Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - When Our Childhood Wounds Wound our Children: The Parenting Map With Dr. Shefali

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Whether you are a parent or not, this episode is going to open your eyes! This week on Language of Love, I sit down with one of my faves, Dr. Shefali. She is a renowned author, psychologist, and parenting expert. Her book The Conscious Parent really changed my life. Now we sit down to talk about her newest endeavor, The Parenting Map. In this episode we get into it all, including: All the unconscious ways our own wounds play out in our parenting style  The specific ways our triggers in adulthood actually developed in childhood and how we can stop the cycle with our own kids How our attempts to raise “successful” and “happy” kids is actually misguided  The secret guilt I’ve been carrying about a mistake I made with my son Sammy Do you want to know how you can be there for your kids in a more fulfilling, meaningful, and loving way that will serve them and aid in their development? This episode is for you! Make sure to check out Dr Shefali’s website and grab a copy of her new book The Parenting Map: Step-by-Step Solutions to Consciously Create the Ultimate Parent-Child Relationship.  Visit my website and check out my books on love, sex and relationships. Be sure to tune in regularly to The Language of Love for great discussions and thought-provoking conversations with accomplished individuals and experts offering invaluable advice on how to love and be loved better.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. and that way my goal is to awaken your mind body and soul it's time to become fluent in the language of life oh i've got a good episode for you this week it's with one of my faves dr shefali she is

a psychologist a parenting expert has been all over the media she's so well respected and has written four books. One of her books really changed my life. And I'm going to share a part of that story with you called Conscious Parenting. Such an amazing book. But now she has a brand new book, which is really like a roadmap for conscious parenting called The Parenting Map, Step-by-Step Solutions to Consciously Create the Ultimate Parent-Child Relationship. And we are getting into it this episode, not only about what goes into conscious parenting, what's involved in the parenting map, some of the really common sort of accepted and tried and true parenting ideals, she really debunks and shows us how dysfunctional they really are. And we even get into some of my

pain and parental guilt around all of my kids, but especially around Sammy. Honestly, what I would say about this episode, that certainly if you are a parent or you're thinking about becoming a parent or you love someone who's a parent, but even if you're not a parent, this episode is going to make a difference to you. And the book is definitely going to make a difference because so much about what she writes about is regarding healing, reparenting yourself, recognizing your triggers and wounds and beginning to heal them in service to really being able to be there in a more whole and fulfilling and meaningful and loving way for your kids in a way that will serve them and their development, but also for you. So I feel like this

is a great read, whether you have a kid or not, but you let me know what you think, because you know me, I'm here to help you love and be loved better. Dr. Shefali, I am super excited to talk to you about this newest book for lots of reasons. Although I will say, first of all, I'm feeling a little teary today in general. So I may start crying. I may not. Just giving you that warning because this book really touched me. And I'll tell you why. Well, lots of reasons. But from my perspective, I remember I had first learned about you and your work. I think you kind of came into the Oprah orbit not long after I had entered. So a lot of the producers I worked with were working on stuff she was doing, you know, with you when you when the conscious parenting was out

or maybe it had already come out. But when that was getting attention and I remember reading the book and my kids were pretty small, I think my youngest was in third grade and the middle one was in fourth and my oldest was like in ninth grade. And they were really all three started to struggle because my mom died and then I got a breast cancer diagnosis and I was going through treatment and all the wheels started coming off. I was still so stuck in grief and dealing with the fear and the chemo and mastectomy and everything else. And I had to stop my life and my kids were losing their shit all in their own different ways. And I was flipping out and getting more and more controlling and they were out of control, especially the younger ones who

were always hyper little boys, like a lot of little boys are. And they didn't like listening and they have, you know, just like kids do. And I would yell at them and I would hate myself for yelling at them. They were just rejecting me and furious at me, understandably so, because I was sick and I was angry. And then I read Conscious Parenting and it really woke me up to something really specific that I know changed my relationship with them because I'll never forget this summer I had finished chemo and I was really struggling as a parent and with them and inside myself and I was trying to kind of shift things and and I did it eventually became what was quantum love but I read your book right before the summer and we were going away for a month to Michigan to this

we'd rented this house in the wilds of Michigan and I really wanted like my intention for that trip was to rebuild connection with them. And all of the work that you did and shared in conscious parenting, as I assimilated that and integrated that, my whole relationship started to change. There were lots of reasons, but there's one in particular. And I think you write about it in one of your in one of the later chapters. And to a certain extent, this book is very is different than conscious parenting. We'll talk about that in a second. But I started to really focus on presence with them and having fun with them and letting go of the goals and committing to like a really long game. You know what I mean? Like, OK, so they're not cleaning up their rooms and I could

go down that dire mama persona path I have where they're going to be slobs and slovenly and unorganized and not do their schoolwork and get find someone to love someday. And they're going to be a horrible partner. And I could go all the way down that path in a hot second. But I just let it all go. And I said, the purpose of this summer is only play and connection. And I don't give a shit if they're dirty and annoying. And I just let go of all the rules other than things that would cause them physical harm. And we had such a magical month. They immediately shifted and it really changed the entire relationship. And I'll never forget like a year later,

I was hanging out with the kids and they were talking to me and Jackson, my youngest said, mama, daddy's the safe one, you know, cause dad was always super protective of them, but you're the fun one. And I thought, oh, I'm the fun one, which I am fun.

