Eps 325: SOLO SHOW Parenting for Mental Wellness

PARENTING FOR THE SEASON YOU’RE IN

Parenting for The Season You’re In is a program for parents who are looking for a deeper understanding of the challenges they are facing, how they may be contributing to the challenges, and tools and strategies for problem solving. Most importantly, this community is about experiencing more joy on the parenting journey. 

Join so many other parents in finding their Joyful Courage as we walk the sometimes mild, sometimes wild parenting path. No matter the season of parenting you are in today, this program is designed to give you what you need to be the parent you want to be.

This is a 6 week class that starts May 10th and goes through June 14th from 5-7 PT over Zoom.

For more information, go to besproutable.com/teens/positive-discipline-classes

Positive Discipline Association Conference

Join us in person for the 2022 Positive Discipline Conference which features presentations for educators, clinicians, and parents. Spend the day developing Positive Discipline tools for home and school, or to support others through your coaching, consulting, or counseling practice.

Learn more at positivediscipline.org

Teaching Parenting The Positive Discipline Way

Teaching Parenting The Positive Discipline Way is a two day, in-person workshop designed to support participants in learning all they need to teach the Parenting the Positive Discipline Way curriculum. Developed by Lynn Lott and Jane Nelsen, this program provides a step-by-step approach to starting and leading experientially based parenting groups and classes. This curriculum can stand alone or can offer significant enhancement to other parenting programs; it emphasizes experiential activities that reach the heart to inspire deeper understanding and change.

Grounded in the work of Jane Nelsen and Adlerian Theory, Positive Discipline centers relationship, encouragement and the practice of life skills, with an overarching theme of trusting the process and recognizing mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow.

This course takes place IN PERSON Fri May 27th – Sat May 28th

8:30am – 5pm ET in McLean, VA

Learn more at besproutable.com/parent-educators

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Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:00
Teens are prone to bouts of depression because they already have such high highs and low lows through the process of teen brain development. That's just a piece of it, right? That emotional spark. Hey, friends, welcome back to the joyful courage podcast, a conscious parenting show where we tease apart the challenges and nuances of parenting through adolescence, because it ain't no joke, right? I'm your host. Casey o'rourdy, I am a positive discipline lead trainer, and I am the adolescent lead at sproutable, a company that represents not only the growth of children, but also the journey and evolution that parents go on through their parenting experience. I am walking the path right next to you as I navigate the teen parenting with my own two children here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, joyful courage. Say it with me is all about grit, growth on the parenting journey, relationships that provide a sense of connection and meaning and influential tools that support everyone in being their best selves. I love creating this podcast for you. Do you know that I love creating this podcast for you? I love hearing how it matters to your life. Thank you for all the love and reviews on Apple podcast, one review came in recently that I am super excited to share so Riverstone. Riverstone one who is a friend of mine. Hey, Riverstone. He wrote awesome podcasts for parents. Joyful courage is an amazing addition to the life of any mom or dad that want to continue growing their parenting skills. Casey is fun and engaging, relatable, honest and skillful at relating the many challenges of parenting in this day and age. I recommend this podcast to other parents every chance. I get five stars. Thanks, Riverstone, thank you, listener for being here for listening and loving this show. We are over 1 million downloads and 300 plus episodes strong, and you have taken us to the top 1% of podcasts worldwide. That's a big deal. I so appreciate you, and I'm so happy you're here. Enjoy.

Hi, hey everyone. Hey, welcome back to the show. I hope you all had a mother's day full of relaxation and ease. Relaxation and ease. That's what we're going for, right? Sometimes the perfect Mother's day is spent away from the family. Sometimes it's spent with the family however you chose to spend it, I am here in support and cheering you on. So May is Mental Health Month. Did you know that May is Mental Health Month, and I'm going to be picking some Thursday throwback shows and just the other shows that come out this month, I'm going to really try to focus in on mental health, because it matters, as you're going to hear in this episode. Speaking of this episode, I want you to know that today I'm going to be bringing up some things that may feel uncomfortable to hear. I'm going to be talking about depression and suicide, and, you know, the dark stuff about mental health. So if today isn't a day for you to be hearing about that or considering that, or thinking about that, then feel free to check out one of the other shows that I have for you. Otherwise, stick around, because I'm really interested in drawing you into this conversation. So yesterday, I saw a post from a gal that I follow, a therapist who has been a guest on the podcast, Katie Hurley. She's an author. She sees clients. She wrote about how she is faring after 24 years of living with her father taking his own life when she was 23 years old. And she wrote about her experience, beautifully written, and the pain and the suffering and just how hard it is to be with that experience losing someone that you hold so dearly, especially when there's no warnings or no indicators. And that's really what she was writing about. And it hit me, reading it, she posted a picture of her family when she and her siblings were quite young, and her father was smiling, and of course, you can't tell by looking that he was having a hard time, right? And then this morning, my son came up for breakfast, and one of the first things he said to me is he was like, you know, told me about a girl in one of the neighboring towns that committed suicide yesterday. She was popular, she played sports. She was a good student, you know, well liked no warnings, no indicator. And, you know, it just got me to really thinking about how people hold so much pain, and we can't tell from the outside looking in, when somebody else is holding a lot of pain or struggling or having a hard time. I mean, sometimes there's tells, right, but a lot of the time there isn't. And adults and teenagers. I'm sure some of you that are listening right now have been or are in a dark place and that feels maybe like you don't have a way out, or that it's not going to be possible to feel better. So full disclosure, I am not a therapist. I'm not a therapist, but I am a lover of humans, and I think it is so important to normalize the mental health conversation. If you're feeling the kind of darkness that is leading you to thoughts of hurting yourself or you suspect your kids are, please find a licensed professional to talk to. There is absolutely help out there,

