Confession- I still yell!

People yell at their kids. And that’s ok. I mean it isn’t great but it is going to happen. 

You could drop your kids off at my house (please don’t- I do not take donations) and there is almost no chance that I would ever lose my shit with your kids.  But mine? The ones that I love deeply? They can still take me down. 35 years I have been working on being a chill, nothing rattles me kind of mom. And I am good! My first was my PhD in parenting. And sometimes.. I still yell. 

That’s the thing. Loving is messy. Loving is passionate and intense and scary and challenging. 

At the core of all the work that I do is attachment theory- the idea that humans are built to form bonds with those they love to secure survival. Those bonds are primitive, key to our security and because we need them, they make us feel vulnerable. Key attachment people are our parents, our siblings, our partners and our kids. These are the people we usually fight to stay connected to. These are the people whose distance can make us lose it. 

Our highly rational frontal lobe reads parenting books and is committed to calm, consistent discipline. Our primal monkey brain only cares that we and our core people are safe. 

Our monkey brain gets triggered when our kids won’t listen, when they talk back, when they don’t sleep. Our monkey brain makes huge leaps in judgement turning tears or spilt milk or lost mittens or “we’re late” into a threat to the survival of our dynasty. Suddenly yelling actually seems like an appropriate response, right? 

Understanding your monkey brain and attachment helps. And likely you will still yell. And then you get to model restoring and repairing the relationship which, it turns out is a huge asset to secure attachment. So make some mistakes and then clean them up. Repeat. Yell less, softer, shorter… apologise quicker, recommit, learn from your mistakes. 

Want more? Check out my 3 part series on Attachment Wounds. 
Want to continue the discussion about how to yell differently? You might want to come talk to “Stop Yelling (Begging, Threatening or Flipping Out, too)  on Tuesday October 22nd 6:30-8 pm.