Handling Emotions – What to do as a parent when your buttons get pushed?

 

© Mira Katja Watson, Sep 2011

Everyone gets upset and angry at times, or highly strung and exhuasted, and just plain overwhelmed. And that’s even without children in the picture.

 

With children around, demanding, needing and depending, not only does it sometimes seem like a lot of hard work, but your own unmet childhood needs and pain get triggered and things can get really distressing.

 

The first thing to realize is that if you are from a Western culture, chances are that you had a horrifically deprived childhood, at least in emotional terms, and that your parents and you are accustomed to thinking of it as idyllic. This is simply because generations of “civilized” people have allowed thinking, ideas and fashions to get in the way of instinctive in the moment responses to real life babies. Wars etc also create massive trauma that is passed down through the generations preventing mothers from connecting with their children, and passing on a pattern of unintentional emotional neglect. Mainly women only tend to become aware of their own repressed childhood deprivation after childbirth, or once the children have arrived and things don’t go to plan. At that point it is important to realize it is not the children who are at fault, but the parent’s own unresolved early childhood experiences that are creating problems in the children.

 

What to do?

 

If you get a chance, do a thorough emotional excavation of yourself and work through the deeper layers of your childhood experience before having children.

 

This is important because Western adult humans who have not been through therapy tend to be split into two or more disconnected layers – the conscious expereince, and a whole other layer of repressed and hidden childhood emotion that they know nothing about. The problem for newborn infants with this is that given that they are so sensitive and vulnerable, and need to survive, they meet their parents unmet childhood needs instinctively in order to be loved, rather than expressing their own needs and character. This creates another whole layer of repressed need and pain in them, which they will again not be aware of until they themselves have children, and so on…

 

Ask yourself how your parents related to you. Did they see you, hear you, respect you. Did they demand that you loved and obeyed them, rather than love you and let you be as you were? Did they support who you were and encourage you to express yourself, or criticize and control you? These questions will help you to begin to see where your own needs were not met, and start to guide you inwards towards the layers of longing and sadness that need to be felt so you can mourn your own losses in childhood properly.

 

If that’s not an option, because your kids were what helped you see you have buried issues there is still plenty you can do to prevent inflicting the same degree of damadge on your children as the difficult emotions you may yourself be now experiencing.

 

It can be helpful to get clear about a few things in advance of being with the children, to give you some tools for how to be with your own emotions as they arise.

 

The first is to realize and accept that the feelings you are having are your feelings. They have nothing whatsoever to do with your children even though they appear to arise in situations connected with your children. The only thing you can ever feel is your own pain, no-one else’s.   Your job is to feel your emotions, that means to experience them directly, and take responsibility for them as yours. This already creates a lot of space for your kids since they will not be blamed for your own bad moods. And you will learn to see the difference between yourself and your child and their needs and emotions, which is also vital to their development of sense of self…

 

Imagine a small child exploring the world joyfully who is constantly shouted at just for doing the things they are doing. It doesn’t make any sense to them at all. The problem is that rather than understanding that their behaviour is not acceptable to you, they tend to understand from the energy that they themselves are bad. This doesn’t help your child in the long run, as they need to learn that they are inherently good in order to have self-confidence and feel safe.

 

What they need is to experience your calm acceptance of them in all aspects of themselves, so they can develop a sense of security and positive appreciation of themselves.

 

How on earth do you show calm acceptance when your own emotions are running riot?

 

There are several pointers that can help you in this respect…

 

1. One is the issue of emotional regulation. Whilst you can teach your own child to calm down when they are aroused, or can stiumalte them when they are down, you may not have had this help yourself adequately as a child.

 

So the first thing you can do to improve your situation massively is learn to feel and monitor yourself so that when the fear levels or sensation levels in your body begin to get higher than what you can handle, and you are tending beginning to lose the plot, you take a break, and give yourself a chance to calm down. You can do this anytime, any place. It means putting that requirement first since once you have reached overload it may often take a good night’s sleep for your nervous system to recover. This is not something you can afford to do, because you wont be present with your children in that state, so you might be better off leaving them on their own at that point. They would probably experience less neglect and hurt if you just left them, than if you stay with them in an over-aroused and negative state, especially if you blame it on them…

 

In short, when you need time out, take it immedidately, and don’t feel guilty. It will do more good than harm in the long run as it supports your own emotional healing process and stability.

