049 - Navigating Big Emotions - With Lacie Newton

Welcome to the podcast. Today we will be talking about a very great and simple way to talk and work on emotional regulation with our kids. And to do that we are welcoming Lacey over on the podcast. Let's do it!

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 you 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. Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed and uncertain when it comes to parenting your emotionally intense child? Do you often find yourself playing with guilt, fearing that you're not doing enough to help them navigate their intense emotion? You are not alone. Many parents face these challenges and struggle to find the right path forward. But take a deep breath, there's hope. That's why I created the Parenting the Intensity community. Imagine having a clear roadmap tailored specifically to your child's unique needs and your family's reality. Picture feeling empowered and confident in your parenting, knowing that you are providing the support and understanding your child needs. It may seem like an unattainable dream right now, but I'm here to tell you that it is within reach. Come join us for our monthly group support to connect with other parents and get supported with your challenge right now. You also get one -on -one chat and audio office hours for the things that you're really not ready to share in the group, and workshop, tools, courses to help you in the process of finding that balance of parenting in a way that works for you, your child, and your family.

Hi Lacey, welcome to the podcast, I'm glad to have you here.

I am so glad to be here, yeah, it's been a pleasure. Sure.

Yeah. Um, so can we, can you introduce yourself and let us know why you do what you do? Sure.

Um, I'm Lacey Newton and I have, um, my, my business is called Mama Simpatico and I am here to help and support moms who might be wondering why mom life is a little bit harder than they thought it would be. And it's really a passion for me because this is my story.

I

was an older mom. I chose to be a mom. Excuse me. I thought I was ready. You know, my husband and I both work. We had a home and then mom life was hard

and

it was very confusing for me. So, it took a lot of soul searching and deep dive, you know, into what the heck is going on for me to understand what was happening and to develop my toolbox even further to grow into motherhood and accept, you know, what was happening and to change my relationship with it and I really learned you know what was happening in my own mind that was getting in my way and was able to develop a new relation to develop a new relationship with it and I became a certified mindfulness teacher because mindfulness was actually my

a

solution because I, you know, at the crux of it all, I was in

experiencing

postpartum depression and anxiety and I was nursing and I didn't want medication. I know that there are medications that are fine, but that was a choice that I was too

anxious to make. And so therapy appointments were like, you know, two weeks apart and I'm like, I need something now. Yeah.

in between. So

in between, and I was like, what do I do with this situation here right now? And so I, I had to learn. And I did. And the more I started to talk about my story, the more I heard that it was very common.

Yeah, you know, we

have all these, we get this

idea

of becoming a and we have these visions fill our heads of what it might be like, and then, you know, reality comes and it often isn't exactly that. I anything we plan for, you know, in life.

Is it sometimes that? I'm guessing it's really rarely what we were expecting. Yeah,

you know, and then so how do we settle with that? And how do we depersonalize that? Because it felt so personal. I was really questioning, you know, like I just, I was so low. I wondered if I was the right person for my children.

You know, I really

doubted

it.

And it was a scary place to be. And I know I'm not alone. And

so

my goal with Mama Simpatico is to support moms and really help spread the message that there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your child. You are the right mom for your child. And regardless of what the messages you are getting from your culture, from your family, from the media, from Instagram, there is this path that's also available

where things do feel like you are the right person for this child, this child is the right one for you, and everything is okay the way it is, and we just need to work with that. Um, it's, you know, we get these messages, you know, in the, you know, on social media from everybody that, you know, you're supposed to be a certain way as a mom, your parents were a certain way, you know, your sister -in -law is doing things a certain way. All the kids, you know, all the parents at school are doing things a certain way. We get all these perfectly curated images of motherhood on our Instagram feeds. And we get these judgments of moms who are doing things differently. Moms get judged when their kids have behaviors. Moms get judged when their house is messy. Moms get

judged

when their clothes are messy, you know? And it's just, it's incredibly like, I don't know, it's like a can't win situation. You're expected to do everything,

you're

expected to do it all, but not struggle while you're doing it all.

No, of course, no, you should you should rise above everything, and you should have it all

together. And this is and I, I think like, when we have emotionally intense, because it's especially hard. Because all of those expectations just don't fit the reality that we're in. Also, like it doesn't fit most people reality, let's be honest, but when things are different in our life, it's even more different than the expectation. So I love that what you wanted to share with us is kind of a roadmap in some way. I don't know if you see it that way, but the comfort plan, which is to help navigate big emotions. And I think that's one of the probably the most requested topics. So I love to have many episodes on that because things can resonate with people differently. So, can you dive into that and let us know what the comfort plan is? Sure.

Sure.

And I'll give a little bit more backstory to how it evolved for me, too, because I'm a special education teacher by day, and I taught special ed for years in what was called the therapeutic learning classroom, and it was for emotionally and behaviorally intense school in there, or I'm sorry, it was for emotionally and behaviorally intense kids in the public school. And I taught at the middle school level. And this was a classroom with large children that, you know, have strong children.

