When is the last time you an remember having a little conversation with yourself about your thoughts and emotions?

Well, maybe not a full-fledged conversation (that might be cause for alarm, actually) but when was the last time you really examined the way you thought or felt about something, a particular situation, issue, even a person?

I’m waiting.

Yeah, we don’t do a lot of introspection about our thoughts and feelings now do we? We just take thoughts and emotions on face value – they are what they are, they just happen – we don’t know how or why we think the things we think and feel the things we feel.

Most of us simply think and act without ever questioning it – without ever realizing the processes going on there. It’s like we’re on autopilot – just a vessel being led around by a brain!

Well, this is the perfect time of year to do a little self-examination, right? Goodness knows there are millions of people around the world who’ve just vowed change in the form of a new year’s resolution. Maybe that’s you.

But here’s the thing – if you want to make change happen in your life, whether that’s changing the way you communicate with your teenager, changing the way you structure your day, or changing how you eat, it all starts with a healthy dose of introspection.

So, listen up because I’m going to help you figure some things out and make sure you don’t throw in the towel in a matter of weeks if you’ve decided to make some changes.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that helps parents who are struggling to find peace and connection with their teens. My name is Ann Coleman; I’m an attorney turned parent educator and a mom who has been there - and I’m on a mission to help you build a stronger relationship and decrease the conflict with your kid so you can help them grow into the young adult they’re meant to be.

I recommend Dr. Susan David’s book, Emotional Agility, all the time to anyone who wants to develop more emotional awareness and emotional regulation – and most of us – at least while parenting teens, need to do both.

I just want to read to you the 90 second story she tells to open the first chapter of her book: (read from book)

 

“Years ago in the Downton Abbey era, a well-regarding captain stood on the bridge of a British battleship, watching the sunset across the sea.

As the story goes, the captain was about to head below for dinner when a lookout suddenly announced, ‘Light, sir. Dead ahead two miles.’

The captain turned back toward the helm.

‘Is it steady or moving?’ he asked, these being the days before radar.

‘Steady, Captain.’

‘Then signal that ship,’ the captain ordered gruffly. ‘Tell them, ‘You are on a collision course. Alter course twenty degrees.”

The answer, from the source of the lights, cam back moments later: ‘Advisable you change your course twenty degrees.’

The captain was insulted. Not only was his authority being challenged, but also it was being done in front of a junio seaman!

‘Send another message,’ he snarled. ‘We are the HMS Defiant, a thirty-five-thousand-ton battleship of the dreadnaught class. Change course twenty degrees.’

“Brilliant, sir,” came the reply. ‘I’m Seaman O’Reilly of the second class. Change your course immediately.”

Apoplectic and red in the face, the captain shouted, ‘We are the flagship of Admiral Sir William Atkinson-Willes! CHANGE YOUR COURSE TWENTY DEGREES!’

There was a moment of silence before Seaman O’Reilly replied, ‘We are a lighthouse , sir.’”

Dr. David uses this story to illustrate how our emotions are similar to a light house, guiding the way for us, giving us signals, directing us in our daily lives. These emotions are often accompanied by physiological sensations, they may come first and signal the emotion or come after we have an emotion depending on the science you believe – but either way, it’s that flutter you feel in your stomach, your heartbeat speeding up, sweaty palms or lump in your throat.

Various areas of our brain – like the amygdala, the reward system, the social system -  that we’ve discussed before,  are responsible for taking stimuli from our environment and causing the brain and body to respond to it with a combination of physiological sensations, psychological feelings and behavioral responses.

You see a road rage accident on the side of the highway and get butterflies in your stomach, feel nervous and perhaps speed up to get around the cars.

Someone throws a punch at you out of nowhere, you duck, your heart beats out of your chest and you feel confused and scared and maybe angry all at once.

These things happen automatically in response to some sort of stimulus (something we’ve seen, heard, felt, touched, smelled in our environment.)

Running, feeling fear, a fast heartbeat when we think we see a snake.

Screaming, heart in our throat, being terrified, when someone jumps from behind a door.

These feelings, sensations and behavioral responses are literally an act of evolution to keep the human species going and thriving.

Way back when our lesser advanced ancestors were still dwelling in caves and fighting off wild animals and hunting for their own food, if they had not had these quick and automatic responses to predators, other cave dwellers that wanted to kill them, they wouldn’t have lasted very long and we wouldn’t be here today. The brain is sort of like a virus – it wants to survive – it wants it’s host to survive –kind of creepy huh?

