Latest / The Raising Emotionally Intelligent Humans Podcast / Episode 7: Singing Randomly; Shift the Emotional Energy
Transcript
- Heidi Lindeman: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Raising Emotionally Intelligent Humans podcast. I'm your host, Heidi Lindeman. I'm a single mom by choice of two little ones, a therapist and a lover of feelings and emotions. Today and on this podcast, I tell stories, real stories about feelings in my family, my feelings, my kids' feelings, how our feelings all come together, ways that they just happens. and then things that we learn from it and how we raise our own emotional intelligence. Okay, and I love telling stories and it's a lot of fun for me. And today I'm going to tell you a story about the random act of thinking and how it can change quite a bit actually. Alright, so setting the stage here. This is dinner time. It's a normal dinner experience. And for me, normal dinner experiences are quite... chaotic or they can be. It's from the transition. I go pick up the girls from their school, their daycare school, and then we come home. Transitions are a little bit hard for our family as just as a whole. Getting out of the car and getting into the house is a little bit of a challenge. Leaving school is a little bit of challenge. So we've got the leaving of the school is a challenging thing. We have to then get in the car and drive home. The drive is only like three minutes. It's not that long. But still, it's enough of a experience that then getting out of the car is hard or maybe it's not long enough who knows but for whatever reason the kids don't ever want to get out of the car especially at the end of the day we're tired it's hard life is hard life is just hard at that point get out of the car eventually get inside and then we're inside then i mom go into i need to make dinner and i need to make it now because i'm getting hangry kids probably are too we're all a little bit hungry at the end of the day And so then I generally go in the kitchen, start making dinner, the kids are playing in the living room. ⁓ And sometimes they play well, sometimes they don't. OK, then today we got our, I got dinner going, made, cooking, and we're sitting down for dinner. And then my older one, she really likes to make her own little spaces. She just loves to create a space that's just for her. She's got many of them in her house. She was creating a little fort. She'd picked one of the areas and she moves her chairs, she has little chairs and blankets and pillows and stuffies and all kinds of stuff. And she moves them around so that she can create her own little space. And then she needs to set it up just right just the way that she wants it for herself so that it feels good and I so get that being a four on the enneagram. I really like the way my face looks. I don't keep it very clean but I like the way my face looks so I totally understand how why she wants to organize and get it just right okay so she's doing that. Why she wasn't eating dinner? I don't got a clue. I'm sure I told her a million times sit down please eat dinner it's time to eat dinner. Can't keep your butt in the chair. Anyway, she's making a fort. Then the little one, she wants to play. She did eat some of her dinner. She wants to go play too. She wants to go in the fort with her big sister. She wants to be just like her. So she goes over, tries to get in the fort, go play with her sister. And her sister does not like this. ⁓ no. She does not think that this is a good idea. She's like, no, you don't come in here. But her little sister, she wants her sister come in there. So then I tell her that she needs to find a way to play with her younger sister or I'm going to take her fort away. I totally threatened her. I don't like threatening my kids. And sometimes when I'm trying to do other things, like eat my food, I don't want to get up and deal with their business because I want to do my stuff. I don't know why they just came out like that kind of accent. I don't have an accent. I don't know what that was. I just went to New York. Can't say I have a I love New York shirt on. First time I ever went to New York and it was a freaking blast. Anyway, sidetrack back to the story. OK, so when I'm doing what I like to do or what I need to do, whether it's cooking dinner, eating dinner, ⁓ doing something that is for my own ⁓ connection or well-being, like basic needs. It's I don't really like to get up and be interrupted. ⁓ I know that I'm mom and I know that that's my job to get up and to go support them when they need to. But I first try to use my words to get them to do what I want them to do. So I told her to figure out a way to play nicer with her sister. You better play nicer with your sister. I'm going take it away from you. I'm not going to let you play with your four if you can't play nice. Thinking that that's a logical consequence, maybe it is, but maybe it's not. That whole concept still sometimes confuses me. What's the logical appropriate consequence and what's the not with a threat or a punishment that doesn't really apply to it. Anyway, another sidetrack. My brain is a little sidetrack-y today. Okay, so I threatened her and I was really hoping that by me saying that, by me threatening to take away her fork, that she would just shift her own energy and that she would then find a way to play with her sister and let her sister play in her fork. On the very rare occasion, maybe like 3 % of the time, this actually works. Most of the time it does not. Most of the time what happens is she feels my intensity. she gets more escalated, she wants to protect her things even stronger, and then she gets louder. She starts screaming and saying no. There might have even been some punches that were kind of, she's not really a punch, hitting, she's five, and my little one is two and a half. They were hitting each other, pushing each other, scratching each other. That's the kind of stuff that they do. It's developmentally appropriate, that's what they just do. Anyway, that they were getting at it because little one wanted to play, big one said no. I was trying to get big one to let the little one help. So we were all just like, no, somebody do something else. Getting each other's business. I want to do this. You want to do that? I don't want you to do that. I don't want you to do this. I want to do this. I don't want to do that. I want to do that. That's the kind of energy was in our house. ⁓ my Lord. Was that hard? That energy. There's just tension, there's tightness, and there's more fluster, and there's more tightness that happens, and then my body gets tight, and then my kid's body gets, I'm sure they get more tight. They get more loud, I get louder. It