Good Inside with Dr. Becky - How Our Past Shapes Our Parenting

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Parenting is hard. It changes us. And it changes our relationships with our partners. And something we could all use more of is compassion - for our kids but also for ourselves. Licensed therapist and father, Kier Gaines, joins Dr. Becky to discuss the complexities of parenting, mental health, and the importance of compassion.Get the Good Inside App by Dr. Becky: https://bit.ly/47hhv6lFollow Dr. Becky on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbeckyatgoodinsideSign up for our weekly email, Good Insider: https://www.goodinside.com/newsletterOrder Dr. Becky's book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, at goodinside.com/book or wherever you order your books.For a full transcript of the episode, go to goodinside.com/podcastTo listen to Dr. Becky's TED Talk on repair visit https://www.ted.com/talks/becky_kennedy_the_single_most_important_parenting_strategyToday’s episode is brought to you by Airbnb: Let's be honest, parenting is expensive, especially around the holidays. If you’re traveling over the holidays and have an empty home consider making a little extra income by becoming a host on Airbnb. Every little bit helps, especially during the holiday season! Being an Airbnb host means that you are providing another family with an amazing experience and it's a great way to earn some extra money for all the different things you wanna do. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb dot com slash host.

Parenthood is such a reminder of your own childhood in the best and worst ways, in the things that you wish happened for you. And now those gaps are big and glaring and they become the driving force behind your parenting style. Why is parenting so hard? Why is parenting also so hard on our partnerships? Why are we so hard on ourselves when we have a hard time with parenting? Well, today I'm talking with Keir Gaines.

Keir is a husband, he's a father, he's community leader, and he's a licensed therapist. And he is honestly just an amazing thought partner on all of these questions. You're gonna get so much from this episode. Keir and I talk about whether compassion is dangerous and why we treat compassion like it is dangerous. And over the course of this conversation,

Kier and I get to a really personal place, where we end up sharing things from our own parenting journey that we have held with a lot of shame and self-criticism. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. We'll be back right after this. you in those trickier times. The Good Inside membership platform is your parenting encyclopedia, coupled with a community of parents and experts you trust, which means that no matter what you're going through, we've got you covered. And then we take it a step further, because I know that we're people who don't just want to solve a problem and return to baseline. We want to raise

our baselines, right? And this is what we really do together. Reduce triggers, learn to set boundaries, and access that sturdy leader that I know is inside all of us. It's all there when you're looking for that next step. And until then, please do check out goodinside.com slash podcast. Scroll down to the Ask Dr. Becky section at the bottom and let me know what you want to talk about in future podcast episodes. So I think we'll talk about parents and mental health and therapy and how it all kind of relates, but maybe we'll just start with mental health. How do you think about that?

I think about it often. Being a therapist and a content creator who makes content about mental health, and then just being a regular person, I find it difficult because mental health is just this gelatinous blob of words and ideas when it's coming at you. It's things you should do, it's best practices, it's what all the latest research is saying, it's cucumbers on the eyeballs, it's all the things. But mental health from an internal standpoint

is a struggle between your mind, your heart, and your reality, and how they all kind of fight for shared voice within your body. When I think of mental health in that context, I think of how you learn to cope with those things, how you learn to listen to those things individually, and how you learn to move on doing what's best for the collective, for the mind, the heart, and for the reality. So I'm curious how you see that. You still have a practice, is that right?

I practice, yeah. Yeah. How do you see that come to life with parents in your practice? Because I think we, you know, as parents, we think so much about our kids, obviously. And that matters, and we want to really take care of our kids and sometimes the thing that's really blocking us is taking care of ourselves and our own kind of mental health struggles. So I'm curious how you see that come up in your practice

with moms, with dads, like what are the things maybe they focus on? What are the things then that are actually kind of the things they're struggling with underneath it? I think one of the things that that are actually kind of the things they're struggling with underneath it? I think one of the things that parents are struggling with mightily is seeing and being aware of when the issues that they have with parenting is really wrapped around their own stuff. Most of being a parent isn't really about your kids.

It's how your own experiences interact with your reality and how that shows up. And- But can you say that again? Oh, I'm terrible at that. I have no idea what I say after I say it. Do you know, I'm kind of like that too. It's like, just like you're in flow state.

