Bridging Separation at Bedtime
Episode 45: Bridging Separation at Bedtime with Dr. Gordon Neufeld @neufeldinstitute
This week Rachael has a very special guest, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, to discuss the importance of attachment and the challenges parents face when it comes to bedtime and sleep. Dr. Neufeld is a renowned authority on child development and you will learn so much in this powerful episode!
Here’s what they discuss inside this important episode:
How attachment is a fundamental aspect of child development
Learn all about Dr. Neufeld's Model of the Six Stages of Attachment
The crucial role parents play in providing the necessary conditions for children to grow up and develop their capacity to hold on when apart
Why is society so focused on independence?!
How quick-fix strategies often overlook the importance of preserving the connection between parents and children
Bedtime challenges and separation struggles
How parents can support their children by bridging the separation at bedtime
And so much more!
Dr. Neufeld has accumulated more than 40 years of experience as a clinical psychologist with children and youth and those responsible for them. A foremost authority on child development, Dr. Neufeld continues to be an international speaker, a best-selling author and a leading interpreter of the developmental paradigm. Dr. Neufeld has a widespread reputation for making sense of complex problems and for opening doors for change. While formerly involved in university teaching and private practice, he has devoted the best part of the last two decades to creating courses for parents, teachers and helping professionals. These courses are offered primarily through the Neufeld Institute – an online educational institute and world-wide charitable organization devoted to applying developmental science to the task of raising children. Dr. Neufeld’s life's work has been to help adults provide the conditions for children to flourish. He is a father of five and a grandfather to seven.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free resources from Dr. Gordon Neufeld:
https://neufeldinstitute.org/resources/free/
Online conference with Dr. Neufeld:
The Current Crisis of Well-Being: What's Happening to Our Kids? https://neufeldinstitute.org/conference-2024/
See presentations and talks from Gordon Neufeld:
https://www.youtube.com/@neufeldmedia
Follow Dr. Gordon Neufeld's work on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NeufeldInstitute
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neufeldinstitute/
Dr. Neufeld’s Book: Hold Onto Your Kids
https://neufeldinstitute.org/resources/hold-on-to-your-kids-book/
Listen to the full episode
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Welcome to No One Told Us, the podcast that tells the truth about parenting and talks about all the things that you wish you knew before having kids. I'm your host, Rachael Shepard -Ohta, and today I am so, so honored to be speaking with Dr. Gordon Neufeld. Dr. Neufeld has accumulated more than 40 years of experience as a clinical psychologist with children and youth and those responsible for them. He's a foremost Authority on Child Development,
and Dr. Neufeld continues to be an international speaker and bestselling author. Dr. Neufeld has a widespread reputation for making sense of complex problems and for opening doors for change.
While formerly involved in university teaching and private practice, he's devoted the best part of the last two decades, creating courses for parents, teachers, and helping professionals that work with children. These courses are offered primarily through the Neufeld Institute, an online educational institute and worldwide charitable organization devoted to applying developmental science to the task of raising children.
Dr. Neufeld's life's work has been to help adults provide the conditions for children to flourish and he's also a father of five and a grandfather to seven and one of my personal heroes.
I just absolutely adore you and your work and everything that you stand for. And I'm so excited to talk with you today. So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Rachael, and I'm delighted to be here. It's an important topic.
So today we're gonna kind of dive into separations and more specifically separations as it comes to bedtime and sleep. And if we have time, we can dive into separations with childcare and things like that as well because I know you talk so well about that. First I would love for you to just give some context to those listeners who are newer to your work and I'd love for you to kind of describe for us your model of the six stages of attachment that help us kind of explain the development and the unfolding of children in those first few years.
Well one of the most important developmental tasks, the priorities of the brain, is to help a child hold on when apart. We know about babies in a sense that they attach through the senses. And so they must be in sight, if not in sight,in smell, if not in smell in sound, if you know, or in touch. And so you need to work those to provide a sense of continuity of connection. But what most people are not aware of is that there's a developmental solution to bedtime that is in the works. And so it's a matter of, of allowing nature to do its job, the brain, to be able to develop different ways of holding on when apart by the second year of life,
or by the second birthday I should say, and before you will see a huge drive for sameness.
