Yesterday my daughter completely melted down because she wanted to shower first.
It was almost 8 PM, and much like Cinderella, once the clock strikes a certain hour, her overtiredness takes over. My bedtime was still three hours away, and my goal was simple: bathe both kids as quickly as possible so I could maximize a little bit of quiet time for myself.
Aubrey had other plans.
I gave her a 10-minute, 5-minute, and 2-minute countdown because I know transitions are hard for her. She slowly made her way upstairs, slowly picked out her pajamas, and then announced she had to poop. At that point, I had no idea how long that would take, so I made the executive decision to bathe Logan first.
The moment she realized she wasn’t going first, the tears came.
She wasn’t upset about the shower anymore. She was upset because the plan had changed.
Something I’ve noticed about Aubrey is that when she’s overwhelmed, time almost seems to stop. While she’s processing big feelings, she assumes everything else should stop too. She feels like she’s lost control, but she’s too dysregulated to explain why.
I tried changing the subject. We talked about cookies, her day at school, and what we might find inside a lake. I was looking for a pattern interrupt, something to help her step out of the emotional loop.
Ironically, what finally broke the cycle wasn’t one of my creative distractions. It was us raising our voices. Her sadness shifted into fear, and once I slowed down, hugged her, and helped her regulate her breathing, she was finally able to move forward and take her bath.
As frustrating as the evening felt, it taught me something important.
I was collecting data for her User Guide.
Here’s what I learned:
- She needs more buffer time than I naturally allow.
- Transitions help, but she also needs to feel like she has some control.
- If she agrees to a plan, changing it creates anxiety.
- Time isn’t a meaningful concept when she’s emotionally overwhelmed.
The funny thing is…many of these same observations exist in my husband’s User Guide too.
I give Jeff countdowns before we leave because transitions are hard for him too. When he’s upset, he needs time to process before he can talk. He experiences time blindness, so “I’ll do it in five minutes” can accidentally become five hours. When he’s hyperfocused, he often needs someone to interrupt the pattern so he can shift his attention.
After nine years of marriage, I’ve naturally built a mental User Guide for him by collecting hundreds of little observations. Eventually, he wrote his own.
It’s over 20 pages long.
Now I’m doing the same for Aubrey.
The goal isn’t to change her.
We don’t get frustrated that a dishwasher requires detergent or that its filter needs to be cleaned. We learn how it works so it works better.
People are no different.
I know from my own User Guide that I hate being late because it gives me anxiety. I need long walks outside to organize my thoughts and do my best creative thinking. I sometimes forget to tighten the peanut butter lid all the way. And I’m terrible at parallel parking because my spatial awareness isn’t great.
None of those things make me broken.
They simply tell the people who love me how I work best.
We don’t expect to instinctively know how to use a dishwasher, a phone, or a new piece of software. We read the instructions because understanding how something works helps us use it well.
So why do we expect the people we love and ourselves to come without one?
If tools come with user guides, why don’t humans?
That’s the question we’ll explore together at the Personal User Guide Workshop on Sunday, July 26, from 10 AM–12 PM at Task Up.
We’ll begin with a calming meditation Jillian McCleaf from the LoveMore Studio before diving into exercises that help you discover your own operating manual so the people in your life can better understand you, and you can better understand yourself.
I’d love to have you there.
RSVP at https://luma.com/posytsjk.
Task Up
104 S. 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
267–761–4118
🦄 SPOTLIGHT: Meet Qing Yang, the owner of Task Up. Some of life’s best conversations happen when people have the space to slow down and connect. In the heart of Philadelphia, Task Up is a locally rooted coworking and gathering space that offers a welcoming place for learning, sharing experiences, and fostering meaningful connections.
🦄 SPOTLIGHT: Meet Jillian McCleaf, Owner of The LoveMore Studio, is activating mothers to awaken to their dreams, to align in order to attract their highest destiny, and to organize their beingness toward pleasure, play, and self-love. Her decades-crafted framework of healing emerged from her own deep spiritual work blending transformational coaching and energy healing to claim that which is our Divine Feminine inheritance: Our visionary connection to the world of spirit, our flowing capacity to navigate the full spectrum of the feeling realms, our passionate erotic energy, and our rooted connection to Mother Earth.