You're like, did I say that? I don't even know if I believe it anymore. Let me see if I can get it back. I think I said something to the tune. I can't get it back. Well, I'll highlight it because I don't think we can hear too many times that when we're really

struggling with our kid, and I get into this in my kids, too, where I'm just complaining about my kid all the time, and I'm focusing on their behavior, and they're so annoying, and they're so frustrating, that often what's at play is there's something going on inside of me. There's probably something that predated my kid. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Parenthood is such a reminder of your own childhood in the best and worst ways, in the things that you wish happened for you. And now those gaps are big and glaring, and they become the driving force behind your parenting style. There's so many voices in this space.

It almost never takes into account your human bandwidth. Parents will come in because I think we over practice perfection sometimes or over practice attentiveness and attunement to the elimination of understanding our own bandwidth. So a parent will say something like, my three-year-old was in the mall and she was acting up and she was throwing a tantrum. And what I should have done in the moment is I should have talked to her calmly and I should have just explained to her what was going on, but I yelled. And then we'll talk.

Okay, you yelled. Why did you yell? Well, because I was frustrated. I have all these things going on at work, all these things going on at home. And in that conversation, the parent forgets that they're trying to be reasonable with an unreasonable person and being frustrated with that process is a byproduct of being human. It is not symptomatic of you being a bad parent. You know, I just started an Instagram broadcast channel, playing around with it.

I'm liking it and the first thing I shared Was it was this morning? Okay, because I just started and my kids were having to get on the bus and I usually do This whole thing in the morning We're like I'm ready and I prepare and I know that helps me show up with good vibes Let's just say for many reasons I did not do that and I was just giving out rush tactic vibes They gave me back rush tactic vibes for sure. It kind of exploded. There was yelling, ah, you're not eating,

whatever it was. And with one of my kids, I gave him a big hug and she got on the bus. And with my son, it was like a coldness. And then he gets on the bus and I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm not gonna see him all day. And you're just left with this awful feeling. And one of the things I ended up then voice noting,

in the channel was just about this moment, same thing, moment my kid kind of has this tantrum and I show up in this way that I don't feel good about. And then we tell ourselves this story about I'm an awful parent. Or we also tell ourselves the story of my kid's an awful kid. I feel like we either tell one or both. But I have a feeling you're going to say that's probably not what's really happening.

No, no, it's you being an awful parent. That's not even a helpful thought. There's no nutrition in that thought. What can I gain from that thought to help me do this differently? Shame? I can gain shame? Oh, we all, man. We got so much shame wrapped around us. It's like a suit of armor sometimes. And shame is because a lot of times we operate with this thought that I was supposed to, I should have. And with parenting, it's such a mixed bag. What I mean by we over practice attunement, and not in the best ways, but we kind of over practice intentionality. That's the social rhetoric today. Everyone's intentional about everything.

I don't think it's a bad thing. I just think it's impossible in perpetuity. But when we say these things, and we make these judgment statements about ourselves, it doesn't allow us to really see that getting it right isn't, that's not the bailey wick of parenting, that's not how you become good at this thing. It's the repairing, going back and repairing. You're never going to always get it right. It's not going to happen. It's impossible. But when you don't, the next biggest and most important question becomes, how do I repair this?

Repair this with my child, which is one thing, because the kid probably doesn't care. Like your kid's five, they're probably not going to remember this moment. This isn't about you being a bad parent. This is about you feeling like you're a bad parent. Yeah. Different thing.

So I have a question. I haven't actually asked someone, but I think about it a lot. Why do we think that compassion is dangerous? I feel like we treat compassion like it's like the boogeyman. Like being compassionate with ourselves after, let's say for me, I yell at my kid and didn't want to or being compassionate with my kid. They did have a tantrum. I guess they were three. They were in a candy store. They want a candy. I said, no, it's a pretty hard situation.

