So pretty typical mom. I think she has five kids, like 10 and under. Okay, so close together. I pay attention to that ’cause it just informs, as I’m thinking about this person, like what their day-to-day life is. Having a lot of kids is not necessarily hard, but a lot of kids close together is just a very particular kind of life, and so. And I’m just very familiar with that.

And so I think she’s breastfeeding one of them, and she’s saying, “How do I know the difference between hormones, my thoughts, my emotions, and then wounds,” right? As soon as I started bringing in healing wounds work into my work, and I liked that. I’m a big fan of Bob Schuchts.
I’m a big fan of Bria Hanon’s work.

And The Body Keeps Score, and Schwartz’s parts work. Like that stuff is super interesting. I like psychology. I like understanding how the brain and the body works, and that by itself is a form, can be a form of distraction, right?

Not dealing with your own life, not dealing with your own thoughts and your own emotions, and then hiding in learning land, is what I call it, is a way to not take responsibility for how you are living your life right now.

And one of the ways that this shows up, and I really think this is so often a spiritual attack, is when we have confusion, and you’re like, “There’s so much going on, and everything’s on fire.” Anytime we’re using really big language and, “I’m just so confused and I don’t know what to do.”

That is often, I find, a spiritual attack. But even if it isn’t, even if it’s just your brain saying, “Hey, I can see that in order to improve our life, we’re gonna need to do some hard things, and I would rather you not do hard things. I would rather you stay exactly the way that you are because you’re alive and that’s working for us.

So I’m gonna choose to make you feel overwhelmed and confused instead of having you go through the process of cleaning up your mind and taking responsibility for your own emotional regulation.

And I’m gonna be a little strong in this episode because so many women are saying, like, “I have childhood wounds. I have hormone things, health things.” And those things, while probably true, and while they are affecting the way that we show up, kind of allow us to abdicate the intentional thinking that we could be doing in the meantime. Okay?

So she says, “There’s days when I feel really energized, and it’s easy for me to do the work.” This email was all about the work, but I knew I wanted to talk about managing your mind because I think managing your mind and seeing your own thinking is more important than the wounds work, especially if the wounds work is keeping us from managing our minds today, right?

If you’re doing a good job and you’re managing your mind today and it’s on your calendar, I really like scheduling wounds work on my calendar, and you’re doing it and it’s thoughtful, great. Okay? But she says, “Then there are other days where I feel drained, and everything feels super hard, and when I try to manage my thoughts, the melancholy side of me just isn’t having it.”

Okay? So right there. The melancholy side of me just isn’t having it. The way she’s saying it, and this is all of us, which is why I wanted to do this episode. This is not her. This is all of you. Make it sound like that just happens. Oh, there’s just this melancholy side of me, and it’s not willing to manage its mind.

And if that were true, if there were parts of our brain that we could not control, then we would feel really sad about living. We would be hopeless if we did not feel like we had agency. One of the things that humans need in order to feel agency, in order to feel hope, is to feel agency. Like, I have some sense of control of things, and I can affect that my life will get better.

But if I say, “Look, your life is just definitely not gonna get better because sometimes the melancholy side of you is just not willing to manage your mind, so all those hopes and dreams you had, probably not gonna happen.” That would be terrible.

And I’m here to tell you a couple things. One, I want you guys to stop thinking that having off days or any negative emotion is a problem. Okay, your human experience here on Earth is going to involve pain and suffering and wild joy and beauty. Okay?

In the times that we experience pain and suffering, it doesn’t always mean that something is really wrong with you or your life. It’s just kind of part of the human package. And remember, if we didn’t have pain and suffering, we wouldn’t know what joy and happiness or satisfaction felt like.

You would just have a constant state. You wouldn’t even describe it as good or bad because it would have nothing to compare it to. And so we absolutely need the negative emotions to create the context for the positive emotions.

So I want you to begin realizing that bad days and hard seasons and negative emotion is just part of being alive. You’re just alive, my friend, and that’s a beautiful thing. And then what we want to do with this work that I teach is not make it any harder than it needs to be.

And one of the ways that we make it harder is we resist it and we negotiate with it and we judge it and we shame ourselves. So what if I just told her like, “Hey, probably seven days out of the month, you’re gonna feel like it’s a bad day, and nothing’s gone wrong. That’s just statistically how it shakes out.”

Seven days a month, a fourth of the month are gonna feel like bad days. And now all of a sudden she wakes up and she’s like, “Oh, we’re just having one of those bad days because I’m a human and I’m alive, and this is the human experience.” And then she can watch her thinking and decide how she wants to live today, how she wants to solve what she can solve.

