Dr Bruce Perry – Page 2 – Inspired New Horizons

Emotional Airbags

Just envision this for a moment: When we are emotionally triggered, it is like an airbag exploding to protect us. However, it catches us off guard – the impact so sudden and so strong that our brains send out high emergency alerts to our bodies. We get hijacked rather than assisted. We feel like we can’t breathe fully, our hearts are racing and our ability to see clearly is limited.

I’ve never experienced an airbag deploying in a car, but I can imagine that it feels more scary than protective when it happens. While we know that air bags are a safety feature designed to protect us from serious and even life-threatening injury, it is not something that we get to practice. We can only imagine what it might be like and we can mentally prepare for how we would hope we can respond in such a situation.

Our natural human response to an emotional trigger is the equivalent of airbags deploying. Our emotions are intended to protect and inform us but a strong emotional trigger can feel surprisingly overwhelming.

Our very first experiences with our internal emotional airbags occur in childhood and they have lasting impacts.

For many of us who are older, the cars our parents drove back in the day didn’t even seatbelts let alone airbags. Those safety features only came along when a critical mass of human beings realized that we could actually save life and limb by being proactive and installing numerous safeguards. It is this very same analogy with our emotional airbags; back in the day, our parents did know about the profound benefits of emotional intelligence and most importantly, skillful emotional regulation.

We are now at a very important tipping point — we are fast gaining critical mass in the awareness that emotional integration is the human operating system upgrade that should be modeled, taught and integrated into our children’s developing brains.

The challenge for many of us is how do we teach something we were never actually taught? The truth is that we have actually done just that in many areas of life. Just look how quickly we taught ourselves to embrace technology, electronic banking and Zoom meetings. If we stop resisting what appears to be harder and even unpleasant work, we might discover that life and our relationships actually get a lot easier and more fulfilling with emotional integration.

I recently learned that we can gain a lot of traction in our own emotional integration education by being around children. This makes so much sense because we can witness in real time what happens in childhood when kids are given tools and support to understand and handle their emotions. It’s a visual aid more engaging than a magic act.

When something new comes along such as an upgrade to our phones, our laptops and even our car’s technology, we can readily see how the improvements enhance our life and address a problem we may not even know we had. The same is true with emotional health. When we become keen observers of children and their interactions with their parents, siblings, teachers and friends, we witness firsthand how having meaningful emotional tools would have made a huge and dramatic difference for everyone — most especially for children who have very limited cognitive resources for making sense of a complex world.

In my prior blog posts in this multi-part series on Game-Changers for our emotional upgrade, you may have noticed that no matter who is leading the charge, or what modality or field they represent, everything points us directly back to childhood.

All the behavioral patterns, the protective armor, the coping mechanisms that we deploy have been handed down to us for generations, with no real advancements at all. In fact, what once seemed so complex about personal growth, trauma and self discovery have been boiled down to some pretty obvious truths: we really had a “one size fits all approach” and a small closet of possible options for navigating childhood. We were so handicapped for how we made sense of what was happening in our world.

A quick review of psychology, neuroscience, the enneagram, behavioral science, etc. reveals that our small closet of options held just a handful of “one size fits all” behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms. We are people pleasers or contrarians, we hide or we fight, we avoid conflict or we create conflict, we numb, we run, we freeze. Normal, child-sized responses to emotional airbags exploding in us, as well as members of our family and community without warning.

No wonder we ran for cover and struggled to make sense of the unpredictability and scariness of it all. We ducked into those little closets to find something that would soothe us and keep us safe from things we were feeling but did not understand.

Dr. Becky Kennedy explains this so beautifully when she reminds us that a small child who is overwhelmed with big emotions – and is throwing a tantrum or having a meltdown – lacks the skills he needs to manage that big emotional explosion. She tells us that we teach our children the skills they need to learn to swim, ride a bike or read. So why — she challenges us — would we expect them to be able to handle big, overwhelming emotions coursing through them — without some helpful tools?

I’m hoping that this brought you to a full stop.

Take a moment to think about how you are handling your own “sudden, big feeling moments” in real time today when your adult emotional airbags get deployed — especially in front of your kids.

We teach our children a lot by osmosis. What skills and tools are we reaching for when we are emotionally triggered, extremely tired, or overwhelmed by others or events? We not only need to role model and actively discuss how our emotions impact us, we really need to engage in the installation of emotional intelligence in our children. We need to teach emotional skills just as we teach them good hygiene and manners, how to share with others and how to use their words. In fact, when we install the emotional upgrades, all the other things we are attempting to teach them will be greatly enhanced in the most remarkable ways. Honestly, the parenting job is less exhausting and more productive with strong emotional skills and tools.

The reason for this is that our brains release adrenaline and cortisol when we are emotionally unmoored. Since we co-regulate each other, if we overreact when our kids’ emotional airbags have deployed, it is like double-dosing all those stress hormones. We would never double-dose our kids cough medicine or Tylenol – but losing our cool with emotionally distraught kids is like giving them an extra dose of stress hormones and throwing back some for ourselves.

Here’s what happens when our bodies get flooded with cortisol: Our heart rate and blood pressure go up; our bodies fight or flight response kicks in; our digestive system slows; our immune system weakens we become anxious, irritable and on edge. Chances are you are now realizing that this is the exact opposite of being a calming first responder when emotional airbags inflate.

We cannot be at our best as parents and emotional first responders when we are over-reacting to our child’s emotions and out of control with our own.

Take a moment to think back to an experience that you had as a kid when your parents or caregiver lost control — do you recall how it felt? It was probably pretty scary and you put a bookmark in your memory banks of how you might avoid that reaction in the future.

This is how our childhood emotional triggers begin. It is precisely why all the intersecting research points us back to childhood for the tap roots of our emotional triggers, inner critics and insecurities.

Old parenting models exacerbated the problem because emotions were treated as a bug and not a feature of our core operating system. Kids and parents were flooded with emotions and cortisol and the parenting rule of thumb was to send us to our room til we were able to be with others. We were often punished or dismissed for our outbursts, while our parents got to return to whatever they chose to do. No consequences for them. No repairs for the relationship rupture. We made a mental note of that too. We got a lot of mixed messaging to go along with our repressed and unprocessed emotional experiences. This double standard also created a lot of issues with our basic need for a secure attachment – and resulted in many of us having anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. Yet another clue from our childhood about why we might be having relationship issues in our adult lives.

Our brains are prediction machines. While we are not consciously aware of it, we have mental notes and bookmarks on a clunky old database that it still uses when we get hijacked and go offline. Our bodies and brains coordinate all their defense mechanisms very quickly when something feels oddly familiar and we need to be on high alert. Our emotional triggers are in those childhood databases.

The pivot is catching ourselves in the act. We have to catch ourselves in the act of being hit with our own emotional airbags and realizing that we are off-line, defaulting to that childhood database.

When we are operating our incredibly complex cars today at high speeds in heavy traffic, we have the ability to stay fully engaged with our current knowledge and awareness. We don’t default to how anxious and insecure we felt when we were first learning to drive. We have the awareness, dexterity and maturity to handle a frightening situation like airbags deploying in a car in the event of a collision. We most likely would act like the adults our kids need us to be in that circumstance. We can do hard things. In fact, we are pretty proud of ourselves when we handle a crisis like this with confidence.

We can do the same for our kids’ emotional airbags; we can become the trustworthy, grounded first responders they need and deserve.

I believe that the reason doing our own emotional integration work gets a lot of traction when we interact with kids is that we get a lot of opportunities to both observe and practice. As we pay attention to the common emotional triggers our children have, we can get equally more in touch with our own.

Kids haven’t changed; what has changed is knowing that emotional integration is an incredible feature of our brains and bodies — not a bug. Our children will have the same big overwhelming emotional responses that we did when we were little. They will get scared, angry, frustrated, confused, belligerent, shy, bossy, sensitive — the list is endless. But instead of leaving them to their own devices and that small closet of coping skills, we will be showing up as caring, comforting emotional mentors.

We can teach them or we can repeat the past. This is where real change takes place.

Each emotion our children feel is legitimate and is real for them. Acknowledging that is huge. It reassures them that they will be ok, that they are seen and heard and that we will help them manage their big feelings. They do not have to do that alone. In fact, they unable to do that alone because they do not yet have access to “top down” executive functions in those small developing brains.

We become the training wheels for our children’s emotional awareness, intelligence and regulation.

No overdosing on stress hormones for you or your child. Helping your child return to their baseline is how we teach them to “ride out” their emotional waves. As they grow older, they will then have a lot of experience with how emotions come on strong, and can subside with a little skillful assistance. We can teach our kids to label their emotions, to understand what they are trying to tell them and to process them in real time. This is how we help our kids get more skillful at their own emotional regulation. We teach them to tolerate a little short term discomfort and to learn from it. This is the preventative step we take to help them avoid numbing their pain.

It is also how we introduce them to the incredible benefits of self-compassion. Rather than our children growing up with harsh inner critics, fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, we will be helping them build resilience, resourcefulness, confidence and growth mindsets.

We aren’t born afraid of our emotions. In fact, emotions are a baby’s first language and how they get their basic needs met. Rather than pulling the plug on emotions when our children learn to talk and express themselves with more context and complexity, we help them differentiate between self-identity and their behaviors. Telling a child they are bad, stupid or too much is the root cause of adults who struggle with their core identity, self-worth and lack of inner confidence. Label the behavior not the child. We have good kids and sometimes they have unacceptable behaviors.

We use boundaries as guardrails for our kids – to help them learn how to make good choices on their own later. Our boundaries teach kids more about the consequences of their behaviors more than any lecture ever will. And we want our children to become very skilled at holding boundaries when they are teenagers and adults so that they can clearly let others know what is acceptable behavior to be in relationship with them. Boundaries are a relationship tool that keeps us safe and in alignment with our core values.

Did you know that children have this same inquisitive nature about emotions? We are the ones who grew up with emotions being labeled as good or bad, positive or negative, even gender restricted. It’s time to peel those labels and reframe emotions as neutral, necessary, invaluable internal information. Emotions are a feature, not a bug of our core operating system.

Both our parental teaching experiences and our child’s learning experiences will be markedly changed for the better when we integrate emotional intelligence into everything else we introduce to our kids. Without all those airbags exploding, we will have more room to fully engage in the dual process in healthy, relaxed and mind-opening ways.

Just out of curiosity, check in with yourself to see how you actually plan for big emotional experiences for your kids on purpose. A surprise birthday celebration, those costumes they will be donning for Halloween, unveiling an upcoming family vacation — these are all intended to evoke great joy, delight and wonder. How do we support our kids when we have bad or sad news to impart — we lean in, comforting, soft and assuring.

Imagine yourself growing up without the impediments of limiting beliefs, false narratives or restrictive social conditioning. Imagine yourself understanding that your emotions are helpful information, normal and acceptable. If you are capable of imagining this, you may find yourself smiling, feeling free and adventurous, even child-like with wonder and curiosity. That feeling right there is what we are going for — that is what happens with emotional integration and giving our kids the skills and tools they need to make sense of the world in a healthy, growth-mind set, ever evolving kind of way.

Magic happens when we begin to take our own adult emotional integration seriously; when we teach and learn simultaneously with our kids. If you are a parent or grandparent, you have the best environment for this “on the job” training.

We all have the potential to contribute in a meaningful way to integrating emotional intelligence for kids and for each other. Bear this in mind with each interaction you have. We can be the scaffolding that we all need to come fully online with emotional intelligence.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Our Collective Emotional Health Journey

This is the third part of my latest series of blog posts focused on all that we are learning about the integral importance of our emotional health — and how to proactively engage in a healthy emotional lifestyle.

The first two parts of this series focused on the breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry that have created better parenting models, vastly improved therapy protocols and perhaps most importantly – destigmatized a lot of what we believed about “mental health.”

If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ll recognize the overarching theme of “mapping how we got where we are, and how we can better prepare for our future journeys through life with the firsthand knowledge we’ve gained from our past experiences, and the newer advancements and tools available to us now pertaining to emotional health.

In each of these posts, I am highlighting two influential change-makers who are instrumental in helping us navigate emotions more skillfully, both individually and within our relationships. You may already be familiar with the change-makers I share today — they are becoming household names- and for good reason. Both Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Paul Conti are having meaningful impacts in our knowledge about preventative mental health care.

“Compassion, community and humanity are intertwined in that they exemplify the full expression of who we are as humans. Compassion enables us to care about other people, to relate to them with kindness, and to consider the world from their perspective. Community is the embodied acknowledgement of our interdependence with other people — our behaviors affect one another.” – Dr. Paul Conti.

Back in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry sounded the alarm on our escalating empathy poverty in his book Born for Love. It was almost as though he had a crystal ball and could see what our future would hold if we continued to operate without empathy for each other and especially for our most vulnerable – our children. He educated us about the need for relational webbing especially for children since their complex brains develop more slowly than any other species on the planet. He was dipping our toes in the realization that emotional integration was the missing piece in our internal GPS; and that we need to provide scaffolding for each other, especially during emotional duress. Empathy helps others feel seen, heard and believed. It can change lives; even save lives. Empathy is integral for healthy brains, to process and heal emotional trauma, and to be in stable relationships with others.

