Dr. Becky Kennedy: Overcoming Guilt & Building Tenacity in Kids & Adults
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January 13, 2025
TLDR: Clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy shares practical strategies for better emotional processing and healthy relationships in parenting, work, romance, and friendship. Topics include managing guilt, building frustration tolerance, nurturing emotional intelligence, impact of technology on emotions, empathy, power dynamics, projection, and storytelling.

In the latest episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, host Andrew Huberman welcomes Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist and founder of Good Inside. The conversation revolves around parenting, emotional processing, and the journey toward resilience for both children and adults. Below is a concise summary of key points covered in the episode.
Understanding Emotional Processing
Dr. Kennedy emphasizes the importance of emotional processing as a foundational skill for developing healthy relationships not only in parenting but across all aspects of life. Key concepts include:
- Emotions Are Normal: Dr. Kennedy notes that emotional expressions, such as sadness or anxiety, should not be hidden from children, as they are naturally perceptive.
- Coherent Narratives: Children benefit from understanding the emotions and contexts around them. Giving them truthful explanations about complex emotional experiences promotes resilience.
Strategies for Managing Guilt and Shame
Dr. Kennedy highlights the difference between guilt (acting against one’s values) and the pressure people often feel due to societal expectations. Key strategies include:
- Redefining Guilt: Understanding guilt as a signal to help align actions with values rather than a reason to feel bad can transform one’s emotional landscape.
- Empathy vs. People Pleasing: Parents need to be cautious about how their emotional state may burden children while striking a balance in nurturing their capacity for care.
Actionable Takeaways
- Model Emotional Honesty: Parents should share authentic emotions with their children to teach them that feeling a range of emotions is normal and manageable.
- Build Frustration Tolerance: Encourage children to face challenges and frustrations as pathways to building capability. Normalize the learning space by celebrating the effort rather than just the outcome.
- Elevate Communication: Use stories and personal narratives to help children process their emotions and feelings – this promotes understanding and connection.
The Role of Technology
Dr. Kennedy discusses how technology impacts emotional processes, particularly among children:
- Immediate Gratification: Today's instant communication can undermine children’s capacity to handle delays and challenges, leading to low frustration tolerance.
- Mindfulness in Use: Encouraging mindful relationships with technology can foster better emotional health in children and adults alike.
Encouraging Growth and Resilience
As children navigate challenges, Dr. Kennedy provides strategies for fostering resilience:
- Normalize Struggles: Let children learn from their setbacks without overprotective interventions.
- Small Wins Matter: Set achievable goals to help build children’s confidence. This can involve daily reflections, such as whispering affirmations to them at bedtime.
Conclusion
The conversation underscores the critical importance of emotional intelligence, resilience, and healthy modeling in parenting. Dr. Kennedy's insights offer valuable perspectives that apply not only to parents but to anyone engaging with relationships, work, and self-care.
This podcast episode serves as a reminder that cultivating emotional intelligence, empathy, and the capacity for enduring discomfort are essential for navigating life’s complexities. Listening to Dr. Becky Kennedy can empower individuals to foster deeper connections with themselves and others.
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and one of the world's foremost experts in parent-child relationships. Now you may or may not have children. If you do, today's episode is absolutely for you.
If you don't, well, you were once a child. Perhaps you're even still a child. Today's episode also will have valuable knowledge and tools that you can apply to your life. Today, Dr. Becky Kennedy teaches us an immense number of extremely valuable tools for the workplace, for romantic relationships, for family relationships of all types, not just parent-child relationships,
and of course also for parent-child relationships. We discussed themes that have not been discussed previously on the Huberman Lab podcast, topics such as guilt, which Dr. Becky Kennedy offers a completely unique perspective on, one that I've never heard before and that frankly, I don't think anyone has heard before. In fact, she distinguishes between what most people think is guilt
and an entirely different set of emotions and offers you very useful practical tools for when you experience guilt and how to work with guilt. We also extensively discuss frustration or what she calls frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance is an extremely important theme for everybody to understand and apply in their lives because frustration tolerance, as Dr. Becky Kennedy so aptly points out, is central to the learning process of anything at every age.
If you can understand this concept and you apply some of the very simple rules and tools that Dr. Kennedy explains during the podcast, I assure you, you can learn many more things much more quickly and with much greater satisfaction, if not during the process, certainly at the end when you master that learning. And those are just a few of the themes that we discussed during today's episode. Again,
Whether or not you have children, I assure you that today's episode is going to be immensely beneficial for all of your relationships. You will notice during today's episode that our studio backdrop is different. You will notice that for once, I was not wearing this particular style of shirt. The reason for that is that this episode was recorded during the LA fires, what was initially called the Palisades fire and then spread to multiple fires throughout LA County.
So we were not able to access our normal studio. So I want to express extreme gratitude to Rich Roll, our good friend in the podcasting space, who allowed us to use his podcast studio, which is where I'm seated now and where I held the discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. First off, our entire team, our homes and our studio are fine. I can assure you of that, but most importantly, our thoughts and our prayers go out to the people who have lost their homes, lost pets, and sadly, there have been fatalities during the LA fires.
So our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and we hope everyone remains safe. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy, welcome back. I'm so happy to be here.
Grateful to Rich Roll for lending us his studio under the duress of fires in Los Angeles. I'm praying that his home is okay. It's unclear at this moment, but in any event,
Let's talk about emotions, both theory and practice. And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I'm certain that this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody. So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something, but then there's the reality. So as a parent, let's say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it's okay to be sad.
Like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, et cetera. But let's say you're feeling particularly sad about something.
Do you express that and show that in front of your kids? Because I've also heard that young kids, in particular, younger than eight or nine, perhaps shouldn't be aware that their parents are experiencing, say, extreme sadness, because it can be scary to them, where they might feel like their world is destabilizing. And then we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents. And then this whole thing becomes pretty complicated. So while there's no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time,
How do you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience and express their emotions? Yeah. And I think everything I'm about to share applies, you know, in the workplace, right? Like, can a boss be, you know, really upset in front of the person they manage management, right? So it's all the same stuff. So I guess zooming out as a star.
Emotions are normal. Emotions are unstoppable. You can't not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right? And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it's really hard to not show someone that you're sad.
You might think you're doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive. They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends on adults. So they have to always notice, is my adult around? Is my adult okay? So they really attune to what's going on for us, right? And so I think
The kind of question is less, do I show my emotions to my kid or not? And it's more, okay, if I'm sad, my kid is going to notice, what do I do then? And as a principal, one of the things I think about often is information doesn't scare kids as much as the absence of information scares kids.
So let's say there's something really awful. I don't know, as a parent, your family member, someone died of cancer. I don't know. There's something really horrible that you just found out, right? There's wildfires right now. Let's say you evacuated and you found out your house burned down. You're sad.
Your child is going to notice that and you want your child to notice that. You don't want your kid to be a teenager and adult who goes around the world unable to pick up on emotional cues from other people.
That's not adaptive. And so the patterns we set with our kids when they're young inform their view of the world when they're older. And so here I am. Let's say it's the situation of somebody dying and I'm upset. First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, it's not my kid seeing me sad. That's going to destabilize them.
It's seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it because then my kid goes, pretty sure my mom was upset. Oh, she's not. Oh, she's pretending like nothing happened. Oh, she looks sad, but she's saying she's not sad. That is really upsetting. It would be like hearing your boss say, oh yeah, 20% layoffs. What are we doing? I don't know. Oh, hi, everything's great. How are you?
Scary. What you'd want is your boss say you just heard something. You were right to hear that. We are about to go through a really tough time. I'm stressed about it. That's why I yelled. You might be stressed. Here's what I know.
This is going to be hard and we're going to get through it together. Now, all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container. It has a story. Humans need stories. We like stories. And so often we think it's the emotions that disregulate a kid. It's the lack of a story to explain it. So let's say this really did happen. People always say to me, OK, but
Dr. Becky, my kid is four. I'm gonna say that their aunt died. They don't even know cancer, right? We don't have a better alternative. I can't even tell you how many parents I've seen whose kids have all of these issues because of the made up stories. I just said she went to sleep for a while, six months later. My kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night. Yeah, they haven't seen their aunt who went to sleep one time, you know, creates a huge issue, no matter what bogus story you make up.
Kids can handle the truth, and they can handle the truth when it's told to them from a loving trusted adult. It's kind of like me and you. Someone can tell us a hard truth, but it's from someone you feel safe with and that you feel like also believes in you and says it honestly, it might be hard, but it doesn't feel awful. So,
It's about saying to your kid, you saw me crying. One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really builds their confidence. It's just you were right to notice that I was crying and I'm feeling sad. And look, you saw that? I'm going to tell you why.
and making this up. Ants Sally died. Do you know what dying means? Dying is when someone's body stops working. Then I pause. All right, so it's just be a monologue. I'll see how my kid responds. I might add.
I'm not dying. Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times. I'm not dying. No one else is dying. I'm safe. And you know what? I'm sad. And I'm still your strong mom who can take care of you.
That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of everything's fine. My kid keeps seeing me crying. They keep hearing words. They're not used to hearing, die, cancer, aunt, Sally, funeral, whatever it is. That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.
So it's the absence of information that causes the harm. Yeah. And it's the lack of coherence between what they're observing and feeling and kind of this like open loop. Um, if I kind of place it in neuroscience, see terms, I feel like the brain does think in the terms of, in terms of stories, stories have a beginning, middle and an end. And they kind of want to know where they are in that story.
That's exactly right. And the terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative. What is therapy? Why does therapy help people? It's interesting. Therapy doesn't change what happened to you. Therapy doesn't change your past. Therapy does not take away the pain, but the pain was never the thing that really got in our way.
It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support. And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving them a coherent narrative is what they need. And without that, the way I think about it is, they have what I call, unformulated experience. It's just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body, unformulated, that tends to later show up as triggers.
right? And kind of other things in adulthood. And so yeah, that's what we want to try to avoid when we can. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Wealthfront. I've been using Wealthfront for my savings and my investing for nearly a decade, and I absolutely love it. Every January I set new goals for the year, and one of my goals for 2025 is to focus on saving money.
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I can't help but put this neuroscience lens on this because I find it so interesting that what you're basically saying, if I understand correctly, is that until we can place things into a story, which is really a sense of beginning, middle, and end, a sense of time, it just reverberates in us. I mean, I think I can't help myself.
