Latest / How To Love Yourself No Matter What / S2 E3. Overthinking Your Teens and Adult Kids? Let Go, Grieve, and Love Them Anyway

Transcript

S2 E3. Overthinking Your Teens and Adult Kids? Let Go, Grieve, and Love Them Anyway · How To Love Yourself No Matter What

• 0:00
  Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.
• 0:02
  I'm a certified life coach.
• 0:03
  But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.
• 0:16
  Let's go.
• 0:17
  Hello, my beautiful friends.
• 0:19
  Welcome to the podcast.
• 0:21
  Today, I want you to notice something that has changed.
• 0:25
  So if you're new here, it won't make that much of a difference to you, but if you're not new here, you're gonna notice that I have broken out season two.
• 0:33
  So I've labeled this as season two, episode three.
• 0:36
  The reason why is because I have so many episodes, almost 400 episodes, and I wanted to make this easier to navigate moving forward.
• 0:48
  The content that I'm sharing in this season of my life does feel like my season two.
• 0:56
  When I was new to coaching and new to podcasting, I spoke on a broad topic of self love, how to love yourself no matter what.
• 1:06
  And I still talk about that every day.
• 1:09
  I still coach on that every day.
• 1:10
  The reality is, is that everybody that I talk to needs to learn how to love themselves more.
• 1:16
  That's actually required for your life to improve.
• 1:20
  And I was just coaching clients today that the whole purpose of the coaching was to see how you actually are doing it right, how we need to start thinking about that more, how that is actually going to create
• 1:34
  a different emotional experience that is going to allow you to move forward.
• 1:38
  And so that has always been the case with this podcast.
• 1:42
  But for season two, I really want to speak directly to the issues that I see surrounding midlife.
• 1:52
  So that's not to say that if you're not in midlife, that you are not going to find things that resonate for you here.
• 2:00
  You will.
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  But I do specifically want to speak to the woman that is in the middle of her life or moving past the middle of her life into her more senior years, because those are the people that I typically tend
• 2:17
  to help, and that is the demographic in which I live as well.
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  So season two is my season two.
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  Okay?
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  Me moving into my 50s, being 50 years old and beyond.
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  So welcome to season two.
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  Welcome to episode three.
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  There's already a few more episodes about this, but today I really did want to talk about our relationships with teenagers and adult children, because this is something that is coming up so frequently in the spaces where I am
• 2:51
  offering support.
• 2:53
  So I offer a weekly class that you can come to.
• 2:57
  It's called Stop Overthinking.
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  And every week, I teach it to a new group of people and you can register for it if you want to.
• 3:05
  You can just go to amandahess ca overthink and you can register for the class.
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  I'll be doing one this week, I'll be doing one next week.
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  I will be doing them weekly until I don't do them weekly anymore, which currently I do.
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  And even after I stop doing them weekly, there will be a replay available for you to be able to watch.
• 3:24
  Right?
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  But as women are registering and men, sorry, I should say women and men are both registering for this class.
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  As people are registering for this class, I have been asking, what do you overthink?
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  Tell me what takes up so much space in your brain?
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  And over and over again, in fact, seven times this week alone I have had somebody reply that the biggest, heaviest thing on their brain is their relationship with their adult children.
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  And I coach on this a lot too in my coaching practice.
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  And I myself am a mother of a 19 year old and a 16 year old.
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  So I have a lot of experience in this area and I have thoughts.
• 4:14
  I have thoughts and I have skills that I am going to offer you today on this podcast about all of it.
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  What tends to happen is when we become mothers, and I've been having this conversation with so many women recently, our lives are turned upside down.
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  As a mother, your life is turned upside down.
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  You don't get up when you want to get up.
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  You don't go to bed when you want to go to bed.
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  You don't get to do the things that you want to do when you want to do them when you are a mother of a baby or babies and small children because they take precedence because their survival is our
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  job.
