The Therapy Edit - On an easy & powerful way to encourage someone

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

In this solo episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna shares a special moment from a recent family get-together which led her to realise that, when someone is struggling, jumping straight in with advice isn���t always the answer and that there’s a far more powerful way to offer support and encouragement to our loved ones - and even ourselves.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, Psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hello, it's just me today chatting to you. And today is an episode I haven't got notes for. I feel very safe with my notes, but every now and again, I think I want to share more of a story than some tips and tools. So this is unstructured, me chatting away about a moment that happened at the weekend. And what came out of it, I think, is this real recognition that we can really encourage each other in a very powerful and simple way. So what happened was my parents came over. Now, I will not be alone in that being both a lovely and a complicated thing.

I love my family. My family are really important to me, but there are, yeah, often these relationships are not simple. So historically, often there have been very kind of mixed feelings that I've come away from weekends with. But I want to spend time sharing a really, really special moment and what I've learned from it. So I often kind of allude to the fact that one of my sons has particular challenges. I don't talk about the details of that partly because I think having a presence online, you become a voice that people seek. And that's an amazing privilege and something I take very, very seriously. But there's also this thing that if you speak about topics, that perhaps even you don't really have a huge amount of expert knowledge of or awareness of,

then people will always come to me with questions for more information on. So I allude to the fact that my middle child has challenges with emotional regulation, meaning that he finds it really, really hard to regulate his emotions. They come out very powerfully and very strongly and sometimes overwhelmingly, physically and volume-wise, and things can just feel like the end of the world to him. Little things can spark off this. We know what that feels like, right? That end of the world, emotional outbursts.

Now that can happen a lot in our household. And when we go out, normally it's okay. Generally it's okay. We go and stay at people's houses. It's generally okay. At school, it's generally okay. But our home is his same. space. So often that is where the challenge is. So my parents came to stay and they really got

a very powerful insight into how things can be for us in a way perhaps that they haven't seen before. My middle child had a meltdown. It was quite extended. It went on for quite a long time. It was really quite intense and I found it really hard. I was really tired. It had a really restless night the night before. And I just found it hard to cope. And my mum was incredible. She had a patience that I found difficult to access. And she sat with him, which is what I always want to do. I just always want to be with him. I'm very much a fan of the work of Dr. Becky, good insight. And she's got, if anyone's resonating with this, she's got loads of resources on deeply feeling kids. And I have learned.

that the best thing to do is just to be present, not trying to fix, not try and change, but just to be there and to be this loving presence is really hard to do that sometimes. In fact, I'd say it is one of the biggest challenges, the most important, the biggest challenges of my parenting. So this was all going on. And I was getting stuff done with the other kids and my dad was kind of pottering around. It was breakfast time. And my dad said to me, he said, Anna, I don't. Oh, it makes someone to cry. he said I don't know how you do it he said you're amazing he said I really admire you and that meant the world to me it meant the absolute world to me I felt in that moment

I felt really really acknowledged I felt like he'd got this insight into my life one of the harder parts and he saw and he saw and he imagined the challenge at my face now, I always want to say, I always want to stop myself from saying that I know, this caveat isn't it, as mum's dear, as parents do, I know other people have it so much harder. And that awareness just brings me huge gratitude. Honestly, in this challenge there is in parallel, this immense feeling of gratitude. Along the way, I'm so grateful to have these precious relationships in my life. I'm so grateful for all the goodness that they bring, the quirks and the just, I delight in them.

And it is challenging. So there is the gratitude. But in that moment, I think I just felt really, really seen in the challenge. I felt really validated. And it's not that that hadn't been there before. It's not that that had been non-existent. It's just the power perhaps it had gone and said. perhaps it hadn't been seen to that degree.

And it got me realizing that so many times in our lives we want to encourage friends, don't we want to help them? We see someone that we love and we want to make it better for them. Maybe we want to give them advice and we kind of know that we're not always meant to. We should ask to see if they want our advice. But we want to, we yearn to just to kind of make the roll of the smoother, for them. So my dad could have come at me with loads of tips, oh, you should do this or try that or have you thought about that or speaking to this person, but he didn't. And I think that was

what was so powerful about it is that there was so much in those words of, I don't know how you do it, that recognition, that really seeing the cost, that really seeing the challenge. So I think how that made me feel was so powerful in reminding me that all those times I feel desperate to help when actually sometimes the biggest things that we can offer, it feels like nothing. It didn't cost him anything to say to me, I don't know how you do it as he walked around the kitchen. It didn't cost him to say, I don't know how you get anything done.

he didn't have to delve into his mind or think about some resources or think about what advice he could give me he just said those things and it meant so much so that, you know, days later I still tear up when I think about it. And it was just recognition. So I think, you know, the little thing that I want to share with you is don't put pressure on yourself when someone's going through a challenging time. Maybe it's your child. Maybe your child's having a hard day. Maybe your partner's having a tough time at work. Maybe your friends going through some stuff. Just acknowledging to them, just recognizing that challenge. Oh, that sounds so hard. Goodness me, that's such a challenge you're facing. You know, if you're listening now and you're going through a hard time,

that sounds so hard. That is hard. What you're going through is hard. There were times going through the trauma in my family when no one could, so we lost my sister, many of you will know this. And I remember so distinctively that there were people that stopped talking to us. That there were people, family, family friends who we knew so well that would cross the road. I mean, they saw us walking down because they didn't know what to do. They couldn't take the pain away. They felt hopeless, helpless. What can I do? What can I do for my friend that's lost a child? What can I do for my friend that's going through a relationship breakup? What can I do for that person that's just lost the job? I can't make it easy. I've got no, I've got no, I've got.

I've got nothing helpful to say. So sometimes the response is, actually, I'm just going to stay away. I'm going to avoid, I'm going to avoid even trying. When actually there is something you can do, you can recognise. You can recognise that that is hard. And that is a gift in itself. It's a simple but powerful gift. But also maybe you need to offer this to yourself today. Maybe you need to utter to yourself. I don't know how you do it. You're doing amazing. This is hard. I admire you. What might it feel like to say those words to yourself? Because we can.

We can say those words to ourselves. It might feel a bit ridiculous. And we might waver in how true we feel that is. But sometimes we need to hear it. So there we go. A little thing that came out of a weekend, a moment of recognition that we need to offer others and ourselves take the pressure off to say the right stuff and just recognize. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe or review because it makes a massive difference to how many people it can reach. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. might like to check out my three books mind over mother know your worth and my new book

the little book of calm for new mums grounding words for the highs the lows and the moments in between it's a little book you don't need to read it from front to back you just pick whatever emotion resonates to find a mantra a tip and some supportive words to bring comfort and clarity you can also find all my resources guides and videos all with the sole focus of supporting your emotional and mental well-being as a mum they are all 12 pounds and you can find them on anamatha.com. I look forward to speaking with you soon.