You’ll recall from my last blog post that this is exactly what Uncle Marvin did for Dr. Marc Brackett when he was just a young adolescent. Uncle Marvin listened to Marc’s stories with empathy and gave him “permission to feel.” It was the empathic support that Marc so desperately needed and it changed his life; it fuels his passion to teach us to become emotion scientists and to help children do the same.

It’s becoming more clear every day that when we know our own inner emotional landscape with greater clarity and understanding, we become more attuned to others’ emotions. We are less judgmental and more curious. Their stories matter to us because they give us valuable information to best support them. Simply put, we become more empathetic and compassionate with others. It has taken a very long time for us to heed Dr. Bruce Perry’s warning about empathy, but at long last we are now paying attention.

Empathy is becoming such a guiding principle that now it is even embedded in Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked In and Inflection AI, has been instrumental in launching a pilot version of generative AI that is powered by a neural network model built on extensive data about human emotions and interactions. This new AI is Pi, the personal intelligence chat bot designed to respond to your inquiries in an emotionally intelligent manner. Imagine that, even artificial intelligence is being trained to be friendly, compassionate and empathetic.

We have the rare dynamic opportunity to show up more compassionately and empathetically in our personal relationships — and to be positive contributors to the growing data base for artificial intelligence that is also emotionally intelligent. That’s right, we can be part of the change we would like to see in the world — especially for our children — and believe me, our children will be using AI. Just check out Pi for yourself and you will see how young people are actively engaging with it right now — and how thoughtful and emotionally skillful the responses can be.

Today I’ll introduce you to two of my long time favorite change makers. They feel like friends to me because I soak up all that they teach through podcasts, books and interviews. They both have learned so much from each other’s fields of research, and they have supported each other through life’s challenges and healing personal growth work in large part due to their deep, connected friendship. It is not at all surprising that they recently teamed up to present a 4-part podcast series on “understanding and assessing our mental health”.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab:

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and the host of the #1 Health and Fitness Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He is an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Huberman launched his highly popular podcast, Huberman Lab, in the midst of the pandemic because he wanted all of us to have access to the information we needed to take care of our health in a proactive way. Compelled by a strong desire to make a difference in a time of major crisis, he educated us about how our brains and bodies operate and how to optimally care for them especially during long periods of uncertainty and anxiety. Very few of us really knew just how important quality, consistent sleep is for our brains, bodies and immune systems – but over 4.2 million people do now thanks to the Huberman Lab podcast.

Andrew Huberman heeded his intuition’s call to action to help us learn more about our brains, the breakthroughs in neuroscience and how we can proactively improve our mental and physical health. His podcasts make this learning so accessible to all of us.

In the spring of 2023, Dr. Huberman invited Peter Attia onto his podcast to discuss his book Outlive. Dr. Attia, a Stanford/JohnHopkins/NIH trained physician, has devoted his medical career to enhancing our longevity; most notably our ability to live longer, with a vastly longer health span and much shorter disease span. It was during this podcast discussion that Dr. Peter Attia shared that our emotional health is the most integral part of longevity, health span, and a deeply satisfying life.

Dr. Peter Attia also shared personal stories about his own emotional health and his road to healing with the help of Dr. Paul Conti, Terry Real and Esther Perel. In my first blog post of this series, I highlighted Terry Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy and his ability to help his clients understand how the impacts of their childhood are causing great difficulties in their current lives.

Dr. Peter Attia knew this firsthand – because in spite of building the life he wanted that included a successful career, marriage and children – it was his unchecked emotions that put all of that in jeopardy. He opens up about these painful truths in his book – and he did the same in his podcast conversation with Andrew Huberman.

It is these honest stories about the struggles we all are quite familiar with, that open up the much needed conversations about how we address mental and emotional health, both individually and collectively. Once Dr. Attia shared his emotional outbursts and the collateral damage they were causing to his family and relationships, it made it easier for others to do the same. This is the power of empathy.

Dr. Peter Attia subsequently invited Andrew Huberman to be his guest on his own podcast, The Drive; and it was during that conversation that Andrew opened up about his own struggles in childhood due to family dysfunction and all the trouble he got into as a result of either running from or numbing to the situation. Another relatable story that mirrors so much of what Dr. Marc Brackett experienced in his youth. In Andrew Huberman’s case, it was Tony Hawk’s parents that gave him some much needed relationship scaffolding. They made a lasting impression on a young Andrew stranded in Northern California when they took him in for the night after a skateboarding competition, taking him out to dinner, being empathic and non-judgmental and providing empathy when it was needed most. They were the mentors and role models that Dr. Marc Brackett encourages us all to be.

Can you begin to see how empathy opens us up by reflecting on our own life stories and offering to others what we ourselves also need. We need to be the Uncle Marvin’s who listen to learn what is really going on and to give others permission to truly feel all their emotions.

As Dr. Bruce Perry wrote in his most recent book about empathy, aptly entitled What Happened to You, we need to understand how our childhood shaped us and our emotional mapping. When we hear these vulnerable childhood stories of struggle and disconnection, we see our own more clearly. In turn, we become more aware that everyone has stories about feeling like they didn’t belong, about trauma or abuse of some kind, bullying, body image issues, feelings of unworthiness or not being smart enough, of being too needy or too distant.

Dr. Andrew Huberman launched his podcast in the midst of a pandemic to provide a public service. He believed that if we only knew the simple, no-cost steps we could be doing to help our physical and mental health, we could build stronger immune systems and each be a part of the solution. Using his highly successful podcast platform, he is now turning our attention to emotional and mental health – for this very same reason.

The proof was in the pudding – three friends, former colleagues, all had adverse childhood experiences that lingered long into their adult lives. Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia and Paul Conti all entered the health field but pursued very diverse branches of expertise. Yet now, their fields are converging and they all point to our emotional and mental health. Both Andrew and Peter turned to Paul Conti, a psychiatrist, to help them with counseling and therapy. In the process, they learned his own story, deepened their friendship and began to see how their respective fields fit together to solve another big human problem.

If you look at the trajectory of their work and their platforms, you can plot very clearly that the pandemic was a pivot point for this deeper dive into the prevention and proactivity approach to our emotional and mental health. The proverbial silver lining in that dark cloud.

In recent months, Andrew Huberman has had a number of noteworthy guests on his podcast to discuss how emotions and social factors impact children’s learning; how to foster growth mindsets in ourselves and our children; how to work on behavioral changes; the impacts of social isolation; and how risk taking, innovation and artificial intelligence transform the human experience.

Just a few weeks ago, his guest was the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, about the challenges we face with public health. Included in this extensive conversation were the impacts of social media and the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation (especially in teens and seniors).

Dr. Andrew Huberman is most definitely a change-maker — and he has fast become a household name. He has successfully created a huge interest in learning about how our brains work. It is unlikely that any of us would sign up for an adult neuroscience class at the local college, and yet there are millions popping those earbuds in and tuning in to listen to Andrew and his guests teach us what we need to know about our personal data processor.

The best part is that his followers are implementing best practices to improve their mental, emotional and physical health. More sleep, less alcohol, more exercise, less doom scrolling, more empathy, less isolation.

Dr. Paul Conti, Psychiatrist, Consultant, Author:

Dr. Paul Conti’s bio will tell you that he is adept at helping people untangle complex problems. He takes a holistic view of each client, to help them recognize the interconnedness of our past to our present, as well as our work lives and personal lives, of our individuality and our relationships. There is a very complex, integrated, inter-connected system at play in all of us. (Just as Dr. Richard Schwartz espouses with internal family systems and his book, No Bad Parts.)

In 2021, Dr. Conti published his revelational book, Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic. How remarkable that the COVID-19 pandemic would present an analogy that we could all viscerally wrap our heads around:

“A wise response to a viral pandemic is to become more closed until a vaccine becomes widely available. A wise response to a trauma pandemic is to become more open so that we ourselves become the vaccine.” — Dr. Paul Conti

Dr. Paul Conti was a recent guest on the Huberman Lab podcast and over a series of four episodes, he and Andrew Huberman provided an extraordinary public service about mental health. While this deep dive may seem unappealing and overwhelming, what you will discover is that Dr. Conti’s soft spoken demeanor, his humility and humanity, and his simple metaphors make a complex subject very accessible.

Here are highlights from each of the four segments. All of this content comes from Dr. Andrew Huberman’s show notes for each episode which aired throughout September, 2023.

Episode 1 – How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health:

Dr. Conti defines mental health in actionable terms and describes the foundational elements of the self, including the structure and function of the unconscious and conscious mind, which give rise to all our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. He also explains how to explore and address the root causes of anxiety, low confidence, negative internal narratives, over-thinking and how our unconscious defense mechanisms operate. This episode provides a foundational roadmap to assess your sense of self and mental health. It offers tools to reshape negative emotions, thought patterns and behaviors — either through self-exploration or with a licensed professional.

Episode 2 – How to Improve Your Mental Health:

Dr. Conti explains specific tools for how to overcome life’s challenges using a framework of self-inquiry that explores all the key elements of self, including defense mechanisms, behaviors, self-awareness and attention. We also discuss our internal driving forces, how to align them and ultimately, how to cultivate a powerful “generative drive” of positive, aspirational pursuits. Dr. Conti also explains how to adjust your internal narratives, reduce self-limiting concepts, overcome intrusive thoughts, and how certain defense mechanisms, such as “acting out” or narcissism, show up in ourselves and others.

Episode 3 – How to Build and Maintain Healthy Relationships:

Dr. Conti explains how to find, develop and strengthen healthy relationships — including romantic relationships, work and colleague relationships, and friendships. He explains a roadmap of the conscious and unconscious mind that can allow anyone to navigate conflicts better and set healthy boundaries in relationships. We also discuss common features of unhealthy relationships and clinically supported tools for dealing with relationship insecurity, excessive anxiety, past traumas, manipulation and abuse. Dr. Conti explains how, in healthy relationships, there emerges a dynamic of the mutually generative “us” and how to continually improve that dynamic.

Episode 4 – Tools and Protocols for Mental Health:

Dr. Conti explains what true self-care is and how our mental health benefits from specific self-care and introspection practices — much in the same way that our physical health benefits from certain exercise and nutrition habits. He describes how the foundation of mental health is an understanding of one’s own mind and the specific questions to ask in order to explore the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves. He describes how this process can be done either on our own, through journaling, meditation and structured thought, or in therapy with the help of a licensed professional. He also explains how unprocessed trauma can short-circuit the process and how to prevent that, and the role of friendships and other relational support systems in the journey of self-exploration for mental health. People of all ages and those with and without self-introspection and therapy experience ought to benefit from the information in this episode.

It is not necessary to listen to all four podcasts in the order in which they were presented to glean valuable insights that we can put into practice right away. However, each one does build on the foundational metaphor of an iceberg — our consciousness being the tip that juts out above the water; and the much larger unconscious part of us that drifts and drags underneath the surface. It is the unconsciousness that gets us into turbulent emotional waters. We’ve all heard this iceberg metaphor used often in personal growth and mindfulness arenas — but Dr. Conti’s explanation will crystalize what once seemed pretty murky.

Throughout the four part series, Dr. Conti anchors us to this important mental health work with two verbs — Agency and Gratitude. Again, we have often heard these two words bantered about a lot as though they are the fast track to personal growth and mindfulness. But they are not adjectives and they are not static.

In his book, No Bad Parts, Dr. Richard Schwartz describes “agency” as being “self-led”. We are adults now who have worked very hard to build the life we want. We are investing time and energy in our careers, we have chosen spouses and are raising our precious children. The catch is that we often self-sabotage our best intentions and hard work because it is the unconscious part of our iceberg that pulls us out of our agency and back into old habits and patterns. As Dr. Conti unpacks this for us, we come to have a greater appreciation for the value of pausing long enough when big emotions are hitting us to course correct. We can make conscious choices to respond more appropriately – and to be consistent with our emotional regulation in order to be good role models for our children; and to be better partners in our relationships.

As for gratitude, Dr. Conti reminds us that it is not just making a list at the end of each day. He stresses the importance of focusing on gratitude as a verb. Showing up in life with gratitude – for what we are able to do, for our diverse resources and tools, and for the people who support us.

We can be enthusiastically grateful for the breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology that help us actively participate in shifting from old faulty models of parenting and relationships into healthier, integrated ones that break generational cycles.

Dr. Conti invites us to take a serious inventory of the places and times that our life gets out of balance. Are we able to stay more emotionally regulated at work or in public than we are at home and in our closest relationships? Do certain people trigger us and amplify strong emotions, while others seem to have a calming and uplifting influence on us?

Dr. Conti uses a cupboard metaphor as a compelling visual for this inventory. Take a peek inside your various cupboards and discover the different coping skills and self-regulation that you use ion different roles in your life. Investigate how you handle things when you are sleep-deprived, on overload, or feel resentful. What helps you get back to an emotional baseline when you are triggered? Sometimes our cupboards are bare; sometimes they have some expired items that are no longer working.

