Kinship Parenting: Overcoming Overwhelm Through Emotional Hygiene

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How do you manage the emotional motherboard of a home with 10 children, 17 foster placements, and a lifetime of complex family dynamics? Well, you don't do it with luck. You do it with thought management.

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Today's guest, Bonnie Butler, is a master life coach who has lived in the trenches of biological, foster and adoptive parenting. She's here to show us that the greatest tool the invisible CEO possesses is isn't a better calendar. It's a regulated nervous system and the ability to lead ourselves through the storm.

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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of legal, financial and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society.

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Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of childrearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experience experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

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I sat on my kitchen floor this week, literally inches away from the wall. I just slid down.

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My heart felt like I'd been through a high speed collision and I was caught in this toxic fantasy of what might have been. The quiet house, the travel, the empty nest, being back home in Montana. And I realized that my overwhelm wasn't just about the kids. It was about the thoughts I was having about my life. Bonnie Butler's story of adopting six siblings and losing her confidence as a parent only to find it again through emotional hygiene is the lifeline I needed this week.

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If you've ever felt like a failure because you can't control the chaos, this conversation will change your internal narrative. Hi Bonnie. Welcome to our show.

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Hi. Thanks for having me on.

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Bonnie's core philosophy is that our overwhelm is often a result of our thoughts about the situation, not just the situation itself.

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Ani, you're a mother of four biological children.

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You fostered 17 and adopted six children.

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Why don't you share with us your story?

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So, just a quick snapshot. We got married, had four kids, thought our family was done for a while, and talked a little bit about foster and adoption because my husband had experience with that in his birth family and decided we were Just going to put that on hold for a while. And it kind of slipped off our plate until we got a phone call asking us if we would become foster parents. And we talked about that a little bit, decided we didn't really want to foster, we wanted to adopt. And our friend who had called really gave us some perfect advice, which is if you want to find out if you can really raise someone else's child, you should foster first. Because you're gonna get the kids who have the challenges and the behavior issues and learning disabilities and all of those things that come with these kids who've had hard backgrounds. And if you can't handle that, then you can stop being a foster parent. But if you go straight into adoption and then you find you can't handle it, it's really a painful exit out of that for the children, for the parents, for everyone involved in it. It becomes really painful. So we agreed to start with foster.

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And we did a dual licensing process where we were licensed to foster and doing the adoption, home studies and everything at the same time. And over the next three years, we had 11 foster kids come through our home and we were doing pretty well. And our oldest son graduated from high school and left. And we had five teenagers in the house, three of ours and two 14 year old foster boys.

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When I got an unexpected phone call and they asked if we would be willing to adopt a sibling group of six, and I'm sure that my face just had a look of utter shock. On it, mine would call me to do what?

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And as we talked about the prospect of that, at the end of that conversation, I found myself sitting on the floor, not even recognizing that I had slid down the wall during the conversation.

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But my husband and I spent a lot of time in prayer and trying to figure out was this right for our family. This is a massive change coming our direction. And ultimately we felt very strongly that it was right that the path that we were to take was to take these six children. And so we had two girls and two boys. And the group that we adopted were siblings. There were five sisters and one brother. And on the day that they moved into the house, I felt so confident in my ability to parent and thought, I can handle this. My four biological kids were doing well. I mean, don't get me wrong, all the ups and downs, normal family, teenagers, the whole nine yards, right? Nothing perfect, but we were doing okay. And the 11 kids that we had fostered, we had been able to help them get onto stable ground and, and moving forward in a successful manner. And So I thought, okay, I got this. I can help six more kids.

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And one year later, I had zero confidence in my parenting ability at all. And just that I can't even figure out what their needs are, much less meet their needs. And over the next 20 years, we went on the wildest roller coaster ride of our life. And we had some of the most profound, remarkable, joyous experiences, but we also had some of the deepest, painful, dark times to walk through together as a family. And there was a lot of heartache and a lot of hard times and times when I felt like, I don't know why God trusted me.

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I can't find my way through this, you know? And I remember one very distinct experience that I had where I was really questioning and felt like I just couldn't do this.

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And, you know, God very clearly told me that I had to stop focusing on what might have been and that that opportunity ended when I said yes to taking these kids and that I needed to focus on what could be because it could be great, but I was going to have to let it be great. And in that moment, I recognized that I had gone from this confident parent to this parent who was so overwhelmed and. And exhausted and drowning that I was only focused on what my life would have been like had I not made this decision.

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And I didn't even know that that's where all of my thoughts were until that moment when I started recognizing that everything I thought was, oh, my gosh, I would have the perfect life. Everything would be fine. I would have all this. I would only have one child left at home. I would almost be an empty nester. Everything, you know, the fantasy that we can get caught up in if only I had done something different.

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And so then I had to start really turning and looking at, okay, how do I make it good?

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How can I let it be good? And that was a really, really long journey for me because there were so many ups and downs, and these kids had had so much trauma and abuse in their background, and we had gone through all the training classes, but nothing prepares you for six kids all at once who had had a variety of different experiences because they hadn't always been kept together, and they'd been in and out of foster care for nine years.

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So by the time we had all of them raised and our youngest, we had to eventually put in a facility because he was so emotionally dysregulated that he became dangerous to himself and to us. And walking away from that facility that day was just a heartbreaking moment for me and A mom where I felt complete failure, that I had failed him, I had failed God, I had failed my husband, all the rest of my kids. And so I took probably about an 18 month personal journey to heal from all of that and from the sense of failure and the mistakes and all the judgment that I placed on myself. And during that journey, as I was healing and learning some of these emotional regulation tools, tools and learning how to manage my emotions better and learning how to recognize my thoughts and to adjust my expectations. Because so often our expectations just get us in trouble. You know, we just have these high expectations and, and the other person doesn't even know we have the expectation and then they don't meet it and then we're disappointed. And, you know, it was, it was a long journey. But about 18 months after that, I started to feel okay, and I started to feel like, maybe I'm gonna survive all of this and maybe it'll be all right. And a few years later, I was really. We had moved to Texas and I was trying to figure out, what am I supposed to do here in Texas? What is my purpose now my kids are grown and out of the house, and now what?

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And as I tried to fit, find a path and really communicated with God on what I was to do, the answer was to become a life coach and start helping other foster and adoptive and kinship parents who are going down that road that I went down and to help them avoid some of those pitfalls that I fell into because I didn't have any help. And, you know, the Internet didn't exist, we didn't have support groups everywhere, and we moved a lot with my husband's in employment. And so we didn't have access to the services because we were not in the county we adopted out of. So I just have a wealth of experience, hard earned experience that, you know, and I've gone through the certifications and the trainings to become a life coach and to understand on a much deeper level these tools and how they can help. And now I look back and I go, okay, I need all my kids to come back home and let me parent them now. Redo. It would be so much more successful. Yeah, well, hindsight's 20 20, right. And so that's what I do now is help other parents to find joy in their parenting, to find their emotional center and to understand that when we understand our own emotional hygiene and when we can manage our own thoughts, our emotions and our expectations, we can stay centered and calm in the middle of total chaos going on around us.

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And the more calm and centered we learn to be, the more that ripples out. And our kids watch us stay calm and then they start learning, some through osmosis and some through. The more confident we become, then we can start teaching them the tools that we have. And we. One of my daughters, the oldest of my adopted daughters, said to me on one visit, mom, you are so much calmer now than you were when we were all home. I said, there's two reasons for that. One is all the training, everything I've learned, and secondly, I'm not responsible for any of you anymore. So there's, you know, that level where they're out on their own and. But, you know, at the end of it, there were moments when they weren't talking to us or this one was mad or that one was mad. But a year and a half ago, we had a family reunion where for the first time in ten and a half years, we had all ten of our children, seven of the eight spouses, 24 of our 27 grandchildren, all together in the same place for three days. And we just had love and laughter and healing and just rebuilding bridges that had been burned over the years. And we learned that we really can come back together, that we can be whole as a family. And for me, that was just the blessing and the reward for not giving up when it got hard. And it got pretty hard. Yeah.

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Wow. I mean, I have two and mine were already grown when I got them. I can't imagine the challenges between three different sets of children. The bio, the foster and the adopted. Must have been challenging in itself.

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It was. And you know, when we first started, we included our biological children in these discussions because it was going to impact them. And I just feel very blessed that my kids have huge hearts and they just were very open about taking these kids in. And as each set of foster kids came through, they bonded with those kids and they loved them and became friends with those kids.

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And you know, there's often what we call the honeymoon period when you have a new placement and the kids are trying so hard to be on their best behavior because they want you to like them and to keep them in your home because it's hard to get moved all the time. But I always looked forward to the end of the honeymoon when you started to see there were real personalities come out. And we had one 14 year old young man was placed with us and he was struggling. He's a very quiet, introverted young man.

