00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 129, "Parenting Discomfort." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Well, hello there, everyone. And, my dear friends, thank you for joining me today. So happy to have you. Hey, just quick before we jump in to our topic today, I have a lot of people keep saying, "you know, is this a good time to get into coaching, in the middle of the holidays?" Yeah, you know what? Financially, it's an investment for sure, but let's talk about what coaching is. My job as your coach is not to tell you what to do. I don't give you advice, I don't tell you how you should do things. What my job is is to show you your mind. So let's say you're feeling stress or you're feeling anxiety or you're feeling frustration. Any of these things, if you want to work through these feelings and figure out where they're coming from, this is what I do. I help you figure out what thoughts you are having that are creating these feelings. Then we take a look at those thoughts and we say "well ,is this thought serving you? Is it helping you?" And if it's creating something that is not helping you, move into a better place or show up as the person that you want to show up as. That's where we take a look at it and that's where we figure out exactly what's going on with that thought. We can try to help you work on reframing that thought and creating new thoughts that will actually serve you better. 

01:44 

It's just such a beautiful process. If you're struggling with relationships, if you're struggling with yourself and getting yourself to a good place...this is where I help you, right? This is what I do as a coach. I think a lot of people think that we're advice givers. And we definitely are not. I help you see your mind and I help you see what you're creating with your thoughts. And I know that for me, I work with my life coach and it helps me so much because I see so often in working with her thoughts that I had no idea were going on until she pulls them out of what I'm talking about. I'm like, "that's what I'm thinking." And it's amazing to me. It is such a beautiful process to help me get clear on what I'm creating and how I'm creating it. And if I want to create something different, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'm like, "well, yeah, that's okay because I do believe that thought. So the feeling of frustration is okay for me to have because I am okay with the thought that's creating it." But if I'm not okay with the thought creating it, then I can start working on something different. So this would be a great. Coaching would be an amazing Christmas gift to yourself. It would be an amazing New Year's gift to yourself. You know what, let's start this new year off in a better place and it's just a great, great gift to ourselves. And it's an investment in ourselves and I will tell you, it takes time and energy and sometimes it's difficult. But it's so worth the process, so worth it and I know that because I do it myself. 

03:25 

Okay, we are going to jump in. So today we're going to chat a bit more about one of the toughest gigs out there. So parenting is tough for a lot of reasons. Some of the first that come to mind are the sheer mental and physical exhaustion caused by constant responsibility, never-ending physically and emotionally cleaning up after someone, increased work load, no free time, and the list goes on and on, right? And this is just in the first month of their life, right? For sure. Parenting seems like the never-ending energy pit until all of a sudden they're grown. So in my case, my oldest has graduated from high school and in most cases, if we are doing it fairly well, once they leave home, we can slack off a bit and it can get a little bit easier. I know that in my case, so much easier now that my daughter, my youngest daughter still lives here, but she is so fully adulting that she's super easy to live with and she takes care of her stuff, right? 

04:36 

But sometimes it doesn't get easier, right? And here enters another thing that can make parenting such a challenge, is that there are no right answers. Every parent-child relationship is individual and unique and no child needs the same things from us. Parenting definitely comes with physical and financial challenges. I want to focus today on the emotional challenges of parenting. The things that can cause so much emotional discomfort and it starts from when our children first enter into our world and take over, right? 

05:17 

The emotional challenges of parenting start as soon as these sweet little babies are born. We may read up on all the parenting books, but there is so much expert advice out there that is conflicting. Do we feed our child on demand or do we put them on a schedule? Who knows? I think while raising my young children I heard multiple and varied answers to this question all at the same time, right? So we really have to start learning to trust ourselves with so many of these questions. Am I destroying my child's chances of having a healthy immune system if I choose to bottle feed instead of breastfeed, anybody else hear that? Right? What happens if I start them on solid foods at three months instead of six months? Will I ruin their digestive system forever? Right? When they wake up crying in the night and nothing is wrong, do I let them cry it out? Do I gently pat them on the back or do I pick them up and hold them for three hours? Do I pick them up and put them down and pick them up and put them down? Like, how many of these is there no answer to? Right? There's lots of people out there who are saying "this is exactly what you do" and they're all saying all of those things. These are some overwhelming and important decisions we have to make from the time we bring these sweet children home from the hospital. And learning to trust ourselves can be really difficult. And this is part of the discomfort of parenting, especially when the kids are young: believing and trusting that we can know better what is best for our child than someone else. If you didn't have a lot of interaction with young children before you had your own, I think this can be even more difficult. 