My friends will tell you I'm fun. My listener, my peeps here would tell you I'm fun. but when it came to my kids back then and you helped me find the path to connection. So I'm so grateful. I don't know that I've ever had a chance to tell you that story, even though we've talked several times, but I wanted to share it just to tell you how grateful I am, but also as an endorsement for your work, because it really makes a difference. And as I said in the introduction, whether you are a parent or not, I feel like this episode is really relevant because reading this book, The Parenting Map, which really is a map, it's in a way taking conscious parenting

and operationalizing it, in my opinion, my book review. I'm not saying that's what you intended. But what I kept thinking about is not only, oh, fuck, I wish I could go back, right? Which I know is normal because now my youngest is a senior in high school. But also, I really thought a lot about my own childhood. And that's why I feel like in many ways, the path you lay out, it's guys, it's in these kind of three stages. She divides the book into three stages and 20 steps. And so it's kind of like starting in the middle of the book where you're and we'll talk about this. We're to talk about a couple of steps in each stage, but it's kind of in the middle of the book where you start getting into wounds and triggers and ways. And you're speaking about it, writing about

it in the context of like how powerful it is when you as a parent can start to recognize the ways that your own childhood wounds are impacting your behavior, the way you see your child and the way you respond to them. But what I was simultaneously processing as I read it, and the reason I think it's relevant, this book is relevant to everyone, is I was really connecting to the ways my parents had those wounds or different wounds, but I was connecting to my wounds, not just as a parent, but as a person. I think it's not only a parenting map, but it's really a map. Maybe this will be part two of your book or the next edition. It's really a map to healing your own inner child as well, because that's what it really comes down to. The more you heal that, the more ironically

you heal your own inner child, the better parent you can be. 100%. Well, thank you for your heartfelt vulnerability. And that's what I love about you. I've connected so immediately to you because that's who you are. You're this very transparent person and that's why you are who you are in the world. So thank you for giving me that. And you're right. You know, it's not that conscious parenting is, you know, smoking weed with your eight-year-old and, oh, we're going to just be, you know, so bohemian and be reckless. That's not what it is. What you were saying in that anecdote is that you realize that you had just entered too much control and you were operating from dictatorship and you were operating from this top-down mentality of ultimate superior,

you know, dictator kind of power tripping. And in that, you were losing sight of the connection. So conscious parenting and what I talk about in this book, it's the how-to of my other book. it's the how to become a conscious parent. It talks about the power of connection before control and correction. And that's such a nuanced difference that people may just think, oh, what's the big deal? But it is all the difference. It's a game changer. Without connection, you have actually no control. You are out of control. You have no control and you have no leverage and you have no voice with them. I mean, you maybe do until they can make it start going to school and acting out and making decisions for

themselves you know when they're infants you can control them maybe I'll confess anything I mean I feel like it's really important to confess and I know you do this in the book a lot you talk about your own parenting foibles and I do too I remember saying to my husband because we had this nickname for me for many years around that same time because we do a lot of persona play in our house where we name these kind of parts that show up all the time. And I had a homework Nazi persona because I had been so conditioned by my parents. That was like approval was love. And I didn't get approval unless I got straight A's. And if I got an A minus, it wasn't great job. It was like, why didn't you study harder? What did you get wrong? And, you know, of course they work at

what they thought would make me successful. We're going to talk about success in a minute because that's a big part of your discussion as well. But they would make me really scared. I would get in trouble if I didn't have good grades. And I would toe the line and was a really good girl. I never got in trouble because I was scared shitless of my father. And I remember having this conversation with my husband. I was like, look, my parents were really controlling and forceful about homework and getting their work done and being responsible. And I turned out fine. You know, look at me. I have two masters and a PhD and, you know, I have great career. Like, what's the problem? And he just like, looked at me. It was like, are you seriously saying that

to me right now? Like, can we just discuss how much anxiety you live with, how much you struggle with depression? I was like, Oh God, but I just thought, Oh, it worked for me. Like I should just do the same thing to them. This was like a decade plus ago, but that's where I think a lot of parents are. Don't you? Yes. So it works on paper perhaps. So we think that is the hallmark and the metric of internal wellbeing. But we know, you and I know by having worked with hundreds of clients, that that is just the persona. So you were doing your persona really well. You were operating out of deep anxiety and fear and uncertainty and doubt that you were good enough as you were. So you overachieved and over-excelled and over-perfected and over-controlled. So yeah,

you look good on that resume, but inside you dealt with the crippling anxiety that you did not have to deal with. It was 100% conditioned into you because of that very superior tyrannical authority that parents think they have a right to have. And they really don't, you know, the ignorance and arrogance of the parent that we think it's our right to control this being in an unmitigated way, but it's not our fault. You know, the nurses and the doctors send this infant home. They've never taken a mental status, you know, questionnaire of us. They've never checked our insanity levels they haven't checked our healing levels and it's never regulated and no one is coming to supervise there's no continuing ed i mean talk about the most difficult sacred job in

the world and they were just thrown in there so of course it lends to this delusional sense of you know superiority and authority which is really misplaced we're not humble we don't check in we don't dare, you know, dare someone tell a parent that it's you, it's them and they will go up in arms. Right. So defensive. Yeah. That's why I never wanted to do child psychology or psychiatry because I could see, even though I was a parent, I fucked up a million times, but I could see that the issue was the parent. Like it was so frustrating to me when I was doing my, like, whatever they're called internships or residencies, you know, when you're getting your clinical training and I would just be devastated. Like I couldn't let go of these devastating kids stories and feeling

completely helpless because the parents bring the kid in and say, fix the kid, but you're not going to fix the kid unless you fix the parent. And this, I think one of the things I love about this book is that it not only kind of very lovingly, you're very loving and kind and accepting, you know, you remind me a lot. I did an interview. I know you do a lot of stuff with him with Gabor Mate and you guys are a dream team in the way that you dovetail each other's approach, but it's a hard pill to swallow for a parent. And even for me, I, you know, was so clinically trained and I worked with kids and I studied human development and I read every parenting book. Like I knew exactly what to do to motivate my kids and give them routine and make sure that they felt inspired

and even don't put them on the race to nowhere. And, you know, I had all my strategy and ironically and really ridiculously thought that if I know what to do and do what I'm supposed to do, my kids will thrive. And boy, was that a joke. Right, because again, it's not the doing, it's our emotional integration that kind of shows up.

