135. The impact of external influences on our internal state

in alignment to your emotions, needs and goals versus your programming,

“bad advice, and let's face it, outdated strategies that just don't work.”

You'll get in the trenches support on nervous system and emotional regulation,

critical mindset shifts, stronger communication strategies, and more.

In this podcast, you'll gain transformational tools that take you from reacting to every frustration, to responding with clarity, regulation, and finally setting the example you desire for your kids. I'm Becky Jennings, your new parenting coach, and this is the Response Abel Parenting podcast. Let's get into it.

Well, this one is going to be fun. I want to talk today. I don't know if you can tell in my voice, I am not doing well. And I was supposed to be starting podcast filming several hours ago, several hours ago, and I had all these topics that I was like,

I can't wait to share about and talk about, and then all the external influence, quite literally, possibly,

jumped into my lap and they said, let me test every bit of resolve and regulation

that you have and see if you can continue to show up the way you intended to show up. If this isn't like the exact definition of what I am trying to teach to embody

“as a parent, as a parent coach, I honestly don't know a better example.”

Let's paint the glorious picture of it all. So yesterday, I, no, sorry, two days ago. I got a notification inside my business Facebook notifications. And it said that your account is being scheduled to be deleted. And I'm like, what?

That's not good news. I didn't actually do anything Wednesday night. I was like, you can take a deep breath, Becky, you can take a deep breath. And you can handle this because even if your account is deleted, you can rebuild.

There is nothing stopping you from rebuilding, right? I'm pumping myself up. So then Thursday, I remember, oh, yeah, your account's about to be deleted. Why don't you go, don't ever click on an email because we know those are wrong. And those are fishing scams.

Don't click on an email and also know email was received.

So, hmm, should have been my first red flag.

But instead, I say, go into your business metasweet. Go into your business manager. Check your notifications there. And see if the alert is still there. Well, what do you know it is?

It's sitting in my business messages. Now, I should have seen a red flag with the video associated with how to appeal your account being deleted. There was this beautiful video that taught you exactly what to do, but it wasn't proper English and it wasn't spoken.

Oh, I should have just known. Anyways, but guess what? Fear says fix it now, right? Fear says fix it. Fear says fix it.

So, it says on the thing, it says, you can't do this on your phone.

“You must do it on a desktop, and I'm like, that's weird.”

But again, fear fix it. So, I go through and I follow every single step. Pause video, go over. Do what they ask. Start video.

Okay, next step. Do that for the whole thing. And then it says, do log out until you receive an email from Facebook. So, I'm like, that's weird. So, I don't get an email from Facebook because news flash wasn't Facebook.

Oh, but guess what? So, then, I film me doing it on a loom video and send it to my mentor and say, am I doing this wrong? Or am I doing this right to appeal my account being deleted? So, I do it twice.

Hmm, I sure do. I do it twice. Meanwhile, I'm not hearing anything back. So, I'm like, okay, I'm in the right spot. Then I get two very weird emails saying these really unpronounceable names

and combinations of letters. I have joined my business. And I'm like, hmm, that's odd. So, I go. And I check to see if these interesting names are following,

but no, they are not in fact following. So, then I go back deep into my business suite

and full permission to do whatever they want.

Okay.

“So, that's where we find ourselves last night”

about an hour and a half before pick up. Thankfully, my kids aren't enough for school program. And so, I was able to just leave them in the ever school program until I got pretty much everything deleted that I thought and disconnected and unlinked

and renewed passwords and new offentications and yaddy out of the whole backbone. So, I thought I was stuck. And then this morning, so that took three hours. Then this morning, I get another notification that says,

"In WhatsApp," that says, "We have walked your account because we see suspicious activity going on." Now, meanwhile, I go into my business account. There's nobody linked.

There's nobody connected.

There's nothing going on. So, I get to the Googs. And I start asking questions and apparently I gave them a skeleton key, which can live there. Just live there.

