TUNED IN MODULE 5

Transcript 

Welcome to module five, reducing shame and increasing curiosity in your parenting by understanding developmental stages. Shame is a big one. It's a big part of every human being. It's in most of our cultures, and it's really an unavoidable part of life.

When we can learn how to understand shame and work with it and support our kiddos in working with it, it doesn't have to be such a scary thing. When it comes to parenting, however, using shaming techniques generally never works, and for sensitive kids, it can be really damaging because they internalize a lot.

So we've talked about this before, but what for some child might just be a harsh comment, and they're like, whatever, that adult was in a bad mood for the highly sensitive child. They're going to really take that in.

And actually, I was just listening to an amazing podcast this morning that I'll link in the notes by two psychologists talking about highly sensitive kids. And they reminded me that when we use shaming or negative parenting methods with our highly sensitive children, they're actually more likely to take on more of the traits of a highly sensitive person that make life really difficult.

So they will be more likely to become a perfectionist, to be a people pleaser, to be stuck in anxiety, because they're trying to cope with feeling like they're not okay and they're a bad person in response to their parents' reactions.

And they actually become overly sensitive instead of highly sensitive. And the difference between those is that being highly sensitive is an amazing superpower. It means we can perceive more. It means we can think deeply.

It means all of the traits that we've been talking about that help highly sensitive. sensitive people actually perform better. When one becomes overly sensitive, it's no longer useful because they're stuck in anxiety and they're actually really stuck in the ego.

They're stuck in making it all about them. And like anything that they do or say is so important and impactful at all the people around them. So all of that is to say using shaming parenting methods with your sensitive child will increase some of the behaviors that you're trying to reduce.

So it's really worth your time to take in this information today. So across the module, we will first start with an introduction to shame and some of the ideas associated with it. I'll share specific developmental stages because it's really helpful to understand what's age appropriate for your child because then you can relax around what's happening instead of feeling like you have to push.

or do something to have them go where they need to go. We'll talk about regression, when and how that happens. We'll talk about accepting the process that our child is in and trusting the challenge that they're moving through.

And then at the end, this is a big one, we'll talk about why yelling doesn't work and how to start engaging in conscious discipline that does work. Okay, so I wanna start by telling a story. When I was in graduate school, I was taking in a lot of information around how to be a therapist.

I was working with clients for the first time in my practicum. And I was also in my own healing process, starting to understand my sensitivities and really step into the more authentic version of myself.

So there was a lot happening, I was integrating a lot and I was new to a lot of these topics, these deep topics like shame. I went to a weekend long workshop that was put on by Pat Ogden. She's the founder of sensory motor therapy.

She's really well known in the field and she's been around for a while. And the weekend was a workshop on shame and understanding shame, processing shame. I got to this workshop, it was actually in her home and it was in a room with about 30 therapists pushed in to chairs next to each other.

And I looked around and I realized that I was one of the youngest people in the room. When I started talking to people, I learned that most of the therapists in the room had been in practice for 10 or 15 years.

So I quickly learned that this was a very advanced workshop. And although I felt like I could handle anything and I've always been learning beyond maybe the developmental stage that I am in, that workshop kicked my butt.

I ended up leaving early. I was so overwhelmed. and checked out and I ended up leaving the workshop early and not returning the next day. I know at the time I said I wasn't feeling well and I had all of these excuses, but looking back, I now understand that I was just overwhelmed with truly looking at the concept of shame because it's not something we talk about.

Now I've been able to return back to it and study it more and I'm ready to share it with you, but I share that story to say, if you see any of your patterns coming up, if you're starting to feel avoidant, if you're feeling really full, if you're feeling anxious, just know that this is a big topic so it may trigger you, but stay grounded, stay here and you can always pause the recording and come back to it so you can really take it in.

Okay, so shame is simply not an effective parenting method because it does is it suppresses behavior, but it doesn't change it. So it will work really well to have your child stop doing something because a human response to feeling shame is to get smaller and become ashamed, but it's not going to stop the behavior because your child's not learning anything in the moment that they're shamed.

I also love this idea that shame is really a low teacher. Like it will work. Same thing with fear. The example that I recently heard was you can learn not to touch a hot pan by burning yourself on it, or you could learn not to touch a hot pan by like getting close to it and realizing it feels kind of hot, having your parent explained to you over and over again, and you'll still learn don't touch the hot pan,

but you don't have to get a high degree burn on your hand. So when we're trying to teach our kiddos new way of being, new ways of being, why not use techniques that will actually help them learn for the long run and won't cause harm, won't cause them to start creating beliefs like I'm a bad person.

I'm wrong. I also see adults in my private practice in Denver, and I can't tell you how many adults that are having really significant symptoms of anxiety, low self -worth, depression, are needing to process moments from their childhood where they felt high levels of shame from their parents.