So whether we are saying the right things by script or not is not the point. It's not whether you take them to the Louvre or to Tibet, it's really how present can you be with your wholeness and how present can you be to their wholeness? But because we're so anxious and we don't realize how we have been trained and conditioned to compensate for our deep crippling anxiety, really everything we do, if we really dissect it, we will see it's a compensation for our terror, terror that still lives within us. And we're just trying to be, you know, you know, these grownups in tuxedos, but we're just toddlers inside. So we need to own that and heal that. And that's what shows up in the dynamic with our children. And that's what creates or discreates, uncreates emotional connection.

Yeah. So let's talk for a minute about control, because I can already feel the tears coming. So I apologize if I get hiccupy and snotty. But whenever I say that, I don't. It stops it. So maybe that'll help. But this idea of control, right? And it gets muddled with safety, right? And also, I think, you know, you talk about the difference between which I think is so powerful, the difference between taking control and taking care. Right. And when your kids are little, this idea of them as sovereign beings, that even though it's in our cultural paradigm and kind of insidiously taught to control your, you know, and even on airplanes and restaurants, control your kid, you know, your kids out of control, like like it's our job to control them. And I know a huge part of your message is that these are sovereign beings. They are not, our children are not ours to control. We are here to be their allies and their guides and their companions and their teachers to a certain extent and their, you know, and to protect them to an extent, but not to control them. And when they're littler, I can see that, you know, being much easier.

But as they move into their teen years, and this was another thing I love about the parenting map, because unlike a lot of parenting books that only focus on those younger years, a lot of your cases that you talk about are teenagers or even 20-year-olds. So I love that, by the way. But, of course, I could not stop thinking about Sammy all the way through. I could not stop thinking about Sammy and all the ways I fucked up. So here we go. I love you guys. Thank you for bearing with me. All right. So I haven't shared this out loud with you guys before I talked to my therapist about it, but not out loud. So his anniversary of his death was recent. And for some reason, but this is about control and maybe some other

things too, you'll tell me. For some reason, I started, as I always do, you know, you think about every moment of their life and all the ways you could have changed the dominance from falling right that's natural when you lose anyone much less a child but for some reason became fixated on on the day of his anniversary of his death was how I gave my power away to his pediatrician. From the time he was born, this kid was smarter than any of us put together and was always had his own opinions, never wanted to be controlled. Nobody controlled him. And he was smarter than pretty much everyone in the room, including his teachers and babysitters and just, you know, and even his parents from the time he could talk. I'm not saying that came from

us. It was some genetic mutation, but he was like seriously genius. So he's like one years old and he's starting to walk. He was a late walker and he was already talking, but he hadn't walked yet. And he was not sleeping. So there was a doctor in Chicago that wrote all the books on happy baby, healthy sleep habits. And he was like the best pediatrician in town. And of course that was my kid's pediatrician. And I went to him and he gave me the sleep training talk, which was basically the Ferber method to let them cry it out. So we decide to let them let him cry it out. And this kid immediately learns how to climb out of his crib. You're going to leave me crying. I'm going to freaking climb out of my crib and crawl, walk to your room or somewhere else around the

house. If you won't let me, you won't come to me. So now we're in a battle of wills. So then we put that tent over the bed. He figures out how to get through the tent. So then I go back to the doctor and this is what I was killing myself for. I'm confessing here to you, Dr. Shivali and to everyone. He told us, and I was so a follower. I came from this medical family. I do what the doctor says back then. This is who I was back then, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. He said, you need to put a lock on the door. So we locked our baby with a, you know, hook and eye lock on the outside of the door. We locked, made sure the room was safe. Plugs are covered, nothing dangerous that he could yank down or anything. Put the cover on the crib, left him to cry. He climbed out and

would be screaming and shrieking locked in his room. And this went on for at least like a week until my husband said, you know, he was like, oh, it'll take a few days. And at a certain point, and I think it was like five or six days, I was not going to budge. I was doing what the doctor said. And my husband was like, how much longer are we going to do this? I can't do this anymore. I'll get up with him. I don't care. And so he started getting up with him. I was like, no, you know, I'm not going to give in. But I was so filled that day of his anniversary. That's all I could focus on is how helpless and scared and trapped and lost he must've felt. And when I read books like yours or child development books or anything else, you know, those first eight

years of life are so important for feeling supported and connected. I just wanted to share that story, first of all, because it feels good to not hide it. My shame that I locked my poor baby in the room, but also my stories that that somehow was one of the seeds. Obviously that didn't cause him, but that was one of the seeds. I let myself be controlled by the doctor and then took that control to my son. And then as he became a teenager more recently, you know, before he died, he was always really bullied all the way through because kids never could understand him. Adults loved him. The kids were like, you're a weirdo. And they were really mean to him. And so the only kids that were Hank would hang out with him were the druggy kids and they wouldn't include him

