In the last Morning Cup of Calm I wrote about how the wounds from our childhood, and even from past generations, imbed themselves as triggered reactions that show up in our parenting. Does your tween’s eye-rolling send you into a rage? That’s a trigger. Does your spouse’s slow reaction to your kid’s meltdown make your heart race? Also a trigger? Does your kiddo leaving their pajamas on the bathroom floor send you spiraling back to the screaming arguments you had with your mother during the great towel wars of 1989? Ok, maybe that last one is a bit specific to me. 

Today, we are going to look at how to interrupt these reactions. Let’s start with a few tools. 

The Five Second Pause

When our fight/flight response takes over our mind and body, the reaction feels automatic (it isn’t). You have about .1 second between the stimulus and response. During that instant, your brain conducts a snap scan of your context to understand the potential threat. Let’s imagine that you are late getting your crew out of the house.

Now picture different versions of your crew: your significant other, your kids, your parents, your friends. Are your reactions different in each situation? Of course they are. Your reactions shift because your brain analyzes the situation before you react. Your potential for growth lies in this split second. You will retrain your brain to recalculate the context and adapt so that the behaviors of your child are connected with a context of your own safety, power, and self-control. In that retraining, you will find the ability to do NOTHING, when doing nothing matters the most.

The goal here is to expand that .1 second to five seconds. If you can do nothing for five seconds, then you can access a plethora of tools and responses available to you. So how do we expand that moment?

Training

Fortunately, triggers usually happen in predictable ways and times. I bet you can name three situations that account for 80% of your fight/flight reactions. I’m also willing to bet that one of these situations involves getting your kids out the door in the morning, so let’s stick with this example. The Greek poet Archilocus said, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Getting our kids out the door is a hard thing! So let’s treat it that way, and prepare for it. Understand that getting out the door is a complex task involving multiple skills and attributes that your kid may not have yet. These include intrinsic motivation, the ability to follow multiple steps, moving through transitions, working through fatigue or grumpiness, etc. You are going to help your kiddo build these skills, and you will do that through your own preparation.

In the morning, get yourself ready 10 minutes earlier so that you can be more present for your child. Part of the morning stress is that we are simultaneously preparing ourselves and our kids. So get yourself ready first.

Then, take a deep breath, and tell yourself that you are going to help your kiddo build skills! Move your child through the getting ready process by encouraging, engaging, challenging, and playing, especially playing. Expect delays and setbacks as part of the training.

Notice and shower encouragement on your kids when they make even incremental improvement! When you understand that you are building skills, it moves you to be more involved in the teaching, and also to have more patience for your kids.

Mantras

I think all parents need a couple of mantras to remind ourselves to stay calm and grounded. A mantra is a short, positive phrase that reminds us that we can move through the moment without going into fight/flight. My go to is, “this is not an emergency.”

Another one I like is, “My child is expressing a need, what is the need?” My husband’s fave is “this is not about me.” In each case, we are taking some of the bite out of the behavior, and depersonalizing it. What’s a good mantra for you?

Meshing 

Meshing is an amazing and underutilized visualization tool. You imagine that you are made of mesh - maybe a fishing net, or a screen door. This mesh catches only the important things. Any triggering stimuli will pass straight through. I’ve used meshing when in conversations with my mother, when trying to figure out where my Amazon package went, and in meetings with that one coworker… you KNOW which one! In our morning routine example, you can mesh right before you engage with your kids, so that any ignoring, eye rolling, yelling, just passes right through you. 

These are all great tools for interrupting the triggered response. What’s the next time you are likely to be triggered? Which of these tools (or combination of tools) makes sense for you? 

For the next couple of weeks, practice spacing out the time between trigger and reaction. See if you can slow down your fight/ flight reaction. In two weeks, we’ll look at how to actually heal the wounds that cause these triggers. 

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