Podcast

How to Recognize and Respond to Shame with Words that Heal. Sara Brown.

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Unshakable Hope Podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kellie Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions, such as how do I trust God’s heart when His ways and delays are breaking mine? We’ll hear from people just like you and me who have experienced God’s faithfulness when life didn’t unfold as they expected.

My prayer is that God would renew our hope in His Word and His love through these conversations. If

Hey friends. My guest today is Sarah Brown. She’s a marriage and family therapist who works primarily with Children and teenagers. You may remember she shared her story on a previous episode, which was an absolutely incredible and moving story. It was called mental illness. Growing up loved, but not safe.

So after you listen today, I hope you’ll get a chance to go back and check it out. When we [00:01:00] spoke last time, I was fascinated with all the wisdom Sarah had to share. We touched on the topic of shame, but I asked her to come back and share some practical ways that we can actually recognize.

Shame and respond to it with words that heal. She primarily draws from some examples of parenting her own teenagers and has some fun stories to share, but it’s going to be quite clear that the wisdom she shares really applies to all of us. We all have these little parts in us that are wounded from our childhood that we don’t understand and this episode can help us learn to receive.

Healing in those places as well. I think you’ll really be encouraged by all that Sarah has to share today.

Sarah, I am so happy you’re back. Your beautiful story on our first episode together so much hope and love. Just inspiring. I’ll be sure and put a link in our show notes for our listeners to catch up with you later. But thank you so much for joining me [00:02:00] again.

Sara: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I love being able to get to talk and share. And it is I do enjoy my story. I enjoy getting to, to be a part of someone else going, Oh, that sounds familiar.

There’s something on the other side of it.

Kelly: Yeah, oh, that makes so much sense. So I’m we’re going to go deeper today and I’m really excited about it. I’m wondering if you could start by just giving us a recap of your story so that people can understand our conversation today.

Sara: Yeah. So my story is I grew up in a home where my mom had a serious mental illness. She was schizophrenic. And so, a big part of my story is this, what does it look like to journey out with all of life when you’re living with someone who’s not always in touch with reality? And how do you trust God in the midst of really hard trauma?

And so, my story [00:03:00] began with my mom’s schizophrenia and my dad’s somewhat emotional, no, very much emotional disconnection in the midst of that and learning how to live and trust others, trust myself, trust my parents to the extent that I could, but really ultimately trust that God is for me and God is It’s real.

And God is kind of the only one that I can put my foundation on when everything else seems a little bit shaky. Yeah. So that was my childhood. And then I. I grew up, I have four kids, I was a stay at home mom for many years and now I’m taking, my kids are more grown and so I’ve taken my experience from my childhood and I’m now a marriage and family therapist working with kids because it was something I didn’t have and I needed and so now I want to provide that for kids who need space.

Kids, young adults, even adult people who need space to process life and have someone who can give them a bit of a [00:04:00] firm foundation and a place to just talk.

Kelly: Well, one of the things that I’ve realized is we need to be self aware and we need to teach our children how to be self aware from a young age so that they can process their emotions, so that they can talk about what’s going on, so that they can become emotional, healthy adults.

So I wanted to go deeper into the area of shame and just talk about in kids, teens and adults, you know, how, what does that look like? And if we as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, however we interact with children in our world how can we learn to respond with the heart of Christ in all these different situations?

Kelly: So does that make sense to you?

Sara: It does. It. It’s hard. So even as a parent, I’m now educated in this whole emotional awareness, but I want to say that I didn’t know it when I was a kid when I was raising my kids. So my son who’s 21 is looking for a therapist going, mom, you did not teach [00:05:00] me how to deal with anger.

And I am just expressing my anger. So I just want everyone to hear it’s hard. We don’t do it right. One of the things I tell parents is that our goal is only to get parenting right 20 percent of the time. And the rest of the time, the other 80 percent is you’re doing really good repair. You’re getting them scheduled with a therapist.

