The Childhood Trauma Most Parents Never Realize They’re Passing Down | Bryan Post | Ep. 158

Introduction to Parenting and Trauma 0:00

Parenting is just an energetic exchange with your child. It's not what you say. it's how you feel when you're doing and saying it. What's the hardest truth about parenting that most people struggle to actually accept? It is stressful. We have framed parenting as a responsibility that's supposed to bring you so much joy, but it doesn't. A Healthy Point of View operated show bringing experts from all over the world to talk about health, wellness, beauty, and mindset. Today we have Brian Post. Brian!

Brian is a child behavior expert, bestselling author, founder of Fear to Love and Bondify.ai and one of America's leading voices in trauma responsive parenting. Today, he continues to help parents build stronger families through trust, compassion and connection. Percentage wise, how many parents out there discipline their children with some form of trauma. Probably 70 percent. This was in the late 80s. It estimated that 90 percent of adults believe it's okay to hit a child two years older or older.

You know we're in trouble because that's all. We launched a platform called Bondify. Tell me more about that. Bondify is the parenting support you needed. Bondifi is programmed with my large language model, which is 30 years of experience, books, videos, everything. Would you say it's critical for someone before parenting to try to heal a lot of those childhood trauma? That would be so ideal because it is not something Welcome to another episode of a Healthy Point of View podcast, your top rated show bringing experts from all over the world to talk about health, wellness, beauty, and mindset.

I'm your host, Sam Tahata. Today's guest, we're gonna be talking to an expert as child behavior expert. All right, what is that? You know, I started looking at his content when he decided to join us here at the podcast, and I start learning things that I was wrong about, right? Through a lot of science and data, the way that we grew up is significantly different. At least I'll tell you for myself, growing up in the 80s and 90s, things were different, you know? We used to get the chancleta, we used yell that as children, so things have changed.

So today's expert is going to go into those details. Today we have Brian Post. Brian! Thank you. Thank You, Sam. Excited to be here with you guys. Welcome. Looking forward to chopping it up. Absolutely, man. So child behavior expert. We got to unpack that. OK. But before we unpack. Yeah. I want people to get to know you because once you unpack the child behavior expert, I think people are going to be able to understand that a bit better if we go way back from when you were a child, around age five or so.

And talk about your upbringing and how that got you to where you're at today. Well, can I go even further back than that? Oh, let's do it. OK, so I was adopted and my biological mother got pregnant out of wedlock. So she was already married, but she got pregnancy with me. I have three half siblings that are older than me and. My biological father, after he got my bio mother pregnant, went and got one of their friends pregnant. And then so that broke my biomoms heart. And she had to place me for adoption, but before she did that, she called her husband.

He was in the military in Germany. She said, I'm pregnant by another man. You said you got to have an abortion. And so she said okay. So 37 years later, when I looked her up, She says, let me call you tomorrow. And I said, okay, no problem. I'm not a crack head. And she said I'll call you back tomorrow. So we hung up and she called me back 30 minutes later. She said baby, you're right. On your mom. Been praying for you every night. Had to tell my husband she was still married to the same man, which is the father of my three half siblings.

but he thought I had been aborted. So the only two people that knew I existed were my mom and her older sister, Gloria, who's since passed. And so the reason I tell that story, Sam, and I go back that far is because by the fourth week after conception, you're already beginning to develop the ability to hear. By the second trimester, you're already capable of psychological processing. So everything that goes into the womb, everything the mother experiences while you are in the wound gets funneled down to the infant and that gets stored at the bottom of your brain stem, the first part of the brain to start developing.

Brian Post's Adoption and Early Childhood 4:46

And so it never goes away. It forms the foundation of who you are. And, so, neuroscience, the decade of the brain, was the 1990s. We learned so much, and we found out that from conception to age five forms to blueprints for all of your future social and emotional relationships. So a lot of times we like to jump up to, age three or age four or five, but in reality, our personality and all the ways that we relate to others starts from in conception. And so my work, and then I was adopted as an infant, I had a sister who was not biological that I grew up with, my adopted sister as well, My work is specific, has always been around adoption and foster care because that's my passion, that is my purpose.

I feel like God put me in the world to experience everything I experienced to have a really deep understanding of human behavior at a cellular level, not just the interpersonal level. And so I experienced, you know, I had a mother. I have two loving parents, like all of us. We have parents who love us, we have parent who work hard to take care of, us put food on the table, keep a roof on our head. Might not have, We didn't have a lot, but we always had enough. They loved us until they got stressed.

And when they get stressed, my dad, both my mom and dad were children of alcoholics. My dad, his father was killed in a bar. My mom's dad had a heart attack in front of her when she was nine years old. No one ever talked about it. So he died. Then my father went on to Vietnam, came back from Vietnam with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. And so they were the oldest. my mom was the older sister of 10. So in that era of the 40s and 50s, their moms are working, trying to survive, try to feed all these kids.

So my parents became the parents to their siblings, and that's called being parentified. So if you don't grow up experiencing something, it's hard to give it. So my parents didn't grew up with emotional affection, emotional presence, and emotional connection, affection and understanding because they were trying to be parents as children. And so then that doesn't go away. So that then goes into how we're raised and especially when they're stressed because he stress high levels of stress. So you just think the higher the stress, the deeper into the brain stem.

that energy is going deeper into the brainstem. So it's like stirring a, I have my supplements I take, and I know you do a lot of supplement stuff. I had my little stir, my mixer thing. The little frother. Well, you can froth right at the top, or you frothe all the way down at bottom. And that makes a difference. That makes whole lot of difference, so that's what stress does. Stress is like a frother in your brain. The more stress you are, the higher the stress, they deeper into the brain stem it goes, and the more it gets activated.

Now, what's really important also is that your personality traits are stored in in you state level of memory, which is your brainstorm. Trauma, also gets stored in the brain stem. So it gets intertwined with the personality traits. When you're stressed, there's no difference between your personality and the trauma that you've experienced. My real kind of real calling card or real invitation into understanding this wasn't even so much my behavior as a child. I had the worst behaviors between me and my sister, but my bio mom said she loved being pregnant.

