Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: 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.

We're here today talking about the science of empowerment. It turns out that the way many of us think about empowerment is not actually helpful.

Empowerment is not about always feeling good about who we are or not letting anybody make us feel bad.

True empowerment involves coming to terms with a lot of negative feelings like shame.

As parents, we need to learn how to help our teenagers stop running away or suppressing their feelings of shame and unworthiness and help them build true resilience.

Our guest today is Dr. Abbie Morono.

She is a speaker and a psychologist and the author of the book Work in Progress.

Abbie, welcome to the Talking to Teens podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Abbie Morono: Thank you so much for having me Andy.

Andy Earle: I am super excited. I've been reading all about shame and empowerment and you've written a book that's really steeped in science and a lot of research, but also is really personal and you share a lot about your experiences and your story as a young person and figuring out your career and what you wanted to do with your life.

Really excited to talk about all that with you. What inspired you to write about this?

Abbie Morono: That's a tough question. I think there's loads of answers to that, but I think the main thing was that I realized I was holding myself back. That's really what led to the change of who I was.

I realized I was holding myself back and I had done a lot of things in my past that I wasn't particularly proud of and didn't really reflect who I was And I realized that I had started to. Subdue my career and subdue myself because I could see my media presence rising and I didn't want people to say, Oh this is the same person that did this, the same person that did this.

So I decided to become invisible and all of these goals that I had, I really had to put them to the side because there was so much shame involved. I realized I didn't want to do that anymore and I had a lot of my own students at the time because I had become a professor and I could see them struggling things like drinking and alcohol I could see a lot of myself in them and the last thing I wanted for them was what I was doing to myself because I would wake up in the night sweating full of shame for something that, wasn't even happening, just the fear of it happening.

And I realized this is just no way to live. And people make mistakes. And all we can really ask for is ultimately behavior change, regardless of what that behavior is, because, what might be shameful for one person might not be for another. So I decided I needed to make that change. And I could see that there were so many students and so many young people That needed that book because I made my mistakes when I was, 15, 16 early in my life and I was struggling with a lot of pretty serious trauma up until I was about 22, 23, and I didn't know what to do with all of that.

And I reached out to a lot of these, self help books and blogs and podcasts and they were great for a really short period of time because they make a lot of appealing promises. But the problem with them is they're not steeped in science, so the actual impact isn't long lasting.

I realized I needed to contribute to that literature. I felt I had a responsibility as a professor to provide that information for my students. And then I started to realize it's not just the students, it's the parents. And there's so many people that need it. I wasn't exactly someone that people felt comfortable coming to because I was very stoic and tough love, and, I had a reputation for being a bit of a hard ball.

They used to call me the Rottweiler. I would see something and go for it and, nothing could really get in my way. That just isn't the kind of person you come to for self help advice and comfort. So I realized I had to humanize myself and put my story in that book.

I used the literature for my own healing and wanted to give that to other people in a realistic way. I'm so sick of seeing these, rainbows and ponies and empowerment is everything's perfect and self help is wonderful it just isn't reality.

It's tough messy and hard. If we don't provide that. real understanding in the science, it's not going to help anybody. That was my ultimate goal.

Andy Earle: Yeah great to hear. So cool to see how you've pulled all this together and been open about your journey through all this.

The book centers around resilience and empowerment. Thinking about empowerment in a different way than a lot of people tend to think about it, it's a word we throw around like feeling empowered. A lot of times we talk about it, as if we don't care what anybody thinks about us.

I don't care what people say. I'm just empowered and this is just who I am. So take it or leave it. But is that a healthy way to think about empowerment or misinformed?

Abbie Morono: No. I'm so glad you said that. 'cause it drives me crazy. I see this all the time. I see the word empowerment and I see it next to women's empowerment too.

Rarely ever do you ever see empowerment next to men. Never. And that's one thing that really bothered me. I wanted to. give it to men without taking it from women and give it to women without taking from men. So that was one of my goals of empowerment isn't a thing for women, it's a thing for everyone.

And this idea of empowerment being take me as I am, one after two, I'm perfect as I am. It drives me crazy because that isn't empowerment. Empowerment, is no clear 100 percent agreed upon definition. But to me, empowerment is a deep self understanding and self acceptance. And I use the phrase, you can't use me against me.

And it means I've accepted myself. And you can't reflect old versions of me. You can't reflect my behavior at me. and make me feel like I have no worth. Now that doesn't mean I think I'm perfect. A huge part of empowerment is recognizing that we are flawed, that I accept myself and I understand myself despite the fact that I am deeply flawed, because guess what?

I'm deeply human. We are all flawed. That's just the nature of being human. So this concept of, I'm perfect as I am, take me as I am, that's empowerment. And we see it, the yes queen, go queen with people saying, I deserve this treatment, I won't accept this. And to a degree, I agree with that, but we've over exaggerated it.

