Eps 672: Letting Go of the Story

Joyful Courage to me today is all about taking a stance of empowerment. I get to decide the story I want to live in. I get to recognize when my mind is taking me down dark paths or victim mindset and I get to pivot back to an empowered place. When I do that my whole experience of my life changes.

Resources mentioned:

• Episode 668 — “Your 2026 Back To School Reset” (the intentional ecosystem)
• Episode 670 — “Knowing Better Isn’t Enough” (your nervous system)
• Episode 671 — “Is This Normal?” (going underneath the behavior)
• Episode 252 — her daughter tells her own side of the story
• Raising Teens Who Talk to You (Cecilia and Jason Hinkley, Happily Family, and contributing authors) — Casey’s chapter, “Shifting From Control to Creation: The Inner Work of Parenting Adolescents”
• Adolescent DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) programs — the structured skills work she and her daughter did together
• Living Joyful Courage Immersion Week, September 21–25, $69 — besproutable.com/immersion
• Past episodes by topic: search bar at besproutable.com/teens

Transcription

[00:00:00] Casey O'Roarty: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Joyful Courage Podcast. This is a place where parents of tweens and teens come to find inspiration, information, and encouragement in the messy terrain of adolescence. This season of parenting is no joke, and while the details of what we're all moving through might be slightly different, we are indeed having a very collective experience.
[00:00:30] This is a space where we center building relationship, nurturing life skills, and leaning into our own personal growth, and man, the opportunities abound, right? My name is Casey O'Rourty. I am a parent coach, positive discipline lead trainer, and captain of the adolescent ship over at Sproutable. I'm also a speaker and a published author.
[00:00:53] I've been working with parents and families for over 20 years and continue to navigate my own experience of being a mom with my two young adult kids. I'm so honored that you're here and listening. Please give back to the podcast by sharing it with friends or on social media. Rate and review us on Apple or Spotify.
[00:01:13] Word of mouth is how we grow. Thank you so, so much. Enjoy the show.
[00:01:23] Okay. Hi. So three weeks ago, I told you about my experience of receiving a text from my daughter in a hotel room in Atlanta. I was at a podcasting conference, I was there talking about this show and the work I do with parents, and yeah, I woke up to my phone buzzing and a message from my then 16-year-old that said, "I'm done with school.
[00:01:53] I'm dropping out." And I told you a couple weeks ago just how that impacted my body, tight chest, shallow breath, all the different versions of a response that I worked on drafting to her, trying to change her mind, trying to fix it, leaving the conference early, the five hours on the plane, cycling through all of those survival instinct responses.
[00:02:23] I told you how it felt to, yes, have my master's degree in education and 20 years of working with families, and absolutely nothing in my head that was helpful in that moment. And I stopped the story because that episode was about the nervous system, and that's all you needed to hear. Well, today I'm gonna share with you what happened after I got off the plane, what I tried, what didn't work, and the thing that finally changed, not for her, but for me.
[00:02:55] And this is the third of three shows, and it's the one that the last two have been building towards. So let's get into it. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad that, that you're here, and before I go into the story, I wanna say something, and I wanna say it upfront rather than at the end. This is the last time that I'm gonna tell this story about my sweet, beautiful daughter explicitly.
[00:03:27] I've actually told pieces of this story for years. It's in my chapter in the Raising Teens Who Talk To You book. She came on the show herself to talk about her story back in episode 252, she's actually been on quite a few times, and told it from her side, which if you haven't heard it, I highly recommend you go listen, because her version is obviously way better than mine, but here's where I've landed.
[00:03:59] That story is a snapshot. It was real. It was real, and it was hard. It was real hard, and it was now, like- Gosh, what year is it? It was, like, seven years ago now, and this story isn't who she is anymore. The girl in this story is not the woman that she is now. The girl in this story is, you know, a part of who shaped the woman she is now, but she is out in the world and living on her own, and really meeting life a- as it unfolds in the most beautiful way.
