Mastering Your Emotional House: Understanding the ’House of WOE’ with the Parent Doctor, Dr. Marissa Caudill
About this episode
Welcome Back No-Problem Parents!
Gain insights into emotional resilience and discover practical tips for parents and children alike.
Dr. Marissa Caudill introduces the concept of the "House of WOE," a metaphorical space representing our internal expectations and the source of negative emotions. She likens life's challenges to earthquakes in this mental house and emphasizes the importance of understanding and remodeling it for emotional well-being.
The House of WOE evolves with age, and parents can use this idea to navigate their children's emotional responses. Dr. Caudill introduces the "Circle of Concern" and the "Circle of Influence," highlighting the power of focusing on controllable elements like actions and thoughts.
The key to emotional mastery, she explains, is practice—being aware of "earthquakes," letting go, and learning from experiences. The episode addresses questions about Dr. Caudill's unique model, the baffling nature of children's reactivity, and the practicality of remodeling the House of WOE on the fly.
So how can we use this idea of the House of WOE to our advantage?
Well, picture a big circle - this is our circle of concern - these are all the things that potentially can cause earthquakes within our house of WOE. Now, within this, picture a smaller circle, our circle of influence - this consists of just what we can control. And what can we control in our life, really? The only things we can really control are actions and thoughts/attitudes. Everything that we worry about in our circle of concern can cause an earthquake in our house of WOE, which leads to pain. But we only continue to suffer if we continue to focus on our circle of concern. If instead, we notice the earthquake, know where it's coming from, and decide to remodel our house of WOE by focusing on our circle of influence and changing our actions and thoughts - by "letting go" of the perceived conflict and accepting what is - at that point, the suffering stops and we are empowered to move on and learn from the experience, and take steps towards a better future.
Learn more about Marissa by clicking one of the links:
www.theparentdoctor.com
https://courses.theparentdoctor.com/discovery-call
Instagram: @the_parent_doctor
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YouTube channle: https://www.youtube.com/@theparentdoctor
Email: admin@theparentdoctor.com
https://linktr.ee/the_parent_doctor
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Full transcript
Hey, welcome back to No Problem Parents. How is the emotional rollercoaster going in your home? Right now with the holidays approaching, there's all kinds of excitement, there's extra activities, lots more hustle and bustle. And I'm just wanting to check in with you to see how are you dealing with all the emotions that are happening in your home, including your own.
Well, my guest today is Dr. Marissa Caudill, and she's gonna introduce the concept of the house of woe. It's an acronym. We're gonna get into all that in the episode, today. She's going to talk about the circle of concern, the circle of influence, and the key to emotional mastery, she explains, is practice. Being aware of the earthquakes, letting go of some of the behaviors and some of the emotions, and then learning from the experiences. So we're going to talk all about this unique model, the baffling nature of our kids' reactivity and their meltdowns, and the practicality of remodeling the house of woe on the fly.
Before we get into the episode today, I want to ask you a quick question. How's your kiddo doing in school? How are their academics coming along? We're a few months into the school year, and I just wonder, is your kiddo struggling? Do you have an unmotivated learner?
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That's learningsuccessacademy.com. I am a parenting coach, parenting strategist, and you are considered the parent doctor. So I'm happy to have you here. We're kind of like-minded in a lot of ways. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, Jackie, for having me. Tell us about the parent doctor and why you went from being a child and adolescent psychologist and adult psychiatrist, right? Yes. You pivoted a few years ago. What caused you to make that shift? Tell us a little bit about your story. Yeah. So I finished my training. I did both an adult residency and child psychiatry residency. So it's actually six years of training after medical school to become a psychiatrist. God bless you. Yeah. And many people don't understand that. They don't understand the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, but it's a long path. So that was in 2013 that I finished everything and started working in private practice, community mental health. Most recently, I was working at a very busy outpatient clinic setting at Kaiser Permanente here in Woodland Hills, California. And that was, I started there 2018. And then as you know,
the pandemic kind of hit and really threw everything for a loop in 2020. So for a couple of years, I was delivering care almost a hundred percent via telehealth. And during that time, teenage mental health, especially really, and kid too, mental health was struggling. We were all struggling. Let's be honest. And here in California, everything was really on lockdown.
