One of the things I teach the parents in my community (which is you!), is to be more present in the moment and be fully aware of our thoughts and emotions so that we can fully understand our needs. In this way, we can better address what we need to be more balanced as a parent and as an individual as well. It is so easy to get stuck in a feeling or a narrative of ourselves and our lives, and we can sometimes tell ourselves that it's just always going to be this way, and in these moments of "stuckness" the ability to be psychologically flexible is absolutely critical. And so for this week's episode, my guest, Diana Hill, and I will be talking about how to be more psychologically flexible and model that to our kids too. Diana is a clinical psychologist and co-author of ACT Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. She is a co-host of the popular podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock and offers regular teachings in compassion and ACT through InsightLA and Mindful Heart Programs. Through her online teachings, executive coaching, clinical supervision, and private therapy practice, Diana encourages clients to build psychological flexibility so that they can live more meaningful and fulfilling lives. Here's a summary of our discussion:

Practicing self-compassion as a parent
What to do when we become inflexible
How to practice psychological flexibility as a parent and teach it to our kids

Be sure to go through her website drdianahill.com or visit linktr.ee/drdianahill to see her latest offerings. You may also check her works on Instagram @drdianahill.

TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura. Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be talking about how to be more psychologically flexible, both as parents and help our kids be that way too. And to have this conversation I'm bringing in an expert and acceptance and commitment therapy specialist and just an amazing colleague who I am so excited to have Dr. Diana Hill. It's so nice to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Diana: Well, thank you for having me Laura. The feeling is mutual. I really love your work and I'm excited to be here.

Laura: Oh my gosh that feels so good to hear. And the feeling is absolutely mutual. Do you prefer me to call you Dr. Hill? Do you like Diana? What do you like?

Diana: Diana is great. Perfect. Okay.

Laura: So Diana, why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do, what ACT is?

Diana: Sure. Yeah. So I'm a mom and I'm also a psychologist and I'm really interested in sort of this intersection between evidence based approaches to living well as well as contemplative practice and what it looks like in the real world right in terms of how to be a more effective parent and also flourish in my own life. I've been practicing ACT for over a decade now.

It's a modern approach to psychology that incorporates a lot of sort of the behavioral principles that help us make changes in our lives with acceptance based principles. Things like opening up and allowing and being mindful and being present so that you can live towards and create a life that's aligned with your values And what's interesting about act is that there's been just sort of this real skyrocketing of evidence for it over the past decade where it's being used not only in the arena of mental health but also in the arena of things like sports performance.

It's been being used with parenting and what some of the research is showing in terms of act and your ability to be psychologically flexible as a parent really spills over onto the mental health of your kids. So I'm excited to talk to you about what psychological flexibility is and how we can do it as parents.

Laura: Yeah I'm so excited to. So why don't we start there? What does it mean to be psychologically flexible? And how do we go about getting there as parents?

Diana: So I think of psychological flexibility there's sort of like a simplified way of looking at it and then more of a complicated way. So let's start simple because that's what we'll remember. And the one way to break it down is just think of the words act ACT. The A stands for being able to accept and allow for whatever showing up in in the moment. So if you think about parenting a lot of times some difficult stuff shows up.

And it's actually when we try and resist it or control it that can backfire. Right so accepting and allowing is the a part and then the C Part is really about caring. What do you care about most in this moment? What's most important to you how do you want to show up as a parent? What matters to you? What are your deepest values? How do you want to be in relationship to your kids in relationship to yourself. So the sea is about caring and then the T party is about taking a step.

So taking action towards what you care about and being engaged. And when you do those three things, when you open up and allow for whatever shows up in life discomfort, uncertainty. When you care deeply and you know what you care about and then you take action towards what you care about. Then you're practicing psychological flexibility. The complicated part of it is that there's these six core processes that enact sort of work together that we teach sort of like sides of a Rubik's cube.

