How Your Story is Affecting Your Relationship with Your Children

What follows are my notes from this podcast: 82. How Your Story is Affecting Your Relationship with Your Children

What do you do with the moment that you begin to look into your own story and you suddenly realize "Oh Crap. I am hurting my own children." 

This can actually distract you from looking into your own story. You shift and want to work on relationship with them instead of your own wounds. 

This guilt is holy. Some things do need to be addressed. You want to make it right. Your broken heart is evidence of your deep desire to love your children better. 

"The past isn't dead. It's not even past."

Your past experiences in your life are profoundly affecting how you are interacting with your children. 

But have we thought about, neurologically, why we are losing it with our children? Most parenting failures are caused by dis-regulation in the parent.

(Go back and listen to Episode 20 on "Affect regulation" if you want to learn more about dis-regulation.) Who doesn't know the experience of feeling triggered by your child? Yes, even a five-year-old can trigger us. Your child does something and your body goes into a different physiological state. We suddenly aren't being the parent we long to be. But why? 

Because issues from your past are being activated. In other words, you are remembering something from your past. But you don't have the sensation of recall. That's called implicit memory. (Check out Podcast 11 for more on that.)

Suppose when you were a boy or girl, you were not allowed to cry. It was off-limits. And now you have a seven-year-old son who cries often. When ever it drags on longer than you think it should, something in your body begins to change. You get dis-regulated. 

Why? 

Perhaps the fact that you were not allowed to cry when you were a child is playing a role. It's this sense of, "Look, I held it together as a kid. I never cried."

Have you named your own reality? Have you grieved about the particular losses that are bound up within that reality? Without that space for grief, it is very likely that your inability to cry as a child is contributing significantly to your diminished tolerance for your son's crying. 

You must address this part of your story to "fix" this. His crying is connecting you to part of a story that has not become engaged. So you become hyper-aroused. And now, you've taught him that he is not allowed to cry. And so, the process of generational wounding continues. 

What is driving your upset feelings toward your son? You are yelling at your son because you are trying to get your dis-regulation to stop! When we are dis-regulated, we will do whatever it takes to get regulated again. You want to be more comfortable in your own body. 

Your parenting failures are often bound up in your story. That means you must engage your story in order to improve in your own parenting of your children -- whatever age that they are. 

Is there a linkage in your parental failures and unaddressed part of your story? Be curious about that. 

It can be very hard to see the way your parents harmed you AND the way you are harming your children at the same time. It's like you are being squeezed from both sides. It can therefore become easy to get distracted by your own story work to deal with how you are treating your kids. 

So .... how do you respond when you realize you are hurting your children?

The single most important thing you can do is ADDRESS YOUR OWN STORY in your family of origin growing up. (This is actually data not opinion!)

"The best predictor of how our children will become attached to us, that is how emotionally healthy they are, is how well we as parents have come to make sense of our lives. How well we tell a coherent story of our early life experiences." -- Dan Siegel

A great book about this is Parenting from the Inside Out by Dan Siegel.

If you want to be a better parent, there are two things to do: 

1. Focus on yourself as a CHILD. Do the reflective work to make sense of your own story when you were growing up and when you were a child. In some ways, you need to parent yourself as a child in order to be a better parent to your child -- even if they are an adult now!

Become curious about when you get dis-regulated with your children. Rather than being furious at yourself for losing it with your kids or grandkids, be curious WHY DO I GET DIS-REGULATED WHEN MY GRANDKID DOES ______." Your dis-regulation is about YOUR STORY not their behavior. (Even if their behavior is atrocious!)

2. The second thing you need to do is make sure your children feels FELT. When your child has big emotions, they need you to join them in those feelings. They need to know that you are attuned to what they are feeling on the inside. You join with them through the sharing of non-verbal communication!

When you realize your child is feeling sad because he wanted to play with his older brother and his older brother didn't play with him, your mind has the ability to feel that sadness and disappointment inside YOUR body. That is empathy. You can put yourself in your child's shoes. Let your mind attune to your child's facial expressions and tone of voice. Your son will know that you are feeling something of what he is feeling. He will feel joined by you and feel felt. This is REGULATION for your child and the main ingredient in SECURE ATTACHMENT. 

"Moments of joining, enable a child to feel felt. To feel that he or she exists within the mind of the parent. When children experience an attuned connection from a responsive, empathetic adult, they feel good about themselves because their emotions have been given resonance and reflection." -- Dan Siegel

Your child MOST needs emotional connection to you. 

Your child was created in the image of a triune God. A "we" and not an "I". Therefore, your child's deepest need is connection -- feeling joined -- feeling felt. 

And if you are listening to this and you feel like you do not emotionally connect with your child, START NOW. All harm can be repaired! 

Integration: means linking of separating parts is what brings healing.This brings Shalom. 

"The key to staying in connection with your child during times of discipline is to align yourself with your child's emotional state" -- Dan Siegel

Your child is throwing a fit wanting ice cream before dinner. You don't have to give them the ice cream in order to let her feel felt. You can empathize with your child's want to have ice cream without giving them the ice cream. Once you feel something of those feelings inside your own body, you might find yourself saying, "Oh! I know you want ice cream right now and that would be yummy, but you can't have any right now. Maybe later."

The magic of that statement is in the non-verbal communication. Your facial expression and your tone of voice let the child know you are feeling something of their disappointment and unmet longing.

Adam's son told his dad he didn't think his dad was noticing that he was working hard to learn to calm himself down. You can say to your child, "I am so sorry I have not noticed you when you are trying to behave correctly." They will feel loved when they hear you just say, "I am heartbroken I have not noticed you trying to calm yourself down." Notice that this story starts with Adam's failure as a parent and ends with the son feeling loved. 

Every parenting failure can become the opportunity for a parenting success if you are willing to do the work of repair. 

The second part of this two-parter will be entirely focused on how to repair!

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