Eps 257: Solo Show- Opening Up to Your Resistance

Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:05
Casey, Hello, friends. Welcome to the joyful courage podcast, a place where we tease apart what it means to be a conscious parent and a conscious human on the wild ride of parenting. I am your host. Casey overardi, I'm a positive discipline trainer, parent, coach and mom walking the path right next to you as I imperfectly raise my own two teens. Joyful courage is all about grit. Grit stands for 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. Today's a solo show, and I'm focusing a lot on the G the opportunity to choose into growth, on the parenting path. Thank you so much for listening. I'm deeply honored to lead you, and I am so grateful that what I put out matters to you. I'm also so totally stoked to keep it coming. Thank you for who you are and for being in the community. Enjoy the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. How are you we are doing well over here, navigating all the things teens and working from home and slow and steady climb to health and well being always, today is a big day. Well, actually, Tomorrow is the big day. 18 years ago today, I thought I was gonna have my first baby. Well, I was having a baby, the wheels were turning and my body was giving all the signals. What I didn't know was that while labor had begun, it would be quite a while until my sweet little baby girl would be out of my body. And by quite a while I mean 11:50pm the next day. Pm the next day. Yeah, sweet Rowan giving me the opportunity to surrender to the process even before she exited my body. My husband and I were so ready for birth, we did Bradley childbirth classes and wrote a birth plan out. We totally had a vision. We were ready. Of all the couples in our Bradley childbirth class, it was for sure that we were going to be the ones that actually followed through with the natural childbirth and birth center birth we were dialed right, and like so many birth stories, ours did not pan out the way we expected. I was an active labor for a long time. People really long and, of course, super excited at first, super exhausted by hour 15, by hour 2025, I was kind of dying for someone to suggest the hospital and an epidural, but I was refusing to be the one that spoken to that. And then it happened. I was exhausted. I hadn't slept in days. My I wasn't making, you know, the progress as far as how dilated I was I was stuck, and my sweet, sweet midwife, Darlene, with so much tenderness, let me know that she had faith in me, staying at the birth center and carrying on. There was no distress or crisis or I could go to the hospital. I could get an epidural, and I could rest for a little bit before getting the baby out, and I cried the whole way to Swedish Medical Center. But man, once I got there, once I got there, I was large and in charge. I got that up at Durrell. I got my second wind. I did push for what it felt like an eternity, like really, you guys, four and a half hours of pushing. Rowan was really tough to birth, four and a half hours of pushing, and finally she was born, my little seven pound, eight ounces, bundle of yumminess that you know, birthed me into motherhood. That first birth again was my first real lesson in resistance and how slippery and tricky and quiet resistance can be. I was super sore after labor, I mean sore in all the obvious places, of course, because I pushed out a baby, but also sore in my legs and in my booty, my bottom and after the fact, I realized that the whole time I was laboring, I was also clenching the back side of my body as I was breathing into my belly and imagining this opening. I was also really closed in the backside of my body, yeah, and I didn't, I didn't realize at the time, obviously, that that's what was happening. And I think this is the kind of thing that happens a lot, like in different contexts. When I work with parents, they really resonate with the idea that they get to let go and be open and be present, right, present with the experience, present to what their child's going through. But in reality, we spend so much time clenching and resisting and holding on to a vision that we have created for our children, and narrative around what's supposed to happen, expectations, attachments to how things will play out. And it's not always even in in our consciousness, right? It can be we don't even realize that it's happening. I know, you know, I know because I share about it. I get it. I lived it. We don't realize that this is what's happening until we are in that discomfort, right, the sore legs and butt that I experienced after birth. It's a different kind of discomfort with our relationships. Some of the indicators of that resistance and that clench manifest as tension between ourselves and our kids, pulling away challenges around communication and listen so much of what our kids, our teens are going through, is not easy for them to make sense of when they are held to a vision that they can't reconcile or fit into, they don't say hey, you know you're not really seeing who I am, and that makes me want to pull away from you. That makes it hard to trust you. Instead, they experience that disconnect as a deep discomfort in their body. Emotions like sadness or anger or resentment show up as filters for how they see the world, and they move through the world with these emotions at the wheel. Right? They move through the world. They begin to move through the world with these emotions at the wheel, and we feel it right. We can feel the pain too, because we have a teen that's pissed off all the time or hurtful towards us or maybe doesn't want anything to do with us and shuts us out. It is painful, much like the pain in the ass I felt after labor. See what I did there, but I will say Happy 18th birthday to sweet Rowan, because Tomorrow is her birthday. I have an 18 year old you guys. Oh my gosh, yeah. So my invitation to you and to me as we continue on the path of parenting our beautiful children is that we are when we're in that pain, in that soreness and that tension, to start to ask ourselves and be curious about, what am I resisting right? Now, I think this is such a powerful question, what am I resisting, right? So maybe my teen can't seem to stand me right now, what am I resisting? Or no one will help out around the house. Where am I in resistance? Or I can't fall. I can't get anyone to follow the screen time rules. What am I resisting? My child doesn't care about school. What am I resisting? My teen is breaking all the rules. What am I resisting? That question, what am I resisting? It sounds like a simple question, right? As if we simple if, as if we simply recognize, like, Oh, my child is moody with me all the time. What am I resisting? And poof, the answer will show up magically to save the day and make us feel better. Yeah, no, it's not that simple, but it is the beginning. It can be the beginning an opening of a deep, personal inquiry, right? There is an assumption with using this question the way I'm offering it, and the assumption is that discovering what you are resisting plays into how your child is responding to the world, like let's I'm going to say that again. Let's sit with that possibility when we uncover what we are resisting inside of our relationships with our kids, our attachments, our visions like, what is it that we're resisting, and when we can discover that we can recognize, begin the work of recognizing how that. That is playing into how your child might be responding to you in the world, right? And it takes a bit of work to discover what's under the surface there, what it is that you're actually resisting, because it's not going to be like right on the tip of your tongue most of the time, because probably you haven't considered that you're resisting anything up until this point. So asking yourself this question may be a stretch, and you know, I love the stretch, right? This is personal growth on fire, my friends, when we can ask ourselves a question and recognize like, holy cow, I I don't know how to answer that question like that, is it that is the question to sit with?