And it just can be in my account. Whew. Now, I followed the other steps. That Google told me to take. That would hopefully mitigate any further challenges. But the caveat is every single time that I followed the thing,

“or asked if I took all these steps, would it allow this person to be gone?”

And every single time it said, "Maybe." There's no guarantee, it was said, "You did all the steps you could, and they will likely be removed." Okay. Now, that's a big external stress, right? My entire business, my entire income, everything, all my coaching,

every client, is all here, not your information. Don't worry. None of that information. We are in a totally different world. But my communication is here. You are on Instagram.

Like you are my people. That's where I talk to you. That's where I get to know you. That's where I share my information.

Like Instagram is my very critical part of my business.

Ha. So talk about a little bit, just a hair bit of external stress. Okay. So we got that going on. As that was happening last night.

“My son, who gets the crunch lab boxes from Mark Robber,”

he was doing a really, really hard run. I'm going to actually show you in the, if you're watching on YouTube. This is what he was trying to create. Okay. What this is?

I don't even know. Apparently it's a laser synthesizer. He's building the laser synthesizer as I'm trying to make sure no accounts are linked. Like let's make sure my Gmail isn't even linked to this.

Like let's just go down this rabbit hole of whatever as experiencing people are asking me for snacks. He starts crying because the hack pack isn't working to the level. He starts getting really angry that he can't figure it out. My other one starts bouncing in the ball.

Like you're a six year old little kid. Of course you're going to bounce ball. All of these things in mind you. I have a class that I'm supposed to be attending in an hour. My husband's not home yet.

Dinner is not done. It's sort of prepped. Not done. All of these little things are starting to add to my dysregulation. To do what I'm talking about.

You know what it's just like everything seems to be going wrong. It's like Murphy's lots. You're like, oh, okay. So today's the day everything implodes. You know, and I'm like, I would say I'm I skew high on the Wu spectrum.

Like I'm into it. Like I've read a lot about this firehorse here. I have read a lot about how it's going to affect me and my sign. And I've followed some like, you know, do these prompts. Like open your life up to the abundance that is coming.

Like clear and shed and old identities and stepping into your authenticity. Like I'm there. I'm in it to win it. I have had the last seven years have been just like it. A kick to the crotch in so many ways.

I mean, the list of bounds. And so I'm like, yes, February 17th was three days ago. I'm like the firehorse is here. Let's go. And then it was like, there's going to be a couple few tests that you're going to really have to get through

that are just going to be begging you to like fall back into your default patterns. And it's how you show up and how you present yourself. That's going to be like, whether or not your true abundance arrives.

And writing down my triggers of like, what is triggering me?

What story? What is this trigger? Where is it presenting itself? Okay. So my chest is on fire.

My teeth are clutching. I'm starting to get a headache. Okay, those are all physiological signs that I and being triggered and activated. I had to move from my office. If you're watching this, I'm in a totally different space because of the fact that the internet does not work anymore in my office after the last two brainstorms. Again, let's just keep getting tested.

So what you just heard was the ice machine turned on and this ice machine is easily from the early 2000s.

“So it is quite loud when we moved in, we were like, why would we ever want a ice machine and we use that thing endlessly?”

I digress. So you're of the firehorse. Ready to step into a more authentic space. Ready to tackle the tests in my true authentic form to welcome in the abundance. And I'm just like universe.

I swear to God, what are you doing? I'm walking myself through my foreset process. I'm registering the trigger. I noticing that there's about seven triggers that I'm experiencing in this moment. I have the external trigger of whatever the hell is happening inside Meta Business Suite and all the technology that I just don't quite understand.

I have fear that is being triggered that everything that I have built because literally four days earlier, a woman in the mastermind that I'm in is like, all of my shit just got deleted and I have to start from scratch. And I was like, oh, God, that would be awful. Don't turn to. Here we are just presenting this opportunity for me as well.

So I have a lot of fear swirling.

“I have my son melting down over at very complex engineering issue that I honestly could not help him to save my life.”

Because if you saw the wires and the cables and the things, I don't know. I don't know what that is. And I certainly don't know what a laser synthesizer is and the point of it. But it looks cool and he's having fun. And then my youngest is just bouncing the ball on repeat.

