Re-Air: Your Parenting Wakeup Call | Dr. Carla Naumburg

In honor of International Self-Care Day, we’re revisiting the informative, fun, and practical episode we did in 2023 with licensed clinical social worker and bestselling author Dr. Carla Naumburg. Dr. Naumburg helps us break down “sh*tty parent syndrome”, the evolution in parenting methods from generation to generation, and practical ways to practice self-care. Mayim and Carla discuss the unusual origin story of their friendship after Carla wrote an article criticizing Mayim’s parenting techniques. They explain the importance of honesty when sharing parenting struggles and not comparing yourself to other parents, how meditation impacts their parenting skills, and the dark side of “mommy blogging.” Dr. Naumburg shares why she doesn’t believe there are bad parents, what self-compassion in parenting really means, and her tips for parenting with anxiety and mindfulness-based stress reduction. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off sitewide, 25% of Luxe Mattresses and 30% off Elite Mattresses. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, in honor of International Self-Care Day, we're going to revisit a super informative, fun, and very practical episode, which will tell you so much about self-care. It's with a personal friend of mine, Dr. Carla Naumburg. Carla wrote a variety of books, but we talk about her book, You Are Not a Shitty Parent, which clarifies what it means to have self-compassion through the parenting process, ways to understand the role of self-care in not only how we deal with our children, but how we deal with ourselves and the entire world.

• 0:41Jonathan Cohen?

  Carla helps us break down the evolution in our parenting methods from generation to generation, the importance of honesty when sharing parenting struggles, and not comparing yourself to other parents. She also talks about how meditation impacts parenting skills and the dark side of the mommy blogging.

• 1:00Mayim Bialik?

  Carla and I actually talk about how we met, which was through the dark side of mommy blogging. She wrote an article criticizing the way that I parented, and we actually became unlikely adversaries and then friends and writers. So we're so excited to look back at our episode with Dr. Naumburg. And also, check us out on Substack for content you cannot get anywhere else. What better way to celebrate self-care than by going to our Substack page? Bialikbreakdown.substack.com. And now, enjoy our episode with Dr. Naumburg.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I'm so excited to be here. Let's talk about all the things.

• 1:35Mayim Bialik?

  I have told you about Carla, Jonathan, in many ways over the years. You may not have realized that this is the Carla.

• 1:42Jonathan Cohen?

  You told me that she taught you to meditate.

• 1:45Mayim Bialik?

  Carla is not the person who taught me to meditate. Carla is the person that I went to when I was struggling a lot, because Carla has been very, very open in her writing, even before her awesome books, which have been very helpful. But Carla and I used to write together at Kaveller, which is a Jewish parenting website. And our relationship, I think, is very interesting, because it started in a potentially contentious way. Carla is a very, very funny and very thoughtful and very... she can be sarcastic. And she wrote an article that referenced me somewhat playfully,

• 2:29Mayim Bialik?

  but I wanted to... What are you...

• 2:32Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to know the shot that you took.

• 2:35Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, go ahead. Let's just do it.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, 100%. I was like, Mayim's being really nice when she says, "I wrote an article that referenced her." No, I wrote an article that straight up called her out. Basically, Mayim wrote an article for this, at the time, new Jewish parenting website called Kaveller, where she, in my totally distorted memory, was like, "I'm breastfeeding my four-year-old, and I love it. And it's the greatest experience of my life, and I love breastfeeding a four-year-old. And it's so awesome when a kid walks up to me and like uses full sentences to ask for my boob." And so, my older child is about the same age as Mayim's younger child, and I was like neck-deep in... Oh, at that point, I had like a toddler and an infant. I don't know. It was just horrible. And I was neck-deep in postpartum anxiety, and I was a freaking wreck. And I saw this article, and I was like,

• 3:23Speaker 02

  "This woman was my childhood idol, not because of Blossom, but because her like three-episode guest appearance on, wait for it, MacGyver, which was and continues to always be my all-time favorite TV show. I've seen every episode like more times than I can count."

• 3:39Jonathan Cohen?

  That's where most people know her from, actually.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Obviously. Obviously. So that's my like association with Mayim. And so, I read this article, and I was like, "Oh, no, she didn't." And so, I totally wrote this rebuttal piece, calling her out, being like, "Tell it like it is." And where that fundamentally came from was my deep sense of shame, because I only breastfed each of my daughters for about nine months. I hated every minute of it. It was horrible. I felt gross.

• 4:09Mayim Bialik?

  Also, that's a very long time. I'm not going to let you use the word "only." That's a long time. You did great.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Well, see, for me, it didn't feel like a long time. I felt like I was failing my kids. And so, then I see you out there, being like, "Not only was I on MacGyver," which totally was not in the article, but that's what I read, "but I breastfed my kids for a million years."

• 4:26Jonathan Cohen?

  And the neighbor's kids.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  She was like out there. And so, in my world back then was all about parenting shame, feeling like a shitty parent, anything could trigger me. And so, I wrote a rebuttal article. And of course, Kaveller is a lovely place. It was like where I became a writer and found my voice. And it was like my first community of fellow Jewish mothers that I felt really connected to. But they were like, "Oh, yeah, some person's taking a stab at mine. I'm absolutely going to post that piece."

• 4:55Jonathan Cohen?

  What was the shot exactly?

• 4:57Mayim Bialik?

  No, it was... She was literally like... I can't remember if you referenced like, "You must have a nanny," or "You must have help." But like, what she said is, "This like holistic mama portrait of you cannot actually be what it's like." Like, it's so hard out here. It's what a lot of people kind of, you know, eventually criticized, like people like Gwyneth Paltrow for, for like making it look shiny. Except I was making it look shiny in like a hippie granola way. So Carla literally was like, "This is not what my experience is. It's not what most women's experience is. This cannot be the whole story." So I literally emailed her. And I was like, "Okay, lady, let's talk."

• 5:36Speaker 02

  And Mayim said something that I will never forget, which I think about a lot when I look at celebrities now, is that, you know, when you are a celebrity, whatever that means, you can't really complain about your life, in a public way, because people assume that if you are a celebrity, then you have unlimited internal and external resources. I don't even think they think about celebrities' internal resources, actually. I don't think they think about celebrities as real people. I think they're just like, "You're rich and famous, so obviously, your life is way easier than mine in every way, so shut up and don't complain." I think that was... And you said it in a much more thoughtful, graceful way, and all I could think was, "Oh, my holy shit, the woman from the girl from MacGyver is emailing me."

• 6:18Mayim Bialik?

  And I do want to point out, and I think this is a good window into not only kind of Carla and my relationship, but what I have been able to learn from her. I did not approach it like, "Bitch, you shouldn't have done that." What I said was, "I think it was an unfair assumption that you made, and I would love to talk to you." Because also, this was the early days... I don't know if people... You know, some people may not have been around at this time of like mommy blogging was new. We were getting paid like, you know, a very small amount of money, because this was like a new enterprise, like of like, "Write your stuff and tell everything that's going on as a mom." But it was still a new... It was very... There was a lot of contentiousness. There was a lot of, "Who's doing it better?"

• 7:02Mayim Bialik?

  It was still like, "Should you breastfeed? Should you not?" And like, people were freaking out about vaccines. Like, it was a very interesting time, where there was a lot of debate about parenting in particular, online. So I wanted to not buy into that trope of like, "I'm going to write a mean article back." So we ended up like, kind of starting to talk, and we built, you know, more of a friendship. And, you know, what ended up happening is, you know, I got divorced. My kids were four and seven when I got divorced. And it was very, very difficult, as many people experience, to be a divorced parent, also a working divorced parent. Also, with my own, you know, like mishegoss and baggage

• 7:46Mayim Bialik?

  that I had come to life with, I was now bringing to my kids. And Carla, in her writing, and eventually in the books that she started writing, was willing to be extremely honest about places she was not happy about in her life as a parent. And, you know, parenting in the present moment, you know, was a real game changer for me, because what Carla was able to talk about is that the person that you think you are, meaning that you come into parenting with, does not have to be the person that you continue to be. Meaning, I was exhibiting rage. I was exhibiting a level of overwhelm and frustration that was out of control.

• 8:29Mayim Bialik?

  My children, at that point, were afraid of me, not because I was hitting them, but because of my anger, my physical presence. I threatened them with my presence and my voice. And I felt shitty.

