Bryan Post has been working in the homes of low-income families bringing mindfulness and presence for 20 years. He helps parents learn that stress turns off the memory system and changes how they learn.
He teaches emotional understanding inside of families that have the stress and anxiety of past trauma. Especially emotional absence and parental depression and how to overcome that emotional absence in our own lives using mindfulness and being present.
Bryan’s Links
https://parentsintraining.org/
https://www.feartolovebook.com/misc-28687180
https://facebook.com/postinstitute/
Links to Foster Care An Unparalleled Journey
https://linktr.ee/fostercarenation
https://patreon.com/fostercarenation
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fostercar
Transcription
hello, and welcome back to foster care. And I’m parallel journey with Jason and Amanda. And today we have Brian post with us. Brian. I found through the post Institute on Facebook. Brian popped up one day and I found a live and I was like, Dang this dude. Is like this dude spit and truth over here. I’m honored to be here. Jason, Amanda, glad you guys have me on. There was many people after talking about this stuff, from what I’ve understood, you seem to have an experiential knowledge base. Like I heard you talk about, you know, working with group homes I’m working with kids and families every day. So tell me, what is it that you do and how are you involved in the system in this situation and how did you get there? Like what led you into that? Man I’ve been in this game for over 20 years now. And to be honest with you, I started, I started working with families in their homes and I still work with families in their homes. It’s today’s Sunday, I’ll see two families today. I’ve got two kids with me right now. So everything that I’m about. I’m a bad experience and I’m about taking complex science and making it really simple and applicable so we can see it in every day and every moment. And so that we can develop a greater awareness or bring a consciousness so that we can live more mindfully and more present and help create stronger, more loving relationships. And so that’s been my whole career. I’m thankful for the nineties, the decade of the brain, because I was just coming out of graduate school during that time and just starting to get my earliest experiences and working with families. And then when I got, when I got introduced to some of those gangsters of the brain, um, it really just, it just propelled my learning and my education. From it from a whole different angle. It was, it was like taking, taking what I was learning in these books by Alan shore and his lectures by Bruce Perry and Joseph DOE and combining it with what I was seeing with families. And this is after all with already having spent several years with some leading clinicians in the field at that time. And so it just really, you know, my big thing is I’ve always had problems with authority because I was adopted, I was in foster care for a short period of time. I grew up in a home with a lot of conflict and, uh, watched a sister adopted sister. She struggled with my parents mightily throughout her life. And, um, It just, it all has just kind of culminated people ask me, you know, how I got started doing what I do. And I just tell them, this is what God created me to do. Everything I’ve ever, everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever gone through. It has molded me to be able to see these families in a different way. And it all started with seeing myself in a different way. I was 27 years old before I realized I was scared. I was 27 years old before I realized that I was stressed and that I was sensitive and that I had experienced trauma and I was already, I had already, I had an agency at that time. I had an outfit intensive, intensive in-home agency seeing, seeing, um, Low income families. I’ve worked in juvenile probation and, um, it wasn’t a till I was 27 years old, two, three years in. Then I realized that it’s what I bring to the table that changes all the dynamics. And that’s kinda what I show up with now. It’s my, my whole mission and goal is to help parents develop a deeper understanding of themselves. So they can then develop a deeper understanding of their children so that they can then educate their children and grow their children, not having a deeper understanding of themselves so that we all get to grow mindfully. How have you learned to walk through do that with your help? Because it sounds like you had your own level of trauma, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. So how will you learn to walk through your own traumas in those moments when it’s really hard to do it? Well, it starts, I say this so often. It’s it’s, it’s like people usually hear it and they’re like, Oh gosh, there’s gotta be, there’s gotta be more. There’s gotta be more, but it really isn’t. It really comes down in any given moment to your ability to stop and breathe. Because when you stop and breathe, you’re out actually reducing the anxiety of your mental. So in the, in the midst of stress and that’s, what’s, you know, when your kids are acting out, your doula is moving you into defense. That’s and that’s all that the amygdala does. The Migdal is protective. It’s always moving us into defense and then it forms these pathways based on our experiences that are always moving us into defense. And so when you, you become stressed, Then you move into defense. The first thing you stopped doing is you stop breathing. You start holding your breath and when you’re ready, holding your breath, you are literally taking on a more the fence of cellular posture. And when you’re taking on a defensive cellular posture, what you’re actually doing is you’re releasing a negative vibration. You’re releasing a vibration of anxiety and fear and stress. And so when we can teach ourselves to breathe in every possible given moment, it helps more than anxiety. And as long as we keep that anxiety dial down. We have a greater Joseph LoDo says in times of stress, our thinking becomes confused and distorted. And our short term memory is depressed. Joseph Aldo has a great interview with Joe Rogan. So I really, you know, I don’t have it. I haven’t seen many good interviews with him, but, um, he wrote a book called the emotional brain is in New York university neuroscientists. He says in times of stress, that our thinking becomes confused and distorted and our short term memory is suppressed. So when the amygdala starts to activate in that anxiety dials up, we stopped thinking clearly. And we forget, we don’t remember. And so when you can teach yourself to read and Herbert Benson discovered