Why Is Play Important for Parents and Children?

Hello, all my fellow lightmakers! It is me, Malcolm Grissom, the stand-up CEO and founder of the World Laughter Organization, and thank you so much for joining us once again on the Lighten Up Project. Today, we are going to be talking about parenting. We're going to be talking about parenting, not the picture perfect kind that you see online, but the real nitty gritty, down to earth parenting, everyday parenting. We're going to be talking about finding joy and how that looks differently every day. It can be different. That's every day different parenting. We're we're going to be talking about the kind of parenting that stretches you, that humbles you, that asks you to be more of the you that you ever thought you could be. My guest today is Bonnie Butler. She is a certified life coach. She's adoptive. She's an adoptive parent. She's an advocate for families navigating through trauma and seeking trauma-informed parenting. Bonnie is a mom of 10. She has fostered 17 children and works with parents who are in the trenches, in the trenches, who are tired, who are overwhelmed, but they're still showing up. They are. They're still showing up because they have to. And so Bonnie's work blends professional training with lived experience. She often offers practical tools, honest truth, and something many parents are searching for-the hope that it actually feels real. It's real hope. So our conversation today is going to be about resilience. It's going to be about awareness, joy, learning how to parent through the complexity and not perfection. So let's lighten up. Let's stay in this and let's welcome Bonnie Butler. Hey,

hi, Malcolm.

How are you?

I'm good. How are you today?

Good, good, good. Doing well. Doing well. I've had better days, but every day is different. Every day is different. Body

is true.

Will you join me In 20 seconds of spontaneous laughter. Absolutely. All right. Love to hear it. Okay. 123, Laugh tack. Always lightens the mood. It always the brain doesn't know the difference between between artificial laughter and genuine laughter, so we're still getting all the dopamine, all the feel good drugs, and it's just I love it. Laughter is laughter is also a great way to connect.

Yes, yes, it is, and it's actually a necessary part of life, right? Yes, I mean it does so much for us, and it just it does a lot for our nervous system. It does a lot for our brain. It just does a lot for life. It's healing. It's just, I mean, if you read some of the science on what laughter does, it's amazing how helpful it is to do that. And I think for me going in, I knew that that's how you started your podcast, and so I started kind of flipping through my memory bank. You know, what memories can I bring up where I really just laughed, just had an honest, true, deep laugh, and so trying to just pull those pictures up of what was so funny in the moment, whether it was something somebody said. Or a situation we were in, whatever, and I just-it's amazing when you do that. Just flip back through your memories and find things that made you laugh, and just laugh again, laugh about them again. Yeah, yeah. Relive those moments. Relive those moments. Definitely changes the trajectory of whatever is happening in the moment. It just changes that moment because I think it helps you to know that laughter can come again, right? Because sometimes when we're in the hard, we forget the joy, and we think we're going to be in the heart forever, and it's never going to change. Right, and our brain will lie to us and tell us that it's never going to get easier. It's never going to get better. It's always going to feel like this, but that really is a lie. And if you just flip through those memories, you'll go, "It'll come again. Right? It just gives us that hope and that ability to look forward to the next moment where we can laugh, where we can just lighten up, and I love the title of your, you know, the lighten up project. Just, I know for me personally, I need that, need that reminder to lighten up. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, and you're 10, so a mother of 10. Yeah, it's that is um interesting. How do you find moments, you know, laughter, but how do you find other moments to just lighten up, especially when you are stressed? Because dealing with dealing with one or two children at a time, depending on their age, can be very very stressful.

It can, yes, it can.

And now you are buckling all the yeah, yeah. So what what do you do to lighten up?

So for me, I discovered, and we chatted a little bit before we started recording that joy is not my natural state of being, and I don't wake up in the morning at 5o'clock with a smile on my face, happy to start the day. So I have to be intentional about it, and I learned that lesson kind of in a moment of hard. And we had four biological children. We started fostering heads, and we had kids coming and going, and then we were asked to adopt a sibling group of six. And in the moment, you know, when we're going through that, are we going to do this or not do this? You know, ultimately, we felt very strongly that you know we are people of faith, and we believe that God was asking us to do that and go through that, and so we did, and I had all this confidence that I could help these kids, right? And then I found that I wasn't as competent as I had thought I was in the middle of helping them because they just had when you have six come all at once. It's a whole different ball game than having one or two come at a time, and I just distinctly remember a day when I was exhausted, wasn't sleeping well. I think the kids had probably been with us about two, maybe three months, and they came right at the beginning of summer, so there was no break where they were on campus during the day. They were home all day long every day, and I had asked them. You know, I'd given them their chore room assignments, and they were supposed to be picking the rooms up. And I had to keep redirecting one of my daughters. And by this point, I mean we had seven daughters and three sons, and so she's eight years old, and she just keeps coming back. And she's being goofy and silly, and she's playing, and she's not cleaning her choreo room. And I'm getting frustrated with her because I have to keep redirecting her to just go get the room picked up. And she came back in the kitchen again, trying to engage me in her silliness, and I looked at her and I said, "I'm not

