understand the science, in my opinion, I think there's a space for science and heart.

And everyone has a different belief around this. But I'm just gonna say, when it comes to understanding your child, it's important to understand both the science and the feelings and process of it. The science matters because your child has a body, your child is growing, there's so much science on what's happening in a developing brain and a body.

So it's true, it matters. And what it does is it activates our linear logical brain. When we're looking at a situation for what's happening, like from a science perspective in the moment, like how is my body dysregulated?

How is my child's body dysregulated? We're activating a more linear and logical space. You could also think about it as your inner masculine. We have an inner masculine and an inner feminine. The inner masculine in me schedules my day and has discipline around waking up and taking care of myself and exercising and understands the boundaries and the logistics of what happening.

Whereas my feminine gets to be and play and have intuition and see and explore within those boundaries. So there will be so much in this course around just connection with your child and understanding in a more process oriented way the dance of relation that's happening.

This module is all about the science. So I wanna start with sharing about a study conducted by researchers in Wisconsin. I first heard about this when I was reading Dr. Elaine Ahrens, the highly sensitive parent.

And the researchers studied toddlers having tantrums, I think two and three year olds. They found that tantrums often begin as mild anger and generally and ideally you can stop these tantrums by distracting or compromising.

I think we all know those moments where our child is like, it's just starting, there's some mild anger and we can kind of divert the energy and avoid it. However, if hunger or tiredness was involved, no distraction or compromise prevented it.

It's just like, We're going to have a tantrum. And they found that once high anger begins, so that's different than mild anger. I imagine you can feel into the difference for your child between mild anger and high anger.

There's no stopping it. We all know this. However, what I think we forget is that the researchers found that on average, temper tantrums of high anger lasted for one minute, 60 seconds. Of course, as I'll share in a minute, angry tantrums can last longer.

And I know with plenty of highly sensitive kiddos that I know, often they last very long periods of time, sometimes up to an hour or more. However, a lot of tantrums only last one minute if we allow them to move through.

The researchers found that one sign that angry tantrums would be short is if children threw themselves on the ground or... were stomping because this is like a sign of more submission, like more submissive moves.

However, if the child was running away or hitting, it would likely be longer. And then they also found that tantrums based on loss, distress or sadness versus anger, usually were even longer and involved more crying because the child would be realizing, I lost this fight and I'm hopeless and they will be experiencing the loss of something that they thought was essential to their life and their happiness.

I'm just gonna plug this in here, I like to share. A child size problem to a child is a really big problem. So it's like if there's a child in a sandbox and their car is stolen to their bodies and brains, it's the equivalent of me as an adult walking out to the parking lot and seeing that my car is stolen.

So in those moments where there's loss, it's like, oh my gosh, this thing that I thought really mattered to me is gone and you can expect a longer tantrum. Researchers found that nothing a child did or a parent did would help during a tantrum once it had reached this high anger or high loss point.

However, the more anxious a parent is to try to stop it, the more likely it is that the feelings would increase in the child because they would just continue to prevail. They feel their parents' anxiety and they match that.

So researchers found that the best way to support the tantrums was simply to wait and that it was easier when parents had all of this information that I just shared so that they knew what was going on and they could create a plan, even if the plan was simply to endure the tantrum, whether it lasts a minute or an hour.

So why am I sharing all of this? It's to say there's people out there researching tantrums. tantrums. There's body responses that happen during a tantrum when a child is really set into a fight, flight, or freeze response that we can understand with science.

We can meet the moment for what it is, and we don't have to get so stuck in our own version of a tantrum, which might look like fighting back or might look like ruminating thoughts of how can I exist or I just need it to be different.

The fact is toddlers have tantrums, and I will be sharing soon why older children and adults also have tantrums. And there are realistic expectations that we can have and approaches that we can take that just help us come off the ledge and understand what is happening.

So, I can regulate my own system with some water, just letting that land. One other point I want to share to introduce this topic is the importance of the mind -body connection. It's so popular in the mainstream right now, mindfulness, mind -body connection, but I want you to consider what this actually means to you.

And the idea that our mind, our thoughts, our experience, and our brains of what we are facing has a very strong impact on what's happening in our body and vice versa, what we're experiencing in our body.

I know right before sitting down to record this module, I felt some anxiety, not knowing what was coming, not knowing if I would be able to share everything that I wanted to share, and that anxiety created some thoughts in my head that had me wonder, can I even do this?

Am I good at this? Will people get it? And I was able to work with both together in shifting and then shifting the thoughts of, of course I can do this. I've practiced it so many times. I've shared this information so many times, my body relaxed.

And then I also took the approach of shaking my body. I decided to sit in a chair with no back instead of my usual chair with a back so that I could just be in a grounded space to help my body stay regulated.

So the connection between the mind and the body is real. Having our own systems believe this and start to tend to this relationship, as well as to teach our children it both through modeling and through explaining it to them.

I'll really empower our children to know themselves, know their bodies, and really feel grounded in who they are with the ability to regulate. Okay, so I'm going to to share a hand model of the brain.

This was created by Dr. Dan Siegel. He's the author of Whole Brain Child, an amazing book that I encourage a lot of my clients to read. There's also a workbook, and I will link to a video of his own explanation of this, if you want to see it firsthand from him, literally.

Put the hand, but I'm going to show this to you now. Okay, so, and you might want to try this while you're watching. Let me just get to space where you can see. Okay, so if this is the brain, I'm going to make a hand model of the brain.

Really encourage you to try this because the somatic, the body, tactile, the feeling experience will help you learn it more. So I'm going to open up my hand right now and show you. This is the reptilian brain, the baby brain.

When your baby is born, they are only concerned with eating, sleeping and survival. They cry when they need something. They get panicked if they don't have what they need. And we learned to tune into the cues that our baby's baby brain, the same brain that a reptile has really well, we don't get mad at them for having experiences of stress, we just try to meet the moment and offer them what they need.

Around two to three. This is the middle brain, so you can put your thumb down now. The middle brain is developing. So literally, it's in the middle of the brain. This consists of the amygdala, which is where we store emotion and memory as well as or rather actually, the amygdala is where we store emotion.

And where we have an alarm system that goes off if we feel like something's not right to we need to protect ourselves. And then the hippocampus that stores memory. This is why some of our first memories are usually when we're age three.

So your two or three year old is really working on developing this part of the brain. So it's only natural that a lot of temper tantrums are going to be happening. And we actually want those to happen because it's a signal that this part of the brain is developing.

If you put your fingers down now, you'll see that this is the prefrontal cortex that relates to this part of the brain. This part of the brain is involved in all of our executive functioning. So thinking clearly planning, being able to link action to consequences in a real way, making plans, having constructive conversations.

This part of the brain is not fully developed until your late 20s. So if you're here, it means you're a parent of a child ages two to And that means that your child's prefrontal cortex is for sure not fully online and it won't be for a while.

However, around two to four and upwards, these fire, these neurons are starting to fire fire. And that part of the brain is being strengthened. And so you're starting to see executive functioning in your child.

It can be so frustrating to see your child have their executive functioning online in one moment like they can really talk and think clearly about things. And then see it turned off in another moment.

And please know that that is normal and it's only human for their age. Here's the catch. When we are dysregulated, either our children or ourselves as parents, as adults, our lid flips. Our prefrontal cortex is no longer online in that moment.

We can't think clearly. We can't be grounded. We can't stay poised. We are in a two or three year old brain state. So I want you to just consider for a moment, was there some time in the last day with your spouse or with your children that you clearly were in a triggered state, your lid was flipped and you acted like a two or three year old.

And that might be, it could be like aggression and anger and in a tantrum space, or it could just be totally checked out kind of hypo aroused. We'll talk about that soon. But either way, you're not here, you're not online.

Just think about it. There is no way that you can productively engage in relationship with your children if either of your lids are flipped. So number one needs to be putting your lids back on and getting regulated.

So it's like, whew, in this moment, I just got a little lost, a moment ago, I got a little bit lost because I said the wrong word and just slightly my lid started to flip like I did the wrong thing, I'm not okay.

And I was able to take a breath and become regulated and then be back here with you all for the lecture. I really encourage you to teach this brain model to your children. Many parents that I've supported have done this and even with small children, three or four, it's been a great way to communicate without having to use the language that requires the prefrontal cortex.

I'm not okay, my lid is flipped. I hear from parents that a lot of kids really also enjoy being able to say to their parent, I think your lid is flipped, we need to put it back on. And so it becomes an empowering way to communicate.