this in the night 1970s with the relaxation response, which was act actually based on Eastern Eastern meditation, transcendental meditation, science, and philosophy and beliefs when you can. But he, because he was a horrible physiologist is like all of a sudden, it’s this thing that we call the relaxation response. And now the boot has been doing this a long time. When you can breathe, you can stay present. And when you can stay present, you change the vibration that you send off to the, to the other person’s brain, because that’s all we do our brains just communicate and share vibration patterns. Wow. It’s almost like some of the stuff that people have said for for years is got real science that stands behind it. And, and we didn’t need the science because it works right. The monks have taught us about that. Yeah. We’ve always known. It’s just. Science the decade of the brain really just helps confirm and affirm it. Okay. It sounds to me like you’re probably about five years older than I am, maybe. So I’m going to guess that you probably were raised with people who had similar mentalities to the way I was raised. Oh, shit. Yeah. If you misbehave, you know, there’s a spanking is the answer. Oh, I got, I don’t know if you, have you ever done the switch stance? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah, no, my, my dad was no joke. He was a heavy, he was a heavy equipment operator in a rock quarry and he grew up one of the oldest of nine kids and they didn’t Jack around. His dad was an alcoholic who died early, get shot and bar his mom had to work. Kind of sharecroppers. Then he was on top of that and he’s a Vietnam veteran was severe post traumatic stress disorder. He did not play, he did not play, which is interesting because then I have my sister and my mom always says that I have two pictures. One of me as an infant and one of my sister as an emphasis. The picture of me as an infant. I mean, I’ve literally looked like I’m drawing. What happened to somebody. I look like a little drunk love baby. And I always knew as I got deeper into this work, that I had a really good in utero experience. And a lot of times people don’t realize just how much of who we are started. After conception right after conception. We so much of who we are is rooted in those early days and weeks and months after we are conceived. And then my sister right next to this picture has these big guys, her fists are clenched and she looks terrified. And my mom always says, when we got you. You were smiling. And when we got your sister, she was crying. And so people don’t realize that that those early experiences define this and create our blueprints. John Bowlby said the first, the first three years of our lives create the blueprints for all of our future relationships. After the decade of the brain, we know that that’s from conception to about age five, creates those blueprints for who we are. And we have to really learn how to navigate through those blueprints. But I say all that, because to go back to the fact that my dad was not, you know, he was a serious, easily stressed out overwhelmed, man. And it’s so interesting because I grew up in a home and you know, there’s so much BS in mental health. There’s so much BS, it’s it? It makes me nauseous. There’s so much BS in the ways we deal with children. And we try to, we try to validate and justify it based on what I’m not sure because brain science certainly doesn’t back it up. And it’s almost like people should not be allowed to continue to advocate and to teach things to do towards children if they can’t back it up with brain science, because it’s now just so obvious. But my dad and he’d be driving in the car. We have a big wide Impala, two door wide Impala. And you know, that was in the day when there was no seatbelts. So starting off on a trip, we’d all me and my sister would be up on that backseat, right on the front seat. And we’d be talking, you know, jibber, jabbering, anxious, little kids, excited, whatever. And my parents were believing. For a little bit. And I know it worked because it was still my dad’s window of tolerance started to get too small and eventually we’d be up there and I’m like this, you know, getting all this and all what they’re talking about and everything. And then he’d say, sit back. It didn’t take me long to realize what my dad said. Sit back. I needed to sit back. But because of my early in uteral experience, it helped me to have a little stronger regulatory capacity than my sister. My sister was premature, she was alcohol exposed. She was in an incubator for the first three months of her life. She weighed three pounds. So she, her regulatory capacity for stress and anxiety was different than mine. So I would learn because I was a little more regulated. I could think I could remember. I would sit back. She might sit back for two seconds and then she’d be right back on that. On that seat, you know, right back in their businesses, she was such an anxious child. She was always talking just nonsensical. You know, they call that nonsensical chatter, but what it is is the truly anxiety and insecurity. And so she’d be back on my backseat. My dad was saying, I said, sit back. I knew a train wreck was coming at that point when he does, when the, when the voice increased a couple of doctors and he says, I said, Back you knew it was, you knew what was going to happen and this wouldn’t happen. Just want, she would sit back for about five seconds and she’d be right back on the back of that seat. And I would just be back there shaking my head and he didn’t give another warning. His hand would come. Like I said, he drove a, he drove a big old front end loader. He used to. Take down these mountains in this rock quarry. And he was not a little man, but his hands would come from that stairwell, that one hand that he saw and he would smack her, backhand her right in the face and knock her into that season. She would just be crying and all I can do is just shake my head, man, because it happened not once, not twice, not three, four, five times. That tells you in any, any parents, little bullshit, consequences, and little points and rewards and little threads, a little ground, that little shaming. If a child cannot learn from getting knocked, getting the hell knocked out of them, right in their mouth with knuckles, by a grown ass man knocked into the back of a seat. If a child cannot learn from that, they’re not going to learn from it. Any of that other crap. And the reason they can’t learn is because they are stressed out and their memory system is turned off. And when we use all those other techniques, they don’t work because the child’s stressed