TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR EMOTIONS
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 32.
Hello, friends. I want to start by thanking you for listening. This time last year, I had this crazy idea to start a podcast, sharing my journey moving toward the empty nest.
One year ago, I had absolutely no idea how to do a podcast. What I did know is that I'd been having a really rough time with my boys as they got older, and I grappled with the purpose of my life, and that I discovered the gift of self-coaching and managing my mind. And this opened the door for the possibilities of my life.
I knew that I had to share this gift with the world. And so here I am a year later, and I'm blown away by how much I've grown through this process, how much I've learned, and I hope you've been learning along with me. And this is all because I've learned how to both accept the reality of what is in my life, and also how to harness my own power to change everything for myself.
But my journey started with learning how to simply feel better. And so that's one of the first topics I want to tackle in this new year, feeling better by taking control of our emotional life. In my last podcast, I talked about who you want to be in 2023.
For the next few weeks, I'm going to be diving into some of the specific goals I see many of my clients working on. As I mentioned last week, us empty nesters have a storied relationship with goal setting. Some of us don't bother setting New Year's resolutions anymore.
It just doesn't feel like it's worth setting ourselves up for failure. Some of us may be working on health goals, and often these goals are things that we feel like we've been working on forever. In the words of one of my dear clients, these are goals that we've struggled with all of our lives.
Other of us would like to have a big goal, or maybe we do have a big goal in mind, but we're just not sure how to move forward. Maybe we want to change careers, or start a business, or a nonprofit. Maybe we want to get back into the workforce after staying at home, or to find new love.
What's interesting is that one of the most common experiences of my clients and friends, and as I've mentioned, this has been a driving force for me in my life, the common thread is that we just want to feel better in our lives to start. In fact, one of the reasons many of us don't even bother setting big goals for ourselves is that we feel stuck in some kind of pain. And so this negative emotional experience crowds out dreaming or goal setting.
It's exhausting, honestly, to feel so emotionally drained. It wears us out, the anxiety, frustration, sadness. And that's not to say that we're all depressed all of the time.
In fact, there's some beautiful aspects of our lives right now. It just can feel so fleeting, the joy. Like the minute we're present with happiness, it's already slipping out of our fingers.
We know we have things to be grateful for, so many things in fact. But at the same time, life feels hard. And on top of this, we can feel guilty about feeling bad, like we should feel better.
Not only better, but more grateful. As if the fact that we're mothers means that we're not entitled to feel dissatisfied. So many women can't have children, and here we are with these beautiful humans we've raised, and we're not happy? How dare we? Well, we do dare, whether we like it or not.
Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes we wonder if it's all enough, if we're enough, if something might have been different if we'd only made different choices. And now we're not sure how to change.
We're stuck. And as I mentioned last week, we as women in our 40s and 50s are up against some unique challenges. As much as we love and adore our teens and adult children, and we really, we really do, we can find ourselves on a roller coaster of love and insanity.
We can be overcome with joy and pride for our children one minute, and then the next, without warning, we feel frustrated, anxious, angry, hurt, guilty. I could go on. Our children are exerting their independence in so many ways, and many of them are unexpected or not exactly what we'd hope for.
Experts say that developmentally, it's 100% normal for our kids to pull away and become distant, that it's natural for them to test us and potentially go against the values we've tried to instill in them. And it's not all about us. They're exploring new friendships and romantic relationships.
They're trying to figure out who they are, separate from us. And some of this involves testing things that we've worn them against. They may be experimenting with alcohol or drugs.
They start driving, and we lose control of a huge aspect of their time and safety. They spend more time away from us, or behind closed doors. I actually thought that the last year my son was home would be this beautiful year-long trip down memory lane, celebrating all of his accomplishments.
And yes, there were plenty of those moments. But it was also painful in ways that knocked me sideways. Let's face it, whether we want to admit it or not, the narrative in many of our minds is that we have done everything for these kids.
Everything and anything in our power to give or do, we have given and done. Sleepless nights when they were young, and again when they've been teens, out late at night, countless dollars spent on education, activities, clothes, food, emotional support, encouragement, attending every event, dinners cooked, carpools, laundry. Look, it's not like we're expecting to be repaid for any of it.
We've done every single thing out of love, in a deep sense of personal responsibility as a mother. We would do it all again. We would do it better even, now that we truly know how precious the time is and we've learned so many lessons along the way.
The problem is our kids aren't sitting around waiting for opportunities to thank us for our selflessness and effort. In fact, our needs, our opinions, our wishes, they're pretty low on our kids' list of priorities right now. As I keep trying to remind myself with my boys, this isn't about me.
But it is a little about me. When it comes to how we feel about our kids and their behavior and what they say to us, their choices, their actions, it feels a little like they should give us a break, appreciate just a little bit more how hard we're trying, appreciate our intentions, how hard we're trying to make them happy and help them be successful, all because we love them. So here we are on the roller coaster.
Have you ever been in a place where everyone is happy at the dinner table or everyone is safe at home in bed and they've actually said good night, or you've gotten a happy call from your child who's away, and there's this blissful moment when everything feels okay. It's like a relief. There's nothing for me to worry about right now.
But just wait until the next morning or the next phone call or text or until you find something in their room. Anxiety, frustration, it feels like it's looming around every corner. And the mom guilt, when they get mad at us, we would give anything to make it right, to fix it.
If they're struggling or they don't succeed in some way, or they're sad, we can't help but blame ourselves. We should have been more on top of their homework. We should have spent $10,000 for that college advisor.
We take on every failure as if it's a failure of our own. Worse even, sometimes we care more than they seem to. We tell ourselves it's about our children's future.
But in fact, so much of this is how we define our role as mothers, that it's our responsibility. And in our minds, often we're responsible for all of it. Although the sick thing is we don't give ourselves much credit for the wins.
It's not like we stay up and high five ourselves when our kids get good grades or make the team or get into a great college. When that happens, we're proud of our kids and relieved. If we helped, we know we did what we needed to do, but it's their win.
In contrast, the failures, we take all of the responsibility for allowing it to happen, as if failure is somehow something we need to avoid for our kids at all costs. And as our kids go through high school, the stakes seem so high. It feels like the process to get into college is more competitive.
And once they're at school, we worry that the help we gave them in high school will leave them unprepared for the independence of college. Short of becoming a social media influencer, the path to financial security seems steeper than ever. We feel like we need to do everything in our power to help them, to help them succeed.
However we define that. I was listening to a podcast a month or so ago, and the woman featured was a doctor who specializes in women's hormonal health and menopause. She said that it seems like a sick joke that we have to navigate the teen years with our kids.
At the very same time, our hormones go completely haywire. We feel off a good amount of the time. Tired, agitated, anxious, even without all the family and life triggers.
Have you ever just thought, I must be going crazy. My emotions are totally out of control. Everything you read about perimenopause, which can last 10 years by the way, everything you read suggests that all of these crazy symptoms are normal.
I'll list them. Irritability, sadness, lack of motivation, anxiety, aggressiveness, fatigue, and mood changes. Our body is a literal powder keg of emotions raging through us as we deal with moody and distant teens.
So the changing hormonal state of our bodies and our kids seeking independence and eventually leaving the nest. So many aspects of these circumstances are completely out of our control. That's not to say that there aren't things we can do for our bodies.
We can exercise more. We can drink less, meditate, walk, go on hormone replacement therapy or anti-anxiety medication. When it comes to our kids, we can keep trying to negotiate with them.
We can take away privileges. We can nag, we can punish or bribe even. We can reason with them.
We can try to spend special time with them, take them on trips, tell them how much we love them and how hard we're trying in hopes that they might see. How many of these things have you tried? I can tell you I've tried all of them, seriously, and more. I've also lost my mind in anger.
I've cried, I've begged, I've done things I regret, and then I've apologized, beat myself up more. Sometimes some of these things work. Well, not the anger, begging, and crying, but some of the other strategies to feel better in our bodies or to connect with our kids.
Sometimes they work. For example, I love meditating when I remember to do it. I definitely feel better if I exercise regularly, even if it's just a walk.
Sometimes I get through to my boys. There are times when I could weep with gratitude when they write me a particular insightful mother's day or birthday card, or when they tell me they love me out of the blue, or they excitedly share something with me, something unexpected. Sometimes at the end of the day, I can reflect that I showed up exactly as I wanted to and it all worked out.