I don't want to give the impression we've got fires burning all around us in terms of this building. But with some distance between us and the fires, that's actually true. And I think one of the things that's so destabilizing for kids and adults in this kind of circumstance is that we don't know how this is going to work out. We just don't. And of course, none of us have a crystal ball.
We can't peer into the future. But it's the not knowing that really extends our brain resources. And I can imagine that for a kid seeing their parent upset and then hearing, well, no, I'm OK. I'm OK. Would create this kind of open loop where then the kid has to worry about it. Like when will this come to an end?
One question about expressing sadness in front of a child, and if let's say somebody expresses why they're sad, is it okay to accept consolation from the kid? Because we hear so much that we shouldn't have to parent.
as children, we shouldn't have to parent our parents. And this is a big theme, especially on social media nowadays. Were you the parent to your parent? Were you the one that took out the trash when someone else should have done it and therefore you took on more responsibilities? I don't want kids to think they shouldn't take out the trash, but you know what I mean? But if you're consoling a parent about a lost job,
if you're the parent, the kid, rather, that is sort of the go-between between the parents as sort of acting as therapists. We hear about this a lot, a lot. And I think a lot of people peer into their past and say, yeah, I grew up way too fast. So on the other hand, I think we would all agree that being a empathic person, teaching our kids that if somebody's crying, you can walk over to that person perhaps and just say, you know,
Do you want me to sit with you or maybe do nothing at all? Maybe offer a solution, maybe not. But at least provide some sort of support. That seems healthy. But the basic question is should parents accept consolation from children when the parent is sad or experiencing some other negative emotion?
I think this is a great question. There's a couple things that are coming to mind. So first of all, all of this is a matter of extent and patterning. Yes, we do not want our kids to feel like it is their job to take care of our emotions. It's not a good situation.
And I think the difference here actually comes down to what the true definition of empathy is. To me, empathy is noticing someone's feelings and caring about them. It's not taking care of them. That's a big difference. So let's say I'm crying and my kid comes over and this whole situation, maybe somebody died,
And they're like, oh, my goodness, mom, can I give you a hug? And do you want me to get you a cup of water? OK, I just want parents out. You know what I'm saying? No, no, I do not want you to be a parentified child. Like, I'd be like, that is so, that is so kind. Yes, that would feel great. OK, that's totally fine. I think the line is, and every parent just knows this for themselves, where it might get to, oh, you know what?
I love that you're noticing I'm sad and I love that you care about that and I also want to let you know those are my feelings not yours and I am really able to take care of them myself with whoever is a friend and you're still really allowed to be a kid who can go play who can go have fun
who can even not listen to me once in a while when I say it's bath time, that's actually your job. So let's go do our jobs well. And to me, that comes down to what empathy is, the delineation of what is a parent's job and what is a kid's job. But also I think all of this can get misrepresented in social media. And I don't want parents to think that they always have to chastise their kid for acting in a caring way.
I feel like kids are, as you said before, kids are so perceptive about what their parents are experiencing, and they'll create or move towards all sorts of emotional gymnastics in order to work with that. Years ago, I saw, I think it was a YouTube video with Jim Carrey, who basically revealed that he became funny
as a way to make his sick mom laugh that he grew up with a very sick mom, which is chronically ill. And so he would like throw himself down the stairs and try and make her laugh or do you know, and he was an incredible world class physical comic among other aspects of comedy. But that his whole career was born out of this childhood tendency.
to notice that his mom was really hurting and try and basically make her laugh, make her feel something good. And you know, now I'm thinking about this because it's just incredible the way that kids can pick up on something and then try and find a solution to it. Yeah. You know, I could imagine that for kids who have a sick parent could be a mental challenges or physical challenges that they got to notice. Yes. And in the case of Jim Carrey, one could argue whether or not it was adaptive or not adaptive. He had this, you know,
Meteor career, but eventually just left it decided that wasn't what he wanted to do. But leaving that extreme example aside, let's say a parent is sick with the flu or is grieving the loss of, I mean, God forbid a spouse or
or something really major. At what point does the parent need to say, listen, I'm really hurting. This is bad, and I can handle it. That might not actually be true. The question is, how much information to give kids? Because you don't want to lie to them. On the other hand, you don't want them to feel the burden of them.
of needing to worry about a circumstance. And I'm framing this in the context of sick parent, but I'm also raising this thing of financial worries, a close friend who told me that growing up there
parent was constantly dealing with moving from one job to the next. It was like this issue of whether or not we're going to have enough resources to get through the next year was a constant question. And this person is now in their mid-30s. And you can tell it still haunts them. And it's completely shaped their relationship to work and finances. Yeah. I mean, I think we can think about this compared to, what would I want from my boss?
I have a boss who's, I don't know, going through a really hard time or having a really hard time at home and I kind of noticed that I'd probably want my boss to level with me and say, kind of again, you're right to notice I'm going through a hard time.
But at what point would it feel like, oh, am I safe in this organization, right? I think we probably all have a point there. And I think it's the same thing with kids. Kids really do need to feel like they have sturdy parents. Again, I always go back to pilots because I think airplane examples are so powerful because there's very few times in adulthood that we actually feel like our safety is truly dependent on another adult, like 100%.
When you're a passenger in an airplane, you are 100% dependent, so it's kind of the closest dynamic.
And you can imagine what it would be like if the pilot was saying, going through a really hard time, who wants to come in and give me, you know, I don't know, you know, tell me a nice story. Like, oh my goodness, like, I can't, you're going through a hard time. This is really not feeling great, right? And what that means and which is, you know, kind of even a larger point is if you're a pilot, you need to make sure you're really doing a lot of self-care more than the average person because of this outsized responsibility you have.
This is what I think about parenting and it's why, you know, the bigger theme here is this is what gets me out of bed, you know, every morning so motivated is not just to help parents understand tantrums or emotions or, you know, the latest struggle in their house, although I actually love that.
It says like, hold on, like we've been really sold like an awful story about what it really means to be a parent and how parenting really first and foremost is a journey of self care. How can I be the sturdiest person possible? Who do I need in my life when things go poorly? So I don't lean on my young children and give them a responsibility that is not theirs. You know, I was just saying to someone the other day that when you have kids,
All of the unhealed parts of your childhood come right before your eyes. They are just triggered over and over and over with your own children. Like, you know, oh, my kid's whining. I can't deal with that. Oh, well, whining is probably triggering because it's kind of representative of helplessness. What was it like in my family if I kind of felt helpless? Was that allowed? Did I grow up in a
You know, if you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about family. Okay, if I don't resolve that, I'm going to act that all out on my children and pass that along. So all of kind of
These situations where parents are feeling all these different emotions from a trigger from something in their life, I think it goes to what I always tell parents, you know, you have a first and foremost job of self care and taking care of yourself. That doesn't mean traveling to Europe for the year and leaving your kids alone.
It means, what is going on inside you? What skills do you need? What networks of support do you need? What do you have around you to help you on the hardest journey of your life and the most rewarding one of being a parent? So that you don't have to say to your kids, you know, oh, you know, can you kind of take care of me?
Paul Conti, who came on this podcast to do a series about mental health, not just mental challenges, but also mental health, which is an interesting concept in its own right, has been quoted as saying that if you were to list out the 100 most important things for romantic relationships, it would be self-care and communication repeated 50 times.
And I'm thinking about that now because it sounds like a pretty good model for pretty much every relationship. Self-care communication. And I must say, the first time I heard him say that it wasn't on my podcast, it was on a different podcast. I was surprised. I thought, self-care first, but the way you're framing it seems to me that if self-care comes first or at least very high on the list of what parents should do,
that frees up the kids to kind of live and experience life with a lot more ease, a lot more peace. Yeah. And to basically unburden them of about 50,000 jobs. That's exactly right. And I think self-care.
has gotten, you know, misrepresented. It doesn't mean getting a manicure every week. It could, if that does it for you. But when I think about self-care and I really think about the work we do with parents at Good Inside, we always say Good Inside and like our app, it's not parenting. It's for parents. It's for the journey of what it means to be a parent. It's for your own stuff. It's for your triggers. It's for finally learning how to set boundaries. It's about finally learning that it's okay to get your needs met.
even when they inconvenience others. It's learning that your relationships are strong enough that they can get through hard moments where people are upset with you, right? It's about finally saying to, if you need to, your mother-in-law, we can't have any visitors on Saturday. And the reason I'm finally able to do that is because I understand myself, value, and all this stuff. This has nothing to do with the fact that your kid isn't sleeping at night, but that is the foundation
for intervening in the way you're proud of when your kid is waking up at two in the morning, right? So that is the self care. It's really like a, not just self care, it's self establishment, it's self growth, really. I don't know the psychology literature or clinical literature around this, but I'm thinking about speed of emotional shifts.
In my own experience of life, I've known moody people, and I've known not as moody people. I define moody as people that whose moods fluctuate quickly and sometimes spontaneously. But this idea that some people are like steady as a rock is a great concept, but we also know that we need to feel our emotions, express them to some extent.
And yet there are people where, if we were to plot this, it would look like a high frequency wave, where some people are really upset, then they're feeling better again. They're upset, then they're feeling better again. I'm not talking about extreme pathology here. I'm talking about, you know, someone cuts them off in traffic and they're pissed, but then they're fine.
They're very, very happy about something they see. So it does always have to be negative. But then they're kind of like flat affect and then they're into something negative. I think that experience of emotions is so far and away different from the experience of emotions emitted from somebody who
You can kind of see the emotion coming. It's like a slow swell. It's like a expansion and then a contraction again that you have time. And I feel like I keep coming back to this theme of time perception. Anytime we have time or we hear about like in the all the Buddhist traditions, like space, like you're trying to create mental space and you know that this gap between stimulus and response, it all sounds great. But with some people,
You have to really be on your toes or perhaps you disengage. And so I've never heard a satisfying answer to this probably because I've never asked it out loud. If you're a kid or if you're a parent and somebody is experiencing something, let's say they're really angry or really happy.
You can imagine riding that wave in with them. You could also imagine sitting back from it. And some of this is probably what we'd call temperament. But maybe you could talk about this a little bit in the context of having one or both parents. It's kind of like a high frequency shifts between emotions versus kind of a slow expansion and then settling of emotions. Because I feel like those are two completely different experiences of life.
