Why? Hello warrior, and welcome to a new month. I’m so excited you clicked play on this episode for personal reasons. I’m always excited for you to learn the next best thing, and I’m always here helping you with things that are going to help. And this is this is no different. But I also, I think this is one of those that I just, I just like want a friend to do this thing with me. So it’s a new month as I record this and I am going to be trying this adulting thing this month, this one specific skill of insulting that I would love it if you joined in and joined me in practicing this. I will get into what it is in the episode, but I just want to sort of be vulnerable up front here and be like, hey guys, I’m fifty four. I’m turning fifty five next month. And I think it’s about time that I practice this a little. So thanks for listening. Let’s go.

Voiceover: Hi, this is the Love Your Life show with Susie Pettitt, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let’s go warriors.

All right, warrior. Thank you so much for joining me, and I really hope you join me this month in practicing this. And what is the adult skill I’ll be practicing? It is practicing me, regulating myself, regulating my emotions, getting myself to calm and my adult brain place before I interfere or try to regulate other people. This is really, if we narrow it down to so many of the problems that we have in our relationships, this is what it is. It is us trying to control or fix the people around us, fix how they’re thinking about it, fix what they’re feeling about it before we look at what we’re thinking and feeling about it. I know that when my kids, let’s say they’re six and eight and they’re arguing over a ball, and if I am in a regulated state and I’m like, yeah, this makes sense. That’s their new ball. Of course they’re arguing and look at them. They’re having sibling dynamics and they’re learning how to manage conflict in a pretty safe way. And their noise is a little annoying to me. So I’m going to go in the other room or whatever. I don’t add fuel to the fire. I stay in this calm place. I don’t agitate the whole system. I don’t make it worse. But when me as a mom that I often used to do get involved and I’m like, hey, you give the ball back or you should have this or you should have five minutes, let’s set a timer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, I’m getting involved because I’m uncomfortable and it’s not a place like I haven’t sat back and been like, what’s the best parenting move here? No, I’m in a reactive brain. Our brain has two states. We’re either in a calm, elevated, like think of your, your, your body is just sort of loose. And like, you can take a deep exhale. We’re in this calm state, okay? Or we’re in this agitated, frenzied, you know, my hand is like going back and forth right now as I talk about it. It’s like, ah, something’s gone wrong here. It’s faith over fear or it’s safety over danger. And what I am practicing this month is to notice when my system goes to danger, because that is our first setting. Our brain is always scanning and it’s like danger, danger, danger. And when my brain goes to danger, I am going to pause. I’m going to notice is there actual danger here? My husband is upset because his business contract fell through. Is there actual danger? My daughter is upset because her boyfriend didn’t return the text right away. Is there actual danger? Like am I physically in harm? Are they physically in harm? So pause. Notice the reality of the situation. And that really ninety eight percent of the time these days we are not in that physical danger. And then bring yourself back to calm. This is what I’m doing regulating myself before I regulate them. I notice this in so many of my clients and in myself as, as you know, we were raised, if you were raised and you were raised in the last century, so born, you know, in the seventies, eighties, 90s, etc.. Okay. Our programming was to take care of other people’s emotions. Mom said, oh my gosh, your faults, you better make it better. Dad’s upset. Like this is we were taught to not regulate ourselves, to try to regulate them so we would feel better. And I’m pretty much over it. I think this is what my adulting is calling me to the table to do this next step where it’s like regulate myself before I regulate them. So instead of me getting involved because it makes me uncomfortable, not because it’s logical or helpful or in their best interest, I do my own adulting work and take a beat and calm down. Like if my kids are roughhousing over this ball, which happened all the time in my house and it’s a little too noisy and it looks a little too rough. Because I was funny enough, I had all sisters, and here I am, a mom of all boys, and I’m like, what is going on? Okay, well, what do I do? I’m like, hold on. Take a breath scan. Is there actual danger? Is there actually something to do? No, it’s just too much for my nervous system. So what do I need to do? I need to regulate my nervous system. All right. Instead of I want my kids, you know, big feelings or sounds or whatever to go away. So I get involved and tamp them down and possibly make them feel like they’re doing something wrong. Or you take that example of like me getting involved as of as a mom with my kids, you know, six and eight in their balls. And it’s like, that’s, do you know why sibling relationships exist? One of the primary roles of sibling relationships is to figure out how to manage conflict. And that is something when we rush in as these overeager parents and we’re like, okay, I’m going to set a timer. You can have the ball here. And we’re just like, because we haven’t regulated ourselves first. So we need to change something outside of us for us to feel better. Okay? We rush in with these rules and these guidelines and these, what do these kids learn? They don’t learn how to manage conflict. They don’t learn how to negotiate. They don’t learn how to be assertive. They just learn. Run to mom or let’s whine loud enough and mom will come in. Or they’re not