MINDSET TRAP PRIMER
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 94.
Hello, my friends. Wow, time goes so fast. We're already at spring break.
I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we were celebrating the new year. Moms of seniors are counting down the days, less than a hundred, until their kids graduate. Some of you might be waiting on college acceptances so your child can make their final decision.
Or maybe your teen knows where they're going to go, and so they've entered this period of senioritis where they can't get motivated to do much of anything. Others of you might have a child who really doesn't know what they're going to do after graduation. No matter what, it's a time of uncertainty.
The future is unknown, but inevitably speeding toward you. Maybe you have a junior and you have that feeling that your kid is up next to bat. You've heard about the successes and disappointments from the parents of kids one year ahead, and you feel a sense of nervous excitement, or maybe dread, about what lies ahead.
Maybe you're nervous about the process, or maybe you just feel a sense of obligation to help your child jump through the hoops of college visits, SAT prep, all of their extracurricular activities, and of course, keeping their grades up. You hear over and over that junior year is really important. Then there's pressure to figure out what your kid's going to do this summer.
Even if you have a kid that's fairly independent, it's hard not to get caught up in wanting to help push, encourage, and support your child to do their absolute best. No matter what age your teen, there is tons to worry about. Marijuana is fully legal in about half of the states, making it increasingly easy for our kids to get their hands on it, even though technically it's illegal for them unless they're 21.
Kids are vaping, of course still drinking, having sex, struggling with their mental health. Some of our kids feel lonely and isolated, or may be surrounded by so-called friends but feeling peer pressure and insecure. Kids can be incredibly mean.
Social media only exacerbates this problem. Each of our kids are going to face their own unique set of challenges, and as a mom, it's painful to come to grips with the reality that there's very little you can do to change any of it. At the same time, we as moms can start to feel somewhat irrelevant.
When our kids need us, it can seem like they really need us. But when they don't, it's like a big part of our lives becomes closed off to us. Do you remember those days when you couldn't even go to the bathroom alone? Well, those days are long gone.
You can find that you spend an increasing amount of time alone, waiting around to feel needed. I have to admit, I've felt this way at times, and it's not like I don't have plenty of my own stuff to do. It's less about staying busy and more, for me, about perceiving that my purpose as a mom is drastically different, and maybe even less important than it used to be.
With more time on our hands and in the face of so much change in our lives, it's hard not to find yourself taking stock. Of course, you think about your kids and what you want for them. You think about what you wish were different for them or with them, and what you might be able to do to help.
But then you also think about yourself. Yourself as someone separate from your kids for the first time, and what's likely to be a long time. What's your purpose? How do you want to be spending your time? What's the quality of your relationships with your partner, your family, and friends? Raising kids has a way of taking up all the space in your mind so that you don't have a whole lot of time to indulge in overthinking.
Well, that's not entirely true. I remember overthinking when the boys were younger, too. Maybe it's just that as they've gotten older and more independent, I found myself with more time on my hands to be able to ruminate in my overthinking.
Can you relate? For my entire life before discovering mindset work, I thought that the way to solve my problems was to change the circumstances of my life so that they aligned better with what I wanted. When I became unhappy in a job, I changed it. I thought the key to releasing my insecurity was to lose weight and exercise.
With boyfriends, I tried to get them to change to be who I wanted them to be, until I became lucky enough to find a man who didn't need to change to make me happy. Then enter motherhood. There have always been parts about motherhood that stressed me out, but every step of the way, I thought that the solution to the pain of parenting was for me to do something to make the situation better.
Whether that was actively trying to get my boys on a nap schedule or being proactive with their homework, getting them to try different activities to see what interests might stick. It's been a hamster wheel of me trying to be the best version of myself so that my boys could be the best version of themselves. Talk about responsibility.
But look, I would do it a million times all over again. They're worth it. I can imagine that you would say the exact same thing about your own children.
All the hard work and the sleepless nights and the worry and frustration, every bit of it is worth it. Particularly if that means that somehow I can ensure that they'll be safe, happy, and successful. I doubt that there will ever be a time when I give up on those goals.