We have brains, sometimes they get dysregulated, sometimes we need to regulate and then come back to a place where we can have a conversation. If you're ever in a moment with your child where it's like this or like this, there probably needs to be a shift in the dynamics so that the lids can come back on.

Sometimes that means coming together and co -regulating until you're both in a space of, okay, we're here and we're safe together. Other times it means taking space until you can both have your lids back on and then you can come back together.

That's also why repair after moments of disconnect or someone messing up don't need to happen in the moment and they shouldn't happen in that moment until both lids are on. More on that later. So that's the hand model of the brain now moving into the nervous system.

If you've ever worked with me individually, you've already seen this. I share this with every single family that I work with generally and I am going to invite you now to pull up the nervous system handout sheet that is attached to this module.

It will help you see a visual of what I'm explaining. And if you're listening to this, like a podcast. You can come back to it later. You just take in what you take in if you're driving or something like that, and it's all here for you.

Okay, so you'll see on page one of this handout, the nervous system symptoms of regulation and dysregulation that was created by my first play therapy teacher, Lisa Dion. She created the Synergetic Play Therapy model.

What she did is she took the standard theory of play therapy and she added the nervous system into it. She added understanding regulated and dysregulated states into the process of play therapy. And wow, is this model an effective way to help children move and grow.

But beyond that, it's not just for being in the play therapy space, we can use her teachings to understand what's happening at home in our nervous systems. So you'll see in the center column on page one, what a regulated nervous system looks like.

This is when the ventral vagus nerve is turned on. So literally the ventral vagus nerve, there's a point at the back of our neck. If you ever like are relaxing in a yoga class and you put any pressure on this point and you can see that it's actually turning on the relaxed state of the nervous system.

It's how we can be in rest and digest. It's how we feel after we just got into a flow state on a run or we did something that got us out of our head and into our body. And it's where we wish that we and our children could be all the time.

In this space, we can think clearly our breathing is stable. Our sleep cycles are stable. We are in our body. We are poised. Everything that's listed here. The reality is that we are constantly moving in and out of regulation.

and dysregulation. So sometimes we'll move over to the right. In this right column, you'll see what it looks like to be in a hyper arouse state. So this is the fight, fight or freeze response. Think about a deer and headlights, they're frozen.

They are not safe in that moment. Their system is pumping out adrenaline and other indicators that this moment is not safe. They're gonna be in a frozen state to protect themselves. If you think about a angry dog that's gonna fight back because they don't feel safe, or you could also think about the bunny in your yard that runs away, like that's the fight response.

So we are also animals, as you know, we have these same responses inside of us. And what the hyper arouse response generally looks like in our human bodies is increased heart rate, a pounding sensation, aggression, fighting, you might have rage, you might be really hyperactive.

It's really a stress response to the moment. It can also be internalized. So if you have an internalized hyperaroused response, you're in anxiety. It's like racing thoughts. It's still that quick, fighty, flighty experience, but it's just inside the brain.

So how many of you experience this hyperaroused state? I know that for me, there can be that internalized anxiety that comes up in moments where I'm feeling threatened. We also sometimes move to the left column, which is the hypoaroused state.

This could look like kind of numbness. You just sort of need to fall asleep if you're ever in a triggered space. You're like, I think I just need to go to sleep. That's actually a dysregulated stress response.

You might be lifeless, you might be numb, lethargic, emotionally constricted, not able to fully express, isolation happens, depression happens. I really worry about kiddos that I see that are spending a lot of time in this place because I think sometimes they can be missed by their teachers and their communities because they're not being difficult.

So I would actually say if your child's showing the hyperaroused state and it feels like a lot, know that it's a good thing because at least they're communicating, I'm not okay. So anyway, the idea is that we always want to be coming back to center as quickly and as often as possible.

It's not realistic to think we will remain in center. That wouldn't be natural for our bodies, but it is realistic to make a goal to come back to center as much as possible. So on the second page of this chart, you'll see regulation activities, some ideas for you and your kiddos to be in a regulated space to get back to regulated space.

But like we've talked about earlier, once that point of high dysregulation is met, once the lid is flipped, likely it will take some time for the tantrum or the outbursts to play out before coming back to center.

You know this, if you've ever had the experience of telling your child, just come down and take a deep breath. And they are like, no, I will not take a deep breath because they're already in that activated space.

They are in side slider free. So these tools are, in my opinion, better on the front end when it's just that little bit of dysregulation to try to minimize. And if you can offer your child that it's really like an interception of the high dysregulation, eventually they'll learn how to do that on their own.

And that's something that's really cool and great for them to be able to do on their own. And you may be thinking, well, I can't be there every time my child is about to outburst and that is totally true.

while they are learning how to do this, while they are learning how to regulate and literally borrowing your nervous system to regulate, you may have to be there a lot of the time. And when you're not, because that's the reality, just have compassion and awareness that their brain has just gone out of a place of awareness and control.

The experience needs to play out and then they will come back to a place of regulation. I'm sure you have your own ways of finding regulation. I know I do, it's different for everyone. For me, music is really helpful.

Singing is helpful. On my way into my office to record this module, I was humming to ground my anxiety and ultimately all of that brought me back to a more regulated space. So just be thinking about how you get back to center, how your kiddos get back to center.

Lastly on this piece, there are some major threats to the nervous system. So we all have a different perception, as you can see at the very top of this handout, of what is threatening. For some, I might hear, they might hear a really loud sound out the window and to them that's extreme, that's scary, that's not safe and they will go into a stress response.

For others, that might not be a trigger for them. They've never had an experience of danger with loud sounds, it's just no big deal. So they hear the loud sound out the window and they stay regulated.

It's different for every child, what sends them into a stress response. So that idea that, well, it's not that big of a deal, like just stay calm. Like it's, you know, this isn't a big deal. It's not gonna work because if their system is perceiving a threat, their system is perceiving a threat and that's that.

In time, you can increase the window of tolerance for which they can cope with the stimuli, but we can't just like. it open. Like we know that people getting really close to your body triggers you. We need to start with just coming, having kids a little bit closer than a little bit closer than eventually maybe your child feels comfortable holding hands with another child, but just throwing another child on top of them right now is going to actually make it worse.

It's going to flood their system. So back to the major threats of the nervous system. The first is a lack of physical safety. That's pretty obvious. If I don't feel physical safe, I will be in a stress response, physically safe.

Number two is a lack of emotional safety. That could be like feeling like misunderstood or like my feelings are too much. Number three is the unknown, which is something that we all face, not knowing how things will go, but it's just important to remember like, Oh, I might be feeling kind of stressed or my child might be stressed because they don't know what's coming.

It might help to make whatever you can. known, like, here's what we're doing tomorrow. And then after that, we'll do this. Number four is unrealistic expectations. So expecting your child to be a way that just isn't accessible for them or isn't developmentally appropriate, like expecting them to always have their prefrontal cortex online.

And number five is incongruency. So incongruency is not being true, not being congruent. So if I'm smiling at you, but I'm saying, I'm so mad at you, you are the worst. You feel pretty weird. It's like, what is wrong with this lady?

This is not safe. So it's as simple as that. It's like when you're not being honest with how you're feeling, and you're like not processing your own emotions, and then you're showing up to your child in a way that's not true, like, I'm fine, everything's fine.

They get confused and dysregulated. There was a study of babies in a bomb shelter with their moms and the moms were clearly very scared, but they were saying to their babies, it's okay, it's all good.

I'm not scared. It's not scary. And their children became more dysregulated. So here's an invitation just to be more and more clear with yourself about what's true, be in a place of authenticity, know your feelings, move them through, be able to share with your feelings.

Like I'm being able to share with your child, I'm having a feeling. And it's not your fault. It's not yours to hold. I've got it, but I'm having a feeling. I'm frustrated right now. I'm disappointed.

And in time, you can teach your children that it's okay to have feelings that are congruent, and that it's not theirs to hold. But you're just in a more honest space and everything's fine, which links back to the rooted rhythm principles I shared in module one, the show up authentically and with curiosity that authenticity and congruence piece is really important.

And as As I said, a lot of this nervous system regulation and dysregulation content was talked to me by my teacher, Lisa Dion, really encourage you to look up her work as well. Okay, so we're getting there, we're doing great.

With all of that said, this links both the science and the heart. It is so important to allow your children to have emotional release. I like to tell parents it's like your child has a basket or maybe like a sack of rocks that they're carrying around, you know, it starts empty and at the beginning of the day, a pebble is dropped in and then a bigger rock and then a bigger rock and these are all experiences they're having of emotional charge.

