Moving from Suffering to Love: Emotional Healing for Grandparents Raising Grandchildren

WEBVTT

00:00:00.880 --> 00:00:16.000
What do you do when the people you love most in the world are the ones who trigger your deepest resentment? As kinship caregivers, we often look at our grandchildren and see a mirror, a reflection of the parents who aren't there.

00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:24.000
Or worse, a reflection of the traits we can't forgive in ourselves. Today, we aren't just talking about parenting.

00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:27.359
We're talking about an emotional exorcism.

00:00:28.289 --> 00:00:38.289
Dr. Tony Siller joins me to discuss how to drop the psychological stones we've been carrying so we can finally lead our families with an open heart.

00:00:42.929 --> 00:01:31.290
Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing Through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of 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. 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.

00:01:33.849 --> 00:01:51.450
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.

00:01:53.060 --> 00:02:01.939
Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

00:02:09.539 --> 00:02:39.300
I'm going to be honest with you. Last week was really hard for me. I found myself in the kitchen in Louisiana, 2,222 miles exactly away from my mountain home in Montana, feeling a heat in my chest that had nothing to do with the humidity. I looked at my granddaughter, and for a split second, I did not see her rosy complexion or her progress. I saw her father's defiance.

00:02:40.180 --> 00:02:49.990
I saw the unforgivable history of our family trauma staring back at me. I felt like a judge in a courtroom instead of a grandmother in a home.

00:02:50.870 --> 00:03:12.229
I realized I was drowning in my own defensive shields and I needed a way out. That's why I reached out to Dr. Tony Szilard. Tony is the author of Love and Suffering and Screened In. He specializes in emotion and leadership, but more importantly, he understands the why behind our pain.

00:03:13.030 --> 00:03:34.699
Tony helped me see that as invisible CEOs, our greatest obstacle isn't the broken foster care system or the lack of state funding. It's the resentment that paralyzes us. If we want to change the trajectory of these children, we have to start by retooling our own emotional motherboards.

00:03:35.500 --> 00:04:22.360
Toni, I'm so excited to speak with you today. I can't tell you how important I think it is for us grandparents that are raising grandchildren to deal with the resentment of the situations that we're in, the financial struggles, the loss of retirement, because I think it's critical in being able to get past the suffering and help these children and to be able to accept them as they are. First of all, Laura, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I love your podcast and I love what you're doing, and you always ask wonderful questions. I think what if I can reflect back what I'm hearing from you is that we want to show up with others with a clear mind and a full heart.

00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:30.800
And what happens is that suffering sometimes obstructs that we haven't really been able to confront our suffering. We haven't been able to process it.

00:04:30.800 --> 00:05:43.779
If you go back to, I don't know if some of your listeners remember the horror movie the Exorcist. And it was actually, I grew up in Washington, D.C. and it was filmed very close to my house, believe it or not. Interesting. And so in ancient mythology, an exorcist would ask the person who was possessed, in quotes, would the first thing they would do with a possessed person is they would ask them to name their demons. The idea there was that by naming them, the demons lost their power over the person until they were no longer possessed. And I think we all have these skeletons in the closet, and we have this pain that we've been through for those of us that are fortunate over a long lifetime. And when we don't acknowledge that suffering, then what happens is that it psychosomatizes in a thousand different ways. And we often feel resentment, especially toward other people who we hate to admit it, but are like us. We see ourselves in them. And that's what Herman Hess, the German sort of philosophical novelist, he once wrote that we only hate in others what's inside us. The rest we don't recognize.

00:05:44.899 --> 00:06:23.230
So it's that recognition of something that we cannot accept within ourselves, and so we cannot accept it in our grandchildren. There was a section of your book where you say that what we do, and I identified with this, is we'll see someone judge them for their actions, but we're seeing them as we see ourself, doing what they do better, rather than accept them as they are going through the process. We're always judging.

00:06:23.790 --> 00:07:59.620
Yeah. So, Laura, like what we do, we're judging creatures, in fact. So I do research on emotion and leadership. And what's interesting is that emotions only arise, first of all, when something's important to us. If we don't value a person, situation or object, we don't feel an emotion in relation to them. So when we feel these emotions, the reason we feel them is we tend to go around and ask ourselves, is this person, situation or event, is it good for me or bad for me? Does it facilitate my goals and values or does it obstruct my goals and values? If it facilitates my goals and values, then I experience a positive emotion like happiness, joy, enthusiasm. If it's obstructing, I perceive it to be obstructing my goals and values. I experience a negative emotion like anger, insecurity, fear, sadness and so forth. And so we enter this emotional roller coaster because we just go around all day long going, good for me, bad for me. Is this event good for me, bad for me. Is this person good for me, bad for me. And if we're able to put that judgment on the back burner and instead just try to be present with what's around us and with ourselves, then we step off the emotional roller coaster. It's a completely life changing event and it's hard to do it. We're taught that we need to judge. We need to judge because otherwise we might make mistakes if we don't, if we don't judge the people around us, the event, the situations around us.

