Transcript
Hello everyone welcome to another DailyJim It is thursday august 11th 2022. Today I want to talk about how we talk to our Children about talking about feelings.
We're just talking about emotions or conflict in general. So lately I've been hanging out around a lot of kids and their parents and reflecting on my own childhood growing up and, thinking about how I was taught to communicate emotions or which emotions I was allowed to communicate which ones I wasn't and in general how my parents would communicate with me and I was thinking about how. We learned so much or frankly unlearned, not unlearned, we learned so many rules on how to communicate from our parents. These are the people who primarily teach us how to speak. They are there from day one many times, if it's not our parents, then it's some form of guardian. It's the people who raise us often teach us how to speak.
They teach us whether we should say sorry or apologize, apologize or thank you or are we allowed to express when we're sad? Are we allowed to say when we're angry? How do we appropriately say that we're angry or express that anger or our joy or our pride or many things like this.
And I wonder if as parents, we are aware of that, maybe we are, maybe we say something to our kids and we realize that the kids mirror or reflect how we are communicating.
And maybe sometimes that may be the most frustrating thing in seeing their kids just uh kind of replicate what we're doing now. I don't have any kids my own myself right now. Um, but I've just seen this and heard this from many, many parents, this idea that kids will soak up like a sponge what we do, what we say, how we feel, and therefore, um, it can really frustrate us or confuse us or make us feel somewhat helpless at times that we have these behaviors and patterns that maybe we don't even like about ourselves. And then the kids start to emulate them.
So I've been thinking about this a lot because I think.
Changing how we speak can be really challenging at times for us. I think about how so many people want to learn a new language? Oh I want to learn spanish, I want to learn german or I want to learn Swahili or who knows a mandarin or who knows what language. And for many people learning a new language can be really, really difficult. Now try to learn to re learn a language you already know, try to change the way that you speak your language. If it's english, try to change the way that, you use commands instead of saying do this, say will you do this, or instead of saying will you do this, would you do this or do you mind doing this or changing just little structural syntactic elements and how do we communicate, instead of, you know, this is one thing when it's somewhat innocuous or lacking a very strong emotion, but how to change how we communicate when we're, angry or when we're feeling really sad or when we're feeling really hopeless or when we're feeling really excited, and then to change the language in those contexts, it can be really, really challenging. And sometimes we just revert I think back to the language patterns that we have from when we were kids, from what we learned from our parents, which probably they're reverting to linguistic patterns that they had from when they were kids and learned from their parents.
And so there's a part of me that when I hear people exclaim that something is genetic, I go, are you sure it's genetic? Or do you believe that it's hereditary? And it's something that's passed on from generation to generation, not necessarily in the genes, but perhaps in the behaviors and the habits and the culture. So if someone isn't, like, for example, I come from a family that historically has had many heart attacks, is it that genetically we have something predisposed to heart attacks? Or and or is it somehow how we deal with stress and anger and how we express it? Or don't express it? And does that add to our likelihood of having a heart attack?
And so just wanted to reflect a little bit today on how? Parents teach us how to speak again, parents, guardians, people who raised us teach us how to speak, mostly, especially from the early age in many of them learned how to speak a lot from when they were kids and some of these deep patterns, especially talking about, some deep more vulnerable emotional issues perhaps, can stay so rooted in us, that I think sometimes they can be hard to change, but when we can change them, they can have huge impacts on our lives. Not always, quote unquote good, sometimes bad, but really can just dramatically impact the way that we see life and how we interact with people. If we grew up where we weren't allowed to express any fear because it would make us weak and we would get scolded for expressing fear. Perhaps we've been holding on to so much fear and bottling up so much fear over the years, that when we finally get comfortable saying that I feel afraid and admitting that I feel afraid then maybe we can step into the courage where courage is being almost an antidote to fear, saying that I know I'm afraid, but I'm doing it anyway. So I know this really didn't talk about politics today, but I think it talks about the underlying way that so many of us communicate and how it can be hard to change how we communicate on the fundamental level. And yet if we do it can really open up a lot of things for us. So that's what I want to talk about today. It's the weekend for me. So I look forward to talking to you on monday and I hope you have whatever type of weekend you want to have. Alright, I'll talk to you soon.
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