If there’s one thing children provide parents with it’s the opportunity for growth. Plenty of growth. Especially if we're parenting children with SEND or a history of significant trauma. More so if we’ve got our own unresolved trauma but it's true regardless - children take us into emotional territory we never would have believed possible.
Reacting impulsively is the brain and body's way of self-regulating - shouting, projecting difficult emotions onto others, slamming doors, swearing. Because we know these things hurt others we can feel better in the short term but in the long run we just feel worse - building up memories of times where we didn't parent the way we wanted to. We can feel a lot of shame.
I want to tell you that we can learn to sit with those difficult emotions, resisting the urge to react, instead getting curious about why we're having those big emotions. We start by making time and space - a few minutes every day where we don't busy ourselves with other things, where we just sit and notice what's going on inside of us. It can bring up difficult thoughts, feelings, memories, and beliefs. Sometimes we need other people to help us carry the weight of it, make sense of it, process it.
As we learn to tolerate those big emotions, we show up differently with our children. Change always starts with us.
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