Yeah. I mean, I think you're speaking to how differently we feel emotions. I mean, you know, I think about one of my kids who I call a deeply feeling kid, right? So my image is always she's just more porous to the world. And so if you think about someone who's more porous, that their pores are literally wider, a lot more is going to come in. And guess what? A lot more is going to come out, right? And
She's a kid who, by the way, you're in a certain area in New York City. She's like, I can't be here the smell. For me, I'm wired differently. I was like, I literally don't smell anything different. No, does that mean she's wrong? No. I actually bet knowing her she smells things. And then she lets me know how awful it is and she can't stand on that corner. And for me, in that moment, at least, because we're probably all volatile in different ways, I look steady as a rock.
Right? Um, I have another kid who, yeah, is pretty steady.
until he feels like his authority and power is threatened, and then he better watch out. And so in one moment, someone might see him as, oh, wow, that kid's really volatile, but in probably 90% of other moments, he's kind of cool as a cucumber. So I also think it's important to categorize kids not as always one way or another, but we all feel emotions differently. None of them is wrong or right. To me, the goal
is to not be locked into any one thing. That to me, rigidity is always the enemy. That's what holds us back in adulthood. If we're always one way, I can never handle someone cutting me off in traffic because the emotion takes me over and I have road rage. Yeah, that's not good. That's a very rigid, limited way of living life, but it's probably also limiting.
to say, I've never really gotten riled up about anything. Forget road rage, but it's kind of amazing to get riled up once in a while and to feel really passionately about something and to feel something enough that you want to go do something about it, right? So there's no morality on it. I think what's tricky, I can even say as a parent of three kids.
is each of my kids, I always kind of imagine this, five of all these different parts of me, they each need a different part of me to kind of lead. Like they almost need different lead parents, right? So my kid who is my deeply feeling kid, I know what's so important is that I believe her experience and I better be ready with certain boundaries because she feels things so intensely.
especially when she was younger, I have to step in more often. There's more difficult behavior, right? My kid who's really, really steady, I try to sometimes, even though it's convenient, because he's so easy, you know, there's definitely a lot going on in there. And sometimes I wonder,
to see almost feel like all the emotional space is taken up by his siblings. And the only thing left for him is kind of steady as a rock. And that can lead to a rigidity later in life, right? So I think these are like moving systems. So much of how we experience emotions growing up is also dictated by the system and kind of the roles our siblings play.
Um, so I don't know if that kind of gives you enough of an answer. Um, but I think that's very, that's informative. Yeah. I think that thing I'd really want parents to know is, I think we place a lot of morality on it. And when for honest with ourselves, we're probably just comparing our kid to how we do things. So if you're someone who's pretty steady, you're like, my kid is crazy. They're dramatic.
Right? If you're someone who's a little more out there, you're not as bothered by that kid. And then you have another kid, you're like, that kid's kind of boring, right? Because they're so flat. And so, I mean, I think this is true in couples too. Whenever we're fighting, we're probably just saying, why can't you be more like me? When we're triggered by our kid, we're like, why can't you be more like me? Right? That's probably what we're always saying to each other, going back to communication. But if you take a little different perspective of, hold on a second, there's no wrong or right way to feel emotions.
Some behaviors are not allowed, but all the emotions have information. And what might my kid need right now instead of, oh my goodness, is my kid messed up or why is my kid not just a little bit more like me? How useful is it to talk to kids about emotions when they're not happening? I mean, to me, this is something I always just say, I always phrase it as emotion talk, right?
knowing that emotions live within you, knowing that there's names for them, that they're normal, that they make sense to me. It's like the ultimate leg up in life. It's like it gives your kids such resilience because we can't beat our emotions. I feel like we've been trying that for generations. Like if I just only didn't feel so angry or so jealous or so sad,
Our emotions are so primal in our body. And I really do believe emotions. They're information. That's what they are. Why would we ever want to not get the information our body is giving us? And sometimes it's almost dramatic what happens in an amazing way. So many people, I think it was so many times of people in a room for therapy to start crying. I'm so sorry.
You're feeling something so intensely that your body is producing water from your eyes to get your attention. Like that's, that must be really important information. Why are we saying sorry? And as far as we know a uniquely human thing, I could be wrong about this, but a colleague of mine at Stanford and psychiatrist called Diceroff talked about this.
that humans are the only species that we are aware of that sheds tears for sake of emotion. Other animals, I have lacrimal glands, they produce water, so to speak, salty water that comes out of their eye region, but not as it relates to emotions. At least we don't think so.
So that's a great example. Like I even think about a conversation I have had with my kids, and I like to just have these moments here and there. Whenever I talk about good conversations with my kids, I think people think I have these 45 minute note there. They're usually 10 seconds. I say one thing my kids say, can I have a snack now? And I think that's a great conversation because I know it gets in there.
Do you know that tears have really important information for us? I can be like, what? What do you say? I'm just thinking, so many people think tears are bad. Tears are kind of amazing. It's like our body is trying to stop us and it's like asking us to pay attention to something really powerful.
I just think it's kind of an amazing thing. Our body does. And my kid goes, can I have pretzels? Oh, sure. I'll get you pretzels. That to me is a win. I just want to tell everyone. I love it. That is a 10 out of 10. I'm bragging to people about that. I'm like, I had the best conversation because I know this is seeping in. Because in the moment, my kid is crying.
You think it's going to be helpful when my seven-year-old is crying. Tears are amazing. They're like a few months. No one wants to hear that. My reflex would be to tell them the biology of tears. No Masobo, who was on the podcast, told us that tears contain hormones that signal to other people, pheromones, excuse me, that literally change the biology of the people around you. We can actually smell tears. We don't realize we're doing it. See, here I go. So I realized, I spent enough time with kids that if you tell them that, they're like,
Whatever. But you know, and that's a great conversation around the dinner table. And again, your kids will roll their eyes. That kids roll their eyes about everything. I always think rolling their eyes or stop is kind of a kid's way of saying, there's a lot coming at me on my own person. I just need to push it away a little.
So that on my own time and under my own control, I can take it in. And we take eye rolls or whatever it is so personally that then we end up getting into a partial go, why are you rolling my eyes? And we miss this opportunity. If we just say nothing then, our kid is going to take in what we just said, just walk away. Let the whole process happen. You know, it's kind of like if your boss comes in and says something like, oh, look, that project really wasn't as good as it could have been. And I really need these things done.
And then imagine, if you're rolling your eyes at me, if your boss just leaves the room, you probably think, I didn't do that as well as I could, I'm gonna go work on it, right? So I feel like not taking the bait is a very important parenting tool. But I think those moments with our kids to talk about emotions and to talk about our own, especially when it comes to struggle, right?
One of the things I think a lot about, I try to be intentional with my kids, especially when they're younger. I just think kids are flooded by their parents' capability. And it is so hard to learn in environments where someone's capability is so far beyond your own.
Like, I'm not a good cook, but if I was really learning to cook, I would want to learn from someone from here there, you know, burn some garlic or messed up the broccoli. And then I was like, okay, well, I guess I could do this next time.
But if I'm learning to cook from someone who is whatever celebrity chef, I don't know. That person's like way too far from me. And I almost feel shame. So I think about this with our kids and how this relates to emotions where when your kids are younger, especially if you just think about the first 10 minutes of their day,
like they're trying to figure out maybe how to brush their teeth, how to go to the bathroom, how to turn on the sink, how to wash their hands. They always put their shirt on the wrong way. They can't get on their socks. There's so many things and you come out dressed perfectly and then I can't get on my socks and you go like this. Okay, one, two. And kind of in those moments, I always think that's, I'm just kind of saying to my kid, I can do everything easily and they don't know our history. They don't know. We struggled to put on socks for five years too.
I put on my shirt backward, you know, until college, they don't know that. And so I think again, in these calm moments, you have this opportunity to say something like, I cannot finish this crossword puzzle or like, I love New York Times games, right? And it's so fun with my kids now that they're older, but my connections was really hard today. I just, I really struggled with it and I was like, oh, I can't do it. I can't do it. And then I took a deep breath and I,
try it a little more and maybe I said, and I did it or I didn't do it, whatever it is. And it gives my kid, first of all, it gives my kid an opportunity to just notice that I struggle too. It gives my kid again kind of an arc and a story of, oh, someone I admire so much, every kid admires their parents.
They've had hard times. They still have hard times. They work through things. They burn garlic. They can kind of talk themselves through it. That is such a more powerful kind of lesson in emotion regulation than teaching your kid kind of directly.
It also seems that here we're not defining the age of the kids, but if one presents themselves as perfect or close to it in any kind of relationship, work, romantic parenting, et cetera, sooner or later, you're going to fall from grace because they're either going to be looking for the mistake or the moment you make a mistake, it's going to be this fracture in the picture that people
had of you. And I have to say, and I think some people might get irritated or even, dare I say, triggered by the language I'm about to use, but I feel like the real ninja move in all this is to acknowledge that there are power dynamics between parent and child, but then to try and dissolve the power dynamics.
And I say this in the context of having run a lab for a long time, which is very different than raising small children, but you have people who are coming into your laboratory. If they're your graduate student or postdoc, they're sticking their whole career on your ability to teach and mentor.
And a lot is at stake. Nothing is for certain. They might not get a job. The papers might not work out. And so there's just so much tension around it. And so as a PI, as a principal investigator in our lab, I remember feeling that pressure of like, it's got to work out. And one of the best things that ever happened to me as a graduate student was that my first paper took forever to get accepted.
and we almost got in and then it didn't get in and then finally it got in such that every paper after that felt like a breeze because it took so damn long the first time and I got to see that my advisor
couldn't make magic happen. And fortunately, that's the way the scientific process is supposed to work. And I think about this in the context of parenting. If you're seen as invincible, we hear about this. People say, I thought my dad was Superman. I thought my mom was superwoman. But you can imagine how disappointing it must be when they discover anything about a lack of capacity or a break in emotional stability, et cetera.
So, how does one present themselves as both powerful and the positive sense of the word? Such a thorny word, but powerful and the positive sense of the word, but human and vulnerable to making mistakes in a way that
You don't give up the essential, let's just call it what it is, a power dynamic with your kids so that the kid then doesn't feel they have to parent you. I love this topic because it's so interesting. Right now it's kind of review season I could inside because I also am the CEO of a company. And to me, the things I talk about with parenting and my kids.
