Life-Changing Advice You Wish Your Parents Knew! 🎙️

Transcript

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Over the past few months, I have been a guest on about 30 podcasts in an effort to promote my book.

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There's a lot of similarity in the questions, especially in the beginning, like, Oh, where did you get the idea?

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Like, tell me your story.

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They all want to know your story, which makes sense, right?

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Because it, it leads you to where you are today.

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One common question that I get at the end is,"If you could go back in time and give yourself advice as a kid, what would that advice be?" I got that question this morning during a podcast interview.

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And afterward I got to thinking, what I really would like to do is go back in time and give my parents advice.

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They struggled, as we all do, and I think, If they knew what I know now, would it have made a difference in parenting?

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I think so.

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This is Flavors of Emotions, expanding your emotional palate for a tastier life.

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My name is Kim Korte.

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Together, we explore how to make sense of our feelings through the lens of a chef, understanding flavors and a recipe.

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I am here to help you refine your emotional palate to differentiate the emotions that shape your world.

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All right, I have zoomed back in time.

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I'm five years old, and I am talking to my parents knowing what I know today.

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What would I say to them?

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First thing, I have five.

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Yes, five things.

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Parents probably want to hear less than one, that's okay.

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The first one is Willful blindness is not an emotional strategy.

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I believe this is pervasive, not just in my family, but in lots and lots and lots of families It's hard to see.

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difficult things emotionally.

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So you shut them down, you turn a blind eye.

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And this term willful blindness was a book title also by Margaret Heffernan.

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And she talks about in the book, really impactful events that could have been avoided had willful blindness not been at play.

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One of the And one of the events that really, really struck me was a female doctor, this was post World War II who was trying to make some money and raise her kid.

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She did some studies on the use of x rays.

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She was trying to figure out why are all these babies dying?

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Infant mortality rate was really high.

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She figured out it was because of x rays, x rays of pregnant women, x rays of babies.

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And what a lot of us don't realize is that back in the day when X-rays first came out, they X-rayed your feet to fit you into shoes.

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They X-rayed you for everything.

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This doctor was able to make a correlation between the infant mortality rate and the X-rays It took 20 years for the practice to stop.

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It could have been that they didn't want to listen to a woman.

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There could have been all kinds of reasons, but the point is, that emotion, however they felt about it, kept them from seeing the fact that babies were dying or were malformed or were suffering because of x rays.

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Today, you don't even hear about that.

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In fact, you know, you keep them at a minimum.

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It's, it's so different.

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Well, willful blindness is in our household was around.

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I mean, for sure, it was hard for my parents to look at some painful, emotional situations that were going on.

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My mom's drinking was hard for all of us to look at.

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Um, what happened to me when I was little, a family friend did something in front of my sister and my brother.

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The family had been over for dinner, he was 15, I was 5.

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My dad didn't remember it.

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My mom was recounting the story like.

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It was just something that happened, like she totally disassociated her emotions from the event.

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For my sister and I, we thought it had been a dream because we had pushed down this emotionally charged situation just as a way of handling it.

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I don't do this to trigger anybody.

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I'm just saying.

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It sets a tone for the rest of your life.

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And I know, and I'm going to get into this a little bit later that it was a tone, I know in my dad's life, I know in my mom's life, and I'm sure in their parents lives, and this is generational blindness and it's, only now that I think more people are opening their eyes, but I still don't think we're opening up our eyes enough and, and I mean our eyes, I mean our emotional eyes to accept things.

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So if I could go back and talk to my parents when I was young, I would say, It's okay to talk about it and it's okay to help me work through this because I didn't until I was in my late 20s and it had caused a lot of problems because I was pushing down all kinds of stuff.

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Even when I was 30 something and divorcing my ex husband, he had been cheating on me for almost a year and I knew it.

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Deep down inside.

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I knew it was going on, but I could not face it.

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I emotionally could not face it.

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Finally.

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Um, I was forced to, and you know, I wasted almost a year of my life that I could have gotten to work on healing that much faster, but because I couldn't face losing him, losing our two businesses, losing his family that I was extremely close to.

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His parents were like my parents.

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I was facing a lot of loss and couldn't do it.

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I vowed after that to never be willfully blind again.

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I think I've been pretty successful since then and it's not always easy, but when you do it and you get into a habit, it's so much easier.

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And, um, that was something definitely that was a big factor, I think, in our whole family's lives for generations.