So I'm so happy that you're here so that we can prevent this for your child now. The thing about this topic is that it's really hard to break patterns of shaming because most of us have it imprinted in us in some way.

The definition of shame is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. So it's a self -conscious emotion. It's one that leads us towards negative self -evaluation, motivation to quit, feelings of pain, exposure, distrust, powerlessness, worthlessness.

I know that all of you here do not want your kiddos to be feeling these things because of something you've told them or a way that you've acted towards them. So at the same time, whether you actively reduce shaming methods or not, your child will show you shame because it's a natural human defense mechanism.

Any moment where your child feels like they're not safe, especially if they're not emotionally safe because something happened and they're blaming you. themselves and they feel like it's their fault, some shame will come up and you can support them in it.

You can help, you can hold them in it. It doesn't have to be such a scary thing. It's like, I feel shame sometimes too. What do you think is coming up for you? Like it's a, it's kind of a yucky icky one, isn't it?

And you can learn how to start talking with your kids about shame when it's here. And, and it doesn't have to be such a scary thing. Another one of my friends, her name is Kyra. She's a coach in the, in the healing industry.

And she talks about how shame festers in isolation. So if we're left alone in shame and we hide from it and we don't bring it to safe relationships where there's positive connection, it actually gets bigger.

But if we can name it and share it with each other, it can move through pretty quickly. So I really encourage you to be looking for those moments where you see your child in some shame and making themselves wrong and getting smaller and wanting to hide, or maybe you've cut onto the fact that their shame reaction goes pretty quickly from shame to anger.

If you can release the need to fix and control the anger and control their behavior and instead meet the part of them that became ashamed and normalized experience of talking about shameful moments in your family, that can be really healing for your child.

And they can learn how to work with shame because regardless of whether you reduce shaming strategies in your family, your child will be exposed to shame in relationships outside of the home. It's just everywhere.

Like every child that I've worked with has had some experience of bullying or being bullied and almost always shame is at play in that process. So just to summarize, we want to get more comfortable with shame that it's a part of life and avoid intentionally shaming our kiddos for natural impulses that they're having when we can.

So one. that might be helpful to think about this is considering the difference between shame and guilt. So shame involves feeling bad about yourself as a person. So you're saying to yourself, I am bad.

Guilt involves feeling bad about what you did. So it's like, I did something bad. Guilt is a much more health, helpful experience. If your child's feeling guilty because they ripped up their sibling's drawing, it could be really helpful to talk to them about what does it feel like in your body?

Is it kind of icky? Is it yucky? What do you think you might've wanted to do instead? Like what could you do next time? What is this guilt here to tell you about how you wish you had behaved differently?

So both are tricky to work with. Guilt is easier to address and come up with solutions. With shame, you're really working with a negative self concept that's being built. Like I am bad. I am yucky. I am gross.

And, and I know that I know that you can handle all of these. I'll share an article here in the module that has a handout explaining difference between shame and guilt if you're interested. So yeah, I'm just once again, I want to share, once shame is here, you really do get to support your child in it.

If you can help them create safety around it, because once safety is there, they can move through the experience and talk about what's bothering them and share the vulnerable parts of them that are coming up around the shame.

And kids really pick up on our shame, if we're sending disgust or shame cues, based on our own printing of where we haven't processed shame, they will feel that there was actually studies. I'll share the study to in the module of babies responding to shame and disgust cues from their parents, as infants, like different parts of their brain, the emotional part of their brain, we're lighting up more in response to their parents in disgust when they were changing diapers.

And what I mean, it's likely unavoidable. But I share this just to underline that kids have a strong emotional response to our own unprocessed shame. So if you're sitting here and thinking, wow, shame isn't really something that I've looked at.

And I know that there's been a lot of experiences in my life where I felt shame, I encourage you to do your own inner work around this. There will be a lot of inner opportunity for inner work in the next module.

But it also might be something to take to a therapist or individual support outside of this space. And lastly, on this section, I mentioned the connection between shame and anger. So there's a pretty clear cycle that happens where one experiences shame.

They don't know what to do with it. It feels too overwhelming. So they actually self -abandon in that moment instead of staying connected to themselves just being with the uncomfortable feeling that's coming up.

They disconnect. And then in an effort to regulate, they get really angry. Rage occurs. And then because they're angry and full of rage and that's pretty unacceptable in our society, they then revert back to shame and then it continues.

So it's like shame, self -abandonment, disconnection, anger, rage, back to shame. It's a tough cycle. And I know that as parents, we get into this. I've seen it happen with literally every single parent I know where they had a moment of maybe losing their temper out of just...

being human and getting dysregulated. And then they feel shame around it because they feel like that makes them a bad parent. And then they go into self abandonment and then anger again, and the cycle continues.