And for other people parenting their kids, they are the exact same principles exact as leading a team. And so when I think about review season and the way we get feedback and the right and back and forth, it brings us all together and I'll explain. So the other day I said to my kids,
I love resolutions. I actually do love resolutions, right? Because I love just the opportunity to say, what is one small thing? I'm like, I value and I'm going to hold myself accountable to do. What I said to my kids was, I want you to come up with one thing, just one thing for now. And it has to be something like manageable and real that I could do that would really make me a better mom to you.
You asked your kids to ask my kids this. I actually asked my kids this relatively frequently. It's like a review, right? Because it's something I do at work all the time. And what I say at work is because often my director reports say nothing. And I said, I just want to tell you something. I need one thing from you by the end of the day.
I need it because like, I know, I know I can get hot, I know I can get a little reactive, right? I know I'm always go, go, go. And there probably is a moment that, you know, I need to pause. I know, I know a lot of issues. So if you don't tell me one thing, I don't trust you as much. So here's what happened with my kids. At that point, it was only two of them. It just happened the other day. My son says, my seven year old son,
Sometimes when you're trying to get some work done at home, and I want to get your attention for something, this is what you do, Mom. One minute, one minute, one minute, and then you still don't give me. He's clocking. He's clocking. I'd rather you tell me five minutes and then give me your full attention. That's literally what I would say. I was just like, that is a really good suggestion, and I really needed to hear that. I can do that.
This is a couple of days ago. Okay, I have to admit, two days ago, he was trying to show me something and he just goes, you're doing it. You're not really giving me your attention. And I said, you're right. Thank you. Change is hard. I actually do need about two minutes. Is that okay? And then you'll put my computer down because I'll sometimes look at him and kind of look, you know, and he goes, okay. It was kind of, it was so beautiful. My daughter said,
At night, she goes, I'm so interesting when you give people this opportunity, how generous they can be with you. I think it's been true at work and home. I don't go, I know when it's my bedtime at night. I always want to do one or two extra things. I know. I always have to get my water. It's just how I am. That's what she said. And you get this rushing voice and you go, come on, it's bedtime. And that's like the last voice out here before bed.
And I really don't like that voice. And so can you just know that I always need to do those one or two extra things and not use that voice?
And again, I said, you know what? I wouldn't want to hear that as the last voice. You know, and I take it night, especially as a little digression. I always feel like I'm in a rush. I don't know. An extra two minutes of my kids, like, my kids are getting older. They're not even in my house for that much longer. I just have to remind myself, I'm not in a rush. Like, this is the best use of my time. And so I said, and that one I've been really good at.
So how do we show our kids that we're fallible one way is actually like asking for feedback, especially when you have older kids. When you have a teenager, this is the number one thing that can change things around. You know what I'm thinking about? It's hard to be a teen and I'm definitely not a perfect parent of a teen. I'm sure you have a long list, but for right now, can you name one thing that I could do?
That would make me a better parent to you. And I want to follow this through because what a lot of teens will do or parents will say, my teenager tells me something ridiculous.
They'll say, well, you know how you make me charge my phone at 9 or 10 p.m. out of the room, you could let me sleep with my phone, which maybe it's like I'm just not going to do that. Or they'll say, you know what you could do? You could give me $1,000 every week for an allowance, right? And so parents will say, my kid doesn't take it seriously. This is where, like to me, one of the most important life skills, parenting, management, friendships, it doesn't matter.
is differentiating someone's words on the surface from their needs or their feelings or their fears, whatever it is, underneath, and not responding to the words, but kind of cutting under them. Let's even say, I can say the phone thing. What would be so great about having your phone? Just help me understand it. I know in my head I'm never going to do it, but
We don't realize just because we're not gonna do something someone asks, it doesn't mean we don't owe that person the right to try to understand why they want it, right? So I might just ask questions. It might probably end with, look, I actually hear what you're saying. All of your friends are on Instagram until midnight. It sounds like you legitimately do miss out on conversations by the time you get to school, you feel out of them. Like I'm not even joking. I feel like if I was your age, I'd be like, that's basically the worst thing ever, I believe you.
Having your phone after X time is just one of my non-negotiables. It's actually just because I love you so much that I feel like my job is to protect you. I wonder if there is some other way that we can figure that out. Or my kid says $1,000. I might say, what would you do with $1,000? Oh, you want to go to more concerts. Oh, your friends all get more allowance. Tell me more. No matter what your kid says to you, there's information.
So I think feedback is one. I think repair is another way. Repair is the most important relationship strategy to get good at. And I just hope everyone hears the duality in that and realizes what that means because if you're going to get good at repair,
You have to mess up. The only way to repair is to mess up. And so if I'm telling you, get good at repair. I am telling you, you have to accomplish step one, which is yelling at your kid. You have to. And you're going to do it anyway. I do it. But if you then tell yourself, wait, I'm getting good at repair. Step one is messing up. I crushed it. Amazing. I'm half the way there. Then when you repair, which is when you take ownership. Hey, I'm sorry. I yelled just like you.
I'm managing my emotions. Emotions are really tricky. Emotions are really hard and do you know what? Even though you're going to have a leg up on this compared to most people and they're adults because you're learning how to regulate emotions, you're still going to be practicing that when you're my age. That is my responsibility to work on. It's not your fault. And I love you. So powerful.
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I love, love, love this thing about asking for a request. It's different than asking for feedback, which could quickly lead to a list of all the things that one does wrong as opposed to a request for how one could do better. There's an important distinction there. It seems that the question that the parent or who knows the boss or whatever, maybe it's with a romantic partner, needs to ask themselves is,
What is this request really about? What's underneath it? I'm just paraphrasing essentially what you said. And what's it really about? Is it a request for more autonomy, for more social connection with other people? And then one starts to realize that certainly in this example that you gave of a child asking for more time with their phone late at night is that it actually has nothing to do with your relationship to them. It's really about their relationship to their friends.
Yeah, could be. And the fact that they might feel as if they're missing out. Yeah. And that leads me to another question, which is, what if you, as the parent, partner boss, et cetera, keep your phone close to you until midnight? And they know that. Yeah. So one of the worst things that I believe anyone can say is, you know, do as I say, not as I do.
It's just such a like blatantly arrogant stance of you're supposed to do what I say because I say so but I'm not going to do it because I don't want to. And yet there are times like in parent child relationships or boss employee relationships where you're telling somebody to do something and you yourself are not going to do it or no longer do it or choose not to do it and
In reality, you don't have to. And maybe there's a good reason why you don't. We don't have to. That's the nature of... That's why I use these words, power dynamics. Which everyone hears and goes, oh boy, here we go. But it is an issue of power dynamics. You have more power than the kid. So what you're doing is you're giving the kid power to express where they want more agency. I like the word maybe agency more than power.
Did you grant your son the right to use his phone later into the evening? My son has... Not to pry into your personal person. My son did not ask me that. And he knows that our phone rules are non-negotiables. No, I didn't mean to pry into your family dynamics. No, but that kid, if that's a rule, you would never give it to them. But I think so many times, and then we'll go back to power, we shouldn't be afraid to learn more.
I actually just think that's what it is. Our kid says, oh, my friends, get this. That's not true. Why don't you just learn more? Oh, they do. It's like learning more about what someone says doesn't mean you ever have to change your boundary. Most of conflict is about a lack of understanding anyway. When you learn more, you're trying to understand. You understand your kid, understand your, someone wants to raise and you think it's ridiculous. You can learn more.
Tell me what's been going on. What have you been doing? Learning more about someone's position does not weaken your position. And I think that's really, really important in any form of leadership. Now, in terms of the power dynamics,
There is something about the word power, is that like, you know? Is that weird? Yeah, I mean, I think the way I think about it and what we do at Good Insight a lot in terms of our leadership and parenting style, I don't use the word power, but I think it's about embodying your authority. Parents have authority. Pilots have authority. Bosses have authority because they're the ones
kind of who have the job of setting up the whole system for success. That's their job, right? My job isn't to make my kid happy. My job is to help create the conditions for my kid to be like a real functioning, confident adult. That's what I believe, right? A pilot job is definitely not to keep passengers happy. It's to get everyone safely on the ground. A boss's job is not to keep everyone happy. It's to set up the conditions for health and success of the business, right?
Now, if you know that's your job, it's no one else's job but the CEO. I mean, to some degree, all the management, but that is their job. And so there's a difference where if the CEO believes a job needs to be done a certain way, it's not that they have power. It's just their role involves having that authority. And if someone else disagrees, it's up to them to say, you can keep the job or not. It's just a different, you have different roles. So, and I actually think owning that very outright, it's actually something I recently said at work.
in a review around something I really wanted and kind of owned, like, in my role as a CEO, like, that is under my role to decide this is important. And now we have to figure it out. Let's see. I would love some input on how we're going to get this done. Same thing for a kid. One of the lines I said over and over and over to my kid when they were younger, and I see so many good inside parents tell me that their kids reflect back to them later, is my number one job is to keep you safe.
So what does that mean? That kind of relates to power. It can mean, why am I not letting my kid, I don't know, jump up and down on our kitchen counter? It's not cause I'm pissed that my kid isn't listening. I'm not letting them jump up and down on my kitchen counter where there's a light above their head because my number one job is to keep my kid safe. Is that power? I mean, I guess, I think it's authority. How would I embody that authority? I would say it looks hard for you to get down. I'm about to pick you up and put you on the floor.
Because I have authority, right? We get to this phone discussion, let's say. And I really do believe that the phone has to be charged out of the room at a certain time. I'm going to understand. I'm going to understand. I'm going to listen. Hopefully, I'm connected to my kid and they feel respected by me in a million ways. And it might lead to me saying, look, my number one job still.
is to keep you safe. And that really means making decisions that I really believe are good for you. Short term and long term, even if you're upset with me. This is one of those times. And so I love you. This might be a point of conflict. I know we're going to get through this. And that is my role as a parent. And it comes from a place of wanting to protect you.
And I think when you embody your authority in that way, kids never say thank you and they will roll their eyes. And kids always feel loved and protected. They really do. I hear it from my kids. You know, maybe this is so true. Sometimes things happen to my kids and I'm like, no one's going to even believe this. But I was walking with my seven year old the other day and I said, what does it mean to be a good parent? What does it really mean? I'm curious. I really thought because
means you're kind of strict. And I said, what do you mean strict? Because you have certain rules that you think matter. And he goes, but it also means like you also have to be loving and fun.