Great next to me. And I see the clock, which is a big trigger for me. The clock ticking down. And I'm watching it tick down and I'm knowing how much needs to get done before I can leave to go take this really necessary class that I need to take. By the way, it's a self defense class and I get to punch things and hit things.

I think this has been the missing link to like my sanity. So there's high priority on this. I've registered the triggers. And then I'm rooting down into the story. What is the storyline that is making this so much more intense?

“Like, what is going on and why is this affecting me the way that it's affecting me?”

And I'm like, oh, because Becky, you've always been a creator.

You've always been an entrepreneur. You've always put your heart out there. You've always done this. And it's never a thing worked. And so you've been let down and programmed to believe that you are not chosen.

You are never chosen. It is not you. You are not supposed to succeed. And all of this is for not you're accounts going to go away. Your body and your brain is going to go see. I told you so why even try this hard when everything is going to go away.

Anyways, and you will never be successful. You will never have the reach and the impact that you want to have.

And you will never help people and you will just continue to do this thing.

Where you believe in yourself so much. And then it all comes crashing down. So I was like, okay, Becky, that's quite the storyline to hold on to. Got it. And I'm doing this in my head as my son's bouncing the ball right next to me.

And as I'm trying to help my other son co-regulate. Guys, I am telling you this parenting stuff is not easy. But when you have the tools, you can go from grounding. You can go from suffocating to be like, okay, I can take this one step. One degree in this direction.

And I can relieve 1% of the dysregulation in my body. Okay, 1% down. Let's take it again. Let's wash rinse repeat what you just did, which is a regulation tool. Wash rinse repeat the regulation until you're like able to speak.

It's kind of like my thing now. Is I'm like, no, no, no. Let's root that sensation down to the story. What's the story? And why is that story being brought up right now?

This story because your nervous system never wants you to feel the pain.

“It has already felt so that was abundantly clear.”

And then you regulate my friend, we regulate. And you know, deep breaths aren't always the thing. They can't always be the effective thing. I started with breath. And then I actually have this visualization that really helps me.

Stan Taken wrote this book called "Wired for Love." And it's all about attachment theory, but for couples and relationships. I find it to be fascinating. And he talks about the primitives and the ambassadors. And essentially, the primitives are our emotions center.

That's the amygdala, right? That is where we are those primitive emotions.

“You know, fear, anger, sadness, disgust.”

All of those really special ones that are driving the ship a lot of the time. Those get activated. And I like to visualize these primitives as the players of the movie Braveheart. The people who are, you know, the blue stripes painted across their face. They have fur vests over their makeshift armor.

They have these like the most ridiculous type of weapons. And they're running towards my problems. Just like not even caring if they get decimated. Not even being paying attention to the arrows flying their way like nothing. And they're just blindly running to this scene to protect me.

And so I visualize whenever these sensations arise in my body. I visualize these Braveheart primitives just taking full action. And my job as a full functioning rational human being who does not want to rupture additional relationships. And who also doesn't want to fall down default belief systems does not want to fall down default reactive pathways.

My job is to basically like put a barrier between those primitives and the next words coming out of my mouth.

It would be the sacred pause. The sacred pause where I'm like okay primitives loud and clear I see you. I see what you're trying to do and thank you so much for protecting me. And I'm going to take a minute. And I'm going to do what I need to do in order to allow the ambassadors,

which is what stand tack can cause the prefrontal cortex where logic, reasoning, effective communication. And all of that really juicy good problem solving stuff lives. I'm going to wait for those to click on mine. I'm just going to I'm going to hold out until those click on mine. And I will not talk until they are there.

Now this has taken a little bit of time and effort and a lot of practice to get to this space where this is my default pattern. But my point and saying that is that is the process I went through. I went through literally the exact process I take my claims through. I went through it myself last night. And so I looked over at my son.