[00:04:40] And when hard things show up in her life, and they do, absolutely, because that's life, she meets them with real skill. She's an extraordinarily emotionally intelligent human being because of everything she's moved through and her willingness to grow, and that means she can be with those hard things and actually use them and learn herself ever better through them, instead of looking for workarounds to avoid them and those hard things.
[00:05:14] That's who she is. So I don't want the version of her from 2019 to keep being the version people hear about just because it makes a compelling podcast, all right? Rowan, I love you so much. I am so proud of you, you continue to grow into, and I a- feel so deeply grateful that I get to be your mama. Okay, I am gonna talk about this story one last time today because I think it's genuinely useful to you, and then I'm setting it down.
[00:05:44] And honestly, there is something kinda perfect about that, and I didn't plan it. Because what today is actually about is letting go of the story you're holding about your teenager, and here I am doing it live for you seven years later, a story I thought I was done letting go of, but I'm making a whole new declaration about it today.
[00:06:09] That work of letting go, it's just not one and done, right? And I want you to hear that because you're going to think you've released something, and then come to find yourself still gripping a piece of it, and that's not failure, it's just how it goes. So let's take a look at where we've been in this little series.
[00:06:30] A few weeks back, in episode 668, I offered a back-to-school podcast and I talked about the intentional ecosystem. And then two weeks ago, episode 670, we spent the whole episode on you, on your nervous system. We talked about flipping our lid, why every tool we have disappears in that emotional state, in that over- overactivated state, even though we need those tools most And then last week in episode 671, we moved into the ring of relationship, the intentional ecosystem ring of relationship, and I gave you those four questions to determine ever better where you are and what the actual problem is that you're trying to solve for.
[00:07:27] So let's just review those four questions 'cause we're gonna use them. They're gonna show up again today. So remembering that outer layer of the ecosystem, our personal growth, right? Am I okay? Are we okay? That question around relationship. Does our house actually work? We get to reflect on the systems and routines that exist in our family, in our households.
[00:07:53] And what do I do right now? That in the moment, what do I say, what do I do, what is this moment being called into? So those are those four questions. And in that order, each of the questions is held by the question before it. So am I okay holds are we okay? Okay, great. Are, are systems working? Holding that, and then the very center, those in the moment, holy shit, what do I do right now tools, right?
[00:08:26] So today is this whole ecosystem model at once because that's how it actually shows up in a real family in real crisis. Not four tidy parts, but all of it tangled at the same time, and there you are, and it's, you know, 11:00 and you can't sleep I'm gonna give you a practice at the end of the show that I think is the single most useful thing I have, and it's called, you've heard me talk about it, so for some of you it's a review, for others it's new, but it's the practice of having some anchor words, right?
[00:08:59] Again, comes out of that chapter of Raising Teens Who Talk To You. I think I did a whole podcast on it. Yeah. So anchor words. So let's set the scene, right? Let me back up before the text in Atlanta. October of 2019, we had- we were, what? Three or four months into being in a brand-new town. We had moved. My sweet girl, who had been struggling for a couple of years by then, and I'm gonna keep- just kinda leave it at that, because those details are hers and not mine to keep dishing out.
[00:09:34] But it's true. We were already in that hard, in a hard season in that month of October. And I'll say, it was serious. Not just, oh, this is just teen brain development. It was pretty intense, and there were stretches where I did not know who was gonna walk through the front door, how I was gonna show up. I was a parent coach, standing in front of rooms full of parents, teaching positive discipline while the sky was falling in my own house.
[00:10:05] I remember back in those days, I was, well, a little before we moved up to Bellingham, I was the parent educator for the Sky Valley Co-Op Preschool. Shout out to them. And I'd show up once a month, and I'd do an hour workshop with parents of toddlers and preschoolers. And I remember when things started getting really hard with my daughter, I would show up to those nights and look at this group of parents and just think to myself, "You people have no problems."
