MAYBE WE SHOULD BE MAD
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 43.
Hello, my friends. I saw a reel the other day where a man asked someone how they would feel if he gave them a million dollars. The man he was talking to said that would be amazing.
And so the first man said, would there be anything that could bring you down if I gave you a million dollars? And the second man responded, no, it would be an amazing day. So then the first man asked, what if I said I could give you a million dollars, but you wouldn't wake up tomorrow? Would you still want the million dollars? Without hesitation, the second man said, no, definitely not. To confirm, the first man said, so you would rather wake up tomorrow than have a million dollars today? And the man said, yes.
So the first man said, that means every day is worth more than a million dollars to you. Pretty incredible perspective, right? But we don't treat every day like it's worth more than a million dollars, do we? Well, I can't speak for everyone, but that's probably true for most of us. It brings to mind the perspective of some people who've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, who make it their life's work to cherish every single day, going on trips they never went on, tackling their bucket list, wanting to fit in as much living as possible.
It's crazy to think how much we take for granted our lives when we actually don't have any idea how much time any one of us has left. But the reality of our daily lives isn't exactly sexy, is it? We have work, chores, errands, items on our to-do list. Often even the way we spend our free time is fairly mundane, scrolling on social media or watching TV.
Having recently traveled with my family, even the fabulous vacations we plan carry with them fairly tedious parts. Airport security, flight delays, long flights stuffed in economy, lines everywhere, packing, unpacking. It can be fairly easy to think that our lives should be more fun than they are, that we should be living in the moment more.
After all, we hear these inspirational messages about how we should treat every day like it's worth $1 million, but then the reality of the day is just, well, let's just say it doesn't feel like a million dollars. So let's connect this to life as a mom with teens. On the one hand, when we think about our kids, it can create a feeling of true purpose.
Raising these incredible humans has been meaningful work, and the experience has probably given you the gift of feeling the kind of love you haven't experienced in any other relationship before. Loving your own child, that's a powerful emotion. Not to mention the pride of watching them grow into every new stage, the privilege of being a part of the evolution of someone's life.
It's such an incredible gift. The intimate knowledge of this other person from their very first moments in life, from the personality that they began to show even as a baby, to the type of toddler they were, the way they began to show their independence, the way they interacted with other people, all of this, this history we share with our child, that really only we can remember from the very first moments. These memories are precious, and they in themselves are a gift.
But of course, we also know that parenting brings with it a totally unique set of challenges as well. Raising babies and toddlers is physically exhausting, and now the stage of raising teens, it's an emotional roller coaster. Of course, we still feel the love and often the pride and joy of seeing our kids take on new challenges and reach milestones.
But we also feel powerful negative emotions on a fairly regular basis. Anxiety, anger, frustration, sadness, regret. So life offers us this dichotomy, a range of human emotion that encompasses both beautiful positive emotions, as well as painful negative emotions, joy and pain.
If I were to suggest that over the course of our lives, we'll experience about 50% negative and 50% positive emotions, would that still be worth more than a million dollars to you? My guess is you would say yes, of course. But really, when we think about it this way, it's also a choice between living and dying. And we absolutely would never trade our life for a million dollars.
And let's face it, no one's really offering that trade to us. So maybe it's a moot point. So we experience our daily lives.
And notwithstanding the lesson of the $1 million trade not taken, we don't experience our lives as feeling like a million dollars. We experience our lives through a range of emotions, some positive, some painful. And these emotions ebb and flow throughout the course of every single day.
When we experience the positive emotions, it's like we want to hold on to that feeling with every ounce of strength we have. And when we experience the negative emotions, all we want to do is feel better. We want the pain to just go away.
One interesting part of thought work is exploring how each of our thoughts or perceptions of our lives creates our emotional experience. So it stands to reason that if we can just find better thoughts or a happier perspective, then we can feel happy more of the time. I can imagine you know, or have met some of these people, the constant optimistic, those that look on the bright side, the Pollyanna type of person who just doesn't let anything get them down.
Kind of annoying sometimes, right? I can't decide if it's more annoying that they seem to be able to access the kind of constant happiness that doesn't seem available to most of us. Or if it's that we just don't believe that they're really as happy as they pretend to be. Who knows, maybe it's both.
