Tag: The Drive

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:

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