So from conception, I have a healthy experience of stress regulation because she released a hormone called oxytocin. and that's your brain's anti-stress hormone. It's also the hormone that makes love possible. So, my brain was somewhat shielded from high levels of cortisol when I was in utero. I didn't experience a significant amount of trauma until the birth period itself, when i knew I leaving the only thing I'd ever known. That was my trauma. My sister, who was a year younger than me, she was conceived to a single mom She was three months premature.

She weighed three and a half pounds and spent the first three month of her life in an incubator. Completely different experience. My mom, my adoptive mom said when we got you, you were smiling. When we, when got your sister, she was crying. That defined their relationship. So I had worse behaviors, but I could regulate stress more effectively. But I didn't get caught. my sister was emotionally immature. So all of her early developmental traumas had arrested her emotional development. So she got caught all the time.

Therefore, like you said, she get hit and my dad was a whipper. We had the leather belt. What year was this that you grew up in? I grew in a little country town called Mountain View, Oklahoma. There was 2,000 people. And what year? In 19, I was born in 1973. So I'm 53 years old. Okay, so you grow up through the 70s and 80s. Yes, sir. I mean, you go way back during those times. It's normal. I'd say I'm Dominican. So in the Dominican Republic, it was normal to get whacked away. That's right. And get yelled at.

Absolutely. and I have memories of all of that. They don't go away, by the way. No, they don' go way and what's interesting about that is, and please interrupt me at any time because I talk about this stuff all the time. But one of the things that's common in my field of working with kids when it comes to child behavior, and this is how I step in to becoming the child-behavior expert, because I work with children who have experienced severe trauma and that severe drama manifests itself in behavior problems.

So in our society, when children have behaviors, we want to control, suppress, and change them. So we try to do consequences. We do punishment. If we're not spanking and yelling and whipping and all that, then we are doing consequences, behavior modification charts, grounding and isolation, timeout even. Those are the most common things that we do in families and schools everywhere. Well, I grew up in a home with a sister who because she couldn't regulate, she was always in trouble. And I have an experience of growing up, like we'd get to go, go to Lawton, Lawtton Oklahoma's, law and force sales.

They have a shopping mall there because we're country kids, right? So on a Saturday, my dad, after working in a rock quarry all week long, My dad worked in the rock query for 35 years. He'd come home every day covered in lime dust. This man loved his family. and he wanna take us out and we get to go to McDonald's or Long John Silver's, or something. So we'd be exciting little kids, you know, I'm talking six, seven, eight years old. We all climb up in the back of that white Impala, and me and my sister, because back in that day, there wasn't no seat belts, so we be up on the front seat.

Well, what do kids do? We're excited, people don't realize that stress and excitement come from the same part of the brain. The amygdala. Your fear receptor, which is right above your brain stem. So we're excited. And before we, you got to think it's Oklahoma, it summer, It's 105 degrees. We're getting to go to the big city and we pull out, we were talking, were listening to radio. Mom and dad are talking. All people don't realize, don' see these things as stress. So then my dad would say, sit back.

Well, because my brain could regulate stress, which means I could also remember Because when you're stressed, your thinking goes offline and your short-term memory shuts down. So because I could regulate, when my dad said, sit back, I would sit that. My sister wouldn't even hear him. because she was emotionally immature, so she like a two-year-old. She might have been eight, but she acting like she two. So she wouldn't even hear him, she'd still be up there. And then by the time, before we got out of town, he would say, I said sit back.

You know how that parental, especially that dad voice elevates when he's getting more serious. Well, that would interrupt her in a small way. She would sit back enough for her back to breeze almost like a trampoline in that back seat of that big Impala. And then she bounced right back forward, being right up on that, back of the front seat. My dad didn't believe in one, two, three magic. Before we even got out of town, he would just, from the steering wheel, bam, backend her right in the mouth, send her flying back.

This would talk about memories This didn't happen once or twice This was a regular occasion and the reason I have grown cousins right now who still tell the story They'd be riding with us and Christie my sister would be up on that backseat that creates a trauma not just for the child who got smacked But the other children that are in the. Yeah, stressful. And, you know, black folks, we always laugh about stuff that make us uncomfortable, but they still remember it. A hundred percent. They still.

Remember it in. The reason I tell that story is because when you've had your father and my father loved us, he worked hard for us. Absolutely. When you had your father smack you in the mouth, backhand you into the mountain, this is a man where he worked in a rock crib. It's a big, it's big man. And he's done that and you still have not learned. You're not going to give a kid a time out and teach him anything. you're going not to take their stars or take the cookies away and think that's going teach them something.

So I tell people that when we are stressed, we cannot think clearly. And that comes from Joseph Ladeau, New York University Neuroscientist. He wrote a book called The Emotional Brain. You can't think, clearly, and you can remember. My father, no more than my sister, couldn't remember that she was gonna get backhanded. No more that, she couldn' remember, that my father couldn remember backhanding her didn't work. Because if it had worked, she would never even, you wouldn't even be up on the seat to begin with.

Right? But it didn't work. And he didn' remember that it did' work because they were both stressed. My mom didn''t remember it that didn ''t work, because she was stressed." So then what happens is we get stuck doing the same thing, expecting a different result. And Einstein calls that the definition of insanity. We don't realize, though, that that comes from a place of stress and fear in our brain. And not only that, but that's generational. It gets passed down for decades. Brian, you know, the CDC says that 61% of adults have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience.

Yes. Right? So my question to you with that is, are most parents unknowingly raising their children based off of those wounds that they've never healed? 100%. And we call it 61% because adverse childhood experiences is a nice framework for trauma, but the reality, Sam, is that most parents have experienced some form of trauma. If you lived through COVID, you've experienced trauma. Trauma is any stressful event, which is prolonged, overwhelming, and unpredictable. And when we don't get an opportunity to express it, process it and understand it.

It gets stored in our brain and our body in a traumatic way. That is something. So in all reality, Because I know we're talking about parenting, right? Now, as before we even talk about, parenting taking what we just talked about in consideration.

