CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Growing Up In Chaos

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

In this episode of The Calling Home podcast, host Whitney Goodman discusses the topic of managing family chaos and walking on eggshells. Many people grow up in families where they are taught to manage the emotions of others, often to avoid conflict or keep the peace. This can lead to a pattern of behavior where individuals constantly monitor the moods and reactions of others, often at the expense of their own emotional well-being. This week, Whitney will talk about why this behavior can be harmful in healthy relationships and give you tips on how to break this cycle.  Join Whitney’s Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram or TikTok.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellus lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast for another solo episode. I am Whitney Goodman. We are about to wrap up a month of talking about accepting your parents inside the calling home community. We will have our last group of the month tomorrow on Wednesday. So this week, I wanted to dive into next month's topic, which is growing up in chaos and give you all a little bit of an introduction to what we will be talking about.

in the calling home community for the month of March. If you are new to calling home, we do have a community outside of this podcast where we discuss a different topic every month. And that means every Monday you get new resources delivered to you. And every Monday, if you're part of the Family Cycle Breakers Club, you get access to a worksheet, an article, a script on how to say something or bring something up, as well as a video. On Tuesday, you get these podcast episodes. And then on Wednesdays, you get a group that is focused on whatever the topic of the month is. So for the month of March, every Wednesday at noon Eastern time, you can meet with other family cycle breakers

to work on this topic. If you don't relate to the current topic, we have tons of other content on the site that you get access to, all the past content when you sign up. And for calling home. And then we also have two groups a month that are just general family dysfunction groups where you can talk about anything related to your family relationships. So if you'd like to join the Family Cycle Breakers Club, you can visit Callinghome.com. We also have a membership called the Emotional Home Improvement Association where you just get access to those weekly articles that are part of the Family Cycle Breakers Club and they're delivered straight to your inbox. So if you're not ready to like take the leap into all the other stuff, you can definitely just stick with those

articles and these podcast episodes. But let's go ahead and dive in. Today I'm going to be talking about managing family chaos and walking on eggshells. So some of you may have been taught that managing family chaos was very important and you needed to do that by walking on eggshells and managing other people's emotions. So let's Let's walk through an example. I want you to imagine that it's 5.55 p.m. And two children and their mom are sitting at the table, finishing having dinner. And everything is fine and calm in the house.

They hear dad's footsteps approaching the door and his hand on the knob. And everyone freezes and gets quiet. Mom gets up and starts frantically cleaning. The kids keep their heads down and eat their food quietly. and dad tosses his bag on the ground and sighs really loud. He doesn't speak to anyone and he starts to passive-aggressively pour himself a glass of wine. He then launches into this story about his horrible day. There's traffic.

His meetings didn't go his plan. His assistant forgot something important again. He hated his lunch. And everyone starts to notice dad's horrible mood. And they know that it's only a matter of time before they become the target of his frustration. And he quickly starts pointing out things that are out of place in the house. Dishes that didn't get done, a backpack on the couch, and everyone starts to clean up frantically. And so in this family, there is one common goal.

Keep dad happy at all costs. Do not make him angrier than he already is. And we have the power to control his mood and to make this better. So after you hear this, I want you to take a second and think about who is this person in your family. And you can think about the family that you live in now or the family that you grew up with. And this person could be you. It could be your mom, your dad, your spouse. But think about the adult in the house that dictates the mood of the house.

Are there any adults that you are concerned about upsetting? Are there consequences or rules about not trying to upset a certain member of the home? How do you feel when this person leaves the house? and how do you feel when they get home? And have you ever been described as this person, or do you see yourself in this story? The number one takeaway I want you to take from this episode is that if you grew up in a family like this, you don't have to continue living in a family like this. And some of you may have not grown up in a family like this, but now you live in a house

like this because of who you're married to or the circumstances of your life. In the example that I gave where the dad comes home, I want us to look at the lessons that everyone in this family has probably internalized. Number one is that if you work and provide for the family, you're allowed to take out your frustration and anger on everyone else. We just need to learn how to deal with it. Two, we are responsible for managing the emotions of others. Three, we need to be on alert at all times for changes in this person's mood when they're around.

