THE PROBLEM WITH “HAPPY THOUGHTS” — WHY REAL PEACE IN PARENTING TEENS STARTS WITH EMOTIONAL HONESTY | EP. 58
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 58.
Hello, my friends. I want to talk about thought swapping. And before I dive in, let me actually explain what this means.
Sometimes when people learn about mindset work, they'll get the impression that it's just about thinking happy thoughts so you can feel better. So in other words, if you feel bad about a situation, just look on the bright side, and then everything will be fine. The problem is, this doesn't work.
How many times has a well-meaning friend or even your husband tried to offer you a different perspective on a problem, and you felt completely frustrated or discounted? Look, if it was so easy to just change our minds, then we'd all be walking around feeling happy all the time, right? But that's just not reality. In fact, the goal of thought work is never to make us blissfully and infinitely happy all the time. If someone could figure out that formula, they would be a very wealthy person.
But the bottom line is that it is the human experience to feel both joy and pain. Look, we will all die. So by default, we will all experience grief at times in our life.
Our bodies will experience pain. There are ebbs and flows in our relationships. There are seasons in our lives.
So it's simply the reality of life that it includes joy and pain. We could also philosophically argue that the reason joy and love are such sweet, profound emotions is because we don't experience them all of the time. That dichotomy of life is part of being human.
When you think about art, forms of human expression, they're often inspired by pain. My boys are musicians, and some of their most compelling work is inspired by the struggles they've had. Art and music speak to us so deeply, not because the messages are foreign to us, but because we can feel them.
Emotions are something we all experience universally. So it's interesting that so many of us feel alone when we experience emotional pain. But again, notice that dichotomy between joy and pain.
I was listening to a podcast where they pointed out that this duality of the emotional experience is actually something we've created language around. Even that word bittersweet encompasses both the blissful joy of love and connection, and also the loss of having to redefine that connection. It's a word that we often associate with this time in our lives as our kids grow up and move on.
Bittersweet. I wonder, would you give up all of the love you've experienced with your child just so you didn't have to experience the pain of letting them go? My guess is your answer would be no. And so we can probably all intellectually agree that in life, we're all going to feel pain sometimes.
And yet we can't help but compare ourselves to the people we see on social media who seem to be doing life better than we are. It's so natural, this compare and despair tendency. And I don't care how successful or beautiful someone is, they can probably find others online who are more successful or more beautiful, or honestly, who just seem to be more happy.
Because look, as much as having more money would be nice, it doesn't guarantee happiness. Beauty fades and is all in the eye of the beholder anyway. Women spend years trying to have the perfect body only to realize that they're just as unhappy skinny as they were in their bigger size.
No matter our circumstances in life, there we are, with our human minds. And the way we perceive our world drives how we feel. So again, you could be the richest person in the world and feel miserable because of how you view your life.
Or you could be living in poverty and be consumed with joy and gratitude. I saw on social media a series of reels of a young woman, a teenager, who was quadriplegic and she was getting ready for prom. She looked beautiful and so happy.
And so I was drawn into the video wanting to learn more about her. I come to find out she was disabled in an accident. Honestly, my first assumption was she must have been born this way because how else would someone have such a positive attitude unless they've never known anything different? Notice that's my lens.
To me, the concept of feeling happy about the circumstance of being paralyzed seems inconceivable. So as I learn more about this young woman, I come to find out while looking at the other post in her feed, she was injured in an accident and she made a conscious choice right at the point of her accident that God had a plan for her and that it was his will that this had happened. She didn't seem to have one ounce of bitterness, not one ounce of self-pity.
I was blown away and it got me thinking about this concept of mindset and how powerful it really is. In this young woman's case, her mindset is fueled by a deep seemingly unflappable faith. Now I've known some religious people in my life and I can't say for sure, but I doubt many of them would have the same positive attitude in the face of this type of tragedy.
So it's not even about faith, although that's certainly one example of how one could have such a strong mindset. My overall point is this is such an incredible example of how our minds create our emotional experience. This young woman's mindset was this was God's plan and she was so committed to that belief that her mind didn't leave room for one ounce of bitterness or self-pity.
Now I feel like I've mastered mindset work on a pretty powerful level and I'm not going to lie, I don't think I could replicate this woman's almost superhuman ability to believe that her accident happened for a reason. Does this mean she hasn't felt emotional pain? I would guess that she has, but it could also be that she considers that emotional pain God's plan too. Examples like this young woman almost make our own challenges in life seem to pale in comparison.