Start with the first thing that comes to mind, go deeper. Go deeper. Go deeper, finding the humility and the being willing to be vulnerable enough to ask, What am I resisting? Is a huge step towards knowing yourself at an ever deeper level. So another gift of our kids, right, another gift that our kids offer us, as always, is the opportunity to know ourselves at an even, even deeper level.

Many of you know my experience with my daughter, the same one I was in labor with 18 years ago, and her mental health and decision to opt out of school. And if you don't know that story. Please go back and listen to episode 252. She came on for an interview and shared and it was amazing. There was so much that I resisted in what we went through, and my resistance added to the pain she was in. Listen to that episode, and hear how we moved through it all, and know that I'm still working on checking my resistance at the door and really being with her and the life she's designing for herself. And I want to say too, checking my resistance at the door requires me to get ever better at recognizing when it's in the room, right? Recognizing when it's in the room. And yeah, the thought of, yeah, but she's just a teen. What can she possibly know about anything does show up, especially in some of the big decisions that she's making. But guess what? She knows about things, and it is the experience and the life she is living right now that will prepare her and influence how she shows up to her future, right? I mean, isn't that true for us? Sure? We can look back at those later teen years and make a laundry list of things that we did that were mistakes, and had We not made those mistakes, we wouldn't have learned the lessons, the lessons that came out of those mistakes. And maybe we had to learn the same mistake, the same lesson multiple times. Raise your hand, if that's you. My hand is up. But what it took was the experiences that we had to really teach us those lessons, encouraged and empowered, is how I hope she feels every step of the way. Both my kids, I want them to feel encouraged and I want them to feel empowered to design the life that they want, and that looks different today than it will in a year or five years or 20 years from now, right? It isn't about being passive and saying, Good luck. This is about being curious and starting by aiming that curiosity at ourselves. What am I resisting? What do you find when you really explore that question? And I challenge you, those of you that are listening today, I challenge you to make it a point later today, after you listen to this podcast tomorrow morning, open up your journal and do some exploring around resistance, right? And remember, this is a personal growth step, right? This is the personal growth step, and it is essential in shifting the experience that we're having, if we want to transform the relationships that we're in with our kids or our partners or anyone else in our lives, doing an exploration around where we have resistance inside of the relationship is going to broaden your perspective around that relationship and give you even more ideas for how to move forward once you've identified. The resistance, you can decide if you want that to be leading you, or if the resistance is something you can work on. Letting go of how you show up in relationship has a huge influence on the quality of that relationship, right, of course, and when it comes to the relationship between you and your kids, you're the adult. You're the one that gets to do the work, they are still baby humans in the grand scheme of things. Yes, they might be taller than you. Their voices may have changed for all intents and purposes. They may look like full grown humans, and they're not. They're baby humans, their emotional development, their mental development, it's still in process. You're the adult, and I know that our teens can hurt us, and it can feel like, you know, why am I in, you know? You know, we've all had this moment, right? If I wasn't the parent of this child, would I want to be in relationship with them? Sometimes the answer to that question is a little painful, right? Sometimes it's a wee bit painful. And when it comes to the relationship between you and your kids, you are the adult. You're the one that gets to do the work. You're the one. Do

you want to go deeper with this. If you didn't already know, I have an amazing new Summit coming in February, parenting for the brave new world. Amazing, truly, and I created it for you. And please know that the wisdom shared during the recording of the interviews has already been integrated into my personal life. I loved every interview. Each one was super useful, super real and relevant. Now, the real fun thing about the summit is I'm also I also offered a bonus to anyone who signed up by last Friday, called my journey to joy program. My journey to joy program. It's one of the first programs that I ever developed, and I have not done a great job of marketing it, but it's amazing, and it pretty much takes you through the process of the inner work that I'm sharing here. I don't use the language of resistance, but it's absolutely personal growth that we all need to show up better for our kids. So here's what I've decided to do. I've decided to extend the bonus that was supposed to end last Friday to this Friday for all of my podcast listeners, yay. That means that when you register, registering for the parenting for a brave new world summit before Friday, January 22 will also get you the journey to joy. Bonus. Now let me tell you about journey to joy. It is a three part program that guides you through growing in your awareness, making choices, seeing and making the choices that you see and moving into action. So growing your awareness, seeing the choices, moving into action, and I deliver the content through videos, short videos, like 10 minute videos, three audios, audio meditations and some journal writing. It won't it doesn't take a lot of time, and it makes a profound impact. It will make a profound impact on your life by going through it again. This program is the bonus when you sign up for parenting for a brave new world before January 22 so good. And the link for signing up is joyful courage.com/b, N W, b n, w, that's where you can register for Brave New World. Do it before the 22nd and you also get the journey to joy program. So good. So listen, I love creating these podcasts for you, and I know that many of you have been listening for months to these shows, if not years, and at the same time, I feel like there's so much more we could be doing together. I know that the relationship that you have with your child and the climate of your home is so important to you, important enough that you make time to catch this show as often as possible. So. And I believe that what you want to create in your home, the relationships that you're longing for, are also totally possible. I would love to take it next level and help you with that. I mean, the podcasts are great. I'm super proud of the podcasts, but there's more work that we could be doing together right to get there, we get to partner. The best way to do that is to work together in an official capacity. That way we can both make creating the life you want a top priority, and also you'll achieve it way faster. So investing in being a part of the summits is one small step. I'm going to be offering even more steps in the work in the near future. So stay tuned. Creating a membership. I'm creating community that's going to be amazing, but for now, I want you to really consider the summit. I am here for you, and I'm ready to support you in creating what you want in your home today. Register for the parenting for a brave new world summit now at www dot joyful courage.com/b, and w. I already gave you that link, but I thought I'd just throw it out there again. If you're interested in even more intensive work with me. Book a 15 minute call, a free 15 minute call, and we can decide if we're a good match for parent coaching. And you can book that call at joyful courage.com/free-call, joyful courage.com/free-call, 15 minutes you and me, we'll see. Is it a good fit? Do you have questions about coaching? Do you want to know about my other programs? Let's get on the phone. Let's get on the phone and discuss it. All right. Loving all of you today, super fun to reflect back on the beginning of my motherhood journey and those early days of laboring and birthing my sweet and beautiful daughter again. Happiest birthday to Rowan, so grateful to have her and for all that she's taught me and continues to teach me, and I will see all of you next week.

All right, thanks again for listening. If you feel inspired and you haven't already done so, please do me a favor and head over to Apple podcast and leave a review. We are working so hard over here to stand out and make a massive impact on families around the globe. Your review of joyful courage on Apple podcasts helps us to be seen by even more parents. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also follow joyful underscore courage on Instagram, Facebook. We love connecting with you on social media, and don't forget to sign up for the upcoming Brave New World Summit now at www dot joyful courage.com/b, n, w, love you.