You’re learning for yourself and you are doing what it takes to fix where things went a little awry. But I wanted to. Kind of give you some things to look for when you’re recognizing that shame is maybe leading your kids into the behaviors that they’re acting out of whether that’s external behaviors like fits or even fights Rebellion, just I’m out of here.

I’m not doing what you think I want, like what you have told me to do. You tell me to do it. I’m not going to do it. Those are kind of those external, but then there’s internal shame. And so that can be eating disorders that can be depression, anxiety panic attacks. It can [00:06:00] also be self harm. So there’s also internal shame and external shame.

And you just have to know your kids to know, are you an externalizer? So I see your stuff outside, or are you internal? And you are. Underground, stirring, so much pain, so much hurt. And you don’t know how to express it outside. So that’s hard to unravel because you might have 2 kids and they each do it differently and you are wanting to be able to use the same tools, but they don’t work for your kids.

Yeah. So noticing. It’s like being a detective noticing what is happening in my kid’s life and our teachers coming and telling me, hey, they haven’t gotten their homework done. They’re falling asleep in class. Or your kids, can you see it in their eyes, in their body posture? Are their shoulders slumped?

Are they Eeyore who kind of moves through the world with a little bit more of a [00:07:00] pessimistic attitude? You start to recognize, or you can start to recognize that maybe there’s a story that they’re telling themselves that is Shame being enacted in

them.

Kelly: That’s so good. A story they’re telling themselves.

I love that phrase because that tells us they’re perceiving the world through a certain lens. So the things that you see that are happening, they don’t look so bad. They look pretty normal and healthy . But somehow they’re perceiving some things in a wrong way, something that’s not true.

And so the question is how do we get to the bottom of that? What question do we ask? What do we do?

Sara: So I have four kids and only one of them is a girl and my girl is the internalizer. And so she gets real quiet. She doesn’t even really shut down. Cause sometimes when you see a kid shut down, you’re like, Oh, something’s wrong.

She pretends like everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. And I remember, I think she was a early teenager [00:08:00] and I went and laid down in her bed with her one night and she was just bummed and she was sad. And so this is 13 years of parenting this child. And I go, Hey. What’s wrong? And she looks at me and she goes, why do you care now?

You’ve never cared before. And I’m like 13 years of caring, like wanting to know I had three boys around her who were very external. So they would talk to me. They would tell me everything. I didn’t have to ask a lot of questions, but this girl. Yeah. Needed me to go in and get quiet and ask the questions that showed I cared and I had to change my entire parenting strategy with her because she needs she was slow to warm up.

So I needed to give her a lot of space of presence. And then ask very few questions and give a lot of time for her to be able to respond. I expected, like, if I ask you a question, you give me an answer. She couldn’t handle that. So she had internalized this [00:09:00] sense of no one cares about me. I’m not important.

And I would go, I’m your mom. I care about you. You are so important, but I wasn’t communicating that to her in the way that she could hear. So her shame story became, I’m not important. No one cares. And. Every part of my heart would say, yes, I care, but I only showed I cared when someone was willing to talk to me about it.

So it’s those things of being able to go, oh, I need to see how my kid is needing me to show up and then make space for them to be able to say. You don’t care. And if I had come back with defense of like, no, I care. You can’t tell me I don’t care. Look, I bought you shoes yesterday and I took you to this place.

We would have had an entire wall build up to where she would never get soft with me again because I came back with my defenses. I had to go. Oh, I missed you not [00:10:00] intending to miss her, but I missed you. And I had to keep that humble heart of like, okay, this is my 80 percent of repair. I get to repair where we’ve gone wrong for 13 years.

And that was a really devastating part of realizing I’d missed her for a really long time.

Kelly: Oh, wow. Well, thankfully. You were able to get to the point where that was uncovered. I remember once you said something that reminded me of one of our daughters when she was a young adult, she was still a teenager,

. And she said to my husband who was such a good dad, I don’t feel like you love me. And he was like how could I not love you any more than I love you? And so he asked her, how do I need to communicate my love to you? What would make you know that I love you? And so she just laid it out for him. And most of it was really just quality time. Cause he was a hyperactive ADHD kind of a guy, ? Fighter pilot. Always moving. He laid his life down [00:11:00] and he communicated with her in the way she needed to receive it. And six months to a year later, she. She knew for certain that her dad loved her and all those parts of her heart had been healed in that time.

