Your 16-year-old daughter is 45 minutes late getting home on a Friday night, you can’t get her to respond to calls or texts. As you sit by the window watching for her friends to pull up and drop her off, you see her walking slowly up the sidewalk towards your house…(not a car or a friend in sight).

You go outside and as you get closer, you can tell by the smell and the look on her face that she’s been drinking - a lot.

Now, imagine yourself really in that moment (if you have a son, imagine it’s your son) and answer the following as honestly as you can:

You:

A – hug her tightly, tell her you’re so happy she’s safe, walk her into the house and put her to bed, saving any discussion until tomorrow,

B – take her by the arm and walk her into the house where you begin questioning her and demanding an explanation for her behavior, in the process, taking her phone from her and putting her on restrictions for 6 months, or

C – start in immediately: Where’ve you been? Why didn’t you answer me? Where’s your phone? Give it to me! Where are your friends? Did you walk or did they drop you off down the block? What’s going on? Oh my God - you wreak of alcohol! What’s that on your shirt? ARE YOU DRUNK? What are you thinking? Get in that house! You’re not going anywhere for the rest of the school year. Just wait until your dad finds out.

You’re listening to Speaking of Teens, a weekly show to help you better understand and parent your teen or tween.

I’m Ann Coleman, and after surviving a couple of difficult years with my teenage son, I decided to make the leap from practicing law into the science of parenting teens and tweens. I want to make sure you have the skills I was sorely lacking.

Listen, if you answered C, don’t be embarrassed or ashamed. Parenting teens can turn a saint into Tony Soprano. Honestly, I’d be surprised if you answered A…and B, well, that’s probably where most of us fall, most of the time.

But, more often than not, I was a C-mom with my teenage son. I let my emotions take over and lead the way. I reacted immediately rather than thinking and responding with more intention because I was woefully lacking in emotional awareness and emotional regulation – 2 key components of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is one of the most determinative factors in having a happy and successful life. Emotionally intelligent people have great social skills and healthy relationships, they’re empathetic, able to better “read” how other people are feeling and adapt their own behavior to it, they’re better able to harness their emotions to motivate themselves. And the foundation for emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of your own emotions, to understand exactly how you’re feeling in the moment, being able to give that emotion a specific name and describe it to someone else. That’s emotional awareness.

Being truly aware of our emotions allows us to realize the importance of something happening around us and our emotions can point us in the right direction. They tell us what we should do next, and they can even let us know that we should change the way we feel. If we don’t know exactly what it is we’re feeling, we’re left confused about what it is we want or need, what we should do about the way we feel and whether we need to work to change it or not.

Are we furious or jealous, ashamed, afraid? Depending on our true emotion, we may need to do something different - even try to figure out how to not be jealous or ashamed.

So, being aware of what we really feel allows us to manage or regulate our emotions rather than letting them confuse, overwhelm, or control us. We can’t regulate what we’re not aware of and don’t deeply understand.

Studies have shown that our level of emotional intelligence directly affects our parenting and our relationship with our children…and that relationship determines their future relationships. The greater our emotional intelligence, the better adapted our kids are and the better their emotional development, mental health, and wellbeing.  That’s how important our own emotional skills are.

The great news is, it’s never too late to work on your own emotional skills, and improve or deepen the emotional connection to your kids and teens and increase their emotional intelligence.

As I said, I was the C mom much of the time. I let my own fears control of me and how I parented my son. That fear controlled every interaction with my son for several years.

But I had no conscious awareness that my behavior towards him was based on this fear and certainly didn’t know where it came from. But it was always there in the back of my mind, driving everything I said or did.

The minute I learned what emotional awareness was and started working on my own, I saw this so clearly. And you know what? Within a really short time, I was able to get a grip on that fear – to regulate it – to keep it out of those interactions with my son. I was able to remain calm, listen to him, empathize and work with him to figure things out. It was amazing how our relationship improved. Not only that, but his own emotional regulation improved immensely and so did his behavior.