and their memory systems turned off. So, so that’s my experience. From as far back as I can remember. So I don’t come to this field with any bullshit illusion of what with children and what doesn’t. I mean, this is my, this is my life. It’s been my. How do you turn that memory system back on? You got to help the child regulate. You have to regulate yourself as an adult. You have to regulate yourself first. My, the brain is, is historical and it is always learning, but if you didn’t get it. You don’t have it and you got to get it in the only way a child can get it is through the teaching and the modeling of the parent. If my dad could not dial down his anxiety, he could not help my sister dial down her anxiety. Therefore he couldn’t help her brain learn a new neural pathway. If you can’t throw enough repetition, help the brain learn a new note pathway that child’s not going to change because you’re not changing as an adult. So we think these children need to change because they have these behavior problems. But what we don’t realize is that these children’s behaviors are byproducts of their neural pathway. It’s conditioned negative neural pathways from a brain that is rooted in survival. And so they come into our lives in the causes, anxiety and stress because they tap into our old pathways, our old survival pathways. So we get locked into these two dynamics. One’s a surviving dynamic and one’s a thriving dynamic. When you start to experience more surviving than you do thriving, you’re not helping that child, that child’s brain change. So what happens is children just grow older. They don’t grow better, and that happens over and over and over and over again. And unfortunately it doesn’t have to because the brain is so amazing. It changes real quick. I can take a child who’s been in high levels of anxiety, take a family where it’s been in high levels of things. Help the family start to develop just some different ways of understanding, some different emotional understanding and awareness, and all of a sudden that anxiety just drops down and then they start to try to work through and create more healing, more repetition. That’s amazing because you know, we, like I mentioned before, we all come to the situation with our own bucket of anxieties. You know, and one of the things I’ve learned about marriages is you take two buckets of anxiety and you try and put them into one bucket and suddenly you have a mess, right. And you start adding kids and trauma on top of that. And that, that mess goes everywhere. And most of us don’t even, I think, recognize our own traumas. Yeah. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t, because we know we don’t know what trauma is. We don’t realize. That trauma is any stressful, which is prolonged over here, alarming are unpredictable. And when that event continues on, without our ability to explain, was that our ability to process it without our ability to understand it. It’s the difference between a short come stressful experience and a longterm potentially life, all time, potentially brain altering. Traumatic experience, stressful experiences that we don’t get to talk about and cry about and feel about and understand become traumatic events. And that’s why we don’t know what trauma is because most of us grow up in environments of trauma and the most pervasive on the trauma in our society. The two most pervasive forms of trauma in our society are emotional apps. It’s a parental depression. And the reason you don’t the stand that you’re, that you, that you experienced problem is cause you grew up in a household where there was food, where there was parents present and there was no beating. There was no abuse and they work hard and there was a few laughs. But what you don’t realize is that your parents were emotionally absent. They were not emotionally connected. When you don’t realize it’s that you probably had a parent who was friendly, depressed. Now what’s important about those two things specifically, Tiffany Phil’s a researcher at the university of Miami did a study with infants. She took two infants. She had one who was, who did she? Oh, she hooked both infants up the brain scans. She had one infant with a healthy parent and another infant with a depressed parent. The brain scans looked exactly the same when the healthy parents got up and walked away from her baby compared to when the depressed parent walked towards her baby. Wow. Imagine if every time your parent walks towards you, you feel stressed. It’s confusing to the brain. Every time your parent walks towards you, you’re supposed to feel a little excited. You’re supposed to feel the sensitivities you’re supposed to experience it. Oxytocin release. Oxytocin is your brain’s anti-stress hormone. It’s a learned hormone in the brain, but imagine if every time your parent walked towards you, your brain signals, threat or danger. Well, that’s what most of our brands grow up experiencing, even though we have all of them basic comfort and accommodations, most of us grow up in these environments where our parents were not there because they’re working because they’re stressed out because they have their own history because they have their own challenges. And they think that that just providing love and support and comfort is what’s what we need, which is. Yes, but that love love is, is a verb it’s action. What was about it? Action. And when your parents are whipping you and saying, I’m whooping you because I love you. That’s the problem. We have grown up with fear, disguises love. We don’t realize that most of our interactions with our children create more stress. You love because that’s our conditioning. We’ve been misconduct. Addition to believe that what we’re doing with our children is actually loved when it’s not so much of what we ended up doing with our children. It’s about our own feeling of survival, because if we’re on a big gun, it has nothing to do with our children at all. Love is allowing you to be patient. It’s allowing you to be mindful. It’s allow you to be calm. It’s allowing you to slow down and it’s allowing you to create an environment and maintain a relationship where your child can become, Oh. That God wants your child to be. That’s. What loves about love is not so much about molding. Your child. Love is not so much about punishing your child because they do something bad. That’s all. Fear-based. But that’s our condition. That’s the way society sees children. And that’s why you encounter so many groups on Facebook, where there are bitter and resentful, hostile and angry parents. Who’ve had nasty adoption of foster care experiences because they were, they were sold a bill of goods. For