How Stress Shapes Behavior and Discipline 17:18

Would you say that it's critical for someone before parenting to try to heal a lot of those childhood traumas? That would be so ideal. That will be a beautiful thing. I mean, people go 50, 60, 70, sometimes their entire life without healing any kind of childhood trauma. Well, half the time, they don't even know it. Right. So out of that 61%, you quoted, most of people don' even realize they experienced a traumatic event. because it's not something that we perpetuate and talk about a lot in our society.

So what do you these? Yeah, I mean, to heal a childhood trauma, there's steps that people have to go through. They have a lots of times have have had to have breakthrough and then actually, you know, accepted and get things off the chest. Mm hmm. Well, what is your recommendation for for, let's say, people that are just going into parenting, that want to be the greatest parent that's out there? The first step of healing for anything is awareness. So parents who want to become parents need to start by reviewing the way they were raised and reviewing it in an authentic way, not in a way that just says, because half of that sometimes comes out as shame because we don't want talk bad about our parents.

But I tell people this has nothing to do with your parents, It has everything to do with your experience because it's your experienced that you're carrying forward. It's you experience that's still still stored in your body mind system. So you got to be willing to. Be authentic with the experiences that. You had as a child. good, bad, and indifferent and be open to exploring how your parenting, your experience with your parents and your parent's experience, with you grandparents. See, people get hung up on this trauma thing.

You're like, why do you have any trauma? Well, go back two, three generations. Three generations, black folks were in slavery. Traumas there. Just be opened to looking at it. And that awareness is like the first step of helping you become more conscious when you step into a parenting role. The, you know, one thing that I've noticed, I was raised by both my parents. They're still together. But one that that have noticed is I personally don't have the strongest relationship with my parent. I love them, right?

We're always together for holidays, we see each other very frequently, they live close by. Then I look at my wife, her relationship, with her parents, which they're both together still, and she was raise by them. And her and her brother, they have this different type of relationship with their parents. It's a very loving relationship. And it actually, when we first spoke on a Zoom call before the podcast, I started thinking about it, the difference, because for years I've been with my wife for 21 years.

We got together last month at high school. And you know, I started realizing like a lot of the things that you teach and that I was I've been hearing you talk about on social media. That's the way she was raised. I always raised completely different. It was just like you made a mistake. You're paying the price for it. Yeah. And you know what, it has fed in to make me who I am. So I don't necessarily know if it's a bad thing per se, because I did follow a lot of my dad's footsteps in business and everything else.

But the one thing that I do have is that type of relationship that see on the other side. Sure. No, that's fantastic. What if we suspend judgment of good and bad? What If we suspended judgment and it's just what it is? And then we grow into the awareness of how it has impacted us. Because when we have a strong tendency to do this in our society, we judge negative things that happen as bad things. Well, bad things, actually just the thought, just a thought that something is bad, and then the statement that's something bad creates a stress reaction in your brain.

And that stress reactions usually will trigger some level of fear and some levels of shame, which then prevents you from wanting to look at it any closer. What if we just recognize it for what it is? We say, I don't have the closeness. It's a great invitation because then you think, then get to think and whether you bring this up to your parents or not, you get think what was mom and dad's childhood like? What were their parents, what were my grandma and grandpa going through during their parenting journey?

And then what my wife's Parents childhood like and then you get to start seeing the cycles that create all of us. Oh, yeah You know, let me tell you something as you mentioned your parents Well, it was I was 22 years old I came home from college My mom gave me a hug and I love and adore my mom. My moms my biggest fan She gave a me hug. And I said You what? Don't even hug me if you can't give me a real hug." She said, what do you mean? I said every time you hug, me it's like a dead fish hug. You just kind of ... and I did it to her.

I say, it doesn't feel good to me. If you cant give a good hug then just don't hug my. She says, I never knew. She said, all my siblings hugged that way. And that goes back to that emotional absence thing. If you don't have a parent hugging you, you won't get that blueprint in you. So then your hug becomes something different and it wasn't until, but that doesn't make it bad. You just need an opportunity to have some awareness and then you get a choice. When you have the awareness, then. Get to choose whether you're going to continue doing it or whether are you going.

To change it, right? And that's the blessing that we all have in our life. Every parent, every individual, my mom, Is now well known and this is this was 33 years ago. She is now. Well known for giving some of the best hugs Really? Yes She took that That lack of awareness and she thought about it, she didn't feel ashamed of it. She didn' feel embarrassed. You might have initially, that's not my business. And she gives the best hugs. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Hey, it's amazing. Brian, how many percentage-wise, and it doesn't have to be exact, How many people do you think parents out there discipline their children with some form of trauma currently?

Probably 70%. Is that high up there? Oh, it's potentially higher. Murray Strauss is a researcher at the University of New Hampshire. He did a meta-analysis. This was in the late 80s, may have been in early 90s and estimated that 90% of adults believe it is okay to hit a child two years older or older. So if 90 percent of adult think it okay hit to a hit child, then you know we're in trouble. Because that's all, when a child is acting out, that because you're stressed out. And if we are hitting, it's because we stressed too.

So whether it is, no one can determine what someone else's trauma is. We all have to kind of come to that ourselves, because it about perspective. But it pretty high number. Is there, when you look at children, obviously they're going through different stages of development, depending how old they are, is there a specific age group as they've grown up that they more prone to be affected by the trauma, where the brain is taking it in a certain different way? Am I explaining myself? Yeah, it's a perfect question.

And no, there's no specific time, There's no specific time because your brain stem is like a hard drive and it starts in utero and its storing everything. So we just have pre and perinatal traumas that we're not aware of. There are so many people that have in-utero trauma they're aware but then as adults they have anxiety, they They feel easily overwhelmed. They can be afraid of things that they've never had any bad experiences with. That's because that comes from in utero experiences. I mean, the first conception to one year of life, your brain is forming one million neural connections per second.

per second and it's nothing goes away. So your brain never forgets anything. It just gets stored in your body mind system and trauma gets store in a fragmented way. That's why when you have a traumatic experience in you're childhood or throughout your life and you haven't pulled it together and become more conscious and more aware of it, anything can trigger you back into that trauma. Because just one little cell gets activated and that everything's turned on. And so now there's no no specific age.

