Ep #167: When Stress Steals Your Clarity: How to Come Home to Yourself

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who want to move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly want to be. My name's Mikki Gardner. I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, we'll get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to be here with you. It might sound a little different today because I'm out walking 18 holes, pulling my kid while he's on a golf tournament with what I do a lot of the time now here in the summer and in that I am really learning to by all perfection. I always want this podcast to be really perfect for you guys and exactly what you need to hear. And I try to always do it in a quiet setting and with all the rules of podcasting. You know what I thought? Screw it. I'm just going to talk to you because I want to talk to you straight. I want to be real. I'll tell you the truth. And here's the thing will be the truth in your life in a lot of ways, and I will say over the past few months, I mean years really, but the past few months, something has been coming alive inside of me.

I'm realizing with real clarity and conviction that I'm here to tell the truth first and foremost to myself, then to the people I love, and then to the world to each of you. And I'm here to walk with women who are ready to do the same thing. They might not know what's next in their marriage or their motherhood, but they know that the quiet ache of not knowing is really all consuming and they're ready to start telling the truth. And a lot of things are going to be shifting here in my life. They already have been. Every single relationship of mine is shifting dramatically like foundational shift because I've just started telling the truth. I'm not lying anymore. I'm not holding secrets. I'm not carrying other people's sweat. In doing so, it's been a rocky road, it's been a lot of heartache. There's been a lot of hard conversations and there's been a lot of beauty and freedom.

And so today that's where I'm coming from. And I wanted to talk to you about what's been coming up for me a lot, which is just learning how to manage the stress and the demands because I'll share more as it unfolds because it's too much in the uncertainty phase right now. But literally everything in my life, potentially in the next couple months is shifting. And while there's excitement, while there's trepidation, while there's concern, while there's uncertainty, there's a lot of stress that comes with that. And stress can be healthy, it can be negative, it can help us build resilience and it can take us down. And so what I've really been working on managing, while I'm telling the truth more, while I'm trying to navigate motherhood and business and school and relationships and all the things that starts with really managing my own stress, managing my own nervous system so that I can make it through the days empowered, resilient, with the capacity to be able to meet the demands.

And stress really is when you have more demands than you have resources. And so what we want to do is really look at how can I start to build a life that can sustain me, that can help me move forward, that can help me take care of ones that I love, that can help me show up and really walk with my kids on this journey. I had littles when I first got divorced. And listen, I remember those days of how hard it is when you're all alone and you're trying to just manage keeping the littles alive and safe. That's our job. And as they grow older, it's different. It's even more consuming in some ways because now I'm watching this young man really go for his dreams, setting himself up, taking on challenges, all of the things. And my job is to support him, not both smoking his ass, tell him what to do, not helicopter, really just to be present, to walk the journey with him, to be that soft space for angel land.

Things don't go his way. And listen, I'm learning so many life lessons on calls course here because sometimes you get a bad bounce, sometimes you land out of bounce, sometimes it goes in the water and you get a penalty, but it's what you do next. So that's what I wanted to talk to you about today. And specifically I'm talking to you, you who frankly is the woman who has everything held together for everybody else. That's what I've literally been living my life doing is keeping everybody else's life comfortable, intact. And you know what? I don't want to do it anymore. It's too heavy a burden. It's not my job to keep my ex-husband relationship with place. It's not my job to make sure that his partner is feeling good and happy about everything. It's not my job to make sure that my kid is happy at all times.

My job is to manage me, to tell the truth, to be honest. And that's really where I've come to. And maybe you're can relate with that. Maybe you're burned out from trying to quote do it all right. Maybe you're wondering, is this how life is going to feel lonely, disconnected? Is it always going to feel this hard? Really? Does it have to be this hard? Listen, I know you're not naive, and I know you've done the work. You've probably done therapy, you've done the reading, you're smart and you're sensitive and you read from your heart. But I also know you might be feeling really stuck, stuck in the relationship, maybe stuck between staying and leaving and not knowing where to go. Maybe you're stuck between self abandonment and a terrifying idea of choosing yourself. Well, I see you because I was her. I was self abandoning for so many years without even knowing it.