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  And I vividly remember becoming a new mom and just feeling the shock wash over me that, that A, I was in charge and B, I didn't have anywhere to go.
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  Like there was no quitting this job, right?
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  This was just my job.
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  And so when my child was up at the crack of dawn, which my child always was, then I was up at the crack of dawn, even if I had been up feeding said child all night long.
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  Right?
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  And it's interesting how challenging it is, I would say for most, for most, not for everybody, but how challenging it is when your lifestyle is just completely upended, completely turned upside down.
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  It's a wild adventure.
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  It is the catalyst which brought me to understanding that I needed to address my emotions and what was going on for me.
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  It is what led me to completely cracking wide open.
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  But then what happens is we learn how to live Inside that.
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  And one of the ways we learn to live inside it is, is how much we love our children, how much we care about them.
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  And we are really and truly responsible for every part of their lives.
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  We are, when they are small, responsible for their happiness.
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  We are responsible for their comfort.
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  We are responsible for their.
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  For their advocacy.
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  We are responsible for keeping them alive, feeding them, clothing them, ensuring that they are successful as babies, then young children, and then moving forward after they're walking and talking and doing all the things, then they go to school
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  and we advocate for them in school.
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  And it becomes our job to make sure they're showing up to class, that they are getting good grades, that they are keeping up with their homework, that they're doing socially.
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  Okay?
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  We are the mother.
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  And so we do the mothering really, really well or the best we can, okay?
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  And in doing that, we become very hyper vigilant of our kids, because when they're small, that is our job.
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  But what people don't tell us is that as our kids age and get older, we stop really having that role.
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  Our role changes again.
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  And it's not as dramatic as when we have the baby and we bring the baby home.
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  It's this slow letting go that goes on, this slow release of responsibility.
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  And yet emotionally, we still feel very attached and very responsible.
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  And it's a really unique experience, I feel, that is exclusive to mothers.
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  I think, though, that when you have that kind of love and care for another human being, and you do that for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, that the letting go of that role is just as difficult as
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  the bringing on of that role.
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  And I just want to point that out because there's two things that happen here that happen concurrently and together.
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  So on one hand, we are learning how to let someone else who we love and care about have consequences.
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  We are learning how to let them be in the world without us paving the way, smoothing it over, making sure they do it correctly, making sure they don't make mistakes.
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  We are having to learn how to do that in real life time.
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  And so we have to be able to give ourselves grace, but we also have to learn how to do it.
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  The letting go is a skill.
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  So when people come to me and say it's difficult for me to do this, I'm like, yes, of course, me too.
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  It's absolutely essential if you wish to have a peaceful existence with your teenagers and your adult children.
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  If you want to have positive experiences with them.
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  This needs to happen.
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  It is required.
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  So we need to learn how to Let go.
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  How to experience the emotions that come up when we know.
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  When we know that the way they're going is not going to create the result they want.
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  But they haven't asked us for our input or they have, and they've gone ahead and done it their way.
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  And being willing to watch somebody fail on their own and be able to love them completely, even though that is happening, is the assignment.
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  Is the assignment.
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  That is our job.
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  And when does it shift?
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  I don't know that there's a magic number.
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  But I will say this, that once your kids start going to school, you're already on that path.
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  And it's not a bad path.
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  It's actually a great path.
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  You can actually have incredible impact on your kids on that path.
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  This does not mean that anything has gone wrong.
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  It doesn't mean that you matter less.
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  It is simply the evolution of being a mother.
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  And yes, you can do it.
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  And yes, there are very hard things about it, and there are very difficult things about it.
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  And that doesn't mean anything other than this is what motherhood looks like.
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  Okay?
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  So that's part of it is learning how to let go.
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  Learning how to let go of what they do when they do it, how they do it.
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  Learning how to let go of what you think is right and instead let them figure out what is right for them.
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  We need to be able to let go.
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  The other piece of this is we need to learn how to grief.
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  So for some of us, we will have had some experience with grief because there will have been hard, difficult loss prior to this.
