Parenting as Love: 12 SECRETS TO A MORE BEAUTIFUL LIFE FOR YOU & YOUR KIDS with Special Guest Dr. Sam Rader

Hey, welcome back. No problem, parents. Today's episode is going to help us teach our kids about self-awareness and self-compassion, which really is key to our parenting. It's not when we discipline our kids, it's not just that we want them to change their behavior because we want them to change their behavior and it's uncomfortable or inconvenient for us. We actually want them to feel good from the inside out. And my guest today is going to tell us all about a model that she developed called Source Code. It fits so well with our three-step no-problem parenting model of seeking first to understand, preparing for the worst, and changing the conversation. And so I'm super excited to introduce you to Dr. Sam Rader. Dr.

Sam is the creator of Source Code, which is a new approach to growth and evolution that identifies how our early childhood experience shapes us and our world and how we can recode ourselves for a healthier, more beautiful life. During her 18 years as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Sam discovered that there are 12 core defense mechanisms that we inherit in early childhood. So these defense mechanisms develop if we don't get what we need at each developmental stage.

She calls these our coping styles. So a big part of Dr. Sam's work is educating parents on the needs of our children at each stage of development. And the good news is that we can reparent our children at any age, regardless of the age of the wounding or the break or the separation.

So the most important part of this is reparenting ourselves with deep self-love and self-compassion. And that, again, fits with becoming the confident leader that I say our kids crave us to be. So I'm just really excited to share this resource with you guys today. Dr. Sam is hosting a mastermind called Parenting as Love, and that starts the end of May and runs through August.

but no worries if you can't make every meeting. There are recorded sessions, but you're also going to learn right alongside with other parents. There's a registration link in the show notes as well. You can just click on the Parenting as Love and get yourself registered.

And also before I introduce our guest today, make sure you're registered for our May 10th roundtable event. We are going to be talking tomorrow all about confidence, self-care, and support for moms. I have five expert panelists that are going to be joining me in this fun conversational discussion about how to take care of yourself, how to boost your confidence, and things you can do that are supporting you in your parenting journey. So make sure you click on the link in the show notes, get registered for the May Roundtable event. These are absolutely complimentary. And if you can't catch the live, that's okay because we are streaming these to Facebook. So follow us at No Problem Parents on Facebook and you can join in the conversation there.

All right, Dr. Sam, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Jackie. I'm so happy to be here and to reach your beautiful audience.

Yeah, so tell us what is Source Code? I'm super intrigued. Yeah, so I was, as you said, a clinical psychologist for 18 years and I had a private practice. And as I was working with all of my clients, I started to notice these patterns where all of them, no matter their gender, their age, their socioeconomic status, their race, how they vote, all of them were talking about the same 12 problems and even using the same language to describe these problems.

And after doing some digging, I sort of discovered that each of these problems were formed in their early childhood, in their first five years of life, when they had a similar experience during a certain stage of development. So for example, you know, there's a stage of development where we're learning about our will, how much we can control, you know, people call it the terrible twos, but it really starts when we're about 10 months old and we sort of have our will formed by age four.

But during that time, we're exploring how far can I push the limits here? What can I control and what can't I control? And during that time, that can go wrong in one of two ways. Either our parents can overly indulge our will, and then we end up being a little bit bratty and entitled and impatient and impulsive, or they can overly frustrate our will. And then we end up becoming passive aggressive and angry and stuck and stubborn. And so those are two of the 12 coping styles that I discovered of when we don't get exactly what we need at a certain phase of development, we adapt by adopting a coping style. So we could have the frustrated coping style. We could have the indulged coping style or 10 other styles at different phases in development.

And my job is to help people identify their coping styles, help people liberate themselves from these lifelong negative patterns and help people parent their children differently so that their children don't inherit these unconscious negative patterns. I call it source code because in our first five years of life, I believe our early experience sort of a code in us that then sort of determines the rest of the way that our story unfolds.

And so if we have a certain coping style, that coping style affects everything that we do. You know, how you do anything is how you do everything. So if you're frustrated, everything in life, it's going to feel stuck. You're never going to get where you want to go in life and everything's going to be a no and everything's going to be resistant. And that's if we live with the frustrated coping style, that's how we feel in all areas of our lives. And what source code does is we go in and we rewrite the code so that instead of being frustrated, you can become in flow.

So there's no resistance. So each coping style has a corresponding antidote or healed position. Give us the two antidotes for the two styles that you. So frustrated, like we said, is the antidote is in flow. We're no longer stuck or resistant.

What does that mean? Like truly mean to be in flow? It means that when there's something that's a no, we actually say no so that we can also know about our yes. So if we're frustrated, we never actually say no directly.

We only say it indirectly through passive aggression. And because our no wasn't going to be heard as a kid, that's our will was frustrated. And so if the no isn't heard, it goes underground and it becomes a passive aggressive no. But when we come out of frustrated, we can finally want what we want in life instead of self-sabotaging.

and we can get what we want in life, get into flow state, say no when we mean no. And that means being able to say yes when we mean yes. And life is no longer this stuck thing. It's this flowy, satisfying thing. It's just really interesting, especially with my attachment background. A family can adopt a baby at birth and that child can really struggle with resistance and rejection of the trust and the love. And it's like, how can that happen when they were adopted right at birth. Well, I know, of course I teach him about all of that, but I mean, maybe some of this is the source code, like you're saying is really ingrained even that early. Yeah.

One of the first coping styles to form is in early newborn infancy. I call it the disconnected coping style. And it's when we don't feel connected to our caregiver that we don't feel understood or mirrored or attuned to as an early newborn. So even if it's just our first few days on earth, we're being passed around between foster parents on our way to our actual parents, that can create a, um, what you're calling attachment and what I call the disconnected coping style that can create a reactive attachment where we don't feel safe in connection.

We don't feel understood. We don't feel like we belong. And then we become disconnected to cope. And the antidote to that would be to become connected.

Um, so in the, I'm teaching a 14 week live zoom course called parenting as love, where I'm going to be teaching parents how to recognize these coping styles in ourselves. And because we all have several of them, right? This isn't like the Enneagram or astrology where you just have one. I had all 12 personally, so we can have tons of them. And so I'm going to be teaching parents one coping style per week, how to recognize it in yourself. Am I disconnected? Am I frustrated?

And if so, if I have this coping style, how did that get formed in my early childhood? And if I have this coping style, how is it affecting my parenting now? What does it do to my kids if I'm frustrated? Or what does it do to my kids if I'm disconnected? And how can I make subtle energetic shifts in the moment to become more connected and to become less resistant so that my children feel safer with me and more aligned with love?

And then also teaching, listen, this is how to not form this exact coping style in your kid. How do you make a kid who's not disconnected? And if you start to see signs of a coping style in your child, you've already accidentally formed that coping style in your child. No problem.

Right. You, you can make subtle energetic shifts in the moment to support them in emerging. So source code is not therapy. This is why I left the field of psychology. It's not about the mind. It's about energy and we can shift everything in the now.

So you can have an entirely different experience of yourself, of the relationship and of the whole world, simply by making a few energetic embodiment shifts in how you're showing up and how you feel and how you're relating with yourself and your children that can completely change the trajectory of their entire lives. I love this so much and as we talked a little bit before recording you know I left my 20-year career as a counselor too because the behavior mod stuff and a lot of the traditional conversational therapy stuff just wasn't fitting with me anymore and part of the problem I think especially with the younger kiddos is they don't know why they misbehave if you've adopted a child if the child's been through some sort of trauma even in biological families and you get through that you move through that, but coming out on the other side, divorce, even when, when parents divorce and kids go through that, they don't always, they can't always verbalize what it is that they're feeling or why they're feeling a certain way. And so I'm really intrigued by this because I think it bypasses that need for verbal understanding or memory of what happened to you, but it's really what's been kind of harbored in your body. Exactly. And that's why so many of the parents I work with say that for them. Source code is like the definitive guidebook for parenting, because when you see your kid acting out in a certain way, there's only 12 ways that they're acting out. And when you've

learned the 12 coping styles and go, oh, right now they're being frustrated or, oh, right now they're acting disconnected. I know what that is. And I know exactly what they need to feel better now. And it's so easy to meet their needs once you know what they are, but no one knows about these subtle developmental needs. No one understands these coping styles. And so when a kid acts out, if we don't have this guidebook, we don't really know why, and we don't really know what to do about it, but it's really, really easy to get back on track. When, if you see them acting out, even though if they don't know why they are, you can know by the way they're acting out what it is, why are they out of alignment and how can I subtly, gently, easily get them back into alignment right now? So this is really cool. This is what you're going to be teaching in that 14 week live Zoom class, Parenting as Love. And so kind of walk us through each week,

you're going to introduce a new coping style and then give us what ideas on how to respond to that. So what we're going to do is I'm going to give a lecture that explains how that coping style gets formed in early development, what it ends up looking like in us as adults and what it looks like if we see it in our kids, then we'll do a Q and A so everyone can ask all their burning questions. And then we're going to go into what I call embodiment practices, which means we're going to work with the energy. So we're going to touch, what does it mean to be frustrated?

What does it feel like in your body? If everything feels stuck and resistant and nothing gets to move or flow. And then we're going to switch our embodiment to find our power, to find our will, because frustrated is a will injury and to aim our will where we want to go instead of aiming our will inward against ourselves and learn what it feels like in the body to feel empowered and to feel more clear and in flow. And so once you feel what it feels like in your body to be in a new energy, we're going to talk about how to do really simple practices that week to practice helping your kids also feel more in flow.

And it's insane. The shifts that happen, the ripple effect. As soon as your kids don't feel frustrated anymore, they don't act out anymore. There's nothing to act out about. They feel in control of their lives. They feel good. They feel empowered. And so none of that, none of those battles of will go on anymore. Once you learn these tricks.

This is so great. I'm so excited that we got connected in step one of my three-step system or program. It's seek first to understand why is my child behaving the way they are? And why am I the parent responding or reacting the way that I am?

And I always say to parents, it's like 90% of the time, the behavior that your kiddo is, is displaying is not the problem, but what do we do? We focus on that behavior and we pull out all these consequences and, you know, things to, to address that behavior. And then that behavior we're feeding that problem. And so it like takes over everything the whole day, the whole week.

And I love, um, with your source code, you're saying that when we see ourselves in our kids, you know, sometimes we're raising kids who remind us of our parents or of ourselves, right? But you're saying source code is a way to say, you know what, the buck stops here. I love that phrase. And you're putting an end to this unconscious generational kind of pain or havoc that's been handed down time and time again, right? That's exactly what source code is. And like you're saying, seek to understand when you try to control the behavior, it's like a game of whack-a-mole.

It'll just pop up over there because what's actually going on is under the surface, there's a pattern that's deeper than the behavior, that the behavior is just one small expression of this underlying pattern. So what source code does is it helps you match a behavior to the underlying pattern so you know exactly how to go deeper, cure the pattern at the source, at the root, and then the behavior doesn't pop up anymore.

You're no longer playing that awful game of whack-a-mole. I also have parents time and time again tell me that learning source code is like having an owner's manual to yourself, but also to your partner, because you finally understand all the ways they're bothering you are just their coping styles. And you finally understand how to talk to them and how to support them so that they're not acting out and being weird either.

It's it's crazy. This is really, really good. And I'm going to encourage all my no problem parents out there listening today. I'm going to have a link in the show notes for you to register for Dr. Sam's Parenting as Love class.

And especially my attachment families, my families that I work with, but feel that disconnect and attachment, but really any family. I'm curious, though, Dr. Sam, with you having the experience as a psychologist for many years, How does this help families whose child might be diagnosed with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder, depression, anxiety? Yeah.

So my system is kind of the next evolution past psychology. So all of the diagnoses that you just named actually have corresponding coping styles. And so instead of looking at the diagnosis, you look at the coping style and you feel it as a root and then they no longer have the diagnosis. So for example, ADHD is actually what I call the frictive coping style and it's a newborn wound and it's just a need for more physical containment.

They just need to be held and squeezed skin on skin more. Oh my gosh. This is so right up my alley. Yeah.

So then the ADD doesn't show up and depression may just be, um, you know, it might be disconnected. It might be deprived. Anxiety might be frictive. It might be, um, constricted, but all of these symptoms are actually just expressions of an underlying coping style that when you resolve the coping style, you no longer have that quote unquote disorder. I don't believe in diagnoses or disorders. And so I can't tell you the amount of adults who I treat who have gone off their ADD medicine. They don't need it anymore because they're not frictive anymore. And they go off their depression medicine because they're not depressed anymore. They go off their anxiety medication because they're not anxious anymore.

None of the, all of these symptoms that they're calling disorders are actually just expressions of an underlying coping style that needs our support. And it's so easy and quick to resolve the coping style. And then the symptoms are just no longer there. Like, you know, OCD, no more.

You know, a man took my 12-week course and he had had lifelong OCD and saw tons of therapists and took tons of medication. And within those 12 weeks of learning about his constricted coping style, the OCD went away like this because it's just an expression of an underlying wound. and the wound is so easy to heal. It's like, it's like instant. And so all of his obsessions and compulsions went away overnight. And that's really the magic and the beauty of source code.

That's a really bold statement. I have for years been saying, since I left my 20 year career in the mental health field, you know, 10 years now with no problem parenting, I have said, I, you know, therapist therapy is good. You know, it has its place and I'm not knocking diagnosis, which I'm not because if people are living with that, I don't want to make them feel like there's something wrong with them. And yet there's always this thing in my mind going, there's something more, there's something else. And I feel the evolution coming. I'm here. I'm here. There's another way.

Yes. It's much deeper. Every we've just been looking at the surface of things like behavior, diagnoses, all of that is just the surface. And what we really need to touch is under the surface.

There's a child specialist named Mary Boyle who said that she believes source code is going to do away with behaviorally based systems of punishment reward for children because she works with developmentally delayed children with speech impediments. And she's switched all of her work to now only doing source code work with the kids. And the kids and the parents are shifting overnight. And they're feeling more love and more safety and more connection with themselves and with each other.

And it's because source code is based in love. It's not based in punishment or reward. It's based in understanding, love, attunement and depth. And that's how you you you heal the problem at the root instead of, again, playing that awful game of whack-a-mole with the symptoms of the problem.

Sometimes I think parents think approaches like this are fluffy and, you know, it means that we're not holding our kids accountable and we're not giving them responsibility and things like that. But it's really the truth of the matter is, is kids won't misbehave when their needs are met and they're feeling secure. 100%. And there's no greater way to hold your child accountable than to talk about what's going on on a deeper level.

You know, like punishing your kid is not holding them accountable. It's missing them entirely. Real accountability comes from connection, communication, and repairing something that needs repair. Talking through what's going on on a deeper level.

It's teaching them right. And sharing with them why they might be having a feeling and why wouldn't we want to educate them rather than be like, do it this way because I'm the leader. And this is, I know this works, you know? And, you know, like you're saying, they do need us to be confident. They do need us to be a leader. They need us to be solid. One of the coping styles in source code is the symbiotic coping style. And that's if we're essentially pushovers that are passive and we let people walk all over us.

if we have the symbiotic coping style, our kids become little tyrants and we don't know how to say no to them. We don't know how to hold a firm unwavering boundary. And then they act out their whole life because they've been indulged by us and unsupported by us. And so it's so important to be solid, which is the antidote to symbiotic in order to be a good parent. It's important to be all of the antidotes in order to be a good parent. And that's what this course is going to be teaching us is how to subtly, quickly, energetically shift in the now to no longer be acting out with our kids so we can put an end to this generational pain.

I mean, the way I see it, we're living in the age of the wounded child. Everybody as an adult is still just a wounded child. And so the infrastructure that we're setting up, the rules we're making, the systems that are supporting us are all made by wounded children. Our leaders are all wounded children.

And so this is our time because we're finally waking up to all these dynamics that if we we reparent ourselves and parent our children differently, this could be the end of the age of the wounded child. And we could actually have true elders who know how to take care of themselves and each other and this planet. And that's really my mission with Source Code. I am super curious how you created and developed and discovered all that. Maybe that's a part two episode, but for now, I just really highly encourage parents to go get registered for your class. The shifts are insane. Parents are interested in checking out that link. Not only can they learn more about the course, but there's also a link within that link to a free masterclass with me. You know, today I talked a little bit about the will injuries of frustrated and indulged.

And in this masterclass, I go into more detail about how those styles get formed and how to resolve them in yourself and in your children. And it's free sign up for that to get a little bit of a taste of the magic of source code. And we also offering a special package where if you buy the class now, you also get a free one-on-one coding session with someone highly trained in source code. So you can bring your personal problems of like, this is what's going on in my family system, help. And so you're going to get that really high touch individual attention.

You're not just going to be in a class. You're also going to have a one-on-one hour long session. Awesome. Thank you so much for that as well. All right. Well, we are going to continue to promote this all the way up to the start date of May 25th for Parenting is Love. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. Thank you, Jackie. It's been a pleasure. All right, that's it for today, parents. Join me next time for more tips, tools, and resources so that you can become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Make sure you register for our May Roundtable event and heck, go into Eventbrite and follow us all year long. Every month we are offering an absolutely complimentary round table event, a discussion on a particular topic. You can find all the details at Hello World and No Problem Parenting in Eventbrite. Thanks so much for listening. And as always, we would be grateful if you left us a review. For now, hugs and high fives, parents. You got this.

Thank you.