All the kids were home. The parents were working from home. It was a challenge. So it was a challenging time and I was definitely busy, but I felt like I wasn't making the big biggest impact that I could make just prescribing medication.
So in my role there as a psychiatrist, they wanted me to do those things that only a psychiatrist can do, which is diagnose and treat with pills, mental illness. And there definitely is real mental illness in the world. And it is very challenging to deal with and to treat. But most of the people, most of the kids and adults who would come to me, thankfully did not have a serious mental illness.
They were just really, really struggling in various ways. And certainly medications can help that, but it's not the only thing that can help that. And I felt frustrated not being able to take care of all the other things that these people needed or would have benefited from in order to be their best selves. So as I stepped away from that role in late May 2022, I started really thinking about how can I have the biggest mental health impact to reduce teen depression and anxiety.
and I feel strongly like you do that empowering parents is the most positive thing we can do as mental health professionals because parents are with their kids all the time you know even if you're the best doctor or therapist in the world you're not going to see that kid for more than an hour a week or so and you can't have that much of an impact but if you can help their parents who are with them day in and day out then you really can you know change the story so that's where the parent doctor came from I really want to pivot and work with parents to reduce teen depression and anxiety. And right now I'm focusing on parents who have kids between the ages of five and 12 to try to be sort of preventative so that those kids hopefully can learn from their parents who are going to learn how to be focused on a direction that matters to them, emotion regulation,
embracing failure and practicing gratitude. And if the parents in working with me can learn those things and teach their kids, I think those kids are really going to be well-prepared and better equipped to handle the stresses of adolescence. Right. And empowering. I love it. Empowering the parents to empower their kids, building confidence in the parents so the parents can transfer the confidence and boost that in the kids. Yep. I'm all about that here as well. So I love that you did that. And I'm finding more and more. I mean, I'm not kidding, Dr. Marissa. I get about two calls a month in the last probably three or four years. So even pre-pandemic, therapists, docs, counselors, speech and language pathologist, like leaving the field, leaving the system.
And, and it just, it's sad in an, and it's almost empowering at the same time because the system is very broken. Yeah. And yet it's also helping a lot of people. Right.
You know, it's almost an oxymoron, I guess, when I even say that. Right. I totally agree. I think it's, it's better that it's there than that.
It's not there. Right. The incentivization, especially with insurance and everything else and the way we measure success is, you know, we're ending up delivering care that really isn't the best possible care. Like we can step, but it really takes a while to step back from that and see that.
At least for me. Yeah. We were talking about that before we recorded that you had you. And for me, it took, it was like three years when I left my 20 year career in the mental health field.
It literally took me about three years to shift out of that system. Yeah. Mindset. But you also did kind of a slow departure, right?
You had like a long- Yeah, you listened to episode three too, didn't you? I did. I listened to that episode and I was like, oh, that's interesting. Because I had to make, I told you my story, but basically I had to make a more abrupt departure, which was really hard.
Because I did love, like you did, I loved the people I worked with. I felt like I was doing something that's really necessary. But I felt like I had something in me that I could, like my purpose was something else, basically. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And it was time, time to shift into pivot today. What I really want to talk about with the parent doctor, you have a, this is like a program. So, you know, since COVID, I think we've heard about courses a lot more than pre COVID and that's obviously because more people are online and, and it's more accessible and it's less risky, you know, to, to get services, virtual services, but you, yours is not just really, it's not really just a course. It's a full program that you're offering to parents to help their kids, again, ages five to 12. Tell us a little bit about that program. Sure. So this program has eight weeks of pre-recorded content from me, and I ran it through a beta tester group this summer and got the feedback that people want short lessons. So I've really strived to make it less than 10 minutes each lesson, have it be really digestible.
And each video is just meant to kind of deliver one point, you know, or one exercise. So you get workbooks and you actually have to do work. This really isn't just a, well, it's understandable, right? We can't become better parents just by hearing what we should say and do. Many people out there telling us, say this, do this, that's all well and good. But the problem is if we are still repeatedly getting reactive and our amygdala takes over, then we can't access what we know.