00:07:59.779 --> 00:11:52.599
If you fall into a ditch, it's good to know where the ditch is so you don't step in it again. But that doesn't mean we have to judge the ditch. It's just like the ditch is there, right? It's there. But if you don't feel that that ditch is going to negatively influence you, but you just need to know of its presence, then there's no need to judge it. So part of it is our own insecurity that we can be like self standing human beings, upright human beings, even without judging others. So what I'm understanding from reading the book is, and what I'm trying to do with these kids, with my family, with my husband, since I've read the book is just listen. And when I begin to judge, identify within me where that's coming from in my past, what's the verbiage I'm hearing? So when one thing that angry, sad, lonely, right? Yeah. When we judge others, what we don't realize, and it says a lot more about ourselves than it does about them, it says I am a person who needs to judge and it's really not necessary. There are some situations where sure someone is dangerous and you need to judge Quickly, to stay alive or to keep your family safe. And so, of course, quick judgments are necessary there. Most of the time we're judging when it's really not so necessary. And this is the irony, is that judgment gets us into this very negative emotional space of resentment. And resentment comes from re meaning again and sentire, which is to feel. So resentment is to feel anger again and again until we become paralyzed. And that's where most of us are paralyzed, stuck. Because first we judge someone, then we feel resentment, and then we spend years trying to get to a place where we can forgive them. And that's the irony. As I write in Love and suffering, without judgment, there's no need for forgiveness. We basically, we create the problem which is judgment, and then the solution which is forgiveness.

00:11:53.399 --> 00:11:57.000
We live in a society that just doesn't talk about feelings.

00:11:57.719 --> 00:13:14.250
That's absolutely right. And I noticed that if I found. If I've given myself permission to simply speak what I am feeling inside to my children. For instance, my granddaughter, who has been labeled with some cognitive brain disorders. Her mother did do drugs in utero. And that, I'm sorry, has probably affected her somewhat. But I haven't written off the fact that addressing these emotions within ourselves and helping them learn to do the same can't override a lot of the outward effects of those things. My granddaughter chose to ignore an agreement that we had, and she has a problem with that in general compared to my grandson. And when she came home, I wanted to be angry with her. And instead, because of reading your book, I said to her, I was very worried about you because you didn't come home when I asked you to come home, and I didn't know where you were, and you don't have a phone, so I can't contact you.

00:13:15.610 --> 00:13:19.209
And I also told her that it made me feel sad.

00:13:20.519 --> 00:13:54.689
I felt that my request was not heard, that she doesn't listen, and that makes me feel unheard. And she stopped. And even though she has a problem processing things, she does understand feelings. She thought about it. You could see her standing there and thinking about it. And she said. And I asked her, do you understand? She said, yes. She said, I'm sorry. And I said, let's work on that.

00:13:55.969 --> 00:14:22.199
And so now when I make agreements with her, I speak to her about them a little bit differently. Her memory is not so good. It goes in one ear and out the other. But if I say it's important to me that you do this because I'm concerned about you, I have to talk to her more from a Feeling standpoint about why I want her to do something, and then I have to ask her to say that back to me.

00:14:23.240 --> 00:14:25.959
Her brain just doesn't retain certain things.

00:14:27.159 --> 00:14:49.719
Why do you think that we're asking. We're asking as grandparents were leaders, essentially. Maybe that's not the role many grandparents in this society have become because there's a lack of respect, I think, for elderly people.

00:14:50.439 --> 00:15:09.189
If we were considered to be leaders, and many of us do want to be leaders in our own families, in order to be a leader on the outside and change that perspective, we have to become leaders on the inside by resolving these resentments. Otherwise, we can't be leaders.

00:15:09.189 --> 00:15:15.669
That's actually right. That's absolutely right. And grandparents are leaders. There's no, don't. There's no doubt about this.

00:15:16.149 --> 00:15:19.429
Grandparents are leaders and they have the opportunity to be leaders.

00:15:20.149 --> 00:15:34.480
And I think our idea that this disrespect and biases toward the elderly, where that occurs, it doesn't mean that they are not leaders. It means that the people who are judging the elderly are.

00:15:35.279 --> 00:15:57.379
Again, it says more about their need to judge than it says about those individuals who are older. So let's look at the widely accepted definition of leadership. Leadership is the capacity to mobilize a group of people toward collective objectives. In plain English, it's the capacity to develop relationships towards shared goals. That's what grandparents do.