[00:10:33] Like, what are you even doing here? You don't even know what's coming. I remember feeling like that, and really struggling to be the leader in the room. You know, Rowan finished ninth grade in public school. She did 10th grade online, and then decided to enroll when we moved up here in Running Start, which is, for those of you outside Washington State, a program where high schoolers take classes at the community college.
[00:10:59] And we thought, oh, maybe it's an environmental problem. Maybe it's an external problem, and change the environment, everything's gonna be fine. It's fine. We were hopeful. I want you to hear that. We were hopeful, because it's the setup for everything that came next. I flew to Atlanta, my phone buzzed. Here's the part I didn't tell you three weeks ago.
[00:11:22] I got home, and I very quickly realized that every single thing I planned on the plane to say, to do, was worthless. All the versions of the texts, all the responses, all the arguments for why she couldn't possibly drop out of high school, the, you know, when-then conditions, the consequences, the reasoning, everything, right?
[00:11:50] Everything that I was gonna say out loud to help her make see, obviously, she couldn't drop out of school, that she had it in her to stick with it, all of it was worthless. Because I came home to a kid whose mind had been made up. This was her decision, and that was the reality we were in. And my actual work, it turns out, was to figure out how to be with this decision.
[00:12:20] Oof, and just talking about it, I can feel a tingling in my thighs and my belly. Yeah, this was major, right? I had to learn to be with it, and I did not want to. I did not wanna be with this at all. So let me tell you what I did instead, because this is the useful part. I went to work on her. I looked for the right words, the perfect combination of sentences that would get her to reconsider.
[00:12:49] I looked for the right conditions, like, the scariest possible outcome that I could share with her, and I just wanted her to reconsider. I just wanted her to look at me and say, "You know what, Mom? You're right. This isn't that big of a deal. I can do it. I can do it." Never happened. I leaned into consequences.
[00:13:09] God. Leverage, right? Something I could hold that would push her along, that would get her through it, that would keep her from doing too much damage to a future that I could still see for her that apparently she couldn't see. And it's funny 'cause I've worked with parents, too, like that leverage piece, we wanna know what can we dangle, what can we put in front of them, what can we take away to get them to get on the path, do what we think they should do?
[00:13:40] Because for me, she couldn't drop out of school. What? That was for other kids. I didn't even know any k- I mean, I knew kids growing up who dropped out of school. I didn't know any other families whose kids were dropping out of school. And underneath all of this was also something that I could not say out loud at the time, but I thought a lot, which was, "What kind of future exists for a high school dropout?"
[00:14:09] What kind of future existed for my daughter if she was gonna be dropping out of school? I believed that there was no future. I couldn't see the future, and that was driving every move I made, and it took me further away from Rowan. And here's what I want you to sit with, because it's the whole thesis of this episode.
[00:14:27] Every single one of the moves that I was making out of desperation from this belief that you can't possibly have a future if you're gonna drop out of 11th grade, right, the words, the conditions, the leverage, the pushing, all of that actually took me further from the thing that I wanted most. I wanted my daughter.
[00:14:46] I wanted to be close to her. I wanted her to be okay. This wasn't a kid who was like, "I am so much bigger than high school. I'm ready to take the world by storm." This was a kid who was shrinking and closing up and couldn't do it, right? I wanted to know that she was gonna be okay, yet everything I was doing was making her feel managed, judged, incapable, and like the person who was supposed to love her the most had absolutely no faith in her whatsoever, which was pretty accurate.
[00:15:22] So that instinct to fix is... It's not a bad instinct. It comes from love for sure. It comes from fear also, which comes from love. But that instinct unexamined will walk you directly away from your teenager while you're absolutely convinced that you're walking towards them
[00:15:54] So let's come back to those four questions for a second. Everything I just described is me living in question four, what do I do right now? What do I say? What's the move? And starting with the first question, one, am I okay? No. That was a hard no. I was not okay. I was terrified. I was grieving a future that I had pictured that was just crumbling.
[00:16:19] I was carrying shame about being a parent educator whose own house was literally burning down. And here's a line that I wanna share with you from the chapter that I wrote that I wish that I could have tattooed to the inside of my eyelids, "We cannot connect or create possibility when we are dysregulated."
[00:16:41] I was so dysregulated. I was trying to build something out of the moment while the biggest part of the ecosystem, me, had completely collapsed. Nothing was holding the space. Nothing was holding anything. That's why the conversations I was trying to have with her weren't useful, not because I was doing it wrong, but because there was nothing to hold it.
[00:17:10] She could see right through me. She could see my fear. She could see my judgment. She could see my desperation. She could see that I was not okay with what she was doing. She became resentful. It became like that thing where our kids are like, "You know what? I'm already having a hard enough time. I don't wanna also manage your hard time."
[00:17:32] Yeah. So here's when things turned and started to change, and I wanna be honest with you about this because I could tell you it w- was this moment of great wisdom. It was not. I simply ran out of the road. Like, I, I ran out of tools. I tried everything I knew. None of it was helpful. None of it was changing anything, and I got to a place where I genuinely had nothing left to try, and that's where a shift began, and it wasn't with some big insightful moment.
[00:18:08] It literally started because I was exhausted. I was exhausted, and spent, and just at that place of total defeat. And I think that's worth saying because some of you listening right now, you know, waiting to feel wise enough to loosen your grip, you might not get wise first, right? You might just get tired And pay attention to that, right?
[00:18:37] Because this is where I made a decision, and I can name this decision. When I finally got centered enough, and I mean literally when I had done enough breathing and walking and journaling and speaking into my voice memos and just dumping out what was happening for me, and my actual nervous system work started to help my brain come back online, I got curious about my own experience.
[00:19:05] Not hers, but mine. And what I found was that underneath everything, underneath this whole saga, was this. I was holding a narrative for her that I was completely unaware of. I had a vision for her life, high school, graduation, college, the shape of it, right? And that vision was falling apart, and the unknown that was left in its place was too much for me.
[00:19:34] I didn't have capacity for it. I couldn't see the future, and I could not tolerate not seeing the future. So all of that fixing and pushing, it wasn't even about her. It was me trying to get back to this narrative that felt safe because it was familiar. Once I could see the narrative, I could get curious about it.
[00:19:59] And one of the things that I realized is I was raised in a family that values education, which is great. We should value education. But the message that I interpreted from the valuing of education was a person's value is dependent on their education. So what does that mean about someone who drops out of high school, right?
[00:20:30] That was a really big, huge moment for me of like, whoa. You know, I came into this parenting gig like, "I'm gonna do it different. I'm gonna be different. I'm gonna send a different message." And yet here I was, so blind to this messaging that l- like, lived in my core and was getting in the way of how I was showing up for my sweet, beautiful daughter.
[00:20:56] So I'm putting down the narrative, not perfectly, not permanently, I picked it up a bunch of times, but I realized, like, okay, I can put this down, and in its place I can ask some different questions. And it's the question that gave the chapter, the chapter its title of the book that I participated in last spring, and it's a question I wanna leave you with today.
[00:21:20] You've heard me ask it before. What do you wanna create? Not what do you wanna fix, not what do you want to prevent, not what do you want your child to do. What do you wanna create right now in the only place that you have any power, which is your relationship today? And when I thought about that question, I could answer it, right?
[00:21:43] I wanted my girl to know how capable she was. I wanted her to feel like I had total faith in her, real faith, not performed faith with a lecture attached. I wanted connection and acceptance and encouragement to be what our relationship was made of, right? I wanted her to experience feeling connected and accepted and encouraged.
[00:22:10] I wanted her to feel seen and heard. And every one of those things was available. Regardless of what she decided about school, every single one of those things I could work to bring into the current relationship that I had with her. That's the difference between trying to control and working to create.