amused. And she looked me right in the eye and she said, "You never are. And in that moment, you know, and I share that story. People kind of gasp and go, "Oh my gosh, how rude! And I'm like, "No, no, no! How truthful, right? Because it was a moment of absolute truth for me that I wasn't amused. I wasn't finding life funny. I was drowning in the hard and the work and the day-to-day tasks and the trying to figure out what. Needs were then trying to meet their needs, and life had gotten so busy. I had forgotten about finding joy. I had forgotten about laughing, right? And in hindsight, I can look back on that moment and go, "Okay, here's my daughter, who, you know, we are the 10th placement for these kids from the time they're born. They've been in and out of their parents' home and in different foster homes, and now they've landed with us, and they know this is the stopping point. They're permanently here. So she's reaching out to me, trying to invite me into her world to connect with her on her level of being silly and goofy and having fun, and I didn't even see-I just saw this child who will not go do what I asked her to do, and I missed that opportunity. I missed that moment to connect with her, and it took me a lot longer to develop deeper connections with these kids because I was so caught up in the work of life and the work of parenting, and often felt like I was drowning in trying to help them get their needs met. So I look back and I'm like, "Wow, I was missing moments right and left where they were opening the door to me to come through, come into my world, connect with me where I'm at, just play with me for a moment, right? And I, I missed it. And I don't. I mean, it was a few months later. My husband came home one day and he said, "I've called our friends. They had an indoor swimming pool.

We're gonna go swim at their house. We are just gonna go play. And my immediate reaction is, we can't go. We're not done. Beds, vacuums, dishes, whatever was on my to-do list for the day was not all checked off. So I'm like, we cannot go play to work. And he looked at me and he said, "All we ever do is work. We need to just go play. And so we set it all down, which was not an easy thing for me. It was uncomfortable, but we set it all down. We left, and we went and played for the afternoon. And that afternoon taught me such a valuable lesson because as we're playing in the pool, no agenda, no time frame, just playing with the kids, splashing, you know, whatever. It was so relaxing, and I couldn't remember the last time I had actually relaxed with my kids and allowed myself to just relax into that, and you know, people laugh at me when I tell them that after that afternoon, I started scheduling play days on our calendar because for me, because it doesn't come naturally, I have to be intentional about finding it, and I still am that way. You know, last summer we have our one of our kids and their family lived with us. So at the beginning of the summer, we sat down and scheduled every Monday as a family fun day. And as soon as summer started, we had all of our Mondays planned. What we're going to do Monday by Monday. So we had the whole summer planned, right? For me, that works and it helps me because I'm not spontaneous. I'm I'm not the person that's going to chuck it all and go, "Let's go ride a bike. Let's go do this. Right? So I think you need to know yourself, and you need to know if you like. My husband is told me spontaneous. He's like, let's just go, and I'm like, man, right? So figure out what works for you. Are you spontaneous? Can you let go and just go, just go play and have fun at any moment's notice, right? Or are you a person who has to be intentional about finding those moments and scheduling them in so that you don't miss them, and I found that

over time, the more intentional I was about scheduling it into my life, and starting to recognize what does it look like through those intentional days and times when we purposely did things, that I started to become more aware of it around me because I started to understand what it looked like, and so the more we understand what does joy look like in your life, what are those moments, and you can grasp those moments when they're happening, rather than looking back and going, "Ah, well, well, they tried to teach me joy and I wasn't paying attention right

yes beautiful story I I love that so what is one thing that so being intentional and that. That's a great answer for for the joy, and I I wonder if that is the same answer, and it can be. But what is well for you? Let Let's go back and let's look. Now that you've realized that you've realized, okay, there are moments where I'm missing these connections with my kids. What is one way or one thing that you've that you did to fix that, to solve that, or at least to start the process of reconnecting.

Yeah, I think a big one for me became letting go of expectations because expectations just mess us up right and left, and I think to just kind of define that right, an expectation is not an agreement between two people. An expectation is an unwritten description, right? So, coming into this podcast, I have an idea in my mind of what this podcast is going to look like, and you have an idea in your mind of what this podcast is going to look like. But if we don't talk about it, if we don't share that with each other, then I come in, and all of a sudden, this podcast recording looks totally different than what I was expecting. And then I can choose to feel frustrated. I can choose to go with the flow of it, but I have to make a choice, right? Where if I come into the podcast and go, let's just go, let's see where this thing goes, and I don't have a planned out. Okay, well, we're going to start at this time, and then this is going to happen, and then he's going to ask me this, and this is my answer, right? So for me, letting go of those unwritten expectations in my mind because I just call that manuals. Right when I'm working with clients, we all have manuals for every person we interact, whether it's a spouse, whether it's our children, whether it's a coworker, whoever. We have this manual in our head of how we anticipate or expect them to interact with us, and when that doesn't happen, there's disappointment, and then there's awkwardness, and there's frustration on either part, right? Because when somebody doesn't meet our expectations, then we feel disappointed, but my question then becomes: Did they even know that that's what you expected, or were you expecting them to read your mind and know what it was that you wanted? So I find when I can let go of expectation, and when I can just step into something and meet people where they are, life is so much calmer, and it allows you to be more present and aware of what's happening. And then you

see the joy in the moment because you're present in the moment, and you're not trying to compare it to what you thought it should be what you wanted it to be. You're just allowing it to be what it is. So when I can, like when we have the whole family together, there's 50 of us now between my 10 kids, the seven spouses, the 27 grandkids, one great granddaughter, one girlfriend, one boyfriend that you know come together, it can get crazy, right? So I can write this entire manual about what this experience is going to look like, and then I can go in and everybody's doing their own thing, and it's crazy, right? And then I can go, well, that didn't look like I wanted it to, and I can walk away disappointed, or I can check the manual, and I can make an intentional decision to just let them be who they are, to not try to control everything that's happening, to just step in and be with them in the moment. And I remember one year, most of the kids were coming home. I think all of them were coming home for Christmas, and normally for me, that would be just height. Oh, you know who's going to be where in the house and what's going to be happening, and chaos personify. But that year, as we were leading up to it, I could feel myself kind of starting down that road. I supposed to be no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want my. I don't want my holiday to look like that. I don't want to be constantly on edge and walls up. Trying to guard who's who's going to get in an argument with who, right? Who's going to cause this to happen? And I really that last few days before everybody started arriving, I would just set some intentional points for me where if I started getting overwhelmed, I'll just go to my room and take 10 minutes and breathe and do deep breathing techniques, whatever it is going to take. But I made a conscious decision. I just let it be.

