Parenting with Love, Joy, and Connection with Bryan Post

Would you like to learn how to build a culture of joy, connection, and healing in your home? Join us for a conversation with Bryan Post, an adoptee and therapist specializing in child behavior, adoption trauma, and love-based parenting. He's the founder of Fear to Love LLC, Bondify.ai, and Leaf Wraparound, and the author of several books, including From Fear to Love.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Bryan's journey as an adoptee and how that shaped his work with families today.
• What do we need to know about trauma, its impacts on the kids, and how it shows up day to day?
• Why might we as parents be tempted to misinterpret those behaviors and expressions as defiance, manipulation, or disrespect? 
• When a child is melting down, shutting down, or pushing adults away, what’s actually happening in their brain and nervous system?
• In a very real-life parenting moment — like a slammed door, eye rolls, a screaming match, a refusal to comply — what does the shift from fear-based reactions to love-based responses actually look like?
• Can you share two or three concrete strategies parents can start practicing immediately that reflect that mindset shift?
• Could you give us an example of words or scripts a parent might use in that moment? 
• How can a parent calm themselves first when their child’s behavior is triggering them? 
• What might a “culture of love and joy” actually look like inside a home — especially one that has experienced a lot of chaos?
• What are some of the small, daily practices that build trust over time?
• What does growth look like in a trauma-impacted home?
• One or two examples of how-to or where to capture JOY in the moments when we are feeling challenged about when or where healing may happen. 

Resources:

• Learn more about Bryan Post
• Introduction to Attachment - Online Parent Education course
• Raising Kids for a Lifelong Parent/Child Bond - Podcast

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Welcome to Creating a Family, talk about adoption, foster care, and kinship care. My name is Tracy Whitney. I'm your host for today's episode, and I'm honored to introduce you to our guest, Brian Post.
Some of you who've been here for a long time will need no introduction to Brian, but for those of you who may not have heard of him yet because you're new to your journey, I want to let you know that Brian is an adoptee and internationally recognized therapist. He is a leading expert in child behavior, adoption trauma, and loved-based parenting.
as the founder of fear to love llc bondify.ai and leaf wraparound and the author of several books including from fear to love and the great behavior breakdown he helps families transform fear into connection using his evidence-based fear to love parenting method
Our audience today, again, includes adoptive parents, foster parents and kinship parents who are maybe new to the journey, but others who've been around a little while and maybe need a little refresher on what parenting kids who've been impacted from trauma look like.
If you've been walking this road for years or you're brand new, today is about understanding our children more deeply, learning how to build homes that are rooted in safety, connection, and trust, and building joy into our daily routines. So Brian, thanks so much for being here to help us explore those topics. Tracy, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here with Creating the Family and all of your listeners. So for those who may not be familiar with your story,
your life as an adoptee and how that shaped the work that you do with families today. 100%. I was conceived out of wedlock. My biological mother was married. Her husband was out of the country in the military. She didn't think he was coming back. And so she met my father and fell in love. And they both have really interesting backstories, which
It's become even more important to a lot of the work that I do when we start looking at generational trauma and the impact of generational trauma and how it shows up in children in the present day. And so my biological father ended up getting another woman pregnant. My mother was heartbroken. She also had three children. So I have half siblings with my mother. I have half siblings with my father as well. I met both of them when I was 37. And so she was heartbroken.
realized that she had to place me for adoption. But here's the kind of the backstory to that is once she became pregnant, she called her husband and he wanted her to have an abortion. So the story was that you need to have an abortion. But when I found my biological mother at the age of 37, she said, I need to call you back. And I said, that's fine. And so she, we hung up.
She called me back 30 minutes later and she said, baby, you're right. I'm your mom. I had to tell my husband. So she was still married to the same man. He did not know. So no one knew I existed except my bio mother and her oldest sister, my Aunt Gloria, who's passed away. And everyone thought I had been aborted.
And so I was adopted as I was in foster care, a couple of two different foster homes. And then I was adopted by my parents, Bill and Opal Post, who raised me, who I love, love and adore. My father passed away 18 years ago, but my mother's still my biggest fan. She's she's she's my biggest advocate and probably has created created a blueprint within me for.
passionate advocacy for children, for adopted children, and really all children. But really just, I think that probably came from her more than anyone else. I also grew up with a biological, not a biological sister. She was also adopted. And this is where the majority of my work, this is kind of the fork in the road.
for the core blueprints of my work. So my mom said, when we adopted you, you were smiling. Now, when I met my biological mother, she said to me, and I always knew this intuitively, Tracy, she said to me,
I loved being pregnant. She said, I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. I exercise. I eat all the right foods. I got plenty of sleep. And she said, I loved being pregnant with you until seven months. And then I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep you. So I had to disconnect. But that what we don't realize is that.
Neuroscience now tells us, and neurophysiology, neurobiology now tells us that by the fourth week after conception, the fetus is already starting to develop the mechanisms for hearing. By the second trimester, the fetus is already capable of psychological processing.
Nadine Burke Harris, who wrote a book that I love called The Deepest Well, she says that in the first year of life, and I interviewed Nadine and I was like, so you mean from conception? She's like, yes, because we miss that. We like to think that life starts at nine months. It doesn't. It starts at conception. And so she said from conception to one, the human brain is developing one million neural connections per second.