You know, one of the things we're talking about parenting. Right. But as a child, there is more than just parenting, especially when it comes to discipline or any kind of potential trauma that they get exposed to. You know, you go back in the day, especially at certain private schools, the teachers would actually hit you with a ruler. Now you don't see that, right? But you still see the parents that are still whacking the kids. So can we talk about that? Sure. Well, I think what happened is the laws got passed.

And this kind of started when I was in, in I'm gonna say probably junior high. By the time I get to junior High, there was starting to be a lot of buzz about paddling because we used to get paddled in school. So, and that was a big board and Ed was an adult and me and my buddies, we can still compare stories to the teachers who lit you up versus the ones who you didn't really care. You know, I always say, Ms. Letford, she was rough, man. And you don't want to getting no panel by Ms Lethford. Then that stopped.

because of more political, political focus, just people thinking about other adults hitting kids, but that didn't, that did, none of that impacted the home. And so, That's such an important observation you're making because that demonstrates how you can, from whatever research or whatever position of power, you could stop something from happening in one setting, but that does not influence all the other settings. And then we think about the number of teachers who, you know, they couldn't paddle anymore.

Well, now you got just, I mean, in the first grade, my kindergarten teacher tying a kid to a chair. I still remember that. His name was Clint Dotson. Her name is Miss Schmidt. What happened is she did that today. And he jumped up, he jump up and she still couldn t keep him down. She did it today, she could potentially be arrested. Easily. Man, that's crazy when you think about it, how much has changed. You know, when we're talking about this type of trauma behaviors and how children are growing up, do you know of what demographic, what ethnicity group or maybe what country out there does it the best?

And I think it's probably just based on individual, individual adults and parents looking to be more mindful and more elevated and we're conscious about relationships. And so I don't know if that there's any any one country that's doing it better than another country. I mean, there has just been so much trauma in the world. Yeah. I mean, some countries are, I would say, are worse off for sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, they do some crazy stuff to you. Just look at them the wrong way. So OK, so we don't really know anything about the other countries and whatnot.

What is the secret sauce here? Right. Because obviously you wrote the book From Fear to Love. Right? And when we talk about fear, You know, one thing that comes to mind when I'm thinking about fear as a child and learning, you know. I remember that one time I was at a babysitter's house and she was unloading the dishwasher. These are the old school dishwashers with all the hot elements at the bottom. And I decided to put my hand down there. Didn't know what the heck was down. Just put me hand in there and I got a second degree or third degree burn.

Right.

Fear, Love, and Emotional Regulation 31:08

That to me is a form of fear now. You know, like I'm scared. I'll never touch that hot element ever again. As a matter of fact, I don't even want to touch the dishwasher. So. Is fear truly something that we don' learned from based off of what I just explained? So that was a former trauma. OK, that. Was a format trauma that that, was an unexpressed. That was that a a overwhelming experience. But let me ask you this to add to that. Now, let's say my parent or that babysitter where I was at. Repetitively tells me, don't put your hand down there.

You're going to get hurt. Don't. Put your. Hand down. There and tries to jam it. Yeah. Creating that sense of fear. Yes. No. Would that change how you're explaining it? That could be trauma, too. That's a trauma because that's creating anxiety around around a situation. And we do a lot of that right. just in normal parenting. Don't do that. But there's a difference between trauma and fear. See, fear is very valuable to our evolution as a species. We have a fear receptor because we needed it to know when to run away from the Saber II Tiger.

So we needed it. And we still have a fear receptor because it informs us to not walk in front of the car or to look where we're going. We still need that. You see, that is a short-term cortisol experience. It's a shorter stressful experience, your brain receives that signal, it's valuable signal. If you eat something bad or if you smell something, the reason it smells gross is because your smells, your sense of smell, you're smell receptor, it hits your amygdala immediately, goes through one pathway to hit your mygdola.

That's why when you smells something you go, ooh. You know where you going, mm. And then, and this is so interesting, It takes An impulse, it takes a thought. Seven different pathways before it becomes an actual thought, so when you see something, It doesn't even register as a Thought until it goes through seven different Pathways, but if you smell it, its immediate. Right? So you need that. There's nothing bad about stress. If you get sick, you'll get stressed. Your body stresses because that is a part of helping you to heal.

It's when the stress is overwhelming and unpredictable and uninterrupted. That's when it becomes potentially traumatic. And then when you don't get an opportunity to express, talk about it and understand it, then that's what it follows you for the rest of your life. So if that babysitter or your parent or whoever, when burned yourself, if they had picked you up, soothed you, comforted Talk to you, let you let, you cry. Let you be upset. And then walked over to that dishwasher, dishwasher and say, bad dishwasher.

Don't burn, Sam, don't hurt Sam. You get bad. Then now you're processing it, your understanding it. and then the adult says, but baby, You can't touch that. It'll hurt you. Didn't you remember that? That's a lot you learn from that's the love because love is the secret sauce. Love is the secret sauce. But we have grown up in a society and we've grown in homes with fear disguised as love. So then what the parent does instead is spanks you. You're burnt. Pops you, you shouldn't be. See, what happens, they get stressed out.

Yeah. And you burn yourself. Stop hollering, ya know? You can't do that. That was it. Listen, that reminds me of when I was a kid. My brother, myself, and one of my cousins, summer vacation, we decided, We thought it would be a good idea to take these big cardboard boxes. I forgot what my mom bought that they were still at the house. And we just decided to just take them and go down the stairs all the way down to the basement. Well, it didn't slide perfectly down, right? When me and my brother were inside of it, It slid down a few stairs, but then it stopped and then tipped over.

My Brother went all of the down and hit his hand on the wall. broke his arm. Grandma was watching. Guess what Grandma did? She came down there with the broomstick. She went after my brother with a broken arm, you know? So I saw it firsthand many times growing up. So, I could see that difference. this conversation unlocks those old memories. 100%. It's a trauma though. Yeah, that's right. It just unblocks them. So one of the things you talk a lot about is one the biggest keys with all of this is communication, right?

