009 - Can you tolerate your kid's pain?

Parenting the Intensity · Aug 29, 2023

Transcript

Can you tolerate your kid's pain? Does that topic sound weird to you? Just wait, you'll see it's in fact a central element of your parenting. Welcome to Parenting the Intensity, where we'll talk all about how we can drop the general parenting advice that doesn't work with our emotionally intense kids anyway, and let go of the unrealistic expectations society puts on us as parents. Together, we'll find solutions and ideas that work for you and your kids. Chances are, deep down, you know what they need. But you need a little encouragement to keep going on harder days and permission to do things differently, and help you fully trust that you already are a wonderful parent to your exceptional but challenging kids. So first, I want to address the fact that if you have a kid with a illness, like a health illness, or that has been hospitalized, this question might bring that back very fast. And part of what I will talk about will apply, but part of it might sound absurd to you if you had to tolerate your kids in excruciating pain while being totally powerless. But I will also address this.

So don't leave just yet, unless it's just too triggering, then just skip that episode. So today I'm talking about any pain, be it physically or emotional. Because if we don't tolerate our kids' pain, we can't support them and raise them like they need to. And I know for some people that's very hard to hear. And at the same time, it might feel weird and like, yeah, of course that's normal. But often it's unconscious that we cannot tolerate their pain. We might react in some ways because we cannot tolerate their pain, but we don't necessarily realize that's what's happening. So in a previous episode, I talked about overwhelm and tolerating your kid's pain can definitely trigger some emotional overwhelm. So I once worked with a mother who had a lot of trouble tolerating her daughter's physical pain as she was getting vaccinated and her child crying because of the pain. And so I went with her and I hold her daughter while she was getting vaccine and she was not even able to touch or look at the child because she was like feeling that pain and was just too much for her. And we might feel that's horrible. But at the same time, she just she reached out. She said, I'm not able to.

I want to, but I'm not able to. And she did the right thing because having her child on her while receiving the vaccine, if she was completely overwhelmed by that, the child is going to know it. The child is going to sense that it's just going to be worse and the kid is going to feel more pain. And so having someone that she trusted do that for her meant that the child was more secure. Of course, the child would have made more secure with her mom, but not with her mom that was in that state. And so she reached out and got someone who could do it. You know, it's not even my child. So I didn't add that connection. I knew the child because I was working with them very closely, but I was able to stay calm and collected because one, it's not something that I'm having that much trouble with for a vaccine or physical pain, not that level of pain anyway. But I was not as involved because I'm not the mom. So it's a solution sometimes, but it's often not a solution to get someone else to do it. But the point is that if we cannot tolerate the pain and we're completely overwhelmed, it's just going to make things worse with our kids. It's the simple example of when our kids get hurt and we overreact because we think the kids got more hurt than the reality. Sometimes the kids will just react more.

It's basic. Like sometimes it's just a reaction that they're going to mirror our reaction. But if we really, really feel bad and it's hard and it's going to be very, very hard for the kids to deal with the pain. We will dismiss it when we don't feel like we can tolerate it. So basically, how can we expect them to tolerate their own pain and deal with it if we cannot tolerate it and we do everything we can for the pain to disappear, even if it means doing things that are not really supportive for the child. And maybe that's ringing a bell for you and your own life. I mean, how often people around you were not able to tolerate your pain and jump too fast to finding solution, which is something we often do as adults. Like someone shares something hard and instead of just listening, we will try to find solution because in doing that, we get out of our own uncomfortable feeling of that other person feeling pain. Or they will just like dismiss, like consider that it's not important and didn't let us express it or just consider that what we're sharing is not real or things like that. And it's all coming from not being able to deal with our pain. Or sometimes you just maybe didn't even express your pain or sadness because you were afraid of it being dismissed and might be with reason because you were dismissed before. So I'm sure that's something that you've experienced in your life because it's a very it's a core social thing like pain and sadness and grief are like all of these things. Grief are like all the negative and anger, like all the negative feelings are socially unacceptable. And so when we feel them, we often are not comfortable with them and others are even less comfortable with them. And learning to be comfortable with our kids pain, no matter what the pain is, is very difficult and very necessary at the same time. And if you have a child who, as I was saying in the beginning, experience a lot of emotional or physical pain for often medical reasons, and you had no power to take that pain away, you know what it feels like to tolerate the pain and suffer to it yourself. Like seeing that pain and you know how powerless that can make you feel. And as absurd as it may sound, it can be a useful tool when you are parenting like an everyday parenting. It can be a strength, but it can also be the opposite. So we can be able to tolerate better the little things in life, little pain, if you will, and not care as much because you're comparing that to something way worse. And for that reason, like you're being able to support your kids better in moments of daily distress, normal day distress and make room for their emotion, even if they're intense in their emotion. But you can also fall in one of two extremes, not being able to tolerate any kind of pain because they suffered enough or having a too high level of tolerance for daily pain. Because you both experience way worse and then you're dismissing their everyday pain more easily. So it can be a curse or it can be great. Like it's it hasn't but it definitely has an impact to have a child that went through that. So like don't dismiss that experience. You can learn from it. You can take from it and use it in your parenting, but it can be a little bit more difficult in your parenting, but it can definitely be a problem too. And if it is and you cannot deal with it, it's kind of a trauma thing. So please reach out for support. So no matter what's your case that you've lived that or not and how you're dealing with it, we need to be dealing with our kids pain and emotionally intense kids feel more deeply the pain. It can be like some kids like we say they're whining and they ask for bending all the time and like every little cut seem like the end of the world for them. It is like it's important to acknowledge that for them. It is others. It's completely the opposite. They will go through like an enormous physical pain with no complaint. Like there is no one pattern of emotionally intense kids.

