Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle. A. We're here today with Dr. Caroline Leaf, talking about how to help your teenager clean up their mental mess. Dr. Leaf is a communication pathologist and neuroscientist whose passion is to help people see the power of their mind to change the brain control chaotic thinking and find mental peace. She's the author of over a dozen books, including cleaning up your mental mess, switch on your brain, think and eat yourself smart, the perfect you and think learn succeed among many other books and journal articles, and her videos top rated podcast cleaning up the mental mess and TV episodes which have reached millions of viewers globally. Dr. Leaf currently does extensive research and teaches at various academic, medical, corporate and neuroscience conferences, as well as in religious institutions around the world. Really excited to speak with Dr. Leaf today about what parents can do to help our teenagers clean up their mental mess and manage their minds. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Caroline Leaf
Thank you so much, Andy, it's great to be with you.

Andy Earle
We were just talking a little bit about mental messes. You've got a book on how to help your child clean up their mental mess. And yeah, how to talk to me about that. What

what what does that mean? Well,

Caroline Leaf
if you look, if you short answer is that look at the crisis that we currently have in with in mental health. It's really bad, whether it's a two year old, or whether it's an 18 year old, and adults too. So there's such a major crisis in mental health. And I've been in the field now for nearly 40 years and doing research also working clinically. And what I have seen in the trajectory of my career is a shift from looking at the whole person and the context and the story and the narrative and all those socio economic, political racism, gender, all these things, looking at all of that over time, and helping a person to padding all of them out and going to just simply looking at symptoms, and labeling and diagnosing and medicating not, if that process worked. If that biomedical model was working for the mind, we should be seeing improvement in mental health. But it's not it's worse. It's the worst it's ever been in our children already. Our children and adolescents are really victims of a very, very bad system. And this that's our I would say that that's one of the major issues or major reasons why we are seeing such a crisis in mental health and increase in suicides and depression and anxiety from kids as young as two and three and four is even record of kids as young as four committing suicide, or dying by suicide. So we really have a major problem. And as I said, if if the model that we introduced or equal, not me, but that was introduced 4050 years ago was working, we would not be seamless. So that's a major cause. Yes, of course, we've got to look at social media, and we've got to look at whatever but every generation places, new changes. I mean, we had the advent of technology and telephones back in the day, and whatever every generation faces something. So it's not that we aren't think we can say, plain that this generation has is facing something completely unique and different to another generation. Because last generation pays something unique to them. Every generation faces something unique, I think the core problem, which is why I wrote the books, this book, and why I've written the books that i This is number 19. And why I've written so many books in this area is because we're not teaching our children and ourselves as adults, how to manage our mind, in the midst of all the chaos of life. And if you take that out of the equation, you'll end up with a mental mess

Andy Earle
lot of also the really, really interesting stuff you're talking about in the beginning of your book, and you connect with this something you call the mind brain body connection. Absolutely. So

Caroline Leaf
basically I'm a to give you a title of what I am does, I'm a psycho neuro biologist. So what I do is I look at the mind brain body connection. So I look at If every so that is to that the mind is not the brain for but a couple of projects. Yes. And for those that are just listening and holding up a model of brain, so we often in our current languaging, mixed mind and brain, that mind and brain are not the same thing they separate. So psycho neurobiology looks at how the mind changes the biology of the brain and changes the biology of the body. And then also looks at what is the impact of if we don't manage like chronic unmanaged stress or the impact of early childhood adverse childhood experiences and trauma, and it looks at that impact on the mind and the brain? And how that then shows up in our life? And then what can we do about it? So it's a very interesting field because it's very ancient, even though we, the modern term is psycho neurobiology. It's something that's been around the philosopher's of olden, your ancient wisdom, spiritual wisdom. And we spoke about the fact that it's not about us, it's about us in the world, and how the world impacts us and the we have these normal responses to adverse circumstances and normal responses to good circumstances. So we always keep the equation in the mix of understanding that our life impacts us. And it's our mind that actually is what's processing life in the mind puts life into the brain. And the brain responds on this neurochemical and physical level, it has to so does the body respond. And that combination of mind, brain and body, psycho neurobiology influences how we show up? So the thinking in this field, and as I said, It's ancient, it's not old, it's not brand new thinking. But the thinking in this field is that if we can look at how a person is showing up, how they're communicating their life, how are they functioning, the relationships, the day to day function? What do they say? What are they doing? What are the patterns? What are they feeling? What is going on in the body, all of those things, if we can look at that, and say, Okay, this is how you showing up, what's the story behind it, and then help a person process that story in a very organized sequential way, and over over time, to find the source and then to re conceptualize that source. And then you can then influence how it plays out in your future, because it stuff has happened, and it will happen, you can't change that fact. So we need to know what to do with what is happening inside of our lives. And that's essentially what the beginning of the book where I talk about, and pretty much what I've been working on for the last, as I said, nearly 40 years now, there's