So that could be a moment they didn't feel good enough and they felt defeated or helpless. It could be a moment they felt frustrated. It could be something they picked up. another child in the line to lunch that where they felt this child feeling some type of way and now that's a rock in their basket.

The basket has to be emptied like we have to dump out the basket at the end of the day um otherwise they're carrying a big load so we have to teach our children that there's space for the emotions to come through and you know this is hard to do because many of us learned opposite like don't cry it's okay it's all okay what's wrong there's nothing wrong that your child can describe to you and their prefrontal cortex they just need to let it go so I invite you to orient your attention when your child is having feelings towards this is good we need we want them to release we don't want this energy to stay stuck in their body that becomes illness or bigger outbursts later my child's just releasing even if the release is them screaming and saying that their life is the worst and I'm the worst sometimes the release has to come out like that until children learn other ways to release the feelings and they trust that you are going to allow it this might be really new for your child and for you to have a family rule that now allows emotions one last piece here I've had parents say well I'm just not really a feelings person like I don't know feelings I don't do feelings I just think in the logical linear space well then I invite you to let your children know that you're not a feelings person and this is new for you too you might say yeah I'm learning that feelings are really important and they tell us about what we need or what we want and I'm working on feeling them you're teaching me a lot so at the very least they get the message that my feelings are allowed and I'm not wrong or bad for having feelings even if I'm not seeing my parents model them.

I hope that one makes sense. And as I just mentioned, our feelings give us so much information about what's happening inside and what we need or want. So if I'm grieving something, if I'm sad, it means I really cared.

It means that I really care about the thing and I'm feeling at a loss. If I'm scared or anxious, there might be important information around what needs to be done or what I need to feel safe or it might be important to listen to an intuition of where something's not feeling right.

You don't want to take fear out of your children. You want them to learn how to work with it. Or if your child's angry, generally it's about something they want or something they feel they need to communicate.

It's like the anger needs to move through or it's a boundary that needs to be set. And then we can address what the feeling was telling us and the solution comes later. I also with this, and then we'll get into the last section one to share empathy comes later, there was a study on cognitive empathy like the ability to take others perspectives, and the researchers found that it was really beginning to rise steadily in girls at age 13.

And this was a six year study published recently and in developmental psychology. So over six years they study kiddos to find out. So I just heard a phone ringing in another part of the house and it brought up a sense of kind of that hyperreal state so perfect example of letting that go and coming back to this very moment.

Okay, so, um, cognitive empathy in kiddos over six years. Empathy wasn't fully on the rise steadily until girls were aged 13 and for boys it was aged 15. It didn't start to develop until age eight. So, likely your child does not have empathy on board as much as we want them to.

We can help them learn that in time and when their brains are ready for it they will learn it. But for now when they're having a feeling we really want to acknowledge the need that they're expressing and to celebrate that need it's like, Of course you feel like you need to stay and play cars for 25 minutes right now like that's your highest desire that's like such a value to you.

Of course you feel like you need that. And then I might set the boundary and say, and now it's time to go we can play later, something like that but we're wanting to celebrate our children's wants and needs so that they learn how to have access to them later.

And that is not in contradiction to them learning. Okay, it's a lot to take in, shake the body, take a breath, and just really know with all of this, like the parts that want to land can land any parts that don't feel useful right now.

Maybe they will later or they won't at all, just let them go and trust that at least one of these nuggets will come up in a moment with your kiddos later and it can be really helpful. Okay, a few more scientific points here.

One is mirror neurons. We learn through seeing, we learn through modeling, even as adults. If you remember or you've heard of the studies of monkey see, monkey do, they were having researchers make different movements and the monkeys were reflecting those back because of mirror neurons.

We have this system. where we see something in front of us and we mirror it back. Another example I like to give, if you ever have been hanging around a certain friend or a certain teacher and they use certain language, and then suddenly you hear yourself saying the same language that they use, it's that same mirror neuron system, like, oh, I learned this, and then I'm reflecting this back.

I remember one of my best friends, she uses the language or had used the language in the past. I'm just present to dot, dot, dot. Instead of like, here's what I think, she'll say, I'm really present to this.

