Ep #138: Why Am I Stuck When I’m Trying So Hard?

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 is 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.

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Today we're doing a little bit of a continuation from last week's discussion on how to keep going when nothing's changing. But before we dive into that, I want you to know that, yes, I offer this free podcast, which I hope you find valuable and insightful, and you gain some ideas and inspiration to move forward. This is a love of mine, this podcast, and talking with you each week, and I love hearing from you. Getting to meet you, to talk about what's going on, what's happening in your specific life is such an enjoyable, but really amazing opportunity for us to connect. So that this isn't just a one-sided conversation, I love to be in conversation with you, and with that said, I want you to know that I am here, I am here for you to be able to reach out to, to help you get more clarity on what your next steps are. And you can do that by booking a breakthrough call with me. This is a free 30-minute call, where you really come in with one issue that you wanna solve, and I will help you shift into a more clear and doable plan to get you there.

And yes, I'm talking to you. So often, and this is a lot of what we're gonna talk about today, we keep trying and trying and trying but things don't seem to be changing. So if you want help actually shifting into what needs to move so that you can have more clarity and start to take more aligned action, I want you to book a breakthrough call with me. The link is in the show notes. This is a free call for you where you will leave with more clarity and a plan to move you and your family towards the life that you wanna be living. And that's what we're gonna talk about today, which is, why do you feel so stuck when you're trying so hard? Because I hear from so many of you that you are, you're trying, you're doing all the things. You're trying to learn and grow and break patterns and to be change makers.

And sometimes it feels like as well intentioned as you are to make your kids lives better, to make your life better, for you to feel better, so you're not stuck in that anger and sadness and resentment, but despite all of those efforts, sometimes it feels like nothing is really changing. I wanna talk about sort of why that might be, and then also offer you some tools to help you drop the rope of the struggle, you know, when we're in that tug of war with our life of trying to get the other person to change.

Or trying to get our relationship to be different, or trying to get other people to be different, we just get into this struggle, this tug of war. And oftentimes, what we actually need to do is drop the rope to give yourself the space and the opportunity to change and that's what we're gonna talk about today. So to dive into this conversation, we need to talk a little bit about the nervous system and what we're working with, because we have to have an understanding of what we're working with so that we can know what to do with it. So I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take your hand and I want you to put your thumb into your palm and then fold the top four fingers over it. Got that? Okay, so now I want you to look at it with your palm facing you, and I want you to look at... You can open your fingers for a second. Your thumb that moves in is like our primitive brain, which is the limbic system. This is one of the oldest parts of the brain.

Your wrist is then the brain stem and the spinal cord, right? So that is our central nervous system, the brain, that limbic system and the spinal cord. Now, I want you to flip your fingers down those four fingers, what this represents is the prefrontal cortex. This is the newer part of the brain. This is where all of our thinking, our planning, our reasoning, our decision-making, all of that lies. And again, this is the newer younger part of the brain. So what happens whenever we are living life is our brain's job is to keep us alive. To keep us safe.

I know we've talked about this, I know you probably hear a lot about it. So when we get triggered or activated, right? That's when we sense that there is something that is not safe. A threat. We become flooded with emotions, and basically everything comes from the oldest part of the brain up, right? So it hits the older part first. That's that survival part of our brain. So when we get triggered, I want you to now throw your four figures up, and what's left is that primitive brain and the spinal cord. So when we get activated, have you ever heard the term flipping our lid, right? It's like the prefrontal cortex, whoo, goes offline and you're left with your limbic system, which is a great part of our brain, really necessary part of our brain, but all of our thinking, our decision making, our reasoning, our planning, all of that's actually in the prefrontal cortex.

