Growing With Grace - Importance of Emotional Intelligence

Hello and welcome to Growing with Grace video episode number four. This is part of a video series that I'm doing because I want to talk to people about what it was like to be a child of the 70s. My name is James Moffat, and I'll be your host. Conversations that help parents build healthier relationships with their adult children. No shame, no blame, just wisdom, healing, and hope for the journey. In this episode, I'm going to talk about emotions we feel and how those emotions control us. Let's talk about emotional intelligence and how we can stop reacting to emotions and reframe them into something more constructive to ourselves and our adult children. So, core themes, replacing fear with connection. Replacing fear with connection means moving away from reacting to people, situations or emotions from a place of anxiety, control, defensiveness, or isolation. And instead of responding with understanding, relationship, honesty, and presence. Let me repeat that. Replacing fear with connection means moving away from reacting to people, situations or emotions from a place of anxiety, control, defensiveness or isolation. Instead, let's respond with understanding relationship, honesty, and presence. It shows up in a lot of ways. Instead of fearing conflict, you stay connected through conversation. Instead of controlling your adult child out of worry, you choose relationship over pressure. Instead of withdrawing when hurt, you lean into honest conversation or communication. Instead of assuming rejection, you seek understanding. Instead of parenting through panic, you parent through trust and connection. In parenting adult children, for example, often sounds like what if they fail? What if they stop talking to me? What if I'm no longer needed? Connection sounds more like how can I stay emotionally available? How can I listen without fixing? How do I protect the relationship even though we disagree? It doesn't mean fear disappears, it means fear no longer gets to drive the relationship. You could also frame it this way. Fear pushes people apart. Connection keeps people human to each other. Or fear asks how do I protect myself? Connection asks how do we stay close and honest? That phrase works especially well in conversations about parenting, marriage, grief, faith, or emotional healing because it speaks to choosing a relationship over reaction. Learning emotional vocabulary. Learning emotional vocabulary means developing the ability to accurately identify and name and express what you're actually feeling instead of using vague or surface level words. A lot of people grow up with only a few emotional terms Mad, sad, stressed, fine. But underneath mad might actually be rejected, embarrassed, powerless, disappointed, ignored, betrayed. And underneath stressed might be overwhelmed, anxious, emotionally exhausted, afraid of failure, mentally overloaded. The more emotionally specific you become, the better you can communicate with others, understand yourself, regulate reactions, build healthier relationships, avoid emotional shutdown or explosive responses. For example, instead of saying I'm angry at my adult child, emotional vocabulary might help you realize I'm actually hurt, afraid for them, and feeling disconnected. That changes the conversation completely. It's especially important in parents, marriage, grief, leadership, and faith conversations because many conflicts are really misunderstood emotions hiding beneath the defensiveness or silence. A simple way to describe it might be emotional vocabulary is learning the language of what's happening inside of you. Or you can't communicate emotions you don't know how to name. Or even many people were taught how to behave, but never taught how to describe what they feel. I remember when I was growing up as a child in the 70s, I I never was taught how to describe how they I felt. My feelings, my emotions, were not even on the table. They were not even considered. All my parents were looking for was performance and for following their rules and being the child that they expected me to be. Being perfect. Reparenting yourself. Now this is a tough conversation because, well, if you're in your sixties like I am, reparenting yourself seems kind of silly. It seems like, what's the point? Actually, you should be doing this all during your parenthood journey, right? If you if you drug emotional baggage into your parenthood journey, um you were not able to communicate effectively with your children with with love, with grace, with mercy. So reparenting yourself means giving yourself as an adult the emotional support, guidance, boundaries, compassion, and care you may not have consistently received growing up. What does that look like? Well, that could look like going to your pastor and talking to him about how you feel and how your childhood of the 70s affected you and how it has made you the person you are today. Self-care could be calling 211 for United Way and finding out if there are any relationship therapists or marriage therapists or somebody that you can go to to do the hard work. So care you may not have consistently received growing up. It's the process of learning healthier ways to talk to yourself, regulate emotions, handle conflict, meet emotional needs, feel safe, create stability, practice self-worth. It doesn't necessarily mean your parents were bad people. Sometimes parents love deeply, but lacked emotional tools themselves. Examples of reparenting yourself would be learning to calm yourself instead of spiraling in panic, setting boundaries instead of people pleasing, allowing yourself to rest without guilt, speaking to yourself with kindness instead of shame. I'm gonna stop right there. Speaking to yourself with kindness instead of shame. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Sometimes we judge ourselves more harshly than the world does. Sometimes we tell ourselves negative thoughts, we speak negativity into our own lives. When in fact, that's not the truth. You know, the the voice within might be telling you you're worthless. It might be telling you you're not gonna ever amount to anything. It might tell you you're a failure. It might tell you you're a bad parent. It might tell you that you're not you're not going to be able to parent your children the way you want to. It might be telling you that your kids are just going to grow up to be failures. It might be telling you that your mistakes in the past are going to be passed down to then your your children's generation. So I'm here to tell you you can change that. You can decide to do different. You can change your world. You can change how you talk to yourself. You can speak positivity into your own life. There's always hope. A lot of adults discover. Oh yeah, speaking to yourself with kindness instead of shame, learning that mistakes don't make you worthless, giving yourself permission to feel emotions instead of suppressing them. A lot of adults discover they still carry messages from childhood like don't cry, don't be needy, keep everyone happy. Your value comes from achievement. Conflict means rejection. Do these sound familiar? Don't cry, don't be needy. Keep everyone happy. Do you know how impossible it is to keep everybody happy? My happiness is dependent upon upon me and what I think and how I feel about myself and how I feel about my world, my worldview. Okay? It's not our job to keep everyone happy. It's not your job to keep your wife happy. It's not your job to keep your son or daughter happy. It's not your job to keep your grandchildren happy. We have to we have to find that happiness within ourselves. Reparenting is slowly replacing those messages with healthier ones. A simple way to explain it is reparenting yourself means becoming the kind of safe, healthy inner guide you may not have had growing up. Or it's learning to care for yourself emotionally the way a healthy parent would care for a child. In faith-based conversations, some people also connect reparenting with healing, grace, identity, and learning to see themselves through compassion rather than shame. Let me repeat that. In faith-based conversations, some people also connect reparenting with healing, grace, identity, and learning to see yourself through compassion rather than shame. None of us are perfect. Not one of us. We're all human, we all make mistakes, we all carry baggage, we have skeletons in the closet, we have shame, we have regrets. So what do you do about that? Do you allow your past to reshape your future or form your future? Or do you want to do something about it? Sometimes all we can do about shame and regret and mistakes that we made in the past is to forgive ourselves and to learn from our mistakes and do better. We have to learn how to forgive ourselves of our mistakes and learn how to do better. So choosing grace over control. Choosing grace over control means deciding to respond to people with compassion, patience, understanding, and humility instead of trying to force outcomes, manage behavior, or hold everything tightly together. Control is usually driven by fear. Fear of failure, fear of losing someone, fear of chaos, fear of being hurt, fear of uncertainty. Grace says I can love someone without controlling them. I can allow people to grow through mistakes. I can release unrealistic expectations. I don't have to manage every outcome. Grace says I can love someone without controlling them. That means you can love your children without controlling their behavior. You can love your children despite the fact that they may go against your wishes. They may go out into the world and decide to drink and drive, take drugs, do all manner of silliness, right? You taught them better, you've educated them and told them the dangers of doing those things. But brace yourself, it's going to happen. You can't control them. You spent 18 years educating them and molding them into the adult that you want them to be. And now you've got to let them go. Now you have to let them go out into the world and make some bad decisions. And mom and dad, all you can hope and pray is that those bad decisions don't have lifelong consequences. I can allow people to grow through mistakes. Don't be a helicopter parent. You can't hover over your adult children. Stop texting them fifteen times a day. Stop calling them and leaving voicemails fifteen or twenty times a day. Give them the space to be adults. Give them the space to create their own identity and their own world. I can release unrealistic expectations. Let's talk about that one. I think sometimes as parents, we have unrealistic expectations in that you want them to follow your footsteps. As a child of the seventies, many parents implemented or imposed their will on their children. Well, I'm an attorney or I'm a doctor. My dad was a TV man. He wanted to pass along his TV shop to me. He wanted me to follow in his foot's footsteps. Well, that