unless he at least did cannabis with them. And so he came to me and I'm really curious what you think about this. And you can comment on the other thing too. I know I'm yakking here, but I'm confessing. I'm curious what you think about this because he came to me and said, we caught him experimenting with cannabis and we threw a fit and we got him into counseling with a drug counselor slash therapist, this cool young guy who talks to kids all the time and works with them. And we were testing him every day to make sure. And so he knew he'd be busted if he tried it again. But he came to me. He's like, Mom, I have no friends. I'm friendless. The kids in school are horrible to me. I have to eat with the coaches. And there are these few kids that

will hang out with me, but they call me a narc if I don't smoke cannabis with them or vape with them or at least eat an adult or something. So can I please, can I please do it so I can have a friend? And my response was, I so wish I could say yes to that. Like there's a huge part of me that wants to say, yes, I want to end your pain. I want you to be able to do drugs with your friends, to smoke cannabis with your friends. But at the same time, I'm your mother and I can't say yes to you doing drugs so that these asshole kids will accept you. Those aren't friends. And we need to find you new friends. And of course, he never wanted to do an after school thing or an extra class. He knew, you know, he wanted to learn himself. He didn't like classes or after school

stuff. So he was resisting me. I was like, let's find an after school thing. Let's find an interest. Let's find you friends outside of school. And he was resisting and then COVID hit. And what ended up happening is that he met a girl online. And in order to impress the girl, he responded to a dealer that got in touch with him because the girl was into drugs. And she said, if you get some drugs, I'll come over. And so he got some drugs. She was going to come over and do the drugs with him. I didn't know about any of this, but he came to me and said, can she come over? And he had a big test the next day. And thank God I said no, because otherwise she would be dead, too. So he had gotten some Xanax or Percocet or something that ended up to be counterfeit fentanyl because

he knew we weren't going to be testing him for that. Right. He figured a workaround again because we were only testing him for cannabis. And he thought, OK, I can impress. So it didn't make any difference. My boundary. Right. But I'm just wondering, because you write a lot in the book, you know, not only about this issue of control, but also about like find your yes and really negotiate with your child. You know, you're still holding those boundaries to a certain extent, but it's tricky to know what boundaries to hold or not. Hearing that story, I'm wondering what your reaction is. Well, first, you know, when you think back to him being an infant, it's really the way all of us were trained to be parents. And in the West, that was the

predominant model. I grew up in India, so that was not my model. But I was horrified that that's what doctors were telling mothers and mothers being wanting to try to be the perfect mothers were following like you did. You were a good girl. You followed the doctor. So it's really just your conditioning that led you down that path. It wasn't your laziness. Wasn't your ill intent. It was truly that you were just conditioned to follow authority. So the problem was in the authority. Like what was the main message and the main message back then in the traditional parenting paradigm, which I have now sought to debunk and eviscerate, is that you treat these children as objects and you manage them and you control their moods and their feelings so that

you can feel dominant and superior. And that's what you and many did that. Show them who's boss. Show them who's boss. I feel safe when they know you're in control. Yeah. It's just so the opposite of what children need. Children need that safety and security and love and attention because their brains are not able to regulate. And therefore, he felt unsafe. And so he cried. But this is every kid of that kind of upbringing where the parent felt that this was the right thing to do. It is sad that that was the way, but that is still the way. I mean, spanking, beating, punishing, shaming, it is the model that I have chosen to debunk. And then coming forward to the other part about saying yes, we say yes to life-enhancing boundaries and we go for those. And we do

not say yes if it's not life-enhancing. So drugs, medications beyond a point are probably crippling for our children, right? So screens today, crippling for our children. So we do not wonder about, oh, am I not leaning into the yes? Like Dr. Shefali said, I clearly say it's you lean into the yes when it's life enhancing. But if it's something destructive and detrimental, you absolutely go apeshit Nazi on them and you say no, you know, then you don't. I shouldn't have said, OK, under supervision, because a lot of his friends, parents were doing this and do this out here, at least in L.A. They're like, if we're supervising and you're only doing cannabis and you're only doing it in this certain way, then yes. Which felt so wrong

to me. But you're agreeing with me. I should not have found a way to make him fit in with these assholes. I mean, maybe it would have led him to do more drugs anyway, because they did more drugs and the ante would have kept going up. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey and it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful,

uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward-Thomas. We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us. it's not again no one's fault it's just the way we're conditioned we're all trying our best so we must preface everything with that having said that parents do give a mixed message to their children it's really a philosophy you know according to me and i'm more of a purist when it comes to drugs i don't believe that our brains especially when our kids are under 25 can really handle a lot of drugs and therefore kids have alcohol poisoning or drug burnouts and they are

hitting rock bottom way before they can even metabolize that. So I'm quite, you know, black and white about that, but I'm definitely not black and white when it comes to everything else with our children. You know, I'm all about play and fun and connection and less rules, the better. But when it comes to something that is physically harmful, which all drugs are, including screens, by the way it's a drug then I'm then I go cold turkey like no hardcore because you don't want to give an ambiguous message to your children now what your son was suffering from was a crisis of connection he was willing to give up his soul to connect and he was so thirsty to connect and and that's why you faltered you faltered because you saw that this kid is so lonely you know so you

didn't do it because you're an idiot you did it because you thought it would help him ease his heart. So you have to have compassion for yourself. Yes. Was it treading dangerous waters? Yes. And I didn't say yes, but I wanted to for that reason, because I knew connection with me was irrelevant, right? Or with his dad or anyone else. It was about just this huge rejection by his peers. Now, Gabor Mate would say if he felt more connected with you, the bullying and social isolation wouldn't have bothered him as much, which also makes me feel guilty. So let me help you. Let me help you with that, because I don't want I see that even my approach can make parents feel guilty. So let me help. Kids come with an essence. And I always say you

need to connect to that kid's essence. But you are not the only human in the world. Again, it's not about you being the be all end all. You do your best. But that is not going to ultimately mean that your kid is going to be immune to the cruelty of peers and the cruelty of life shit is going to still happen so you need to know okay i showed up the best i could of course i i was a recovering conscious parent i was recovering all of us are but i also honor that my kid was a kid who would not have fit in to this brutal world my kid was a very different kid. He was an outlier kid. And that kid comes with their own struggles. And my kid was trying to fit in. So he gave in to the demands of peer pressure beyond my control. You cannot take full

responsibility for outcomes. So all my work is to help people, parents understand, you have a great influence, you have a great power, but you are not in control of the outcomes of your children's lives. I say that all around and around the town. Please, you are not in control of the outcome. Stop focusing on the outcome. The goal is not to keep your kid alive. I'm sorry to talk like that. I want you to talk about that because I do feel like if nothing else, I should have been able to keep this kid alive. That is, again, your delusion of control, as you've seen. I'm sorry to talk straight to you. No, I want you to talk straight to me. Yes. Our kids can die at any point because of this or that. And that is the crapshoot risk we take when we put our love into these beings.

They are not ours to own on every level, including that death is not ours to own or manage. So that's the crapshoot of intimate relationships. Now you've opened yourself up to this person, literally dying on you and leaving you with the gut-wrenching trauma of that. Well, then do we say we should not be parents because it's the worst trauma in the world. No, you are a parent and you are exposing yourself to literally the worst trauma you will ever experience because you are not in control of their moods, their opinions, their lifestyle, and then finally, their choices, their death and their choices. So my work is all about being in the moment as present as you can be, but letting go of your delusion of control over the outcome, including

death. So every day we're a parent and we love our kids, we have to also say goodbye to them because that's just to cultivate the wisdom that we do not own these beings. And what that does is when you say goodbye every day to yourself, to life, to your loved ones, is that it invigorates connection in the present moment. But we take nothing for granted. And that's just that wisdom being constantly cultivated. I don't own my kid. I don't own their sexuality. I don't own their outcomes. I don't own their achievement, but I own myself and how I show up right here, right now. So can I illuminate with this unconditional love and acceptance? That's our only control. Our only control is how we show up. How we show up. And I will say that his death,

unlike which were very transformative the death of my mother my father and others who I've loved his death somehow I think because the other ones I knew they were coming you know they were long illnesses so maybe that was part of it maybe it was because he was my son or is my son but his death on a certain like I remember you know I've talked about this before but I remember one like hearing the question, like, you need to decide, are you going to live or die? Like, do you want to keep living? Not that I would have killed myself, but I just got the message that if you don't claim this pain and start feeling it and healing it, you're going to die of something. And so it was like, do you want to live or die? And I immediately knew like, oh yeah, I want to

live, not just for my kids, my other kids and my husband, but like what really hit me relevant to what you're saying is what an insane, priceless gift being alive is. Anything can happen anytime to any of us. Correct. And it's such a miracle that we get to be here. And so from that standpoint, it really changed. And my youngest has definitely benefited. I was thinking that the other day as well. He has on many levels as painful as it was and as much as he was traumatized without a brilliant 14 month older brother forging ahead of him. He now is willing to claim that he's also smart and not just a jock or a comedian. He is benefiting from my willingness to be like, OK, I can't fucking control anything here. So I call the things I would have tried to control

before. It's like a joke with my husband. We just look at each other and like, well, he's not doing drugs. So let's say yes to it. OK, let's say yes to it. So we just say yes to everything because he's sober and responsible and a good kid and he's having fun. And it really has in some ways, I think set him free, which was a silver lining. But I want to talk about this with like the permission thing, because I 100 percent and this is something that I have done since they were little. And it led to a lot of issues with babysitters and teachers because I rarely said no to them. And I know you have a section step in your book about punishment and this idea of, you know, needing to correct or control our children's behavior. And you mentioned this

before, spanking, yelling, walking them up, grounding them, taking away their things. These are the ways we're taught to quote unquote, discipline our children or give them consequences so that they will learn that they won't do it the next time. Cause now there's a consequence and that sure as shit worked for me. I watched my sister get the shit beaten out of her. I was not going to do what she did. Right. But it comes with a whole other brand of crippling issues. But you talk about this idea of natural consequences and finding your yes. So if they wanted to like take a whole carton of ice cream and put it in a huge bowl and make a giant sundae and only eat a third of it, even though I knew when they were doing it, they were only going

to eat a third of it, like just the fun of making. OK, yes. So I would like train anyone who's a babysitter, just say yes, unless it's going to cause them physical harm or someone else physical harm. You just say yes to anything. And it was hilarious to see how hard that was for people. Yeah. And you know, I always say, don't control them, control the conditions that they exist in. So if you didn't have the ice cream, guess what? Then maybe they wouldn't even do it. They do put socks and so don't keep the cookies. Don't keep the ice cream. Don't keep the soda and don't keep the TV and don't keep the iPads. And then you won't have to say no all the time.

But if you keep the quote unquote, you know, candy dangling in front of them or take them to Target, to the toy store, and then they want things, then you're going to be saying no, no, no. So don't take them there because they cannot handle the stimulation just yet. So create the conditions,

let the conditions be the police. You know, when my kid was young and couldn't understand why we couldn't go to the park at, you know, six o'clock because we had other things to do. I would, you know, pretend to call the park and say, I want to go too. But then the park would say, oh, we're closed.

