Ep 56: Are You Regulating or Coping?

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Picture your child feeling some intense feelings in their classroom. Perhaps anger, sadness, or disappointment. Now imagine that they’re able to move through these intense feelings without getting lost in them. Because your child knows how to regulate their emotions, thanks to you and the countless times you’ve modeled emotional regulation to them. Isn’t this what we’d want for our children?

You already know that for you to model emotional regulation to your child, you gotta be able to move with your own big feelings and stay anchored in your connection mode. To say it another way, to offer your child this emotional regulation, you need to know what it feels like in your own body first. And here’s my question: how do you know if you’re regulating or coping? Are you truly regulated or simply doing what you gotta do to get through the day in one piece? Knowing the difference between real regulation and coping is so important for your own health, your decolonized parenting, your social justice action, and of course your inner child re-parenting.

Welcome back to Episode 56 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

Before we begin, this episode is a part of our inner child re-parenting series which runs from episode 50 to 58. You can listen to each episode solo or multiple episodes together, depending on your curiosity and bandwidth.

In this episode, you and I are going to explore how our inner child wounds can complicate our ability to practice regulation. Then, we’ll discuss one action we can do to slowly cultivate regulation and safety, going beyond coping and surviving. So that you can offer regulation to your child and meet their needs where they’re at, most of the time. And this practice will help you stay centered in moments when your child pushes your parenting buttons too. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started.

Recap: Inner Child Wounds & Parenting

Let’s start with a quick recap of why we’re talking about our past and our inner child wounds. First, the way you love your child is shaped by how you were loved as a child. When you understand what kind of care you didn’t get, you can grieve this loss and give yourself what you didn’t get. Healing your inner child wounds and breaking generational cycles are two sides of the same coin.

Second, getting triggered means you’re parenting from the past you’re trying to heal from. When you’re triggered, you’re looking at your child through the lens of your past pain instead of seeing what they need from you right here, right now. That’s why inner child wounds that get triggered can make it hard for you to meet your child where they’re at.

And finally, when you’re triggered, you’re in the protection mode of fight, flight, freeze, fix, people please, and shutdown. You’re no longer in connection mode where you’re curious, compassionate, creative, and caring, everything you need to be the parent you know you can be. And our nervous system can either be in protection mode or connection mode…one at a time. In protection mode, you use your trusted, tried, and true survival strategies that have protected you from being criticized, rejected, abandoned, or humiliated since you were little. These strategies include being hypervigilant, people pleasing, being perfectionistic, or shutting down and numbing out when you feel threatened… whether the threat is real or perceived. You unconsciously use these survival strategies over and over again so much that they become a habit. This protection feels familiar. It works so well at getting us through the day in one piece that we tend to forget that this protection comes at a cost. We tend to forget that staying alive isn’t the same as living, let alone living fully and loving with our soft, open, and whole heart.

Surviving is coping, not regulating

And this is what’s important: our survival strategies like being hypervigilant, people pleasing, perfectionistic, or shutting down and numbing out…they all work until they don’t. They’re so effective at keeping us protected until we enter meaningful and intimate relationships like the ones with your partner, your child, your co-conspirator and so on. Then, protection gets in the way of real connection. And if you and I get radically honest with each other, you might already know that whatever survival strategies that helped you cope with stress and threat in your life before becoming a parent… hmmm might not work out so well now that you’re raising a little human who’s asking for real regulation, not just survival-based coping.

But before we dive into parenting, please allow me to share a few examples.

Say you’ve been using people pleasing and code switching to survive your childhood and also to survive under white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. Then your partner enters the scene. You might have been conditioned to set your needs aside to people please your partner to keep them from abandoning you. But you already know that for this partnership to blossom in real, messy, meaningful ways, both of you need to get to know and fall in love with the real you, not the version of you that you think your partner likes. So, a protection strategy like people pleasing  gets in the way of real connection.

