Robyn Gobbel on Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors

Debbie: 

Hey Robin, welcome to the podcast.

Robyn Gobbel:

Thanks for having me, Debbie.

Debbie:

So happy to be talking about your book. I was mentioning before we hit record that someone in my community referenced your book, which is called Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors, Brain-Body Sensory Strategies that Really Work. And I was like, OK, that ticks all the boxes for the kinds of things that I want to personally know about and that I know this community of listeners would want to hear more about. So we’re going to get into that. But would you take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about your work in the world and also kind of your personal why that brought you to be doing this.

Robyn Gobbel:

Yes, I’ll start with my professional background. I think that will lead us into some of the personal stuff. But I was a therapist. I have always wanted to be a therapist. I wanted to work with kids with the hardest behavior, as always. I found the memoirs of this woman named Torey Hayden when I was in high school. And she was a special education teacher who worked with the kids really nobody else knew what to do with. And I remember being like, that’s it. That’s what I want to do. So when I finished graduate school, that’s what I did. I went right into working with the kids that really nobody else wanted to work with. Nobody else knew what to do with. There was this kind of chronic, like, I don’t know what to do. You take them. And I, of course, had no idea what to do either. But there was nobody else for me to ask. And there was nobody else for me to send them to. I was kind of at the end of the line. So I was very committed to figuring out what’s happening with these kids. Why are these behaviors happening? The kids that I work with at that point in particular are kids that had histories of very serious complex attachment developmental trauma. They were having behaviors that certainly you weren’t reading about in parenting books.They absolutely weren’t responding to the kinds of parenting, you know, that were written about in parenting books. And, and their parents were lost and overwhelmed and felt like everybody was constantly giving up on them, which they kind of were. So I just felt like I didn’t want to be one more of those people. I’m a pretty tenacious person in general. And I kind of took the challenge up, I guess, of figuring, trying to figure out what is happening here? Like why these behaviors are so baffling? Like, why are they happening? That led me to discover interpersonal neurobiology in the field of relational neuroscience, which doesn’t exactly tell you what to do, but it gave me a really great kind of framework, or I like to say map of human behavior and what happens when things go a little awry. And so over the years, I’ve just integrated different aspects of relational neuroscience into my work with kids. I was a play therapist, and worked very, very closely with their families. And then about five years ago, I closed my practice in Austin, Texas. I was a full -time outpatient psychotherapist, right? Saw kids and families all day long every day.

And I closed my practice to move my family across the country thinking I would reopen a practice, but then the pandemic happened. And so everybody just kind of had to pivot and I was doing a lot of teaching and training anyway. So I really just leaned into that. There are professionals who need support, you know, because the professionals are still saying the same thing they were 20 years ago. I don’t know what to do. I can’t help you. And I really don’t want families to hear that from a professional. So I work really, really hard to train professionals and help them feel supported. And then I have an online community for the parents. So I still get to work directly with the parents who are really alone.

Debbie:

So, okay, that brought up a lot of questions from you already that are not on my list of questions. But I guess I’m curious to know when you went to grad school and you were focusing on these things, what kind of therapy were you doing? And I ask this because I recently released an episode on the limitations and challenges of traditional therapy with neurodivergent people. And so I’m just kind of curious because I’m so interested in what trained psychotherapists do and don’t know. So I’m just kind of curious, where did you kind of come up against the limitations?

Robyn Gobbel:

Some of the limitations were undoubtedly the fact that I was brand new to the field. And there’s just kind of an element of that, that there’s just no way around that. Everybody has to be new for a while. But without question, my professional background, my training had largely been in cognitive -based models and then what I would call traditional child -centered play therapy, which tends to involve kids being able to do symbolic and metaphor based play. And what I didn’t know now, or what I didn’t know then, but I do know now is that kids with the level of attachment trauma and complex trauma that I was working with and continue to work with, cognitive interventions, well, first of all, are essentially useless. And even metaphor, good metaphor, symbolic, play -based interventions really aren’t what kids need at that stage, the stage that I was getting them at, which is that they were a step away from needing inpatient care. So I was getting hurt at work. I mean, things were being thrown at me, I was bit, I had a black eye once, I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t know how to contain or deescalate kids, and for some reason I thought they were gonna play with a dollhouse. Yeah, it wasn’t happening.

Debbie:

And I’m just curious, that sounds like a hard job. So what was it that kept you moving forward instead of saying, you know what, this is not what I signed up for, I’m out.

Robyn Gobbel:

I think in some ways it’s a little hard to articulate. There was just, that was just never an option. Like I never, I’ve never wanted to do anything else. And in this specific realm, I’m not like this in all areas of my life, but in the specific realm, I just wanted to understand why. And especially like other therapists are telling me this works. But either I’m doing it very wrong, right? Like I have the same experience parents have, right? They’re like, everyone’s saying this work. So I must be doing this wrong. Or this is not what these kids need. And if it’s not what these kids need, I don’t know what they need. And I just felt really committed to finding out. I would assume that there was a part of me that really saw myself in these kids and really wanted to be the grownup that didn’t give up, that didn’t give up on them and also didn’t stay focused on their badness, right? Like could really continue to see something’s wrong.

Debbie:

So you mentioned earlier that it was discovering relational neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology that kind of marked a shift for you and opened up your eyes to a direction that could really work for these clients that you were working with. So can you define what that is just so we’re on the same page?

Robyn Gobbel:

Yeah, interpersonal neurobiology, which is where I stumbled first, is a theory of human development that was put into the world by Dr. Dan Siegel. And it is a way of bringing together many, many diverse fields of study and then conceptualizing human development. And when I first heard Dr. Siegel talk, I heard him on a CD as driving down the road. And I just remember that means just that bolt of like, my gosh, finally something finally something makes sense. And also finally something has a lot of hope in it. We’re not sitting here pathologizing, not just kids with behavior problems, but frankly, humans. I mean, so much of 

our theories of human development and our theories of behavior change are kind of grounded in the idea that humans are bad unless we make them uncomfortable enough to be good. And I do not believe that. And I didn’t want to believe that. I don’t know. I guess there was a part of me that was like, that’s kind of a crummy job. I don’t think I was having these thoughts at the time. But his work and the way he talked about people and this continues to be one of the things I respect most about Dr. Siegel is he’s so hopeful and he’s so respectful of how he talks about people, including people who we could objectively say have very bad behavior. So it felt like the first time somebody could begin to offer what might kind of be wrong, quote unquote wrong. What was being disrupted in these kids whose behaviors were not inviting connection at all. Like nobody wanted to be in a relationship with these kids. And Dr. Siegel was really offering an idea about how at their core they absolutely wanted to be connected like all humans do. But what was getting in the way of that?

And from Dr. Siegel’s work, then I started to discover his colleagues, Dr. Allan Schor and regulation theory, eventually, like Dr. Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory, Dr. Bruce Perry and neurosurgeon model of therapeutics and these, and there’s so many more, there’s so many more, those are just the ones that I tend to spend the most time with on a day -to -day basis. And so now these like broader interpersonal neurobiology has expanded into this broader field of relational neuroscience. Like that’s kind of an umbrella topic, or I’m sorry, an umbrella title for these fields of study and theories that are focused on the brain and the nervous system, the relational pieces of the brain and the nervous system.

Debbie: 

That is really helpful to have that kind of broad view. And I want to get into your book in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you, you wrote about your aha moment where you first learned of the idea that no behavior was maladaptive and that that was really hard for you to kind of wrap your head around. And it was for me too. And I think about that’s a term that I use, you know, in my, and I think for me, I’m just thinking there’s so much language, there’s so many kind of assumptions that we make in the language that we use and kind of supporting families. And for me, even reading that was a reminder that everything has to be questioned. But could you talk about that aha for you and what that meant?

