Hilaria

Published Jan 30, 2023, 3:35 AM

Hilaria shares her emotions and gratitude for all the support her family has received. Dr. Hillary Goldsher joins Hilaria and Michelle to discuss parenting through challenging times and how to take care of not only your kids but yourself during them. 

Which is anonymous, with the Laria Baldwin and Michelle Campbell Mason and I heart radio podcast. It's Hilaria. Hi, guys, It's been an emotional time for my family and I do so want to express to you how grateful I am for your support and your kindness and your reason. Quite honestly, I think without it we would crumble. So thank you so much for being our rock right now because I don't feel so strong. Kids are sponges and all certain conversations are not always age appropriate. We cannot deny that they don't feel the energy and pick up on certain things in the family and at home. Also, parenting little people can be stressful regardless of added stress. So today we are speaking with Dr Hillary Culture about how to take care of our children and ourselves when times are hard. This is which is anonymous. I'm Michelle Campbell Mason and I'm LARRYA. Baldwin and we'd like to welcome Dr Hillary gold Scher. Hi. My name is Dr Hillary Culture. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills and I specialize in parenting as well as trauma, depression and anxiety. Welcome. Thank you for coming and talking with us. I feel like so many of us have a certain amount of gasoline and our bodies every single day, regardless of added stress in our life. What would you say is a a tool for maintaining our energy every single day? This is the ubiquitous question that we ask as as parents and certainly as as moms constantly. But I think we have to get past this to like cliche of it, like how do we self care and really dig into what that looks like on a day to day basis. The notion of like moms have to take care of themselves, the mental low, the logistics, the sort of primitive edict to take care of littles is all there, and we can only do it if we're regulated ourselves. We can only regulate our children if we regulate ourselves. And I'm always careful when I talk about this topic to understand people's relative differences and ability to self care. The help you have, the resources that are available to you, the literal time um that is available in the day that you don't have your kids around, but whether it's a five minute meditation, uh ten minute journaling in the morning, a call to a friend, going in the bathroom and closing the door and deep breathing for a few minutes. We have to have a practice to self regulate, and with self regulation comes not just a containment of sort of bodily responses to stress, but also comes the messaging to ourselves, the reinforcement that like we we matter, how we are doing matters, that we are the heart and the compass of our family. And without being diligent with self care, there's just fill over. There's emotional rent to pay for not just us, but our entire family. So it's to me, it's really about the practice, the dedication to a practice, if it's a couple of minutes or an hour every day, depending on what you have available, but making it deliberate, purposeful, intentional. I have a really very strict morning routine and I think without that, you know, the hardest times in life are virtually impossible. But I also feel like with so many parents, it's a it's a gift to have those moments um are there. I mean, do you recommend people just get up earlier, try to carve it out or hide in a closet or you know, kind of how do we how do we get that if we're constantly you know, in being requested. Yes, yes, that's the question, A fair question. Now I recommend what I practice, which I meditate a couple of times a day, and I wake up, you know, five or ten minutes early, and I added on again for a round two before I go to bed. And so if I don't have room for anything else in my day, I have that as bookends to my day. So, yes, I think you have to be deliberate. It's so hard for us to give up an extra five ten minutes of sleep. It's so hard for us to lock ourselves in the bathroom without being distracted, but just trying to find and usually it's after the kid has go to sleep or in the morning before they wait, just trying to find a time to breathe and sort of connect with yourself because it's so easy to not self check, to to sort of look at yourself and figure out how am I, how am I doing, how are my feeling, and what do I need to do to sort of address any outstanding stressors are worries and how is that impacting my family? And how do I communicate to myself, to my partner, to my kiddo's about sort of the emotional compass of where my family is right now, because our kids feel like I mean, our kids feel what we are. I was given great advice many many many years ago, which is um had, which had nothing to do with parenting, but they said to me that the key to anything successful in your life is to be inside and outside at the same time. You want to be inside your experience to be able to feel the passion, and you want to be outside to sort of see the perspective and check yourself as you as you use that word you know, and I think being as I know in my experience being a mom of so many, even though I have you know, school and resources and you know, the ability to have friends and people who work with us to help us, I still don't have a lot of time to myself. And so what I've learned is practicing on the go sometimes, you know. And and it didn't where when I had few children, I may I may have had more time to do the self care that I would love, of meditating and stuff like that. And now I find that a lot of it is being in the moment of noticing my shoulders checked, noticing my brow check, noticing my jaw check, and constantly scanning and of course I'm very yoga yoga connected, um, but it allowed me to get away from the excuse of oh, I don't have time for that. It's like, well, the time is now when you're living. Yes, you're talking about a notion that I talked about a lot with clients. I believe you have to tell me if this resonates the idea of the difference between being sort of inside your feelings and an observer or a witness of your feelings, right, and that is something you can sort of practice and do on the go, albeit it's quite difficult to do all the time and to do successfully. And what I mean is being inside a feeling looks like we're angry, we're sad, and we're acting from it, you know, we're just standing in it and we're acting from that feeling. We're yelling or disregulated or slamming a door and being outside of feeling. And this is I say it as if it's easy, and there's a few things harder from an emotional psychological standpoint, but being outside the feeling and being able to narrate. I'm really angry right now. I feel my body getting tense and hot. I'm going to go into the other room and take a break. That's something you might say to yourself, That's something you might say to your child. I literally said that to my eight year old either last night the night before. So there's a version of self care we can do in real time, And not only is it good for ourselves, but it's good for our children to witness us managing tricky feelings because being inside of it almost always ends up with us showing up in a way that we don't feel best about. Being outside of it gives us more opportunity to think and to choose yes, Garta said, I have the ability to escalate a situation or de escalate a situation. And that's always where I'm like, Okay, I have a choice with this, and I don't always make the right choice, but I try to because and that's also just like the beauty of having the liberty within your mind to say, I can take a pause, I don't have to react, I can take a breath, I can wait five seconds, and like what that does to your nervous system. I have a question about like the physical um response to trauma. Obviously we all we all feel it, and you know, it's just a fact that when we are mind revisits trauma, how it affects our cortisol levels, and how that completely throws off our nervous system. Is that something you can speak to a little bit, because I think a lot of people forget how much our thoughts affect, you know, the science of our bodies. That's right, And I think this goes along nicely with the notion of being inside our feelings are outside of them. A trauma response and slightly oversimplifying it, but a trauma response is our body responding to something from the past in the present, right, And so it takes on sort of a fight or flight mode, and that can show up in different ways. We might feel a racing heart, we might feel shaky hands, we might feel hot, we might shut down, we might flee, either emotionally or literally. It is a response to a sort of current stimuli as if it is a past traumatic stimulus, and so it can be intense and quick and overwhelming and unpredictable, and the two collapse together, so you're responding to the moment as if it is a threat when maybe it's not. You know, we the kids are hanging all over us, and um, we have a trauma response, and we yell or screaming away that is disproportionate to the situation at hand, right, And so a few things to do. One is to understand this generally speaking, and we're having this discussion right now, that like, oh that's what that is. That happens to me sometimes, and employing like deep compassion and empathy. That's a very primitive edict. That doesn't make anyone sort of a bad person. It just makes us all human, particularly if you've had past trauma, and most of us have in one way or the other. Right, So being able to just understand that paradigm is useful. And then when it happens, it's like not if it's when you know, we're not going to get this acent of the time, right when it happens, employing the practice of being able to recognize, oh that just happened. You know, it's just pulling on my shirt because they're tired and hungry, and I responded in a way that was disproportionate hat trauma response. And again so in the moment, empathy and compassion. And then I mean, depending on the logistics, I want to always acknowledge like sometimes we can't step away or sometimes we have lots of other kids they are we're in the middle of something, but if possible, being able to take a minute, do some deep breathing and sort of employ that compassion I'm talking about, Like, Wow, I just had a response to something somewhat innocuous, stressful but innocuous. That must mean I'm coming from like an old wounded part and starting hand on heart, like I I'm just a person trying to manage really really difficult feelings from my past right now. And then when my favorite things is repair, repair, repair, It's one of my favorite tools as a parent. And maybe it sounds obvious, maybe it sounds revolutionary or somewhere in between. But we're all going to show up in ways that we don't feel good about. We just are. This is what I do for a living, and I do right and and so one of my favorite parenting tools is to go back and and and go to your kid, to go to my kid and say, mmmm, Mom, we just got really angry back there, didn't I I yelled and I slammed the door. And that must have felt scary. That must have felt hard to see. I know it did for me. And that had nothing to do with you. Yeah, I needed you to sit down for dinner. That's still true. But Mom is gonna work really hard on kind of managing her tricky feelings when I have them, and and and and and try to do a bit better next time. We all have tricky feelings, do don't we? And your kid, Michael, thank you so much. Your kid might go like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the point is is you're infusing a narrative into your kid that says like, tricky feelings are okay, it's okay to feel disregulated, and here's what it looks like to try to repair and to work on sort of containment next time. I love that. That's something that we do a lot at our house. And one of the things that I always try to drive home is that no one should ever treat you that way, and you shouldn't treat anyone that way because I you know, especially I'm One of the things I think as a parent is I'm afraid that they're going to experience things and then they're going to end up in a relationship when they're like twenty five, and that's what it's going to be like, you know, and so um, you know, saying that this is normal, and this happens doesn't mean it's okay. And then I try on top of them and wonder how you think about this? I try on top of that. You know. The other day, um My, my son Leonardo was having a really hard time and he didn't really understand why, but it's just you could tell that his nervous system was too much and moving his body and crying and trying to fight and a bunch of different stuff. And he's a really sweet kid. He's really the sweetest of all at my kids. And so I said, what do you need? And I took him out, just the two of us so we could talk, and we just went downstairs and then he said, I really want to go to the store and I want to buy balloons, and I want to buy balloons for all of us, and I you know, So we went to the there's like this little party dollar store to box from my house, and we went there and he picked up seven balloons and it was a really quick trip and by the time he was home, he was in a different place. And he came and he wanted to give a balloon to each one, including our four month old um and it was just so heartwarming, but he needed us an extra tool because reason doesn't work with a six year old. That's right, that's right. I love that that came to you both, you know, sort of organically. That is correct. And you're bringing up another really important dynamic is that education and rationality around feeling management does not happen in the moment of an upset or a tantrum. It just doesn't. And so in the moment of an upset or a tantrum, go to tool, in my view, is empathy is validation, acknowledgement. It's so hard right now. You just wish that you didn't have to leave the play date. You just wish you could keep on staying. I know it's so hard to leave, so difficult. You're so angry. I see you punching the seat, I see you grabbing at the blankets. I know you don't want to leave. It's so hard, and we still set the boundary and we do have to go. So either you can walk out the door and mom is going to grab you and help you out the door. But being able to start with empathy, and you're right, sometimes if we have the ability or luxury of like a little time switching landscapes, witching. Having an emotional outlet in a different space can change how our child is moving through the moment quite significantly, and you kind of organically. And it's hard. It's hard because and I've gone through phases where I was like, all right, go into your room or time out, or how dare you do that? You know, I mean, that's shaming you go through because you're just like, why are you doing this? I do not understand. And then that gets to a big part of what I want to talk to about today. They feel what's going on in our home. That's right, that's right, that's right. There's no question. I mean some of what you're describing responding to our kids. How dare you? What's wrong with you? Go to your room? You've just lost X, Y and Z, etcetera. All have those moments, and sometimes those things are appropriate sort of a firm, hard consequence or boundary, right, But that's secondary, that's not the headline. The headline is some version of validation and acknowledgement. You're hurting right now. I see you, I hear you. It feels so hard right now, You're so angry. I'm gonna sit here with you until it until it passes, and you know what, I'm still going to sit here with you, right and talking about extending it to the notion of what's happening inside a household. If a household is going through a particularly difficult time, you know, related to I don't know, challenges at school, family illness, uh, separations, divorces, etcetera. Being able to say that out loud to a child, not in the moment of upset, because again, no education or information is really seeping in, but later, maybe at bedtime. My favorite time to deal with my older one who's more mercurial, is to say something like, wow, I was thinking about earlier you wanted to have a second dessert and you were so mad and sad that I wouldn't let you have it. Yeah, that was really hard. And then if something's going on in the household, I might say something like, gosh, you know, we just we've been looking at a different schools for the last month. I wonder how that feels inside your body or inside the house, like a change is coming and it's kind of scary, a lot of unknowns, and maybe you feel that um and that's normal. I feel it a little bit. I'm a little nervous about where we're gonna end up, where I'm going to make new friends, how it's gonna feel, and being able. You know, my my eight year old will be like, oh yeah, yeah, stop talking. You know, my little one would engage forever, but my my older one is going to deny any complicated feelings, even though he's a son of a a psychologist. But right nonetheless, I know that that narrative is getting in there that I'm providing him guidance and insight, you know, sort of goal posts if you will, about what's happening in the house. It's not you. There's there's a feeling going out inside the house that's hard. Right now, we all feel it. What about when it's not age appropriate to have certain conversations with them? How and that they can feel it and you're trying so hard to mask it and you're trying so hard to in a smile on your face and like everything's okay. There's joke in my house where I was like it's all great, yeah, great, like literally I'm poppy in uh in trolls where like every and she's like I'm gonna get back up again. You know, people joke and we joke on the house that that's me. But it's like, you know, what do you do when you can't actually explain to them? Such a good question. I'm so so happy that you asked it. You can still have a conversation. And I know we imagine that our kids are going to sort of be like, no, no, but what is it? What's going on? You have to tell me, please fill in the blanks. It's not really really what kids are interested, and especially little ones, what they want to know is that you're okay and they're okay. So I would still say some version of like, I think it's been feeling a little tricky in the house, like some worry and some difficult feelings like frustration or sadness. I felt that have you. Well, they might say yes, no, or nothing, and that might feel really hard. It might feel a little bit different to be in the house. That might make you sad or mad. And I want you to know that sometimes families go through times where those kind of feelings are are more present than other times. And I'm here and we're all together and you can always talk to me and we'll all work through those things together, right, So you don't have to say to them that anything specific is going on per se and if something specifics going on, uh, there's an illness or something, but you're not wanting to get into the details of the severity of the illness or um or what's going to happen. You can say like, oh, Grandma's sick and that's and that's felt a little bit hard for all of us. We're not sure how she's doing every day and we're wondering about her and thinking about her, and that's hard, right, So you can just do like really age appropriate general stuff. I think there's a feeling or a poll that we have to fill in all the blanks. And really, our kids, as I said before, just want to know we're okay and they're okay, and to acknowledge what they're experiencing. Naming it is so much more containing than suppressing and denying it. And we know that has grown ups. Right. If you think about your friend, your sister, your partner, if you're feeling upset and angry and you share that in your partners, like oh my god, you're fine, You're always fine, like you always figure out a way through it, that doesn't feel as good as when our partners says, Oh my god, I'm so sorry you're feeling that way, like it's been such a difficult week, and you know what, I felt it too. Kind of thing, right, it feels so much more containing and relieving. Our feelings can come up and out instead of stay stuck inside. So don't be afraid to go towards the tricky feeling, you know, inside ourselves, and definitely not with our kids. Yeah. Absolutely, As a parent, we we want to protect our children, make it like everything is fine, even when it's not. That's right, it is. It is a primitive edict that we all have to be conscious of and sort of fight against. I mean, not not to overstate it, but we are not serving our children better by keeping them apart from the exposure and management of tricky feelings. There's there's no escape from tricky feelings as little ones are as adults, and so we want to be able to say we all have this, and here's what it looks like, and here are ways to cope with it, and to notice that our bodies always regulate to another feeling state. I'll say that to my kids a lot that like, did you ever notice that that a feeling that one particular feeling never stays, it always changes, it always goes away. Right, So if you're feeling said, you kind of know that at some point they'll feel different, right. So, and that's true for all of us too. We don't always have just one feeling state and be able being able to sort of teach our kids that through our own management or our tricky feelings and through the room. Yeah, we aside from like say, ensuring your children that the feelings do transmute and become something else eventually. Um, are there any other little tips you have? Like I always think with kids like box breathing very simple, you know, techniques that just kind of immediately calm the system. Are there any that our top of mind for you just we could recommend? I think breathing is an excellent tool. We do either breathe four times, hold and then breathe out for four times. We do rainbow brass where the kids sort of hold their hands and do some version of this, which can be really useful. We sometimes draw out feelings, like you're feeling so frustrated. I wonder if you can make a picture of that or tell a story around it. My older one really likes what but I would say the primary thing, and this feels paradoxical, so paradoxical, is to just sit with our kid in the feeling, to try to name it and sit in it. Because more we try to make it go away, the more persistent it is. And we notice that with ourselves. If we feel anxious but we try to push it away to suppress it, it it like shows up