was the furthest thing from my mind. I didn't want to be a TV man. I didn't want to work from six at night until one in the morning fixing broken TVs instead of being around my family, watching my kids grow, working a full-time job before you do that. Unrealistic expectations places a burden on your adult children that they don't need. Let those things go. They are unique unto themselves. They're a unique creation of God, and God has a purpose for their lives. You may not know what that purpose is, but if you sit back and watch, you're probably going to see your children, your adult children, grow and blossom and become the person that they're supposed to be. To let them do that. I don't have to manage every outcome. It's not our job to fix our kids' problems. It's not our job to enable bad behavior. It's our job to be present, emotionally present. It's our job to be a safe haven. It's our job to not judge our children, our adult children when they come to us. It's our job to show them grace and mercy, and to be a mentor and a supporter, and to be vulnerable and to be transparent, and tell them about times in your life that you made stupid mistakes and how it affected you and how you had to grow and learn through it. In parenting adult children, this can look like giving advice without demanding obedience, allowing natural consequences instead of rescuing, listening more and lecturing less, keeping a relationship open even during disagreement. Control often sounds like you need to do this my way. If I don't fix this, everything will fall apart. I have to keep everyone happy. There's that happiness again. No, stop it. You are not the happiness machine. When your adult children walk into the room, they're not going to automatically just become happy because of who you are. I have to keep everybody happy. No. That's an unrealistic expectation that you as a parent have set for yourself. So give yourself a break and let that go. It's not your job to make everybody happy. Grace sounds more like I trust that growth takes time. I can love you even when I disagree. My role is connection, not control. Grace sounds more like I trust that growth takes time. I can love you even when I disagree. My role is connection, not control. Now I repeated that twice because I thought it was very important. What does grace sound like? Choosing grace does not mean becoming passive, tolerating abuse. You're not a doormat for your children. If your children live in your house and you have rules and boundaries set up for the betterment and for the enjoyment and for the support of everybody involved, you have the right to expect your adult children to follow those ground rules, to respect your boundaries. And you do not have to take abuse. You don't have to be their doormat. Let's just say they have a problem with controlling their temper, emotional regulation. Those things tend to surface in abusive mannerisms. So don't tolerate it, don't allow it. You're not their doormat. Choosing grace does not mean becoming passive, tolerating abuse, abandoning boundaries, avoiding hard conversations. As a mentor and as a support person, sometimes we have to manage conflict. Sometimes you're going to receive pushback from your adult child. Sometimes they're going to throw your past into your face. Sometimes they're going to go, well, look at what you did when you were younger. You got arrested for drunk driving. Why can't I get arrested for drunk driving? Do you realize how ridiculous that just sounded? Yes, as parents, we made mistakes. And yes, we had to learn from those mistakes. And yes, we had to grow up. Well, your adult children are going to have to do the same thing. They're going to make mistakes, and they're going to have to live through that. They're going to have to live through the consequences of their mistakes. What did my dad tell me when I was growing up? Think about what you're fixing to do before you do it. Feel free to steal that from me. Think about what you're fixing to do before you do it. Why is that important? Well, because there are consequences to every the decision that we make. There are consequences. Sometimes those consequences can be life-altering and lifelong. So instill that in your children. If you haven't done it yet, do it now. Think about what you're fixing to do before you do it. Choosing grace does not mean becoming passive, tolerating abuse, abandoning boundaries, avoiding hard conversations. Sometime we're going to have to have a hard conversation. Sometime you're just going to have to look at your adult child and go, you know, I raised you better than this. It's not your not that you're throwing your parenting in their face, but when they come to you and tell you about some ridiculous conversation that they had or some some action that they took despite what you've taught them as a child and as a grown adult, when they decide to do that, that's on them. That's not on you as a parent. You're not responsible for that. They are responsible for that. So don't let them pawn that off on you. And don't avoid the hard conversations because your adult children need to know the truth. Deliver truth and love, be compassionate, be graceful, be merciful. But sometimes you You gotta tell the truth. And sometimes truth hurts. So grace can still be truthful and firm, it just isn't driven by domination, panic, or manipulation. A concise way to say it, control tries to force change. Grace creates space for growth. Grace releases the