Robyn Gobbel:

I was in a… It’s funny the details you remember, right? Like I’m in the back row of this enormous conference with my friends, right? Like, I was interested in the conference for sure, but I was probably more interested in the social experience that we were having there. And Bonnie Badenack, who has since become like my primary closest mentor, early in the day, said that she believed no behavior was maladaptive. And I had a similar response as you kind of described just now, which is, what? Like that, I’m sorry, but these kids have real maladaptive behaviors. Like they’re bad and they’re unsafe. They’re crossing other people’s boundaries, all this kind of stuff. These are, and also this sense of like, I thought maladaptive was almost like a generous word, right? Like implicit in the word maladaptive, for me, the way I was using it was the behaviors had once been adaptive and they had served this child inside their traumatic experience or their previous experiences and they’d been adaptive and they’d really needed them. It’s just that they’re no longer adaptive anymore. And so again, I thought this was this really respectful, generous language that really focused on that piece of it. And also, I really trusted Bonnie Badenok, who is a leader in interpersonal neurobiology and turning it into clinical practice. So I had a conflict. Like, no, that’s kind of bonkers, but also, hmm, the person saying it, I trust. So I think I need to pause and get a little curious about that. And I did, and I called some colleagues. And there was also that kind of moment I think a lot of us can have, which is like, well, if you think that, you clearly don’t know the kinds of kids I work with. Right? 

So I called my colleagues who are working with the same kinds of colleagues I worked with and ultimately asked Bonnie if we could study together, if she would take me on as a consultee. And she said yes. And then that’s when like the theory of interpersonal neurobiology and polyvagal theory specifically, those two shifted for me from like head knowledge to body knowledge. And as I went along and understood so much more, I mean, memory science is a huge piece of the idea that, you know, no behavior is maladaptive, autonomic nervous system, the stress response system. Like as I started to more intricately understand all these different pieces in the way that she already did, I was able to not just like trust her because I trusted her as a mentor, but understand how she came to that conclusion that in the moment that that behavior happens, where I’m not implying it doesn’t have grave consequences. But in that moment, it 100 % matches what’s happening in that person’s inner world. Memory, autonomic nervous system, all the things, the ways they all come together. Now in the next moment, it could change because we change moment to moment in all of those ways, the way we’re processing information. But in that moment, that behavior is an adaptive response to what’s happening inside that person’s nervous system. And for some people that might seem like we’re really splitting hairs. Like, okay, is that adaptive? Is that maladaptive? I mean, it’s still got consequences. I think for some people it feels like we’re really splitting hairs, but for me it was, it changed everything. It changed everything. I mean, it changed how I approach my work and it changed how I approach these kids. It had changed what I was feeling in my body, it changed what I felt about myself, changed everything.

Debbie:

Okay, so your book is called Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors, Brain -Body Sensory Strategies that Really Work. And I want to go into some of the concepts in there. And I just want to start with one of the core tenets that you said, which to me was another, you know, you mentioned that this is an aha, a la kids do well when they can, Ross Greene, who I just interviewed yesterday to talk about CPS with young kids. But you said that regulated connected kids who feel safe behave well. And I read that and I will say like personally, I felt judged as soon as I read it. I’m like, so I’m not creating a safe environment. Like I immediately interpreted it that way and I had to really sit with it and understand what you were really saying. Can you explain what you mean by that concept?

Robyn Gobbel:

