How managing our emotions makes us better parentS

FEBRUARY 2017

When you regularly dismiss your feelings, push them under or away, a surreal disconnection with yourself begins. At first it may be imperceptible and you vaguely wonder why you are feeling a bit low. In time though this begins to be your norm – an out of body experience pervades, where you simply go through the motions to get through your day. This can go hand-in-hand with feelings of sadness, guilt, loneliness, despair, anxiety – being numbed-out. This may be tolerable for you, but when you add to this your parenting role, the situation changes. You are expected, and in many instances want to be emotionally connected to your children. How can you? Regardless, you carry on because this is what you expect from yourself and because there seems to exist some rule book that expects this of you.

Have you ever gone through your days feeling disconnected, running on autopilot, and still giving until it seems impossible to carry on? Then you rant, have an outburst or whatever your favourite mode of decompression may be, and then you feel better, pick yourself back up and soldier on until the next time. Could there be a more creative, loving way to deal with your feelings so that you are better able to deal with your children’s feelings?

This used to be my story and relationship with my mysterious feelings until I gave myself permission to let myself into my world of feelings. The door to this world had remained locked and sealed for many years and in fact I didn’t even know a door existed, let alone a door that I had the power to unlock myself. I suppose I had always wished somebody else would magically make me feel better. It was a hard lesson to learn - life doesn’t work this way! Feeling good about myself and my life was an inside out job. Perhaps this was when I really started to grow-up.

Why am I telling you all of this and how is it connected to preparing emotionally for parenting? My wish for you as a parent is that you don’t experience years of living in an emotional desert, for you to know that you have the key to open the door to your feeling world too, and that when you do, you can enjoy the experience of relating deeply and meaningfully to yourself and your children.

Being emotionally depleted meant disengagement, dissatisfaction and disconnection – not an ideal space from which to parent effectively. I found that the more I denied my feelings the harder it was to connect from a place of unconditional love with my children. I had less patience, less tolerance, and had irrational outbursts. This fuelled the emotional roller coaster my children then had to ride with me. It was so hard to be mindfully present and engaged with their worlds, when mine was so full of turmoil.

I began to see a pattern emerging in my sons’ behaviour that appeared to be directly related to my ability to handle my own feelings effectively. When I was calm and happy, I was able to connect with them from this resourceful space and I had all the time in the world. It had a miraculous knock-on effect not only on how we connected but on the amount of fun, laughter, and joy that was accessible to us, because I was feeling content.

I also realised that if I wanted my children to have access to their wonderful world of feelings, I first have to access mine and find tools that I could use and model to them so that they didn’t keep their feelings under lock and key exactly the same way I had up until then.