Let's talk about emotions, both theory and practice. And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I'm certain that this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody. So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something, but then there's the reality.

So as a parent, let's say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it's okay to be sad, like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, etc., but let's say you're feeling particularly sad about something. Do you express that and show that in front of your kids?

Because I've also heard that young kids, in particular younger than eight or nine, perhaps shouldn't be aware that their parents are experiencing, say, extreme sadness because it can be scary to them or they might feel like their world is destabilizing. And then we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents, and then this whole thing becomes pretty complicated.

So while there's no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time, how do you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience and express their emotions? Yeah, and I think everything I'm about to share applies in the workplace, right?

Can a boss be, you know, really upset in front of the person they manage, management, right? So it's all the same stuff. So I guess zooming out as a start, emotions are normal, emotions are unstoppable. You can't not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right?

And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it's really hard to not show someone that you're sad. You might think you're doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive. They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends on adults.

So they have to always notice, "Is my adult around? Is my adult okay?" So they really attune to what's going on for us, right? And so I think the kind of question is less, "Do I show my emotions to my kid or not?" And it's more, "Okay, if I'm sad, my kid is going to notice.

What do I do then?" And as a principal, one of the things I think about often is information doesn't scare kids as much as the absence of information scares kids. So let's say there's something really awful. I don't know. As a parent, you're a family member. Someone died of cancer.

I don't know. There's something really horrible that you just found out, right? There's wildfires. Right now, let's say you evacuated and you found out your house burned down. You're sad. Your child is going to notice that, and you want your child to notice that. You don't want your kid to be a teenager, an adult, who goes around the world unable to pick up on emotional cues from other people.

That's not adaptive. And so the patterns we set with our kids when they're young inform their view of the world when they're older. And so here I am. Let's say it's the situation of somebody dying and I'm upset. First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, "It's not my kid seeing me sad that's going to destabilize them.

It's seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it, because then my kid goes, 'I'm pretty sure my mom was upset. Oh, she's not? Oh, she's pretending like nothing happened? Oh, she looks sad, but she's saying she's not sad.'" That is really upsetting. It would be like hearing your boss say, "Oh yeah, 20% layoffs.

What are we doing? I don't know. Oh, hi. Everything's great. How are you?" Like, what is happening? It's scary. What you'd want is your boss say, "You just heard something. You were right to hear that." We are about to go through a really tough time. I'm stressed about it.

I yelled, "You might be stressed. Here's what I know. This is going to be hard, and we're going to get through it together." Now all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container. It has a story. Humans need stories. We like stories. And so often we think it's the emotions that dysregulate a kid.

It's the lack of a story to explain it. So let's say this really did happen. People always say to me, "Okay, but Dr. Becky, my kid is four. I'm going to say that their aunt died. They don't even know cancer, right?" We don't have a better alternative. I can't even tell you how many parents I've seen whose kids have all of these issues because of the made-up stories.

"I just said she went to sleep for a while six months later. My kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night." Yeah, they haven't seen their aunt who went to sleep one time, you know, creates a huge issue. No matter what bogus story you make up, kids can handle the truth, and they can handle the truth when it's told to them from a loving, trusted adult.

It's kind of like me and you. Someone can tell us a hard truth, but it's from someone you feel safe with and that you feel like also believes in you and says it honestly. It might be hard, but it doesn't feel awful. So it's about saying to your kid, "You saw me crying." One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really builds their confidence, is just, "You were right to notice that I was crying, and I'm feeling sad.

And look, you saw that? I'm going to tell you why." I'm making this up. "Aunt Sally died." Do you know what dying means? Dying is when someone's body stops working. Then I pause. All right, so I'm going to just be a monologue. I'll see how my kid responds. I might add, "I'm not dying." Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times.

"I'm not dying. No one else is dying. I'm safe. And you know what? I'm sad. And I'm still your strong mom who can take care of you." That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of, "Everything's fine. My kid keeps seeing me crying. They keep hearing words they're not used to hearing, 'die,' 'cancer,' 'Aunt Sally,' 'uncomfortable,' whatever it is." That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.

So it's the absence of information that causes the harm. And it's the lack of coherence between what they're observing and feeling and kind of this like open loop, if I kind of place it in neuroscience-y terms, I feel like the brain does think in terms of stories, stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and they kind of want to know where they are in that story.

That's exactly right. And the terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative. What is therapy? Why does therapy help people? It's interesting. Therapy doesn't change what happened to you. Therapy doesn't change your past. Therapy does not take away the pain. But the pain was never the thing that really got in our way.

It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support. And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving them a coherent narrative is what they need. And without that, the way I think about it is they have what I call "unformulated experience." It's just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body, unformulated, that tends to later show up as triggers, right, and kind of other things in adulthood.

And so, yeah, that's what we want to try to avoid when we can.