Come Talk Anger and Emotional Baggage With Me...

If you are anywhere near South Florida, I want to see you on July 26th.

My dear friend Eli Harwood, therapist, author, and the person behind Attachment Nerd, is coming to Coral Gables for the release of her new book, and the two of us are going to spend an evening talking through something I care about deeply. The stuff we carry into parenting without meaning to, and how to deal with our own baggage so our kids don't have to carry it for us. Details are at the bottom, and I really hope you grab a seat.

Now let me tell you why this conversation matters so much to me, and why I wanted it to be the thing I bring to you in person.

It starts with anger.

I have a temper. Not the kind that makes me proud, and for a long time, not the kind I knew what to do with. I used to have a genuinely unhealthy relationship with my anger. And I say relationship on purpose, because anger itself was never the problem. Anger is a signal. It points at something that matters. But no one ever taught me how to feel it and use it well, so it leaked out sideways into my adult life, my marriage, and eventually the way I showed up as a mom.

That’s the part that got my attention. My kids did not sign up to absorb something I never dealt with.

I talked about all of this in a podcast episode with Eli, and it cracked something open for a lot of you. So I want to keep going here because the conversation underneath it’s bigger than anger. It’s about everything we hand down without realizing, and what it takes to stop.

We all have baggage

Every single one of us. And if your first thought is "I really don't have much," that's its own kind of baggage. Welcome to step one.

We tend to think baggage means big, capital-T trauma. Sometimes it does, but more often it's quieter than that, and here's the part worth sitting with: most of our baggage started as a solution. The kid who learned to read a tense room and head off the blowup was doing something smart. The kid who stopped asking for much because asking never went well was protecting themselves. Numbing out, bracing for criticism, gripping for control when things felt shaky. Every one of those was a way a younger version of us stayed okay.

Eli put language to this in our conversation that I keep thinking about. These coping tools get handed to us, often by people who were handed them too. Denial, the habit of going "it's fine, it's not that bad," gets passed down a whole family line the same way an old recipe does, without anyone deciding to teach it. We just absorb it and start using it.

The trouble is the tool outlives the moment it was built for. What kept you safe at eight gets in the way at thirty-eight, sitting across from a toddler who needs you to stay present right when every old instinct says brace, fix, or get out of the room. You reach for the tool because it's the one in your hand, even when the job in front of you calls for something completely different.

That's what makes this work so personal. It asks you to look at the tools you were handed and decide which ones you actually want to keep, and which ones stop with you.

Why our kids feel it

Here's the part that matters most. When we carry unexamined baggage into parenting, our kids feel it. This is true even for the most loving, devoted parent in the world, because for the early years, we're our child's whole world.

It helps to understand what's actually happening in a child's body. Kids do more than watch our reactions. They organize around them. A young child reads our tone, our face, the energy in the room, and uses all of it to figure out whether the world is safe right now. Their nervous system is still under construction, and ours is the blueprint they borrow from. When we're steady, they learn that big feelings can be felt and handled. When our stress spills out in ways they can't predict, they start doing something quieter and more costly, scanning our mood before we've said a word, bracing for what might come next, shrinking their own needs so they don't add to ours.

This comes from the pattern over time, the thing a child comes to expect, far more than from any one rough afternoon. And it's how baggage gets handed down without a single word about it. A kid absorbs less of your actual story and more of what your unprocessed feelings taught their body to expect from the people who love them.

That's the part that stays with me. My aim is to stay someone my kids can bring anything to, which means working on the stuff that would otherwise make certain feelings feel too risky to bring me.

What doing the work actually looks like

Some of my hardest moments happen when everyone is technically fine and I'm the one quietly coming apart. On those days, if the kids are safe and settled, I've learned to step away for a second. The bathroom, a closet, wherever I can close a door and breathe. Sometimes I come back and just look at my kids for a moment. Like their hands, and how they’re so small. Focusing on a piece of them reminds me how they're still learning and growing, and it pulls me back into the moment I'm actually in, instead of the one my body is bracing for. That's all the pause is. A few seconds to land before I react.

Here's why that pause is so hard to pull off, and why "just stay calm" has never once worked for me. Our bodies react before our thinking brain catches up. By the time the rational part of you shows up with a reasonable plan, your heart rate is already up, your jaw is already tight, the sharp thing is already halfway out of your mouth. That's wiring, not a character flaw. The old pattern moves faster than the new intention, every time, right up until you've practiced the new one enough that it starts to keep up.

So the work is less about staying calm and more about knowing your own early warning signs, the heat in your chest, the clipped tone, the specific thing your kid does that sends you from zero to sixty. The better you know your signals, the more often you can catch the moment before it becomes the moment. Not always. Sometimes I still get heated and the frustration shows, or the sharp comment slips out before I can pause.

Which is why the other half of the work is repair. When you miss it, and you will, you go back. You get down to their level and say something like, "I got really frustrated and I raised my voice, and that wasn't about you. I'm sorry. That's my feeling to handle, not yours." That one act does something quietly powerful. It teaches your kid that rupture is survivable, that love stays put when someone messes up, and that the grown-up is the one responsible for the grown-up's feelings. A lot of us never got that growing up. We get to give it now.

I've been doing this work for years. I still do it, because it doesn't have a finish line. And honestly, it's changed my life as much as it's changed my parenting. I don't like how anger feels in my body, and I don't want to live on edge. Working on this gave me something steadier, for me and for them.

Come do some of this work with me, live

This is exactly what Eli and I are going to get into on July 26th. Anger, emotional baggage, the patterns we inherit, and how to deal with our own stuff so our kids don't have to.

Eli's work is some of my favorite in this space, and getting to do this in person feels special. If you've ever wondered, "am I passing this on," this is the room you want to be in.

• An Evening with Eli Harwood, in conversation with me

• Sunday, July 26 at 7 PM

• Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL

• Your ticket includes admission for one guest and a copy of Eli's new book at the door

If you can't be there, her book "How to Deal with Your ___ So Your Kids Don't Have To" is the next best thing. It's genuinely one of my favorite parenting reads, and it's practical in a way that sticks.

On YouTube

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An opportunity for YOU to ask Dr. Mona your parenting questions!

Dr. Mona will answer these questions in a future Sunday Morning Q&A email. Chances are if you have a parenting concern or question, another parent can relate. So let's figure this out together!