Here is a section from my book to be published later this year – “Frazzled to Fabulous in 5 Minutes a Day – How to regain your calm, enjoy your kids and get more done”. In this section you will learn how your childhood and your beliefs about how your childhood affects your parenting. It has not been professionally edited yet!
Imagine you are a plant! A plant needs adequate light and temperature, the right kind of soil and every so often will need repotting. What do you need?
Working on the underlying reasons and roots of your stress, anxiety and overwhelm will stop the repeating patterns that cause this in the first place. You might be thinking that the reason for your stress is the lack of support from your partner with the house and children, having to look after elderly parents, trying to juggle a full-time job with childcare etc.
Although they seem to be the cause of your stress, different people respond to the same situations in different ways. What is it about your particular situation that makes you respond to your external situation in the way you do?
It is usually connected to or caused by the things that did or did not happen with you were young. If your mum told you that having kids is a bad idea and she was always stressed and overwhelmed, that doesn’t paint a positive picture of motherhood. You might unconsciously decide to make it right for your children and try to be the mum that you didn’t have. That decision would put constant pressure on you and your parenting without you even being aware.
In the diagram above you can see that your childhood experiences will have given rise to thoughts, feelings, beliefs and decisions about the way that you were parented. Take for example a child who was heavily disciplined. Feelings arising may have been fear, giving rise to the thoughts that she must do everything at home to keep the peace and be a good girl. Beliefs that may arise, could be “I’m bad” or “I’m unlovable” (because I make my parents angry). Decisions that may arise from this could be to be as helpful and kind to people as possible. This is just one possibility that could arise from strong discipline. Other children would be more defiant and push even harder against their parents which would give rise to a completely different set of beliefs.
In this example the child grows up and has children of her own. She then parents unconsciously and most probably automatically does what her parents did even though it caused her suffering. Or she parents consciously, deciding to do the opposite and be completely relaxed and laid back about discipline. Whilst she is still has emotional attachment to the way she was parented, she will be parenting from a place of pain and suffering and on some level her children will pick up on this. She may even hear her parents words coming out of her mouth – those very words that she swore she would never say. So although she will have done the opposite, she will perpetuating discipline challenges down the generations until a child further down the family line chooses to release this pattern. If you think about your own family, you may notice comments such as “In our family, people always do…” or “This xxx has always been a challenge in our family” etc. Through EFT it is possible to release these patterns although that is a topic for another book!
The diagram above, illustrates that the children will interpret their parents way of parenting in their own way. It may be in the way the parents intended or it may be in a totally different and unexpected way. So as parents, we can have the best intentions in the world but our children will interpret those intentions in a way that we have no control over! But we can tap on the way we feel eg on guilt. For example, my husband and I have always done EFT with our daughter to help her through her challenges. But now she will sometimes say “Let me have my problems – you make me feel like its not OK to have problems”! We can laugh about it but its interesting to see how our good intentions can create new problems.
Or she may work on her underlying challenges to parent from a new way that is neither strict or laid back.
Through deep EFT work, you could release the negative feelings associated with being told that having kids is a bad idea, and all the beliefs and decisions you made as a result of having that experience. That way, you can be fully present with you mothering and your children, without the constant underlying pressure.
If you are a mum who wants to have feel happier in herself, with her children check out my book Frazzled to Fabulous in 5 Minutes a Day Follow my quick and easy step-by-step programme here https://www.frazzledtofabulous.com/