Just let the holiday be what the holiday was going to be, and to meet my kids where they were, to accept them for where they're at in life, because each one of them are on a different journey, like they're at a different point in their journey, right? And some of my kids are farther down the maturity line than others are, and some of them are in different. You know, some of them are in college, and some of them are married, and some of them have kids, and some of them don't. And and just allowing each one of them to come in, come together, be where they are in their life, and let them be okay, and me be okay with where they are in their life. And I am telling you, it was the most relaxed holiday we've ever had because I intentionally let go of any need to control what was happening. Of any need to get them to be who I wanted them to be in that moment, and just let them be themselves. And great memories from that-just really beautiful memories from that holiday-and that taught me moving forward when we're together, that works so much better than me going. Okay, at 10 o'clock we're going to. At 11 o'clock we're going to. Right, because they don't all want to do that. Yeah. So it just helps me to function better as a parent, as a human being in general. If I go into situations, and there, I mean, there are situations where you have to have an agenda, and you have to have things taking place at specific times. But that was not one of those situations. And allowing myself to let go of that aspect of my personality just helped everyone else to relax. And I think one of my kids said to me, You are so much more relaxed than you used to be, and I said, "Well, there's two reasons for that. One is I have learned a lot about myself. I have learned so many tools about emotional regulation. I now understand how to regulate my own emotions, which I didn't know how to do when I was in the middle of the chaos with them. They're dysregulated. I'm dysregulated. Chaos

everywhere, right? So now I have this entire toolbox of tools available to me to regulate my emotions, and I can be totally calm no matter what chaos is going on around me. And I and this fucking thing is, you're all over 18, and I am no longer legally responsible for any of you. So there's a piece in that when you know that your kids are all adults and they're doing okay, you know, and it just frees you a little bit of that intensity of being responsible for everything that's happening in their lives. Oh yeah, moments to laugh about.

There's you. You bring up with both stories, the one that you shared before, and this last story. This wonderful bridge for what I do. So one of the things that I do is I, I am a teacher, coach, improv. I do virtual improv, and I intertwine that with laughter therapy and positive psychology, And often parents are, especially parents, would yeah be asking you know so because they they share improv, they think you know theater, they think entertainment, and they share well yeah that's good but you know that's not really parenting. I I don't really need that. Want that so it's it's good. But two things that you just mentioned. So in your first story, in your first story, listening is very important to parenting. Listening is very important, and I don't just mean listening to what's being said or listening to what's you know to the body language to the nonverbal communication, but also listening to what's not being. Said listening to so like behind the lines listening right and improv is great at that improv forces people to be 100% present to really listen to the the so one of the the basic concept is yes and and this kind of goes into your next story as well as yes and is all about accepting the offer whatever the offer is and building on it so even if it's not the perfect offer, you know, it's not the offer that you thought it was going to be. It's not your preconceived offer, right? You're accepting it and you're building on it. If you're making a story, and someone changes the direction of the story, you know, in a direction that you weren't thinking of, you have to go with that direction of the story, and it's so it's building these tools that are essential to parenting that you're bringing up. So it's doing that, and yet it's doing it in a playful way. It we're playing games while we're doing this. We're having fun, which yet leads to what we talked about at the very beginning: is when you're having fun, that could lead to

laughter, and as we both pointed out, laughter is connection, and that is a wonderful way just to connect with your children, with your spouse, your partner, your neighbors, with everybody around you. So, if you

you're welcome. And I think if you look at it, I mean, I am I am work oriented, right, and task oriented, and I I love collaborating. Like if we're doing a big project, and I have two or three people that are working with me to get that project together, right? I love that, and I connect with those people. So there's an element of connection that comes from working together on something. But realistically, if you look at the deepest connections in your life, they come from playing together, and even in those opportunities, when you're working together on a project, it's the moments of humor that pull you closer together, right? So, as a family, when we can learn to play together, when we can learn to laugh together, those are when those deeper bonds and connections are made. And that was a lesson that I had to learn through those experiences of being told you're never amused, and being forced to go play in the pool, and realizing that that level of connection deepens when you can play, when you can let your guard down, and when you can just have fun and play and be your true self and your inner child. Just play. You connect with people on a completely different level than you connect when you're working on a project together.

Love it. The family that plays together stays together. New meaning to that, yes, yes, I love it. Okay, so now let's bridge over to trauma informed parenting. So, so that's something that you talk about and you you work with. Now, for our listeners who are not familiar with that concept? Can you explain that and why does it matter?

