Fostering Emotional Safety

Is your home an emotionally safe place? And do your kids feel that way about it?

Here's Christy Straub. What if we had homes that felt like that, that felt emotionally safe, meaning love without fear? Whatever I'm bringing to the table, I'm coming home from school, maybe I was bullied.

Maybe I came home from work and I had a horrible meeting and someone berated me across the table. What if home were the safest place in the world for all those people to come? If we make homes that felt like that, that would really start to change a culture. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. What can we do to make sure our homes are emotionally safe, places where our kids can feel free to deal with their emotions, know how to process those emotions biblically? We're going to talk about that today with Josh and Christy Straub. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. I remember when I was in college, I'd just come home for the summer and I'd gone to a Bible study.

And I'll never forget this. The Bible study leader was talking about, you know how you sometimes at school, you get afraid, you're wondering what people think about you? Do people like you? Kind of going through all of this and I'm going, yeah, I can relate to that. Then he said, do you know your parents have these feelings too? And I was like, no, they're grownups. Grownups don't have, they don't feel peer pressure. That's just something you feel when you're a kid. And it was like, oh, like they said, when you leave, they get sad and lonely when you go off to college.

And I thought, I wonder if they really do have, I didn't go home and ask my mom because that would have been too weird. But it was like for the first time I thought, oh, emotions are not just something that kids have. And then grownups, by the time you're a grownup, you've fixed all of that.

You're all fixed. Yeah. And I think that was kind of my mentality. So having emotions is something you do when you're a child. When you're a grownup now, you don't have those emotions anymore. You've worked on that. You fix that.

And in some ways you learn to stuff them. I mean, I can never one time remember sitting at my locker in a football locker room in college with my guys and going, hey guys, what are you feeling? What's going on? How are you feeling right now? I would like to go back and see what that would have looked like if you had tried that. Let's talk with Wilson today.

How did that ever happen? And I never walked into Troy Line's locker room ever and walked up to a guy and said, how are you feeling right now? Well, it is something you could talk with your kids about. We've got Josh and Kristi Straub joining us again today on Family Life Today. Guys, welcome back. Thank you for having us.

Yeah, we love being with you guys. Well, you've written a book for parents to read to their kids or maybe to read to one another. This is a kid's book. It's called What Am I Feeling? But I actually, as I was looking at the book, I thought, I wonder about parents of teenagers. We literally have had moms of teenagers put the feelings chart like one of them. She put it up on their mantle, like under their television, and they were watching some basketball. I don't know.

I'm not a basketball fan, but it was some big basketball game. And so one of the kids was like Instagram storing it. And they're like, why do you have a kid's characters hanging from your mantle? And she's like, because my teenagers need it. The chart you're talking about is in the back of the book.

So the book is a storybook for kids, and this is probably for preschool, elementary school kids. Moms and dads read this to them. Whether you've been married 25 years, it's identified feelings. And then in the back, there's a chart with nine different faces, nine different emotions, so that you can put words to what it is you're feeling. And we're sort of laughing about this little chart, but I'm not kidding.

It is really helpful, obviously for a child, but for a full-fledged married adult, single adult. I mean, Anne and I, many times in conflicts early in our marriage, she would say to me, what are you feeling right now? And I'm not kidding. I would be like, I have no idea.

I honestly don't know. Sometimes I knew tomorrow, but in that moment I had never been taught. I had never processed. I had been taught you stuff it away. Men don't cry.

And the only emotion he would show was anger. Yeah. I mean, it sounds crazy. And you think I'm kidding. I'm not kidding.

If that chart was anywhere I could go, I could point and go. I feel like the pirate. Yeah. I am the pirate.

You are the angry Alex. Seriously, the number of couples that have said, like, we're going to put this in our bedroom wall. These core nine are the basic emotions, right? So obviously there is a plethora more and as adults we can narrow down more. I mean, it's not, you know, I'm frustrated or, you know, there's much more.

You could go into fear, guilt and shame with adults. That would be huge. What are the core nine? Because I thought there were only five. After I saw Inside Out, I thought there were only five. Isn't that the best movie? Do you want to know what's crazy? We just watched that movie.

For the first time? Yeah, I know. Everyone's like, how do you not know Inside Out? I'm like, I don't know. Do you know Inside Out? He's like, I don't use that in your counseling practice. And now we watch it. We're like, how did we not know this movie? This is it.

This is one of my feelings. But what are the nine that are on the chart? Depending on who you talk to, some say five, some say seven. I mean, we put nine in here, but we have afraid and happy and jealous across the top, guilty, angry and sad, and then surprised, embarrassed and brave. And we chose ones that we felt like most, especially preschool and elementary kids would be feeling as primary emotions that they would understand. Contempt is one of the primary, but a kid isn't going to understand contempt.

So we didn't put that one in there necessarily. But you were talking about the locker room and athletes and things. When I first started talking about emotional safety and emotional intelligence. Which, what am I feeling? I mean, to be able to name emotion, it's like the beginning building block of emotional safety.

That's why it's important. And so I was invited to speak to joint special operations command at Fort Bragg. And I was nervous. I was, you know, I had to take all my scripture out.

I was just talking about the research. You were feeling? I was feeling nervous. I was scared. He named it. He was flippy in his tummy.

I was flippy in my tummy. And, but the reality was, is it resonated so much with them that now I speak at all the army ranger battalions and with joint special operations command and army and air force because it resonated, particularly also with the wives. Because the very thing they're trained to turn off to survive on the battlefield is the very thing they have to turn back on to survive when they get back into home.

And so when I talk to men about this, even sports athletes, like emotional safety was linked to extracurricular and athletic success. Why? Because if it's bottom of the ninth and there's a three, two counts game seven of the world series, you're down by a run. You have a man on third and you're the coach. Who do you want hitting in that moment? You don't want your home run hitter who's batting 100 with runners in scoring position. You want the guy who's batting 350 or 400 with runners in scoring position, the guy who can come through under pressure and research over and over and over again shows that the ability to come through under pressure is linked back to that sense of emotional safety and emotional intelligence. Because that batter standing in that batter's box, he isn't thinking about what dad's going to say to him if he screws up or what his wife or who, you know, that voice that's just hanging there.

Instead, he's in the moment, remembering every pitch that he studied that's going to be coming out of that pitcher's hand because he can come through under pressure in that moment. So for the first time in my life, I know why I threw the interception that lost the state championship in high school. Oh, no. Oh, we're going deep here. I was trying to make a joke, but in some ways it's like I'd never connect my emotions to that moment. Were you thinking something at that moment?

No, I wasn't at all. But, you know, there's all that going on. There's so much going on in your head, depending on the relationships you have with family, your parents, or if dad's pressuring you to be in this sport.

You never really loved it, but you never really talked about it. Yeah, it's very powerful because it doesn't matter what stage you're on, whether it's the NFL, whether you're a businessman, whether you're, you know, a pastor, no matter where you're at. The more emotionally healthy your marriage and the relationships you have at home, the better you're going to show up on the stage that you're called to. What's the goal here for parents? Are we trying to get our kids to be able to identify and then control their feelings? Is that the aim? Or are we trying to get them to feel more deeply what they're feeling?

What is it you're aiming for? Oh, those are both good. I like that. Well, we're talking about emotional safety, right?

This is sort of the end goal. And again, that's a term that most people aren't even familiar with, right? A lot of people are familiar with emotional intelligence, right?

We kind of know what that is. And last year, Google came out with a study and they studied their top performing teams. They wanted to see basically testing their hiring process. Are we hiring the right people at Google? So typically they would hire, right, for the STEM skills, which makes sense, science, technology, engineering, math. And what they found, I think, from the way they wrote the study, it even floored Google.

Yeah. So the top three were emotional safety, empathy, and emotional intelligence were the top three things they found among their most productive teams within Google. So it forced them to start changing their hiring process to focus on the soft skills, not necessarily the hard skills, because the hard skills can be taught.