I absolutely can and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to. A lot of folks have that reaction and I don’t do that on purpose. I am not somebody who creates intensity on purpose for effect, but I have learned over the years that that is an experience with how that lands with folks. And what I’m understanding is that there are a lot of misconceptions about what felt safety is and what the parent’s job is in their kids’ sense of safety and connection and regulation. And that piece there, there’s been this way that parents have started to believe that that is their job and they have total control over that in their kid. And so if their kid isn’t those things, that it’s the parent’s fault, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Parents have a lot of ways that they can influence their children’s regulation, connection, and felt safety, which is why I wrote that book. I work with parents because there’s so many ways we can influence these experiences in our kids, but we are not in charge of it. We are not in control. We are not in control of it. So for me, regulated connected kids who feel safe, and a lot of times I say do well, but for people who are new to this way of thinking, they tend to relate a little bit more to the word behave well. So I kind of go in and out of shifting those. For me, it’s not like, it’s not a checklist. It’s not to get your kid regulated, get them connected, get them feeling safe. And now you’ve got good kids. It’s not a checklist. It’s an invitation for curiosity. So when our kids are struggling, and then we start to get dysregulated, inevitably, that’s how brains and nervous systems work. If we can find a way to hold close to curiosity and ask ourselves, what’s going on with my kid? Is this a regulation issue? Is this a connection to me or to themselves? Or is this a felt safety? Now, the truth is it’s almost impossible to really silo those pieces out, but there are some things that fall into these different categories a little bit more clearly than others. And so I still think it’s a helpful thought experiment. More than anything, that keeps us connected to the idea that something is wrong. My kid is struggling. And I might not even be able to fix that. It might not actually even be my job to fix that.

But if I can see their struggles as a reflection of the state of their regulation, the state of their connection to me and to themselves and their experience of health safety, that means I’m not making big characterological judgments about my kid or myself. They become a kid who’s struggling instead of a bad kid. And the kids that I work with whose behaviors are so outrageous and so confusing, all the adults in their lives are looking at them as though they’re bad kids. And the adults aren’t bad for looking at the kids that way. The adults are just being normal. Right? And taking a step back from that, even the biggest behaviors and remembering this is about regulation and connection about safety is huge in the way that you approach that kid.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah, I think it was Mona Delahooke who mentioned this idea of a dysregulated child. Instead of what’s going on with you, what does your nervous system need right now? And just asking that question totally changes how you respond to and show up for a kid who’s having a hard time.

Robyn Gobbel:

For sure. For sure. And I really believe that it’s true across the board that if a kid is struggling, that there’s something going on regulation, connection, and file safety. And I don’t like to get too binary and too rigid, but I actually think that it is that clear. I also think that humans are supposed to struggle sometimes. Like being dysregulated as a part of our developmental process of becoming who we are, dysregulation isn’t inherently bad, right? I’m not aiming to get my kid to be regulated all the time. And sometimes we aren’t experiencing safety. And that’s just, again, that’s not a bad thing. I mean, it’s bad and it’s better to be safe, experiencing safety. But it’s not necessarily something as parents who are supposed to be rushing in and changing or fixing or things like that.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I’ve done what I tend to do, which is I go deep before I do the overview. So I’m going to zoom out for a second because I want to make sure that you have a moment to talk about the broad strokes of your book, who you wrote it for, you know, my audiences, parents of neurodivergent kids, and some, probably many of whom have experienced trauma almost all if not all have kind of, you know, very sensitive nervous systems and so forth. So can you tell us about your goal with the book and who it’s really for?

Robyn Gobbel:

Yes, because I had very clear goals. I didn’t want to write another book. I just didn’t want to waste people’s time. Parents don’t have, they don’t have time for this stuff. So I, again, I’ve said my history is working with kids with serious complex trauma and attachment trauma, though over the years, my audience has gotten broader. And now we talk about vulnerable nervous systems and big baffling behaviors. So kids who are neurodivergent. I have a lot of parents of kids with neuroimmune disorders. I have my own intimate familiarity with neuroimmune disorders. I have a lot of experience supporting those folks. I wanted to write a book for families who didn’t feel seen in the other parenting books that they were reading. And these are not bad parenting books. These are amazing parenting books that I’ve read and benefited from. And the added component of what I call the baffling piece, that moment of like, what on earth? This makes no sense at all, either because the stress response is so sensitive, or the kids that have attachment trauma have ways of navigating their stress that is different than kids who haven’t experienced attachment trauma. And generally speaking, most adults are very, very baffled by that. So I wanted to write a book for those families, for the ones who felt like even these other great parenting books that I get a lot out of still feels like I’d not totally seen in the pages of this book. 