So we can feel a sense of shame that we can't handle our relatively inconsequential problems. It's like on the one hand we have friends or strangers we see on social media and they don't let down the veil to let us in to see whatever challenges they may be going through. So we assume that they must just be a lot happier and more capable of handling the ups and downs of their lives than we are.
Then on the other hand we might know people or see complete strangers who are going through something significant and we say to ourselves there's just no way that I would be able to handle that same situation without completely falling apart. So when I first start working with my clients we start exploring this concept of our thoughts creating our feelings and this concept can be difficult to grasp at first because we've all been raised to believe that other people can hurt our feelings and that circumstances in our life create our anxiety or anger or sadness. This thinking is exactly why so many of us feel so out of control of our emotional life because we literally believe other people and the things outside of us create our emotional reality.
But soon as my clients really begin to grasp how much more power they actually do have to create a new emotional reality with their mind they're tempted to try to just change their minds to feel better. Again this concept of just thinking happier thoughts. But to go back to the example of the quadriplegic woman for most of us in that same situation it would be incredibly hard if not impossible to convince ourselves to believe that the accident was God's plan and feel peace with what had happened.
It's just not reality to try to make ourselves believe that it was meant to be if what we really think is this is a terrible tragedy and my life will never really be the same. So how do we actually do this? What's the process for feeling better if it really is our mind that's creating our emotional pain? Well let's go through an example. Often in this time of our lives with teens and grappling with the empty nest a common emotion we feel is anxiety.
This kind of emotion is often triggered by us thinking about something that we don't want to happen. I can think of so many examples that relate to our kids. Everything from worrying about them getting a speeding ticket or having a fallout with their friends to really big concerns about use of drugs and alcohol, failing out of school, and so many other worst case scenarios that honestly we can entertain on a daily basis.
Our minds are so good at projecting negative outcomes into the future. We'll go from seeing 1D in our kids test to envisioning them failing out of school and never going to college. The anxiety can feel overwhelming at times honestly because the number of negative scary thoughts we have about our kids and their lives can feel overwhelming and hard to sort through.
We can find ourselves going down a rabbit hole about all of the bad things that could happen and our anxiety continues to grow and it's almost like we panic because what we notice is that we feel anxious and we really don't want to feel it. Have you ever been in this place and tried to talk yourself out of feeling anxious to try to feel better? We tell ourselves that whatever we're thinking about isn't rational or that there's something wrong with us that we can't stop thinking about all of this and so honestly it's like we're trying to shame ourselves out of the negative spiral. Let me ask you something.
Can you remember a time when your child was scared when they were little? Think back to how you handled it. Maybe they were afraid there was a monster in a closet or the lightning was really loud. You knew that whatever they were afraid of was likely not a real concern, that there wasn't really anything to be afraid of, but in that moment did you tell your child that there was something wrong with them that they were scared? Did you talk to them as if there was something shameful about thinking there was a boogeyman in the closet? Sure, maybe you went into their room and turned on the light to show them everything was okay, but you didn't say now go to bed and stop being afraid.
I would imagine the energy that you gave them, no matter how irrational the fear they had, you probably made them feel as if it was okay that they were afraid. That there was nothing wrong with them that they were afraid and that you were there to support them until the fear passed. Sit with that for a moment.
No matter how crazy the thought your child had that created their fear, you made your child feel like their fear was a normal reaction and you helped them work through it. You gave your child love in the moment of their fear. How often do you give yourself the same grace when you're feeling anxious? Do you say to yourself it's okay to be afraid, that your fear makes sense and that you've got yourself, that you have your own back as you process the emotion until you feel okay? Do you love yourself through your anxiety? My guess is what many of us do is that we try to shame ourselves out of the feeling.
We try to convince ourselves that whatever we're thinking is stupid or not rational, but then when we can't just let it go, we tell ourselves there's something wrong with us that we keep feeling anxious. Honestly, we create anxiety about our own anxiety. How do you think your child would have reacted when they came into your room in the middle of the night crying because they were afraid of the boogeyman in their closet and you said to them, stop it, there's no boogeyman, go back to bed? And when they didn't feel better, you said, what's wrong with you? Why can't you just let it go? How do you think your child would have reacted? Now notice how you react when you do the same thing to yourself.
