Michelle Gale on Catching the Explosion Before It Happens
There are a handful of practices I lean on to keep myself from blowing up. This started years ago, when my oldest was around three. I was working with one of my teachers at the time and admitted how much I was struggling with my patience. It left me feeling terrible about myself. A lot of what I'd been doing was somatic work, paying attention to my body and noticing where the tension collected. Her suggestion surprised me: bring my son into the practice. Ask him, when he saw me starting to tense up, to remind me to breathe.
What happened next still amazes me. This tiny three-year-old would watch me pacing, moving fast, clearly heading toward losing it before I'd even registered it in myself, and I'd hear this small voice: "Breathe, mama. Breathe, mama." He kept it up for a couple of months. He could read it in me before I could read it in myself, and that taught me something.
The pattern finally clicked. When I'm pacing, when I start snapping, it's nearly always because I'm out of time. I suspect plenty of parents know this one. We can be loving and generous right up until the clock runs out, and then the whole thing collapses fast and gets ugly. Out of time, pacing, grabbing things off the floor, jerky movements. My son was catching all of it. Kids make surprisingly good partners that way.
Catching it before it tips over is the goal. That takes having something in place ahead of the moment, some kind of centering practice you return to. The ability to stay grounded isn't handed to you; you have to build that muscle. Small breathing exercises help. So do little prompts on the computer. There are good apps for this now. A year or two back I was using one called Stillness Buddy, which would surface on my screen and nudge me to take a breath, pause, sometimes read a short quote or sit for a quick meditation. Headspace has ten-minute sessions you can slot into the day. Plenty of options exist.
Recovering after you've snapped matters, sure. But the real work, the part that changes things, is doing it such that you aren't exploding as often in the first place, and you're able to stay closer to who you actually are.