And I said who's bouncing the ball right next to me. And I said who? I'm really angry and he's bouncing the ball and he's like yeah, about what? Yeah, I'm like my computer. I'm feeling really angry and he goes, are you feeling angry and you want to punch it? I'm like, I do want to punch my computer.

However, that would cause a whole new set of problems. And so humor helped a little bit. But I got up. I left the room. I went and got a glass of cold water.

And I sat in the kitchen for a second.

And I just kind of let it wash over me. I'm in this phase of life that is like, you can't control what you can't control. You can do everything you can in your power to the best of your ability.

“But life is going to life and we need to stay in the pocket of understanding that life is going to happen around us.”

It's not shaking our internal system to the level of going so low. Meeting the external chaos in the depths. We can then notice the external chaos and not absorb it. Notice, not absorb, notice, regulate. Notice, take any action I can do to support myself to alleviate the pain.

But what is not going to help is me dumping my own dysregulation into the mix. And then allowing that to all kind of stew together and create this next round of just like good lord who knows what we need to clean up next.

A few years back, my son.

“The whole reason why I do the job I do today was having one of those fiery moments.”

He was talking back demanding it be his way. He was refusing to listen to any of our solutions and the moment was getting really intense. I hasn't been looked at me and said, well, you know all the parenting stuff fixed this. I completely froze.

All the scripts from the books I read, all the strategy from the podcast I listened to completely disappeared from my brain and that moment.

But based on the volume of challenges that we were having with our strongwill, ADHD son, I knew I had to figure out if different way. Because panicking in the moment and grasping at anything only to not follow through at all and end up yelling just wasn't working.

“From this experience, I developed a repeatable, easy to remember and easy to follow system that literally works with every single triggering moment.”

I can attest to it because there are many in my life. Now I can show up the way I want. I can communicate in a way that actually resonates with my strongwill child. If this sounds like a solution for what's happening in your home, take these next two steps. Watch the free training about my rewiring process in the show notes and then number two book your free call.

On that call, we will talk about what's happening in your home and you will get a customized solution that works best for you. I assure you, it doesn't have to feel as hard day in and day out as it does. Here is the solution and I'm so excited to talk to you about it. So that was a very real life test and then the test kept coming. Today, I've spent three hours, three hours that I wanted to dedicate to podcasting, dedicated to creating really special content that has been inspired for you. And I didn't get to do that and that was really frustrating, really frustrating.

And I know that I'm going to be coming into probably some fiery situations with my kids after school because when are they not. And I know it could really affect me. So before I even go to pick up today, I'm going to be doing the forced process. I'm going to register what I'm feeling in my body. I'm going to root it down to be like, what is this sensation leading me to and what is the story there that's amplifying this whole thing.

“To make it so much more fear based, so much more intolerable. What is that storyline and then analyzing that story? Is that still true?”

Is that still who I am today? Do I even identify with that story anymore? Or can I say thanks so much for the protection that you helped me way back in the day, but I really see you. I don't really need you anymore. And then regulate the shit out of that moment, right? Like we're doing everything we can to regulate and then we get to choose. We get to choose how we respond from that place. We are so set up for failure as parents as mothers in this current society. We are set up to fail. Honestly, there are so many more barriers to success than there are just like this wide open way for us to just be authentically mothers and be supported and do well at it.

It's just it's profound, honestly. And so we're already starting at a deficit. And when we let that deficit continue to determine the way in which we show up, the way in which we respond, when we allow all of the external to encroach and live in our internal, then it makes all the sense in the world that we feel claustrophobic. It makes all the sense in the world that we are zero to 100 and reacting at the smallest things. It makes all the sense in the world that we react before we think because our primitives are sitting there armed and ready because they're like,

girl, you are under a lot of pressure and a lot of stress and you are baseline, not feeling great. And if I write, so I'm always going to be looking to protect you and it's going to get smaller and smaller and smaller. The protection is going to not just be like, oh, your whole entire business could come crashing down. Yes, that is a reasonable and rational reason to feel afraid and to take action, like your child bouncing a ball, not.

