There’s a grief that comes with parenthood. It came the moment I snapped at my two-year old and I woke up and had this numb sensation that I was not the parent I hoped I would be. I was angry and I didn’t even know it.
I have heard the self-chastising or dismissive variation of ‘I didn’t know I was an angry person until I became a mother’, many times. I have heard it from myself and I have pushed it down. I have laughed it, wished it and rationalised it away, anything rather than take responsibility for it. And so, it flared up again and again. Until one day, when the anger overpowered me, I learnt that the anger needed care and attention. It needed understanding and it needed compassion because it came from somewhere.
As painful as it was to catch myself mid or post-rant saying or doing mean things to my most precious children, it was even more painful to admit to myself that perhaps I did not get the help I needed with the very thing that threatened to engulf me now. I was staring into a deep, dark hole and it was scary.
This is not to berate or blame my parents even though I admit that, in the pro-cess of learning hard things, there was some thrashing and resentment. But once I understood more about myself, and my human wiring, I realised that they were simply doing the best they could, the best way they knew how with what they had received.
After many decades of research into child development and the mind, we now know that whatever nurture our own caregivers received – supportive or insensitive - sunk deep into the unconscious and got embedded, as part of long-term memory, into a catalogue of automatic responses.
When faced with an emotional or psychological need, our caregivers drew on an internal manual passed on to them by their own caregivers. These manuals contain instructions on how to respond and perform when faced with certain situations. These manuals got handed to them in the very early years of their pre-verbal lives, before they had the means to process them, or enough awareness to open them up to rational inquiry.
Unless we, as parents now, open ourselves up to this inquiry, through honest and verbal reflection with safe others, we will most likely continue passing on the same instruction manual. When faced with difficult moments such as ‘how to respond when my child is disappointed’ or ‘how to deal with a temper tantrum’, or even ‘how to respond to a plea for comfort after my child has been ‘naughty’, we risk getting caught in a loop of automatic and self-protective reactions.
If, like me, you feel that some or many of the pages of this manual are missing, torn or tattered, then knowing how to respond sensitively in some of these situations can feel like a monumental task. It can be exhausting, frustrating, or even terrifying. Instead of connection, all you feel is disconnection, from your child and even from yourself.
As I became a mother, the dawning realisation that my manual was torn and in-complete elicited a deep anger. An anger born of a fear of not knowing how to meet my children’s most fundamental needs when all I’d ever hoped for was to be a good mum. An anger born of the pain of realising that those needs, for all my parents’ best efforts in the chaos of their own lives, were sadly not met in me.
The Circle of Security programme, which I now facilitate, got me started on this journey in learning to understand myself, my anger and my feelings of inadequacy as a parent. Thanks to the safety borne of meeting with other parents who could share their own strengths and struggles with their children, I was able to reach a place of acceptance about the state of my forlorn manual. I was then able to make a choice towards repairing it and filling in some of the missing pages.
No matter what childhood you feel you had, or the condition of your manual, this opportunity is there for all because we all experience some level of discomfort and confusion with some of our children’s needs, feelings and behaviours.
When I finally found the courage to explore, and wake up to the deep pain of my wounds, I was able to take responsibility and make a clearer choice.
The choice was for self-compassion and self-acceptance. It’s from that place that I am learning to relate more healthily to the world, to others and to myself. It’s from that place that I’m better able to acknowledge and accept my own discom-fort and incompleteness, and still perceive myself as ‘good enough’ and worthy of love. I am then able to do the same for my children. And that is all the security they need.
