As a parent, practicing self-care is not an indulgence – it is necessary in order to do the hard work of raising your child. We encourage all (healthy and legal ;-) ways to care for yourself, from play and pampering to rest and reflection. One of the most profound forms of self-care, however, is to let parenting guide you in uncovering and healing leftover emotional baggage from your own childhood. With kids we say, "feel it to heal it" – and this is equally powerful for parents.
The next time your child triggers a strong negative reaction in you, stop to consider if there’s something there that might be more about you than your child. Take a deep breath, find a compassionate listener, and feel it to heal it. Our children and what they draw from us can be powerful therapy for working through hurt from our own childhoods.
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." – George Santayana
As adults, we are all products of our own childhoods. As we passed through childhood, our experiences, both positive and negative, all got encoded within us, literally helping to structure our brains. The strategies we developed to try to manage our experiences, and all the associated feelings, filtered through our innate temperament and formed what we come to think of as our personality. While we might believe that we’re naturally perfectionistic, or just don’t like to take risks, or get bored easily and move on, it's important to realize that some aspects of our "personality" are unresolved feelings and coping strategies that we developed in childhood to protect us. Until we make them conscious, these scripts run on autopilot.
Many coping strategies that we developed are useful and functional, and continue to serve us. Sometimes, however, a script that started to keep us safe as children later gets in the way of feeling good or reaching our full potential. Somebody might have stayed safe from a critical father by never stating their opinions, only to find that they later avoid speaking up at work. Or maybe your parents instilled a fear of strangers to keep you safe, and now you feel suspicion and distrust about people you don't know.
As a parent, your leftover issues and unconscious scripts will cause you to react toward your child with a misplaced anger or anxiety. Following the example above, if it was unsafe for you to speak up in your home, you may also encourage your child to be reserved, and feel very anxious when they are "showing off" or acting too confident. Left unchecked, reactions that are coming from your own past prevent you from attuning to your child in the current situation, and managing it effectively now. And, because your reactions are full of emotion and anxiety, they're likely to also become hot-button issues for you children, which they'll carry through life (until processed).
The way to process and release your old baggage is to make it conscious, and feel the feelings that were too overwhelming as a child, ideally with the support of a good listener.
The drive to be a more present, compassionate parent may be what inspires you to notice and work on feeling and releasing some of your triggers. Hopefully, however, you'll soon realize huge benefits that come to you for doing the work and wading through old feelings. The benefits often include a a sense of lightness, freedom, hope, and new energy. And on top of that, people often find they're no longer inhibited in ways they were before, and can make progress toward exciting dreams. This is why we say that healing by feeling is an act of the deepest self-care.