You will find the PDF’s that Dr. Conti provides in the Huberman podcast series to be very helpful guides for these metaphors and for the proactive, preventative mental health practices he espouses. The 4 part series is a worthwhile investment of your time if you want to gain real insight into a proactive, preventative approach to mental and emotional health.

SUMMARY:

Today, I pulled together a few critical pieces of our collective journey. We now know that Dr. Bruce Perry’s wisdom about our empathy poverty was spot on. Empathy plays a vital role in building the connections we all long for — and that science has proven — supports our most valuable relationships — those with our children and our partners. We live longer and healthier when we are deeply connected with each and supported by each other.

Friendship is often the engine of change and healing. We are not meant to do our inner work and emotional healing alone. It is far better done with others that we trust and who are good role models. We need emotion scientists and emotions mentors. We can become the relational web and scaffolding for our families and friends. It is especially good to have a buddy with whom to do some of this inner investigative work. Why? Because we are not alone — and we do see ourselves in each other’s stories. When we feel heard in a very meaningful way; we feel like we belong.

People who have done their inner work often pursue fields that take what they have learned to a whole new level. All three parts of this current blog post series on proactive and preventative emotional health have showcased such people. What these change-makers need are followers; they need others who take the courses, who soak up the knowledge, who put the practices into action. Then they need us to tell others our experiences with our own changes. When we give each other our personal examples of how this inner work and new tools, have dramatically improved our lives, we offer encouragement for others to try it out as well.

Do you know who the most excited little sponges are? Our children! When we begin to teach our children that they do have permission to feel their emotions and we start having calm, supportive, inquiring conversations about their feelings, we get tangible evidence of the power of empathy.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Click this link to listen to Part 1 of the Mental Health Series with Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Paul Conti https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000626920013

You can use this link to discover all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast. This link will take you to Andrew Huberman’s webpage: https://www.hubermanlab.com/all-episodes

Use this link to go to Dr Paul Cont’s webpage to learn more about him and his book, Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic. Read endorsements from the Greater Good Science Center, Lady Gaga and more. https://drpaulconti.com

Change-Makers Mapping the Way

Welcome back to my latest blog post series about the change-makers who are helping us take the next meaningful steps in the integration of emotional health into our lifestyles. In the first part of this series, I shared two dynamic change-makers for parenting and for couples. The common thread for both Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting model and Terry Real’s relational therapy is what we learned and experienced in childhood that impacts us still today.

Unfortunately a lot of what carries over from childhood into adulthood regarding our emotional health is often not so obvious to us. When we get emotionally triggered or over-stressed, we unconsciously react with patterns we have memorized for decades. We know them by heart.

This is the second post in this series pulls that common thread of childhood, inviting us to go back and revisit how we came to shape our world view but with an entirely different lens this time. Now we are archeologists, searching for the clues and examining artifacts.

A common metaphor that is being used to today across the spectrum of emotional health and personal growth is one of a map. This helpful metaphor tells us that we need to know our backstory and childhood history to clean out and update our beliefs and behaviors. This is the role of an emotional archeologist.

We are going to discover things that are still getting in our way when we retrace our steps. Let’s start by tossing out the chunky picture book with baby faces that express only happy, sad or mad. Most of the life mapping we did back then was based on a very limited emotional vocabulary. It’s nearly impossible to create a more nuanced map to navigate the complexities of real life with only three basic emotions. Yet that is what we did — and that is what we operate on unconsciously even decades later.

When Brene Brown introduced her book, Atlas of the Heart, in November 2021, she gave us a major upgrade to the chunky emotions picture book. She gave us language, definitions and real life examples of our emotions. She called it an atlas.

“I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that with an adventurous heart and the right map, we can travel anywhere and never losing ourselves.” — Brene Brown

It was the first time for many of us to have an emotions reference guide; an atlas that helps us understand just how much our emotions are impacting how we navigate through life. Brene’s research supported the fact that most adults were still using only three basic emotions to express themselves – the same three that little kids use every day. Her extensive research was a reality check for how we’d gotten stuck and hampered in our adult lives with such a limited emotional vocabulary.

Brene not only offered us definitions for 87 common emotions and experienced, she provided common, real life examples of when these emotions were likely to show up. Brene’s book upgraded our emotional vocabulary from three core emotions — angry, sad and happy – to a much richer, contextual and expansive way to understand ourselves.

A bonus is that when we understand ourselves better, we become more skillful at understanding others – even (and especially) our own children.

The truth is that as we get to know our own emotions and experiences more clearly, the better we can show up in our relationships with more empathy and curiosity about how others are feeling. Rather than getting lost in each other’s emotions, we can become skillful travelers together.

In my last blog post, I highlighted the parenting movement that Dr. Becky Kennedy is championing. If you are a parent who follows Dr. Becky, you no doubt feel so seen and heard when you watch her videos. With a dollop of reality and a dash of humor, she skillfully shows us how we get hijacked by our kids’s behaviors and can quickly come down to their level with our own reactions and behaviors. Can we catch ourselves in the act of returning to child-sized tools for big emotions and scary experiences? Can we pivot and choose wisely to deploy more mature skills?

“Underneath bad behavior is always a good kid.” – Dr. Becky Kennedy, Founder of Good Inside

Underneath our own outgrown behaviors is that little kid we once were. What we learned and mapped out in childhood is what we need to investigate.

Let’s meet two more change-makers who did their own extensive emotional inner work — and then looked around and asked themselves how they could help others. They poured their hearts and energy into their respective fields and the creation of new approaches for becoming emotions archeologists. Then they took their work one step further. They are teaching us how to integrate our emotions and positively impact how we navigate life and map a better future.

These change-makers are paving the way to a major pivot in mental and emotional health: An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.

BACK-MAPPING: DR. RICHARD SCHWARTZ, creator of Internal Family Systems

We now know that we do need to go back and look at our childhood to “back-map” why we react without thinking when we are emotionally charged. What happened in our childhood that contributed to our coping skills, unconscious behavioral patterns, emotional triggers and beliefs about ourselves?

In a recent blog post, I shared that Dr. Dan Siegel, author of of Whole Brain Child, acknowledged that many people do not want to revisit their childhood experiences. There is a fear that revisiting old painful memories will take over our current lives and we’d rather not go there. But the truth of the matter is that unconsciously these things we keep stuffed down or locked up are literally showing up in our lives anyway. It’s not the monsters under the bed or the secrets in the closet that are the problem, it is the reality that they are taking up a lot of storage space — and they creep into our minds and behaviors unconsciously.

Meet Dr. Richard Schwartz, creator of a revolutionary form of therapy known as Internal Family Systems. He also uses the concept of a map to help us understand how all the parts of us show up when we are making our way in life.

If you are not familiar with the term Internal Family Systems, you may think that it is a discipline or field devoted to our family trees – which are often full of generational patterns, inherited traits and all kinds of dysfunction.

However, Internal Family Systems is actually a very useful evidence-based psychotherapy developed by Dr. Richard Schwarz in the 1980’s. In plain language, Internal Family Systems is all about us – the me, myself and I.

It is our unique, individual, inner family system comprised of all our sub-personalities. Each and everyone of our sub-personalities has its own viewpoint, qualities and roles it plays in our daily lives.

Before you shrug your shoulders and dismiss that IFS could be beneficial for you and all those you love, stop to think just how familiar you are with a few of your sub-personalities. How well do you know your Inner Critic? Do you have a steamroller in your personality that likes to run over any constructive feedback you might be offered? Are you a people pleaser who often gives to the point of exhaustion? Do you have a fierce warrior side of you — the big protector who prefers a fiery battle over calm conflict resolution? Do you have a stealth, hyper vigilant, guard who stands watch night and day to keep you safe?

If you’ve ever felt an internal tug of war, it’s quite likely one of your sub-personalities was engaged in a struggle. I’m guessing you may be now feeling a little more curious about Internal Family Systems.

In his book, No Bad Parts; Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, Dr. Richard Schwartz does not refer to our sub-personalities as “demons” as this pillow suggests, but rather a much more appropriate, relatable term — they are our “burdens.“

If you ever get in your own way, then you can fully grasp how our sub-personalities are often the very cause of our self-inflicted problematic behavioral patterns. They do burden our lives; they make things harder than they have to be.

Dr. Richard Schwartz reflects on the work of childhood attachment theory pioneer, John Bowlby, to help us explore how and why we came to possess such intricate, complex sub-personalities. John Bowlby viewed our “childhood attachment styles” as our “internal working models”.

Many of us grew up with parents who were not emotionally available and often had a lot of problems of their own. The old parenting models punished us for our “bad” emotions, gave accolades for our “good” emotions; or worse yet, encouraged our ability to become cognitively dissonant and just power through our emotions.

As children with pint-sized developing brains and the inability to make sense of a very big, complex, confusing and contradictory world, we developed “maps” of what to expect from our caretakers and the world in general — and from all our subsequent close relationships. These “maps” we created also told us things about our own level of goodness (or lack thereof) and how much we deserve love and support (or how we weren’t worthy).

These individual “maps” get lodged in our bodies of our young parts and become very powerful – and unconscious – organizers of our lives. These are our personal burdens.

As if that isn’t even to contend with as we mature, we also carry internally another class of burdens — legacy burdens. These do not come from our direct life experiences, but we inherit them from our parents. Legacy burdens are the generational patterns, beliefs, and attitudes that get passed along rather organically. They too are very potent organizers of our lives. Think of all the societal conditioning, cultural beliefs and attitudes that are baked into our lives from birth. As Dr. Schwartz articulates “because we have absorbed these legacy burdens in our daily environments, we have marinated in them for a very long time; so it’s often harder to notice them. In this way, legacy burdens can be as prominent and unnoticed as water to a fish.”

Legacy burdens often show up as biases and prejudices that we may not be consciously aware that we possess. Intellectually we believe one thing, but instinctually and unconsciously we can act and feel quite differently when we are emotionally charged. High stress situations take our executive functions offline – and suddenly we are acting on the “baked in” legacy burdens, not from our current values.

Dr. Richard Schwartz invites us to become very fluent and familiar with our sub-personalities. Where we once believed it was better to use willpower to fight or resist them, he turns this theory inside out. One of the most transformational ways to really get to know ourselves well, and to do our our “inner work”, is to get up close and personal with our inner cast of characters, our sub-personalities. This is our very own “internal family system.”

We’ve often referred to personal growth work as peeling off the layers our onion, but Dr. Schwartz tells us that our sub-personalities are more like cloves of garlic. Each part is like a garlic head with individual cloves. The individual cloves developed from an event or experience, how we made sense of it, what we came to expect on a regular basis, and how we mapped it out. These parts have “blended” themselves to our perspectives, emotions, beliefs and impulses.

Our emotions, bodily sensations, thoughts, impulses, knee jerk reactions, limiting beliefs — they all are emanating from our internal parts. Dr. Schwartz refers to all of these as “trailheads“. He offers that when we focus on one, it is as if we are starting out on a trail that leads us to the part of us from which those feelings, reactions, impulses emanate.

What happens on this trail when we lean in with curiosity and a strong desire to learn our inner terrain? We open up to discovery about the parts of ourselves and our stories that have much wisdom to impart to us. And we often learn that all that messaging we got as children is not at all who we really are, who we have become and especially how we can continue to evolve into the best version of ourselves.

Can you picture yourself as a small child on that trail many decades ago? How different would the landscape look to you and how scary would it be to navigate it with limited resources all while fighting back tears and an onslaught of big emotions? Would you want to use the map that child created to help you navigate the trailhead today? Of course not. Today you have so much more knowledge, self awareness, agency and resources at your disposal.

Take a moment to think about grown adults that are still having meltdowns and explosive temper tantrums. Reflect on the emotional triggers you can spot in yourself and others that seem like a huge overreaction to current events. Do you see childish bullying tactics showing up with adults who frankly should know better?

With the Internal Family Systems model, Dr. Schwartz reframes our sub-personalities as our “parts”; as if each part were a person with a true purpose. Our inner “parts” are doing a lot of important jobs to help us get through life and be in relationships with others. The problem is not us — the problem is that our “parts” keep us stuck in the past.

The parts of us that throw temper tantrums are loudly announcing “please pay attention to my needs right now”. The parts of us that want to “numb out” are simply assuming the role of “pain reliever”. Very often it is deep emotional pain that causes the parts of us to step in as a protector (albeit one that now causes us more trouble than relief). The inner parts of us are the ones pulling our emotional triggers.

If you have ever been a sibling who tried to protect younger siblings from a parent’s unchecked anger, then you have a very clear, real-life example of the role that your “parts” are playing for you. Dr. Schwartz helps us understand that when we change our perspective on our parts and the roles they play, we can “unburden” those parts of us from outgrown, outsized fear and responsibility.

The Internal family systems model has become a big transformational pivot for how therapists and psychiatrists are treating trauma, addictions, depression and anxiety. It is similarly a meaningful pivot for individual and couples counseling and it is vastly improving our approach to parenting. We are shifting away from stigmatizing these issues, from blaming and shaming, and relying solely on abstinence or will power to solve the problem.

