[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. This is Lisa Lewis, your host. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. [LISA LEWIS] So my guest today is Lisa Sugarman. Lisa is a mom, a parenting author, a nationally syndicated humor columnist, and a podcast host creating content that helps empower parents, especially moms, by giving them permission to embrace their perfectly imperfectness. She’s also a survivor of suicide loss, losing her father at age 10, and a member and ally of the LGBTQIA community. She lives with her husband and two daughters just north of Boston. Welcome to the show, Lisa. [LISA SUGARMAN] Thank you so much for having me. [LISA LEWIS] It’s so great to have you here, and I have so many questions already, and before we just jump right in, as I like to ask all my guests, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not? [LISA SUGARMAN] I absolutely, in every possible way do, and I think that if you asked my husband or my daughters or anyone who knows me even remotely well, they would say that I am absolutely the definition of an empath. So I can most definitely put myself in that bucket of being a highly sensitive person, for sure. [LISA LEWIS] If you don’t mind sharing, like how did you learn that you were an empath or highly sensitive person? [LISA SUGARMAN] I mean, I think I’ve known for most of my life. I mean, I’ve always seemed to feel the vibrations of emotions around me, other people’s highs or lows very personally. I remember that all the way back to my earliest memories of just being anywhere in my life or in any relationships in my life. I lost my dad when I was pretty young. There’s only so much a young child can really understand and internalize when they have a loss like that and I always felt like I was in a different place of understanding than maybe an average 10-year-old would be, just because of the way I was feeling and the questions I was asking and the way that I was internalizing it all. So I think I’ve always known and just lived with that in my pocket all these years. [LISA LEWIS] I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like to lose a parent, your father, and especially to suicide. I’m sorry about that. I’m just, oh, wow. [LISA SUGARMAN] Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. Yes, it was actually, in my case it was, it’s become a double whammy in a way, I guess. He passed away when I was 10 and the narrative that I was given when I was that young was that he had had a heart attack. He was a pretty heavy smoker, even though he was a very physically active guy. He was a big tennis player and he raced cars and he was a big mountaineer, but he smoked a ton of cigarettes every day. So it was not like, it was super farfetched that I ever would have questioned it. It wasn’t until I was, so I’m 54 now, so it was, it’s going on like 10 years now, I was in my mid-forties when I found out that he did in fact end his life and his own life. So there was the whole grieving period and loss period and that experience with one narrative when I was 10 and then you flash forward 35 more years and now I’m a grown woman and a wife, and I might had teenage daughters at the time. I think both my girls, one was in college, one was in high school, and I learned something completely new and different that changed everything and it rewrote the whole story. It put me in a position of grieving all over again, but just from a completely different perspective and at a completely different point in my life. So the way that I look at it, the way that I think about it is that I’ve gone through it twice. I’ve lost them twice in two very different ways so it’s been a journey for sure. [LISA LEWIS] Oh my goodness. I’m wondering, and I’m curious, did you find out by accident about how it happened or just? [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes, it was just a weird situation. It wasn’t like some super dramatic, like I found a letter or I had some crazy conversation. It was very much like a slow burn I guess you could say. The very short version is that my husband and I, we live in a tiny town north of Boston, and I do have some family members, cousins who live in the town as well. I hadn’t seen these cousins for a while, and I bumped into, we bumped into them. We were just like having lunch at a café in the summertime and my cousin sat down and we were sitting and we were chatting, and she has kids that are a little older than mine and we were just catching up and out of absolutely nowhere, she asked if my girls had had any of the same depression that my father had. I didn’t know my dad had depression or had any type of mental illness whatsoever. So that was like a super odd thing to have heard and it took me by surprise, took my husband by surprise, and I’m super close with my mom, have always been, and yet for some bizarre reason, I really, I guess I just filed it away and didn’t really even talk to her about it until a little bit later on down the line, probably that same summer because at the time we weren’t living in the same area. So when the next time we were together in the same space, we were just talking, just having lunch and during the course of that lunch, we were just doing what we always do, which is just to like, we’d remember the same stories, I’d ask her questions about when I was a kid relating to my kids doing things when they were kids. We just started talking and my dad came up, that subject came up, and it just dawned on me what my cousin had said. So I asked her, “Was dad depressed?” She said, yes. That was the first time we’d ever had that conversation. Then before I really even knew what, it was a weird moment before I knew what was happening, I had never even thought suicide. I had never really even thought deep mental illness. I just filed it away. Without even realizing I was asking the question until it was out there, I just said, did, “Dad take his life?” She said, yes. She, at the time made that game time decision in that moment. I was 10 years old, I was an only child, he was my person. I mean, as close as I am with my mom, my dad was my person at that time in my life. I was a tomboy. We did all our things together, and it was shattering. I think in that moment my mom just felt like, this is changing the course of her life forever. This is devastating in so many ways to layer on top of that, oh, and he also took his own life for a 10-year-old was like, she just thought it was way too much at the time. So she kept that and held that for me and took the brunt of that for me and so my whole life, I grew up thinking my dad had a heart attack, which made perfect sense and was never something I questioned. She’s like there wouldn’t be no reason for me to ever ask, but I did. When I asked in that, in that moment, she decided, I’m never going to lie to you. I think it was, it was an issue for her of like, I was 10, she didn’t think I could handle it then I was a teen, she didn’t want to lay it on me. Then I was going to high school, then college, then getting married, and like there was always a reason why it wasn’t the right time. So she just decided to keep it and to hold it and then I eventually asked about it and she was super honest about it and has been ever since. So that’s the medium version, the medium to long version of the story. [LISA LEWIS] Oh, well, thank you for sharing that. I can’t imagine how your mom made that decision and held that for as long as she did. Oh, my goodness. [LISA SUGARMAN] It was pretty remarkable. I mean, to know my mom, she’s just a, I mean, she’s a remarkable human being. She really is. I mean, what she’s done and how she’s done it and she went back to college six months after my dad passed away and got her degree, took her five years, she was working part-time, she was taking care of me. She was newly widowed. My grandmother moved in, she took care of her. So my mom is superhuman as far as I’m concerned. She’s just someone who is so dedicated. She’s so dedicated to her family and to doing whatever it is that she can do and needs to do to make sure that her family is good. She did. And it’s funny because a lot of people have asked me in the years since I’ve found out that my dad took his life, they’ve asked like, how did you feel that she didn’t tell you the truth, that you didn’t know the truth? Do you have any resentment? Does that bother you? It’s like from the very second that she acknowledged like, yes, he did in fact take his own life, never since then and never in that moment have I had any feelings of like anger or resentment or mistrust. Like, I get it. I totally got it. As a mom with two daughters, I, 1000% understood why she took that on herself. Because I really don’t know if, I don’t think I could have handled it. I feel like I was a really pretty strong kid at the time, but not where that was concerned. Like, no, no, I don’t think I could have handled it. So I’m just pretty grateful to her for that. [LISA LEWIS] So your mom decided to keep that information to herself. I want to go back to just what you, how you work with parents, like to embrace that perfectly imperfectness. I don’t know if your mom feels like this is her imperfectness or if you feel that way at all, but I just see it as like, yes, here’s a decision that needs to be made. This is the decision I chose. It may not be the perfect decision. Is there even a perfect decision? I have to embrace that. I don’t know, there’s something about this situation and how you work with parents that I don’t know if this has anything to do with that or if that led you to work with parents. [LISA SUGARMAN] I don’t think it led me to work with parents consciously. I mean, I can definitely see the irony in all of that. That’s like the ultimate big overshadowing irony of all of it is that it was definitely a very sudden decision. Like you said, definitely I think for a lot of people may not have been a perfect decision in that moment, but she really did embrace it for what she needed it to be. I mean I’ve never really thought about the parallels between that and the work that I do with that as the overarching theme but it’s interesting to think about it. I mean, what really got me involved in working with parents and writing for parents in particular was really just my own experience as a mom, my own experience for so many years, almost a decade and a half working in the school system with parents and kids and families and that unit and just seeing how desperately parents were trying to be perfect for their kids and expecting that their kids would be perfect themselves and how that was just it was really debilitating parents. It was really debilitating their kids because it’s just so unrealistic and it’s so unfair. It’s unfortunate because it can be so limiting and stifling when you’re not letting things happen organically and you’re not embracing things when they get chaotic, you’re really just trying to avoid any pitfalls. It’s not real life. So that’s what really inspired me to want to start really writing about embracing the mistakes that we make and embracing the falls that we take and and the things that don’t go right because it’s within all of that we build all the resilience. It’s once we embrace whatever the situation is, regardless of whether it’s what we wanted or what we didn’t expect, that’s when we develop resilience that carries us through our life and allows us to be nimble and allows us to experience disappointment or failure or challenges and rise beyond them. I can totally see the tie in that you’re talking about, but the impetus for me writing about it for parents was really just about that whole overarching, we got to let stuff go and be okay with it. [LISA LEWIS] So how do you let stuff go as a parent and embrace that