Andy Earle
a really a cyclical way that this all plays out this neuro cycle that's happening, I guess, really, all the time, constantly.

Caroline Leaf
Thank you for saying that. You one of the first and I've been interviewed by hundreds of people, if not 1000s. And you're the first person who's actually said what you've just said, you said such a beautiful statement that we are neuroscientists all the time. And that's exactly what I've called a system that I've developed, because I want to understand, how do we as a human, we wake up in the morning, we go through the day we go through our life, what are we doing? What's this process of life becoming part of us and impacting how we function, I developed a system called the neuro cycle that basically looked at the science of how life becomes part of us, and influences us. And then what can we do to actually reverse engineer in order to you know, we can't change what's happened, but change how it plays out into our future. And that process is called the neuro cycle. So yes, we are constantly neuroscientists, either we're doing it well, and we are managing it, or it's missing, because either way, you're still going through life. You can't unless you did, you're still going through life. But if you don't manage it, it's messy. So messy, messy, messy, being messy body may see a messy mind, messy brain, we support the messy life. And that's okay, as long as we recognize that and then do something about that. But the doing something about the messiness has been for the last 4050 years taken to be a state of symptoms, that has been riddled with kind of like reduced down the complexity and the massiveness of a person's unique story and uniqueness has been reduced down to a set of symptoms to be eliminated. And we take away all of our human experience in that and that doesn't work. And the evidence is very evident. This book that I've written yet at Burton wrote this one was released about 18 months ago with a help cleaning up for mental Mesa pretty much put adolescents and adults in this very much because for two to 10 year olds, this is anyone from 11 onwards can benefit. This is two to 10 year olds and it's a how to help a parent of a child and teach the child how to manage them income this because you can do this, um, my youngest patients were two three years of age. My kids are adults now have more children. They've learned this from when they were two and three years of age. So to helping a person manage their mental needs switches in evitable is something we can teach ourselves and our children.

Andy Earle
Sounds like a lot of it really is also noticing that the approaches that we've been using or have been tried to use aren't really working and kind of understanding what we're doing that might actually be counterproductive or are not hopeful.