But what you can't teach is whenever you're in a room with a collaborative group of people and someone brings up an idea, and that idea is not a very good idea, and you know it might not be a great idea, but you're not bullying that person and putting that person down. That person feels safe in that team to bring up any idea, and they know that they're going to be a part of that team, that the idea is at least going to be put on the table, whether it's not accepted or not, but that that human is valued within the context of that team. That would be emotional safety, that I could show up and I could be fully present and not have any fear of what I'm going to bring to the table. It's really, and you know, you're talking about really what's the end goal here.

What if we had homes that felt like that, that felt what this term would be emotionally safe, meaning love without fear? So there is love. Whatever I'm bringing to the table, I'm coming home from school. Maybe I was bullied. Maybe a girl picked on me and what I wore that day. Maybe I came home from work and I had a horrible meeting and someone berated me across the table.

Maybe mom is just feeling hopeless, rejected, you know, sort of losing a sense of purpose. What if home were the safest place in the world for all those people to come home to and to be looked at across the dinner table, on the couch. And I want to hear how your day was. I want to hear what happened to you today. And I don't need you to show up as anything you're not. I don't need you to fix me. I'm not trying to fix you. I just accept you for who you are and what you're bringing.

And if we could make homes that felt like that, that would really start to change a culture, a generation, maybe a world. I think for parents listening, even for myself, when my kids would express this is what happened or I was bullied, I think what I would do as a parent oftentimes is I jump to the fixing your problem. And so I jumped to that so quickly. I didn't sit in their pain. Is that typical? Because I would lay in bed thinking, how can I fix their situation?

Absolutely. And don't you find, too, as a parent that often their feelings feel bigger to us, right? Typically because of our story. So I know our daughter, I remember her coming home and she has big emotions. I'm a grown up child with big emotions still.

I attest to that. And she will feel sadness sometimes. And it triggers a place in me.

And I remember early on, I mean, she was little. And she said to me, Mommy, sometimes I like to feel sad. I like how sadness feels.

And I thought, my brain panicked. You're going to struggle with depression. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't like sadness.

No, no. Like, but in our own with we see it through our lens of our story and maybe the places that we still carry wounds. And so what felt to her what was probably a run of the mill regular everyday emotion felt huge to me. And so we can start to blow it out of proportion.

And then we're the ones awake at night trying to fix this. How do I make her? She needs to be a happy girl. I want her to be a happy, happy girl. Okay, dance class.

Dance will make her happy, you know. And okay, so if I recognize that I struggle with sadness, I don't like to feel it for myself. Maybe I had a history of that.

Maybe that was in my home. Okay. Maybe my daughter, she might have a propensity for sadness, depression. She might. But that's not mine to carry for her.

What if I can just sit with her, be like, I know I sign this isn't tell me about that. Like, tell me what makes you feel sad with no gut reaction to fix, which is where we feel all the pressure. Right. Because we have to have the solution, the answer. What if we just took that off and we just sat with them in their feeling?

We used to call it like, you know, number two going, you know, when he'd get down, you know, like it's really that posture where we just get down on their level eye level and we can just sit with them. And you're saying that is more important than actually fixing the problem that's more necessary. Well, because you raise resilient kids. They're going to run into bullying the rest of their lives. They're going to run into places where they feel rejected for the rest of their lives.

And if we're helicoptering, if you will, and trying to fix every one of their situations, we hijack that process of building resilience, of teaching them how to handle their emotions and help them problem solve through those difficult situations. We moved to a new city when our oldest was 11 years old. And I remember that her first few months in a new school in a new city trying to make friends. It was not going well. And I knew that she was not happy at school. I remember dropping her off at school one day and I was thinking, maybe I should go in and try to set up a meeting with the teacher, maybe the principal and just say, you know, if she's having a hard time, could we maybe pair her up with somebody, maybe call some other parents and say, could so-and-so invite her over?

I probably would have done all of that. I'm just nodding like, oh, I know. I'm driving away and there was this little tap on the shoulder, this little voice that goes, what have been the times of greatest spiritual growth in your life? Has it been the times when things have been hard and you've had to learn how to lean into me and you've had to learn how to rely and trust and maybe I'm doing the same thing in the life of your 11-year-old and maybe you just leave this between me and her.