And four, if they escalate or get angry, it's our faults and we did something wrong. One of the main consequences of growing up in a family like this is you become someone who attempts to manage other people's emotions. And you likely developed a skill set to help you like maintain. the illusion of control in these types of situations. So you may have become hyper aware of your surroundings and the people around you. You study faces, energy, and behavior. You know what this person sounds like when they've had too much to drink or their face right before they snap and you think, if I can plan and anticipate their moods, everything will be okay and I will be

safe. And you attempt to manage their emotional experience so that there are no surprises. But this doesn't always work. And actually, I think it really doesn't work. It kind of just gets into this like self-fulfilling loop where you think it's working. And it can actually really harm your potential healthy relationships when this is something that you always do. And I want to give a caveat to say that like this is one of the biggest challenges that I dealt with in my adult life and in my own relationships is that I did this all the time. And I can still slip back into it. But I think it's something that made me a good therapist, but also made me a really difficult partner or friend or sibling, whatever it is, that I was constantly monitoring how other people were behaving, what their moods were asking,

are you okay? What's wrong? How are you all the time? Like to a degree where it was annoying. It was annoying to me and it was annoying to other people. And I would do it with people who had no reason to be monitored in that way. I would do it in relationships that were secure and safe and where a person has not given me any evidence that I need to act that way. And I had a lot of trouble trusting that people would tell me how they felt when they felt it and that I could trust them to be honest that I developed like this really annoying habit of that I still do sometimes of asking people like, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you sure what's wrong? Like over and over basically until they would snap and tell me something. And sometimes it was that I'm just

having a bad day. And you're like not letting me have a bad day because you want me to explain it to you. And I noticed that I could not feel comfortable when people were having a bad day or in a bad mood. I always would personalize it and make it about me and make it something that I had to fix and something I had to do. And so when I talk about this topic specifically, the things I talk about, I rarely relate them back to personal experience and I'm always talking to you from the point of view of the therapist and, you know, tens of thousands of hours of working with other people, but this is something that I genuinely am like, wow, I did this a lot. And doing this work of therapy and doing this work of learning how that impacts my relationships

and how that impacts me has been tremendously helpful. And so I hope you can see that and feel that in the things that I'm saying. So I want to walk through some examples of what it looks like or sounds like when you are attempting to manage someone else's emotional experience. And I just describe some of them to you in the ways that I would do them. But walking on eggshells or trying to augment your behavior or speech to not set them off, asking, are you okay repeatedly and not accepting their answers? That was a big one for me. Trying to read their emotions through facial expressions, body language, or behavior,

you know, reading all these things and like creating a story about it. Believing that you can control or manage someone's emotions if you do the quote unquote right thing. Very dangerous cycle to get into. Trying to make your emotions smaller so they have more room to express theirs. trying to anticipate or predict someone's emotions or their potential reaction, taking responsibility or blame for someone else's emotions. And I always want to point out and make this disclaimer that sometimes this emotional management strategy is about safety. I mentioned that I was doing this a lot in relationships where it did not fit, but sometimes you're doing this in relationships that are abusive and that are dangerous.

And typically the victim is trying to avoid the usual negative consequences in the relationship. It's an attempt to assert power and control to stabilize the dynamic and make it less risky. And it makes sense why people do it. It makes sense if you've done it. In some situations, managing someone's emotional state is about survival or safety. And if you are currently in a situation and you're listening to, to this, where there is a threat of physical harm, abuse, or serious injustice, it's crucial

to prioritize safety, to gather resources and support, and to plan your actions in a way that allows you to exit or manage their relationship safely. Leaving a violent relationship can be dangerous, and it should not be taken lightly, and I would never want to encourage anyone who is in a dangerous situation to just throw caution to the wind and be like, you know what, I am going to provoke this person, I'm going to say what I want to say, and I'm just going to not care, because that could be dangerous for you. So if you ever needed to do this to survive or just get by in the past, you'll likely carry out that same behavior, like I said, in other relationships where it's totally unnecessary. And so this is the pattern that we need to

interrupt, that when you do get around safe people and you learn what that's like, you have to break that skill that is like second nature. And you want to do that so that you do not negatively impact your healthy functioning relationships. And another disclaimer here is that we do impact people through our behavior and our words. You cannot manage someone's entire emotional experience. You're not to blame for their bad moods, outbursts, or violence, but we do influence one another. And so I think there's a lot of nuance when it comes to that and when it comes to understanding like how this is playing out in your relationships. But ultimately, trying to manage someone's emotions will become very exhausting to you, and it makes you lose touch with your own

emotional experience. So when you're around someone that you have to constantly manage and like hold their hands and make sure they're okay, like you know, the experience of being with like a toddler. You know, it's like that. It's like when you become a parent, you have to gain all these skills to really self-regulate and keep your emotions in check and learn how to compartmentalize them so that you do not make them your child's responsibility or you do not like snap at them and do things that you do not intend to do because you're not managing your emotions. But when you have to do that with other adults or people that could actually like pose a threat to you, it's even harder because.

you have to become in that moment totally detached from how you feel and completely focused on the other person. So let's talk about some strategies that you can use to stop managing their emotions. If you find yourself trying to do this, walking on eggshells, really trying to monitor people, here are some questions to help you explore that. Who model? this type of behavior in your family. Did any of your family members attempt to manage the emotions of others? The conjuring last rites on September 5th. I come down here with you. Array!

