Unlocking the Link Between Unmanaged Stress, Pain and Common Ailments: with Special Guest Tatiana Miller

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Don't make this parenting gig harder than it needs to be. Become a No Problem Parent today. All right, parents. Well, my guest today is going to help us unlock the link between unmanaged stress and childhood pain and ailments. We're going to seek first to understand, which is step one in No Problem Parenting, and get to the root cause of our kiddos' stomach aches, headaches, and pain. Meet Tatiana Miller. She's going to help us shift from surviving to thriving.

She integrates holistic principles for stress management, mental health, and organizational well-being into easy-to-understand and engaging presentations and workshops. She has a radio show called How to Be a Human that airs weekly, and it helps others create the life they desire. Tatiana was named one of the top 10 most inspiring women leaders of 2022 by IRE Publications. Her groundbreaking work has helped integrate Eastern and Western medicine with establishing the nation's first integrative medicine program while she was part of the neurology pain team.

Tatiana's passion is to teach others to cultivate and strengthen the connection between mind, body, and spirit to meet their emotional, physical, and functional needs. I'm super excited to introduce you today. Welcome to the show, Tatiana. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

I'd love to begin by having you tell the listeners your personal story because it's really why you're doing what you're doing now. Exactly. And also, I think, preface it with just for my life in general, because I truly believe that how we are within ourselves, right, what's in what's within us is going to find expression. And this experience that I'm going to share with you definitely is deeply, deeply embedded in my passions and my motivation every day. So I was years ago, I was a mom with two young children and a husband and two dogs and a life like all of us have.

And I had been having some back pain. And like every parent does, we're like, nope, got to get to soccer. Nope, got to get to this. Nope, got to do homework.

Working in a hospital didn't really pay much attention to my own self-care, which is a typical parent thing, right? I was, you know, in a job that I really enjoyed. At this point, I wasn't part of the pain team yet. I was actually working for the well-being program for employee health. So at my fingertips, I had access to many physicians in the hospital, but didn't take time to take care of myself. So I was also teaching yoga. I love yoga. And I was teaching a yoga class. I went to demo a twist.

That's when you like have your hips facing one direction, turn your torso the opposite way. And I felt my right leg come out from under me and I fell on the floor. And I heard this often now working with patients, but you hear people when they have accidents where they just know. Like you hear this often, right?

Your instinct, your intuition will never lie to you. And as soon as I hit the floor, I just knew that I couldn't feel my legs. And I knew exactly where in my back something was completely off. So, of course, people ran over to me and they're like, let's get you up.

And I looked at them and I said, I cannot feel my legs. So off I went to the hospital and I had basically had some pretty serious bone degeneration from my autoimmune disease. and at the time I was 33, I think 33, early 30s, and I was told that, you know, I really had to come to terms. I had four different doctors tell both myself and my husband, we just had to come to terms that I probably wasn't going to be able to walk again. My pain was so intense that my husband would take like a 50 pound, one of those weights that you put on the rack machine, he would put it on my back because it was so painful the pressure from the way it helped relieve the pain it was probably the lowest point in my life as far as feeling hopeless um because i did not sign up to be paralyzed no that's what i kept telling myself like this is not what i want in my life um i have young children my husband didn't sign up for this um there was this guilt and this like sensation of, of, I don't want to live like this. So it gave me a really, really intense look at what hopelessness and depression looks like, but also what it looks like for a parent to have their ability to care for their family taken away. So basically four doctors said, you're going to be paralyzed. You got to come to terms with this. I had lost all of my reflexes on one side of my body. My hand would shake, like I would try to cut. I had a very serious accident trying to

cook because my hand would shake so much. It's because all my nerves were being impinged. So finally, my parents found a doctor in Mexico because I'm from Mexico City. So I flew home.

The doctor was like, I think I can help you. We'll give it a chance, but you have to live here for a while. And at that point, you know, I had one child in elementary school, another kid in preschool. I couldn't walk. I couldn't move. So my husband and my children stayed behind and off I went and the surgery was successful. I had to learn to walk again. But here are the key things from that experience. I, for the first time, realized that no one's going to do it for you.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that if you're not self-reflecting, having self-awareness and in a good place with yourself, there's nothing anybody can say to you. You know, people would say to me, oh, it's OK. You're still a great person. And it wasn't about my self-worth. Right.