learning. They’re adulting skills themselves. So it is this, you know, for me now I’m just putting a stake in the ground. I’m like, yeah, okay, I’m done with this. I am going to regulate myself before I try to regulate someone else. Well, it’s not my job to regulate someone else, but manage myself and my own emotions instead of trying to change them so I feel better. I want you to see, dear warrior, that this is the path to freedom and feeling lighter that I know all of us crave. Okay, so many of us feel responsible and uncomfortable when someone else is having a big emotion, and our job is to step back and be like, oh, oh, hold on, I’m not the ruler of the universe. I don’t have to fix everything. I don’t have to get involved with everything. Just because their nervous systems are on high alert doesn’t mean mine needs to be too. Because that is running all of us midlife women. It’s running our adrenals to the ground. It’s making us totally hypersensitive. And we keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. And I’m done with that. Let’s move on. So your mom and sister are arguing. Let them. Your husband and daughter are arguing. Let them. Let them. I get that they’re being upset. Makes you upset. That’s where your leverage is. Tune in to yourself. Oh my gosh. Like, let’s say your husband and your daughter are arguing about her curfew. Okay, first of all, back out. Remind yourself your husband is a grown man and maybe he doesn’t have the skills yet. Or maybe he does, but you getting involved is not going to help. It’s like, this is what his life lesson here is to do. Let him have the consequences of what’s coming out of his mouth. And your daughter. Let her have the consequences of what’s coming out of her mouth. Faith over fear. So just because we’re uncomfortable doesn’t mean we jump in. Because when we jump in it actually it’s adding fuel to the fire. We jump in with these reactive, impulsive moves. Maybe we talk our husband out of it. We demean him, or we try to solve a problem that their brains should be capable of solving. But maybe they’re not, because we’ve always jumped in. So what do we get to do? We get to learn how to regulate ourselves. If you’ve listened to my podcast before, I have said so often that the better you get at feeling uncomfortable, the better your life gets. So in this situation, it’s like turning towards yourself, noticing, okay, there, you know, someone outside of you is having an emotion or they’re unregulated. Turn inside, get your brain out. It’s like if you have a focus on your brain, like you’re the camera and you’re looking out at them. Do that flip it thing. So it’s looking back at you and be like, oh, this makes me uncomfortable. Oh, I’m noticing it in my chest. Oh, I’m going to breathe. Oh my gosh. It’s so hard for me when my husband and my daughter are yelling. Taking some breaths. I’m bringing my system back to calm. This makes sense. Oh, I can still hear them. I’m going to go in the other room. Okay, I need to calm myself because you going and getting involved in that dynamic. I’ll coach you every day till the cows come home, but I have not yet seen that go in a way that is helpful. It is either disempowering to them or it’s using your brain to solve the thing that they should be learning how to solve, right? And this is the meta skill. We are so uncomfortable feeling uncomfortable that we make our life more uncomfortable because we get involved in places where it’s not our business. So that’s, that’s also this. It’s like People did you know this? People are going to be upset. People have feelings. Even if we go in and we make it all magical with husband and daughter and we’re like, okay, how about this? And how about this? And okay, well, the next minute your daughter’s going to have a feeling and your husband’s going to have a feeling. You can’t stop their emotional experience. You can stop by listening to the Love Your Life show and joining the Love Your Life school, feeling responsible for their emotional experiences. That’s codependency recovery. But whether you get involved or not, someone’s going to be upset. People get upset. So there’s that. We tell ourselves this lie that like, we can make it better. Like, oh, look at us. We’re so skilled. And sometimes in the short term we can. But that’s only because those of us born last century have really skilled our tune like helped with all the skills that other people we want them to learn. You’re stealing their human experience. It’s actually one of the coolest things we can do. I see it all the time in heterosexual relationships. I see women doing the over feeling for the men, the over figuring out. I’m just letting that sit for a bit. We tell ourselves this lie that we can make it better, but it’s not making it better. And then we complain. So the reality is, is when we get involved, they miss the skill building of, say, resolving conflict, or they miss the skill building of emotional regulation. And if we’re not involved, if they’re upset at each other or they’re upset as directed in the right area or whatever, they learn to move through it. It’s having this faith that the human can move through it. If they are our kids, they get lessons in proportion to their age. Let them, their eight year old brother taking the ball. That is age appropriate. That is different than, you know, being at twenty eight and having something like. So let them learn the skills when they’re younger. Let other people be upset. Get better at having that camera flip towards you and managing your upset instead of needing them to change their upset so you feel better. Do you see how out of that control that is? It’s like, oh, if my teenager with a different like a less skilled brain than mine, less developed brain than mine, less all these things, less skills, if she changes how she’s feeling, then I’ll feel better. Okay, that’s not cool. Why not you? Who better than you to regulate? Let them be unregulated. Let them have their life lessons. Let them like I’m just like, with my hand. I’m like, shoo, shoo, go