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And my oldest biological daughter really connected with him and tried to draw him out. Of his shell a little bit.

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And, you know, he had gotten in trouble one afternoon. And so he was laying on the couch in the living room, kind of packed, pouting. And the other kids were upstairs in the loft watching a movie. And my daughter leaned over the edge of the loft and kind of teased him a little bit about not being able to be up there because he had gotten in trouble. And I kind of was watching to see what would happen. And a few minutes later, I saw him just kind of army crawling up the stairs with a pillow.

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And he got to the top of the stairs, he stood up, he threw the pillow at her, and then he ran back down and laid back down on the couch, Bit a little laughing. And my heart just sang because I'm like, okay, he feels comfortable enough to throw a pillow in the house. We're good. He's feeling more connected. And they stayed connected and stayed in touch even after he left the home.

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But, yeah, it's an amazing journey. Tough at times, but really, really rewarding. I mean, the hardest thing I've ever done and the most rewarding thing I've ever done. I hear you. You know, we're really created as such resilient beings, and we have opportunities to see that when we get from the place of being a victim of circumstance to an agent of change. And I think that's the key, because for these children as much as for us, we have the resilience, but we don't know it until we.

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Even though for some of us, this was not a choice, it ultimately does become a choice. And we have to be clear about that in order to move to that position of being an agent of change. And once we can do that, I think that's such a challenging place to be in between that place. But then once we do, it's amazing, the walls that we get through, and it's like a marriage. This is the way I look at it. You weren't who you.

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You aren't who you were when you started.

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And the beauty that you share is that we get through this together, no matter how messy or difficult, because life can be really messy. And obviously yours was, but you stuck with it, and you knew that you were supposed to do it. You made a choice at the beginning, and you're constantly looking back at that. I can't tell.

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I'm sure everyone knows, and there's nothing to be ashamed of about this, but we look back at moments and we go. I remember feeling like, did I make the right choice?

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Am I good enough to do this? Somebody else could do this better, right? Yeah. And those thoughts tank us. You know, they just tank us, and. They can make you want to quit. And I think that deliberately getting through those moments, however we can, as messily as we can, have to sometimes. And it's okay to be messy. It's okay to be messy.

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It's okay. Yeah. And I teach my clients there are three, three bridges that all of us have to walk across in order to be successful. And one of those bridges is, this is not the child I thought I was going to have. And one of them is, I am not the parent I thought I was going to get to be. And the third one is, this is not the life I thought I was going to have. And when we can cross those bridges, we start to feel a little bit more peaceful about where we're at and the journey. And one of my clients asked me last week, did I ever feel like I got jerked back across a bridge and had to go over it again? And I said, you know, yes and no in that yes, I had to cross those bridges again and again. But I never looked at it as getting pulled back across a bridge. I looked at it as Crossing Bridge that had the same title from a New Place because it might be with a different child and it might be a different situation, but life is a series of bridges that we get to cross. And some of them are short and easy to cross, and some of them are extended and long and harder to get across. And if we can just look that there's always going to be a new bridge in the future somewhere. And. And some of them are really fun bridges and have glorious views, and some of them are a little bit more difficult.

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Like, it's easy to ride a bike across a concrete bridge. Right. But it's not so easy to walk across a rope bridge that's swinging. And, you know, you've got just wooden steps that you don't know if you can trust to step on or not. Right. So there's just a variety of different experiences and different bridges that we get to go across. And if we can just keep moving forward to go across the bridge one step at a time, we will get to the other side. I love that visual.

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I love that comparison. Thank you for sharing that with us.

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So out of this whole experience, you've created the well, which is a place for foster and adoptive parents to gather and find healing and find that pathway forward together, is it not? It is. And I'm in the process of building that right now. So I'm Hoping to open it in March and to just have a place, a well, is a very symbolic thing to me. It's a gathering place. And, you know, in the old days, before there was indoor plumbing, all of the women gathered at the well, and sometimes the men came, but most of the time it was in the evening, right at the end of the day, and they would go and gather at the well and draw that sustenance back into their lives. Not just the water that they pulled up out of the well, but the connection with each other and the strength that we draw from being in community together. Sometimes in this journey, we can feel very alone, and it can be very insulating because our closest friends and family don't truly understand what we are dealing with and what is happening in our home.