When we "flip our lid", we get activated, all of that goes offline, and so what we end up is we just end up in a triggered state with the older part of our brain, our unconscious, running the show. Okay. So this is just a really important thing that I wanted to bring here, because there's other parts of the nervous system that are also at play, this is just one part of it. And so when we know that we're triggered, when we're activated, when we're in a highly emotion driven state or in a state of not feeling safe or having a threat against us, this could be an actual threat. You know, a person that's there to harm us or something going on, a natural disaster, something that requires our ability to get up and run, fight or flight, right? Like get up and go. That's actually necessary, right. And so we can't shut that down.

But what we wanna also do is understand that there's more happening here. And that's what I wanna talk about today. Dr. Dan Siegel introduced the idea of the window of tolerance. So this is really recognizing how our emotions affect our nervous system. So the window basically defines what we can handle from an activated stimulation, right, with still feeling okay, or still feeling safe. So this is like how much outside stuff can happen, right, what kind of experiences that might be uncomfortable, or things, but that can we handle without "flipping the lid", where we sort of go offline.

And the reason I'm bringing this up today is because when we feel stuck, and we feel like we're trying, trying, trying. What we're often doing is we're trying to stay within this window of tolerance of what we can handle. And really for us to make pretty significant changes, whether that's deciding to divorce, whether that's sort of moving forward, co-parenting in a different way, whether that's changing a relationship, we actually have to be willing to be outside or expand our window of tolerance so that we can handle a little bit more. Now, here's where I wanna say, that it is really important to understand that we all have different windows of tolerances. Some of us can handle a lot of conflict or noise without getting really agitated by it. Others of us who have had experiences cannot handle anger or visible conflict or things without really going offline.

And so it's just important to start to become aware of what is your window? How much safety can you feel with still being able to regulate and cope with what's happening? So again, for us to actually be able to move ourselves forward in new territory in a different relationship, in changing the status quo, we have to start to understand how do we function? Where is our window of tolerance and where do we go outside of it, right? And oftentimes, we are in a hyperarousal which is too much and we're very activated, whether that's irritation, anger, hypervigilance, anxiety, panic, or we can go into hypoarousal on the other end, which is where we feel numb, disconnected, collapse, withdraw. We feel flat, feel shame, right?

So we don't wanna go to either end of these places necessarily, 'cause this is where we're, again, in that activation place where our prefrontal cortex goes offline. We wanna expand our window to be able to handle more while staying where we can cope, make choice and be regulated. So if you think of it like a river, right, we wanna be flowing up and down the river, but kind of staying in the middle. The river banks are those two sides where we get either hyperaroused, which is too much activation, irritation, anger, hypervigilance, anxiety or panic. Or we go into the hypoarousal, which is numbing, disconnected, withdrawn, collapsing. We go into shame, right?

As stress goes up, our ability to cope goes down, but that is dependent on what your window of tolerance might look like. And so what we wanna talk about is being able to open up the awareness in little bits, where we can stay within that window of tolerance to stay present, to stay curious, to stay open, without going to one side or the other. We do this by learning how to take a little movement forward. How we can start to create more and more safety within ourselves so that we're not dependent on the outside world, to be sort of safe and regulated, that we can stay grounded and regulated within it. So there's a lot of factors that impact our window that might look like sleep, it might look like pain, right, diet or exercise. All of these things actually really impact our window of tolerance. When we are running on fumes, not taking care of ourselves, not exercising, not working towards well-being, we actually are decreasing our window of tolerance because we're adding more stress to our plate. And again, the more stress we have, our ability to cope with it is gonna go down because our window closes, right? Again, it goes in.

So what we wanna do is first and foremost, when we feel like we're stuck and nothing is changing, part of it, like we talked about last week, is stopping and re-assessing. Okay, why am I feeling stuck? Well, it's often because I'm outside of my window, my window to cope. And so we actually need to bring back our ability to cope, our ability to regulate ourselves and, or maybe not even bring it back, maybe you learn how. Because so many of us have not been taught how to do this. And it begins with really looking at how am I creating less stress in my life? And listen, lives are really, really stressful, and I am not minimizing that. And I'm not saying that you can go to sleep for eight hours and eat a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables and then magically, everything is gonna be better. It's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is we have to start to look at how am I reducing the amount of stress that my body is feeling. And part of that is just general good care and maintenance of our body. Our body... We're just animals, right? We are the soul that is inhabiting this body, in this life. And so we have to care for that body. Again, working on sleep, working on diet, getting enough water to drink, minimizing the negative impacts and toxins on our body, whether that's alcohol or smoking or drugs or anything else.