[00:22:33] Control is focused on her behavior. Creation, creating is about what we're experiencing inside of our relationship So let's see what happened there in terms of those four questions. So I stopped hammering on question four, right? What do I do? What do I do? I went all the way back out on the outskirts of the ecosystem to that first question, am I okay?
[00:22:59] And I did that work. I did what I needed to be okay, the breathing, the noticing, coming back to myself, some inner child work, journaling, seeing a therapist, talking to a very small group of friends, 'cause there were certain people that couldn't be who I needed them to be, so they didn't get air time, right?
[00:23:23] And from there, I could finally work on the second question: are we okay? Right? Are we okay? Was my relationship with her okay? And that took a little bit of work and time. I got to make amends for how hard it was for me to hold her decision and be supportive and, and trust her, right? I got to own that. I got to, you know, step in the muck many times as I tried to, you know, show up for her and get it wrong.
[00:23:54] So making amends was a big piece of strengthening our relationship. And over time, that final question, what do I do, what do I say, it started to take care of itself because the moments got easier, right? Not because I found better words, but because there was something that was holding them, right?
[00:24:19] Remember, each part of the ecosystem is held by the part before it. I keep saying it because I keep watching it be true. And you might be thinking, "Well, what about the third question, like routines and systems?" I'm gonna be honest, there was a solid few years where from the outside looking in, it probably looked like there are no routines or systems here.
[00:24:41] But for me during that time, it was, you know, checking in, it was inviting her to eat with us, it was looking for small ways to connect Yeah, you'd have to look pretty close to see where the systems were taking effect during that period of time. And I think it's really important to say as well, I did not sit down, get curious, have this brilliant realization, and turn it around all by myself.
[00:25:13] I did not move through this period alone, not even a little bit. I had, like I said, my therapist. Coaches, therapists, we need supporters as well, and I wanna say that plainly because I think there's perhaps some shame that maybe you might be carrying about needing support when you're supposed to be the one that has it all together.
[00:25:33] I needed it. I got it. It mattered. We eventually also, and through our community, did a adolescent DBT program, dialectic behavioral therapy. I've talked about it before on the podcast. It was, um, an adolescent program, so once a week she and I did a skills class with other parents and teens, and she had a DBT therapist.
[00:25:56] It was structured. It was professional. We both got to move through it. I learned so much You know, as someone who, like, I teach parenting, right? I coach parents. I continue to have so much to learn about being in relationship with other humans, and this was a hugely useful program. Getting help for her and doing my own work were never two competing things.
[00:26:22] They happened at the same time, and they really held each other. And like I mentioned, I had a small list. I had a small circle of friends who could hold this, who I could say the scariest versions of what I was moving through, and they would listen and not judge and not try to fix it and not flinch. They just would hold it, and if they did wanna give feedback, they'd ask, "Can I offer something?"
[00:26:48] And this is not nothing. This is probably the most important piece of what I had. Well, one of the most important parts of, of what I had. And I also had, you know... Well, she also had, Rowan had her dad. He was really good at showing up to this period of time and trusting her and believing in her, and I'm so grateful that she had one parent who really was able to be there like that from the get, right?
[00:27:17] So here's what I wanna say. Some of you have been listening to me for years, and I said this last week, and I meant it, and over 10 years of this show, there's people who've been with me for most of it, and we've never actually done anything together, right? And I love that you're here, genuinely. The show is free, and it's gonna stay free, and you owe me nothing.
[00:27:41] And I hope, actually, I hope that by listening to this show, you're getting a piece of what I was getting going through this hard time with Rowan and feeling like there were people who could see me and my experience and really get it and believe in me. Like, I hope that that's your experience of listening to this show, but I do wanna be straight with you about what a podcast can and can't do.
[00:28:10] I can give you insight. I feel pretty good about that. What I can't do from inside your earbuds is ask you the question that would crack your situation open. I can't see the narrative that you're holding because you can't see it either. That's what makes it a narrative instead of a thought. Somebody has to be looking at it with you.