Like when your fear is driving you or your anxiety or overwhelm is driving you, you can have read all the parenting books in the world and you still and myself included like when I get to that point I still won't say the right thing or later I'll have to come back and apologize to my kids right we're human beings that's how we're wired so I think by teaching parents how to regulate their own emotions so that they can maintain their connection to their best self their most thoughtful brain at all moments which you're helping parents do too then really we can help parents to be able to connect and build trust with their kids. And that's something that I think really by building that emotional bank account, it's a joint bank account, right? You can make contributions and withdrawals and your kids can make contributions and withdrawals. And if you don't have some savings in there before you enter adolescence, you're in trouble. These eight weeks are very structured. And during that time, I have weekly one-on-one calls with people and weekly group coaching on Zoom. And then after that, we transitioned to a Facebook group that's private to continue implementing and learning those things together with ongoing weekly support for the next four months.
So it's a six month experience because I don't really believe that you can make an immediate change in your behavior. It's just not easy for any of us. It takes time and practice. And I want to support people to be successful.
So it's a big commitment of time. It's not cheap, but I really think that it's something that many parents can benefit from. Absolutely. And, you know, when we spend $5 a day on coffee and we say we can't afford to learn how to shift our mindset and become a more confident parent or a stronger leader or advocate for our kids, I throw the BS towel.
Yeah. But I also, for me, and I've been doing this for 10 years now with my parent coaching, I also don't want parents to come to me that aren't really like all in. Yeah. That just kind of want a quick fix to feel good in the moment or whatever.
but there is so much more that parents can be doing with their kids than sending them off to therapy. And I'm not, again, I'm not saying therapy is not good. If your kid's doing well in therapy, they enjoy going. That's great. If they don't, and you have to fight to get them to therapy every week, you might want to try something different. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think oftentimes our kids wish that we could do more. And again, we can't be their clinical therapist, but they really crave our leadership and they crave that. We, I remember when we brought our son, he was having testing anxiety. They said, and I'm like, I think it's dyslexia, but I never diagnosed dyslexia. Right. I wasn't even, I didn't even, I wasn't even a therapist. I wasn't diagnosing anything, but I was just like, I think it's dyslexia. Oh no, no.
They think it's test anxiety. So we bring them, you know, I was well-connected in the therapeutic field and I bring them to somebody I trusted and, you know, said, can you assess them for this? Maybe ADD or anxiety. And she's like, I can't. And so she tested them and she comes back. She's like, well, it could be generalized anxiety disorder, which I don't know, was it 90% of the population has that on any given day. Um, but we left there driving home. My son said, mom, I said, what'd you think? But, and he's like, well, it was, it was okay. She was really nice.
I liked the games we played, you know, as she was doing some of the testing, but he's like, why can't you just help me, mom? You're a counselor. Why can't you just help me, mom? And it was like, because in my mentality, I was like, oh, I can't do that. I can't be his counselor that's separate. He won't be honest with me. He won't share everything with me. He, you know, like I'll be biased or I could do damage or harm. Right. There's no one better to, you know, like you say, we know our kids the best and we know what they need. But I think the hard part is when we're experiencing frustration with our kids, it makes us feel overwhelmed and worried because we think if I can't handle it, then what does that mean? Cause we love them more than anyone. Right. So if your love isn't enough, then, you know, you feel totally like overwhelmed and like a failure and, and that's difficult. So we don't know what we don't know. And we don't know what we don't know. And, you know, there is a wish that you could just bring it to some,
bring your kid to someone when they're struggling and that person will have a magical solution that will make it all better. And that's just not typically the case. And that's what I love about your program is that you're actually helping the parents to kind of deal with and overcome the challenges that they, the triggers, the reactivity, the amygdala being hijacked. I said the amygdala is like the smoke detector of our brain, you know, warning, warning, warning, incoming danger. And you know, it's firing off sometimes a little bit too much. So you're really helping them with all of that. Talk about your four pillars, if you can just run through all of them. And then if we can maybe focus on the emotional regulation one for just a bit. Yeah. So over the last year, I've given a lot of thought about how can I convey and educate parents about what's really most important because so often we get tied up in the minutia of what it is that your kid's doing that you don't like, or that seems like it's the problem. And that's kind of a red herring often. And so the four pillars I've come up with to kind of focus on in our journey as parents are direction. And this is really about yourself. Like what is your purpose in life? And are you tapped into that through your work, through your hobbies? You know, are you enjoying your life? And also the direction that you want to have with your kids? We have such a short time in our whole life to be at home with
our kids. And are we giving as much thought as we could about what do we want this relationship to be? What do we want to accomplish with our kids? What do we want to do with them while they're under our roof? What experiences do we want to have? What do we want to impart to them?
Right. So really being thoughtful about that, because I think, again, like you said, you enter this parenting journey, just kind of haphazardly, you don't give it a lot of thought. I've given so much more effort and thought to my journey to become a doctor than I did to my journey to become a parent. But if I couldn't be a doctor anymore, I would be sad.
I would be somewhat devastated. But if I lost my relationship with my kids, I would be completely devastated. They're so much more important to me than anything else. So I think direction is super important.
And then in my work with teenagers, too, I think as parents, we have to live lives that our kids are going to look up to as lives worth living. And if we're not, like if we're unhappy, if we're struggling, if we're complaining about our jobs, feeling disempowered, that doesn't really inspire our kids to want to grow up and be like us. So the direction part is hard. It's hard work because you're going to have to be honest with yourself and some introspection and judgment about are you in alignment with what your purpose is.
But that's the first pillar. The second one is emotion regulation, which I think is really the meat of the course. The third is embracing failure, which kind of comes to the work of Carol Dweck, the psychologist from Stanford, who's done all that work on mindset. But I think absolutely, if we can learn to teach our kids to celebrate their failures, really and truly celebrate them, which I know this is hard for most parents, right?
Your kid comes home with a failed math test. It's really hard not to have an angry reaction. But if you could imagine having instead a response of like, well, that's great. Like, what are you going to learn from this?
This is a learning opportunity because that's what failure is. It's a learning opportunity and it's only going to hold you back if you let it. So we have to teach our kids to really celebrate failure as stepping stones on the path to their success and not become overwhelmed by it. And then the fourth one is practicing gratitude because I think as families, we're all busy and we know so much about from research, the practice of gratitude on a regular basis has so many wonderful health benefits, psychological benefits, social benefits.
And when we can come up with ways to teach our kids in age appropriate and developmentally appropriate ways, it really bonds us to them. And it really adds to that bank account I was talking about. So those are the pillars. Emotional regulation, I think is something that, I don't know if any of us really learned it or gave it due diligence, I guess, maybe growing up.
I don't, I don't know that our parents did and, and things are really different now than they were when even you and I were, were being raised. And so it's more than just feelings, right? So So describe a little bit about how you teach emotion, the importance of emotional regulation. Yeah, I guess, honestly, I've never thought about it as much as I have in the last year, kind of considering this.
And I've done a ton of reading and come up with some ways that I think will help people to understand these ideas. But basically, like you're saying, we all get better at emotion regulation with age. Our kids do too, right? Our 10-year-old doesn't usually throw the same fit that they did when they were two.
Thank goodness. Right. But we also all probably know people our age or older who still at times fly off the handle or lose their cool. And in our culture, I do think we kind of celebrate that in some ways. Like there are certainly people on the national stage who get where they are because of their lack of emotional regulation. And we kind of applaud it. It's kind of fun to watch people. And we, you know, it's in movies too, right? Like people sing their lines.
but I think it's also important to keep in mind something that we don't see all the time. And that is that a hundred percent emotion regulation is humanly possible and it's possible for all of us. And it's really something that we should aspire to. And so if you're losing your cool and your temper a lot, which a couple of years ago I was, but I've come so far in a short time, I really believe this is something you can teach yourself and practice and get better at. And truly, I think we all should want to do this because it makes your whole life so much better when you have control over your emotions.