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Number two and number three kind of go together, which is learning how to challenge your beliefs, challenge what you've been taught, and not believe everything that you're told.

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We become institutionalized and it's like we learn this side of politics, this side of religion, this side of a topic.

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We don't learn to investigate or not really investigate, not to look at the beliefs that might emotionally be distressing or challenging for us.

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So knowing that we can challenge beliefs and refine who we are and expand our decision making, our ability for critical thinking.

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And that can only start when we get to topic number three, which is don't believe everything you think and don't believe everything that you feel.

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We can get them wrong.

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We have very limited perceptive capabilities.

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11 million bits of perceptive data a second, and we capture about 40 to 60 bits.

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I mean, it's small.

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So being more consciously aware of our surroundings, of what we're hearing, what we're seeing, you know, what we're perceiving, and taking all of that in to create our emotional responses is very important.

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Be more proactive in that is really important because we're not getting the whole picture.

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And so if we are focused just on what we get initially, we might be missing some really important information, something that could make a difference.

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And that's it.

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Always to remember, we're using our past to predict how we feel in the moment.

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And it's not until we're consciously aware of that and challenging it, especially in these big emotional moments, that it gives us an opportunity to pivot and to reframe situations or see it in a different light, which ties into the whole idea of challenging your beliefs.

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Because as much as we like to think our way is the right way.

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It's not always true.

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So I hate to break it to you.

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It's not always true.

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Another one that I would talk to my parents about is labeling our feelings.

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To be more proactive in helping us to label our feelings.

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When we see someone And we do this as adults, not just with children, but with other adults.

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We will look at someone who's crying and we'll just automatically go, Oh, they're sad.

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Not knowing that they could be happy because they just won the lottery and they're just on the floor in tears.

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We don't know.

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I mean, sure we have family members, you know, that we know really well.

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So we're really in tune with them, but just in general, we can still get that wrong because we can't get inside people's heads.

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We like to think we can, and we're empathetic, but our empathy is developed from our experiences, and so it's very unique to us, and so when we try and put our feelings on other people, then we're putting our experience on them, but also, We just don't know right and the reason I bring this up are I'm going to give you two examples of this there was a video on one of the social media platforms.

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This adorable little girl and she's just crying and her dad's got a camera on her and he's like, why are you sad?

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I don't understand.

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Why are you crying?

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And she's like, I don't know.

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I don't know.

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And he just keeps filming her as she's crying.

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It doesn't try and work her through it or anything.

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He just keeps asking, why are you crying?

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I don't know.

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Finally, she says, I'm gonna go get something to eat and I'm gonna watch my favorite TV show.

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So she's gonna take care of herself that way.

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And you might say, great, look she learned how to take care of herself.

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Which is partially true.

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She did.

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She went and got something to eat, but what she didn't know was why she was feeling that way.

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And the clue was that she needed food and the food helped her to feel better.

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He had said, why are you sad?

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So she may have thought and could have associated comforting her sadness with food.

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I've talked about this before and I'm going to keep talking about it.

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The emotions that we feel are twofold.

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There's the emotions for sadness, for love, for anger, those feelings we get in our body.

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But our body uses the same locations for us to feel hunger and tired and all of these other types of emotions that keep us alive physically.

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When this little girl was experiencing hunger, probably low blood sugar, she could have been thinking it was sadness because she was crying.

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Because what do we normally associate crying with?

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Being sad.

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Really, it was hunger.

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If you can talk to your child and say, not what are you feeling, but where are you feeling this?

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Then after they've said where they're feeling it, say, well, what does that feel like?

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Give some options.

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Like what do you think?

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And have them start to throw out some labels.

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And as they feel it and observe it in their body, they're going to come up with the answers.

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Another occasion, I was attending a congregation meeting and I walked into the restroom and my friend's child was there and she was crying and her tooth was just, you know, hanging by a thread.

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So I, I got some Kleenex or some toilet paper and pull the rest of it.

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And she's just crying and she's wearing these thick glasses and behind it's these big eyes and just the tears are coming down and I'm like, oh, Erin.

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And I said, it's okay.

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And she's just crying and I'm like, does it hurt?

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She's like, yes.

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I go, does it hurt because you see blood?

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She's like, yes.

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I said, well, you know, blood doesn't equal pain.

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She's like, really?

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This cute little urchin voice?

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Yes, Erin, blood doesn't mean pain.

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So does it hurt?

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No.

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I go, well, why don't you just rinse your mouth, get that blood taste out of your mouth and go show your mom your tooth.

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And that's what she did.

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And she was fine.

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So in that moment, she had never thought she was experiencing pain that didn't really exist.

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It was only because she expected pain because of seeing blood.

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Think about that statement.

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It was expected.

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We experience what we expect.

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So helping our children, if my parents had helped me to understand that, that would have been great.

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This knowledge wasn't around back then.

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So I'm just saying this is me today going back to the 1960s to tell my parents what I know now.

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Right?

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Okay, so I'm not picking on my parents at all.

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These are things that they just didn't know back then.

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Okay, we've done willful blindness.

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We talked about feelings aren't facts, challenging beliefs, and don't label your kids feelings anybody's feelings.

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Just don't teach them to label others Help them to see and inquire But don't make the decision as to how they feel unless they have Enough context enough information.

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So if somebody falls down and their knee is scraped Obviously, they're crying because they're in pain.

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Make sure that it's in context and that they are not just guessing on behalf of somebody.

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The last one is probably, uh, up there in importance for me only because just recently have I I've gotten stories from my dad.

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Um, my dad is 91 now.

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My dad lost his wife.

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wife a year and a half ago.

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Um, my mom passed 31 years ago.

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He married her, uh, pretty much straight away and they were married for almost 30 years.

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And now he's living, in a facility for independent living that also does memory care, all that kind of stuff.

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But he gets real with us every once in a while.

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He'll have a Negroni or two and he'll start to share like he hadn't before.

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And I learned a lot about my dad these past 18 months that I didn't know for 60 years, the fact that he didn't feel love.

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from his parents.

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How horrible is that?

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I knew that he didn't like being a latchkey kid, but he also didn't know what he was going to get when he came home.

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His dad was a drunk and a philanderer.

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He would take him to bars where he would sit while he drank.

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My dad would come home from school and there'd be women there.

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He watched his father beat his mom.

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And so his willful blindness, you could see started early as a coping mechanism and he didn't have any support.

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He didn't have what he needed to help him because his dad was a drunk and his mom had her own problems.

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Like grandma, I don't know, like she always seemed very loving to me, but my dad didn't feel loved by her or his father.

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I was shocked and that set him up right for having a hard time showing love, and I know my dad loves me, I know he does, but I didn't always feel loved.

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And I realized that was just a product of what he'd been through.

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And I wonder if I had known a lot of what he's been sharing now, a lot earlier, I might have had.

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Well, I would have had a lot more compassion and understanding as to the human being that he is and what he went through and it might have helped him to work through all of this because what, what does that generation and, and even my generation do?

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Don't feel, push it down.

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Maybe he could have released it and, and had a more emotionally fulfilling life.

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So if I could go back and say, dad, talk about these things, share it with us so that we know you not just as a dad, but as a person.

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Um, it could have added a level of closeness that I don't think we had.

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My father and I had a very intellectual closeness, but not a real, emotional one.

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And sorry, dad, if you're listening to this, cause he probably will be, but I think it's important to know you're not alone there's a bunch of people who have gone through something similar and if you can release it earlier.

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Even at 61 now if I'm gonna make well, I am gonna make it to my 90s.

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I I've had several years of emotional health and freedom that's gonna make my next year's that much better.

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So it's never too late to start.

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And if I could go back in time and give my dad that information might've made a big difference for the years in between then and now.

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And that would have, that would have made me happy.

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So if you could go back in time, what would you say to your parents?

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What advice would you give them knowing what you know now and how is that advice playing out in your life today?

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We all have opportunities to be better parents, better partners, better employees, better friends.

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And now you know why I'm so interested in emotions and trying to make a difference in the life of people, especially kids, because if I knew, even in my teen years, what I know now, what a difference it would make, just to be able to connect to my emotions and to process them better and identify them, it would have made a huge, huge, huge difference.

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So hopefully some of what I have shared will help you.

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Thank you for listening.

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I appreciate your time very, very much.

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It's important to me.

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Because I know time is really, really precious, especially today.

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Everyone's so busy.

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So take good care of yourself until next time.

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If you would like to connect me or get my book, check out the links in the description until next time.

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Take good care.

Life-Changing Advice You Wish Your Parents Knew! 🎙️

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