[00:28:30] And like I said, I didn't find that narrative alone. It was through conversations with my therapist, conversation with other colleagues, other coaches that I'm in relationship with, the small group of friends. I found that narrative through my relationships with people around me, and I'm just gonna give a quick little plug here.
[00:28:53] That's the whole reason that I've created Immersion Week. Immersion Week, that's why Immersion Week exists in the shape that it's in. It's five days, it's live, it's with me and other parents who are in the same season that you're in. There may be some variance on the details, but we are all moving through adolescence, and change happens inside of relationship, right?
[00:29:20] Change happens inside of relationships. So I'll give you the details at the end, but first I wanna tell you about the anchor word practice
[00:29:36] And again, this was useful for me as I moved through the hard time. And, and the hard time wasn't a couple months, you guys. The hard time was a f- quite a few years, and there wasn't a choice that I had about whether or not I was gonna have a personal practice that was gonna support me in what I was moving through.
[00:29:58] It was survival, right? So just to remind you, I wrote a chapter in the book, Raising Teens Who Talk To You, with Cecilia and Jason Hinkley. Hinkley? Why does that sound weird? I believe that's their last name. Oh my gosh. Um, they're the Happily Family people, and they put together a book with a bunch of contributing authors.
[00:30:21] It went live, um, it's now an international bestseller on Amazon, and it was published last spring. My chapter is called Shifting From Control to Creation: The Inner Work of Parenting Adolescents, and it was also part of the early bird bonus for immersion week. That closed last week. So if you got in early, you already have it sitting in your inbox.
[00:30:43] Go read it. But I'm gonna teach you this practice about anchor words right now on air for free, 'cause you don't need a PDF download to do it. You just need about four minutes and a little honesty. So here's the situation that it's built for, right? Similar to what I moved through with my daughter. You're in the muck.
[00:31:05] You're in the mud. You're in the messy terrain of the teen years. Your child has said the thing, done the thing. Your lid is flipped, or it's about to flip. It's been flipping. The relationship feels tough, and in that moment, being a good parent is useless. It's too big. Your brain can't do anything with just be a good parent in those moments.
[00:31:32] You are activated. And I'm gonna suggest that what you might need in that moment is not a value but a word. So I talk about the intentional ecosystem. I love the word intention and intentionality. Intentionality means taking the time outside of the moment when nothing's on fire to decide who you actually wanna be for your teen in this season, right?
[00:32:03] I want you to think of it as qualities. What are the qualities that you want to animate, activate, bring to life in your relationship with your teenager? Not who you think you should be or who your mom was or wasn't. Three qualities that if you could embody them, would make you the parent that your teen needs in this season right now So when I think back to my hard season with my daughter, the qualities that are top of mind include compassionate, encouraging, and calm.
[00:32:48] Yours might be patient or easygoing, curious, steady, warm, playful. Playful. Playful's a tough one. I like, when, when I talk about playful or even joy with parents, to me, that is a quality of lightness and buoyancy, right? Like, I kind of sit up a little bit. Lightness, yeah. And it's real, right? Don't skip past that one, 'cause a lot of you, a lot of us, during the teen years, I mean, playfulness leaves the room.
[00:33:23] Lightness feels really hard to attain, 'cause everything feels so heavy. And guess what? Your kids notice the heaviness. So you pick three qualities, three qualities that your relationship with your kiddo is calling for. Write them down. Put them somewhere you'll see them. Put them on the bathroom mirror, your phone lock screen, a note taped inside the cupboard or in your car.
[00:33:52] I have alarms set on my phone. Here's what happens with these qualities. You get activated, right? You get activated, ah. What do you say? What do you say? What do you say? No, instead of reaching for a script or something to say, you remember those words. Compassionate. Okay. What does compassionate look like right now?