And the reason for this is, is that it is, it is to be like is an alternative to being with. And so when you feel like you're able to hold on even when you can't be with, but that's just the beginning. By the third birthday you should see a very strong drive to be part of, to belong, and to be on the same side as whomever you're most attached to. So these are different ways of being close and they, and as a child develops, becomes aware of their differentness. This helps bridge that differentness. And then it continues on by the fourth birthday. A child,
the brain should interpret closeness as mattering to because it occurs that, um, that mom and dad hold close that which they hold dear.
And so this is when the child takes a turn to the sweet, wanting to be dear, and wanting to matter. Well, if there's no discontinuity, if there's no disruption that alarms the child, it starts going deeper yet. By the fifth birthday, the limbic system,the emotional brain opens, all it stops, and the child will be giving his heart To whomever he is attached to and then he's full of I love you's… full of I'm gonna marry you and stay with you forever never never and If that goes, okay, and the heart isn't broken. Then the child by six years of age Wants to share all that is within their heart and wants to have no secrets that would divide.
This actually is a foundation for a new kind of intimacy in marriage and in friendships. And so we have all the unfolding of this, but what is the brain trying to do? Trying to develop the capacity to hold on when apart. So the more you can provide continuity, the challenge in the first year of life is when the baby is not in sight, can you make it so they're in sound if not in sound? Can you make it so that they're in smell? So you work the senses if they're not in touch and so so you work the senses.
By the second year of life you've got more to work with and and but the whole idea is continuity whether it is directly or through bridging, through being able to look forward to the next contact, but that is the main thing. If you introduce separation before the child can hold on when apart, what happens is the brain goes into a defensive mode and ironically sleep is one of those defenses. And this is the huge paradox that people don't understand.
It is not that you can't by forcing a child, by pushing their face into separation, get them to sleep, but it's at great cost.
They get stuck in more primitive ways of attaching.They lose their ability to feel futility when it is encountered and it is at a huge cost and so that's why it's so important is no no no no allow the brain to do its work, allow nature to do its work, it will get there. Everybody's in a hurry these days everybody's in such a hurry and it's so adult -centric they want children to go to sleep so they can preserve their sanity.
Well you're gonna have to find another way to preserve your sanity not at the cost of the child's health and well -being and in terms of their development. And so it's just gone upside down. It's like a Alice in Wonderland charade, you know, where it's not all in keeping with how children develop and the time they need to do so, and working the senses for, you know, for all your worth being able to get that favorite stuffy toy, get it on your skin, your smells, you know, prepare it for use to help the baby go to sleep. There are natural ways of doing this and that's my concern.
You just touched on so many things that I want to dive deeper into. So I think one of the things that stands out to me is that, you know, you mentioned a lot of science there. You mentioned a lot of what we know about the developing brain and the infant brain. There is science to support this nurture of young children. So why do you think it's taking so long for society to catch up? Why do you think things like sleep training are still so mainstream when we actually know that there are other maybe better, healthier ways?
Well, The science, unfortunately, is fragmented. There's a lot of dots, but it takes joining them together. There's a lot of puzzle pieces, but it takes being able to provide the meaning. And unfortunately, so, again, we're living in an adult -centric world where we don't have multi generations instead of looking to the traditions of our ancestors, our grandparents, to the lullaby, to various ways of being able to work with this, we Google, we go to Google, we go to the internet for answers. We're so peer-oriented and we think that whatever is a norm. I don't really know the answer to that problem, Rachael, but it's so sad. It's so sad and I see, I see so many parents going the wrong way with this…. when a little bit of patience and it will unfold and your child will be so much healthier for it.
Yeah, it's really tough and I know you're in Canada, I'm in the U .S. and our parental leave policies here are just absolutely dreadful.
Oh, they're dreadful. They're absolutely dreadful.
Yeah, so I think a lot of parents feel this pressure and they feel like they're on this time with crunch where they have to get their baby as independent as possible.
This nuclear family is at the root of it. Like people often say, "Well, come on, get real. You know, you can't put such a load on parents. Well, I'm not putting the load on parents. This is society. We fragmented. We've come undone. And we're not living in multi-generational situations. We don't employ grandparents properly to get back into this. With our seventh grandchild were committed to two to three days of care a week.
Because that's what we're meant to do.
This is what we're meant. Odessa is our 18 month old grandchild. Her parents are thick into the work mode and they need to be. This is when their professional careers are at their potential. But that's when grandparents need to come to the fore.