how life, where the child is supposed to be. I hear you on that, that love is a verb thing. This is something that I’ve been, I’ve been trying to preach for years. I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods by Disney. That love means that we were meant to be, and we’ll find the perfect answer and it will just fall in our lap and everything will always be awesome. And we won’t ever have to do anything because I’ll find my Prince charming. He’ll find his princess and we’ll live happily ever after. And that’s what real love is. Isn’t it? Well it’s well, So for decades, we’ve been sold this bill of goods and the parents have not taken the time to like point out the fact that loves of it really is a verb. I love that. I didn’t know the first place I heard that, but I heard that years ago and went, wow. That that’s, that’s actually kind of deep love is not what you do to someone. It’s what you do for them. And learning how to do that for other people, it is, is a, is a real skill set and doing it for a kid who needs it in a moment when you don’t feel like it. And so is that sometimes it’s the thing that we need to do for them is just be present and see that’s, that’s the hardest thing. The hardest thing Amanda said, well, how do you help? How do you help the child? The most difficult thing for us is to just be present. We don’t have to give advice. We don’t have to Dole out punishment. We don’t have to Dole out our judgments. We have after learn to be present and we have to learn to be supportive. We have to learn to be encouraging. That is enough because when we can get to a place that our brain can allow, wants to do that our child’s brain can change. It doesn’t matter. I have to get a lot more complicated than that. And I’m telling you, this is, this is over 20 years experience of working with every level of child. Probably a hundred times every diagnosis, every medication I’ve seen it all. I’ve worked with it all. I it’s just like ad nauseum. I had a dad the other day. Oh, you’ve never seen a child like this. Oh my God. Give me a gun right now. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all and seeing stuff worse than anyone wants to manage it. And so what we have to realize, and this is kind of my, my whole platform is that children there’s a big, big children’s behaviors arise from a place of stress. Bottom line. Both of our children and adults are negative behaviors. There’s a rise from the state of stress. Our positive behaviors arise from the state of stress in between the behavior and the stress is the presence of a primary emotion. And there are only two love and fear. Let’s do the expression, the processing, and the understanding of the fear that we can call them the stress and diminish the behavior. It’s not about the behavior. It’s not about the behavior. It’s not about the behavior. It’s about the stress and the fear, the stress and the fear, or the roots, the behaviors, the tip of the iceberg, the stress, and the fear is the root. The first part, the first part of that model, which is called the stress model. Is that we have to in the face of stress, the first thing we have to do is we have to stop and breathe and dial down our own fear so we can move into a space of Hawk. And then we can tend with our children’s stress. One of my older sons he’s, uh, 19. Now we had a discussion a while back and it turned into a little bit of a debate for a moment. Cause he thought it was crazy, but it kind of lines up with what you’re talking about. I said, you know, man, All these people that meet all those things. I see. And I said, you know, I see so many people whose behavior is rooted in fear. I didn’t understand it until I get a little bit older. How even, like you said, positive behavior can sometimes be rooted in fear. I’m afraid something good. Won’t happen. If I’m, if I don’t behave this way. That’s right. Yeah. And I don’t be a little bit selfish here because I really would like to hear what you have to say on that. She mentioned about being emotionally unavailable, right? Yeah. Met a lot of guys. Yeah. I’m in a dad’s group and we talk really deeply in there. And I’ve met a lot of guys who, who kind of struggled with the same thing. So how do you reconnect with those emotions so that you can learn to deal with them? Because. If I don’t know how to deal with them and I can’t model them for my kids. And so they’re going to sit in that same place, or they’re going to feel the emotions and just not have anybody to show them how to deal with them. And now I’m just going to deal with behaviors instead of helping them deal with the emotion. So what we, what we don’t realize is that relationship, every aspect of this, this episode, based on everything that you and Amanda do and everything that I do. It’s all rooted in emotion. We, we think it is that we can approach it from a logical place, but it’s actually rooted in emotion. So because we are emotional because we’re nothing more than vibration. So every interaction you have is really it, it literally is emotional, but your brain has learned through early conditioning. To try to override it. But the reality is, is that our brains are dictated to, by our emotional brain. Your left hemisphere is dictated to you by your right hemisphere. But over time, what happens is that when the emotional brain is ignored and denied and suppressed, the left hemisphere, the thinking brain becomes more preemptive and more, more dominant. But we don’t realize it’s still controlled by the emotional brain. And so in order to connect or reconnect, I am saying you have to reconnect this there. You’ve got to slow down and let it rise up. The problem is it is the emotion has been suppressed to the bottom of the ocean. So you go down and you dive in and you swim down and it starts to get kind of dark and kind of cold and you swim back up before you let it really come up. And then you, you override it with your thinking. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to slow down in any given moment. And you’ve got to ask yourself, and this is, this is the practice of mindfulness. You’ve got to slow down and breathe and ask yourself, what am I feeling in this moment? Because you’re always feeling something you just may not know it until you asked a question and spend the time to get in touch with it. And then you honor that emotion. You honor that emotion for yourself. Parents have to be able to do this. Parents have to be able to do this, you know, from moment to moment with their children in order to stay present. So I’m driving in a car with my, I could have two, three kids with me. The I’m not focused on kids. I’m focused on myself. I’m focused on my own breath. I’m focused on my own thoughts. I’m focused on mine. I want awareness because that’s how I keep myself dialed down so I can engage in any given moment to whatever may show up. It’s like keeping the brain of Blake a blank slate, but you only do that by being able to monitor your emotions. So it is it’s, it’s a repetitive process. It’s a process of conditioning. Just slowing down. Even in this moment, you take a deep breath, breathe into your chest and you just ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? What am I feeling is an anxiety. Is it sadness? Is it grief, which then builds into more sadness and then it’s just right there. You just stay right there with that. You see a lot of times, but we want to just go around. We want to run away with it. We want to talk through it. We don’t want to stay with it. Yeah. You’re talking about me pretty deep there. You know, it’s funny, you mentioned that because I had gotten into a mindfulness practice for awhile. Really structured about it every morning. I would, I had an alarm set. I get up early in the morning. I’d get up for work at 2:00 AM. It’s one of the few quiet times in my house. I have six kids in my house today, and then we have another little guy that comes over and hangs out, um, a godson who comes over in the afternoon. A couple of days a week. My house, it’s not a quiet place. Right. He was an infant and I have them. All the way up, all the developmental ages. I have a four year old, a five year old, a six year old. I have a 13 and an almost 15 year old. I have a 19 year. So like you can only imagine all the, all the things that noises during the day. So the morning is the only time we get that quiet place, I would spend that time intentionally. And it was funny that Amanda would look at me some days and say, did you do your, your meditation? No. Why? Yeah, she could, she could see that coming out in me in ways that I’ve learned to, to, uh, you know, I take that time at different points in the day now to really try and, and sit through that, you know, but, but we sit through so many of those moments, some of the emotional moments in our house, That it can be overwhelming pretty quickly if you’re not careful. And if you don’t, you don’t have that experience to be able to lead your kids. And now I have, I have one little guy and he was, was born. He was drug exposed in utero. He spent his first 11 days in the hospital on a methadone wean down. And so when he, when he came home from the hospital, he stayed with a family member for one night and they were like, well, can’t do this. You know? I mean, you can only, if you’ve ever seen somebody on meth trying to try to come off of it, that’s hard. Imagine a newborn at a day old that it was tough. And so he came to our house and then I have some skill sets that make me uniquely qualified to deal with that. And, um, our daughter was in the hospital, real sick at the time. So Amanda and our oldest son would spend most of the time there. So guests who had the drug addicted baby to take care of. Yeah. You get in that moment with him. It’s amazing that that even now we have a connection there because I would sit quietly with him so much. Um, I now spend time. Um, we just found a sensory sleep sock. I think they called it for them to, um, for them to be able to try that out and see if that helps him sleep. And I’ve found that if I can get it to lay down in a sensory sleep sock and he’ll lay down, I’ve taught him to fold this little hand and he was, he was teaching mommy how to do this the other day. You’ll fold his hands and Lisa’s fingers when lacrosse your balance, you know, take a big breath and I’m trying to teach him belly breathing. So breathe. So that moves your hands up and big, deep breath, and then let it out slow because this kid runs 180 miles an hour all day and trying to get him to sleep as a challenge. So I start this, let it out real slow, and he does this practice. I would sit with him in that moment and just be present as we would do this together. That was amazing to watch it fall asleep. Cause this is the kid who can lay in bed until 1130 at night. And he’ll be out of bed a dozen times and there’ll be a hole in the wall and they start to hit me normally four or five years old. We’ve done all the house. It’s not the 19 or something. Right. It’s got the old plaster and lath walls. There’ll be one little spot and he’ll start picking it. He’ll pick a hole in a dang mall just because he’s bored and wild and all that. And to watch him do this and calm himself down. Yeah. Amazing. See how that mindfulness practice not only helped me in ways that Amanda could see, but like I kept watching him and he’s he’s five years old today. And the why can do this and put himself right to sleep. It’s just amazing that all this power is not from this cool new drug yeah. Or seven different drugs at once that finally worked together. Yeah. The power of breathing breath to mindfulness presence. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. Is you being there with them? Any, anybody can swallow a pill? Yeah. You’re alone in that that presence is allowing you. To turn on his Oxy response. So when you can keep the anxiety nailed down and you can turn the oxytocin hop, then you were training his own oxytocin response. And that oxytocin response is eventually what helps him be able to regulate his anxiety, to see a lot of these kids because of their early experiences, they have more cortisol. Then they do oxytocin. So they’re not able to call them. And then over a period of time and cortisol become stronger. So the anxiety is higher and the calm, the oxytocin gets washed away. So they end up finding, they ended up finding they’re soothing from exhaustion, not from true call. So presence enables us to always be turning on someone else’s oxytocin response. They get anxious and anxiety down, and that could come out through cursing. It could come out through loud voice, come out through hyper activity, could come out through, you know, hitting, hitting, hitting something. When we dial our, our, our anxiety and our fullness all down, we turn our oxytocin up and that starts to turn their oxytocin up. And as their oxytocin starts to turn up a little higher and a little higher, their anxiety goes down. You know, it’s amazing that there’s science behind all this just the other night. You know, the little dude we’ve got, who stays with us, right. Uh, in the evenings every, every now and then we watch a baby for him. And, um, and the kids were the two youngest were, I mean, they were wild. They were ready to just blow the roof off the house. I’m like, no guys, it’s bedtime. I got this