And if we can do that as parents, then we also can teach our kids when they're going through that rocky period of development in adolescence, that it is possible, right? Just by being the example, even though your kid may not be experiencing that when they're 15 and it feels like their life is over when their boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them, that's normal for their development. But if you can be the example that has more wisdom and more perspective and is walking that walk, then you can really be inspiring for them.
so I'm really visual I like visual analogies and what I've come up with to kind of explain this idea is that within us all we have an internal house of woe woe being an acronym for our world of expectations right so some of this is conscious expectations of how we want things to be some of this is unconscious but what happens as we go about our days is you know something will come up and it will be in conflict with our house of woe. It's not what we thought was going to happen, right? Whether it's, they don't have almond milk at the Starbucks, you know, it can be something small or it can be, you know, your kid forgot their homework at home and you just drove all the way to school, right? Like whatever it is, something happens. And then you have an earthquake in your house of woe. And so you feel this physically, right? We get a stress response.
We feel it in our bodies. We might clench our hands. We might breathe faster. We might raise our voice. We might clench our shoulders up. So really my work is to teach parents like to practice connecting to those earthquakes. And at first you're going to do it after the fact, right?
You're not going to be able to, in the moment, recognize that you're in an earthquake. You're just going to be reacting like we do. But with practice, hopefully you can then a few minutes later when you do calm down, think, oh yeah, that was one of those earthquakes, wasn't it? And then recognize what was it that I was feeling? What did I think? And for most of us, when you start analyzing this, you realize that we tend to go to a few different emotional homes.
You know, when we get upset, you either get really angry or you get really fearful or really anxious. You know, we tend to go to one of those emotional homes or maybe more than one, but we don't have the whole rainbow of emotions when we get upset. We all have our flavor that we like. And once you know this about yourself, then that's the next step to be able to catch yourself in that moment.
and the better you get at recognizing it, just like work with people who have panic attacks, right. Or anxiety, like the, the more early in the process of that escalation, your emotional escalation, you can turn it around the easier it is to turn it around. And eventually if you can stay in a pretty calm place all the time, you can start practicing sort of really sitting back in what I call conscious awareness, like observing yourself, living your life rather than being in And I use the analogy of like, you know, when you play a video game, there's an avatar and that person is experiencing, you know, whatever arrows being thrown at them and whatever mayhem is happening in the game.
When I play video games, I get really like, oh no, really reactive. When my son who's been playing these for years plays, he's just cool as a cucumber. He has that separate identity as the person playing the game, not the person in the game. And so that is what I'm trying to get parents to experience too, is we can go through our life like the person playing this game, not the one who's the avatar in the game.
I like this. I like this metaphor. This is key. Let's reiterate that though, because I like the way you said that because I wasn't catching on at first with that.
I'm like, yeah, I do that too when I play video games. I'm really reactive, but that makes perfect sense. Yeah. That when the more you get used to something, you can separate yourself from it.
And I teach that a lot. You know, like let's not buy into the same emotion as our kid. Let's not join in on the same emotion when they're flared up. And my 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool.
That's a big part of it is that the responses are more for the parent to not lose their cool, like to remind themselves that I don't have to join in on the same level of emotion. I can be separate from that. But that really takes training, right? Because we have mirror neurons.
And when our kids are in distress, we experience their earthquake in their house of woe will trigger an earthquake in our house of woe if we don't work to prevent that from happening. And the other analogy I give is that our kids' houses of woe, because they're under construction, right? And they're getting sturdier as they get older. But it's kind of like the three little pigs where when they're very young and they're toddlers, they have like this house of woe that's like the house of straw, which will just collapse.
And sometimes, you know, as parents, we don't even know what happened. Why are they having this meltdown? It's completely perplexing, but something happened. You cut the sandwich crust off the wrong way or it was the wrong color t-shirt.
Who knows? But it wasn't what they were expecting. And their earthquake just caused the whole meltdown. And then it will get better.
