WHAT YOU REALLY WANT
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 56.
Hello, friends. If I were to sum up the goal of life coaching in a few simple words, I would say it's to help you get what you really want. That's really it.
Before I discovered life coaching, I thought it was something that people who had no aim in life might need. Honestly, I couldn't imagine actually needing or wanting a life coach. The reason I finally took the leap to get coaching was because I reached a point in my life where I really wanted something and had no idea how to get it.
Now, I have to tell you, I'm not the kind of person who generally doesn't know how to get what she wants. I was raised to believe that hard work and determination could take me far in life. And honestly, that strategy worked really well for me.
I was successful in school, successful in my career path. I've used this formula so many times in my life that it just seemed like a fact that if I wasn't getting what I wanted, I just had to work harder to get it. Unfortunately, the strategy completely fell apart once I had kids.
I have to be honest, I haven't always felt successful as a mom. Have I tried hard? Yes. Have I always tried my best? A hundred percent.
Definitely. Have I fallen apart and screamed and yelled at my kids? Totally. This pattern was similar to just about every other goal I've ever had in my life.
Try hard, try my best, experience failure, repeat until successful. Except in motherhood, my ability to feel successful felt entirely dependent on the moods and actions of my two beautiful sons. In other words, if they were happy and doing what I considered the right things, I got to feel happy and successful.
But then when they weren't happy and doing what I wanted them to do, I'd feel like a total failure. And because I felt so responsible as a mom for my kids' happiness while being in success in life, if I was failing at this, I needed to do everything in my power to fix whatever wasn't working. As I look back on the way I've parented my kids, I've totally applied this work hard, try my best, repeat until successful formula.
What does working hard look like? Over the years, I've done a lot of planning and scheduling and honestly agonizing over how to engage and inspire my boys. I've wanted so much for them. I've wanted them to be happy, successful people.
I've modeled the work hard, try hard framework for them, but I think I've also expected it of them. Trying my best has looked like me trying to approach my boys in the right way so that they could live into everything I've hoped for them. I, like most moms in the world, want the best for my boys.
I want everything for them. I want them to be happy and to feel loved. I want them to have kind friends and supportive relationships.
I want them to be safe and make good choices. I want them to work hard in school to do their best. I want them to be well-rounded and explore all their talents.
I wanted them to go to a great college and go on to find a successful career. I want them to be resilient and be able to handle the inevitable challenges of life. It's funny, everything I want for them, I haven't always been able to give to myself, but somehow I knew for sure that it was my responsibility to make sure my boys had all of these things.
It sounds so reasonable and honestly obvious that we as moms would want our kids to be happy and feel successful, that we would want them to be safe and make good choices. How could we want anything different for them? And for a large part of our kids' lives, we really have been responsible for facilitating this for our kids. Keeping our kids happy and safe felt so much simpler when they were little though.
Some of my clients approach me for coaching because they're struggling with a teen who's depressed or defiant. Let's start with the challenge of a teen who's depressed or struggling with another mental health challenge. When our kids are sick, we take them to a doctor.
So it makes perfect sense that if our child is struggling with their mental health, we would take the step of bringing them to a therapist or a psychiatrist to determine if counseling or even medication might make them feel better. So often moms who come to me have already taken this step and yet it's not working. Kids refuse to take their medication or they lie about taking their medication or moms worry because their child just doesn't seem to be getting any better.
It's such a powerless place to be when we see our child struggling and we've tried everything we can think to do and they're still not better. Needless to say, if a doctor prescribes medication or recommends some kind of therapy to help our child, we want to follow the doctor's guidance. So it can feel incredibly challenging to us when our child refuses to comply.
We end up in this tug of war with our child where we honestly end up feeling like we have to police them into doing what the doctor says. And why wouldn't they, right? If they're struggling and there's a path to help them feel better, why wouldn't they just take the path? It's natural for us to think that our kid is just being defiant or combative on purpose. From our point of view, not following the doctor's orders, particularly when it comes to our child's mental health or health, it's just not an option.
I couldn't honestly imagine getting to a place where I would just give up on trying to support my child and their mental health just because they didn't feel like taking their medication or going to therapy. But here's the problem. What can we honestly do when our almost adult child doesn't comply? No matter how many times we remind or ask nicely or even nag, we can't tie them down and force them to take their medicine or go to counseling.
But in absence of having any real power to get them to comply, we find ourselves in an escalating war with our kids, yelling, threatening. Look, we're frustrated and angry and honestly, incredibly afraid. The consequences of our child not taking care of their health or mental health seem catastrophic.