some other way now a sudden, are tummy hurts? Or you know, our shoulders are tight, right, but though they are in a supported environment, it usually dissipates. So I know it's not always possible, but to the extent it is to be able to just sit with a kid and like you're you're so sad. Nothing feels good right now? Right? No, I tell I teach my kids that, yeah, well, or or at least you can work with it. I teach my my children that your your body has a physical reaction to all of your thoughts and emotions. So once we have that, we think about, okay, well, how are my thoughts affecting all of my muscles? You know what? It makes sense. When you're in love, your belly is full of butterflies. When you're scared, your mouth is going to go dry. When you're stressed, your neck is gonna hurt. I mean, it's it makes sense. And so to teach them that, I mean, I always say I'm going to be a successful parents if I can teach them to be good little problem solvers. I want them to be like, Okay, this is the issue. Let me weed away all of the stuff that I just is not helpful and that is tension in my job that is not going to make the situation better, and then I can really focus on on what needs to get done and how to solve this. And I love what you're saying as well about you know, making teaching them things that they're temporary, things are tem bory because as you know, as adults that's difficult, and as children that's extraordinarily difficult. And that's where you know, when you talk about child suicide rates and stuff like that, a lot of it is not understanding, not being in that outside looking in saying this is temporary, this is going to go and I have the ability and the resources to get out and not being afraid of the feelings. And you know, one one concept I like to think about is is it's not about sort of guiding our children to make their feelings go away. It's about getting them better to feel the feelings right, and so having a narrative around that. I know it, it's so hard to feel this you just wanted to go away or but being able to say, like, sitting in your feelings is part of how we help them go away, talking about them in a safe environment, feeling them in your body and letting them come up and out, not being afraid of the feeling and not being afraid of how it feels in your body. And I love that you have that dialogue with your kids because oftentimes, as I work with adults all the time that have a um sort of a traumatic response to a bodily sensation that's related to a difficult feeling. Right, so they feel shiky or their chest titans, and that feels traumatic because it feels like it's dangerous, and that fight or flights sort of false alarm threat kicks in as opposed to like, Okay, something something hard or scary or difficult or worrisome has has come into my head or in my environment, and like, how do I take a moment and breathe into it and figure out what my next move is? You know that difference between being like in the feeling and then outside of feeling. Thank you so much for joining us today. We could continue this conversation for a very long time, and I think one thing I'd love to take away from this is how we know how to explain it to our kids, but we still have the same responses and how to integrate that into our practice. So thank you for that reminder. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Michelle. One thing I really love about that conversation is, you know, I went into it with this idea of, oh gosh, how do I protect my kids from just all of this growing up and the negative things in life and hard times? And I just do want everything to be sunshine and rainbows all the time. And one of the things that I really appreciated that Dr Gilshaw told us is that sometimes teaching them not to be afraid of the emotion and not to be afraid of the pain, and you know, not to be afraid of going through hard times, that actually is such a gift because it's going to teach them to be resilient and understand that feelings are temporary and that you know better times can come again, and when when the fear no longer elicits fear, then there's a there's a lot of freedom too, because fear is the most paralyzing thing any of us go through. I mean, I was thinking about what she said about the trauma response and how you can have a reaction that's almost out of body, and I was thinking about about a year ago, I was arguing with someone pretty intensely and I got so out of my body that I made the uber pull over, jumped out of the car and started running down the street. It was such a wild reaction and it was such you know, deeply seated trauma response. And it was kind of interesting to have her say that, because you know, we're all subject to a children, adults, everyone, and so it's it's it's a nice reminder that we're not alone. And the body is so complicated in the mind, you know, it can take us, you know, to the most highest highs and the lowest lows, and that we all just need to be patient, breathe through it, feel the feelings, and there's it's got to be a way out. Yeah, And I'm seeing the humanity and other people as well and understanding that they might be going through something as well, and so being kind, being patients and being good, you know, friends to as many people as we can. You know, what's that, I don't know, let's blow but that idea. You know, everyone you meet is going through something, right, So just having that kind of approach a little gentler absolutely all right, guys. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for for listening, and thank you again for all of your kindness and support

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