But I have finally reached the point with my ability to mind that my emotional well-being is no longer dependent on my kids or what I do to support them. Now, you might be asking, what does that even mean? How can your emotions not be impacted by your kids? That doesn't seem possible, or maybe even desirable, if you interpret what I'm saying to mean that I don't care anymore. And that is most definitely not what I'm saying.
I still care just as much as I ever have about my boys' safety, happiness, and success. I love these boys with all my heart, and nothing will ever change that. What's changed is my need to change the circumstances of my life just so I can feel better.
There are so many reasons why this is important, but the biggest one, I think, from our perspective as women in the midst of this long transition from mothering our child to slowly letting go of our teens and eventually adult children, what I call the empty nest straddle, the reason it's valuable to no longer need to change the circumstances of your life to feel better is that you, quite frankly, never could do this in the first place. We trick ourselves into thinking that we can, that if we just get that other person to change, for example, then we can feel better. And sometimes that other person does behave the way we want them to for some of the time, but it's never enough to allow us to feel better all of the time.
I could go into so many examples to demonstrate this, but the bottom line is that no matter what the circumstance is, whether we're talking our kids' behavior, our partner's actions, the words your mother-in-law says, the weather, your weight, whatever these facts, at the end of the day, you don't feel a thing about any of it until you have a thought about it. And you might even be with me up until this point, but what you might not be sold on is that you have the ability to be in charge of the way you think about all of these circumstances. I get that we talk about things triggering us, and it feels so true that when these triggering circumstances happen, let's just say your teen says, I hate you, Mom.
I think we'd all agree as moms that we're going to feel something about the fact that our teen has said those words to us. Those feelings may not feel like a choice, but ultimately they are. I do want to honor, though, that we have an instinctive reaction to certain circumstances.
These reactions happen so quickly. I think it's why we're so convinced that we're at the mercy of our circumstances, because we react emotionally in response to circumstances or things that happen to or around us. And one of the reasons that we have these instinctual reactions is that our primitive minds are governed by the motivational triad.
Okay, so this is rooted in evolutionary psychology, and essentially the motivational triad involves three basic drivers of human behavior, that we seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. I've covered this before many times, and it bears repeating, because this is such a powerful aspect of how our minds automatically respond to the world around us, and I don't think we give this enough attention or credit. Without this instinctual motivation, we quite literally would not be alive as a species.
The instinct to keep ourselves safe, to be on the lookout for danger, to seek out pleasure as basic as food, water, and shelter, for our minds to learn and assimilate information quickly so that we can learn how to survive, these are powerful base instincts. But in our lives today, we're not regularly fighting for our survival, and pleasure in every form is readily available to the extreme. But our minds continue to look for danger, and one of the biggest threats they find is the possibility of emotional pain.
Think about this for a moment. Our minds want to avoid emotional pain. We've learned that one of the biggest threats to our happiness and well-being is emotional pain.
Of course we want to continue to avoid physical pain, but I want to invite you consider how much of your mental bandwidth you spend avoiding physical pain as opposed to avoiding emotional pain. Maybe it's because we have a perception that we have more control over our ability to avoid physical pain. We've learned not to touch the hot stove.
We look both ways before we cross the street. We wear seat belts. We do all sorts of things in our daily lives that we've learned or have been taught by our parents not to do or how to do so that we can avoid physical pain.
Of course we can't avoid all physical pain. If we have some kind of medical diagnosis or a fall of some sort, we'll feel physical pain. But it makes sense.
I took a really nasty fall a few weeks ago and I needed stitches in my foot. It hurt so much, but I didn't expect it not to hurt. And I also knew that the pain wouldn't last forever.
I just had to allow the pain. But then there's also physical pain that doesn't go away so easily. But we diagnose the pain and we do what we can to make it better.
In the process of trying to decide how to proceed to feel less physical pain, there might be moments when we feel angry or helpless, but at some point we realize there's no upside to getting angry and judging the pain. The pain just is. And we realize we need to learn how to live with it, even as we do what we can to make it better.
So interesting that we have a completely different experience with emotional pain. It is very hard to allow it in the same way we might be able to allow physical pain. And notice, allowing pain doesn't mean you do nothing.