• 8:46Mayim Bialik?

  And I turned to Carla personally, not, you know, on the record. And I said, I would like to know, like, how can I keep getting there? And Carla was not the first person who had suggested meditation, but she was the first person I could hear it from. And it seemed so foreign to me because I had heard of like, oh, there's this website, and this was earlier, you know, in the, in the consciousness of meditation. And what appealed to me was that Carla was not, you know, she was not from, you know, from an ashram where I could never go. She wasn't, you know, she wasn't raised in, you know, a culture that I think would foster a natural sense of mindfulness.

• 9:30Mayim Bialik?

  She was, she was a person like me. She was like a mom who was stressed out, had a lot of stuff from, you know, her ancestral family. And I literally began learning how to meditate on Carla's suggestions. Sharon Salzberg was one of the first people you told me to turn to, and I bought one of her books. And you told me about that there are walking meditations. Never knew that was a thing. And by walking meditation, that doesn't mean like, taking a walk and listening to a guided meditation. It means as you place your feet, there are words that you say and you walk a straight line back and forth. And I started doing that. At that time, you turned me on to a couple of websites

• 10:14Mayim Bialik?

  that you could like, download the audio. It's much more sophisticated now to have access to these things.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:20Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:04Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:49Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:33Mayim Bialik?

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• 13:19Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:04Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:41Speaker 02

  Oh, me too.

• 14:42Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, exactly. So you, you know, your degree, you have a degree in psychology, and you also have a master's and you have a doctorate. And your, your work was clinical social work, correct? That is your, that's where your kind of thesis lay.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Just to be clear, my master's and my doctorate are actually both in clinical social.

• 15:00Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, I meant you have a master's and also a PhD. Can you tell us a little bit about, tell us a little about your childhood just so we can know where you fit in to sort of the world of people who eventually become people who write parenting books?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  This is where I joke with my friends that if I ever start with a new therapist, I'm going to need like the PowerPoint slideshow to catch. So I won't pull out the PowerPoint, but I will just tell you guys, I am the child of multiple divorces. And this wasn't a situation where my parents married and remarried and divorced each other. They married and remarried multiple people. They divorced each other when I was not quite a year old. And without going into too many details because I want to respect my family and their privacy.

• 15:40Mayim Bialik?

  I don't, sorry. I meant, I don't want to respect my family.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, that's fine. It's, it was a childhood of addiction and mental illness and multiple disruptions and moving back and forth between different parents' houses in different states. My parents, still to this day, can't really talk to each other. So it was, there was a lot of custody battles and awful stuff. So that was my childhood. And how did I end up writing parenting books? Because writing is the only way I have been able, it's, it's like my main vector for figuring shit out. So I go to therapy. I've gone to therapy since I was a kid and the court ordered it. I take medication for my anxiety and I work hard to incorporate hilarious stuff into my life every single day

• 16:25Speaker 02

  because laughing is like my main coping mechanism. And I write books. And I write, I write about the stuff that I am struggling with. And so the real clear one is my third book, which was called How to Stop Losing Your Shit with Your Kids, which is pretty obvious what I was struggling with there. And my, my newest one is You Are Not a Shitty Parent, which is about self-compassion and a syndrome I made up, which is called shitty parent syndrome, which I myself struggled with for many years. And so I think that, you know, when I became a mother, and my daughters are now 13 and 12, not only, Mimi, you set a beautiful context for it, but it was a time where just social media was erupting and we were all trying to make sense of it.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Reality shows were erupting and, and there was so much judgment. And there still is. But I'd chosen to kind of not be a part of that world so much anymore. But between mommy blogging and social media and all the conversations, I was, like, I would look at other people's style of parenting and simultaneously think, I should be doing what they're doing. And also, I totally don't agree with that style of parenting. But like, I was just certain I was doing it wrong. And that's one of the problems when you grow up in a really chaotic, dysfunctional, traumatic household, is you can say, I don't want to do it that way. But that's like saying, I don't want to go down that road, but I have no idea which other road to choose. And there's a million other roads.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And you're like, I don't know which one is the right one for me. And thankfully, I have a, my husband, my parenting partner, who is grounded and supportive and much less anxious than I am, thank God. But it was a real process. And I remember literally sobbing in my therapist's office because I had become the parent who was feeding my kids like frozen chicken nuggets. And I felt so horrible about this. And that was obviously not really about the nuggets, but it was sort of about the nuggets. But, you know, so, so that was kind of where I was and that, what got me into writing.

• 18:28Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit? Because, you know, How to Stop Losing Your Shit? I mean, I remember when you wrote it and, you know, I was having a lot of parallel experiences because we have kids, you know, the same age. And can you tell us, just so also we can, you know, be reminded how human even the people who write books are? What did it look like for you? I mean, was my description close?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Um, I, yes, yeah, look, I did a lot of yelling.

• 18:56Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  I do a lot of yelling and screaming. I probably would have done more door slamming, but we don't have that many doors downstairs in our house and running upstairs to slam a door and then running back downstairs.

• 19:04Mayim Bialik?

  It's not as dramatic.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  It doesn't have the same dramatic effect you're looking for. But look, my kids, I remember when they were really young and I was with them a lot alone, like my daughters are 20 months apart. So I had these two really little ones and my husband was traveling a lot for work. And it took me a long time in therapy to figure out why that particular formulation of mother along with two daughters was so triggering for me, but I was losing my shit with them all the time, just yelling, a lot of yelling is what I remember. And for me, it wasn't so much, it didn't feel like rage. It felt like intense irritability coming from a place of overwhelming anxiety. And it took me a long time to identify that my screaming at my kids was actually not from a place of rage, which isn't an emotion I identify with quite as much, but from just

• 19:49Speaker 02

  constant and almost debilitating anxiety is what it was for me.

• 19:52Mayim Bialik?

  What is the anxiety? Meaning when you're a parent, like what, can you put your finger on, like what, what is it?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  So let's just set the context. I am Jewish. I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors

• 20:07Speaker 02

  on one side. And I grew up in a completely unpredictable, unstable, constantly changing, like didn't know where I was necessarily going to live from year to year, didn't know if a parent was going to show up to pick me up, didn't know if that parent was going to be drunk or not. And so for me, anxiety, I don't, I don't know. It's just how I move through the world. I literally don't have another way to describe it, but what it looks like on a day to day basis is constant worry, right? About everything. And I remember having a babysitter once and I like gave her the list of things and I thought I was a pretty chill parent. I was like, you can take my kids out wherever you want to go. You can feed them whatever you want. You can do whatever activities. I totally trust you. And here's 27 things to remember. And she was like, holy crap, it must be exhausting to be in your brain and I want it. She said

• 20:51Speaker 02

  that to me, literally. And I was like, oh, honey, you have no idea. But for me, the anxiety, like I don't, it's just worrying about everything. It's worrying. I, I remember having a, a conversation with a friend once when my daughters were like three and two and disclosing to her that every single day I worried that one of my children might die. And I just worried about, and she looked at me and she was like, what are you talking about? I said, you don't worry about that? She said, no, I never worried about that. And I was like, what are you talking about? Clearly you don't come from a lineage of people who are constantly being tried to murder and like, like, you know, whatever. So I realized that that was, I just like same planet. I mean, two different worlds, right? So, but, and then sometimes the anxiety, like that should actually happen. I remember

• 21:35Speaker 02

  being at my grandmother's cabin, her lake house up in upstate New York and thinking to myself, I don't want the girls to fall down the stairs. I'm really scared the girls are going to fall down the stairs. And so I was like, every time they went down the stairs, they were probably six and four at the time. I was like, slow down, careful, slow down, careful walking down the stairs. And then one time I got in the shower and I didn't say that and my daughter fell down the stairs and broke her arm.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  And I'm like, thanks for that universe. Like what am I supposed, how am I supposed to make sense of this? Right? How am I supposed to make sense of the fact that the one time I'm not there nagging my kids, she actually falls down the stairs and breaks her arm. She's fine now. Everything's fine. But so does that, I mean, anxiety is just how I move through the world.

• 22:15Mayim Bialik?

  No, I, I, that's really helpful. Do you want to say anything, Jonathan?

