Did you realize that your teen’s behavior, their mental health, and their overall wellbeing largely depends on your ability to regulate your emotions.

This is one of the biggest lessons I walked away with after two years of hell with my own teenage son.

The problem is that most of us are pretty bad at this. We weren’t raised by emotionally intelligent parents who modeled emotional regulation or talked to us about our feelings.

I can say for sure that I never understood the role my emotions played in my son’s behavior going off the rails. But when I started becoming more aware of my emotions and where they came from, I was able to manage them better, and change the way I responded to him. This  made all the difference in the world—his behavior and our relationship improved exponentially.

Today I’m going to talk to you about your emotions, the role they play in your teen’s behavior, and how you can manage them better.

If you understand your emotional world, you can profoundly change things between you and your teen, which will ultimately improve their behavior.

You know what scientific research says is one of the biggest factors in whether or not we have a happy and successful life? Our level of emotional intelligence.

Emotionally intelligent people understand their own emotions, can articulate how they feel and manage their emotions so they can respond to situations and people appropriately. They have great social skills and healthy relationships, they're empathetic, better able to "read" how other people are feeling. Emotional intelligence is more important than regular intelligence.

Research also shows that our level of emotional intelligence directly affects our parenting and our relationship with our children...and our relationship with them determines their future parenting and relationships.

The more emotionally intelligent we are, the better adapted our kids are and the better their emotional development, mental health, and wellbeing. That's how critical it is that we hone our emotional skills.

So, how do we become more emotionally intelligent?

The foundation of emotional intelligence is emotional awareness or the ability to understand exactly how you're feeling while you’re feeling it and being able to fully describe that emotion to yourself or someone else.

We need to be able to pinpoint if we’re nervous, annoyed, jealous, frustrated, or something else entirely. Our emotions can give us direction if we slow down long enough to examine them and realize what’s really happening in our brain. Otherwise, we’re just confused, overwhelmed and controlled by them, acting spontaneously without much thought at all.

So, understanding ourselves, our inner world, is the first step towards being a calmer and more intentional parent who can better help our kids maintain their mental health and wellbeing.

Let me illustrate this with a scenario. It's 2:30 AM and the creak of the back door wakes you. Your heart starts racing because you’ve caught your 15-year-old son sneaking out twice in the past 3 months. You ease out of bed and tiptoe to the hallway, where you see him carefully closing the door behind him, shoes in his hand, trying not to make a sound. He thinks he’s pulled it off – the perfect sneak-back-in.

You can literally smell him from where you're standing - maybe smoke, maybe something else.

Imagine yourself really in that moment (if you have a daughter, imagine it's your daughter)... what are you thinking and what emotions do you feel in that moment…and what do you do next? What's your immediate response?

Now hold that thought a minute and let me tell you how this works in your brain…because emotions are very personal, right? What I feel in a situation may not be what you'd feel in that same situation.

And even if we do feel the same under the same circumstances, we may not react the same way.

We could both feel frustrated about the same thing, but maybe you may just walk away while I stand there and tell everyone just how frustrated I am (that’s usually what happens anyway!)

Here's how it works. When we experience something (for example, let’s say someone cuts you off on the freeway), you first have a thought—you interpret what’s just happened based on all the personal data you have stored in your brain (your “inner data”). You might think anything from, “gosh, I guess they didn’t see me” to “that asshole!”

You may also have a physiological reaction--notice your heart beating faster, or that you get shaky, or your face feels hot. And you experience the psychological feeling -- the emotion itself, which could be anything from empathy to rage depending on your interpretation and your ability to regulate those feelings.

Then you’ll behave a certain way. You may actually do nothing, or you may mutter under your breath, flash a hand gesture or worse.

This is known as the cognitive triangle: picture a triangle and on the 3 points are thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Each impacts the other two. If you change your thoughts, you can change your emotions and behavior. If you change your behavior, you can change your thoughts and emotions.

But most often, we go from thoughts to emotions to behavior…with never a pause in between!

For example, you find that wet bath towel on the floor for the hundredth time this week after saying to your daughter every day, “please hang your bath towel up after you use it.”

Your thoughts come so fast that the emotion and the behavior are almost instantaneous. You might think something like this "Oh my God, how can she not remember to do such a simple thing after I've told her over and over, I'm just over it -- I'm actually just pissed" and then you yell -- "I swear Olivia, if I have to tell you one more time to hang that towel up, I'm going to absolutely lose my mind!"

So, let’s back up a minute to how you interpret or think about a situation. As I said, your thoughts are based on your own inner data. But what is this inner data?

It’s your personal history and lived experiences, the environment you grew up in, your culture, how you were raised, your religion and world view...and as it applies to your kids…your parenting style.