However, your nervous system is going to put them on the same level when you are baseline dysregulated. So with that, I want to share that first of all, you're not alone.

I'm a woman in America who's just losing a mind. I share that to just give you a little bit more context as well. And I think one of the key things that has helped me a lot is speaking out loud to myself about what is real and what is not when I register the sensations and I am getting into the story aspect when I'm getting to the rooting down process and I say out loud. Why I'm triggered? It does this beautiful thing of taking the power out of the trigger because I get to in real time say it whenever you say it out loud they call it name it to tame it whenever you name something it immediately takes a little bit more of the power out of it. So as a narrating like I'm triggered because right and I say what I'm triggered about.

“Then I get that beautiful invitation and the opportunity to say is that true is that real or am I just moving down my automatic negative default pattern thought process that has just been really perfected.”

So let me give my brain a second option let me do like this is what we do in cognitive behavioral therapy we look at the data and then we say what is that true is that real or is that something that we're is coming from fear is that a story is that a judgment is that a perception. You know there's so many things that feel true but aren't true there's a phrase that says perception is reality so we truly get to shape our reality by going through this foreset process where we register where we root down into the story and this is where it gets so beautiful because.

“We then get to shift the narrative about that story and we get to then create the reality that we want to see and we do that the very two next steps is.”

Regulate give your body what it is asking for tell your body thank you but honestly you're safe this is not something to send the primitives to your safe and then from there we get that beautiful thing called choice where we get to choose the words that are coming out of our mouth next we get to choose how we handle that trigger.

And if this is resonating with you and you're like dang that I'm nowhere near that or I'm trying that or I'm doing that but I'd still like some guidance do me a favor.

Book a call with me my calendar link is in the show notes you can jump on that call and we will get to go through all of this talk about your triggers talk about the default patterns talk about what your goals are talk about what yourself perception is and see if what I do as a coach every single day with the clients that I'm working with could also start to transform your life.

“I'm working with somebody right now and every call she shows up to which is just brilliant we were working together for like two and a half weeks and she's like that's life changing that experience was life changing.”

And you know it's amazing because we are just not aware we are rushing and we are in the thick of it and we are being tested at nauseam by the external and so it's really hard to see another possibility and that's my job that's my job for you is to show you the possibilities that is my job for you is to show you what's possible and to give you the tools and the pathway and the steps to achieve what's possible. Not just this pie in the sky like this is possible for other people no no no this is possible for you because I am you I'm sitting in this chair triggered as hell about this business thing and I'm still stepping into the authentic person that I want to be saying yes I am triggered yes I understand the root story of why.

And as a result of knowing those two things and being able to regulate my body I can step into a position of authority and power I get to control how I respond to it which means I get to control the reality around it. Dang that is powerful and then watch how that transforms the relationship that you have with your children watch how that transforms the way you show up when they do the same repetitive behavior that is annoying you and is causing you so many sleepless nights where you're sitting there staring at the ceiling saying oh my god if they're still acting like this in five years what if.

So empowering it's so empowering and it's so possible so I invite you to book that call with me because it's really important work it's really important work not just for your soul for your health for your happiness for your relationships but for where we are in the state of the world. And what's coming down the pipeline nobody really knows but it ain't looking good for the team so for instance if the save act passes then several of us lose our opportunity to vote or becomes very challenging to vote so there's going to be more and more this is the time we need to armor up.

“In a way that we are unshakable in our beliefs of self we are unshakable in the way that we respond to triggers so if that resonates with you.”

So look a call with me let's talk let's help on the phone and we'll see where this leads thank you for being here for another week letting me work through that process in real time and I will see you all next week bye.

Thank you for listening to the response able parenting podcast if you like what you heard please take a moment to rate review and subscribe.

“If you know someone who invented from this podcast I'd be honored if you'd share this episode with them.”

Until next time know that you are enough you are capable you've made it through all of your hardest days and we will keep growing on this parenting journey together.

This podcast was produced by Kim Kelty and myself Mackie Jennings and edited by the Kelty method branding and podcasting. (soft music)