[Ep. 350] Embodied Parenting: Teens, Single Parenting, and Sleep Deprivation

Luis gives us question-and-answer style examples of his upcoming six month Embodied Parenting Slow Group, starting October 6th. 

https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/parenting-group

Parents ask how to single parent, or co-parent with a sick partner, how to parent while sleep deprived without doing the "cry it out" method, and how to parent rebellious teens and siblings. And a big one: how do you regulate once in crisis mode? 

Capacity is key! Luis discusses nuances of each topic, and he gives a pendulation practice  to help build capacity. Balancing foods are also paramount in helping support our nervous systems to have capacity. Check out you local library or buy your own copy of Food Therapy: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

You can read more about, and register for, the Navigating Weight & Body Image With Somatics webinar here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/weight-and-body-image-webinar

You can register for November's Community Somatics here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/events/community-somatics-november

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You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

You can follow Luis on Instagram @holistic.life.navigation

Questions? You can email us at info@holisticlifenavigation.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:07

Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. They walk into the house and they sit down, they go on their phone, they ignore you. How's school? Nothing. Can you help me with dishes? Nothing. Right? There's no connection. They are isolated, disconnected from you because they're overwhelmed by their own experiences, many of which they're not telling you at this age. They're holding it alone, which is a lot for them. You can't make them tell you. Trying to do that will just shut them down more. But what you can do is create some parallel co-regulation. On today's episode, I'm going to answer some really interesting questions that have come in for people about parenting and my upcoming embodied parenting group. I put out a call to ask me questions about embodied parenting. I have a group coming up. It's my first group in two years. I will not be leading this again for at least another two years. And this group is called Embodied Parenting. It's easily one of my favorite groups to lead because it is so fun to teach parents how to actually enjoy their role as a parent and to realize their role as a parent is way easier than we think it is. It is not about your kids liking you. It is not about making them happy. It is about being a container that they can rely on. So it's about having a firm sense of self and from that place, attuning and connecting and loving your child. So it's really a lot of the focus is how to embody your own experience while parenting because it's so easy to get lost in theirs and lose your own ground. And from that place of losing your ground, we become abusive, we threaten, we become cruel, we shut down, we fawn, we burn out, we hate the experience of being around our kids. So if I can teach anyone to like being around their kids more and to try to not perpetuate traumatic uh patterns of parenting that you may have inherited, that's a job I am very happy to have. This first question is such a good one. Can you please, please, please do an episode on how to cope with the sleep deprivation of parenting without snapping or sleep training? So sleep deprivation is something that we rarely talk about, but it's huge. And a lot of parents might not even notice they have it because they've gotten so used to it, especially if you have multiple children or if your children, even as they get older, still have insomnia or issues sleeping. The first thing I want to say is connection takes capacity. So you can't just connect to someone and be a great parent because you love them. You have to have the capacity to do so. Capacity is how much space you have in your body to actually withstand the sensations that come from being in relation with somebody. Your child screams, they're sad, they need something from you, they're demanding a certain kind of attention and focus. You require capacity for all those things. We even require capacity for joy. So it's not as easy as I love you. This should be easy. It's not. It's actually I love you, but I can't stand being around you because my capacity is this big. Sleep is one of the built-in mechanisms for increasing capacity. So when you're not getting sleep, your capacity is rapidly decreased. It's way smaller, and you're going to be on edge. You're actually going to be making more stress hormones. Studies show an increase in adrenaline and cortisol in the bloodstream when people are losing sleep. So you're actually in more of an active fight or flight response when you're not sleeping, which gives you a greater tendency of becoming triggered, of screaming at a child, of overreacting. Absolutely so. So there's a couple things I would do here, especially especially because sleep training is also, God, I won't say it's a sham because some people do really well. We did a titrated version of sleep training that wasn't a cry it out method at all, but was just showing our daughter that will come when you cry, but we wouldn't highly engage. So what I mean by that is she would cry, we wait five minutes. That's it. Sometimes we'd wait two minutes. We let her cry a little bit because you can let your child cry before they get completely activated. You know, traditional sleep training and crying it out is they're crying and they get so activated from not being tended to that they pass out, but they're dissociated, they're going into a collapse or a freeze