Our brains unsurprisingly go to the worst case scenario. God forbid, lifelong depression, long-term physical damage, suicide, death. I'm sorry to go there, but honestly, I know.
I know from personal experience, our brains as moms go to the worst case scenario. Honestly, our human brains all do this. We look for danger in an effort to avoid it at all costs and it doesn't get any more dangerous than a serious risk to our child.
Your child may not be struggling with a mental health condition, but you might instead be dealing with their mood swings and general defiance or combativeness. Experts say that it's completely normal for our kids to pull away and test boundaries, that it's part of them figuring out who they are by separating themselves from who we are. But that doesn't make it any less painful if your child says to you, I hate you, or refuses to come out of the room to interact with you.
Think about what's happening when we perceive that our kids are acting out or acting against us. When our kids are being defiant or aggressive with us, refusing to do something, rolling their eyes, ignoring us, yelling at us. When they're exhibiting this kind of behavior, they're reacting to a feeling they're having, possibly anger, frustration, even powerlessness.
Whether we agree with the reason or not, they are reacting to a feeling they're having. So while we may be observing the actions that our kids are taking that stem from their negative emotions, it's helpful to keep in mind that we're actually observing a reaction to those emotions and thoughts about their circumstances that are creating their emotions. And we may not know what all of the layers are for our kids in terms of what they're thinking and how they're feeling.
Nevertheless, it's hard not to take our kids' actions personally. First of all, our kids can make it personal. They're often not shy about telling us that we're wrong or even saying things that we think are pretty mean.
We observe our kids' words and actions and we can't believe that the human who adored us a few short years ago now seems to hate us or maybe to blame us in some way. We can also take our kids' words and actions personally because we really do believe that it's our job to help our kids be respectful adults. And when they're not being respectful, in fact, when they're being the polar opposite of what we consider to be respectful, then we can react in one of two ways.
We feel guilty because we think we've done something wrong. I'll often hear clients say that they should have been more strict when they observe their child being what they consider obnoxiously defiant or disrespectful. As moms, we can blame ourselves and think that if we had only been better at our jobs that our kid wouldn't be behaving this way.
We can also react to our teens' defiant behavior by thinking that our kids are just wrong, that it's their fault, or that there's maybe something wrong with them that they're this way. Notice how in either case, someone is wrong, either us or our kids, and it just feels terrible either way. And what do we do when something is wrong with our kids? Well, we try to fix it.
If we think we're at fault and that we did something wrong, then we feel guilty and beat ourselves up. We can't take back whatever it is that we think we did wrong. For example, we can't turn back the clock and do things over as a strict parent, but we might try to overcorrect by being strict now.
Whether we think we're the one at fault or our kids are to blame, either way, it seems the only solution is to fix our kids, to change their behavior. Ultimately, the impact of all of this is that we're just perpetuating a cycle of tug-of-war. We pull harder to get our kids to move in our direction, to see our point of view, and they pull harder in the other direction.
It's exhausting and frustrating. Now, don't get me wrong, we get to do something when our kids are being defiant or disrespectful. There are actually many strategies that we as moms can pursue when dealing with a defiant, angry, or sad teenager.
As a coach, I strongly believe that each of us has our own values and that we each need to decide for ourselves how to respond and how to set boundaries with our kids based on those values. How strict? What rules you put into place? The consequences you choose to enforce? All of this is up to you. And believe it or not, you have these options no matter how old your child is.
But the problem we as moms often face when implementing these strategies is that we take the action from fear, anger, and frustration rather than love, peace, and confidence. Here's what I mean. When we act out of fear, anger, or frustration, we typically are operating from a mindset that sounds something like this.
If I don't get my child to change, the consequences will be catastrophic, long-term, terrible. That it's a huge problem and I need to fix it. Something's wrong here.
That my kid is wrong and that they need to change. It sounds drastic, but ask yourself honestly. If you're fearful or angry about something your teenager is doing, what is it that needs to change? What are you thinking will be the consequences if that doesn't happen? What's wrong with your child that needs to be fixed? And what are the thoughts that are driving your fear or anger? Now, whatever's coming up for you right now, I'm not saying that you're wrong to be thinking this way.
My point is simply that because you're thinking this way, you're feeling angry and anxious. It makes perfect sense that you do. But just notice how you tend to interact with your child when you're being driven by these emotions and the belief that something needs to change.
Ultimately, it feels like the only way we can actually stop feeling frustrated and scared is if our kid stops doing whatever they're doing or starts doing the thing we really need them to do. So what's the alternative? I mentioned the possibility of acting from love, peace, and confidence. Well, it probably feels like you're acting from love right now.
