Kyle MacDonald

If it's thoughtlessness, that's a little bit more tricky, particularly if it's a relationship that matters, because then it's about actually trying to let the other person know what they might not be thinking about or might not have in their mind about us that has meant that they've lashed out in some way.

And in some ways, if it's someone who is just mean by nature, then it's kind of the easiest one, right?

It's like, they're gone.

Yeah, we have to keep our brain online, and that I think is always the challenge.

So if we think about, which is a bit of a mouthful really, which is we talk about this idea in therapy of emotional regulation, which is basically how do you control the volume knob of your emotional distress on any given day.

And so to be able to do that thinking, we do have to be regulated enough to keep the front part of our brain above our eyebrows online to think about the other person.

So that is important to recognize that sometimes if we're losing our rag, actually the thing we need to do is calm ourselves down first.

Yeah, we often talk about it on the show as the boring stuff, you know, sleeping, eating, minimising alcohol and drugs, getting the exercise, you know, doing all that stuff which everyone goes, oh, no, I should do it.

But actually, it's always a good place to start when we're trying to assess what's going on with ourselves.

Well, I think one of the hard ones which blows that rule apart is taking feedback from your children.

Because a lot of times, you know, I've got two teenage girls or nearly, a 12-year-old who thinks she's 16 and a 15-year-old who thinks she's 18.

But that can be quite challenging because our kids do tend to, you know, throw it back at us.

And fair enough too a lot of the time.

But it can be quite hard as a parent to take that feedback, I think.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully come back to us and say thank you so much for all that you did for us.

Yeah, and I think that's the painful bit, right?

And again, if we think about that idea of emotional regulation, that pain, what we commonly think of as having touched a nerve, that pain can get in the way of us being able to think through what's actually being said to us.

Because actually, criticism is easy to think of as a negative thing, but I often think about it as feedback, which can be positive or negative.

And a lot of time that's where our growth and learning is, which isn't easy and isn't necessarily pain free.