Mother-Child Bond

© Mira Katja Watson, Sep 2011

 

If my child has an issue why do I as his mother need to look at myself?

 

So your child is hyperactive or has tantrums, or is anxious or aggressive or choosy or too sensitive or a host of other worrying issues. Mothers go into huge detail explaining to me what is wrong with their children, or what they are worried about. Yet through lack of our society’s awareness of this topic, they often they haven’t considered that really the only place their children could have learnt their fundamental behaviours and habits is from their parents… So whilst the child’s behaviour appears as a symptom, the cause is often discovered when we look at how the parent is relating to the child, and what aspects of the parent’s behaviour the child is reflecting…

 

 

Sarah, for example, was a lovely woman with an 8 year old son, who had problems relating, was very shy, prone to insecurity and outbursts of anger.

 

She approached me for help with her son’s behaviour, and several months later began to confide that she has no confidence, that she always feels insecure and as if she can’t do things that she should be able to at her age. She also notices that her emotions are up and down like a roller coaster, and she worries about how it will affect her kids. At that point I had the opporunity to take her son’s treatment to a new level by helping her to look at some of her own issues and become aware of some of her own long-standing patterns and responses, so that they would no longer be reinforced in him. She understood this as it made total sense to her from a logical perspective and also emotionally. She could feel it was true.

 

I explained to her how not having her own emotions recognised as a small infant and not being felt adequately so she could learn to regulate her own emotions would most likely have created this pattern of insecurity and lack of self-confidence in her as an infant. She had the characteristic physical issues of a pulling sensation in the eyes, not being able to feel her body much, being uncomfortable with sensations of her own life force in her belly etc. and at times the typical look of a very small, totally neglected infant.

 

She began to see immediately how her child was mirroring these aspects of herself to her, no matter how well she tried to hide them and cover them up with her adult personality.

 

In fact to an outside observer it was obvious that her son was like a smaller version of her with all her difficult and painful patterns magnified five-fold, and the developmental difficulties all the more apparent because he hadn’t learnt to cover them up. I explained that her son could not help but try to meet her own unmet childhood needs for love and attention that she was not herself aware of, because chldren pick up keenly on their parent’s unconscious needs and try to fulfill them in order to be loved. As a consequence he would be experiencing deprivation himself, as was being evidenced in his problematic behaviour, social ability and slowed cognitive development.

 

I showed her how the solution lies in learning to experience and feel her own emotions directly, when she is feeling powerless or lost because she doesn’t know what to do for her son. Similarly when she feels insecure or angry she needs to experience these emotions without involving her child. In feeling her own emotions directly she would be taking care of her own unmet childhood needs, rather exposing the heavy bulk of them to her son. Consequently she would be better able to relate to him from the clarity of the more adult aspect of herself and meet his needs instinctively rather than being in an emotional muddle herself.

 

By coming back to her own body sensations and grounding, and learning to stay centred in her own body, Sarah was able to learn to relate much more clearly to her son.

 

Another aspect was that because her child was often so distressed and emotionally needy that she felt powerless, and overcompensated by giving way to his requests when she didn’t really want to and being softer than with her other child. As a consequence he often didn’t respect her wishes and played up repeatedly with temper tantrums.

 

She had noticed that sometimes he would calm down as soon as she left. We explored the idea of her listening to her inner sense of boundaries and being true to what she did or didn’t want to do, and sticking with this regardless of how her child was behaving. I suggested that in this way he would also get the message from her that he is competent and capable of taking care of himself, rather than weak and in need of protection, and that he would start behaving accordingly… As his mother began to take responsibility for herself, her son naturally gained clarity, competence and independence with very little resistance on his part. The harder step was probably for his mother to come to terms with feeling her own feelings and beginning to be more honest… however, the rewards for her efforts were the immediate improvement in her child’s wellbeing.