• 22:19Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, this is the matrix moment where if you hadn't put so much energy on the stairs, would they have fallen in the first place?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Oh, shit.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I can't even think about that right now because if I think about that, then I have to go back and question my entire life. And I have a refrigerator repairman coming after this podcast, so I'm going to have to table that one until the refrigerator is fixed. But that's, I don't, I have very mixed feelings about what you just said.

• 22:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Intentionally.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Part of me is like, yeah, absolutely. And part of me is like, oh, great. Now we're blaming the mother again, right? Which is not what I think you wanted to do, but that's where my brain goes.

• 22:56Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm definitely not blaming the mother, but what I am doing is, your other line of thinking is that you have the control to be there at every moment of all of their existences. So the other question is, well, if you went in the shower, were they totally alone? Were there any other family members around? If not, should they have been inside if that was really a major risk? But like, there, there is not the possibility that you could be with them at every single moment if they were allowed to be on the stairs and the stairs were a serious danger. So the question is, if you thought the stairs were a serious danger, it's not about watching them at every moment. It's like, it, it's very, it's very tricky.

• 23:37Mayim Bialik?

  The thing that I take from Jonathan's interpretation is that Jonathan is a person who knows how to think like you do.

• 23:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, of course I do. If you don't think that they may die, you don't really love them.

• 23:47Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. There you go.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Dear listeners, we don't actually mean that.

• 23:51Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I'm a hundred percent joking.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  But we all think that.

• 23:53Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I'm a hundred percent joking.

• 23:54Mayim Bialik?

  So I, this is.

• 23:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I would love to be a human being who never contemplated bad things happening.

• 24:00Mayim Bialik?

  I don't, so I, for all the things that I have, this specific one that the two of you are talking about, I don't have it like this. And I'm not saying I'm better, believe me, I always think I'm worse. But that's interesting to me because Jonathan will have an awareness about his child that I wouldn't think to have. And obviously this looks a lot of different ways and a lot of different people. And I also think it's interesting that Jonathan doesn't have kind of the rage and tendency to shout and be angry that I do. So, you know, obviously we're all like all the colors of the rainbow, but I think it's interesting because listening to Carla talk, I do hear a lot of things that I've heard you talk about, and I just think that's interesting. That's all.

• 24:44Jonathan Cohen?

  I have in my life had the rage, but also my life was completely unmanageable when I had that amount of rage. And I have changed a lot of the external factors in my life that were causing me to want to lose my mind. And therefore I have a lot more ability not to lose my mind.

• 25:02Mayim Bialik?

  Was there a specific wake up call that led you to a new path, which I believe for you eventually led to meditation?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  So it wasn't, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it was a night when my daughters were pretty young. So they were probably, I don't know, three and two, four and two, something like that. And I was just finishing up my doctorate in clinical social work. So literally, littering a PhD in like overwhelming feelings and confusing thoughts. And I, I sat down at my computer. I had just lost my shit with my kids pretty epically, like screamed at them. And then I was like, okay, well, nothing good is going to come up tonight. Like I got nothing in the barrel. I can't parent them. Fuck it. I'm just going to put them in front of the TV. And then I felt super guilty about that, but I decided to table that for a minute. And I literally sat down at the computer and typed into Google, how do I stop yelling at my kids?

• 25:50Speaker 02

  When I was literally supposed to be an expert in this stuff, right? I was like, like defeated and just Google, help me. And so I found a million checklist and my little uptight type A heart was like, I can do this. I'm going to make a list of all the things and I'm going to do it. And it was like, you know, take 10 deep breaths and go yell into the toilet, which I think is a super weird one because at the time I had two kids in diapers and I was like, enough with the toilet stuff.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  But I made my checklist and it lasted about like, you know, 18 hours maybe before I was losing my shit again. And then I not only had the guilt and shame about exploding at my kids, but also the guilt and shame about failing at this thing that clearly thousands of parents had been able to conquer because they were writing about it all over the internet. Just so people know, you can actually say whatever you want on the internet. It doesn't mean it's true. People should just know that. So anyway, um, so then I was like, oh, well, Google is for the little people. I am going to take my academic brain and dive into the academic literature. So I was, you know, looking up stuff on the databases about like

• 26:55Speaker 02

  maternal emotional, maternal emotional regulation. Because if you use big words, obviously you're going to get better information. So I was reading all these articles and at the bottom of every single one of them, it said, these parents would probably benefit from some training in mindfulness practice. And I was like, that is bullshit. That is a hundred percent bullshit. Mindfulness is bullshit. It's for people who beat drums and drink kombucha and no offense if you like kombucha, but I think it's like horrifying. So I totally just ignored it and ignored it. And then finally one day, I don't even remember which day it was. I was just like, well, nothing else is working. So I found a, somebody told me about a mindfulness based stress reduction course and I signed up for it and I was like a hostile witness going to it. I was like a four year old being dragged to this, you

• 27:40Speaker 02

  know, conference room in this stupid building in this stupid town and everything was stupid. And I was so annoyed and I was like, well, clearly what I'm trying isn't working. So I need to try something new. And I learned some things that literally changed my life. So the first thing I learned, which I think a lot of people know now, but when I learned it, it, it was like my world had been turned upside down, which is that you don't have to believe everything you think.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And when I heard that, I was like, I'm sorry, what? Like, I have just spent decades being trained in a academic and professional culture where we are taught that our thoughts really matter and that our thoughts are so important that we need to pay other people hundreds of dollars to sit on couches for an hour to talk about our thoughts and that I, as a professional, should be charging you hundreds of dollars so we can talk about your thoughts. And I was like, and they were like, hmm, sometimes you can have a thought and it's just a stupid thought and you don't have to believe it and you can just move on. And literally, I can't even tell you guys how much that blew up my life. And then I learned about self-compassion. And the first time I learned about self-compassion, they tried to get us to put our hands over our hearts. And I thought that was the biggest crock of shit I'd ever heard.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  And all I could think about was Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, sitting in front of the mirror, being like, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me. And I was like, I am out.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  I still will tell you that I refuse to put my hand over my heart. I can't bring myself to do it. It's just not my style, but I think it works for many people. But this idea that I could notice when I was suffering and actually intentionally be kind to myself in response, I'd never seen anybody do that. I'd never heard anybody talk about it in years. I have a bachelor's in psychology and two degrees in social work and nobody ever talked to me about this stuff. And that, that was the game changer. So, learning to notice my thoughts and not get swept up in them, which is essentially in mindfulness meditation, that's all you're practicing doing, rather than believing every unhelpful thought I have, and learning to be compassionate to myself, those are the two things that changed everything for me.

• 29:48Mayim Bialik?

  So, your current book, You Are Not a Shitty Parent: How to Practice Self-Compassion and Give Yourself a Break.

• 29:56Mayim Bialik?

  What, I mean, and there's, I really like the disclaimer at the front where you're like, you may have read other books of mine, but this is a different kind of approach to the way to insert in particular compassion for the things you may not be happy with or the things that you'd like to change. And, you know, I read the book and I was like, I'll just bookmark a couple of things and we'll talk about it. And then like, you know, many, many dog-eared pages later, there are so many things in here that you present that honestly are not just for me as a parent, they're just for me as a person.

• 30:36Mayim Bialik?

  Because, you know, I think everybody in this room knows, and you probably know as well, I don't just have a problem with being a shitty parent in my head, I have a problem with being a shitty person. Meaning, my children are not the only people that I lose my shit with. My children are not the only people that I can be threatening with or bully.

• 30:58Mayim Bialik?

  It's embarrassing, you know, to be vulnerable like this, but it's also embarrassing to try and pretend that I'm something that I'm not. So, what I really loved, and you know, the reason that I think it's really important for you to get to talk to us, is that the things that you experience as a parent, you know, are an extreme magnification of all your stuff. And if you don't have kids, your stuff is still there and it's going to be magnified but by other people. So with kids, like the way that I see it, being a parent is not for everyone, and I have tremendous respect for people who, you know, don't want to go down that road and want to sleep and go to Disneyland whenever they want. But for me-

• 31:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Or never go to Disneyland.

• 31:43Mayim Bialik?

  Or never go to Disneyland. But for me, you know, having kids has been a lesson that if you had told me I was going to get, I might have made a different decision because it's like having your issues reflected to you 24/7. All the time. And even when they are not physically with you, you know, this is my invisible string that attaches me to them, like even with one at the age that he's about to be up and out, that changes nothing about his and my relationship. Meaning, it's constantly being mirrored back to me what works and what doesn't.