And in all indigenous cultures, all grandparents played the primary role. So the problem is how we're trying to do this. We're trying to do with in a way that's never been done before, and really is not all that doable.
Yeah, that's something I say to parents all the time, is it's feeling this hard because it's not supposed to be this way. Like it's not all supposed to be on you. This is not how it was designed to go. It's not something that you're doing wrong that's making this feel so unmanageable that your baby is still waking up at night. It's you're not supposed to be doing it this way. We're so backwards in our society.
No, you're not supposed to. It's a new world. It's a daunting world. The majority of children are being raised in single family, functional single family dwellings. Neil Postman predicted that the greatest impact on our society today is the loss of the extended family and the loss of the child's village of attachment and even people get that wrong is when they think well it takes a village to raise a child….. they're not understanding that a child's village is built from bottom up; it's who the child is attached, to becomes empowered to take care of that child. It's not who loves the child or who's commissioned with their care.
So this whole idea of role -based care in our society is totally ludicrous. You don't go to university to get credentialed to take care of, or if you do, that's irrelevant to the child. The only one empowered is the ones that they are attached to. So it's a bottom-up arrangement and we're not taking care of those attachments. Hence it's my book, "Hold on to your kids." It's not about holding them back. It's about preserving the connection that allows us to take care of them and that is our first priority now because culture used to do it in the past. There were traditions and cultures and all kinds of things to make sure this happened. We're left on our own now. We've got to preserve those connections that allow us our care to get through.
And if our care doesn't get through, there is no end to the host of troubles our children have if our care doesn't get through.
Yeah, that's so true. And I do love that book, and I share quotes from it very often because I do find that with parents, especially parents that are growing up now that are, you know, peers to myself in their, maybe 30s, we do have this backwards idea that we need to prepare our children for the world. And that means we need to get them not too attached to us, independent- practice separation, yeah, practice, separation. People are sending kids to daycare just to prepare them, even if they don't really want to or need to, which, you know, daycare, if people need to use daycare, it's absolutely fine.
There's no understanding that we are not the animating factor here. We're not the main thing. We're no more than doulas or midwives to what nature has been doing for eons. We can't grow anybody up. We can't even grow ourselves up. You know, all we can do is provide the conditions so nature can have its wonderful way with our children. We're just midwives and we don't understand that that the realization of human potential is a spontaneous thing.
Just like in a plant, life it is spontaneous. We don't have to teach them to grow up. We don't have to teach any of it. It will unfold. Our job is to provide the conditions that are conducive for nature to do its job.
Yes. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I would love for you to talk more about that. We'll be right back.
So Dr. Neufeld, you just mentioned that. You can call me Gordon. Okay, thanks. So Gordon, you just mentioned that all we really need to do as parents is provide the necessary conditions for our children to grow up and you know to be all the things we wish for them to be happy, healthy, have great relationships. What are those conditions and how can we make sure that we're doing what we need to do in those early years?
Well everything goes back to attachments. Everything goes back to our quest for togetherness. Our survival lies in it. The baby doesn't have instincts to survive. The baby has more than 30 reflexes to attach. Why? Because if the baby attaches, then the baby has a greater chance for survival. So everything is in attachment and the thing about humans is we have different ways of becoming separate and different ways of separating. So the brain's, as I said, the primary challenge is to develop ways of holding on. So the first, the first condition is,
is some satisfaction, satiation of the togetherness, needs of the child, of the relational needs, the invitation to exist in our presence. The sense of sameness with, of belonging to, the sense of somebody being at my side, of being significant to, of being loved, of being cherished. These are the basic relational needs. They should never be used against a child, because when they are used against a child to, to get them to do our bidding, then it makes the child in charge of those things.
And as soon as the child is in charge, the brain works feverishly at proximity, at togetherness. And this is today's children working feverishly at togetherness. It becomes depersonalized, and then they have to place in games and get addicted to all of these things about being the best, the most attractive and so on. No, this should be the right of any child is to have this invitation to exist in another person's presence that nothing would come between.
This should be our first commitment with this, with this, just like with a plant. If the roots are being able to get what they're seeking, growth is an ex -agenda. We can't make a plant grow, but we can certainly nurture its roots. So the challenge always is to retreat to what we can do as parents, to provide for their relational needs, for their togetherness needs.