imperfectness in those mistakes? [LISA SUGARMAN] That’s like the billion-dollar question. You do it with a lot of practice. You do it slowly, gradually. I guess I think it’s different for everybody, but I think you take baby steps and you try to, on the one hand, lower your expectations in some ways, or maybe not have them and on the other hand let your kids know that you support their decisions, even the bad ones because they’ve got to figure it out their own way. So it’s a combination. I think it seems a lot of different factors playing in together that allow us, it’s trial and error. I mean, it’s not easy. When you only want the best for your kids, and that’s what the majority of us who have families and have kids that we’re raising want is the best for our kids, it’s hard to let go and let them feel the bumps along the way. But I think if we can train ourselves to step back a little bit and allow those moments that are less than perfect to happen and to take deconstruct them, like, okay, that wasn’t great, what wasn’t great about it? Talk about it, talk it through what could have been better? What could we have done differently? What would you change? It’s just a process. It’s like anything that we have to unlearn and then learn. We do it, we do baby steps. [LISA LEWIS] It seems to me, just by listening what you’re saying, if we can just acknowledge to ourselves now are imperfectness and our mistakes that we made, and talk about it with our children and our family, that as they individuate from their parents, as they mature, that maybe even that transition would be a lot easier for both parents and for the child. Where I tend to see a lot working with clients as the parents are on this pedestal, and then as the children mature into adulthood, that they’re like, oh, wait a minute, my parent is not perfect. They do make mistakes, and I don’t, to me, that feels a little bit more harsh. I guess if it’s more, if we could just be more real with each other earlier on, that there’s a smoother transition. [LISA SUGARMAN] I really agree with that, and I really support that, and I really promote that because it’s really, teaching our kids how to be human beings, how to be young adults and adults and people who can stand on their own, that’s our job, that’s our role. We do it in different ways at different times. You’re not going to be brutally honest with a four-year-old in the way that you would be with a 22-year-old child, and you’re not going to let that four-year-old see certain things that you would expose your older kids to, but it’s all age appropriate. But all along the spectrum, as our kids are growing up, that age range, we need to be allowing them to see that we’re fallible. We need to be allowing them to see us make mistakes, and to see us rally from them and to see us change course and find a new solution. Because we spend their whole childhood modeling for them, even when we don’t realize we’re modeling for them, and we have to do it in that way too, like that imperfectness and being able to embrace it and tolerate it and move through it. They’re going to get that first and foremost from us. If we don’t expose them to that, they’re not going to be equipped to deal with it. They’re not going to learn it as easily and as well from the outside world because our kids learn most of what they learn about being a human being from us before they learn it from anybody else. I mean, I agree with you that it’s something that should start early and continue on and those conversations become more honest and open and transparent. Because we’re only human I was just listening to a podcast this morning. I’m a big fan of Glennon Doyle’s we can do hard things podcast and one of the things they were talking about this morning was how we tend to, we inherit the stuff as parents. We inherit the stuff that our parents put onto us, and we don’t often see our parents as just human beings. They’re mom and dad. That’s a different connotation. It’s a different relationship. It’s when we do allow our kids to see us as human beings who screw up and make bad decisions and cry and do all those things that just deepens the relationship. I think a lot of people think it weakens it, but I think it deepens it. [LISA] Can you give us an example of what that would sound like from a parent that’s made a mistake and they’re sharing it with their child? [LISA] Yes, I mean, again, it depends. It’s like an age-appropriate conversation. It depends on how old your child is. But I mean, maybe you agreed to take on a project, maybe you agreed to volunteer at your child’s school, and it was a big project and you were overwhelmed by it and you were frustrated by it. You had thoughts of quitting that project and instead of keeping that from your child, maybe you would be open and be honest with that child. If you had to step away from it, you’d tell them why and if you had to work through it, and it was challenging, again, you could say, “Hey, this is really hard for me. I’m overwhelmed by it, or I’m struggling with it, but I need you to know that I want to stick with it, or I need to give it up, whatever you need the outcome to be.” As long as you’re open and honest, they’ll understand that the challenging stuff doesn’t just happen to them. It happens to all of us and the fact that we have the title of mom and dad doesn’t exclude us from having any of the same stuff happen to us that happens to them. So I think it’s more about just like having those open dialogues and saying, I’m frustrated, or I’m anxious, or I’m a little scared or nervous or sad and why. That I think its really powerful because it’s something that a child can identify with. It’s like turning on the TV and seeing someone who looks like you and behaves like you doing something that you want to do. It’s validating that someone else is out there feeling it or doing the thing that you’re that you’re