• 32:26Mayim Bialik?

  I constantly can disappoint them. So, again, that's just, they live in my house. So it's like having a built-in part of your life constantly showing you your shit. And, you know, I remember when, when I would see other people parent and I would see how angry they got with their children for what I thought were seemingly like, what? I had a lot of judgment about it, "Until I became a parent." And I was like, oh, it's rarely about them. It's almost always about me. And that's what you taught me. And that's what meditation kind of gave me the space to start thinking about. Like, it's all in here.

• 33:06Mayim Bialik?

  So, I tremendously appreciate this book and also, like I said, these are things that as humans, we need to focus on. It's not just children that are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, it's us. Right? That's halt.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 33:22Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:07Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:52Mayim Bialik?

  It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Check the link in today's episode description to get started. You know, I have a problem with affirmations, you know, the way you have a problem with putting your hand over your heart. You do have some really good guides in here. And on page 193, you have a box that says, "Good enough parenting is absolutely good enough." Right? And again, the judgmental mom in me is like, that's not true. And then I'm like, you know what? Yes, it is. And here are the points that you make.

• 35:24Mayim Bialik?

  "Children," but let's just say people, that's the "they," "they will not always get what they want or even need, and they will be okay." Like, I need to remember that with grownups. "We all make mistakes. We can always apologize. We can always make things right again." That is true with grownups and not just children. "People can have strong and unpleasant emotions all over us," like how you say that, "and say the wrong things and do the wrong things. That doesn't mean that we're terrible people or they hate us or our relationship sucks. It means we're all human. This is what humans do, especially to people they love." Ouch. Wow. "And we can notice when we've gotten off course and choose to treat ourselves and others with compassion at any moment." This is a very important box.

• 36:08Mayim Bialik?

  It's a really important box. Talk a little bit about why this is so hard for people to put into practice.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think the biggest reason it's so hard to put into practice is because we're not practicing it and we don't know what to practice. So, my kids, I don't know about your kids, are getting some amount of social, emotional education at school. It's like a curriculum. I don't, I don't know what the curriculum is. And I don't want to get involved because I probably have lots of opinions that nobody actually asked for. So, but when I was a kid, there was no social, emotional curriculum. We all just like got bullied and bullied each other and treated each other like shit and nobody talked about it, nobody cared. And that was just how the world worked. And now all of a sudden, I think, thanks in no small part to the internet and self-help

• 36:59Speaker 02

  people, which is a real double-edged sword, I say, as one of those self-help people, we're all of a sudden starting to talk about feelings and thoughts and behaviors in ways that we never have before. And most of us didn't grow up knowing the difference between a feeling and a thought and a behavior. And this is hugely important. And we don't know how to identify our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and make the distinction and understand what we can and can't control. And what, so, look-

• 37:30Speaker 02

  I, they're, one of the things I say to parents and to children all the time and that I try to remember when my children are having a really rough moment, is that no feeling is ever wrong, right? Some of them are hugely unpleasant and horrible, but they're never wrong. You're never wrong to feel the way you feel. It might not be a helpful feeling, but it's never a wrong feeling and you're not doing something bad, right? In addition, our feelings aren't something we can control. We can influence them. We can set up things like Jonathan, you were saying a minute ago that once you change the external factors in your life, you weren't filled with so much rage. My guess is sometimes you still feel angry, even though most of the external factors in your life are presumably in a better place.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  We can do things like get enough sleep and get enough exercise and make sure we feed ourselves on a regular basis and like try to set up a scaffolding. So that we're, take our medications, whatever it is, but set up the scaffolding so we're less likely to feel shitty feelings. But the truth is, we all have days where we just wake up feeling like crap, right? It just happens. So we can't control our feelings. You guys talk a lot on this podcast, this is what I think I love, about the narratives we create in our minds, right? And when people around us are experiencing and expressing unpleasant emotions, we tend to create a lot of narratives in our mind about what the, why that's happening and what that has to do with us and what it means for our relationship. And I think that-

• 38:55Mayim Bialik?

  I have no idea what you're talking about, Carla.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  I know, me neither. I don't, like, that's not the world I live in all the time. But here's the deal, whether or not our narratives are accurate is not actually that interesting to me. What I'm interested in is, are they skillful? This is a term that I learned from my study of Buddhist psychology and I myself am not a Buddhist, but I think Buddhist psychology is some of the wisest stuff out there. And the Buddhists talk about, they don't talk about good and bad, which I love because good and bad is like so judgy and just makes you feel like shit. And then you finally do something good, but it doesn't last very long and then you feel bad again. What they talk about is skillful or not skillful. And things that are skillful bring us closer to our goal, whatever it is.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  And so, um, the, what I'm interested in, in these internal narratives that we make up, these stories we construct is, are they skillful? Are they bringing us closer to whatever our goal is? And maybe our goal is a stronger relationship with our child, or maybe our goal is keeping the house clean enough that we don't lose our minds. Like I don't, those are two different goals and we can hold them both. But, um, so I think a lot of this box is about the narratives we construct. So if your kid is a freaking mess, right? Or if they're just having a difficult moment, how, what's the narrative we're gonna say to ourselves? And it could be, oh, I'm a terrible parent because I'm not keeping my child happy all the time. Or it could be, oh, my kid is having, you know, this big transition.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  They're tired because they need more sleep and they're in a growth spurt and whatever. Or the narrative could be like, yep, shit happens. We'll get them through this and tomorrow's another day. And I'm gonna like opt for option B or C, rather than the shitty parent option, because I think those are more skillful. Like they lead me in a better direction of whatever my goal is, which presumably is to have a smoother night and not feel like shit about myself in the process.

• 40:47Jonathan Cohen?

  The core idea here is that we are constantly assigning labels, judgments and narratives to all of our experiences, which only make the experience harder if we're analyzing it through a lens of, I'm failing.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  100%. Everything is harder when the story you have is, this unpleasant thing is happening because I'm not good enough at X, because I should have done something better. It feels harder, you get stuck in your own thinking. You can't come up with like creative solutions for how to do things differently. It just, it all feels awful. And whether or not it's true, which I would argue it's generally not, it's not helpful.

• 41:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Where I would go next is that a lot of people who are filled with anger and rage, if you're, if you're experiencing those things on, on that, you know, the intensity of that, is that you probably aren't even aware of the stories that are driving you to be that angry or annoyed. You're in a reactive cycle that you're just, something is happening with the kids. It's tripping up some internal wire for you. And you're having this emotional reaction to be able to slow down and be like, oh, I'm upset at this because I have a need that is to keep the house in a level that I can manage. Or it's that, oh, wait a second, that super annoying feeling that I'm having is because

• 42:11Jonathan Cohen?

  I think the kids are not doing their homework, therefore going to fail at that. Like there's a whole string of what I call downstream narrative thoughts that we don't even recognize as thoughts. We just move way past them. They're just like very quickly happening and we're just straight to the emotion.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  100%. And as, as I'm sure we all know and mine can explain in great detail, that part of our brain that takes control when we are flooded with emotion, isn't a thoughtful part of our brain. It wasn't designed to be thoughtful. It was designed to like full steam ahead, keep this person alive, like react, not sit down and think it through. And so that part, our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that can think and manage our emotions and get a grip on things and perceive things clearly, just isn't functioning. It's not online. And so one of the ways that my mindfulness practice helps me is in those moments when I am flooded by emotion, I've, I've trained myself and, and we, I talked about practice before. And when I say the word practice, I don't mean just do it.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  I mean, you're starting something new. You're probably gonna suck at it when you start. It's not gonna be easy. It's gonna feel weird. You're gonna have a hard time remembering it. You're gonna be like, what did that weird woman on the podcast say?

• 43:26Jonathan Cohen?

  You mean her?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  I was talking about me, not my Im.

• 43:30Mayim Bialik?

  I don't have that narrative at all. I'm fine.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  And then the more we practice it, the better we get at it. But what many people do when they learn some new piece of, of idea, new practice, a new something is, they, they read it or they listen to it. And then as long as life is generally okay, they're like, I'm not gonna change anything. Cause why would I? Life is fine and I'm too busy. I don't have time for this crap. And then the shit hits the fan and they're like, oh, what was that breathing thing I was supposed to do? And they can't do it because your brain can't do new things when you're in a crisis, right? It doesn't work.