The problem is that society has evolved much quicker than our brain. We’re living in cities and suburbs with conveniences our ancient ancestors wouldn’t think possible – and quite often, neither does our brain.

Our brain still reacts in the same manner to stimuli in the environment, but it makes mistakes all the time, thinking something is what it is not. Causing us to become nervous or fearful or angry automatically – when it actually should not.

But psychological feelings, physiological sensations and behavioral responses also occur when we conjure them up based on our thinking – our interpretation of something we’ve seen, heard, felt, touched, smelled in our environment.

This interpretation can be based on our past - memories, sometimes memories of things we don’t even consciously remember, - this can cause an emotional reaction as if the present situation is the same as the past.

Our brain can cause negative thoughts to pop into our head automatically. In the literary world you would call it an unreliable narrator – a story told in first person by someone who lacks credibility (they’re either lying or don’t know they aren’t being 100% truthful). Think Fight Club, Shutter Island or The Sixth Sense. When we fully believe our unreliable narrator, we can have emotions that are not appropriate. You might tell yourself you suck at parenting or you’re ruining your child and feel hopeless, which means you may behave in a way that shows you don’t think things can change.

So, the bottom line is, we can’t fully trust our thoughts or our emotions. We must learn to question both. We need to be aware of what our brain is telling us to think and feel and examine it closely, so we can decide if we can trust them or not.

But so many of us operate in a totally unconscious haze. We think, feel, and react – all at once – never even realizing it – never examining what has happened, never wondering why, never stopping to dig a bit. We’re just always in reaction mode – no awareness. We lack awareness, which is crucial if you want to regulate your own thoughts, emotions and behavior.

I just talked in episode 100 about how critical our own behavior is to that of our kids and teens. Our behavior counts. If we want to change our kids’ behavior, almost 100% of the time, we need to change our own.

To change that behavior, you have to get to the root of it – the thoughts and the emotions that prompt that behavior. And this takes self-reflection, introspection, self-awareness…

Few of us take the time to think about why we think, feel or act the way we do.

We formulate thoughts based on what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been exposed to,  how we were raised, the way we’ve been treated by other people. Our life experience so far.

I talked about cognitive biases in episode 27 and parental mindset and bias in episode 30. Our brain has a way of distorting our thoughts and causing issues for us.

Some of the things we think and believe to be true have been floating around in our brain for so long that we’re not even consciously aware of them. We don’t even know that a thought popped into our head and just made us feel a certain way, which then made us act a certain way.

For example, let’s say I thought my husband was insulting me when he asked if I was ready to leave for dinner – I thought he was criticizing what I was wearing, which hurt my feelings and made me angry as well. So, for the rest of the night I hardly spoke to him. I thought he was criticizing me because I grew up with people making fun of my clothes because my grandmother made all my clothes. But I don’t consciously realize that’s why I got upset and acted the way I did.

You could have had one tiny thing happen at some point in your life, or maybe you’ve had a more traumatic experience – almost anything can lay the groundwork for certain thoughts to easily creep in and find a home in your head.

When we accept our automatic thoughts as the truth – as fact - we give them complete control over us – control over our emotions and our behavior

But in reality, our thoughts are merely how our brain has interpreted the world around us – based on lived experience.

Our thoughts are our perception of reality – our interpretation of the facts through the lens that we’ve formed throughout the years we’ve been alive.

For example, let’s say when your teens started driving and going out on their own, you were adamant about having a curfew of 11:00 in 10th grade and then midnight in 11^th grade and now going into her senior year your daughter wants to stay out until 12:30. Your knee-jerk reaction is absolutely not – nothing good ever happens after midnight. You even do a little voice raising and lecturing about all the crimes that can take place that late and how dangerous it is. And of course, a power struggle ensues.

But in your mind, it is simply fact that teenagers should never be out past midnight – that midnight is when all the trouble starts. That it’s simply dangerous and that’s that.

Let’s say you stop and sit and reflect on why this situation is so emotional for you and you realize:

You grew up in a working-class neighborhood with its fair share of crime. Your home had extra locks on the door, security lights all around, the police scanner going on all night.

When you were old enough to leave the house alone, if you were out of touch for more than a couple of hours, your parents were calling the neighbors looking for you.

And when you were a teenager, they were adamant that you never be out after midnight. They would have grounded you for a month had you walked in the door at one minute past midnight.