Sara: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting that it’s knowing ourselves like this is how I’m loved and then watching people meet us that way.

That love gets communicated, especially parents to kids and I mean, in all relationships, but our kids need it in the way that they hear it. And sometimes that’s hard because we want to give it in the way we want them to hear it in the way that we’re willing to give it.

Kelly: Yeah, so the question we’re really asking is how do I meet the needs of the kids, teens or young adults in my life that I’m in relationship with?

How do I meet their needs? and I think 1 of the things you mentioned before, is we need to be careful to respond instead of reacting. . So, maybe you can just give us some more helpful hints about how to, [00:12:00] respond how to notice how to ask questions

I

Sara: can tell you through a story of not doing it well, so I

love these stories.

As I said, I have 4 kids. And so my boys are mostly external. My youngest is actually internal, but my 2 middle boys are pretty external. So the 3rd boy. He was the most external, he was the loudest, he was the most rambunctious, and he and I were the ones that got into fights like this, and for some reason, he could bring a reaction out of me easier than anyone else in the entire world.

And so there was a time where he and his little brother had come to a deal and the little brother was going to do the dishes. But the dishes didn’t get done and that little brother went to bed and I was like, the dishes need to get done Zane, you’re the one that cooked dinner, you need, or whatever they had made something you need to do the dishes.

No, India and India is my youngest son’s name. India and I made a deal, I’m not doing dishes and I’m like the dishes have to get done Indy’s in bed, he’s not [00:13:00] doing it, you got to do the dishes. So, we are now at odds with each other. And he is really good at escalating with his temper, and I am really good at matching that guy.

And so what ended up happening is instead of just going, I understand that there was a deal made, that deal isn’t going to work. Is there something else that we can do where Indy can do your chore and we can do something else like negotiating? That would have been great. But we were not in a place of negotiation.

You’re going to do dishes. I’m not doing dishes. Indy’s doing dishes. You’re going to do dishes. I’m not going to do dishes.

So at some point I got to the point where I said to him, you’re going to have to do every chore for the rest of your life. And at that point, I realized that my oldest son was recording this and sending it to all of his friends.

And that shut me down real fast. Not in a good way, not in any way that I was going to respond, but I stopped screaming at my, I think 14 year old. I don’t know how old he was at the time. And that video went to all [00:14:00] of my 16, 17 year old friends. there are better ways. If you don’t want a video of you going to all of your kids, friends, and you think you’re not presenting yourself, well, maybe don’t do that.

So what could I have done?. I’m going to respond

Kelly: to that first. Oh yeah. I remember once Lisa Teurkerst told a story that she was yelling at her daughter And I guess her pastor had called her and she had answered the phone because she was holding the phone. And he heard all of it.

So it’s such a bummer when stuff like that becomes so public,

Sara: right?

Kelly: Yeah.

Sara: This was the privacy of our home. I was supposed to be allowed to do bad parenting stuff. is one of those things where I’m like, okay, what would I want to be doing if someone were watching? It is a check of my spirit, a check of my moments.

Like, do I need to take a 10 minute break? Do I need to just breathe for a little while? What am I telling myself? I don’t even know what I was telling myself with my son. Like, [00:15:00] if he doesn’t do dishes, I’m a bad mom. If he doesn’t do dishes, I’m going to have to do dishes. And that’s too much for me. I don’t know what it was that made me neat.

I think I just needed to overpower. I’m the adult here. You have to listen. You don’t have this permission to say, Indy’s going to do it. You’re not the adult. So it was like a power struggle of, I’m going to prove that I have authority over you and I have to win. I can’t actually remember if he did the dishes.

I, I think I lost.