And we

had big behaviors. And I had experience in applied behavior analysis and a lot of training in that. And and so I would use that in that classroom, supporting the kids, we have therapist in there. But I had a confidence with supporting kids with big emotions and big behaviors. And then I became a mom. And I had a three year old, big emotions and big behaviors. And my confidence was shot.

I was like,

I don't know what to do. Because I realized that with what I had been trained in with applied behavior analysis and I don't care to get into a huge discussion on it because I think it can be done differently in all kinds of places but what I had learned didn't

wasn't what I wanted to do in my home because I didn't feel connected to my daughter during that. It felt like I was addressing the behavior but not the person.

Yeah.

And it took me a long time to figure out that that's why I felt completely under equipped. And so the evolution of the comfort plan came from my experience with deep diving into what's happening, and relearning like how I want to address big behaviors on a deep emotional level because I wanted to get through these big tantrums and big experiences with connection and not feeling like a crappy mom and not feeling like there's something wrong with her.

And

it was really challenging, but through my evolution, through mindfulness, through her becoming more verbal, and learning what was happening, the comfort plan emerged. And so what the comfort plan is, it's like, it's this go to it's like, okay, things are intense, seek comfort. And it's just that easy.

And

I've worked with moms who were like, Oh, I was afraid I was gonna reinforce this big

behavior. I don't want it to be more. But what I'm message I'm trying to share. And is that when we are experiencing a huge emotion in our bodies and our kids are experiencing a huge emotion when they have big behaviors.

So

it's just the tip of the iceberg, but inside there's big emotion. Our brains are literally shifting from working in our, our prefrontal cortex when right behind our forehead, where we're able to learn, able to communicate. We're able to problem solve our kids. Brains are now in our, our more primitive brain, our limbic system, and they are reacting through flight flight, you know, fawn and a freeze. So they

are

in their, their stress response. There is no real learning there. There is survival, survival mode. And so the only thing that can get that prefrontal cortex back online, is to get out of the survival mode. And we, we, when we are feeling comfortable, we are survival mode, brain is turned off. So they are mutually incompatible.

Yeah.

So when we approach our kids, as they are this fear, you know, they're in this intense fear, and their behaviors are to protect themselves, we can start to see that we just need to soothe them and tell their and send signals to their emotions and their body that they're safe. And so, and, you know, I don't want to send the message that any parent is like triggering major safety concerns, like you're, you're doing okay, you know, it's not that don't take it personally. It's just how their brains and bodies are working.

And

so when we say, you know, in my mind, I, I'm now, okay, what can I do to to my child feel more comfortable. Because we can do the learning later. We can reflect later when her brain is on. We can do the problem solving. Like, well, what if we do this differently? We do that later. So we can do that through physical touch. We can do that through comforting words. We can do that through our environment, shifting in our environment. Because sometimes the environment is just re -triggering that stress. So the comfort plan is really just making up, making some like brainstorms before the big event. You know, what would bring comfort to this situation? And just having that be the default, like letting the rest go. Safety, of course, but then comfort.

And

then you can always come back later. You kids do not want to have these big aggressive or big emotionally, like, you know, expressive situations. They don't

want that. We're not gonna be

reinforcing that. And, you know, when I do work with parents, I do talk about, yes, there's times where our kids have some learned behaviors that we're like, eh, hey, you're learning to put on this, you know, little thing.

You it worked

in the past, but it's not the big, big stuff.

It's just not. And I think at some point, you kinda see the difference. Like you see when it's just like they can very easily snap out of those learned behavior and learned reaction that are used for whatever purposes, but it's, it's really different when they have those bigger emotion, you're not going to like make a joke and they're going to stop.

It's not that easy. It's way deeper than that. When it's like more surface level, you know, like you're as a parent, you know, you can see it and it's like a different quality yeah there's a different depth and the emotion in it's like sometimes just like um i would say just naming it like you're you're you're exaggerating a little bit right now and if the child is like yeah yeah they are if they're really reacting even more you've got it wrong that was not exaggeration but like when you just like make fun or in general when they don't have really big emotion they will snap out of it and just it was just trying to get something or losing it but when it's really big it's it's not the same like you cannot get them out of them, out of there just easily or it's way different.

Yes. And I work with my families

and teaching them this one to five scale because it's a very easy way to communicate that. And what you're describing is number three on this scale. So, what we were talking about with that lower level. So level one is just completely calm and not feeling a big intense emotion. And the five is the biggest emotion we're experiencing. So, you know, one and two, we vacillate between one and two all day long. It's normal.

We're not expecting anybody to be a one. We even go to three most days,

most of

us, but three is the tipping point. Once we're at three, if we're not employing some kind of, uh, you know, tool to self -regulate, we're going to go back. We're going to go up to

four and five. Yeah.