We've taken this self love and self care into self delusion of, I don't need to grow. I don't need to change. And it's really hard to combat that because people tend to think in black and whites, either you're empowered, or you have no self esteem. Either you support women's rights or you don't.

Either it's for men, either it's for women. And we need this middle ground. It's like the movement of where we say you're perfect as you are, you don't need to change regardless of weight, regardless of anything. And what it can do is make us accept really unhealthy habits and unhealthy behaviors. And what we should be doing is saying, you should love yourself and you should accept yourself as you are.

While you work on being a better version of yourself, because not everybody is perfect, nobody is perfect, and we shouldn't be promoting these notions, and what it also does is, now it makes perfection the goal, which is an unattainable goal. Empowerment doesn't mean that. Being empowered doesn't mean any of that, and it doesn't mean being bulletproof, it doesn't mean Your opinions can't hurt me.

It just means I accept myself, and it's fine to be upset by the comments people make. It's human to care what people think about us. The only people that don't care what people think about us are psychopaths. And that really isn't the ultimate goal, is it? It's about understanding what comments are well meaning, what aren't.

But this notion of empowerment, it just gets so Diluted in the media, and that was one thing I really wanted to push forward in this book. As much as I can't speak to the male perspective, I try to put in a few stories of it. But have that reminder of, we shouldn't be pushing out men from this group, we should be welcoming everybody.

Andy Earle: Given all that, then does empowerment mean that we don't feel shame? That we've elevated ourselves past feelings of being ashamed or embarrassed about who we are?

Abbie Morono: I got asked that same question by a friend of mine who is a therapist and she had asked me that because she tells her clients that when they feel shame it's about how do we get rid of that shame because there is this understanding that shame is the antithesis of empowerment and I couldn't disagree more.

So the brain weighs two percent of our body mass but it takes up 20 percent of our energy. What is it doing? It's constantly working. It's constantly processing. So it doesn't just do things without thinking, like our emotions have a purpose. The brain creates these emotions when it's got so many other things to deal with and so many other things to do.

It creates these emotions for a purpose. We have this concept, that emotions are irrational. And there was that big movement in behavioral economics about emotions being irrational. And to make conscious, rational decisions, we need to ignore them. That's not actually what they do. Emotions are designed to help us survive, help us understand our situations.

Now, shame serves a purpose, just like every other emotion. It's not the antithesis of empowerment. It's actually the road to empowerment. That's why I called the book The Road to Empowerment, The Journey Through Shame, because we think that we get to empowerment by getting rid of shame, and actually we get there by listening to it.

Because if we really look at what shame is, just like every other emotion, it's a signal. It signals to us that we have this sense of who we are, or who we want to be. And something we are doing is not cohesive with that. Now that can be our moral standing, that can be our ethical standing, it can be our belief system, it can be our social groups.

But something we are doing, or have done, does not fit in line with that sense of self. And because it's so deeply personal, what we can do is go, okay. I feel this emotion. So therefore it's telling me that I am worthless, that I am bad when actually what it's doing is saying, Hey, something you did is undermining your value.

Something you did is bad. Okay. So what do we do with that? We listen to it. We listen to what it's trying to tell us and we correct the behavior. That's a really difficult thing to do. It sounds easy, but it's hard because it's self directed. So when I feel that shame, I feel inside that deep personal sense of failure.

Something I really feel about myself. I acted against that's a hard reality. So much easier to just push it to the side and say, make shame, go away and keep acting the way that I'm acting, but we don't get to empowerment that way because that's not self understanding if we're not listening to what they're telling us, we can't listen to what it is that we really want and who it is that we really are.

So we have to sit with that shame and listen to it and then act on it. So we self reflect, we say, okay, what are you trying to tell me? What am I doing? And then the problem usually is when we act in bad ways or ways that don't align with who we are, the reasoning underpinning that is typically very painful.

Most of the time, if we experience a hard trauma, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. We did something bad or something bad happened to us or someone we love, and we don't know how to process that. So we self direct it. We feel guilty. I didn't do enough. I did too much. I potentially caused this.

My inaction caused this. All of these things. And that's often what causes that shame. So when we sit and listen to it, we have to deal with those really difficult emotions. And that is painful. And not all of us feel emotionally equipped to do so I understand the therapeutic view of push shame aside because it is difficult.

But it isn't what the literature tells us to do if we really want to have self acceptance, and we need to take that road. We need to walk that tough road of shame.

Andy Earle: But aren't we always going to be not living up to the person that we want to be or that we hope we can be? So does this mean we're just always going to be feeling bad about ourselves?

Abbie Morono: That is such a good question because I get asked, so when am I done?