response and sleeping from that place. I don't recommend that whatsoever. But you can let your child cry just enough, and everyone knows their own child to know what just enough is, before they're heightened, overly heightened, overly dysregulated, and then go and be with them. But the goal when you go and be with them is not to interact with your voice. You can hum, you can pet them, you can tap their body, you can give them your hand, lay next to them quietly. You don't want to engage because when you start engaging socially, you start talking, you activate them, and they're gonna be far more uh less likely to fall asleep. So you can do little moments of tight training, let them cry a little bit just to see they're okay, and then come in to be with them, but non-verbally. Take breaths, come in slowly, be soft, let them attune to your body, and then walk away again. And you might have to do that 30 times. You'll eventually teach your child to feel safe in the room by themselves. You'll eventually show them if they need you, they can cry, you'll come in, but you'll also show them that it's safe to have a little time in the room, that they'll be able to fall asleep eventually. And over time, this can help them fall asleep. So outside of a strategy of helping them sleep, like I'm talking about, helping you with your capacity is the number one priority. So you need to cancel things, not do as much when you have nights or if you're in an era of sleeplessness. Really do the bare minimum. You want to also consider not relying on stimulants. Stimulants are really easy. I did this, it's very easy to rely on when you are sleep deprived. But the stimulants are going to keep you from feeling your cues of napping and exhaustion. And being sleep deprived without stimulants means you'll go a little slower, you'll do a little less, and you'll probably nap a lot more. And that's good. You want to let your body do that because napping is how your body repairs throughout the day. So not stimulating will allow you to get into the natural rhythm of how your body wants to repair from a night with very little sleep. And that can actually help increase your capacity throughout the day. I would get my book Food Therapy or look at all my YouTube videos. I mean, I have tons, I have like 50 YouTube videos about food because food is an incredible capacity increaser, especially in this case when you've lost sleep. Food can really help your body repair during the day and not add to your fight or flight response, which is already heightened from less sleep. So it can ground your body, it can repair your adrenals, it can soothe your nervous system, and by balancing your glucose, it gives you more sustained energy, even when you've gotten little sleep. I know this when I travel and I get sleep deprived or I'm going into different time zones. When I'm eating my balancing diet, I'm just moving through it with a lot of grace. If I'm eating lots of stimulants, relying on a lot of sugar, I'm not able to bounce back as quick when I don't get enough sleep. So try those things and really overall, it's honoring your capacity. It's not doing more than you can handle while you're in this era. It will change. Eventually it will shift. But when you're in it, be really gentle with yourself in terms of how much you put in your plate, because your capacity is lower than average and it's meant to be. There's nothing wrong with you. Next one is parenting a nine-year-old daughter whose father has MS. So when you're co-parenting with someone who's chronically ill or has very low capacity, or I'm gonna lump single parents into this. If you're a single parent, you barely have any help. You have to understand that your body is being tasked with something that is meant for many bodies to do. I mean, historically speaking, even one or two generations ago, people in our own bloodlines had many, many adults and siblings helping out. I mean, my own parents growing up had their parents helping, those four adults, right? I don't have any of that in this lifetime. It's me and my wife, and that's really it. And my mom visits sometimes because I live away from my family. So when you're solo parenting or you're taking on the majority of the parenting roles, your one body is doing what requires many other bodies to do, tending to another person, especially if you have multiple children. In this case, it's one nine-year-old daughter. That's a lot. So, like I said to the last person about sleep, and this is a big theme in the parenting group, the main thing you want to really focus on here is capacity. Your fatigue, your frustration, your body tension, those are all signals from your body that you're at capacity. Most of us, when we're at that place, push through. We push through because we feel guilt that we can't give our child what they want. We push through because we judge ourselves compared to other parents, who, by the way, are also pushing through. They are totally breaking down behind the scenes. I work with them. Don't believe parents that are enjoying every moment of it. It's not usually true. And if we don't listen to those signs, you know, we'll start to burn out. So it's really important that when the body shows us a signal, frustration, overwhelm, exhaustion, that's the body saying, stop right now. And what I want you to do, and the same person asked the question about sleeping, can do the same thing. Go in a room that has a door that closes, close that door, lay down so your head is being held, whether it's against a wall, on the floor, on a couch, on a bed, let your head be held. And I want you to take in one thing in the room, one thing that settles you, and feel where you feel settled. Put your hand wherever that is, and just be with that place for a moment or two. If you have the time, set an alarm, 