So once we bring awareness to the cycle, and we slow down, and we know that we're trapped in that, we can actually make a choice to regulate, step out of it, and then make a different choice, often using the bounce back and repair that we've discussed in previous modules.

Okay, so that was just the introduction. There's a lot more to go here, take your time with this module. Understanding developmental stages. If we understand the developmental stages that our kiddos are going through, we can have more compassion and empathy for what they're showing us.

And we can also really step off the ledge, we can remember, oh, this is a natural part of their development. I remember I was having an experience of my stepdaughter really rejecting me. And this was after we had built a really secure attachment.

You know, we had worked through some of the initial process that occurs when you're becoming a stepmom or a stepchild. And I was confused. I was like, why is she rejecting me? I'm like, really giving her space.

And we know how to flow in relationship together. And I talked to one of my mentors at the time, who's a child development expert. And she reminded me, she was like, you see that, Sophie, this has nothing to do with you being a stepmom and all of the emotional process that comes with that.

This is everything to do with your stepdaughter being a five and a half year old who's working on her individuation and working on trusting herself. And in order to do that, she's going to have to reject and push away the safe caregivers in her life or at least one of them to find herself.

She's pushing you away in this moment so that she can find her. And it's actually symbolic of a secure and safe attachment. And I was like, oh yeah, I teach this. You know, this is those moments where you feel like there's something to fix or process or go to therapy about.

And then you remember that it's just a natural part of development for your kiddos. So Eric Erickson was a psychologist in the mid 1900s. This is like basic child development theory. I learned this in my very first intro to child development course in college.

And I go back to it again and again because it's that good. And what he did is he separated developmental stages from infancy all the way up to adulthood and approaching death. And he identified the major conflict that one is going through in that stage.

So a lot of the challenges that we meet in those stages will reflect the conflicts that I'll elaborate on in the moment. can see these listed in the writing section of the module underneath this video if you'd like to follow along.

So I'm going to go through each one and just kind of talk about it a little bit. And what's important to note is that even though we master each of these developmental stages, if we're growing in a healthy way where we're supported to have our needs met, we often regress to earlier stages if we're trying to work something out.

And our kids do this too. This will make more sense in a moment. So the first stage is infancy from zero months to 18 months. And the major conflict is trust versus mistrust. So the question babies are sitting with is, can I trust my world?

Is this a safe place? Can I trust that my needs will be met? And the we regress. So in my adult life, I've had moments of regression to my infancy stage if I'm not feeling in trust of my world and if I'm not feeling safe in my world.

And I mentioned this in a previous module, but I know that this is one that as an adult, I've had to work on because I did experience birth trauma. And I did have an experience of my mom not being well, like she was physically ill and able to care for me.

And so my little baby self was wondering if I could trust my world. And so I've had to really work on trusting. And I've actually had to work on it from an approach of accessing the lower baby parts of my brain, remember the hand model, the lower parts.

So it's a nonverbal, implicit, meaning underneath consciousness, memory that had gotten stuck, that I had to work through to make sure that the stage is mastered and it's a continual process. So I share all of that to say, if we're hitting any of these and you think, to yourself, hmm, I still really work on this one in my adult life.

You may want to think about with a really good therapist or in some of the exercises in our next module, looking at what might be stuck there. I know I'm, I'm going on a bit of a tangent, but it feels important.

Um, this is really important because when we like overly personalize or overly identify with our kids processes, we end up projecting on them. So if your child, you know, if you're having a baby, and you have a part of your implicit memory that's stuck in not trusting your world, you might project on the baby like, oh my God, they're crying, they're not trusting, and you're going to create a loop of anxiety.

That's not good. You know, so we just want to do our own work so that we can let our kiddos be in their stages. So I'm going to go on in toddler years, the major conflict is autonomy versus shame. So this is the two or three year old that's saying, I can do it myself.

And if they can't do it, they get really down and it's where temper tantrums are happening and it's where potty training is happening. Shame and doubt are like together. They're feeling like, I can't do it myself.

I can do it myself. And a lot of times in that potty training process, some like shame and doubt can be linked to even just the basic bodily functions of going to the bathroom. But the virtue of this stage is will.

It's like, I can do it. I have will. You wanna be well integrated in this stage in your adult life too. So we're supporting our kiddos in this. And as always, we're remembering that in order to get to the other side and kind of went over this conflict, like to become autonomous instead of stuck in shame, we have to dance with both sides of the coin.

So you'll see your kiddo in shame and doubt, and then you'll also see them in autonomy and it's meant to feel like a struggle. That's how we work through the conflict. So release the part of you that's thinking, oh my gosh, I'm doing something wrong.

I'm a bad parent. My child's feeling ashamed. This is so bad. And instead meet them in it and recognize that it's a natural, important part of development. Looping all the way back to the beginning of this lecture, what I had suggested is not to ignore shame and pretend like it's not here.