And that's what telling the truth really means to me now. It means stepping in and being honest. And I had to start telling myself the truth that I was burning the candle at both ends because I was trying to keep everybody else happy. I was so busy trying to keep every plate in the air, make everything look good, not have any issues, keep everything comfortable in the outside for everybody else to do the right thing, to say the right thing, all of those things. And I'm so tired. I was so tired of living in that way because ultimately I didn't know what I wanted. And that's where I had to start is really start to look at all of the stress that was on me, the overwhelm, the burnout that I was experiencing. I could blame everybody around me. Sure, that's totally valid. A lot of people do that.

But you know what happens when we do that? Nothing changes. Other people just go on and enjoy the fruits of our labor. And that's really where we have to start to shift. And that's where I work with women because I've been there. I've been doing this work a long time. I've been co-parenting for over 12 years. And a lot of those years we're just by the skin of my, the scrappiness, the fingers, clenched the tight grip, trying to keep it all together. And as I get older and as I've experienced more and more things, I just realize that when I do that, the person that falls into bed at night me and put my head on the, I'm tired. I'm wondering, is this really it? Is this all there is? Is this what my entire life is going to look like? And I don't want it to be that.

I want it to be, I'm not going to say easy, but to slow with more ease, to be able to enjoy life as it comes in the moments without all the stress and the drama that I'm adding. Because when other people add enough stress and drama to our lives, it's really about how do we start to take care of ourselves to not keep adding to that pile, and that's when the stress comes in. Stress is negative when there is more demand than there are resources. So again, we can focus on changing everyone around us, but it's not going to change anything. What we have to really start to do is look at the foundation by adding more resources to ourselves to increase our capacity, to reduce the stress. We can't change the other people. So here's my advice, stop wasting your time. That's what I came to.

I'm like, why am I wasting my time fighting, not telling the truth to anybody, let alone myself? So I started telling myself the truth a little bit more. I started to get really honest. Where was I adding more mess and more stress in my life by not telling others what was actually going on, or by not being honest about what I need, even to myself telling myself I could do it all. I can't. I'm only human, right? Just like you and I was feeling so much anxiety and anxiety really is when we are only seeing part of the issue. That's actually where the root comes from. And anxiety is, it means part. So when I'm feeling really, really anxious, I realize I'm only seeing a small part, my part, and I'm feeling disconnected from source. I'm feeling disconnected from God who can see all of it from that bigger, wider power in your life, whether you call it God, universe, source, right?

It's that bigger picture where everything is connected, everything is okay because it all comes from the source, which is love. So I realized with my anxiety, what I have to do is start allowing myself to let go to surrender, to focus on what I can control, allow and process my feelings so that they lose the power over me. When I let my feelings run the show, I'm powerless and it's really stepping in. So here's what I know to be true, at least for me, and maybe this resonates from with you, but a few years ago, I had an accident. I think I've talked about it here probably several times, probably a couple of years ago. You can listen to those episodes and hear it, but my dog took me out and shattered my knee. It literally shattered it to the extent that there was no bottom part of my knee left.

So it took 11 days for them to diagnose it. And if you haven't read, the Body Keeps the Score. It's a phenomenal book, really dense, but really interesting and informative about how literally every experience kind of lives in our bodies and our job is really to process those. But when I had this trauma to my knee, I think shattered a lot of other things inside of me and broke loose a lot of stuff going on. And I started to really look at myself, my life, my relationships in a different light. And granted, that was a few years ago, but what it took me on was a journey of starting to really look at what does my body need? What is going on with my internal nervous system? Because I can get on this podcast and give you affirmations and tell you mindset tricks and ways to change our brains.

There's so much science around it, and it's amazing, and I've done a lot of episodes on that, and I love that I can also help you process your feelings, tell you ways to safely process and learn to feel your feelings. You know what? That's absolutely a requirement. It's not something we should do. It's a requirement. Here's what I come to understand. It's that we can't shift and process our emotions and our feelings. We can't shift and process our mindset and our thoughts until we have really started to build a more solid, safe, nervous system, right? Because our nervous system is running the show all of the time in the background. We talk about fight or flight. That can happen in big ways and it can happen in small ways. And over the past few years, I've gotten certified as a somatic coach. I've done a lot of somatic healing in my own body, a lot of energy work, and it's really taught me that the key to leading in our lives differently, the key to being more honest with ourselves, to being able to tell the truth to ourselves and to others, requires a safe nervous system.