[00:34:15] What does it feel like in my body? What does it sound like? What does compassion sound like? That would be the practice that I would use if compassionate was one of my anchor words. So activation. Okay, I'm activated, and I wanna freak out. I'm not gonna do that. Maybe I'm gonna take a couple breaths. Maybe I'm gonna do that nervous system practice from a couple weeks ago, calm things down.
[00:34:45] And then, what do I wanna create? What do I wanna create? What's the, what's the quality I wanna bring to this moment? That's it. That's the practice. Because that question has an answer, and what am I supposed to say here does not. We're grasping. What do I wanna create, right? What do I wanna create? What's the quality that I wanna bring into the room?
[00:35:12] That's gonna get us somewhere. And notice what you've done with that practice, you've come back to yourself. You've come back to yourself. You've come back to that bigger picture of the ecosystem, that am I okay? Question one. You went out to that biggest part, your part, and then you move towards the middle with something to work with.
[00:35:37] And here's what I love. When you work on being compassionate, and encouraging, and calm, or easygoing, or patient, or fill in the blank for you, you're not just managing yourself, but like I said, you're creating those qualities in your relationship with your kids. You're building the thing out of what you keep putting into it, and they feel it.
[00:36:02] They feel it before they can name it, right? Something shifts in your relationship, and over time, that shift continues to happen, and here's the line out of the chapter that I wrote, "Instead of adversaries, our kids start to think of us as allies on their journey." Isn't that what we want? Isn't that what we want?
[00:36:27] Ally, not warden, or manager, project manager of their life, annoying old person in the house. No. We want them to think of us as supporters, as allies, people they can count on. So here's your homework this week, and I realize it's the third time I've given you homework in three weeks, so you've got this. I believe in you.
[00:36:51] Week one, remember we did the breathing, feet on the floor, you're okay, you're enough. Last week, it was about noticing, calming yourself, and going underneath the behavior, right? Meeting our kids where they're at. This week, pick your three anchor words. Do it today. Do it in the car. If you're driving right now, you know, and the podcast ends, take some time and just think, "What are the qualities that are being called forth in my relationship with my kiddo?"
[00:37:22] And you know what? The ones that were helpful in 2019 aren't the ones that I'd pick now, right? Seasons change, and what's being called for in relationships change, and the relationships that are calling us forth change. Yeah. Let your anchor words be the thing you reach for when things get hard. Woo. So yeah, that's what happened.
[00:37:48] She dropped out in 11th grade, and there was a period after that which was pretty dark, and I'm just gonna leave it there. But I figured out how to stay connected with her through the period of time that was the hardest, and that's huge. Through her hardest days, she felt loved. She felt supported. She did not have to earn her way back into my good graces because she never really left them.
[00:38:16] And over time, and I wanna be very careful about the shape of this sentence, because I am not claiming credit for her life, but over time, this is what supported her in helping herself, which is the only kind of help that ever actually makes an impact on anyone. We have to decide to help ourselves. And you've heard me share, she got her GED, she became a licensed esthetician.
[00:38:45] She has a great job. She decided in her own time, on her own terms, that she wanted to go back to school. She did community college, and she is moving into her senior year now at a four-year university studying biochemistry. There are sights on graduate school. She lives on her own. She wants to hang out with me.
[00:39:05] Oh my gosh, it's awesome. And that's the last thing I'll say about this timeline, because I, as I told you at the top, this, that snapshot is over. She is a whole adult with her own life, and what I'm actually proud of has very little to do with that biochemistry of it. What I'm proud of is that she can be with hard things.
[00:39:35] She's got real emotional intelligence, and when life comes at her, and it does, believe me, it does, she meets it with skill. She grows through it. She knows she's gonna be okay, and that's what I'd have wished for her if I'd been wise enough back then to wish for the right thing, that when life comes at her, she'd meet it with skill and grow through it So I'm not telling you this so you'll believe that if you do the work, your kid ends up in a biochemistry program looking at graduate school.