So, when you are parenting a child who's been through really hard things, you have to parent in a completely different way, and for us, oftentimes, you know, we so many foster parents and adoptive parents, we step into this world wanting just out of a pure desire to help children, right, and a belief that we have something to offer that we can help these children. So then, these children come into our home, and we've been through some trainings here and some trainings there, and and they try to prepare you for what to expect when these kids come into your home. But oftentimes, and when when kids move in, we call it the honey. Moon period, because in general they are going to be on their very best behavior because they don't want you to kick them out. Right? They've just had a disruption. They've just been moved out of another home, whether they've been taken away from their biological family or whether they're being moved from one foster home to another. There's a disruption in their life right there, and there's an attachment disruption because they're being pulled away from people that they had started to attach with. So they are just angelic in their behavior. They will do the chores. They will do anything that they think is going to help you, like, but they can only maintain that for so long. I mean, any of us could only maintain for so long before it gets exhausting to keep that wall up, right? So, there will come a day when some behavior will happen that may be shocking, but at the same time, you're like yes. For example, we had a 14 year old foster son who had moved in with us, and he was relatively quiet and timid. He was very academically engaged, straight A's, very intense, very focused on his academics. We had another 14-year-old foster boy in the house at the time, total opposite. Really couldn't care less about academics, and all he wanted was to look good so the girls would pay attention to him. So we have these

two boys opposite ends of the spectrum, right? And Louis had been with us for a while, so he was used to the dynamics in the house, but our other son, he was new, so he's quiet and he's just on his best behavior. And then something happened. I don't. I mean, it's been so many years. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I do know that he had been restricted from the TV, and in the house that we lived in at the time, that a massive living room area, and there was a loft up above it, and the TV and the games were up in the loft area, and the loft was open from either side. You could look down. So he was 14. I had a 1718-year-old, my the oldest of my biological daughters, and they had connected for whatever reason. These two had connected, so my daughter's upstairs and she's watching some TV show, and she leans over the railing and he's laying on the couch in the living room, kind of pouting because he can't be upstairs, and she's teasing him a little bit about how how you got in trouble. You can't come up and watch this show with us, right? And up until this point, you know the whatever it was he did to get banned from the TV is the first time he's ever stepped out of the honeymoon phase of things. And I'm sitting at the desk in the dining room, kind of watching, and I catch this movement out of the corner of my eye, and I see him army crawling up the stairs on his belly, and he's got a pillow off the couch in his hand, and he gets to the top of the stairs and he stands up and he chucks that pillow at my daughter, hits her with it, and then he races back down the stairs, just laughing himself senseless, and goes back and lays down on the couch. And I was so happy in that moment because I knew, okay, we've crossed a bridge here, right, where he feels comfortable enough in my home to throw a pillow, which up until that point he had been very structured and very tight and not relaxed. So you have those kind of things going on.

One of my daughters, when we had the six kids come all at once, two of the girls were playing a game on the computer one day, and one of them got mad, and she just knocked the keyboard off the desk, and the other one pulled her fist back and went to put her fist through the computer screen, and my husband grabbed her wrist and stopped her from putting her hand through the computer screen, and she immediately she just snapped and she became hysterical. This was the first time I had left my husband unattended with all of the kids, and I was gone to a meeting and I got home and I could just hear the screaming and screaming and screaming going on in the house. And I walked in and I could see down the hallway, and my husband was sitting in the door, and she's pacing back and forth in the room, screaming. And I walked down the hall. I'm like, "What happened? And so my husband said, when she snapped, he just scooped her upright. He put his arms around her, pinned her arm. Her body picked her up to take her to the bedroom. She's screaming. She's got her feet dragging her feet down the walls, trying to stop him from getting her to the room. He gets to the room. He sets her down and he says, "You just take a couple of minutes and you're calm yourself down. She shoots past. He catches her, grabs her again, takes her back. After a few rounds of this, he just sat down in the doorway so that she couldn't get out of the room. So she's been screaming at the top of her lungs for 45 minutes. So I ask her, "Is that what happened? Is that accurate? And she said, "Yes. And so my husband got up and walked away. I sat down with her. We kind of walked through a better reaction, how she could have responded better, right? And when I get her completely calm, I tell her you just lay down for like 10 minutes because she was so emotionally just exhausted and overwrought. And I went to find my husband, and he's in our room, and he's just wiped out. And he looked at me, and he said, "She said she

hates me. And I said, "Well, welcome to my life. If I hear that less than 10 times a day, it's been a good day. But for him, it's the first time any of the kids have said that to him, but I hear it on a regular basis, right? So those are things that you don't necessarily expect when the kids come in. You don't expect them to have tantrums and scream and yell. And what he didn't know, and we didn't know at the time, right? These kids had been abused in every way. You can imagine abuse happening. So for her, at eight years old, with everything she had been through that we were unaware of, for a man to pin her arms to her body and head for a bedroom with her-absolute terror in her, and so here's my husband just trying to get her out of the situation, get her to a place where she can calm down, but she doesn't know that, and she doesn't trust any adults at this point because she's had awful experiences with adults. So then, he's in a situation where he's like, "What is going on? Just this little thing-a fight over the computer-has become a massive explosion, and for her, she's in absolute panic mode because her arms are pinned to her body, and she's headed for a bedroom. And it just; those are not things that you anticipate as a parent. And with your own biological kids, you've been with them from the beginning, so you understand what situations they've been in that have caused fear in their life, and you know what sets them off, right? And it makes sense because you have the history with these kids. You do not have a history, and you may or may not ever get a history on what they have been through. So something that seems very minor to us is massive to them, and it can trigger these outbursts that you don't know how to handle because it brings up a past trauma in their life that you don't even know happened.