Really, the main reason why you care so much about all of this is because of how much you love your child. I get it. But how can we possibly act from peace when our kid is acting so terribly? And what would confidence look like here? Let's put a pin on those questions and I'll come back to them.
So up until now, I've been talking about how hard it is when our kids aren't happy. In other words, when they're depressed, sad, angry, or defiant. And no matter the underlying reasons, it can feel impossible to help them actually be happy when we're having such a struggle dealing with their behavior that stems from these emotions.
So I also talked about us wanting our kids to be safe. Another way that our teens seem to act out is in the way they experiment with drugs, alcohol, sex, and any number of other illegal or risky behaviors, or at best, unproductive activities. Depending on our kid, this may feel a bit less personal than when our kids act out against us, implying that somehow their behavior is just their fault and not our fault.
When it comes to drugs, sex, and alcohol, we can intellectually understand that the fact that our kids may want to experiment with these things most likely has nothing to do with us as parents. It could be peer pressure, or maybe the desire to have fun, or escape some negative feeling. Intellectually, we get it.
You know, it's funny, it's possible that our kids are even being more responsible than we were when we were their age. Generally speaking, kids today may be better at identifying designated drivers or wearing condoms. But on the flip side, vaping wasn't around when we were growing up.
And marijuana is actually legal in some states and certainly much easier to obtain. The internet and social media make it so that our kids learn about all of the ways to have a good time and get into trouble at a pretty early age. So maybe it's a blessing that they see the dangers and risks online, but then also they're so much less ignorant than we were.
All of this seems like a blessing and a curse. And actually, we as parents are so much less ignorant than our parents were. And I'm not saying our parents were dumb, or that they didn't suspect that we might have been doing things, but our parents had access to so much less information about where we were and who we were with.
It was so much easier to keep them in the dark. And sometimes I think that was a blessing for them. So bottom line, we worry.
We want to keep our kids safe and healthy, but our kids' priorities in this area are totally different. It's like for them, it's like one, have fun, two, have fun, three, fit in, maybe ten, be safe. But for us, it's like one, be safe, two, don't do it, three, stop doing it, maybe number ten, have fun.
Just completely opposite priorities. And like with the challenge of our teens acting out in anger or not taking actions that will help them feel better or manage their mental health, we can feel powerless against our teens' risky behavior. Again, ignoring it doesn't seem like an option.
But if we've communicated with our teen about the risks and we perceive they aren't listening or experimenting in a way that we believe is a serious problem, again, we find ourselves in this tug of war. We want our kids to stop. Then it can almost seem like they want to do it even more.
Again, enter the anxiety, frustration, and anger. It seems so simple that we want our kids to be happy, safe, and successful. We've talked about the challenges with our kids' moods, mental health, and safety.
But if these two areas are a challenge, then it can seem like getting your kid to take their long-term success seriously feels next to impossible. But what does success look like? Or what do we want it to look like? While our kids are in school, it usually means that we want them to do their best, to live up to their potential. No surprise, it can feel like our kids have a completely different perspective on what they want for their life or how hard they're willing to work for it.
They certainly don't judge how dire the consequences might be if they don't take pre-calc and English class seriously enough. Each of us, every single one of us as moms, want our kids to be happy, safe, and successful. We know on some level that they're the ones who need to own this.
We know we can't make our kids be happy if they're not. We can't force them to be safe if they don't want to be. We can't make them be successful if they don't want to be.
But don't they want those things too? Why is it so hard for them to see that what they're doing isn't going to get them there? That they're seriously jeopardizing their well-being, their health, safety, and future success. But right now, as we operate from a place of anxiety and frustration, what we're doing isn't working. Look, it makes sense.
Of course we want our kids to be happy and feel successful. We want them to be safe and make good choices. But when they don't, we can feel overwhelmed with anxiety and frustration.
This is the point where many women come to me for coaching. They'll often say to me that they want to be able to support their child without feeling so overwhelmed with all these negative emotions. And they can see how the way they themselves are reacting to their anger and frustration and fear is only seeming to create the opposite of what they want.
And in the process, it's also creating a rift between ourselves and our kids as our kids pull away even harder. What often comes up in coaching is that my clients acknowledge that one of the hardest parts about what's happening, what's often underlying a lot of the fear and frustration we're feeling, is that they think that they must be a terrible mom. It's a gut-wrenching feeling because there's really nothing we care more about than our kids.
