Ep #50: Name It to Tame It Series – Part 3

Welcome to the Co-parenting with Confidence podcast. I'm your host, Mikki Gardner, and this is the episode number 50. Name It to Tame It, Part 3. [music] 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. [music] Hi, friend, and welcome back. I'm super excited to be here with you, and I hope you're enjoying the series that I'm putting together. After working with so many moms, and some dads, who are on this co-parenting journey, I definitely have witnessed a whole lot of feelings, and rightly so. Divorce is not some fun, easy process that any of us want to go through. And all too often, we think that we're alone in our feelings, we're feeling that we're feeling the wrong thing at the wrong time, or that we shouldn't be feeling this way, or for this long, or we're feeling it too much. And you know what? We just end up shutting down, we isolate, and ultimately, we prolong the suffering. So I wanted to really create a series of podcast devoted just to some of the common feelings that we all experience, why we experience them, how we can identify it and what we can do about them, because frankly, you are not alone in feeling these things, and I wanna help normalize some of that. In the last couple of episodes, we looked at a lot of different emotions, anxiety, regret, shame, guilt, stress, overwhelm, all of these. And if you haven't listen to 48 and 49, I would really recommend that you do, because we can't take ownership and we can't take control over things without having a language to communicate what we're feeling. In order for us to process and deal with our feelings, we have to be able to identify them and be able to talk about them. So that's what this series is all about, giving language and context to some of the feelings that we all experience during divorce and co-parenting. And today, we are gonna look at the feelings that we have when we're hurting, grief, sadness, despair, hopelessness. And I'm gonna continue to use Brené Brown's definitions because there is simply no better source than Brené. So I'm gonna start with sadness. Sadness is one of those emotions we feel very often. And is it always a bad thing? And what do I mean by that? Who doesn't love a sad movie? We all, we watch them, we cry, and then it's fantastic because it's uplifting on some level, albeit sad. So Brené says, "To be human is to know sadness. Owning our sadness is courageous and a necessary step to finding our way back to ourselves and to others." And what she's pointing out here is sadness is actually a useful emotion. And what do I mean by that? It's wired into us for our survival. Everything goes back to the primitive days. Think of the cavemen, they're very simple creatures. That's what our brain is still wired to do. And so sadness was really useful because it was almost a signal to the other people in our community, 'cause we always lived in community, you couldn't live alone because you literally couldn't survive. So sadness was always a way of a red flag for the other people to realize something's wrong, they need to be brought back in. When we're sad, we might be down, we might seem distant, we might try to isolate ourselves. And again, we do that on a primal level, because it is your brain's way of raising a flag to say, Hey, I need to connect. So sadness is actually a connector emotion because it keeps us towards belonging. Grief is certainly, again, one of the very common emotions. We all have it. To be human and have a human experience is to lose things. There is birth and there is death. It's the thing that we're guaranteed, all of us will die. And so that's what we think of when we think of grief, but how it relates... How I see it relating to divorce and co-parenting is that it really is you are mourning a loss, the loss of the life that you thought you were building, the loss of the dream, of what you thought you had, the loss of the family as you knew it. And so to minimize, or ignore, or push aside that grief that doesn't help us. Instead, grief needs to be seen and needs to be heard, and there's a few steps. Brené's work finds that the foundational elements of grief really come down to loss, longing, and feeling lost. So loss, she says, "While death and separation are tangible losses associated with grief, some participants described losses that were more difficult to identify." And this is, I think, where we go when we're divorced and co-parenting, because it's a loss of normality, a loss of what could be, what could have been, the loss of what we thought we knew or understood about someone or something. And this is part of grief, part of that loss. Longing is a second one. Longing is not consciously wanting, it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what is lost. Longing is something that we all feel. Again, sort of the normality, the dream that we thought we had, the life we thought we were living is suddenly gone and we have to start to go through the grief process so that we can start to understand belonging is part of it. And it's normal to be sad, to miss these things. Feeling loss is absolutely part of this. Grief requires us to re-orient ourselves to every part of our life, physical, emotional, spiritual, social, all of it. And so for us to do this, we have to be willing to move