But we treat compassion like it's going to, I don't know, like it's going to do something. Like it's going to make your kid soft. That's part of probably, say more. Like we're letting ourselves off the hook. I think that we're just now, we overcorrect a lot in almost everything we do. So if there's a deficit of something, instead of fixing it to the point where there's like some equitable distribution of where it is, we go the opposite route. Oh, this thing is too salty. Instead of saying, well, let me wash it and rinse it off and rinse the salt off,

we're like, no, I'm going to put a pound of sugar on top of it. Like, that's not helpful. I think this old way of thinking that we've had for the past, I don't know, couple of centuries was really predicated strongly on the amount of grit that a person had in order to be strong. And Dr. Becky, I'm sure you've seen time and time again these moments where parents withhold love from a child or a certain amount of affection from a child because the world is so cold. And I have to prepare you for this cold world because no one's going to treat you like I

do. So this roughness is going to forge you by fire. Now you're going to be strong. And I think we think that way, that we're being protective when we restrict compassion from our children. It's building a callous for the cool world. And oftentimes it's quite the opposite. Desumderia, I guess we think our bodies think anything is dangerous when it's unfamiliar. Now I'm going to get really upset. So maybe we do kind of treat compassion as danger because we've received so little of it.

So I don't know if that's right. Maybe that literally is. It feels relevant though. Yeah. Yeah, it feels relevant to people's experiences. Also compassion looks so much different than it did two decades ago. There's no one who modeled compassion from a larger, like, societal perspective for us.

Where? I mean, our parents had compassion, but comparatively to what parenthood looks like today, it's way different. Did you have compassion? I did. My mom was ahead of her time. Yeah, it was, I had a lot of compassion in my house.

And I think that that's one of the things that I credit with the emotional resilience that I have is it was a lot of hugs and kisses. Oh, absolutely. I'm a very loved child. Yeah. You know, and I, I want to be honest, I, my parents were very different from each other, like very, very different. How so?

And they both had compassion in some way. Well, and I feel like I'm a blend of both of them. My mom is like pure compassion. My mom is the essence of seeing the good inside other people. I do feel like she saw the good inside me when I was struggling. And so I do feel like I received compassion. And I think my dad always operated from a place

of seeing capability in someone. And so he was more directive and definitely less soft, but he was always like, I know you can do this and I know you can do better and I believe in you. And so even when he, I remember showing him an essay and the whole thing was read after, I was like, you know, and he'd be like, no, it was really good. I'm just editing stuff and things, you know,

it could all be improved. It'd be like, I know you can be a better writer. Like, I actually felt that from him more than criticism, but I think, look, you and I then have this, I don't know, emotional privilege. There is something to that where I too think compassion made me stronger as an adult. Yeah. I think your parents, that's a really good mix. You have the affirming, supportive

dad, and you have the worldly understanding mom. I feel like that's such a good combination. Well, I think those are those two pillars, right? Where you need someone who like kind of sees that you can be more capable than you feel in the moment. They're like, I always think that like I reflect capability to my kid or I hold hope for a version of themselves that isn't showing up in this moment. And I can connect to them where they are today. I can like validate and connect and I can like have this expectation. And maybe I kind of got it separated

and then I feel like what's helpful as parents is if we can like embody both or at least on our best moments, you know, not all the time. But I do think that kind of circling back this idea of being compassionate with ourselves. And you said this, there is this fear that then my kid is going to be soft, and I won't have done a good job of preparing them for the world they're going to have to operate in.

And I'm just going to say this, even though maybe I'm going to regret saying this, I think I feel more of that fear from dads than moms. And obviously there's exceptions, but I think when I break down, because often I'll have a couple of say, oh, my husband doesn't know about this not punishing thing. And actually underneath that is like a fear from a dad of like, I want to make sure I'm doing good by my kid. Like I want to make sure my kid's prepared for the world. And punishment and kind of in some ways doing to my kid what the world might do to them feels to them.

