Survival Mode

This is Going to Be FUN: the Podcast

Episode 42: Survival Mode

Episode Summary:

Survival Mode

Are you living in survival mode? Holding on for dear life hoping you will survive your teen's current phase, attitude, or the teen years in general?

Do you give yourself benchmarks for where things will be better? Like this school year or sports season or when they get their driver's license and you don't have to be their personal Uber driver anymore?

Learn how living like this is stealing your joy and what you can do to get it back. It is so much easier to do this when you have a coach cheering you on and helping you see the things you can't see for yourself. If you want support along the way, I would love to be your coach and cheerleader to bring the joy back in your parenting and in your life. Try out coaching for free and experience it for yourself.

Your story and my story are not that different. The details are probably different, but the things I have learned on my journey are probably the same things you can learn from yours.

The Time My Babies Almost Died

I have 6 kids: my oldest is a boy, then I had 3 girls and my youngest are identical twin boys. When my twins were born, my oldest had just turned eight three weeks prior, and so I had six kids, eight and under.

My youngest daughter was not quite 2 at the time, so she was still just a baby when I was pregnant with them. Their pregnancy was stressful. We had just moved to Arizona and didn’t have any family nearby and I was soooo sick.

At 23 weeks, they developed twin to twin transfusion syndrome. I won't go into the details of what that is, but unless we had emergency surgery within days of discovering it, both babies would die. Even with the surgery, there was only about a 60% chance that one baby would survive.

My sister-in-law happened to be coming in town that weekend and moved her trip up so she could watch our kids while we traveled to Hollywood, California because it was one of only a few places in the US to offer the surgery. 

We fasted and prayed for a miracle and the surgery went as smoothly as it could. I will never forget the moment in that ultrasound room the morning after the surgery when they checked for heartbeats and found two little hearts still beating.

We were so relieved, but that was just one benchmark and there was still a long road ahead. I was placed on bedrest for the rest of my pregnancy and wasn’t allowed to lift anything – including my 1-year-old daughter. It was hard.

I had weekly, sometimes bi-weekly, ultrasounds and had to ask friends we barely knew to help with our other kids. We also had to move out of our home and into a different home during that time and I couldn’t pack any of the boxes. It was so hard for me to let other people come and pack up my house and then unpack it in the new house. 

THEN it will be better 

I would tell myself every day, "if we can just make it through to 28 weeks THEN these babies will be so much better off. If I can just rest and take it easy we can make it to 28 weeks."

Then as soon as we hit that 28 week mark, I thought to myself, "If we can just make it through to 30 weeks." We got to 32 weeks. 

But then I thought, “If we can just make it through to 32 weeks.” I spent the remainder of my pregnancy just wishing and hoping that we could we make it a little longer and surviving one day at a time.

We made it to 36 weeks, which is full-term for twins, which was an absolute miracle, and when they were born, I was just so grateful that we had made it and they were alive.

But immediately they were placed in the NICU. My mom had come down to help with the kids while I was in the hospital with the babies, and I was basically stuck at the hospital.

My husband had only been in his new job for a few months, so he only had a few days of vacation time, so I was at the hospital by myself. It was so lonely and scary to see my little perfect babies who had been through so much all connected to tubes and wires keeping them alive.

There was so much information I was trying to process and understand. It was such a challenging time, and I would just think... "If we can just get him off the breathing tube... If we can just get him breathing on his own... If we can just get him off the feeding tube and he starts nursing on his own... If we can just get out of here and get home, THEN things will be better." 

The Not-So-Happy Ending

And when we got home, I was thrilled, I was so delighted, I felt like I could take on the world. I was so happy to be reunited with my older kids and so happy to be in my own bed and so thankful to finally have these babies home and healthy.

But I quickly realized that there were more challenges... I had twin infants that needed to eat all the time, and I didn't sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time for many months. I would get a cumulative four hours of interrupted sleep at night, and I just felt exhausted.

And I thought, "if we could just get these babies to sleep through the night THEN things would be so much better." 

My youngest daughter was an explorer and she would escape from the house all the time while I was nursing the babies.

We put locks and chains on the door, but she could still find a way out, and she would be roaming the neighborhood... She was two. And it was crazy. And I kept thinking, "if we can just get through until she goes to preschool, THEN things will be better.” 

The Grass Is Always Greener

Are you noticing a pattern here? Every time we would reach the milestone I was waiting for, there was always something else. Each time we reached the “end” there was always a new struggle. And that's the way it goes for all of us.

In the last few weeks I have noticed my friends saying things like, “If we can just get through to the end of this sports season...” “If we can just make it to graduation...” “If we can just get this part finished, the rest will be easy...” “If we can just make it to summer...”