And I'd be like, oh, the park is closed. Or, you know, so I would be creative because they couldn't understand. And I would make the conditions the evil person, not me. I'm like, don't blame me. Go to your teacher. You know, let's go to the, let's write a letter to your teacher. We've written letters to teachers. Let the teacher deal with your not wanting to do homework.

Why am I being the bad guy? So we want to ally, but it's not about indulgence. It's about allyship, guidance, being their guide and in the most beautiful way as a partner. But leaning into the yes doesn't mean we're saying yes to indulgence and entitlement. We're just finding. So, you know, kid says, I want to go to the moon. We don't say you're so stupid and ridiculous. We go, I want to go too. Come on, let's write a plan. Let's find the ladder.

Let's build a ladder. Let's design a rocket. Yeah. Right. And within 10 minutes, they're going to get bored. Trust me. So, you know, we're so afraid of the imagination of our children that we actually curtail creativity and we don't lean into their playful energy.

And we suffuse that playful energy, which then becomes depressed energy very quickly, because that is their natural state. Children are not mini adults. They are children. Children, their work is play. Their language is play. So if we're suppressing play because we're putting them into one supervised activity after the other, we're literally robbing them of creativity, resilience, interpersonal mediation skills. We're literally sucking them because they're constantly being commanded by adults who don't understand them. And we're just robbing childhood of boredom, childhood of creativity, boredom of play, of laughter, because we're trying to create these robotic automatons who are going to be Wall Street execs or super successful. Concert pianists or whatever it is that we decide they're going to be. Right.

I think it was step 11, and you got into this in different places, but it was activate your third eye as in your insightful self, you call it, or your essential self. I always talk about the essential self. or you referred to it earlier as your essence, but this idea that we have these three eyes, we have your inner child, which adults do. I mean, the inner, the child is still the child. It'll eventually become an inner child. But the inner child, the imposter ego, right? Like, so those places where we get triggered or want to fix, manage, and control. And then there is that essential self, that insightful self. And that in our kids, it comes through kind of, you know,

doing the things that we've been talking about and lots more that you get into in the parent map. But also you talk about how important it is. And boy, have I been on this journey for a while now to reparent yourself, that it's through reparenting yourself that you can start to move beyond the imposter ego, heal the inner child and really be in constant communication with your true self, your essential self, your tuned in and tapped in self, which is where you can use your intuition, where you can move without trigger to navigate things with your kids, where you can be in the present moment. So I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. So I wrote this book into three stages as three stages, but a journey. The first stage is all

about changing mindset, which we've been talking about a little bit. The second stage is about disrupting patterns and reparenting, which you just alluded to. And the third stage is how to connect with the kid. So what you're talking about is in stage two, where we parents feel so out of control because we were raised in control and fear. So we still have that inner child raging inside. It's actually driving the ship, right? It's taking control of the reins. We don't see that though, because a long time ago, we began to compensate for the fears of the inner child by developing a false persona. So I talk about the five false personas

that we could have created. Many of us are operating out of anger and that's the fixer parent, the fighter parent, I'm sorry. The one who's an exploder, who likes to be in control and is kind of tyrannical and very masculine, heavy, dominant energy. If you're operating out of anxiety, then you're going to take on the ego pattern

of the fixer parent, the enabler, the over-rescuer, right? That's me, that's me. that's you then if you are ruled by attention seeking as in how do things look and how do I look on the outside then you're going to take on the persona and the pattern of the fainter the one who feigns it all just fakes it all if you are avoidant and you're very scared of big emotions and getting messy and conflict you will be the freezer and if you are abandoning yourself all the time you will be the fleer so just noticing what comes up in you and what patterns you take on will allow you to see them in action with your children. And then you break the loop

and you break the loop by creating this adult self that reparents you in that moment. So in the moment when your kid is sobbing, and if you're a fixer parent and you want to give them the candy or you want to give them the video game because they're just having this meltdown or their boyfriend has broken up with them and you want to call the boyfriend and yell at them because you want to fix the situation. You get to see, ah, I'm in fixer right now. And you go back to the inner child and you say, what's going on inside me? And you get in touch with your deep crippling anxiety. And then you do what your parents never did, which is see yourself, validate yourself, honor yourself, and then heal that part in you. So I give lots of conversations you need to have

with yourself. I give the actual scripts. I give the to-dos. I give the techniques. So you can build that muscle of every time you're in that ego pattern to take that pause, to realize it's something going on inside you and come back to yourself. And then I teach how you can recognize it in your kids because now your kids have ego patterns, right? So my daughter, my daughter is a fighter and I'm the fixer. So the moment I saw I'm an incurable fixer, then I could see, wow, she's an incurable fighter. And I stopped reacting to her because I began to see, ah, she's activated. She's wounded. Let me now understand what's going on inside. So it allows this beautiful multidimensional lens where you're not just robotically reacting,

but you're going within healing yourself, healing your child. And you also, I don't remember which section you talked about this, but it's relevant to what you're saying, and, and I've learned to do this with my kids as well, is to, I have a lot of issues, but being wrong is not one of them. I don't mind being wrong. So this isn't that hard for me, although I know it's hard for lots of people, but I will go to my kids. Now it's not as big of a deal, but yet when they were younger and I knew I had been in one stuck or acting from a place of fear or I overreacted to something or I was just PMSing and being reactive and snarky, I would go back to them later and apologize and say, look, I was not my best self. I was feeling

