Latest / Hardiness with Dr Paul Taylor / The Best Stressed-Out Mum I Can Be With Carly Taylor
Transcript
- 0:05Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to you. This week's My Joe Monday.
- 0:09Speaker 1: So if you've been listening to My Joe Monday for
- 0:10Speaker 1: a while, you'll know that a lot of what I
- 0:13Speaker 1: talk about comes back to acceptance, So not acceptance that
- 0:18Speaker 1: everything is fine, acceptance of our own nature, so our
- 0:23Speaker 1: own human nature. And Marita talks about obedience to nature
- 0:29Speaker 1: and what that means is experiencing fear or discomfort or
- 0:34Speaker 1: even complaining as natural to being human as heat is
- 0:39Speaker 1: to summer and cold is to winter. You don't fight
- 0:42Speaker 1: the weather, so you dress for it and you get
- 0:45Speaker 1: on with your day. We are a part of nature,
- 0:48Speaker 1: and we forget that constantly. We battle nature all the time.
- 0:53Speaker 1: We get stressed, we get anxious, and that's nature doing
- 0:57Speaker 1: exactly what it's meant to do because we care about something.
- 1:03Speaker 1: And this week gave me an example of this. And look,
- 1:07Speaker 1: it's a bit of a small situation in the scheme
- 1:10Speaker 1: of life, but it's my reality right now. So my daughter,
- 1:15Speaker 1: who is twenty years old, she's currently backpacking over in
- 1:19Speaker 1: Europe and she is doing part of that trip on
- 1:22Speaker 1: her own. And I've been really stressed out about this,
- 1:25Speaker 1: even though I've done it myself. And maybe that's the
- 1:28Speaker 1: reason I'm stressed out, because there were a few incidents
- 1:30Speaker 1: when I traveled alone. But yeah, it's stressing me out,
- 1:35Speaker 1: and there's been a lot of what if thoughts, a
- 1:37Speaker 1: lot of crystal ball thoughts, and at times it's been
- 1:40Speaker 1: affecting my mood. But last night I just stopped and
- 1:46Speaker 1: I asked myself an I'm honest question, why is this
- 1:49Speaker 1: stressing me out so much? And of course I'm stress
- 1:53Speaker 1: like I love my daughter, I care about seeing her again,
- 1:56Speaker 1: And that stress isn't a sign that there is anything
- 2:00Speaker 1: wrong with me. It's actually a direct response to how
- 2:03Speaker 1: much he matters to me. If I didn't care, I
- 2:07Speaker 1: wouldn't feel a thing. And there's a concept from Marita therapy,
- 2:12Speaker 1: which if you are not familiar as a Japanese approach
- 2:15Speaker 1: to psychology, that explains exactly what has been happening to
- 2:20Speaker 1: me before I made this little shift in my attitude.
- 2:24Speaker 1: So Marita uses the word toro werre, which means something
- 2:30Speaker 1: like mental entrapment. So we get caught up in our thoughts,
- 2:35Speaker 1: we get so caught up that we feel trapped in
- 2:38Speaker 1: our own heads, and it really describes the state that
- 2:42Speaker 1: we end up in when we start fighting our own
- 2:45Speaker 1: natural reactions instead of just having them. So inside that state,
- 2:53Speaker 1: there's this specific pattern called shizo nor mujon, which translates
- 2:57Speaker 1: roughly as a contradiction between the ideal situation that we
- 3:02Speaker 1: would like to be in and reality of what is.
- 3:07Speaker 1: And it's that gap between how you think you should
- 3:10Speaker 1: be and how you actually are, Or it could be
- 3:14Speaker 1: how you think a situation should be, or the situation
- 3:18Speaker 1: you'd like to be and what the situation is. And
- 3:22Speaker 1: so for me, it looks like this. So I was stressed.
- 3:26Speaker 1: That was my reality, and underneath that there was his
- 3:30Speaker 1: second voice saying shouldn't be this stress, Like I should
- 3:34Speaker 1: be able to cope better than this, and that was
- 3:36Speaker 1: my ideal. So as a side note, Paul's coping absolutely fine,
- 3:43Speaker 1: So of course I had those thoughts like why can't
- 3:45Speaker 1: I be more like him? The real suffering wasn't the stress.
- 3:50Speaker 1: It was the argument I kept having with myself about
- 3:53Speaker 1: whether I should be feeling stressed, and that argument will
- 3:58Speaker 1: just keep going. There's rarely a resolution. I see this
- 4:03Speaker 1: constantly with my clients. The harder people demand that they
- 4:07Speaker 1: feel calm or they demand to be a certain way,
- 4:11Speaker 1: the more entrenched that anxiety comes, so fighting that gap
- 4:17Speaker 1: only makes the gap wider. So last night I just
- 4:21Speaker 1: dropped the argument with myself, which meant I dropped the
- 4:24Speaker 1: struggle with my true nature instead of trying to talk
- 4:29Speaker 1: myself out of the stress. I accepted it as a
- 4:33Speaker 1: normal human, very appropriate response to loving someone, and then
- 4:39Speaker 1: decided to be the best version of a stressed out
- 4:42Speaker 1: mum that I could be. And that doesn't mean the
- 4:45Speaker 1: calmest mum or the mum who's got it all handled.
- 4:49Speaker 1: It means feeling the stressfully and still getting done what
- 4:53Speaker 1: needs to be done, so still communicating with her, still
- 4:56Speaker 1: getting on with my daily tasks, still showing up for
- 4:59Speaker 1: the peace people in my life, and getting on with
- 5:02Speaker 1: the rest of my day. And this one shift it
- 5:05Speaker 1: did take the sting out of it. I'm still worried,
- 5:08Speaker 1: of course, and I probably will stay that way until
- 5:12Speaker 1: she's reached her destination or and still I hear until
- 5:15Speaker 1: I hear from her next. But I've stopped fighting myself
- 5:19Speaker 1: about it, and that was where most of this sort
- 5:22Speaker 1: of heavy weight was. There's a word for that in
- 5:27Speaker 1: Japanese psychology, and that is arrogamma. Just being as you
- 5:32Speaker 1: are not liking the stress, not chasing it away, just
- 5:36Speaker 1: letting it sit alongside you while you keep living and
- 5:39Speaker 1: keep doing what needs to be done. So this week,
- 5:44Speaker 1: whatever it is that is stressing you out right now,
- 5:47Speaker 1: it's because you care about something. The stress isn't the problem.
- 5:51Speaker 1: It's the argument that you're having with yourself about it
- 5:55Speaker 1: that is. So try dropping the struggle. Have a great
- 5:59Speaker 1: way everyone. I'll catch you next week mhm