Like they're going to help their kid. But I'm curious how you see that come up and how you, I know you're really effective at breaking down assumptions and making people think differently. So what's your magic there? This is a big one because it takes on so many gendered assumptions that we have that come from so many facets of our society,

it's impossible to trace it directly. I think with men, there's something about boyhood that with a primary tool that men, myself included sometimes, seem to find very effective is, I don't want to say aggression, but just this ability to navigate the spaces of boys and not continuously be bullied, be pushed over, be talked over, or be dominated in any way. And in communities of little boys, and I don't mean like five, six year old, four, when do they start losing that connection in order to gain community? Maybe around third

grade little boys, they lose the softness, the sweetness, because other little boys don't always identify that as being a part of the behaviors that they demonstrate. And if you want community, you have to shed yourself of those things to get in. We see that a lot, but I think it's men not wanting to raise a man that doesn't look like a man, that doesn't meet the world like a man, who isn't confident, has this chest out posture and doesn't take up space, all these very stereotypical things that we think about when it comes to masculinity. And if you ask people on the street, give me 10 qualities of a man, no one is going

to say compassion. I find it very hard to believe that we'll say compassion, we'll say the robotic boilerplate utility words, we'll say, you know, he needs to be strong, he needs to be protective, he needs to be all of these things that little boys have no business being, they just need to be little boys and be sweet babies and be kids and be loved. But I think it's the idea of me raising a boy that no other man will look at and see a man in. I think that may seem very extreme and I'm sure that there are, it dovetails into smaller

iterations of that same thought, but I think that's where it comes from. And that's based on my conversations with dads. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things I talk a lot about with parents, I guess it's like we're similar in our brand of kind of parenting guidance is parent-focused because at the end of the day, we don't actually change our kids' behavior by directly approaching their behavior. It's like an output.

It's not an input, right? The inputs are, okay, like how am I thinking about this? What are my assumptions around this behavior? What's coming up for me? I think that's a really important question. What is coming up for me when I see my kid crying? What is coming up for me when my kid doesn't join soccer right away? What is coming up for me when my kid isn't one of the first ones to read in their grade?

And if we're kind of triggered by our kid's behavior, it has less to do with our kid's behavior and more to do with what's coming up for us. And our relationship with that thing. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know about you, but I'm already trying to wrap my head around our holiday travel plans. Making the most of time off, visiting family, and also wanting that time to reset. Our family loves using Airbnb so that our vacation can feel, well, more like a vacation.

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slash host. How do you think about therapy in terms of when we're struggling with our kids? Does my kid need therapy? Do I need parenting advice? Oh, do I need therapy? Do we need some couples therapy? How do you think about all those things?

With adults, I don't always know who needs therapy, but I can tell you who can use therapy. If you think that this thing, oh, this thing is a problem, maybe I should see a therapist. That is a clear indicator that I think you should see a therapist. Even if you don't need it, you can always use it. And it's just another person in the room. It's an advisor. It's somebody who can look at your stuff and not be biased and filtered with the emotional

piece of it and help you walk through it, help you cope, help you build strategies, help you build awareness around the thing. If you could utilize any of those, then I think you're a good candidate for therapy. And if you're in a relationship with another person, I think by default, if y'all are doing life together, I would definitely recommend some therapy, even if it's good, because good isn't a forever word.

Good is the word that we use to categorize the moment or the season in your relationship. It's going to get tumultuous at some point, and you may need different coping skills than you had five, three, even two years ago, because the relationship is forever evolving. So I think all those folks, great candidates for therapy. Oh yeah. Oh my goodness, I couldn't agree more. I think when you folks, great candidates for therapy. Oh yeah.

Oh my goodness. I couldn't agree more. I think when you're in a long-term relationship, like I would think about this moment that you decide to do it, right? When things are, like you said, things are good. So like here's one person, there's another person, and there's like a space between them that feels good. And each person is growing. Like that's what happens. And so staying together kind of assumes like when one person grows in one direction, the other person kind of has to grow to maintain that like optimal space. If not, you have more space, right? And those are major assumptions. That's hard. Like being in a long-term relationship and adding in children, okay? I don't know many people are like, having kids was like amazing for my relationship.

It was so good, it fixed all of our problems. I don't know. I haven't heard that too often. Or I haven't heard that from like people I trust. You know, let me put it that way. I hear that I'm like, I don't know. I don't know about you. Possibly they gave you a lot of commonality

in terms of something to care about. It gave you a means of a different connection because the way I bounce with my wife, just our energy together, when we're together, there's one thing, but when it's us and the kids, there's a certain procedure. Like, there's a way that we go about parenting that's on a completely different frequency. It's a different component of the relationship, so, yeah.

