2. From Chaos to Calm: My Parenting Breakthrough with Bryan Post

After discovering the work of Bryan Post, I couldn’t get enough of it. Every day, while driving in my car or working around the house, I was listening to his teachings. There were so many short videos on his Facebook and longer videos on his YouTube. My brain was on fire with all of this new information. It was like nothing I had ever heard before.

Was this man talking about me? Not my child. He was telling me that I had to calm down, that I was making the situation worse with my own stress, and that my child was not choosing these behaviors. The odd thing was, it was making sense. Somehow, it just felt right. Could it really be as simple as this? He was telling me to do nothing. To stop and breath and not make things worse.

I showed this to Steven. He was skeptical. It sounded too "airy-fairy." Too good to be true. Every new thing I learned, I would relay back to him. He was interested but not convinced.

The more I learned, the more curious I became. Bryan was teaching me about the brain and what happens when it goes into a fear state and how we all feed off each other's energy. I found myself having to pull my car over and put my head in my hands many times while listening, as my brain was blown by how much I could see myself in this information. I would shout in agreement at my phone as more information sparked moments of realisation. Lightbulb after lightbulb going off in my head.

But the real test was in those big moments with my child. He gave me plenty of opportunities to try this out. One evening, while he was melting down in his room, Steven and I waited it out downstairs. Bryan’s mantras ran through my head:

“All behaviors arise from stress and fear.”

“They cannot choose behaviors in this state.”

“Their thinking is confused and distorted.”

“They are regressed back into the trauma in these moments.”

I reminded Steven of these; he was still unconvinced. But I kept repeating them, trying to convince myself as much as him. “Okay,” I said, “I’m gonna try this.” Up I went.

My wee guy was in a rage, his room was wrecked. His face was red, and his body tense. He was on the bed, his body curled into a ball, refusing to look my way. The anger was emanating from him, palpable.

I asked if I could come in, and he grudgingly nodded. I sat on the floor. For a while, I said nothing. Bryan’s words echoed in my head again: “Just breath.” So I did. I wish I could remember all of that interaction from that day, but I can’t. I just know that things went very differently. I remember him moving closer and eventually cuddling in beside me. I mostly remember coming back down in awe to tell Steven about it, replaying it to him in disbelief. I remember calm was restored, and breakthroughs were made. My wee guy had been able to talk to me, and we had reflected together on what had led to him feeling and behaving this way. When I understood his experience, I felt very differently. Where there had previously been frustration and disappointment, there was now compassion and empathy. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.

Of course, I worried this was a fluke, a one-off. But as the days went on and I kept seeing the fear, kept seeing the regressed, stressed child underneath, the repair got easier and quicker. He started to expect that I would come to him in this way, and secure in the knowledge that we could have these moments afterwards. He started meeting me in the hallway, on the stairs, waiting. This was actually making a difference. And every time, I would go back to Steven, and we would marvel at what we were seeing. He was still resistant, but he couldn’t deny that there was something to this.

The more I learned, the more change we saw. I started offering ways for him to express his emotions through drawing, screaming, jumping, and even allowing a safe space for him to swear and get it all out. The meltdowns became less frequent and much shorter. I wasn’t perfect. I made many many mistakes. But I always came back to repair and afterwards, reflect, so that I could learn about what I could do differently.

So, when Bryan Post announced that he was offering a new parenting program, I had to sign up. He called it the ‘Parenting Matrix.’ It would last 28 days, and he would talk to us each day, delivering a short session with work for us to do daily. This was like the Matrix movie; he said that if we did this, we would be leaving the old parenting paradigm behind us and that there was no going back.

I was all in.