Ep #122: “Just Don’t React” and Other Bad Advice People Give

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name's Mikki Gardner. I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother. And I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome back to the podcast. So today I wanna talk about bad advice, the bad advice that people give, because listen, don't we all know free advice is worth exactly what we pay for it, but it continues to astound me what kind of bad advice is out there. And I wanted to talk about it here today 'cause I had this experience over the weekend, and I think that we all have this experience. And so I just wanted to come today and start talking about it and kind of debunk what's bad advice, what's good advice, and how do we separate the two things. So what happened was, I'm at a hockey game, my son's hockey game, and I ran into a father who we had previously been on a team with, he's a divorce lawyer, and he always has a lot to say, a lot of opinions about hockey, about life, about everything.

And he was asking me about my business and the book and different things. And then he starts launching into one of his clients that he's struggling with because she's a divorced mom, got out of an abusive relationship, the ex is extremely difficult. I know some of you are like, "Yep, Uh-huh, I know this. I know this story." She's also terminally ill and really really sad situation. So he's telling me about how he's trying to help her. And he said, "You know, I just keep telling her, don't react. Don't react when he says these things, when he sends you those viciously mean texts." And he was telling me about some of them, and they're just horrific, really exploiting this woman's cancer and the situation, just vicious viciousness. And he said, "I tell her just don't react. And you know what? She does a really good job, but then she reacts." [laughter]

And I thought to myself, "Yeah." And I said to him, "Of course she does." And he's like, "I know, but I just keep trying to tell her don't do it." Okay, well that isn't actually good advice. And I said this to him, I said, "That's not good advice because she can't not react." I said, "Put yourself in her shoes. She is facing a terminal illness with young children, with an abusive, dysfunctional, ex who is going to get custody of these children. The amount of fear that this woman is probably living under, how do you expect her not to react?" But this goes for every single one of us. It doesn't have to be this extreme case to still have the same situation where we say to ourselves, "I'm not gonna react." Right? "I'm not gonna fall into the pattern. I'm not gonna let his evil nasty words get to me."

But then eventually you do, right? And that's the conversation that I wanted to have today, is how do we work from that place? From the reaction. When we do react, then what? Because oftentimes we just beat ourselves up and with good reason when everyone's telling us, "Just don't react," like that is even a possibility. And listen, some of us have really good willpower. Some of us don't. Some of us can keep our head down and ignore, ignore, ignore until we can't. And that was the point that I said to him, it's the point where the tipping point where you can't not react, that's where you wanna be working from. That's the point that we wanna talk about. It's not just "don't get to that point", 'cause that's unrealistic. No. What we have to do is understand what got me to that point, and how can I change that in the future?

That's a more powerful conversation to have than just "don't react". And how do we do that? Well, that's what I wanted to talk about today because there's a number of things going on. But if we go back to this example, and I said to him, "Put yourself in her shoes and the amount of fear that she must be living under trying to think many, many, many steps ahead for the rest of her children's lives, which she will not be present for." So when we have that kind of emotion, that is where these reactions are coming from. But just like I said, we don't have to be in this really extreme situation to still be feeling these feelings and having these emotions that at times take over and cause us to react even when we don't want to. So it might look like less extreme, you might wake up in the morning and decide, "You know what?

Today's the day I'm not gonna yell at my kids. Yes, I'm overwhelmed trying to be a single mom. Yes, I'm stressed." Yes, you're probably overworked. Yes, you probably have to do all the things for everyone. All of these things are true. And you're saying to yourself, "But I don't wanna keep yelling at my kids. I don't wanna keep taking my frustration out on them. So today I'm not gonna yell. Just not gonna yell today." And you might do a really good job. You might get to 5:00 PM, you might get to 9:00 AM, I don't know. But then there's gonna be that point when you snap. And if you do hit that point, whether it's because the kids aren't listening, because no one's helping you, whatever it is, what we don't wanna do is just wait until we get to that point and then just be banking on our willpower.

Be banking on the fact that we're not gonna feel so overwhelmed that we can still stay sort of clear and connected. We don't wanna set ourselves up for that kind of frustration and that kind of failure. And listen, failure, I think, is a very relative term. I think failure is, as Marie Forleo says, a faithful attempt in learning is what fail means. So I'm all for failing and mistakes and doing all these things, but what I'm talking about is we don't wanna set ourselves up for disasters, so to speak. Maybe it's, like I said a few minutes ago, that you really don't wanna continue to get so frustrated and be living under the sort of the thumb of your ex. So what this might look like is maybe you know that the parenting plan says that Friday at 6:00 PM he gets the kids until whatever time.

And maybe traditionally the pattern goes where you start texting on Monday or Tuesday, "Hey, what's the plan? What's your plan? What's your plan? What's your plan?" You might not get any response. You might get a, "Oh, I'll let you know." You might get a hostile response. But what we're doing in that scenario is we're waiting on the other person to tell us what we can and can't do. This is frustrating. This is going to make you very unhappy because you're waiting for the other person to give you permission for what you can and can't do. So I can already hear somebody say, "Well, Mikki, what happens when they don't go to the parenting plan? That we plan everything for 6:00 PM and then they don't show up? These things happen. I understand that. But what I wanted to talk about today is not letting ourselves get to this point where we sort of blow up, where we have these huge emotional reactions.

Because what we end up doing is creating more mess to clean up later. Here's an analogy that I want to use. It's like we are walking towards a cliff, right? And you can feel yourself getting closer and you're looking at it and you're like, "Ah, the cliff's there. The cliff's there. I don't wanna fall off the cliff. I don't wanna fall off the cliff." But we're getting more and more frustrated, more and more stressed, more and more emotional, then something happens and it pushes us over the cliff. So what we don't wanna do is keep walking towards the cliff, but then hoping we're not gonna get frustrated that we fall off the cliff, or that something happens and pushes us off the cliff. Instead, we wanna step back 10, 20, 50 steps to look at it and say, "When did I even get on the road that led to the cliff?"

"When did I even start walking down that place that led me to the point where I was really kind of biting my nails trying to stop from falling off the cliff?" So does that make sense? And that's what I want to dig into right now. So in each of these examples that I gave, what is happening is we are feeling intense emotions, and maybe they're not so intense, but maybe they're sort of low level just simmering, like in the text example where you're waiting to find out if the other co-parent is taking the kids at the agreed upon time, it's like a low level simmer of disease, uncomfortableness, uncertainty, nervousness, anxiousness, and it's just this low level brewing. And then as the days go on, as it gets closer, you can feel it going up and up and up, and maybe by Thursday you're like, "Oh," and you just blow up.

Send a nasty text, get really frustrated, whatever it is. Maybe you wait till Friday and you just don't say anything. "I'm just gonna wait and see if they do what they're supposed to do this time," and probably aren't going to if that's been the pattern. But instead, what we wanna understand is where are my emotions happening all along the way? Because the key to not overreacting or not reacting, so to speak, is being able to regulate your emotions along the way. So what does emotional regulation mean? It just simply means that we are not being run by our emotions, but we're aware of them, we're able to witness them, we're able to process them, and we're able to move forward in spite of it. Here's the thing, emotions are necessary. They're little messengers in our body that tell us when we are in alignment or out of alignment.

When something is a stress response or not. Emotions aren't the problem, the problem is how those emotions get manifested. And whenever we are trying to ignore emotions or push them down, it's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a little bit, but eventually it's gonna pop up just because of gravity, and you are gonna end up underneath it. And that's kind of this cliff example, is we don't wanna be fighting with our emotions so that that actually is the fight that we are engaged in most of the time and that's the one that we're losing when we have these big reactions. And listen, we're all human we react, again, no harm, no foul, no blame when we do, but when we're trying to make an intentional choice not to, when we're trying to make intentional choices to move ourselves in the direction that we wanna go, to create co-parenting relationships that are grounded in calm and clarity, when we are trying to build relationships that are based on honesty and integrity, these emotions will get in our way if we're trying to ignore or suppress them.

And that's where it's like walking towards that cliff. In the example that I gave about not yelling at your kids or yelling at other people, we can try to hold down the emotion as much as we can, but if we're doing it unconsciously when we're just trying to kind of suppress and ignore and act like it's not there, or toxic positivity our way around it, it will come up. Again, the more you suppress something, the more force it has to come up. So instead, we need to really step back and look at, okay, well let's say you were trying not to yell, and then you did yell. So from a place of non-judgment, from a place of curiosity, from a place of knowing that you are a good person who's having a hard time, or having a hard emotional experience, we can stop and look back and say, "Hey, what just happened there?

When did I start to feel the emotions build? And when did I lose it?" Because there are clues all along that journey of points when your frustration, your disappointment, maybe your anger, overwhelmed your system, and then you hit the reaction. So again, it's not to stop or not have these emotions, no, the emotions are actually necessary to point you in a direction because they're telling you that there is a need that isn't being met. So we have to understand what was the need and where did I stop listening? Or where did I really start pushing it aside? Because in there is the key to changing the dynamic that you're in. Within our emotions, within those reactions, when we start to unpeel it like an onion, we can start to understand what's actually going on here. And when we look at it from that place of trying to understand, to be curious, and to notice patterns, and to notice when you are having different emotions and how those manifest, well, this is where the magic happens, because this is where you learn how to move forward in a different direction, can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

So the real work happens once we start to actually integrate, once we decide, "No, I'm gonna make some changes." But then when we start to try to do it, and when we make mistakes and when we fail, that's when the work really begins to start to uncover, "Well, what's actually happening here?" So that you can start to back it up and not even get on the road towards the cliff, that emotional cliff, so that you don't fall over. And I just wanna say again, it's not about not reacting. We're human. We all react. That's part of it. But it's understanding why, right? Where are the emotions trying to tell me something? "Where is this frustration telling me about a need that isn't gonna be met?" And it's really about not waiting for other people to change, but deciding, "How is it that I wanna feel?"

If I am feeling constantly stressed, aggravated, frustrated, angry in my co-parenting, we can either wait for the other person to change, and you will be waiting quite some time, 'cause you probably have been waiting already a long time. Or you can decide, "No, I am going to decide how I'm gonna feel about this. I'm gonna decide what I want to change, and I'm gonna start working on shifting that." That is a powerful place. That is the place where we start to really take action from, because we're not just reacting to what's happening around us. So let's go back to that example of maybe the parenting plan says that the other co-parent is gonna get the kids at 6:00 PM on Friday. And notoriously this doesn't happen. But maybe you wanna make plans, maybe you wanna know what Friday night is gonna look like either for yourself, if you are not gonna be with your children, or for you and your children, right?

If they're going to be with you. So instead of just expecting or hoping, or, "Fingers crossed, they're gonna do it this time," likely there needs to be a boundary set. And oftentimes we think that the parenting plan is the boundary. It's not. Now that's just a guideline that people choose to ignore or listen to. So what we're really looking to do is create a boundary. But the only way that we can create healthy boundaries is from a grounded place, an emotionally clear space, an emotionally regulated space. If we are in a stress response, if we are reactive, if we are highly emotional, we cannot set healthy, clear boundaries because we're in that emotional state. So we actually have to stop and pull back those layers of the onion and start to look at, "Okay, where do I really go wrong in setting myself up for a reaction? Or setting myself up to not communicate well? Or setting myself up to be really disappointed by the stuff that they do every single time?"

That's that walking it back that we always wanna look at. So the boundary in this instance might look like, okay, maybe you send on Monday, "I will wait to hear from you by Wednesday, otherwise I will make other arrangements." It's saying, "I'm gonna give you until Wednesday, if I don't hear from you, I'm moving forward." And you have a plan A and a plan B. There's always plan A and plan B. I don't ever like to just go with one plan, because the other person, we don't know. So I wanna know that I'm covering all my bases so that whichever direction it goes, I'm taken care of, and that I know that emotionally I have the skills to move forward in the direction I need to go. That I can stay regulated, that I can stay calm because I've prepared, because I have a plan, because I know what I'm gonna do in response to whatever the other person is going to do.

Not in reaction, but in response. The same thing is when we really don't want to yell at our children, and maybe we start to get heated, we start to notice ourselves getting overwhelmed. We need to just listen to those emotions that are coming up, those frustrations, and ask yourself, "What is going on right now that I'm getting really emotional?" Well, maybe it's they're yelling and they're screaming and they're not paying any attention, or maybe they're fighting, or maybe they're arguing for the 15th time, or maybe no one's listening and not doing any of these things. So in those moments, we gotta stop and breathe and step back, calm that nervous system down, get the emotions and the reaction level. And once you feel in a calmer state, you ask yourself, "What do I need right now?" You might need help. You might need five minutes outside to yourself.

You might just need quiet for a minute. You might need a glass of water. Whatever it is, you start to give yourself that. Listen, this doesn't mean that everyone else is gonna be perfect and that everything's gonna be amazing, no, but what it does do is help you regulate your emotions so that you're not acting from an emotional place. Getting yourself curious and inquiring around, "What's going on for me? What needs do I have that aren't being met?" What's actually happening in this situation so that you can take aligned action. This is the process my friends, and this is what I wanted to talk about, because it's not fair to just say, "Don't react." If that were plausible or even an option, the world would be a very different world, right? But you can't muscle your way or willpower your way to never having an emotional reaction.

The way to limit and to decrease the emotional reactions is to actually step into your emotions, to start to do the work to be able to regulate them, to be present with them, to process them, and to start to use them to push you and lead you and guide you in the direction you wanna go. So I hope that this has been helpful today because, again, it was just this bad advice that I heard, and I was like, "No, this isn't okay." We can't keep just telling people don't react because it's not even an option sometimes. So I wanna be able to help you with this, and I know I've talked about it, but I want you to know about this because this is a game changer. I've created a co-parenting wellness assessment or an audit, and all it is is a life audit.

Listen, for us not to get to the cliff, like I talked about, you have to figure out which road doesn't lead to the cliff. And so to do that, we have to stop and take an honest appraisal on what is actually going on in your co-parenting, in your life, in your home, in your relationships. We do that by taking some time away. I'm not talking about like days away at a retreat or whatever, which is amazing if you can do it. But just stopping and creating some space for reflection so that you can gain some clarity. And I have created a PDF for you to do just this. It gives you different areas that you're gonna audit. It gives you prompts and questions to ask yourself to be able to figure out, "What's working? What isn't working? What are the needs that I have that aren't being met?

Where are the holes and the gaps that need to be filled?" Because once you start to look at that, then you can start to prioritize, "Okay, this actually... This area needs really a lot of attention. This area needs a little less. How can I start to do things differently?" So that you're getting a different result. But just like I talked about a minute ago, it's one thing to go through all that, and this is an amazing exercise that you absolutely will benefit from. But what I also know to be true from each of my clients and the co-parents that I talk to all the time is that it's really hard to do on our own. It's like when you're in the forest, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. All the time it helps to have somebody on the outside helping you to be able to see the individual pieces and how they're playing or not playing well together.

So with this co-parenting audit that I created, what I'm doing for you is creating an entire coaching experience around it. And it's gonna take between two and three weeks. That might sound like a long period of time, but trust me, it is not. Because what we're gonna do is actually help you do the audit. You are going to figure out what is working? What isn't working? Where are the areas? All of that. And then you and I are gonna start to fill in the gaps, and we are gonna figure out what needs your attention and what is the priority right now from that place as you start to go into your life and integrate changes and start to try different things. I'm gonna be with you via Voxer for two weeks, where I'm just gonna be going back and forth with you. So we'll talk about what's working? What isn't working? Where did you hit a reaction point?

Maybe you got really overwhelmed, maybe you emotionally dumped all over someone. Great. We're gonna learn from it because you and I are gonna pull back the onion to understand, "Okay, what happened 10 steps, five minutes, 20 minutes before this?" So that we can start to understand what are the emotions and what is the block and the hurdle in the way. And then with my help via Voxer, we're gonna actually get you moving through that. I mean, this is the piece that is so incredibly valuable, and I know is going to be a complete game changer for so many of you. Those of you that decide, "I actually wanna make some changes. I'm ready to take the action, and I'm ready to ask for help and support to do it," because that my friend, reaching out, raising your hand, and saying, "I am ready for change and I am ready to invest my time, my energy, and my money into myself,"

That is where things change. That is where things shift when you put that in the sand. So that's where I want you to start to look at. I'm offering this audit for a shorter period of time, and it's only $297, again, for three weeks of really intensive coaching experience. I am not going to let you not move through this and feel a positive direction on the other end. You and I are gonna make sure that you are supported, that you have what you need, and that you are actually implementing the changes and learning and growing and evolving. This could be the shift for you. And I want you to have these shifts. So many of us say we want change, but then we're not doing anything about it. If you truly want change, you have to raise your hand. You have to ask for help.

You have to start doing things differently. Otherwise, we're just waiting for other people to change, for other people to give us permission or for life to just magically get better but it doesn't work that way, we both know. And I'm inviting you to really step into your power and to choose differently today, all you have to do is either send me an email, which is [email protected], or go over to Instagram, and my account is Mikki Gardner, that's M-I-K-K-I G-A-R-D-N-E-R, send me a DM with the word audit. Send me an email with the word audit, and I will send you the link to get started. Listen, this is so low cost and so high support, that's why I'm not gonna offer it forever. But the people who are going through it right now are getting so much value, and I want that for you too. So please do yourself a favor. Send me that email or DM me, and let's get you on the road today. Until I see you and talk to you again next week, I just want you to know that I believe in you, I love you, and you can do this. Take really, really good care of you friend.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff, this podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or a qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice.

Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week.