So it's important when you're taking these kids in that you actually get trauma trained so that you understand what does that look like for a child, because trauma actually changes their brain chemistry, and it changes their fear responses, and it changes these triggers in them, and it changes behavior patterns in their life. So she's responding out of a trauma response, and my husband doesn't even know what that looks like, right? And so, you cannot parent kids that come out of trauma the same way you parent kids who have never experienced trauma. They're two very different parenting paths. You have to be aware that they've had trauma, you have to be able to just give grace in the moment, and you have to say, "Okay, we need to stop. We need to breathe. We need to regulate. And if you don't know how to regulate, you cannot help them regulate, right? And then you're seeing all this happening. They're totally dysregulated, and then you become dysregulated trying to get them to calm down because they're not going to calm down in the normal ways that we anticipate kids to calm down. So then, pretty soon, everybody in the house is dysregulated, and chaos is bringing. And you can't find your way out of it. So we are working now to get training, get better training for foster parents going in, so that they have emotional regulation tools, so that they learn what it looks like when they're becoming dysregulated, so that they can then say, "Okay, we need to stop. We need to breathe. We need to really look at what's happening, and we need to be intentional in how we move forward. Because if you don't have those tools, you don't have any way to fall back. And there is-I do not know a single human being anywhere that can be emotionally regulated 100% of the time. So that is not our goal. We the goal is not to be regulated 100% of the time. That's an impossibility. The goal is to train these parents to notice when they're

dysregulated, and to catch it early in the process when they're becoming dysregulated, and teach them the tools to get back to a state of regulation, and then as the parents can recognize, okay, hold on, I need to put myself on timeout, right? Because I am I'm not handling any of this very well, so I need to remove myself from the situation. I need to regulate, and then I can step back in. And now I can help the children learn how to regulate, and I can get them to a regulated state. And our goal, and my passion, and my just mission, as I work with foster adoptive and kinship parents who are struggling with these unexpected emotional outbursts and these behaviors that we just have never seen before, is to help them understand. Number one, when does it start? What triggers you to get dysregulated? Right, recognizing that you're dysregulated. I have an entire collection of tools that you can pick the tool that's going to work best for you. And the more you practice these tools, the more you become familiar with them. You know, okay, over here I need the stop process, but over here I need deep breathing techniques, and over here I need this other regulation tool. Right, so you start to become very familiar with yourself, with your own emotional hygiene and your own emotional regulation, and then you can recognize much quicker when that dysregulation is starting, you start to notice what your triggers are, so you can just okay. I need to stop because I'm going to lose it here, right? And in the process of retraining ourselves and teaching all of these tools, this is how you get back to regulation. This is how you settle your own nervous system first. It's like being on the airplane, right? Put your own osmotic on first, then help the child. So as we're doing that, we become much more proficient at seeing it within ourselves, correcting it within ourselves, and then teaching our children, and you, when you are regulated, it's so much easier to just give grace to

the kids and just be able to step back and say, "Okay, I can take a breath and I can let them have this tantrum in a Safe manner, right?

We can give them a place where okay, you can go right here. You can scream to your heart's content, and when you have all of that emotion out, then we can sit down and we can look at what triggered that. Why did that happen? What brought? What came up for you in the middle of that, and here's some tools that we can use so that moving forward we have tools accessible so that kids can learn how to manage their emotions. Right, and if you think about it, when we're in school, we're taught dental hygiene. They bring dentists in. They teach us how to brush our teeth. They do all this stuff, right? We're taught personal hygiene, shower, wash your hair, wash your body, get your clothes clean, keep things neat and tidy, keep your home organized. They teach us all of those things. No one teaches anything about emotions. They don't teach us how to recognize emotions. They don't teach us that it's okay to feel emotions, and that is one thing that is crucial. If we're going to learn how to regulate our emotions, number one, we have to accept that we have emotions. Number two, we. Have to know that it's okay to have emotions. Whatever emotion you're feeling, it's okay to feel it. Emotions literally are a sensation in our body. They're not going to kill us, even though at times they feel like they are, and they can get very intense and very overwhelming. But it's a sensation in our body, and when we can recognize it, when we can name it, find it in our body, breathe through, and go. Okay, so that's what anger feels like in my body. Anger sits in my chest. It feels hot. It's sharp. It red. It you know whatever it is for you when you scan your body and just go. Okay, this is what I'm feeling. Whether it's a joyful emotion or a hard emotion, you can find it. Where does it sit in your body? And then you can start to become more comfortable with it, and it's less fearful if you start to work with where is it, how big is it? What temperature is it? What does it look like?

Right? Is it sharp? Is it soft? Is it warm? Is it cold? And as we start identifying those emotions, we can start to go, "Oh, I'm going to be okay. This is what sadness feels like. Sadness sits in my stomach. Sadness is big. Sadness is right, and if we allow ourselves to feel it and to name it, then we can start to process through it and release it, and we can allow our body to release that energy, and it doesn't stay stuck in us. But when we push back and we are fearful of allowing ourselves to have that emotion, allowing ourselves that time to feel that sensation, to reassure ourselves it's okay to feel this, whatever it is, it's okay to feel things. And when we can talk about our emotions with someone safe, that processes that out, right? So research is now showing that the sensation of an emotion lasts approximately 90 seconds in our body. So if you can give yourself the 90 seconds to feel that sensation, and you think about that, how long did that 20 seconds of spontaneous laughter feel at the beginning of this podcast, right? So allowing 90 seconds can feel overwhelming, but if you can sit in the sensation for 90 seconds and start to identify what is it, where is it, just be curious instead of pushing it away, instead of being afraid of it, start asking yourself those questions: Where is it? What color is it? Is it a temperature? Is it sharp? Is it soft? Be curious about whatever that emotion is, and allow yourself to feel it. You can process that out, but if you don't process that out, emotions can actually stay trapped in the cells of our body for up to seven years. So think about that: 90 seconds of discomfort to start recognizing and becoming curious, or seven years of this thing sitting in the cells of our body, triggering repeatedly over and over and over again, because we're not allowing it to come up, we're not addressing it, we're not looking at it and going, "It's okay, it's really okay to feel this.