So let's normalize that. It sounds obvious, but why is it that having kids makes a partnership trickier? That's such a good question. And I'll tell you the reason that sticks out the most to me. A relationship to your point is two people growing, but you don't grow in the same direction at all or at the same speed. So there are a lot of touch points that are needed in order to keep you all together. And those touch points are, you know, they're romantic, they're spiritual, they're physical, they're, there are so many strings that are keeping you all together as you kind of grow at these different rates of speed

and in these different ways. Children complicated because it's something else to focus on in the midst of this already complicated thing that you're trying to put together. This thing does not care about your marriage. This thing's job is not to keep your partnership together. This thing turns you into a fundamentally different person and now there's a different set of touch points that you all need to do. Who's going to do drop-off? Who's going to do pick-up? Oh, my goodness, I'm the type of person

that can't stand to see my child with a stinky diaper because it reflects badly on me as a parent. But my spouse isn't like that. My spouse doesn't mind. Kids will be kids. So now this is a different point of contention in our relationship that is very, very centered on our identities. Me feeling like a good parent. Too many things to disagree on. Then when they become teenagers, when they become adults, what life is supposed

to look like, what money is supposed to look like. Having a child complicates your relationship severely. I don't know why we pretend that it doesn't because it doesn't sound nice to say. Well, I think, you know, and something I think of a lot in parenting, but anything, it's hard for us to hold to seemingly oppositional things at once, right? I would say like two things are true. Like, you can have love for your partner

and partnership can be hard when you have kids. You can love your kids and also say, my partnership has become more difficult. That doesn't mean you don't love your kids. It doesn't mean you like regret having kids. Those can just both be true. And I think that's, it's hard for us. So we get attached to these single truths and then that really sets us up for failure because even going back to therapy, then we tell ourselves and I'm sure you see this therapy is a sign I'm messed up. Therapy is a sign my marriage is messed up. Healthy people wouldn't have to seek therapy at this point. We have these like singular things versus I'm a good person. I love my partner and we could use more skills to communicate

effectively. This is a tricky time in our lives and we're going to actively work through it as opposed to passively allow things to spiral into oblivion, right? And I think those are barriers, right? People have these assumptions about people in therapy that mean something about them versus I'm a person who has some things I can learn, I'm a person invested in my own self-growth and therapy is a place where all that can happen. And I think therapy is also a place where people have to confront the thing

that they might be avoiding. And that's the fact that the thing that I need to believe is true is not. That's such a hard thing to rack us out with. I can just be blind and keep living my life the way it is. And hopefully nothing will go awry. to rack us out with. I can just be blind and keep living my life the way it is and hopefully nothing will go awry. Maybe, probably not. When you avoid the things that you need to see, generally everything works out in life.

Right? As long as you keep running. As long as you keep running. Stay on that treadmill. But one day you'll get tired and when you do, you have to slow down And what's coming right up behind you is all the things you've been avoiding. And I mean, they're running that full sprint and they're going to hit you really hard. Yeah. And I just want to say for everyone listening, just because it's obvious to me, but it's

not obvious that I don't say it, therapy has been a part of my life forever. I'm always in one type of therapy, 20 types. I don't know. It's something where I think people assume therapists or psychologists, whatever it is, oh, like you figured out, so you help people. It is so not like that. And I know you like to establish that about yourself too. No, I don't have all the answers for myself. I can help you out, but I don't run this machine perfectly. And it's the understanding that I'm not supposed to.

That's been the benefit of therapy for me. I've been in therapy, not as long as you, I've been in therapy consistently since, I'm 38 now, since I was 31, right before I had my first kid. That's when I started going to therapy. Is that why? Oh yeah. Yeah, that was a tough adjustment for me.