So, buckle up…because just by listening to today’s episode you’re going to actually become more emotionally aware and you’re going to learn how to continue developing your emotional awareness, which will help you manage your emotions, communicate better with your teen (without all the drama), and remain more connected to them.

These emotional skills will not only make you a better parent but will help you in every area of your life. Being able to manage your emotions rather than letting them manage you, is an incredible feeling and it can change everything

So, let’s talk about our emotional life for a minute. We experience lots of emotions all day, every day. But most of us don’t pause and go “oh, I’m feeling slightly frustrated right now not being able to find that email” or “I’m annoyed that car just took that parking spot”. We feel, we react, and we move on. We feel, we react, and we move on.

Just thinking, right now, about the fact that you experience emotions all day, can make you become more aware of those emotions the next time you feel them. And remember that our emotions tell us what matters to us, they motivate us to do something. Without them we’d be directionless, lost – they let us know what we should do next.

For example, let’s say you’re standing at a street corner with a group of people ready to cross the street when suddenly the man in front of you grabs his chest and falls to the ground. You may feel concern, worry – you might to go to his aid, give him CPR or call 911. But the person standing next to you may be afraid or panicked and concerned but actually walk away quickly.

Emotion is personal. What I feel in a situation may not be what you’d feel in that same situation. And even if we do feel the same in a given situation, we may not react the same way. We can be concerned and help or be concerned but walk away.

Let’s break down the whole emotional experience (again, this is going to help you become more aware). It usually goes like this:

Something happens (we hear something, see, smell, taste, or touch something - just like seeing the man grab his chest and fall to the ground).

At the same time, we may even feel something physiologically. Maybe our heart starts to beat faster, our face feels hot, we start to shake or break out in a sweat, get goosebumps - depending on the situation.

And we appraise the situation. We interpret what just happened. Maybe we actually think about it, or it can happen automatically and unconsciously.

We experience a psychological feeling – the emotion itself.

And behave in a certain way – we do something – again depending on the emotion and the direction it gives us personally (walk towards someone, walk the other direction, raise our voice, cry, cross our arms, turn our back, slam a door, send a text) - our emotion tells us what to do.

There are so many things that factor into how we appraise or interpret a situation, how we respond physiologically, what emotion we experience and what action we take. That’s why the same situation can cause various emotions in different people and why the same person my feel different emotions to basically the same situation, at different times.

Our emotions don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in relation to our own inner data – the specific information stored up in our brain, which causes us to interpret the world around us in our own individual way.  Our personal history, lived experiences, the environment we grew up in - all that inner data is there waiting to be applied to the current situation.

For example, let’s give the people on our street corner some personal history and see if that might, at least in part, explain why the first person was concerned and went to help and the second was concerned but walked away quickly.

That first person grew up in the city, had taken CPR classes, had been a camp counselor and lifeguard as a kid. The second person grew up very sheltered in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, this was their first time to the city and just a few years ago they watched as their dad died of a heart attack waiting for an ambulance to come from 15 miles away.

But there’s even more than our personal experience that factors in here - the culture we grew up in, how we were raised by our parents, our religion or world view. And as it applies to our kids – our parenting style. All of this inner data is there, in our brain, applying itself to the situation, informing our thoughts, our emotions and behavior.

But there’s also the context of the situation - like where we are, who we’re with, what else is going on at the time, the mood we’re in, whether we’re hungry or tired! All of this matters and figures into the equation at the moment

Let’s dig a little deeper and keep thinking about how our emotions work. This is all helping with your emotional awareness. Emotion researchers (yes, there are scientists who just study emotion) they argue about all sorts of things though:

• they argue about the order of our emotional experience – for example, whether we have those physiological sensations before, after or during the moment we actually experience the psychological emotion. In other words does our heart start beating fast and then we become anxious, or do we become anxious and then our heart starts beating fast?
• they argue about whether all of our emotions are constructed in our mind based on physiological sensations, our personal experience, culture, and context of the situation, or
• whether there are a few certain “basic” emotions caused automatically by specific areas of the brain and that happen to us automatically without thought (without consideration of personal experience or culture or context),
• some believe there are very specific facial expressions that everyone in the world, no matter the culture, exhibit when they feel certain emotions - a certain scrunching of the face indicates anger, another, fear, another confusion, etc.,
• others say that’s bunk. That as a matter of fact, different cultures in various parts of the world have concepts for emotions that other cultures have never heard of and therefore never experienced…and that people can be angry and smile just as often as they can be angry and “look angry”.