We talked about the love, but I wanna talk about, because the way you actually explained that, it's not just love but it how you communicate that love. There's way that you did that that was very smooth. I want you to kind of break it down of how the communication, why is communication so important for this to be effective? Well, the way communication becomes effective is grandma has to stop and take a few deep breaths and realize that those babies are okay, that one of them's hurt. Because what happens is if you don't stop, and breathe, stress overwhelms you and hijacks your brain.

and that's what happens to adults. So then, instead of being able to have a, so what really happens is the moment you become stressed and your amygdala and brain stem get activated, your first impulse is I'm gonna die or he's gonna to die. So now think about that from a survival mechanism. The moment you get stressed, you constrict into survival. Survival says, I'm gonna die, or somebody's gonna to die. That is an overwhelming impulse. And so if you don't stop and breathe, and Bruce Lee said, the greatest lesson you can learn in life is to master the ability to remain calm.

Because he knew that by remaining calm, you just take a deep breath right now. Your thinking remains clear and your short-term memory is available. You realize in that moment, nobody's gonna die. I'm not gonna, die you're not going to die, so then I can slow down and as soon as I slow it down, now I could literally communicate from an open, loving energy. because no one's going to die. Stress has not hijacked my brain. And then I can listen to you and I could hold you, and can comfort you. But what happens is we get stressed as parents and as adults, And we have so much other stress going on all the time that we shift into survival.

Then as soon as we do that, we tap into those old blueprints. I want to do what dad did. I want to do what grandpa and grandma did to dad and then just keep passing the cycle. We don't stop and do anything different. And the only thing you gotta do truly, and this sounds so simplistic because it is, it's just not easy. The only things you got to is you've got stop-and-breathe. Right. Stay calm, right? So by you saying stay calm. You know, I started to tap it in. the 12 years that I worked in the fire department.

What people are actually gonna die. And that's one thing that they taught you from the beginning, you have to stay calm. If not, a chaotic scene will become even more chaotic. We're there to try to control it. So when we start talking about emotional regulation and the importance of emotional regulations, What are some of the things that you can recommend for people to do when it comes to emotional fitness, to work on that? Well, one thing you could do, probably the biggest, most important thing, is practice your breathing.

Breathwork. Because in the 1970s, Herbert Benson wrote a book called The Relaxation Response. He was a physiologist at Harvard. And he said, when we become stressed, the first thing we do is start holding our breath. So practice your breathing. Just conscious breathing, and people are always asking me, is there a specific way to breathe? Just get some air in your brain and into your body. Doesn't matter, that's the first thing. That way, you gotta practice you're breathing when you are calm, not when your stressed.

So you practice the breathing and then the second thing is grow in you emotional awareness of the things that hijack your grow in your emotional awareness of what your triggers are. The reason people have triggers is because there's something underneath the trigger. Right. So grow into your awareness. And then the third thing is exercise and nutrition are critical because not only does it fill us with oxygen, but it turns on our oxytocin receptors, which lowers our blood pressure, makes us in the food.

The food is so critical because so much of the. We eat is manipulating your cellular system. I listen, I believe that. Somewhere out there, someone has a vested interest in families breaking down and people being sick. Because there's nowhere out there where people are actively promoting unless you're with liquid liquid Vita where People are active promoting Families being connected families being kind to one another families be in calm families lowering their stress Laughing more having more joy.

This is for everyone The whole our whole society is is so in motion all the time Yeah, and the food's so bad and you know, then you get then. You get medication and Then you go down even more of a remedy with a chemical imbalance, you you, know early on when we started the podcast you said that You're doing this to Don't quote me exactly, but you said the word at the cellular level Right, which I kind of perked up when you say that because obviously in the medical field with what we do everything we Do is down to the salient?

Mm-hmm, right and it's not just You know nutrients inside your body and stuff, but it's also the frequencies of the environments that you're in, the energy, that vibration that create that cellular health. Right. Can you let's talk a little bit more because you started talking about the nutrition and all of these different things. And I want to kind of go back to when you said you doing this to affect it from a cellular level. Absolutely. Well, That's all we are. All we all as we actually are is just the cell.

And that cell is just a source of vibration. It is a just the source energy. And, that energy and that vibration creates that frequency. From my field of study, you're talking about the impact of stress and trauma on the DNA and on this cells. You're talkin' about impact the stress within the cells and Bruce Lipton, who's a cellular biologist, says that 98% of disease and disorder is related to stress in the autonomic nervous system. When you're carrying stress in yourselves, that's what you are vibrating.

And when you stress and you vibrating, That is how we are all communicating. Because our skin and our bodies make us think we're separate. But we an interconnected species. Interconnected, there's no, if you strip away the skin and you stripped away, the blood and the tendons and muscles and bones, it's just energy. And we're exchanging that energy all the time. Right. I tell parents at the most, when you, strip it all down, parenting is just an energetic exchange with your child. Say that again.

Parenting is an energy exchange. It's not what you say, it's how you feel when you're doing and saying it. Alan Schur is another neuroscientist who's been a big mentor of mine. He says the core of the self is nonverbal nonverbal and unconscious and lies and patterns of affect regulation, which means it's not what you say, it not you do, its how you feel when you're doing and saying. That makes all the difference. You meditate? Oh yes. How important is meditation? For me it is a part of mindfulness, a mindfulness practice.

Because the most important thing I can do in any relationship is be aware of where I'm at in a given moment. Because that sets the platform and the foundation for everything that happens between us. If I am stressed, if I got a lot of stuff going on, which I always have a lotta stuff goin' on. I have seven kids and three grandkids. And more businesses than I could even count. So I'll always a have lot a stuff go on I just need to be aware of it. Because when I'm aware, I can get present to the moment because the present moment is the only thing that actually exists.

Nothing exists outside of this conversation. It's just the president moment. So stress causes you to react from the past, obsess about the future, and it takes you out of the presence. My meditation practice, my mindfulness practice is all about staying present right here, right now. Yeah. And especially people that are living such a very high paced lifestyle. You know, one of my business mentors, he always brings it up. Very wealthy guy, real estate investor. He always talks about how the billionaires are always going to the monks to try to figure out how to live in peace.