someone we love taking their own life is everyone's nightmare. Some of you have lived through that nightmare. Many of us have been through some really tough times with our teens, and have had teens that have shown, or maybe are showing so many signs of depression and hopelessness, especially through the last couple of years, right? And it's understandable that we would slide into worst case scenario, right? That we would be scared for the worst possible thing. You know, even speaking into this right now, I can feel a tightness in my chest and around my heart, thinking of my own times where it's been really scary and I was worried about my own child's health and well being. I remember years ago, maybe like five or six years ago, teaching a positive discipline class parenting class in my local community. We had been meeting weekly for about four or five weeks when news came out that a child at the local middle school had taken her life. Many people in the class had been connected in one way or another to this family. It was devastating. There was a lot of talk around well, what can we do? How can we make sure this isn't ever our kid? What happened? Where did things go wrong? Right? There was a conversation around the school district putting on a suicide prevention night for parents, and as I listened to the pain and the unanswered questions floating around in this small group. I looked up and I looked at the walls all around us, the walls of our classroom, there was probably about 25 posters that had been put up that we had made over the course of the class, posters talking about and highlighting the importance of belonging and significance, the importance of social interest, encouragement, finding solutions. Posters that talked about mistakes, being opportunities to learn and grow, brain development, posters that broke down the steps of family meetings and CO creating agreements. And then I saw the words that I still say all the time, and you've heard me say them, the most powerful tool you have for influencing the behavior of your child is the relationship that you nurture with them. I looked out at all these parents, parents that I had gotten to know pretty well over the past several weeks, and I said, you guys, what we've been doing here in this space for the past weeks, the conversations that we've been having, the activities that you've played with this is suicide prevention. This is suicide prevention. Humans are wired to belong and to know that they matter, and sometimes life or brain chemistry mucks up our perception of that belonging and significance, and we end up, or teens end up feeling hopeless and disconnected. Teens are prone to bouts of depression because they already have such high highs and low lows through the process of teen brain development. That's just a piece of it, right, that emotional spark. And you probably know what I'm gonna say here. How we be with our teens as they move through whatever they're moving through matters. Being willing to have hard conversations and ask hard questions really matters. You know, when my son told me about the local girl this morning. I asked him, you know, have you ever felt that low, to which, you know, he quickly responded with no. And I believed him. I believe him because I know him really well, even though we are, for sure, going through a pulling apart time me and my son, which is killing me. Not gonna lie, I have faith that when he looked me in the eye and said no, that he meant it, and I followed up with, if you're ever feeling low like that, you know, we can call the therapist. I know, he said, Now don't get me wrong. I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying. I am not under the illusion that. All you need is a particular parenting style, and you can avoid depression and you can avoid suicide. I know that that's not true. I know that we can do all the perfect parenting things and still have kids that struggle and still have kids that end their lives putting all the hands up for the therapists, the social workers, the counselors and psychologists out there that are doing such important work. I see a therapist. My daughter sees a therapist. My husband and I check in with a counselor from time to time. My son's had a few sessions too. Mostly, my biggest thing is I want to normalize therapy, to be sure that when and if he already has a relationship with someone who can help right? We know where to go as a family. This is becoming normalized, and there is no shame in getting mental health help. We go to the doctor when we get sick, right? When we aren't feeling good in our physical body, or we're injured. Doctors help us make sense of what's going on and then support us in healing and moving through whatever's going on in a way that brings us back to good health. It's the same with therapists. They help us make sense of what's going on with our emotional body, with our thoughts, and then support us in healing and moving through it in a way that brings us back to good health, right? In a way that offers us tools and coping mechanisms so that we can move through, that we can grow through what we move through therapy is for everyone. I know you've heard me say that before. I like to think about it as having somewhere to dump all my stuff, a place where I can get out of the experience I'm having, and I can look at it, I get to connect the dots between how things make me feel and think with the past experiences that are being triggered. We all have a filter that we are experiencing life through. It's created over time by the events, the experiences and the relationships that we've had, the ideas right ideas in our life, that become values, our developed understanding of who we are. That's what this filter is. That's what makes up this filter. And sometimes the filter serves us, and sometimes it gets in our way. The key, I think, is to question the filter, recognize that it exists and it's subjective, and get curious about it. Therapy helps us with that. So that's my therapy soapbox. Everybody gets to go to therapy. Back to the mental health and suicide prevention. Here's the deal. Mental health issues happen for the people we love. If you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you know that we my family, has moved through some big mental health experiences, and it's nobody's fault. It is nobody's fault. What I have learned over time is that I can be an advocate for my people by how I respond when they are in their darkness, when I'm close, but not insisting on talking. When I ask, do you need me to listen? Or do you want to know what I think? When I share, sounds really hard, and when I say, I believe you, what I've learned is that my people don't need me to fix to talk them out of how they feel, to dismiss their experience. I know, obviously right. But these things get sneaky. They sneak up on me, my kids, my husband. They need to be seen, heard and validated. They need us to maintain relationship, even if they aren't showing up well on the other side, they need us not to give up. They need us to invite them into problem solving and possibility on their terms, and when we get that gut hit that things are bigger than us, I talked about this a couple weeks ago, on that sixth alternative is to punishment episode. When we get that gut hit that things are bigger than us, our kids need us to stand in our confident authority and be firm on finding outside help for them. They need us to keep up with all the positive discipline things they need us to trust their process and the fact that they are moving through something that is actually offering them experience that will guide them in the future.