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  And for some of you, you may have been able to approach that in a really complete way.
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  But what I find is most people don't know how to do that because none of us have been taught how to do that.
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  So we don't know how to grieve in a whole incomplete way.
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  We actually look at grief and go, I guess this is something I have to survive and tolerate.
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  And so that's how we approach grief.
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  And that's how I approached grief.
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  I had no idea, like, when I lost my mom, I didn't know what to do.
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  And I'd never experienced a loss like that.
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  And so I had to go the long, hard, difficult way, which I don't want for you, right?
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  So when it comes to teenagers and adult children, we've got to learn how to grieve.
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  And what grieving really is, is understanding that loss is there and that we feel loss in our body.
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  We feel loss in our body, and it is a very Unique feeling, and it's one that carries sadness, and it can carry regret and it can carry frustration.
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  It can carry these things.
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  But the grief itself is just the piece of it that I want to focus on right now, which is that sort of empty pit that we feel in our stomach, that feeling of emptiness.
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  That, to me, is what grief feels like in my body.
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  It's a missing of sorts.
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  And we do grieve parts of our journey when it comes to our kids.
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  We grieve them believing that we are the best thing ever, that we're the most beautiful human on the earth, that we're the most important person to them.
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  We grieve that, and we have to grieve it.
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  But what we don't want to do is we don't want to make it their responsibility.
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  That's not their responsibility.
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  One of the things that I talk a lot about on this podcast and with my clients that I think is just such a powerful thing, is understanding that me taking care of my emotions is a me job, and
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  them taking care of their emotions is a them job.
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  And so I have to learn how to sit with that feeling and let it pass through.
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  And what I will tell you is it will always pass through.
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  It will always pass through.
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  Feelings go in and out like waves.
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  They come in, they go up, they go down, they go out.
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  If we don't resist them, if we don't block them.
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  Where the overthinking comes in with all of this is fighting with the feeling.
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  I don't want to feel that emptiness.
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  I can't handle it.
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  I won't be okay.
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  I won't survive it.
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  It's just too hard now.
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  Your brain is going to take over and it is going to argue with what happened in the past.
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  It is going to argue with the decisions that they're making now.
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  It is going to create a fight inside of your own brain.
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  And I want to point out that on one hand, it sucks for you because you are living through that, and that's very painful, and you're creating a lot of suffering without meaning to.
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  But it also sucks for your relationship with your kid because that is the version of you that you bring to every interaction with them.
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  And so it's a twofer.
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  It actually, and it's so important to understand this creates much more of what you don't want.
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  It creates so much more of what you don't want and so much less of what you do want.
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  Most people will come to me and say, what I want to feel is peace.
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  I want to feel at peace.
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  But the underlying belief with that statement is that if my kids were doing this, doing that, if they were talking to me, marrying the right person didn't cut me out, didn't cut me off, including me, me in Thanksgiving,
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  Christmas, et cetera, et cetera, then I wouldn't feel this way and I'm owed this.
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  And it's just so interesting, right, how we think like that and it feels so true.
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  But what it is is it's just rejection of a feeling.
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  It's just rejecting a feeling.
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  It's like I don't want to feel this loss, so I want to go and fix everything so I don't feel it.
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  And then if I can't fix everything now, I'm going to blame you or my daughter in law, I'm going to blame her or their friends, I'm going to blame them.
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  It's all just not being able to hold the emotion for long enough to let it pass through.
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  When we can hold the emotion and we can let it pass through, which it will always do if we let it, and we've got to build safety to be able to do that right, then we can start looking
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  at which way do I want to move if I'm going to move forward, knowing that I can't control them, that I can only control me.
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  How do I want to show up?
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  What version of me do I want to show up?
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  I just think it's such a powerful, valuable change in the way that we approach things.
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  And it can change the way that we navigate ourselves, which is essential, but it also changes the way that we navigate our relationships with other people.