And then I wanted to try to write a book that took into account my understanding of how the brain changes and how adults can become more regulated because most of the adults that I work with, they know a lot of stuff. They’ve read all the books, they’ve listened to every podcast, they know the things and they still can’t do the things they want to do. And that was certainly true of the parents in my clinical practice and what was different in my clinical work with them is that they were having this very intensely relational experience with me, and they were getting this experience of co -regulation, and they were getting the experience of compassion, like over and over and over and over again. They heard me talk about their kids’ behaviors with compassion, and ultimately, they came to understand that I felt the same way about them. Then they could start to feel that way about themselves. And that is a, in my experience, a crucial non -negotiable piece of this equation of taking theory and tools and actually being able to use them. And it’s not even for me about being able to use the tools. It’s about feeling better in your own body. And when you feel better in your own body, you’re going to be able to use the tools that you want to use in your parenting, at least some of the time. I mean, not all the time. And I really challenged myself to think, can I take what I understand about how the brain changes and heals in relationship? Is there any way I can do that in a book? And I wasn’t sure, but I tried to take what I knew and I tried to take what people were telling me from listening to my podcast or getting my emails. And I tried to merge that together with what I understood about things like interpersonal neurobiology.

And that inspired me to write the book in a slightly different way, where the beginning of every chapter is a mom who’s coming to parent coaching with me and I write it in first person. So I really narrate my own inner experience, what’s happening for me, what my thoughts are for me, which I have found to be a really helpful part of the healing journey with the families I work with. And I thought, well, maybe families who read this book could believe that if I, maybe they could believe me, I guess, maybe they could believe I really feel this way about my clients. And there comes a point where all humans inevitably ask themselves like, well, what makes me so different or so special that I don’t deserve this?

Debbie:

I just want to, before we move on, I loved that format where you had, you know, it was like kind of a composite parent that you were talking with. I think her name was Nat. Is that right? And I just really enjoyed that because it was really validating and you, you really kind of addressed all the insecurities or the invalidation that so many parents have experienced time and time again with so many people. And as you said in the very beginning, like going to a specialist, a therapist for help and having them say, we can’t help you, we’ve never seen this before, this is too whatever. I mean, that is, that’s a really low point for any parent to have to experience that. And one of the, one of the dialogues in there, I really appreciated. Matt said, well, aren’t you going to tell me what to do? And you said, well, you know, that’s not, you’ve been having other people told you what to do. Like, how’s that working for you? You know, essentially. And I really just appreciated that. And I think because we do, we want, we do want answers. We want help, we want answers, we want strategies. And I so appreciated how you demonstrated this real sense. Everything you’re doing in the book, you demonstrate in the way that you work with the parents. And I thought that was really effective. And it opens the reader up, I think, in a way that most books don’t.

Robyn Gobbel:

That is lovely to hear. I mean, that was a great summary of really what I’d hoped, especially that part where you just said, you know, the things I was teaching in the book are coming through my relationship with Nat, which is a wonderful way for people to learn. And they start to, like, people are making neural networks of them in relationship with me, frankly, as they’re reading the book. They’re feeling in relationship with me and they’re making a neural network out of that. And there’s a part of me that’s really uncomfortable to say, I want people to make a neural network of me in their minds. Like there’s something about that feels just uncomfortable, but that is what I want. It doesn’t have to be me. I want people to make a neural network in their minds of somebody who’s like holding these core truths, not just about their kids, but about them, right? That their behavior is not maladaptive either, even though parents have told me some pretty fascinating things, right? It’s not maladaptive. It makes perfect sense and I’m not judging them for it, right? And that I can have authentic, I mean, you know when somebody is not being honest with you with their compassion, it feels like pity. And so I don’t care if the neural network that parents make is of me or of someone else who gives them those things, but I also know there aren’t enough people giving parents those things. And I wanted to try to fill that gap in an accessible way.