06:51 

So I was a third of eight children and my two youngest siblings were born when I was in sixth grade and tenth grade. So I got to experience my mother parenting after years of raising children, and she was easygoing to begin with. So she was pretty lax with her parenting by the time those youngest kids came along and this is what I saw modeled. So when I had my first child, I was pretty chill about it. Because I had helped raise these two younger kids, right? Not really, but you know, as an older sibling, you get a lot of responsibility. I read parenting books, but I was confident in so many things about having a baby. To be honest, I never really sterilized bottles. And yes, I was a bottle feeder. And since my mother had bottle fed my younger siblings, it didn't seem weird to me. It didn't seem wrong to me. It didn't bother me at all. It seemed normal to me and didn't have anything morally right or wrong tied to it. But I learned that there's a lot of people who do feel that there is, right? If my child's pacifier dropped on the ground, I'd pick it up, wipe it off, put it back in their mouth. When my oldest was eight days old, he went to church for the first time and was systemically held by every girl who was eight years or older. And I thought it was great. We lived in Germany at the time and the older German women in our congregation, not so much thinking it was a good thing. They were totally freaked out that I was letting all these little girls hold him. And for the record, that child is still alive, as are my other three, and none of them has struggled with being sickly ever, even though they were bottle-fed and held by tons of people because I was a "babies love to be held, people love to hold babies. It's a win-win" kind of mom, right? And there's a lot of people who are very different than me and that's not right or wrong. It's just different, right? 

08:47 

But apparently I did everything wrong with my kids, but I trusted myself to know how to take care of them. My mother trusted herself, and she modeled that very well for me. I had a neighbor and a good friend though, who lived across the hall, who the first child she had ever held in her life was her own son. And she was about a year and a half ahead of me in the child process. And she literally, she told me this later, literally thought that I was going to kill my first child when I brought him home from the hospital. She was one who sterilized bottles for 12 months and was uber uptight about so many things that I was completely lax about. And guess what? Her child grew up to be healthy and happy as well. And yet we had very different parenting styles. Go figure, right? Learning to trust our God given instincts can be a tough road. And that is one reason why parenting can cause so much discomfort. It can be so easy to second guess ourselves, especially when so many people are so willing to give advice to young mothers. 

09:59 

And this is just the beginning of the discomfort. Let's grow these kids up a bit and see how uncomfortable we start getting. Shopping. In the store, your three year old, your five year old, or maybe even your seven year old, decides they are not happy and proceeds to throw a huge tantrum on the floor, banging fists and feet, right? There's an opportunity for a lot of discomfort here, right? Potentially. But I'm going to pop us into a thought model and see what could be uncomfortable. So your child is screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. That is a circumstance. What do you feel? You might feel embarrassed, annoyed, angry. Maybe you feel even amused or curious, right? What you are feeling is a result of, what do you got? Our thinking, right? You're getting this thought model down. Know you are. Okay, so what we're feeling is a result of what we're thinking. And the piece of that that is interesting is discovering what thoughts are going on in our brain. 

11:04 

I remember when I had four young kids, the oldest was probably 10. I don't remember specifics about this particular situation, but I do remember that I was upset about something one of my children had done. And I had a thought that I hadn't had before: was I upset because their behavior really needed some adjustment? Or was I upset because of how it would make me look to everyone who witnessed the behavior? I remember this being such a life-altering thought for me. And it changed me because the more I thought about the question, the more I begin to realize that the person I wanted to show up for was my child. When I was more worried about my reputation, or what the neighbors or the strangers in the grocery store thought, then I didn't have my children's backs. I was throwing them under the bus because of my own discomfort revolving around my thoughts about what other people thought who I didn't love nearly so much as my child. So what is the thought behind your uncomfortable emotion? That is so worth exploring. It gives us great insight into ourselves, which can sometimes be another piece of parenting discomfort, right? It's never ending. 