Or maybe it's not about being happy, but about being open to the range of emotions we experience without judgment, without beating ourselves up for feeling bad. I talk a lot about how the way we feel is driven by our perspective, or the story we tell ourselves about what's happening in our life. But I found, and this is certainly an experience of many of my clients, that there are some stories that we just can't change.
It almost feels like the story chose us, and in this way it feels true for us, even if it's just our own personal lens. Here's an example. Let's say our teenager doesn't talk to us.
They stay in their rooms most of the time. When they answer questions, the response might be short. We could even witness an eye roll or hear a sigh when they answer.
So we interpret these actions in a number of ways. We might think they're being rude and disrespectful, and we might then feel angry or annoyed. We could think they just don't like us or want to be around us, and that thought might make us feel hurt, rejected, or sad.
All of it boils down to the perspective that we want or hope our children will act one way, but then they don't. We have certain expectations, and our children don't meet them. Byron Katie, if you know her, would suggest to us that we should love what is.
That our kids shouldn't talk to us because they don't. And the reality of that is perfect. On my better days with my boys, I can get there.
I do recognize that this is the stage they're in right now, and so expecting them to be different is just a recipe for my own misery. Are they being rude, or are they just being in their own world right now? Do they not like me, or do they simply feel so secure in my love, maybe even in their love for me as their mother, that they don't think it requires proof on a regular basis? For them, I'm just mom. I'll always be there.
On the one hand, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that this is just what being a teen looks like, that it's only the reality of our expectations not being met that makes us feel miserable. Kids do what they do. We think they should be doing it differently, and we're wrong.
So we get frustrated, or feel sad, or rejected. Intellectually, you might see the logic in this, but the reality is we feel frustrated and sad, and it's hard to convince ourselves that we're not. It's hard to just change our minds about it.
And actually, I want to explore the possibility that we shouldn't always change our minds to feel better. First, when we feel angry or frustrated, and we think we shouldn't feel this way, then we layer a judgment of ourselves on top of the angry or frustrated feeling. It's almost like we expect ourselves, particularly as moms, to just be better than getting frustrated with our kids.
Maybe we think other moms don't ever feel this way, and so we think we're somehow doing this parenting thing wrong. We could even feel guilty for honestly not liking the experience of being around our own kids, these people who we love more than life itself, but also who don't act like lovable or even likable people sometimes. They can be sullen, self-centered, selfish, moody, disrespectful, messy, demanding, mean.
These aren't words we want to direct at the people we love, and so we blame ourselves for reacting to our perspective. Our kids give us the silent treatment, so we give it right back. They yell, we yell.
We don't mean to let our tempers get the best of us, but it happens. We react, and then we beat ourselves up. All this judgment, it actually makes a terrible situation worse.
Rather than just feeling angry or rejected or whatever emotion tends to come up for you in these situations with your teen, on top of all of those terrible feelings, we feel guilt and shame. So what would happen if we just took away the guilt and shame just for a minute? What if we should feel angry? What if we should feel rejected or sad or frustrated? What if you gave yourself permission to feel these things? And look, I know none of us wants to feel this way when it comes to our kids or really anything else. We wouldn't choose these emotions, but think about what happens when we're fighting so hard not to feel these feelings.
First, we react, and very often the way we react is our attempt at trying to fix the situation by changing our kids' behavior. We think they're disrespectful, so we snap at them to try to get them to show respect. We think they're rejecting us or shutting us out, so we try to fight our way back, get them to open the door to us again.
Our reactions can be our attempt at feeling better by changing our kid, which unfortunately rarely works. We can also feel better by holding it in, telling ourselves that we don't have a right to feel this way, telling ourselves we don't want to react and be out of control, so we bottle it up and eventually get so fed up and just explode. Or we let the emotion eat us up inside.
Bottled up pain just gets bigger. So if we can't change our kids and bottling up our emotions so that we don't have a big negative reaction doesn't work in the long run, so maybe trying to change our minds about the situation could make us feel better. Could we just look at the situation differently? Our teens are just being kids.