These researchers can’t even agree about how many emotions humans are capable of feeling.  The number varies greatly according to who you ask. But think about this a minute – emotions don’t just come in neat little packages all by themselves. Quite often, we’ll experience several emotions all at once.  We could be elated that we won an award at the annual meeting and panicked about getting on stage to accept it. We might be thrilled that we won the company softball game but disappointed that it’s the last game of the season. Relieved that our physical is over but dreading seeing the results of the cholesterol test.

Another thing to think about; we often have emotions about our emotions! So, experiencing an emotion can cause us to experience an emotion about the fact that we just experienced an emotion. Right.

For example, perhaps you discover someone you don’t get along well at work, just got fired and you feel a sudden wave of excitement and relief, followed immediately by embarrassment and shame for feeling that away about someone else’s misfortune.

Keep all of this in mind as we keep exploring our emotional life here.

Earlier I mentioned our inner data – our personal history, lived experiences, how we were raised, our culture, how we were parented, our world view, and even our parenting style, all of this plays into how we think about or interpret a situation and therefore how we feel about it and how we react to it.

And often our inner data coalesces in a way that distorts our thinking – and when our thinking is distorted it results in an emotional experience and response that are also distorted, out of proportion or mis-matched to the situation.

There are several different types of what psychotherapists call, “cognitive distortions” or negative self-talk, or automatic negative thoughts (because they’re usually negative). This is what a lot of work in cognitive behavioral therapy is all about; changing the way we think about situations so we can change our emotions and behavior.

Because once we develop a negative way of thinking about something, we get stuck in an unfortunate loop . We have a negative thought, which leads to a negative emotion, which leads to a negative response or behavior, which leads to more negative thoughts and negative emotions and negative behaviors. This type of loop often causes anxiety and depression in many people.

This negative self-talk can be directed at ourselves (I’m such a loser, I know I’m going to flop on that presentation tomorrow, I’ll never be regional vice president), but it can also relate to our teens and tweens. I’m going to mention a few of these cognitive distortions here and I’ll have more information in a special download for this episode linked in the show notes:

The first cognitive distortion I’ll mention is pretty straightforward – it’s called, Jumping to Conclusions and it’s a biggie. Related to yourself you might assume someone thinks badly of you or that no matter how hard you work, you’re never going to reach your goal. But related to your teen you may assume you know what your kid is thinking right now or what they were thinking when they did something wrong (you don’t) or you may predict their future based on what’s going on right now (she’s not studying like she used to so she’s going to end up not going to college and will never “amount to anything”). Can you see how this could impact your emotions when dealing with your child and affect how you respond to them as you get caught in this loop?

Another cognitive distortion is Overgeneralization. If you overgeneralize about yourself, you may have one experience (let’s say you were fired from a job) and you decide you might as well not even look for another job because you’re probably just going to be fired again. But with your teen,  you may conclude something about them based on a single incident; they made a C on their first algebra test so they must be lacking in math skills so you force them to double down on their studying, you hire an algebra coach and make them request extra homework.

Catastrophizing. This is when you always expect the worst – a catastrophe - you believe something is worse than it actually is (a current situation or even something in the future. You use a lot of “what if” scenarios in your head. Related to you it could sound like “I just missed a call from my gynecologist – what if I have cervical cancer?  But, with your teenager, maybe you find weed in their room, and you think, “Oh my God, this is just the tip of the iceberg, what if she’s doing hard drugs too? What if she’s taking pills and gets addicted?