The second invitation we give them is the invitation to become their own person. And if we give this invitation, we've got it. We've got it because we're able to provide them with rest. The brain always yearns for rest because it needs rest to get on with, you know, its work. So we provide them with rest from the work of attachment and the brain goes on, okay, now, you know, the potential can unfold. And we give room for that and hold them in that in that context and it's actually deceptively simple. Not easy but deceptively simple when we realize that we're not the main player. Nature is. It's been doing this for eons. Nature is the main player.
I know we tend to over complicate things I think especially in my generation sometimes parents will ask me like questions that just seem like they should be simple like oh my three -year -old really wants me to lay with them at night while they fall asleep what should I do and I say well lay with them yes.
Like it's really you know and this is the thing I find that we have evolved into a into a people that seeks for the answer rather than our true destiny which is to be the answer to our children…. like I am Odessa's answer and my wife her Nana is her answer. Her parents are her answer. Well step fourth, accept your calling and be that answer.Be that answer to that invitation to exist in your presence. All these little things about what to do, how to feed, whether you do this, whether you don't, they pale insignificance to the bottom line.
The bottom line is, is provide for their togetherness needs and nature will get on with the rest and it will cover a multitude of sins if you manage to get the main things right. And the main things right are being able to preserve that connection. And that's the challenge of bedtime. Why? Because bedtime is facing separation. For a baby, it's like a little death.
There's no sense of self yet to be able to provide continuity for the morning. They're not able to hold on to their parents, when out of sight, that, you know, it's so what do we do. We make it easy. We get our smells on them. You know, we build the return, so it's within their ability to hold on. I'll be back to check you. You simply provide this. Why? Because they're going to be changing right before our eyes. This isn't a skill. The whole idea that you need to teach them to self -soothe is ridiculous.
It is absolutely ridiculous. This whole thing is about self-care. Like honey, you need to learn to take care of yourself. Walk on your own two feet. All the literature says that parents who actually are preoccupied with getting children to walk on their own two feet have children who are overly dependent, looking to be carried. It is always paradoxical. Your generous with your care and they then become preoccupied with being independent, walking on their own two feet. But care was, we were never meant to take care of ourselves, even as adults. We were meant to be in arrangements of cascading care.
Now in North America, we don't involve our ancestors in any indigenous circles and anywhere else in the world. The indigenous, the ancestors are still playing a part. Why? Because relationship goes forever. Your mother is your mother, dead or alive, for better or for worse. Your grandparent is a grandparent, dead or alive. That means that your experience of their love for you, whether they were, they are there or not, transcends death. That's incredible. We don't allow our ancestors to take care of us because we don't take care of them. And so it goes all the way around.
The bottom line, children need to depend upon those who are responsible for their care. They need to depend upon it. We have thrown dependents out of the bus. They need to depend. It doesn't work any other way. And we need to be embedded in cascading care no matter how old we are or how young we are. These are the only arrangements that make sense as an attachment is a delivery system for care.
I love that. So for you know today's modern parents maybe they are not able to be with their babies all day because they're working or whatever it is. So you know bedtime is also a separation. So now baby is separated all day, but then they're also about to be separated for bedtime and overnight. So what are some things that parents can do to help?I know you talk a lot about bridging the separation. Can you talk more about that?
It's not so much that. Not so much that. We're very creative if we know what the problem is. The problem here is to preserve the connection. That's the problem. Now, before the Internet, we've had lovers for tens of thousands of years who,when they were apart, figured out how to stay close. Nobody asked, "Well, how should I do this?" You know, there were pictures and lockets. There were magic ways of think of me.
There were thousands of ways and everybody's personality came through in the way they did it. It wasn't done by the book. If it was, you didn't take it personally. You needed to take it personally. My love has me on his radar, on her radar. My love, you know, has given me a locket of her hair with the smells. Like, this is a problem that can be solved. The problem is, if you write a book about it, people follow the directions and don't get what it's about. And following directions here, it's just that you can't dance by reading a book. You can't learn to dance that way. And you don't do the dance of parenting. The attachment dance is the oldest dance in the universe.
It's the way the atom, this is the way the electron dances with the proton, the moon dances with the earth. It's the oldest dance in the universe. it's there, we just need to enter into it. Again, when our children are revolving around us and we have them on our radar and we know that we must preserve the connection, like the earth needs to hold on to us to take care of us, hence gravity. That's the bottom line. We need to preserve that. If we do, then we know we must bridge everything that separates.