I love what is, as Byron Katie would say. Sometimes this works. Sometimes in coaching we find the thought causing our pain and it's almost like the discovery of the thought makes us realize something that was underlying our pain that we didn't even know was there.
The discovery of some of these thoughts can be like dislodging a stone in a wall. All of a sudden a little light gets through and you start to tear down the wall and sometimes it's remarkably easy to let go of patterns or beliefs that you haven't even realized had been holding you back. But there are other times that trying to grasp onto new thoughts just to feel better isn't honest.
Recently while we were away on vacation my boys were doing some things that I had a lot of thoughts about. I'd gone into the trip determined to be in the moment, to appreciate the time we had together and to really try to just let them feel how they wanted to feel and show up how they wanted to show up. I really wanted to love what is.
So each day I really worked on it. I explored my story. I recognized that my hopes and expectations for the trip weren't matching reality.
I took responsibility for my feelings. I wasn't blaming the boys. I knew I was hurt and frustrated because of what I wanted and I tried really hard to convince myself that what I really wanted was for them to be who they are.
But I'm going to be honest I got to the point where it was just too much and I realized I was lying to myself. I was frustrated and hurt and angry and yes it was my story, my perspective that things should be different. But I realized I wasn't willing to give up that story just yet and so I decided to let myself get mad.
Rather than beating myself up for not letting my boys just be themselves, for me not being in the moment with them, cherishing these moments of vacation, rather than actually trying to feel better, I gave myself permission to get mad. And do you know what's interesting? As I opened myself to the anger, as I chose it consciously, because I decided that no I was not loving what is, I was pissed that we were on vacation and the boys weren't talking to me and taking jabs at me. I was over it and I let that be okay.
I didn't need to be better than that. I just needed to be honest with myself. As I chose to feel hurt and angry, I also chose not to react to it or resist it.
I didn't need to yell at anyone but I also didn't need to tell myself I shouldn't be feeling it. I found power and freedom in so fully honoring the way I was feeling. On one of my social media posts I talked about blaming other people for how we feel.
I say in the video that we can feel justified in blaming others, that we find power in knowing it's someone else's fault, that they did something wrong, until the other person doesn't change just because we're right and they're wrong. Someone commented on the post that I obviously had never dealt with a narcissist. I commented back that I wish she was right about that.
But here's one of the lessons dealing with narcissists has taught me. The narcissist behavior, the way they treat others, it can absolutely be shocking, cruel, inhuman, and the people they prey on can be pulled into their web and actually blame themselves for the narcissist behavior. When you finally understand what you're dealing with, when you finally get educated about narcissism, it's natural to want to blame, to even hate the narcissist.
And maybe you should hate the narcissist. The narcissist may have done things and from your perspective those things might be unacceptable, deplorable, unforgivable. Ask yourself do you really want to feel better about the actions of someone who has done things that go against all manner of expectations of decent and kind behavior? I say no.
I think we should be mad. I think we should feel angry. I actually think in dealing with a narcissist who thrives in taking power away from others, I think acknowledging and allowing your anger can be empowering and perhaps even an important aspect of the healing process.
I share this extreme example to say maybe we should allow ourself to feel angry in life. Maybe we should feel sad, rejected, frustrated. So you might be asking yourself well now what? Now that we've given ourselves permission to feel angry or rejected or sad when people in our life don't meet our expectations, the next step is to be clear about why you feel the way you do.
You're not angry because of what the person did specifically. You're angry because you had expectations they would do something different and those expectations weren't met. Now ask yourself are these expectations that I have of this other person reasonable? Every situation is different but I would imagine if you were to go through this exercise you would find that there would be some situations where you would think yes absolutely my expectation is reasonable.
For example you might have an expectation that your partner doesn't cheat on you. That's a reasonable expectation that typically couples agree on ahead of time and when that expectation is violated we're angry. Of course we're angry.
Then there might be other times when we really have to be honest about our expectations. Sometimes our expectations particularly of our kids can be so high and so all-encompassing that it can be difficult for them to meet those expectations all the time. Or we could have expectations that are frankly more about us and what we prefer than about our kids.