When we do this inner work and look at our “parts” and how they show up in our adult lives, what we discover with much clarity is how our own kids are doing the very same thing today. If your child or grandchild blurts out that they are “stupid or bad”, “too much trouble” or “not smart enough”, they are blending their behavior with their identity– they are creating their inner garlic clove.

Once we begin to explore our own childhood maps, we gain a lot of insight into what might be happening in our own children’s self identity. We can readily see when our children might be taking their behaviors – and our reactions to them – as labels for who they are. We can help them course correct in real time. Yes, an ounce of prevention will most definitely be worth a pound of cure.

Rather than waiting for these emotional and mental health issues to crop up and create big problems in our lives and relationships, we can become proactive in our emotional health lifestyle. The groundwork for this improved foundation for a long and meaningful life has been laid by Brene Brown’s two decades of research on shame and vulnerability, Kristin Neff’s work on self compassion and Dr. Carol Deck’s work on mindsets. It integrates seamlessly with all the research, studies and improved methodologies by Dr. Richard Schwartz, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Gabor Mate, Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Bruce Perry (just to name a few).

Counseling, therapy and life coaching are all changing in very beneficial ways due to breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral science. We are collectively moving to “prevention” rather than treating problems after the fact.

Dr. Schwartz’s book – No Bad Parts – and Dr. Becky Kennedy’s insights that we have good kids with problematic behaviors dovetail in a very impactful way. We can teach our kids an expanded emotional vocabulary, integrate their honest emotions with their experiences in healthy ways, and teach them invaluable emotional regulation skills.

Now let’s turn to a pioneer of this new emotion revolution – a man whose childhood life story became fuel for his passion to teach us all how to integrate our emotions to guide us rather than stunt our growth.

EMOTIONAL GPS: Marc Brackett, Ph.D, – Author of Permission to Feel and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Marc Brackett stated the obvious in a recent online workshop based on his book, Permission to Feel: Emotion regulation is taught and modeled. Emotion regulation is goal oriented – it helps us achieve our goal in healthy ways, not adaptive ways. We cannot teach our kids what we ourselves do not know.

During this workshop, Dr. Brackett shared powerpoint slides of his global research that revealed that most adults offer that they were never taught emotional regulation at home or in school. This is not at all surprising evidence. We now know that old parenting models did not integrate emotions into our developing brains. We also know that the complexity of our personal burdens and our legacy burdens made our navigation of life harder than it needed to be.

Dr. Marc Brackett knows this intimately — and it was his own childhood experiences that set him on the path to change what we got wrong.

I first learned of Dr. Marc Brackett’s work on an Unlocking Us podcast with Brene Brown during the COVID pandemic. He had released his book, Permission to Feel in September, 2019. When the pandemic left us collectively struggling with ongoing uncertainty and big mood swings, Brene knew the time was right to talk about the many emotions we were all feeling. This podcast aired in April 2020 and the conversation was relatable and relevant. We were like sponges ready to absorb what we were hearing.

Marc brought a strong sense of humor to the challenging topic of emotions and shared with Brene that he often got a lot of pushback when he’d present his research to academia or school administrators. Emotions were thought of as the messy, sticky problems — certainly not solutions to behavioral issues.

But Marc had a compelling portal to break new ground on a brand new trail in the field of emotional intelligence. It was his life story. He told it – and those who once resisted – began to see how all the dots connected.

Marc’s personal childhood story is one that is sadly quite familiar; it will open your heart as you learn about the dysfunction, abuse and trauma he experienced as a young boy. He articulates so poignantly his troublesome outward behaviors and the dark inner secrets that caused him to be so out of control, angry and despondent.

Marc’s young life was full of inner struggle no one could see from the outside. Unprocessed emotions, dark secrets pushed down and his inner parts doing their best to protect him were the root cause of the outward unruly and difficult behaviors. Until his beloved Uncle Marvin showed up in his life in a profound way.

Marc’s Uncle Marvin gave him “permission to feel”. With Uncle Marvin as his emotional mentor, Marc was able to “unburden” himself by telling his story of abuse to his trusted uncle, without being shamed or blamed. He was believed. He was seen, valued, heard and deeply cared for by Uncle Marvin.

It is hard to hear Marc’s personal story and not find multiple points of connection. Any fellow academic or school administrator could see parts of their own stories embedded in his. They could easily overlay his story onto students, peers, and their own family members. Suddenly emotions were clearly not the problem and neither was problematic behavior. They were symptoms and warning signs for what happened in a child’s life.

Now he had their attention — and their buy-in — to support his work and most importantly, his outreach to educate others.

We need emotional scientists….not emotional judges. We also need emotion mentors.

We need to have people who will listen to understand and who will support us in getting the help we need when our “parts” and our behaviors are evidence that something needs to be addressed. These people are usually the ones who have done their own inner work. They have deep wells of empathy and compassion. They build trust and meaningful connection. They are a safe place to land.

Marc has spent more than 25 years researching and writing about emotions and talking to people all over the world about their feelings. He is an impassioned change-maker who knows firsthand the scars of childhood trauma, the importance of being able to express, feel, and process emotions as they are unfolding.

He knows that we cannot teach what we ourselves do not know.

We wouldn’t send our kids out on a hike without a buddy, gear, a trail map and a water bottle. Yet we often send our kids out into the world totally unprepared to navigate their emotions and those of others.

Dr. Marc Brackett is the Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and he developed the RULER program that is being taught in classrooms and workplaces all around the globe. RULER is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning which teaches adults and students the value of our emotions and building the skills of emotional intelligence.

Yet another seismic shift and it is happening at school. Rather than focusing solely on problematic behaviors, adminstrators and teachers are being taught to become emotion scientists. What is the root cause of these uncontrolled behavioral outbursts? The RULER program starts by teaching adults what they need to learn. Then they take those new practices and understandings and teach them to children.

RULER is an acronym for this skills-based scientific approach:

R – Recognizing Emotion

U – Understanding Emotion

L – Labeling Emotion

E – Expressing Emotion

R – Regulating Emotion

Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey co-authored their book What Happened to You; Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing in April, 2021. This insightful book opened us to learning the backstory of people, of gaining context and deeper understanding about childhood experiences that left scar tissue on how we view and navigate life. Dr. Brackett’s work takes a microphone to this collective human issue — he is using his incredible platform to advocate for “permission to feel”.

Rather than judging kids or their emotions, he is urging us to recognize that our emotions are chock full of valuable information about what is occurring in a child’s life and how they are mapping it. Children are not able to use their executive brain function to do this work, which is why we adults need to be their training wheels. Their brains are developing — slowly — but life experiences and big adult emotions are coming at them hard and fast. We need to become emotion scientists, not emotional judges. We need to be their training wheels to learn about emotions and how to use them effectively.

Recently Marc launched the Permission to Feel online book club as yet another avenue to educate people globally about emotional integration and regulation. It is a grassroots effort to foster the needed conversation about our emotional health. It feels like a support group for emotional integration as people share their past experiences and offer how they are learning and applying the RULER approach to their own lives, to parenting and in their relationships.

Marc and his team also unveiled an engaging new app to help us expand our emotional awareness and vocabulary — How We Feel. This colorful app is free, easy to use and contains 144 emotions! It’s designed to help us “check in” periodically throughout our day to see how we are feeling and to offer helpful tips and tools if we need some emotional support. This app can help us spot some of our “go to” emotional reactions and patterns.

Dr. Marc Brackett’s personal life story is a trailhead. It led him to discover how childhood shapes us, the importance of teaching and role-modeling emotional intelligence and regulation, and the invaluable scaffolding we can provide to others when we become skillful emotional mentors.

TRAILHEADS AND UPGRADED GPS:

Brene Brown gave us an atlas – the reference guide we sorely needed to begin our emotions excavation work. Dr. Richard Schwartz gave us a whole new way to view our childhood experiences and emotions, without judgement and shame; without feeling like we have to wrestle with our emotions and blame them for our woes. His more positive approach encourages us to look at our own trailheads, investigating the roles our parts have played in the past and letting go of what no longer serves us well. He invites us to step into our mature agency and chose emotional regulation to help us navigate our lives more skillfully and successfully.

Dr. Marc Brackett gives us “permission to feel” and encourages us to become emotional scientists with ourselves and others. Drop the judgment and lean into curiosity. When we get comfortable and more agile with this new approach to our emotional landscape, we can become trail guides for our children and others. We can become emotions mentors.

SNEAK PREVIEW:

In the upcoming 3rd part of the blog post series on change-makers, you’ll be meeting Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Paul Conti and our Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Many of us are learning about our emotional and mental health from podcasts these days. I’ll do my best to distill and curate some of the most salient content that is having big impacts in our overall wellbeing. Not suprisingly, the turning point is “prevention”. We are no longer going to wait to treat problems when they occur; we are pivoting to preventing them as much as possible.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Here are links to the websites for Internal Family Systems and the RULER Program:

Internal Family Systems:

https://ifs-institute.com/about-us/richard-c-schwartz-phd

Yale School of Medicine -RULER program:

https://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/services/community-and-schools-programs/center-for-emotional-intelligence/training/ruler/

The Natural Next Steps

When I began my personal growth journey, the buzzword that was catching on was “mindfulness”. Time Magazine touted mindfulness as the new science of health and happiness in 2016. The message was clear — we are time travelers, often letting our minds wander to the past or future. We were being urged to find our balance and be more fully present in the moment.

It became very evident that in addition to time travel, our monkey minds were filled with an inordinate amount of chatter. So, meditation was introduced as the tool to help us stay more present in the moment. The internet was abuzz with “how to” practices and new meditation apps were hitting the market with a fury.

We were being reacquainted with something we take for granted — the power of our breath to regulate us. We were told to pay attention to our breathing and to use it as a grounding tool when we felt distracted or emotionally overwhelmed.

At the time, I recalled how I was taught the Lamaze method of breathing in my early twenties to help me through the labor and delivery process of my first baby. The seed had been planted that a few deep breaths could help keep me stay calm under pressure. Over the course of many decades and a lot of high stress parenting moments, I often told myself – and my kids – to take three calming breaths. I remember my dentist laughing when I shared with him that I used the Lamaze method more often in his office than when I was delivering my babies.

So, I had a lot of “buy-in” and actual experience when it came to the “breathing” component of meditation; but like most, I struggled with the traffic jam of racing, competing thoughts whenever I attempted to “meditate”. I could use my breath to slow my heart rate and calm my body. The next big step was learning how to manage the 60,000 thoughts create so much distraction every day.

That’s where mindfulness played a key role in what was touted in 2016 as the new science of health and happiness. Mindfulness was the buzzword and the trend that shifted our awareness. We began to cultivate greater “self” awareness.

Self-awareness helped us recognize when our minds had wandered off on a trip to the past or the future while we were playing a game with our kids, or enjoying a delicious meal with our family. Meditation practices helped us hone our focus and attention muscles. The goal was never to eradicate our 60,000 thoughts a day; it was to become more discerning about the ones we actively engaged with and to help us stay in the present moment with greater frequency.

The new science behind mindfulness was helping us to understand that time travel to the past often put us in negative ruminative loops and time travel to the future could make us worry and become anxious. We were missing out on gathering up and storing all the positives that were occurring in the present moment. The benefits of being present in the moment was being able to steep ourselves in moments of pure joy, delight and strong feelings of happiness. It was being more keenly attuned to gratitude – both giving and receiving it. It was also the recognition that this present moment may be the very one we had worked so hard to make come true. The science was telling us that our happiness is most salient when we live in the “now.”

Meditation was the term and the tool introduced to us to help us better understand all that our amazing brains are capable of doing when we choose to be consciously engaged in all its features. It became the gateway for learning about neuroplasticity and how neurons that fire together wire together; in other words, how we can create new neural networks throughout most of our lives. Our interest in meditation greased the wheels for us to take a deeper dive into learning how to care for our complex and incredible brains.

It was the Mindfulness trend in 2016 that put us on the path of greater access to the knowledge, tools and resources we have to do a much better job of caring for our brains and improving the quality of our lives as a direct result. Change-makers are coming onto the scene with relatable content, using layman’s terms and helpful metaphors to teach, getting us engaged and excited about all sorts of new approaches to parenting, relationships, education, counseling and therapy.

It is now the fall of 2023 – and the natural next giant step in the science of health and happiness has crystallized into mental health and emotional health. We now know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if we want to live longer, happier and healthier lives, we need to integrate emotions into our operating system and we need to take brain health and hygiene seriously.

Where we once believed that only those with very disregulated, dysfunctional families were predisposed to mental health issues, we now know better. We also know that being well resourced both physically and emotionally is how we build resilience, courage and flexibility for the inevitable challenges of life. Furthermore, we are just beginning to fully grasp the negative effects of disconnection and loneliness, especially in our teens and elders.