• 44:01Mayim Bialik?

  Say that again.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Your brain can't do new things when you're in a crisis.

• 44:06Mayim Bialik?

  So if you're always in a crisis, you're never gonna do anything. I mean, you're never gonna get out of it.

• 44:10Jonathan Cohen?

  You're stuck in a very repetitive pattern. I wanna just tag here that if someone has the experience of feeling overwhelmed a lot and losing their shit a lot, there's likely something happening in their thinking that they're not aware of, because they're just going right from whatever's going on as a trigger to annoyance.

• 44:32Mayim Bialik?

  As someone who loses my shit a lot and has, I, I can tell you for me, and maybe, you know, Carla can let us know if I'm right. You know, for me, I mean, if I'm always at a nine and a half, it doesn't take a lot to get to the 10 and a half. Meaning if my cup is always half full, it's gonna spill over quicker than if my cup is in a positive way, not.

• 44:56Jonathan Cohen?

  100%. And if you're at that nine and a half-

• 44:58Mayim Bialik?

  I always think everyone's attacking me and that I always have to defend myself. And so when anything comes in, that's what you get.

• 45:04Jonathan Cohen?

  So you have this hair trigger response, but really what's happening-

• 45:08Mayim Bialik?

  Don't I sound like the most fun person ever?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  I think you're delightful and all this shit just resonates so deep with me, so I'm good here.

• 45:17Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, keep going.

• 45:18Jonathan Cohen?

  So if we open the computer that is my Im's brain and we look at like what happened right before the hair trigger response, really what's happening is lines and lines of code that have narrative associated with them that are like triggering that emotional response.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  I think there is an exception to this. I think I generally agree with you, but I think sometimes for some people, the trauma that becomes a trigger and later in life actually happens before they have, um, words. So it's like pre-verbal trauma. So it may not even appear as thoughts. And I, I think also this happens, and I am not an expert in this, so I can't say a whole lot about it. But there are also ways that trauma is held in the body and you can have a somatic response that there may not be actual thoughts associated with it. But I think in general, Jonathan, what you're saying is absolutely correct, that these, it's like you're playing that tape in your head and it's old and you've just played it so many times.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  You don't even need to get to the end because you already know what, your body just races right past it to the explosion. And, um, sometimes recognizing those thoughts and starting to change them is really, really important. And sometimes it's actually not.

• 46:32Jonathan Cohen?

  I 100% agree with you. I am a big proponent of it's held in your body and likely it is 100% pre-verbal. And also that the pre-verbal, uh, somatic experience that whatever, is part of the trigger. So when something is happening and someone's flying off the handle, they are feeling it first likely. They're not thinking at first. They're feeling it first and they are probably bumping up against some need, some wound, something that is being held in the body. And there also is likely a story associated with it because as time has gone on and they've become an adult and they've tried to push against whatever this thing is held in their body, they've had to try and rationalize it.

• 47:16Jonathan Cohen?

  They've had to say, what is going on? So for my Im, when it's this notion of, I'm being attacked, that is 100% a physical, uh, held feeling. So she feels it immediately, viscerally. She doesn't think, oh, I'm being attacked. But if she were to slow down enough and say, what is that thing I'm feeling? It is, I'm being attacked. And there's an entire lines of code as a narrative associated with, I'm being attacked. This person didn't do this or that or the other thing. And then it resonates in the body. But what's happening when she's reacting like that is that the narrative is just actually short circuited and going right to the somatic response.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have been like, we need to dig into the story here. And now I'm like, I don't know if I care about the story, right? I don't, I, maybe I do, maybe I don't. It depends on the situation. What I'm really interested in, because Jonathan, you said something super important.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  You said this about Mayim, so I'm not gonna say this about Mayim because I feel comfortable speaking about her experience.

• 48:15Jonathan Cohen?

  She set her up as the guinea pig here. I'm just playing on the scenario presented to me.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'm just gonna say this, but I don't know if it's actually true in Mayim's case. That often it starts with a physical sensation, right? And so so many of us are trained to ignore the sensations in our bodies.

• 48:32Mayim Bialik?

  Forget about ignore. We don't even have an awareness that they're happening.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  So, yes, we don't even realize, right? And I would argue that in many cases, what happens is we have a feeling or a physical sensation or some combination of both. And then we attribute a story to it. And then we behave, we act on it. And this can all happen at like the blink of an eye. It happens so freaking fast, right? And what I'm interested in is can we go either go back to the bodily sensations and notice them? And is there some way we can address that? And we identify our feelings and let it be okay that we're having one. Because here's the thing, feelings do not want to be fixed. And when you try to fix feelings, they get really pissy and they get more intense. And they do all the things, they just kind of want to be felt, whatever that looks like for you.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  So when we can identify our feelings and feel them instead of fixing them or trying to fix them, that kind of calms things down. Or we can just be like, you know what? I feel like shit in many different ways, emotionally, physically, whatever. But I actually have this thing I have to do. I'm gonna do it anyway. And this doesn't work a lot, right? This doesn't work all the time because if we're talking about-

• 49:40Mayim Bialik?

  You mean being alive? I feel like shit, but I have to live, so I'm gonna do it anyway.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  I have to get out of bed and get my kids to school or whatever. Now, for some people, there's a line there because they're dealing with a major mental illness or something really significant. They literally can't get their heads off the pillow and get out of bed. But for a lot of us, I'm more interested in what does it take in that moment to help you not yell? Like, what, how do you, how do we interrupt that cycle? And I would argue that tangling with our thoughts is not necessarily the most helpful way.

• 50:09Jonathan Cohen?

  And I 100% agree with you. I totally agree that you need to deal with the physical sensation first. You need to ride that out. You need to feel it, give it space to exist without trying to fix it. And where I believe the story is fairly essential is if you're continually feeling this particular type of way, what's the pattern in that story?

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 50:36Jonathan Cohen?

  If it's, okay, I have this emotional experience. I have a trigger, I fly off the handle, or I have an intense emotion. First thing, of course, deal with the emotion. Give it the space. Move to a relationship with it that it doesn't necessarily lead to whatever the most extreme version of it is.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  And let's be clear, that can be years of work, but go ahead.

• 50:59Jonathan Cohen?

  100%. So just that in itself.

• 51:04Jonathan Cohen?

  And understanding that that is related to a sense of being attacked. Then when the feeling comes up, having that little help of, oh, wait, I'm not being attacked. And looking around and saying, am I being attacked? Am I really being attacked? Can really expedite the relationship with the emotion. So I 100% agree that you can't go into your head about it. But having that mental understanding can help change the relationship with the emotion.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, therapy is amazing for lots of different reasons. One of it is, is you get insights. Another is you get coping mechanisms. You get to go into a space and dump all your shit and then walk away and be like, see you next Tuesday at 2:00, bye! And that's super powerful. And for me, growing up in such a dysfunctional childhood, having, my therapist happened to be a woman who also had children. And for her to just kind of normalize things for me and say, nope, that's okay. And she's older and her children were a little bit older. And she could just say, no, actually, that thing is fine. That, that thing you're doing right now, that's, there's no problem there. And to have someone I really, really trusted say to me, that particular parenting move is not a problem.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I needed that reality check and it was a game changer for me. And I know therapists aren't supposed to be saying that to you technically, but depending on the relationship with your therapist, sometimes that's really what you need. Someone who's not clouded by all the bullshit in your brain.

• 52:35Mayim Bialik?

  I'm enjoying very much the kind of process of how we get kind of to the losing the shit. But I also, I would like to talk about Carla's book because when all those things, you know, of course, these are the things that we're, we're looking to do. And those are the things, and I will say, like, I am a much less terrifying parent to my children now.

• 53:02Mayim Bialik?

  However, there are still times when either as parents or as humans, we miss the mark and we have tension and difficulty. And it never has occurred to most of the books about this that the answer is self-compassion, which is also, you know, part of the eastern tradition and the eastern philosophy, right? Meaning, a lot of books about self, a lot of self-help books, a lot of parenting books, focus on like, these are the things you need to do to not lose your shit. And I think what Carla has tapped into is, and sometimes that doesn't work for everyone. And what do we do then?