Caroline Leaf
Absolutely. It's so so much. So you just think of it, it you have something, I'm sure you've got a lot of stories of things that have happened in your life and from childhood always through, as if I and everyone listening and watching this, if we know the story and put that aside, but just look at the symptoms of unmanaged trauma. And those symptoms will be or emotions going all over the place you anxiety that's no longer working for us, potentially deep, deep depression, potentially suicidal thoughts, or problems physically in our body, and looking at life, like you just don't want to live in your life sucks or whatever various levels of that, that what I've just described, we can't just end the day we can't just say okay, suicidal thoughts, how often depression, how many times are bad, and then you're kind of like symptoms detect and then take those sort of very surface descriptions and then say oh, that's because you have a neurologic neurobiological AWS. So therefore, you are going to get diagnosed with depression or clinical depression or bipolar depression or schizophrenia, or panic disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder, all these names, as though they are an entity, like cancer or diabetes, or cardiovascular disease, it if you do that, if you take a mental experience, and you classify it as a categorize it into a medical, physical, bodily analogy, pathologizing misery, or you medicalize, Misery pathologized childhood or adolescence or life experiences, what we do is take the whole humanity out of it, we take away the huge part of it. And we just take it down to a few little things that you can see above the iceberg, you know, the tip of the iceberg, and you get the symptoms and imbibe it by its nature, the current biomedical model, it stuck in those symptoms and says, Okay, huge showing up with all these things, therefore, you get diagnosed. Now diagnosis implies that we have a underlying biological cause identified, like in cancer, we understand this the biological cause these cells are multiplying, and they shouldn't be multiplying. So you target that that works cardiovascular disease, maybe hypertension, high blood pressure wherever we can. But when it comes to mental health, you can't say oh, your brain Maitri said, meanwhile, you know, your actual life experience affected your brain show your brain will be affected, I show that with my research as Germania, the scientist, but that's not the cause that's the result, it's the impact of life. So we have to make that distinction, we have to manage the impact of life and look at it in terms of what you know, maybe people are not tremendous gut issues, or they've got you know, heart heart palpitations or hypertension, or that kind of stuff that is needs to be managed, because you're at risk for stroke, if you hit hypertension, that kind of thing. But those aren't the cause. It's not that you have a brain disease, or a genetic flaw, or chemical imbalance as a cause. Those are the result of changes on your life in your life. So we have to go look at the whole story helped manage that story. And that in itself then helps to heal. It facilitates the healing of the physical, as we heal the mental, if that makes sense.

Andy Earle
You talk about management, you talk in the book. And you mentioned earlier, mind management, how do you manage your mind? Or what does that even look like?