We have to start to look at these things, and how are they impacting our lives, and how are we sort of numbing or disconnecting, or collapsing, or how are we increasing our anxiety and panic by how we're taking care or not taking care of ourselves. So that's one thing that I wanted to offer, is that when we think about building up this window of tolerance, being able to increase our ability to handle the stressors, increase our ability to cope and to manage without flipping that lid, so to speak, again, going into the primitive brain, by keeping our prefrontal cortex online, it's all around feeling more and more regulated and safe within our bodies, and really working with our nervous system, healing the nervous system to be able to be in that state where we actually have more agency, right?

We have more choice. And that's where we can start to really make movement. So when we are not in that place or when our window of tolerance has shrunk down, that's an opportunity to stop trying to fight the problem or the change and really look at how can I increase my capacity to be able to make a choice, to be able to cope and to move forward. So we talked about the factors, right, to help reduce stress where you can, so that you can increase your ability to cope. And I also wanna offer you one other tool, which is a breathing pattern for grounding, and there's many different breath patterns.

Here's the good news. I know that you can do it because you're breathing right now. We all are breathing all the time. We don't have to think about it, but breath is the thing that can connect us back to our body and help us increase this window of tolerance. So I wanna offer you a short breathing exercise here. If you are driving or moving about, right, maybe hit pause and come back to this when you have a space to sit down, maybe you wanna close your eyes and really connect. And so I wanna offer you this breathing. It's called the shallow bottom breath. And what we're doing is we're really grounding down into our root chakra, into that grounded place, into that knowing, that each and every one of us holds in our body. And the way that we tap into intuition more, into our knowing, into our internal guidance system, that GPS that we all have inside of us, breath is one of the best ways to do that.

So I'm gonna guide you through this, and you can do this exercise any time where you feel kind of really anxious and moving and spiraling or you're getting really, really agitated, you can ground yourself down. So what it is. Is the breath in through your nose, all the way, and then out through your mouth, and you completely empty your lungs, and then you hold it at the bottom. It sounds like this.

I'm gonna do that one more time. We're gonna go in through our nose, release all the way out through your mouth, and hold. You repeat that breath over and over, trying to simply lengthen the exhale, to feel if you can pull out more air on your exhalation and hold it, making that longer than the inhale. You can do this three, five, 10 times. You can do it for a couple of minutes, but even just five or 10 rounds of that breath helps you root down into that grounded place. It helps our nervous system come back online, right, like that prefrontal cortex, that thinking brain. It helps it get re-activated, gets the blood flow going and pulls everything back down into your knowing. So if you wanna feel more grounded and you feel like you're just spinning, spinning, spinning, I want you to try the shallow bottom breath and see if it helps you ground down to calm your nervous system, to get your thinking brain back online, so that you can then cope differently. So that you can then make choices that will move you in a different way, right? If we want a different outcome, we have to be different, and being different is believing, thinking, feeling and acting differently.

You are so capable of this, my friend, I promise you. And listen, we don't all know how to do this on our own, and that's why at the beginning of the show, I offered you the breakthrough call with me because oftentimes, we need someone on the outside, someone who understands what we're going through, how we're feeling, and how to move forward with some tools and strategies and healing that can help. I am here to do this for you. So I hope you take me up on the offer of a breakthrough call. That's what I have for you today. If no one else tells you, just know that you are loved and that you are so capable of being the exact mom that your kiddos need, and to being the adults and parents that you need. Much love and many blessings, and I'll see you next week.

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.