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And when you try to talk to somebody who doesn't have any understanding of that, and they just see your children and think, oh, they would never do that, right? And so then you stop talking and you stop trying to have people understand, but then that is isolating. And then you feel very alone. And it just leads to more just sorrow and hardship when we feel isolated and alone in this journey. And so the well for me is a place of restoration and refilling, a place where we can rise together in community, where I will spend some time teaching tools and coaching and answering questions. But it's also a place for you to come and share your story and share your burdens so that it lightens the load, so that everybody who's in this community together and connected together can build a support system for this group that will come together, that we will know there's someone who truly understands our journey. And they can't fix it for us, but they can help us through it. And they can just be there sometimes, you know, just walking into a room and knowing that you're in a room of people who are on the same path that you're on. There's a sense of just being able to relax, right? Because they understand you. And they're going to understand when you say, you know, I came home today and found out that my teenagers had pulled knives on each other, or my daughter was choking my son, or these crazy journeys that we have happen that people outside go, what?

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It's just an amazing place when you can come together with other people who understand you, who know that you're in a place that you never expected to be in.

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And yet you're here and you're doing your best and you're trying your hardest to find your way through that forest that's in front of you. Right. And so, for me, I have felt very strongly impressed to create this membership, the well where we can come together and provide that sustenance and that support and that strength to each other. I love that. I'm so excited to learn more and be a part of it. I always tell people when they share their stories of these. These horrible and beautiful situations that we're in, that it is so healing for others. There's a lot of shame. We're afraid that what will come out of our mouth will just horrify others. And it's difficult to be vulnerable about the things that we need to be vulnerable about in order to do the healing both for us and for the children. And I tell people, don't worry. You're in a safe place.

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And every story that I hear is part of my healing. I think hearing your own story is very powerful.

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Most people that I interview, most grandparents that are raising grandchildren that I interview, tell me after they finished sharing their story and then they listen back to it. That is a big piece of the puzzle for them. Yeah, it is. It is. You know, there are so many things that we know in our head and our heart, but when we have to put it out to the world somewhere, it's a different experience. And I know when we were looking for a placement for our son and a place that would be able to help him, I had to fill out five different applications. And it was such a painful experience that first time. Putting down in black and white what my experiences with my son had really been. And then to be rejected at that facility and given another reference and having to do the paperwork again and again and again.

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But it did help me to understand that these things are real. It's not just in my head.

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It's not. It. It happened. And, you know, we have to find the right placement for him. And that meant five different applications before we found it. But it was. It was healing for me to put that out on the applications and have the people, they were so understanding, but they're like, our facility just doesn't have what he needs. And so try this facility. It'll be a better fit. And this one over here is where you need, and that one over there will be the best fit. And when we finally found the right fit, just that peace that came over us, that as hard as it was to place him there and to walk out that day and hear that door lock behind me, it was the best thing for him. We have to make hard choices sometimes. To Start to heal.

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And the whole reason that this community exists is because we haven't been talking about these issues of mental health and wellness that are critical. And if we want to put an end to. To them, instead of passing them on from one generation to another, we need to talk about this. And the world needs to be aware that this is. This is like removing the COVID to a very ugly face. Yeah. Yeah.

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And it is. You know, I struggle at times because everybody. We are taught personal hygiene. We're taught dental hygiene. We're taught how to clean our house, we're taught how to manage money. We're taught all of these things, but we are never taught emotional hygiene. No one talks to us about understanding our emotions, understanding how they come into play, how they feel in our bodies. No one tells us that it's okay to feel these things. You know, all of our emotions are okay. It is okay to feel. And, you know, we can't process and move forward if we're constantly pushing them away and shoving them down and ignoring them.

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That doesn't do any of us any good. And so as I learned this and I saw the difference in my life and how I felt and my ability to stay calm in the middle of total chaos, I just became very passionate about helping other people understand this and helping them have the tools that they need so that they can understand this and they can teach their children and we can start healing through these generations and giving these kids a better shot at a healthy adult life. And, you know, you really can't help someone else regulate their emotions if you are dysregulated. So it's starts with us learning how to regulate our own emotions, and then from there we can help others learn how to regulate.

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I agree. So having seen 17 children come through the foster system in your home, what do you think is the one emotional misconception the system reinforces that actually hurts the healing process for both the child and the parent?