little dude who’s crying. And so I took him, I took them upstairs to their bedroom and lady torn down and I sat down and with the door open between the room so that they can both hear. And because a little girl, we got staying with us right now. She’s, she’s kind of in that same head space, you know, I don’t know her whole story, but I know just by watching the, she has some of that high anxiety. And if I sat down with my little dude, you know, Frankie and. I’m sitting there talking with him and doing the breathing exercise, and I’ve got the infant sitting in front of me and he’s, you know, he’s crying off and on because that’s what infants do. And it’ll calm him down, all that as we go through that, and this kid falls asleep beside me and I’m like, this is amazing. So I picked a little guy up and carry him in to the other room and I walk in there and because. I’m not a singer. Don’t ask, don’t tell my kids that they don’t know it yet. They’ll figure it out soon enough. But because I grew up in that church, old fundamentalist church, what we see seen, we sing old hymns, right? I’ve got a lot of old hymns on my heart. So I’m walking around carrying a baby. And I got this little girl who is just still high in her anxiety. And I’m just walking in circles in the bedroom, carrying the baby, singing old school church, hymns to these kids who they’ve never heard before. And it was amazing to watch her do the same thing and watch her just calm down. And I don’t know how much of like the mirroring she was getting as I was with him. You know, being loud with it, take bear then, you know, being real loud with the breaths so that hopefully she can hear me and we’ll try and mirror some of that herself. But then I walked in there and it wasn’t maybe 10 minutes in each ramp. And I ended up with those two asleep and the baby who is kind of Ethan. I know he was getting ready to be hungry. He fall, he knows his off in the middle. I’m like, Holy cow, look at all this. So much of this, that, that 10 years ago I would have been so lost and figuring out how to handle it. Yeah, we didn’t, we didn’t walk into most of this w with, with head knowledge, right. We had to learn it through experiential stuff. We had to like stumble our through art through it ourselves and screw it all up. And so know, I think the important piece for people to take away here. I said that, yes, you can do it. You were dealt with the things to do it. And. You don’t need a PhD in anything. Sometimes you just need the screw up enough to figure out how to go. Right. We all do. Even the PhD, the PhD usually has some screw up even more because they have so much head knowledge that won’t allow them to get to their heart. Yeah. And I think that that experiential stuff is, is part of, what’s really made this so very important. Yeah. And you know, one of the things you said, Jason, is that we were breathing, hoping that your child might see you and mimic that Allan Schore says the core of the self is nonverbal and unconscious. Then lies and patterns of affect regulation. I just reframe that to say that it’s not what we say or do. It’s how we feel when we’re doing and saying it. So just your singing and just your breathing and just the slow motion that you were taking is actually creating a different vibration that vibration. Is what’s changing the environment. So that’s what it is. Mirror neurons coming place, because the neurons are electrical or electrical units. They’re not, you know, something that’s looking at you, it’s something that’s being experienced. So as your energy and vibration is changing. Your child’s energy and vibration changes, everyone’s relaxing and you don’t have to say anything at all. You just have to feel in the right space and the right energy. You know, you mentioned all that. It reminds me, we’ve had a couple of different people come on our podcast and talk about equine therapy. And how much that’s exactly the same story of what’s going on when you work with horses and where we’re in kind of rural Missouri, we’re in town up here. And if I go over here, there’s a little road that goes down and dead ends into a place where gal has a barn and a couple of horses. And my wife and daughter went down there and this, this white horse snowball she’s named her, always walks up to the fence and wants you to pattern. And so my wife and daughter went down there one day and the owner was out. She says, Oh, these are all rescue horses. She said, just be careful with that one. The white one, she is mean. She will hurt you in a heartbeat. And my daughter’s like, Oh, shoot alone. I can’t even get her to come to me. And she was like, she walks over me all the time then it’s okay. It’s interesting. I walked down there with them recently and went down because I know a few people who talked about that a lot. I have a couple of people I know who work with horses a lot. Just understanding that nonverbal side of it. And to walk up and I had the kids down there and to, you know, shoulders down, head down, calm breathing, and how they behave. And then get a little bit animated, a little bit excited, move my hands a little bit based on shoulders, on feet, square tub, and to see the reaction I’m like, this is what you do every day. Dude, you don’t know it’s a bit like you have the same reactions. She’s just, this horse has been abused. So she’s more obvious than harass, you know, she’ll turn around and gave him, gave me the height and didn’t real fast because it’s not close. She’s trying to ignore me. She’s paying close attention. Those hubs can hurt me. She’s threatening me right now and kind of just watch it and teaching the kids how to, how to walk up and be calm, potentially dangerous situation and create this calm mode, this room where they can just walk up and pet this horse. And the lady was blown away that she could just walk up and pet this work. Uh, and it’s, it’s the power is there. It’s, it’s the same thing we do with our kids. It’s the same thing we do at work with the people we work around. I mean, I deal with the public, some in my work, and I’m going to tell you to the public as a whole, it’s a challenging thing to deal with some days and some days, but on my hate me face, you know, I can, I can do that and keep a space around me. Pretty easy. Now, I mean, I’m standing around places with, with large quantities of explosives and stuff. And so people, if I make a hate me face, people tend to stay away. But it’s all about that vibration that you’re putting out a world around you and being conscious of it. Yeah. Understanding the con that you have that in, you. And understanding kind of control it. Where did you first learn that number one? That