“I Hit White Last Night”

A client messaged me today: “I hit white last night with my son.”

She was referring to an exercise we’d practiced, based on a Jai Institute for Parenting tool (download a worksheet version here), where emotions and associated physical/mental cues are visualized on a thermometer.

The scale ranges from deep green (calm, connected) to yellow (annoyed), orange (angry), and red (furious).

At the very top of the thermometer is also a small section that is white. For me, this stage shows up as “white hot rage”. With my bilingual clients, we’ll use a phrase in Japanese that I think very accurately describes this state: 頭が真っ白になる — which means, literally, “my mind went white”.

This is a state of emotion (whether it be anger, anxiety, overwhelm etc) that is so intense that it makes us unable to respond reasonably in the moment. The aftermath feels like a bit like emerging from a fog — the feelings are so intense, they’ll often leave an emotional hangover for hours or days afterwards.

Many parents recognize this state. It’s startling how quickly we can go from calm to snapping, or, as Dr. Dan J. Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson put it in The Power of Showing Up, “flipping your lid.”

During my training as a parent coach, “lid-flipping” was considered so common that there was even used a hand motion to illustrate it: a fist (representing an integrated brain) flipping open (disconnection).

When this happens, your nervous system goes into fight-flight-freeze mode, perceiving your child as a threat. (For those who want to geek out more and hear from Dr. Siegel himself, here’s a short video of him explaining his ‘hand model’ of the brain.)

So how can the concept of a thermometer tool help you with emotional regulation?

1. Recognize your real baseline.
   
   If you’re like any working parent I know, it is very likely that you are in a perpetual yellow state, as a result of the hourly deadlines of running a household with kids and holding down an intense professional role. Your heart rate is perpetually elevated, stress hormones are running through your veins, and your mind is a running task list that never rests. It’s hard to be green without intentional and consistent strategies to reach it on a daily basis.
   
2. Tune into warning signs.
   
   You might think you’re going from green to red/white suddenly — and in outlier cases, this might happen. From what parents share with me, though, there are usually at least a few warning signals before the temperature shoots up.
   
   Try to tune into what your body is telling you. Has your smile disappeared? Are your shoulders coming up to your ears? Maybe you start to feel the itch to look at your phone and distract yourself from what’s happening?
   
   I recommend to my clients that they write out the signs along the thermometer and put it up on their fridge to remind themselves of what it feels like when they’re starting to get disregulated. (Disregulated = anything above the green zone.)
   
3. Name it and create space to reset.
   
   When emotions spike, it’s time to experiment with strategies to return to green. Deep breathing, a quick call to a supportive friend, journaling, chewing ice, or even doing jumping jacks — what’s the thing that can help you to come back into your body and remind it that you’re actually safe? Every parent’s nervous system is different, so try out different things and see what works for you.
   
   The second critical piece is one that parents often miss: narrating what is happening so your kids can understand and learn from what you’re going through. It’s the, “I’m feeling frustrated that I’m being asked for so many things at once, and I can feel my body is tightening up and I’m starting to feel like there are rocks in my tummy. I need to take some time to get back into a calm place.”
   
   Yep, I know — it’s corny. But naming, acknowledging, allowing and ultimately tolerating big feelings, and being able to come back into regulation — this is a core skill of emotional intelligence.
   

Breaking Generational Patterns

For many of those who are parenting now, emotional regulation wasn’t modeled by our own parents. My half-Japanese, half-American upbringing emphasized discipline, grit, academic achievement—but big feelings? There was only strategy: suppress.

It wasn’t until I had kids myself—tiny, raw balls of emotion—that I began to confront the depth of my own unprocessed feelings. And here’s the hard truth: most of us are building emotional capacity in real time while also trying to co-regulate with our kids. Talk about trying to learn to ride a bike in a typhoon!

I’ve seen this pattern play with dozens of working parents I’ve spoken to and coached over the past year — so if any of this is resonating, know that you are not alone. I also highly recommend Lindsay Gibson’s excellent book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. (One parent said to me: “I’ve never felt as seen as when I read that book.”)

If you’re navigating these challenges, I encourage you to try the thermometer tool and explore the resources linked in this post. And know that by doing this work to build your own emotional intelligence and capacity to regulate even in the hardest moments — you are giving yourself and your kids such a gift.

Photo credit: Toa Heftiba @ Unsplash