EMBRACING THIS MOMENT
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 124.
Hello, my friends. I want to start by telling you a story. Last night, I brought my son's comforter into his room because I had just washed it.
He was on the phone, sitting on his bed. So, without wanting to interrupt him, I took the comforter and just started putting it on the bed around him. He put the phone on mute and he said to me, "Does this remind you of anything?" At first, I didn't know what he was talking about at all.
I actually didn't realize he had taken the phone off mute at first. But then I saw him looking at me expectantly. There I was, holding onto the comforter, about to put it around him, and I realized, he was thinking about all the times when I used to tuck him into bed.
My son is now a 215-pound wrestler. He is 6'2", 17 years old, and almost a man. But he interrupted his phone conversation to be present for me, for a second of nostalgia over a bond that we shared so many years ago.
In that precious moment, my entire perspective of where I am in my life right now shifted. It's my son's senior year, and I've been having a lot of feelings about the stress he is under and the pressure of the college process. I've noticed that my mind is often caught up with thoughts about how I can support him.
There have also been a lot of other things going in my life that have been all-consuming. I've been anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. But I understand where it's all coming from.
I'll be honest, it's still not comfortable. But I've been processing my emotions and taking care of myself. In fact, in last week's episode, that's exactly what I talked about.
The question I explored was, how do you take care of yourself when you're going through emotional pain? But it's so fascinating because the additional perspective that I was reminded of by my son's words is that when we spend so much time focused on our pain, we can miss the beauty of what's happening right in this moment, right there alongside of the pain. Often when others offer strategies for finding more joy in your life, they'll recommend gratitude journaling. Basically starting or ending every day by listing five or ten things that you're most grateful for.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but we can sometimes use this process against ourselves, particularly if we're doing it in the midst of our hectic lives. Almost more of a self criticism. It's like we'll think, I should be more grateful.
Look at everything in my life that I should be more grateful for and here I am complaining or unhappy. My clients say this to me all the time. And I want to start off by saying to you that nothing I say is ever a should.
I'm not here to tell you what you're doing wrong or what you should be doing better. Instead, what I want to do is offer you a mirror, a reflection of how the way you think about your life creates your experience of your life. I feel like my son gave that mirror back to me last night.
He wasn't telling me I should be doing anything different, but his ability to be present offered me an invitation to open my mind to what I was missing, the beauty of my life in that moment. And I wanted to share this with you because I believe so many of us are walking around in our lives not seeing the beauty of it. Look, the thoughts that we have that bring us emotional pain are really loud.
Whether you're stuck in worst case scenario, catastrophizing thoughts about all of the things that can go wrong, or maybe it's the judgments that you have about yourself, how you're not good enough or not worthy. You could have judgmental thoughts about other people and how they're letting you down or not living up to what you need from them. Often when I do mindset work with my clients, we do spend time looking at the impact of these negative thoughts specifically.
I help my clients understand the unique lens that they bring to their life and how that impacts the way that they feel, the way they respond or react to what's happening in their lives, and ultimately how all of that impacts the results they create in their life. So for example, when our brains catastrophize, we're looking at the world through a perspective that the worst case scenario we're imagining is highly possible. And look, this isn't because we're broken, inherently anxious people.
Our brains actually are designed to seek out danger. And so when we're in a situation that we perceive to be risky or dangerous or new, our brains are naturally going to go to the worst possible outcome in an effort to try to find solutions to eliminate that possibility. It honestly makes perfect sense.
But often when we feel this anxiety, we get kind of stuck in it. We can actually even use the anxiety as further evidence that something is really wrong, and then we spin in the anxiety. So rather than beating ourselves up for this type of thinking, it can be really helpful to understand why your mind is going there, and also what kind of emotional experience it's creating for you, so that you can then decide what you want to create instead.
When you see the impact of your mindset, when it's truly impacting your emotional well-being, and when you actually can see for yourself how it's your thoughts rather than the circumstances of your life keeping you stuck, often these thoughts can truly let you go. It's a remarkable feeling when you unravel the mystery of your mind by simply opening yourself up to compassionate awareness. But you know, it's often those negative thoughts about ourselves that can be the hardest to let go.
Because they're often thoughts that we've been practicing for so long, it's like it can become your identity. But again, our minds are these powerful tools. They don't beat us up for the fun of it.
The fascinating thing is that there's often a reason why our minds have practiced certain negative thoughts over and over again throughout the course of our lives. No matter how negative or mean we are to ourselves, it can sometimes be a shield. Or we can honestly think these thoughts are necessary as a motivator.
We think we're unworthy, and therefore if we can just keep trying to be better and prove ourselves, then maybe then we can avert whatever danger we think comes as a result of our unworthiness. It can be hard to let go of a thought, even if you can objectively see that it's a terrible thought. When your mind on a primitive level sees this thought or self-belief as something that's protecting you.
