You are listening to the Less Drama More Mama podcast, episode 36: Emotional Adulthood
This is Less Drama More Mama, the podcast for moms who want to feel calm, in control, and confident about how to handle anything life throws their way. If you’re ready to go from feeling frazzled and disrespected to feeling calm and connected, this is the podcast for you. I’m your host, Pam Howard.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever and whenever you’re listening to this podcast right now, welcome to the show.
I am only a few days away from my school’s Spring break. It’s kinda late this year, but I’m really looking forward to some downtime, spending some time with my sister who’s coming into town, but also being able to open up more time on my calendar for some more free mini-sessions with you.
If you’ve been trying to schedule your mini-session and there never seems to be a time that’s convenient for you, check my calendar again this week because like I said, I’m going to be adding a few more spots over the next two weeks. And then summer will be here soon. Can you believe it? So, don’t wait to schedule your mini-session. How amazing would it be to go into your summer feeling so much better about spending time with your kids? Right? So go to www.lessdramamoremama.com/mini
Also, I’d love it if you would mention this podcast to at least one mama friend this week. It’s a great conversation starter at a class party or a school get together. You just say, “Hey, do you listen to podcasts?” and then, even if they say no, you just say, “Oh, I have a great one for you to listen to. It’s all about parenting and having less drama in your life. You’ll love it.” The more people who listen to the podcast, the less drama in the world.
So, today I want to talk about a concept I’ve touched on many times before, but I feel like I can never really talk about it enough because so many moms that I work with are struggling with it on a daily basis. And the concept is called Emotional Adulthood.
Emotional adulthood is when you take full responsibility for every emotion that you feel. Most of us go through life living in emotional childhood, where we’re not taking responsibility for how we feel, where we’re blaming other people or external circumstances for how we feel. We blame our parents, our kids, our bosses, our spouses, our exes, the government, where we live. Everyone and everything else is to blame for our unhappiness. And living this way is very disempowering.
Now, we come by it honestly. When we’re children, we depend on our parents to get our emotional needs met. We cry when we’re hungry, tired, or our diaper’s wet. And often our parents are there to help us solve our emotions for us by giving us some food, rocking us to sleep, or changing our diaper.
Also, we’re raised to believe that external things cause our emotions. We’re taught that other people can make us feel good, that ice cream or a cookie or a new, shiny toy can make us feel good, which creates a dependence on external things to bring about positive feelings. And then we also learn to blame our negative feelings on external things, too. We’re taught that other people can hurt our feelings, or that what other people do causes our negative emotions. When we believe this, then we’re always living at the effect of our circumstances. And in order to feel good, we either have to hope and pray that our circumstances are favorable and that other people do what we want them to do, or we need to try to control and change and manipulate them, which is impossible to do. Either way, we end up feeling completely powerless over our emotional life. The truth is we get to think and feel whatever we want to about the circumstances in our lives. We might not always want to feel a positive emotion, and that’s ok, but it’s always an option.
As little kids, we don’t have the ability to understand all of this. We don’t know how to manage our minds. We think everything outside of us is causing our feelings, and we act out all of our emotions in big, reactive ways. But nobody ever takes us aside as we get older to teach us the concept that, in fact, we are responsible for our emotional needs and that it’s our own thoughts that cause our emotions in the first place. This is why you’ll see people go from relationship to relationship or job to job or house to house and they’re never satisfied because they’re trying to control their feelings by changing their circumstances, instead of changing the real cause of their emotions, which is always their thoughts. Once you start taking responsibility for how you feel, you take back all of your power. Instead of living at the effect of your circumstances, you take control of your emotional life.
As a school counselor, I do start teaching kids this concept from the time they’re in second grade. And in the beginning, kids will argue with me that other people can hurt their feelings. So, I do an activity with them to prove my point. I put six signs around the room with the names of six different emotions on them: excited, worried, angry, embarrassed, sad, and surprised. Then I read different scenarios and tell them to think about how they would feel in each situation. Then, when I tell them to, they get up and they go stand by the sign with the emotion they imagine they would feel in that situation.
And inevitably, what happens every single time I do this, is that I’ll read a scenario and there are people standing at at least five of the six emotions. And I say to them, “How is this possible? If our external circumstances cause our emotions, you’d all have the exact same feelings. But because your thoughts about the situation are different, you feel different emotions. And nobody’s feeling is right or wrong or better or worse.”
For example, one of the situations is that they find out they’re going to be a big brother or sister soon. Now, some kids become genuinely angry just thinking about this because they have a thought like, “I’m the baby in the family,” or “I already have a sibling. I don’t want another one.” Some get super excited about the idea of a baby joining the family. Others are surprised, sad, or worried. It’s fascinating to watch them realize that there are so many different ways to think about the same situation, and that everyone sees things through their own personal lens.