And my heart hurts hearing myself say this in a good way. They know. I think kids know. And maybe he says that because that's what we are. But I think kids know. And I can't even tell you how many kids I used to work with. And teens, especially, the pain of their parents, not embodying their authority was so clear.
they knew that they shouldn't be out at a certain time. They knew that they were hanging out with kids who were like bad news and their parents had no idea. And they felt unanchored. Like they really, really knew not that their parents were in exerting power. That word isn't their parents weren't embodying their appropriate authority to protect their kids.
I had something come to mind, which is not a phrase that I've ever used before or heard before. But what comes to mind is kind of statements of stance. Yes. I feel like statements of stance in parent-child relationships, families, workplace romantic relationships, et cetera, are great when they're about actions or about sort of overriding themes. Like, no matter what, I'm trying to keep you safe.
I might not get everything right, but that is non-negotiable internally, and I'm going to try and make it non-negotiable externally. It's a statement of stance about actions. Or keeping you healthy and safe is my number one priority. Those are facts. Those are things that one can really say and believe.
you know, until the end of time, be trying to incorporate into one's behavior. But I feel like statements of stance about emotions are very dangerous. Like, we don't yell in this house. You know,
It's okay to cry, right? There's always a caveat. Of course, it's okay to cry, right? But there are times when crying is less appropriate. There's times when yelling might be appropriate. There's times when emotions need to be expressed or not expressed in a particular way because I don't think I'm alone in thinking that, you know, the kid tantrumming in the
in a public environment is an embarrassing thing for them, for their parent, for people around, and it's not the end of the world, right? That's a tantrum, for goodness sake, right? People will survive, but I feel like statements of stance about emotions kind of hold us to this standard that we'll never be able to meet, but that statements of stance about action,
until we fail and hope we don't. We can say things like, my job is always to keep you safe. I'm always going to try and make the best decision for you and for your sister, for instance.
But I think that many people, I'm not just speaking from my own experience, but in talking to friends and others that they grew up in homes where there were these philosophies, these statements of stance. And the moment that things didn't match that statement of stance, the whole concept of what parents and children are supposed to be about just started to dissolve. And it creates that underlying fear. Do they even really know what they're doing?
or maybe they don't know what they're doing, but maybe they're trying. So in any case, it's just something that maybe we could talk about for a moment. I have some reactions to that. I think I kind of think you're talking about values and principles, right? And so I think there are, in my house, to be honest, it's not like we have some wall of like, these are our family values. I've seen those in people's homes. Yeah, that's not.
Yeah, on the refrigerator. Not organized enough to do that. But if I thought about a couple that come to mind, like, my job is to keep my kids safe. By the way, safe does not mean they're never in a situation without risk. That's not what I mean. You know, but in general. It's his own form of danger. Exactly. The minimization of risk is also not safe, right? So, but in general, my job is to keep you safe. I'm not going to let you do things that, you know, endanger yourself or others. So that's one. Another principle I think about is, um,
I will always tell you the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. You can always count on me for that. I call that truth over comfort. So if my kid says to me, how are babies made? That value is useful.
Another thing is like all feelings are allowed. Not all behaviors are okay, right? Stuff like that. What about we don't swear in this house? So what I was about to say. And then you're on the phone and then you screw up and then the kid goes, you swore. To me what's very different is these kind of rigidities around behavior.
We don't swear. Swearing is a behavior. We don't cry in public behavior. We don't tantrum here. That's a behavior. Behaviors all the time are a manifestation of feelings that overpower skills. So saying we don't do certain behaviors, to me, it doesn't even make logical sense. Well, what if I'm in a situation where I have a really intense emotion and don't know the skill to manage it? We don't... The behavior is going to happen. And then I feel like a bad person.
That's very different than values around intention. I want to be truthful with my kids even if things are uncomfortable. I might fumble around with the words, right? I might even sometimes lie because I didn't do that value in action. But what I can come back to is, okay, nobody lives their values 100% of the time. So I think we're talking about actually something core to what we think about a good inside, which is
I'm a good person with values who is totally imperfect and sometimes acts in ways I'm not proud of. Both are true. When families have values that are very behavior-based, what ends up happening in the kids is they start to equate certain behaviors with morality. These are good behaviors that make me loved in my family, and these are bad behaviors that kind of make me feel like I'm not the right part of my family, and they even make me wonder,
Am I lovable? Am I good inside after all? Right? Am I worthy? That's not good. Because whenever we type behavior to identity, that's shame. And we've tried to motivate kids with shame for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it does not work and causes a lot of problems. I think another one, which is interesting is actually as my kids get older, I said this to my teen recently, this is really tricky.
One of my jobs as always has been to create guidelines and rules with you. You know, it's always going to be kind of collaborative, some because of my authority will be directive that I believe are going to keep you safe. And I think this really relates to a phone. I want to tell you another part of my job that might sound contradictory, but I actually think we just need to hold them both at once. Another part of my job is to be there for you when you inevitably go against those guidelines.
And I want you to know that we have rules around what Canon cannot be done online. And I'll say this here, like, if you do kind of become part of a really inappropriate text conversation, if there is bullying, if you do come across some images online that make you feel really uncomfortable and you're like, I shouldn't have seen that.
You're not getting in trouble with me. I'm not going to throw you a party. I will be there for you to help you through those moments. Those things sound contradictory, and in our family, we know two things can be true, and those are both true. To me, that's really important for a teenager to know.
Let's talk about guilt and shame. Yes. I've heard some kind of catch-freezy stuff, not from you, but like, oh, you know, guilt is about the thing you did, and shame is a feeling about who we are. And, you know, while I'm not against those sort of 1990s, early 2000s kind of psychology isms, I feel like they're not very useful.
in the same way that hearing that there's a gap between stimulus and response. And if you identify that gap, well, then goodness, you're going to be the kind of person that can feel stressed but not be reactive. You're going to be responsive, not reactive. That's just a bunch of words that doesn't hear my biologists. So I'll just say it doesn't take into account the fact that the biology of stress changes your perception of time and a whole bunch of other things that basically make that gap between stimulus and response much, much smaller.
And I think once people understand that, they go, oh, so like the kitchen refrigerator magnet or the poster on the wall that says, there's a gap between stimulus and response. It was supposed to save me, but it didn't, of course not. We're just in different states of mind at different times. So how do you define no pressure here? But how do you define guilt versus shame? And what about guilt and shame?
Great. Two of my favorite topics. I have a couple different ways of defining things. I'm like you. To me, I like defining things in ways that are very concrete and very usable. That's all. And if there's multiple ways of doing that, that's great. So the way I think about guilt, and this will probably set us off in a direction about what is not guilt also, is guilt is a feeling I have when I act out of alignment with my values.
And in that way, guilt is a really useful feeling, really useful, because it makes me reflect on, wait, I didn't act in line with my values. I wonder why? What would I have had to do differently? What got in my way? Well, I'm so glad I have that information from my body to have this deeply uncomfortable feeling to set in that process, right? So if I yell at my kid,
I'm gonna feel guilty, right? I think about a time when my kid told me, you know, I lied to you. I did take that eraser from that kid in school, and I feel really guilty. And I said, first I'm so glad you told me that.
I'm so glad you're feeling guilty. That's the right way to feel. Now, there must have been something so hard about seeing something so shiny and fun that you don't have. I totally get that. And you're right. That's not in your values to take it. So that's a useful feeling. That feeling is going to help you not do something like that. Again, let's figure out what you can do, not just to say sorry. This is what parents miss. You know what's going to happen another time? You're going to see something else pretty cool. Someone's cubby. And you know what most people think?
You're gonna have, again, I would too. What can you do the next time you have that ball? All of this comes because of guilt, useful feeling. Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. Now, Tamigill is one of the most misunderstood feelings because what you hear all the time, and you'll hear how much it kind of conflicts with this definition is something like this. I haven't seen my friends in years. There's finally a dinner.
But it would require me not to put my kid down to sleep, you know, and I'm talking to someone I'd say, okay, well, I'm guessing you're not leaving your kid alone. Now, again, my husband or my mom, someone who's a totally safe adult.
Becky, I told my kid and she was clinging to me like, no, mommy, I need it to be you, I need it to be you. And so I'm not going to dinner. Do you know what I'm going to say, Andrew? Because I feel so guilty. This is all right. Someone asked me to be in the PTA meeting. I'm so busy. I can't, but I can't do it because I feel so guilty. Okay.
Again, I'm just curious. I say, well, it sounds like you really want to go to dinner with your friends. She's like, oh, I do. All I do is parent these days. I literally haven't seen these friends in years. They're in town. And she'll tell me about your friendships. Does that mean you value my... Yes. I know that I'm kind of more than just someone who puts down my kid for bed. And I love doing that, but this matters too. So I said, this is really interesting. You really value your friendships.
Your life right now feels out of balance and that your friendships, that part of your burner of your stove is like really low. Okay. And you're not going because you feel guilty. I just want to share an idea, guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. It seems like going to dinner would be in line with your values and almost it's true. So what is this feeling?
And here's what I think the feeling is. I call it not guilt just because I haven't figured out a more sophisticated term, but here's what I think is happening. A lot of us, especially women, when we were growing up, we learned to notice everyone's feelings around us.
And we learned that our value really, and our worth really, and we were kind of best in good girls when we took care of everyone else's feelings except for our own. I think so many young girls especially become expert at what people need of them by becoming distant from what they need for themselves.
the picture I gave my mind is sort of like having on 10i cast in every direction, except perhaps at the exclusion of paying attention to the 10i that are inward. And we are, you know, intentional resources are finite. I mean, we just don't have the capacity to like.
respond to other people's emotions and feel at the same time to the same degree that we would have we just concentrated on theirs or our emotions. This is a fact of how humans work. Yeah, and kids are oriented by attachment. They have to learn with their families. How do I become the most lovable, safest version of myself? So I have a friend who, I remember her, even in middle school, I can't come.
My dad's traveling and my mom really needs me to stay home and watch a movie with her, right? And I know this mom. Well, it's like, oh, you know, love me. You don't write. I mean, this was so she became expert at always noticing other people's emotions and not only noticing them taking the emotions from them, kind of like taking them into their body and almost metabolizing them for them.