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I think the mentality that if you start to bond with that child, they move them because they don't want you bonding with the child. You're a temporary caregiver. And I think that is the most disastrous and dangerous thought process, because part of what happens with these kids kids is every time a placement is disrupted, then that's a whole new disruption, attachment issue for that child. And when they're pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled, how do they ever learn to bond and attach with someone when every time they started to, they're removed? And so I think there's got to be Some rethinking on that. And I think that the process of healing has to come in allowing these kids to be loved. And you know, we do have to be careful. Right. Because there are foster parents who then interfere with the reunification and that's not what we want. We want the reunification to happen. But if we can train these foster parents to manage the their own emotions and their thoughts and not go down those roads to start with and not stand in judgment of the biological parents, but to be that loving, safe place for the child and allow the child to have a loving, safe place until they can return home. And if they're not going to be able to return home, then find the most loving, safe, permanent place that is best for them and quit disrupting them. I mean, our oldest was in nine different foster homes before she came to us. And there was so much just damage done with all of that disruption and can imagine she was 10, almost 11 when she moved in. And she had zero trust in any adult and rightfully so. Every adult in her life had let her down.

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And so with us, I mean she had seven years with us before she turned 18 and left. She never got to a point while she was in our home of trusting us. We now have a beautiful, trusting relationship with her and she's married and has two kids and is doing pretty well in life. But you know, those seven years she was not about to to let her guard down and trust us because she didn't have any evidence that adults were trustworthy. Yeah.

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Wow. You talk about self sabotage. Why is it that we as caregivers often sabotage our own peace even when things are going well? Yeah, I've seen that happen time and time again. Yeah, I think that we start to get fearful. Right.

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Everything's going okay. So something must be lurking in the background, something, you know, the other shoe is going to drop. And we're on guard all the time and when we are guarded all the time, that takes us down because we don't allow ourselves to actually enjoy that people peaceful moment. We don't sometimes don't even sense that we're in a season of peace because we're so on edge waiting for the next thing to happen that we don't sit back and go, you know, we're okay in this moment and I'm doing okay. And allowing ourselves to just say, okay, this is really hard, but I can do hard things.

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And it's okay to acknowledge that it's hard, but we don't want to acknowledge that it's hard because we want to keep this front up, that we can handle it all, and we really, truly cannot handle it all, all on our own.

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But trying to keep that facade up undermines us continually. And we're always searching for what's gonna go wrong.

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Especially if there's been trauma in your background. Right.

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There was in mine. It took a long time for me to understand that I actually would get bored if things were peaceful. Yeah. So we had an interesting study that was given to us because we had had the kids about three and a half years, and there were times when things would just be so calm, and then one of them would just fly off the handle over six, some little thing, and all of a sudden, chaos is reigning everywhere again.

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And the social worker sent us this study and said, I think this might be helpful for you guys. So what they did is they took children who were in a constant fight or flight situation, and they studied them in that fight and flight environment. And then they studied what happened when they put them in calm, safe environments. So what the study showed is that the longer they are in fight or flight and the more repetition that is for them, Then the brain thinks that that adrenaline rushing through it is normal.

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That becomes a baseline for the brain. So the brain seeks it.

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So when everything is calm and peaceful, their brain is searching for. For that adrenaline. And so they'll create chaos to get the adrenaline rush so that their brain can feel like, okay, now this is where I'm supposed to be is in this fight or flight. The downside of that is that the adrenaline stunts growth in very specific areas of the brain. And one of those areas is that the kids. That hunger and full switch doesn't work. So these kids can eat and eat and eat and eat and never feel full. Yeah. And I took me a while to understand that.

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At some point, I have one of. Those, like, the food's right here, and you can't put another bite in. But it. It doesn't. Their brain doesn't trigger that, so they don't feel full. So then we have to, as adults, be very practical and boundaries with food, Teaching them how to choose wisely, how to eat wisely. And, you know, we had to sit down with our kids and say, okay, knowing this, how many servings at a meal do we need? And so we allowed them to kind of have a lot of input in that discussion. And they all decided that two servings was enough.

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They didn't need four and five and six servings of something. So then we had to decide, what does a serving look like? So they set what they felt was a comfortable serving, and they could have two servings at a meal. So we had a set breakfast, lunch, dinner, and they could have one afternoon snack. And other than that, we had what we referred to as a closed kitchen. They could not come and just eat all day long and graze all day long in order to teach them healthy eating habits. They. The other area of the brain that gets really, really impacted is logical thinking that A leads to B leads to C leads to D. And that this choice, every time you make this choice, this is going to happen. This is connected, and that doesn't connect for them.

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And so they make choices that are harmful.

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And it never crosses their mind that this is going to be a poor choice. And then they'll do it over and over again, not connecting that it's going to be a poor choice every time you make it and helping them. You know, I remember distinctly one day having a conversation with my daughter and just saying, okay, I need you to take me by the hand and walk me across the bridge that you went across when you did this. Because it makes no sense to me that you would look at this situation and go, oh, let's go do this way, and help me to understand.

00:40:10.150 --> 00:40:36.320
I'm not trying to be critical or judgmental of you. I want to understand how your thoughts worked. What was your thought process in going down that path so that I can help you better. Because I can't even fathom why you would that. And see, it's impossible sometimes to try and understand why they think the way they do when their brain is working that way.

00:40:37.440 --> 00:40:56.890
Yeah. And they don't understand it. Yeah. They don't know why they think that way. They don't have the ability to connect that and go, well, this. You know, I've cornered my granddaughter and said, what made you think you could do this? And she'll sit there and think, and she'll go, I don't know.

00:40:59.130 --> 00:41:05.850
Yeah. Yeah. We had a real problem with them stealing from everybody in the house.

00:41:06.810 --> 00:41:28.930
And there was an afternoon when one of my daughters had come home. She had been babysitting, and she set a $20 bill on the top of her dresser that she had gotten paid. Ten minutes later, it was gone. And so we sat everybody down and we said, clearly, one of you took it. I mean, we're the only people in the house. There's no way around that.

00:41:29.650 --> 00:41:44.620
And of course they're not. None of them are going to. And so we just said, you have 15 minutes to return that money. Whichever one of you took it or we had some consequences line, and you will all pay the consequences.

00:41:45.490 --> 00:42:21.580
So whoever took it, the rest of them are going to be pretty mad at you if they're paying these consequences for something that you did and you just won't admit it. And I said, just put the money back on her dresser. And we talked about, why is this such an issue in our home? Why is it that you feel like it's okay to take something that doesn't belong to you, but if you're the one that had it taken, you are devastated and you are angry and you are so upset that someone would take something that belonged to you, but you turn around and take it from someone else.

00:42:22.380 --> 00:42:39.760
So we need to start connecting. How you feel when it happens to you should be preventing you from doing it to one of your siblings. And I said, we're just going to kind of sit here in this circle and chat for a little bit until you guys help me understand what the process is behind this thought that you can just take something.

00:42:40.480 --> 00:43:59.750
Because the girls were pretty close in age and size. And if I was doing the laundry and I put this daughter's shirt on that daughter's bed, the daughter who ended up with the shirt didn't give it back. Oh, well, mom put it on my bed, so now it's mine. It's like, no, mom, just put it in the wrong pile. Give it back. And as we sat and chatted that day, my one daughter finally said, I think what happens for me is that I see something that somebody else has and I like it and I really want it. And I start thinking that it should be mine, that I should have that it should be mine. So then I just take it and tell myself that it is mine, that I deserve it, and I like it, and so it is mine, and I have it now, so it's mine. And I thought that was very open and honest of her to just say, well, I see it and I like it, and I think it should be mine, therefore I take it, and now it is mine. Well, it's interesting because what's helping me get through when these sorts of things happen is to talk about feelings rather than people getting angry.

00:44:02.230 --> 00:44:42.769
So my granddaughter really understands feelings. She can't understand why she steal things or lies constantly about things, but she can understand how it makes other people feel because she understands how it makes her feel. So if you say, do you understand that when you take that shirt off that person's bed and you think you deserve it more that you've made Someone very sad about something that they just got that meant a lot to them, and she can go, yes.

00:44:43.810 --> 00:44:46.850
And we all judge people.

00:44:48.769 --> 00:45:10.290
Right. We all make judgments about people, but we judge people the way we think we should feel. Right. Through our own lens. Right. We think that that person shouldn't have that because I deserve it more. So when you show that to a child, they actually do understand.

00:45:10.769 --> 00:45:19.040
So she's starting to retrain her brain because this is what she saw. This is what was exampled for her.

00:45:20.480 --> 00:45:22.720
Yeah, that's.

00:45:24.240 --> 00:45:35.200
We started off talking about why we sabotage, why we do self sabotage, and got into this conversation. But this is a really. It's a very.