00:15:58.099 --> 00:16:57.789
And if a grandparent is detached from the family and not involved, that would not be a leadership role. But one thing to understand about leaders is that leaders are often the last people thanked for anything. And leaders are the people who others depend on, whether they like it or not and whether they want to admit it or not. And to me, that sounds a lot like the kind of grandparents you're serving with your podcast. Also, I have to say, the way you handle that was fantastic with your granddaughter, because what you did is, first of all, you were willing to be vulnerable and you were willing to share your feelings. And there's research on self disclosure. When we express our feelings, others tend to like us more. And it tends to be disarming because others feel like, hey, okay, I guess I can talk to grandma because you invited her to talk with you by you first opening up and becoming vulnerable. Most of us, what we do is especially as we grow older, right?

00:16:57.789 --> 00:17:01.149
So I'm not a grandparent yet. I'm. But I could be. I'm 58 years old.

00:17:01.789 --> 00:17:15.579
And one thing that we tend to do as we become older is we think that we've got it all figured out. And then we look at the younger generation and the attitude is, okay, when. So when a younger person's having a problem, they are the problem person.

00:17:16.059 --> 00:17:26.380
And I as the older person, I'm the solution person. And this is a big mistake because then we're not willing to be vulnerable. We don't open up and so they don't end up liking us. They feel like we're just lecturing them.

00:17:26.860 --> 00:18:49.309
And the other thing you did is that instead of becoming angry, which is what most people do, you instead shared that you felt angry. That's. Those are two very different things. You shared your authentic feelings. And I trained with Marshall Rosenberg, who was the founder of nonviolent communication. And I was actually in his last 10 day training before he passed away. He was a real mentor for me. And you could take that even to the next step. And to say, I feel angry that you didn't keep that agreement and then you could explain what is the need that you have that led to that feeling. So I feel angry because you didn't keep that agreement. Because I have a need for acknowledgement in your life. I have a need for detection to be seen. And when you didn't keep your agreement, felt really sad because I felt unseen, you know. And so this kind of openness and vulnerability. I have another study I'm working on with about leaders and what's interesting is I have people saying when that leader opened up to me and shared what they were insecure about, I really felt important to her or him. I felt like I'm willing to go to the mat for this person because they trusted me to be able to share that with me. Interesting. That makes sense.

00:18:49.869 --> 00:19:01.379
That's the way you get a child to respect you much more easily than threatening them or punishing them. Or there have to be consequences.

00:19:02.579 --> 00:20:21.849
There's a difference between compassion and consequences. Yes, there's consequences, but there's also compassion. So there's a sense of high expectations, but there's also high support. And when we do one without the other, that's where we lose that connection. Especially today when we're competing with all the phones and screens and social media and other influencers that are really sometimes negatively influencing our grandkids. I think what you did is instead of being the solution person, you became the human person in her eyes. And that's how you were able to bridge that divide. It really switched on a different light within her that day. And it's begun to change our relationship in a way that I haven't been able to in four years. That says a lot. I hear people and I've experienced myself a lot of brokenness in the system. In my situation. We got a call, they said if we didn't pick up the kids, there was no one else they could give them to legally without the children going into the foster care system. And we didn't want that to happen in Texas. It's a pretty broken system.

00:20:22.889 --> 00:20:41.289
And so we took the kids and we get no support other than we do get help for medical needs because we didn't take them out of the foster care system.

00:20:43.049 --> 00:21:02.269
So there's a lot of anger from grandparents about different issues, legal issues, which are different in every state, support issues, which are different in every state. But how do we accept this reality without becoming emotionally entangled in the resentment of it?

00:21:03.230 --> 00:21:55.599
We're forced into these high conflict situations involving parents and their issues and agencies and their issues. How do we accept the reality of this? Help us. Another wonderful question here, Laura, and it sounds like, if I'm hearing you well, that some grandparents feel like these are supposed to be the golden years and now they're becoming the bronze years because I'm having to do this caretaking. So first of all, I've gone through a lot of the research on caretaking and well being and one really important finding is important for your listeners to know about is that when we engage in caretaking and we feel that we're choosing does not decrease well being at all. It doesn't decrease happiness.

00:21:56.240 --> 00:22:02.720
But when we become involved with caretaking and we feel that we're not choosing it, it decreases happiness a lot.

00:22:03.759 --> 00:23:02.009
And I think this is something very important. You know, what differentiates us from other animals is that between stimulus and response. Stephen Covey said this very well. Between stimulus and response, we have the freedom to choose. That's what sets us apart as human beings from other animals. And in, in your case, in the case of many of your listeners, you are confronted with a situation. You're either going to essentially adopt your grandchildren or they're going to go into foster care and you decided that you're going to take on that responsibility. The important words there that you decided, you made the decision. So it's not involuntary, you may have felt pressured to do. But these are the kinds of watershed events that leaders are confronted with. And we say that circumstances don't make the person, they reveal the person. Those were the circumstances and that revealed the kind of leader that you are.