20, 30 minutes, you might fall into a nap. If you don't nap, you might just stare off into space. Give yourself this moment of just feeling unwanted, unneeded for one minute to 20 minutes, and you'll be amazed at how this can restore your capacity to then take on the tasks that you are tasked with as an only parent or a parent that takes on most of the roles. This woman writes, I have late teens and young adults, and I'm struggling intensely. So teens and young adults are very difficult because they are in this age where they are so individuating and they are usually going against everything you've set up for them. Like you become a source of stress for them. Unfortunately, this is really normal in today's world. You know, I like to think that historically it wasn't. Like we were all one village, one tribe working toward a common goal. So we all kind of found belonging in our common values and goals. That's not really the case with most kids now. Instead of the little tribe socializing our kids and teaching them values and elders teaching them values, they learn their values on social media. They learn them at school with, you know, nice teachers, but not family members or people that totally share your life or values. So they're getting all these external influences, and including being socialized by their very own peers who are also in dysregulated, you know, experimental phases of their lives. And all that is landing in their bodies. What happens with us is we feel an attack. We feel overwhelmed. We feel a rupture in our bodies when they are rebelling or unable to connect with us. Now, one of the reasons that happens is because instead of just, you know, showing up to them with kindness or patience, we show up to them with a firmness and overwhelm, and we tend to nag them to conform to what we're trying to get them to do. I have a video on this, but I'll talk about it here. Parallel co-regulation can save us in this case, because especially with teens and young adults, they love parallel co-regulation. This looks like a child coming home from school and they come into the room, they walk into the house and they sit down, they go on their phone, they ignore you. How's school? Nothing. Can you help me with dishes? Nothing. Right? There's no connection. They are isolated, disconnected from you because they're overwhelmed by their own experiences, many of which they're not telling you at this age. They're holding it alone, which is a lot for them. You can't make them tell you. Trying to do that will just shut them down more. But what you can do is create some parallel co-regulation. Put your phone down, we're gonna go for a walk. Or what movie do you want to watch? Where would you like to go out to eat tonight? What's something we could do together this weekend? And you find a task, something to do where you're side by side, you're not focusing on each other, but you're enjoying the same thing. It could be music, it could be video games, it could be riding a bike, it could be tending to the garden, it could be any of those things. But what this takes for a lot of people who haven't done this yet, especially if you have ruptures with your kids that have been longstanding, it takes some serious, firm boundaries, and that takes a lot of capacity. And that we deal with for a whole month in the six-month program. Because if you already have a distance with your child that started when they were 11 and now they're 16, that's five years where they've been practicing isolating, ignoring, talking back, shutting down around you. That's not going to stop overnight. But you can create the environment to help them snap out of it, especially when their attitude, their behavior, the rupture you have with them is induced and amplified by technology. Most teens and young adults, the issue is not them. The issue is how technology is affecting them. Their screen addiction, addiction to alter-processed foods, social media, using their phones all the time. That's an environment we as parents actually helped create. So we need to help shift it. Whether it's being really radical and shifting the kind of phone they have, whether it's creating a rule of having devices in one room and you use devices in a common area, whether there's a screen time policy where at this time we don't do any screens, at this time we start. Enacting something helps them come out of the shutdown and overwhelm from these devices and allows them to unfold a little bit and be more part of the family and again have a relationship with you. So I would consider those things, try them out, see what emerges. This is a great one. How to regulate once we're in crisis mode. All the tricks to prevent meltdowns are helpful, but once we cross that threshold, it's another story. I really like this one because I agree. There are lots of tricks and strategies to try to prevent a tantrum or massive overwhelm or a child screaming or breaking something. But what do we do when it's actually happening? That's a little more important to me because there is a real gift. I've learned this myself. I'm raising an autistic child. There is a real gift you get to give these children when they get to meltdown without us joining them. We prevent their meltdowns and tantrums often because we can't handle them. So what if we could handle them? Well, one, there'd be less urgency and fear driving the prevention of them. And two, we would have nothing to fear as parents. We would try our strategies. If they don't work, the child has a meltdown. We could feel our own anchor come into ourselves. And this is where active pendulation comes in. There's my child screaming. There they are running away. There they are throwing something. And then here I am. Can I feel the difference between us? My favorite way to do this is to look around the room