do it. Let other humans be humans. We had so much stress for it to our lives when we’re like, oh, I need like, we’re feeling responsible or this is on us. We also had so much stress to ourselves when we’re not doing the work of emotional regulation with ourselves, with our adult selves. This is what I’m doing. I’m fifty four, going on fifty five. I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I have perimenopause. I have like all this stuff going on. And what I’m realizing so much of is I can’t even say it correctly in an English sentence, but what is at the base of so much of my symptoms or what’s going on is dysregulation. It’s just slowing down and building my skills at being uncomfortable. Okay, so my husband’s upset about that text he got. Let him do I need to take that on to my plate of upsetness? No. And this doesn’t mean being a cold hearted bitch. Okay. We can validate. We can learn those skills. I’ll put that episode in the show notes. But us trying to get involved and trying to control how someone else is feeling, first of all, that’s so diminishing to their human experience. It’s like when someone tries to get involved with me, to tell me how I shouldn’t be feeling, what I’m feeling. What do we call it? Gaslit. We get all, like, uppity. Like, don’t you tell me. Like it’s like, oh my gosh. And that we’re doing it to them. We’re trying to prevent them from having a feeling, right? And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work long term, nor is it our job. The more I try to control other people and how they’re feeling and what they’re doing, the more stress I get. I get stressed about like, oh, other people are not playing along to the playbook of Susie’s life. I add fire to fire. My brain is like, something’s gone wrong here. And it’s like, no, we’re just trying to calm our brain, calm our brain. And if the only way we know how to calm our brain is to try to change what someone else is thinking or feeling, that’s completely disempowering. And I want to have you with me stepping into this more adult shoes that we’re going to be wearing. And I want to support you in this the whole month of September in the Love Your Life school. If you haven’t joined yet, that is, we are doing emotional regulation. We are learning emotional regulation, which frankly, like I’m the coach and I think we could be learning this until we die because the strongest part of our brain is the amygdala, which is the emotional, impulsive, aggressive part of our brain. So when we are triggered, which we’re going to be triggered all day, every day by numerous different things, we’re going to feel emotional. Our skill set, our warrior skill building here is learning how to best support your wonderful self in that emotional experience. It is way easier than trying to control all the people. Do you see that? Like us learning how to calm and regulate our nervous system? Just what we’re doing in the Love your Life School in September. So much frigging easier than trying to control all those humans, trying to get our eight year old to understand that it’s okay to six year old plays with a ball, or trying to get our husband to understand that it’s okay that his daughter pierced his, you know, whatever that are. Stop it. Let other people have their human experiences. Let them have their opinions. Let like the. We’re just like, okay, he thinks that. Do you know how much freer that is? And side note calm is contagious. Okay. Co-regulation is for real. When I’m calm and I bring my calm to a storm and I like notice, you know, the storm in the distance. And I’m like, oh, there they are arguing, there they are upset. Or like even, you know, I visited my son earlier, um, last month and he is in the middle of grad school. He’s got all this stuff, he’s juggling all these different things. And I’m just sort of noticing the storm in his head and I’m like, yeah. And in my brain, if I’m not like, oh my God, danger, danger. Like he’s thinking this way. If I’m instead in this calm, regulated, I’ve regulated myself. I say things like, yeah, this makes sense. He’s feeling this way. This is big. I want him to be feeling agitated. He’s got a lot on his plate. He’s going to be living a big life. Let him build the muscles of learning how to feel. So my calm is contagious. My like, because if he says, I’m so nervous about this and this and this isn’t working well, and I have this and I start freaking out. Unhelpful are people that we love are going to be crabby. They’re going to be annoyed. They will be frustrated. They will be stressed. Let them. The solution is not to have these little amoebas walking around that are like, that’s the best life. That’s where they get their let them and then let you bring the calm, let you add the water to the fire. Calm down, slow down. Teach our systems. We’re not actually in danger. And let’s bring that calm to the storm. If you’re interested, join me in the Love Your Life School. Um, and also I would love to hear from you that you’re in on this too, because the more of us doing it, it helps. It’s helpful. All right, dear warrior, thank you for being a part of the Love Your Life show. Thank you for being a part of the love your life family. And if no one has told you yet today, you’re awesome. You dear one who plugs in a podcast like this, who is learning adulting skills and wanting to take it to the next level and be their best selves. You are extraordinary. You are extraordinary. I call my listeners warriors because you’re doing things other people don’t do these days in society. It’s way easier to numb out. It’s way easier to be like, oh, and to get overinvolved in people’s lives or to just feel the feeling of like, oh, I don’t think I should have interfered there, but oh, okay, well, I’m just going to go get on Facebook and forget about it or I’m just going to go, you know, have my whatever you’re maybe we do that sometimes for sure. But then you’re also listening to this podcast. You’re freaking awesome. I love you and I’m sending you a hug today. Thanks for being here.