Yeah, absolutely. And I knew that if I didn't talk to somebody, the frustration, the fear, everything, would have bled onto this child and it would have affected the type of parent that I was going to be, even though I didn't want it to. So. You know what you just said that I think is so simple,

and I know it's hard for you to remember what you said, but so I'm gonna remember it for you. Thank you. You just said, you know, oh yeah, that was tough for me. Like adjusting to a kid, that was tough for me. And you said it so nonchalantly, but I think there's such power and it's so de-shaming, like for everyone to think about one thing that they could say to someone else

and just kind of share. I think we always use the word admit. I always think admit can be upgraded to share. Admit has such shame. To share with someone that something's really hard for you. I think for me, my child who can get very emotional, my deeply feeling kid, I talk so much about an approach for those kids because it's really hard

for me to stay calm. Everyone thinks that people who talk about things a lot as content creators, it's because they figured it out. No, no, no, no. Anyone who's talking about a certain topic a lot, it's because they have to work through it. And so staying calm with my deeply feeling kid, I just want to say here on this podcast, is tough for me. I want to share that. I want to share it with you, Kira. I want to share it with everyone. That is tough for me. And that's, I think, so powerful for us all to share something like that with someone, just to name it.

Can I tell you why that's powerful for me specifically? The thing that irritates me the most, it is a huge pet peeve of mine. This thing that we have where everybody only speaks once they reach the mountaintop. They don't tell you the story or take the pictures when they would climb it to the top and they slipped on a rock or the little thingy springy thing that they spelunk on, it snapped and they fell 20 feet and broke their leg.

No one tells those stories. They only tell it at the mountain top. So I think, especially in the parenting space where there is so much shame and there is so much guilt and there's so much virtue signaling for someone who's a professional to get on the internet, look directly at the camera and say, my kid had a tantrum this morning and it was tough for me with all this knowledge and all these skills to navigate through that. Man, when I tell you that makes me feel so human. Let's double down on that. Man, when I tell you that, it makes me feel so human. Well, let's double down on that. Maybe we can each kind of even end today

by kind of just sharing something that's very real and so not mountaintop-y. Because actually, when you say that, when people share the mountaintop, I'm like, does anyone really get to the mountaintop? Like, I don't even know. Is that real? Or like, I don't even, I'm not there. I don't know.

So, but let's assume, whether you do or not, there is definitely a point for everyone, even if you do reach the mountaintop, which I have not been there, where you are on the path. And you're right, sharing the story on the path in the turbulence is, I often think it's more healing than like, sharing the advice to get out of the turbulence. So you want to go first? You want me to go first? You go first. Okay. My husband and I talk a lot about this as something that we look back on and wish we had done differently, but I don't think I've ever actually shared it here. So here

it goes. My deeply feeling kid had major sleep struggles as a three year old and I just had my third. So I know as a psychologist, at least in theory, sleep struggles or separation struggles, kids don't feel safe when their family changes, so common. She was a deeply feeling kid and so everything was especially intense. And I was like so insistent that she couldn't sleep in her room. Like I don't know what I was scared of. Maybe like she'd never go back to her room. I don't know. And there were so many months of her having such disrupted sleep.

She just would be screaming. I mean, we'd go, but then we'd like walk her back. And there were nights where she'd like sleep on like the floor. She was so uncomfortable. And I feel like I'm inverting myself by just saying, I did that for months. Like if I could go back, I would be like, sweetie, like this is a hard stage. We're gonna put a mattress on our floor.

Like, we'll figure it out. You need something. You need more of us. You need to see that we're here. You're going through a lot with this, you know, third child change to some degree. You're wondering like, are my parents gonna be there? What else could change?

And you're scared. You were scared. And I really wish I had handled that differently. I really, really do. And that was like a really hard couple months. And I guess maybe this is still part of my, I feel like I've repaired with her, but maybe this is part of my continued repair with my own imperfection. Yeah, I'm pretty sure she's, if she remembers, but I'm pretty sure she's forgiving you. The hard

part is kind of forgiving yourself. That's the moment you've been compassion. Sometimes we feel like we have to earn compassion or sometimes we withhold compassion from ourselves because you don't deserve this compassion because you did that bad thing. This is my self punishment. I'm gonna punish myself for not being a good parent by restricting this compassion. Nah, I'm right there with you.