But it gets better two steps forward, one step back. And the sturdiness of our house of woe depends on our physiology. And I talk about that in the course too, like getting enough sleep and drinking enough water and avoiding substances that mess with our neurotransmitters. Like all those things are important to keep us calm and able to stay focused on that emotion regulation piece.
It's really bold of you to say that a hundred percent emotional regulation is achievable. It is. I mean, I don't think it is for most people, but if you think about people who really, I mean, the human brain is incredible. Have you seen videos of monks who can like raise their body temperature just by meditation?
I mean, I think there really are people who are enlightened and walking around the world. I think as Westerners, we don't really learn about that or see it or celebrate it as much as they do in the East. But what's really changed for me, I've been meditating on some level. Like I read Jon Kabat-Zinn way back in the nineties and I tried to do these things, but what's changed for me now is I realized, I realized there was meditation missing from my life, but I felt like I needed to carve out time to make it happen.
And that's actually false. you can live in a conscious awareness state in a mindful meditative state, even when you're fully awake. And once I realized that I was like, Oh, that's key. Like that's to be able to see your child having a meltdown, feel your own mirror neurons reacting, but as an observer, right.
As the person playing the game, not as the avatar. So as you practice that, that sitting back, just building that space, like not reacting, but just seeing it happen. Like, Oh yeah, this is happening and knowing it's going to be okay. It gives you like the superpower to be able to then come to your kids with love. And that's why I call the course unlocking love because I think as I, when I'm meditating and when I'm building my gratitude practice throughout my day, I'm connecting with kind of an infinite source of love, right? Which you can call it God, you can call it spirit energy, whatever you want to call it. But I do think that this spiritual piece is absolutely key to helping people, helping parents and kids connect with one another.
And I think it's something that in my psychiatric training was completely missing. Like we learned the bio-psycho-social model of patient care and patient assessment, but there's no spiritual in there. And I think that you can't get there without the spiritual. Like you have to have that part.
And we have to be able to see each other for who we really are. a lot of the conflict with parents that I would see would come over how the kid is dressing or what they're eating, what their weight is, you know, whatever. We worry so much about the body and what it's looking like, but that's not who we really are. That's not who I am. That's not who you are. That's not who our kids are. Their spirit is something separate, right? It's their true self. It's separate from that. And so I think when we can be more centered in our true self and see our kids for their true selves, it becomes so much easier also to separate the behavior.
Oh my gosh. That's so, I love that you say that because, you know, for years and years and years, I, as a mental health practitioner and in-home family counselor, we was all behavior mod. Yes. Behavior, behavior, behavior.
That, yeah, that would, for me too, as a psychiatrist, we would do a lot of, you know, for the kids who had the most severe distressing behaviors, you know, you'd be doing applied behavioral analysis kind of treatments and things like that, which there is a, there is a population of people for whom that works, but it's really operant conditioning. You know, it's really just, um, it's getting a result through manipulation, but if you have a child who's neurotypical, who can talk to you, who understands, then you shouldn't need that.
And it's not going to give you the result that you really want. What you really want is to have a kid who sees you for who you really are and loves you for that. Then you see your child for who they really are. And you love them for that without any need for them to be something different.
Right. Right. Yeah. Or a reflection of you in a way that like puts this burden on the kid.