• 53:42Mayim Bialik?

  And that's really where I think, you know, there's hope in, in this kind of approach. So the notion is not like, you hit your kids, it's okay. Or you scream at your kids, it's okay. The, the notion is, I think for a lot of parents, especially of our parents' generation, I think I can speak for all of us in the room. They were not allowed to admit they were wrong. They, they were not. They were never wrong. Meaning, if they messed up, you just kind of like did it. It's not that they didn't feel bad, but you didn't talk about it. You're just like, okay, now it's a new day. But no one acknowledged what happened, right?

• 54:24Mayim Bialik?

  And so what, what this kind, what, what self-compassion means, and I like, there's like a heart on the cover. But what self-compassion means is saying, I'm not allowed to pretend that didn't happen because that's gonna fuck up my kids. Because they know something's not right if I screamed, if I yelled, if I threw things. So one of the things you talk about is naming your child's feelings, acknowledging where they're at, being able to say,

• 54:56Mayim Bialik?

  we're in a tense situation, right? But we're all having feelings and we can also start again.

• 55:06Mayim Bialik?

  And there are things that we do to not put ourselves in that hole of, I fucked up so much, probably gonna fuck up tomorrow, so let's do the same thing tomorrow. Does, does that make sense in terms of this kind of redirection? You talk about like connection before redirection. Meaning, before you say like, oh, that was shitty, let's do this, right? To not distract away from it, but to say, I owe you to connect back with you. I, I owe you love. I owe you a conversation.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  I think what a lot of we parenting people talk about and post on social media and ask parents to do requires such a tremendous amount and has a lot of assumptions about where we parents are on our internal process, not only at any given moment, but over the course of our lives. And so Mayim and Jonathan, you guys are clearly my people. We can sit around and talk about things like introspection and generational trauma and, you know, trauma that's held in our bodies and blah, blah, blah. And this is like just words that roll off our tongue because this is the world we live in. But for many, many people, it's not. Like, when I go listen to my husband talk about business shit, I'm like, I know you're speaking English, but I actually have no idea what you're saying.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know what word, so I, I get very anxious when I hear

• 56:28Speaker 02

  clinicians and coaches and people like that tell parents that they should be able to interact with their children in a certain way, especially around very heated topics at very difficult moments. Because I think that assumes a huge amount of many parents, especially because those of us who are really struggling with shit loss, and I'm not talking about like occasionally yelling at your kids. I see that as completely normal par for the course. That's just the parenting deal. I'm talking about, what are we talking about? We're talking about frequency and intensity, right? So when it's happening all the time and it's super intense, if you are a person like me who has struggled with that, chances are, like you pointed out, Jonathan, there's a lot more going on behind the scenes.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  And asking me to be able to identify my child's emotions in a difficult moment is what I call coulda, woulda advice. If I could have done that, I would have freaking done that. But clearly I can't do it in that moment, so I need something else. So what I really start with, so here's how I think about self-compassion. I think about mindfulness, mindful parenting, meditation, being patient, being calm, being present, being all the things, naming my children's feelings and helping them through difficult motion, moments. I think of all that as like, goals I'm aiming for, things I want to be able to do. You know, I want to get better at this, I want to, whatever. I think of self-compassion as the solid ground I can land on every single time

• 57:56Speaker 02

  I don't meet the mark on those things, which is a lot, right? So I am constantly striving to find ways to connect with my daughters. And as any parent knows, the fun thing about parenting, and I use the word fun a little sarcastically, is that as soon as you figure something out, your kid goes through a major developmental leap and that thing you thought you had figured out no longer works. So that's really enjoyable. And so as I'm constantly striving to like figure out how to connect with my daughters, who are, you know, teens now, I have to keep reminding myself, and this is all self-compassion in action, right? Parenting is hard for everyone. It's a hard thing to do, right? For everyone. Just because it's hard, that doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong. It's just the nature of the beast.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And this is such a mind shift for me because I think there's so much out there. And one of the reasons I love the stuff that you two are putting out in the world is it's so real and I, it's so honest. And I feel like there's a lot out there that really would lead a person to believe that if you are parenting right, it's gonna be smooth and easy the whole time. And if it's not smooth and easy, you're screwing up. And I call that the big lie because it's bullshit.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  And so just even just that, the ability when I'm having a hard moment to remind myself that parenting is hard for everyone, which is what we call this idea of common humanity, which comes out of Kristin Neff. She's a researcher out of Texas, and I have to give her full credit for her amazing work on self compassion. Just reminding myself that I am not alone and how unbelievably difficult this is. It has been a game changer in my parenting, parenting and my perspective on it.

• 59:31Jonathan Cohen?

  I completely agree. And I'll be honest, I had a little bit of problem with the title because I feel like self compassion gets this slippery slope to people not really trying that hard. And I'm not saying that's true. I'm saying that's my, you know, like that's my bias.

• 59:48Mayim Bialik?

  Can you say more about that?

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, tell me more about that. I'm interested in that.

• 59:51Jonathan Cohen?

  It goes to something that you said, which is that it is extremely hard. And even if we were doing it the right way, it wouldn't necessarily be easier, which I totally agree with. And also, there are things that we do as parents that make it harder.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:07Jonathan Cohen?

  That we should know about. And that's not necessarily about self compassion or anything else. But like, you know, my son had a really hard time getting to bed at night. And when I learned that his bedtime was impacted from the moment he woke up, and that it was about ritual and consistency and having predictability, where I thought it was like, oh, he should, you know, be tired at the end of the night, and that there's this whole emotional world that he's navigating and bedtime is just a reflection of that.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Jonathan Cohen?

  That totally changed how I understood bedtime. And actually, I was, I'm not saying I was failing as a parent, and I'm not saying I was a bad person, but not having that information about that, that bedtime was really a reflection of his emotional world throughout the day, was making my life way, way harder.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  What I say in the book is I do not believe there is such a thing as a shitty parent. I don't believe that exists. And some people are gonna be like, you have no idea. Well, let's remember, so I grew up in a really chaotic childhood with parents who I believe were doing absolutely the best they can. And it was on some level, obviously enough because here I am, but on many levels, it was really hard time. In my clinical social work, I did home visits, which means I would go out to people's homes and work with families who were struggling with parenting. So you could imagine, you see a lot when you're actually in someone's house. And I've also worked on a locked in patient psychiatric unit where people go when they are struggling with suicidality, major mental illness that doesn't allow them to function, all of these sorts of things. And you can imagine, I saw

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  a lot of parents there. So I've seen a lot of things that someone else might call shitty parenting. And I say, there's no such thing. I say, there are parents who don't have the information, resources and support they need. And so Jonathan, that story you told teed me up so beautifully, because in that moment, your struggles with bedtime weren't because you were a shitty parent. And you actually never had that, I don't think you had that narrative, because I didn't hear it in the story you told. But you didn't have the information you need. And that perspective, shifting that perspective from, I'm such a shitty parent because I cannot get my kid to sleep, to there were things I just didn't know. And when I learned them, everything was a little bit easier. That's the shift I want for parents.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Because the problem is, you know, when you start talking about yourself as a shitty parent, it's like you're just on this crap highway to nowhere, and there's no way to get off, right? There's, there's nothing to do. There's no, there are no other options. But when we start to think that no matter how bad things are, no matter how deep you are in abuse, addiction, neglect, mental, whatever it is, if you can just see it as you are lacking the information, support and resources you need, and resources may be external, and it may be internal, then all of a sudden, there's like off ramps off this shitty road, right? Like, oh.

• 1:03:00Mayim Bialik?

  I want to hit on a couple of points. And, you know, I have about five of these, and maybe you can just kind of like, give us your sort of tidbit. I mean, I also want people to buy the book. You talk about disconnecting from the bullshit, things that you need to do for yourself to try and reduce the probability that you're going to lose your shit. And you talk about, stop hanging out with people who are not healthy for you.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Mayim Bialik?

  And you talk about saying no, unless you really, really, seriously want to say yes. And you also talk about just think no. Can you talk about those three things? Like, give us kind of your, you know, your elevator pitch for what those three things do?