12:31 

Parenting provides us with a lot of amazing blessings, but one of the greatest is the opportunity if we're willing to see our own work so clearly. In the example I gave above, if I find that my thoughts are more concerned with other people or my reputation, then I can begin to realize that my thoughts are motivated by fear. If my thoughts are more concerned with what my children are learning and how they're engaging with the world and my relationship with them, and my responsibility as a mother, right, that I want to show up as a mother who teaches them, then I can probably begin to see that my thoughts are motivated by love. What kind of parent do I want to show up as? This is the insight that we can begin to gain about ourselves through our parenting. This insight is the information for me to know what my own work is. This question can continue to be relevant as our children grow even into adulthood. So one of the great things about raising children is the whole time they're with us in our home and even beyond, we have opportunities to explore our thoughts about what they are doing, how we feel about it, and what thoughts create those feelings. And these sweet kiddos provide us with never ending opportunities to feel embarrassed or annoyed or angry or amused. It's a veritable petri dish of self-discovery if we're willing to look at it and be curious. So this is such a beautiful plan, don't you think? I think God really put this one into play in an amazing way. 

14:05 

And as our children grow into teens and adults, what we thought we had understood and were good at all of a sudden doesn't matter anymore because all of the rules have changed. Our sweet teen starts to experiment with drugs and alcohol or gets pregnant or gets someone else pregnant. Maybe they become addicted to pornography or start staying out all night and we have no idea where they are. Maybe they just start talking back and really getting some lippy attitude, right? The opportunities for exploring ourselves are endless and it's uncomfortable. Once again, we may start feeling embarrassed, mortified, Filled with self-doubt, feeling like we're a failure. And this is all part of the process. Once we figure out how to manage these kinds of emotions when our children are younger and the stakes don't seem so high, like throwing a tantrum in the store, it's huge at the time for sure, but we grow into bigger and bigger things, right? Then they become teenagers and then the stakes are much higher and we get to learn to explore and manage our thoughts at a much deeper level, isn't it? So incredible how the process of personal growth is never-ending when we are seeking to be engaged in this way. 

15:20 

If we are willing to really look at ourselves and figure out the thoughts behind our feelings, then we are putting ourselves in a place for some progress and growth and self understanding that is difficult to come by in any other situation. Not impossible. People who don't have children still have a lot of really great opportunities to do this. It's just the nature of life, right? But parenting is what we're talking about today. So the thing that is so great about parenting is that, again, it is a never-ending opportunity for continued growth. Because once we make it through teen years, then these amazing people become adults and everything we've worked for changes once again. 

16:03 

So here's what I mean. We've just spent the last 18 years controlling so much of what happens in the lives of our child. We have planned vacations, we've gotten them to bed, and we've gotten them up from bed, and we've gotten them to school and home from school. As they got older we helped them schedule their school classes. We've made choices about what they eat and even the clothes they wear. They often drive the car we buy them and they may ask for advice on all sorts of issues. So of course this starts off with us doing all the things for them. And it starts tapering off as the child gets older and older, but generally we've had a lot of control over things through the years. Then these people move out one day, all of a sudden they move out and they expect us to just stop being in control, just like that. With one walk out the door, we have to change everything we've ever known about parenting. 

17:02 

And this can be a challenge because then we have discomfort all over again. Giving up control can be hard and uncomfortable. Parenting adult children is a whole new ball game than parenting when they were younger. They may still have things that we may have thoughts about that cause us embarrassment or dismay. We may question what we did as a parent that they turned out this way. When these uncomfortable feelings arise, guess what it's time for? Another exploration of our thoughts that are causing the feelings. And once again, we get to ask, are these thoughts serving me? Are they showing up from fear or love? Are they moving me into the action of showing up the way that I want to show up as a person? If my goal is to be a kind and loving person, am I showing up that way? Or am I harboring resentment for things they are doing, or boundaries that I am not setting? Am I embarrassed because they are living with a girlfriend or a boyfriend and they are not married? Or maybe they chose not to serve a mission or they came home early? This work that we do here is so incredibly valuable because it helps us to see our own thoughts and make some decisions about whether those thoughts are serving us. Only when we learn to understand why we are not showing up the way we want to, can we begin to change it. And because these relationships with our children are so close to our hearts, it can sometimes be really difficult to clearly see how we are engaging with them. Some of our thoughts and emotions and behaviors are so habitual that we don't even recognize them when we are in the act of engaging in them. 