[00:40:10] That's not the promise. There is no version of this where I get to promise you any outcome, but here's what I know. We just don't know how things are gonna turn out with our teens, but there are endless possible outcomes. Endless, not one, not the terrible one that your brain has been rehearsing at 2:00 in the morning, endless.
[00:40:34] And when you take care of you, and you keep your focus on who you wanna be and what you wanna create in relationship, you increase the likelihood that everything's gonna be okay, maybe even better than okay, and that's the whole offer, not certainty, but better odds, and a relationship that's still standing whatever happens.
[00:40:58] Having lived it, I'll tell you, that turns out to be a lot, a lot
[00:41:11] Wow, I didn't realize how that would feel to share all of that with you. Um, I do wanna finish just again talking about immersion week, 'cause it's next week, you guys. September 21st through the 25th, Monday, not too long from now. It's five days. It's live with me, if you're listening to the podcast in real time.
[00:41:32] Monday is a two-hour workshop, and we're gonna walk all four of those ecosystem layers. Uh, we're gonna look at how you're doing, how the relationship is, whether your house actually works, and what you've got for hard moments. You'll see your own thin spots, which is uncomfortable, but also the entire point, right?
[00:41:55] You'll get tools for strengthening each of those layers. Tuesday is office hour, so you will have had some time to sit with the Monday content and bring me your real questions about what you're rolling around in. Wednesday is the group coaching. You watch a couple of parents move through something live with me, which is often where people learn the most.
[00:42:20] Um, it's so much easier to see the experience when it's not your own house, right? Gain insights and nuggets. Thursday is soul care. We journal, we meditate, we tend to your inner world. Everything today was about the fact that you can't create anything from empty, and the Thursday call is a place where we fill up our cups.
[00:42:46] And Friday's when we build your plan. You leave with something to do, not just something to think about. The whole thing is $69. $69 because I want it to be accessible. I want it to feel like just enough, where it's not an insignificant amount, but it, it feels doable. My hope is it feels doable. And, uh, the first 20 people who take advantage can sign up for a private 30-minute one-on-one call with me.
[00:43:14] They're going fast, but there's still a couple left. And registration closes on Monday when we start. So once you're in, we're in, and it's just us for the week. So if you've been listening to me for all these years and you've never done anything with me, I'd love this to be the thing you do. This is the perfect thing for you to do.
[00:43:34] It's five days, $69. You'll be in the room with parents who are exactly where you are, which does something that listening to the podcast alone in your car cannot do. So go to besproutable.com/immersion. That's besproutable.com/immersion, and I'll put that link in the show notes. All right? That's the story.
[00:43:57] Last time I'm telling it, and I'm okay with that, because the reason I can set it down is it's all worked out. And more than that, because my girl is so much more than the hardest thing that ever happened to her. Your kiddo is more than the hardest thing happening in your house right now, too. I know it doesn't feel that way every day, but that's a snapshot.
[00:44:21] You're in a snapshot, and snapshots do end. If you want to take one thing out of these last three podcasts, let it be this: You cannot control who your kiddo becomes. You never could, and the harder you hang on, the further you get away from them. But you can decide who you're gonna be while they figure it out, and it turns out that's the part that matters most.
[00:44:47] So pick your three words, then go be them imperfectly over and over for as long as it takes. Breathe. Yeah. I've got you. You get to trust the process. This is a season. It's not a verdict. Your teen is still in there. I'll see you next week. Thanks for being here. Bye.
[00:45:14] Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to my Sproutable partners, Julietta and Alana. Thank you, Danielle, for supporting with the show notes, as well as Chris Mann and the team at Podshaper for all the support with getting this show out there and making it sound good. As I mentioned, sharing is caring.
[00:45:31] If you're willing to pass on this episode to others or take a few minutes to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify it helps other parents find this useful content. Be sure to check out what we have going on for parents of kids of all ages and sign up for our newsletter to stay connected at besproutable.com.
[00:45:51] I see you doing all the things. I believe in you. See you next time.