Welcome to IVF This Episode 38- Emotional Adulthood

Hello my beautiful friends and welcome back to the podcast. I’m loving today’s topic because it’s kind of the culmination of several podcasts that I’ve done over the past few months, kind of bringing all of those ideas together. 

First, a little update on our last IVf go-round. 

Yesterday, we had our frozen embryo transfer. 

Because of the way I write and record these, by the time this episode is released we will already know the fate of that transfer. 

Like, well, any of us that have experienced the TWW- and I’m not just talking exclusively about IVF or fertility treatments because I think this is pretty universal when you’ve been TTC for a while, your brain goes through some intense mental gymnastics- and come to think of it, this would be true for any major thing in your life that you want- right? New house (especially in this ridiculous market), new job, marriage, literally any major life event.

Our brains go into overdrive. All the scenarios. All of the heartbreak. All of the happiness. 

All of us- even your coach. 

As I’m writing this episode, we are now 24* into the wait. My brain goes back and forth from “it didn’t work” to ‘there’s no way for us to know that, yet” to “I didn’t do XYZ, right” to “I’ve done everything I know to do to be ready and able to welcome and carry her.”

It’s totally normal. I’ve been working on the thought, “She is exactly where she is supposed to be and I know exactly how to take care of her.” This is the thought I continue to come back to. Re-directing my brain from the constant barrage of “you didn’t do this, and you didn’t do that.” 

I remind my brain, “I know why you think that. You’re trying to protect me from potential pain. But I choose to not feel that pain ahead of time. I remind myself that I am safe and, again, that she is where she is supposed to be and that I know how to take care of her.” 

The reason I wanted to share this with you all, is because I want you to see that just because I am a coach and coach on this stuff all. Day. Long. Doesn’t mean that my brain is wired any differently than yours. Our brains are wired the same. I don’t have to get rid of those thoughts. I know they’re going to come. I have just trained myself to recognize when there is bull-shittery afoot and remind my brains, “oh no love, we don’t do that here. We don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore.” And then build thoughts that I want to intentionally think. 

Now, it doesn’t work 100% of the time. In fact, I would say this works about 50% of the time. Sometimes I don’t catch the BS, sometimes I see it and still lean into it- it is not about perfection. It’s about intention. 

Imagine what your relationship with yourself could be like with 50% less self-loathing. Imagine how you would feel with 50% less anxiety. Imagine what you could accomplish with 50% less perfectionistic fantasies? The possibilities are ENDLESS, my friends. 

So if you want some help with that, book a mini session with me- either through y website www.ivfthiscoaching.com or on the links in my socials. It’s 30 minutes, completely complimentary. It’s there for you whether you want to continue the conversation of working together or not. It’s my gift to you. 

Ok, so today we are talking about the concept of Emotional adulthood. This concept was developed by one of my coaches, Brooke Castillo of the Life coach school. She was the person that I found when I first found coaching. I was trained using the coaching model that she developed. And this is one of her primary concepts that she developed as a backbone of her work.

The reason I wanted to talk about it today is because it kind of ties together the basis for a couple of previous episodes (feeling triggered and Toxic people).

So, I’m going to explain what emotional childhood is, and then what emotional adulthood is. 

Emotional childhood is when we do not take responsibility for how we feel- it’s really that simple. 

Understanding that we are responsible for how we feel, in any moment is one of the primary tenants of my coaching. We are in charge of our thoughts and we are in charge of our feelings- because our thoughts create our feelings. 

When we are functioning in emotional childhood, we are blaming people for how we think, feel, and act. 

I do want to make sure it’s known that this is incredibly normal. No one takes us to Emotional childhood college. No one teaches us about our thoughts and our feelings. We learn math, science, reading, and writing, but when it comes to all of the things that happen in our brains, we are left to our own devices. So, we believe what we are told and what we are modeled.

No one takes us by the hand and is like, well, now that you’re an adult, let me tell how about how taking responsibility for your thoughts and feelings is the most empowering thing that you can do for yourself and your mental health. Ummm, no. In fact, the pseudo-empowerment movement – it’s funny I heard another coach call it “diet self-help” and I think that is so appropriate. Anyway, that movement continues to perpetuate the emotional childhood with terms like “toxic” and the “hustle” mentality that generally leaves us feeling defeated because we can’t be “perfect”.