through all of these processes. "And the more difficult it is for us to articulate our experiences of loss, longing, and feeling lost to the people around us, the more disconnected and alone we feel," Brené says. Talking about grief is difficult in this world that people just want us to get on with it, move forward, just, it's gonna be okay. And that really minimizes and halts the grieving process. So find those people that you can talk to. And I'm not saying over and over and over, but when you are in the grieving process, you need to be able to communicate this. I love... I'm gonna end this grief section with Elizabeth Gilbert's quote, she says, "Grief does not obey your plans or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you whenever it wants to. In that regard, grief has a lot in common with love." So the next couple of emotions that I'm gonna talk about that I often see moms that I work with and that I talk to on social media and throughout the day that we really feel often is despair and hopelessness. So Brené, again, tells us that hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns, particularly self-blame and perceived inability to change our circumstances. The hopelessness stems from not being able to set realistic goals, meaning we don't know what we want. And this is so common after divorce when everything's been shattered, sometimes we don't even know what we want. And so we can feel hopeless because we're having a really hard time re-orienting ourselves. When we attempt to go toward something, maybe we're not 100% sure, but then we give up when we fail, we can't tolerate the disappointment and can't reset. And so hopelessness is really that feeling that we just can't change things. So despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person's entire life or future. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives, and we combine that with extreme sadness, then we feel despair. I know each one of you listening to this, you can understand this feeling. I really love Rob Bell's definition of despair. He says that despair is the belief that tomorrow will be just like today. I know that I've felt those moments when I woke up and I felt like there was just no way that it was gonna be different, no way that I was gonna be able to change now that everything was shattered, everything was gone. And those mornings, and those days when you are stuck in the hopelessness, in the despair, it is so hard to move forward. That's why we want to be able to understand what's going on, see why this is happening while we're feeling this way, so that we can connect and move forward. When we talk about hopelessness and despair, we have to talk about hope because we need hope like we need air. To live without hope is just risking being suffocated by the hopelessness and the despair, being crushed by everything that we think is holding us back. But hope isn't what most people think it is. Brené Brown tells us that it's not a warm, fuzzy feeling that fills us with a sense of possibility, but hope is a way of thinking, it's actually a cognitive process, meaning it's a thinking process. When we experience hope, we have the ability to set realistic goals, meaning, I know where I wanna go. You're able to figure out how to achieve those goals and an ability to stay flexible and figure it out. That's where our curiosity comes in. Hope sounds like I know how to get there, I'm persistent, and I can tolerate the disappointment and try new things over and over. Hope gives us the agency to believe in ourselves that we can do this. Hope is really a function of struggling. We don't develop hope in the easy times, in the comfortable times, but it's through the adversity and the discomfort that we create hope. This is a moment, this is a time in your life that you actually can cultivate hope through having an outlook, a new perspective, a mindset of figuring it out. It's a lot of what I talk about on this podcast, because when you see that everything is gone, that everything has changed, that maybe you didn't want the divorce, maybe you had no choice, maybe you were the one who wanted it, but either way, when everything has changed, it's really important that we create hope, and hope is learned. And here's the biggest thing, children most often learn the habit of hope from their parents. So to learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, by consistency, by support. Children who have high levels of hopefulness, have experienced adversity. They've been given the opportunity to struggle, and in doing that, they've learned how to believe in themselves and their ability. This is what you can offer your children during this time. I know that it feels so, so hard when you're just trying to keep your head above water, but when we can start to cultivate hope, when we can start to put into practice the consistency and the commitment that we need to build the support system around us, and to not beat ourselves up for how we're feeling but actually engage and figure out how to move through it, this is a huge example to your children of how to process adversity and how to learn from it and how to grow. So the key takeaways from this episode are really that all of these emotions are necessary, sadness, grief, hopelessness, despair, they're common. And