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How Does Our Own Upbringing (Our Triggers) Influence Our Parenting?

Much more than we realize…

We have unconscious imprints from our childhood experiences – our schooling, our families, and other childhood influences.  What we don’t realize is how much is unconscious.  Every time we get triggered and our blood begins to boil and our heart beats faster, our unconscious has just been activated… but there are things we can do.

As we get flooded by our emotions, we lose our patience and our rational thinking abilities and act on instinct to protect ourselves.  We immediately launch into fight, flight or freeze.

Fight – we yell and say hurtful words

Flight – we storm out of the room and possibly say hurtful words as well

Freeze – we stare in shock, with a look of horror and scorn

How Do These Triggers Impact Our Children?

Our children and teens have even less ability to stay calm and think rationally than we do.  Their higher level thinking brain (the Prefrontal Cortex) is still developing and so it is only natural that their emotions flood them.

When we lose our cool, we are projecting our unconscious onto our child.

What Are Our Most Common Triggers?

• Big melt-downs
• Disrespect
• Being ignored
• Non-compliance
• Whining
• Crying
• Complaining
• Abandonnment

5  Things to Do When We Are Triggered?

1)  Recognize and name the trigger (silently, to ourselves)

2) Remind ourselves that our child’s behaviour is communicating a message to us and is actually not a personal attack – even though it feels as though it is

3) Reframe – Our thoughts create our feelings.  Try to see our children’s behaviour in a different light.  What is their emotional need right now?

*Read my articles on The Four Goals of Misbehaviour to understand the unconscious message that your child is trying to communicate to you.

4) Remember the #1 rule:  “When our Child is in a state, validate, validate, validate”  (Validating doesn’t mean that you agree, but it does mean that you are hearing your children and doing your best to understand their perspective.)

5) If you are unable to keep yourself from going into fight, flight or freeze, explain to your child that you both need some calm down time and you are going to walk away for five minutes and then you will be back (it’s important to return).

Children quite naturally feel all their emotions without blocking them.  They spontaneously surrender to pure feeling, then release the emotion as it passes….We adults are often afraid to surrender to our emotions.  We find it difficult to tolerate feelings such as rejection, fear, anxiety ambivalence, doubt, and sadness.  So we run from our feelings either by burying them through avoidance, resisting them, or displacing them onto people (our children) and situations outside ourselves through emotional reactivity.

~ Dr. Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent p.64

(I recently read the book, The Conscious Parent, by Dr. Shefali Tsabary, Clinical Psychologist, and highly recommend it.)

How Can We Learn to Handle Our Own Emotions/Triggers Better?

Negative emotions will always feel uncomfortable, and we can’t just make them go away.  However, we can learn to sit with our emotions and let them come over us like a wave and then wash away.

As you learn to be with your emotions, they will no longer overwhelm you.  In the full acceptance of surrender, which is of a quite different character from mere resignation, you come to see that pain is simply pain, nothing more and nothing less. Yes, pain is painful – it’s meant to be.  However, when you don’t fuel your pain by either resisting or reacting, but sit with it, it transforms itself into wisdom.  Your wisdom will increase in line with your capacity for embracing all of your feelings, whatever their nature.  Along with increased wisdom comes a greater capacity for compassion.

~ Dr. Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent, p. 65

It’s really important that we learn how to be kind to ourselves and accept our emotions.  If we can do this, then our children will learn to accept their emotions without displacing them onto others or shutting them down.

When we don’t know how to honour our own feelings, we don’t honour our children’s feelings.  

~ Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Meditating is another research-proven method of decreasing our emotional reactivity and increasing our patience.  Try meditating with a guided meditation, once/day for 8 weeks and notice the tremendous calming benefits.  (There are so many amazing apps available to lead you in a guided meditation.  Try Headspace or Headspace for kids, Calm, Smiling Mind, Stop/Think/Breathe and many others.

As emotions get activated with the start-up of school, I encourage you to notice your own triggers, expectations, childhood experiences of school etc. and try not to let these emotions transfer onto your children.

Warmly,