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  One of the things that I have said on this podcast many, many times, and I say to my clients always, is that unconditional love is a renewable resource that has no downside.
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  Unconditional love is a renewable resource that has no downside.
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  What we tend to do is when we feel not good enough, rejected, like we don't belong, when we feel that right, when we have that belief and we feel that awful, painful feeling in our gut, we will withdraw
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  love from everybody, including ourselves.
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  And it's just a place that we go to that is designed by our brain to be protective, but that it actually doesn't give us more of what we want.
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  One thing that I was saying on a discovery call with somebody yesterday is when this pattern is showing up, we are basically going inside of our house, locking all the doors, closing all the windows, shutting all the blinds,
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  turning off all the lights and going in the closet.
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  Yeah.
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  And Then it's like, why can't anybody find me in here?
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  Well, you.
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  You can't be found in there.
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  You've made yourself unfindable.
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  So I'm not going to say to you that if you have a fractured relationship with an adult child, that unconditional love will fully solve it.
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  But what I will say to you is that unconditional love is going to bring you a lot closer than where you are right now.
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  A lot closer.
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  And that we have to heal the parts of us that expect other people to validate and love us, to be able to go out and love others unconditionally, love ourselves unconditionally.
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  When we have that ability, then we can start moving towards what we want.
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  Now, can the relationship be repaired with a estranged child?
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  Don't know.
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  But can you start building relationships in your life that support you?
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  Yes.
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  Can you exit that closet, turn on all the lights in your house again, open the blinds, open the door, be an inviting, welcome place for people to step into?
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  Yes, you can.
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  Is that what's required?
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  Yes, it is.
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  Now, when we're talking about teenagers, right?
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  It's not different.
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  I have really seen the evidence over the years of the two different versions of my kids that I can get.
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  There is the version of my kids when I come in hot and judgmental, and letting them know that how they are being is a problem for me that almost always results in defensiveness.
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  It results in an interaction where the result is either there's a fight or there's the kid backing down and saying, whatever you say.
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  Rarely does it actually fix whatever's going on.
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  It usually doesn't actually address what's happening.
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  It ultimately just either creates more of a problem or just makes the problem keep limping along.
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  We have Groundhog Day later.
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  What I have found to be way more effective is to first of all be very, very full emotionally before I address the problem.
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  What I mean by that is I've worked on my own thoughts about myself, my self worth, my mothering.
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  I am not letting their behavior be a reflection of me.
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  Because we're taught that, right, your kids are a reflection of you.
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  What a horrible thing to do to somebody to say, you know, this being that has their own brain that grows into their own person is a reflection of you.
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  No, they're not.
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  They're just a human being with their own brain.
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  We're not attached.
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  There's no line that keeps us together.
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  So when I approach them and I go, okay, I know that I sometimes make mistakes and that if I approach My kid with unconditional love.
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  And I look for what's right in them to begin with.
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  And I come from a place of they are not doing this to screw with me, that this is something going on with them.
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  I can come in open and curious.
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  Does that mean that I am a limp noodle?
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  No.
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  You're not allowed to swear at me or yell at me.
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  And if you do, I'm going to be like, listen, I understand you're angry and upset, but I can't actually let you swear and yell at me.
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  Right.
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  A lot of times what I get asked is what do I do and what do I say?
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  And what I'm going to tell you is what you do and what you say doesn't matter so much as what you think, what you think and what you believe.
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  And the energy that you bring is essential.
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  Kids can smell it on you and then even your 40 and 50 year old kids can smell it on you a mile away.
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  We all can.
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  We just know each other so well and so we want to be very, very careful to not do something because it's like, well, I'll just say this so that they stop doing X, Y, z.
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  No, we need to marry in our head.
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  Like, I love my kid unconditionally.
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  I want you to say that out loud.
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  I love my child unconditionally.
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  What does that mean, I love them unconditionally?
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  It means I don't withdraw love if they don't do something that I don't like or if they do something that I don't like.