So, we take all of this inner data – everything floating around in our brain – apply to the current situation, which creates our thoughts about it. And those thoughts cause us to feel a certain way – our emotions—and then we act or behave based on those emotions. Thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to behavior (it’s called the cognitive triangle).

For example, let’s go back to the sneaking back in scenario.

I can tell you that back when we were going through this sort of thing with our then teenage son, my initial thoughts would have been, “OMG, I can’t believe he’s doing this again, what is he thinking? Does he not see how he’s screwing up his life?

I would have felt sheer panic and anxiety, and words would have exploded out of me as soon as I saw him: "Are you kidding me right now? Do you have any idea what time it is? Who were you with? And what is that smell? Were you smoking weed? I don’t understand what you’re thinking. I am SO DONE with this. Go to bed right now and hand your phone over – you won’t see that for while and you’re on lock-down for the foreseeable future Bruh!”

The problem is, I wouldn’t have understood that it was panic and fear that I felt. It would have felt more like anger to me and my behavior would have reflected that as well. I had no emotional awareness—didn’t know what I was feeling or why and therefore just reacted however it felt right in the moment—whether it was punishing, yelling, or sarcasm.

When he started doing things that many teens do, I didn’t understand why he was doing it, I misinterpreted his behavior, I applied the inner data I had at the time to the situation, which created emotions in me that I didn’t even understand—I just knew it felt awful. I wanted his behavior to stop, and I was willing to do whatever it took to MAKE it stop.

It was only later that I realized it was my fear driving the bus. I applied my inner data, which included the fact that my brother was a drug addict, and all I could think about what how I could not let him end up like my brother. My behavior was solely focused on stopping his behavior.

I let that fear take control of every interaction with my son for at least a couple of years there without any conscious awareness of what I was doing. I was terrified for where his behavior would lead him—all the worst scenarios floating around in my brain.

Fear is sneaky. It can show up as fearful passive behavior (just letting your teen do what they want) but for most of us it shows up like anger and controlling behavior. If we can control it, we don’t have to be afraid of it.

“If I can make him listen and do what I say, I can keep this from happening to him -- I can fix it!”

And guess what happens when we are overcontrolling with our teens? When we punish, yell, lecture, remind, advise, and consequence to try and get them to fall in line so we can feel better about the situation? We create rebellion.

In short, teens need to feel heard and respected and don’t want to be treated like little kids. So the more we try and control them, the harder they push back. The more we yell, the louder they yell back. The more we tell them what to do the more they do what they want. The more we punish and consequence, the sneakier they get and the more they lie.

The bottom line is, when we try to control, we set the conditions for off the rails bad behavior and emotional and mental health problems. We create a contentious atmosphere, where we’re just looking for problems to be upset about, and they gladly give them to us.

So, it’s obvious, that our inner data, when applied to the situations with our teen, can distort our thoughts, which can distort our feelings, which can cause us to react in a less-than-appropriate way. My inner data about my brother’s issues, distorted my thoughts where all I could think about was my son ending up in the same situation, which caused fear, which led to my controlling behavior, which led to conflict and disconnection, more controlling behavior, and the downward spiral of my son’s behavior and mental health. It’s very easy to get stuck in an endless loop.

If you’ve ever been to a therapist, you’ve probably engaged in cognitive behavioral therapy—it’s all about helping you change the way you think about situations so you can change your emotions and behavior.

There are some specific cognitive distortions that I think play a big role in our emotions and behavior as parents.

For example, we tend to jump to conclusions. For example, you might assume you know what your kid’s thinking or what they were thinking when they did something wrong (you don't). Or you may assume you know what their future’s going to look like their current behavior (she's not turning in homework, she's going to end up not going to college, and will end up in a dead end job). These types of assumptions create fear and controlling behavior.

Another cognitive distortion that many of us are experts in is catastrophizing. We expect the absolute worst thing that could happen is definitely going to happen and we decide to worry like crazy. For example, you find a nicotine vape in their room and think, "Oh my God, I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, I’ll bet she’s smoking weed and doing hard drugs too. What if she gets ahold of something with Fentanyl in it…she could die of an overdose…Oh my God, Oh My God, Oh my God.  Again, this fear causes us to control them so we lecture, punish, we check up on them constantly, and monitor their every move. And rather than avert this imagined catastrophe, it drives our kid to hide everything from us better -- they stop communicating all together, they lie to us, we lose our connection with them and any influence we previously had in their life.

A third cognitive distortion I know parents use a lot is the shoulds and should nots. This happens when we've developed a list of behavior rules over the years or come into parenting with them built-in from our own parents. We decide how they should behave and if they fall short, we stress over why they can't meet our expectations. We might also have the shoulds when we compare our kids to other teens their age. “You should be able to do XYZ” because we’ve seen other kids do that. Again, this causes all sorts of nagging and controlling behavior.