So three is where we want to learn where our kids are showing a three on the outside because they're more likely to be a three on the inside. And it's really critical to, for me, to look at it as the outsider inside because all I know as a parent is the outside.

And I

trust my children and the student, you know, the kids, my students, because I'm a teacher, I say that, but also my family's kids.

is we give them ownership of labeling their inside. We're not gonna tell them what their experience is because it empowers them to share it with us. So all we can ever say is, well, it looks like this on the

outside.

And then, so differentiating between the inside and the outside, the inside is the way it feels, the outside is the way it looks.

And it helps give language to our kids. Well, you're a level four and I, So a three is like usually whining, crying, pouting,

maybe

using some old tricks that

you don't

want to use, but just offering that replacement way of saying something it doesn't work, pouting, stomping, that kind of thing. Level four is usually like really crying loud, maybe yelling, maybe kind of throwing things a little bit, but I save level five for the things

that could be injurious to

people,

slamming doors, throwing things at people, fighting, stuff like that. And so it gives a language to help the kids start to also realize what they're doing because in the heat of the moment, when their limbic system is on and they're in their reptilian, they're in their primitive brain,

they're

not in control of their bodies.

And

when we go back and reflect, That's when we can, we can talk about, you know, what you did see as the parent, but all of this, you know, is really best done with like plan of kind of phased out plan. And I do want to put out there first is that actually when I work with a parent, um, the first comfort plan plan is how can I bring myself comfort? Is this, how can, what can you do when this emotionally charged situation starts bubbling up to ground yourself so that you can be the calmest person in the room, so that you can bring yourself comfort, so that you stay at a level three and you don't get higher in a four or five, so that you feel good after the situation is over.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's something that we like address all the time. it's the parent. It starts with us as a parent. And as much as we would like to fix kids, that's not how it works.

Right. Right. So yeah, the comfort plan first step is really just like, okay, so, okay, so my, my kids started to get a little bit elevated. This is the situation I know how

to give

myself comfort. And often it's, you know, just reminding ourselves that either, you know, through words we can say something like, well, it's okay. So it's in parenting, there are hard moments and this is one of them. You know, sometimes just remembering that it's just not you, it's just parenting. There are

hard moments.

Sometimes it's, you know, doing a self -compassion kind of thought. And I often teach, you know, this is, it's understandable that I feel frustrated, you know, fill in the blank because, and just offering ourselves that understanding of our emotions brings a lot of regulation to our own internal system. Being understood in general will

help

regulate anybody's system.

And

so bringing understanding to ourselves in that moment in our own minds can help. Also, it could be just putting on, you know, more comfortable pants, you know,

like your kids a little

high, you know, you can tell it could happen today. Get comfortable clothes on, you

know,

make sure you have

water nearby, things like that. And so getting comfort for yourself. And then number two, getting comfort for your child. And, you know, you can even parents can even develop a comfort plan with their child out of the moment.

Yeah, of course,

you know, you know, and we use this in my house a lot. My daughter has a lot of sensory physical um, triggers, I I could say with clothes and just things and she's labeled them the bugs and you know, that's her word. And so the bugs, we, we talk about the bugs, like it's just, it's, it's as normal as feeling happy in

the house.

And

I've asked her out of the heat of the moment, what helps and it's hugs. And

then

she gets the bugs and she's like, no, don't touch me. I'm like, just a reminder, you know, hugs help.

And it took

a while, but she would slowly open to her own suggestion. And now we have this, this thing where she calls for me, and I know she's laying on the floor, and I go and I hug her for like three minutes. And it's just calms her body down. It's what works for her.

Yeah. And I that's interesting, because was you said, like, you would identify that out of the moment. And in the moment, and I and that and we can reflect on our own experience, we know what helps. But often when things are going bad, we are not able to go there. Like I can tell you that when I go, I don't feel as good. I don't want to do yoga as much as when I feel good. But it's when I don't feel good that I should do it more. So that's an important thing to like, she knows that's as helpful in her. But in the moment, she won't be able to reach that necessarily. And she needs the help of the parent to be able to reach that without forcing, of course. But as you

said, reminding her that that's helpful for you, can I hug you? And now like, it's helpful. Yeah,

now she's able to see it at a lower level.

You know, we

talk one to five all the time in our house. And another thing, you know, about one to five, is it, it's a way to communicate without words. Just

to end.

Yeah, in our house, even with her sibling too, she, we have, we know that if, you know, if we hold up the number four, the number five, anything, it means I don't really want to talk right now, but it's not personal. It's not about you. I'm just, I'm grumpy for whatever reason.

And so it really opens the door of communication and understanding.