There's six sides and they kind of work together and they build your psychological flexibility over time. So we can go into what those six processes are. But it's helpful just to get it simple into the ACT Part so…

Laura: I can see how this would be so helpful to for parents who are stuck in things like school refusal that could say mommy, I don't want to go to school. I'm not putting my shoes on like just in that moment. You know it's back to school time here. You know when we're recording this episode and I'm hearing that a lot and just those three things.

You know accepting, allowing those feelings, accepting that this is happening right now and how can I respond in a way that is connected to my core values. And that demonstrates how I care. That's beautiful. Yes. So why don't you take us through those steps, those six steps?

Diana: Sure maybe we could use an example because I think it always comes to life with an example. So, so an example in our household is actually technology. So that's something that I think a lot of parents have been dealing with over, especially the pandemic, our own personal misuse of technology as parents, but also our kids. And it's a double edged sword, right? Like they got to use it, but we kind of hate it and we're worried about it.

So the first practice of these six core processes is about getting presents and a lot of times when we are facing something that's uncomfortable. So maybe I'm, I really dislike my two boys and I'm like a homesteader, a little bit of a granola mom and like prevented my boys from seeing a screen for the first two years of their life and now they are die hard Minecraft players. Right?

So I could like take that Minecraft and I could throw it out the window and I would be really happy. Right? It's one of the places where I get really psychologically inflexible. So the first thing that we need to do is sort of be present and notice our own inflexibility and get into the hearing now. So not only be present with ourselves, but also be present with our kids a lot of times we're stuck in our own heads and not actually in the moment.

So being present is one of the six core processes and the second process that's related is noticing, as I mentioned, stuck in our heads being able to notice our own thoughts and our own judgment. So when we're oftentimes, when we're parenting, we have lots of should we have lots of judgments, we have lots of rules and those should judgments and rules about things can make us really rigid. So in the arena of technology, I have all sorts of sugars and judgments about my kids and how much he should be doing or not.

And what it means about me as a mom, if my kid is playing too much and the nature of our mind is that it's always gonna be producing thoughts and some of our thoughts are really helpful to us and some of our thoughts are not so helpful for. So when I get really should be on myself or I should on my kid, it's not helpful. It actually derails me from my values and being present and listening to to my kids and actually what's reality and and sort of in the here and now, One of the things that we did actually around technology use with my son, my older son who's 11, almost 12 now was we said that we wanted to talk about the use, but what I did ahead of time was that I'm going to have a conversation with him and not have an outcome plan.

Like I'm not gonna have my goal to be that we're going to solve this problem. I'm just gonna listen, right? So getting into that beginner's mind. Yeah. So that relates to a third aspect which is acceptance and being able to open up and allow for whatever shows up. And when I had that conversation with him, what actually showed up is he said, I don't want to talk about this with you mom because I'm afraid you're going to take it away.

And he got really teary, right? And so being able to accept and open up to whatever it is, the discomfort of school refusal sitting with your child that doesn't want to go in to school is not only accepting the discomfort of your child, but what shows up for you in that moment under your skin. So acceptance is not necessarily about approving of something but actually allowing your full experience. So that's three.

Laura: So I just want to pull that out and say that again, that acceptance is different than improving. It's about allowing. I really think that that's something that's important to drive home because I think that lots of folks worry that they're gonna be permissive or that if they are in a place of acceptance with their kids when their kids are having a hard time that their kids are going to get the message that it's okay to be doing what they're doing or that those behaviors are acceptable.

And I think that that is so important to highlight that it's not about approving of what's happening, you know that saying that this is necessarily a good thing, but accepting that it is happening and allowing the space for it to happen.

Diana: And that true like paradox there is that when you accept something, you actually open the door for the possibility of change, I actually had that. Yeah, I had the opportunity to interview Stephen Rollnick, who's one of the co-founders of Motivational Interviewing and motivational interviewing is used for things like substance, used to help people change their substance use, it's the primary treatment for that. And a lot of detox centers, motivational interviewing is also used with hostage negotiation, right?