00:45:36.320 --> 00:46:09.450
The way the brain is affected by trauma is fascinating to me, and it sounds like it's an important part of understanding why these kids think the way that we do. And this is not just these children. I mean, this is part of the traumatic effects of being raised by humans that do this to other people.

00:46:10.410 --> 00:46:14.120
So many of us is very real. And.

00:46:14.440 --> 00:46:18.040
Yeah. I want to ask you one more question before we go.

00:46:19.560 --> 00:46:31.080
If you could mandate thought management training for every caseworker and judge in the kinship system, how do you think that would change the way families are supported?

00:46:36.840 --> 00:46:44.390
I think if we could get everyone trained, that would just be such a huge shift if we.

00:46:45.430 --> 00:47:15.130
Yeah, I mean, if everybody understood managing their own emotions. But also, sometimes we really have to turn around and put ourselves in the child's shoes. Right. And this child. And for my kids, there were, you know, weeks on end when they didn't know where food was coming from. And so they would go do a scavenger hunt through the neighborhood. You know, they'd knock on a door and, oh, we're on a scavenger hunt. Do you have peanut butter next door?

00:47:15.130 --> 00:47:40.230
Do you have bread next door? Do you have jelly? Do you have. And that was their coping mechanism. Right. And so they learned to lie to survive. And they don't learn. You know, if we are in a healthy, stable home when we're growing up, we learn by osmosis. And even if we're in an unstable home and dysfunctional, we learn by osmosis. The way our motherboards are formed.

00:47:41.590 --> 00:48:33.070
Right. And we pick up on little things. And so we kind of learn how life works as we're in those situations. But for kids who are in constant fight or flight and who are being pulled every which direction, they never learn those things. They don't have an opportunity to learn, because every day, their only goal is to survive the day, and they do what they need to do in order to survive. So if you have a child who's been trying to survive one day at a time for 10 years, 11 years, 12 years, they're not going to turn around and let go of that survival mentality three months after they get into a safe environment. It's going to take a very long time for them to trust. I mean, and they become adults that steal.

00:48:34.750 --> 00:49:04.970
Yeah. And it was interesting when I was working with one of the top child psychiatrists in the state of Nevada, she agreed to talk to my husband and I. She would not take us as clients. She told us we should sue the state of California for placing all six children with us. That. That was totally insane. But she said that you can plan on them being developmentally five to seven years behind their chronological age.

00:49:05.930 --> 00:49:09.370
And we saw that time and time and time again.

00:49:09.930 --> 00:50:25.070
So you've got a 15 year old who's chronologically 15, but is acting and behaving more like their 10. And the maturity is not there. And it doesn't come quickly and it comes in a gradual place. And she said in general, by the time someone is 21 to 25, that frontal cortex is taking more shape and form and they're making smarter decisions and thinking more logically and they can rationalize things out. But with these kids, sometimes that doesn't develop until they're in their 30s, and sometimes it doesn't develop at all because of that trauma to the brain during all that fight and flight and the adrenaline and everything that happens. They never heal from that. And so, you know, just think about the difference it would make if everybody understood emotional hygiene. If we had all the foster parents trained and if we had the social workers trained and the judges trained and everybody was working together to help these kids find a strong emotional foundation. What a difference it would make. Well, we're doing it, and I'm glad we are.

00:50:25.790 --> 00:50:29.070
Thank you, Bonnie, for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

00:50:30.190 --> 00:50:48.560
Yeah, thank you. Bonnie shared that there are three bridges we must cross. The bridge of the child we didn't expect, the parent we didn't think we'd be, and the life we didn't think we'd have. Ask yourself today, which bridge am I refusing to cross?

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Am I standing in the middle looking back at the old shore?

00:50:53.040 --> 00:51:51.740
Or am I ready to take the next step in the life I actually have? Remember, you can't regulate your home if you aren't regulated yourself. Join us next week as we dive into the gendered motherboard with Dr. Anthony Szilard. We're asking the hard questions. Why do grandmothers silently absorb the vast majority of the caregiving labor while grandfathers often pivot to the garage? We're moving past resentment and into strategy, exploring the neurobiology of why we lead differently and how to man up the support system in our homes. And the mission continues, and we are 2.7 million strong, still nurturing and still here. We are the keepers of the motherboard, the regulators of the storm, and the architects of a new legacy. Your emotional hygiene is the most important asset on the balance sheet.

00:51:52.060 --> 00:51:56.460
Keep nurturing, keep leading, and I'll see you in the next boardroom.