Per second. So the brain is exploding. And so the first thing my biological mom said is I loved being pregnant. Now, my adoptive mom said, when we got you, you were smiling. That says so much because my adoptive sister, my mom said, when we got your sister, she was crying. My adoptive sister was born to a single mother.
potentially alcohol exposed, maybe drug exposed. She was three months premature. She weighed three and a half pounds when she was born. And she spent the first three months of her life in an incubator in the seventies. Yeah. Our conception to birth was diametrically different. Right. And that impacted both of our ability to regulate stress. So that's my sister and I.
We grew up in a home with two parents, beautiful, loving, hardworking parents. But they were both parentified. They were both children of alcoholics. They were both the oldest. My mother was the oldest of a sibling group of 10. My dad was the oldest of a sibling group of nine. He's the oldest male.
So what is that? What do we know now? We know that in that era that the oldest siblings raised the youngest. So they were parentified. So not only did they not grow up with blueprints for emotional connection and presence, but my dad was a Vietnam veteran. He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder when he came back from Vietnam. Slept with the light on next to the nightstand for as long as I remember.
My mother, her father, when she was nine years old, he had a heart attack in front of her at the kitchen table and died. And no one ever talked about it. She didn't tell me this. I didn't know this until just years and years and years later. So they both had extensive trauma. And so you have four.
Beautiful souls all brought together with extensive trauma. And then that was our life. And what I tell parents to this day, I try to simplify it. If you have an adopted child, not only do you have a child who's experienced trauma, and in most instances, I'm going to say 99%.
If you have an adopted child, they've experienced indelible lifelong trauma. Because I'm 52 and I'm one of the world's experts at this stuff. And I can tell you that I still, to this day, have challenges rooted in my earliest experiences. And I'm...
Pretty mindful. So I pay a lot of attention to how I'm showing up and to what my experiences are. So I believe it's an indelible lifelong imprint. And so children, these children, our children, they are stress sensitive and fearful. And I've been doing this for 30 years.
And I always say, if I had learned anything else, that's what I'd be teaching. But in 30 years, this message has not changed. Probably 25, 27 years, the message has not changed. And I am a consummate studier. I research and read everything. Adopted children are stress sensitive and they are fearful. So the stress sensitivity, which you cannot see 98% of the time.
triggers the amygdala, which triggers cortisol, which puts them in a state of survival. And when we can stop looking at just diagnosis and medication and all the problems, and we can just see our children as stress sensitive and fearful, and then you ask yourself, if my child is stress sensitive, not only do I want to regulate the stress in their life.
As much as I possibly can, you can't avoid bad things from happening. And we might talk about that here in a little bit. But if I can realize that when my child is acting out, it's because my child is stressed out. And that stress drives their fear. Then I only have two things I really have to contend with. Not the behavior, but the stress and the fear. Because if you contend with the stress and the fear, the behavior diminishes.
Why do we parents then misinterpret those behaviors? What's going on inside of us that causes us to misinterpret those behaviors, I guess, is the better question. Well, it's an excellent question. And I will say that.
We as parents are a byproduct of our society. We are a byproduct of our culture. We are a byproduct of generations. We're just showing up with blueprints for what we've learned and has been passed down to us for 100 years.
200, 300, 400, 500 years. So we've been conditioned to believe that behaviors are bad. We've been conditioned to believe that when you see negative behaviors, you've got to control them, suppress them, or change them. CSC, control, suppress, or change. So that is our conditioning. And the reason we have that conditioning is because we have been conditioned wonderfully and beautifully to be fearful.
We have been raised to be fearful. We have grown up, many of us, the great majority of us, not even adopted children. I'm talking about all of us. And I like for people to understand because, of course, my platform is adoption and foster care, but I'm speaking human behavior.
This applies to all of us. And that's what's really important. Everyone wants to focus on the kid and the behaviors, but we have to focus on ourselves first. And so what has happened is we've become beautifully and wonderfully conditioned for fear. And what we've grown up experiencing as love is actually fear.
disguised as love. So then what happens when children start acting out, we have all this conditioning that says you have to control it, you have to suppress it, or you have to change it. But what we don't realize is that when a child is acting out because they're stressed out, it stresses us out. So then when we get stressed out and our cortisol and our amygdala kicks in and we move into survival, then we want to control and suppress and change because that's survival.
So our obsessive focus, and this is societal, our obsessive focus on behavior control and management comes from our own fear. Yeah, that resonates. I was just talking with some of my adult children recently about my own struggle to not respond according to my fear of what people around me might be thinking when my child is acting out.
To flip that and say, this is not about what people are thinking about me. This is not what people are thinking about my kid. This is what does my kid really need right now in this moment to feel safe, to feel connected. And just questioning myself along the years as I've become more and more trauma informed to say, wow, you know, when I was a young mom, I really did care too much about.
what my parents might have thought about the way my child was behaving right now, or what the stranger in the grocery store thinks. Like, why did I care about that? Can I comment on that? Yeah, for sure. I have a very neurodivergent brain. And I like for people to understand that when people have experienced trauma, it changes the brain in a negative way, but also that opens a pathway for a very positive thing. And so...
This is how my brain functions. You say respond. You responded too much to what other people thought. But I don't believe that's true. Here's what I think has happened. We've been taught that we respond, but we don't respond. We actually react. That's a great point. Reacting is unconscious. You didn't do it intentionally. You did it because you became stressed.
Because of your perception, now your perception is heightened because your kids are doing whatever and your parents are there. See, this is where we go down the rabbit hole. When the parents are there, right? When the extended family's there, then we're reacting because we're in survival. We're not actually responding. Responding requires consciousness. Yeah, it was absolutely reactionary rather than responsive. That's a very good point.