It's the same with catastrophizing, worst-case scenario thoughts. On a primitive level, our minds think that if we can just figure out what that worst-case scenario is, then backtrack to figure out how to avert it, then we can save ourselves from pain. Why would we stop catastrophizing if it's going to save us from pain? The other way we can be stuck in pain is because of thoughts about how other people aren't meeting our expectations.
I mean, don't we deserve better? Isn't it true that the way they're acting is unacceptable or unfair? And shouldn't I be able to set boundaries or figure out a way to get them to change their behavior? Because I don't like it. I don't want to be around it. Why would you ever let go of this judgment when other people are clearly wrong? So I want to offer that it's okay if you can't easily let go of these negative thoughts right away.
Maybe not for a while. If you really consider for a moment the power of the protective intention around some of these negative thoughts, it's interesting to also consider then how much it makes sense that these thoughts are holding on to you because they're desperately trying to protect you. Maybe trying to protect your child or your family.
And asking yourself to let go of these protective thoughts, no matter how terrible they seem, asking yourself to let go of them is like asking yourself to let go of the shield that you're carrying. It's like forcing yourself to give in to the very thing that you're fighting so desperately to avoid. Honestly, it's no wonder that our primitive mind is so intricately connected with our endocrine system, with our fight-or-flight response.
When you look at it from this perspective, it's absolutely no wonder that it's hard to separate ourselves from these negative thoughts. So in your life right now, if you're struggling with thoughts about worst-case scenarios or judgments and frustrations about others or thoughts about how there might be something wrong with you, even though you don't want to be thinking this way and you definitely don't like how you feel, consider this question. How might these thoughts be trying to protect me right now? How could your mind be trying to predict the future so that you don't have to feel future hurt or disappointment? How might you be trying to get others in your life to fall in line or take better care of their own responsibilities so that you can feel better, feel less pain? And how might you be beating yourself up in desperate hope that you can be better so that you can finally feel better? I mean, can we just stop for a moment and appreciate how important and valuable some of these goals are? You want to protect yourself and others you love from pain.
You feel responsible for those you love. You just want to help. You just want to feel better.
It doesn't seem like so much to ask. Your mind thinks these negative thoughts are protecting you. Just open your mind to the beauty of that.
What if overcoming these thoughts isn't about being better or stronger or just figuring out how to get over them? But what if truly conquering these thoughts requires you to make peace with the reality that these thoughts are not actually keeping you safe? Recently, I've found myself in a lot of worst-case scenario thinking. One topic is my son's college process. I'm petrified that he'll be disappointed.
When you see your child working so hard for something, you feel this sense of responsibility to do everything you can to support them in achieving that goal. There are definitely some logistical things we can do to help, and we can certainly find ourselves signing up for the task of official reminder. Even when your teen's on top of their deadlines and assignments, you feel compelled to check in just to be sure.
In reality, there's not much that I can do at this point. The application deadlines are around the corner, and my son's been pretty adamant about not wanting any additional feedback on his essays. He's the one who has to tackle his senior year schedule.
It's really all up to him. And yet, my brain is like this supercomputer looking for risk for things he might have forgotten, for ways that I could be helpful. I know my son will end up at a great school that's a fantastic fit for him.
He's been open-minded throughout the process and is doing everything that he needs to do. This situation was very different with my oldest. So in some ways, I feel like I should, and there's that should word again, but I should be relieved and grateful that my son's so on top of this process.
I shouldn't have to worry. And yet, my primitive mind is still on alert for danger. It's trying to protect him and me from disappointment.
And my friend, it actually makes perfect sense. I have no control over the outcome, but I care so much about how it all turns out for my son. Of course I'm having thoughts that are creating anxiety for me about this.
Think about how this protective instinct shows up for you in your life, both with your teens, but in so many other aspects of your life. Maybe you want to protect your teen from pain in their relationship with their boyfriend or girlfriend, or you want to protect them from the pain of rejection in social situations, or if they're struggling or working hard in school, maybe facing some medical diagnosis. Throughout every step of your child's life, you've been having this thought, I just want them to be okay.
I really hope things will work out for them, and I'm afraid that they won't be okay. Look, if you didn't care, life would be a lot easier, wouldn't it? But you know that you wouldn't choose that either. You wouldn't choose to not care about your teen and their well-being and success.
We brought these kids into the world, and it's been one of the greatest joys of our lives to have the privilege of watching them grow up, with every accomplishment, even those seemingly small but monumental accomplishments in the early years, like when they learned to walk or said their first words. Throughout their lives, you've had the privilege of seeing them grow, and all along the way you've had this thought, I just want them to be okay, to be safe, happy, and successful, but I'm afraid if they're not, I'm afraid they won't be. I know you also know the pure gratitude and joy, maybe even relief, that comes from seeing your child overcome a challenge, even if it didn't turn out exactly the way that you'd hoped.
