If you experienced not being heard, or not being understood, or not being loved just for being you as a child, you probably remember how painful that is.
Remembering how we felt as a child can be powerful to help us put ourselves in our child’s shoes and connect with how much they want to be heard, understood, and loved.
It’s normal and natural for all children to experience uncomfortable feelings, and to have really big feelings, however much we aim to be attuned to their needs.
Most of you reading this probably live in a colonised culture.
In colonisation, the body and feelings have been denigrated for thousands of years.
In “The Patterning Instinct,” Jeremy Lent says, “in just a few generations, the philosophers of ancient Greece revolutionised human thought. The senses and emotions were no longer to be trusted. Reason and abstraction would henceforth be the source of what was good in the human experience.”
As Aletha Solter writes in ‘Tears and Tantrums,’ “During the Middle Ages in Europe, many people thought that babies and children who cried or raged a lot were possessed by a demon or a devil. The treatment was to have a priest exorcise the devil from the child.”
We tend to think that we live in a modern civilisation, but when we look at recent perceptions of children’s feelings being a sign of ‘misbehaviour’, we can see how much colonised culture is deeply embedded in centuries of old beliefs of feelings being related to badness, shaming, punishment and harshness.
We see the results in us adults who grew up in this culture. Repressing feelings is common through screen scrolling, coffee-drinking, eating, busy-ness, acquiring things, and drinking alcohol. So much of repression is socially sanctioned in this culture.
As always, I invite us to be deeply compassionate with ourselves. I think that understanding history helps us with this. Seeing the very long lineage of believing feelings are evil, bad, wrong, shameful things, and in more recent times, to thinking that all painful feelings indicate unmet needs, so any feelings are to be stopped with distraction, can help us be compassionate with ourselves if we find listening to our child’s feelings hard.
It may seem as if distracting, giving a dummy or pacifier, food, or other things to stop children from crying or feeling upset is the most compassionate thing, but have you ever been upset and longed for your parents/partner/friend to simply be present with you and listen to how you feel, without trying to distract you or minimise the feelings?
And have you ever noticed that if you distract your child from their painful feelings that those feelings don’t go away, but come back to the surface again later on?
Not only that, but unexpressed feelings are real physiological things, so when feelings are not expressed, they accumulate in the body.
The stress hormones that correlate with the feelings build up, along with the unexpressed expression, and tend to lead to the things that we find challenging as parents.
When a child has accumulated feelings, they feel agitated in their body, which means it’s hard for them to cooperate, to make eye contact, to sit still, to concentrate, to hear our requests, to sleep when they’re tired and stay asleep until they’ve had enough sleep.
Accumulated feelings can also lead to biting, hitting, throwing, taking or pushing.
Or they can be seen in common repression mechanisms such as a dummy/pacifier, thumb-sucking, nose-picking, hair-twirling, screens for numbing rather than learning and entertaining and connection, eating to repress feelings, moving to avoid feelings, and so on.
And again, I invite so much compassion for us all. This is literally thousands of years of cultural conditioning that feelings and the body are inferior to the mind.
This isn’t about judging ourselves. This is an invitation to become MORE compassionate with ourselves and our feelings, as well as becoming more compassionate with our children and their feelings.
If we want our children to experience being deeply heard, lovingly understood, and unconditionally loved, learning about how to listen to their tears and tantrums, and respond effectively and empathically to accumulation, repression and aggression, is a big help.
If you want to learn about Aware Parenting, I have loads of free articles and courses here on my website.
I am also facilitating a podcast series called “Aware Parenting Conversations,” that you can find on my own podcast, and I am a part of @TheAwareParentingPodcast with my dear colleague @LaelStone.
If you want a deeper experience, I am I’m running a Masterclass called: “Reducing repression, aggression and agitation in children” on at 2pm on Sunday, 1st March in the Making Friends with Children’s Feelings Course. Everyone already in the course gets access to it. If you want to join, you get 22% off with the coupon code: 22%
If you’re reading this after that date, you can still watch the Masterclass in the Course FB group.
And if you’re already really familiar with Aware Parenting and would like support in becoming an instructor, doors to my Aware Parenting Instructor Mentoring Course 2020 close on the 1st of March – that’s just 2 days away!
Much love,
Marion xoxoxo