18:44 

I know with my own children, as they have grown into adults, I have really needed to take a look at my love. I noticed that so much of the time it was not a clean love; it was a love with an agenda. And I had no idea because I had just loved that way for so long. If you haven't checked out the episode "Clean Love," go back and check that one out because that's one of my favorites. But for me, getting to a point where I could be aware of my agenda behind my love, or the fear behind my love, it was a process to get there. And it was a process that was fraught with discomfort, right? Parenting discomfort. It was so hard to see what was really going on. And to be honest, much of my awareness came about as I worked with other life coaches who helped me see thoughts that were so commonplace for me that I had no idea that they were there. Until all of a sudden I saw it. It kind of reminds me...it was just a funny story. Story off-topic. But one year I bought a Christmas wreath that I hung outside of my door and it stayed there. It was a live one and it stayed there and I didn't replace it until the following Christmas because it became so commonplace that I didn't see it at all, even in July. But I'll tell you what, the amazing news was was that after it had totally dried up, it turned into this really pretty kind of coppery orange color. It was perfect for fall. 

20:15 

Okay, so we have these things in our lives that we have no idea that they're there. These thoughts because they've always been there and we just don't even notice them. Okay, so at first when I recognized this tainted love that I have for my children, I felt embarrassed that I had loved them that way, with an agenda, with expectations that they would respond a certain way, or that they would change their behavior if I just loved them hard enough. And it was so uncomfortable to see that I was not the loving mother I had thought all these years that I was in my head. Realizing that I had been manipulating them with my love was so painful for me to see. But when I summoned the courage to honestly look at it, then I realized it was something I could change. I could learn to love in a clean, beautiful way. I could repent for my previous behaviors and I could offer a heartfelt apology to my children. I could grow into a person who was much closer to the version that I wanted to be. Was all of that uncomfortable? Absolutely. But now that I've cleaned a lot of that up and I'm living in more awareness of how I'm loving and how I'm showing up, there's a lot less discomfort. 

21:27 

I still have thoughts about things my children may be doing, but I'm onto myself so much more quickly these days. I catch myself often before I say something that I will regret, which is my action line, right? And more and more often I'm catching myself in my feeling line and in my thought line. And it's exciting to catch myself having thoughts that I know don't serve me and create the kind of relationship I want to have with my kids. Because the more I intercept these thoughts and replace them with thoughts that do serve me, then over time, the more I start to naturally think the kind of thoughts I want to have without so much work. And it's happening. I'm consistently noticing myself having more and more clean, loving thoughts with regards to my children. And I love it. And here's the great news. My children will continue to offer me circumstances and I will have thoughts about them and I will feel discomfort. They'll bring home potential marriage partners that may cause me some discomfort. They will make marriage and parenting choices that I'm sure I will have all sorts of thoughts about. And I don't believe it's ever gonna stop my whole life. I will continue to have opportunities to manage my thoughts  around the circumstances they bring into my life. And that is the beauty and discomfort of parenting. Continual opportunities to see my thoughts, to seek to understand how my thoughts either are or aren't serving me. 

22:56 

My discomfort around parenting has nothing to do with my child. It has nothing to do with their behavior or their choices or their lifestyle. My discomfort has everything to do with my thoughts about their behavior or their choices or their lifestyle. And if I can continually check my discomfort and clean up my thoughts, thereby cleaning up my love, then I am consistently becoming the person I was created to become. I am getting some really good practice in at becoming this person. I am learning to love as Christ does. I am taking a step forward on the path toward eternal life. It's all just a lifelong process, and there will always be discomfort because we are people who are always growing and changing and evolving, and we're people who are always having thoughts: well-conditioned thoughts that have been in our brains for years. And as a result, our relationships are also constantly growing and changing and evolving. So, perfect place for us to see our work and move forward in having more of the kind of experiences we really want to have. That's what parenting offers us, and it's brilliant and it's beautiful, isn't it? And this awareness around the constant discomfort, awareness around our feelings and the thoughts that are creating them is one of the greatest things about growing up. 

24:33 

Growing up is awesome. I love it. I love it. And I hope that you are loving this middle-age. If you're struggling with this age, feeling stuck, feeling like you can't figure out this middle-age gig, this is what I do. This is what I help you figure out. You are my people, right? So, if you need some help, I can help you get there. I can help you get to a place where you are in a place of growth and you're able to manage your discomfort. You're able to understand where that discomfort comes from and you're able to work through it. Okay, my dear friends, if this podcast is helping you, please share it. Please share this information with people who need a healthier, emotional space to live in. This is what this is all about, okay? So, share it and if you have not subscribed, do so. Please leave me a review. If you haven't done that yet, I would appreciate that a lot. And that's going to do it for us today. Wish you all the best as we are moving in on Christmas, right? We've got about a week and a half, 10-11 days left. So hang in there, my friends, make it happen for you and I will talk to you next week. Bye! 

25:47 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!