You see them getting through something, and it's like, thank God they got through that. They're going to be okay. There's nothing more powerful, more beautiful, than those moments of pure joy and pride and gratitude.
But inevitably, life brings us new challenges. Amidst the stress and anxiety, it can be hard to appreciate the value of what we're fighting for. We can be so focused on and overwhelmed by the pain.
We experience our lives through our emotions, and so when we feel terrible, it's like we can feel our lives are painted with this brush of pain. That's all we see. When you're in the midst of a challenge, or just facing a lot of uncertainty, consider how hard your powerful brain is working on trying to find a way out of your pain.
Like a supercomputer, your mind's going to imagine every scary possible outcome, and it's going to give you ideas about how you can overcome those possibilities. Your mind's going to tell you all of the things that are wrong with you, so you can fix yourself, so that you can avoid pain in the future. Your brain's also going to focus on everything that's wrong about your life, or about other people, because if it can just find a way to change those circumstances, or get other people to change, then you can just feel better.
Let go of that resentment or the hurt. This is your brain on autopilot, my friends, and it's actually a beautiful skill of your brain. Your powerful, instinctual mind has kept you alive and out of danger.
It's responded to dangerous or risky situations in fractions of a second, without you even having to have a conscious thought about it. Your mind is constantly generating resourceful, creative solutions in your life. So consider that there is a purpose to your pain right now.
So if you're having thoughts about your life that are creating pain, and if no matter what you do, you can't seem to let them go, there is a purpose to this pain. Consider it could be that your brain thinks that it needs to hold on to these thoughts to keep you safe. If nothing else, consider the beauty of that, the marvel of the human brain.
I know when you're in pain, it feels hard. I know you don't want it. But there is a reason your mind is creating this pain.
It's really not much different than the pain you feel when you touch a hot stove. Your fingers immediately send signals to your brain telling you stop touching that stove. Think about how quickly, how instinctively you pull away your hand.
You also immediately learn a lesson that you can apply to the future. Be careful not to touch that stove when it's hot. This potential to both want to protect yourself from pain and to learn from that pain is there when you face any challenge in your life.
But consider that if you're not able to let go of these thoughts, you haven't yet learned the lesson that those thoughts are trying to teach you. And here's the thing, our minds are convinced that the lesson these thoughts are trying to teach us is that there is danger. That there's some real danger that we desperately need to avoid.
Either that we have to avoid some terrible worst-case scenario or fix something that's wrong in our life. And because we're convinced of this danger and focused on how to avoid the pain of it, we get stuck in this spiral of catastrophizing and judgment and beating ourselves up. And I don't think I need to tell you that that just makes you feel miserable.
But what if that's not the lesson that you need to learn here? I want to offer an alternative perspective and that's that you are capable of holding and overcoming your emotional pain. Consider this, I'm willing to bet that there are many things in your life that you consider yourself very capable of doing. In fact, there are many things that you're very capable of doing that aren't particularly fun.
Doing laundry is one. Not something you necessarily look forward to doing ever, but you do it when you need to because you want clean clothes. Driving your kids around when they were younger, not the most fun, at least not all the time, but you did it every day likely multiple times a day because you wanted them to be involved in activities and to have friends.
These things weren't fun, but you made the decision to do them, whether consciously or unconsciously, because there was some result you wanted to create. You also never questioned whether you were capable of doing these things, sometimes even hard things, either because you cared so much about the outcome of them or because you'd practiced doing those things for so long you created a belief in your confidence. Sometimes we might feel that way about a sport or a hobby.
Maybe you feel that way about your job, maybe about volunteering or public speaking. Think about your life. What do you do that you know you're more than capable of handling? Now contrast that with the parts of your life where you might be anxious or doubtful, the times when you tell yourself you don't think you can handle something.
Maybe you're afraid of failure, maybe afraid that you're not going to be able to handle it if your routine fails. You could be unsure about how to set boundaries or how to approach a challenging relationship. Notice how there are times when we actually tell ourselves that we're not capable, as if that's the truth.
And look, it's absolutely true that none of us want to fail. None of us want to be rejected or disappointed or hurt. These emotions aren't fun.
But my friend, your emotional experience is roughly 50% pain and 50% joy. Over the course of your life, 50% of the time you are going to feel hurt, rejected, disappointed, sad, bored, frustrated, angry. At some point you'll feel grief.
At times you might feel like a failure. Consider that this experience is 50% of all of our lives. And notice how interesting it is that we're also so afraid of that pain.
