Girl Behaviour Decoded | What Her Nervous System Is Telling You

The door slam. The silence. The one-word answers. Whatever it looked like in your house this week, or over half term, I want to tell you something that changes everything: her behaviour is not the problem. It's information. It's her body telling you something it doesn't have the words for yet.

In this episode I'm breaking down the three ways a girl's body responds when it's overwhelmed - fight, flight and freeze - and what each one is actually trying to say. We're also talking about why the phone is often part of the signal, not the cause of it.

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything wrong and nothing is landing, this one's for you.

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Transcript

0:01

She slammed the door so hard a picture fell off the wall. And you stood there in the hallway thinking, what the friggity frig just happened there? What did I do wrong? What did I say? Could I have done it differently? What the hell is happening to my daughter? She never used to be like this. Or maybe it wasn't the door. Maybe it was the silence. The way she just, you know, stopped answering you. What or had or gave you one-word replies? Or had eyes on her phone 24-7. Gone. Right there in the same room as you. I mean, we looked at this last week at the webinar about what was going on with the phone and why it's so addictive. What is going on behind the scroll? What is her body actually reaching for? And look, we've just come out of half-term in the UK, haven't we? Which for some of you was lovely. The weather was glorious. I bet you are outside chilling, out in nature, having fun and connecting. But of course, there's the other side of it where one week off was just like full of, oh, I'm bored, nothing to do, and you were trying to keep the peace 24-7. And now we're back to school, and you're honestly not sure which one was harder. I get it. I see you, I hear you, and I validate everything you've just said or I've just said. Whatever it looked like in your house, I'm guessing some version of it has left you exhausted. So today we're actually going to talk about what the behavior is telling you. Because as I've said before, behavior is never just about one thing. It's not none of it is random and none of it is personal towards you. Yes, and I know how friggin' hard that sounds when you're in it. 100% in it when you're being attacked by your daughter. But she's not attacking you, she's attacking the situation she finds herself in. So if you're a mum of a girl or a tween who's starting to feel like a stranger in your own house, this podcast may well stop you in your tracks a little. And I think that's a good thing. Because you know you've tried the conversations, you've read the books, you've googled at 2 a.m., you've maybe spoken to the school, maybe even pushed for a referral. And still she seems unreachable. Still glued to her phone 24-7, still shutting you out, still not the girl you know is in there somewhere. And you're starting to wonder: is it me? Is it her? Is something actually going wrong here? Here's what I want you to know before we go any further. Nothing is wrong with her. And nothing is wrong with you. But something is very wrong with the story we've all been told about teenage girls. You know, just grit your teeth the whole way through, you'll be fine. And today and every week on this podcast, we're gonna unpick it. So welcome to the Teen Whisperer. I'm Rach Friedley, a health play specialist, a mum, a coach, and a person who finally connects all those dots that everyone else has been staring at separately. We make a picture. You find out what is actually going on for your daughter. Here's the truth: your daughter's behaviour is not a problem to be fixed, as we're told time, and time and time again. It's a message from the nervous system. Basically, her body's built-in alarm system that isn't getting what it was designed to need. And when you understand that, really understand it, in your body, not just your head, everything changes. How you see her, how you respond to her, how you feel about yourself as her mum. So every week I'm going to give you the physiology, the tools, and the honest conversations that should have happened years ago. No jargon, no judgment, no list of things you should have done differently. Just the truth about our girls, their bodies, their cycles, their nervous systems, and what they actually need to come back to themselves. So let's dive in. Just gonna say before we dive in, if half time was had, if there was shouting or silence or something that came out of nowhere, I mean you know that, naught to a thousand in two milliseconds, you're in very good company. Putting a teenage girl in a house with no structure, no routine, and everyone's patience already stretched is genuinely difficult. You didn't fail the holiday. The holiday was just hard. So most of the mums I talk to right now are carrying a low-level hum of worry that never quite goes away. A background dread that if they say the wrong thing or look at her the wrong way, it'll kick off again and again and again, and they'll spend their next hour trying to work out what they did wrong. I want to say this clearly: you are not doing it wrong. You're responding to something nobody has ever explained to you properly, and that changes today. So here's the thing: nobody tells you about behaviour. It is not a problem, it is not defiance, it's not your daughter being difficult for the sake of it. Behaviour is information, it's her nervous system, that built-in alarm system I mentioned earlier, communicating what it cannot say in words. And when that alarm system is overwhelmed, it responds in one or three ways. Every single time. Sometimes it responds with fight. That's the door slam. They're snapping, the you don't understand me. It's not aggression, it's a body that's overwhelmed and trying to create distance to feel safer. It's natural. Sometimes it responds with flight, that's the withdrawal, the one-word answers, the disappearing into her room or her phone for hours on end. Same overwhelm, different expression. And sometimes, and this is the one that really throws mums, it responds with freeze. That's the flatness, that's the I don't know. The total shutdown where she can't access words at all. She's not being difficult. The part of her