It was about my life had been taken away from me. How I identified with living had been taken away from me. So I really had to search deep and use the tools that I used with my clients and patients to say, hey, it's all about mindset. Hey, it's all about emotional intelligence. Hey, it's all about how you're showing up to the situation and utilize the tools that I was telling others to use in the most extreme of circumstances.

But I really learned that prior to that moment in my life, I had never understood that I'm responsible for me and I'm accountable to myself. Right. My husband can't fix how I feel. My husband can't fix what attitude I have.

And prior to that, I had wanted that from others. And so I learned that when you have yourself as your best friend, and that's not being selfish because a lot of parents say, well, my self-care, then that's taking away from my family or my job. And that's selfish. No, no, no.

If you are not OK with yourself and your self-care, maybe you won't become paralyzed, but you will leave pieces of yourself behind that nobody can give back to you. That is such a great message. and I learned that and I had to almost go to nothing right my life taken away from me and have those moments of silence of of pain of having to really respond to my life versus react um because when you can't move you can't run away you know you can't you you you you have to deal And so I started learning how beautiful it is to accept your circumstances, surrender to the outcome and just be in the process, right? Really be present. And I learned that I hadn't been present in my life. I'd been busy. I'd been doing, but I hadn't been present.

And I also learned that my children, my interaction with my children was superficial. It wasn't a deep connection that I then started to cultivate with them. And then, of course, an appreciation for just my body that I could breathe and move and that I really had to dig deep and push myself to get up every morning and learn to walk again. and I was able to take that and then help others right and and tell others my message which is you don't have to survive right no matter your circumstances you can thrive because in those moments when I was alone and I was rehabbing and I was worried about what am I going to do what's life going to be like you know I had to leave my job and that's really scary for a lot of parents right to make choices to leave your income for your health or for your children and and honestly it worked out and it does when you're making choices to nurture yourself, your humanity,

your spirit, or your children, your biggest responsibility, things work out, but we tend to lead our lives out of fear. And that's another lesson that I learned, right? When we make choices out of fear, we tend to be reactive and we tend to make choices that just bring more issues to our life. Yeah. So, so that is my story. And that really motivated me to just try to spread as much light into the world as I can, because in my view, there is more suffering than thriving.

Oh, for sure. I think we do it to ourselves too. Some people even become almost comfortable, uncomfortably comfortable with their suffering. Yeah. So what I've seen and the other gifts that this gave me is that I was able to really understand, right, how patients are feeling when they end up in a hospital or in an ER or with a chronic illness. There's a big difference between somebody saying, oh, yeah, that's hard. And somebody that says, I lived that.

And I and I remember where you are right now. And I can tell you that it's up to you. This is the hard thing with raising children and with pain, right? It's up to you. The outcome is up to you. And when you watch children, teenagers, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of teenagers that were in oncology. And several of them, I watched them all the way to the end of their life. And I had the privilege to see the power of the spirit. And what I mean by that is I watch them enjoy their life, even though their bodies were no longer able to help them live a normal life for a teenager, you know, and I watch both.

I watch people that the last phases of their life were just very full of sorrow and pain and not enjoying. And then I watch the opposite. And those are lessons that I think we can take into our everyday life. Absolutely.

There's this power in emotional intelligence, even learning about like all the emotions that come with something like this. And how do you dig deep and find that resilience or that grit or that will to live on and to endure something like being paralyzed? In anything in life, to endure, you have to trust. And that's a double edged sword because that means you have to accept what is happening.

And I found that through just my belief that we are just a drop of water in an ocean. And and when you understand that. Things happen as they should. Pretty ugly, bad, good.

It makes life a lot more liberating. And I always this is a very extreme example. But another thing that was really valuable to me is that when you accept where you are, you have a lot of choices. So I've watched parents lose their children in ways that you're like, how is that possible?