They're not you. They're not. Yeah. And again, if you're getting your validation and your affirmation from your child and the success of your child, then you really are off track. And I would highly encourage parents to check you out at theparentdoctor.com. Yep. If you go to my website and you're interested in the course, you can book a discovery call with me, but I'd want to talk to you first to make sure that it's the right thing for you. And that I feel like I'm a good fit and we'll meet the need that you have, because I don't know that it's right for everyone to take my course at this time. If you're really in crisis, then you might need more local support. And I'm in California. This isn't medical care. This is just education, right? So I need people to be joining me when they have enough support to take care of any emergencies at home. And when hopefully both parents are committed to spending some time over a few months, and I think it's probably the most worthwhile investment you can make, but to really understand yourself so that you can support your kids in the best possible way. But again, we have more control over our behaviors and our thoughts and our actions and our emotions than we think we do. And it's really possible to not just be at the whim of your thoughts and your feelings all the time. There are real mental illnesses,
right? It is possible for someone to really have a much harder time getting to what I'm talking about. I think biologically, when we're talking about the amygdala and that fire alarm, right? I call it basal sympathetic tone. And basically that is kind of, we all, especially in our first year of life, which we usually don't have any memory of, we get programmed to have a certain basal sympathetic tone. We're figuring out, can we trust the world or not trust the world? Are our needs met or are they not met? So you can imagine all the different scenarios that a child can enter the world, right? They might come into a wealthy family that's been waiting for years to have this baby and has everything laid out and has nurses and parents. And you know, that kid's going to be good. Like their sympathetic tone is going to be low because every time they cry, someone's checking on them. Every time they're diverse, dirty, it gets changed. But if you have a child born in,
you know, I'm thinking you see the news right now, like in war turn Gaza, there's moms giving birth. They don't have access to thing. You know, the mother's sympathetic nervous system is on high alert. I don't know what that's going to be for that baby. Right. So, or a kid who has to be given up or their parents die and they're in an orphanage and they're getting physically, maybe the minimum of what they need to grow, but are they getting the contact, the nourishment, the rubs, you know, the love, the words spoken to them, the eye contact that they need? Probably not. So that child's sympathetic tone is going to be higher at baseline. So their whole life is going to be kind of a more uphill battle to get to this place of, you know, being able to sit in conscious awareness. That's much harder for that person than it is for someone whose needs have been met and who hasn't had a really difficult or traumatic life, but it's still possible.
It's just going to be a more baby steps kind of effort. You know, you have to start where you are and be compassionate with yourself and kind of move from there. Yeah. And throughout life, you know, there can be events where you might have had low sympathetic tone and then something happens and now you have higher sympathetic tone.
That's what PTSD is. Or even motherhood. I mean, when you have kids, your sympathetic tone rises. That's why in the postpartum period, there's so much anxiety and depression.
Like we become much more protective of this other life that's out there and fearful of what might happen. And that, I mean, it gets a little better, but I still remember I was not a generally anxious person throughout my life. I remember bringing my son home and our first trip to the pediatrician, I'm in the back seat. My husband and his mom are in the front seat.
And for the first time I started having these intrusive thoughts of like, oh my God, what if we get in a car accident? Like, what if we all die? Like, what's, what if we all die in the baby? So it was just these weird.
And I thought, what is this? Like, what is happening right now? Because those are not thoughts I ever had. I have always felt safe in a car.
I enjoyed driving until then. And even still, when we have all the kids in the car, I just think, oh man, everything that's important to me is right here. And what if something happened? Yeah.
It's strange how our brains work. That same thing happened when we were bringing our son home from the hospital and I'm in the backseat, my husband's driving and I'm like, slow down. He's like, I'm going 25. I was like, so much faster.
And we got to wrap up, but we started going down the attachment stuff and that's, that's my jam. And I like to say to people when they say we don't remember, like, I know what you mean. But for parents out there, we may not have verbal memory at a year old, but the body keeps the score. If you haven't read Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's book, the body is right behind me.
It's like one of my Bibles, you know, my permanent library. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and we do verbally or nonverbally remember our body. Our body does remember some of those things.
And so sometimes it's like, especially if you've adopted a child or have a child in foster care, and you like, you don't know what their experiences were in the first year. It can be very confusing for parents when they're experiencing rejection, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, that's, that's a whole nother topic for a whole nother podcast episode, which, you know, I'll just have to have you back, Dr. It's like, that's easier, easy enough.
Yeah. Okay. So people can get ahold of you by going to the parent doctor.com.
I'm going to have links in the show notes so that there is that discovery call option for parents to reach out to you. Otherwise, you're on Instagram, Facebook. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Yeah, it was great to meet you, too.
And I look forward to staying in contact. All right. Take care, Jackie. All right. That's it for today's episode of the No Problem Parenting podcast.
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Until next time, remember, your confidence comes from embracing both successes and setbacks. So take a deep breath, embrace the chaos, and remember, you got this.
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