And I thought, but I'm a grown-up so I can deal with that. She's only 11, but the God of the universe is sometimes taking our kids through hard things because to your point, there's resilience being developed. There's learning how to trust in Him being developed. And if we're trying to super-engineer everything so that they don't have any of these experiences, we're shielding them from things in life they're going to face later on. And I would say if that's happening within you, there's probably something in your own story. If those fears are coming up, love without fear. If there's a fear coming up for your child, and we have real fears for our children, but if there's a fear like, I need to hijack that process, there might be a rupture in your own story to go back and kind of take a look at. Well, I was thinking when you were saying, which was so beautiful, what would it be like if our children came home to a home that was emotionally safe?

Here's my first thought. Well, that requires parents who are mature enough to be able to process their own emotions and lead the way in that and so many. I went back to your chart of the nine emotions.

Tell me if I'm wrong. Six of them are not fun emotions. They're the kind of emotions you want to run away from, from being afraid to jealous to guilty to angry to sad to embarrassed, right?

So what do we do as adults? So many of us, we just run away from those. We soothe those. We medicate those any way you want.

You've seen that. So how does an adult become emotionally stable enough so that they can lead a home that becomes that emotionally safe environment for their family? You just described, I'd say what, 98% of homes in America were numb. And I can't tell you the number of people in my personal life. I mean, you know, a lot of the moms who, you know, read the book with their kids and have contacted me kind of behind the scenes. I'm like, Christy, like, I don't think I feel anymore.

I didn't know that. But like, I'm trying to teach my kids, you know, not to throw a temper tantrum and what to do when they're sad or when they're angry. Just like, I don't even know when I'm angry. I don't even know when I'm sad.

I'm just the same all the time. And you start to recognize there was probably somewhere along the way, we just started to turn down the volume, stuff, numb, and there's a lot of really great ways. I mean, our culture makes fun of it, right? It's like wine o'clock. I mean, the Netflix binging, right? There is so many ways that we can just numb out and we actually celebrate it. You know, we eat it away. We drink it away.

We, as a culture, do a really good job at that. So this is where people, I think, are like, this is too big. It's too overwhelming. I don't want to go back. I don't want to deal with hard stuff. I don't want to think about, you know, what I've walked through.

I'll help my kids. But it's exactly what you're saying. We cannot lead our kids where we haven't been. But emotionally numb is more functional than emotionally volatile.

It is to a point, yes. But there's a place in which it will most likely catch up to you. And a lot of times that happens in your closest relationships. Maybe it's your marriage or that type of thing.

But your health. Our body feels trauma. You know, whether it's a capital T trauma or a lowercase t trauma, there's different types of traumas that we experience throughout our lives. Because we're humans.

We live in a fallen world. I believe that therapy is not for crazy people. It is for broken people.

And there's not one of us on the planet that hasn't been broken to some regard. And so don't shy away from that if that's part of your journey. Because we are all about becoming more and more healthy emotionally, spiritually, physically, in every area of our lives.

So that we can be the best we can be for our kids and for the Lord. So aren't some people just kind of relaxed, even keeled? Their emotions are steady and stable. And they get happy and they get sad, but they're just kind of in control.

And other people are kind of like, whoa. You talked about being emotional, right? That's me. Are you just the steady person?

I am. I see that as you. And so if your kids, if you've got five kids, and that's what we had.

If some are emotionally steady and stable and you go, this is what you want. You want your kids to be like this. The ones that are highly volatile, you go, we've got to fix you to be more like, but you're saying that's not the right way to parent.

Well, here's the thing that the child then will typically get the message and I can speak to this. You're too much. You're too dramatic. You're too much. And it's, I have literally said those words to our son.

You're too much. And I realized as they flew out of my mouth, like, what am I speaking over him? And I think what we talk about in this book, right? We're talking about give it a name and then give it to God and ask him what to do with it. I think this is where as parents, it takes all the burden off of us when we want to jump in and fix it. It's not our job. That's God's job. And this is our way to point them to him who created them, who created them with volatile emotions, or a very even-keeled one who's maybe going to be a, I don't know, pilot or something, you know, or one who's going to stand on a stage and be dramatic and it's necessary and it's good and it's their gifting, but it's not something we put in them. It's something he did.