So it's a super effective approach. And when I talked to Stephen Rollnick, he talked about how he uses motivational interviewing with his kids and I was like okay, here's a hostage negotiator that's using this technique and what is the technique. It's actually quite simple, it's being present accepting without trying to fix your child or fix yourself. It's also sort of sitting in the ambivalence because humans are ambivalent.

Our kids are ambivalent, even our kid that wants to doesn't want to go to school, kind of wants to go to school or our kid that is using wants to do more video games also doesn't want to do more video games, I talked with sticks, Red and Johnson who wrote the book, the self driven child that talked about kids video game use when they ask like a group of ninth graders about their use pretty much everyone will raise their hands saying they feel like they use too much. Right? So kids are ambivalent and when we can sit in acceptance and being present with that ambivalence, it gives a little more wiggle room for the child to then start to look at okay, you know, maybe they do want to change something or maybe there's another perspective here. Right?

So acceptance is actually the secret sauce I think to a lot of our struggles with our kids if we can practice acceptance of what's showing up for us as parents as well as acceptance of our kids. So those are the first three

Laura: And it's true for us to when we're struggling with something just for our own selves, that acceptance piece is so important.

Diana: So those are the first three. And um I was being present, being aware of our thoughts which enact, we do something called cognitive diffusion, which is being able just to step back a little bit from your thoughts without getting entangled in them. And then acceptance are sort of the sort of acceptance side.

And then there's also some element of act that's a little bit more, I think a little bit different from a lot of therapy, which is looking at your personal chosen values and you as a parent, what really matters to you, how do you want to show up? And I think about values as sort of like favorite songs like you, what's your favorite song or favorite, your favorite song laura that just like lights you up?

Laura: Pinks cover me in sunshine as a really when I'm loving right now.

Diana: Yeah, and so when you listen to that song, how does that make you feel?+

Laura: It makes me feel happy and light and that everything's gonna be okay.

Diana: Yeah, beautiful. So you just have like an embodied feeling associated with this song and that you kind of have like an inner knowing like this is like it hits me in the right spot values are a lot like that and I will say my favorite song is not pink, not pink, but that doesn't make pink any better from, you know what my favorite song is, right, I'm like really into like Krishna Das chanting, you know, that's like where I get going or Janet Stone.

So whatever your personal chosen values are for, you are sort of intrinsically motivating and what's cool about intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation is that it can really, you can really draw upon it when you've got nothing left. And so as parents, we are burned out. The pandemic has hit parents, there's kind of hit different groups, disproportionately right and parents, especially parents of school age, children have really been slammed by the pandemic and the research on that is bearing out.

So when I kind of keep a thumb on the A. P. A stress in America studies and they sort of, they used to do it every year. The A. P. A. Would stand the test the stress in America, but during the pandemic they started doing it every month And one year later when the pandemic started. So in I think it was May 2021. They did this survey of folks to look at stress And what they found was that parents were disproportionately affected by the stress, but also parents were starting to cope in really unhealthy ways.

So there was a 20, it was like 24, of Americans reported using more alcohol during the pandemic, it was like 50 something percent of parents reporting using more alcohol, right? Like we are having a hard time. And so I really do think this concept of values is what we can dip into when we are struggling. It's not about should or expectations, It's about how do you want to show up, what do you care about?

What type of person do you want to be in this moment with your kids at the end of the day, What matters most at the end of the day, what's most meaningful to you? And when you do that as a parent. So for example, in that video will go back to my video game example, when my kid was saying like I'm afraid you're gonna take this away from me, right? What I actually did was I stepped into my own values of my parents, of being able to see this really is important to him and I want to know what's important to my kid, I want to be able to have a conversation of what's important to him and I and I started asking him about why and when he started talking about why it was important to him, some of the things he said was mom, this is the only time that I can really spend time with my friends.

This was during the time when we were like, in lockdown, we weren't spending time with friends, this is how I connect with them. I really like solving problems mom, it's really fun, I like building stuff, it's really exciting, I feel really engaged when I'm doing it. And so all of a sudden I was able to actually hear him and take perspective, which is another act process, but really be able to be present with my child and engage with him and understand.

And ultimately at the end of the day, I want him to be able to have difficult conversations with me and for him to know that I am showing up fully to listen because this is just the one of like, this is like kind of a video games is somewhat benign in terms of future conversations, we will have, I hope we have conversations about sex when he wants to have sex with someone. I hope we have conversations about drugs when those show up and if I screw up this video game conversation.

I'm setting the stage for the down the road him not coming to me, right? Because I'm going to try and fix it. So values are really important in parenting. How do you want to show up as a parent and and in the discomfort of it staying aligned with your values. So that's the fourth one.

Laura: And I want to just point out for the parents listening that I'm guessing that some of the very things that he gets out of Minecraft are actually quite in alignment with your deep values and goals for him. Like you want him to be a problem solver, you want him to have lasting connections and deep friendships, you want him to have fun in his childhood, I'm guessing.

Diana: Yeah, absolutely. And I wouldn't have known that if I had gone in with the, I already know mind. So as parents, we go in with, I already know more often than not, we don't go in with psychological flexibility. We go in with psychological rigidity because we get caught in when we were talking earlier about striving, we get caught in this striving cycle of my job is to, oh, I love this the term of being a carpenter parent versus a gardener parent child.

Yeah, so my job is to like carve my child into something and that makes form that and that actually it's like it makes me feel better, you know, as opposed to does it really make me it does it make me feel better or does it actually lead me astray from this possibility of the unknown, which is quite uncomfortable of where my where my kid will go and Yes, so absolutely, I think that's a core component of it and the other two.

So we've got that we've gone through being present, being able to step back from your thoughts, practicing acceptance, knowing your values, the other two parts of psychological flexibility. One of them is about perspective taking and being able to know when you are caught in a narrow self story about yourself. Usually they are things like I am I always I can't or when you are have a really limited self story about your kid or about your partner, right?

You've never been in a fight with your partner and you're sort of defending your own story. So perspective taking is your ability to take perspective on yourself, takes get behind somebody else's eyes and then also be able to just take perspective on the big picture of what is the small stuff that's not important and then what is the small stuff that actually really is important because there are small things that we don't want to miss with our kids, like those little meaningful moments of savoring something and that's perspective taking of being able to just sort of not be so caught up in our narrow mind and then the last process has to do with committed action, taking action towards your values and doing that consistently tiny habits on a regular basis to just keep moving towards what you care about.

Laura: What's beautiful. I think about parenting is that we get to do this, work for ourselves, for our own betterment and in the process we get to model it for our kids and we get to help them learn these things that would have been so beneficial. I mean I went and got a PhD because I didn't get the skills I knew I needed to you know, handle emotions well and to feel deeply and live in a world that wasn't set up for me as a sensitive soul, like that's when I like, that's why I became a therapist to learn the skills that I didn't get at home growing up. So tell me how this plays out then when we are attempting to create flexibility in our kids because kids can be rigid too sometimes.

Diana: Well, I think the best way to create flexibility in your kids is to be flexible yourself. I mean obviously kids learn through what you model and we got to be careful about the carpenter syndrome of like I need to make my kids flexible, but I do think there's a few tools and tips that that we can do. One is when you notice a kid that is getting rigid around something oftentimes our response to rigidity is to respond with rigidity, right?

To respond with rigidity by forcing and this concept of the sort of the righting reflex, like trying to set them straight or force them to become more flexible. But actually what we can do in that moment is pause and understand that we become rigid for a reason. We become rigid because evolutionarily our brains are designed to protect us and when we are rigid, we're often confronted with something that is uncomfortable that we are afraid of, we are avoiding something.

And so if we can start to look at what's underneath the rigidity, like what is underneath that for our child that is making them feel unsafe in some way, feel threatened in some way and be able to go there and sit with them in that and ask questions and get curious and you know, sometimes with my kids when we start talking about feelings instead of saying like, well where do you feeling?

They just can't, sometimes I can't put language on their feeling would all say it's like we're point to it like where is it on your body that you're feeling something like there's something I have a kid that is afraid of escalators and we've like spent so much time in target trying to just work on this phobia right in those moments where I remember going to target with him during the holidays and we had to get to the second floor to get the video game for my son and and we were standing at the escalator and that these other parents would come up behind us and we'd be standing there and and okay, like we can do this, we can do this and then he couldn't do it. So we have to step aside right?

And I remember in those moments really trying to practice being with him in the process of his fear, having compassion for him, finding the edge of that comfort zone and being an encouraging compassionate voice. But then also having compassion for myself as a parent of like this is hard, this is embarrassing. I've been at the foot of this escalate and I should have this figured out I'm a therapist role, you know, and then also receiving compassion from other parents. Actually the people that stood in line behind us were quite kind, They said things like, oh yeah, like this, this is hard, this is scary.

So wherever your child's rigidity shows up, I would say the two tips around that is first look for what's uncomfortable that's driving it, What are they avoiding and stay with that a little longer and then second practice compassion and the flow of compassion, have compassion for your child, have compassion for yourself and see if you can receive some compassion from other parents because we need to be alone, parenting we need to be parenting for each other with each other and not be doing it alone.

Laura: Absolutely. I think so often we think that we're being judged pretty harshly out in the world and all of the parents that I talked to whenever they see another parents or Kiddo struggling, they only ever reports me that they're thinking kind of loving compassionate thoughts towards them. So I think if we can all just assume that every even if they're not and they are judging us like we can still draw like compassion from them to you know that and let that contribute to the flow of compassion.

You know, compassion for them that if they're in a place of judging us for what's going on for our kids and something must be really hard going on for them right then that they can't access compassion to a family that's clearly struggling. Oh I think compassion is this bomb that could just soothes our humanity.

But it's hard shoot, I just lost my thought. Let's take a moment to remember where I was going to go before the compassion distracted me. So one of the things that I think is really helpful here is that you're teaching to not resist our kids rigidity when I talk about this with parents. You know, I'm from the midwest, I don't know where you are in the world.

Diana: I'm in Santa Barbara California.

Laura: Yeah, you, you might not get this reference, but in the midwest, when you're driving on icy roads and you start to skid or lose control of your car, the instinct is to steer against that skin is to counter it by turning the wheel to get yourself straightened out. But we all learn in driver is that is that when that actually happens, you need to actually turn your wheels slightly into the skin so that you can get the traction to get yourself going back right. And I think that that's what you're, we need to do that in our parenting by leaning into the skin, not resisting it, going with it for just a little bit, creates that space, creates a feeling of acceptance and allowing and lets kids move through.

Diana: Yes, I think it's always this dialectic, right? It's moving towards allowing, not resisting and then also not rescuing because what happens is we tend to as parents rescue a little bit too soon and when we do that, we actually steal something from our kids, we steal the problem solving process.

So our brains developed based on how they are used. And if we go in and we do 90% of the brain work the problem solving of the figuring out of the, you know, me telling him exactly how to get on the escalator and picking him up rescuing him through, then actually he doesn't learn the process of how to do it himself. And that Is actually one of the things that's quite satisfying for kids, right?

So remember like when they're like two or three and they're working with those puzzles and you just like as a mom, you just gotta like sit on your hands because you just want to put it in now, you're like a 40 year old woman, you know how to solve this puzzle. You don't need to do it for your kids, right? And you don't need to rescue them from that little struggle. Actually, one of my good friends is that she's a professor of positive psychology and she had her second child a little bit later and she would send me all these videos of like her baby on the ground like reaching for this toy and she's like we're developing grit and she wouldn't rescue and she was just like this like this is not.

Laura: But no, but it's true. I have a video on my Instagram page of my youngest reaching for a toy and it took her 20 minutes to get to it. And when she got to it, she was so satisfied. And I think it does start very young this rescuing instincts that we have and that we do have to sometimes sit on our hands and and hold that edge figuring out just exactly where the scaffolding is.

You know, so if we're helping our kids, where is that line between doing too much rescuing them versus supporting them, that it's a delicate balance and we won't get it right all the time either. We'll make missteps. There's little adjustments and our kids actually are usually really good at telling us what they need from us in those moments.

Diana: Yes. And there's a difference between struggle and suffering that it's good for our kids to struggle a little bit, but we don't want our kids to suffer obviously, and that's part of trusting yourself as a parent to know, right? And the psychological flexibility part is when my kid is struggling, Can I breathe into that feeling of discomfort in my body of how hard it is?

Because yeah, they're struggling to put in a little, you know, puzzle piece, but we're going to see them struggle as teenagers and relationships, right? And we're gonna like, I'll just call that guy up and tell us no, you can't just call that guy up and tell them what you think, right? Or in friendships, I see parents coming in like parents of teens wanting to come and like, like, you know, swoop in and like solve their daughters friendships, right?

So being able to open up, allow for that discomfort while being tuned into what are my values here? Like that's the intrinsic motivation, right? In the same way that we can wake up early in the morning and get ourselves to the gym because we really care about, you know taking that moment of self care and taking care of our bodies because it's intrinsically motivated.

It's very different when you can dig into your values and that's where psychological flexibility can be so helpful with this sort of real sort of developmental task as a parent, which is to continuously loosen up the reins around your kids, allow them to have bumps and bruises and love them and allow them to struggle and learn and allow them to have the satisfaction of building mastery in their lives and not stealing it from them.

Laura: So beautifully said, thank you so much Diana for sharing your expertise with us in this way. We didn't get a chance to talk about your journal. You have a daily Journal, right, that I think that would be really helpful for parents who are grappling with some of these things. Would you share us a little bit more about like where folks can go to learn more about you and potentially learn from you and work with you?

Diana: Sure. So ACT Daily Journal is a book that Debbie Sorenson and I wrote together. She's my friend first and podcast, co host second and now co author and she's a mom too. And we really developed this journal because we wanted to bring these principles of these six core processes of act into people's daily Lives.

Like what does this look like day to day and get it out of the therapy room and out of academia into life. So you don't have to be in therapy to do it. It walks you through the six core processes over eight weeks. And it includes also a week sort of the foundation of compassion. And it has journal exercises that has short stories and vignettes about from Debbie and I about how we use these processes in our daily lives and then it gives you exercises to try out.

You can if you go through my website at DrDianaHill.com. I have sort of like a freebie where you'll get a free compassion course that's just comes with purchasing the journal there that you're not putting it through me. But just going to the website and I also have like just a ton of metal like your website, which is it's so fantastic Laura but I have a ton of meditations and resources there. So if you go to DrDianaHill.com, sign up for my newsletter, you'll hear what I'm up to. I'm always sort of doing workshops and trainings and all sorts of stuff.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. And everybody. Her podcast Psychologists Off the Clock, right?

Diana: Yes.

Laura: Yes, Psychologists Off the Clock is absolutely must subscribe to and listen and thank you so much for creating all of these great resources for us and coming on here and talking about this with us. It was really helpful.

Diana: Thank you. You're just a delight. I love being with you and I hope that everyone has a wonderful rest of the day.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.

All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!

Laura Froyen, PhD

Laura Froyen, PhD

Balanced Parent Podcast

Laura Froyen, PhD

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Episode 120: Four Steps for Embracing Psychological Flexibility in Parenting with Diana Hill