00:23:02.809 --> 00:23:56.069
And I think while, okay, certainly I don't know the extent of the angst and frustration and difficulties you experience with your grandchildren. I can only tell you a couple things. One is that your grandchildren are never going to forget you and they're always going to know that you've been there for them, even when their own parents haven't been. Now, in our technology mediated society where so many people are tethered to their screens, even parents that are with their children, I so my before Love and Suffering, my book before that was called Screened in the Art of Living Free in the Digital Age. And it's all about how our screens are affecting us and our relationships. And I interviewed Jenny Radesky who wrote the screen use guidelines for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

00:23:56.639 --> 00:25:15.720
And one thing that she really taught me is that she did this observational study in this restaurant in Boston where she watched parents with their kids. And what she observed was just unbelievably sad and devastating, which is that most tables, what she saw is the parents are on their screens, they're on their phones, and the children don't have phones, and they're making all of these requests for their parents attention. And the more they make requests, the angrier the parents become. And so what most parents are doing is they are abdicating their responsibility, which is to facilitate the conversational duet. Conversational duet is this kind of call and response, conversation, discussion that goes on for years between a parent and their child and now in your case between a grandparent and their grandchild. And this is the number one responsibility that parents, and I would say grandparents too, who choose it have, which is to help their children or grandchildren assimilate into social relationships. You know, the number one ingredient for happiness, social relationships, close relationships.

00:25:15.720 --> 00:25:22.920
If you look at the longest standing longitudinal study of adult development that we know of in human history, it's still going on at Harvard.

00:25:23.319 --> 00:26:48.359
And they have people from there about 15, 16 years old up until their 90s. And what they're finding is that the, the closer someone's relationships in middle age, the happier they are in later age there. Also, if you look at success, number one ingredient for success, close relationships. A University of Chicago study, which Harvard and Stanford also participated in, what they did is they tracked over 7,000 engineers for over 10 years and they wanted to see what led to the success of these engineers. And believe it or not, technical expertise or knowledge of engineering, which most people would say is going to be a pretty high percentage of their success. Because imagine an aeronautical engineer, if you mess up the plane cockpit like the plane might crash, right? That knowledge of engineering is extremely critical. That knowledge, that technical Expertise accounted for 14% of their future success. If you look at the engineers who were promoted, who earned more money over time, who were given more influence versus those who were demoted, fired, didn't really go anywhere in their careers. Only 14% was attributable to their knowledge or technical expertise of engineering. The other 85 plus percent attributable to only two things, personal character and their capacity to develop relationships with their co workers. In other words, personal character and socio emotional abilities.

00:26:48.519 --> 00:27:02.759
Those two are really inextricable. If your personal character is someone who manipulates and betrays and lies, good luck developing social relationships, right? They're really part and parcel of the same thing. It's like our relationship with ourselves is personal character and then our relationship with others.

00:27:03.079 --> 00:27:29.079
And that's what grandparents instill in their grandchildren. Especially today, when so many parents are absent or facing so many mental health issues that they can't parent in the first time in American history. Now over 50% of university students have seen a mental health counselor during their four years of university. This has never happened.

00:27:29.480 --> 00:27:43.409
So ever since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007 and then the first Android phone in 2008, we're seeing this astronomical increase in loneliness, depression, anxiety, mental health issues.

00:27:44.210 --> 00:28:13.680
And this means that many grandparents, who are not digital natives and are not even as much digital settlers as their children are, are being called upon to provide this mentoring on how to develop close social relationships, which is really the number one ingredient for happiness, well being success in our society. And so a lot of us see it the opposite way. We say, okay, so when I was single, I was number one.

00:28:13.759 --> 00:29:12.940
When I got married, I became number two. When we had our first child, I became number three. And then if you're lucky as a grandparent, you're still in the top 10. This is like the way many of us see being a grandparent, but it's the opposite. Grandparents, because their grandchildren need them so much, they end up having these very long standing sustainable social relationships. I know so many people tell me they're closer to their grandparents than their own parents and that just changes everything. Well, it's also challenging because we're playing both roles in this situation. We're parents and we're grandparents, so we want to be the ones that do the warm and fuzzy things. But we also are trying to discipline them and help them recover from either no discipline or no boundaries or whatever they've been exposed to prior to this. So I know that's a problem for many of us to deal with. I want to ask you about the digital question. What do we do?

00:29:13.420 --> 00:29:23.509
I'm sure you've seen this with your own children. The addiction of devices is horrific. It's disgusting.

00:29:24.629 --> 00:29:57.049
What do we do when they get angry, when we want to take away their devices, or when they're 10 years old and asking for cell phones and their attitude is, my friend has one, why can't I get one? You're mean, you're not nice. Because we take those things away from them or we don't have the money to give it to them, quite frankly. Yeah, okay, that's. Now you're talking about the bane of my existence. We. So I became a parent late in my life. Our children are 12 and 9.

00:29:57.609 --> 00:30:01.170
And this is a really challenging issue with our kids.

00:30:01.170 --> 00:30:04.490
And I think with all kids, especially one thing that I.

00:30:04.809 --> 00:30:50.450
Okay, you want to talk about resentment? One thing. If I feel resentment, my resentment is going to be because the school does nothing about this. And every single child in our 12 year old son's class has a phone to the point where it was not. We just couldn't prevent it. And we had agreed it was going to be 13 and a half when he would get a phone. You heard that there's, that there's this sort of wait till 8th movement, wait till 8th grade. I haven't heard that yet. It's a nonprofit doing work on this. And, and so we wanted to wait till eighth grade. And that couldn't happen because he felt it was unfair because all this was. Now, again, what's our number one role as parents, caretakers, grandparents? It's helping them assimilate into social relationships. Now all his friends are on this WhatsApp chat and he's excluded because he doesn't have a phone. And so we ended up giving him.

00:30:50.849 --> 00:31:08.700
And I'll say this is extremely hard. One thing I would recommend is having a family meeting once a week and coming to some agreements over how the phone is going to be used. And there is an app, believe it or not, called Google Family Link, which is free.

00:31:09.579 --> 00:31:48.399
And Google Family Link, it goes on your phone, it goes on your grandchild's phone or your child's phone and you can establish how much time they have. And you can also limit or exclude certain apps. So that's been helpful only because some of the worst moments I've had as a parent have been resting the tablet out of my child's clutching fingers. I know. And then they're even saying, you hurt me, you hurt my fingers. And it's the worst feeling. And I'm never going to talk to me. Yeah. So now. Okay, you don't want to give up the phone after your time is up. All right, get on my phone, Google family link block, and that's it. It goes off.

00:31:49.359 --> 00:32:04.409
Yeah. Okay. Or tell them that they aren't going to become engineers when they grow up if they don't listen. Yeah, but that doesn't work. The nothing works. In fact, even with my own children, when I say, would you like to do what? You can finish the sentence any way you want.

00:32:04.490 --> 00:32:12.089
Hey, would you like to blank? And it could be really fun activities. Going outside to play ball, you name it.

00:32:12.089 --> 00:32:18.409
Going out to a restaurant that they really want to do. If they're in their screen time, the answer is no, they don't want to do it.

00:32:19.369 --> 00:33:00.680
It's an addiction. I don't think it's any different than telling someone that's an alcoholic that they can't have alcohol if they haven't decided to stop. It's okay. So my perspective from interviewing tons of people on this is that actually it's not an addiction. That actually what we're addicted to are the same things we've always been addicted to. We're addicted to approval, we're addicted to recognition. We're addicted to feeling worthy and competent. And what happens is that our screens provide a kind of accelerated access to placate those addictions. So, for example, if you're someone is obese, we wouldn't say that the fault is with the refrigerator.

00:33:00.680 --> 00:33:36.750
We would say it's the food they're addicted to. But at the same time, we get access to our screens Unlimited 24, 7. And there's no oversight. So let's compare an addiction before screens. Let's suppose you were addicted to gambling, okay? And you're out there at casinos all the time. And then some of your family and friends start to get together and they go, you know what? You've been going to the casinos like five or six days a week. You're coming home at four in the morning and they start to talk with you. And then it's. There's this huge social cost of your addiction, right? So everybody now is you're getting stigmatized as the addictive gambler.

00:33:37.309 --> 00:34:02.889
Nowadays, you could be addicted to gambling, and you're in your screens like nine hours a day gambling. But the difference is nobody knows what you're doing on that screen. And so you're getting accelerated access to your addiction with lower social costs. So unfortunately, these technology companies have set this up in such a way that they will Stop at nothing to capture our attention. And then what do we have?

00:34:02.889 --> 00:34:47.909
We have a whole world of people who are extremely unhappy getting back to. Talking about our feelings. Then if we were to express, express it that way to a child and say, you've been on the screen for blank amount of hours and I would like to spend some time with you. Yeah, one would think. I would like. One would think that would work. But the thing to consider is that the issue to consider is that really brain development goes all the way into the 20s or 30s. That's why the human head is much bigger than the birth canal. We call it the fourth trimester. So of course the first three trimesters are in the womb.

00:34:47.909 --> 00:35:52.829
But most of our brain development and social development occurs outside the womb. This is the thing is that you telling, even telling a 17 year old, much less a 7 year old, hey, here are some really good reasons for you to stop and I'd like to spend some time with you and so on. Good luck with that. Sometimes it works. Once in a while it works. But for all of the screens. And it goes the other way too. I do a lot of workshops for schools where all the parents come together because they're all facing these issues. And I interview them, but I also interview their kids. And you should see what these kids are saying. They're literally. I have interviews with children saying, I really like to spend some time with my dad, but the power of scrolling on his phone is just too great for him. It's everybody. So you're not giving me any opportunity for closure on this subject. You don't have an answer. You have an answer for everything, Anthony, but you don't have an answer for this one. It's a tough one. It's a tough one. And so I think I will say this, I will say this, that the more you meet with them before they're on screens, because when they're not on the screens, they're more rational about it.

00:35:53.469 --> 00:36:41.099
And so having these family meetings. Absolutely. And coming together and talking about agreements and how it's going to work. And then also you talked earlier about consequences. Right. So having some consequences associated with going over your screen use. So here's one. Okay, you have, let's say it's 45 minutes a day or it's an hour a day, depending on the age. You can decide on how long there's research on this about how much time to give based on their age. And you might say, okay, so there's an hour a day of screen time. So if you Go over that. Then every minute you go over is going to count as two minutes less the next day. So literally, they go over by 30 minutes. Then they lost the hour the next day. And we do that, and the kids accept it because we agreed on it ahead of time. Great. Okay.

00:36:41.179 --> 00:36:48.789
I think I can put that question to rest because we can talk more about it. There's a lot of possible strategy, but this. No, it's true.

00:36:48.789 --> 00:37:07.550
It's like they're magnetized to this device, and trying to talk to them while that's going on doesn't work. You need to do it before I. Would do some kind of a parental control, like the Google family link or another one. Okay, so getting back to what we were talking about, forgiveness.

00:37:08.750 --> 00:38:08.059
There is sort of silent struggle amongst us where when we look at these grandchildren, we see these unforgivable traits of the person who caused the family trauma, their parent. How do we stop projecting past their suffering onto an innocent child so that we can move beyond that and get on with just loving this innocent creature? I know those moments happen for all of us. We go, that's just like their mother. Or this is why she does that. Her dad did that, too. Laura, these questions are so great when you ask. We have to start with the most unforgivable person. And it's not our grandchild. It's our child in that instance of what you just shared. And so we have to forgive the mother or the father of our grandchild or son or daughter.

00:38:08.779 --> 00:38:41.989
And this can be really hard because, for one, by judging our children, we often are judging ourselves also. So it's not just, why are you like that? But it's why am I like this, such that you are like that. Good point. And so, again, we see ourselves in them, and that makes it hard to see this with any. Just as our grandkids are under the thrall of their screens, we're under the thrall of the very human tendency to cope by not feeling badly about ourselves.

00:38:42.389 --> 00:39:36.860
And we don't want to feel badly about ourselves. And then as soon as we start thinking that maybe our children are the way they are because we are the way we are, or at least there's a correlation or a relationship there. It's not that we're 100% to blame for the way our kids are, but if we see that what we did, and what could we have done better, once we go down that rabbit hole, we start to feel really badly about ourselves. And so instead of guilt, which is okay, I wish I hadn't done that, I'm going to do it differently, which can be positive, but in some cases we feel shame, which is this negative thing happened and it's my fault and something's wrong with me and we feel unworthy. So to start with forgiving our child for being the way they are. Well, there's a number of strategies in love and suffering. One of them is, which I'll share here, is I have a strategy which is to forgive, is to give, for which is. I love that. Which is. Yeah. Where you're giving for your child to yourself what they couldn't give you.

00:39:38.539 --> 00:39:45.980
So, you know, instead of blaming them for being the way they are, you're just accepting. That's where you. We're beginning with acceptance. Like they.

00:39:45.980 --> 00:39:53.259
At this point in time, they are the way they are. I'm not going to change them. I can only change myself. And the way I see them.

00:39:54.219 --> 00:41:10.500
And instead of seeing them as the enemy or seeing them as the one who's wrong, again, they're the problem person. I'm the solution person. Instead of that, I'm just going to say, okay, in this point in time, this is how they are. And then saying, what has my child given me? And probably you could come up with some things that your child has done that have been really positive in your life, including for many grandparents, a sense of progress, purpose, connection at many times. And then seeing, well, there are ways that I wish they were different. One exercise I have in love and suffering, which I think is actually of all the exercises in love and suffering, I think it's the best one. I think the best exercise is to make a list of the things that your child has done that in you resent, and write them down. For example, my daughter didn't show up when she said she would pick up her child. My daughter was supposed to take care of her child, but instead was doing drugs. Whatever it is, the list of what you resent. And then for each behavior next to it, write down what's the character quality you associate with that behavior? Okay, so she was doing drugs instead of picking up her child. That's insensitive.