need to manage people and chooses relationship instead. Choosing grace over control means trusting that love often works better than pressure. So in your conversations with your adult children through the week, you might find yourself being a sounding board. You may find yourself being quiet and listening to your adult child speak. Listen to them talk through their mistakes. Or listen to them be in total denial. Right? So grace creates space for growth. That means that your adult child's gonna have to learn on their own. Life is a wonderful teacher. I can look back in my late 20s and early 30s and tell you that stupidity and not thinking about what you are fixing to do before you do it causes you to make some stupid mistakes. And then you have to live through the consequences of those mistakes. I.e., oh, I didn't pay my car note on time. And the tow truck came and took it away from me. Probably by the time the tow truck shows up, you've missed several payments. Or I didn't pay my light bill. The electricity got shut off. Or I spent my money on weed and alcohol, and now I don't have food for the rest of the week. Or I didn't pay rent on time and they they slapped me with a fine, a late fee that I don't have. So when your kids come to you and tell you those things, you can be graceful, you can show them mercy, you can show them compassion, you can show them grace, and you can say, hey, I've done that before. Even if you haven't done that before, you can say, Well, I'm sorry that this has happened. But how are we going to grow from this? What mistake did you make that you need to make some changes? Help them to see the error of their way. Don't judge them, don't control them, don't try to rescue them, don't pay their rent, don't pay their car note, don't pay their car insurance. I can't tell you how many times on some of these parenting support groups that I'm in, a part of, a moderator. I can't tell you how many times I've heard about parents paying for their children's mistakes. Well, little Johnny wound up in jail for drunk driving. I had to go pay his bell money so that he can he can get out of jail. Maybe little Johnny needs to stay in jail for a week, or maybe longer, so he can get his head straight and so he can come face to face with the reality of his mistakes. When we are helicopter parents and we we hover around our adult children and we fix all of their problems, we're enabling bad behavior. We're enabling bad decision making. I like the couple of statements that Denzel Washington makes uh during some of his equalizer movies. One of them is progress not perfection. Progress, not perfection. We have to make progress. Your adult children have to make progress. We can't expect them to be perfect because we're not perfect. So don't put that on them. But you can expect progress. You can expect them to learn from their bad mistakes. And another thing that he says in his movies is if you can be whoever you want to be, especially here in America, you can be whomever you decide you want to be. And if your world that you're in, your worldview or your world circumstances doesn't allow you to be that person, change your world. Let me say that again. Your children, your adult children, need to be able to take a healthy look at where they're at. Physically, emotionally, spiritually. They need to be able to take a healthy look, have a healthy perspective of what their world is. And if they don't like their world, then they need to change it. Stop making stupid decisions. Baby steps. You as a parent, as a supporter, as a mentor, you have the ability to help them change their world. Not by paying their rent or their car note or their car insurance or their or their mortgage. But you have the ability to be a safe haven, a safe space that they can come to, and you can help them change their world. You can give them suggestions, not control, but you can say, hey, so you're an alcoholic or you're a drug addict. What about you getting some help? What about going to rehab? What about instead of spending your rent money on drugs or alcohol, maybe you should pay your rent. That way you can keep a roof over your head. It's just small things, baby steps, right? So I hope that some of this is helpful or useful for you. Maybe you need to listen to this a couple of times. Maybe you need to take notes. But there's hope. There's hope for you as a parent through reparenting, through self-care, and there's hope for your adult children. They can change their world. They can make progress. And the end goal of progress is not perfection. The end goal of progress is them becoming the man or the woman that they need to be. Changing their world. All we can do is change our world one step at a time, right? So thanks for spending this time with me on Growing with Grace. If today's conversation encouraged you or gave you something to think about, I'd love for you to stay connected. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Share this with other parents who might need it, and keep growing with us. Remember, it's never too late to heal, to listen, or to love with grace. I will see you in the next episode. Remember, subscribe to the channel, leave comments on the episodes that you're watching. If you're getting something out of it, let me know. Please share this episode with friends and family so they too can learn how to grow in grace. Alright? Thank you for listening. Thank you for the privilege of your time. And we'll talk to you later.