This can also happen in the context of advocating for justice with your beloved community. Say you’ve been relying on being perfect and being quote unquote good since you were little to keep those who raised you content. Then you start community organizing with your co-conspirators. You might say something that hurt your community and, of course, you didn’t mean to. You know accountability is important. But the shame from messing up, being imperfect, and being a quote unquote “bad” ally is too intense and it keeps you hiding instead of owning your missteps, apologizing, and coming up with accountability plans. Again, perfectionism aka your survival strategy that protects you gets in the way of real connection.   

How’s that landing so far? These survival strategies that keep you protected are important. I’m not knocking them at all. In fact, I’m so grateful for my own survival strategies that help me cope with stress and threats. But for us to truly connect with those we love and co-create meaningful relationships with them, we need to know when to be in our survival mode. And when it feels safe enough to get out of it and go back to connection mode. Because coping isn’t enough. Relationships thrive in regulation. And today we’ll explore how to balance protection with connection.

Alright, let’s apply this concept to parenting. Pradeep and I used to work together in the online social justice parenting program called the In-Out-N-Through program. I’m using a pseudonym for confidentiality, and he gave me permission to share his story with you.

When Pradeep was little, he had to pretend to enjoy playing by himself even though he wanted to play with his mom. Looking back he understands that his mom was grieving a divorce and was too tired to play after coming home from her late night shift. As you can see, Pradeep had to overlearn how to stuff his desire for connection down and become hyper independent. Because the rejection he felt when he asked his mom to play and she couldn’t was too painful. So his survival strategy that keeps him protected from feeling rejected is being independent, not asking for help, not bidding for connection. It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? And this protection worked…until a tiny human came into his care through adoption. Pradeep doesn’t have any record of Max’s first three years of life besides the logistical details but Pradeep knew right away that Max needed a lot of his presence, attention, and emotional availability. But each time Max needs emotional comfort and co-regulation from Pradeep, Pradeep said he could do all the hugging and consoling for a bit all while on the inside he felt this strong urge to stop giving hugs and labeling emotions. On the inside he believed he needed to teach Max not to be soft and to be tough and independent like Pradeep had to be when he was little. So, when Pradeep couldn’t tolerate the discomfort anymore, his go-to coping behavior is teaching Max independence by reading books to Max (notice I said to Max not with Max) or handing Max some toys for Max to play with. And usually Max cries even more and doesn’t want to leave Pradeep’s side.

After breaking down this scene together, Pradeep could see that he was reacting to get rid of his discomfort that stems from his inner child wounds. We covered trigger and reactivity in the previous episode if you’d like to check it out. Pradeep wasn’t actually meeting Max’s needs for emotional comfort and regulation in that moment. That was why Max still kept crying. So, Pradeep’s survival strategy of independence protected Pradeep but it got in the way of really connecting with Max.

And here’s what’s interesting. And I’m saying this with so much love. I know you love your child, period, full stop, no questions asked. And…when you co-regulate with your child and you feel like you’ve given your all and they’re still crying, many parents often feel somewhere along this spectrum from feeling helpless (like “what did I do wrong?” “why can’t I figure this out?”) to feeling resentful (like I’ve given you my all and it’s still never enough). I just want to name this out loud and shine some grace on how your love for your child can coexist with other feelings like resentment and helplessness.

Phew, I need to take a moment and rock my body, feel my feet on the floor, and exhale with sound. Ummmm. No shame, no shame, no shame.

Pradeep realized right away that the survival strategy he was using to cope with the discomfort wasn’t enough to provide the real regulation that Max was asking for. So the work that Pradeep has been doing with me and that I’m inviting you to do here is to go beyond coping and to cultivate real regulation. So that you can offer it to your child and meet them where they’re at.

If there’s one thing I need to make sure you understand, if you take nothing else from this episode at all, it’s this. Coping with stress and threats isn’t the same as regulating.

When your child pushes your buttons, you get triggered. Then, you react by reverting to old, tried and true coping behaviors like yelling, shutting down, or people pleasing. When you use these coping behaviors, the pressure from the discomfort is relieved. The itch got scratched. Then, you feel a bit more stable. Your emotions feel manageable again. You feel a little more in control again. But relief isn’t regulation. Stability isn’t safety. You feel stable through coping but your child is asking for safety that comes from regulation.

Safety comes from feeling anchored and centered enough to return to your connection mode where you feel curious, caring, connected, and compassionate.

Stability, on the other hand, comes from doing what you gotta do to cope and regain a sense of control when your body and emotions feel out of control or when you’re triggered. But it doesn’t return to your connection mode aka where you can be the parent you know you can be.

And the reason we’re working hard to distinguish between coping and regulating is that we often mistake stability for safety. And we settle for stability instead of cultivating true safety that comes from true regulation that children need.  

This concept is very nuanced and subtle. And it has a powerful long-term effect on your wellbeing too, not just on parenting. I want to make sure you understand what this concept looks like in real life. Instead of throwing neuroscience jargons around, I’d love to share a personal example to help paint a picture for you.

But if you’d like to nerd out, please feel free to dig into the literature using terms like sympathetic arousal physiology, dorsal conservation parasympathetic physiology, chronic dysregulation, and faux Window of Tolerance. Alright? I’m already tired saying these words out loud.

The neuroscience

Okay because of my upbringing and past hurt and harm that were done to me growing up, my survival strategies included being hypervigilant, being in control, being perfect, and being excellent. My nervous system stays in the activated state of fight or flight almost all the time. I stay ready so I don’t have to get ready. I operate in protection or survival mode as a baseline and it’s hard for me to come back to the real baseline which is in connection mode. Remember, we’re not supposed to be in fight or flight all the time. For most animals when the threat is gone and they feel safe again, they return to their equilibrium, to their connection mode. But for you and me, what if we don’t remember the last time we felt safe? Now add your race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, abilities, age, gender, sexuality, and spiritual practices to your consideration. When was the last time you felt safe under white colonial capitalist patriarchy? A system where your food, housing, and healthcare can disappear when you stop working. So I’m stuck in my survival mode of fight or flight where I’m always protecting myself by being hypervigilant, being in control, being perfect, and being excellent. If my body were a car, the engine is stuck at 10,000 rpm and never gets to idle. And because our nervous system isn’t designed to be stuck in survival all the time, we develop coping strategies to make our survival mode feel stable or manageable. Otherwise the accelerator keeps revving up and you’ll spin out of control into complete chaos. Or, on the other end of this survival spectrum, if you tend to numb out and dissociate and slam on the brakes all the time, eventually the engine will sputter to a halt and you won’t be able to get anywhere.

So for me my nervous system is revving up all the time for me to stay hypervigilant, in control, and in perfectionism. For me to hit the brakes so I don’t spin out of control into complete chaos, I eat and eat, and eat until I get a food coma which leaves me tired, and sleepy. Then I can quote unquote rest. Is it real rest and regulation? Absolutely not. A food coma is only a coping strategy that slows down my engine enough so that I won’t keep revving up and going into a complete chaos. I would slow down enough to feel stable, not safe.

For a long time, I thought I was doing really well at relaxing because this stability was all I knew. So I mistook it for real safety. I mistook this relief for real regulation.

Now that I understand neurobiology more. I understand that zonking out after a food coma is only dampening the high level of activation in my nervous system…it’s easing off the accelerator a bit. If it were a real regulation, not a coping strategy, it would bring me back to my connection mode where I feel curious, connected, caring, and compassionate again. But no I was zonked out. I couldn’t connect and form meaningful and messy relationships with anyone. I was too busy sleeping.

Now it’s been my lifelong journey (and remains a work-in-progress) to find the smallest spark of safety aka real regulation and savor it. I still cherish the memories of some of the times when I’ve felt this safety, times like:

When I was sharing a meal with my fellow trans sex workers at the end of the night many moons ago and felt a profound sense of heart-centered connection. In that moment, my spine was fluid but upright. I breathed fully without holding my breath out of fear. My gaze was soft and I didn’t have to be hypervigilant. I know now that it was real regulation not just coping. I was connecting with my sisters, caring, curious, and compassionate.

Or when I was doing a fashion show catwalk for my grandmother when I was little. She couldn’t care less about my gender. She was cheering me on and planted three tender kisses on my cheeks and forehead. In the moment, I didn’t exactly remember what unfolded in my body. But remembering this scene right now my chest feels warm, soft, and open instead of hardened and armored up. My jaws relaxed instead of clenched up. This is real regulation.

Or when the squirrels that I hand feed put their cute tiny paws on my thumb or when I feel so connected with my ancestors, I feel this immense sense of awe, reciprocity, and interdependence that Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer described in Braiding Sweetgrass. I feel it in my chest and stomach. I feel so loved and most definitely safe and regulated.

Are you still with me?

I hope these examples make it clear that I work really hard on surviving in a system that seeks to erase me. But I work twice as hard to cultivate these moments of aliveness, safety and regulation. So that I can thrive while surviving. My point is if you’re saying “Nat, I can’t even remember the last time I felt safe,” I hear you. I truly do. By cultivating real regulation and safety slowly (the key is to take small steps and go slowly), you and I can get unstuck from survival together. You and I can survive together while nurturing our aliveness too.

[MIDROLL]

My dear co-conspirator, I can’t tell you often enough how grateful I am that you’re here doing this radical and liberatory work of both healing yourself and practicing social justice in your daily parenting. And you don’t have to practice alone. Every month I hold a community workshop on Zoom for people who subscribe to the Come Back to Care Newsletter. You’ll meet with me and other social justice curious families live on Zoom once a month to discuss topics like how to discipline young children without using power-over domination and coercion, or how to work with your parenting triggers, and more. Get notified when these monthly workshops are open for registration by signing up at comebacktocare.com/newsletter. I write each email with nourishing care and deep respect for your time. Again, sign up at comebacktocare.com/newsletter. Alright, back to the episode.

[EPISODE]

Systemic oppression and why it’s even more important to heal

Before I share some prompts and practices for you to play with to cultivate real regulation and safety, I want to reiterate that cultivating true safety and regulation is also about your health and well-being. Surviving white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy might make us become anxious and hypervigilant as a baseline or numbed out and shut down as a baseline. We’re literally and neurobiologically stuck in survival without any reset in the nervous system. And it costs our bodies wear and tear.

Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, trauma experts and authors who have fifty years of combined clinical experience, explain that when you’re stuck in your survival mode being anxious and hypervigilant all the time, you use more oxygen and nutrients and secrete more stress chemicals while inhibiting digestion and immune responses. You’re sending a signal to your brain that you’re fighting for your life whether you’re in danger, grocery shopping, cuddling on the couch with your little one, or cooking. Kain and Terrell explain that in survival mode, there is a high cost of doing business. If you’d like to dive into the literature, you can start with terms like high allostatic load.

To speak plainly, being stuck in survival isn’t just about being stressed emotionally – it’s also costing your immune system, digestion, cardiovascular system, and overall health.

As much as liberation needs all hands on deck, don’t we as a culture need you to be well? You’re doing one of the most important jobs which is nurturing our next generations. And for that alone I have deep love and care for you. I would refuse to let white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy continue to co-opt and colonize your nervous system.  

True to our mission at Come Back to Care, I need you to be well so you can take up space, take risks, and take a stand advocating for our tax dollars to go towards making things like childcare accessible and education equitable instead of towards funding war, genocide, and environmental exploitation. There’s never going to be enough individualistic self-healing or self-regulation under systemic oppression that extracts from our dignity and exploits our labor and disconnects us from ourselves, one another, the land, and the spirits. I hope we can cultivate this true regulation and safety enough to bring our whole selves to advocating for justice with our beloved communities. So that you’re not fighting for justice and re-imagining liberation in your survival mode, whether that mode is anxious and hypervigilant or numbed out and shut down. Rather, you’re doing this liberation work at home with your child and in your community with your co-conspirators from your connection mode, from your dignity, power, and divinity. Our healing and parenting here are political.

Attending to safety

So let’s begin our practice right here, right now with an invitation to notice the smallest cues of safety inside our bodies.

When we talk about parents regulating their emotions, we often focus on staying centered in the heat of the moment when you’re triggered. And this makes sense because triggers move us into our protection mode, so learning to recognize when something is shifting you towards protection can help you stop and shift back into connection mode.

But there’s another piece to this puzzle which is deepening your awareness of what feels safe inside your body – of what moves you into connection mode. That’s our focus today. The two pieces of this puzzle work together. When you know what safety feels like for you, you can land here and find your center quicker when your child pushes your button. Alright?

I invite you to notice small sparks of safety and connection where you feel safe-enough, present-enough, and alive-enough to meet the world. Deb Dana, a trauma expert and therapist, calls these sparks Glimmers. These sparks can feel like holding a warm cup of coffee in the morning in silence before your little ones are up. And the warmth in your hands softens your heart and brings a gentle smile on your face followed by a juicy exhale….hahhh.

Notice how small this is. Our nervous system has been so well trained to notice signs of danger that we’re excellent at reacting to triggers. So, we’re balancing survival by training our nervous system to notice cues of safety and connection. You can think of Glimmers as the opposite of triggers.

Other examples of Glimmers include taking a walk outside and feeling the breeze on your face, smelling your favorite candle, going jogging, having dinner in the park with your friends, sitting in silence during your baby’s nap, noticing a nod of acknowledgement from your colleagues, watering your plants, cuddling with your cats, making delicious soup, wearing plush fleece socks, rinsing your hands under cold water, or laughing at a funny meme on the Internet…the list goes on. Again, these things are tiny sparks of safety and connection. It’s not a three-day vacation in Paris or an hour of yoga.

If you’re first reaction is “my day is so chaotic and there’s no moment of peace,” I hear you. That’s why we’re practicing this self-awareness together to actively find these Glimmers in your day. This invitation I’m sharing with you is an adaptation from what Deb Dana suggested in her books. Please take what resonates, leave the rest, and more importantly make it your method.

In a nutshell, you pause and savor these Glimmers even if it’s just for 5-10 seconds. And if you’d like, at the end of the day, share these Glimmers with those you trust.

Allow me to elaborate.

First, start with what’s predictable. After you look at your planner and know what your day looks like, perhaps pick one routine in the day that you know is likely to be filled with Glimmers.

Then, when that routine comes, be extra active and intentional about pausing, noticing, and savoring that sense of safety and connection. When I wash my hands, I practice being intentional around feeling the temperature and pressure of the water on my skin and thinking of my ancestors and thanking them…instead of thinking about what to do in the next work meeting. This quick connection with water grounds me. And to savor this Glimmer, I simply give myself permission to take this sense of regulation and safety in fully for 5 seconds. That’s it. What other parents in our community love is taking photos of these glimmers and making a glimmer album on their phones that they can access when they need a little re-centering throughout the day.

Lastly, if you’d like, you can record these glimmers in your journal. Or, share them with those you trust at the end of the day. I know many families enjoy reviewing what they were grateful for each day. It can be fun to review everyone’s glimmers too so you can get to know what brings each family member joy, connection, and safety. You can talk about them or show the photos on your phone too. If you’re like me and you might forget or be too tired to do this glimmer review at the end of the day, sometimes once I finish savoring the glimmer, I text it to my accountability buddies right away.

How’s everything landing so far?

Closing:

To wrap up this episode, coping and surviving get us through the day in one piece. And I believe in small steps we can go beyond coping and cultivate real regulation and safety.  So that when you’re breaking generational cycles and resisting systemic oppression you can do so regulated and from a place of your dignity, power, and divinity.

Thank you so much for being here and doing this heart-centered work with me today.

If this episode fills your heart cup and you have the bandwidth to reciprocate, I have 2 invitations:

I invite to you reciprocate with your time by leaving a review and rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Or reciprocate with your money by joining our Patreon. You can find all the details at comebacktocare.com/support.

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As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.