Let’s take a look at some of these change-makers:

PARENTING:

Scroll through your favorite social media platform today for parenting tips and you will most likely discover Dr. Becky Kennedy, a children’s clinical psychologist who made a big pivot from old school parenting and psychology to a vastly improved integrated approach to help children struggling with their big emotions and problematic behaviors. She transformed her practice when she and her colleague launched “Good Inside” in 2020. If you are a parent, grandparent or child caregiver, you will find Dr. Becky’s teachings invaluable; and you will be leveling up your parenting skills in a whole new way.

On her website, Good Inside, Dr. Becky offers insights about herself and her professional practice. It is proof positive that all that we have been learning about childhood development, our brains and bodies, and our emotional health are shifting how we approach age-old problems.

Dr. Becky introduces herself as a clinical psychologist, mom of three and founder of Good Inside. When she first started her career, she practiced a popular “behavior-first” “reward-and-punishment model” of parent coaching. She shares that “after a while, something struck her — “those methods feel awful for kids and parents.” She got to work, taking everything she knew about attachment, mindfulness, emotional regulation and internal family systems theory– and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents.

“By focusing on the parent behind the parenting, and the child behind the behavior, we help families heal — bringing out the good inside everyone. ” (Excerpted from her Good Inside website)

What Dr. Becky came to realize as she transformed her methods and her professional practice is that we cannot teach what we do not know or skillfully use ourselves. Since none of us were taught about how the brain works or emotional integration and regulation, we were simply using the same parenting practices that keep perpetuating behavioral problems.

This is precisely why we reached a tipping point in our need to change our understanding and approach to mental and emotional health. Generation after generation had just continued down the same path, passing the baton of problems, dysfunction and disregulation to our children, until it reached a collective crisis level that could no longer be ignored. The children of each generation were surrounded by adults who did not know better. Parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, grandparents, siblings and friends — and even well intentioned counselors — were all coming at behavioral problems and addictions with the same outdated, unhealthy approach and model.

As the mental health industry began to recognize that many of the root causes of behavioral issues and addictions could be traced back to childhood, it became evident that the old parenting model and lack of emotional integration into developing brains and bodies were the core sources of our collective human problem.

We should be breathing a collective sigh of relief.

We can move forward from here with greater understanding and deeper empathy for ourselves, our parents and each other. No one is alone in doing the work that will help us live better, healthier and with greater inner resources.

Now you know why Dr. Becky’s following is growing exponentially. She has over 3.1 million followers and that number will surely swell with the recent release of her Ted Talk “The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy”. Today’s enlightened parents are clamoring for the improved skills and tools to raise their kids in emotionally healthy ways.

Dr. Becky is a change-maker for a growing parenting movement.

RE-PARENTING OURSELVES:

A few short years ago, I participated in a Relationship Summit with Terry Real, the highly regarded family therapist and author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It and his newest book, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build A More Loving Relationship. During the Relationship Summit, Terry would often share real life examples from his couples counseling sessions. He made the keen observation that few spouses were willing to make any changes for their partners even when their marriages were on the brink of failure. However, when he asked a troubled partner about their relationship with own their children, everything shifted. As he helped his clients see their offsprings’s experiences through the lens of their own childhood, most parents were broken open. Spouses might not change for each other, but they can be deeply motivated to change for the sake of their children.

As Terry so wisely counsels — we need to care for our inner child and we need to reparent ourselves. This is part of that “healing process” that Dr. Becky promotes as well. It shifts us into raising our kids with the safety, security, acceptance, trust, guidance and respect we wished we had received. This is how we break disregulated generational cycles and shake off societal conditioning that negatively impacts our most cherished relationships. Many of us grew up believing that emotions were either good or bad; that anger was only ok for boys to show; that behavioral problems in a child should be punished. None of this is true.

Marriages are saved and strengthened when we no longer show up with all that childhood baggage and child-sized emotional behavioral patterns. Spouses who go for couples counseling often discover that the root cause of their marital issues came from their childhood experiences of marriage and family.

Here is where Dr. Becky’s work with children, and Terry Real’s work with couples really synch. Both are addressing childhood attachment styles, parental behavioral patterns, emotional triggers, poor coping skills and the long lasting impacts of internal family systems.

Couples who take this work to heart often find a lot of common ground in how they want to be parenting their children in a healthy and unified way. They can also find more common ground in their marriages and help each other in their own “reparenting process”. The places where we are most sensitive, needy and emotionally disregulated become opportunities for deeper connection and not the barriers to a healthy, happy and fulfilling marriage.

The truth is that we can do our inner work at the same time we are teaching it. It is a win-win situation since children give us such rich opportunities for real time, real life practice in dealing with a wide range of ever-changing emotions. Now that we know that our spoken and implied messages to our kids become their inner voice, we can be pre-load their inner voice to be an encouraging best friend, not a harsh judgmental critic. We can “re-parent” ourselves while we are teaching our children using this better parenting model. We can actually “feel” this loving, trusting reparenting occurring in our own bodies, when we are caring for our children as we had wished to be cared for when we were little.

In the recent Huberman Lab podcast series dedicated to mental health, Dr. Paul Conti, explained why we succumb so easily to auto-pilot for habitual, problematic behavioral patterns. When we were kids, we learned what patterns kept us safe and connected. We memorized these patterns for years. Anytime we feel those old familiar feelings, we replay the memorized pattern. It’s our “go to” move when we feel vulnerable. We unconsciously repeat our habitual patterns even though we now have agency to change them. This is the very reason that our emotional triggers from childhood can still have such strong impact even decades later.

With the new parenting model, and the science that helps us understand the “mechanics” of changing our brain’s memorized patterns, we will stop resisting the need to change our outgrown childhood behavioral patterns.

Terry Real is a dynamic change-maker, especially for older adults, who not only are saddled with outgrown childhood behavioral patterns, but are also constrained by old gender stereotypes and societal conditioning.

In this blog post today, I highlighted two “change-makers” who are making waves and making a meaningful difference because they have done their own inner work — and then found a way to take what they learned out into the world to share with others. The ripple effects are transformational for parenting and marriages.

There are multiple “movements” that are gaining traction as a direct result of the newest science of health and happiness because of breakthroughs in mental health and emotional health. In upcoming posts, I will be shining a light on these movements and the dynamic change-makers who are making these movements dynamic, relatable and impactful.

In the meantime, click the links below and get to know Dr. Becky and Terry Real.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Dr. Becky Kennedy was featured in Time Magazine in 2021 at the Millennial Parenting Whisperer
https://time.com/6075434/dr-becky-millennial-parenting/

Check out Dr. Becky’s GOOD INSIDE website — and be sure to sign up for her newletter. https://www.goodinside.com

Follow Dr. Becky on your favorite social media platform, including Instagram and Threads. Her short reels offer a daily dose of parenting reality with humor, relatability and a nugget of helpful advice.

Click this link to watch Dr. Becky’s TED Talk on the single most important parenting strategy https://www.ted.com/talks/becky_kennedy_the_single_most_important_parenting_strategy

Terry Real is a family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy- a revolutionary new approach to couples and individual counseling. Old counseling models kept us stuck in looking only at surface problems and not the root cause of our disharmonies. Click this link to go to Terry’s website and discover the plethora of resources he offers to help you build deeper, more rewarding relationships. https://terryreal.com/relationship-online-courses/

“Nothing is more important in our lives than our relationships. A great relationship boosts your immune system, opens your heart and keeps you vital and creative.” –– Terry Real

A Tipping Point for Our Lifestyle

There was a time when physical fitness wasn’t such a compelling component of our daily lives. Many of us were “weekend workout warriors”. That’s when we would carve out the time to go for a run, take a long bike ride or hike through the local woods. It was in the early 1980’s that a growing awareness of the importance of regular physical exercise intersected with the invention of the Nordic Track and commercial gym memberships expanding to a broader audience. The Nordic Track became a highly popular Christmas gift that held a prominent space in the living room or bedroom for a few glorious weeks. It wasn’t long til there was a lot of humor being shared about the Nordic Track becoming an ingenuous clothing rack by the end of January. While that Nordic Track might not have “fast-tracked” us to include physical fitness into our daily routines, there was in fact an upward trend in the growing awareness of the long term benefits of regular exercise.

Here we are decades later, and most of us have fully integrated some form of physical exercise into our daily routines. We wear fitness trackers to count our steps and measure our heart rate. We speak the lingo with ease – resistance training, VO2 max, zone 2 cardio, grip strength and core balance.

How did we get from weekend workout warriors and Nordic Tracks that morphed into clothes racks to this whole new lifestyle that includes consistent physical fitness? It was that upward trend catching big momentum – for all the right reasons.

And here we are now – at the tipping point of yet another upward trend — proactively attending to our mental and emotional health. It’s going to transform how we integrate tools and practices to support our mental and emotional health into our daily lifestyle. It’s going to dovetail with our commitment to our physical health because they go together like hand in glove.

Just a few short years ago, this would have seemed highly unlikely.

When it came to our mental health, the focus had always been on the pathology. No wonder we had so much stigma associated with mental health. We waited until there was a serious issue and then asked “what’s wrong?” or “who has some diagnosis of a mental health problem?” Treatments were often bandaid solutions to ease anxiety, but not uncover the root cause of the anxiety and fear. Health professionals were treating the symptoms and not the core problems. Because of the stigma associated with mental health, many people tried to power through their emotional and mental health struggles on their own.

We wouldn’t ignore a concerning physical health problem indefinitely. The same is now true for our emotional and mental health. Early intervention, paying attention to the warning signs and getting the support we need is now viewed as normal, healthy and empowering.

We are normalizing what we once kept hidden and that is shifting us to investigate why we react to life as we do. We are beginning to understand how our brains work and what they need to function optimally. We took our brains for granted – and yet they are running our daily lives. With all this groundbreaking knowledge, we now have an invested interest in being proactive about brain health.

We are learning why sleep is key for optimal brain function and health. We are also learning the importance of hydration throughout the day for our brains; and the effects of caffeine, sugar and alcohol on our brains and sleep cycles. We are getting morning sunlight to set our circadian rhythm and dimming our lights an hour before bed.

This upward trend of weaving mental health into our lifestyle is already showing up in our daily lives. Our fitness devices track our sleep cycles and we are now sleeping in darker, cooler bedrooms. Mattresses and comforters are featuring temperature controls to cool our bodies down to proper sleeping temperature and then warm us up just before waking. We take “sleep stack” supplements before bed just as we take probiotics and vitamin supplements in the morning.

There’s nothing like a few new products to really nudge us along on that upward trend; that’s how the momentum builds for our new integrated approach to mental health. Our children will be learning about their brains in this brand new way, all while also implementing healthy brain hygiene. This is how our human evolution advances us – one generation at a time, adapting and adopting what we are learning.

Knowledge is empowerment.

Where we once believed we had no agency over how we were “wired”, we are now learning that the neuroplasticity of our brains allows us to proactively create new neural pathways to help us build — and maintain — positive, meaningful changes in our mental and emotional health.

Just like the previous upward trend that spurred us on to take our physical health seriously and to be proactive in maintaining healthy physical bodies throughout our lifetime, we are now at a tipping point for positive brain health integration.

In a recent Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Paul Conti (Stanford University graduate, psychiatrist and author), pointed out that most of us know an incredible amount of information about our physical body and anatomy. It is also very complex, with many moving parts that integrate rather seamlessly. We can readily self-diagnose when something about our physical body hurts, is not working well, has a bug or virus. Dr. Conti believes that we can also learn about our brains and mental health in the same way.

We can start by taking better care of our brains through sleep, hydration, self-awareness, healthy coping skills and improved emotional regulation. as the foundational building blocks for proactive positive brain health.

Once we have laid this foundation, we will be more receptive to taking the next transformation steps. It is analogous to taking better care of our physical bodies with rest and proper nutrition — and then easing into a diverse, and sometimes challenging fitness regimen. Just like we build muscle strength and endurance in our bodies, we can be building better neural networks and muscle memory for our emotional and mental health.

Mental and emotional health has taken a giant step forward.

Although our brains and emotions drive much of how we show up in life, they were often relegated to the back seat. Think about that — our premier operating system was a back seat driver that we usually ignored.

Now we know more and we know better how to care for children’s developing brains and how to take care of our own adult brains and install valuable upgrades. We are realizing that emotions are a feature not a bug and we need them to help us make decisions about what is most important to us. In fact, emotions are are core ingredient to our overall happiness and fulfillment in life. All those emotions that we stuffed and suppressed were roadmaps for life. Is it any wonder we got so lost and misdirected?

We have been operating on a very outdated autopilot for far too long. We have ignored the lessons and guidance from our back seat drivers. Our unconscious mind is a like a five year old in the driver’s seat, stretching up to see out the windshield while straining to reach the gas pedal.

Over the next few weeks, Andrew Huberman and his guest, Dr. Paul Conti, will be offering a four part podcast series entitled “How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health.” I have found Dr. Cont’s insights to be revelational and eye-opening.

I will be distilling this four-part series into blog posts over the coming weeks with great enthusiasm. If you are also fascinated by this upward trend that is rapidly gaining a lot of momentum, take some time to listen to the podcast series and check back for future posts about the healthier trajectory of our mental and emotional lifestyle.