You know, I'll give you a couple of examples. There's a little boy that was in a doctor's office, like in the waiting room. And you know how waiting rooms have those TVs. He was standing there looking up at the TV, watching whatever was on and the TV fell on top of him and he passed away. There's no rational explanation for that. Right. There's no way to make sense of that. And in those circumstances where we are faced with things like I'm doing yoga now, I'm paralyzed.

Like, how is how do you make sense of that? Right. Or I just lost my child or my child has been doing fine in school. And all of a sudden they're flunking because we'd never noticed they had a learning difference.

Those things that are shocks to your system are meant to rattle you so that you change course. Right. So that you see the opportunity and whatever is coming up for you. Because what I've seen with people is that we tend to repeat these patterns of behavior, of thinking, of choices.

And when we're not on the right path, the universe, God, whatever you believe, has a way of making the soup boil over. And so to me, those are parts of trust, right? I trust that things are falling apart because this is no longer for me, because this is no longer where I need to be in my life, because there's something new that's coming. So in order for new opportunities or new beginnings or children to heal or start to do well in school, we have to clear the other stuff that's taking up our energy, our time, our focus, our attention.

And that only happens, unfortunately, with humans most of the time when we're forced to do it. Because like you said, when we were talking prior to starting, it's like we're used to what we're used to. We know what we know. Yeah.

And it could be, you know, this happens a lot with children. I saw them come in and they'd been having anxiety for a year. Right. And now they have IBS.

And the kid just gets used to this feeling of I can't breathe and my stomach is hurting and I don't want to be here. Whatever the circumstance is going, they just get used to it. even though it's hurting them. And that's where I feel that something greater than us is guiding us into, hey, hey, I gave you chances. I tried to tell you you're not doing it. Boom. I'm going to make it to where you have to course correct. Yeah, that's really important. Sometimes we ignore our, well, I think this is really common in adults, but I also think in kids that they're telling us, they're giving us the signs. They're showing us that they have symptoms of, you know, not feeling well, of being anxious, being depressed, having an allergy of some sort,

and we're not paying attention to what they're saying. And we're maybe kind of shushing it off or, you know, like, oh, you're fine. You know, you just ate too much sugar today or, oh, you're fine. You're, you just had a long week at school. You'll be okay. And we're not really intently paying attention to what it is they're trying to tell us. And oftentimes kids don't know what it is. They're relying on us to help them figure it out. So what are some of the ideas or tips or tools you can give parents listening today and how to be more emotionally intelligent with your child?

Right. So I think back to my story, you cannot have social awareness. In other words, be emotionally intelligent with another human if you don't do three things prior to that, which is create self-awareness, have the commitment to have constant self-reflection, and then take those two things to understand how you're showing up in your life and in your world. And so emotional intelligence starts with you. And then what's inside of you can come out and interact with others and connect with others. And I think parents get too caught up. I see this often. I've done it too caught up in the doing the dishes, doing the laundry, doing the job, taking, driving, picking up and not being with their children. Right. So being a present parent is not just checking off the tasks, right?

Oh, they ate. Oh, they, you know, they have activities. Oh, they're going to school. It's about actively being with your child.

What does that mean? That means that sometimes you have to stop what you're doing and sit on that couch and put your child in your lap and ask them, hey, what's going on in your world? And it's silly to a lot of parents because they're like, oh, well, this is a nine-year-old or a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old that, you know, this isn't real. But you have to understand that for them, that is everything.

That is their world. As silly as it is to you or as non-relevant or non-important, to them at that moment, that is everything. And part of emotional intelligence is being able to actively listen. And that doesn't mean that you're just sitting there going, yeah, I hear your words.

It means that you are a detective, that you are a puzzle maker, right? That you're saying, okay, you are fine, but you're acting out, you're this and you're that, and that you're digging, right? That you're paying attention to the unsaid things, to the things that are inside of your child that it's up to you to pull out and put together like a puzzle. So the stomachache is not about a stomachache, right?

The stomachache is always a psychosomatic symptom of fear. what is where is the fear coming from and then we look at safety right there's physical safety and there's psychological safety so if I'm a child and I'm in an environment where there's a lot of aggression right I'm not going to feel safe and my body has to process that and try to protect me in some way and that's going to be in in a way for me to shield myself right so stomach aches are about protection. They're about rounding in. They're about protecting your core. And so stomach aches often are about some sort of anxiety that comes about from not feeling safe.

