86. The One Thing You Need to Know About Breaking Intergenerational Patterns as a Mom with Danik Bernier (PART two)
It's 2am. You're rocking your baby.
A weird sensation moves through your body and you don't know what to make of it.
You're too tired to understand what's happening - and that's okay.
That's where we left off in part one of this conversation with Danik Bernier, MSW RSW. If you haven't listened to episode 85 yet, start there - Danik shares the story of her great-grandmother and what it taught her about the feelings that pulse through us as mothers without explanation.
In this episode, we pick up where we left off. We get into what to actually do with what your body is telling you - and why doing it before the hard moment is the piece almost everyone is missing.
Why the Mental Note Matters for Mom Emotional Regulation
Danik noticed something over time: the sensation she felt at 2am was showing up more and more when she was with her daughter - not her son. She didn't know what it meant yet. But she kept taking a mental note.
That's the first move. Not understanding. Not fixing. Just noticing, and then looking back later with a fresh pair of eyes to see if there are patterns.
What she already knew about postpartum anxiety and postpartum depression wasn't fitting with what she was going through. The mental note gave her data to work with when she was ready to look at it.
What a Mom's Window of Threat Actually Is
This is where Danik introduces the concept that reframes everything: the window of threat.
A window of threat is a moment in your 24-hour cycle where you risk more often than not going into fight, flight, freeze - or fawn, which is when you push your own needs, values, and what you know is good for your family to the side and go into people-pleasing mode just to avoid any kind of threat that might come up.
When you're in your window of threat, you're giving from a place of total depletion. You're not just at zero percent. You're in the minuses. And that's when unintentional emotional neglect - of your kids, of yourself - becomes a very real risk.
You can have more than one window of threat. And they change as your kids get older. Danik's used to be mornings - her partner leaves early for construction, she's always been alone with both kids every morning. Every transition, every "put your shoes on, let's go" was a potential trigger. That was her window. Now that her kids are school-age, the mornings have more ease. Her new window is evenings when her partner goes out and bedtime is on her alone.
Your window of threat is personal. The strategy is the same.
How to Regulate Through Your Mom Triggers: The Proactive Steps
Here's what Danik and I both kept coming back to in this conversation:
the tools you hear about for emotional regulation don't work in the moment.
Look at your toddler's little hands. Notice five things you can see, four things you can touch.
The 5-4-3-2-1 technique. Box breathing.
These tools can help. But not when you're already in it. When you're in your window of threat, your logical thinking brain isn't online. Whatever's stored up there can't make its way down to the survival brain that's running the show. You can't reach for a tool you haven't already built into your body.
That's the missing piece. That's the proactivity of it all.
Here's how Danik breaks it down:
Step 1: Name your window of threat. Look at your 24-hour cycle. Where do you lose it more often than not? Where do you find yourself people-pleasing or shutting down or going into survival mode? That's your window.
Step 2: Ask what your body needs before you get there. Not during. Before. When you're still in your logical adult thinking brain, approaching the window but not yet in it.
Step 3: Choose a body-based tool and use it proactively. Danik's example: box breathing every morning even when everything is fine, even when her toddler woke up happy, even when there was no crisis. She was staying in her logical brain for as long as possible so that when a trigger hit inside her window of threat, she had options. She'd already given herself another way to respond.
Step 4: Practice it outside the window - over and over. Danik's work in EMDR informs this: you can essentially desensitize yourself to an upcoming stressor before it arrives, so when it comes, your body already knows what to do with it.
The Somatic Tool That Actually Worked for Me (Kayla, Mom Guilt Therapist and ADHD Mom of Two)
My couples counselor gave me a tool that I thought was completely nuts when he described it.
I was dealing with a lot of unregulated anger. Not chosen anger - the kind where the situation seems to expect it. Screaming because people won't put their shoes on. Flying off because of teeth brushing. And we had a lot of conversations about my relationship with anger, my history with it, what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it.
What he gave me was a somatic exercise: zoom in on the point of contact where your body is touching something. The ground under your feet. Your seat in the chair. If you can't feel that, focus on your throat - notice the speed and the feeling of what's coming out of your mouth.
Then he told me to practice it 100 times a day.
I looked at him and said, pardon the - I don't have time to pee. Read the room.
He said: you don't have to make time for it. You do it while you're making lunch. While you're talking to someone. While you're in the shower. It's not extra.
I went home, did my homework, and within a week I could feel myself reaching my window of threat - and then it wouldn't happen. I could feel my feet on the floor. I could hear the speed of what was coming out of my mouth. I could actually stop myself.
And then I was mad that it worked.
He didn't teach me how to use the tool in the moment when I was already yelling. The whole tool was proactive. That was the point.
Why Proactivity Is How Moms Put Themselves First
Here's the thing Danik said that landed hardest for me: you're meeting your needs first so that you can meet your kids' needs first.
Not kids first, then mom. Not side by side, because that creates constant tension. It's more like - if you're watching the video it makes more sense visually - the kids are in front and mom is meeting that from behind. But she has to feel resourced in order to meet it.
The proactivity is how you get resourced. It's the chicken that wins.
And this isn't a one-time fix. This tool has ebbed and flowed throughout my parenting. New developmental stage, new communication, new demands on my nervous system - and sometimes I need to come back to it. The moms I see often say: I thought I dealt with this. I went to therapy when my son was two. Now he's six and I'm back to the same theme. That's not failure. That's how it works. The tools you need change as your kids change.
Sometimes you have to put yourself first for a season before you can put the kids first. And sometimes you put the kids first and squeeze yourself into the margins. The proactivity is what makes either one sustainable.
Journal Prompts for Moms Working on Emotional Regulation
What is your window of threat right now - the moment in your day where you're most likely to lose it or shut down?
What does your body do just before you hit that window? Is there a sensation you recognize?
What would it look like to do something for your nervous system before that window - not during, before?
I'm a mom guilt therapist in Alberta and the proactivity piece is something I come back to again and again with the moms I work with. If this landed, listen to the full episode with Danik above - and go back to part one if you haven't yet.
What's your window of threat right now? Drop it in the comments - the more specific the better. You might find you're not the only one.
P.S. Danik hosts a podcast called the Healing Mothers Club - I've already binged a few episodes. It gets to the root of things in a way that generic wellness content doesn't. Go check it out.