You I just had a conversation with a client about this who's got a couple kids that are really struggling with mental health, and how challenging it can be right to be in that fiercely committed, lovingly detached place like it is hard to watch the train wreck, it is hard to watch our kids suffer, no doubt, but Right? I think about the butterfly. I think about the butterfly that struggles to get out of the chrysalis. It is in the struggle that the strength they need to fly is developed. Right? Same as. True for our kids again, doesn't mean we abandon them, but they need to be in their experience. And again, even when we're doing all the right things, our teens are on their own timelines, and at the end of the day, they are going to need to lean into helping themselves. This is so hard. Oh, my God, right. We can drag them to the therapy office. We can say all the things, and until they are connecting the dots around it's up to me to design my life. You know, they're just gonna keep doing their due. So again, this is where fiercely committed, lovingly detached, shows up, taking care of ourselves, showing up for our kids and letting go. Be in right now. Be in today. Trust that that's enough, and that's really big, that's really big, and that's what's on my mind as we move into mental health awareness month. I hope that there was something in this short, little show for you that you can take away and sit with. I'm going to continue, like I said, to focus on Mental Health this month, and again, pick some Thursday throwbacks that highlight mental health as well. I want to offer the national suicide prevention line. That number is 800-273-8255 I think it's important for all of us to have this number handy. It's for people who are struggling, and for those of you loving people that are struggling, the website is Suicide Prevention lifeline.org There are tons of resources there to check out ways to be involved. So yeah, I wanted to offer that tool up for all of you, I am so appreciating you. I'm seeing you. Please know that you're not alone. I've had three client calls just today with parents who have kids that are really having a hard time, and the parents are really in the work of letting go, letting go, letting go, you know, and making sense of letting go, not meaning abandoning right? Because sometimes when we think about letting go, it's like, okay, good luck. That's not really what it's about. We still show up, right? We still show up, but we let go of the outcome, because we don't know what the outcome is going to be. We get to be present with what is and hold space for possibilities. Good stuff, good stuff. Loving All of you, seeing you. I'm excited for the interviews that are showing up this month. I know you're gonna enjoy them. I had a great time with the six weeks of alternatives to punishment, but I'm really glad to be back to my alternating interview, solo show schedule. I hope that you loved Charlotte Avery last week. I sure did. I'm hoping to meet up with her when I'm in Alexandria. And yeah, I'm sure you'll love who I interview next week too. So yeah, that's it. That's what I got for you today. Hope you loved it.

All right, there you have it, another solo show in the bag. I hope you took away value. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Casey at joyful courage.com. I do read every single email that comes my way. If you love the show, please show your support by writing a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts to help our impact grow. You can screenshot it, put it in your Instagram story. I will re post it if you do that. Thank you to the team at sproutable for your back end help. Thank you Chris at pod shaper.com, for your stellar editing. So honored that you listen each week. We're all doing the best we can in the moment. That includes you have a beautiful, beautiful day. I'll see you Thursday with a super special throwback. Love you. Bye.