And when, you know, we saw that about 85, 86% of patients that are seen in the pain department are there for unresolved stress. And like I said, for most parents, what we think should not stress our child out, it's not us, right? This isn't about you. This is about the reality that your child is perceiving.

And even if they are exaggerating a situation, you have to validate that that is real for them and then guide them into understanding whether the pessimism is guiding them into the downward spiral or the optimism that they had, you know, has taken them into a disappointment and help them live in the real world. So there's something called the pain pleasure scale. And the pain pleasure scale teaches us that physiologically, right, so it all starts in the brain, then goes to the nervous system, then affects the physiology. And what happens in the pain pleasure scale is that we're more apt to understand and give more attention to negative things, fear, frustration, anger, jealousy, because we are wired, right, to survive. So your nervous system and your brain are going to pay more attention to those things, they carry more weight than the things we want, feeling good,

joy, peace, whatever. And what does that mean? That means that it's on you for yourself to say, oh, my pain pleasure scale, right? It's way up here and to find ways to even it out.

And that means that we can't be happy, happy, happy, happy. We can't be sad, sad, sad, sad. we really have to learn and encourage ourselves and our children to be neutral and to feel what we feel and come back to neutral right whether it's a dip down or dip up on the emotional scale just have to teach them hey maybe you're having a hard time I get it right my son was on the couch just last week crying his eyes out because he ran for student council president and I was like I saw him practice his speech the day before. He's a pretty in tune child. So I said, well, what happened? You know what? And he said, I froze. And my friends told me it wasn't long enough.

And I'm just really upset and disappointed in myself. And so I sat with him on the couch and I hugged him and I was like, you know, I said, I saw you practice. You froze up. Your speech wasn't long enough, but you know what you tried and, and it's okay for you to feel disappointed, but can we also access a little bit of feeling like, wow, I was courageous. I went up there, I give a speech in front of a whole bunch of people. I was the only boy in my whole grade that tried, you know, it was all like all other girls. Um, and he said, yeah, I didn't think about that, but I was like, but you will feel sad and disappointed and then you'll be okay. You know?

So like feel it, but don't dwell there. And, and I think that a lot of us don't do that with ourselves. Oh, for sure. There's a disappointment and we're looking at all the negative things and we're not looking at the fact that we tried, we took a risk, we put ourselves out there.

We, you know, any of those kinds of things, we just, we disregard that. And I think the older we get, the more embarrassed we get sometimes too. Now, all of a sudden we're, we're embarrassed or we have imposter syndrome or all of the negative things, you know, growing up start to leak into our mindset. And it's like, that is just crap. Right, right. Exactly. But our children, our children are going to behave based on what we're teaching them. And so if that is what we're modeling for ourselves, then that is what your child is going to do. You know, if your child sees that I gave a speech yesterday at my son's school because I'm the president of the board and we're trying to get more volunteers. So we're seeing this trend of dual working households, which I understand, I totally get, but a disengagement of showing up at the school and being present. Your children learn about community, about socializing, about emotional intelligence, about support systems, about role modeling in the school.

And so if you're just letting the school do it all, there's no way your child is going to get what they need because teachers aren't psychologists. They're not, you know, they're educators and the school's job is not to fulfill your child emotionally, right? The school's job is to teach your child to write, read, and do math. They spend so much time there that then it becomes on us to create a community where there is more than that. I think that that's where our accountability and responsibility as parents comes in to see what are we missing if my child is having issues or if my child doesn't want to go to school or if my child is having stomach aches or headaches, or if my child is getting bullied. I think this is a real problem right now with all the aggression that we're having and violence, because again, children are seeing that, right?

So if I have a parent that is acting that way at home, yeah, I'm going to go to school and act that way. And that's all the child knows. And it's not that the bully is bad. It's that they don't know better. Yeah. I always say bullies are the ones that need the most hugs. When you don't feel good about yourself, you want others to hurt or to feel as bad as you do. And, and so that that's, that's typically the bully. And the inclination is that we push the bully away and we nurture the victim, which of course we need to nurture the victim. We also need to nurture the bully.