That's happened a lot. Okay, cool. Let's do it. So, I think there's do it. So, I think there's a part of me that had to grow up so fast that I abandoned my childhood. I don't remember much of it. I don't like silly stuff sometimes. It's just being an adult and having the responsibilities,

it just crushed that part of my spirit. And for a very long time, I felt like I suppressed that in my children a little bit. They're being too silly or too excited about things from my definition of whatever too excited men at the time. I wouldn't rain on their parade, but it'll put me in a weird mood. And I know I am the emotional leader of my household. What my feelings are, it is going to smear all over the walls and everybody's going to feel a little bit of that too. I am the deeply feeling child in my house.

Well, actually so is my daughter and so is my wife to some degree. My youngest is a, she's a no limit soldier, man. I don't know if she has feelings, but I wish that I could go back and be the way I am now, then, and just allow them the space to be excited and realize that trying to temper that in their lives was just a byproduct of me not dealing with my stuff,

not even recognizing just this, maybe this yearning that I had to be a kid and be free like that again. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's my thing. I regret that. I wish I could go back, but it's impossible. You know, and there's so much cure. First of all, thank you for sharing that.

And you know, our stories, our shares are different, but in a way, there's something so similar where we do get triggered by our kids. You know, we see something in them that we had to shut down in ourselves. I mean, my daughter, the way she feels free to scream and put her displeasure on display, I probably feel like envious. I mean, I probably had to shut it down, but I was so quote, good, I was so good. Now I have like such icky feelings about that word. Just means like you kind of shut the stuff down inside so it doesn't come out and then it just kind of

comes out later. It's all that happens once it go. But we see something in them that we had to shut down. And I think for both of us though, what we're saying to bring this whole circle is compassion isn't dangerous. Like change actually starts by the compassion for ourselves that we had to learn to shut it down. We can be compassionate about that, that our past kind of bled into our present. We can be compassionate about that, that we did something we wish we didn't do. We can be compassionate about that. And that was

probably the missing ingredient in the first place. It's not dangerous. That's probably something we need to do things differently the next time. Yeah, being compassionate is not being overly permissive. It's not the same. I'm not letting you do whatever you want. I just have a deep understanding. You know, being compassionate for yourself is not letting yourself off the hook. And conversely, beating yourself up about things isn't compassion either. It sits in this fine middle of understanding what you could have done different

and accepting the fact that you didn't. And also taking on the idea that you will do things, you will try to do things differently the next time and be okay with the gap between your expectations and what you actually deliver. I love that. And something I often think is compassion is the thing that keeps you on the hook. If you want to let yourself off the hook, criticism, shame, blame, you can't change

from that place. You want to let yourself off the hook? You blame yourself all day long. Compassion, I'm even thinking now, like in this moment, I think about there are other ways that all this manifests. When my kid's behavior feels out of my control, I can get harsh instead of like allow it and pass and trust. And so now I'm like, okay, wait,

I did that with my daughter, not my finest moment. Now I, now honestly I'm like, wait, I see another area around my son's homework, my older son where I'm like, oh, I see another area around my son's homework, my older son, where I'm like, oh, I like doing that there. Right? Things, yeah. Okay.

So actually, this exercise of compassion is going to leave me on the hook for more global change than even that one thing around sleep. Yeah. Which is optimally important because the things you practice in the small spaces and the small moments of your life, you can practice in the other moments too. You're not just a parent. A parent is just one piece of your identity. And you said it earlier, we have a hard time with dialectical ideals, with competing priorities,

competing perspectives, competing ideologies. We just struggle with it. But we're all just this big blob of competing philosophies all the time and they're always smashing up into each other. You really wanna lend yourself, I know give yourself some grace, we all say that, but you really do, you don't know what you're doing, but you're still trying to do a good job.

I think that deserves applause, even if you don't believe it does. I think that deserves applause, even if you don't believe it does. I love that. Thank you for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com slash podcast, or you could write me at podcast at goodinside.com. Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world, and you deserve resources and support so you feel empowered and confident for this very important job you hold.

I'm so excited to share Good Inside membership. It's the first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like-valued parents. It's game-changing and built for a busy parent who wants to make the most out of the few minutes they have. Good Inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom at Magnificent

Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julia Knapp, and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Brooke Zant, and the rest of the Good Inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves, even as I struggle, and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain good inside. [♪ soft music playing in background, fades out. [♪ soft music fades out.

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