Well, how are we going to do that? Well, the goodbye ritual gives us a clue. We take their attention and put it on the next connection. We focus on what stays the same. You know, you have my nose. You have this. We focus on what stays the same. We do this. We focus on belonging. On the next return. There are so many ways we do this. But I find that when people get it, they don't ask any more questions. They are brim full of ideas.
When they don't get, I used to, I taught university courses on development and attachment and so on for years and years and years, it seems. And I would have students putting up their hands and say, "Oh yes, Dr. Neufeld, but what should we do then? What do we do?" and I would say, "I see that you do not yet see." Because if you saw, you wouldn't ask what to do. What to do reveals that you haven't got it. And so please just get it.
Your child needs you to be able to figure out how to hold on to them through thick and thin. You figured this out, or at least you know this is the challenge of marriage. If the challenge of marriage is to hold on and don't let anything come in the way to be able to preserve the connection with each other in all of these ways, how much more is it true of a child who has less developed ways of being able to preserve that connection and when it's all our responsibility?
Yeah, that's so true. I find so often that when parents are asking those types of questions about like the logistics and the little, you know, what should I do if this happens or what should I do if that happens? It's, it's your right. They don't have the confidence yet.
They don't have the vision. Yeah. They don't have that. You don't have the vision and you haven't stepped up. And again, the, the issue is, is my father told me something that's never never left my mind. Before he died he got wind that I was going to write a parenting book.
He died about three years before I actually got on with the job but he knew I was gonna do so and he said Gordon you're making a terrible mistake. You're making a terrible mistake because "It's all bluff," he said. "It's all bluff." Now, he was a wonderful father to me, and he said, "Daddy didn't know what you were doing." He said, "Nobody knows what they're doing, but your child can't know that. Your child needs to believe that you are their answer." And that's what my father was for me.
He was my answer. He, you know, his confidence in me, his belief in me, his delight in me, his love for me. He was my answer. He didn't have the answers,but he didn't expect to have the answers. And by not expecting to have the answers, he got on with the job.
I love that.
And so when I wrote the book, I first of all did not write a book as a parenting book. And unfortunately, it got scouted out by the largest English publisher in the world, and they said, "Well, we have a problem, because we could bring your book to the university place, academic, but we think it would do a lot better as a parenting book, but you need to convert it to a how -to book." And I said, "I can't. It's a book on relationships. It's a book on the child - parent relationship. They said, "What you're going to have to do the how -to's?" I said, "No." They said, "Well, we won't publish it." And then I capitulated, right?
But I try to set it up so that the parents know that, no, this is, it's all about relationship. If you get the relationship right, the rest will unfold. It's about relationship. It's about the baby's relationship to those who are responsible. It's about we have to have the hearts of our adolescents if we're going to be what they need us to be. My oldest children are in their fifties. They still need a father. I need to have their hearts to be the father they need. It takes a weight off of their relationships. You know, it gives them a strength to take care of their dependence. And it's fulfilling it. It's the dance that works.
We are gonna take one more quick break and when we come back I would love to ask you another question about your own parenting experience. We'll be right back.
Okay, we're back with Gordon Neufeld and this has been such an incredible conversation. I could listen to you speak on this all day long. What I would love to hear though is something that you wish you had known before you became a parent and it's kind of like the theme of this podcast is talking to parents about things that they maybe never knew before they had kids and every time I have a guest on that is a parent themselves, I love to ask this question. Just, you know, what do you wish that you had known before?
Well, the basic thing was I wish I knew that nature had a plan. I wish I knew it wasn't all up to me. When I started parenting, I was filled with anxiety and alarm and doing it right and so on. And I didn't realize that nature had a plan, that there was a blueprint, and that it all started with relationships. It would have taken the focus off of behavior, it would have taken the focus off of getting child ready for society, and there would have been more patience.
The second thing that I wish is that I would have had the confidence of my father to bluff it. that I didn't need to know a lot of things, but I needed to confidently step up to the plate and to know that what I brought there was enough. In the studies, when a 15 or 16 year old new mother, marginalized mother, actually steps up to the plate, becomes the answer to their newborn infant, the positive results in that baby are far more than all the courses about teaching that young mother how to care for the baby.
Again, we've been doing this for Thousands upon thousands of years. We've done it without books. We've done it without the internet. We've been doing it. Now, the other, the, our, our, our lesser evolved cousins, the primates are showing us up. They're actually doing a better job than we are.