My husband would often complain about how his dad would wake him up an hour before school because he hated having the family rushing around in the morning. When we were dating he would often tell me about how unreasonable his dad was and how it became a huge point of contention between the two of them. Wouldn't you know it that as our boys have become teens there have been times when the wake-up time has become a point of contention for him too.
He and I would much rather our boys wake up with time to get ready, have breakfast before they leave for school, have it be a peaceful morning, but time and again at least one of them leaves without having eaten anything because they didn't wake up on time. Sometimes it's hard to let go of these expectations because it just seems like the logical responsible thing to do to wake up with time to get ready. But as I've noticed no matter how many times I knock on the door and remind the boys to get up it doesn't happen.
I've decided that these expectations I have are only making me miserable and not changing anyone's behavior. When it comes down to it only you can determine what reasonable means when it comes to expectations and we get to have expectations. But what I've realized is that we often don't choose our expectations intentionally.
We have all of these unspoken subconscious expectations of others, our kids, our family, our co-workers, our friends. We have expectations and we're constantly evaluating others to determine if they meet them and then we blame them when they don't meet our expectations. What if we get to have expectations and other people also get to not meet them because that's kind of the reality of life, right? We have expectations of other people and let's face it also of life and sometimes it doesn't meet our expectations.
Sometimes we go on vacation and we don't enjoy it. Sometimes our boss doesn't acknowledge our hard work. Sometimes partners cheat.
Kids don't want to talk to us. Every single day we have expectations that aren't met or things happen that we don't want. We try really hard to accomplish something and we fail.
Our kids try to accomplish something and they fail. People treat us in ways we don't want every single day. So let me ask you why shouldn't we feel mad, rejected, disappointed, sad, or frustrated? When you think of it this way, why do we let ourselves get surprised when we feel these things? Why do we actually even make it a problem? I know it's uncomfortable to feel negative emotion but if you really think about it, it's not painful.
It's just a vibration in your body, a tightness in your throat, your chest, a heavy feeling in your belly, throbbing in your temples. You could use a series of words to describe any emotion, positive or negative, just a series of vibrations and yet we're so sure we're not supposed to feel them. Here's the interesting thing.
When you welcome in negative emotions almost like a friend, you stop pushing against them. You stop making them bigger by trying to stuff them back inside or layering on guilt and shame because you're feeling these emotions. Our bodies are designed to feel emotion.
It's how we experience our lives. We of course welcome in the beautiful, powerful, positive feelings but I wonder what would happen if we could do the same thing with our negative emotion. They say pain is a teacher and perhaps the pain can teach us even more about ourselves than love and happiness can.
Welcoming in my pain has helped me understand so much more about who I am, the expectations I have of others, of myself and in understanding this pain, there have been times when I've been able to let it go and there have been times when I have decided I need to hold on to it for a little while and when it comes down to it, no matter how I feel, I still get to choose on purpose how I want to show up. For me, sometimes anger is like the beeping sound in the fridge when the door isn't closed all the way. It's like warning, you're pissed.
Someone hasn't met your expectations. Sometimes I decide it's not a problem and I actually laugh at myself that I thought for a moment someone was going to do something I wanted them to do. Like silly you, you had expectations and they disappointed you again but then there are other times when I decide I am angry because of my expectations and that those expectations were reasonable and then rather than acting from a place of blame, blaming the other person for not meeting my expectations, I'm able to communicate my expectations in a way that's honest, not blaming but making the other person aware these are my expectations.
The other person can decide to meet those expectations or not. They have agency over how they respond but then I get to decide what I want to do from there. We can't change other people but we always get to set boundaries about what's acceptable to us and what is not.
The question always is where do you draw the line? I say start with being honest with yourself. So we're supposed to be angry sometimes, feel rejected, sad and in this contract of a motherhood we signed up for the love and pride and joy and happy memories but it seems we've also signed up for the anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, all of it. Maybe we should be angry.
Life is 50-50. Can you embrace all of it? You might be surprised what life has to teach you if you do.
Until next time friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast please leave a review and check out our coaching program MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think my friend.