But if she continues having this thought, the melancholy side of me just isn’t having it, which means not willing to manage my mind, then she just has to accept not only whatever the actual bad day was, because I’m sure there were things and somebody spilled water and the dog pooped in the living room or whatever it was. You know what I mean?

But then there’s this thought like, “And my life is terrible, and it’ll never get better because even when I want to make things better, I can’t make things better because this part of me shows up sometimes that makes it so that I can’t make it better.” That would be a terrifying story.

And instead, I want to take this mom and be like, “Yeah, I’m sure you do have some hard days sometimes, especially with little kids, especially with hormonal changes because of breastfeeding.” I mean, I don’t even know that I think, especially because of those things. Like I’m not dealing with any of those things, and I have hard days sometimes.

And if I thought that having a hard day meant something had gone wrong with me or my life, it’s pretty easy to get your brain to throw a fit and be really upset. Oh, no. Maybe it’s because of your childhood, and maybe it’s because of money, and maybe your husband doesn’t love you anymore, and maybe you’re gonna be stuck here forever. And when the kids leave, maybe you’ll have really regretted how you spent your time. I don’t know. Our brains are wild.

And so instead, I want to be like, “Hey, you’re having a not great day right now. That’s okay. How do you want to think about the day knowing it’s just not one of your favorite days?” So she says, “I can’t even necessarily pinpoint a thought other than everything feels so hard, and I don’t want to manage my mind right now.”

Yes, those are the thoughts. I want to give you a gold star and an A on your paper. Those are the thoughts you’re having. Everything feels so hard. I don’t want to manage my mind right now. But you’re saying that to me like you don’t get to choose those thoughts.

Okay? But once you see those thoughts. Let’s just pick everything feels so hard right now. You guys think that we would all agree that everything feels so hard right now, but that is not provable in a court of law.

What’s provable in a court of law is how many kids she has, the things that actually happened today, her body weight, her bank account, like, things that we can all agree on. Let’s say her three-year-old, like, fell out of the chair, at lunchtime and hit her head on the floor and is crying and upset.

Which is like, we both wanna comfort the child, and at the same time, moms are like, “But why can’t you just sit on your bottom?” So we’re mad when they hurt themselves. It’s just a wild mothering experience.

So she thinks we’d all watch a movie of her life and think that’s so hard. Now, I would validate having a full life, or especially, like, a lot of kids close together, and I would say, “Yeah, it’s pretty intense.”

But what you think about it is gonna determine your experience of it, because I can always find someone who has air quotes, like, “worse life than you” and is managing their mind and is having a better internal experience than you.

And I don’t say that to my brain in a, “There are starving kids in Africa. You better eat the food on your plate.” Like, “There are people of a worse life than you do, so you better be happy about your life.” That is a terrible way to talk to people. I would never, as a coach, talk to you about that, like that.

I would say, “Yeah, you’ve got a lot going on right now, but let me also just gently invite you to see that the way that you’re thinking about what you’ve got going on right now is making it feel worse. And you’re feeling disempowered, and it’s exhausting to think like that and resist what’s happening. And you don’t like yourself. You don’t even sound like you’re on team you right now.

And because all of those things feel so painful, I can tell that you wanna buffer, which means avoid feeling your feelings by, like, doing the self-help work, when really the work is right here today, which is, today is an intense day, and that’s okay. I can handle that. I’m good at tough days.”

If you can reach for silliness, that’s my favorite, right? Like, when enough bad things happen in one day, and it’s just ridiculous, and then you get a flat tire, and you left your phone at home, I’m just like, “All right, Lord, bring it. What kinda day are we gonna have?” I’m opening my bubbly water. So we’re just gonna hear that.

Okay. So then she has this thought, “I don’t wanna manage my mind right now.” When you guys talk about what you want or don’t want, you say it like it’s the truth, but it’s just a thought and it’s optional. ‘Cause I wanna ask her, “Why don’t you wanna manage your mind right now?” And that will kind of, like, wake you up.

Because if I ask it that way to suppose that there’s a choice in the matter, you’re like, “Oh. Why do I wanna think like that? Why am I choosing to think like that? And if you run through the model, which, you know, we teach in everything that we do, when you think, “I don’t wanna manage my mind right now,” what’s your feeling? Her feeling is probably sad or defeated, or she might feel like a loser, or she might be judging herself.

Okay? So you’re gonna pick one feeling that you would have when you think, “I don’t wanna do this work that Sterling’s talking about,” right? She knows I say manage your mind, okay? But I don’t wanna manage my mind. I just wanna feel what I feel in the moment.

Okay? But she knows that… She knows there’s something not quite right about that, so her feeling is gonna be some version of sadness to hopelessness. And then she’s gonna show up in her life not well, right? So maybe she’s scrolling on her phone, maybe she’s overeating the cookies, maybe she’s snapping at the kids.

Maybe she’s snapping at her husband and she’s like, “If I just had more time, and if you help me with the kids, and then I could heal the wounds, then maybe I would be happier,” because she’s missing that she can control these thoughts. And then listen, this is a hard concept to understand because for 20, 30, 40 years, we’ve just been watching our thoughts and we didn’t realize we had control over them.

Okay? She goes on to talk about kids and learning more about childhood wounds and then watching it in real time create childhood wounds. I’ve thought about that a lot because obviously I see in real time the woundedness that our family is creating for our kids, and I think all childhoods have adversity and create wounds, and I just believe that they’re gonna get to have those tools and deal with them later.

Now, one of the things that you can do to minimize woundedness is to witness it. and I forget what study was done about that, but they, like, took people who were in trauma, and they didn’t even give them therapy. They just witnessed and said, “I saw that you experienced that, and that wasn’t okay.”

Right? They just had a witness that didn’t gaslight them about it and be like, “What are you talking about? Everything was fine.” and that those people did much, much better even than people later who didn’t have witness but then went to therapy, right? And so I just try to witness for them when I can if I think woundedness is being created.

I just try to witness it for them and name it for them and say, “You know, that’s not okay. It shouldn’t be like that. And I’m sorry it’s like that right now.” And I love you. And then with my older kids, I go, “We’ll work it out when you’re 25. I’ll help you heal your wounds.”

But I think I don’t know. You could Google it to find out, I guess, but I don’t know that you can heal the wounds in the child while the child is there ’cause the child has a child brain, and the child needs to believe that the people taking care of the child are safe, something about that. So I just don’t know that we can do it in real time, but I just like to tell them the truth.

Like, “Yeah, that’s really hard. Yeah, I see that you felt really dismissed in that moment. I’m sorry.” I mean, I do have to do that. There are some big sacrifices that my kids experience by living in a big family, and I explained that, I feel like, on a coaching call recently that we didn’t sign up for soccer.

And I was really sad. That hurt my oldest boy because he loved it. It’s so good for him, and it is a good and wonderful and healthy thing, and just because we have so many kids and a lot of things going on, we chose not to do that, and I was very sad about that. And that is a real, like, drawback to having a big family, but overall I still think it was the best, good choice.

But I can sit with him and say, “I’m really disappointed. I’m grieving that. I’m sorry about this. I hope, though, that ultimately having these brothers and sisters and living the life that we do and me being present with you and not losing my mind is the best thing that I can do for you.”

“Do you have any thoughts or books or. ” First of all, I love this woman. She sounds like me, and I just always want a book, and I always want a podcast, and I always want a course. I’m like, “I wanna learn more about that.” But I would take this woman and I would say, “You’re not allowed to learn anything new. You just need to watch your thoughts. That’s it.”

I wouldn’t even ask her to shift her thoughts to positive thoughts. I would just say, “I want you to sit with your thoughts and see how your thinking is creating the emotional experience of your life right now. Not the kids, not the hormones, not the wounds, not the husband, not the anything else.

Your thinking is creating pain in your body right now, and you can stop doing that right now without learning anything else.” She says, “I often act from a place of scarcity. Time scarcity, money scarcity, energy.” So she’s just saying, “Hey, Sterling, I have a lot of thoughts in my brain that say I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough energy.

Can I go read a book about that?” I’m like, “No, stop having those thoughts. Be a woman who’s committed to practicing not having those thoughts.” I want you to notice every time a scarcity thought comes up and just say, “Oh, that’s an old thought. It’s a thought error. I’m gonna choose to have this thought instead.”

One of the things they do with people who are OCD is, they show them how to recognize thought errors, right? And so they wash their hands, and then their brain goes, “Oh, I need to wash my hands again,” right? And they teach them to notice that thought and go, “Oh, I already washed my hands,” so that thought is a thought error. I don’t need to wash my hands again.

And that is the work of rewiring an OCD mind. And it may always have that inclination, right? So sometimes I think, a lot of the psychology work or the temperament tests show us that we might be inclined to be a certain way, but it doesn’t mean we have to be that way.