really triggered. I'm really sorry that I was impatient with you. Granted, after that, every time I was impatient, my son would ask me if I was having my period, which was not something, you know, that was not a deal we had to rectify that, but it was really powerful. And I, and I was aware that it meant a tremendous amount, like it meant so much to them, but also it was modeling for them. Absolutely. How to take responsibility for yourself. Right. So it's teaching them. No one is perfect. Everyone's limited. It's not their fault, but you're taking accountability. You are a work in progress. It takes off the pressure on them to be perfect, to be all knowing it's the most important thing we can do is to show ourselves as being actively working on

ourselves it's not just about saying sorry and just crying in front of your kid it's about saying I'm crying I'm sorry and I'm accountable for these behaviors I'm working on myself like have you met your grandmother and and really and really own that we are works in progress but we are working on it. Yeah, we are. And I had the most beautiful moment with my now 27 year old, who's had a lot of all my kids have been toughies. They just came in that way. And this one has struggled a lot with anxiety and depression at different points in his life. And he has a lot of medical trauma. He had cancer as a little baby and all kinds of stuff. But he came to me not long ago. I mean, this is probably like six months ago. And he's like, I just was thinking about this. And I wanted

to tell you that watching you transform your life and heal your wounds and move into this place where you're in flow and happy, you know, not happy, you know, just you're in peace and you feel good and you can deal with things. And I think he meant post Sammy, but he also meant just like in general, he's like, it really gives me hope that I can do that too. And I was like, oh my God, parenting prize moment. Like I said that to him, I was like, God, there's like nothing you could say that makes me feel fuller right now than hearing that.

Well, you are a model for all of us. You know, you are living authentically and you have overcome the most unimaginable tragedy, our greatest fear, and you're here to still live it and talk about it. So you are holding that beacon. You are now, you know, helping all of us heal you don't realize the impact you're having, but you are.

Thank you for that. Well, let's talk for a second about happiness because I love this conversation. And it really, in your book, it really made me think because I'm a hundred percent with you that success is not the goal. In fact, I remember having this conversation with my dad about six months to a year before he died.

And he was lamenting about how so many of my friends from childhood were multi-gajillionaires now. you know, have you noticed as an AKA, you're not a multi-gajalina. And I said to him, you know, that's, yeah, that's true, but that's not what success is to me. And he looked at me like I had eight heads and was like, well, what do you mean? And I told him it's about feeling in peace. It's about having relationships that are meaningful to me. It's about being connected to the people I love and doing meaningful work in the world that I love, like that's success. And he was like, oh, you know, he'd never thought of it that way because it was how much you had in the bank and

how impressive you were at a cocktail party. So I've always been that way where success to me is just being able to do what you love in the world, whatever that is. But I was really struck by what you were saying about happiness, right? Because it is, well, two things. One, I had that epiphany that you write about in the book when after Sammy died, I remember I was thinking about it. I think I even posted a video about it. I was like, oh, my God. I mean, I know I'm a recovering codependent, but I just realized how freaking codependent that phrase is that I must have said 10,000 times in my life. You're only as happy as your least happy child. Like that is fucked up. And I've never questioned it. And I was like, what is that about? And I know that like happiness is, you know,

none of us are happy all the time. Happiness is a state. Right. And all our emotional states. but I thought it was really interesting how you wrote about how, because most parents will say, all right, I don't, you know, success, that's not politically correct. We don't need to, but like, I just want my kid to be happy. I just want them to be happy, right? That's what every quote unquote good parent says. So I want you to speak to that because I think that's so important. Yeah, that's huge. So we really think it's on, you know, noble compromise to say, okay, okay, I'll give up success because that's so, you know, trashy now. It's not the thing to, it's not in, but can I, you know, please,

all I'm asking is, can you just, you know, let me help them be happy. And it's so problematic. First, that, that adage of, you know, you're only as happy as your least happy child is really, really not very dysfunctional and it's, it's enmeshment and you should be happy regardless of your child's emotions. And we encourage that codependency. Do you see, We tell parents, you're a good parent. If you become miserable, if your kid is miserable, how is that going to be helpful?

You know, it just makes no sense if you stop to think about it. But the other part of, I just want my kid to be happy. Almost every word in that sentence is problematic. First, it starts with an I. Then it has a just, as if it's a small goal, you know, as if it's such a meager goal. Make, you can't make anybody else, right? My kid, I just want my kid, my, the word my is a problem. they're not yours. So making someone else not possible, happy, you can't make happiness.

It's, you know, life is not meant to be an amalgam of moments that lead to one goal called happiness. Life has vicissitudes and nuance and complexities that, that change all the time. They're impermanent, which requires you to simply be present. So I tell parents, instead of, you know, training yourself to think you're a great parent to make them happy. why don't you train yourself to help them simply be present exchange happiness for presence i want my kid to be present to their life experiences if they're going through 10 breakups and that's what their life is calling into into action well then that's what they need to experience you cannot coddle them from natural life experiences now what happened with sammy was not natural but it was

natural right it was it was an unnatural natural event but for the natural natural ones which are like the run of the mill, you know, your kid doesn't get invited to the birthday party. Your kid doesn't like the cellulite depressed, you know, he's struggling with depression or anxiety like my oldest. Right. But what was unnatural about Sammy's situation is that his medication was laced with something deadly. Right. So that was the unnatural part. But otherwise he was kind of doing natural things, you know, wanting this, wanting that. Sure. Sure. He had extra issues, but not so atypical, right? So you could not protect him from that. And he was going to have to go through his own life experiences and shadow work and struggles. And you saw,