was something you were doing that you didn’t even know before you realized you were and number two, how to control that and to get the responses from people that’s beneficial, but you’re looking for, from the people around you, especially with kids, you know, I feel like I just, um, Probably at some level, it’s always just been a part of who I am. Um, I had an experience early with my, with my oldest daughter when she was, uh, going through potty training. I, and I just. I knew then it’s like, I wanted to do different than how many my parents had done me. And so I wanted to parent her different. And so I knew I just had to do something different, you know, it’s like, just do something different. It doesn’t mean you don’t always know this is in my early twenties. You don’t always know what to do. You just do something different. And then when I really had the awareness of my own fear, Later into my young adults when I was 27, that really changed everything. When I, when I became intimately aware of how scared I had always been and how sensitive to stress I’d always been, that really changed. It changed everything for me. It literally changed her. Yeah, I can see that would changing everything for you when you can finally realize it. Unfortunately, I think most of us wait way too long in life. Before we start to realize this, it gets a little more challenging. Yeah. I trained a guy a while back at my job and he’s a young dude. Right. And I remember sitting and thinking first thought, it’s like, Oh my gosh. Yeah. 20, you know, young, 20 year old dudes, they’re just. Not so frightened. And then the next day I’m training and I’m thinking, dang it, he reminds me me at that age. It’s driving me crazy. And I remember who I was at that age. I’m like, yeah, that guy wasn’t very bright. I know him real well. He did all kinds of stupid stuff and it wasn’t till I got older that I started reading and for the challenge for us as I was a young dude who didn’t have a clue, I mean, I can say I had a good heart. But I didn’t have a clue what to do that wouldn’t cause damage. And I’ve told this to my oldest son, he sends gone off to the military and he became a nurse through the military and, and gotten out and, and we’ve talked. I said, dude, you would like a science experiment gone. Yeah. It’s like giving a 12 year old, a beaker and some acid and some other things and just see what happens. I mean, they didn’t send you home with an instruction manual. Not that I know what I was doing. I was a dummy. Yeah. And now with, with the two kids we have, who are in the middle that are teenagers, who are young teens right now. And I’m like, okay, yeah, I can, I can kind of figure this out better. And, and I didn’t do the early childhood nearly as well as I should have, but as I have the youngest kids, because we have that many right. I’m like, okay, I can do this right now. I can start out. Right. How do you, how do you speak into the lives of a young family who think they’re doing everything right, but, but have some things that would really make a big difference and get to that part in their heart, where you go home, man, just listen to this man. That’s like, I screwed this up and here’s how you can not screw it up. Well, sometimes you have, you have to work through their guilt and through their shame. And a lot of times it’s our guilt or shame that gets in the way of us really getting honest. And so just very gently helping them start to just consider that they’re seeing something different than what they think. I had a dad not long ago. We were, we were just sitting in their living room, having a conversation. My first meeting with this mom and their dad, and they’re young, they’re young couple. And, um, I basically just laid out that they laid out for them, that they had experienced significant trauma in adolescence. And man, dad just. He, I called stoping up. He stowed up and he was, he was so emotional in his face and I just slowed way down and I lowered my voice and I said, dad, what’s going on right now. And he was just like a, just like a pant up. 13 year old and he just tears streaming down his face. I didn’t know. I’d experienced trauma and I don’t, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s been the best. And I just let him sit with that. And I just said, but it had, it’s not it’s right here right now. It’s still right here. They just, you know, just allowing him to relax into that without feeling overwhelmed about it, that it just is what it is. And they have a 14 year old that they’re really going through it with right now that startup all that adolescent trauma and anxiety. And about a week later, he texted me and he said, man, I just saw a great example of what you were, what you were teaching us. Then he talking, you can imagine his family members five-year-old right. Diane, a little dynamic. And so just sometimes it’s just planting seeds for people to be able to consider that. There’s something different than what they’ve experienced and Stephen Covey called that a different paradigm, but, you know, seeing, seeing a different paradigm and I tell people they have to learn to see through a different lens than what they’ve grown up with. It’s funny, you mentioned that, um, When I see things three times and in rapid succession in my life, if for whatever reason I pay attention to that year, the third person in the last, probably two to three days that has encouraged the idea of planting seeds in people’s lives to me. And I feel like, you know, whether you want to call it God or the universe or something. Well, when something comes up three times in quick succession like that, I know it’s time to, for me to pay attention. Yeah. Planting seeds, instead of fixing problems. Yeah, you can’t, you can’t fix people’s problems. I love that. I love that. So you, you you’ve talked a couple of times about working with families. Do you, do you work with families on your own? Is that, is that like a service that you offer or how does that, so we have, um, well, I have a wrapper. Parents and training. It’s a wraparound agency in Northern California where we serve adoptive families and they’re at risk adoptive families. And we’d go, we’d go in and provide a number of services to help them maintain the place. And, um, you know, try to try to create. An opportunity for some hope and some healing for these kids and for these parents. So that’s my, that’s my full time here again. It’s usually about seven days a week. And then we have post Institute where we provide education. And then there’s a Facebook post Institute page where I do the daily dose five days a week. You sound like me. I do this like seven days a week