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Look, it's all about setting boundaries, right? And we as women especially, and I'm gonna say that I do see a gender divide here. We as women are not supposed to say no, right? We are supposed to agree to things and say yes. And I think there's a lot more pressure to do that. But let's go back to each of these things. Really quickly, years ago, I heard Mary Pfeiffer, who's an amazing, brilliant psychologist who wrote Reviving Ophelia. And then years later, she wrote a book on aging wisely, and she was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and they were talking about, what have you learned later in life? And she's like, yeah, I just walk away from the conversations I don't want to be a part of now. And she was like, she's like 70 or something. And I am like, I was like 40 when I heard this. And I was like, I just want to do that now. Like, can I do that now? Do I have to wait

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  till I'm 70? And I realize, let's put a pin in this and just acknowledge, there is a huge amount of privilege inherent in being able to walk away from conversations you don't want to be a part of. That is a very privileged thing to be able to do. But I am more and more thinking about, even just at like, school pickup, right? I'm not talking about big life conversations, you could be. But sometimes I get stuck in these shitty conversations on the playground, and I'll just say, excuse me, I need to go. When I was, when I had a clinical practice, which I don't now, but I was working with a lot of parents, and they would talk about spending time with other parents. And I would hear through this story that these, that these other parents were leaving them feeling like shit.

• 1:05:06Mayim Bialik?

  Is that why you wrote that article about me?

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  No, well, yeah, okay, I did. But let's talk about that, because that article, surprisingly enough, mine wasn't actually about you, right? That was about me and my shit and my shame and all my unresolved crap about how I was feeding my kids, which remains unresolved to this day, but we will just move on. So, but if you are hanging out, look, we all have that voice in our head, right? We all, every single one of us has that judgmental, shamey, blamey, you suck, you're not as good as everyone else voice in our head. It's gonna be there. I'm sorry, I can't make it go away 100%, not even with my awesome book. But how about we not hang out with people who reinforce it?

• 1:05:48Mayim Bialik?

  You have something called, well, there's a lot of S's.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  That's my favorite letter, because shit starts with S.

• 1:05:54Mayim Bialik?

  So this is page 173, and this is what it is. It says, sip, snack, stretch or soak, snuggle, song or show, sleep. And this is like my, one of my favorite things from this book.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Can we, can we back up, though, and offer a little context for why I'm saying this, though?

• 1:06:09Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, go ahead.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Look, all I'm saying is, when you are having a shitty moment, one of the ways to treat yourself with compassion, I talk about in the book, is to, A, get curious about what you need, and B, take yourself seriously. Because a lot of us are like, wow, I really need a freaking break. And then we sort of say that and put it out in the universe, and then charge right back into all the to do list, and all the things I've forgotten, and the doctor's appointments, and the dentist appointment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I'm saying is, can you ask yourself what you need, get really curious about this, take yourself seriously, and then treat yourself with some kindness. And I think for a lot of people, they confuse self care with self improvement. So when you are stuck in shitty parent mode, or shitty person mode, what you think is, there is

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  something wrong with me, I need to fix it. I need to go on the internet and find the self care article, I need to find the expert, I need to read the book, and I need to start training for a marathon, or do a new diet, or start a super intense meditation practice, or whatever it is. And what I'm saying is, no, no, no, in that moment, maybe just what you need. And again, Jonathan, this isn't letting yourself off the hook. It's not that you're not going to go back to whatever parenting snafu you made, and try to either reconnect with your child, or learn a new way to interact with that moment, or whatever it is. All I'm saying is, first, what you're gonna do is notice that you're having a really hard time, that you're struggling and suffering, that this doesn't mean you're a bad parent,

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  and that you need a little compassion. And from that place of feeling taken care of, feeling acknowledged, feeling respected, feeling important, like you matter, and you're worth caring for, even by yourself, then you dive back into the parenting problem from this place of clarity and.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Creativity and you can sort of look at the problem from a much more solid position. So this whole list that Mayim is talking about is like really basic stuff that you can do to treat yourself with compassion after a really difficult moment.

• 1:08:16Mayim Bialik?

  I think that's a really huge thing that I never understood. Confusing self-care with self-improvement is a bad thing that I and I think a lot of people do. I never thought about because when people are like, what do you do for self-care? I'm like, I go to therapy. And like, that's different. What do you do for self-care? Well, I read this book and that's not self-care. And

• 1:08:40Jonathan Cohen?

  You know what you do now? You go to sleep early.

• 1:08:42Mayim Bialik?

  I go to sleep early. No, I do more of the things that Carla talks about doing, which Jonathan already does. I have one more question.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm here for it.

• 1:08:52Mayim Bialik?

  Well, the the section is called, if compassioning the crap out of our kids is so awesome, why don't we do it all the time? Meaning, i- if that were the solution, why is this happening? And one of the things you say is we didn't know any better. And that really hits my heart because we do the best we can. And so did our parents and grandparents. The second point, though, is really important. Most of us were raised in a culture that believes we need to discipline our children in order to maintain respect and control. And what this acknowledges is that we have a very binary concept of of children. They're either good or they're bad. When they're bad, you have to discipline them to make them good.

• 1:09:34Mayim Bialik?

  And what Carla says is there's actually something in the middle, which is sometimes we all have bad, rough, hard days, times, moments, thoughts. You don't always have to find the thing to do, which in many cases we've been taught is hitting or disciplining, to get it to change. You can notice it. It can be, and you can still feel okay, and they will be okay. Can you speak to that a little? Because I think there's also so much confusion still about harsh discipline. And, you know, again, this is not about should people hit their kids or not. Jonathan and I are very clear on that. But I love this notion that that's not the only way to exist as a parent

• 1:10:19Mayim Bialik?

  is to take a bad child and make them good. That's not how we should even frame it.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Look, I, first of all, adamantly and unequivocally anti-hitting. So let's not hit our kids. And if you are, if that's a thing you're struggling with, then please get help. Because even if you are hitting your kid, I don't think you're a shitty parent. I think you're a parent who needs more information and support and resources than you have. So having said that, we're in a very interesting place in the world of parenting. By which I mean, for the first time, I would argue in human society, we are talking about and exploring on a society-wide level the impact and importance of our relationship with our children and what it means for their future. Now, I'm not saying that parents in previous generations didn't care about their relationship with their kids. What I'm saying is that wasn't what kids were for.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  You had kids because you needed to pass along your genes and keep the species alive. And you needed someone to take over the farm or the blacksmithery or your law practice when you died. Parent, becoming a parent was a financial investment in your future, right? And now, so many parents are having children later in life. So many of us have a whole career first, right? And in our career, what we learn is that if we work harder and we do the right things, we're going to get better at it and we're going to get a promotion and we're going to get a gold star and we're going to get more money. And someone will tell us we're doing it right.

• 1:11:41Mayim Bialik?

  Also, that's part of the kind of capitalist patriarchal structure, really. Meaning that's it's that's not true in every culture. Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Yes, that's such an important point, Mayim. Thank you. And so we take this mindset into parenting.

• 1:11:54Mayim Bialik?

  Totally.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  There's like, unless you have like an awesome therapist or a parent that you're really close to, who knows your family really well or something like that, who can give you this gold star feedback, we don't have that. So what we look to for our feedback is our children's behavior. This is like hugely problematic because children don't have prefrontal cortices. Right? Like, they don't have this part of their brain that they need to behave well and behave predictably and follow all the rules. And so like, kids are an inconvenient

• 1:12:26Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, they have a prefrontal cortex. It's not fully developed.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Whatever, like, you know, these things.

• 1:12:30Mayim Bialik?