When our kids are melting down, shutting down, pushing us away, you mentioned a couple things that are happening in their brain and their body. If you could just kind of summarize them real quickly so that it sets the stage for the next couple questions. I'd love to. I'm going to do it in two ways. And I'm going to do it with a theoretical model that I've been teaching for 25 years called the stress model. The stress model says in.
Times of behavior, when a child is having a negative behavior, the behavior is being driven by stress. So all behavior arises from a state of stress. And in between the behavior and stress. So when you become stressed, your cellular system constricts into survival. Your amygdala is what throws you into a stress state. And that survival state.
all your cellular system constricts into survival, that is fear. And that fear drives the behavior. Now, there's a couple things that are going on here. So first of all, when our children are acting out because they're stressed out, it stresses us out. So it triggers cortisol in us, which causes us to move into survival, which then drives our fear, which then drives our behavior.
I call it a negative neurophysiologic feedback loop. Now, here's what's important in that. Joseph Ledeau, the New York University neuroscientist, wrote a book called The Emotional...
brain. And he says, in times of stress, cortisol starts surging through our brain, passes the hippocampus and the hypothalamus, and it hits the hippocampus. Now, the pituitary gland, it surges past the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and hits the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for helping you to remember and your clear thinking. So Joseph Ledeau says, in times of stress, our thinking
becomes confused and distorted and our short-term memory is suppressed. So in that moment of stress, which drives fear, which drives behavior, our thinking is confused and distorted. This is the child as well as the parent. The child gets stressed first, the parent reacts. Now you've got two stressed out systems, two stressed out fearful systems.
And the thinking is not clear and the short term memory is suppressed. So we're not online like we're not logical in that moment. We've become very emotionally reactive. And here's the really interesting part. So cortisol comes fully online by the time your brain is 18 months old. So I love I have three grandchildren myself. And it's been it's been phenomenal to watch the way their brains come online at certain stages in development.
And also to not be able to take it personally as a grandparent when your grandbaby doesn't want you to just hold them and kiss all over them. It's because they're in that there. There's a different stage of brain development. Give them six months. They'll come around. And so when the.
Amygdala gets activated and releases all that cortisol and surges past the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is a very important structure in the brain. It's the part of the brain that is supposed to release a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the brain's anti-stress hormone. Cortisol is the stress hormone. Oxytocin is the anti-stress hormone. But the difference is oxytocin, unlike cortisol,
which is automatic and starts, because it's a part of our growth process, oxytocin has to be learned. So the hormone oxytocin, which is the brain's anti-stress hormone, is also associated as the love hormone.
It is the hormone that gets turned on in joy. It's the hormone that gets turned on in affection. It's the hormone that gets turned on in connection and relationship. And when that hormone turns on, it calms down the cortisol, which then allows our cellular system to move from being constricted to relaxed and open. And then we can be in relationship.
And that is a very sensitive feedback loop that occurs between parents and children. And when you've experienced trauma earlier in your life, you have heightened sensitivity. Your amygdala volume is turned up to a seven, to an eight. And so it doesn't take long. And that's just automatic because of your birth experience, because of your trauma, the earliest transition you have experienced. So you have a volume that's already a six, seven.
It doesn't take long to get jacked up to an eight, nine and a 10. And the problem is, as soon as it gets jacked up to an eight, nine and a 10, it's all static. Right, right. You can't hear a thing. There's no clear signal. And then that's reciprocal with us as parents as well. Yeah, because we go, oh, our kid can't hear us. So we say it louder. That's right. And then ours is going up and theirs is going up. That's right. Total chaos. That's right.
Hey, listeners, sorry to interrupt this fascinating conversation with Brian Post, but I want to hear more about you and your story and who you are and where you're listening from. You can tap the link in your podcast player or in the YouTube show notes and tell us anything about yourself that you want to let us know. We love hearing from you and it helps us plan future podcasts. It helps us plan future content. And I'm excited to hear from you. If you don't want to respond,
on the podcast player or the YouTube show notes, you can always email info at creatingafamily.org. So most of your work centers around shifting parenting strategies from that reactive fear feedback loop to love in a very real
parenting moment, like rolling eyes and slamming doors, refusal to comply, refusal to go to school, all those things. What might that shift look like in a real life conversation with a kid who's having one of those meltdowns?
Oh, gosh, that's such a I love the question. And I love the fact that I have spent 30 years traveling around the world, working with families in their homes, doing real life stuff. I have an agency in Northern California. We provide wrap around intensive wrap around services. So we go into homes. And just yesterday I filled in for one of my we call them family specialists. They're like our coaches that are going to home. So I went down and spent time with these two.
11 year old twin boys, I went down to fill in for his shift and I was just functioning as a coach. So as a coach, we went to Sky Zone, which is the big trampoline park. And so one of the boys has been really struggling. And let me tell you, these are, these are boys who have early extreme in utero trauma.
and trauma for the first year and a half of their life. They have a single mom. She's about 5'2", and she's the most soft-spoken woman I think I've ever met. I mean, she's so soft-spoken. These boys are prone to aggressive, violent behavior. So I take them to Sky Zone where they like to go, and one in particular has been really struggling.
He had a really good time for the first hour. So I call it a window of tolerance. Children have a window of tolerance for how much stress they can handle. We all have a window of tolerance. And when that window of tolerance shuts, you can't tolerate stress anymore. So when he can't tolerate stress anymore, all of a sudden he gets into his posture, his face changes, and he starts cussing the other kids. And he'll say ugly things. And he's a pretty bulky kid. And he'll start cussing at the other little kids.