Think of this in the context of physical pain. Allowing pain means that you do what you can to diagnose or alleviate the pain, but once you've done all you can and you realize that the process of recovery is going to take time, there's nothing left to do but allow the pain. To accept it.
What's different with emotional pain? Well, when we experience emotional pain, we want to fix it. We want it to go away. That makes sense.
Why sit with any kind of pain if there's something you can do to make it go away? So similar to how we fix physical pain, we try to diagnose the problem. So far so good. Strategy is the same.
But with physical pain, we seek expert input. We google symptoms. We try to figure out what's causing the problem.
And the answer is something going on within us. And when we discover what that is, we take whatever steps we can to fix that pain. But how do we typically diagnose emotional pain? My friends, rather than looking within us for the problem, we typically look outside of ourselves.
We look to the behavior of others. We look to things that don't meet our expectations. We look to the uncertainty of the future.
And once we've identified that circumstance outside of ourselves that we believe is the cause of our emotional pain, we take steps to fix that thing. Maybe it's fixing something that's wrong right now. Or it could be avoiding some negative thing that we fear will happen in the future.
We spend so much of our mental energy looking for the cause of our emotional pain outside of us. And here's where we've gone terribly wrong. Because we literally cannot fix the world outside of us enough to avoid all of our emotional pain.
And so we're in a constant state of alert and even anxiety, guarding against that moment when things go off the rails again and the circumstance doesn't align with what we need it to do to feel better in our lives. And just think about the implications of this in the context of our life with teens. Our life in the emptiness straddle.
Our entire life is, in fact, in transition. Our teen is growing up. There are evolving influences in their lives that we can't control.
Our role as a mom is changing. So much is changing. So much out of our control.
Consider how exhausting it is for us, for you, as you try desperately to control your life so you can hold on to some semblance of peace. How's that working out for you, my friend? But there is good news. The emotional pain you're experiencing is actually not being caused by the circumstances outside of you.
This is a mindset shift that is transformative, but I understand if you're skeptical. We've all been so conditioned to believe that the world causes our emotional pain that it's hard to wrap your head around the possibility that you do, in fact, have control over this pain. That pain is being caused by something within you.
What if you were to diagnose what's going on within you, rather than looking out into a world over which you have no control? But my friend, just because the problem, the cause of your emotional pain, is within you does not mean there's something wrong with you. Your mind is working perfectly normally. The problem is that you're not supervising your mind.
Consider what might be possible if you were to spend even a fraction of your mental bandwidth supervising your mind, understanding what's going on within you that's causing your emotional pain, rather than trying to fix the outside world. So where do I start, you might ask? Well, this is the process I teach step by step in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. But you can also start by learning more about the 14 common mindset traps. And I've done a series of podcasts on each of these traps.
And as I was doing this work, I came to see how connected all of these traps are and how often we fall into multiple traps in any given situation. But I've also seen with my clients that we tend to have tendencies to fall into particular sets of mindset traps. And since really getting your head around all 14 mindset traps might feel like a heavy lift, I thought I would segment the traps into a few different categories so that as you explore these traps, you can take a bit of a more focused approach, tackling that set of mindset traps that are a particular challenge to you and your life right now.
So as I said before, the cause of your emotional pain is within you, not outside of you. Let's dig in a little deeper into what I mean by this and how it relates to mindset traps. And let me define a mindset trap first.
This is essentially a counterproductive way of thinking, motivated by our subconscious desire to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. The key phrase here is counterproductive way of thinking. So one can imagine that being motivated to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy is generally a good thing.
The problem is, sometimes it's not. Let's take a really simple example with food. Think about your favorite food, the one that you have a hard time saying no to or limiting yourself to once you start eating it.
So your subconscious brain has learned that this food is a source of concentrated pleasure. You get a big spike of dopamine when you eat your favorite foods, and that dopamine hit is teaching your mind that you want more of that food. But then you eat too much of it and you get a stomach ache, or you eat too much of it over time and you find yourself gaining weight.
So as much as your subconscious mind wants the food, your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that actually supervises and plans, that's focused on what's good for you in the long run rather than the short run, your prefrontal cortex says, actually maybe we shouldn't eat as much of that food. Notice that we're talking about two different parts of your brain in an argument over whether or not to eat this food. So the mindset trap in this case is that your primitive brain believes that more of your favorite food means more pleasure.
You could think of this as a form of emotional reasoning for those of you who are students of the mindset traps. But it would be counterproductive for you to blindly believe your primitive brain. The result would be constant stomach aches and weight gain.
Your prefrontal cortex or your higher brain would see that there are consequences to falling into the trap of just believing that more is better. And so what your prefrontal cortex wants is to have less or just enough so that you don't get sick or gain weight. Your prefrontal cortex wants to supervise your primitive mind, the part that's constantly on the lookout for more pleasure, less pain, and to be as efficient as possible.
So which side of your brain gets to win? This tension between wanting the food and not wanting the food is a classic example of cognitive dissonance. This is when you have two conflicting thoughts or beliefs. And what actually happens inside of us is that we feel tension or discomfort because mentally we see there's an inconsistency between our beliefs or behaviors.
An inconsistency in our actual perception of reality. The implications of this are pretty far-reaching. If you've ever struggled to stop doing something that you don't really want to be doing, this is cognitive dissonance.
For those of you who can't not have that sweet thing after dinner or the snack in the afternoon or that drink at night, you say to yourself in the morning, I'm not going to have it. I want to cut back because I've noticed some negative consequences. I don't want.
But then you find yourself in the moment eating or drinking that thing because your primitive brain wants it. More equals pleasure. And my friend, if you don't build the muscle of supervising your brain, you will give in to the primitive desire every time.
And this is why I often say that this skill of mindset work is transferable to every aspect of our lives because this same framework applies just as much to your life with teens and your spouse and your co-workers and your goals, the way you talk about yourself, those things about your life you want to change. It applies equally in all of these aspects. Wherever in your life you feel stuck, you are in some way experiencing cognitive dissonance.
You want one thing but also want another thing. You have two conflicting beliefs. And until you take responsibility and make a choice, you are going to continue to feel stuck in emotional pain.
Now, I'm going to apply this to an example with our kids in a moment, but I want to underscore one more time how different this explanation of the problem is, why we're feeling stuck in emotional pain, how different the concept of internal cognitive dissonance is from blaming our pain on something outside of us. It's not the chocolate cake's fault that we eat it. It's not the wine's fault that we drink it.
Of course, we can blame the addictive properties of alcohol and sugar, but at the end of the day, we still need to take responsibility for our decision to eat or drink that thing. The conflict and source of our pain and discomfort is inside of us, not outside of us. It's not the circumstances of our life causing this emotional pain.
So what's an example of a mindset trap that leads to cognitive dissonance with our teens? Let's say you want your teen to be happy. Of course, all of us moms want this, but we can't actually feel our teen's happiness. What we do is we observe the way they're living their lives and our minds interpret this.
Either my teen is happy or my teen is not happy. So let's say that your teen has a group of friends and he loves spending time with them. In fact, all he wants to do is spend time with his friends.
It makes him visibly happy, and you love to see this as a mom. But now that your teen is in high school, in addition to wanting him to be happy, you also want him to focus on school, to be able to manage his time so that he can spend time with friends and keep up with his academic responsibilities. But the truth is, your son doesn't like school.
In fact, doing homework and studying for tests does not make him happy at all. So here you are as a mom. You want your son to be happy, and spending time with his friends makes him happy.
But like with the cake or the alcohol, your brain tells you that too much of a good thing has consequences, and you'd like him to do a little bit less of what makes him happy. You feel this tension, this cognitive dissonance of wanting your son to be both happy and responsible. The statement feels like it encapsulates parenting teens perfectly.
You feel this constant tension, this dissonance between wanting them to be both happy and responsible. In fact, our minds tell us that if they aren't responsible now, they'll be unhappy later. And all of this is perfectly normal.
Here's where we get into trouble. When you're not aware that your mind is experiencing this dissonance, you tend to react to your primitive brain's perception of where there's the highest risk or reward. In this case, an example would be that we might react to a thought along the lines of, if he doesn't do schoolwork, he's going to fail his classes.