It's true. Yeah. I know I see those, those cute videos sometimes on Instagram or something of the mother chimp holding her baby chimp while they sleep or something. And I'm like, see it’s not that complicated, we could just do it like that too. And everybody would be a lot more relaxed. And do you think one question I forgot to ask you earlier, when we were talking more about sleep was, do you think that there is a certain point at which supporting your child to sleep or co -sleeping is no longer appropriate or does it really just matter on the child and your relationship with them?
Well, I, no longer appropriate. I think that depends. There's a lot of complicating factors. If there's a divorce in the offing, if you don't get the child out of bed, well, that's a complicating factor and a real factor. If you're separated and you've got to do this, there's so many things in today's world that needs to be taken into consideration. It's not co -sleeping that is the issue.
It's providing a sense of connection. It's not a particular method. It's not a procedure. It's not wearing your child that is the issue. It's how do you do this under the circumstances that you're in, in the society that you're in. How do you do this?
And so as soon as you go to a method, you've lost the point. The point is, is the baby, the infant, whether they are a preemie in the hospital, is there a way of providing continuous connection? Is there alternatives to provide more of this? It's simply the question. And then we look at the circumstances that are there and say, well, what have we got to work with?
And so for one child, it may be that the answer is sleeping with. It's what we used to do in traditional times, you know, right into adolescence. It may be,it wouldn't be the norm in our society because it would bring great shame to children if others knew it, so it creates a secret. It's a complicated matter. And so you can't answer it unless you have a particular situation in mind or in this situation.
And then when you answer it, you have to be careful that it's not followed as a letter of the law because it's not about that at all. It's about the spirit of the thing and the spirit of the thing is how do you provide, how do you do this? When young elephants are, when the parents are killed or poached and young elephants are rescued, the elephant keepers usually have to sleep directly with those young elephants for two years before the neuroses, the alarm, begins to reduce that they can sleep on their own. Now if that's true for an elephant, but that is a traumatized elephant that has lost its mother, there are reasons would, we would go right back to the beginning and we shouldn't hesitate to do so.
If our intuition calls us there, we need to listen to our hearts. We need to do the things that we believe our children need from us. Everybody's answer is a bit different than somebody else's answer. So don't compare yourself to anybody else. Just be the answer to your child.
I love that you said that. Before we wrap up, was there anything that you went through with your own kids around bedtime or sleep that you remember or that you…
They're all different. I was going to say, you have several children, so I'm sure you had them. They were all different. Some loved their beds and cribs and were delighted and woke up with, you know, others with, you know, the mornings. Is it morning time yet and we would say no…. it's not they would go back to sleep and others could not close their eyes because it meant that they were out of touch with their world and they fought sleep like crazy and Odessa now our grandchild the seed does not buy into sleep one bit because it interferes with her play time and so all she wants to do so it's not that hard to get her to sleep, but if she should wake up as all she wants to do is play for two hours, they're all different.
And the main thing was to, you know, to be patient. Nature is at work developing its solutions. So the child will be different a month from now developmentally than they were now. Be patient. It isn't the skill to be learned. it is a development to be realized. And so don't be concerned about it.
That is one thing that I try to impart on parents and it's really not the popular thing to say at all because parents want very quick results and their sleep and it's understandable. But yeah, part of it is really just acceptance and patience, like he said.
Yes.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Thank you so much for joining us today. It was such a pleasure to speak with you. I love listening to you speak about this. What can listeners do to connect with you if they want to learn more about your, you know, approaches and your book?
It's a neufeld institute .org. It's a non -profit charitable organization that reaches into eight languages with its courses and hold on to your kids is actually in 35 languages, but there are more than 40 courses there. There is, I think, a free resource on getting bedtime right, which really looks at bedtime as the little death, so to speak, facing separation and why. And that would be a good, good starting place for individuals to look at that. But that's the best place.
I myself have been retired many times over and I'm somewhat inaccessible because I'm Odessa's now caregiver, right? As it should be.
Well, we appreciate you making time for us today. And yes, I did take your bedtime workshop a couple years ago and for any professional sustain. Highly, highly recommend it. There's so much good stuff in there. So thanks again in there. So thanks again for joining us.
My pleasure, Rachael. Thank you. Thank you.
