Most of Us Confuse Calmness with This
Here’s how you can spot the difference.
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I was working with a client recently, and she mentioned that she doesn’t yell or lose her cool. In her words, she’s really good at staying calm. This is great, I often work with parents who struggle to pause, especially when it feels impossible. Managing our reactions and checking in with ourselves is a key part of the process.
As our call went on, I realized that what she described as calm wasn’t really calm; it was avoidance. She manages to stay calm because she struggles to enforce a boundary with her kids when it causes them to get upset. Instead, she either gives in or compromises with them. Once they’re calm, so is she.
This doesn’t just show up in parenting but also in her life. By her own admission, she struggles to set boundaries with anyone. When we dug a little deeper, we unearthed the story she was telling herself: Conflict isn’t safe, and she needs to avoid it at all costs.
If she thought her boundary would upset another enough to cause conflict, then her job was to “stay calm” and avoid the conflict. In her mind, she was exercising calm parenting tools, and yes, she could stay calm, but in part, it’s because she never entered the storm.
It’s easy to stay calm when everything is going well, but that’s not why people reach out to me. Staying calm in chaos is the real challenge. That’s where tools, a process such as PARR (pause, acknowledge, respond, reflect), and support can transform your relationships, specifically the one with yourself.
What does it mean to be avoidant?
You struggle to set boundaries, which you know will cause discomfort.
You can set a boundary, but struggle to follow through.
You overthink your decisions, and as a result, you are not confident in giving a directive because you are unsure if it’s right or wrong.
You feel unsafe in conflict and struggle with discomfort yourself
Your happy place is when everyone around you is happy
You believe you have to be accommodating
When you see your children or a loved one struggle because of a boundary you set, you try to meet them in the middle (aka, negotiate).
Ultimately, avoidance usually means you don’t trust yourself to sit with discomfort and to help others manage theirs, so we avoid it altogether.
I wish I could tell people I have the answers to make parenting or living easy. But that’s not the reality we’re in. You must experience discomfort, struggles, and moments when things go wrong. It’s how you and your kids learn and grow more resilient.
Parents want to raise confident kids, but the way to confidence is through competence. We gain competence every time we overcome adversity, manage an outcome we don’t want, or work through a struggle.
What does it mean to be calm?
Calm is a practice, and you recognize it as such. I practice calmness and stillness when things are calm. When I take a few moments in the morning to ground myself, meditate, journal, and foster stillness, I can access this state in more challenging moments throughout the day.
Calm and confidence go hand in hand. When you set a boundary and things go wrong, you can stay calm because you know it’s a need. A need for your kids to gain the ability to tolerate frustration. A need for your kids to experience an undesired outcome and feel what they need to feel in order to learn how to self-regulate.
Calm is not passive. A calm person takes space from a conflict and doesn’t need to react. They trust their instincts and their intuition.
Calmness is where you access your inner wisdom, that part of you that knows what needs to happen and trusts the process.
Calmness is the energy you seek when you’re dysregulated. If you are struggling, do you seek the support of an anxious person who constantly seeks to fix you or the one who can hold space and truly sees you?
Harnessing calm energy takes time, especially if you were raised in a home that never felt calm. You may have had parents who constantly yelled or forbade you from feeling what you needed to feel. There may have been constant conflict and no resolution. Perhaps you felt afraid to speak up and state what you needed. We struggle to stay calm or access our calmer, wiser self for many reasons.
Many women I work with say they’re calm, but once we dig a little deeper, they realize they’re avoidant. Women in particular are valued for being quiet and demure, agreeable, non-confrontational, and having a go-with-the-flow personality. You see that as calm, but really, it’s just suppressing who you are.
Calm is the opposite of suppression. Calm is expressing your needs and staying rooted and anchored in your knowing, even when the other person disagrees. It’s holding space for others without trying to fix them. It’s honoring the hard moments and saying thank you for this discomfort because I know it’s here to teach me.
Calmness is steadiness, not avoidance.
Once you embody what it means to be calm, you will quickly see that calmness is contagious. At the end of many sessions with my clients, they’ll say, “I feel so calm.” I am not doing anything to help them calm down; they are experiencing my innate calmness, and it creates a safe space for them to experience it themselves. If you are described as someone who has a calming effect, it’s because it’s coming from within you; it’s not felt in the doing.
Take the time to notice if you’re being calm or being avoidant. Avoidance leads to passivity, permissiveness because you’re not stating your needs, and ultimately resentment because you feel unseen and unheard.
Show yourself grace, and know that recognizing this and creating self-awareness around it is half the battle. Once you spot it, you won’t be able to unsee it. Once you see it, your wiser self has room to enter, and then you can do the work of what it means to BE calm.