Dr. Becky Kennedy
speaker
3,434 appearances
7 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 18 Jun
Dr. Becky Kennedy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Like, we're in a close relationship. Like, can you be here a little bit more with me? And that is true. Like, that is what I want to do, right? And sometimes it can be a little distancing, right? And a little separate. People on the other end of that spectrum, if they know I'm very porous, I tend to, to me, one of the ways of also thinking about it, I think I gaze in before I gaze out.
And I think a lot of people gaze out before they gaze in, right? They spend a lot of time in other people's brains and less time in their own, right? What do they think of me? What do they think, right? If that's what's going on for you, then the shell to your egg is, isn't always intact. And so there's a spillover. It's like, whose feelings are whose? Whose thoughts are whose?
I'm spending so much time worried about what that person thinks of me. I almost like, what am I, what do I, what do I think? Right? And so the exercise you're naming is actually just a resetting of a boundary, right? And things that are absurdly concrete are are necessary for the most primal parts of our brain to actually understand. My name is Becky Kennedy.
To me, what I say, I don't usually say that. I'll say, my feet are on the ground. When I do a grounding exercise, everyone in our community knows this, my hand is always on my heart. I think there's some amount of having contact with your body. My hand is on my heart. Sometimes I used to do this with clients, especially after an emotional experience, going like this.
Name five things in the room is probably another way. There's a red clock. I'm wearing a white shirt. They're very, very, very basic as a way of kind of coming back into your body. Two mantras that I find help parents a lot actually make me think about this exercise. One is I am the pilot, not the turbulence.
In our kids' turbulent moments, when they are that turbulence, what so easily happens is we merge into that with them. And then it's no wonder our kids can't calm down or episodes last forever because we're just turbulence and turbulence together, right? So I'm the pilot, not the turbulence. Also...
One day I'm going to do a partnership with some airplane company because I feel like airplanes are just so beautiful because the pilot gets a cockpit. They get a boundary. Like, it's, right? That's what parents need. So that's one. And the other one, when your kids are upset or after there's an argument, some people get very dysregulated just knowing someone's upset with them, right?
Which is, again, kind of whose feelings are whose. I find one of the most effective mantras, and again, these sound cheesy, is just, I'm safe. This isn't an emergency. I can cope with this because our body, if you tend to be porous, you get activated just by other people being activated, even though it wasn't your feeling in the first place.
And your body actually needs the reminder that you're safe to not kind of add to that turbulence.
Yeah.
So, all right, I'm going to respond to that. And you just cut me off. You're like, Becky, that's not the direction I want you to go in. Because I guess MGI, which is I call most generous interpretation, is to me the embodiment of not what I do all the time. Definitely not because I'm imperfect. But what I think is just a useful framework to try to employ as much as possible.
Because the idea of what is the most generous interpretation of someone's behavior, like projection, counteracts our very natural human tendency, which is just what is the least generous interpretation, right? We all come up with the least generous interpretation of people's behavior all the time. And it's just quick. It's easy.
And I think it's because in our brain, if we see something bad or annoying, it's just easy to think that that's the whole, right? So I can't even tell you how many times every parent I know We'll say, my kid doesn't listen. They hit all the elevator buttons. They hit other people. And then I said, and I know what you're thinking. They're a sociopath.
They're like, that's literally what I'm thinking. I was like, I know. I have that thought too.
Right.
No. It means you are a good kid who has not yet learned the skills to regulate urges. That's all it means. That would be the most generous interpretation.
I have a kid like that, too. He wants things for himself, and he derives a lot of joy from things. Those types of kids are going to do things. Okay. That's my resilient rebel. Okay. But... Projection. Why am I bringing that up? So what's my most generous interpretation of why this projection would happen? Why would a kid say, you're mad at me? Or, you know, I can see how mad you are at me.
Or why would someone even say in adulthood, you seem really, really stressed out, right? Again, the gazing in versus gazing out. I think it comes back to in our childhoods. I mean, that's what often a lot comes back to. Were we taught that we have an emotional life that lives inside of us? Then were we taught how to understand that emotional life?
Then were we taught how to manage and cope with that whole emotional life? Most people were not. So it becomes this very, very complicated conundrum. The emotional life is happening inside me. Again, like you can't beat it. It's happening. Our feelings can't get rid of them. And they're very powerful. They're sensations.
But if your framework was always you're getting punished, you're getting ridiculed, you're being a baby, then you develop a very conflictual relationship with your feelings. Like they can't be real. They almost can't be mine. That's really what they can't be mine.
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