I have three and they are completely different. But what I'm suggesting is like I encourage you to try and be aware of how you feel next time your kids is not feeling well. No matter if it's like emotional or physical pain, try to be aware of yourself. Even often we just were not even aware of that and that will trigger your answer to your kid the way you feel. You react to their pain. And I just want to like not feeling well with a child can definitely like be being angry or fighting you. Like it sometimes that's how they express their pain too. So like I know you know that but just as a reminder. And so when they're expressing their pain, notice if you're tensing, of course, if they're kicking you, you're tensing for another reason. But notice if you're tensing, if you have a pressure in your heart or the urge to make things go away by finding a solution or dismissing or lowering their feeling. If you have any of those reactions, it's because you're uncomfortable with their pain. And so if that's the case, it's not going to be magic, but just being aware of that feeling, the fact that you want the pain to go away, it's often the first step to being able to like take yourself out of it a little bit and focus on really what's happening with your kids and giving them more space to express that thing. And really try not to dismiss or distract. And yes, sometimes you need to distract. I mean, a kid in pain that you need to do something, sometimes you need to distract from the pain. But we don't want to distract from the pain all the time because we need to feel the pain, especially emotional pain, like physical pain. Sometimes it's more we can distract for we can distract for any kind of pain, let's be honest. But especially emotional pain is not a good idea to always distract from. We can for a short amount of time or sometimes, but not all the time because it's going to build up at some point and it's just going to get worse. So it's really better not to do that. But I'm not talking about like vaccine, distract your kid from that or you're having a medical procedure that is very painful. That the techniques include distraction to help the kids go through that. So in those moments, of course, use distraction and other techniques. But I'm more likely in talking about things that you don't really have control that cannot go away, like emotional pain. It's very important not to just distract from it all the time. But sometimes it's okay to distract from it. We all do that, like numbing ourselves in front of the TV, for example, or drinking a glass of wine.

So yeah. And then once you noticed how you feel, if you can meet them where they are, as long as it's safe, of course, if they're kicking, biting, it's not safe. But if it's safe, meeting them where they are and empathizing and acknowledging that they're feeling pain, even if it looks way too intense to what happened for us as parents. And letting them live through that feeling, that pain while holding them. And I don't necessarily mean physically. Yeah, you can be holding them physically, but some kids don't want to be old. When they're in that emotional state, so it can just be holding them energetically, like being there for them, that they know you're there to support, even if you're not touching them. So just letting them feel that pain. And notice what difference it makes. Does it make a difference in the way they're feeling their pain? In general, it will. That going back to self-regulation and co-regulation. We'll talk more about that later. And it might take longer than you feel comfortable with. Like sometimes when we let people feel their pain, their sadness, it takes longer than when we just dismiss it and make it go away. And it can be hard because we feel it should be over by then. But normally when we acknowledge, when it goes away, it goes away for real. It's not going to come back to blow it later. And also it's okay if you can't. I mean, it's okay. Sometimes we just can't. As I was giving as an example in the beginning, some pain is just too hard for some of us to fan them, to support. And there are some people that have this, like they feel physically what others feel when they feel pain. And if it's your case, I mean, my art goes out to you that must be so hard on a daily basis.

Get some other people to do some things with your kids or support your kids when they're hurting and you cannot do it yourself. No matter what it is. And I know it's not always possible, but it's okay if you can't. It's totally okay. And sometimes you will be able to do it and sometimes you won't. And like some pain, you will be able to do it much more easily than others. And it's totally normal. It's different from one person to the next. So just try.

Just try and see if that can be helpful. So I hope that was clear. It's kind of a weird topic, I know. But it's something that I think is very important that I personally think of it often when my kids are going through pain, especially emotional pain. But even sometimes physical pain, because I have two of my kids that are like very sensitive and that can they can really feel pain intensely. And it's easy to dismiss. And my older one doesn't like physical pain is very not something that bothers him. And I add because of that, I kind of never really bothered at the beginning. It was, but then I was like, and it took me a little while to switch with my second one because it was completely the opposite. She was feeling physical pain much more. And at the beginning, I thought that was too much, but it was just in comparison with what I was used to. So, yeah, just each person will experience pain definitely. And there's no right or wrong way to experience pain. So I encourage you to try and tolerate that discomfort of your kids experiencing pain to be able to better support them through their pain. And back to the support episode. The last one, finding the people around you that can support your pain is also very important because you also deserve people that can listen to you, like support you through your pain without dismissing it and just try to fix it when you just need to be listened to. So I would love to know if there's some pain that is harder for you to support than other. Let me know. See you next time. I'm so glad you joined me today and took that time out of your intense life to focus on finding a new way to parent that works for you and your kids. To get the episodes as soon as they drop, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and please left a rating and review so other parents can find it too. Also check out all the free resources on my website at familymoments.ca so you can take action on what's the most important for you right now. And take a deep breath, keep going, we're all in this together. you