Kelly: Really? I wonder too, if it could have just been that you were tired and so having the patience to stop and, think of a constructive solution or A way to work through this in a more mature way.

Sara: So tired or hungry, or you have other complaints that you’ve had against that kid, or even your spouse or friends, like if you’re emotionally already. It’s harder to have those conversations for sure,

Kelly: right?

Sara: Yeah. So responding is better than doing that because the [00:16:00] reaction is always going to build a reaction.

Someone has to get off and to get off the cycle of reacting. Someone has to choose to respond. And sometimes that response is, Hey, I need this. 10 minutes. Sometimes that response, if it’s really bad, your whole system won’t calm down. If it takes less in less than 20 minutes. John Gottman talks about that in marriage conflict.

If you’re activated and you’re in fight flight. Which you can tell by your heart rate increases, you’re not really thinking from your frontal lobe. You need at least 20 minutes to be able to calm down so that you have a more productive way. And so I tell parents that sometimes you’re going to have to take a 20 minute time out or your kid needs to take a 20 minute.

The younger they are, you might not need that much time, but as they become teenagers themselves, they may need 20 minutes to calm down so they can hear you.

Kelly: So that they move out of the fight or flight part of their brain into the frontal lobe area and can have constructive thoughts and a right perspective.

Okay. That’s [00:17:00] very interesting. I’m wondering about anxiety and depression. That is definitely something that’s under the surface that a child, teen, young adult, even adults may not be able to put their finger on the pulse of. They may not be able to explain it.

Can you talk about some, one of the things you say a lot is we need to get curious. With those in our world. And so can you talk about some ways that you might go beneath the surface to uncover something like that?

Sara: That’s one of the things that’s nice about some of the interventions in therapy is they’re kind of tricky.

So with kids or teenagers, especially teenagers who are depressed or anxious, we do this thing and you could do it with your kids. You could do it with teens. You could do it in a classroom. You could do it at a Sunday school where we do painting. So we say. Paint your sadness, paint your depression, paint your anxiety.

We, we call it worry or something like that because sometimes, like you said, they [00:18:00] can’t get words to it, so they need to give a representation of it. And so painting it can from here in front of them so they can look at it with a little bit of a different eye. That’s a tool that I use. The other thing you can do is you can ask the questions of like, What does depression tell you?

I tell him, I’m like, I’m going to ask a weird therapy question. How old does your depression seem? That’s a weird thing. It twists their brain and they’re like old. That’s a weird question. Yeah. Can you answer it? And sometimes they say I don’t know but it gives them enough Like idea that there’s a different way to think about it.

So then I can ask things like well What does it say to you? Where do you feel it in your body when you’re feeling depressed? Where do you feel it in your body? You The 3 areas that you’re always wanting to understand to get full understanding around anything is what does your body feel like? What does the emotion, what does the emotion that goes with it?

Is it sad? Is it anger? There’s online, there’s emotion wheels [00:19:00] that have like many words. And so if they can even use those words to go, okay, it’s sad, but it’s not quite, you know. This sad, it’s this word and they get a little bit more precise in the language that they have around their emotion.

That’s super important. And then the thoughts around it, that’s the story they’re telling themselves. If you notice where it is in your body and you kind of focus on your chest and you breathe into your chest where you’re feeling that tightness of your anxiety, can you tell what it’s saying to you?

If I say some words like I have to be perfect. I’m never going to be good enough. I’m not lovable. There’s something wrong with me. Does that ring true?

Sara: Yeah. And if that’s true, what emotion is it? Is it scared? Are you fearful? Are you hurt by something? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Are you just sad deep sadness? And if you link those three, then it kind of forms what’s happening. And as they can feel it and express it, it actually releases a little bit. It might [00:20:00] not release all the way, but it like turns from an eight to a seven.

And then your hope is as they have conversation and think about it, it can turn from a seven to a five. And then as they continue to talk about it, and maybe you share some of your story and they go, I’m not alone. It can turn from a five to a three. And then there may be something that happens that activates it again and they’re back at a seven and you can go, Oh, you’re at a seven again, that must mean your chest is really tight and you help tell them the story of their shame, their anxiety, their depression, and they’re not alone anymore.

Kelly: Wow. Now I’d like, what are the three things again?

Sara: Yeah. So body. So what does it feel like in your body? Okay. What’s the emotion? So body, emotion, and then the thought. So it’s brain, body emotion connection. And the thought part is the, what’s the story it’s telling you.

Okay.

Yeah.

Kelly: Okay. So one of the things that I’ve noticed is when people grow up with a lot of rejection,

Maybe it’s their dad that just [00:21:00] wasn’t present. Or an absent mom, you know, they have abandonment issues. So the story maybe they’ll tell themselves is, , I’m not chosen. I’m not preferred.

I have to fight really hard to get someone’s attention. So I’m unlovable. I’m not worthy of their attention. And it just makes me think about people who have a hard time believing God, their father really loves them.

And so I’m wondering how you would communicate that to somebody. How do you work with that? How do you communicate the truth?

Sara: So we kind of talk about that as a core wound when one of your parents who are the two people that God really put on this earth to fill you in with love that you never have to pay back to them, that’s their role.

And when they miss that, there’s like a core wound there of a sense of I’m not good enough or I’m not lovable working through that is really hard because what it sometimes takes is people. It’s community, finding a community who can speak the truth to you. God is so [00:22:00] good at covering this. I think that’s so why he created so many of the parables, the parable of the prodigal son, the parable of the lost sheep.

We want to believe that there is someone chasing us. And if we were, if we left. Or we were gone, we would be missed and when our parents leave us, or there’s a, even if our parents die and they didn’t even choose it, there’s this sense of, am I missed by them? Was I enough for them? Yeah. And so it’s an incredibly difficult wound to heal.

And it’s the thing that God sent Jesus down here for to say I’m going to chase you. You don’t get to leave. I, your father, I’m going to move heaven to earth in order to find you. And it’s when we can rest in the fact that we are, he would do it if it was just for us. Now, feeling it and believing it and knowing it are so many different things.

So we can know it because we read the scripture, [00:23:00] but we can’t necessarily feel it until we feel it from like, even feel it in our body until we recognize it in our community. hmm I see that they see that I’m worth it. I see that those times when I come with my insecurity of like, I’m not good enough.

I can’t do this. They go, okay, well let’s help you. Let’s get you to where you feel like you’re good enough. What does it take for us to be able to invest in you so that you see that God chose you? I choose you so we call that repair like oh, there’s another word for it. It won’t come to my mind right now, but if it does, I’ll let, you know, where it’s like.

In new relationships, you get to rebuild what was broken before.

Kelly: And

Sara: no perfect, no person’s going to be perfect. So you have to give people the benefit of the doubt of they’re trying their best to do it, but God’s hands and God’s feet come in the community around you. So then there’s repairing. And then one of the other things that is great is that your adult self, [00:24:00] so my 43 year old self can go back to my nine year old self in my mind and go, you did the best you could with what you had.

You are lovable. You are worth hearing. You are worth knowing. And I now get to reparent myself because I will be the only person that will always show up for her. Because I know her. She’s in me. And so there’s a repair that comes from the community around me from God. And then from my actually own adult self going.

Yeah, it was really hard. What we went through. Yeah, you really believed you were a failure and you needed to be perfect.

Kelly: Wow. That’s so good. I remember my daughter was really struggling. Megan, she’s given me permission to share this. She went through a period of time where she really thought God was mad at her.

She just could not believe that God, she just had a very black and white view of God in the Bible and had feelings of [00:25:00] unworthiness and Shame she was very angry about being deaf and she was very ashamed that she was deaf. And so that all played into this whole thing. And we had been told you need to take her to a counselor, but she wasn’t at the point where she was willing to go deep and dive into those places.

But as a later teenager, she was willing to go into them. And I just remember a verse God gave me for her that. That spoke love into her heart and it’s Psalm 18 and it’s this group of scripture 16 through 19 that just God is saying, Hey I love you. I’m going to rescue you. I’m pursuing you. I’m going to pull you out of those dangerous places and I’m going to rescue you. And then the very last verse 19 says I brought, I rescued you because I delighted in you. And it’s just so beautiful. And I read that to her and I said, God is. delighted in you. He’s smiling over you and tears just ran down her face.

Like [00:26:00] that was the moment that really broke through this lie that I am unlovable. God is mad at me. She just could not believe that God was smiling when he thought of her. When he looked at her, it was just beautiful.

Sara: Yeah. Oh, I love that. One of the, one of the times that I was praying with God, he kind of gave me a picture of how little.

I am this piece of dust, this like tiny thing and how big he was. Like I just had an ex, a feeling of how great and big he was. And there was this realization that he turned his eye and he chose to say this little speck of dust is lovable and I’m going to love it. and it was his turning and looking into this Piece of dust that I, that is me, that makes me lovable, that gives me value.

Like the God of the universe is willing to see the tininess of me in comparison to him and go. I [00:27:00] delight in that. And so what got shaken up in me and this realization is we need to know by God’s love, it makes us lovable. God’s delight, which I love that you said that because it’s God’s love makes us lovable.

God’s delight makes us delightful. And God being willing to hear us. Makes us have a voice and that’s who I want to be in other people’s lives. I want to love. So they know they’re lovable. I want to delight. So they know they’re delightful. I want to hear so that they know they have a voice. And I think that’s the hands and feet of God.

That’s what we’re called to do to show community so that when people have that wound of my dad didn’t do this for me, my mom didn’t do this for me. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced it. We who have Christ in us get to be the one that says. That big God, he sent Jesus for you, who is like little nothing, but it made us everything.

It made us everything.

Kelly: I love that so much to believe that we [00:28:00] are chosen. And the Bible says this in multiple places, we are chosen. And he’s the God who the Bible says. Called the stars by name. And he sees the sparrows not one sparrow falls to the ground without him noticing and we are so much more valuable Than the birds and the stars He knew us before time began.

Yeah.

Sara: Delighted in us. I love that. Delighted in us. That’s so important.

Kelly: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. And so I’m wondering If we notice we’re re reacting frequently in a particular situation instead of responding with the love of Christ, that obviously points to something not right within us. How can we get curious about our own story?

How do we figure out what’s going on ?

Sara: Yeah. When I do therapy with teenagers, especially knowing the parent’s story is really important because the parents are often responding out of a story that they’ve been telling themselves a shame story or past trauma from their [00:29:00] childhood, whether it’s big T trauma, meaning they have big stuff or a little T.

So as a parent, Ask yourself, like, is this, am I taking this more seriously than I need to, are we in a dance of escalation where I am reacting with anger? I’m reacting with shaming. So, like, I have to go back to my kids over and over again and go, Oh, I didn’t mean to say this is all your fault. You’re an idiot.

If those things are happening, you can start to go, okay. This might be more about both of us. I’m not going to say it’s not about your kids. Cause I know kids, but it’s about both of you. And if you can be the one that gets off the cycle, you can help your kids. So then it becomes asking yourself. Okay. I have a 13 year old when I was fighting with my son and he was 13, I was responding, like I too was a 13 year old. And I had to kind of get curious. This isn’t an adult response. I couldn’t do this at the work office. Like I couldn’t go, you’re going to do my work for the rest of your life to [00:30:00] my boss. So I’m somehow acting out of being younger than I actually am. And so if I start to notice that, then I can get curious and go.

What happened when I was 13, why would my body have pieces of me trapped at 13, and then get curious about my story, get curious about that story. I’m telling myself. So what’s the thought process? Like, what am I thinking? I’m not a good mom. I need to be perfect. I’m a failure. If my kids don’t do this, then I I’m not good enough.

What is my story? So then there’s that thought part. What’s the emotion that’s coming up? It’s anger. I would tell you that anger is always a secondary emotion. So there’s probably hurt or fear that comes underneath that anger. So getting curious, I’m angry at my kid. , I’m afraid that he’s going to never listen to me.

And that’s going to mean that he’s going to do stuff that aren’t, that isn’t good for him. Not doing the dishes. Ain’t no big thing, but if he starts to do drugs and doesn’t stop it and he’s [00:31:00] not listening to my authority, then I’m afraid that he’s going to get hurt.

Kelly: Yeah.

Sara: Responding in fear is talking to someone about your fear is a lot easier than powering up and using your anger to try to get control.

So asking what’s the emotion that’s underneath it. And sometimes the very first thing that you can start to notice. And if you recognize what’s going on in your body, Oh, my cheeks are getting warm. I can feel it. Then you start to know I’m going to be reacting, not responding. My heart’s beating real fast.

I’m going to be reacting instead of responding. My hands get real sweaty and I’m wiping my hands off. Oh, that means I’m reacting instead of responding. So your body can be the clue that says. I’m feeling a little out of control. I’m not quite sure what I don’t quite get it, but my body isn’t feeling normal.

And so if you start to recognize that, then you can start to go. I need to go give myself 10 minutes. And in those 10 minutes I need to go, am I afraid? Am I hurt? And then if I’m afraid, what am [00:32:00] I afraid of? What’s the thought? I’m not a good mom. And sometimes it goes, Oh, I remember when I was 13 and my mom said, you’re a lazy stupid girl who’s never going to be able to parent well.

And that story is now going, and I’m this 13 year old going, I’m going to parent well. I’m not stupid. I’m not lazy, but you’re telling yourself a story that wasn’t ever true about you and it’s affecting how you’re parenting. So it’s. It’s getting curious about yourself and then recognize if this is your story, what’s going on in your kid’s life.

These things are happening in him or her too. His body is getting a little animated. Okay. Maybe his stomach clenches and then he feels like he’s going to throw up. I don’t know what their body’s doing, but they’re also feeling emotions that feel out of control. And then they’re telling themselves this story.

So I don’t know if my Zane, my kid who it’s not fair. Okay. Fairness matters so much. It’s not fair that I have to do those dishes. Indy said he was [00:33:00] going to do it. So mom’s not being fair. And if you’re not being fair, it means you don’t love me. What is the story that’s going on in his head? If we have time, I have a quick story about him when he was seven.

He, all of his emotions are on his face. And so, and again, like I said, even though this was, he was older, we have done this dance quite a few times. So at seven, there was a time where he and I had just gotten in a big fight and I could just see in his eyes. And I was super curious about what was going on in the back of his head.

So we went grocery shopping and I asked him, I was like, when we get into fights like that, we had calmed down and resolved it mostly what goes on in your head? And he goes, well, sometimes I think, Oh, I’m so stupid. I knew that this was going to happen and I should have just stopped. And I was like,

yeah. I like that. You think in that stuff. But then he looks at me and he goes, And I also think you need parenting lessons. Oh, that’s probably true too, but he had a story going on. And some of the story [00:34:00] was shaming. You’re stupid. You shouldn’t even get into this fight. And so then we could talk about that part.

And then I had to be really gracious in this whole parenting lessons. And we joke about it now he’s 16. And I still say, Yeah, I kind of need some parenting lessons when we get like this. So yeah, so there really is a story that’s going on and they can’t access it in the moment when they’re in fight flight and you’re noticing that activation, they don’t know what their story is, but when you come back to repair and things are got calmed down, getting them in touch with what’s the story they’re telling themselves is really important because you need to be able to offset it.

He thinks he’s stupid. He’s a really smart kid. I don’t want him to think that he’s stupid. I would rather he not do the behaviors. So there is a sense of wanting him to go. I shouldn’t have done that. But sometimes there’s this sense of, I always do the wrong thing. No kid. Most of the time you get it right.

We just have to somehow, sometimes it goes wrong and we can repair. So know your story and then [00:35:00] know and get curious and look into what your kid’s story is.

Kelly: Oh, that’s so good. I want us both to offer some hopeful thoughts here at the end. One of the things that I’ve noticed is

Even though I can look back and think, Oh, I wish I would’ve done this. I wish I would’ve done that. The Lord is bigger. Hallelujah. Thank you, God. He is the perfect parent who loves these kids more than we do. He’s the one who’s pursuing their hearts and speaking to them in ways that we wouldn’t even believe if we knew. And he’s doing works beneath the surface that we’ll notice Later, like they’re not even aware of it. They’re not even praying about it. They’re not even responding really to it, but there are things happening beneath the surface that we would be amazed if we saw what God was doing.

Sara: Yeah. That’s one of the things that when my kids have something that goes hard, whether it’s my fault or. other extenuating [00:36:00] circumstances. It’s where they have to meet with God.

Kelly: Yeah.

Sara: It’s the, and if their lives were perfect, they wouldn’t have to meet with this God who is the only one that they can go to who is 100 percent reliable.

Yeah. And so it’s those moments of our pain and those moments of our sorrow where God gets to be, I was talking to my aunt and it’s just the veil between heaven and earth gets really thin when you’re in pain and suffering and sorrow. And so it’s those moments that our kids get to meet with this powerful, loving, delighted God.

Yeah. I hate it, but it’s beautiful.

Kelly: It’s so beautiful. I love the thin veil that happens between heaven and earth. I love that God knows how to speak to us in a way we can hear him. God knows how to speak to our kids in a way they can hear him. And that’s so comforting for us as parents. And the other thing I want to do, I meant to mention, which I thought was so [00:37:00] creative of God.

One of the ways that he worked in our girls lives is my oldest daughter, he Healed her through getting a service dog, and it was so cool because we did not want her to get a dog. She didn’t she wasn’t living with us, but she lived about an hour away. And we somehow knew that dog was going to, you know, impact our lives too.

It wasn’t like just going to be. Totally her dog. So we were a little resistant, but it was so interesting because I was sitting at my computer writing a blog one afternoon. And God said to me, go to Colorado Springs and get a dog with your daughter. And I was like, I was stunned. I got tears in my eyes and I’m like, really?

I’m not sure I want to tell my husband this, but you know, of course I did. And he was like, wow, that’s so interesting. And so I went and God made it so clear. And in the car we prayed and God chose the puppy for her. she trained that dog to be a [00:38:00] service dog to respond to sound and it made her feel a lot safer when she was going to school, getting her master’s degree.

And one of the things she would tell you today is I am so thankful for that dog. Because I learned how to love again through that dog. And so God used that unconditional love of that dog To heal her heart and open her heart to be able to receive the love of God and the love of other people again.

Sara: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things God does is he gives us so many ways to show. I love you. I choose you. I delight in you and animals, especially dogs. I have a dog sitting right next to me on the table, next to the computer. It’s just one of the ways that he goes, Oh, look at love, unconditional love.

That’s an amazing story. I love that.

Kelly: So Sarah, as we close, I just wonder if you have some favorite hope, filled encouragement that you like to offer parents. In negotiating these [00:39:00] types of situations.

Sara: One of the things that I just always like to remember is that there are going to be places where I miss my kids.

There’s going to be places where I hurt them. There’s going to be places where I don’t meet the needs that they have, and that is where God closes the gap. He meets them there, and there is never a place that I am going to leave a gap that God isn’t going to come in and be willing to heal them in those areas.

And so for me, there’s hope in the fact that I don’t have to be perfect because I have a God who’s going to show up in those specific areas where I didn’t do it well.

Kelly: That is such an encouragement. Sarah, thank you so much for sharing with us today. I really appreciate it.

Sara: Thank you, Kelly. Thank you for this time, this space. I really appreciate it.

If you were encouraged in your faith today, it’d be great if you’d help get the word out by subscribing, sharing with a friend or leaving a review. I’d love to hear from [00:40:00] you. You can reach out through my website, kellyhall. org and pick up some free resources while you’re there. Thanks for listening to the Unshakable Hope Podcast.