Or maybe you start to think of your son as an irresponsible kid, and so then you think it's your job to make him responsible. Maybe you blame yourself. Each of these are examples of mindset traps we can fall into if we're not supervising how our primitive brain is interpreting the circumstance in front of us.
Notice how when our primitive brains create these narratives about the problem, and we're not onto ourselves about that, then we feel emotional pain and then take action from these emotions. So for example, if you're in this situation and you think, if my teen doesn't do their homework, they'll fail, you're likely to feel anxious and motivated to help them avoid failure, which involves emotional pain for you and for them. So from that emotion of anxiety that you've created with your thought, you might start nagging.
You get frustrated when they go out. You threaten to ground your teen. When they push back, the situation escalates.
And to be honest, you're probably spending more time focused on your fear of the worst case scenario than on demonstrating any empathy for your teen who's happy with his friends and doesn't like school. In other words, from anxiety and fueled by this mindset trap, in this case of catastrophizing, you are most likely not showing up as the mom you want to be for your teen. And this does not necessarily mean that you just let them hang out with their friends and never set boundaries around the responsibility to their schoolwork.
Here's one alternative. You still see your son spending time with his friends and you still think he should be spending more time on homework. You want him to be happy, but you also want him to be successful.
You can see the cognitive dissonance in your own mind. You might even notice that your primitive mind wants to offer up these thoughts that he's going to fail, that he's irresponsible and you need to fix it, or that all of this is your fault. You see these thoughts and you see them for what they are.
A trap. A set of mindset traps that are counterproductive in terms of creating the emotions you want to be able to show up with your child in the way that you want. So when you're able to see these traps for what they are and manage your mind around them, instead of leading with anxiety, you approach your son with love and curiosity.
You share your observations and concerns and ask for his input. You acknowledge that he loves being with his friends and not so much on spending time on schoolwork. Depending on his age and how you want to parent, you might even set boundaries around the time he can spend with his friends or the amount of time or effort you expect him to put into school.
You would be clear about expectations and consequences and you would be willing to let your teen feel whatever he needed to feel about it. However you choose to parent your teen through the situation, you would lead with love rather than anxiety. Your teen isn't something to be fixed, not a problem to solve.
They are a work in progress and at best we are a guiding influence. We can't control them and we certainly can't get them to be who or what we want them to be just so we can feel peace. All of this is a choice.
And my friend, my job isn't to tell you how to parent your teen or how to show up in your life in any way. My job is to give you the tools to manage your mind so that you are in control of your own decisions about how you show up for your teen and in your own life. So over the next few weeks I'm going to be sharing with you more about four categories of mindset trap types and which mindset traps relate to each of them so that you can more clearly see these patterns in your own mind.
The four types are the worry mindset, the fix-it mindset, the judgment mindset, and the validation seeking mindset. I've created a quiz that asks a series of questions about life with teens and at the end of the quiz your answers are scored into these four categories. These are not meant to be labels.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you score high in the fix-it mindset. All it means is that you have an invitation to explore the mindset traps that relate to this particular mindset type and you can find the quiz on my website www.thesmalljar.com. My friend, cognitive dissonance is a regular part of life. In fact, in our lives with teens I think it's a daily part of life.
There is so much I want for my boys, so much I want in my own life, and the tension I feel on a regular basis between conflicting thoughts and beliefs within my own mind is actually mind-boggling. And without the ability to supervise that part of your mind that wants to default to avoiding pain when there is no danger, or seeking pleasure at all costs, or simplifying life so that you've missed all of the nuances, without the ability to see these mindset traps for what they are, you will stay stuck. And the consequences of being stuck in mindset traps are significant.
It means damaging relationships, keeping you stuck, keeping you from being able to achieve your goals, actually keeping you stuck in emotional pain, the very thing your subconscious mind is desperately trying to avoid. The beauty of this work is that you can learn about these mindset traps and set yourself free. Go check out the quiz, my friends.
https://small-jar.involve.me/mindsettraptypequiz
Until next time. 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.