trying to do. It’s the same way with our parents. It’s validating when we realize that they’re human too. [LISA LEWIS] Sure is. As I hear you talking and I heard a lot of feeling words, some emotional words, why is your child’s EQ more important than their IQ? If you can explain what EQ is. [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes, yes, of course. So I think most people understand what IQ is. It’s your intelligence quotient. It’s how you perform on a test or on an exam. It’s more academically based. EQ though is something a little bit different. EQ relates to our emotional quotient. I mean, the simplest way to explain it in basic terms is like, it’s our people skills. It’s our ability to have empathy for someone, or sympathy for someone. It’s our ability to make eye contact with someone or be a good friend or hold space for someone who’s struggling. It’s those interpersonal skills. There are people who are born with really incredible brains. We all have those friends that we went to school with who it feels like they never studied and they just crushed it every time. They opened a book the night before and they aced the exam, or they wrote the paper an hour before and they aced the paper. So I think some of us are pre-wired in certain ways to have different aptitudes for that like academic learning. Like, I know for myself, like, I always had to read something like 17 times to really internalize it and really be able to comprehend it. So I always felt like I worked a lot harder in that way. But then you’ve got the EQ piece, which is, I think it’s more of a learned set of skills that we learn from the people around us. We learn primarily from our parents, which is how to be there for a friend when they’re having a bad day, or how to collaborate with your team on the playing field or your group for the science fair or whatever it is. Those are things that we learn and I feel like my own experience personally is that I would always much rather have that high EQ and be able to relate with the people around me because you can learn most stuff. If you apply yourself, it may take a little longer for some people than others to learn certain concepts or math skills or instruments or whatever it is. But I mean, that stuff you can still learn, is that emotional stuff that is a lot harder to internalize and I think it’s more valuable in a lot of ways. Not that academics aren’t valuable, but if you, I mean, if you could have all the degrees in the world and have the most high-powered job and not be able to relate with the people you work with and your team and collaborate and not be successful. So I think that those EQ skills honing them when our kids are young and talking about those specific skills, it really gives our kids, I think, a leg up in the world in their life because they always have that to fall back on. They can always be that good friend or that good listener or that compassionate human. So hat’s for me, that’s why I think it’s, they’re so important. [LISA LEWIS] Oh, I wholeheartedly agree with that too, that EQ is very important and I think more, more important than IQ and also one of those that I have to study, study, study to learn and absorb and to be able to use the information I’m reading about. [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes, same. [LISA LEWIS] So why is the power of positivity every parent secret weapon? [LISA SUGARMAN] I get asked that question a lot because I tend to write about and talk about and focus on positivity a lot. I think at the end of the day, it’s the old saying that your attitude is everything. I think it all boils down to that because in so many instances, your attitude is everything. Because our attitude and the way we receive things that happen to us, or the way we engage with people who we come in contact with, like, we can’t, so much we can’t control in the world. There’s so much about life around us that is beyond our personal control. But how we choose to process what goes on around us, how we act and react to the people we come in contact with, that’s on us. That’s up to you. Most of us have that ability to choose, like, do I want to take the sin in a positive way, or am I going to and moan about it, or am I going to be bitter? We make these conscious choices even though we don’t necessarily realize we’re making these conscious choices. So, especially in like the circumstance of parenting, like parenthood is just ridiculous. It’s just like, I mean, I love my children more than anything in the world. I’ve been a mom for over 25 years. It’s hard. It’s hard work. It’s a labor of love. It’s all the things, anything that it could be, that’s what parenthood is. It’s blissful and joyful and hard as hell and beautiful and complicated. So like, you got to have a little bit of a sense of humor about it and so if you try to stay positive, even in those moments where things are just unraveling, wheels are falling off the bus, everything is going wrong, like we have two choices. We can either completely cave in or try to choose positivity, which almost always, like, when you’re in that frame of mind of positivity or gratitude, it’s hard to be simultaneously be in another frame of mind. Like, if you’re happy, you’re happy. If you’re sad, you’re sad, if you’re grateful, you’re grateful, it overwrites any other emotion. I mean, if you can try to be intentional about finding something positive, even in a negative situation, you’re better equipped to deal with it. You’re not going to be as adversely affected by it. You can navigate it with a clear head. So I feel like that’s always been my secret weapon. This is not to say that everybody has to walk around shooting rainbows out of your eyes and sunshine and twinkly stars everywhere. That’s not life. But the point is that when we do have the ability to choose, if we choose wisely, and we take a step back for a second, we