Andy Earle: Yeah, exactly. What's the end of the road? When can I just feel good about myself?

Abbie Morono: And people say as well, I had this breakup, how many months is it until I'm happy again? Or I went through this thing, how many days now until I'm over it?

And we really want to know that and go, okay when am I empowered? Like, when is it done? And You know there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is, you're never done. And the bad news is, you're never done. And the beauty of that is we can always change. So if you don't like who you are, you can change it.

If you don't like how you react, you can change your reaction. If you don't like your mindset, you can change it. And it's we think that the world will stop. I remember both the happiest and saddest time of my life. I write in my book about a lot of the traumas that I went through that, it's not always fun to rehash, but one of them, when I really started to face it, And that reality sinks in of, I'm never gonna be the same person that I was before this thing happened to me.

It doesn't matter how much healing I do, whoever I was prior to that has been stolen from me. And that's a really harsh reality, and I remember sitting with that feeling and realizing, I've got to figure out who I am now because I'm never going to get that person back. And what you think is going to happen is the whole world is going to pause and everybody is going to mourn with you because you're mourning that sense of self.

And you think that, you go down to the kitchen and you're like, why isn't everybody mourning? You go to the shop and like, why is everyone really shopping for their groceries and not mourning with me? Do they not know what I've been through? And then it's the same when you go through something really positive.

Like when I finally finished my Viva for my PhD and I was a doctor and I'm looking outside and I'm like, why aren't there people outside my window clapping? Do they know what I've just done? And it's the good and the bad. We expect the whole world to stop and everyone just cheer for us or mourn with us.

Then we're this new, different person, and everything's stopped. But that isn't how life works. Things keep moving. And, good or bad, the work is never done. Because life will keep changing. You get to that point, that happiest, that saddest moment. But it's so temporary. It will go away. And, that's either good or bad for you at that time.

But really, that's the reality. And I write in the book that there was that point when I really started to deal with my trauma. And I was crying every day on the bus, every single day, for months, morning, night, crying through my workouts. And this thing that I said to myself was, this feels like forever, but it just feels that way.

And that's something that I always say to my students. When they say, this is who I am now, or this is never going to go away. I say, it just feels that way, but it's just a feeling. The feeling will pass because we are all a work in progress. If you hit that point where you're like, I'm self empowered, I'm happy.

I'm great. What if the next day something happens? What if the next day nothing happens for just some reason you feel stuck? What if you're like, I'm so empowered and happy by myself. I don't need anyone in my life. And then you meet someone and you're like, Oh, I want to be with this person. Now there's new obstacles to overcome and the opposite way round too.

If you lose someone new obstacles to come, you never know what is around the corner. So that empowerment isn't a place. It's just that I'm deeply flawed, but I'm okay with that. And it's also that recognition of. This is just a point in time. Tomorrow will be another point in time, and I'll have to do the work then.

And it's more a mindset, because it's not that end goal of once I reach a million dollars, I'm there. Once I reach empowerment, I'm there. We do it every day. We make a choice every single day to keep up with that self understanding and self acceptance.

Andy Earle: You write in the book about how we often suppress shame or try to avoid feeling shame, which I thought was really interesting. You also write and I love this, shame helps you understand who you are. Shame acts as a moral compass that helps you recognize when you've strayed too far from the path to becoming the person you want to be.

So these conflicting things going on where we're pushing it away. We're trying to avoid it, but it's almost trying to tell us something about ourselves as a parent. How can we start to notice if our kids seems to be in that shame suppression mode? And how could we encourage or normalize?

Expressing it more or getting more in touch with some of those feelings.

Abbie Morono: Yeah, I always say when it comes to shame, we can do three things. We can escape it. we can suppress it or we can heal it and heal it means feel it. So when we escape it, you can look for escapism behaviors

so I'm filling up my time with things. And usually these are maladaptive things. So if you see a change in behavior drinking too much maybe doing drugs even things like playing too many video games or watching too much TV. Now these, they're normal behaviors, but when they become to the point where other things are suffering and they're doing these things, often that's an escape.

It's really great to channel through work, just like it's great to channel through friends. But once you start doing that to the degree that it starts to take over other aspects of your life, it becomes over excessive. And often when we do over excessive behaviours, it's because we're trying to escape not being in that space.

We're escaping sitting with ourselves. So anything that becomes excessive is an escape often. And then suppression. Now suppression is really common. And also escapism can feel really good in the moment. So often it can be hard to spot because a person may, seem functional and healthy because they're not dealing with that really negative thing, they're not sat with it.

But if you take them away from the behavior that they're escaping with, you're going to see them get really agitated. Because now you're taking away that escape method. And now you start to see those negative emotions come through and you're going to see really irritable behaviors.