Just imagine how incredible it will be to know as much about your amazing brain and mind as you do about your physical body!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

September 6, 2023 Episode: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health with guest, Dr. Paul Conti https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=100062692001

Here are the show notes for the first episode in this series

https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/guest-series-dr-paul-conti-how-to-understand-assess-your-mental-health-huberman-lab/

Daily Gummy of Wisdom RoundUp

One of the most rewarding experiences I have is recognizing when there are a lot of synchronicities in play amongst a diverse community of people from whom I am learning all kinds of things. And this has been happening often in recent weeks. I hope you will enjoy this Daily Gummy Roundup that highlights what is top of mind for many right now:

This Daily Gummy of Wisdom was shared just yesterday, on September 3rd, 2023. Here is what I offered:

We all experience those moments when difficult emotions make us just want to cry. We should have a good cry –it’s good for us.

Crying helps us to reduce stress, helps to alleviate physical pain by releasing oxytocin, which is our body’s natural pain reliever for both physical and emotional pain. Children cry automatically when they fall and get hurt – and now you know why this is such a normal, natural reaction.

Tara Brach, renowned psychologist and meditation teacher, offers us this acronym – R A I N – to help us appreciate the beneficial impact of being with our emotions. It seems such a fitting metaphor to tap into the health benefits of crying. Let it R A I N.

R – Recognize what is happening

A – Allow the experience to be there, just as it is

I – Investigate with care and interest

N – Nurture with self-compassion; treat yourself as you would a good friend.

A good cry and this tender self compassion practice is as beneficial as a much needed rain shower for a parched plant. Rather than ignore or dismiss difficult emotions, take a few moments to feel the RAIN. Let the tears fall, take time to be with your emotions and experience. Nurture and care for yourself just as would for your child.

Just this morning, one of my favorite business and tech resources, Professor Scott Galloway, shared a Harvard Health review on the psychological benefits of crying — along with his personal insights that young men are even more afraid than older men to be seen crying. For the record, Scott is busy writing his next book on contemporary masculinity. This is a subject very near and dear to Scott’s heart as the father of two teenaged sons. Scott has long been a proponent of helping our young men integrate the full scope of their emotions into their developing bodies and brains, dropping old stereotypes and societal conditioning about men and their emotions, and the importance of having quality male role models especially for elementary and middle school aged boys. It is not at all unusual for Scott Galloway to push the envelope in the right direction, so it was no surprise (and every encouraging) that he would be promoting normalizing crying for men — especially younger men.

We can start this game-changing pivot by responding to our little boys and girls without any gender bias. They are simply small human beings with very few emotional resources and skills, yet — and their brains are not fully developed enough to support what we often expect of them. Let’s normalize crying for our boys with the understanding that their bodies and brains are supporting them in a very natural, normal and psychological healthy way. Let’s encourage men to cry too – and let’s not judge them for expressing deep emotions; let’s have a deep appreciation for their capacity to be that in touch with what matters most to them.

This Daily Gummy of Wisdom was shared on August 31st, 2023:

You can read a lot of books and listen to many inspiring podcasts, but if you don’t put into practice what you are learning, you aren’t really going to be seeing real progress.

Brene Brown once had a great conversation on this very subject with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, where she talked about buying a Peloton, making space in her basement, shopping for cute workout clothes and new sneakers. Great big intentions — and the hardest part was actually putting on the clothes, walking to the basement and not only getting on the bike, but actually doing a workout. This is a fitting analogy for doing our self-discovery and personal growth work. We can cultivate greater self-awareness and make a list of the habits and behaviors we want to change, but if we aren’t putting in the “reps”, we won’t be building new muscle memory with the better skills. Here’s the thing — we usually know exactly “when” we should be responding differently, but if we just fall back into our normal default patterns, it is the equivalent of staring at the Peloton and wishing we were raising our heart rate and strengthening our quads. Wishful thinking will not make it so.

Self-awareness helps us recognize where we need or want change.

Catching ourselves right before we default to old habits is the next step.

Putting into practice a better response or choice is where the rubber meets the road. The goal is not to be perfect — it is to get better, more often.

The small consistent practices are what bring about sustainable, reliable change. Put in those reps. Just two or three a day are much more beneficial than wishful thinking.

I wrote this Daily Gummy a few weeks ago and cued it up to post on August 31st. Imagine my surprise when listening to the Rich Roll podcast which dropped on August 28th, I heard Rich’s guest, Brad Stulberg talk about how we can spend far too much time peeling off the layers of our onion and never really get around to doing the actual work of healing and growing from what we are learning.

Wow – did that insight really resonate with me. The older we are, the more layers we have in our onion. Do this work earlier in life and there are hopefully fewer layers to peel back. Do it at 40 and live the next fifty years without fossilizing the layers.

But the real take away from this Rich Roll podcast entitled “Rugged Flexibility and the Neuroscience of Expectations” with author and coach, Brad Stulberg, is that at some point, you just need to do the work.

This Daily Gummy was posted on August 30th and was inspired by a book I had just finished reading, Tomorrowmind by Dr. Martin Seligman and Gabrielle Kellerman. Here’s the full Daily Gummy insight:

What if we had the ability to look more closely at each other and see all the individual characteristics we possess — the hopes, the dreams, the habits and personality traits, and the various roles we have in life?

Too often, we view others only by their jobs, their ethnicity or color of their skin, their gender or even the sports team they like. The reality is that we all have multiple identities that we move in and out of each day.

We are children, siblings, aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents. We are spouses, partners in business, co-workers, colleagues, peers, mentors and bosses. We might be caregivers for an aging parent or a declining spouse, volunteers at a charity, members of a book club, fans of the same author or podcaster, members of a pickle ball team or crafting group.

Have you taken the time to write down all the identities that you have? Have you thought about the many hats you wear each day? Taking the time to do this is a skill called “recategorization” and it is the perfect portal to finding common ground with others.

If you need some new ice-breakers fore getting to know people and building friendships, consider asking questions that will help you discover more about the multiple identities we all have. Intentional focus on our individual characteristics diffuses big generalities we often have – and expands the opportunities to get to know each other so much better.

Over the past week or so, I have found myself completely captivated by a number of episodes in Esther Perel’s two podcast series. She hosts “Where Do We Begin” which is focused on personal relationships and “How’s Work?” where she tackles the complex issue of human behaviors and teamwork dynamics in the workplace. In both of these podcast series, it is very common for her to skillfully use “recategorization” to help people find more common ground than they realize they have.

Very often, once partners and colleagues begin to see each other through a shared identity, they soften in their strongly held positions and discover empathy and awareness they simply could not see previously. Esther Perel is a Belgian-American psychotherapist, with a global reputation for her transformational relationship counseling successes. She has a rare surgical precision to get to the root cause of the most delicate and complex relationships issues – and she does so with great empathy, compassion and kind candor.

It has been noteworthy that she often incorporates the reality that we all possess multiple identities and may have great difficulty shifting from one role to another with skillful ease. Esther suggests creating cues to help us refocus our attention to each relationship. Even if you work at home, changing from your pjs to work attire before you sit down at the kitchen table for a Zoom call, will help you and your brain make the distinction that you are a co-worker and teammate now. Changing at the end of the day into casual clothes and taking a walk outdoors can help you make a clear shift from work to home and family.

Esther most definitely leaves a lasting impression as you listen in on her counseling sessions through her two dynamic podcasts. It is very easy to see ourselves in the conversations and relationship issues that she unpacks with her clients. The big take-away from Esther Perel’s work is that there is so much more to all of us than meets the eye — AND – we have more in common that we realize.

I hope you enjoyed this Daily Gummy of Wisdom Roundup — and that you too will start to pay attention to the synchronicities that are showing up across all aspects of our lives. There is most definitely a growing awareness of the importance of our emotional health, the psychological benefits that we derive when we know more about the role of our emotions, and our basic human need for real connection.

If you like what you’re learning and want a daily supplement for your emotional health and self-discovery, sign up to get my Daily Gummy of Wisdom popped into your inbox. Here’s the sign up link: https://inspired-new-horizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Check out Scott Galloway on his own podcast, the Prof G Podcast – and on the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher. His most recent book is Adrift – America in 100 charts – a real eye opener. And check out his newsletter No Mercy/No Malice. https://www.profgalloway.com/

Discover the many resources that Rich Roll has to offer by checking out his website https://www.richroll.com and definitely check out his amazing Podcast:

Here’s the episode with Brad Stulberg https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991?i=1000625912789

If you aren’t familiar with Esther Perel, treat yourself and get to know her and her incredible work. Here’s the link to her website which is chock full of helpful resources: https://www.estherperel.com

Check out her two podcasts (and keep your eyes peeled for her to appear as a guest in other’s — she is really gaining traction and her work is relevant for this moment in time.

Growing Forward

I found a fascinating article the other day that intrigued me so much I spent an entire day making lists and creating graphs, pie charts and collages. Are you wondering what captivated me? It was about the person we will all be in 5 years.

Consider this: The person we will become in 5 years has a lot to do with the decisions we are making as the person we are today (and tomorrow….and so on). What shapes us? The books we read, the foods we eat, the workouts we do, the friends we meet, the sacrifices we make, the habits we build.

Those prompts really got me to thinking about who I am today for those very reasons. I thought about family and friends, and how the last five years have shaped them as well. Even if we would have had a crystal ball then, I doubt very much that any of us could have guessed how much we’ve changed; much of it intentionally and some of it due to things not in our control.

What if we could plot all this change, so we would have a visual for who we were 5 years ago, who we are today, and to project who we might be 5 years into the future. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a chart of our self discovery and personal growth trajectory? I’d call it the “Growing Forward” chart.

It makes sense to step back and take a look at who we were in 2018. Nothing like a rear view mirror to help us see just how far we’ve come.

What books have you read over these past five years? What genres or subjects were you drawn to and what knowledge did you gain? How did you apply it to your life? Reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, deepens our empathy for others and helps us see ourselves in other’s stories. What did you discover about yourself and others through the books you read.

Think about new friendships you have formed and what drew you to these new people. How have they shaped who you are today? Did they introduce you to a new hobby or interest? What have you learned as you listened to their life stories? What did you learn about yourself that was reflected back to you in their experiences? How do these friends make you feel?

Are those habits that were so hard to implement in the beginning now a part of your normal daily routine? How have those improved habits changed your life? What is working so much better now?Are you more conscious of the choices you make that might derail your goals?

Have you discovered any new interests, taken up a new hobby or resumed an old one with a renewed passion? Are you spending less time on social media and more time being present with family and friends? Have you shifted your perspective on self care and recognize that you need to take good care of yourself so that you can be your best for others?

Are you amazed to discover just how much you really have changed over the past 5 years? Since so much of our change happens incrementally and definitely not in a linear way, it is quite surprising to take stock of these transformations, especially in 5 year increments. That’s when the real changes we’ve made become so apparent. That is where we see our “growing forward” trajectory.

I decided to look back on my blog posts from 2018 as part of this reflective exercise and while the topics are still relevant, the research and resources that have advanced our understanding about them have exploded into mainstream conversations. Back then, we still thought of meditation and mindfulness as something done on a cushion. Today many of us are more familiar with how our brains actually work than we ever did before thanks to neuroscience — and the podcasters and authors who break it down into layman’s terms for us and weave its value into our daily lives.

In 2018, there was still a major stigma associated with mental health and no one was talking about emotional health. We may have known there was a growing mental health crisis underfoot but all the pieces of the complex puzzle were not yet coming together. Personal growth was gaining a little more traction and life coaches were in high demand.

We could feel a sense that we were searching for something, but there wasn’t a lot of clarity and we were swimming in a sea of so many tempting distractions. Social media and the news cycles were addictive.

No matter what we were all individually doing that was shaping who we would be in five years, none of us could have predicted the major impact of a global pandemic. This would create changes we did not anticipate and yes, it would also shape who we’d become. The pandemic disrupted our “normal”. We’d been operating in our “normal” for so long that we had become unaware of how we were just going along with the pace and societal influences.

Change happens when our normal routines are disrupted. It is a basic principle for helping us stick to new habits or goals. Disruptions are the catalyst for reflection and redirection. Suddenly, we were all sent home to “think about it”. A collective disruption and a serious re-thinking of what matters most.

It is not at all surprising that the pandemic expedited the integration of modern medicine, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive and emotional health. There was no denying just how interconnected they all were. We started to pay attention to compromised immune systems. We could no longer deny the impacts of high levels of anxiety and extended periods of uncertainty. As humans, we just aren’t built for these long durations of stress and volatility. We need to return to baseline to rebuild our tolerance and resilience. We need breaks, we need quality sleep, we need to feel safe.

As we were washing our groceries, we started to think more consciously about what we were eating. We were learning to bake sourdough and create home-cooked meals.

Isolation and loneliness were amplified which proved just how much we need human connection for our health and well-being. Families needed each other to help with childcare and schooling. Grandparents moved from retirement communities to live closer to their adult children and grandchildren. We began to see the reality that we had missed before. How important safe and healthy childcare is, what needs to change in how we educate our children, What we miss when we cannot be together – to celebrate, to grieve, to scaffold, to comfort, to encourage, to challenge.

The perfect storm became the impetus for breakthroughs.

Our learning curve trajectory was on a rapid ascent. It was integrating with medical and science advancements that would deliver many missing pieces to our human puzzle.

We may not have realized that as we were accepting changes that we had no control over, we were in turn making changes of our own – based on meeting our needs and what mattered most to us. We were micro-dosing change as we found new ways to support ourselves and our families through the pandemic. It was definitely not linear, and we back-tracked more than a few times, but our trajectory has become evident.

It takes a lot of commitment, practice, dedication and perseverance to become an overnight sensation.

We think that rock stars and celebrities, inventors and AI blow onto the scene and create seismic shifts in an instant. But this is not the case. And it certainly has not been the case for medicine and science when it comes to the recent explosion of knowledge, tools and teachers for emotional health. It just feels like an aha moment. It has been a long time coming — and it arrived when we were most ready to soak it up.

As I looked through the past five years of my blog posts, I re-discovered the moments where I was seeing the integration of so many modalities for personal growth and self discovery. As a neuroscience geek, I was so excited. I had long wondered if there wasn’t a better, more enticing way to draw people into doing their own inner work. Why did we have to hit rock bottom or have our world fall apart to begin engaging in self improvement?

To be candid, if not for the pandemic, I may have thought my own personal growth work was done. I had a solid “starter kit” of improved self awareness and better life skills. I was handling myself much better than ever before.

But the real test and the real growth happens when we take our individual work into our relationships. The pandemic delivered a plethora of opportunities to put the new skills and practices to the test. Suddenly, there were a lot more people coming onboard with a keen interest in emotional health and personal growth.

As parents realized how their own childhoods had impacted them in unhealthy ways, they embraced the new parenting models that integrated emotions into the developing brains of their children. Again, there were so many emotions welling up in all of us that it was crystal clear we needed better skills so as not to compound an already complex problem.

We had poked holes in our awareness, seeds had been planted, some had sprouted and there was a growing demand for education, support and counseling. A huge pivot had occurred – the veil around mental health was lifted. Seeking therapy and counseling became normalized, just like hiring a fitness trainer or life coach. The demand for counseling was so high that there simply were not enough professionals to meet it. Just a few years prior, BetterHelp online therapy was only promoted on personal growth and wellness platforms. Today, BetterHelp is a sponsor for business and news podcasts, influencers and fitness gurus.

When neuroscience handed us the missing piece of our human puzzle — emotional health — all the other pieces that had been discarded or misunderstood, fell into place. Are you aware that we had tunnel vision for a very long time – and believed that all our troubles were lodged in psychology? Breakthroughs in neuroscience changed everything – and now we are treating PTSD and childhood trauma in much more beneficial ways, with remarkable lasting results.

The pandemic’s one major positive contribution is the shift from “treating” problems to “preventing” them. After all that we have been through both individually and collectively in the past five years, many people are embracing the truth that we can take better care of ourselves and each other.

The conversations that we are having today and the growing trends in preventative practices to improve our quality of life and our healthy longevity came about because of change. Today we understand that we need to take care of our brains first and foremost. We having a better working knowledge of how our brains operate, what they are capable of and how we can maximize the full capacities.

We are no longer ignoring the warning signs, no longer numbing the pain or putting a bandaid on it, no longer believing that suffering is the way we get to the path of healing. We are enthusiastically proactive.

Here is what I find so exciting about what might transpire for all of us in the next 5 years. As we begin to take better care of our brains and bodies, we will in turn take better care of our children. Our children will grow up with healthy attitudes, resilience and an overflowing toolkit of life and relationship skills. We will be leading by example.

Did you know that when we are overstressed, we are full of cortisol that keeps us in a heightened state of fight, flight or freeze….and when we are with others, they can sense that (especially kids). We end up pushing people away because of all that negative energy.

But when we are calm, emotionally regulated and resilient, we are full of oxytocin (the feel good hormone) and yes, others can sense that too — and guess what — it is like a magnet drawing people to us because it feels good.

As we are making these discoveries for ourselves, we are integrating it into our lives. We start making better choices and in turn those healthier decisions shape who we are becoming. In 5 years, just imagine the books being written right now that we will read in the future. Just imagine the friends you will be making – the ones that make you feel good and inspire you to discover all kinds of new things. Just imagine how your body will feel with 5 years of really good sleep, consistent hydration, regular exercise, healthy eating habits.

If you believe that all these positive, proactive and preventative measures will have a profound impact on your “growing forward” trajectory, you are right.

Take some time to reflect on what you have learned about yourself over the past five years and want you want for yourself and your family in the next five years. There has never been a better time to tap into incredible resources, education and mentors to help you achieve your goals.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Ryan Dusick, founding drummer of Maroon 5, talks with Doug Boost about losing everything, finding recovery and rebuilding his life https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adversity-advantage-with-doug-bopst/id1496406333?i=1000624725432

Metabolism, Brain Energy & Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer. Discover how we are evolving in our treatments for mental health issues that can negatively impact our quality of life.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000625115529

Dr. Martin Seligman is often referred to as the father of Positive Psychology. He wrote about post traumatic growth in his book Flourish in 2012.. Now 11 years later, he offers his insights with both psychology and neuroscience to help us prepare to live in a new normal of rapid change

Dr Peter Attia is leading the charge for a long overdue pivot in modern medicine. It is time to become proactive turning our attention to presentation rather than just treatment. Have a longer health span, and better quality of life. Emotional health is the cornerstone.

Authentic Self

It dawned on me recently that the truest test of being our “authentic self” is when we can move through our various roles and interactions without a costume change, an edited script, or adjusting the dial.

Give it some thought. Do you find yourself making personal adjustments to accommodate others, a situation, or to feel like you belong?

We’ve all done this. We know when we are walking into a situation that feels like eggshells and landmines, so we shape-shift a bit to stay in our comfort zone. Or, we sugar coat our truth and hope that we will get the desired result. We might even put up with some bad behavior and decide not to call it out just to keep the peace. We say yes to things that we really don’t want to do. We stay silent when we know in our hearts we should speak up.

One of the compelling reasons it is so hard to disengage from all the costume changes we put ourselves through is because we have multiple identities. And before you freak you, just know that this is really good thing.

Take a moment to think about your own multiple identities. It is a fun exercise and admittedly a little mind blowing. You can be a child, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a grandparent, an employee, a boss, an entrepreneur, a friend, a gym rat, a yoga student, a writer, a musician, an artist, a volunteer, a birdwatcher, nature enthusiast, a mentor or coach, a member of a pickle ball, golf or bowling team. Are you surprised at all the hats you wear, the interests you have and the variety of people with whom you interact?

It is only natural that we would make some adjustments as we move in and out of our roles throughout the day. We may shift from being a sole decision maker as a parent to a team member at work, a student in a class or a caregiver for an aging parent.

As we are working on our personal growth, we may discover that we are more cognizant of the situations where we do “make adjustments.”

This is a very positive sign that we are gaining traction with the changes we are making – the very changes that get us showing up as our true “authentic self” in every one of our multiple identities.

Think of your authentic self as the “mothership”. You will step into all those other identities grounded in your core identity.

Our core identity is shaped by personal attributes we value. These core values are the touchstones for our words, our actions and behaviors. When we are clear about our values, we cultivate the skills and tools we need to show up more consistently as the person we want to be. We also hold ourselves accountable and make amends when we make mistakes.

A sign that we might be making adjustments that are not in alignment with our authentic self is when we feel discomfort. Think of discomfort as the warning signal that our values and our actions aren’t matching up.

If we are trying to fit in with a group and we go along with something that conflicts with our core values, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. If we have to dial back our natural effervescence, we are going to feel flat. If we bite our tongue instead of speaking up for ourselves or others, we will feel disempowered.

It takes courage to show up authentically in our various roles when we are making changes, but once we get over that initial discomfort, we will discover that we are moving with greater ease and more self confidence. It honestly takes less energy and brain power to tap into consistent behaviors and actions than to be adjusting constantly. In fact, our neural networks will be rewiring to support our better habits and the desired consistency.

Some of the places that may be hardest to step into our authenticity is with our family members. It is pretty commonplace for us to get stuck in old paradigms. Once the baby of the family, always the baby of the family — even if that baby is now 45. Or on the flip side, the eldest child may be the one everyone turns to when health care decisions need to be made for aging parents. Family members can inadvertently keep each other trapped in a long ago past.

Complex family dynamics are often the most challenging places to practice showing up authentically. It may also be the place where some of our most surprising changes take place. Just one family member showing up authentically and shifting the old paradigms can set off a cascade of positive improvements.

The reality is that none of us really stays the same. We are all impacted and changing by our life experiences. Some people will embrace change and work hard to evolve through their trials and tribulations. They will be the ones who will be the cycle breakers, the ones who offer insight and wisdom, the ones that hold space without judgment, the ones that show up as their true selves.

I’ve read books by people who have evolved into their authentic self and they write so eloquently about how freeing it is, how much joy they get out of each day and how much younger they feel. These same sentiments are echoed by the diverse guests of the podcasts I enjoy. Best of all, I see it emerging in my family and friends. It is so evident that they are moving with fluidity and grace through all their roles and experiences.

Authenticity comes from a strong sense of self identity, with clarity about our core values. Those values become the touchstones for decision making, emotional regulation, setting boundaries, being self compassionate, leaning into vulnerability and not getting attached to the outcome. When we can show up consistently with these attributes and skill sets regardless of the role we are in, we will feel a major positive change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Nedra Glover Tawwab has become the “go to” expert for understanding how boundaries help us take better care of ourselves and our relationships.

These conversations with some of our favorite icons will lift your spirits and motivate you to be your most authentic self. Check out this podcast on your favorite platform.

Dr. Maya Shankar hosts this podcast about real life events that dramatically changed people’s lives. Talk about moving into authenticity due to a major change of plans…these conversations will touch your heart. Check out this August 1st episode with author Dan Pink on the Science of Regret https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slight-change-of-plans/id1561860622?i=1000623007434

Any Brene Brown book will support your efforts to become your authentic self. Sometimes it is just super comforting to know we are not alone and this one nails it.

A Wholehearted Emotion Revolution

My last blog post was all about the importance of unpacking our family and emotional baggage — and the remarkable opportunity we have to involve four living generations in doing just that. This post is going to start by unpacking how we got here.

It is all about this moment in time where there is a growing, diverse community of people who are committed to personal growth and emotional health. Some are far along on their journey, others are just beginning and there are many smack dab in the middle. No matter where we are in our journey, we are all reaching both forward and backward – asking for more help and guidance AND offering encouragement and resources.

We did not get here by accident or all at once. We got here because of collective yearning and learning.

Over the past two decades social sciences handed off the baton to neuroscience to help us better understand what was really happening in our brains, in our nervous systems and neurobiology, and through epigenetics. Incredible discoveries were made that brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of trauma, cognitive and mental health disorders, the connection between stress and physical health and so much more. So many fields merged together to reverse engineer what we got wrong.

Ironically it was about this same time that Brene Brown started her deep diving research into shame and vulnerability. Imagine how serendipitous this was?

Of course, no one wanted to talk about shame and vulnerability – those subjects were taboo and cloaked in secrecy. That should have been our first clue she was really on to something. Brene told a hilarious story of how she could shut down a conversation with a seat mate on a plane in under 30 seconds by revealing she was a researcher – of shame and vulnerability.

Flash forward to today and those very topics open up a two hour stimulating conversation between three strangers on a plane, who share vulnerabilities as readily as Biscoff cookies, and become fast friends by the end of the flight, swapping contact information and favorite personal growth resources. (Read my recent blog post Leapfrog for that story)

That is just one shining example of how far we’ve come….and how long it has actually taken. Two decades, multidisciplines and a growing longing we were all feeling but couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Brene started her shame and vulnerability research in 2001, right before 9-11. As devastating as that massive tragedy was, there was an also a collective unity that emerged from it, at least for a while.

A decade later, in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry published his book, Born for Love, where he warned us about our growing empathy poverty. He was shedding a light in the correlation between an infant’s environment in the first year of life and their ability to emotionally regulate in adulthood. He was sounding the alarm for where we were headed if we did not offer safety, comfort and stability for our children. If you were to go back and read that book today, you would be amazed at the amplified realities of his dire predictions for all of us, and especially for our youth. Back in 2010, we had no clue the negative impacts social media and our political polarization would be having on our mental health and empathy poverty.

Also in 2010, Brene Brown’s infamous Ted Talk on vulnerability went viral. It still stands as one of the most viewed Ted Talks in history. It turns out vulnerability wasn’t such a taboo subject after all. It just took Brene’s courage to put it all out there for us. We may not have recognized that this was a massive “me too” movement as well. It was evident that at a very grassroots level, we were longing for answers to questions no one was asking.