you couldn't protect him and you couldn't even protect him against something that was such a, you know, a freak incident. You couldn't. No, he was sheltering at home for God's sake. Right. He was right there. So it was something that was a freak accident and these things happen, but also all these other heartaches of life keep happening to our children and we cannot protect them. So having this ideology that you're here to create happiness will only create great stress, will drive you crazy, will make you over parent because you think it's your responsibility to coddle your children. And it'll create anti-fragility and not anti-fragility because your kids will begin thinking every time they're uncomfortable or anxious, oh, there's something

wrong with them because you've told them that happiness is the holy grail. So anti-fragility actually will be created within your kid when you teach them that they are actually okay being anxious. They're okay. Okay. So be anxious. Okay. So don't go to sleep. Just let yourself feel them. Right. Right. So it's okay if you are panicking right now, it's okay if you're going to get a C grade. You see, we've created such an unrealistic hyper-realized idea of perfect life that now anything less than perfect is intolerable. And our kids are picking up on our energy, but also all this social media and all these apps have created an intolerance. Now we cannot tolerate any comment said about us. We'll cancel the person. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's so powerful

and important. And I'll tell you, reading it, I think I finished the book yesterday and I got to this part about happiness and my oldest, who I, as I told you, has struggled off and on, was doing amazingly well. He was finding his path and on a really good track and feeling really good. And then about like six months ago, he started to struggle again. This is just what happens, right? And I had to really like coach myself not to like have my stomach drop and be like, oh, you know, I didn't do it to him, but inside myself. And so I literally took what you wrote in one because you give a ton of scripts, which I love. And here's what I wrote him, which I think is almost exactly your script. I said, you know, because he was just talking to me last

the night before about how he was really feeling down and struggling and how he was so disappointed because maybe this is just what his life was now. And looking back, he's been a lot more depressed over the past year than before. And he starts to think this is where he's going to be stuck. Right. And so I said, you know, each time you go through a rough patch and then feel better, you're actually becoming stronger within. That was your script. This is true. Even if another rough patch may and likely will come, it'll get easier. And I'm with you all the way. That's pretty much exactly your script. Yeah. And what that is teaching ourselves and our children is that, you know, instead of comparing our kids to the standard, you have to, if you are

going to compare, compare them to their last episode, right? To their last moment. So if they used to forget their keys six times a week, but now they forget their keys five times a week, that is growth. Focus on the growth, not don't focus on this ideal standard that is external to your children, because that has nothing to do with your children, right? If my mother kept telling me that I needed to, you know, be five foot nine and look like a supermodel. I would feel like that was out of my league. But if she tells me, wow, you know, you're growing more into your confidence, into your body compared to yesterday. Now that makes me feel like I'm competent, like I have efficacy. So I might say, wait, what are you saying? Yesterday I sucked.

That's my reaction. Right, right, right. Right, right. Because we're so, we're so disparaging of ourselves because we have these unrealistic standards to compare to look at your father. Yeah. We take compliments as insults. You know, that's one of my growth edges. Like my husband jokes that if he tells me I look great, I'll be like, what? I didn't look great yesterday. Correct. Correct. Men are, men are scared to give compliments because we are going to come after them. If they say, you know, Oh, you look, you, you seem to have lost so much weight. That's the death of them. Yes. That's the worst thing to say. Yeah. Like, what are you saying? I've lost weight. I didn't know I had weight to lose.

So now they get into trouble, right? Yeah, it's so true. I know you don't have all day, although I would keep you all day if I could. But I just want to read this part because I just thought it was such a great summary. It's not even at the very end of the book, but it's this series of statements

that to me kind of summarize what you're teaching. One is, okay, here they go. My child is my partner in this journey called life. My child's brain is developing, so they need patience and kindness. My child is not yet aware of how life operates, so they need care and connection. My child, ding, ding, ding, this is a big one. My child is a sovereign being who desires respect just as I do. My child is not my enemy designed to make life difficult, but we often feel like that.

My child's behaviors are not against me personally, and my child does not want to be shamed or degraded, just like I don't. I just love that because I feel like that's the super duper duper cliff notes, right? I love that. And if you could just put it on our fridge and just on our computer and in the bathroom, then we could center ourselves because that little child in us panics so much that we truly make the enemy out of our children and or we make our parents out of the children and our children are not our parents. They're not here to give us the approval praise that our real parents never gave us. And they're not our enemies. They're just being themselves. And can we just stop projecting so much? So the parenting map is three stages,

20 steps. I guarantee people who read this will evolve after the read. I mean, there's just no way you're not going to evolve. I evolved. I evolved. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's a beautiful book and I love the action steps and the putting it into practice. It's much more than just theory. The book is called The Parenting Map, Step-by-Step Solutions to Consciously Create the Ultimate Parent-Child Relationship. And it comes out this week, hot off the presses. So go and get your copy. Certainly, if you're a parent, as a baby gift to a new parent, I'm going to give this to every new parent that I buy a gift for. And for yourself, whether you have kids or not, because it will also show you the path I feel to also healing

a lot of yourself as well. So it's the parenting map ain't just for parents, in my opinion, Dr. Shefali. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. And thank you to all your listeners, you know, take the courageous act to change your parenting because that'll just liberate your children forever. And there's nothing greater we can do for ourselves than to give our children their ultimate freedom to be themselves. Yeah. And to feel completely loved and accepted for exactly who they are. Yeah. And resilient and flexible along the way. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all your work in the world and all your deliciousness. Thank you for joining us. And we'll put the links in the podcast, you know, in the show notes, we'll put all the links to

your website and to the book. So you guys will be able to find all of that there. Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you.