It's simply to not be utilizing shaming parenting methods as the adults because you've integrated this stage. And if you haven't, then there's probably some support that's needed. If you're showing up in a toddler brain, in the middle brain to parenting moments and creating cycles of shame.

So we support our kiddos in shame. We don't produce the shaming moments. From three to five is the preschool years. The major conflict is initiative versus. guilt. So it's like a step up from shame. We were talking about the difference between guilt and shame.

And with guilt, we can really start to take some action. It's like, Ooh, I did this thing where I just ripped the other kid's pencil out of their hand because I really wanted it. And then I realized that that doesn't feel so good because that's not who I am.

And it made the other child really upset. So you're wanting to support your kids in integrating experiences that they've had and helping them learn from them. You really get to start to talk about, well, what was that like?

How could you have done it differently? What is that guilt feeling? How does that experience feel in your body? You help kids start to understand it so that they can take action. And then the virtue is purpose.

They feel like they have purpose. Hang with me here. These are really interesting to look at when you kind of get them down and review them multiple times. So the school age kiddos from age six to 11.

They are facing industry versus inferiority. So this is where self esteem issues can really kick up and it's natural. Your 10 year old will naturally be having many moments where they feel not good enough, because they're working on it.

They're like, do am I good at this? Like, can I be industrious? Can I get stuff done? Or am I gonna feel stuck and not good enough and feel like I can't even start my homework because it's not going to be good anyway.

Once again, you're holding space for the process. And the virtue that comes with integrating this developmental stage is confidence. From 12 to 18, the adolescent years, the major conflict is identity versus role confusion.

And by the way, I'm aware that we're going beyond age 12 here. But I think it's really helpful to think about and I want you to be prepared. For when your kid was older, and I want you to also be thinking about your own developmental stages and where some parts of you might be stuck.

So identity versus role confusion. Teenagers are meant to not know who they are. You're meant to have to sit in witness of those awkward moments where they go out of the house wearing the thing that is like, oh, are you sure you want to wear that makeup on your face or whatever it is and the more we can get out of their way and let them be in the process of finding themselves and having awkward moments and,

you know, realizing, oh, I just showed up in this way, or I just did this thing that is really not true for me. If you can be there with them to talk about those moments without adding extra judgment and shame, you will really be building the foundation of a positive relationship with your child for the long run.

The virtue that comes is fidelity. Kids are really working through, well, teenagers are really working through trusting themselves. in relationship, trusting themselves to be authentic in relationship, so that they can embody fidelity.

From 19 to 40, we're looking at young adulthood. If you're in your 30s, or around 40, you might be feeling flattered that you are considered to be in your young adulthood. But the major conflict here is intimacy versus isolation.

So it's, am I going to lean in to the connections and the relationships that are here for me? Am I going to go out and seek secure attachments and partnerships? Or am I going to stay isolated? And the virtue that comes is love.

Middle adulthood from 40 to 65, the conflict is generativity versus stagnation. So people are really looking at, did I contribute to society? Or did I just stay stuck? sometimes you see people like really activating a midlife crisis around this time and even switching careers because they're realizing I've been stagnant in this job and it's time to contribute.

This is a really beautiful stage and the virtue that comes with it is care. And then lastly, in the maturity phase from 65 to death, the major conflict is ego integrity versus despair. And it's really, if you have a parent who's approaching death or you've been around an elder, you might really feel and support them in this process of like, am I proud of who I've been and who I am?

Did I show up with integrity or am I stuck in despair? Because I don't know if that's true. And that's, in my opinion, why there's a lot of depression in our elders today because they don't have proper support to integrate the stage and to look at the ways that they did show up in integrity and they did contribute.

The virtue that comes with the stage if it's integrated is wisdom. So those are a lot of stages and that's a lot to think about. I really encourage you to spend some time with this model and think about where have you seen yourself in these conflicts, how can you support yourself more in mastering them?

And as I mentioned before, in order to move through them, we have to let all of the parts of the conflict be welcome. It's just two sides of a coin. It's not like, oh, trust is good and mistrust is bad.

It's, oh, as humans, we work through mistrust and trust, mistrust and trust. And when we land in the trust, it can be a really integrating experience, especially for that stage. Just quickly here, another developmental model use, I think about a lot when I'm working with kiddos, um, is based on Dewey stages.

Dewey is another theorist. And the way that Dewey puts this is, um, you know, in utero to the first months of life, the question being asked is, do I exist? No, it's like, think about a baby in the womb.

There's no language, it could feel foggy. It's, we might not feel grounded. So if you're stuck in this stage, or your child stuck in something that happened in this stage, you're going to experience them sometimes ignoring you, not having eye contact, not offering language, this is a sign that they're stuck in an unconscious memory, I go back here, because it's the lower parts of the brain, it's not conscious that it's coming up and they're and they're kind of getting stuck in it.