And so, with these kids, especially, you have to know how to do that. You have to know how to process it yourself, and you have to know how to help them sit in it and process it because they've had nothing but chaos, and they don't know what safety looks like. So safety for them looks like explosion, because then they can keep you at bay, and then you can't hurt them, right? So, learning how to sit in that with them, and learning how to process through it with them, and helping them to start to process through that is being a trauma responsive parent,

and you know the the thing is you're talking about parenting, but in some ways now now I understand when we're the educators, teachers, you know, were not parents, but at the same time, there are some key things that you said about parenting that really is that pertains to education, and one of those was that you said you can't parent. Youngsters that have gone through trauma at the same way that you parent others, and that is very true for education too. Very true for education. You really have to meet the children where they are in order to because, like you said, trauma rearranges the brain. You know, it does. It rearranges the brain, and so in order to to really educate to get these STEM, you know, this idea, all these ideas out. You can't present it the same way to everybody and people, everyone to get it the same. And so you bring

up a really good point. And there's an organization. I'm actually on the board of directors for Attach, which is the Association for Training on Trauma in Children, right? And for healing, and Attach has specific programs that we go into the schools and train teachers. We train office staff. We can train anybody in the education field, right? Whether it's at elementary education all the way up through college, we have programs that we can train them how to be with these children and how to respond to these children and what the needs are for these children, and we are definitely trying to get the word out that these programs are available, and that we can come into the schools and teach this, and train the teachers, train the staff, so that you know how to better handle what's happening with these children. And I know, like my youngest ended up not. We pulled our four youngest off the public school campuses because they just could not function in a normal classroom setting. And my youngest was really he struggled the most. He was so emotionally dysregulated, and at the time I didn't understand any of the things. I didn't have the training. I hadn't been through everything that I, you know, I was walking through this with him at the time, and he just was so dysregulated and so disruptive in the classrooms that they had to get him out of the classroom in order for the other children to learn. And so then we have a whole different journey going on with him, and that you know the end of my journey came with him when we had to find a facility because he was so dysregulated that we couldn't have him in the home anymore, and that you know that was such a painful experience for me to lose that child because I didn't understand everything that I needed to know to help him, so that started my journey to figure out myself, my own regulation, my own emotional hygiene, and then to start being able to help other parents so that

they don't end up where I ended up.

So you're bringing up some a couple of wonderful points that I just want to hammer home is that it's important whether you are whatever type of leader you are, whether you're an educator, whether you are a parent, it's important to work on yourself and your own regulation because that is what comes through through to whatever kiddo that that you're working with is if you're if you're not regulated, then they're gonna sense it, and that is going to yeah, that's going to break the trust.

Yeah, and ultimately, I was contributing to the chaos happening in my home because I didn't even recognize that I was dysregulated, so you cannot help someone else regulate from a dysregulated state. So, not recognizing my own dysregulation contributed to the chaos that was happening because I couldn't help them regulate. I wasn't regulated, and I didn't even know what regulation was because I didn't know. Again, nobody teaches us how to manage our emotions, right? But as I learned that, and I was so grateful for that, and honestly, I have seen that even though my kids are a. Adults, right? And often I just tell them, okay, I need you all to come back home and let me have a do-over because now I could parent you from such a better point and such a better place, right? That things would hopefully go better, be a little easier down that road, but I can teach them what I know, and then they can parent with their children, right? And I can go and teach other parents who are in this journey the things that I know and how to become more regulated. But I see within my own children because I am so much calmer than I used to be, and that ripples out, and my kids are calmer. They're calmer around me because I'm calmer around them, and so it does generate out. We feel and feed off of each other's energy. So when we are dysregulated, and that's the energy we're putting out, then people around us are, you know, they're. If you think about it, when you walk into a room and you gravitate towards people, who are you gravitating towards? You're gravitating towards the one that's calm, that has got their emotions under control, right? You're not gravitating to the person over here who's so dysregulated that it's chaos around them. So you may not walk into a room and start going, okay, they're dysregulated, they're right, but your body fills up on it, and you pick up the energy of other people around you, and your kids are the same way. You know,

your kids pick up that energy that you're putting out. So when we as parents can become regulated, and we can remain calm regardless of what's happening. That helps our kids to be able to trust that they can be calm, that they can relax and let go of some of that anxiety that's happening because they're safe with us because we're calm.

Yes, yes. So let's take a step back now, because we're getting into trauma, and for the parents who don't experience as much trauma, you know, for the parents who aren't foster parents, you know, have been with their their children the their entire lives. What are some of the simple ways that parents can build trust and safety with their children?

I think that probably the number one thing is what you brought up earlier about listening, right? When we listen to our children and listen at that deep level where you're listening for what they're not saying as well as what they are saying, then you can start to connect with them on a completely different level, and one of the things that I encourage parents, whenever possible, right, be the chaperone on your kid's school, and don't try to step into the circle with them. Just listen, right? When you've got six kids in your car, turn the radio off and listen listen to the conversations between the kids, and you will learn so much about your child and about their friends and where they're at and the things that they're struggling with, and the things that they're doing well with, and some of their fears will come up because they think you're just paying attention to the road, right? But they'll start talking with each other, and if you just listen, take your kids. If you've got, I mean, I had 10 kids, take them one at a time. Hey, let's go run errands together today. Would you come with me to the grocery store? Would you come with me while I go take care of this or go take care of that? Spend one-on-one time with that child, and just ask them what brought you joy today. You know, what made you happy today? What was hard for you today? And especially around the dinner table. I mean, really seriously. Whenever possible, sometimes people are so busy right now, right? And kids are involved in 10 different things going on. We made an intentional decision when we just had the four kids that each of them could pick two things, two extracurricular activities to be involved in. Because at one point they were each doing four or five different. We had no family time whatsoever, and family time really is critical. Just time, just together, and we said you can each choose two things, and everything else has to go. We just need to have some time.

That week, so when you're sitting around the dinner table, put all the phones away. I have a no electronics at the dinner table rule in my house, so all of that gets put away, and we just talk about what was hard for you today, what was good for you today, joy today, what are you struggling with, and you can connect with each other, and that you can celebrate their wins, celebrate the joyful moments with them, and you can sit in the hard moments with them. And as parents, sometimes they want our take on it, and sometimes they don't. They just want you to give them a hug, and they just want you to say, "Hey, I'm sorry, that's hard, right? And so the more you listen, the more you can know when do they need advice, and when do they just need to have just spend time as a family and do those things. Somebody the other day suggested they go on to chat and they say, "Hey, I have kids that are this age, this age, this age, and this age. Tonight we're having dinner together. Give me a list of questions that I can engage with my children at these ages with some things they're experiencing. I want some funny questions, and I want some serious questions. And chat will come up with a list of questions for dinner talk. So then, they'll just take those questions to the dinner table, and they will just draw a question out of the bowl and ask a question that will start some conversation. But be willing to put aside the extracurricular activities and sit at a dinner table together and have conversation with your kids. Is

it very? Very important for everybody right now, especially parents. I think to because the world is all about go go go go go go, and parenting even let let two two children, much less 10, you know, or more, but it's they're all about. I gotta take them to sock practice. Oh, go now. It's it's ballet lessons or it's piano lessons, and then it's tutoring, and then it's the play, and then it's this and that, this and that. Yeah, and what you're saying is so important. Is as if even more important than doing all the stuff, doing all the things Is just pausing, spending a moment with your family together. Yeah, just being together. I love that. I love that.

And try to choose one day. Just choose one evening a week when it's going to be your family's evening, like we had Monday was our family day, right? So Mondays when the kids got home from school, all the cell phones went away. The Monday night was family night. It was, and you know, at first they struggled with that because we're like, nope, we're you're not texting your friends tonight. You're not engaging on screens tonight. Tonight is our time together as a family. Play board games. Do watch a movie together. Whatever it is, right? And it was hard in the beginning to get them to understand the importance of that, and it was hard for their friends in the beginning. But after a couple of weeks of that, our kids' friends knew. Don't text them on Monday; they won't answer. Monday night is their no electronics night, and so if you really stick with it, it becomes a tradition and a habit in your family, and then you safeguard it and protect it. And pretty soon, their friends are helping them safeguard and protect because their friends see the value

in it. So, Bonnie, what would you say to a parent who feels like they're failing?

I would say to first of all watch your thoughts because that's what your thoughts are telling you that you're failing. And I was I had a master's degree in failing as a parent, and looking at every little thing that I was doing wrong, right? And our brains will tell us in two seconds. Yep, you screwed that up, man! Did you mess that up? You are a failure as a parent. Look at look at all these things, right? And we keep the. List and so think about a cartoon like the Royal Guy. Right, he comes out and he lets loose the scroll and it rolls and rolls and rolls right out. And we have that scroll in our brain of everything that we perceive was a mistake, everything we said wrong everything we did wrong every move we made that was wrong. We can keep that list, and we can. I mean, one little thing will happen, and that scroll will roll, and we'll read the whole scroll, right? So, I don't know any parent. I'm sure there are some out there who feel like they have never made a mistake. I don't know them, and that wasn't my experience. And the parents that I work with don't feel that way. We all feel that sense of failure. And when I had to place my son in a treatment center, and I walked out, and the door closed behind me, and I heard the door close, and I heard the click of the lock, and in that moment, I felt this weight settle on me that I had just failed at the most important thing I would ever be asked to do. I had failed my son. I had failed myself. I had failed my family. I had failed God, and now what? Right, and our thoughts will tank us so much faster than anything else. So I teach people the stop process. So when you are telling yourself I'm a failure, and you let that scroll roll, and you're reading through that scroll. Actually, put your hand up. Stop. Just stop, and tell yourself, "Okay, Bonnie, stop it. No more scroll. Stop reading the scroll. And then take a breath, and just breathe in slowly through your nose, and out slowly