When we’re children, we don’t have the capacity to think in conceptualized terms. That’s because our pre-frontal cortex- the part of the brain that is responsible for executive functioning is not completely formed until you’re 21. Your pre-frontal cortex is vital for this emotional adulthood concept because it is your “logic brain”. When we’re kiddos we think that everything that’s going on in our lives is what causes our feelings. And this is perpetuated when something happens and a teacher or parents says, Now you hurt that persons feelings. You need to say sorry for hurting her.” Or “When you do that, that’s really mean and it makes them feel this way.” This is what I meant when I said, since we’re not taught this stuff we model what was modeled to us. This is a perfect example of how we model what was modeled. 

It’s so deeply ingrained in our society and culture that we don’t even realize that we are continuously teaching and reinforcing this to ourselves, our peers, and our children. It is a very disempowering thing that we do to ourselves and other people. 

Children don’t have the capacity to understand the distinction, and won’t really until their early adulthood, and there are so many adults functioning in emotional childhood – we, as a society, keep ourselves in that place of emotional childhood. 

We blame the government.

We blame the economy. 

We blame our bosses.

We blame other people.

We blame infertility. We blame our partners, our ex-partners. 

We blame our parents, our siblings and our childhood. 

Emotional adulthood is when we decide to take full responsibility for every single thing we think and feel, no matter what.. No matter what someone else does or doesn’t do. 

Now, I’m not suggesting this is easy- by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a challenge, for all of us. I still struggle with this with my kids and the hubs. Often, I want to give them the credit for a thought or a feeling that I have. But it’s not theirs, it’s mine. 

Now, I know some of you might be brimming with a “but, what if?” question. Here’s the thing, the circumstances of our lives, the things that happen to us and around us, the things that we don’t have any control of- those are always opportunities for us to have a thought and a feeling about. But the circumstances never create our thoughts and feelings. Circumstances are always neutral. It’s math, there’s no drama or flair with circumstances. My coach instructor used to describe it as, “if there was a fly on the wall, what would the fly see or hear?” And that’s what you use for a circumstance. 

The reason I know that a circumstance cannot create a thought is because the thought is entirely dependent on the person, the individual. One of my favorite examples of this, that I share with many of my clients, is the circumstance of a negative pregnancy test. We know that is a circumstance because the pregnancy test is a negative, other people can see it. Other people would agree, yup, that’s a negative pregnancy test. 

Now for one person, this news might be completely devastating- like for many of us. 

But for another person, this might be the best news they’ve heard in a while. Not being pregnant was the goal for that person so they are actually feeling very relieved. So it cannot be that the negative test was what created that thought and feeling, it was the person- they’re preferences, their beliefs, their thoughts. 

One of the primary reasons that I wanted to bring this up and sell you guys on this idea of emotional adulthood is because so many of my clients come to me thinking or feeling (consciously or subconsciously) that they are victim’s. Now I know that’s a pretty blanket term that not a lot of us would use to describe ourselves, in fact, it might be a little triggering to hear me say that. But there are a lot of ways that the victim mentality comes through, and I’ll be completely honest, so many of these things (probably all of them) I have felt or thought myself. 

Here are some of the ways this might come out:

You’re blaming other people or situations for how you feel

You feel like life, God, or other people are against you

Cynicism and pessimism

You spend a lot of time catastrophizing

You think people are intentionally trying to hurt or upset you

You believe that you’re the only one that is experiencing “mistreatment”

You relive painful past memories that made you feel like a victim

You refuse to consider other people perspectives when talking about things that upset you

You feel powerless and unable to cope with a problem or life in general

You feel attacked or defeated when given constructive criticism

You believe the world is a mostly bad place

When something happens to you, you relive it over and over and over with other peope in your life

You expect to gain sympathy from others, and when you don’t get it, you feel upset

You’re constantly putting yourself down

These are all examples of emotional childhood, which is a reframing of “victimhood”

In these scenarios, and this isn’t an exhaustive list, by any means, think about how much power we give to other people and situations. How much authority other people and situations have over us. 

