The internal scream

I used to think of myself as calm and in control.

Voice level. House tidy. Snacks in the bag before anyone got hangry. I could de-escalate a meltdown in the supermarket without anyone else even clocking it was happening. I was good at it. I was, by every visible measure, regulated.

Except I wasn't. I was performing regulated. There's a difference, and it took me years and a daughter who point-blank refused to buy the performance, to understand what that difference actually costs.

I sat down recently and actually wrote out the rules I'd been running my whole life without ever choosing them. Not values. Rules. The ones that got installed early, that I never once questioned, that I thought were just "how you're a good woman, a good wife, a good mother." Turns out every single one of them was quietly, relentlessly anxiety-inducing. Not just for me. For my children.

Children are exceptionally good at detecting incongruence  the gap between what your face and voice are doing and what your body is actually doing underneath. Long before they can name a feeling, they're reading breath rate, muscle tension, the micro-tightening around your eyes, the half-second delay before you answer. Their stress response system doesn't sync to your words. It syncs to your actual state. When the two don't match, their threat-detection system doesn't relax. It sharpens. So the calmer I tried to perform, the harder she searched for the crack in it.

Here's my list.

Rule 1: You have to speak nicely to be heard.

I spent years managing my tone and my message. Always soft. Always palatable. Because somewhere along the way I learned that if I wasn't nice, I wouldn't be listened to at all.

Anxiety inducing because: it left me trying to manage everyone else's emotional response to me. So I tiptoed. Around her. Around everyone.

New rule: Nice, no. Kind, always. Your emotions are not mine to manage.

Rule 2: I'm not allowed to say no for fear of upsetting someone.

My body would feel the no immediately  that tightening, that pull back. And my mouth would say yes anyway.

Anxiety inducing because: living like that is living inauthentically, and my body knew it even when I overrode it. This isn't a small thing either, this kind of chronic self-override has been linked in research to higher autoimmune risk in women. The body keeps score of every no it wasn't allowed to say.

New rule: Notice when I feel it's a no. And learn how to say it.

Rule 3: Listen to other people's opinions above my own.

Everyone else's read on the situation mattered more than my own instinct. The parenting book. The other mum. The relative with an opinion.

Anxiety inducing because: it ignores your intuition, over and over, until you stop trusting it's even there.

New rule: Trust my instinct, and listen only to those who have walked, or are walking, the same path.

Rule 4: Put others' needs before my own, because wanting my own is selfish and I don't have time.

Everyone got fed, considered, accommodated. I was last on my own list, most days I wasn't on it at all.

Anxiety inducing because: my needs went unmet, and unmet needs don't just quietly disappear. They calcify. I became resentful - quietly, not always consciously, but it was there.

New rule: My needs matter too. And I can't give what I don't have.

Rule 5: It's my job to keep the peace in my family.

If everyone was calm, I'd done my job. If anyone was upset, that was on me to fix.

Anxiety inducing because: it's an impossible task. You cannot manage other people. Trying to left me feeling permanently out of control, chasing a peace I could never actually secure because it was never mine to hold in the first place.

New rule: It's my job to work on my own response and model what I want to receive  not judge others.

Rule 6: Hide difficult moments from the world and pretend everything is fine.

The performance had to be seamless. Nobody could see the cracks.

Anxiety inducing because: shame loves a dark corner. The more I hid, the more power the hiding had.

New rule: The more open I am, the more it helps me, and others.

This is a list of ways I was trained and it worked, by every external measure. It got me the career, the reputation, the sense of having it together. It was just never built for this part of motherhood, because this part asks for the opposite skill: not managing how you appear, but actually inhabiting how you feel.

I didn't set out to fix her anxiety. I set out to stop abandoning myself. And I realise now  she was reading my every move, all along. The safer I felt in the world, the safer she did.

Changing six rules didn't just change me. It changed both of our lives.

You are the intervention. Not a strategy for her - you, leading the change.

The Leadership Method Self Led - last chance to purchase at the current price.

— Laura & Emma
The Emotions Lab