But you never see the Monks who have nothing going into the billionaire to find out. Yeah, right. So If I want to start taking certain steps into learning how to parent, the right way. There's one thing that you say is you don't have to be a trauma expert. You have be trauma responsive. Break that down for me. Well, the whole buzz is being trauma-informed. So everyone wants to be trauma informed now. Over the last probably five to 10 years, I was teaching trauma inform 25 years ago. And there's all kinds of different types of trauma.

All kinds. Any stressful event can be a traumatic event. The problem is, being Trauma-Informed, The moment you become stressed, because your thinking becomes confused and distorted and your short-term memory

Breathwork, Mindfulness, and Cellular Health 47:48

is suppressed and you're not breathing because you are holding your breath because of your stress, all that information goes right out the window. So I say it's not enough to be trauma-informed, you have to trauma responsive. which means you have to be able to respond to trauma. So in my work, responding to Trauma is when a kid is yelling and cussing you out and throwing things, threatening to kill you, breaking things. You know, running away. That's my line of work where I can't just be trauma-informed because all that stuff's really stressful.

But I've got to be trauma responsive. So I have got be able to dialed into myself enough. And we talk about, I been talking about trauma for so long because it's just like the thing that I do, but it is just stress. It is human behavior. In parenting I don't even judge it as right or wrong or good or bad. I just ask parents to stop and evaluate, go parent however you're gonna parent. Yell at your kids, spank your kid, do whatever you gonna do. And after that's said and done, Go in the bathroom, look in a mirror, and ask yourself, Do you feel good about that?

And be really honest. If you do feel about it, well you keep doing what's right for you. and if you don't feel it about, then start slowing down, start breathing, Start paying attention, and start doing something different. Because it all comes down to love and fear. And when we're stressed, we are in fear, and until we breathing, were not shifting in love. Love and Fear do not coexist. Brian, you've written over 20 different books, sold over a million copies, right? What's the hardest truth about parenting that most people struggle to actually accept?

It's stressful. That is stressful. It's stressful, do you know? I'm not a parent, so they're not. They're. Not aware that it's actually stressful because we have framed parenting as a responsibility that's supposed to bring you so much joy, but it doesn't. And here's the thing about it is parenting is not cognitive. You can't read about how to be a better parent in a book because parenting isn't emotional experience. And when you are struggling, and parenting is great until you're stressed. Because when start struggling that's when tap into those old blueprints.

That's where your fears get stirred up. And so when can recognize that parenting a stressful, then you go into it breathing. Then you going to it with more mindful awareness. and then it stops being so stressful. That's it. So let's talk about some of the books that you've read and why. Okay. You tell me, what's your greatest book that your've written in your opinion? Well, I think probably the best one is From Fear to Love. That is the most recent one? I wrote it 10 years ago. Oh, okay. I've probably written 17 since Fear To Love?

But I think it's the most impactful because you can take out the adopted, the foster care, and put in the biological, to grandchild, it is human behavior. And I just simplify it and just put it in a book that takes people two hours to read. Everybody's got two hour. It's simple. Because the truth is simple, It doesn't have to be complicated. I never wanted to write a big long book nobody was going to Wanted to write a book and I say in the book read the books four times Because you've got to have the repetition because that's how you change your brain Absolutely And what are the if you wanted to break down the steps in?

The book, how would you break them down? Well first the stress being aware Being aware that stress which is automatic to our system, generates fear. There are two primary emotions, love and fear, so we have to be able to breathe through the fear and the stress so that we can move into the love, but if you don't, if don' breathe the through stress and then the fears, then stress drives the behavior. And what happens is we get locked in that negative feedback loop with ourselves and with our children and one another.

And when you're stressed and you move into survival, you can't be in relationship. In relationship is the most important thing. Love is a most powerful healing force in the universe. The most power. Now we live in a very technical world, right? A lot of technology. And we're noticing that a lot kids are glued to these different screens and the different algorithms and taking over the mind. They walk around with the devices, the cell phones, things that we didn't have when we were kids. So what kind of effect does that have, when parents are trying to truly parent their child, and they're dealing with something that they just didn't have as an exposure when they were growing up?

Well, we've all had dopamine opportunities, and that's usually why we wanted to go play football with our buddies and run the streets, because it triggered dopamine. The cell phones and the pads are just engineered to trigger dopamine, And I love the fact that parents are always talking about, well, my child won't get off his phone or get of his games. Well usually parents don't want to get out of theirs. So where you have a child that's sitting, looking at their phone and their video games, you probably have the parent who's sat in somewhere looking, at the phone, and scrolling through TikTok and social media.

So if we want things to be different, then we got to do different. If you want your child not to on their phones and not be on the games all the time, put yours down and get involved. See, it's easy to parent through a phone because it doesn't require any energy. That's the thing. See, when you got your phone and I'm your parent, there's no energy expenditure that goes into parenting. And so because we're stressed, we are always trying to conserve energy. So if you don't realize that you're stressed, you realize you are trying to conserve energy, and then the moment you realized you were stressed and trying conserve your energy you put your phone down, go take a hot shower, walk outside, get yourself grounded and present, then you say to your child, hey, let's go play basketball.

Hey, lets go for a swim. Let's talk. Then you start creating a new model and the new one is relationship. Now, one of the things that you talk about is you got to let them cry it out. Children, you know, no, we know. No, I don't. I won't let him cry out, either. Let them try it. Oh, No. So are we talking about? Are we? What do we talk babies or or kids? Yeah. Crying is a stress reaction. Okay. So crying it out, you might've saw my social media video about crying out. Yeah, I saw a video. That was a spin on our traditional approach to crying because what we do is we've had all these physicians and these grandparents for years tell you to let your baby cry it without realizing that when a baby is crying, it is a stress reaction in their brain and they don't have the mechanisms to calm themselves down.