That's not guilt. That is taking someone else's emotions and taking them into your body at the expense of taking care of your own needs. And so I have a visual for this because I think it's really powerful where, let's say it's the situation where a mom is saying, I really want to go out to dinner, but I feel so guilty. First thing is just powerful to say, that is not guilt. It is something else and it is real and it is powerful, but it is not guilt.
What is happening? I'm on one side of a tennis court, like me and you, Andrew, but let's say it's a tennis court, and you're on the other side, or even, and like in between instead of a net, it's like a glass table. Over here, I am here in my desire to go out with my friends because I do value my friendships. Okay, over there is, you're upset about it. And let's say instead you're my daughter, you're like, no, no, don't go. No one else can put me to bed. That is definitely hard to deal with, but that is,
daughter's feelings. Those are not your feelings. Those are your daughter's feelings. And some of us slash a lot of us have developed this tendency where we're on this court and all of a sudden all those feelings from your side somehow go through that wall and they come to your side and you call it guilt. It is not guilt. And to me, one of the most liberating things, and this actually relates to empathy, as I was saying, is to give that feeling back to its rightful owner. Because what that means is if I really give it back,
Now I have a boundary. That's my kid's feeling. That's not mine. And I can now actually empathize. People said, no, I was empathizing. I wasn't going out. No, no, no. That's not empathy. You weren't going out with your friends because you couldn't handle the distress in your body. You just made your daughters feelings your own. You just engaged in something almost selfish. This has nothing to do with your daughter.
In those situations, that's why we say weird things to our four-year-old. Like, don't you want mommy to have friends? I feel like, why are you asking me that question? It's like a pilot being like, don't you want me to make an emergency landing? Like, if you need to make an emergency landing, don't ask me for permission. Because once I give it back to my daughter, I can do this. I can say, you really wish I would put you to bed tonight. You're right, it feels so different when grandma does it. Oh, it does.
I'm going out. It's okay if you're upset. I'll be back and I'll kiss you and I'll see you in the morning. And then this next part's so important. When you walk out, I don't want any person having any illusion that the daughter's gonna be like, yes, you go girl. No, she is going to scream. That's okay. Going back to the boundary. You're allowed to take care of your needs.
and other people are allowed to be inconvenienced and upset by it. It doesn't mean your needs are wrong. It doesn't mean their feelings are wrong, and it definitely doesn't mean you feel guilty.
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Wow, I say wow because I think the lens that you're looking at guilt through and the way you're defining it is so very different than the way it's been discussed ever. And I think this is a super, super important topic. So I'd like to lathe into it a little bit more.
In some ways, the way that I think many people experience guilt, at least according to your definition, which by the way, I love. It's when we've act out of alignment with our values versus feeling pressure.
I think about, I mean, the word knows I don't have the best reputation as having a short text response latency. It's variable. Sometimes I'm quick on the draw and other times I'm like, goodness, it'll be days or weeks. I mean, over the holidays, I was spooling through it. I would respond to people like a week later.
And I do my best, but I do often feel quote unquote guilty about not being as responsive in text to a number of people because I care about them. I value them. But I get overwhelmed by text messaging very easily to the point where I have to put my phones out of the room when I work, et cetera.
So, the way I experience a bunch of text messages coming in is as pressure that then I feel guilty. I'm not trying to make this about me. No, I want to. Let's go into this. I have a lot to say. I feel quote-unquote guilty, but what's interesting is I believe in cognitive dissonance, and then what I notice is that my brain tries to bridge that gap.
I come up with these like justifications with like, well, when I text people and they don't respond of like two weeks, I don't get upset, which is true unless it's in a particular sort of category of circumstances. So how come the way they view this whole dynamic is not the same as the way I view this dynamic? Maybe this is a more male-centric view as opposed to feeling porous like I feel they're upset. But I will say, you know, in fairness to all the chromosomes and their arrangements, I do feel
bad. I get socks like I love these people and they're reaching out to say whatever happy new year or something and I'm feeling pressure as opposed to feeling how wonderful it is to have people in my life. So here this is such a beautiful example where I'd ask myself or I'd ask you to ask yourself okay.
I already, you already named one of your values, which is interesting. I really value my relationships. You said that. Okay. That's one value. And I think this is, I'm going to ask you this question. Do you value quick responses all the time from you on text message? Is that a value of yours? From me or to me? From you.
Do I value always responding to people on text right away? The truth is, if I'm really honest, I hate shallow exchange of any kind, except maybe a fist bump to somebody you just kind of feel some kinship with on the street and you have that connecting and you just give them the fist bump. Great.
more in depth lengthy connection. Like three hour long conversations or drop. Friend came by the other day for new years. He was on my list of people that and yes, I made a list of people that I want to deepen my friendship with in the in the new year. Came by we had a two hour lunch. We chatted and and I feel like.
it was awesome and worth a million single line text messages. And I'm also the kind of person where like, I'm good to not see him for a while, not because I'm tired of him, but because I also have other friends and things to do. So I'm more of a depth, not breadth kind of guy. So this is to me, this is such a powerful process. And then after this, I kind of want to link it back to how I've actually told my kids about
why I do go out to dinner with friends, right? So I value deep relationships. I value relationships. I value deep relationships. And with them, if I'm honest with myself, responding to someone right away, it's actually not my value. But again, we can hold multiple things at once. That doesn't mean I don't care about those people. And I just laid out all my values. What I think is so powerful as a not guilt diffuser is naming this directly to the people.
So it doesn't have to be on text, but you're seeing person X and you know, I'm never that good. I just want to tell you, I really value our friendship. I really value these times we have together. Something I just also want to get off my chest is going back and forth quickly on text. That's not something that's easy for me that I do very often. And so you might text me and it might take me a while. And I just wanted to name that to you.
Now, look, someone else always has the right to say, well, that's interesting. That doesn't work for me. And one of my top values with friends is someone who's always getting back and forth. To me, that's actually great. Great. Now we know, OK, what are we going to do about that? That's fine. You know where someone stands. And the reason I relate this to the situation with going to dinner is I remember early on.
When my daughter said, why do you have to go to dinner with friends? Or why do you and dad? This is it. Why do you and dad go to dinner without us? I know the couple you're going out with. You both have kids. Why can't you bring us, right? And this is where we say we feel guilt, but we don't because I'm like, time out.
She's feeling this feeling, not me. And also, I don't need her permission or approval. That's the real parentified thing. We go to our seven-year-old and we're like, don't you want me to have adult conversations again? It's not an atypical response. I've heard parents do that. Say that. Don't you want me to have a social life? But you know what it is?
is asking your kid to do your job for you. Again, can you imagine a pilot say, do you think we should make an emergency landing? You'd be, that's how a kid feels when they're asked that. They're like, why are you asking me that? Here's what I said to my daughter in that situation. I really did. I want to tell you something. I love being your mom. I really do. It's one of the most important things in my life.
I also really like being married to dad. And I really like the times we have when it's just us and other adults. That's really important. I remember saying this. Maybe I was really trying to double down. We actually, we, we have that before you guys were here. You know, like what? Yeah. Um,
And so one of the reasons I want to be honest with you, why do we go to dinner without you? It's not so much we go to dinner without you. We think of it as going to dinner with each other and just adults. Is that something we really enjoy? It's really important to us. It's a really important part of us. And that's why.
Being really vocal about your values as opposed to looking to your child unconsciously to give you permission to have those values. If you want to use power, that's a power. That's a power move. And it's amazing. This is true in any time in life. The more you can locate someone,
the more you respect their boundaries. I use that word a lot and I'll like locate. I'm sure you know people in your life, like, can I locate them? You kind of know who they are. You know what they value and you respect them, right? When you can't locate someone,
You feel very uneasy around them. You're kind of like, where are you? Who are you? What are you stand for? And as you can see with my daughter, it was a very, I wasn't saying something mean. I was saying something true. And so I think with the friendships and when you say, is this guilty to, it's like, well, maybe my step and my action is just actually being honest with this person. I'm not very good at responding right away. I want to let you know, I deeply care about our friendship. I'm not very good at responding to kind of small talk over text.
and I just wanted to let you know that, so you didn't misinterpret it. I wonder what would happen. I wonder if people would respond really positively. I love it. I can't help but recall when I was a kid, after dinner, my dad would sometimes take a walk by himself. Now, Grant, he's a physicist, and he was a theoretical physicist, so he's like all his experiments were in his head, and he did work on paper, too.
So he would take these walks and occasionally I'd see him coming back from these walks and he'd be smoking a cigar, something he doesn't do anymore, fortunately. I'm grateful that he's very robust. He was actually a guest on the podcast recently, talked about science and life, et cetera. And one of the things that I remember thinking and still to this day think and feel is
It's kind of awesome how he takes this walk and he looked like so happy with the cigar and his thoughts and he'd walk. And I wanted to be on those walks with him. He was very, very busy. In fact, I wanted a lot more time from him than I got. It's kind of interesting because now it's oftentimes that I'm the busier one, the tables turn kids. But in all seriousness, I didn't think of it as self care, but it was so clear that that was his time. Yeah.
That was absolutely his time. And I knew when I could and should join for things and when I didn't. And so when you say the more you can locate someone, the more you respect their values. I feel like bells go off. It's like exactly that. And there are other examples of my mom, et cetera. But it's kind of interesting when we see somebody
adult or child, like really in their element of their thing. It's almost like we love them for it and through it. And it fills us, I think, with a healthy sense of safety, like they're right there. Kind of like the pilot flying the plane really well. Well, actually, we don't really want to know about the pilot. I want to hear the thing at the beginning. We're about ready to take off.
I actually don't like it when we're landing and they say, we'll be on the ground in just a few moments. I'm like, we're at 10,000 feet. Can we make it a little bit longer than that? But you get the point, which is that I don't want to hear from the pilot. I just want the pilot to fly the plane.
You want the pilot to do their job. And again, and these, you know, I think I have so many pilot metaphors around sturdy leadership. And I think it really is such a metaphor for how we teach people the skills they need to parent. Because again, no one becomes a pilot overnight. No one becomes a CEO overnight. No one becomes a lawyer overnight or a professional basketball player. You know, I think we actually laud CEOs these days who say, I don't know how to do leadership as well as I'd want to. I'm getting executive coach. You all want to work for them.
person, right? The amazing athletes in the world get amazing coaches and I go to amazing training camps because they're amazing, right? And so I just, somehow with parenting, it's like the last area where people think I should become an amazing parent overnight. I shouldn't have to invest in skills or education. Even people who invest in skills and education for every other area of their life that they probably care about less, there's so much shame we've internalized that we should be able to do it naturally.