Catastrophizing is closely related to incidences of depression and anxiety, and it can also steer us way off course when trying to parent our teens. When we start thinking this way, we’re afraid all the time of what’s going to happen to them, which causes us to try to control them. We lecture, we punish, we check up on them constantly, we hover. But rather than avert this catastrophe we have in our head, it drives our child to just hide everything from us better. They stop communicating all together, they lie to us, we lose our connection with them and our influence in their life.

Mislabeling - This is the extreme version of overgeneralization – taking one negative quality of your and turning it into a global judgement. Maybe you’ve labeled yourself as “unsophisticated” because you made a mistake ordering wine at a high-end restaurant. But if you give your teen a negative label (just in your head) it can be so damaging because it negatively impacts your emotions and behavior in relation to them. For example, because you can’t get them to remember to pick their towel off the floor or take out the trash without reminding them a dozen times, they’re “lazy”, which just increases the likelihood you’ll look for them to be lazy, respond to them as though they’re lazy, you’ll be more likely to get annoyed about certain things, set more rules about certain behaviors, that set them up for failure and just confirm your mislabeling.

Then there are the Should Statements – This is when you’ve developed a list of behavior rules over the years, for yourself, other people and your kids. Maybe you blame yourself, feel guilty or become annoyed when you fail to meet these standards. You’re constantly looking backwards at the “should a’s”. But when it comes to your teen, these “should statements” can just be part of your parenting philosophy or style, or the fears you have about their future. You decide how they should behave and if they fall short, you stress over why they can’t meet expectations, you clarify the rules, you punish or dole out consequences, you argue and lecture, try to control their behavior so they meet the standards in your head.

So, watch out for these cognitive distortions - how you interpret situations, especially as it relates to your teen or tween.

Okay, so let’s get into the nitty gritty of emotional awareness – you may even be able to tell where you are with yours. As I’ve said, being emotionally aware helps us to better regulate our emotions, direct our behavior and reach goals. It also minimizes anxiety and misunderstandings, and inappropriate reactions.

Understanding our own emotions can also give us a sense of calm and control and recognizing emotion in others can enhance our relationships and build social skills. So, emotional awareness is the single most crucial element of emotional intelligence. But how do you know how emotionally aware you are?

Well, this describes you if you’re at the top of your emotional awareness game:

• you’re fully aware of the specific emotion you feel while you are experiencing it. For example, whether you feel displeased or indignant
• you’re able to articulate your emotions – tell someone what you’re feeling,
• you understand what causes or exacerbates certain emotions in you
• you realize a combination of emotions can be experienced at once
• you recognize emotions in others
• you use emotion to motivate you to make better decisions
• avoid situations where you’re likely to experience negative emotions and gravitate towards those where you’ll experience more positive ones

But if you’re on the lowest end of the emotional awareness spectrum, you’ll not even be aware that you’re experiencing an emotion – in other words, may think, "I feel foolish” but feeling foolish is not an emotion – it’s more of a judgment. So, while you may feel embarrassed or jealous or annoyed or frustrated, you only “feel foolish” and that doesn’t give you any indication of what you need to do to correct it.

Or maybe you experience the physiological sensations of a particular emotion every time you’re in a certain situation, but you don’t associate those sensations with an emotion – you might even attribute it to a physical ailment - food poisoning or a virus!

Or, you might realize you’re experiencing some sort of emotion because you feel different – you’re energy level is different – you feel an intensity and you even react a certain way, but you just can’t articulate what it is you feel. You may know it’s an unpleasant feeling, a bad feeling but that’s about it.

Or you may even be able to articulate that you’re “mad” or “sad” or “afraid” but not be able to differentiate between the various types of anger, sadness, or fear - you’re enraged, you’re grieving, you’re jittery. Let’s talk about this differentiation a little bit. I said earlier that emotion researchers can’t even agree on how many different emotions humans are capable of experiencing. But it does appear that most of our emotions fit into a small number of general “emotion families” like anger, confusion, disgust, fear, happiness, love, sadness, shame. For example, emotions like annoyed, dissatisfied, frustrated, exasperated, furious, and indignant - all very different emotions from the anger family.