In August of 2010, Brene released her book “Gifts of Imperfection” and invited us to join that grassroots “wholehearted” revolution by finding the courage to tell our truth stories. Mostly she was encouraging us to stop saying (and believing) we were OK when in fact, we were not. She grounded her research in the truth that we were born worthy of love, connection and belonging.

The very same message that Dr. Bruce Perry was also telling us.

Over the coming years, Brene would publish more books including Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. Dr. Bruce Perry co-authored What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Dan Siegel published Whole Brain Child, No Drama Discipline, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain and the Power of Showing Up(with Tina Payne Bryson and most recently he released Interconnected. Dr. Mark Brackett published Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive.

Rick Rubin, the renowned music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has a compelling way to make us stand up and take notice of what was happening in this grassroots wholehearted revolution. When an idea’s time has come, it will find a way to make itself known.

The seeds of this wholehearted, emotion revolution were scattered far and wide. They began to take hold not only in the research but within us. The self-help section of our favorite bookstores began to swell – from psychology and neuroscience, to the enneagram, to Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Clarity & Connection by yung pueblo (just to name a few).

Brene’s Netflix documentary, Call to Courage was released in April, 2019, where she invited us to choose courage over comfort in a present day culture that had us divided and disconnected. We should have buckled our seatbelts.

Less than a year later, just as Brene launched her two dynamic podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, the global pandemic was unfolding — and isolating us even more. Perhaps we were listening more intentionally to Brene’s guests and the deeper conversations because they were resonating on many levels.

What we had all been feeling individually for decades, was now also being felt collectively. It was becoming crystal clear that we are not only hard-wired for connection, we are inextricably inter-connected through school, the workplace, grocery store, supply chains etc.

Suddenly the topic of our emotional health was popping up everywhere. What once had only been discussed in the self-help and psychological arenas, was being mainstreamed into business podcasts, education, physical and cognitive medical fields. A magnifying glass was handed to us to see the impacts of emotional health on our children and teenagers; on all of us. Brene Brown confided in her sister series of her podcast that the pandemic puts strains on marriages and parenting we’d never experienced before. We were never meant to withstand long stretches of uncertainty without revealing our vulnerability and need for connection.

The wholehearted revolution that was afoot back win 2010, had been growing slowly. All revolutions take time to build momentum. Surely the global pandemic accelerated the swiftness of of this “wholehearted, emotion revolution.”

Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, was one of Brene’s podcast guests and he shared so honestly what many already knew to be true: “The mental well being of our children and adults is shockingly poor. We have a crisis on our hands and its victims are our children.”

The warnings that Dr. Bruce Perry had offered in his 2010 book, Born for Love, stressed the importance of our community and relational scaffolding for our children. This wisdom could no longer be lost on us.

There has been a giant step forward and a big pivot in the right direction as we step back out into our new normal and begin reinventing ourselves from the inside out. The books and podcasts that are emerging now are speaking directly to the corrective actions we must take.

We must integrate our emotions in our brains and our experiences. We must unpack family and emotional baggage to stop the trauma cycles and give us space for better quality lives and health. We need to scaffold each other, especially our children, and cultivate growth mindsets. We need to shed the armor that we believed protected our vulnerability and discard outgrown behavioral patterns. We can build life skills, resource ourselves better, and rediscover our empathy and common humanity.

Brene Brown published Atlas of the Heart which helps us expand our understanding of 87 emotions and experiences. It is a family reference guide that supports us in helping our children and partners integrate their emotions.

Kristin Neff released Fierce Self Compassion (How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive) which encourages us to treat ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we would a dear friend; and to break free from limiting gender stereotypes that has us all suppressing our emotions in harmful ways.

Dr. Gabor Mate published his phenomenal book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to healing and better emotional health). His insights into how generational trauma get passed down through our family systems point directly to the need for us to unpack family and emotional baggage.

Dr. Peter Attia very recently released his incredible book Outlive, where he drives home the point that our emotional health is the most integral component of our lives. We can be physically health and emotionally unhealthy and we will be miserable. And in turn, we will make our families miserable. He unpacks the reasons why we’ve long heard the phrase “hurting people hurt people.”

Dacher Keltner, a renowned expert in emotional science, just released his book, Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is the final chapter of his book, aptly entitled Epiphany, that really brings home the lessons that we have been learning over these past two decades. Dacher Keltner reflects on the work of Charles Darwin whose thinking about the evolutionary science of emotion was shaped as he cared for his 10-year old daughter Annie until her death. Dacher offers that we mimic nature as we move through our evolution (and emotional revolution); there is a decaying (shedding the old that no longer serves us), a composting (extracting the lessons and nutrients we need) and then a regrowth (which is where we are now).

We now possess better insights, research, tools and collective commitment than we have ever had before in this emotion revolution. Young people are hungry for mentors and author Arthur Brooks encourages the older generation to rediscover their purpose by stepping into that role. It is an exciting time to be alive — and be an active participant in such a healthy change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

The Baggage We Should Be Unpacking

It’s no surprise that we all have family and emotional baggage that has never been unpacked – mostly because it feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who would ever want to do that?

What if we were to reframe it as exploring a treasure chest instead? The clues to unanswered questions; the keys to unlock some of our hidden assets; a mystery solved; a weathered, yellowing journal of unknown and revelational history.

We are fearful of what we might discover in our family and emotional baggage. Many of us don’t care to relive the painful memories we stashed in there decades ago. But we are not the same as we were then – we are older, have had more life experiences under our belt and have more nuanced perspectives. Maybe we can unpack the baggage and clear up much needed space for a lighter way of being.

We are not alone when it comes to complex family histories and generational patterns. We are all in the midst of a big unraveling of old societal conditioning, gender stereotyping and poor parenting models. As Maya Angelou espouses “when you know better, you do better.” Thanks to the major breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and emotional science, we now have much better resources and tools available to us for personal growth, self-awareness, relationships and parenting.

In fact, it is these very breakthroughs that provide an entirely different framework for hard conversations and more productive dialogue about the elephant in the room –debilitating family dynamics.

If we wait until parents or grandparents pass away, we miss asking the questions we would like answered. Have you ever sifted through cardboard boxes of old photos and had no idea who the relatives were or the stories that went with each photographic memory? It is just like that with family baggage. So many secrets boxed up and sealed tight. If family members are courageous enough to enter into these challenging conversations with honesty and a desire to learn, it will jettison that cumbersome family baggage.

Just look around at all the complex family dynamics the next time you attend a graduation, wedding, family reunion or holiday gathering. You can readily spot familiar family patterns, passed down from one generation to the next, taking its toll on our younger generations; families dealing with the same adversities, just a different cast of characters.

The baggage may be invisible, but its impacts are as apparent as blue eyes, tall stature, the shape of a mouth or nose and even personality traits.

No generation is immune from common life events including genetic health issues, divorce, co-parenting, behavioral issues, co-dependency, estrangements, blended families, addiction, mental health issues and trauma. Hard things happen in life. We can, and must, stop making them harder than they need to be.

Today, we have the rare opportunity to involve four living generations — grandparents, parents, siblings and grandchildren — to do the work necessary to break generational trauma and address dysfunctional behavioral patterns. It may be the first time ever that we also have evidence and impetus to come together to do this multi-generational unpacking of emotional and behavioral baggage.

A good starting point would be to collectively acknowledge that the old ways of parenting and dealing with emotions are primary root causes of ongoing family dysfunction and our growing emotional health crisis. We got it wrong and now we need to be actively involved in turning the tide on that old paradigm. Just acknowledging this truth can lift the fog of shame, guilt and blame. These conversations are long overdue and we don’t want our grandchildren being burdened by the weight of unhealthy, unproductive family secrets. We can stop spreading harmful patterns and limiting beliefs from one generation to the next.

When we can overlay the new template for parenting and emotional health onto our past experiences, we gain clarity where once there was only murky confusion. There are a lot of stories embedded in our family history that are horribly inaccurate. Imagine discovering this and realizing that we’d been making incorrect assumptions and judging others when we really could have been showing up and offering each other support and emotional scaffolding.

Yes we are afraid to have those hard conversations, mostly because we are feeling very strong negative emotions arise in us each time we even think about it. It would be analogous to refusing to go to the doctor for a suspicious lump. We can no longer afford to let our fear and anxiety prevent us from learning and discovery.

The biggest challenge in having these hard conversations and unpacking family baggage together is the massive entanglement of old, unprocessed emotions, traumas and false narratives about each other. The only way we can do this work is to become very skillful in interpersonal and emotional skills.

If we are going to do a deep dive into the dark, deep waters of our generational family history, we want a seasoned, skillful dive master and tools to help us see clearly, cut those falsehoods that keep us tethered, and avoid getting re-snagged on past trauma. Emotional triggers, limiting beliefs, fixed mindsets and jagged remains of adversities are hard to navigate without compassion, empathy and powerful listening skills.

For the record, we may have attempted to do this in the past, but all we really had to guide us was “hindsight”. While hindsight can shine a light on our regrets and help us own the consequences and outcomes of our choices, it often leaves us at a dead end. Problem identified, but no meaningful path to healing and prevention.

In 2009, Dr. Dan Siegel introduced a new concept for personal growth and self-awareness. He was planting the seed of what would become “other awareness”. But there was no way for us to get to “other awarenesss” without knowing ourselves deeply. Dr. Siegel called his revolutionary personal transformation concept “mindsight”. Mindsight picks up where hindsight stopped. No more dead ends.

Dr. Siegel framed “mindsight” this way: It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner emotional lives with more clarity, integrate our brain and our emotions, and enhance our relationships with others.

Mindsight is how we put our own oxygen mask on first. There is no way that we can be of meaningful value in helping others on their emotional health journey if we ourselves haven’t done our own work. Full stop.

In my previous blog post, “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared the steps and the benefits of Dr. Siegel’s concept of mindsight and whole brain parenting. Doing the hard work and committing to a lifetime of personal growth is not for the faint of heart. But as we often say with physical fitness, “no pain, no gain”.

Dr. Siegel encourages us to use this “mindsight” lens to go back and look at our own childhood to discover how our experiences and our caregivers shaped us. Imagine being able to do this – AND have conversations with siblings, parents and grandparents about those experiences that would provide context and nuance, not to mention long overdue accountability and the possibility of repair.

Do you know what your emotional triggers are? Are you aware of the limiting beliefs that were baked into your inner critic when you were a child? Are you still having meltdowns like a two year old when big emotions consume you? Do you expect more emotional regulation and better coping skills from your partner, kids or friends than you can muster in stressful situations?

These are the warning signs of compromised emotional health. If we do not attend to our emotional health, two things will happen — (1) our physical health and quality of life will also be compromised and may even go into serious decline; (2) we will pass down to our children similar unhealthy emotional patterns. Ignoring our emotional health has perpetuated the multigenerational family dysfunction since the dawn of time.

When Dr. Dan Siegel introduced mindsight in 2009, he was an advance scout for what has now broken wide open into the mainstream of our lives. Over the past two decades, multi disciplines have merged and reverse engineered what we need to do in order to address our growing mental health crises.

We need to undo and unlearn all the things we got wrong about parenting, about emotions and about relationships.

It has taken several decades, a ton of research, and more family heartaches and brokenness than we can imagine to bring us to this moment in our collective evolution. We are now able to visibly see and feel why we need to commit to this work when we look at our children and grandchildren. Not only do they deserve better, we are motivated by our hearts to take this work seriously.

In the past, each generation entered adulthood and parenthood with a strong desire to do better than the prior generation. Good intentions, but faulty information and poor diagnostic tools. We labeled kids, rather than naming emotions. We unplugged their first love language (emotions) as soon as they learned to talk and express themselves. We had blindspots and blurred life maps. We unconsciously repeated the same old patterns and reactions from which we recoiled or hid from as kids. We numbed our pain rather than extracting it and healing.

The reverse engineering that neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, neurobiology, emotional science and social sciences have done is now extending a call to action that cannot be ignored. This call to action is meant for all of us — all 4 generations to become involved. We need to do some serious excavation work on generational baggage.

We each need to make our own emotional health a priority. We need to plug it back into the core foundation of a meaningful, satisfying and rewarding life. We need to upgrade our default systems that were never integrated in childhood. Plug those emotions into our operating systems and get more skillful at regulating them, learning from them and growing because of them. We need to unpack emotional and family baggage that is putting more obstacles in our way than we realize.

We do not have to wait until we are at the master class level to dive into teaching our kids and helping our partners. We can learn together. In fact, our children and grandchildren are the best teachers in the world. If we can step back and ask ourselves, “what did I need when I was their age?” we will instinctively know how to meet the moment. Instead of asking “what’s the matter?” we can pivot and learn by asking them “What matters most?”

This blog post is the first of a new series I’ll be sharing about the life-changing benefits of personal growth and self-awareness not only for our own quality of life, but for all of our relationships. Let’s explore how we got here, what is fresh and new for our emotional health, what we are discovering about the connection between fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, better ways to help kids through divorce and blended families how we can improve the education system from preschool to college and so much more.

There is an “emotion revolution” rising from the ashes of old parenting models, lack of emotional regulation into our human operating system, and the hard lessons learned through a global pandemic. Are you in?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: