Episode 344 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 344 of Your Parenting Long Game. As I’ve spoken about before on this podcast, I am a highly sensitive person. In fact, I’m pretty textbook “highly sensitive.”
I can sense what kind of mood people are in, and even a little bit about their personalities quickly and strongly. I’ve even said that I can sense someone’s energy through a Zoom call!
I do understand people exceptionally well. I understand what motivates them and why they do things that seem illogical to so many people. Parents who have been stumped by their kids’ behavior for a long time are amazed at how well I can explain to them why their child is doing what they’re doing. Someone actually once called me the “child with big emotions whisperer”!
The reality is very frequently I notice and feel things that others don’t. Just one silly example: I’m actually extremely sensitive to the lights around me. I can’t stand the colors of about 90% of light bulbs. They’ll drive me crazy, and most of the time no one else even notices the lights.
And growing up, because I noticed and felt things differently, I always felt different.
And I’m going to share a story about that in a moment. Now that I’m an adult and especially now that I do what I do for a living, I love being a highly sensitive person.
But to be honest, it was tough as a kid.
And you don’t have to do too much analyzing to understand why I am so passionate about helping parents who are raising kids who feel strongly, because I don’t necessarily want kids to experience some of the “side effects” of being a highly sensitive person that I experienced.
I had amazing parents. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still close to them to this day. But they did not understand my sensitivity or what I needed.
In their defense, no one did. Dr. Elaine Aaron was one of the first professionals who coined the term “highly sensitive person,” and her first book about it didn’t come out until I was in high school. And even then, I guarantee it did not circulate in the mainstream.
So my parents wouldn’t have known what was going on for me, let alone how to help me understand and cope with what I was feeling.
And my mom, who very honestly did most of the emotional raising of me, she had a mom herself who was very strong and supportive, but was also definitely of the school of: “Suck it up!” and “Feelings are a waste of time. Feelings get in your way, and if you have a lot of them, then you are weak” and “You need to take them somewhere else.”
So as a kid, I was feeling all of these things and no one else in my family was. I will say that my dad is actually also highly sensitive, but my parents got divorced when I was really young, so he didn’t raise me.
So the family I was living with most of the time, none of them were sensitive.
So I was often told, not even in a mean way, but just told very matter-of-factly that when I felt the way I did, the whole family couldn’t just revolve around me and what I wanted.
So here’s a little example of what I mean: Because I’m highly sensitive. I can’t sleep unless it’s really dark and really quiet. And I have two older brothers who are a lot older than me. They’re actually six and nine years older than I am.
And they are not very quiet, especially when they’re together to this day. They’re not quiet when they’re together.
Well, when I was growing up, I would always be the first to bed, of course, because I was a lot younger. And I needed that dark and quiet to fall asleep.
So my family would turn out the hall light outside of my bedroom. But inevitably, my brothers would run upstairs and they would make a lot of noise. They’d flip the light on. It would get loud. It would get bright, and yes, if I wasn’t fully asleep, I could see the brightness of the hallway and it woke me up almost every single time. And when I was really tired, I got really annoyed.
So I remember one particular evening where I was trying really hard to fall asleep. My brothers kept running up the stairs. And I came out of my bedroom and I asked them a couple of times to be quiet. Now my brothers treated me very differently. One of my brothers was very sweet and he said, “Oh yeah, sure. Rach! Sorry…we’ll try to be more quiet.”
The other one didn’t really care, to be honest, that he was being really loud and he didn’t do very much. He’s like, “Yeah sure, Rach, whatever.” But it kept happening that night, and I remember getting more and more annoyed.
So I came out of the room and at one point I just screamed at them, probably at the top of my lungs. And my mom of course runs upstairs and she said, “What is going on?” And I said, “Mom, they keep running up the stairs. They keep turning on the light.”
And I think at that point it wasn’t that late. I was young, I was going to bed early. It was maybe 9, 9 30. And she said this to me — and again, it was not mean at all. It was just that matter-of-fact voice, she said, “Rach, not everything can revolve around you. They need to be able to come upstairs and turn the light on, or they can’t see their way down the hall.”
Now, that was objectively true. They had to turn on the light. Maybe they didn’t have to be so loud, but I really was sensitive to anything above a very quiet whisper.
What I thought in my child brain was, “Oh, that’s true. They can’t revolve around me. I have to stop feeling the way that I’m feeling. I can’t always be like this.”
Now, this is just one small example, but this happened a lot when I was a kid. And what I learned from all of this is: Suppress how you feel. Ignore it. It’s wrong. No one else is feeling that way, so neither should you.
And most importantly what I learned is: It is inconvenient for you to feel that way. Your feelings are bothering other people. And unfortunately when I learned that – and I’m not saying that anyone made me learn that – but the way I ended up coping led to some pretty unfortunate side effects, side effects that I’m trying to prevent as I support parents, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen to your children.
One of the side effects of suppressing my feelings and believing they were annoying for others was that I had no instinct for what I wanted or for what was good for me.
I had a very hard time making decisions — from the smallest ones (“Where do you want to go for dinner?” Or “which movie do you want to watch?” I seriously had no clue!) to the biggest decisions, (Which job offer do you choose? Do you stay at your job or do you go to graduate school? Should you marry this person or not? Should you stay married when you are miserable?)
These were decisions I had no idea how to make. In fact, I was paralyzed sometimes for months in making these decisions.
Now, with the smaller decisions, whenever possible, I asked other people to decide for me, so they would decide where to go to dinner or watch a movie to watch, but that only reinforced that I didn’t know what I liked or what I didn’t.
I felt my feelings were inconvenient, so I just started going along with other people’s feelings. Now this did reinforce my ability to read other people. I could always tell when they needed me, I was there for them, but I really lost my sense of self.
I was absolutely stumbling around in my life for a long time because I was just so out of tune with what made sense for me.
So that first unfortunate side effect was that I totally lost myself.
The second, and maybe this was the bigger and more dangerous, was that I had no idea how to handle the discomfort that inevitably was going to creep up because I’m a human being and life is uncomfortable sometimes. And I would say that this one still affects me today.
Because after therapy, I do have a much better sense of myself, but I still struggle with discomfort.
So here’s what happened to me personally: When I was uncomfortable in any way and yuck from anything – like I made a mistake or I was at a party and feeling really at a place, or I got a bad grade on a test or did something that upset someone (because at this point I was a big time pleaser) – whatever was uncomfortable on a day-to-day basis, I had no idea how to handle these feelings besides to shove them down. I numbed.
I did everything I could to turn them off. My personal way of doing that (and people do this in all sorts of different ways; I know this as a former therapist who helped people with some of these issues)…my personal way though was dissociating, kind of leaving my body, pretending those feelings didn’t exist.
Now eventually, dissociating wasn’t quite enough. I used food to push down my feelings. Eating things I loved felt so good. In that moment, I could forget all of that discomfort and eating for that moment quieted all of the yuck I had inside.
To me, there were no other ways to get rid of these feelings besides dissociating or eating. I just wanted them to turn off because I did not know how to handle them, and they were getting bigger and bigger as I didn’t handle them.
Now, it wasn’t just this that was an issue though, because you know what happens when you numb the hard feelings?
You actually end up numbing the good ones too. When you’re pushing away feelings, you actually have to push them all away. Brene Brown once said something, and I heard this years ago, and it has stuck with me for all of these years. She said, “You can’t selectively numb.”
So when you numb the bad, you numb the good too. Now, again, I’m so much better now because I’ve had the strategies to know how to do things differently, and I’m so grateful to teach parents to teach their kids and honestly, to teach themselves to learn how to be uncomfortable.
Like I said, I want to prevent some of the issues that I experienced, but I’m going to be honest, sometimes some of this still rears its ugly head in my life.
In fact, that was one of the motivations for this particular episode. I want to quickly share something that happened recently.
Let me start by saying that I love when people play with my hair. To me, it’s just so relaxing. It feels really good, and I have a daughter who happens to love to play with my hair. I got lucky.
So a couple months ago now, she was playing with my hair and I sort of noticed that she was doing it, but I didn’t really feel anything. I couldn’t process it. It was like it wasn’t even happening. Now because I have done work in this area, I recognized that I was numbing, tuning out, and even something that would feel amazing, this moment where my daughter was connecting with me, where she was playing with my hair, doing one of my favorite things. I was tuning out.
So I still have to work to stay present in the discomfort and even in the joy.
This is why I am so dedicated to doing what I do for a living, how to use the Long Game method to become leader parents who know how to raise children who don’t shut themselves down, kids who shut off their feelings do some pretty dangerous things.
I wasn’t someone who turned my yuck out, but a lot of kids do that when they have a lot of yuck. They turn it out on other people, they become aggressive, they become more disrespectful. I did also turn my yuck in, and a lot of kids do that as well, where they really just don’t like themselves.
They feel bad about the things that they do. And eventually, whether they’re turning their yuck out and being aggressive and disrespectful to others, or they’re turning it in and being almost aggressive and disrespectful to themselves, eventually if they don’t deal with this, they’re probably going to numb.
And the numbing, to me is the most dangerous part because I numb through food. People numb through drugs and alcohol, and shopping, and being super busy.
And I don’t want this to keep happening because it doesn’t need to keep happening. So I’m going to tell you in just a minute a simple thing that I needed. But I do also have a free resource for you if you want to hear a little bit more about raising resilient kids without harming their self-esteem.
You can head to the show notes because you’ll find that resource and others that are there for you. The show notes are at www.rachel-bailey.com/344.
But I do want to wrap this up by sharing with you what I would have needed that my parents honestly just didn’t know how to give me.
What I would’ve needed on that night when my brothers were running up and down the stairs, when they were being loud, and my frustration was growing and growing, what I would’ve needed is just my mom to say to me, “Hey, Rachel. No wonder you’re upset because you’re sitting in your room trying to sleep, and they’re being loud out there.” I would’ve needed her to see me and understand me.
And then I would’ve loved for her to say, “Since the light does need to be turned on sometimes, and your brothers are going to be loud sometimes, do you want to know how to deal with these feelings of discomfort?”
I would’ve wanted her to set that boundary for me Because I did need to know that the world didn’t revolve around me.
But I would’ve wanted to learn how to acknowledge and deal with the feelings I was feeling.
These are those leadership parenting strategies I teach inside of my program. It’s all about the Long Game. It actually doesn’t take longer. It just leads to fewer side effects as our children are living life now, and as they are growing.
Again, there are resources for you as a parent on the show notes at www.rachel-bailey.com/344. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you again soon.
FREE RESOURCE: Fostering Resilience Without Sacrificing Self-Esteem