  No, I just didn't want people to be like, what do you mean? They're missing the part of the brain? Yeah.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  I think when I think about it, I think about like a big empty, like, gaping hole in the front of their brain. Okay, whatever, there's a few little wiry neurons, but they're not very good at flashing yet, or whatever neurons do. Somehow, though, our children's behavior and their successes or their challenges and their struggles have become like, we parents take this on as like a referendum on our parenting. And that if our kids are struggling, it's because either like we're shitty parents or we haven't like worked hard enough to find the expert that's going to fix them. And if we haven't done that, we better have a damn good story about how hard we tried and we called everybody. And I would like to also acknowledge this is a super classist thing I'm saying right now.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Super duper classist. So we got to acknowledge that. But what I would argue is, yes, absolutely. I firmly believe that we need to teach our kids how to be functional human beings in the world. And we need to have high expectations for them. And we also need to show up with a lot of compassion when they don't meet those expectations. And we also, I just don't think disciplining, and I know there are parenting people like Mayim and Jonathan, you're going to hear a lot of shit when I say what I'm about to say. You're going to get the listeners coming in here unhappy with you. I just don't think disciplining is that useful because it doesn't give kids what they need. All, so if a kid screws up, sometimes they legit know they screwed up. Like when my three-year-old brother and I was like 13 and he put oatmeal in my record player.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  He absolutely knew what he was doing and he was a little demon. And he did deserve to get disciplined, mom. But like, my daughter has gotten in trouble twice already at the beginning of the school year. And it's for stupid shit where she, you know, was in a moment where she wasn't structured enough. It was her passing time between classes. She was screwing around with her friends. She got sent to the principal's office. And so after this, like, the first time this happened, I was like, well, that was dumb. Don't do it again. And the second time this happened, I was like, oh, child, I think you seem to be having a hard time knowing what to do with yourself during unstructured time. Should we have a conversation? And she's like, yeah, I won't fall out of the chair and I won't like look up stuff on the computer I'm not supposed to look up.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  And I was like, which by the way, she got busted for like, whatever, it was dumb stuff. But nothing that bad. And I said, I think you have a good sense of what you're not supposed to be doing. Let's talk about what you can do instead. And so we talked through her options and she decided if she has extra unstructured time, she wants to draw pictures. And she usually draws like superhero bananas and they're amazing. So it's awesome. But in that moment, I could have disciplined her. I could have been like, if you get sent to the principal's office again, I'm going to take away your screen time or I'm not going to let you go to this party with your friends or whatever. And so that makes her scared, but it doesn't actually give her the skills she needs to do better. So instead, we had a conversation about like, let's see if we can get curious about what the problem is and then come up with a plan for doing things differently.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  And let's notice that in order for me to do that with my child, I actually had to be in a place where I wasn't losing my shit with her. So it took me like years, and I'm not exaggerating, years of personal work and therapy and medication to be able to be in a headspace that when my kid comes home after being sent to the principal twice in a week, I don't lose my shit with her.

• 1:15:50Mayim Bialik?

  Right. And you're also, you're working on your next book, which is specifically for middle school age.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  It is. So it is a middle grade version of how to stop losing your shit with your kids. It's gonna, it's called How to Stop Freaking Out. So no profanity for you parents who don't want that for your kids. There won't be any swear words. But it's basically talking to kids about what our thoughts, what our feelings. What, it's for kids.

• 1:16:16Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  It's for, it's for middle grade kids, which is what we think of as like eight to 12. So it's these skills for the kids. It's going to be highly illustrated, lots of fun pictures, because that's what the kids want.

• 1:16:27Mayim Bialik?

  My kids are going to be reading that.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Your kids are going to be too old for it.

• 1:16:30Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but you know what? I think it's still important. It is still important for them to understand. Fine, I'll let them read this one. I'll tell them, I'm not a shitty parent, you guys. Carla said so.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  So yeah, but when you get the book, Mayim, just like casually leave it out on your coffee table and be like, my friend Carla wrote this, whatever. And don't pretend like you want them to read it. Just don't.

• 1:16:49Mayim Bialik?

  Carla, tell us where people can find out more about you.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  CarlaNamburg.com.

• 1:16:54Mayim Bialik?

  Anything else you'd like to say? Where can we find you in other places?

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  They can go to Instagram.

• 1:16:59Mayim Bialik?

  Great.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  And Facebook and look me up there. I'm the only Carla Naumburg around.

• 1:17:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Should we end with our hands over our hearts?

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  I'm not doing it. You can't make me.

• 1:17:08Mayim Bialik?

  Carla, thank you so, so much.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys. I love being on your show and I love all the wisdom and humor you're putting out in the world.

• 1:17:20Jonathan Cohen?

  What else does there even say?

• 1:17:21Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I really, I like Carla, I like the way she speaks. She also has a way of, at least for me, you know, like, everybody's not for everybody. She has a way of speaking that kind of makes sense to me, you know, just the way she talks about. It's not that I haven't heard these things before, but it's the way that she talks about it. And that really just started with, you know, me knowing her as a writer and then as a friend. But I think she's really captured a lot of her personality, really in all of her books. And I, I, I learned a lot of new things today and I just am really grateful for her.

• 1:17:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Can I put you on the spot?

• 1:17:56Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:17:57Jonathan Cohen?

  You talk a lot about the things that are challenging for you as a parent.

• 1:18:02Mayim Bialik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:04Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it's helpful. We used to have a little section called My Mym Realizes.

• 1:18:11Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Jonathan Cohen?

  I think we can use that section as a way of also saying some of the good stuff, because you've had some amazing breakthroughs with your kids.

• 1:18:18Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 1:18:18Jonathan Cohen?

  And, you know, I don't want people to overemphasize or overconnect with some of the challenges that you have when there's also a lot of really beautiful things that are happening with you and your kids.

• 1:18:29Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, honestly, I, I did start, you know, this meditation journey, you know, years ago when Carla, you know, right around the time that her first book came out. I mean, I had been speaking to her, obviously, before that. But, um, yeah, it's been a real journey. Um, a lot of it, I will say, I'd say most of it is about me taking care of my, my mental health and my mental wellness. A tremendous amount is about that.

• 1:18:53Mayim Bialik?

  Um, you know, getting, getting more sleep is something that is highly, uh, you know, highly underrated by me. So, you know, even in, you know, their earlier years, when, for example, they were, you know, nursing through the night, which was a conscious choice that I made, you know, to not night wean, for example, you know, that absolutely impacts, you know. But for me, I don't think I ever really got out of that kind of like survival mode, you know, with my, a lot of my parenting.

• 1:19:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Recently, you had, um, a change in how you reacted to your youngest.

• 1:19:26Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it's, yeah. Um, the Byron Katie work has also helped with that, you know, more recently when we spoke to Byron Katie and also Michael Singer. But, um, yeah, there's been a real process, you know, I, when she talked about fit, I, I definitely feel like I have a good fit with my kids, but my, my older one definitely has more of my cadence of speech and, and humor and communication. And my younger one is a little bit more of a challenge for me. And, um, he has often a different perception of his tone versus what I hear, and I can be very sensitive to that. It's a trigger from my childhood about how you are allowed to speak to parents, and I want to break out of that, but it can be hard.

• 1:20:05Mayim Bialik?

  But, yeah, I've, I've learned, um, the, the more patience I have, the more able I am to, to deal with things that are challenging, especially with the way he speaks to me. Um, and I also, um, I've stopped hearing the tone that I think he's using. And instead, I listen more for what he's trying to communicate. Um, and he, he, you know, comes around a lot on his own and says, you didn't like how that tone sounded, and that's not how I wanted it to sound.

• 1:20:37Jonathan Cohen?

  So this is the huge part. You changed your reactivity to him.

• 1:20:41Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:20:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Because for a while, you thought, oh, I can't allow that tone, him to have that tone with me.

• 1:20:46Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:20:47Jonathan Cohen?

  And that was a little

• 1:20:48Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Jonathan Cohen?

  journey we went on.

• 1:20:50Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Jonathan Cohen?

  And what was happening is you were in conflict with him.

• 1:20:53Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:20:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Because you were like, oh, I can't allow him to speak to me like that.

• 1:20:56Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:20:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Then you switched and started to hear what he was trying to say versus his tone.

• 1:21:01Mayim Bialik?

  And he softened as well.

• 1:21:02Jonathan Cohen?

  And now, in the last couple of weeks, you've been saying how he's coming back to you, saying...

• 1:21:07Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah. No, it's been, it's, it's been a pretty, yeah, I mean, you know, we have months that are sometimes like, woo, that was a rough weekend, many months, many weeks in a row. Um, but yeah, so, um, but I still do have, you know, a lot of these thoughts about I'm doing it wrong and I messed them up and, you know, I can never recover from this and they'll never recover. Um, but, uh, yeah, I think, um, I do appreciate this perspective and, and that perspective as well.

• 1:21:30Jonathan Cohen?

  So for everyone who wants to put their hands on their hearts.

• 1:21:33Mayim Bialik?

  From our, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.