And I can relate. My whole life I have been saying things like this to try and motivate myself to keep going.

But I have finally realized that it won’t be easier on the other side, it will just be a different kind of hard. And that sounds a little depressing, but I don’t think it is, because with the hard comes a lot of good.

The truth is we only have the moment we are in right now. And it has a lot of things about it that are hard…but it also has a lot of things that are beautiful and amazing and we are missing those things when we are surviving the hard. 

It is Going to Be 50/50

This happens because our brains will always interpret things as positive about half of the time and negative about half of the time. When I first learned this concept years ago, I didn’t believe that my life was 50 percent positive and 50% negative.

I am an optimist by nature, so I was certain my life was more like 80% positive/20% negative. Maybe 70-30. But 50-50? Not a chance. But as I have lived my life and observed the lives of others and given myself a little bit of space to consider whether it might be true, I have learned that my life isn’t 50/50.

I have learned that 100% of my life is for my own good. But my brain is 50/50, it interprets the circumstances of my life as positive about half of the time and negative about half of the time. 

Why Your Brain is 50/50

There are a couple of reasons for this that seem to almost contradict each other and yet both are true.

1. The human brain is always trying to keep us safe by creating a balance between our emotions. Just like it is trying to regulate our blood sugar and our metabolism and our hormones back to the level that is “normal” for us…it is trying to regulate our emotions. To keep them at a steady flat line instead of lots of peaks and valleys. So when we feel better than normal, our brains will try to regulate us back down to normal. And when we feel worse than normal, our brains will try to regulate us back up to normal. The normal range feels safe and comfortable to our brain and keeping us safe and comfortable is its job.
2. We need negative emotions for growth. Think about the times when you have grown the most in your life. Did you feel mostly emotions you would consider positive or mostly emotions you would consider negative? Was that time in your life easy or hard. It was hard and full of negative emotion right? That is how growth works. Those struggles are what we use as humans to grow and progress to the next version of ourselves. And so our brain needs to look for those negative things, those negative experiences, those negative emotions, so that we can progress, so we can keep growing. When we look back we can usually look back and see how it was for our good. But when we're in it, it just feels like a struggle.

A friend was telling me the other day that she had realized that “everything worth doing is hard.” And I agree, but I would phrase it differently. When something is hard it becomes more meaningful.

The struggle is what makes it matter so much to us. Going to college feels more meaningful to the kid who had to work and get scholarships to pay their way because there was no way their family could afford it than the kid who has always known their parents would pay for their tuition, room and board. The instrument or sport a child has invested their time and energy into mastering is more meaningful to them than the one they could just play casually with no effort.

Don’t Miss the Good Stuff

Sadly, we often make things worse for ourselves because we are mad about the negative emotion and wish it was different. We resist it and try to avoid it. We wish we were already through it. And we miss out on the 50% positive emotion we could be experiencing.

On the other side of whatever struggle you're in right now, there will be a new struggle. Life won’t be better...some parts will be better, but there will still be hard things.

3 Ways to Feel More Positive Emotions

Don't get me wrong. I'm not telling you to resign yourself to a life of misery and endless wo. Yes, negative emotion is part of life. The goal is not to get rid of it entirely but there are a few things you can to feel more positive emotions in your life:

1. Adjust your “normal range” for emotions more toward positive emotions
2. More quickly recognize how the hard stuff is for your good - maybe even when you are in the midst of the hard.
3. Learn to process emotions so you can stop resisting and avoiding negative emotions and accept the 50/50.

Feeling better is possible and it isn’t complicated, but it does take time and effort. It requires us to keep going when things get hard and see where we are missing out on the positive 50.

That is really challenging to do on your own, and having a coach has been a vital part of that process for me. If you want to feel better in your life, I invite you to join me in the ENJOY coaching community where I can help you do this work. 

STOP Surviving

 So many parents are trying to survive the teen years one day at a time, holding on for dear life –

If we can just get through this attitude phase THEN things will be better.

If we can just survive until they get their drivers license and we don’t have to drive them everywhere, THEN things will be better.

If we can just survive AP Season THEN we can get off this emotional rollercoaster.

But in doing so they are missing out on all that they could be enjoying about the teen years. Yes, there is hard stuff when you are raising teens. But there is also SO MUCH GOOD.

Don’t wish these years away! I have experienced this transformation in my own life and I would love to help you experience it too. It will make parenting easier, more effective and a lot more fun.

If you have ever wondered if coaching could help you experience more joy in your life and in your parenting, schedule a free parenting strategy session today and give it a try.

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