It's 50% of our lives and yet we all want to reject it. And our brains can perceive this emotional pain as a threat to our safety and create all sorts of mind drama to try to avoid that negative 50% of our human experience. Now it might sound depressing that 50% of our life is pain.
Like what's the point? And I think this is actually the reason that some people decide to live small lives. Because they're so afraid of the pain. If you don't ever put yourself out there, you don't have to worry about being rejected.
If you don't try new things or take on new challenges, you don't ever have to risk failure. And sure, that's an option. You could reason that maybe the negative 50% won't feel so heavy if you don't take on too much risk.
But I bet the positive 50 can sometimes feel a bit muted as well. And then you might face other negative emotions like disappointment or boredom or feeling like you haven't done enough with your life. In my opinion, when you have children, at least in one respect, you're opening yourself up to a really big life.
You're creating a situation where you're bringing into this world someone who you're very likely to love more than yourself. Someone whose accomplishments are more important than your own. With so much hope and so much investment in your kids' happiness and in their dreams, it's no wonder that we're petrified of failure.
We're even more afraid to see them hurt. Now we've already decided to step into this big life. So here we are, having the benefit of all of this added love and joy and pride in our lives, but also the fear, the worry, and the frustration.
All of it, this big, beautiful roller coaster of a life. Consider that no matter where you are, there is 50% joy and 50% pain. But then there are times when we become so focused on the 50% that's pain that it actually can feel much bigger than 50%.
Maybe your kid is struggling and you feel overwhelmed with anxiety. Maybe you're transitioning to the empty nest and have so much more time on your hands, so much more time to ruminate in your thoughts, so many fewer distractions that now all of these doubts about your worthiness and how you're not good enough are bubbling to the surface. Wherever you are, my friend, that pain is trying to teach you something.
And there is purpose to that pain. And my friend, it will leave you when it's finished teaching you. Finding the truth of these lessons is the work we do in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. And my friend, in my experience with my clients, I'll tell you that the lesson they learn is never that they're not worthy, or that they're not capable, or that they aren't able to handle what's to come.
What is your pain trying to teach you, my friend? If it's not that you have to work harder, if it's not that you have a reason to be afraid, what is that lesson? Could it be that you have the opportunity to learn how to let go of expectations for how your child pursues their dreams? Is your lesson learning how to be true to yourself and what you need in such an honest way that you can set boundaries with yourself and other people in your life? Is the lesson that the shield you've been carrying for most of your life to keep you safe is discounting all of the ways you are so much more capable of meeting the challenges in your life than you were when you first learned to pick up that shield? If all of your negative thoughts are here to protect you, how might you now be able to grow and believe in yourself and trust yourself in ways that you never have before? My son offered me such a beautiful reminder that I've been so focused on my own anxiety over his college process that I've been missing how it's hard for him too. In fact, I've potentially been missing how it's hard for him as he contemplates next year no longer being at home. What a gift to be reminded of how much beauty is in my life right now, right this minute, with my son still at home.
I'm willing to bet that there is so much beauty in your life too. If you're having a hard time finding it, start with the love. Start with the love that you feel for your children.
The love that you get to feel no matter what they're doing, no matter how far away they are. That love may also be a big reason, that love may also be a big part of the reason you're fighting so hard. Something so beautiful can also sometimes be the purpose for so much pain.
I'm worried about my son and his future, but it makes perfect sense. The purpose of my pain is actually my love for him, my belief in his potential to go after his dreams, and I actually don't want to let that go. I don't want to let go of my love and my dreams for my son, so I'm willing to also hold space for the negative 50, the worry and the fear of disappointment.
But there's another aspect of my anxiety being fueled by worst-case scenario thoughts, and the purpose of my pain, and the purpose of this pain for me, is to give me an opportunity to build my trust in myself that I can weather the season of my life. And more than even just getting through it, I want to be present in it. I can carry my worry around with me in my purse and also have the privilege of being in the front row watching how hard both of my sons are working to self-actualize, how hard they're working to achieve their dreams.
I can hold space for the hope and the joy as well as the worry and any other emotion that comes my way. I choose to be here and do whatever it takes to support my boys, whatever they let me do to support them. This is the privilege of being a mom, and there's so much beauty in that.
But in the words of Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop to look around every once in a while, you might miss it. In this last few months with my son at home, I don't want to miss it. Life is so precious, my friend.
But the truth of the human experience is that it's 50-50. What I've found is that if I can embrace the pain, when I can love myself through it and stop fighting against it or thinking that somehow there's something wrong with me that I feel it, that I need to work harder to fix something, when I can truly see the lessons that the pain is here to teach, the experience of my life becomes so much more focused on the beauty of my life. That 50% peace and joy and love actually starts to take up so much more space.
This is available for you too, my friend.
Until next time.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