through your mouth, and do that three or four times until your nervous system settles. You feel your shoulders relax. You feel your body start to calm down. You can put your hand on your chest, and you can feel your breathing in your heart rate. Right, and if you can settle your nervous system enough to get your breath and your heart rate going at the same rate. That's called being incoherence. That's ultimately where we want to be: is incoherence. You can't maintain that all the time, but if you can get there for just a few moments, and then you're going to observe, what am I thinking? What is this thought telling me? Because our thoughts create our emotions, our emotions drive our actions, our actions create our results, and our results feed our thoughts. Right. So when we are in a negative thought spiral, and where I am a failure, then the emotion comes up: disappointment, sadness, frustration with ourselves. Right, and then what actions do we take out of those emotions? And then what results do we get? And we get these negative emotions create negative actions, negative results, and then what does it do? It proves to us that we're a failure, right? So then we just get caught. So we literally that action of putting your hand up and saying stop breaks that thought cycle long enough that you can take a breath, you can pause, really pay attention. What was I thinking? And you'll find the thought, "I'm a failure. I screwed up. I did right. You start finding the list. So then we're going to use the P, which is pivot with purpose. This thought is not serving me. This is not helping me in the least. So, what thought can I choose instead? And be intentional. Okay, so I'm not a perfect parent, and that's okay. I can give myself grace. I made a mistake, but you know what? I did all these other things right, and start listing the things that you did right.

Let's unroll that scroll, and let's start reading the scroll of the things that you did right, and pay attention to that. Right, so use I. That's the stop process. Got a stop sign. S T O P. Stop. Take a breath. Observe your thoughts, and pivot to a positive thought or something that's going to serve you better than this negative. I'm a failure, because we all make mistakes. We all fail at something here and there. But you know what? We all also do things right, and we also make really good choices, and we really can be great parents. But we need to recognize that, give ourselves credit for it. So when you're feeling that failure, stop, take a breath, pay attention to the thought that's creating that, and pivot your thought to something else. Give yourself grace. Hey, today wasn't so great, but I can do better. I've got how many hours left in the day? We can turn this around, right? And you and I talked the very beginning of our conversation about having the best day and the worst day can be the same day sometimes, right? So if we're in that place of failure, that's a worse day because we are feeling negative and doubt. But you can turn that into a best day for watching for moments of joy when your kids come home and they're smiling. Smile back, right? Just put a smile on your face and feel what that does for you. Even if you don't laugh, put that smile on and feel the lift in your spirit. Just because you smile, that starts the turnaround. Pay attention to what you're thinking, right? Positivity actually does work. It changes things. So switch out of that the worst day of my life into I can find something really good today. I've got 30 minutes left before I go to bed. In this 30 minutes, I'm going to find something good that I can sleep on tonight.

Yes. Yeah. love it. So I understand that you have a free gift for our audience.

Yeah. So I have created a guide for finding joy, and some of these tools that I've talked about are in that guide, so I gave you the link to the guide, and they can wherever you put your show notes, they can find that link. You can click on that link, just put your email address in there, so we know where to send that guide, and that guide will download as a PDF, and then you can work your way through that guide. It will also trigger an email series that will come to you about using the guide. So that guide has, I think, if there's four or five tools in there, but it helps you process through thoughts, emotions, actions, and results, and then it gives you some tools about finding and flipping your thoughts, and different things that you can use to turn things around when you are caught in that negative spiral. So it's a way to start watching your emotional regulation. There are emotional regulation tools in there, and things that can bring the joy back into your life.

Wow, this this is such such a wonderful conversation with so many gems, so many gems. How can our listeners out there connect with you? Continue The conversation work with you, reach out to you. What's the best?

So everything is really streamlined. You can go to BonnBellerCoaching.com, and even though most of what's on there is geared to foster adoptive kinship parents, that's the bulk of my work, but it's not exclusive work. I do work with parents that are not adoptive or foster parents. I have worked with actually I've worked with CEOs of their own company. I've worked with teenagers. Anyone who needs and is seeking help regulating their emotions, you can reach out to me because I do two paths. I do one for foster and adoptive kinship parents, and I do one for people who are just seeking emotional regulation. So there's a button on my website. You can click there to schedule an appointment with me. You can email me. Just feel free to reach out directly at bonnie at bonnie butlercoaching.com, my website is bonnybellarcoaching.com. On Facebook, my Facebook business page bonnybellercoaching Instagram at bonnybellercoaching LinkedIn bonnie butlercoaching. So all you have to remember is Bonnie Butler Coaching, and you can find me.

All right, all right, very good. Well, Bonnie, body, but like coaching. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming on to the Lighten Up Project for sharing your information. For joining now our community, the Lighten Up Nation, to help us bring this this message and these messages to a global audience, I really love it. Finish this sentence for me: Parenting isn't perfect; it's a about

parenting. Isn't perfect. It's about growing together.

Love it, love it, Bonnie Butler. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to our audience for continuing to support us, we could not. As as I said, we are trying to build a community, a global community. Well, we're not trying. We are building a global community. We are talking about the importance of joy and humor and laughter and play and hope and and trauma and how all of this looks like in all of every part of our life in parenting, in our relationships, in work, in everything that we go to, and we're bringing this to the next generation to help them, and so hopefully this will become an ingrain part of our society. Anyway, I thank you so much. I couldn't do this without you. Please, please, please join. Go to our Facebook page or our LinkedIn page. Start a conversation with us. Tell us what you like, what you don't like, what you want to see more of. Please share this this podcast that we're doing with other people that you know of. Help us build our Community, and most importantly, as Bonnie said, it all starts with that smile. So remember that every smile can open a door, and then every laugh can open a heart, and every step can be your next victory. Until next time, I'm Malcolm Grissom. Thanks so much.