The same for fear – in that family you could be apprehensive, nervous, distraught, horrified, terrified - again, all very specific emotions.

I could go through lots of emotion concepts here but instead I’m going to include them in the free download for this episode that you can find in the show notes.

It’s normally these unpleasant emotions (anger, fear, sadness, shame…) that require our attention – our awareness - because as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, they give us direction, and it’s often something very important (like avoid that person walking towards you). And it’s often our most intensely felt unpleasant emotions that we really need to manage or regulate.

SIDE NOTE HERE: Just because an emotion is unpleasant to experience, like sadness, for example, doesn’t mean it’s a “bad” emotion. There are no good or bad emotions – some are just more pleasant to experience than others. They are what they are – signals that give us direction. Because so many emotions are unpleasant to experience, many people choose to ignore or bury them, which only works for so long.

Okay, so let me repeat myself a second. We can deal with the pleasant emotions, no problem. It’s the unpleasant emotions that we need to pay attention to and be able to regulate. The more intense the emotion, the more regulation needed.

For example, if you’re a little nervous about an upcoming presentation at work, that’s just good information to have - it tells you, you need to prepare more, practice to feel more confident. It’s not something you need to manage or regulate really, it’s just useful and helps you do what you need to do. It gives you direction.

But if you’re distraught that a friend is mad at you, that not only tells you the friendship is very important to you and to do something to work it out. But because this is an intense emotion, we must pay more attention to our actions, manage them better. Being aware of that, we can decide calmly what to say rather than crying and pleading for forgiveness.

The greater the level of intensity of an unpleasant emotion, the more important it is to be very aware of the specific emotion we’re experiencing because it’s those intensely felt emotions that we need to be able to regulate better in that moment. And if we don’t know what it is we really feel, not only do we not know what to do about it, but the less likely we’ll be able to manage our response.

So, learning to be aware of and differentiate between whether you’re just annoyed or are furious is critical to your emotional regulation. If you know you’re furious, you can take steps such as walk away for a minute, breathe, think. It’s been scientifically shown that the more specifically we can differentiate between our negative emotions…their level of intensity within an emotion family, the better we are at managing those emotional moments. So, gaining a deeper understanding of as many emotion concepts as possible is obviously paramount here – you need to develop your emotional vocabulary – learn words for various emotions. Having these emotion words in mind will help you notice more when you actually experience these emotions. Not only will more knowledge of emotion words help you personally, but it will help you when you’re talking to your teen about their emotions. You can help them label their own and gain more awareness and regulation. You’ll find a nice long list with definitions, in the download for this episode in the show notes

So, besides learning emotion words so you can improve your differentiation, what else can you do to start becoming more emotionally aware?

Well, another top strategy for obtaining more emotional awareness is to practice mindfulness.  Mindfulness is simply a term to describe being fully present in the moment – the “here and now”. Practicing mindfulness trains our mind to focus only on what we want, when we want. It has been scientifically studied for years and is proven to help us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions as they happen. It creates a “calm space” between an emotional trigger or incident and our behavior. It allows us to see what’s going on in the moment in a more subjective way.

So, how do we practice mindfulness? I’m going to give you a very brief overview here but, again, I’ve packed a lot of extra in the download including more suggestions for actually begin your practice.

The practice of mindfulness can be broken down into a couple of components. First, paying deliberate attention - focusing our attention on the present moment - only to what is happening right here and right now at this very moment – in the present – not on what has happened in the past or what might happen in the future – we are only right here, right now, in our mind.

This helps us with those cognitive distortions, negative self-talk and parenting out of fear. It allows us to let those thoughts and emotions float on by so we can thoughtfully and intentionally respond to our teen.

The second element is having an open attitude about what we notice when we’re focusing our attention on the present moment.