It was drilled into your head that people are out driving drunk and seeking drugs and robbing places after midnight. That more gun violence happens after midnight.

And sure enough, some of your friends did have close calls or were involved in minor incidents after midnight.

So, even though you live in an upper middle-class neighborhood in a small town, with little crime, in your mind, there are no circumstances under which your kids should be allowed out past midnight.

Now, when an issue comes up in your life (with your teen or your spouse, even at work) and you have a very strong reaction to a situation, you need to do a little self-examination – have a bit of inner dialogue.

2500 years ago in ancient Greece, Socrates supposedly said that one of our greatest challenges was to know ourselves and that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Have you ever heard of the Socratic method of teaching. It’s supposed to be based on how Socrates was always questioning people about their beliefs - their reality. He wanted to ask and ask and ask until he could get people to realize, “Oh, okay, I guess what I believe to be true may not be factual at all.”

Similarly, manufacturing companies and even other businesses use a method called the 5 Whys to get to the root of a problem and try to prevent it from happening again.

Asking questions is a way to teach, it’s a way to get to the heart of a problem and come up with countermeasures and it’s a way to kick off change in ourselves.

If you want to change the way you act, you have no choice but to try and figure out what’s causing you to act a certain way. Why do you get so angry when your kid does this? Why does hearing that make you extremely sad?

Why do you get so annoyed when your spouse does this? You can’t change your behavior until you know why you think and do what you do.

Using the 5 Whys technique may actually be able to help you when you start.

1) Why did I argue with my son about wearing that stupid wrinkled shirt? Because I don’t want him leaving the house looking like that.

2) Why do I not want him leaving the house in a wrinkled shirt? Because people will think I that didn’t care that he left the house looking like that?

3) Why does it matter to you that people will think you didn’t care about him leaving the house in a wrinkled shirt? Because people will think that I don’t care about other things that he does or doesn’t do.

4) Why do you care that people might think you don’t care about what he does or doesn’t do? Because I don’t want them to think I’m a negligent mother.

5) Why do you care that they think you’re a negligent mother? Because my own mother was negligent, our clothes always looked awful, our hair was never cut right, our shoes were hand-me-downs and I never felt good enough to be around the other kids at school and I vowed way back then my kids would always look nice when they went to school!

Now, you just had a huge argument with your 14-year-old son about wearing his favorite shirt to school because it was wrinkled. Your morning was ruined, his morning was ruined and he stormed out of the house late for carpool wearing a different shirt that he grabbed up out of his floor at the last minute.

And you’ve just assessed the situation and realized all of this happened because you were humiliated as a high school student by your appearance, and you blame your mother.

You likely would have stayed mad, and this argument would have happened again in the future if you hadn’t just realized this about yourself.

Of course, you can now apologize when your son gets home. Explain to him that you went through all of this on paper to figure out why you had such a strong reaction and tell him about your high school days. He’ll come away with more of an understanding about his mom as a human and the next time this issue crops up, you’ll know that your kid is not ever going to be mistaken for being uncared for and not worry about what he chooses to wear.

Now, every situation may not be this clear cut and it may take you several instances of these thoughts and emotions coming up, to actually make any headway in understand where it’s coming from but you keep trying. There also could be unconscious memories being triggered from past trauma. If you can’t figure it out it might be time to see a therapist.

Self-regulation, emotional regulation starts with self-examination, with self-awareness, emotional awareness. It starts with you noticing that you’ve either had a thought or had a big emotional experience.

And I’ve talked in other episodes about journaling to figure out your emotions. You can go through a series of whys or you can simply just start writing: what happened, who said what, what we you doing beforehand, what mood were you in, what was your kid doing, what was going through your mind, how did you feel.

The more you write about your emotional encounters with other people – including your teen – the better you will understand yourself and the more you understand the better chance you’ll have at making changes in your life.

We’ve also talk about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation in other episodes – as a matter of fact just in episode 96 – it’s hugely beneficial and can help you be more present in the moment with your teen.

But here’s the deal - you try different things and settle on whatever works for you – whatever helps you see your unreliable narrator for what it is, helps you learn enough about your own thoughts, emotions, and behavior – your automatic reactions. The important thing is to start – and keep moving forward.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today, thank you a million times over for joining me today and I hope you keep coming back if this is your first time listening. If you found it helpful, I would be ever so grateful if you’d share it with a friend.

You can scroll to the bottom of the episode description to join our Facebook group if you’d like to come chat.

As always, remember a little change can go a long way.