And you do become a parent overnight. You become a parent overnight. You do. Yes. I'll remember my graduate advisor at two kids while I was working in the lab saying that there were all these books back then about pregnancy. And she was like, it's wild. There are all these things and what you should eat and should be and how you should you and your partner and how you should prepare for the birth and all this. And then like, and then at the hospital, they're like here, and you're like,
Now granted, that was in the early 2000s. That's still what it is. And they're like, what do you need? And they go, you need a car seat to leave the hospital, which by the way, you definitely need that. That's all. Like just a car seat. Like, how am I supposed to manage this? Because I think I want parents to know because they're just so much shame. And maybe we should talk about shame, right? The only thing that comes naturally when it comes to parenting is how you were parented.
that comes naturally, that lives in your bones, that lives in your circuits. And there might be some people who say, amazing, I have the greatest privilege in the world, then what will come naturally is exactly what I value and what I want to do. I would say more often, people would say some version of definitely not what I want to do, or parts I want to do differently.
And to me, it's kind of like if you were brought up speaking English, and you really want to speak Mandarin, or you want to speak Mandarin half the time to your kid, and someone said, are you gonna learn Mandarin naturally? I feel like someone's saying, how does one learn Mandarin naturally? You would, I don't know, you'd probably sign up for, you know, do a lingo, you'd find an app or something or a course, and you'd then practice and practice, and you'd be able to make progress because you actually learned something new.
And so I just think big picture like parents are they're so under equipped and set up to feel and this is I think has to do a shame that when my kids are struggling or when I'm yelling a lot it means something that's wrong with me or something is wrong with my kid.
I feel like these days in almost every area, if a CEO is saying, I feel like I'm struggling. Is it my fault or my employees fault? They probably say, I don't know. There's probably people around who can help me, who can teach me. Why do I keep yelling, right? And same thing with almost every other field.
And to me, more than, like, if there's any legacy I get to leave in this world, it's not even the approach itself, even though I think our approach to parenting is very different. I just want parents to know, like, there is no shame in investing in learning and growing in parenting. And to look at that, like, they probably look at every other year of their life.
I assure you that your legacy extends far beyond that, but includes it as well. You've had a tremendous impact and continue to. I mean, it wasn't long ago that, you know, the power dynamics of parent child relationships where, you know, you do what I say and I'm the parent, you're the kid and like that kind of thing. And I grew up in a different era. I'm 49 now and I've been wanting to say I'm 49 now so that I can actually say something with, with having had some experience when things were truly very different. They were just so different. Yeah. It was like you.
what you got and you worked with it and things are so different thanks to your part in all of this. And one thing I do want to return to because I realize I took us off track with it is this idea of kids, but perhaps adults as well, feeling
or thinking they feel someone else's feelings, taking that on, this difference between real guilt and, gosh, it's really hard to come up with a word for it. At one moment, I thought, well, maybe it's faux guilt, but no, you're not pretending. You're actually feeling something which feels like guilt. It smells like guilt. Someone said co-dependence. I don't know that much about that word, but something like that. Yeah, it's a whole landscape. Yeah, it's exactly. It's a whole landscape.
But, you know, one practice that I'm familiar with, that I know exists in a couple of different realms of what's called modern psychology tools is this idea of creating a frame separation. So like after you come together with somebody say to like do therapy or something or you had sort of an emotional
bind or entanglement doesn't have to be negative. Um, that one way that you can, uh, learn over time to differentiate their needs and wants from your needs and wants is this idea of, of in your head, I know it sounds kind of corny, but there's a clear neuroscientific basis for this, at least in, uh, to my understanding of in your head, you say, for instance, like if we had just done this, like we had some resonance around something, maybe an argument. Okay. Like Dr. Beck, you and I got into a fight.
that in order to really be able to move away from that and see it clearly, how much of that was yours, how much of that was mine. There's this idea that you tell yourself, okay, what are five ways in which you and I are clearly distinct entities? So you say, and I know this folks might chuckle at this, but you say like, okay, I'm a man, you're a woman. I live in California. Dr. Becky lives in New York.
could even make it like first person. You say like a third person rather. You could say, I Andrew Huberman, I'm wearing, you know, a black shirt and a black over shirt and Dr. Becky is wearing black and white. Okay. So some people might think like, what's the use of that? But to me as a neuroscientist, whoever came up with that and it wasn't me is
Nothing short of brilliant because the brain organizes emotions in these broader schemas of physical objects and physical distance and distance in time. And that's the way that we can differentiate between ourselves and everything around us. And there's a whole discussion to be had about this. But so it's something that I've been playing with a little bit because I don't claim to be this ultra empath or anything. But I think
It's clear that sometimes we take in our thoughts and feelings about what other people are feeling, sometimes accurate, sometimes not, and it can become very difficult. Whether or not someone's a one of these, I guess you call it deeply feeling, deeply feeling, the deeply feeling kids or not, I mean, anytime you get into an emotional resonance, good or bad. Yeah.
I think it's we're porous, we're porous, and that's part of what makes humans so beautiful, but I've found that practice to be very useful. Even if it's just in my own head, like they're over there and I'm over here, but not even necessarily pushing off them. The thing like, oh, like I'm me and you're you. And there are a bunch of ways in which we differ in time and space. And I think the nervous system
comes to understand that as a felt thing, as opposed to just a statement. Like, hey, you own your emotions all on mind. That's just a statement. Is this any of this? I've never heard of that, but I love that. And it is in parallel, I think, with so many of the things I teach parents. So even the idea of locating someone, to me, my version of people in my life that I know and love, even if I don't agree with anything they say, that I can locate.
They're like an egg with a shell. They have a shell. There's a boundary. We're really talking about boundaries. We all have different levels of porousness to the external world.
And I think if you know, and there's pros and cons of both, I really mean this. I am not terribly porous to other people's experiences. I really have solid boundaries. There are definitely moments in my closest relationships because what people will say to me, okay, I know these are my feelings and not yours. We're in a close relationship. Can you be here a little bit more with me? And that is true. That is what I want to do. And sometimes it can be a little distancing and a little separate.
People on the other end of that spectrum, if they know, I'm very porous. I tend to, to me, one of the ways of also thinking about it, I think I gaze in before I gaze out. And I think a lot of people gaze out before they gaze in. They spend a lot of time in other people's brains and lost time in their own. What do they think of me? What do they think? If that's what's going on for you, then the shell to your egg
isn't always intact. And so there's a spillover. Who's feelings are who's? Who's thoughts are who's? I'm spending so much time worried about what that person thinks of me. I almost like, what do I, what do I think? Right? And so the exercise you're naming is actually just a resetting of a boundary, right? And things that are absurdly concrete,
are necessary for the most primal parts of our brain to actually understand. My name is Becky Kennedy. To me, what I say, I don't usually say that. I'll say, my feet are on the ground.
When I do a grounding exercise, everyone in our community knows this as my hand is always on my heart. I think there's some amount of having contact with your body. My hand is on my heart. Sometimes I used to do this with clients, especially after an emotional experience going like this.
Name five things in the room is probably another way. There's a red clock. I'm wearing a white shirt. They're very, very, very basic as a way of kind of coming back into your body. Two mantras that I find help parents a lot actually make me think about this exercise. One is I'm the pilot, not the turbulence.
In our kids' turbulent moments, when they are that turbulence, what so easily happens is we merge into that with them. And then it's no wonder our kids can't calm down or episodes last forever because we're just turbulence and turbulence together, right? So I'm the pilot, not the turbulence. Also,
One day I'm going to do a partnership with some airplane company, because I feel like airplanes are just so beautiful because the pilot gets a cockpit. They get a boundary. That's what parents need. So that's one. And the other one, when your kids are upset or after there's an argument, some people get very dysregulated just knowing someone's upset with them, which is, again, kind of whose feelings are whose. I found one of the most effective monitors, and again, these sound cheesy is just safe.
This isn't an emergency. I can cope with this because our body, if you tend to be poor as you get activated just by other people being activated, even though it wasn't your feeling in the first place and your body actually needs the reminder that you're safe to not kind of add to that turbulence. I love it.
Can we talk about projection? One of the things that drives me insane, people close to me know this, because of this issue of porousness versus non-porousness, is when people tell me how I feel. And so I've talked to a few
very qualified psychiatrist about this, and it's called projection. Like sometimes it's, if in anger, it's a vacuative projection. Like you think I'm crazy, someone will say, like you think I'm crazy, or you're upset with me or something like that. I feel like projection is one of the kind of litmus tests of how porous we are. Because in theory, somebody should be able to tell us that we feel whatever.
And if we first look inside, and by the way, I love this concept of, do you first look inside or outside? Do you listen to what's inside or outside first when something kind of arises emotionally, emotionally outside you? Love love love that. It's something I'll have to explore.
But if we don't do that, then you could see how projection would be very effective. And not accusing anyone of using this in any kind of diabolical way. I think people just do it because it worked and they're doing it because they've always done it. But if somebody says, you don't care about me as a friend or
you know, telling someone how they feel is so very different than telling someone how we feel. Yeah. All right. It's kind of an obvious. And yet once you start watching for projection, you see it all the time. Yeah. Not just at you, but like in between people.
Right. Like, you know, like, I know this stresses you out, but you know, people start doing it all the time. It's very interesting to see how people kind of divide into a couple of different groups on this, maybe two or more groups, in terms of whether or not it affects them, whether it gets in their head, or somehow they're like, no, no, it's ridiculous. I don't feel that way. And for me, it's very context-specific. But I love your thoughts on projection both towards kids and from kids.
