Why Collisions Are Inevitable for Ambitious Moms with Brooke Farrell
Links mentioned in today’s episode:
Connect With Brooke: brooke@unifyfamilies.com
Find Brooke on Psychology Today
IFS Resources:
Books: “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz & “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For” by Richard Schwartz
YouTube Video: “What is IFS Therapy?” by Dr. Tori Olds
You're running your business and your family on one nervous system, and when work and motherhood collide, your body usually feels it first. In this episode, I'm sitting down with the therapist who walked with me through the hardest part of my story, to talk about what a collision actually feels like on the inside and how to come back to yourself when one hits.
Brooke Farrell is a private practice therapist who works with individuals, families, and moms using internal family systems (IFS) and polyvagal theory. She's also a mom to twin girls and shares her very own collision she recently experienced in motherhood.
Brooke explains IFS in plain language: the idea that two parts of you can pull in opposite directions while both wanting something good. We get into what happens in your nervous system when you ignore collisions for too long, and why even your best plans fall apart the moment you're flooded by these emotions.
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Inside Out”, the explanation of IFS may seem familiar, and it’s a good visual for us to refer to here. Brooke shares with us that naming these emotions while they’re happening and asking the loudest part to wait in the “waiting room”, can help your nervous system regulate.
Experiencing collisions as an ambitious mom is inevitable when operating both business and motherhood on one nervous system, but this episode walks you through ways to help you find regulation when one comes up. Take a deep breath, hit play, and then send this to a mom friend that may also need to hear this.
Running Business and Family on One Nervous System
Most weeks on this show, we look at collision points from the outside: the calendar, the logistics, the week that falls apart. Today we're going inside. Every collision point happens in one body, on one nervous system, and nervous system regulation for moms is something almost none of us were taught.
Brooke Farrell has been my therapist for three years, and I've trusted her with some of the hardest parts of my story. Today she's here to walk through what a collision feels like from the inside, and how to come back to yourself when one hits.
Defining Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is a way of understanding that we aren't just one part. We have lots of parts to us, and sometimes those parts want different things, they sometimes clash, and some will get louder than the rest at different times. No matter what, every part is trying to protect us and keep us safe. Underneath them all is what IFS calls “Self”: the calm, compassionate, curious version of you that you were born with and that can't be destroyed.
If you have ever watched the movie, Inside Out or Inside Out 2, this may start to feel familiar to you. Joy, Sadness, Anxiety – all of those characters are “parts”. By the end of the movie, the main character Riley, learns to hold all of her emotions, all of her parts, with compassion. When watching this movie through an IFS lens, it teaches us that all parts of us are good – they want what is best for us and to keep us safe.
In a collision, one part of you wants to care for your child, and another wants to keep the commitments you made to your business. Both want something good, which is exactly why it can feel so overwhelming.
Brooke shares that sometimes, while these parts have the intention to help us, they are running on old information – something that happened to us earlier in our life – and that information is no longer helpful in the present day. For example, the strategies that made you successful before kids stopped working after. Just because a collision keeps happening doesn't mean that's simply how it has to be. You have to pause long enough to ask whether this way of working is still working for you.
When Collisions Hit the Body
Brooke explains that under ongoing demands, our bodies keep releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Our body is not able to resolve this large amount of stress hormones and eventually, that starts to show up physically. For me, it ended up being recurring hives. I wasn’t pausing and listening to my body, instead I kept pushing until my body had to get loud enough for me to listen.
The goal isn't to be regulated 100% of the time, that’s unrealistic. The goal is flexibility, being able to move in and out of stress and knowing how to find your way back to calm.
Name The Part and Send it to the Waiting Room
If a part is trying to get your attention, give yourself a moment to pause and then name it. Decipher which part of you is trying to get your attention. If you can't deal with a part at that moment, Brooke suggests asking it to wait in the waiting room. You'll still need to come back to it later, but it keeps all your parts from flooding you at once.
Remove The Pressure
When you start to feel a collision rising, say it out loud or in your head: "I'm feeling flooded right now," or "This feels hard because it is hard." Brooke shares that by acknowledging this and naming it, it takes some of the pressure off of believing you should be fine. If you’re able to, another step further would then be to talk with someone about it. When we do that, it can be freeing and release an immediate pressure from ourselves.
Coming Up Next on the Podcast
Next week, I'm talking with my friend Emily Fortune about whether balance is even the right thing to chase in ambitious motherhood, and what it looks like to aim for focus instead. If this excites you, stay tuned and be sure to follow the show!
Quote of the Episode
“Our body, our systems will get loud enough in some way to get our attention.”
Brooke Farrell
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