Caroline Leaf
What does that even mean? Let me give you a score. What does it even mean? A simple example. We're talking about kids. So let's say that you have teenagers and they come, I know that you talk a lot about obviously, this podcast is very geared towards teenagers. And I'd say now that we post COVID will hopefully end it's been a really tough time. So parents emote has been the most difficult time to parent over this COVID period, we can all agree to that. Whether you go to young or an adult child or an adolescent, whatever. So appearance already quite strained. And raw emotions are quite raw, and people are trying to normalize and all that stuff and isn't getting better all the time. But now let's say your child has got back on back to school, and they come home from a bad bad school. And they were something happened that affected them and adolescence. Adolescence is as we know, the most difficult part of our entire life cycle. So from you know, 1011 through 18, it's the most difficult part of the life cycle. And everything is just a shock and, and whatever. So now let's maybe say that they were rejected by friends at school or something happened that really is through them. So they come in the door and throw the bed down and maybe swear and maybe get frustrated or withdraw or just snap at you or just seem generic and have a really bad attitude and your emotions as a parent or rule that can lead to an immediate level of conflict. And that just is really missing. And that they say that this happens as a continual basis or on a continual basis. A pattern starts to emerge in their child's behaviors, and that could be they come home and they know they're not going to get sort of this is going to happen so they avoid it so they start with doing maybe the door to the room get stuck in social be just another brain goes down another mind brain connection goes down another road that isn't going to help. So it says something's going on here. So this whole thing just goes, sorry, let's edit that out, something popped up on my screen with this zoom thing. So it's hoping that the recording, is it still recording, okay, you're good. Now we have this messy situation developing in minds are not be mentioned, either parent, nor child. And more and more behaviors are going to be developing, potentially that child will go into spiral school results starting school would behave as school ma grades start getting affected, and a whole series of behaviors that make the parent very concerned. So they speak, maybe take the child to a psychiatrist, who then you know, this child won't talk much of the 13 minutes Christianae book, they have a label, clinical depression, medicate the child may be ADHD medication label, that is bad. Okay, I have a whole chapter in here on how that can happen. So don't be what has been mentioned look like that is not mind management, what has happened there is just spiraling into more and more of a mess, what we need to do is, if we had to have a policy put in place to help this parent crisis we in it would be to work on helping that parents help themselves because the distress that a parent experiences when they haven't managed the own stuff that they're going through and trying to protect the child and not knowing how to connect and this whole spiral I've just described, that is going to the level of distress that you feel about your child's distress is actually going to make the child especially adolescent, look at your level of reaction, and make them feel even worse about themselves. Because they see you the way you you very distressed and this thing does is going nowhere, they will then think, Oh, I'm really in a bad place. If my parent who's maybe in their 40s, or 50s, or whatever, they think this is so terrible. I'm 15. And this is absolutely terrible. It's even worse because they think it's terrible. So in other words, the level of the stress that we reflect back to our child about the distress increases the distress, so unintentionally, we making the situation more messy. So begins, mind management begins with me as a parent, looking at myself and my reactions to my child, and knowing how to support myself. So we should be focusing heavily on helping a parent understand what they are going through in response, and being able to manage their own risk their own reactions. And they always do that to the neurosurgical you can and in that way, then helping the child in their in a better place oxygen mask principle, when you've got the oxygen on yourself, you can help your child so that is my mentor and my mentor will be as you as the child comes in the door and they are all doing all the things I describe your the new instead of going or not again, or in your self you tense up and you think oh my gosh, I could do all this, but so much, but what do they do just and you maybe snap with it? Instead of that you say okay, I know, I feel like this and you can say it out loud. Or in your head. I feel like this and you can make a little sentence I feel totally overwhelmed. I don't know how to deal with a situation. No judgment. No, you just you just label you literally label your emotions to panicky I feel overwhelmed. What are your behaviors I'm about to snap at my child and then what are you actually feeling your body, my heart palpitating completely out of it feels like my heart's gonna just jump out of it's out of my body. And my perspective, I'm looking at this, it just feels like I can't cope now just by labeling making four sentences of how you feel what's what are you doing? What is your perspective of what's going on your body. Those are four signals that give you information by simply labeling Bose you've done the first tip of the neuro cycle which is to bring into awareness in a very organized and non chaotic mind manage were you managing your mind you stepping back and observing yourself giving us a grace giving yourself the Kate to feel like this, etc. You've now basically changed the neuro neurology, your neurophysiology has shifted to one of being able to be EmCon empowered to you empower to control so you literally have brought that toxic situation that's been happening for a few days or whatever, a few months or whatever, into conscious awareness bodies, all sentences. And now you can change and rewire the network that this comes from which is the situation with my teenager that I don't know how to deal with it's coming. Let's tap and whatever whatever the details also the whole thought tree that is toxic versus unhealthy thought inside of our brain. So by saying those four sentences as appear if you bring that up, then we can quick and you can do this really fast. Once you know the system, you can then say okay, what I'm then you go to the next you literally move okay, four sentences, then you say okay, now I'm gonna actually reflect orchestra selection. Why am I feeling at this? Well, this has been happening for a long time. It's okay to feel like this is making me very scared. I'm going to find I'm going to get help. I'm going to listen to this podcast. I'm going to read up to this book. I'm going to talk to a therapist or a best friend or something. So it's okay. I feel like the speaker Is your do this sort of reflect stick where you acknowledge why you feeling like this, you can if you've got time, maybe you can just quickly write down if you've got a notepad around or on your phone, just make a few notes of those four sentences that you said and what you reflected on just the why. And you just bring it all into consciousness, the writing downsides be pulled out of chaos. As you write down, more things will come up, then you're going to the fourth step, which is really check where you reconceptualize when you say, Okay, well, in the situation right now, this is what happened, what I can do right now, I can do more later on, I can talk to that therapist, but right now, I need to help my child. And it's okay for me to feel like this, or what can I do so I can basically explain what I'm going through. And so then we're going to work on this ticket, I can give them a statement, I can be empathetic, one of the biggest things that can help a child is empathy, empathy for yourself empathy for your child, so then the first step is to reach Okay, do it. So they knew to do that in those five steps in your head. And it's in detail in this book in detail in this book, and I have an app called the neuro cycle app where you can learn how to do this, well walk us through it with audio visuals like me literally training you to do this on a constant lifestyle basis. Now you can say to your child, okay, you've done this in three minutes, got yourself calm while you were just maybe making coffee or something. Now you look at your child and you say, hey, Seamus, you really not feeling great. Look to me, I'm here for you. No, Judge? No, no, you're creating a safe space to send to them. Hey, I see you. I don't understand that. I'm here. I see you. I'm sorry for my previous reactions. But I can see you need me now. Shamli. Me? Can you talk to me, I'm here for you. Just tell me about your day? What do you need? Do you need a cup of coffee? Do you want to sit with me and have a cup of coffee together? What do you need? I'm here to listen, no judgment. And then maybe your child sits down still doesn't say something. And then you can you can actually verbalize what you went through and say to them, Hey, you know what, this has been going on for a while. And I'm sorry that I've been handling it badly. And you're these are the emotions that I've been feeling. And this is what my body is. And you actually go through and you tell them out loud. This is our topic, this is what I've done. I've went through these steps. And my my action is I want to tune into, I'm getting myself under control so that I can help you. And I want to hear you. And I want to listen to you. And let's work this out together. And I can teach you the new recycle, we can do this together. Because the new cycle is a mind directed neuroplasticity system, it helps to get your messy mind under control by your wise mind, because we all have a wired full of wise mind. It's wired into our neurobiology. It's part of our deep spiritual non conscious mind. And we'll all we've got to do supermom extend back into that zone, we can stand back and observe and that's what the neuro cycle enables you to do, are doing that polynomial neurophysiology. You get to the point where you're calm enough to say the right thing to child and then for your child with a little big, they can then learn how to respond. That is mind management. And as you bring in this in as a lifestyle, you can then start working on the moment by moment, little things that pop up as something, and then you can start looking at patterns. And attack means that this has been around for a while and it is a pattern in your child's life or your life, then it's going to take a little longer than the moment you use the moment neuro cycle to calm down and to get into statements. Okay, and this has been going on for a while. Our back, we spend five minutes a day or 15 minutes a day for the next 63 days. And I'll tell you why 63 working through this partner, but we can rewire the brain because at the moment, this is driving you and going in your room and reading social getting stuck on social media or as continually fighting about this, or you're dealing and label is going to make this bigger. What we need to do is we can thus unpeel the roots and reconstruct search shrimps and we can build a better coping mechanism. We mustn't insulate our children, trauma as much as we see your kids in distress, they have to use you nodding your head, you have to use the distress as an app lesson. So we have to help the child to learn how to manage the mind in order to her life is not going to be perfect. You cannot insulate your child from everything, but you can teach your child what to do when they feel thrown and give themselves permission. So KDP said my mother was feeling totally overwhelmed by my reaction. So an adult feels and that's okay.