00:41:11.610 --> 00:41:37.210
That's just downright unkind. Selfish. What were you saying, Laura? Selfish. Selfish. Exactly. And so make a list of all of these character qualities. And now here's the hard part. Write another column. And to the right, and in this column, make a list of the people for each character quality that at some point in your life would attribute you with that character quality.

00:41:38.170 --> 00:42:10.650
Ouch. Who would attribute you as being selfish, as being insensitive as being unkind and make a list of those and really go through those and name those people. And it helps us to see that when we point our finger at someone else, we have three fingers pointed back at ourselves. It's like in the biblical parable of this woman who's about to be stoned for adultery to death, and then people are about to kill this woman. And then Jesus says to, says to all these people, like, okay, so who here is free of sin? Who here wants to cast the first stone?

00:42:11.050 --> 00:42:14.489
And then everybody drops their stones and goes home, right?

00:42:14.650 --> 00:42:39.429
And so maybe we can figuratively drop our weapons, our psychological weapons, and go home and say, yes, my child has made many severe mistakes and so have I, and I'm just going to love them as they are. I'm going to accept them as they are and love them as they are. And whatever part of them is in my grandchild, I'm going to love them through my grandchild, even when I don't have opportunity to be with them in person. Thank you for that.

00:42:39.429 --> 00:42:54.110
I'd like to end the whole show on that note, but I do have one more question for you, and I do want to mention that this is going to be the first in a series and we have a lot more to talk about. Tony's book.

00:42:54.590 --> 00:43:13.079
Yes, Love and suffering break the emotional chains that prevent you from experiencing love. And by the way, if it's okay, Laura, can I also offer to your listeners two free books, which are the myth of how your definition of happiness creates your unhappiness.

00:43:13.480 --> 00:43:24.789
And the second book, very relevant to our discussion today, is the Myth of friendship, how your misunderstandings about friendship keep you lonely. And these two books are free.

00:43:25.190 --> 00:44:33.400
All you have to do is you go to theartoflivingfree.org free happiness and friendshipbooks. So again, it's www.theartoflivingfree.org free Happiness and Friendshipbooks. You go there, you put in your email, you get a confirmation email in your inbox, you confirm it and then you receive the links to download. You can either print it out as a PDF, you can get and print it out, or you can read it on a Kindle or any e reader and then you'll receive every two weeks an article about loneliness, relationships, work, life, balance, leadership. And if you don't like those, you just unsubscribe at any moment. But to start with, you get the two free books and then you can just decide if you want to continue or not. Thank you. And I'll be sure to Put those links in the show notes. Thank you. My last question for the day is that most government policy focuses on the money issues. The forms that need to be filled out, we deal with a ton of paperwork.

00:44:34.519 --> 00:44:49.929
If we shifted our social norms to prioritize mental health, and basically, in this case, we're talking about emotional emancipation for the caregiver.

00:44:50.570 --> 00:45:01.289
What kind of transformational support do you think that the state or the government should be providing to ensure that we're raising whole, healthy humans?

00:45:02.969 --> 00:45:10.400
Again, wonderful question, Laura. And I think we need to support our caregivers.

00:45:11.199 --> 00:45:28.880
We need to stop investing so much on weapons and invest more on education. We still need to defend ourselves as a country. I'm not suggesting we just don't invest anything. But what I'm saying is that it's such a small percentage of the military budget to invest in caring.

00:45:29.360 --> 00:45:39.400
Caring for children through education and counseling centers, caring for caregivers so they can give better care to their children, to their grandchildren, to others.

00:45:40.440 --> 00:47:39.039
And I think also we need to look not just at government policies, but also the beliefs we subscribe to our social norms. Because I live in Rome, Italy. I'm originally from Washington, D.C. and I live in Rome. And I gotta tell you, here it's very different here. Grandparents are seen as treasures, and they're really surrounded by their kids and their grandkids and. And families much more intact over here. So I, for example, when we first arrived here, I'm a professor at Luis Business School in Rome, and we first arrived here almost five years ago, and I. I thought, okay, the way I'm gonna make friends, okay, I meet someone, okay, this. This guy's pretty cool. I'm gonna say, hey, let's go grab lunch sometime. But he never really would take me up on my offer. And then what I realized after. Took me about a year, was to realize that the way that Italians tend to operate, like we in the US it's more about the individual. And so, like I. Easy for me to get together for meals with new people in the U.S. here in Italy, it's not so much the individual, it's more of the family. And so what I started doing, at the advice of my wife, who's also a psychologist, she said, why don't you. Instead of. Instead of asking people to go out for lunch one on one, why don't you say, hey, we could go grab lunch, you and I, or we could get together with our families on the weekend. And what happened is everybody without Phil would say, let's do that. Let's get together. With our families. And then there was, everybody's happy. So I think we need to think about our norms, how we value grandparents, because especially today, especially in our sort of screen embedded society where so many parents are just really losing their capacity to parents and grandparents, we need grandparents to step in and we need them to know that it's sending a soldier off to war and then not respecting them for having fought in that war when they come back.