say, okay, look, I’m angry about this or bitter about this, like it’s just going to make it worse. So if I can try to somehow stay positive about it, or at least find one thing that’s positive about whatever the situation is that I’ll be okay. That’s why I think it’s a pretty valuable tool to just have in your pocket [LISA LEWIS] It sure is and it can change the mindset and sometimes, and it can be really hard to shift that to positivity. Maybe sometimes you do have to feel sad or a little negative and then once that’s felt, seen, acknowledged, and it’s like, okay, now I can let that go and see that what is really happening here and see maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn here or a takeaway. I see that also too as the positivity in this situation. [LISA SUGARMAN] I love that you put it that way and it’s almost like a filtration system if we allow it to be, and I really appreciate you saying the need to sit in something, even if it’s not a good thing. Like we do have to sit in those feelings that aren’t the great feelings to process them and acknowledge them and connect with them before we say, okay, well this doesn’t serve me anymore. So I’m going to filter that out and I’m going to keep what does serve me and suit me in this situation. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s a really important point that it’s not about ignoring the stuff that isn’t good, it’s about dealing with it and then choosing to let it go. [LISA LEWIS] And just, and I work with adults, I don’t work with children and including myself, I’ll be in this too, is that sometimes the uncomfortable feelings are so uncomfortable and, I know I have to sit in it and I just want to kick and scream and then I’m like, well, what age do I feel like right now? Oh, there’s my three-year-old, my four-year-old that needs to have a tantrum. Then it’s releasing that, acknowledging it, and then it’s like, okay, now I can, my adult self can show up and I can be with these uncomfortable feelings, even though I don’t want to be in them and it doesn’t feel as bad, or I know there is a way out or I’m getting through something. [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes. Well, life’s about balance. We can’t just ignore one whole side in favor of another whole side. In this context we’re talking about the good and the bad, the positive, the negative. We have to make space to experience both of those. The challenge is how do we maintain that balance, or how do we almost give ourselves permission to take everything in and then siphon out what we don’t need? That’s a challenge. We learn, it’s a skill, we learn that skill and sometimes we hone that skill throughout the course of our entire life and that’s okay because we’re a work in progress. [LISA LEWIS] I love that. I love that, the filtration system. Ah, I also like picture like a sea or or what do I call, a colander or something like that. [LISA SUGARMAN] When I think of that, I actually think of like gold mining, like panning for gold. You’ve got your little pan and you’re just shaking it back and forth and acknowledging all the junk that you caught, and then looking at what’s worth keeping and what’s not. [LISA LEWIS] And finding that golden nugget. [LISA SUGARMAN] Exactly. [LISA LEWIS] So Lisa, what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [LISA SUGARMAN] I think if it were one thing that I know has really served me, it’s to really try and make space for the mistakes that we make and the experiences that don’t go quite the way that we want them to go. Like, allow that stuff to happen without being fearful of them. Try and look at them in a different way, like opportunities and really try and see what’s hidden within them because everybody loves those happy moments, those wins, those success stories. But I feel like there’s an awful lot more to be learned when we look at the situations that didn’t go well because they so often lead us to a better outcome than we ever expected. So I would just say be open, even in the face of the messy moments because there’s always something really beautiful hidden within those moments. [LISA LEWIS] Oh, thank you. That’s a powerful message. I hear also like having faith and trust in the process. [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes, totally. Absolutely. [LISA LEWIS] Do you have a free gift you like to share with my audience? [LISA SUGARMAN] Yes, absolutely. I would love to give anybody who you choose a copy of, my most recent book is called How to Raise Perfectly Imperfect Kids and Be Okay With It. I would absolutely love to gift that to you to be able to gift to somebody else. [LISA LEWIS] Well, thank you very much. I’d be glad to give that, gift that to somebody and I definitely will. [LISA SUGARMAN] Great. [LISA LEWIS] Thank you. Where can listeners get in touch with you, Elisa? [LISA SUGARMAN] I mean, they can find me everywhere. I’m all over the place at this point. You can go to lisasugarman.com or you can find me on Facebook at the Lisa Sugarman or Instagram at Lisa_Sugarman. My books are in most of the fun and cozy little indie bookstores around the country that you can find. You can always just look me up. I’m on Amazon or Barnes & Noble as well. Just search Lisa Sugarman and everything I do should pop right up. [LISA LEWIS] Ah, thank you so much. All of that information will be on the show notes, so just in case you didn’t catch that, we can look at the show notes to find all that information. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Lisa. It’s been wonderful to have you here. [LISA SUGARMAN] Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. [LISA LEWIS] Thank you, my listeners, for listening in. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please visit my website at amiokodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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