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  That's not what this looks like.
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  That's not how this works.
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  I love you unconditionally.
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  That doesn't mean I let you walk all over me.
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  You don't get to steal from me.
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  You don't get to treat me poorly.
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  You don't get to treat other members of my household poorly.
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  But I can come with unconditional love and I can always bring that version to you.
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  I can always have a wide open door.
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  You are allowed to come in my space.
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  You are allowed to come in my home, but not if you create chaos.
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  But that also doesn't mean I withdraw my love from you.
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  It's this open place that we can be with ourselves that allows us to have the interactions that we want to have now, regardless of what's going on the other side.
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  We have the ability to bring that version of ourselves.
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  But in order to do that, we must learn how to deal with our own emotions.
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  You need to know how to allow and process them.
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  I have had so many conversations about this recently because I have been doing this class and I've been doing discovery calls, and I've just been talking to so many of you.
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  And what I will tell you is this is the missing piece.
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  We are so obsessed as a culture into what should I do instead of how do I sit with this and do nothing and let it through?
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  And then how do I want to approach this?
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  What is what I want to think on purpose here?
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  And what is the emotional fuel that I'm going to use to drive it forward?
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  That's why I offer unconditional love.
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  Unconditional love is beautiful fuel no matter what you do.
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  You can use it with the mailman.
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  You can use it in traffic when you're driving.
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  It is a renewable resource that always serves you.
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  So when it comes to your teens and your adult children, giving them agency is the thing, right?
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  Letting go, letting them make mistakes, letting them figure it out, not assuming that you know what's best for them.
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  Maybe you don't.
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  One thing that people say to me all the time is it must be difficult as a coach when you, you know, give somebody advice and then they do the opposite.
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  And I'm like, it's not difficult for me at all, first of all, because I don't have to live it, so that's not a problem for me.
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  But second of all, I don't think that I necessarily know what is the right thing for you.
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  My job is to help you to explore what version of me do I bring here to get what really works for me and creates the results that I want in my life?
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  And you're asking me for coaching?
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  Your kids are not actually asking you for coaching.
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  Worthwhile noting, right?
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  When I'm coaching, you're asking for my advice.
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  Your kids are not asking.
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  So we need to just really be clear.
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  There's going to be situations where, especially if you've got children living at home, they're teenagers, or even adults, where there's going to be rules and expectations and boundaries that you will have to set and hold.
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  But you can do those with love, too.
• 24:57
  The intention behind anything we do has value and meaning, and sometimes the other person can't receive it.
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  That doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
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  So navigating this can be a little bit challenging.
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  That's why I always offer coaching, because coaching helps us get a different perspective.
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  Coaching helps us see it in a different way.
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  If ever I feel really stuck with something, I always get coached just because I know that that is just going to help me get the clarity that I really need here.
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  But in listening to this, I just want to point out that one thing in parenting is unconditional love and the other thing is curiosity and releasing judgment.
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  If you bring those qualities to your relationship with your children, no matter what age they are, you will have a better relationship with them.
• 25:52
  A little food for thought.
• 25:54
  If you want to hear more about how to do these things in practice, come to my overthinking class.
• 26:02
  Stop overthinking.
• 26:04
  Amandahest Ca Overthink.
• 26:08
  But also, I want you to know that you can book a discovery call with me.
• 26:14
  It's free.
• 26:15
  It's an opportunity for us to talk about what's specifically going on with you.
• 26:21
  We put a plan in place and then we look and see if coaching is the right fit for you.
• 26:25
  And if you would like to explore that, you can go to amandahest Ca Bookacall.
• 26:32
  All right, my friends, that's what I've got for you today.
• 26:35
  I hope you have a beautiful week and I'll see you next time.
• 26:37
  Bye for now.
• 26:40
  Thanks so much for listening today.
• 26:43
  If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.
• 26:48
  It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.
• 26:54
  I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.
• 26:58
  Until then, take care, friend.