So a child, the brain will not allow you to cry yourself to death. The brain would eventually shut you down, so to try it out is not a good practice. Yeah, I misunderstood that because I'm thinking about when I was a kid. you aren't allowed to just keep on crying. You can get smacked if you don't cry. And that's even different. Right. That's almost- Yeah, so that why I was thinking, I thought maybe it's a different practice. Okay, okay. So I know what you're talking about when you talk about crying it out.

Because I believe in letting children have their feelings. So there's a difference between letting a child cry it out around nighttime, bedtime, what have you, versus letting the child have their feelings. So after my dad would smack my sister, backhand my sisters in the backseat, she would be obviously distraught and crying and yelling. It would take about three seconds before he would say, shut it up. And she would at that point be trying, well, what are we actually doing? We are suppressing the energy that is trying to move through the body.

Now we're back to the energetic. So when you're upset, And you're crying. You're trying because you are discharging energy that your cells are releasing that energy. That's how you not that's. How you don't have trauma by releasing. you have to express and you. Have to process to understand. So you get to release the energy, but if all of a sudden your parent says, hey, I'll you let me give you something to cry about. Now you got to shut down the. Energy. so now you suppress and left stock. with a negative energy.

And we grow up thinking that it's not. So then the message is crying is not OK. Especially for men, especially for boys. I know you heard real men don't cry. It's always been like that because most of us suck it up. That's right. The fire department was like, that's why I couldn't even speak about a lot of the things, the traumas that were affected. Then you carry it in your body. Carry it. and then you get high blood pressure and cholesterol and heart disease and gain weight and alcoholism and porn addiction because you're looking for some kind of way to self-soothe what you've been carrying that you couldn't just express.

The single most pervasive form of trauma in our society is unexpressed grief. We cannot grieve because we are afraid to cry. You find all these other things to sedate with. That's right. So, you know, when we're talking about crying it out, right? To stay on that topic. You know you see some parents, and I want you to let me know if this is OK or if there's something wrong with it. Kid, something happens, they start crying like crazy. Boom. They give him the iPad. Yeah. And then the kid looks at the iPads, sees the little YouTube character or whatever and goes into the zone.

Trauma-Responsive Parenting and Medication 58:38

Is that OK? Or is that not the best parenting at that point? So I believe every parent has to do what's right for them. Some parents can be so stressed out by their child being stressed that it's probably better to give them the gadget to get the child to stop crying. So the parents stop stressing. But if my child is crying, I'm breathing because I am regulating myself first and then I gonna be supportive. And then, I might even say, as I've said to my grandchildren and my children, let it out. Just let out, i'm right here.

We're gonna get through it, it's gonna okay. Guess what I doing? I replacing my physiology and energy with the gadget. I'm triggering oxytocin. I am triggering doping. By using the energy of my body instead of using a gadget. Now when my child becomes distressed, they're going to come to me for soothing and comfort and not to the gadget But parents have to use the gadget. I mean, it's a great effective babysitter sometimes. And you should use it sometimes, because you need to take a break. Because parenting is stressful.

But don't make it all the time. Now I'm gonna take it a step above. Yeah. If you don' want to talk about it, just let me know. No man, I'll talk everything. So the same way the parent gives the iPad, so they can get that break, and I understand that. You got some parents out there, they get so frustrated with this child. So parents are so easy to just, they wanna medicate the child, right? They wanna put him on the adrenaline, the Adderall, which you and I both know, sometimes it's not the childhood that needs to be medicated, it sometimes is that adult that probably needs be medicated.

I wanna hear your professional opinion on something, because right now we're at one of these all time highs, And there's a big movement that's going on right now, the Make America Healthy Again movement, which I'm in DC every single month with RFK Jr. and trying to change a lot of things when it comes to our health system. And one of the topics that you're talking about is a of these SSRIs and all these other medications that they're putting children on, and it just completely disrupts their entire biochemistry, right?

And now they are dependent on these drugs. And sometimes the parents knows or the parent don't know, but it's the solution, right? In my opinion, I don' think it is always a solution. So I want to hear your professional opinion on that. First of all, i don''t blame the Parents. I blame The Medical Establishment. Because they are the ones writing the prescriptions. Right. They are not teaching parents anything different. Parents are no doctors. A lot of parents didn't get bachelor's degrees or master's degree or PhD's.

They're just parenting doing the best that they can. And if they go to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrists says, let me give your child these seven different meds because all these behaviors need all of these different medications, then the parent is going to go along with it because they don't know any better. But at the same time, that's not an excuse for the parent not to educate themselves. And the first thing to do, I always say before you put a child on any medication, and I don't believe in medication.

I believe diagnosis, not for children. Their brains are still immature. They're still developing. It doesn't lead to anything good. except energetic suppression. It just suppresses the energy of the behavior and I believe the Behavior is the manifestation of stress and trauma. Just as much as is, the Behaviour is pathway for healing. So feelings and behaviors is how we're trying to express the energy to get to a different place. But if you medicate me, now you're shutting down the Energy. And then typically because you shut down The Energy, and now The energy diverts and becomes some other behavior, so I get some Other medication.

I mean, I work with kids who are on seven, eight, nine different psychiatric medications. So I'm working at the top of the Top. It gives me no anxiety to advocate for a parent to take a child off all of them because I don't believe they're effective. I believe until, and people, you get all kinds of comments about this, but I've been doing this for 30 years. Right. Yeah. If I have seen it, I'd seen at all. Until you exhaust the changes in the relationships that the child has around them, and the environments the child is in, you should not put a child on drugs.

You can't send a kid to a boring classroom with an emotionally disconnected or an emotional abusive teacher and expect that child to just sit there, especially not children, because here's the thing, Sam, that most people don't realize. 70% of children in a classroom do just fine because they can regulate stress. It's the 30%, usually the adopted children, usually foster children and most of those can be black children. Black children getting prescribed psychiatrics is almost an epidemic and it is a straight pathway to prison.

And parents are overwhelmed and stressed out and don't know what else to do. The teachers are stressed out and overwhelmed and don't know what else to do, because all they're doing is behavior modification and consequences and threatening the child, which means all's they are actually doing, is stressing the children out even more. The child's already stressed. Now you stress them out ever even, more now you wonder why they keep having these behavior problems because no one's feeding a child food because some of these children come to class and haven't had no food.