And that’s the best thing ever. I want you to feel like that’s the best news that you’ve heard this year, is that you can change how you think in order to enjoy your life. And if I can do that with my six kids and my painful marriage and my stress eating food issues and, you know our money feels tight this year. This is, like, the first year that our money feels, like, really tight, where we’re like, “Oh, I don’t think we’re gonna spend money on that.” And I hate that feeling, right?

And I know that because I grew up poor, my childhood wounds, whatever, about being poor can be activated. That I don’t need to know any of that. I don’t need to deal with any of that to just be like, I see the thoughts I’m having about money, and I’m choosing not to indulge in them and to think different things.

And my husband said that recently. He was like, “Wow, you just seem, like, way calmer than you normally do about that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m just not gonna do that. I’m just not gonna have those thoughts. They don’t help me, they don’t serve me, they don’t get me what I want, and I’m just choosing to believe that God always gives us enough time and enough money and enough energy,” all three of those things, my friend, “and it’s gonna be okay.”

She says, “Money is really tight and my needs are very high.” Okay, but both of those are thoughts. I know you feel like they’re true. I know you feel like we would agree that money is really tight and my needs are really high.

But when you think those thoughts, you’re gonna feel terrible in your body, and it’s gonna lead you to not paying attention to your money and not paying attention and actually meeting your needs.

So I want you to get clear on the thoughts that you’re having and how they’re creating negative feelings and action and result in your life. And if you want, you know, I do lead people through thinking of the intentional thought that you wanna think instead.

But I will just tell you, if you sit with your unintentional thinking, if you just sit with, “If I allow my brain to keep telling me these stories and I choose to believe them, this is what it’s going to create in my life.”

So if you continue to think everything feels so hard, and it makes you feel deflated, and then you sit on the couch and you scroll on your phone, and you don’t solve any of the problems in your life with your prefrontal cortex, ’cause you’re super brilliant, my friend, I promise, then your result will be your life is gonna continue to feel hard.

But if instead you have the thought, everything just feels so hard, just. Anyway, I have six kids, and the shenanigans every day, and that is a thought that I have often. Like, why is it so hard to live? With tiny dysregulated humans. But I just, now I just watch that thought go by, and I’m like, “Yeah, but I love it. Yeah, but it’s fine. Yeah, but we’re gonna have fun today.”

So it’s not that I don’t ever have that thought like zoom into my mind, unintentionally, it pops up. I just don’t indulge it. I don’t plant it. Gotta stop doing that. Now, do I think that the wounds work isn’t important and we don’t need to do it all?

No, I think it’s there, and it’s interesting, and I have healed a lot of things, and it’s made my life better. I just don’t think that healing wounds or not healing wounds affects my ability to handle my life today, right? I know that I have the ability to manage my thinking today, and I do not manage my thinking so that my life feels good and happy all the time. That is not the goal.

For me, the sainthood goal, the way we measure our sainthood-ness, is if we are at internal peace with what’s happening right now. So no matter what God is putting right in front of us, ’cause He controls that, I have internal peace. That is very different than feeling good and happy. It’s just like, “Oh, okay, Lord, this is the kinda day that we’re gonna have? Cool. I didn’t know, but let me just get on board with that. I’m willing to do that.”

When you have a teenage daughter, they just like cry unexpectedly, and I kinda knew that was coming, but it still catches me off guard. Like, I’m just going through my day and making breakfast or something, and then a teenager will show up and then be crying, and it’s like the end of the world for them.

And we just sit there and we’re like, Oh, okay, I guess we’re gonna do this now. That’s fine.” And that’s my job. So I want you to know that no matter what’s going on with your life, you can change what you’re thinking about to enjoy.

I also wanna say that there are just times when I’m ready to hear this and do it, and times when I’m like, Nope, I wanna pout about this a little bit more, and stomp my feet, and be mad, and pretend like it’s everyone else’s fault.

So I just wanna say that’s okay, too. I love you when you’re in that place. If you’re like, “Listen, I just wanna be teenagery for like three more weeks,” I’m like, “Do it. I love you. But any time you want, this is available to you. This is an option for you.” You can manage your mind and really enjoy your life, and feel powerful, and have agency, no matter what’s going on. I really promise.

Okay. App is coming soon. Check out the trip to France. I think when this comes out, collection two of our Calm Catholic Kid stories are gonna be out, so if that’s true, there will be links in the show notes for this episode.

All right. I love you. I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening, and have a blessed day.