So many of my clients don't even recognize how hard they are on themselves. I've done the same thing to myself. We judge ourselves so harshly and expect some kind of superhuman ability to sail through life without anxiety, without disappointment or sadness.
But the reality is we feel these things. And when it comes to our kids, we feel anxiety. We feel frustrated and sad and hurt and all sorts of difficult emotions.
And of course, love and pride and all sorts of beautiful emotions. But when it comes to anxiety, continuing with our example, our first line of attack is to try to show our brains that there's no boogeyman in the closet. Wouldn't it be nice if it were that easy? The problem is the boogeyman we're envisioning, whatever terrible outcome we're afraid might happen in the near or distant future, we have no way of knowing that it will actually be okay.
We have no way to know. So our brains do what brains do, which is that they look for the danger and they fixate on that one possibility, no matter how remote a possibility, no matter how low the likelihood of that worst thing happening. If our brains have latched onto it, it's like the only way we can possibly feel better is if we do everything in our power to try to avert that terrible outcome in the future.
I've done this to myself so many times in the past. And so if what I'm saying speaks to you, I feel you. I've been there.
The scenarios I've been most afraid of happening in my life, particularly related to my kids, I've spent so many hours and days and weeks and months agonizing over those worst case scenarios. It's like if my mind had been writing a book, the terrible story would have been fully fleshed out and ready for publishing. I can't tell you how much pain I experienced living those scenarios, truly living the worst case scenario, having it be my reality in that moment, even when everything was totally okay, or at least nowhere near the worst case I was envisioning.
I remember talking to my mom in one particularly painful chapter of my life, and the fears I were having felt so real to me. The possibilities I was envisioning, it was like, no, the boogeyman really does exist, and he's lurking in my closet. My mom even agreed with me.
She didn't say, look, there's no boogeyman. No joke, I was facing an unimaginable worst case scenario that had way more than a 1% probability of happening, and there was really nothing I could do to stop it. Believe me, I tried, and everything I did made it worse.
I was totally powerless. Maybe you've been in a similar situation, facing something with your teen or in your life, a medical diagnosis, an accident, something simply out of your control, and the anxiety fueled by thoughts about how badly things could go, that anxiety was real. Or maybe you're facing something where something bad hasn't already happened, but you've seen signs that make you incredibly afraid that things are headed down a bad path.
The anxiety is real. And frankly, I don't know how helpful it is to try to talk ourselves out of our fear. Again, if it was as easy as opening the closet and seeing that there's no boogeyman, I'm guessing you would have already done it.
Like that anxiety you feel when you think you've left the burner on or the iron on at home, and you run back to check, and then everything's fine. It's great. In those cases, you've been able to conquer your anxiety by looking in the closet and seeing that there's nothing there.
Everything's okay. Anxiety gone. But when you open the closet and all you see is an uncertain future with an infinite number of possibilities, there are many, an infinite many of outcomes you could envision that you don't want.
And we can't convince ourselves that possibility doesn't exist. And so again, just telling ourselves our fear is irrational doesn't work because it's all possible. One interesting aspect of thinking about future negative outcomes is that whatever the pain we think we'll experience in the future, when we think about all of these possibilities, we actually just bring that pain into our present moment.
How many times have you envisioned a car accident or your plane going down or any terrible thing you really don't want to happen, and you feel in your gut this panic, this punch in your gut, like, oh my god. For a moment, sometimes longer, it's like we experience that pain, that fear, that helplessness, as if that thing were actually happening right then. It's terrible actually that our minds are so good at simulating that pain.
But it's honestly how we've evolved. Our brains look for danger and instinctively will do everything they can to keep us safe. So if that means churning through all of the things you'll say to your teenager to keep them from drinking and driving, or if that means waking up in the middle of the night to try to find a better way to get them to see how important it is, our brains are going to do it.
So all this to say the fear and anxiety is real to us. So the way to relieve that anxiety isn't to tell ourselves there's something wrong with us, or to tell ourselves that the thing we most don't want to happen could never happen, because honestly we don't really believe it. Even if we could agree the likelihood is only one percent, we're still going to fight against that small possibility.
There's nothing wrong with you that you feel anxiety. It's literally part of the human experience. And there are outcomes in our lives that we fear, and we can't convince ourselves otherwise.
To top it all off, there are some things in our lives, many more than we'd like, circumstances that are out of our control. And so while we can do as much as we can to avert disaster, we can't control every aspect of our lives. We can't control other people.
We can't change the past. So many things are out of our control. Let me ask you this, how hard are you fighting against these realities in your own life? How hard are you fighting against or resisting the reality of how you feel? How hard are you trying to convince yourself that you shouldn't feel the way that you do, or that there's something wrong with you that you feel the way that you do? And on top of all of this, how hard are you trying to control those things that you are actually powerless to control, all so that you can avoid feeling more pain? I want to offer that all of this, resisting your emotions, shaming yourself, trying to control everything, this is actually what's creating even more pain for you in your life right now.
I love my clients, and I am so honored to have the chance to work with women to take power back over their emotional life, and recently one of my clients shared this, how sad that I've resisted emotions that make me human and that come from living a full life with absolute ups and downs, with incredible experiences and painful losses, but it is what has made up my life, and with that powerful emotions, good and bad. How sad that I've spent my energy avoiding an entire part of me, because I don't believe I can handle those emotions. What she says is so real, this is everything, and I want to share it with you, because this breakthrough is the key to understanding what holds so many of us back, that we're so afraid of feeling emotional pain, and honestly so convinced that we won't be able to handle that pain, that we create so much unnecessary pain for ourselves right now, and the truth is we always handle our pain, because think about what that even means, handling our pain.
We feel emotion, and we experience it in our bodies, that part is automatic. I think what we often mean when we say we can't handle our pain, is that we worry that we'll shut down or react in ways that we don't want. But honestly, and I really want you to consider this, so what? So what if pain means you need to shut out the world for a while, or to yell, or to cry? Could it be possible that if the worst were to ever happen, that we could approach the situation as if we were a child coming into our room in the middle of the night? And we could just be with ourselves in the pain, and tell ourselves it's okay, I've got you. You're just experiencing fear, and it's okay. You're just experiencing an emotion. There's nothing wrong with you, and I'm here for you. Because at the end of the day, you will always be there for yourself. Always. And so if you can believe that, you will be there with yourself through any pain that you experience in your life, and that you'll get through that experience by putting one foot in front of the other, until you get to the other side of the pain. And this thought extends to our kids too. Whatever you feel might happen to them in their lives. Whatever heartbreak, or disappointment, or failure, whatever lies ahead for them, I have no doubt that you will be there for them too. And you will hold their hand, and get through the experience by putting one foot in front of the other with them, until they, until you both, get to the other side of the pain. This is the human experience.
So instead of trying to convince yourself that you shouldn't be afraid, consider that you will experience fear in your life. And you will face whatever comes by taking things one step at a time. Because the worst thing that you can experience in your life is an emotion. When people die, we feel grief. When scary things happen, we feel fear. When we fail, we feel disappointment. This is the human experience. And we feel these negative emotions because we love so hard. And we try new things, and we go outside of our comfort zone, and we risk failure. We make our lives bigger through these beautiful connections, and experiences.
Would you really want to cut yourself off from love, and from growth, just so you could limit your exposure to emotional pain? I'm guessing you would say no. So here's my invitation, stop telling yourself you shouldn't feel emotional pain. Stop telling yourself there's something wrong with you, that you experienced it. Instead remind yourself this is my normal human experience right now. And to stop telling yourself you can't handle the pain, either the pain you're experiencing right now, or the pain you might experience in the future. You are handling it. You will handle it in the best way you can, by putting one foot in front of the other.
It is possible to get to a place where you know yourself so much, that you understand why you perceive your life in the way that you do. And that is the gateway to changing your mindset, so that you can overcome unnecessary pain. But no matter how much a master of my own mind I become, I still experience emotional pain. But it's pain I choose on purpose. It's pain that I understand and welcome, because it's part of my emotional experience. It's the counterbalance to the deep love I feel in my relationships, to the big goals I set for myself, and the rich life I've created for myself. So I choose all of it. The joy and the pain, the love and the grief, the disappointment and the accomplishment. This is life and all of the parts of it are beautiful, my friends. I invite you to consider that this possibility is available to you too. That you can curate your emotional experience to be powerful and beautiful, and know that you're capable of handling all of it. My program Mom 2.0 can show you how all of this is available for you right now.
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.