Emotional childhood does look like us having temper tantrums and rage fits and yelling and screaming at each other. It puts us in a place where we don't feel like we have control over ourselves as adults and we therefore start acting like serious toddlers. I've done this so many times in my own life. I catch myself acting like a whining, screaming little girl because I'm not taking responsibility, and I'm yelling at someone, blaming them for how I feel instead of truly taking responsibility for every emotion that I have.

When we are in emotional adulthood, we are taking responsibility for how we think and feel and the choices that I make. You end up feeling so much more empowered and you get to be the person you want to be instead of being in this default emotional space. 

This was how I really learned and understood emotional childhood, let's say I give my emotional life over to my husband and I tell him, "You are responsible for making me happy." or, "You're responsible for when I'm frustrated and you're responsible for when I'm sad and you're responsible, everything you do causes an emotion in me." You can see how, when I'm in that space, I'm going to be constantly trying to control him. 

I'm going to be constantly trying to tell him what to do and how to do it and I'm going to be mad when he doesn't do it and my emotions are going to be all over the place because I'm trying to control his actions because he is the pawn in my emotional chess board. Whatever he does is going to determine how I feel. 

That is a very disempowered place to be and it's maddening because you can't control other people all of the time. I've noticed that they don't really like it when you try. I mean that's the truth, so when I really learned this concept, I noticed that there was a lot of psychology talk in relationships about meeting each other's needs, and I really think that is the ultimate in emotional childhood. 

If I go to my husband and I say, "Here are my needs and you need to meet them.", it's almost as if I'm a dependent child, right? My needs are that you do this, this, this and this in order for me to be happy. If he in turn tells me what his needs are for me to make him happiness - - me to make him happy, then we have put each other's happiness in each other's hands. That's not a good place for it to be because most people can't even make themselves happy, let alone try to make someone else happy. 

Most people don't want to spend all of their time and energy trying to make you happy because they're trying to manage their own emotional life, so delegating that responsibility to even someone that you love can affect that relationship in a really deep painful way. 

I like to say the best relationships are when two people come together and say, "I'm going to meet my needs. You meet your needs, and then we can just come together and have a really good time. My expectations of you are not to manage my emotional life, because I'm having a hard time doing that myself. I don't know how I could expect you to do it." 

I was explaining this concept to a client and she asked me, “well if your only responsible for how you feel then don’t you abdicate responsibility for how you treat other people?

Which I love this questions but I think the opposite is true. I think that when you’re acting from a place of emotional adulthood, you DON’T act in a way that is mean or spiteful, or petty- those actions come from a place of emotional childhood. Usually when we’re being mean, or petty, or passive-aggressive it’s because we’re trying to control the person. We’re trying to get them to behave in a certain way so that we will get to feel better- which generally only leads to tension or frustration in the relationship. 

Emotional adulthood says, “look you get to behave in however a way you want and I get to behave however I want. I’m responsible for all the things on my side.” I’m picturing The scene in dirty dancing “this is my dance space. This is your dance space” That’s what emotional adulthood looks like, and apparently professional dancing. 

The last thing I want to add to this, and it’s just as important as the other things I talked about is that when you are learning this process and you start taking responsibility for your thoughts and feeling- the point of it is NOT to then start blaming yourself for any thoughts or feelings or actions that you take and don’t like. A lot of us might go from blaming other people and then turn that blame on ourselves. 

Blames serves NO purpose in relationships. Well, I guess its purpose is for more pain and suffering but it doesn’t serve any useful or productive purpose in relationships and that includes the relationship with yourself. Blame is a judgment. 

The opposite of judgment is always, always, always curiosity. 

“I wonder why I am thinking this?” “

“I wonder what I am thinking that’s creating this feeling of XYZ”

“I wonder how I can look at this situation differently?”

“Is this how I want to think or feel?”

There are many times throughout our infertility journeys that we will choose to feel sadness, grief, angry, or another painful or uncomfortable emotion. That’s a beautiful thing. The point is to choose it, intentionally, eyes wide open, and taking full responsibility of it. 

It’s an enormously liberating gift to give to yourselves, my friends. And it’s a gift that I want each of your to experience. 

That is what I have for you today. 

I will talk to you soon.

Have a beautiful week.