When our children trigger us

Children invite us into rooms within ourselves that we spend a lifetime avoiding

Nothing will expose your early wounds quite like trying to get children out the door before school.  In our house, mornings were often the hardest part of the day. One child moved slowly, just as I do. The other was quick and efficient. I hated the rush because slowness is my natural rhythm, and every morning felt like a collision between who I was and what the day demanded.

These days I meet many parents who are psychologically literate.  They have read a lot but they haven’t necessarily done their inner work.  So, even if you understand your inner child, can name your attachment style, have listened to the podcasts and read the parenting books; your child will meet the unconscious parts of you that haven't yet been integrated. Because it's when you're stressed and exhausted that those parts show up.

So when a little person cries, do you rush to fix them? Or do you shut down, explode, withdraw, go numb, feel guilty? Do you physically or psychologically leave the room?  With your teenagers do you find them too much and hard to handle so you leave them alone?  None of that makes you a bad parent. It makes you human with coping strategies you use to manage your internal experience.  We all have them.  Some of us experience these triggers a lot when our kids are little, some of us later when they are teenagers or young adults.   They are a signpost to where you need to explore your unconscious patterns.

Children have a way of touching our greatest wounds.  The places where our younger parts learned: I'm too much. I'm alone. Love has to be earned. There's no room for my needs.

Those beliefs don't live in your mind. They live in your body. That's why a toddler's tantrum, a refusal to put shoes on, a teenager's stonewalling, can awaken old grief, anger or fear inside of us because our nervous system doesn't know the difference between then and now.

The child isn't creating your triggers. Your triggers belong to you.  They're revealing the places where your younger self is still waiting for someone to choose them, for someone to stay and listen.  For someone to be interested in your emotional world.

That's why parenthood can feel so overwhelming. Children invite us into rooms within ourselves that we locked long ago and forgot existed.  Most of these rooms live in the basement of the psyche. We buried them there because what we were feeling at the time was simply too much. We dissociated, adapted, fragmented and survived. The problem is that the parts we left behind don't disappear. They wait.

Our child doesn't need us to be perfect. They need us to be conscious.  To be able to notice, to stop and pause, to repair when we have a rupture, to stay contained within ourselves whilst allowing them to have their emotional experience.  They need us to soothe them when they are young to help their nervous system learn how to soothe.  Our teenagers need some stabilisation and containment when their emotional swings are really big, so they feel safe and that there is room for them to explore who they are in the supporting container of our love.  That means when they are overwhelmed we can stay in our body, in our internal experience, soothe ourselves and stay connected to them.

Our children call us to choose differently, to make a choice that isn't reactive.  This is how we end generational patterns. Ancestral trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next until someone does the work on themselves.  When you choose to explore your inner world, to understand your coping strategies and pull them out of the basement and into the present, you are choosing to love parts of yourself that have been desperate for connection for many years.  

We can reclaim our inner child. We can reconcile with the parents who passed these patterns to us. But the greatest legacy we leave is to do our inner work, we do this for our children, they call us to be better people.

We don't need to keep carrying everything that came before us.

When we do our own healing, our children benefit. Our partners benefit. Our friendships deepen. Every relationship in our life becomes more honest, more connected and more alive.

Relationships are where we are wounded, but they are also where we heal. This is perhaps one of the greatest gifts our children offer us.

Maiden to Mother Transition

When a young girl goes through Menarche, she is asked to let go of her childish ways so as to accept her maturing as a menstruating woman. In many indigenous cultures she is welcomed through ceremony and accepted into a circle of adult women in her tribe. This has been largely forgotten in western culture. Menstruation is still shrouded in mystery, shame and secrecy. Cultural norms mean women have to hide what is a massive part of their life.

During pregnancy and childbirth a new mother is asked to let go of egoic behaviour that will prevent her from giving selflessly, gently and open heartedly to her new baby. She is forced to face her shadow or perceived negative attributes that she has buried deep underground. This requires us to get extremely vulnerable. It can be a long and painfull transition. Through this transition you birth your own Inner Mother.

It requires us to get familiar with all the different parts of us - those we like and those parts we don't. It takes a lot of conscious exertion of energy to keep those parts we don't like in our unconscious. This plays out in our conscious life. These are child parts of us that were not loved or acknowledged when we were children, so we fragmented them off into our unconscious to stay safe. To survive we adopted behaviours used as strategies to make our way in the world many of them focused at keeping us in control. When we can really embrace those dark parts and learn to love them we emerge from this transition more whole.

Finding these underworld parts asks something different of us. We cannot access our unconscious through our rational and logical part of our brain. We need to go into our primal and limbic parts of our brain to feel for them in our body. So this work requires us to learn to be in our body; to experience all of our emotions in a grounded way. When we learn to love and accept our dark parts we stop projecting them onto other women. We start to heal our sisterhood wounds which in turn, helps us naturally support other women. We can see and own the messy side of ourselves and not get sabotaged by it.

Why is this transition so important? When we don't accept our dark parts we project them onto others. When we can't be with our own emotions in a grounded way and learn to self-soothe, we cannot soothe the new baby in our arms who comes into this world with an unregulated nervous system. For the development of healthy attachment patterns with our babies, we have to co-regulate their nervous systems to help them learn and grow. We teach them slowly how to self soothe and provide that sense of safety in their nervous system through our attunement to them, when they cry from hunger, tiredness or needing a nappy change. Learning to feel safe to be vulnerable aids in our personal development because we start to ask questions and seek to understand what is going on. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we learn to support other women in community and be able to hold space for them. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we open the door for our sexual empowerment.

Our journey through rites of passage is different to that of men. Women go into a dark place, the underworld. The vulnerability they experience in their descent is challenging and in the stripping back of parts of themselves they don’t need anymore, they plant the seeds for their new expanded self to grow. It is like a tree that sparks from a seed and first it grows roots down in the dark of the earth so that when it grows taller and its branches spread wider, it has a good base to support its growth. Every time we go through a transition in life we go to this place, the time it takes to transition and the degree of transformation is different every time.

When many women go back to work after parental leave many feel quite disconnected because they know they have changed, yet very few workplaces acknowledge that change or provide transition support for them to go back. Often many women experience a huge degree of cognitive dissonance because of this; they have to pretend they don’t have children at work. It can be a very confusing time for many women, they cannot just turn off the mother part of themselves. Why should they?

There is so little support for women post partum to work on all of this. Most of the support is physical and maybe looking for signs of depression. When we support our mothers in society we foster a healthy community and society. Our children are our future.

Well good news. Dr Nic Pawley and I will be launching our online course next year to help you create your inner mother. This course will focus on the bio/psycho/social aspects of your personal development. You will learn embodied practices to develop a healthy grounded relationship with your emotions; you will learn about post-partum health from a TCM perspective; the changing rythms of womens sexuality throughout their life; how to work on your unconscious childhood patterning that may be holding you back and how to create your inner mother.

If you are interested let us know. If you know someone who may be interested forward this email onto them.