00:47:39.440 --> 00:48:05.769
If we want to have grandparents go into this struggle, sometimes to be caretakers, we have to value them and show them that, hey, this is a really valued role in our society. And I think that means investing more in support for caretakers. And I think it also means just all of us, you know, the word respect and maybe we can end on this. The word respect comes from re, which is again and speccere is to see.

00:48:06.009 --> 00:48:27.719
So respect is like to see again. And so it has two meanings. The first meaning is if we want to see someone again, we have to respect them. The second meaning, though, I think is even more profound, which is to see someone, to look at someone once, but then to look at them again and really see them, really look into them and see their struggles and see what brings them joy, what brings them suffering.

00:48:28.360 --> 00:48:43.239
And then that's, I think, what creates a connection. I think we need to see our grandparents again and see them for what they're doing, value them for what they're doing, and give them the respect they deserve. It's a perfect way to end the show. Tony, thank you.

00:48:44.039 --> 00:49:01.139
It's been a pleasure and an honor and I really appreciate your time. For me too. I have to say it's one of the best podcasts I've been on, just because of your authenticity and the really thoughtful questions that you've been asking. So thanks for having me on your show, Laura. You're welcome.

00:49:02.980 --> 00:49:05.940
Here's some key takeaways from today's conversation.

00:49:06.340 --> 00:49:23.509
Tony explains that in ancient mythology, an exorcist first task was to ask the demon its name. When we don't acknowledge our suffering, it psychosomatizes in a thousand different ways. Tony says we have to name the resentment so it loses its power over us.

00:49:24.469 --> 00:49:35.509
One of the most profound moments of our talk was the realization that we only hate in others what is inside us. When we judge our children, Tony notes, we are often judging ourselves.

00:49:35.909 --> 00:49:47.119
We see ourselves in them and. And that makes it so hard to accept the person standing in front of us. We also tackled the bane of many parents existences. Screens.

00:49:47.679 --> 00:50:09.599
Tony reframes the phone. Not as a tool, but as a variable reward schedule a slot machine for approval. He shares why we must move from being the solution person to the human person to bridge the digital divide. Tony challenged me with a question that I want to pass on to you. Are you leading with a hammer or are you leading with a translation guide?

00:50:09.759 --> 00:50:28.079
When your grandchild ignores an agreement, are you taking it as a personal insult to your authority or are you seeing a system overload? This week, when I feel that snap coming on and I encourage you to do the same, I want you to try Tony's 10 second pause.

00:50:28.800 --> 00:50:51.259
Step out of the survival basement and back into the CEO chair before you speak. Respect comes from the Latin respicere, which means to see again. To respect our grandchildren and our adult children who've caused us so much pain, we have to look past the first glance.

00:50:51.739 --> 00:50:54.699
We have to look once, then look again.

00:50:55.259 --> 00:51:06.150
Until we see their struggles and and their soul instead of just their mistakes. As Tony said, without judgment, there is no need for forgiveness.

00:51:06.789 --> 00:51:43.159
Imagine the energy we would save if we just stopped holding court in our own kitchens. And please be sure to check out Tony's website at theartoflivingfree.org and don't forget to grab the free books the Myth of Happiness and the Myth of friendship. They're at theartoflivingfree.org freehappinessandfriendshipbooks. I guarantee there's a wealth of information there for you, and I hope you'll join me next week when I share with you another story from a grandmother raising grandchildren. Ruthie Shofi.

00:51:43.320 --> 00:51:57.570
Her story is powerful. It needs to be heard. They all do. And I hope when you hear Ruthie's, maybe you'll be encouraged to share yours. It may be the story that someone else needs to hear. We are 2.7 million strong.

00:51:58.050 --> 00:52:19.889
We're moving mountains, relocating lives, and seeing again when the world has looked away. And your heart is the most important asset on the balance sheet. Keep nurturing, keep leading, and I'll see you in the next boardroom. I'm Laura Brazan, and this has been Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, Nurturing Through Adversity.