So I always say if you do start to see that change in mood and emotion and increase irritability, With those increased escape behaviors, something is happening. And then when it comes to suppression, it's a little bit different. Suppression is really isolating. So we feel an emotion come up and we go, no, I don't want to feel you.

And the brain is going, no, feel me. And you go, no. And it's this internal battle. And eventually the brain gives up and goes, fine. If you don't want to feel me. you won't feel anything because the thing is the parts of our brain that process negative emotions where that trauma or where that shame is well they're the same parts of our brain that also process positive emotions like the insula like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex those areas they process all emotions and we need them For our life to be in color, but there's no way to get rid of shame completely without getting rid of those positive emotions.

So when someone is suppressing their emotions, what you're going to start to see is them subdue themselves in general, you might start to see isolation behaviors, but what you're going to start to see is that lack of emotionality in general, they're not going to want to talk about it. They're going to want to be on their own a little bit more.

They're going to start to become really muted. And often we see in their non verbals too, when people suppress their emotions, they get more like tight and cortisol in the brain. It actually affects our muscles. So it affects how rigid our muscles are and how fluid we move. So it's almost like we have this cloud over our head and it affects everything we do.

It's we're at this slower pace. Whereas escapism is almost like faster, but you're constantly trying to keep busy. You're constantly trying to do this. And it's a little bit more chaotic. Whereas suppression is like slower. And I always see it as like someone on full speed versus someone with that cloud over their head and everything is heavy.

And. Then how do we get parents to help that? We want to move those individuals from escape and suppression into that healing. And like I said, healing means feeling, and that isn't easy. Especially as a child, because we don't have fully functioning prefrontal cortex. Until we're 25, and it's the prefrontal cortex that really helps us navigate our emotional experiences.

So when children are going through that difficult period of shame, especially if they're getting bullied, because that's such a huge traumatic influence on kids. It's really hard to know how to provide them that support, but kids model behavior. So the best way to do it, Is to be emotionally aware yourself, to model that behavior, model, having those discussions.

If you have a partner model, a healthy relationship, make sure your children see you and your partner talk about your emotions, talk about how you're feeling, express a negative and the positive. Invite them into the conversation that if you don't have a partner, have friends and do the same thing and model with your children.

Ask them about their day. And if they won't talk about yours, talk about those hard feelings. And that can be difficult as a parent, because we have this idea that we have to be perfect. We can't be flawed. I have to be the perfect mom, the perfect dad. And if I'm not, there's shame.

So we don't want to expose our kids to negative emotions, but what we're actually doing is doing them an injustice. If we're grieving, as a parent. Say we're going through a divorce and we don't want to put those negative emotions on our kids and we think that they're not being affected. They are.

Because kids will sense that you're struggling and they blame themselves because they don't have the prefrontal cortex to understand everything isn't about them. So grieving with your children, letting them see you process that emotion in a healthy way, if you get therapy, talk about therapy, letting them witness that and be involved in that is the best gift that you can give them because you're teaching them.

It's okay to be human. It's okay to struggle.

Andy Earle: I've been thinking about this a lot in reading through your book and just reflecting in especially the teenage years, because it's such a time of change. You're constantly going through different transitions and all of the pressures are changing. Your concept of yourself is changing. We could talk about this all day, but we're just coming to the end of our time here. Dr. Abbie, thank you so much for coming on the show and speaking with us about all this has been really fascinating. And there's so much more that I wanted to talk about in your book that we didn't get to.

So I highly encourage people to pick up a copy of Work In Progress: The Road to Empowerment, the Journey Through Shame. Can you talk a little bit about where people could go to learn more about you, about what you're doing, or maybe follow updates from you?

Abbie Morono: Absolutely. So you can find everything I'm doing on Abbiemorono. com. My Instagram is drAbbieofficial. My LinkedIn, I believe is drAbbie, drAbbiemorono even. And you can reach out to me at contact@Abbiemorono. com.

Andy Earle: We're here today with Dr. Abbie Morono talking about what empowerment really means. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Abbie Morono: We see so much shame in kids and what they feel is

I'm alone in this. They think no one else feels this way. And when we feel like no one else feels this, we feel like we're a freak. Like there's something wrong with us. If you are a teacher or an aunt or someone that is around kids that you see struggling and you think I can't help them. You can help them.

If you have those conversations, if you provide a safe space, that's what kids need. If you want to get out of that depressive cycle, the only thing you can do is go through it. Small changes, small behaviors that you show yourself. I am not at the mercy of my emotions. I'm listening to them. But I'm just not letting them control me. Our emotions are telling us about our behavior and our situation, not about who we are as a person. They just tell us how we feel. Emotions are designed to help us survive.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. You can now sign up directly through Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.