Debbie:

Yeah, and it also, I think so many parents are the big feelings that they’re feeling, right? The way that their own nervous systems get triggered, the things that they get anxious and stressed about, the sense of failure, all of those things, they tend to mirror exactly what our kids are experiencing. And so to be able to then experience what it feels like to be seen and have that sense of felt safety, then that allows us to be like, okay, now I know better how to provide that for my child. So I thought that was really cool. gosh, okay, so we’re already running long and we haven’t really gotten into so many things, but I’m gonna ask just a couple of concepts and then I’m gonna encourage listeners to definitely check out Robin’s book, If You Have a Child with Big Baffling Behaviors, which I imagine most listeners do. Otherwise, why would you be listening to this show? So in the book, you say that there are two modes that our brains are in at any given time: connection or protection. That’s the first time I had even thought of that. And you say there’s no gray area in between. You’re in one or the other. So I would love it if you could just explain that a little bit because I think our kids probably spend a lot of time in the protection mode.

Robyn Gobbel:

If we look at Dr. Porges’s polyvagal theory and his idea of neuroception, and then, and he’s not the only one who is talking about these concepts in the science in this way, this is just the work I’m most familiar with. But the work of polyvagal theory and neuroception tells us that the brain is constantly taking in information from what’s happening out in the environment, from what’s happening in the relationship that we’re in right now and what’s happening inside our bodies. And it’s actually even way more complicated than that, but for simplicity sake, we’ll just keep it at that for now. That we’re taking the information from these three places and the information is either giving us cues of safety or cues of danger. And not a lot of stuff is this binary, but safe or not safe is binary in the nervous system. And I kind of think of it as like buckets of safety or danger. And if there’s more safety in the bucket, then there is cues of danger, then the nervous system is going to experience safety and rest into connection mode, which is its default, we’re really longing to be in this safe, socially engaged connection mode, which doesn’t necessarily mean we’re engaged with other people. That connection to ourself, as well as all sorts of other things, nature, pets, is a very valid form of connection. But when we’re taking all these cues from these three different places, if there’s more cues of safety, then there are cues of danger, we’re going to rest into connection mode. When the nervous system through this concept called neuroception, neuroceives more cues of danger than cues of safety, it is going to switch over into protection mode. From there, the intensity of protection mode can very much really vary. It’s like a dimmer switch, right? It’s on or off. But once it’s on, it can be tiny, tiny bit on or all the way on. We can be in protection mode enough to be like, huh, wait a minute. I think something might not be right here. Let me check it out. Actually, everything’s fine. Or we can move all the way into like, OK, I’m in danger. And I need the energy in my arms and my legs and my mouth to protect myself so I can return to safety. The goal is always safety.

Debbie:

That’s super helpful. Okay. Thank you for breaking that down for us. And what I really want to get into, and we can’t go into too much detail, but you have a whole section on fixing those behaviors. I love the way that you talk about the owl brain, the watchdog and the possum brain. To me, it seems like the owl brain is kind of like where we want to be, right? That’s like the green zone or something. And then I think of like, and tell me if this is wrong, but I think of the watchdog I read that is kind of like the fight or flight and the possum is being more like the freeze or fawn mode. So you offer strategies for all of those and you say, let’s fix those behaviors. But what are you really providing parents through that section of the book in terms of how to address the way that their child’s brain is wired?

Robyn Gobbel:

What I’m really offering is tools that invite regulation, connection, and felt safety. That the more we can bring our kids in any given moment into regulation, connection, and felt safety, again, we’re not in control. We can extend invitations. Because it’s kind. Because it’s kind to help people feel safe when they are safe. That our kids with sensitized stress response systems and behavior problems, they’re feeling unsafe when they objectively are safe, right? Like if there’s a kid who’s objectively not safe and is having a lot of fight -flight behaviors, those kids make sense. They still need support and services, but those kids aren’t getting referred to services in the same way these other kids are getting referred to services. The problem is that it feels to everyone around them like it doesn’t match. That objectively speaking, this kid is safe, but they’re having these behaviors that are suggesting that they’re not feeling safe, regulated, or connected. And so the entire concept and I do I mean, I’m a former play therapist. So I kind of developed a way to be with kids and helping them understand themselves, which is where this like playful metaphor came up with so important for kids to de -shame their behaviors and understand themselves. So that’s where that playful metaphor came from. And then the adults love the metaphor as well. It just makes them report that they feel simple and there is something very endearing about an adult talking to me about their watchdog brain. It’s just so precious. But that’s, I want regulation, connection and felt safety. I want to offer those tools.