He's so irrational that the other kids know something's not right. Right. And so instead of getting mad at him, they're just like, dude, what is, what is up with dude? And then they came over to me because they think I'm, they think, assume I'm the father. Right. And so they say, you know, he's, he said, he said naughty words to us.
He pushed him. And so they're telling me and he's my little guys over over, you know, kind of watching because he's expecting to get into trouble. And I said to the kids, I said, thank you for letting me know. Thank you. And so and this is this is how I'm I'm explaining the fear to love shift. And the best way to explain the fear to love shift is to also provide the contrast normally. And this just happened with another one of my coaches just two weeks ago.
The parent wants to go say to the kid, hey, what's wrong with you? That's not okay. You can't do that. Are you ready to go? If you're going to keep doing that, we're going to get out of here. This is not okay. Because then you've got other adults and other parents kind of looking at you. I didn't do any of that. I apologized to the boys. I said, guys, I'm sorry he said that to you. And then they went ahead and they kept playing. And eventually he came walking over and I smiled at him.
And I said, hey, buddy.
I brought him in for a hug. I said, are you okay? He's like, yeah, they're being mean and da-da-da-da-da. I said, okay, well, let's get it together. We'll be okay. And so then we just, I did not say not one thing, not one thing. And let me tell you why. And this is what parents have to understand. Because when a child is in a state of stress, they are not thinking clearly.
And they cannot remember. They are in survival. So he's not going to hear anything I say. The only thing he's going to respond to is he's going to feel. He's going to feel my presence. That's why I smile. That's why I'm breathing. That's why I'm calm. That's why nothing else matters. I'm completely dialed in on him. And so then I walk over.
And I'm just observing him now. So now he's my responsibility. So his other brother gets ready. He's like, can we go? And I'm like, OK. So I already know this is going to be a challenge. Adopted children struggle with transition. They really struggle with transition when they're stressed out. So his little brother says, I'm ready to go. I said, OK, well, go ahead and go get your shoes on. He said, well, I'll go wait for him. I know what that means. That means I'm going to go get on him.
yell at him, pull him, say, it's time to go, create more stress. I said, no, no, you go get your shoes. And so I waited for a minute and I said, go over and check out those video games. And I waited for a minute. And then I just, I actually did not even, I think I walked over. He was kind of talking, doing, yeah, these other two big boys.
And then they came over and he said, they said, he's calling us. He called me this word, this word. I said, I'm sorry that happened, guys. And so they walked away and I said, hey, buddy. And I said, come here. And I pulled him in again. I said, it's time to go. Look at the clock. It's time to go. We got to go so we can go have some dinner before we go home. I don't want to. I said, I know, but we'll be back. We'll come back another day. And we transitioned out.
into the car. We went and ate. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you something, Tracy. He didn't actually relax until he had had about three bites of food. And then he started relaxing and then he got tired. And then we're in the car. He's, he got the right shotgun because his brother rode shotgun on the way there. He leans over on my arm.
Just like a baby. Because when you, this is something that people don't understand. When you stress, you regress. I was not looking at an 11 year old. I was looking at a two year old. And a two year old at a peak state of amygdala development sees everything as a threat. So then what happens is I create, and now this is the part that parents have to understand because they basically say, parents at this point say, well, you didn't do anything. I actually did everything.
Yeah. Bruce Perry says the brain always. Oh, you got it. You got to hear this. The brain always returns to the way the event was handled the last time. Yeah. Yep. You felt that, right? Yeah. So how how I handled him and work through that process at Sky Zone.
Today or tomorrow when he goes again, guess what his brain's going to return to? It's going to return to when he's stressed, it's going to return to how I handled it, which is going to help him navigate just a little bit better. But then I also said to his mom, he's got about a one hour window of tolerance. So that means probably at 50 minutes, we need to start transitioning the heck out of there. Yeah.
Because someone who's not as mindful, not as present, not as tuned in, who's going to get stressed out and reactive is not going to be able to handle it the same way. And then it's going to spiral out of control. And that's what I do. That's the process. There are two ways to change the brain, repetition and emotional impact. And here's what we don't realize.
In every every day, every interaction is the repetition. So every day, every interaction. And his mom texted me later. She said they were so relaxed when they were home. She said it's like just being in your presence calms them down. Yeah. And that that is a that is a physiologic reality. Right. Yeah. My regulated brain helps regulate their brain. My regulated nervous system helps regulate their nervous system.
And I told her, I said, I gave him lots of love while we were there. I gave him several hugs and I did. He'd come through because I knew he was, I knew he was, he's been struggling all week. So he'd come through and I'd open up my arms and he'd give me a hug. The drive-bys. Yes, the drive-bys. Yeah. And she said, I'm surprised he let you do that. I'm not surprised at all.
Yeah. When you see the when you see the two to three year old and you don't see the 11 year old, then you don't have anxiety about hugging the two to three year old. You have anxiety about hugging the 11 year old because you're thinking about how the 11 year old is going to think about what everyone else is going to think. All their friends are thinking. Right. That's right. I'm just focused on my two to three year old.
I know what matters to my two to three year old. So it's the it's all those moments. See, that's the repetition. That's planting seeds. That's what the brain returns to every single time. But the other part is the emotional impact. See, and that's I believe that that is the part where we really struggle in our society. And this is how children grow older, but they don't grow better because we have been conditioned to believe that negative behaviors are bad.
I don't see. I think that so much of what we've experienced, this is my neurodivergent brain. I believe that so much of what we've been taught in parenting is actually inverted. Like we've been taught that behaviors are bad. I don't believe behaviors are bad. I believe that behaviors are a form of communication. And not only do I believe they're a form of communication, but I believe that really extreme behaviors come from the brainstem. They come really extreme behaviors comes from the very roots of trauma.