and find one thing that settles me, feel where it settles me and breathe into it and really orient to that place while I witness what they're doing. Because from that place that feels the beautiful tree out the window, I am not going to have a trauma response on my child. I'm not going to overreact. I'm not going to yell. I'm not going to contribute, join, or increase their activation that they're already exhibiting. Instead, I'm going to counter it with something a little more soft, which allows some alchemy, some co-regulation to emerge. So let them melt down and root into your safety, your security, and your agency as the adult and see how you parent from that place. Okay, I'm going to close on this final one about sibling stuff. This person writes the olding, the oldest is 10, the youngest is five. We've got the classic, she's annoying, he's being mean, dynamic going. I intervene often in coach kinder communication, but man, is it frustrating to constantly remind the 10-year-old of the age difference? Gosh. Okay, so I always pause because if I haven't personally experienced it, I have a hard time speaking with authority. So I'm not speaking with authority here, but I am speaking from experience as a therapist, counselor who has worked with other take that part out, Alfredo. But I am experienced as working with families who have had sibling dynamics and working with the siblings myself. So I haven't raised two kids, I only have one, but I've worked with many. So I'm going to speak from that place. One thing to consider is our children with each other in the house, like when there's siblings, they're learning about boundaries and renegotiating proximity and conversation and connection and communication. They're learning all that with each other. So your house is like one giant test tube. It's not fun, but that's what it is. So when they're angry at each other, when one pushes the other, when one runs away, when one takes something, they're learning about agency. So it's an important little balance here of we don't want to shut down their agency of how they're learning to express how they feel about their brother or sister's behavior. But we want to teach them like your frustration is totally okay. I would be mad if someone was sitting too close to me too for all the time. Or I'd be upset if I had to constantly listen to someone talking in a way that annoyed me. So you want to validate, yeah, it's annoying for you. I would feel that way too, which gives them a connection to you. It helps them understand, like, mom gets me or dad gets me. You know, my parent understands what I'm going through. And what do you do with the frustration? So instead of trying to break up the frustration or prevent it, validate both the kids and how they feel and then teach them what to do with the energy that comes up. Do you take that frustration and push it at your sibling? Or do you take it and move away? Do you take it and yell, or do you take it and ask for something that you need? Teaching them to redirect the energy into getting something they could they want instead of putting something on the other sibling or at the other sibling can be really, really useful. But the first place for me comes through validation. Yeah, it is annoying hearing your five-year-old scream. It is annoying the way a five-year-old wants to play with you. To the five-year-old, it is really sad that your big sister won't play with you. She just at a different age right now and doesn't enjoy this, right? It's like teaching both children how you feel makes sense and then humanizing the other one. And this is why they're doing that. And that's okay. Let's do something else. To try to teach them that boundaries are okay, frustration is okay, and they can live under one roof and have ruptures and at the same time not take the ruptures out on each other. Now, I am unsatisfied in my answers. I'm gonna tell you why. In my six-month group, I have Camille Leek, who's my friend and co-teacher, and she does one-on-one support the whole six months. So, like the way these questions are coming in, you can send her questions like this all throughout the six months. There's no cap how many questions you can ask, and she'll give you practices. And the reason why I say I'm unsatisfied is this is relational work, especially with parenting. What I'm saying is not the be all end all. You're not going to try this and immediately have success. It's going to be different for every child, every parent. It's very unique. So I don't believe in a formula for parenting. I do believe because it's highly relational, it's an experiment. So you go try out these experiments, these things I just gave you, see what shifts. And if you were in the group, you would come back and tell me this did nothing, this got worse, this got better, and then we would tweak it from there. So this is my plea. Any of you who feel called to this work, please join us. We start October 6th, and it's my plea because I'm not doing this for another two, three years. So I want to get as many people in this one as I can so I can teach you live, be with you in real time, and have my team be able to support you in engaging with your kids through this more embodied way. Any other questions, anything you need to know about the program, you can find through the episode details or by going to holisticlifenavigation.com and clicking on groups. This group is called Embodied Parenting. And again, again, we begin on October 6th, and I look very forward to seeing you then. Thank you so much for your questions. Feel free to leave more in the comments, and maybe I'll do a second video. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place. Maybe even put your hand over it and let whatever wants to come up come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.