There is a version of growth that looks like progress but is really just motion. You stay busy enough that the hard questions never get loud. You minimize what happened so you can function. You spiral at 2 a.m. and by morning you are already moving again. And the whole time, you tell yourself you are fine, that you are handling it, that at least things are better than they were. None of it looks like being stuck. But it is. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you already know that.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent, sit down with Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy and a single parent herself, to name the patterns that quietly hinder our growth. The shame spiral. The victim mindset. The overcompensating. The distraction dressed up as productivity. And then, the harder question: are those same patterns showing up in our kids?
You cannot grow through something you are not willing to look at. That is what this conversation is built around.
Key Insights from This Episode
- Naming the traps, whether denial, shame spiraling, or overcompensating, is the first and most courageous step toward real growth.
- Learning to stay in the river, to sit with hard emotions rather than escape them, is a skill you can build, and it changes everything.
- The way you face your own struggles is quietly teaching your kids how to face theirs, and that is a powerful gift when you are doing the work.
Naming the Traps, Whether Denial, Shame Spiraling, or Overcompensating, Is the First and Most Courageous Step Toward Real Growth.
For Amber, it started with denial. After her marriage collapsed, she stayed in a loop of what ifs and if onlys for three years, praying, fasting, sending long texts, seeking counsel, then seeking wiser counsel, doing everything she could to not accept that it was over. Denial, she was careful to say, is not always obvious. It can look like staying faithful and hopeful. It can feel like protecting your kids.
Not everyone’s version looks the same. For Robert, it was quieter. He never completely denied what had happened, but he also never let the full gravity of it land on him. He would acknowledge the pain briefly and then move toward what was better or different. Amber named that as a more passive form of denial, and drew the line clearly: anything that keeps you from being grounded in the full reality of what is becomes a trap.
The shame spiral entered the conversation through Elizabeth, and the energy in the room shifted. Lying awake, sometimes waking in the middle of the night, replaying every decision and everything she could have done differently. Not just the big things from the end of her marriage, but small moments from a regular day. The loop was relentless, and it kept her convinced she was not good enough, not worthy of healing.
What is worth noting is that the shame spiral is actually another form of control. If I can just figure out where I went wrong, I can prevent the pain next time. Amber named that dynamic directly, and Robert recognized his own version in it. After his marriage ended, he found himself overcompensating, trying to reverse every accusation his ex had made against him, not out of genuine growth but out of a need to prove her wrong. It was control dressed as self-improvement, and it kept him from examining what was actually true.
The throughline for all of it: we cannot fix what we will not honestly measure. The trap is not weakness. It is the very human instinct to protect yourself from pain. But when that instinct keeps you from facing what is real, it also keeps you from growing through it.
Learning to Stay in the River, to Sit with Hard Emotions Rather Than Escape Them, Is a Skill You Can Build, and It Changes Everything.
There is a framework from author Chip Dodd that shapes the heart of this conversation. He describes healthy emotional living as staying in the river of life. The idea is that there are two banks you can escape to when things get hard. One side is busyness, overactivity, over-scheduling, throwing yourself into work or tasks to avoid sitting with what you are feeling. The other side is apathy, checking out through distraction, scrolling, television, things that feel like rest but are really just numbness. Both are ways of avoiding the current.
Staying in the river does not mean everything is okay. It means you float with whatever the water brings, sadness, frustration, loneliness, anger, without escaping to either side. Elizabeth shared a personal practice she developed for her own late-night shame spirals: instead of letting her brain run the loop, placing one hand on her heart and one on her stomach and asking her body what she is actually feeling. Not trying to fix it. Not trying to think her way out of it. Just naming it and letting it be.
When Elizabeth first described the approach, she said to deal with the feeling. Then she corrected herself: sit with it. Those two words feel completely different. Dealing implies a task to complete. Sitting implies presence. Robert admitted his instinct, like a lot of people’s instinct, is to deal with hard emotions by redirecting into action. But the river framework asks for something more patient than that.
What finally broke Amber out of denial was not a breakthrough moment. It was a group. She found herself surrounded by other people who were also hurting, where she could let go of some of her need to perform and just sit in the powerlessness of what her situation actually was. That, she said, was the first real step toward growth. Not having answers. Just having people who understood.
Vulnerability, as Robert put it, is not a personality trait. It is a skill. It gets easier the more you practice it. And for solo parents who came out of difficult or toxic situations feeling like the worst is over, it is easy to mistake relief for growth. The problem is often external, the relationship, the other person’s behavior. But growth is still part of the journey, whether or not you feel like you need it right now.
The Way You Face Your Own Struggles Is Quietly Teaching Your Kids How to Face Theirs, and That Is a Powerful Gift When You Are Doing the Work.
The second half of the conversation turned toward the kids, and it was just as honest. More is caught than taught, as Amber put it. When kids see a parent growing, actually doing the work of facing reality and moving through it, that becomes a powerful model. When they see a parent staying stuck, that gets modeled too.
One of the subtler ways this shows up is in how we respond when a kid says something self-critical. When one of his daughters would name something hard about herself, Robert’s reflex was to immediately counter it, to tell her she was not what she said she was, to push the thought away before it could settle. But he came to see that in jumping to correct her, he was also minimizing something real for her. She was not saying it for attention. She was naming something true in her experience, and a quick reassurance was not building the relationship or building her.
Elizabeth brought a story about her son Jax that illustrated the other side of that tension. After he had lied to his teacher and to her, they had a long talk. When she noticed he had gone quiet, she asked what he was thinking. He told her he was just thinking about what a bad person he was. She did not immediately rescue him from that weight. She normalized the behavior as human, acknowledged that she had done it too, and then asked him to name his good qualities and back them up with examples from the last 24 hours. She held both things at once: this happened, and it does not define you.
Amber added an important layer of discernment here. When her 21-year-old daughter Jade started showing up with consistently harsh words, Amber finally reflected it back, telling her what she had heard and what it felt like to receive. She watched the weight of it register. The question she sat with afterward was honest: was that for Jade’s growth, or was it to ease my own discomfort? In that case, she said, it was both. And that kind of self-awareness in a parent is part of what makes the difference.
Fear is the other thing that can quietly limit a kid’s growth without a parent ever meaning for it to. Elizabeth’s mother communicated, not in so many words, that pursuing an acting career would lead to nothing good. The message landed as warning rather than encouragement, and Elizabeth walked away from something she genuinely wanted. Robert had a similar experience with music. Neither parent was being cruel. They were being afraid, and that fear got handed down.
The alternative is curiosity. Instead of shutting down an idea with worst-case thinking, Amber suggested asking what would that look like, what would you need, where would you start. Letting a kid talk something through out loud builds more than just a good decision. It builds the kind of trust where they will actually come back to you when things get hard. And it gives them practice weighing consequences on their own terms, which is exactly the muscle they will need as they grow.
This Is Where Growth Lives.
If you are reading this and some of those patterns felt uncomfortably familiar, that recognition is not an indictment. It is the beginning of something. The denial, the overcompensating, the late-night spirals, the busyness that passes for progress, these are not character flaws. They are what people do when they are trying to survive something hard without enough support.
But you are here. You are asking questions about your growth and your kids’ growth and what it means to stop circling and actually move forward. That matters.
The path through is not about getting everything right or arriving at some version of yourself who never struggles. It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, to stay in the river. To sit with hard feelings instead of running. To get curious instead of fearful. To let the gravity of things land, because that is actually where growth lives.
You do not have to figure all of this out alone. That is why this community exists.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Chip Dodd – Living Fully in the River – Podcast