Andy Earle
We're here with Dr. Caroline leaf, talking about how parents can help their teenagers clean up their mental mess and manage their minds. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Caroline Leaf
Marshals do not live alone. Psychiatry speaks into the media, we would think emotions are the most important thing. They are linked to behaviors and to or at least sensations and perspectives. And when we package them together, we get a bigger picture. And when we realize that those are actually just the tip of the iceberg. We need to go deeper and find the actual thought and the net It works and how the self taught which is in the branches of the tree. And we need to know how to go to this level to actually see how this is impacting my friend relationships, my sibling relationships, my own relationship with myself why you couldn't find the source. And another thing is we can't become aware of those emotions and aware of the source, we also have to reconceptualize, we have to change, we have to heal the root. If someone is training to be a pro athlete, no one expects a child to be good at the sport until they've been trained. And so that's all logical. But when it comes to the mind, it tackles instant, quick fix, as soon as a child a problem label and diagnose the effort that goes into this audit, there's much more effort that should be put into the mind. My husband, for example, his parents put him in boarding school when he was five, and he didn't see his mother for a whole year. And I just think of the trauma of not seeing your parent at five for a whole year. There were a lot of issues that then once he got the basic stuff, Soldier trickle into his parenting, for example, were maybe just the normal kid stuff. He would overreact and think, Gee, I don't have this opportunity. And when it came up, he would actually say this was coming from that this is a better way. Let's discuss, et cetera, et cetera. So the child could see his impact of his life on his parenting, but also, we manage this.

Andy Earle
Want to hear the full episode, head over to talking to teens.com/register for a free trial of our premium podcast, you get exclusive access to loads of great content with no obligation and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to teens get started today with a free trial over at talking to teens.com/register Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.