While focusing our attention only on the present moment, the goal is to notice what our mind is thinking and feeling - as if we were someone else on the outside looking in and to be curious.

We notice those thoughts and feelings (our thoughts and feelings) without judging them to be right or wrong, good, or bad. We simply observe with curiosity – “hmmm, interesting thought you had there Ann.”

And by noticing our thoughts and emotions, without judging ourselves for having them, we begin to realize these thoughts and emotions are fleeting…they come into our mind and leave our mind, they are separate entities from us, they’re not a permanent part of us, they’re not even truth. So, they cannot and do not control us. We can learn to simply acknowledge their presence and let them pass on by.

I know how odd this can sound if you’ve never tried it – It took me a while to understand the purpose of mindfulness and make sense of it all. But then when I actually tried and started practicing, that’s when it came together, and I could see exactly how it helped me.

When you start paying attention to your thoughts more as an outsider you begin to realize that thoughts are just thoughts and emotions are just emotions and nothing more – they’re not facts, and they alone can’t DO anything - they don’t control us unless we allow them to. They come and then they go unless we decide otherwise, unless we decide to latch onto them.

For example, you notice you’re feeling really annoyed, so with curiosity, you think, “I wonder why I’m feeling so annoyed – I think it’s because I think I look silly” and “So, why is it I think I look silly?”, “It must be because I think I’m dressed too young for my age…hmmm, interesting thought…”

But by being non-judgmental with yourself about these thoughts, you’re able to say, “I’m not going to focus in on this or beat myself up for feeling it, because it’s just a thought that happened to cause an emotion”.

By being curious and non-judgmental while observing our thoughts and emotions from afar, we automatically limit their power over us and force ourselves to see them for only what they are – thoughts and emotions that are not permanent parts of us.

Practicing mindfulness allows us to become more aware of the patterns in our thoughts and our emotions and helps us see them for what they are - as separate things from us, that aren’t a problem – but merely things to observe and be curious about.

So, mindfulness helps us see things as they really are. We learn to observe things objectively and see things more clearly and in a non-reactive way. We are no longer under the spell of our thoughts and emotions.

And with this awareness, we are better able to be intentional in how we respond to the world around us, including our teenagers. It allows us to remain calm when our child is not, it allows us to not react immediately in a way that we regret later, in a way that escalates an already emotional situation.

There are many strategies you can try that will help you gain emotional awareness and I have a detailed list in the download for this episode – just go to neurolgility.com/8 for the show notes and you’ll find the link.

I hope you feel a bit more emotionally aware just by listening to this episode – I think you’ll be surprised how much more observant of your emotions you’ll be at least for the next few days. But if you want to truly work on your emotional awareness and reach a level to really make a difference in your life and those around you, please start working on your emotional vocabulary, begin your mindfulness practice, take these and the other  strategies in the download to heart and make a real effort.

The more emotionally aware you become, the better your communication and interaction with your teen, the closer your relationship, the more influence you will have in their life, the more emotionally intelligent they will become and the less likely they will be to engage in risky behaviors.

I’ll see you back here on Tuesday, June 28^th. I’m taking a week off to get the new podcast studio pulled together, decorated, and ready to roll on video. Please come back on the 28^th!

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com, an organization I started to educate other moms and adolescents about emotional intelligence.

You can go to neurogility.com/8 for this episode’s show notes and to get the download…

Thank you SO much for listening – I really hope you’re determined to work on your emotional awareness and regulation.

If this episode helped you in some way, please consider sharing it with a friend. My goal is to help as many moms as possible learn how to better parent their teens.

Please come back for future episodes…new shows drop every Tuesday morning, but I’m taking next week off so remember the next episode will drop on Tuesday, June 28^th.

If you have an idea for a future show, or a guest (or you’d like to be a guest), please reach out to me - my email’s in the episode description where you’re listening – I’d love to hear from you.

And you can follow me @neurogility on Instagram and Facebook!

Thanks again – see you on the 28^th!