And so when you have a behavior being driven by the very roots of trauma, then it is actually the single greatest opportunity that God could give you to create a healing moment for that child.
Right. But see, because we've been conditioned to view it as bad. So our amygdala reacts and we get stressed and we move into survival. We think about what everyone else is thinking and we think about all the all the blueprints we've received from grandma and grandpa and mom and dad and aunts and uncles. Expectations. Expectations. Yeah. And we miss the moment. And instead of.
working through and supporting the trauma, understanding it and working through the trauma that is surfacing as behavior. We end up trying to suppress the behavior, which suppresses the trauma. So children don't ever grow better. They just grow older. Yeah. And I actually wanted to make a point when you were talking about stress tolerance and it's really important that we parents understand that it's not just.
bad stress that they have limited tolerance for. It's also good stress. So in your example of this young man, the first 50 minutes that he was there, he was probably having some good old fashioned fun, physical body work, but that is a form of stress. And when our kids are stress sensitive.
Good stress and bad stress has a limited time of benefit. And so if we can catch them before that window expires, then we can help them with the transitions. We can help them with the repetitions. Then the emotional impact becomes positive emotional impact, not negative emotional impact. Because we can do all that damage and harm just by trying to move them out of that.
stress tolerance window that has expired. And that just adds to the harm that's already been done. And instead, recognizing that any stress, good or bad, has a limited shelf life for kids.
stress sensitivity. I went to a Kevin Hart comedy show and I, at one point I was laughing so hard that I was crying and I thought I was going to have to get up and leave because my stomach was hurting so bad. So even good stress can become bad. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So let's get a little practical or a little bit more practical, even than that example was when a caregiver is managing
transitions and stress tolerance windows and things like that. What are some practical strategies that they can, in the moment that they're experiencing this?
you know, maybe rising difficulty with their child. What's something that a caregiver can do and then tell us how that helps or why it helps both the caregiver and the child. I'll give you, you, you actually, you actually gave the answer to your question. I'll give you the, the most practical thing a caregiver can do. It's so practical that we don't do it because we're stressed. But the thing is, is to stop, stop and take three to 10 deep.
breaths. You have got to stop and breathe because if you don't stop and breathe, then your brain goes right back to what Joseph Lodeau says. You become stressed. Your thinking becomes confused and distorted. Your short-term memory is suppressed. So the most practical thing a parent can do is stop and breathe. Take three to 10 deep breaths. Slow down. Slow down.
realize that you're not under attack, that the child's not being willfully disobedient, that they're not trying to control you. They're not trying to manipulate you. They're stressed. So you've got to calm your stress so you can see their stress. Then you can see their fear. And what's so magical? What's so magical about that is that as soon as you do that, your brain comes back online, Tracy, and you can see up teeth different things that you can do. Right.
Your horizon expands. Because now you're thinking clearly and now you can remember. Now you don't feel like you're under attack. So the most practical thing.
is to stop and take three to 10 deep breaths and then connect with how you're feeling in that moment. The whole time I'm with parents or I'm with kids or whoever, I am paying attention to what I'm feeling. I'm paying attention to what my body is doing. I'm paying attention to what my thinking is doing. I'm paying attention to my breathing because I know that I want to stay online and present. And stress causes us to...
Obsess about the future, react from the past, but it takes us out of the present. So once you do that, if you can't do that, you shouldn't do anything. Because if you do anything else, it's going to make it worse. I'm going to say that again. I'm going to say it again because it's so hard to hear because it's so simple. But if you can't stop and breathe, if you can't stop and breathe and take three to 10 deep breaths, you should not do anything else because you're going to make it worse. That is the
biggest and first step. If you can't do it, I'd like to give parents permission and professionals. If you can't stop and breathe, if you can't take those three and 10 deep breaths, go ahead and do whatever you do. Go ahead and see how it works out. And then after it's worked out, however it's worked out, I want you to come back and I want you to review it as you're taking your three to 10 deep breaths. And I want you to ask yourself, what could I have done differently?
Yeah. What could I have done differently? And at what point could I have done differently? It all is very simple, but it is not easy because our amygdala wants us to take action. Yeah. Your fear receptor in your brain puts you in survival and it wants you to take action. And let me tell you, you're going to mess up.
It is not going to get it. You're going to make it worse. And you've got to be able to ride through that storm calmly. It is just like you're surfing. In times of stress, you are riding a big wave. And if you freak out, you could die. Not literally. But that's how your amygdala is feeling. That is how your amygdala is feeling. There's a show on Netflix, I believe. It's either Netflix or Amazon Prime. It's called 100 Foot Wave.
It'd be a fantastic show for parents to watch because you have these guys going out in Portugal, riding, this guy rode a hundred foot, they're chasing a 100 foot wave and they have to get into, it's called a flow state.
Right. Yeah. I've heard about that. And this is the same state that children get into while they're playing video games. They can get into a flow state. That's why it's so difficult for them to put the game away. Right. You got to get into a flow state, which is just breathing and being present in the moment and not worrying. I would also encourage parents, if you are able in that moment where you're taking that pause and you're breathing three to 10 times in nice, deep, slow, steady breaths, it's okay to say to your kids, Hey,
Mom needs a minute to pause. Mom needs to pause, take some deep breaths. Mom needs to calm her brain down so she can talk to you and help you through what you're feeling right now. And of course, when your kids are really little, that's the time to start narrating that stuff. But if you're doing it with an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old, it's okay to stop and say, hey, mom needs a minute. Oh, you're 100% right. It's such great modeling for our kids.
One of the struggles that I had as a young parent, I was very reactionary. I didn't narrate what was going on inside my internal state. And it definitely is something that I've learned because I'm still parenting. My oldest is 32 and my youngest is 14. So it's something that I've gotten much better with, you know, with my 18 and my 14 year old, I can stop and say, you know what? I need a minute. Just give me five minutes to breathe or.
I'll go get a drink of cold water or leave the room and just calm myself down. It's great modeling for them. But it took me a lot of years to learn that. And I'm hoping parents can hear from others' mistakes and learn earlier. Isn't that the beauty of life and wisdom? The other thing I can suggest that parents also find difficult is when you can stop and you can take a deep breath, say to yourself, I'm not going to die.
So say to yourself, I'm not going to die because your brainstem, when you're activated, that's where you're at. Your brainstem is like, I'm not going to die. And you can say to your child, you're not going to die. We're going to be okay. We're going to get through this. I just need to, I need to take a step back for a moment. Just try it one time. And if you just try it one time, you're just pulling out of that negative feedback loop.
And when you pull out of that negative feedback loop, everyone can relax a little bit more. And even if your child can relax, this is important. Even if your child can't relax, you're able to relax.
us is that the more regulated nervous system has the ability to regulate the more stressed out one. So in physiologic feedback loops, a negative state cannot grow in the midst of a positive one. That's so important. So your child can continue yelling and fussing and cussing and threatening and doing all the stuff. But if you're regulated,
It won't amp up. Right. It won't amp up. And then you can say to your child, and I really encourage parents, when your child is really stressed, talk less because you're just activating their sensory. It is so hard. That's why you got to stop and take those three to 10 deep breaths. Yeah. Because you're stressing them out more by talking. Right. So talk less. You say, we're okay.
We're okay. We're okay. You're going to be okay. We're going to get through this. Tell me how you feel. Tell me how you feel. When you're a child in this, I teach a concept called the three emotional pathways. We have three emotional pathways through how we express energy, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. If your child is in a behavior state, that means they've already dropped through the attitudes and the feelings. What you actually want, and see, this is the neurodivergence again, the inversion.
We've been taught that children's attitudes are a sign of disrespect. As soon as you believe that, you're going to snowball right down into negative behaviors. Yeah, that's true.
Think about that for a moment. As soon as your child, and I see an attitude expression is an emotional pathway of expression. What is emotion? It's energy in motion. So the moment your child rolls their eyes and gives you attitude, they're expressing energy, which helps them transition. But we've been taught that that's a sign of disrespect and they shouldn't do it. So then we tell them, don't you roll your eyes at me, which then shuts down that pathway and then suppresses them into feelings.
So they yell and we've been taught, don't you yell at me. So then we suppress that pathway down into behaviors. Then they start misbehaving and we say, don't behave that way. What are they supposed to do? Right. Yeah.
It brings the word picture to mind when you're pressing down on, say, a jar of jelly and you're just pressing and pressing and pressing. Well, where's the jelly going to go if you keep it's going to ooze out the sides? And that oozing out of their behavior is what creates the stress. And if we can be if we can be the mirror instead of them being the mirror and we're holding up the standard.
of calm, regulated behavior, and they can look back and then reflect that, then we're giving them the opportunity to grow past what they did the last time and giving them the opportunity to learn even tiny little progress. I love that, that I'm not sure why jelly came to mind, but I'm going to borrow that from you. I'm going to create the jelly jar imagery. Yeah.
One more interruption to let you know that at the start of the new year, we added several new courses to our library of free courses sponsored by the Jockey Bean Family Foundation.
You can find it at bit.ly slash JBF support. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash JBF support. These courses are free. You can take one, two, or all of them and strengthen your family, strengthen your parenting tools and help you lead your kids towards healing and joy. And again, thank you to the Jockey Being Family Foundation for supporting our efforts to allow these courses to be for free.
Thanks so much. And let's go back to the show. Let's talk a little bit about co-regulation. And we've been talking a lot about things that parents can do to check in with their internal state, get themselves right. But what are some other than the, we're going to be okay and we're not going to die. What are some other things that we can say to ourselves that will help kind of trigger us back into a regulated state? If we feel that we've already kind of gone down that path a little too far.
Well, so I'll give you a high-level one. Yeah. And the high-level one is that when you're really learning and growing as a parent, you realize that your reactions aren't really about your child.
They're about old experiences you've had that are getting triggered. So I say high level because that takes a little bit more work, but it's a part of the same process. You can realize that your child's behavior that's causing you to feel reactive isn't about your child at all. So you can ask yourself this question, why am I feeling the way I'm feeling right now? Your child can be doing whatever they're doing. You say, why am I feeling the way I'm feeling right now? That will anchor you into the core of your...
emotional pattern as a parent okay there's so many there's so many tools and techniques and and you know i'm i'm a grew up in the 70s so you remember in the 80s and 90s tool time the show and everyone everyone started talking about don't be a tool oh yeah yeah don't remember that yeah so we are the tool yeah we are the tool
And it is our internal regulatory state that is the most important. And I like to give, I like to give.
the most important tool, which is your own self-regulation. Because without your own self-regulation, you can't co-regulate. So that could be, I'm not going to die. We're going to be okay. Getting quiet, breathing. Those are the basics. If you start needing to talk too much more than that, you're just probably going to be in a state of stress. And that's not what you want to do. You want to stay focused.
on calming yourself down and then it's just a matter of being present to your child right being present to yourself and that's why what you said tell your child hey mom needs a minute you can say that you can say hey i need a minute i need a time out i don't believe in time out for kids i believe in time out for the time the adult goes and takes the time out for kids i want us to have a time in but you can't create time in with with a dysregulated system
And just to pick up on that just a little, a step further, is that attachment, the concept of attachment is in the theory of the definition of attachment is the dyadic regulation of emotion. But what we forget is that Kittle and Klaus were the attachment and bonding pediatricians. It's attachment and bonding.
Attachment is the behavior of the child to the parent. Bonding is the behavior of the parent to the child. Both systems have to regulate, but the bonding system has to be regulated first. Right. Right. Because otherwise the child's attachment system doesn't have a secure place to land. Yeah. And so this, and this is very important.
I love for parents to, number one, work on prevention, but number two, work on creating opportunities for oxytocin. Yeah. The things you don't want to do is you don't want to yell. You don't want to threaten. You don't want to try to force. You don't want to try to control.
You want to create oxytocin. And oxytocin is turning on that anti-stress hormone. It's turning on that love hormone. So before your child escalates, give them hugs. Love on them. Tell them how special they are. And then when they're stressed, they have that.
to come back to right right okay so that's very important and then in the times when your child is not stressed find something some fun you we get so and these become conditioned states in our brain everything we're talking about is a brain-based pattern and that's why this is so hard
So we're wanting to condition them for joy. We're wanting to condition them for connection and love. So let's shift then right now and talk about that love and that joy and the connection. Give us some, some of us struggle, raising my hand, more than others to be fun. I'm not known as the fun parent in our house. Give us some very starter practices for building fun and joy and laughter in the home that kind of glues everybody together.
You're asking such great questions. And I always want to go to the root first before we get to the surface. And the root is, what was your experience with your own parents when it came to joy and laughter and fun? Because that defines our blueprints.
for joy and laughter and fun. And so most of us, I don't say most of us, I did not have that experience with my parents of joy and laughter and fun. We had lots of yelling and shaming and demeaning, and there wasn't a lot of good times. There were some small good times in between.
But you got to ask yourself, what are your blueprints? Because that's how you're showing up. And then what you've got to do is you've got to hold yourself to task to create that joy and to create that laughter and to create that fun. And so here's a very simple way you can do that. What makes you happy? What makes you as a parent happy? What makes you as a parent joyful? What do you as a parent consider to be fun? Start doing those things.
Start doing those things and then start engaging your children in the doing of those things. Now, a lot of times the things that we consider to be fun, our kids think are boring and stupid, right? So you have to realize that you're initially going to get that resistance from them. But if it creates joy for you, your system gets regulated and a regulated system is an attractive system.
It vibrates attraction. So it will pull them to you. So hold your joy, whether it's turning on music and dancing. You know what? I have danced with all three of my grandchildren now at the youngest of ages because I love music. I love music. And that's creating a vibration. So find something you can be joyful about. And the next thing is find something that they enjoy.
that you can join them in and that is enjoyment in joy we move into joy you don't have to love it you love it because they love it right and then as the parent what i want you to do is i want you to observe their enjoyment that's where you will get your feedback
is by finding something that your kids love to do and doing that, trying to find some common ground. But all that's going to be really hard if you can't really assess your own blueprints that you're showing up with. Yeah, yeah. I would add a third one to that, and that's to speak out loud your observations about their joy. Yeah. And it's kind of contagious. It gets...
that conversation back and forth going and it keeps things kind of on the upswing. Wow, you were really having fun sledding down that hill. I love the way you laugh when you're having so much fun. And it just brings that desire to laugh more up inside of them, sometimes to please us. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because then it becomes that muscle memory and that repetition that's building those positive emotional impacts.
It's awesome. So when we're working on building a culture of joy and connection and love and those positive oxytocin exchanges in our homes, what are some of the environmental things that we can consider building into our homes? You mentioned music. I find music to be such a...
tone setter in our home. I also love music. So my kids have all grown up with very diverse tastes in music. And that's been a great tone setter for our family. What are some other environmental things that you would advise parents to put in place when they're looking for joy?
That's another great question. And I go back to the century pathways. So it's the sights, pleasing things to see, things that you can see that indicate connection and remind, remind the brain of connection. So pictures of you laughing together, playing together, doing fun things together, memories. So your sight smells.
Help your house smell good. And usually that's going to associate with food, which associates with taste. When you smell something, it goes directly to your amygdala. So when it's pleasant, it's great because it calms the amygdala. When it's unpleasant, it triggers it automatically. And sight, sight, your brain has to go through seven different pathways before something you see.
is recognized as a thought. So that's very important. But also, sight, when you're stressed, it's one of the first things that you shut down. You stop making eye contact because it stimulates your frontal lobe. So you have your sights, you have your smells, you have your sounds, which is nice music, something soft in the background, keeping volumes down on TVs. And let me tell you, when my grandson comes,
oh, he's two and a half years old. He is turned up. He likes the TV up. He likes the toys everywhere. And sometimes I'm like, oh, it's overstimulating. It's so stimulating, but that's where his brain is at. His brain is in that heightened state. So sometimes just turning the volume down, the TV can still be on.
but the volume's down. And so it's just reducing that pathway. And then touch in the environment, getting in touch. You nailed it at the beginning of this podcast. Drive-bys, the drive-bys, the drive-by touch. You know, it doesn't have to be, oh, give me a hug. Oh, let me lay on top of you. It's just a little pat, a little hug, a little touch, scratch on the back, whatever.
whatever sensory engagement your child really enjoys. And then there are also so many, Tracy, there are people who are professionals at creating therapeutic environments. That is a very real thing. And I, I started talking about therapeutic environments 25 years ago, but now people who they know the paint colors, you know, they know the different ways. In fact, I have one of my colleagues, that's her whole expertise is therapeutic environments.
Put some plants in your environment. Clean the air. Natural sunlight instead of all the fake lights. Open your window, your blinds and get some natural light in. So there are just so many little small things that we take for granted that have an impact on our nervous.
system yeah if you have a kid that's especially sensitive to that kind of sensory input set up a little sensory corner for them where their favorite blanket whether it's a rough texture or a very soft texture or some fidget toys that help them just kind of re-regulate their brains and bodies
we've got tons of really soft blankets all over the house and big soft pillows that you can just sink into. And we've been through probably three or four couches before we found the one that just is like comfortable for everyone. So yeah, setting up those environments, creating a very warm, hospitable environment that isn't just hospitable to
outside people coming in but is hospitable to those who live there that they can inhabit the spaces and you know we've we've said a lot over the years a safe brain is a learning brain and when their brains can feel safe in their space I always worked with my kids to make their bedrooms feel like a haven so that they could just
come down off of all of their hard body systems all day long and feel safe to sleep and safe to relax. And yeah, that hospitality of not just for strangers, but for everybody in your family. Can I speak to that, what you just said?
Don't be afraid to organize your child's room, especially when they're young. Don't be afraid to go in and clean their room because what you're actually doing is you're modeling to them what it feels like to have a clean room. You're modeling to them how to clean up because when they hit the teenage years, they're going to get really, really messy. But what you'll find is if you've modeled, if you've modeled officially once every couple of weeks or once a month.
They'll clean up the pig pen and it'll be, it'll be pristine, but because their brains are in a chaotic state, pretty soon their room's going to be right back to chaos. Don't be afraid to go in and help and suggest, because remember when we're stressed, we're regressed. So they're not, they may not be 15.
They may be five. You know, your eight-year-old may be two. So the things that our adult brains we expect and think should be normal, they're not there yet. Children's frontal lobes don't develop until 21 to 25 years old. So they have a long ways to go. We call it half-baked around here. Half-baked, amen. Yeah, and I think, too, we need to be very mindful, especially kids that are stress-sensitive, that less is more.
in your environment. You don't need so many bright colors or so many toys. In particular, I see a lot of young families just having way too many toys and it creates like this internal chaos for the kids, but it's, it's also pretty chaotic for the parents. And when you're trying to.
interact with your kids from a regulated state, but you feel this chaos in your environment all the time, you're kind of fighting against yourself. So try to think less is more when you're creating that haven environment in your home. Fantastic. So let's talk about what growth looks like in a family that is working towards healing that stress sensitivity. Oh, that's such a good question to look for an indicator.
And let me tell you what growth looks like. Growth looks like a steady progression of your child being able to tolerate more and more stress. So when you have a child who can go to school and this is parents miss this all the time. If you have a child who can go to school and they go all day long and you don't get a phone call, they don't get suspended.
right they're using their window of tolerance you've helped them to grow that window of tolerance now some parents have have children that go to school and within an hour they're getting a call that's okay that's okay that just means they've got an hour window of tolerance so growth is two hours so so real growth and real healing
is an increasing window of tolerance for stress. And you'll see it in small indicators where a child will get frustrated. But instead of blowing off or instead of cursing or instead of breaking something, they'll hold that frustration for a moment because they're trying to regulate it. I don't want you to discount that as a parent. I want you to realize that
That is a byproduct of what you've been creating. Right. You're growing that. And in creating that, you're strengthening their internal system. So, so much, probably all of what I teach has almost nothing to do with external controls. It has everything to do with growing an internal control system. So when your child is maintaining that frustration, they're growing.
You're on the right track. And so what will happen when parents are on a growth, on a healing, I like to call it the healing trajectory, they'll start at having an explosion every day. Right. And then they'll have one once every other day. And then they'll have one once in three days. Yep. Then they'll have one once in a week. And then they'll have one once in two weeks. You got to commend yourself.
Yes. Yes. You've got to say, I'm doing it. And that's how, that's how you tell when you're doing it. It's just like the joy you can measure, measure right now. You can today, any parent listening to this, you can write down on a piece of paper, the instances of joy in your home for the whole day. No judgment.
Just write it down. He was laughing. I was laughing. He was relaxed. I was relaxed. We had a good dinner. Just write down the instance of joy. And then measure against that in a week. Measure against that in two weeks. Measure against that in 30 days. Because the increase of joy is an indicator of a reduced stress reaction, which is how we grow. The brain heals.
in experience and regulation. So when you can have prolonged experiences of regulated relationships and prolonged experiences of regulation in your environment, the brain is healing.
And that's what we're all in it for. And I'm so grateful that we could end it on that positive note of measuring joy. We want parents to understand the roots of trauma and the impacts that trauma can have. But we also want parents to feel equipped and confident to respond in ways that build safety and build trust and lead to joy. And so thank you so much for joining us, Brian, for helping us better understand.
And listeners, I want to say that you should stop today and write down three joyful things that have happened this week for your family. And then look back at that list next week and add to it. And if you're feeling tired and stressed.
Try to remember that your work is meaningful and significant and that healing and joy are possible in your homes. Thank you, Brian, for joining us. This was fantastic. And I really appreciate your time. Glad to be here. My pleasure.