Array! Array! Array! Array! Array! The Conjuring Last Rites, only in the theater, September 5th. So at the beginning of this episode, I gave you that example, right, of the mom who is at the table with her kids. When we look back at this example, the mom is definitely attempting to manage dad's emotions, and the kids are following her.

This might have played out really differently if the mom had a different reaction to the dad. Now, obviously, we can't leave out. I've left out so much context from this story. There's a chance that, like, dad could get violent if mom confronted him or if she didn't do what she did. But there is certainly a leader here in, this is how we deal with dad. And there is some modeling going on when we're talking about what adults are doing and how children are interpreting and learning that behavior. where did you learn that you could manage other people's emotions who in your life has blamed you for their emotions or behavior and that might sound like I wouldn't have done that if you didn't make me so angry I only threw that plate at the wall because you were rude to me you know

these types of things that are like my emotions are like a plus b equals c I had my reaction because of what you did and do you ever blame yourself for someone else? else's emotional state. Why do you feel you must walk on eggshells and monitor their mood? Have you ever mispredicted their reaction? How did the adults around you manage their emotions? Did they blame you whenever they would react explosively or negatively? And were you responsible for supporting or helping the adults around you emotionally? Are any behaviors that kept you safe as a child, getting in your way as an adult. These questions are going to be part of worksheets and an article inside of the March growing up in chaos content. So if you'd like to

work through this like journaling or whatever in another form, you can access that there when you become a member of the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Here are some reminders I want you to take away from this episode. You cannot be totally to blame for someone else's emotional state or reactions. Remember that we cannot successfully predict how someone will react in every situation, especially if they are unpredictable. We learn many things in childhood that kept us safe then and no longer work as adults. You can respond the right way and understand. all the emotions, but some people will still react negatively or blame you. We also need to remember, and this was a big lesson for myself, that people have to learn

to regulate their own emotions. And this means we have to give them the opportunity to do that. And sometimes that means watching them struggle or avoiding them when they are upset. And you have to practice in whatever way you can, allowing people to feel what they're feeling while keeping yourself safe. You are allowed to set boundaries around how they express their feelings, and it is not your job to manage the experience. You can be there for them. You can be kind, you can be supportive, you can be empathetic, but you do not have to be swallowed up by their experience and you do not have to be harmed by their actions during that emotional experience. It is not my job to fix them. I am allowed to keep myself and those who depend on me

safe. I cannot predict how someone will behave when they are upset. I should not feel like I'm walking on eggshells in my home. This is a coping skill I learned in childhood. I have power and option as an adult, and I can't feel my feelings if I'm always focused on how they feel. I hope that this episode gives any of you who are like so used to walking on eggshells, managing other people's emotions, being on high alert, some hope that this can change and this can get better. And the best way to work on this is to work on this with people that you can trust that you can rely on that have been predictable and that have been emotionally safe people. And if you have anyone in your life like that, whether it's a friend, a teacher, a sibling,

a parent, a grandparent, anyone, that you can start to dial back some of these behaviors with them and practice what it's like to show them kindness, compassion, empathy, but not spend all this extra effort, monitoring them, looking out for how they're feeling, apologizing, you know, making yourself smaller. You can learn through some of those feedback loops that it's safe for you to do that. And if you are someone that grew up in a house like this or is in a relationship like this, you cannot bear all the responsibility of changing. that cycle. The other person also has to learn how to safely manage their emotions, how to talk about them, and how to control and augment their behavior in a way that allows them to safely

express those emotions without hurting you, themselves, or someone else. So you can show up, you can be supportive, you can show kindness, compassion, and empathy, but that does not include you holding yourself responsible for every single one of their feelings and putting yourself in harm's way as a way of helping them or quote unquote keeping yourself safe. Again, these types of relationships can be dangerous. You could have learned this in a dangerous relationship. And so I think it's really important that you have support when you're working through stuff like this, especially if you are in an abusive relationship, whether that's with a partner or a family member or a friend and figuring out how can I keep myself safe while I work

on some of these patterns can be really, really helpful. I would definitely suggest finding a therapist or an organization in your area that helps people who are in abusive relationships or in a domestic violence situation. If this is something that you would like more resources on again or to meet other people who are dealing with this same issue, you can join us at callinghome.com. We will begin adding all of these new resources and the groups about growing up in chaos and managing other people's emotions beginning on March 1st. And we would love to have you there. Thank you again so much for being here. And I really appreciate you all. If you enjoyed this episode, please do not forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. This really helps

keep the podcast going. And if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to cover in the future, please don't hesitate to DM me at Sit With Wit on Instagram. Thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.