But just as often, the things I try when it comes to feeling better about my kids or my body, any of the other frustrations we might have about family, friends, work, sometimes the way we try to fix the situation or feel better about it just doesn't work. For example, for me, sometimes exercise makes me feel more exhausted, more hungry. Sometimes I show up in exactly the way I want to with my boys or other people in my life, and they still shut me out or disagree.
The point I'm making is, yes, there's always something we can do. But whether we do everything right or everything wrong, there's quite a bit about our life right now that's not in our control. Our hormones, zero, no control happening.
Our kids, it feels like less than zero control, like opposite day. The things we try to do to help and ways we try to connect with our kids can backfire, literally, despite our very best intentions. We are powerless.
I want to ask you to sit with that for a minute. When it comes to my kids, I am powerless in many respects. I'm certainly no longer in control.
When it comes to aging, my hormones, I'm powerless. What comes up for you when you contemplate that statement? I am powerless. It's not comfortable.
You might want to argue with me. You might want to tell me all of the things that you can do or should do. But what I want to invite you to do right now is embrace the powerlessness.
Stop fighting it. It might feel scary and a bit unnatural at first. We've been moms for so long at this point, and we've been in control.
But the simple fact is that we are now no longer truly in control of our kids. Let's just start there. When we think about parenting our kids, we don't think of it as control.
We think of it as our responsibility. We feel like we do know. We feel like we know our kids, and we want the best for them.
And we certainly know more about how the world works than they do. We just want what's best for them. So we're fairly certain that we're right about the path that they should be taking.
For example, they should never drink and drive or do drugs. They should go to college. They should apply themselves at school and be on time.
They should be respectful. I could go on and on. And this list isn't unreasonable until our kids do drink, they do do drugs, until they tell you they don't want to go to college, or they don't care about school, and that they're actually never on time, or that they act in a way that we think is disrespectful.
Our kids do those things and more that we don't agree with. Now, some of the things our kids do that we don't love, we can live with. We've learned to pick our battles.
But think of that phrase even, picking our battles. It implies that there's a war that we're waging with our kids and that someone has to win. And so there might be one or two non-negotiables for you.
I know I've come across mine, the things I'm willing to go to war for with my kids, or that's at least what I've shown them. But there are things that I need to be right about, that I need to make them see. It is about control, about helping our kids live up to our expectations.
And look, I'm not judging here. This has been me. This has been my experience.
And I wonder if you can consider that it might be yours as well. What is it about your kids? What is it that they do that drives you crazy with anxiety or anger? What are the specific behaviors you've noticed that make you feel terrible? These behaviors, these are actions your kids are taking. And in many cases, the reasons they're engaging in these behaviors has nothing to do with us.
But we make it about us because we can see the repercussions of these behaviors and we feel a deep responsibility for helping our kids avoid these consequences. If our kids do drugs or they drink, they could die, they could get hurt, they could get arrested. If our kids don't apply themselves in school, they won't get into college, they won't be successful.
If our kids don't go to college, disaster. You may or may not agree with these specific statements, but my point is that whatever actions our kids take that make us unhappy in some way, there's a consequence in our minds that we desperately want to avoid. Because we know that if our kids get hurt or fail, then we imagine they will feel terrible.
But what's also happening is that we want to avoid feeling terrible, feeling like a failure, feeling responsible for something disastrous in our kids' lives. So we desperately need to fix it, to avoid it. So we enter the battleground and we fight for our point of view.
We fight for control to change our kids' behavior. Byron Cady often says, when you fight with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time. When we fight against our kids, we lose.
We lose because we feel terrible. We feel fear or anger in the moment when we see our kids engaging in the behavior we don't like. We then try to get them to change.
They don't. Then we get frustrated and angry. We might act in a way we regret and then we feel shame.
It's a vicious cycle. And I want to offer that this cycle can exist with anyone in our lives that does something we don't like. Our partners, parents, siblings, bosses, friends, co-workers.
We live in a world where we have expectations of each other. The example with our kids is sometimes the most painful because of how deeply we feel responsible for the outcomes of their lives. We have expectations about what their lives should look like and it's our job to help them meet those expectations.
With others, say our husbands or lovers, we have expectations of them too. We have expectations about how we're treated, about how people make us feel. That's an interesting phrase, how people make us feel.
Did you know that you can't actually make someone feel anything against their will? You can't. You can't actually control others' feelings unless they agree with you. You can't make someone love you.
You can't make someone appreciate you. They either love you or appreciate you or they don't. And to make things more complicated, they could do things that they think are actions that show you how much they love you and how much they appreciate you, but you perceive those actions as not good enough.
So you don't feel loved. You don't feel appreciated. But when we think we have to rely on others to make us feel, we're powerless, not in control of our emotions and how we feel.
One of the aspects of managing my mind that has been life-changing for me is that I actually have realized how powerless I'd let myself become. And actually, it's even more nuanced than that because I was trying desperately to control things that were out of my control, but not taking control of the things that were actually in my power to control. Whether or not you're religious, you've likely heard this phrase, Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This, in a nutshell, actually explains the power of managing your mind and your emotional life perfectly. There are things that are out of your control, namely other people and the way they show up in their lives, their actions, their perceptions of their lives, their feelings. These are not in your control.
But that also implies that other people are not in control of your feelings unless you let them. Now, look, the hormonal state of our bodies, sometimes that leads us to have a reaction that feels not in our control. So we are sometimes more emotional because of our hormones.
This is something that's also not in our control. So while our hormones might play a role in how we feel, or at least in the magnitude of our emotions, other people still do not control our emotions. They can't make us feel anything unless we let them.
And this is how we do it. We unconsciously decide that we can't feel better until other people change. Enter insanity.
Sometimes people change or act in the way we hope. In fact, a lot of time people generally act in the way we hope, and then there's no problem. But the minute people don't meet our expectations, and we think they should be doing something different, we literally cannot feel better unless they change.
We cannot feel better unless they change. And they don't change. Grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change.
Acceptance. Accepting the reality of your life right now. How people act.
The circumstances of your life. What is it that you need to accept right now? To stop fighting against. To stop trying to change.
To win. Now often when I'm talking to my clients and I tell them this, they'll respond, I don't want to accept this behavior because then the consequences are inevitable. And it will be my fault or I'll be miserable.
This isn't the life I'd want to live. But the consequences are not inevitable, and the circumstances don't have to make you miserable unless you let them. Which gets us to the second part of the quote, the courage to change the things I can.
So what can you change? Well, we've established you can't change other people, but you can change your own mind. You can question whether the consequences of the other person's behavior are inevitable. You can question why other people's actions are such a problem for you.
You can question what you're making all of it mean. Because we do have a choice. Other people don't control how we feel unless we let them.
Other people can't make us feel unappreciated. We just perceive that what they're doing isn't enough. That whatever it is demonstrates that they don't appreciate us.
Other people can't make us feel hurt or angry. We just perceive what they're doing as hurtful or not what we want. And we get to perceive the world however we want.
But rather than perceiving the world unconsciously, we have an opportunity to question why we perceive our lives in a way that brings us pain. And sometimes pain is what we would choose. When someone we love dies, we would choose to grieve.
There is no other emotion to feel. But other times we are unnecessarily causing our own pain by needing to be right, by needing to control, and to get people to see our way. Because when they don't follow our rulebook, we're stuck in pain.
In these cases, we can question if we want to be in pain. It's not at all that our feelings aren't valid. Our feelings always come from our perception of our lives and are valid based on what we're thinking.
But with a conscious questioning mind, we can begin to observe whether we want to choose pain in the situation that we can't change. Sometimes the answer is yes. And many times the answer is no.
It's a powerful choice. It's where we get our power. And when we first accept the reality of our lives and learn how to consciously decide on purpose how we want to think and feel about our lives, that's the beginning of a whole new realm of possibility for our lives.
Because then we get to decide how to show up. And that drives the results we create in our lives. The power of self-coaching is the wisdom to know the difference between the things we can change and the things that we can't.
If this episode resonated with you, I hope you'll consider leaving me a review or commenting that the podcast was helpful. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, friends.
Thanks for listening to The Small Jar podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at smalljarcoach and subscribe to this podcast. Remember, you are the author of your story.
