One of the most challenging parts of parenting is holding space for our child’s big emotions.
During these times it is helpful to understand that it's part of a child’s healthy development to feel what it’s like to have a big reaction: to feel what it feels like when things don’t go their way, to feel what it feels like to have a negative belief, or to get overwhelmed, and the contrast between what joy, excitement, and connection feel like.
We don’t have to be in resistance to these experiences. They are valuable learning material as children get used to navigating their perspective. And while there are many ways we can assist them through this, it is not our job to protect them from having any big emotions,
to solve all of our child’s problems for them, or to shut down or make big emotion go away.
It is our job to allow our child to feel what comes up for them through their life experience and to self regulate our own emotions and perspectives so we can be that stable support for them as they learn to process emotion themselves.
And guess what? Their ability to process these big feelings is innate. It might look messy and untamed at times, but we can trust that with our anchor of support, they will return to equilibrium. And many times, they do this quicker and with more ease than adults do. Have you ever seen a child who was really upset one moment, then laughing and playing the next like nothing happened? This is natural for us. The problem is when we bring our own conditioning to the table.
For example: As adults, we probably have big mental stories around our emotions. Instead of using an emotional trigger as our cue to pause and get mindful, the mind runs rampant following all the negative thoughts that then give the emotional feedback of more and more negative feelings.
Or maybe we’ve learned to resist our emotions. It’s the resistance that can make them flare up even bigger, stick around longer, or get stuffed down only to pop up again as un-placeable anxiety, rage, depression, or even physical illness.
These conditioned ways of approaching emotion create suffering, not the emotion itself.
When we are willing to embrace our emotions with acceptance, gentleness, and curiosity it is remarkable how even negative feelings take on a different hue, how easily they can pass through us without resistance, and subside into greater insight about ourselves.
If we have trouble navigating our child’s experience of emotion it might be an indicator that we ourselves never learned how to process emotion in a healthy way. That’s not necessarily our fault, but it is our responsibility as a conscious parent. And it’s also our gift. Learning to welcome emotions home and use them as a guide into greater alignment will change yours and your child’s life.
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