brain that does reasoning and communication generally goes offline when she's overwhelmed. It's like pulling the Wi-Fi from the wall. She's not choosing to disengage, she actually just cannot engage. And remember, none of this is personal, all of it is information, and the moment you start reading it as information rather than a behavior to manage, everything shifts. And whilst we're here, the phone fits right into this. When she's scrolling, really lost in it scrolling, you know that scrolling when you just get that glaze on her face, she can't hear you, she can't see you, she doesn't know how long she's been on there. That's information too. Her nervous system is reaching for the fastest available source of comfort it can find. Instagram gives a hit of belonging without the connection. TikTok gives a constant novelty that stops her having to sit with whatever is happening inside of her. And for the girls with nothing much going on offline, so no bus, no youth club, no one to walk to or even talk to, it's also just company. The only kind available to her right now. So when you see the phone, don't see the problem, see the signal. Her nervous system is hungry for something, and until we give it something better to reach for, the phone will keep winning. I talked about this in my webinar last week. Your daughter is not addicted to her phone. So, how do we start? How do we start reading her behavior as information rather than something to fix? Do you know what? I'm so glad you asked. And yes, I know you didn't. The first thing is just notice, not judge, not fix, not react. Just watch with a bit more curiosity than you had before. When does the behavior tend to happen? What time of day does it happen? What day of the week? And then look underneath it. Did something happen at school on that day? Something regular in her diary that happens on that day? Has she eaten nourishing food? Has she slept? Has she been on her phone for three hours with no break? Has she had any fluid? And by that I'm meaning water or juice. But there's obviously the decent juice you need in there. And I'm not talking monster here, I'm not talking leucasade, and I'm definitely not talking coffee. And we'll come back to this properly in a couple of weeks. Notice where she is in her cycle. Because her nervous system does not feel the same every week. Not even close. The same situation that rolls off her one week can flatten her completely two weeks later. This is not random, this is totally natural, and her body doing exactly what it's supposed to do. The second thing, stop trying to solve it in the moment. If you take away her choice in the moment, it means she loses the autonomy, it loses, she loses the sense of self. And I know that's hard because the last thing we want is for our girls to be struggling and suffering on their own. When the door slams, everything in you wants to either match her energy, so react with her, or fix it immediately. But when her nervous system is in that overwhelmed state, the part of her brain that takes in new information has literally gone quiet. Again, pulling it out of the wall like the Wi-Fi. Anything you say, any explanation, any consequence, any attempt to connect, it's going into the gap. The gap where she physically cannot hear you. It's not landing for her. What she needs in that moment is not words, it's your calm. You not escalating, you staying steady. That is the most powerful thing you can do, and it costs nothing except the enormous amount of holding it together when you really don't want to. So a key hint here, a key tip here, is to pause, breathe, and connect to yourself and ask yourself the question: is this about me or is this about her? It takes you out of the situation. And then give it time. Let the storm pass, let her nervous system settle, and then when she's calm, when the moment is right for her and she's come back to you, that's when the conversation can happen, not before. So this week I'd like you to do one small thing: get a notebook, back of an envelope, whatever you want to use to write on, or put it on your phone. For the next seven days, just jot down the moments. When did her behaviour flare? What time? What day? What had the day looked like? What was happening in her week? What was going on in her cycle? Did she sleep the night before? Did she eat nourishing food? Has she been on her phone all afternoon? Has she been outside? Has she had any exercise or any movement? These are all your facts. You're not building a case against her, you're becoming her own personal detective. Your detective of your own daughter. You are starting to see patterns, and patterns, once you can see them, are completely manageable. Remember, she is not trying to make your life hard. She is not broken. She is not the sum of her worst moments. Remember, we're adding the dot to dot to dot to make that full picture. She's a girl whose nervous system wasn't given everything it needed in that moment. And she's doing what all nervous systems do when they're running on empty. She's signalling loudly. Her alarm system is going off 24-7. Loudly sometimes, quietly other times, but always telling you something. And you are the one who's gonna learn to hear it because you're here, you're listening to this podcast, and that matters way more than you'll ever know. And for her, you are her anchor, you are her safe harbour. Because once you understand what's going on, she can then learn to reflect what you are mirroring for her. So before I go, if what you've heard today feels like something you so needed to hear, I want you to tell you about WTF. What's the feeling by the way? But you know, we all have those WTF moments. It's my membership for mums just like you. The physiology, the tools, the community of women who are in it too. All like you, all in one place. The doors are open right now, but only until the end of June. Then they close until August. So if been think try that again. So if you've been thinking about it, now's the time to join us. Come and find us. The link is in the show notes. So I'm gonna leave you with that for this week, and I just want to say remember, you are frigging awesome. You are doing a wonderful job with what your daughter is facing right now. Don't ever put yourself down. You can only do as much as you can given the information you have. So, yeah, see you next week. Take care. Da day.