One that has the resources and the capacity to meet the demands of our lives. And when we are under-resourced, our only job in that moment is to find more resourced. What does that mean in practical terms? When we are triggered, we are completely activated from something going on. Our only job in that moment isn't to run around trying to change it. It's simply to help ourselves get to a more neutral state so that we can get our feelings and our thinking brain online so that we can make choices that are intentional, that are aligned with the direction we want to go. But as long as our nervous system is triggered, activated living in fight or flight, we are living in a stress response and we can't make any change from there. And that's the place where when we live from there, we're just looking at changing everybody around us.

We think everybody else is the issue. And granted, I'm not minimizing or saying that they aren't. They probably very well are, right? They're systemic, large issues at play, right? Racism, sexism, patriarchy. There's a lot of things out there, but we don't have control over those things. What you do have control over is you, your body, your nervous system, what is happening intentionally. So we've got to stop wasting our time focusing on doing other people and focus and where your power is, and come home to that learning to reduce our anxiety by connecting resource, connecting with breath, connecting with stillness, because it's when we can get to that place of stillness, focusing on our breath, resourcing our body to where it needs to be and what it needs to, that's when we're able to allow and process feelings so that we can connect with the vast capacity that you have inside of you because you have so much power inside of you.

It's from this place that we can start to step into curiosity and watch as clarity arises. And listen, most people are going to hear this and be like, yeah, Nikki, I'm not interested in all that. I just want the quick fix. I get it. I've been there, and this isn't the podcast episode for you, but if this is resonating with you and you're ready to build a foundation where you are really being resourced and resource yourself in a way that you are able to change the direction of what's going on for you, that's the conversation I want to have with you. That's the conversation I want to start to have more else because that's what I'm doing here in my own life. I don't know what's coming next. I mean, like I said, everything might shift and it's going to be a month or so until I know. But in the meantime, the only thing I can do is continue to focus on what I have control over, which is resourcing myself, showing up for those that I love, including myself from a soul aligned place, really loving myself and others. And that comes in the present moment.

I dunno, I hope that this resonated with you. I hope that you can hear something here that you're like, yeah, Mickey, I'm ready. I'm ready to come home to this and I'm creating something really special. And when I have it, I will share it. I really want to create more of a container and more conversation here where you and I can just exhale, where we can feel, where we can unravel, and where we can rechoose. So you can rechoose at any moment your life, right? From a place of clarity and power and peace. I want it to be an intimate space, a deep space, a brave space, so that all of us can really enjoy that. So in the meantime, what I hope for you is that you take a minute to pause, really sink into the moment and ask yourself, where am I not telling the truth? So I want you to ask yourself, where are you lying to yourself? Where are you pretending that everything is fine? But frankly it's not. What's the truth about how you feel? What you want to change and what you feel ready to change this summer? This could be your time to really get on, start telling yourself the truth, to let it be messy, to let it be clarifying, to let it be healing.

We're often so afraid of telling the truth because we feel like it's going to blow our entire life up. Telling the truth doesn't have to blow your life up, but you do need to stop gaslighting yourself. And that's what I realized. I have been gaslighting myself for so long saying things were fine when they weren't telling myself I could do things and that I could just get through. I didn't think I needed to. And so that's where we land and that's what I want to offer you today, is really sit with it for a few minutes. We don't have to have an answer. We don't have to have a plan. It's just to get honest with ourselves. Where am I lying? Where do I want to tell the truth? What do I want to show every and what do I need? Just asking yourself by today, what do I need?

And whatever the answer is, what is one little way that you could give it to yourself? Alright, my friend, more to come later. In the meantime, DM me or shoot me an email. And if you want to have a conversation, if you're ready to create a foundation that is unshakeable and you need some support in the meantime, don't on break your call with me. Let's have a conversation. Let's figure out a way that you can spend this summer really supporting yourself, whether that's staying in your marriage, whether that's getting a divorce, whether that's learning how to co-parent differently, wherever you're at. Let's have that conversation because I know that this journey isn't meant for us to walk alone, and my job and my mission is really to support women wholeheartedly as they start to walk. I realize that my job is really to be here, to walk with women who are in that quiet ache of not knowing what to do next, whether it's in their life, their marriage, their motherhood, but they're ready to come home to themselves. And if you're ready to come home, I'm here to welcome you. Sending you so much love and many blessings. Have a beautiful week.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff. This podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or the qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit coparentingwithconfidence.com . I'll see you next week.