When you don’t manage your mind, your primitive brain will take over, and you’ll be more likely to indulge in thinking like an emotional child and becoming very reactive. When you notice yourself blaming or complaining or feeling like a victim, or you attribute your behavior to someone else (“Well, I wouldn’t have had to yell at you if you’d listened to me the first time”), that’s when you know you’re in emotional childhood and the way to get into emotional adulthood is to take full responsibility for all of your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
So, here’s how that sounds in my family. Marissa will leave a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink and immediately, my brain thinks, “Dammit. I’ve told her a million times to put her dirty dishes in the dishwasher. She only cares about herself and no one else.” That thought causes me to feel annoyed and resentful. Now, it’s usually at this point that I’m able to catch myself and realize that those thoughts are completely optional.
So, then I’ll stop myself and ask, “How else can I choose to think about this? How do I want to feel?” And I’ll usually remind myself that one, she’s a teenager and two, of course she doesn’t want to take the time to clean her dishes when she has more exciting things to do. These thoughts drop me into a more compassionate and accepting place and then I can take the action of either asking her to do it again in a calm way, not in an exasperated way, or I can simply drop my resentment and do the dishes myself.
The more you pay attention to your mind, the better you’ll be able to access your prefrontal cortex and think consciously, rather than reactively. And the more you practice thinking intentional thoughts, the stronger the neural pathways will become in your brain to those more emotionally mature thoughts. It took me a while to be able to get to the point where I can stop myself and redirect my brain, and sometimes I still don’t stop myself because I’m only human.
But, I really want you to understand this: When your child doesn’t follow the rules or doesn’t do something you’ve asked him to do, it has no effect on you whatsoever until you have a thought about it. Your child can say something like, “I’m not going to do what you asked. You can’t make me. I hate your stupid rules” and that’s all about him and how he’s behaving. And that behavior is coming from his thoughts and feelings in the moment. It only affects you when you make it mean something about you, when you take it in and you let it affect you.
The way you think about his behavior will determine how you experience it. And as long as you believe that your child or anyone else has the ability to hurt your feelings or make you feel any emotion, you’re going to feel powerless and out of control, which will lead you to try to control them even more. When you’re trying to control others, it’s always out of a feeling of powerlessness or fear. When you’re managing yourself and your own mind, you feel the opposite: you feel empowered and confident and at ease.
I hear parents say all the time, I just need my child to learn this or to do that” or they’ll say it directly to their kids sometimes, “Mommy really needs you to do this right now.” The only reason they think they need their child to do anything is so they, themselves, will feel better. And the minute you need your child to make you feel better, you’re in emotional childhood.
Hal Runkel put it well in his ScreamFree Parenting book. He said, “Once parents begin looking to their children to fill any sort of emotional need, the children can no longer look to the parents for stability and guidance.” He says: “Kids need parents who don’t need them.” Right? You don’t want to be dependent on your kids. They’re dependent on you for providing safety, affection, acceptance, love, and support. When you can take care of all of your own emotional needs, you won’t need your kids to do anything at all, except be themselves. You can decide how you want to feel about them no matter what choices they make, rather than trying to change and control them in an effort to make yourself feel better.
So, the recipe for emotional adulthood is taking responsibility for how you feel and being willing to feel any emotion. Remember that an emotion is just a vibration in your body. Anger, frustration, overwhelm, stress, anxiety, guilt. They’re all just vibrations caused by thoughts in your brain. Many of these emotions have a vibration that feels like pressure inside of us, and when we resist feeling them, when we push them down or we try to avoid them, they grow stronger and we end up releasing the pressure by screaming, yelling, or reacting to them in some other way. Your brain doesn’t want you to allow these feelings because it’s designed to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
But once you understand that emotions are harmless and you open yourself up to them, you won’t be in such a hurry to get out of them. You can take responsibility for them, rather than blaming someone else, and you won’t feel the need to change anything external because you’ll know that you can handle any emotion. When you’re willing to experience all the emotions, you won’t be so afraid of them. Your life will open up in a big way when you allow all of them that make up the human experience. Go back and listen to episode 11 for more about how to feel a feeling.
And the last thing I want to say is that sometimes when I talk about the concept of emotional adulthood with my clients, they confuse taking responsibility with taking the blame. Like, when they realize that their thinking is causing their feelings, they feel guilty or angry with themselves and then they beat themselves up. Please don’t do that to yourself. The goal is to empower you. To help you understand that when you take responsibility for every emotion you feel, it’s the ultimate in having control over your emotional life, and you get to decide how you want to think and feel about every circumstance you encounter.
Ok, mama. In what areas of your life are you being an emotional child? Think about who or what you’re blaming for your results and how can you take more responsibility to create the results you want? Leave me a comment on today’s show notes at lessdramamoremama.com/036 and I’ll talk to you again next week. Bye, bye.
Thank you for listening to the Less Drama More Mama podcast. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes and make sure you subscribe, too, so you never miss a show. Got a question, comment, or idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at pam@lessdramamoremama.com