 

2. Learning to feel your body, and feel sensations in the body, whilst emotions are running, and not following or believing the thinking that goes with it can be a crucial tool. Whenever your own strong emotions are triggered there will be a sequence of phsyical sensations too, which indicate to you what is taking place. For example, anger or rage can feel like a volcano erupting from the pit of your abdomen up through your stomach and chest. If you don’t feed it with thoughts of blame, the phsyical sensations often die down in just 5 or 10 mintues and pass. You can just observe these and use them to help you stay in the here and now. This takes pracitce and gets easier with time.

 

3. In addition to this, focusing on something other than yourself whilst such sensations and emotions are running can be extremely helpful. The more you go into an emotion or thought, the bigger and louder it becomes.  Training yourself not to do that, but rather to let it run in the background and focus on your present environment, on something outside of you, and greater than you, can be extremely beneficial. This can for example, be paying close attention to your child and being fully present with them. In a way you have to split your attention so that enough is on your inner state for it not to get more intense – ie for your nerves not to get over-burdened, but that at the same time you are in full feeling contact with the outside world.

 

What this does in practice is strengthen your capacity to feel and stay present with strong emotions, as well as provide your child with the attention s/he needs. So it can work both ways. They key is to learn to catch your own emotions moving before they overun you, and to stay present…

 

4. Knowing that it is not your fault that you have emotions, and that there is not much you can do other than observe them, not go into them, and not push them away can help. Just being honest with yourself about your experience, and what your limits are will help. If you cant do something because it pushes you well over your limit, don’t. Make plans for those eventualities before you get to them – for example a safe room you can lock a child in, or someone else to take over, or just a pair of earphones or earplugs to give yourself a break.

 

5. know that when you are going through your own unfelt childhood emotions, you may go through a very difficult period when you feel as if you can’t manage. But emotions always shift if you accept them and allow them to be there. Its only what you resist that persists. And those feelings will not be there forever. Its just a patch.

 

6. Its better for your child for you to give them a couple of hours of really focused, tuned in, empathetic attention a day, rather than a whole day of half-present but resentful caretaking. They need the specific empathetic attention to develop their nervous systems and brains, and you need to pay attention in order to be fully with them. The other kind of attention is not useful for children apart from for preventing them from hurting themselves. If you don’t feel you can give them much of that attention then find other adults who are willing and able so that the kids can get the learning they need. It doesn’t have to be you… just someone that they obviously like and feel comfortable with.

 

7. If your child is behaving in a way that makes you angry or upset, try to put aside what you want and see what the problem is for them. Are they overstimulated? Tired, bored or hungry? That way you are more likely to be able to solve the problem without involving your own emotional cycle or hurt. If they are out of control, better to remove them eg from the supermarket than try to sort things out there.

 

8. If you spend days or weeks in a despondent or exhausted state where you feel as if you are not really present or here, you may be regressed and experiencing unresolved emotions from your own childhood. If that is the case it would be helpful to find a therapist that can really empathise with you so you can start to get some of the emotional empathy and regulation you need to bring you back into the present moment. Otherwise it will be unlikely that you can do an adequte job for your child… remember its not your fault if this is what you are experiencing, but its urgent to do something about it and get support because when you are not present, your child experiences neglect if there are no other emotionaly present adults around.

 

9. If your tendency is to want to hit your child or be verbally abusive then you really need to get help immediately from a professional. Your aggression is absolutely out of place when directed at a defenceless child. It is never acceptable for a fully grown human to offload their backlog of pain and frustration on a child, becauese it just perpetuates the cycle and passes your damadge to the next generation. These feelings are your responsibility, and for you to deal with. Its actually hard for a child to be around you if you have those kind of behavioural tendencies, even without you acting out, because your presence will feel heavy and negative. So it is urgent you get help to start moving through the issues, as well as practising the guidelines above, which will help.

 

To help stabilise your emotions and create space:

 

Have a daily routine of morning yoga or brisk walk, something that helps you calm yourself and moves the body

 

Drink plenty of green vegetable juices/water throughout the day.

 

Avoid coffee and other stimulants – they wreck your intiuition and wear you out.

 

Always abandon your kids before you abandon yourself – stop and calm yourself before you get past the point of no return. Otherwise you are possibly damadging them.

 

Remember that you children trigger your unfelt and unmet childhood emotional needs and that you may need regular professional support to work through them. Don’t be shy to get the help you need.

 

Find at least a part-time occupation for yourself so that you can maintain and interest in something other than your child. It doesn’t have to exclude your child, but it is adult-focused and stimulating. That way you will resent your child less.