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.

The developmental challenges for our rites of passage

As we go through life there are different rites of passage we go through. In days gone by, we used to celebrate these transitions and create community support around our friends and loved ones who go through these passageways. This is not something we’ve paid a lot of attention to culturally from many years and I can’t help but wonder how that impacts on the shape of how we grow?

For each stage has a developmental challenge that we must address. If we do not, it hangs around at the next stage of life. For some people it retards their growth, particularly into adulthood or into their second adulthood. This is one of the biggest challenges for most people going through these transitions and it is why many people can get stuck. Particularly when the haven't explored themselves in their teenage years or their early adult years.

The rites of passage we go through are our teenage years, our early adulthood where many of us become parents and put our creative energies into the world, our midlife and our elderhood. Another way some people write about these passages are Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship. The latter being the rite of passage that is death.

When we go through a passage, which can take a number of years, we go through a separation phase, then a liminal phase, then an integration or incorporation phase. For most of the people I work with in coaching, the liminal phase is often the hardest because our foundations are shaky due to our changing identity. It is in the presence of community that we are able to transition with greater ease through these phases as it offers support and our space being held by others.

For females, we sometimes refer to these stages as Maiden, Mother, Maga or Queen and Crone. The third stage, the Maga/Queen is relatively newer, really only having been talked about a lot in the last 15 years. It has come about because women are living longer and we can clearly see there is a stage that they go through in Midlife where they are really expressing their gifts to the world in a big way and being their most authentic self.

The developmental challenge for each rite is:

Maiden/Teenager - to explore the world and ourselves whilst being held in the container of the community.

Mother - to express our spirit in the world through our creativity to the world. Whether that be in the form of creating a family, creating our vocational gifts through our work and to receive recognition for that. To say yes to life with all of our energy and vitality behind us.

Maga/Queen - To discern your truth within you and to be radically honest with yourself, to stay present and to learn to be kind to ourselves.

Crone - to let go, rest, receive and trust.

When we don’t express these challenges or explore them they show up in the next phase. So the young woman who perhaps lives in a family where there is high control and she is not able to explore her sexuality in her teenage years, will do that in her twenties, in her next phase. For women in mother phase, many women are focused on looking after young children and don’t get to explore their life’s work at this phase. This can also happen to all of us. For many people in the late teenage years they explore areas of study that have been pushed onto them by their parents; it is not really what they are passionate about. So it is not surprising for many women and men, once they hit midlife to explore alternate career choices and hobbies that might be aligned to what they loved to do in their teens. This is very common now days. It requires some discernment on our part, as we squish a lot of stuff into our life at midlife and we can easily become tired and burned out.

At midlife, where radical honesty with ourselves is the challenge, it is not surprising that many people are faced with working through old trauma, slowing down because their body tells them through physical health issues or pain and learning to create a more grounded relationship with their emotions and how they express them. Come back to the truth of who you are is what our psyche whispers to us.

Finally in our crone years, as we wind down and really enjoy life it is hard for many of us to trust and receive when we have been in a constant spin of productivity for years. These are great years when we can offer mentorship to others and enjoy the flow of life.

So if your teenager is driving you crazy think back to your years and know that they are here to explore themselves in this stage in every way. Let them go, to a point. Our role is to keep them safe as parents but that doesn’t mean locking them up. When it comes to our midlife selves, it’s OK to reconnect to passions you had as a kid, explore it, it is normal. What is important is to acknowledge what is going on and speak about it openly.