If if you're having any aha aha moments with these stages, and you're realizing, I think me or my child is, one of us is stuck in a stage here. This is where getting some therapeutic support to process any perceived traumatic moment would be really important.

So I'm just gonna fly through the rest of these from birth to 18 months. One will be asking and integrating, is the world okay? Can I trust? They might be stuck in a hyperaroused state. That's the toddler in a hyperaroused state.

Really finding out if it's safe from 18 months to 36 months, the question is, am I okay? And if I'm not feeling okay, I'm gonna feel shame. Rather, this is more of the toddler stage where, is the world okay?

And am I okay is both include the toddler stage. From age four to six, we're gonna be asking, how much can I do? The emphasis will be on quantity instead of quality. So that's why your five -year -old comes home from school and says, look how many pictures I drew.

Isn't this great? They're wanting to be acknowledged for how much they can do. And that's really appropriate. And then seven to 11 year olds are asking, how well can I do it? And then beyond that, because now we're looking at quality instead of quantity.

Kids are moving into teenage years and adult years, which touches more on the previous model that I shared. So what I just touched is really theoretical. It's meant actually for training therapists and how they're working with people.

But in my practice, I really like to educate parents with the same information that I'm learning as a therapist because if you're here, you're wanting to learn and you can handle it. But with that said, any parts that don't feel relevant or feel too heady or theoretical, just let it go and reach out with any questions.

Okay. Um, just, yeah, just a couple more sections here and they're not quite as elaborate. I want to touch on regression. So, um, you have likely had a moment of experiencing your child regress to an early developmental stage when they're having baby talk when they're goo goo gying when they're becoming nonverbal and not listening there.

It's any time the lid is flipped. That's a regression. And generally, there might be a brief moment of feeling a lack of safety and so kids just need some help putting their lid back on and then they'll come back to the developmental stage that they're meant to be at but sometimes kids might be processing a traumatic moment that happened at an earlier stage and so they're kind of getting stuck there and they're letting you know they're stuck there.

Thank you. as well as they might be trying to regress back to a time that felt more safe. So I don't know if this is for everyone, but I know a number of people that I know, and even in my own experience as an adult has had moments of regressing in adult intimacy.

So maybe you're acting small and you're being cute or you're using a baby voice. This is an example of regression. I'm actually avoiding true adult intimacy in this moment, and I'm going to go back to a time that feels safer.

It's not wrong. I just want you to understand what regression is and know why that might be coming up. So regression isn't a bad thing. It's actually a normal part of development. Kids will go back to stage, and then they'll go back, and then they'll go back, and then they'll come up two steps, and that's the two steps forward and one step back idea.

But I encourage you from a trauma -informed therapeutic perspective, if your child is regressing, to meet them in that regression. If they're in a baby talk to say, oh, there's a baby here. I'm here with you.

They're asking to be attuned to in that developmental stage. That's not to say that you can't enforce boundaries if you've really had enough, but you want to explain to them that the boundary is for you.

There's nothing wrong with how they're being or what they're trying to communicate. So you might say, I get that you're wanting me to hold you like a baby. I love you. I love playing babies with you.

Right now, I'm cooking dinner, and I'm just asking if you can try it a different way, because I'm starting to get a little bit overwhelmed with your baby talk. Could you talk to me with your grown -up voice?

OK. A reminder here that if I haven't made it clear. already, our kiddos are meant to go through challenges. Eric Erickson, this model that I'm sharing, one of the main guys in the field of child development, like his whole model is based off challenges and conflicts that we're chasing, or not that we're chasing, but that we're facing.

And the idea is not to chase it. It's just to be okay with the fact that growth periods are healthy, and with challenge comes benefit. It's, you could also think about a contraction before an expansion, as we're giving birth.

When your child is in contraction, they are generally moving towards the other side of the coin. So you can be watching for, if it's easy for you to become the parent that just wants to fix it for your child, they're having a hard moment with another kiddo at school, and your impulse is, I'm going to call that kid's mom.

Like, let me have that kid's mom's. because I want to fix it for you, you might actually be getting in their way from sitting with the challenge and finding solutions to integrate the challenge themselves.

That's not to say they don't need your support, but they might need your support in coming up with confidence to talk with that child that's being mean to them, or to be more like Teflon instead of Velcro and just let some of the words coming at them, you know, bounce right off them.

They likely need your support, but they might not need it in the way that you're wanting to extend it if you're just trying to fix their challenge or avoid their stuck points for them. Okay, so we're getting into the last segment of this lecture, talking about yelling and conscious discipline.

There are so many models for consciously disciplining your kids, you can look into love and logic, you can look into peaceful parenting, you can look into what are some other ones. Google conscious discipline parenting for my child and you will find scripts, you will find YouTube videos on how to exactly discipline your child in the module on loving boundaries, I'll share a little bit more around like specifics.

Today I want to get more into the theory and the psychology because, as you know, when you have a sensitive child, the normal things don't work, you actually have to, even when it comes to discipline, go back to those original principles of really prioritizing presence, prioritizing connection, and from there you'll be able to help shape and shift your child's behavior but normal discipline strategies generally don't work,

you can try them if they make you feel comfortable. good, but most families that I work with that have sensitive kids have to they have to take a deeper dive than just learning a model of discipline.

They have to really do their own work to stay present to tune into what's happening in the moment with their kiddo. And when you're in that place of a tuned connection with yourself and your child, you will come up with the thing that needs to be said.

You will, from your heart to theirs, communicate, that wasn't okay. What you just did wasn't okay. Can we redo it? Can we learn together? But you're coming at it from a place of how can I speak to my child in this moment in a way that they'll actually hear and they'll feel supported and they'll feel like I'm here to help them learn, not make them wrong.

But just a quick note on yelling. Yelling really doesn't work, although we all do it sometimes. It's only natural. I want you to imagine an experience of you made a small mistake on a project at work and your boss, maybe your boss does this, and I'm sorry if they do, calls you and just totally screams at you, like makes you feel like you're a worthless person.

And how could you even do this? You're actually just going to go into shutdown and feeling bad about yourself or you might, or you might want to, it's like, you might want to fight back, you'll get really overwhelmed, you're not going to learn in that moment.

There's also scientific proof that this doesn't work. There was a study, I'll share this study in the lecture, but below, but there was a study that measured people's responses to when they were hearing instructions with an emotional tone, or a neutral tone.

And they had less activation in a good way, when they were hearing an instruction from the neutral tone. And they also remembered the neutral tone more. So they remember the instruction that was given to them in a neutral tone, then the emotional tone.

So let's even try it right now. If I say to you, see how you feel in your body, you just have to stop shaming your child. It's ridiculous that you're shaming your child, seriously stop. Or if I say, it's really going to serve you to stop shaming your child, please stop shaming your child.

There's a completely different experience of receiving the information. And you're more likely to remember that instruction later on. Because you're not in fight or flight response. Once again, with this quick Google search for five minutes, and you will find so many reasons why.

by yelling isn't effective. And as I said, sometimes yelling happens and that's when you'll wanna return to the previous module's instructions on the bounce back and the repair. If you can use the repair because you had a careless moment and say, geez, I wish I didn't yell.

I know that's not a good way to get what I want. I wish what I had done instead is this and you can actually offer a redo. You can offer a redo of the message that you were trying to get across. And what that does is it provides that opportunity for repair, but it also teaches your child that they could do the same.

They could have a moment where they yelled because they weren't getting what they wanted. And then they could realize that that's not gonna work if you're holding the proper boundary and they could redo and say, I'm going to explain more clearly what I'm wanting and then ask if they've really embodied the opportunity for redo.

Lastly, with the yelling, I just wanted to share on one study. It was a longitudinal study where parents were... Yeah, and I've mentioned this in other content before, so you might have heard this, but basically parents were wanting to know if their parenting approach now impacted behaviors down the line, and researchers studied kiddos for three years between age seven and ten, and they did find that the kids that were given warmth and compassion in their parenting were much more likely to succeed later.

And if the parenting lacked the warmth, the 10 -year -olds were more likely to show depressive symptoms as well as full -breaking behavior. So high hostility now and yelling now really indicate a potential for less ideal behaviors later.

So even if right now the yelling is working and it's just making your child listen because they're in fear or they're in shame, a few years down the line, you really might not like what you see. I believe I mentioned this study or parts of it when we were talking about the types of parenting, but either way, it's really good to review the findings of this study.

So we're just needing to slow down and offer more softness, more compassion, teaching our kids that it's okay to mess up. We're not perfect. We yell. We say the wrong thing. We know a rule, but we break it.

We know that the speeding limit is 25 and we go 30 sometimes. and so we're aligning with our kiddos in the human experience of messing up and then fixing it and then feeling guilty and then wanting to do a different next time.

And for your highly sensitive kiddo in particular who does have access to wisdom beyond their years, they will really thrive off these moments of authentic human loving connection with you where you're offering your vulnerabilities.

We'll talk in the next module about how to make sure you've integrated traumatic parts. Like we don't want to be offering vulnerable authentic connection when we're actually just giving a 25 minute lecture on something that's stuck in our best.

We want to be integrated meaning we've processed. moments that are stuck as traumas in our system so that we can come to our child and say, sometimes I feel guilty too and it helps me take a different action instead of coming to our child and saying, one time in third grade I felt guilty and this happened and then this happened and we're kind of giving them a lecture around something that's still in process for us.