Yeah, love that. It's a great way also for siblings to clearly understand and when kids cannot express like, I'm feeling bad or I'm feeling this way, at least they can say, I'm feeling like a four. Like, just don't bother me. Yeah, exactly. It's a great boundary.

Yes, because our language is in the prefrontal cortex,

you know.

So, you know, it is a step towards communication, but it doesn't require words.

And

of course, if we can get to the point where we can talk about it, we are getting more out of that part,

you know,

there's this, you know, name it to tame it kind of idea and mindfulness where if you can name your emotion, you're starting to, to work with it. But our kids are not always there as adults aren't always there. So sometimes we just regulate ourselves even by saying, wow, this is a level five. I don't know what it is. I don't know what emotion it is, but it's a level five for me. And this also brings in, um, this idea, it brings a more understanding for the whole family because it's so fluid, this one to five system in our house. And it has been with some of the folks that I work with, but I can get to this point where I, I know my own levels. If I'm a level three, I cannot say yes to glitter. my kids. I cannot. I totally get that. If I come back, if I give them the glitter, no matter how much they say they're going to clean it up.

Yeah, there's going to be some everywhere.

There's going to some everywhere. And that's going to take me up. That's going to take me,

you

know, because I,

because I'm, we're adults, like we have bills, we have work, we have rude people. We have all this stuff in our own lives that triggers us, you know, and that's what I love about the comfort plan and my, when teach navigating big emotions is really the overarching, um, program that I teach with this, but it, it teaches a communication that normalizes that us adults are having big emotions. Irregardless of what is happening with our kids. So then when the kids come in, it's, it's another trigger and that's okay. It's, it's a human thing to be triggered

by this, you know,

because like I said before, we're getting all these messages of what it's supposed to be. And, you know, so we start to question ourselves, but this is how we start to work with it and how we start to normalize. Like this is parenting. This is parenting for me and my child. And this is what I'm working with. So my kids, my, you know, it also depersonalizes my tricky moments, you know, as adults.

So

when my kids are wanting to do something that I feel I already have this tension in my body. Like I can feel it,

you know,

because I practice mindfulness and I'm pretty in tune. Um, not that I get it right all the time. I like to caveat that. But once I realized that I am, I am slightly, you know, kind of just on edge, I'm a

level

three myself. I can tell them, you know what, I would love to bring out the glitter, but we're going to have to wait. Cause I've got a few grownup things going on that I need to deal with, or I need to go take a rest. I'm

a level

three for some grown -up reasons, but when I'm feeling more like I can help with the glitter and the,

you

know, any messes that come, I know you're going to clean it up most, you know, yourself. I know you

told

me that, but I need to be a level two or one. They, they realize what's happening because we've talked about it so much.

And, and

the thing is, they're not taking it personally. When I've come to them without doing that and I'm in a grumpy mood, my kids think I'm mad at them.

Yeah, yeah, and they so easily think that even if that's not the case and that's not why we're trying to convey, but just the fact that we are not in a great mood, kids will really fast integrate that they did something wrong.

So they

take it personally.

Yeah,

this is the way to separate that. And it breaks my heart the times that I wasn't able to, you know, nobody's ever going to get it right all the time, but you know, it offers a conversation for repair to, you I am so sorry,

I was a

level four, I should have done this differently, you know, in modeling, like, gosh, I should have told you I was level four, and I should have taken a break, and

then come

back to you, you know, and it gives them some understanding so that we can we can keep that communication, attunement and connection going through the rough patches.

Yeah, really love that. That's that's a really, I love that simplicity of that way of talking about it, like it doesn't even require words. So that's great.

Thank you very much for sharing that. I think it's a very great tool for parents to use and start using and we will have to have you over again to go deeper on that and mindfulness I think also would be great. We do, we did have some episodes on that, but I would love to dive deeper on the link between the two. So want to have you over again. So thank you very much for being here. Is there any resource that you use or love that you would like to share with the listeners?

Yeah, you know, when I was when I had those troubles as the as the mom of a two, three -year -old. I leaned on the Janet Lansbury podcast a lot, and she was one of my, what I call, mama mentors. We got to collect these mama mentors that

will

guide us to be the moms that we want to be. And for any listener who, Janet Lansbury really targets younger children under five. So any listener with that age group, she offers a lot of tools to help with what she calls respectful parenting. And it felt really good for me to learn from her when I was going through it.

Thank you. I haven't heard of her.

So that's right. And I love always having your resources to share. So thank you. And if parents want to know more and work with you, how can they find you?

Yes, you can find me at mamasimpatico .com. I'm on Instagram at mamasimpatico. And I'd love to connect and talk. I love talking this. um you know talking about this it's it's one of those things that's like wow kind of got through it and um really did some

deep

diving so i have a lot of thought on it and

i'd love to

share yeah

thank you that's great so i'm gonna put all the links in the show notes so that people can find you easily so thank you for being here today

thank you

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 leave everything in 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.