So that's a whole nother podcast episode. What are some of the other reasons that, you know, a lot of times when our kids are struggling, they are having stomach aches, maybe they're having headaches, migraines, sleep issues. What are some of those common things that you have seen on the, as part of the pain team, common reasons for kids to have those, those types of symptoms. I want to, I want to start explaining this just for parents to know, we technically have three brains in our body, right? So there's the brain that we all relate to. There's a whole wiring in your heart that acts as a brain, and there's a whole wiring in your gut that acts as a brain.

So anytime we see a shift from ease to unease, which is disease, which is a headache, any symptom, there is messages that come from our brains, our nervous system to our body to say we're under threat. The brains in your body do not know the difference between I just got in a car wreck or I'm driving in my car worried about getting in a car wreck. It thinks that something is wrong and it needs to protect you. So depending on the signals that you're sending in your body, which start with your thoughts, then lead to some sort of sensation, emotion, feeling that then triggers another thought and that becomes a cycle that is going to affect how your body feels.

And it typically starts with a reoccurring thought that a child is having. I'm not good at school. I can't keep up with the work. I'm just giving an example.

I can't keep up with the work. I don't feel heard when I ask for help. I'm embarrassed, right? So I'm just giving an example of one child.

This is really typical, right, for children that are not quite where they need to be in school or can't keep up or have undiagnosed learning differences. And what will happen with those children is that they'll start to get stomach aches. This is very typical with them before the class where they're struggling. And so that is their body's way of running, right, of flight.

Of protecting. Yeah, of protecting them, protecting them because children know, but they can't decipher or rationalize, right? children know what they're feeling and what they're perceived they might not know what it's called they just know something's not right and i'm not safe um headaches typically stem from headaches typically start with your middle school or high school or student and they come from inflammation in the brain and why does inflammation the brain happen with psychosomatic stuff, it happens when our internal resources cannot meet our external demands, right? So that is a crisis. When our internal resources cannot deal with what's being thrown at us, our brain starts to overwork, right? It's like any other organ in the body, which creates swelling.

A big, big, big cause of this is overexposure to technology. So the biggest cases that I saw of teenagers were self-worth, insecurities, comparison. As a result of social media, these kids are staying up till 1, 2, 3 in the morning on social media, not understanding that again that is not reality right so the pain pleasure scale goes into pain because i'm not good enough i don't have enough likes i can't keep up blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and it's an overstimulation of the brain so inflammation comes from overstimulation that is very very magnified by exposure to screens and it tends to all be rooted in I'm not good enough, all of these self-worth things. So headaches come from typically that stomach aches come from fear. And then there's aches and pains, right? So like,

low back pain, pain in the bones, things like that tend to come from feeling like you can't keep up with the demands of life. It also is very tied to the food that our children are eating, which isn't a physiological issue. It's a consumption issue, meaning if I'm a child that is having a hard time in school and I come home and I have sugar and red dyes, of course, I'm going to have stomach aches and headaches. You know, I'm trying to nurture myself through eating for things that I should be getting emotionally.

Yeah, exactly. And I work a lot with kids who have had breaks in attachment in their early, you know, the first three years of life due to medical pain, abuse, neglect, separation from their primary caregiver. And as these kiddos grow, you see parents start to see this as infants already, but even as toddlers, that's the terrible twos times two or four or six. It's the, you know, I, I do well in school as in elementary.

I do well in school. My teachers love me. Everybody says I'm so great, but at home, I'm rejecting my parents. I'm not listening. I'm disrespectful. I'm throwing tantrums or rages for two hours at a time. You know, we see things like that. They're trying to fill a void.

Yes. Yeah. Behaviors they don't understand because they were so little, right? When, when it happened that, I mean, I see this in adults, I see this in corporate consulting, right? With, with executives that are like, you know, have these patterns with their teams or their employees that, you know, come from, oh, my mom went to a psych ward when I was six. Like, I had that the other day, you know, or at this other one that's an owner of a big business.

And he's like, I keep having these issues with my employees and, you know, micromanaging, I'm too controlling. And it all stemmed from the fact that his dad was never around because he was in the military and he was always seeking that control, right? That sense of like, I, I, I know when somebody is going to be there for me, this is what I can rely on. So we micromanage because we think, well, if I can control you, then you won't leave me.

You'll show up for me. Right. And then there's some worth and value to that. Right.

And when you're not feeling filled up emotionally and you're not getting that connection, that sugar craving is like 10 times what it normally would be for, for a kiddo. So then there's when we are consuming sugar, we are also causing the brain to release feel good chemicals. And that becomes an addiction, which is another reason why I think we really need to start paying more attention to our youth. Not only like your personal children, but all children, because our children are addicts.

I know that's hard to hear, but it is a very real reality. So the United States is the biggest consumer in sugar in the world. It has the highest rates of childhood obesity. And this is our fault, right?

Not the child's fault. Right. And so we all have to work together to build these communities where our children have the resources, the education, and parents have the awareness because that is going to affect all of our children. Yes. Anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are through the roof. Even though we have all of the modalities in the world to help people, I will say it, I say it time and time again, it starts with you, the parent. Absolutely. That emotional connection has to be there. And instead of just appeasing our kids and giving them what they want, what we think they need, we have to start with connection, building trust, have to be real with your children.

When we try to social engineer, shelter, you know, false praise, make them feel like they're amazing. And all of our children, every child I've ever met is amazing, but that doesn't translate into real world scenarios, right? So the world does not revolve around each child. And unfortunately, we are making them believe that so that when they then have to go out into the real world, they feel betrayed.

They feel like they can't function. They feel like they're not equipped. And the reality is because they're not. Right, right.

We've just over-promised and under-delivered for them. And we've praised and praised and praised without giving them, like I say in step three of No Problem Parenting, conditional praise, factual praise, something they could believe in. We're just convincing our kids and boosting them up when they don't even believe they're that good themselves. So what is it about us that we're wanting to make our children feel better than they feel about themselves?

We are doing them a disservice. Yeah, I think it also comes from what we spoke about previously, which is the lack of presence. So if I'm working all the time, doing things all the time, and my children are a secondary thing, they're not a priority, then I am going to let them have the sugar because I'm like, oh, but they deserve to feel good because I want to feel good, right? or you are going to let them stay on electronics as a babysitter because you're like well that makes them happy so if they're happy and they're full and and they're asking me for more again because it's an addiction then I must be doing an okay job or a good job and the metrics for if your children are okay are not are they on iPads or are they eating sugar right it's can I solve a problem? Can your child solve a problem without you helicoptering them, right? That's what prevents the stomachache and the headache. Because remember, all those things are protective because I feel like I can't deal. Yes, exactly. The other thing I wanted to bring up too that I've seen too is parents trying to dictate for their children how they should live, right? There comes a certain age where your child is who they are and that comes around 12 13 you've either done it or you have you've done the work or you haven't right and you cannot impose on your child what you believe is for your child right so i see this a lot with private school parents where they're like

my child has to go to an ivy league school and they have to be good at math and science and the kids in the emergency room or in the hospital like i would see going I suck at math I love painting painting makes me feel alive you know and the parents going nope nope nope nope not gonna not nope nope nope and the kid is gonna flunk right or they're gonna start acting out because the parent I call it a painting right so like our kids are born and their canvases like they as a human being are a canvas and there's parents that paint the canvas for their children and the kid's gonna buck right like we say in Texas they're gonna buck or you help guide your child, right?

Your child's drawing the lines with the pencils and you're like, yeah, but what if you also put the sun, you know, or, and you can guide your children, but your children come wired with personality traits, gifts, interests that maybe come out of nowhere, you know, that have nothing to do with you or your family. And that's part of creating safety for your child that they trust that what's, what's part of them, what's in them is okay. Yeah, exactly.

Before we wrap up, I do want to talk about, you truly believe that pain, whether it's emotional pain or physical pain first needs to be acknowledged and honored, right? Respected and felt not pushed away to the curb. Like, Oh, it's just a tummy ache or it's just a migraine. and and you also believe that we shouldn't let pain dictate our lives so there are people that are living in chronic pain and there are solutions for them um and so i love that because at no problem parenting it's not like we're saying that there's no problems in parenting it's actually the opposite it's saying that you we will guarantee you're going to have problems but it's how we deal with and overcome those problems problems are meant to be dealt with and overcome and so um we don't let pain dictate our lives any more than we let current problems, behavior problems,

or whatever's going on with our kids dictate our, our life. In children, pain most of the time, right? 80, 80, about 85% of the time stems from undealt stressors in the child's life. And that is why when a child starts to say, I don't want to, I don't want to. So I get this a lot with sports, right? The child is being pressured because the dad is the coach or the dad was a college whatever. And so now the kid has to do it. The kid will throw up. This is a really common thing. Before a game, the children are throwing up, right? And the parents are like, you're not sick. And the kid's like, yeah, I'm not sick. The body, right, is saying, I cannot handle the nerves, right?

So the gut, the brain gut is like, we got to help. We got to help. This is too much heat in the body. It's too much energy and out it comes, right?

What we should do is say, hey, Johnny, you're going to have a game tomorrow. I understand that it's okay to be nervous. Are you feeling nervous? Yes, dad, I'm feeling nervous.

Okay, so what is it that makes you nervous? Is it that you think you're not good enough? Is it that you're worried about what your teammates are going to say? Is it that you feel a lot of pressure for me because I'm the coach?

And then you listen, right? You dig. You listen for what it is. And then the child will tell you because I have them tell me all the time.

Well, I'm nervous because I don't want to lose. I'm like, oh, so you're nervous because of what you're telling yourself? Yes. Why are you scared to lose?

well I'm scared to lose because I don't want you to be mad at me oh I'm not going to be mad at you if we lose right and you start I call it a it's a tangled ball right with the kid feels in their stomach and their brain and their heart and you start to untangle it and you find that string and you start to pull it right and then you give them resources and tools to deal with it okay so what are we going to do tomorrow to help you with your nerves we know you're going to feel nervous So what are we going to do for it? Well, I don't know. So I will get I will help them find tools that resonate with that child.

We find the issue. We validated by telling them that we get it. It's OK. And we understand. And that way, the child now knows, hey, I'm going to identify what I'm feeling so I can talk it out with my parents.

Right. So now we're creating self-awareness, creating a support system, and then we figure out what tools to use. the other thing is that as a parent my children often ask me mom what's wrong right because we I've talked to them about this stuff their whole life and I'm like no I'm fine no mom something's wrong okay fine I'm nervous because I'm about to give a speech to a thousand people you know like I told my mom last night oh mom yeah that's scary so what do you do and I was like well I have my playlist I do my breathing exercises and you know I came home last night and my son's like, how did it go? And I said, well, I didn't have time to do this because somebody was talking to me. So I was, you know, a little bit more nervous and I just, I'm honest with them. And I tell them, you know, I'm just as nervous as you are. I'm just as this as you are. So that's how you create validation by letting them know that these feelings are normal and these things are real, you know, by being vulnerable in front of your children, because that's how children learn, right, that that's okay. Absolutely. Well, I think we could have done four different podcast episodes with this one conversation because there's so many different topics. So I'm going to encourage parents listening today to go to your website,

mentalhealthsolutionsonline.com to learn more information about the services, the coaching, the mentoring, consulting that you do, public speaking. You just, you offer so much, Tatiana, and your wealth of information, both with personal experience and also professional experience and knowledge. And then I also want to encourage parents to go listen to, tune into your radio show, How to Be a Human, or find it on your favorite podcast app.

It's basically all about the things that I see, having worked clinically, having done consulting that are like the missing ingredients for us to thrive. You know, emotional intelligence is a big factor um just things things that that i wish we had a manual you know right like we have manuals to teach us to read right and um i i am very passionate and feel like these are things we should be teaching in educational systems right emotional intelligence um how to deal with stress conflict girls it should be a class that children take just like they take math reading and writing yeah absolutely you're just a wealth of knowledge thanks for taking the time to be with me today and coming on the show sure thank you it was wonderful to connect all right parents that's it for today make sure you head over to the website no problem parents.com sign up to get our emails we're going to be giving away tips tools techniques and resources updates on podcast episodes roundtable events and more check out no problem parents.com for now hugs and high fives. You got this.