So, short of seeing a therapist, what can you do to become more emotionally aware and regulated so you can avoid the issues I’ve mentioned?

First, you have to be willing to examine your inner world, and get curious about your own thoughts and feelings and how they influence your behavior.

This takes a great deal of objectivity. You have to figure out what you’re thinking and whether those thoughts are accurate or distorted, where they come from and how you can change them. So, you have to start here—willingness to do the work and an open mind.

There are specific strategies that have been scientifically shown to help us become more emotionally aware and regulated – and none of them are complicated.

On that you might see as pretty elementary is developing your emotional vocabulary. Learning the words that describe emotions and their specific meanings. For example, you need to be able to understand if you’re annoyed, frustrated, baffled, or blue. Remember, we can’t know what to do next if we don’t understand specifically how we’re feeling.

Having these emotion words in mind will help you notice more when you actually experience these emotions (it will also help you coach your teen on their emotions).

Something else that’s extremely beneficial (and my strategy of choice) is practicing  mindfulness—specifically mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is simply a term to describe being fully present in the moment -- the "here and now". Practicing mindfulness trains our mind to focus only on what we want - when we want.

Scientists have studied the effect of mindfulness. It’s not only proven to help us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions but it also creates a "calm space" between an emotional trigger or incident and our behavior.

The practice of mindfulness consists of just a couple of components:

Paying deliberate attention...focusing our attention on the present moment...only to what is happening right here and right now at this very moment.

And having an open attitude about what we notice when we're focusing our attention on the present moment with the goal of noticing our thoughts, feelings, or urges but not getting stuck in them.

Observe what happens out of curiosity and then bring your attention back to the present moment and what’s happening now.

We simply observe or notice those thoughts and feelings with a level of curiosity (“huh, that’s interesting”) without judging them to be right or wrong, good, or bad.

This helps us to realize that thoughts and emotions are fleeting...they come into our mind and leave our mind, they’re separate from us, they're not permanent...so they cannot and do not control us.

Another scientific method of becoming more emotionally aware is to journal about your emotions. Write down how you feel—especially when you experience an unpleasant emotion – especially when you have a heated exchange with your teenager. What was going on, what happened just before, did it bring something up from your past? This will help you become more aware of the patterns and triggers for your emotions.

I realize all of this sounds like a ton of work. I mean who has time, right? But here’s the thing, you’re already spending time arguing, nagging, and consequencing your teen, and possibly feeling guilty later. This way, you’re at least spending time on something that will help you and your teen both. This work has so many positive benefits.

The great news is, it's never too late to work on your own emotional skills, and improve or deepen the emotional connection with your kids and teens...and increase their emotional intelligence in the process.

When you become more emotionally aware, several things happen:

You're better able to remain calm when your kid isn’t calm at all, which means you’re better able to listen to them, empathize, acknowledge their emotions and help them calm down. You’re modeling emotional regulation for them and you’re less likely to react immediately in a way that you regret later, you avoid escalating emotional situations so your relationship improves, and ultimately their emotional regulation improves, their overall emotional intelligence improves, their relationships improves and they’re less likely to develop mental or emotional issues.

So, I want you to remember that we can’t always trust that little voice in our head—our brain can completely mangle the facts and truth with judgments and opinions and total lies. Our brain makes mistakes, jumps to conclusions, interprets situations incorrectly, quite often, actually.

Just because you think it, doesn't mean it’s true. When you experience an unpleasant emotion, take an objective look at the thoughts behind that emotion, separate yourself from those thoughts and realize they're not a part of you, you can ignore them altogether.

Slow down and understand that you rarely need to respond immediately. Give yourself time to evaluate the situation with intention before you respond.

You have an opportunity, every time your teen does something that aggravates you, worries you, or makes you mad or anxious, to give yourself the time to question your thoughts and your emotions so you can respond to them in a way that strengthens your connection, their trust in you, and improves their behavior and their wellbeing.

If you’d like to learn how to discipline your teen without all the fearful controlling, you can check out the 5-Day Reboot: From Conflict to Cooperation – the link is at the bottom of the  episode description right where you’re listening.

And if you want to work on your emotional world, download my free guide, Emotional Awareness Strategies—you’ll also find that link in the episode description and in the show notes.

Alright, that wraps up another episode of Speaking of Teens. Thank you for being here to the end, whether you’re new here or an SOT OG, I appreciate you and hope you’ll keep coming back.

If you got something out of today’s show, I would really appreciate you popping into Spotify or Apple and giving us a 5-start rating so other parents will know they too will get value from the podcast.

Now, until next time, be sure to connect with your teen in some small way, each and every day.