No one is giving the No one's making eye contact with the child. No ones slowing down to try to understand what the children is actually going through or what they've come from. I've been in IEPs, individual education planning meetings with schools for 13 year olds and no one in the school even knew the childhood had been sexually abused for eight, nine years of his life. How do you not know that? And you're charged with caring for this child because if you don't know, that you understand where this is coming from?

So we just compound the use of medication because we are helpless and stressed out and scared. And the reason children are on multiple medications is because they have adult professionals that don't know what else to do. So the best they can do is add another medication. Because they've not challenged themselves to anything different. See, I get a little worked up. I like that. is that that's something that people would have to really be aware of. Right. Because if not, we live we already live in a very toxic world.

That's right. We're the one nation in the world that we only make up four percent of the worlds population. But we're prescribed nation in the world. We're the highest medicated, that's what I was looking for. Medicated in world, so we're too quick to put kids on all of these different medications. It's just perpetuating the cycle. And it makes things worse because when you start talking about, you mentioned before, dopamine, serotonin, all these things, now we are taking that wet sponge with all this different hormones or whatever that are supposed to Pour out.

We're drying out that sponge, right, with all these chemicals. And now it becomes a chemical imbalance. That even if we want to go out there or the child wants to start meditating and doing breath work, you know, it's an uphill battle because of all this medication. Oh, 100% is. The adults are not leading the way. The adults want the child to go do breath work and go to meditation, but they're not doing breathwork and doing meditation themselves. We live in an inverted society. Adults expect children to do what they don't do themselves, And it's just like the thing with my, I have attitudes, feelings and behaviors kind of explanation that I do.

Adults in our society, and this all comes from a trauma in the generations. We don't want children to yell. we don' want them to threaten. And we want to cuss. But what do we do as adults when we're stressed out? We yell, we flip off, We cus, all the stuff that we will medicate children for. It's just all backwards. It is. Right. And you've come up with some tools for parents to use. You launched a platform called bondify. Yes. All right. Tell me more about that. Bondify is the parenting support you needed in that moment.

So every parent who's been through a tough moment knows those moments when they didn't have any support. And so Bondifi is programmed with my large language model, which is 30 years of experience, books, videos, everything. You go onto Bondifiy, you ask it a question, there's a picture of me, and you're asking me a So any parenting question you have, you can ask on Bondify, free of charge, and you get a response. I'll engage you in a conversation. And I will give you my love-based perspective on what you're going through and how you could do something different.

Because I believe everyone just needs a little bit of support during the most stressful times, especially with their children, to take them in completely different way. That's what Bondifi is. It's a community. We communicate. We have I do Q and A's weekly. Like I said, there's we post videos, we posts articles, new books, all in bond effect. So we're going to have a little fun here. One of my favorite podcasters, Stephen Barlett, with the diary of a CEO, he came out with these conversation cards.

You just take that little sleeve off there. Pick two random cards, two cards you'll read them. Well, read one out of the two and then answer it. OK. I like diary of the CEO. What was the most valuable lesson you've learned in the last year and why?

Bondify, Reflection, and Closing Advice 1:09:38

That I am able to slow down and be more effective than I am when I'm trying to speed up and get a lot done. That's probably, it's, probably become more, more evident because I have a company in Northern California with 75 employees and I've a great partner, great partners. and I'm the one who gets stressed because I want I. Want things to be done at a certain level when it comes to serving the families that we do. And I have learned that I can be more effective when I sort of. That's that kind of goes with the three.

Yeah, right. Come a little bit more. I could see that. What else we got? OK. Well, would you do if you absolutely weren't afraid What are you afraid of? I guess we gotta start there, right? At my core, afraid not being good enough, failing, and being abandoned. At core. Those are the major fears that drive me. And they've been driving me since I was born. And if I absolutely wasn't afraid, I think I'm I've been blessed to understand that fear is not something to be afraid of. It's something. To observe and step through and.

I actually I don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe I will fly. You know, I'm as a as as business professional and I do a program for men helping men who've been financially successful and successful in business, helping them get to emotional connection and presence and meaning, because that's usually the second mountain, which is the legacy mountain. I have found myself as I've gotten older, being more intentional about. slowing down and being more intentional about recognizing what I'm feeling afraid of something and then determining if I want to push through that or not.

I mean, I don't drive as grind as hard as I used to when I was 30 years old and I am okay with that. So if absolutely wasn't afraid, probably go to Mexico and buy this 100 yards on the ocean that I wanted and probably just move there. That's probably what I'd do. I can see that happening for you, for sure. You know, one of the things that I want to, before we wrap up that, I wanna touch up on is when it comes to parenting, how important, because we talk about all of these different things during the episode today, but how is having a spiritual belief and spiritual connection important?

It's imperative for me. And I don't feel it is my position to judge anyone else's path. Because I believe that we are all on the path back to God. Mm hmm. If I was offering offering guidance to anyone, I would say, Finding a source of spiritual connection is like finding yourself. OK, and so then it becomes extremely. And for the person who doesn't necessarily have a spiritual belief, right? Who questions, well, is there even a higher power? Sure. Where do you go from there? There's love. There's love, just love.

I'm with you on that. So, Brian, as we wrap up here, if there's someone who's listening or viewing this podcast that truly resonates with today's message, what's that last thing that you can leave them off with? In times of stress, we always have two choices. We can continue to react from our same old blueprints, stress and fear and overwhelm, or we can stop. We could take three to 10 deep breaths and we could choose love, and I hope they'll choose And if people want to find you or find the book where can they Brian post official it's probably on instagrams where I'm the most busy and then brianpost.com they can google me Also, which will include all the links down below Brian.

It was a pleasure of having you in a healthy point of view podcast. Thank you Guys, you heard Brian love love Let's not go based off fear. Let go base off We all know that we have someone, if not ourselves, that can really, really utilize the information that talked about today. So make sure you share, make you subscribe, like, do all that other fun stuff, and we'll see you for the next one.