some of them, again, especially the sadness and the grief, they're necessary because they are a connector. When we resist them, we are actually just inviting them to be bigger, inviting them to last a lot longer. Here's one way to think about it. We're gonna feel all of these feelings that we've talked about in this series, maybe for a little bit, maybe for a longer time. So what we wanna do is start to look at it as it's just a point that we're passing through. It's like if we're visiting the town of sadness, we're gonna pass through it. We might look around, we might spend some time there, we might have lunch, wander around, but what we don't wanna do is set up camp. We don't wanna set up a... Pitch a tent and live in sadness. So we wanna learn how to process, how to move through. That's what I do with my clients. I teach you actually how to process and feel emotions. The vast majority of us were not taught this skill. Had we been taught this skill as children in college, it would be a completely different world. Instead, we're actually told to numb, to resist, to ignore. Just buy something, just drink this, just take that pill, just do these things, and it'll be better. But oftentimes, what we're missing is the ability to have language for how we're feeling and how to process it. And so what we wanna start to do is learn how to do that, so we have stronger hope and hopefulness in us being able to move through things. So one of the things I talk about so, so often is keeping the little promises. What does this look like? It means consistency, it means deciding what you wanna do, and that can even be that you're willing to feel your feelings. And sometimes... It's not a time, if we're overwhelmed by sadness or despair. Listen, I get it. Some mornings it is hard to get up, but what I want you to start to do is understand that you can do this and you have compassion for yourself. So I'll put it in the show notes, but I have a worksheet. It's a self-love list, and this sounds ridiculous, but stay with me here. When we talk about keeping the little promises, it's really you setting yourself up to be able to move forward. And so you can download this sheet and you can fill it in. I ask you to find 20 things that your soul loves, because I believe that self-love is really just doing things that your soul loves. That might be taking a walk in nature, it might be having a cup of tea and reading a book, it might be a number of things. And you get to decide what that is, what makes you feel good on those moments. In those moments that you feel like you just cannot get out of bed, you can't possibly move forward, you can reach for one of these things. All you have to do is do one of them, then you can go back to not feeling good. But oftentimes, when we just start to fill ourselves up, we grow, and we're stronger. We get energy, and we can move forward, we can process differently. So yes, you're getting up and getting your kids to school. Yes, maybe you're going to work and you're getting things done, but you're still flooded by the sorrow, by the sadness, by the hopelessness and the despair. I want you to keep one little promise to yourself a day. Pick one thing that you are gonna do each and every day that fills you up, that shows you that you love you and that you have your back. Maybe that's meditation. Again, maybe that's a walk in nature. Whatever it is, I want you to make one little promise to yourself. And as you're moving through these emotions, you're gonna have your back by actually doing something that feels good to you, even when nothing does, because it's up to you, to be able to move through this. Get the support you need. That's the other thing, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a support group, a friend, we need that connection, we need that belonging. And so when you start to do these little things that support you, that connect you back to you, that's when we can move through all of this. My hope for this series and this episode is to help normalize the feelings that we're all experiencing when we're hurting, so that you can liberate yourself from the prison of those un-expressed emotions. Because every action or inaction, every decision is made based on how you're feeling, we cannot ignore our feelings. Instead, we are empowered when we learn how to identify and process them. This is actually our superpower. We can't think our way to happiness, and we can't force ourselves to act in a certain way long-term. It's only through being aware and learning how to accept and move through our feelings that we find the agency to really start to make change. If you have any questions, I want you to reach out to me. I am here to help you. And if you know someone who could benefit from today's episode, I would be so grateful if you'd share it with them. Text it to them, email them the link, or take a screenshot and share it on your social. And if you do you share it on Instagram, please tag me because I'd love to connect with you there. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'll see you next week for part four. And in the meantime, take really, really good care of you, friend. Thanks for listening to Co-parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit coparentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]