and then five days a week. And you sound, you’re trying to get like 14 days in your weekend. Busy busy. You know, here’s the important part about that is that, you know, the post Institute stuff on the Facebook lives and things that I’ve heard there, that’s where I, where I’ve managed to find you, you know, you said you’re in Northern California, right? Yes. We would not have run across each other any other way. Cause I mean, We’re we’re located in mid Missouri. I was stationed in Monterey Bay for a hot minute years ago, but that’s not all my experience of California is I can tell you that right off post down there, right off of, uh, the Presidio at Monterrey. It’s a cool place to enter called companions and he would make you one heck of a sandwich. And that’s what I remember, California. So yeah, we probably wouldn’t have met. And it sounds like you’ve got a message to hand out to the world. Where can people find you online? Because I mean, other than obviously the Facebook group and the lives and stuff. Um, where can people find you to, to talk to you and learn from your message? Cause it’s value and that’s that’s really, yeah, we do have a, I have a book. My, one of my best sellers is called from fear to love. And we have a little website set up where we ship people to book for free. It’s called fear to love book.com and they pay the shipping and handling. We send them, we mail them. Physical copy of the book. We give them a audio of the audio version of the book, and we also give them a one hour webinar that I did for adoptive moms. Um, and that’s all for, I think, $6 and 95 cents. So that’s, you know, that’s a great little introductory offer, but otherwise, yeah, on, on the post Institute, Facebook page where I do daily dose, right. There are probably 450 50 videos that I’ve done over the last almost two years. And so there’s some, all day lectures on there. You know, there’s some five minute talks and they, they can get as much Brian post as they want. So we’re, we’re, uh, all the information is out there. Yeah. And I’m thankful for it because you know, our, our kids all come from, from a place of trauma wife and I both come from a place of trauma, learn how to deal with that in a way that’s beneficial for us and them, you know? Cause I mean, so many what’s the divorce rate last I heard was somewhere hovering just North of 50%. Right. And so you’re raising these kids, whether it’s foster, whether it’s adopted, whether it’s even biological kids, there’s, I’ll tell you. No, I don’t think my kids listen to my podcast. So I’ll tell you, even my biological kids have caused me some trauma. Well, parenting is not easy. No, it’s not for the week. And so, you know, but, but any parent needs stuff like this to be able to walk through because if we do it right, our end goal someday, and it’s going to be a while yet, but someday is to have this house was grandbaby showing up down then. But at the end of the day, it’s just got to show it’d be me and her. No, I tell people all the time, this, this is not, this is, it feels like you’re doing it for your child now, and you’re doing it for your family now, but really it’s not, this is for your grandchildren and your great grandchildren, because we are changing the lineage of families. And so we’re changing the generations to change that you have the ability to break the chains. Right now in this generation and send something different forward. And that’s, that’s what I want for families. Cause that’s how we change the world. I was in talking with some friends here a while back and a while in the dads group I’m in. And one of the things we talked about a lot was, um, what’s heritage was, was legacy and. That was, that was the thing that I realized that we have a legacy good or bad. You’re going to leave it. That’s right. And, and in foster care, we see a lot of those kids who, who are now parents with their kids in the system, and this is her opportunity to break those generational changes. 100%. Thank you guys for having me on. No, it’s, it’s been awesome. You know, Jason showed me some of your stuff and I was like, wow. You know, it was just very eye opening because who doesn’t want to do better for their children. You got to do better for yourself first. Thank you so much for all your time today. Yeah, because what you’re, what you’re doing with, with what you’re doing online, you’re changing, you’re changing the hearts and minds of parents what’s will change kids and grandkids. And quite frankly, those kids and grandkids at the one cut of me making decisions about our healthcare and our lives, when we can’t do it anymore, we got them, make sure they do better. And, and you’re leading that in a positive way. So we really appreciate that. Right. You guys take care now. A huge, thank you to Brian post for coming on here and sharing all of his wisdom and experience and hard-fought knowledge with us today for free check down on the show notes, to find ways to contact him, look up to post Institute. On Facebook and sign up for his information and we will put links to all of his stuff down in the show notes. So you can find him. You also find our links as well down there. Now, one quick warning. If you’re on an Apple device, sometimes Apple podcast in iTunes, the links don’t work. It’s a little bit wonky and I cannot seem to figure it out. So until then, Just going over to foster care nation.com. Look at the show notes tab and you will find here’s a picture of him and his show. Click on that. And it’ll all be listed in there for sure. Now, if you guys would like to support us in any way, we would love it. Take this episode and share it with your friends. Share it with people who you think might be interested, share it with people who could use the information, just share this around and let people know that there’s help out there for kids. Who’ve been through hard things that we just don’t know how to handle. Now, if you have a car extra dollars and you’d like to help us out and support us monetarily, and that’d be awesome. Go on over to patrion.com/foster care UJ. And joining the people, helping us over there. That’d be great. We’d love it. That’s awesome. If not the content is always free, just come on back next week and check it out next week and be sure to find our social media information. You can find most of that all over at the website you spoke and search for foster care and unparalleled journey. We have a support group over there. A group of great people reach in there. Talk to people, ask us questions and we’ll help you out again. It’s all easy to get into and it’s free, no charge, nothing like that. We will talk to you again next week and as always.