Debbie:

That’s great. And one of the quotes I pulled out, you said, Ultimately, we cannot change anyone else’s behavior or nervous system, we can make a lot of offers of connection, felt safety and co regulation, but we’re not responsible for those offers being received. And that felt really important to me. Yeah, I hope it feels really true and also still really hopeful that, you know, when we think our kids are struggling and it’s our fault, struggling kids are painful. But when we think our kids are struggling because it’s our fault, it’s crushing. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. I just, my episode from last week was Christina Kuzmich and she wrote a book called I Can Fix This and Other Lies. I Told Myself While Parenting My Struggling Child. And we spent a lot of time talking about that, that pain of feeling like this is somehow my fault. So I just, I really appreciated that. I’m gonna ask you one more question. You have a section in the book called why knowing isn’t even half the battle. So say more about that.

Robyn Gobbel:

So that’s the third section that’s really focused on parents and helping parents understand that age. I mean, people ask me this question literally every day. I know all these things. Why aren’t I doing them? Then they make meaning out of that. Like, I must not really want them or I must be, the brain makes all sorts of fascinating stories that are almost always not true. And the reason parents know lots of things and can’t do them is the same reason that kids are struggling. Very few kids are misbehaving because they don’t know the right thing to do. Very, almost never is that the problem. And that is the same with parents. Like if all I had to do was learn something, I would do it perfectly for, I mean, that doesn’t, like I say it out loud, everyone’s like, of course, of course not. And so helping parents really take the theory I’ve already laid out for their kids and start to apply it back to themselves now allows us to step into a place of having self -compassion. And then self -compassion for me is like the number one thing to help our nervous system rest back into connection mode. And when you’re parenting a kid whose behaviors are totally out of control, it’s important to figure out a way to feel better before your kids’ behaviors are going to change. We can’t wait for that. Yes. We’ll be waiting a long time, potentially. Yeah. Yeah.

Robyn Gobbel:

So yes, yes, exactly, which is completely unacceptable. And it’s very, very hard. And it also is possible to, when I would say grow your owl brain, stay even a fraction of a second more regulated and slowly, slowly, slowly over time have your nervous system spend a little more time in connection mode because it’s very bad for our bodies to live chronically in protection mode and it explains why we can know all these things. I mean, I know a lot of things about parenting and my kid edits my podcast and we giggle about this. About like, hmm, mom. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we’re not even for perfection here. We’re doing the best we can, right? And the same goes for me. I mess up with my kid every day, every day.

Debbie:

Same, 1,000%. Yeah, and I just like that reminder. It’s a nice note to end this on to that. I think it can feel counterintuitive in some ways to kind of focus on ourselves. And it feels like it’s not fast enough. It feels like this isn’t working. You talk about that, what to say when parents say this isn’t working. But really, I think the only thing that we can do is focus on ourselves so we can better show up for our kids. And it’s just, it’s not a switch. It is slow and incremental, but it’s actually meaningful. It’s the real change, right? It just takes as long as it takes. So Robin, we’re gonna wrap up. I appreciate you. This went a little long, so thanks for hanging in with me. Can you, before we say goodbye, let listeners know where they can learn more about you, get your book, all the things.

Robyn Gobbel:

Very easy to find at robyngobbel.com. You can find everything there. I am pretty active on both Facebook and Instagram. You can find me easily there. And I have the podcast, The Baffling Behavior Show, all roads, robyngobbel.com. That’ll take you everywhere you want to go.

Debbie:

Awesome. Okay, listeners, as always, I will have links in the show notes to all of those resources where you can connect with Robin. Also, all the names that we dropped throughout the conversation. I’ll include links to that as well. So thank you so much, Robin. It was so nice to chat with you today.

Robyn Gobbel:

You too. Thank you.