And he's the one who's going to have to coach them through it. And so to continually point them back to the face of God and start to hear his voice for themselves, not mom and dad's voice, that's the goal. And when we do that, we can get to a place in our own lives where, you know, I love baseball. I played baseball.

I was a wrestler. I love nothing more than for my son to do those very things. Right now he's into music and guitars and dancing and singing, which I can't do at all. But I've learned to come to a place where I'm not trying to live my unresolved childhood through him. And I'm instead celebrating who God's created him to be, not mourn who he's not. And I think as parents, a lot of times we hope that our kids are going to turn out a certain way and we end up putting our own agenda on our kids.

And the reality is that the more healthy we are as adults, the more we can step into who God's creating our kids to be and who he, you know, and step into their story and celebrate that. So I'll tell you something that happened on Family Life Today more than a decade ago. We were interviewing Dr. Robertson McQuilken, who was the former president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary, who had stepped down from his role as the president because his wife had developed Alzheimer's and her care had become, so it had required him to be home with her.

He said she is always anxious if I'm not with her and always happy if I am with her, so I must be with her. And I remember him sharing a story about a conflict they had had. This was back before her Alzheimer's had started, but they were in conflict and she was expressing her frustration, her anger, her emotions, her sadness. And he was explaining to her logically why what she was feeling was not how she should be thinking, right, that she was trying to correct the feelings. And in the middle of the conflict, she looked at him and she said, Robertson, logic isn't everything and emotions aren't nothing. And all of us who are wired toward, well, here's how you should be thinking so that your emotions are more normal need to remember emotions aren't nothing. They're a part of the warning system, part of the data base that God's given us to say, what's going on in my life?

I may live more out of my head than I do out of my emotions, but I should be paying attention to what my emotions are telling me because in order to make the right choices, both mind and heart have to speak into that, don't they? And I think as parents we can speak into that. I was with our granddaughter last year as a three-year-old. I have all sons and so there wasn't a lot of drama, but some grease splattered on my face and she started screaming and crying and I thought she got burnt by this grease as we were cooking together. And I took her over to the couch and her parents had said she's pretty dramatic. And so I got over to the couch and I said, what happened?

What's wrong? Did it burn you? And she said, no, but it burnt you. I feel so sad for you. And she's crying so hard. And I realized, I said, oh my goodness, look how empathetic.

And I explained what that word meant. You feel for me. God's giving you the gift of feeling for others and you're compassionate for them.

What a great gift. Whereas if that would have happened with my family growing up, my parents would have said, get control of, in other words, shut down that drama because that's ridiculous. But I like that we can explain that, identify the word, kind of celebrate who they are. But I love the idea of taking it to God because God created us.

He's always celebrating over us and to teach our kids to take it to God first I think is huge. Well, and part of how we do that is by helping them identify what is it I'm feeling. You get out the charts, you get out the book, you read through it again, and you help them give language to be able to identify what is going on in their heart and understand that's not what controls your behavior.

We don't live out of our emotions, but we also acknowledge that that's a part of who we are and who God's made us to be. And guys, I think this is a book that a lot of moms and dads are going to go, this is exactly what we needed to coach us, to guide us. It's not just telling us what to do, it's giving us a tool to do it with our kids. Thank you guys for writing it and thanks for spending time talking with us about it. Thank you guys. You guys are a gift.

Absolutely. That makes me feel happy. Which picture on the chart are you doing? We've got copies of the book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order the book, What Am I Feeling? Helping kids learn to manage big feelings and little bodies. Go to familylifetoday.com to get your copy of the book or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title of the book is What Am I Feeling? And you can order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Well, I hope whatever your children's emotions have been here on this Christmas Day, they have been good emotions. I hope all of us have experienced the love and the joy and the peace that comes from remembering what this day is really all about.

I hope that's been part of your experience or will be part of your experience as the day goes on. Hope you have a Merry Christmas, and I hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. And I hope you can join us on Monday when Pastor Dean and Sarah will be with us to talk about what he calls unsaved Christians. He'll explain what he means when we get together on Monday, so I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.