That can create more anxiety for them and it can make our kids feel like they need to care take us. So approaching our last section here on conscious discipline. The definition of discipline is teaching.

Discipline comes from the word disciple, which means a follower, a teacher, or a leader. So first of all, we really want to model the behaviors that we want our kids to see always. This is the most effective way to change behavior and this goes so far beyond discipline.

If you're really modeling connection to self, healthy assimilation and processing of feelings and acting with integrity, you actually won't need to use discipline that often, but when we do need to use it, the purpose of discipline is to instruct and to teach not to punish.

So we could take away our kids toys forever and punish them and offer consequences, but if we don't lovingly instruct them in a way that they can receive with both of our prefrontal cortex as online, we're not teaching them how to respond differently next time and we're really missing the point.

So the biggest takeaways that I want to offer you for conscious discipline is to to always identify and acknowledge the need, feeling, or desire behind your child's behavior. We'll talk about this a lot in this course, but as I've said before, every behavior is rooted in a need, feeling, or desire, and your kiddo, when they're acting out, one of those things are subconsciously stuck under the surface.

So as we slow down, we can identify, oh, you're actually just hungry. You're actually overstimulated. We went out to this party and we hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, or I had this intention for this to be a really great day out with us and it wasn't, and that makes sense.

And you can acknowledge that in them and say, it makes a lot of sense. You were having big feelings. because this, this, and this. You're educating them on how their nervous system is more fine -tuned as a sensitive person, and they are more sensitive.

So you're acknowledging that. And that alone could help your child build the internal awareness and the internal regulation capacities to have a different experience next time. The second takeaway is to remember that the teaching can happen later.

And the teaching doesn't necessarily have to happen on the same day. In fact, as we've talked about before, you'll want to come back to teaching and reparative moments later once there's connection and regulation.

So one, acknowledge and validate the need, feeling, behavior, or desire. Two, remember that the teaching can always happen later and probably should happen later. Beyond that, implementing consequences, reward systems, those kinds of things for behavior, that's really up to you.

I did mention in the last module that a reward system can be really helpful for morning and evening routines and maintaining discipline, really, and structure. So I see positive reward systems working well.

I generally don't see consequences, meaning things getting taken away from sensitive kids working. I see this a lot in my practice, parents that are just really attached to having consequences for bad behavior.

I think it works really well for the parents because it gives them a sense of power and control. But when I meet with the kiddos in my therapy room, it's pretty clear it's doing nothing for them. Like literally, they're just feeling ashamed, like they messed up, like they're disconnected from their parents, and the consequence will not prevent the behavior from happening again, in my opinion, from what I see.

see in highly sensitive kiddos that are trusting me in a one on one space. So maybe it's not the answer you're wanting. Like there's no step by step manual for conscious discipline of your highly sensitive kiddo.

But if you take away these tools that I'm offering of really taking a step back, acknowledging the feeling need or desire, prioritizing connection and relationship, and then offering the teaching in a way that you get to problem solve together later, you really do.

You really do have an opportunity to create a system in which your child feels like they can mess up. And then they can come to you to process and try on a different way later. The reality is that even if your child is acting like they don't care, we call this, especially for teenagers, the case a case of the ethics, like they do something they know is wrong and they just literally don't care and you're getting frustrated that they don't care.

99% of the time they do care. They're just in a defense mechanism because they can't handle the experience of potentially feeling ashamed that you've that they've disappointed you. So if you can release the experience of making them feel like they've disappointed you and you can instead tell yourself, what is my child learning in this moment?

What is my job as parent to help them learn? And it becomes a more neutral, fun experience of what we had another mess up. What do we need to do now, you will create a system that really works for conscious discipline, which really is just conscious awareness, communication and making plans together for the future.

I will share a video that talks about redos. Redos are great for for this for this piece, unconscious discipline, like, oh, let's pause and rewind and and do it again. Yeah, and I know something else.

Something else that a tip that I really enjoyed from big little feelings there another organization that offers parenting courses, is this idea that you could create rules in your family, like if we put our hands up, that means stop.

And you can really practice this with your kiddos so that if you're tickling them and you're like kind of engaging with them in a way that doesn't feel good to their sensitive body, they can put their hands up and then you stop and back up.

You're teaching like body signals to say, here's my boundaries, here's what I need. And you can practice that between siblings, but you'll come up with your own ways of getting clear on the rules. making those rules clear to your kiddos.

And it's a creative process. But as you're going through this course, the hope is that you're becoming more relaxed, you're feeling validated in your experience of raising a highly sensitive child. And from that place of relaxation, the creative solutions will come up more easily.

Lastly here, if you are someone that feels like you need a list because you want the step -by -step list of what to do in the moment, I have two different lists or models that I've created for parents through time that we're trying to just kind of have a checklist.

If I'm in the moment with my child, both siblings are fighting, I don't know what to do. Thank you. Like, what can I do to get everyone more regulated in that moment and then offer a discipline moment?

So I will offer a link to a blog post that shares about some steps to conscious discipline, disciplining siblings that are heading, as well as a few steps. That's just another variation of that that I've written out here.

And to close, I'll just go through one of those lists so you feel like you have a concrete step -by -step go -to, if that's something that feels supportive to you. I know that I've given a lot of information in all of these modules.

If there's parts of it that haven't felt helpful or relevant or felt like too much, please just take note of that and let go of the parts that don't feel like they're perfectly relevant and useful to you.

But I'll close with just going by some steps with an example of what might be happening in a moment where you feel like you really need to offer conscious discipline to your kiddos. So let's use the example of you have two daughters, one's four, one's six, and one just pushed the other one onto the floor.

So you're there, you're mom, and you're probably thinking to yourself, we were just getting into a flow and now we're dealing with this. But you get to find your center, stay regulated, and know that this is an opportunity for growth.

Number one, you'll want to create safety. So you'll want to separate everyone and separate yourself with enough distance and create enough safety to even be able to have a teaching moment. Once there's safety, like that physical safety, step two, you'll want to encourage everyone.

to regulate. This might require taking space. This might be that we stop at step two, you go over there and draw, you go into your room and do whatever you want to do. Let's all just take some space and then we'll come back to this and we'll make sure that we make this right.

There's no point in moving forward if you or your kiddos aren't regulated. Step three, you'll want to bring curiosity. I can't tell you how many times I've had a kiddo in my playroom and in my therapy room say, my brother always gets in trouble for hitting me, but really I started it.

Like you don't see everything that's happening between siblings and a lot of time the one that's getting accused of being the persecutor actually was just going about their business and wasn't even engaged in a sibling dynamic, but they they were instigated.

So you really want to bring curiosity on you want to hear everyone's story and you want to believe them that the story they're telling you is true to them. Like they're needing you to validate an experience that they're having and it feels true to them.

It's not the time to get too focused on who's telling the truth or not telling the truth. If they're, if they are telling you a story, it's likely they really need you to believe that story because it relates to an internal experience that they're having.

Step four, you want to check in with your own boundary and set a clear boundary. So maybe the boundary is, I hear that you were feeling really frustrated that she was calling you names, but hitting is still not okay.

And that's my boundary. Um, to the other child, it might be, I know you were feeling ignored, but calling names is a no. And you know this, um, this is where you may want to, if you decide that consequences are something that work for your family, I don't go into detail around this, because like I said, I don't think consequences work very well for highly sensitive kids.

I think the conversation is enough. Um, but this is where you would maybe enforce a consequence if that's something that feels true for you. And then step five is offering any repair that is needed. So you might be encouraging your daughters to give a sincere apology to each other.

You might have to model this like really model and practice what it would look like. Well, so if I were you talking to my sister, I might say, I'm really sorry, I called you names. I just wanted you to play with me and you were ignoring me.

And when you ignore me, it makes me feel like I don't matter. You know, you're modeling that and then you can have them practice. And then step six for you as parent is really identifying the lesson, the main lesson.

There's always lots of lessons, but the main lesson that you were trying to teach in this experience from this experience and then weave this into family life throughout the week. So if you get information, okay, the lesson here is really how to control one's impulses when you're feeling hurt.

Like one sister was hurt because she felt ignored and the other sister was hurt because she was being called names. You can talk for the rest of the week. Like, why do we do when our feelings are hurt?

How do we work through them and sit with them and communicate to someone that can understand like maybe one of our parents, the experience we're having before we just lash out at another kid or our sibling.

And then we're gonna offer opportunities to practice. So those are six steps to try on. You can see them listed in the lecture here. I know that you'll come up with your own method that works for you.

if you embody and integrate the two biggest takeaways of acknowledging the feeling need or desire underneath your child's behavior and always remembering that the consequence, the teaching moment can happen later and in fact can only happen once you and your kiddos are regulated.

This was a long one to review. We talked about shame, how it's a difficult experience. We talked about the developmental stages and how understanding them and accepting them can help us reduce shame and just increase awareness as we're parenting.

We talked about regression, why that happens, when that happens and how to support it. We talked about accepting the processes that our kids are going through and getting excited and celebrating the fact that challenges are important and with them we grow.

And then lastly, we talked about conscious discipline, why yelling doesn't work and the internal shifts that are needed to truly support your kiddos in the moments where they need teaching. It's not about punishment, it's not even about consequences, it's about teaching, learning and growing together.

Thank you so much for being here. I am excited for you to practice and integrate this new information within your family system and enjoy the extra material that comes with this module. Take care, bye.