And I remember about a year into our friendship, all of a sudden I was saying that all the time. I think I still do. It's like, it was mirrored in front of me and then I mirrored it back. So, and there's a researcher, Bianca Acevedo, who studies a lot of this.

And studies like the sensitivity that exists, especially in highly sensitive people that makes this mirrored experience even stronger, that I can definitely share more on if you're interested. The reason I'm sharing it is that, if you want your child to learn a new way of being, you have to show them.

You have to match the experience they're in. So you have to actually show them, this is what it feels like to have a big feeling, to move it through and then to find regulation. So if you're not allowing your own self as parent to have feelings, to get dysregulated, and then to regulate, your child is going to have a really tough time learning how to do that.

And that's also why that one -on -one time and the bonus content in module one, having space for them to really be in a relaxed place and start to learn from you and have the mirror neurons turned on is really, really important.

Okay. I'm sharing a few more things in this last section. The insula is a part of the brain. It's the seat of consciousness, Bianca Acevedo, who I just mentioned, she studies this a lot. And she found that this part of the brain, the seat of consciousness where you can perceive more and you can be very conscious, it's higher in its activity and highly sensitive people.

So in the study I mentioned in module one, where highly sensitive people were looking at positive experiences and negative experiences and getting activated for longer and in bigger ways, this part of the brain, the insula was also turned on more.

So a blessing and a curse, it just is what it is. It means that if you're highly sensitive and for your child that's highly sensitive, their insula is going to be really active. They're going to be really aware and conscious of what's happening.

which we just get to honor and know and be empowered in knowing. The second to last thing I want to share here is with this idea of the nervous system getting dysregulated, because highly sensitive people in particular, they stay in activated states for longer, both positive and negative, even an experience of extreme excitement can be in hyper or outstate.

It just means that we can expect for bigger swings to be happening. Let's just have realistic expectations so we stay regulated, that our sensitive child is going to have high highs and low lows and be moving back and forth often, and that's okay.

Something that I really love in my own experience of being parented, and just so much love to my parents for graciously parenting a highly sensitive human. That was me. They joke about how it was always the best day or the worst day of my life, and I think that's really true.

I do know that it shifted in time where I exist more in the middle ground, but I'm not sure that that shift occurred until I started to have a prefrontal cortex that was fully developed in my adult life, so just some food for thought.

Lastly, I want to just plant a seed for the idea. We'll get into this more when we talk about what it means to have a highly sensitive child and be a highly sensitive child. This is the last brainy study I'm going to share about, a study where highly sensitive children, people were asked to engage in tasks with different descriptions of emotion such as happy or sad.

And then it was also followed by the corresponding faces of their partners or strangers. So this was a study for adults. And basically, they had a really strong reaction to both people in their family and strangers who showed the faces of happiness or sadness of other strong emotions.

And they had continued brain activity lit up in the face of those emotions. So why am I sharing this? I'm sharing this to say that it's highly likely that you are highly sensitive child while they might not have extreme empathy like feeling really sorry if they do something wrong or really caring about what you think and feel they are picking up on other people's feelings and experiences in a big way and often their brain is staying activated in those spaces for a while.

So just always be cognizant of the fact that your child might be carrying an experience that they picked up somewhere else. Who knows where they got her from. Their brain is in an active space and they need your help more than anyone to come down, to get regulated, to understand what's happening in their brains and bodies with neutrality without blaming or shaming.

I feel like what I share today is just the very tip of the iceberg of a lot of these topics will get into a lot more nuanced understandings of different parts like how to actually set the boundaries.

How to maintain regulation in your own being when we talk about parent self regulation, a deeper understanding of your child's highest sensitivities coming soon. And just in review of what we covered today, which was quite a lot.

We started with an introduction on a tantrum and what's happening and low anger first high anger. Once you get to high anger. Things are just going to be like this until they come down, you have to let it play out.

We talked about the mind body connection. We talked about the hand model of the brain. Nervous system dysregulation which you'll see a handout for. And then the importance of emotional release and letting it go and emptying the basket of rocks.

And then lastly I shared some tidbits of more research and parts of the brain like the insula to understand particularly for your highly sensitive child. That was a whole lot. I hope that it landed reach out with any questions, and I can't wait to see you again for module three, which will be more theory based it will be more self reflection on who you are as a parent and less of the brain stuff but I hope that you enjoyed and good luck with the assignments and challenges for this section.