So the possibility that, or worse, the belief that we are actually not a good mom or that we'll make a terrible mistake in the way we're parenting, it makes all of this feel so heavy. As I think about this even now, I can feel the weight of that pressure. So listen to this logic.
We want our kids to be happy, safe, and successful. For them to make good choices. But then when they're not happy or not making good choices, we feel overwhelmed with anxiety and frustration.
And that often makes us feel out of control and can also lead us to behave in ways that we don't want. Whether that's yelling or losing our minds with our kids or just feeling consumed by negative emotions to the point where we have a hard time functioning. We want our kids to do better so we can feel better.
And we can't feel better unless our kids do better. And the reason all of this is so heavy and that we feel the responsibility of achieving this happiness, safety, and success for our kids is that we want to know that we've done a good job as a mom. Ultimately we want to be happy and successful and we can't unless we achieve that for our kids first.
Think about the powerlessness of this. The only way you can feel happy and successful is if your child is happy, safe, and successful. Only sometimes, a lot of the times, they're not.
And we're realizing that we have almost no power or very little influence to make that happen for them. So our brains go to the worst case scenario. Something terrible is going to happen.
They'll get in an accident, have an overdose, get addicted, get pregnant, fail out of school, not get into the right college, never move out, never self-actualize. We so don't want these things for our children that it's almost like we focus on them more. As if just by thinking of it, there's a high probability that it's true.
But entertain just for a moment that none of it is true. Isn't it funny that we really don't dwell on the possibility of the best case scenario? Of all of the infinite number of outcomes out there, the very best and the worst being among them, we only choose to focus on the bad and almost never the good. It's like we don't want to fool ourselves into thinking the best case might happen because then we might drop the ball in fending off the danger of the worst case.
It's like we want to prepare for that terrible outcome ahead of time. You know, it's funny, when I ask my clients to really consider what they would do if the worst case scenario happened, like what if their child really did fail out of school? What if they didn't want to move out? What if they got addicted? It's almost like once those scenarios become true, we know what to do about them. Kid fails out, we'd work with them to figure out next steps.
Addiction, we'd get them help. It's almost like the gray area where everything is actually okay is the scariest because we don't know how to help. We don't know how to fix it.
So right now in your life with your child, I want to invite you to consider that there may be nothing to fix. I know that you want to argue with me. You want to say that you can't just stand by and do nothing, but that's not what I'm suggesting.
What I want to offer you is that you look at the reality of your teen's life. Look at it honestly, right now. Look at what they're doing, what they're saying, and stop saying to yourself that it shouldn't be happening.
Whatever the actual facts are, those facts are true right now. Maybe your child is depressed. Maybe they are doing drugs.
Maybe they're dating someone you don't like. Maybe they aren't talking to you. Take a breath and acknowledge this is the reality of what's happening right now.
Stop arguing with it and acknowledge it. In doing this, just notice that your brain will want to place blame on yourself, on your child, that one of us is doing it wrong. But notice the judgment and try to drop it for a moment.
There's no need to blame anyone. This is just the reality of what's happening right now. And as you sit with that reality and you let go of the blame, you can entertain curiosity.
Why is my child doing what they're doing? Again, without blame, just curiosity. There's a reason they're doing what they're doing. Can you find it? Is this the best they can do right now? Are they falling prey to peer pressure? Are they in love? Are they just caught up in their own world right now? Consider that there are so many different reasons why our teens are acting the way they are, and the majority of them have absolutely nothing to do with you.
Out of curiosity and even empathy, we open our minds to a whole new set of options in the way we interact with our children. We don't have to give up on our hope of helping them be happy, safe, and successful. We don't have to condone or even accept the reality of what's happening right now.
But when we stop fighting the reality and simply acknowledge this is what's happening, and there's a reason it's happening, without blame, without judgment, my child is doing something I don't want them to do, but they have reasons. I may not like them, but they have reasons. Notice how this opens your mind to the possibility of approaching your child with love and empathy rather than fear and anger.
Love and empathy may still try to influence and change our child's behavior, but notice the same actions, setting boundaries, enforcing consequences, when done out of love rather than fear or anger, produce an entirely different result for you, and hopefully in time also with your child. Because what we really want, the only thing we can really control, is how we show up, how we support and love our children in the best way we can. What we really want is to be a great mom, and that is something we can always control.
I mentioned at the beginning that the goal of life coaching is to help you get what you really want. Could you imagine feeling happy and successful even if your child wasn't yet happy and successful? I know you your child unconditionally, but can you love yourself unconditionally as well?
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.