just escalates on top. And I saw this wasn't working. This wasn't going to work. And I decided I was going to change it. I was going to do something different. And I picked them up. And I took both of them. I picked up the older one and had the little one come with us. And I picked her up and I said, we're going to go in the office. is where we change our energy. And I picked her up and I brought her into my office. My office is the one space in the house that is almost always picked up. And it feels really nice. And it's calming. it's... It's a therapist office. I really enjoy being in my space. And I know my kids actually enjoy it too. They tend to calm down a little bit more when they're in the office. So it's like, okay, we're going to come in here and we're all sitting in this really big oversized chair, which I just love. Love how big it is. I can fit in it. The girls can, one girl can sit next to me. The other girl can sit on top of me, but they're still being mean to each other. with their words, their behaviors. I grasped for whatever I could and I looked at the bookshelf And I started singing about what I saw on the bookshelf Something like I See some books there on the shelf. There's some rocks on the shelf too. ⁓ There's some books over there on the shelf What are they doing over there on the shelf something like that? I just start singing about all the things I sing on the shelf. I have some rainbow that I use for rituals. I started singing about the rainbow that was on the shelf. Anything I could see. I just started singing it. And then my older one looks at me and she says, are we making up a song? And I said, yep. And then I keep singing. I keep singing about the bookshelf. And then they started singing. They started helping me. And I was with what I was. singing. I would sing and prompt them to sing and then they would keep singing. So it's something like, oh, and what do you see on the bookshelf over there? And then they would look at the bookshelf and they would just start singing about what they saw. And then they're... Their energy shifted so not only were we singing about them the bookshelf, but they started playing together There happened to be a doctor's kit that was nearby so they started playing with the doctor's kit and Then they started singing as well. Okay, so I'm going to play this clip so you can hear what their singing was like as well. It's really great to make songs out of whatever we are doing Okay, so that is just a small clip of the song that we made up together. We just started singing it and as you can hear, they totally shifted all of it. They shifted into them singing about being doctors and the little one, her leg was hurting. And then the older one was the doctor and had to fix the little one's leg. And then the little one's leg was hurting again. And then the older one had to fix her again. and they just sang and they played and it was lovely and it absolutely 100 % shifted the energy in our house and it gave us just more grounding and we were more regulated my body felt softer in less tense and I'm sure as theirs did too And singing. Oh, singing. is so great with kids. If we think about kids and how we teach them, with little kids, almost every single show we watch has so many songs that literally all of the shows we watch are just singing. It's singing and then it's a little action and then it's singing again and then some more actions. I'm singing again. There's a lot of singing. And then if we think about all the ways that we've learned to learn things, like the ABCs, how many of you still actually sing the ABCs when you're trying to figure out what order they go in? I legit cannot figure it out sometimes unless I sing it. I will legit sing the song in my head to figure out where the ABCs go in. because songs hit a space in our brain that allows us to remember really well and it hits a different space, think. Now, don't quote me on this one, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it hits a similar place where our emotions are, so it can legit shift your emotions ⁓ and regulate you. It hits that regulation space in your brain. And then you're all like, ⁓ I forgot that I was angry or pissed off about something or uptight about whatever it was. So just think. There are so many times when I just start singing and it really helps a lot. It's probably my fave. My fave parenting strategy these days is singing, which is also something that's interesting because I don't enjoy singing in front of people. There are very few and limited spaces where I will sing and want to. I will sing my favorite church songs and I've had to grow at that one. I would not sing them when I was younger, but then I, it became really meaningful and deep for me. So then the singing became more deep and meaningful for me. And that really connected me to singing. I'll sing my favorite songs in the car, but I am generally not somebody who wants, I don't want to be in a choir. I have no interest in being in a choir. I don't like just singing for random singing, except for with kids. Oh my goodness. Is it amazing to sing? with kids to sing whatever we're doing and to feel this shift in energy, the emotional change that we have in our house, the lightness that comes when we sing. And we can sing about serious things. We can sing about non-serious things. It's just really lovely and it really helps. That That's what I want to leave you with today. It's just a little singing. So maybe try it out. Try out a little singing. And I would love to hear if the singing shifts something in your house or if it doesn't. I know that too. I would love it if you have enjoyed this episode, if you've gotten anything from it, if you could give me a five star rating on iTunes. That is how this podcast gets shared, gets sent to more people. And I want more people to be able to raise their kids with some emotional intelligence, to grow their own, and then to grow their kids' emotional intelligence. So that we can all be more connected as humans, that we can all be part of the mom tribe together, part of the parenting tribe together, and actually make a real difference in this world. We need so much more emotional regulation and emotional intelligence. to work us through all of the really, really, really big challenges that are happening right now. And I know that a small... A child challenge is not the same thing as what's happening in the world. And it's also the place that I can influence the most right now is with my kids and helping them grow to be as emotionally intelligent and emotionally regulated as they can be and emotionally aware. Anyway, that's the story for today. ⁓ Come back for another one soon. And thanks for listening.