Parenting is hard. Really hard. Therapeutic parenting is beyond hard. In all the therapeutic parenting advice (specific to trauma/autism/ADHD/FASD etc), one thing that’s often neglected is the small issue of the parent’s nervous system.
"Children who need love the most will always ask for it in the most unloving of ways"
- Russell Barkley
"A child whose behaviour pushes you away is a child who needs connection before anything else"
- Kelly Bartlett
"Respond to children with love in their worst moments, their broken moments, their angry moments - because it is in their most unlovable human moments that they most need to feel loved"
- L R Knost
It’s all true. And yet it sounds so simple. If only we didn’t have a nervous system to contend with. But we do have a nervous system to contend with. A nervous system designed to unconsciously store the finer details of every threatening situation we’ve ever experienced since our conception. It’s not just the life threatening stuff. It’s every time we felt small, overlooked, humiliated, inadequate, shamed - every time we felt as though we weren’t good enough for our parents or teachers or other adults in our lives. Feeling those difficult feelings alone with nobody to help us to make logical sense of the experience or to process the emotion. For some of us, we’re battling a lot of history. Others not so much - but enough that it’s still tricky. Our children’s most difficult moments can take us right back there. The face contorted with rage. The shouting. The crying. The hurtful words. The not knowing what to do to help.
When we move outside of our window of tolerance, into survival mode, we literally lose the ability to properly read our children, to make sense of their intentions, to respond with empathy, to weigh everything up and make wise decisions. The reality is that sometimes when our children need us the most we’re the least emotionally available. The best we can do at those times is damage limitation.
It’s easy to feel like we’re failing when we’re bombarded with therapeutic parenting advice that’s impossible to live up to all the time. But the fact is we will fail repeatedly. It’s what we do with the failure that matters. We need to resist feeling overwhelmed with guilt, accept ourselves as the human beings we are, create and hold on to a compassionate self narrative - but without justifying or excusing our own poor behaviour, without dismissing where we’ve still got work to do. Never asking or allowing our children to carry the weight of it.
It’s a fine line to walk.
If we can respond therapeutically some/most of the time, with PACE, and openly take responsibility for the times we can’t - apologise, narrate our internal experience, make it clear to our kids that our response was about us and absolutely not about them - then they’ll be okay.
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