So, all right, I'm gonna respond to that and you just cut me off, you're like, Becky, that's not the direction I want you to go in. Because I guess, MGI, which is, I call most generous interpretation, is to me the embodiment of not what I do all the time, definitely not because I'm imperfect. But what I think is just a useful framework to try to employ as much as possible. Because the idea of what is the most generous interpretation of someone's behavior, like projection,
Counteracts are very natural human tendency, which is just what is the least generous interpretation, right? We all come up with the least generous interpretation of people's behavior all the time, and it's just quick. It's easy. And I think it's because in our brain, if we see something bad or annoying, it's just easy to think that that's the whole, right? So I can't even tell you how many times every parent I know
We'll say, my kid doesn't listen. They hit all the elevator buttons. They hit other people. And then I said, and I know you're thinking, they're a sociopath. They're like, that's literally what I'm thinking. I was like, I know, I have that thought too. You know, when I was a kid, I used to push every button in the elevator. Right. Does that mean I'm a sociopath? No, it means you are a good kid who has not yet learned the skills to regulate urges. That's all it means. That would be the most generous interpretation. You just want to push them. I'm joking.
I have a kid like that too. He wants things for himself and he derives a lot of joy from things. Those types of kids are gonna do things. Okay, that's my resilient revel. Okay, but.
projection. Why am I bringing that up? So what's my most generous interpretation of why this projection would happen? Why would a kid say, you're mad at me? Or, you know, I can see how mad you are at me? Or why would someone even say in adulthood, you seem really, really stressed out, right? Again, the gazing in versus gazing out. I think it comes back to in our childhoods. I mean, that's what often a lot comes back to.
Were we taught that we have an emotional life that lives inside of us? Then were we taught how to understand that emotional life? Then were we taught how to manage and cope with that whole emotional life? Most people were not. So it becomes this very, very complicated conundrum.
The emotional life is happening inside me again. Like you can't beat it. It's happening. Our feelings can't get rid of them. And they're very powerful. They're sensations. But if your framework is, was always you're getting punished, you're getting ridiculed, you're being a baby, then you develop a very conflictual relationship with your feelings. Like they can't be real. They almost can't be mine. That's really what they can't be mine.
People like this often blame other people a lot for things they never did when they're really frustrated and upset because it's almost like, this can't be mine so late.
Who did this feeling to me? You know, there's a lot in the world. A lot of that in the world. Who did this feeling to me? Who put this in me, right? It's so fragile and so sad almost. And so, you know, toxic. But projection in a way is the only way that I can understand my emotional life.
is by imagining you having an emotional life. I don't know, like a lot of these things, I hear myself say this, I like mellows, like, oh, what a vulnerable way to go about the world. What an awful way to live in your body that you're so overwhelmed and almost so self-abandoning
of the information in your body that it must be someone else's. So that's what projection is. So what do we do when we see it? I don't know what's an example. You're so stressed out. You've been so stressed and you're thinking maybe you're thinking of partnership. I feel like you're going to want to be stressed.
never helps in the heat of a moment to be right. I've tried it a million times. I don't know about you. To be right in an argument. To be right in a heated moment when you're like, I'm going to be right. Not if you want an effective outcome. No, but it's a very hard urge to resist. No, it took me many years to learn, but someone taught it to me in one hour.
I feel very grateful that she taught me this that she didn't tell me to do it, but I just realized if you just like I don't have any word other than just like soften if you just kind of like
Imagine becoming more like a noodle than like a rigid bar of iron. I just like, oh, and I actually, I think of the way that like my, he always comes up, but my, I had this bulldog mast of Costello and he was like super lazy. The contract with him was he would protect me with his entire life. But if my life wasn't on the line, noodle.
And I remember just thinking like, if I just go there, then the basic contract of like, I care about you, I'll protect you with my life is still there. So I guess I learned it from my bulldog, but it sort of played out in a romantic relationship. And it was just really beautiful. It was one of the best things I learned from the two of them. Yeah. Is that I just like literally like physically, often?
then like everything becomes apparent. Somehow for me, it allows me to get back into my own eggshell, but still have optics out. Now that's me, I realize it's, you know, and that doesn't mean in the heat of the moment, I'm not like feeling like I want to be reactive. But for me, a physical change to my body, self-directed physical change to my body is what just kind of like changed everything. Yeah, and I think, you know, this is so true in relationships, definitely at work and definitely in parenting is
You don't have to represent everything you believe in like a given moment. Like we're not so fragile like to be like, no, and you're projecting like, I have time. Like this is this is a heated moment. I can kind of chill out. You're so stressed. And I think I'm not. I think there's projection of it.
Oh, I am? Who cares? Just like get through the moment, right? And then maybe after, if it feels important, I say, I feel like this thing happens sometimes when you're stressed, you say I'm stressed, I don't know. Like let's talk about this. That's when that happens. I think this is really true with kids too, right?
has happened the other day. And in some ways, it's the same strategy, which I jokingly on Instagram called do nothing with a capital D and a capital N, because so many times in hard situations, especially when you're accused of something, that's not true.
people will say to parents, oh, so you're just gonna do nothing. I'm like, take away the just. Like, doing nothing in a heated moment is a very sophisticated technique because really what you're saying is you're doing nothing on the outside and you're being a adult and managing your feelings on the inside. Amen to that. Versus doing nothing on the inside and just yelling or reacting on the outside. So the other day my son came to me
before school, my youngest. And he goes, my sweatshirt's still dirty. And I was like, oh man, you promised me you would wash my sweatshirt before school.
Between us, he never asked me that, okay? And here's my fork in the road. It's like, we all know what it would be easier. By the way, I wanted to say back to him, 99% of me was about to go, you never asked me. And then he's like, I did. No, you didn't. And now you're lying to me. And all of a sudden it's like,
You know what he was saying to me? I wish my sweatshirt was clean. That's what he was saying. That's what we're all saying. And I'm so upset about it. The feeling is so big that it's like too overwhelming in this moment as a seven-year-old to be mine. So I kind of have to make it your fault to try to make sense of it. So what did I do in the moment? I literally did nothing.
You promised me you watched my sweatshirt. And I went like this. I kind of was just like looking at him like I knew what it was like to want something and not be able to have it. And he's like, you did. And the moment I go, I did. My sweatshirt is dirty. You really wanted it to be clean. It's kind of, he's like, I really did. I was like, oh, that's the worst.
Not joking. At the end, by five minutes later, I didn't say anything. I got another sweatshirt. We moved on. I didn't say I wasn't going to ruin the moment by being like, see, you could cope or you never asked me. But I think in both these moments, whether someone's saying you're stressed or my kid's accusing me,
If I think about this a lot in parenting, I don't have to prove my parenting in a moment. I don't have to prove it to my kid. I don't have to prove it because my mother-in-law is watching. I trust myself way more than I trust one single moment to represent everything about me. And I think when we can gain a little bit of that confidence, we have a lot more freedom to just be effective.
and to also know there's a moment to do nothing, and then if something's a chronic issue, if my son's chronically blaming me, when things are less heated, I'm gonna say to him, you know, something in, you know, a calm moment. These are super important and novel approaches to things that I think everybody deals with. Kids in the picture are not. My audience sometimes gets angry with me when I
I asked very long extended questions, but could I just share with you something I learned about an experiment? Because I think it blew my mind. I won't take long. There's a imaging experiment. So you put people in a scanner, they image their brain, see which areas are active, fMRI.
There's a really wild experiment where they bring people in for the scan. They don't tell them why they're there, and they tell them they're going to be paid $30, and they set out three $10 bills. Maybe you know this experiment. I don't know. Then they go into the scanner, and then they come out, and then the researcher leaves, and there's a discussion, et cetera, et cetera. At some point, one of the $10 bills is removed by the researcher.
And people are told at the end of the experiment, you took one of the $10 bills. And they're like, no, I didn't, because they didn't. Nobody says you're right. But then they re-image them.
And they compare that to a condition in other subjects where people actually did a little sneaky steal during a money game. And the same areas of the brain light up that we think are associated with guilt. In other words, if somebody is told that they did something,
Even if they know they didn't, there are aspects of brain circuitry that reflect a quote-unquote feeling of guilt. It's like it introduces this question about reality. And so they can know with 100% certainty. You can know with 100% certainty that you did not do something.
and yet it starts to introduce these questions about how you gauge reality, simply because somebody you just met a few minutes earlier, yes, in a position of authority, they're the researcher, you're the subject, et cetera, told you that you did it. I think this has huge implications for parent-child relationships, for romantic relationships, workplace relationships, for
real bias in the outside world, you can imagine if you're told your whole life that you're a piece of garbage or that you're part of a bad group or something like this. I'm not trying to get political here. You could come to believe that at a level that is biological, even if cognitively doesn't make sense. So this is where I think about this challenging boundary between knowing what we know, being a container, staying in our frame, pick your favorite lingo around this.
And the fact that words and the emotions of other people really do have the capacity to rewire us on the inside. You know, a question I have about that study, I'd be really curious if there was variation among subjects where some people that guilt part lit up a lot more. Okay, so you reminded me. So this is the wild part. Okay. The distribution of kind of like people who have this
By the way, folks, there aren't single brain areas for whole emotions, but let's just for sake of simplicity here.
that have the guilt area activated even when they didn't take the money. The entire population of subjects doesn't experience that to the same degree. You have these people for whom it's very high amplitude response and others who aren't. Now I don't recall and I need to go back and look at the study if it divided according to male female because earlier you said that this tendency- I would bet a million dollars that if I got to know those people, the people who really light up,
have a lot of focus on gazing out and determining their inner reality by what other people think about them and the people who did not light up as much are the people who gaze in and have a deep sense of themselves even in the face.
of kind of a lack of validation or even in the face of criticism. I would bet my money on that psychological kind of, is that a moderator or a mediator? I don't know. You would tell me. So I'd be very curious about that. Great. Well, I have no skin in the game. Like, I didn't run this study and I'll go back and check it out. It's a collection of studies. And I hadn't known about this. I mean, I read the neuroscience literature, but I hadn't known about this. I find it
like a complete yes, of course, on the one hand, and also super surprising on the other, and just oh, so cool. In the sense that it's informative, and it's making me think that some people really need to do the work of paying more attention to other people's emotions, and feeling them a little bit more, and other people probably need to do the exact opposite. That's exactly right. And to me, I always, I say to the people I manage, I think about this in general with adults,
I think such an empowering thing as an adult is just to know where you are in any given scale. So for me, as a leader, I'm always guests. I'm like, go, go, go. We can do this. We can get this accomplished. I'm probably like pretty far in that. And given that, I know it's really important for me to have people around me who sometimes say like, well, let's look at this first, right?
I also know that sometimes if I do have a like maybe I should slow this down. I should like really listen to that because that's like not right. But knowing where I am on a scale is important.