Episode 148- How to Be A More Calm, Less Angry Parent and Partner with Darlynn Childress

I was joined on this episode of the podcast by a special guest who started out as an acquaintance from my coaching community and who I now realize could be my twin, Darlynn Childress.

Darlynn is a life and parent coach who spends most of her days helping moms stop feeling like crap and actually enjoy their kids. You can visit her website here.

She is also the host of the Become A Calm Mama podcast, and founder of the online community, “The Calm Mama Club.” She’s dedicated to sharing practical tips and tools for you as parents to feel more calm and more enjoyment in your relationship with your kids.

And of course, we applied all these same concepts to being partners in relationships. They translate so beautifully because we all have a little kid inside us who needs care and attention. And self-awareness is one of the primary characteristics of a healthy relationship, whether as a parent or partner.

Let’s dive in.

Darlynn’s personal experience as an angry parent

“I was a really ragey mom. I have two boys and they’re about two years apart. Around the time that the younger one was two, he started to have these crazy meltdowns. He was aggressive and I had no idea how to respond. Sometimes I would yell and get really in his face like, Stop hitting your brother, just really mad.

His behavior was getting worse and worse, and so was mine.

I put him to bed one night, and it had been another bad day…I was just so frustrated with him all the time, and I said, ‘You know, bud, I love you.’ He’s four years old, in his little toddler bed, and he said, ‘I know, Mommy. I just don’t think you like me very much.’

And I was like, okay, I need help and resources. That’s when I started to take parenting classes and read parenting books and do the work, because it’s not instinctive. Just like marriage – you don’t know how to be in a marriage at all.”

So. Heart-wrenching.

But it’s like I always say in The Marriage MBA, these are the skills you didn’t learn in school. Where do we learn this if someone doesn’t come and teach us? We don’t know how to be parents, we don’t know how to be partners just because we’re adults.

These are learned skills, and Darlynn not only learned the skills she needed, but developed a whole additional framework around the concept of being calm in your parenting – which naturally carries over into all your other relationships.

Reframing our perception of behavior by looking at emotional drivers

“When I saw my son upset, angry, overwhelmed, I didn’t even know those words then. But instead of judging and criticizing and putting him in timeout and going to the behavior first, I learned to go to the feelings first.

I learned the concept: feelings drive behavior.

I started practicing compassion with my son and immediately the temperature decreased in my family. What was intense rage from him kicking and screaming and running around the house… he was [still] intense and instead of trying to stop it, I just joined a little bit. Like, ‘Wow, you got some big feelings.’”

This is such a huge insight. How the nervous system comes into play with our kids’ behavior, our partner’s behavior, our own behavior, and how we interpret that is such a valuable tool to have on our side.

Between fight, flight, freeze, and appease, we can apply these modes to our partners and our kids – we can look at them and realize, ‘Oh, they’re in a fight response right now.’

We can also notice it about ourselves! ‘I’m extremely angry very suddenly, I know this goes deeper than the kids running all over the house or my partner being late to dinner.’

Because the thing about the nervous system is it gives us an automatic response unless we act upon it, for example, by just noticing when it’s happening.

This is something I talk about endlessly and I loved seeing it from Darlynn’s lens.

The calm parent, calm partner framework

“Obstacles started to come up for me with, ‘Okay, you had your big feelings. Now what? You actually bit your brother. You actually broke the remote control. You were jumping and now the video camera is on the ground, cracked.’

I needed to understand how to actually set boundaries and limits and have consequences that weren’t punitive. That led me into a deeper journey of trying to understand boundary work.

I learned a lot of different parenting philosophies. The process [became] connection, limit-setting, boundary work, and correction.

We are responsible for our actions as a parent. If I regulate my nervous system by screaming at my kid or being too physical or emotionally shutting down, there will be an impact on them.

And that impact is my responsibility. The fact that you did it doesn’t mean that you’re bad. But you did – you were upset and you didn’t regulate your emotions. It’s okay, your feelings make sense, and there was an impact.

It’s also your job to learn how to regulate your emotions differently and deal with the impact.

I believe that when you bring connection on one side and correction on the other side, it helps the person or the child pivot faster towards improved self-regulation.”

What I love about this is that I have a philosophy that truth with a capital T will always be the same.

It doesn’t matter what philosophy, modality, faith system you have, distilled it down to its essence, it will always be the same. And hearing Darlynn talk about this is so similar to how, in The Marriage MBA orientation week, the first thing we talk about is stress cycle awareness.

Do we even know that we have one?
How would we recognize what’s happening?
What does that look like for ourselves?
What does that look like for our partners?
What are some of the common behaviors that we see?

And that’s exactly what Darlynn was talking about – just with a different flavor.

Fully understand the characteristics of a healthy relationship

If you want to stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.

The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school. And helps you reimagine marriage so you can have a relationship that works for you.

What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.

You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.

If there is a foundation of love in your marriage and you are ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: