emotions

 Why parents’ help is not always helpful? Managing our protective instincts


Welcoming a new baby to this world means becoming responsible for every aspect of someone else’s life. This experience brings a variety of emotions into play. From now on, parenting means operating in these highly emotional circumstances, and we need to learn how to manage our reactions to what is happening with our child. 
Our parenting strategies might be partially a conscious choice, but they are strongly influenced by who we are, what is our history and the context in which we are bringing up the children. For example: if we find ourselves overprotecting our children, we might realise that we just can’t help ourselves. We do it because it’s our emotional reaction to an anticipated threat. To see our children struggling seems unbearable. The obvious reason for trying to clear all the obstacles from our children’s path is that we want the best for them. The underlying dynamic might be more complex though. We might also be over protective in areas where we ourselves had hard times as children, or we might have strong need for controlling the world around us (and the children within it) to manage our anxiety and make life as predictable as possible.

For complex emotional reasons our good intentions to help our children, sometimes become the source of control and turns out to be not so helpful.   
 Experiment and protection

Finding the balance between providing enough space for our children to explore, take risks, learn and develop and to offer the appropriate protection of our children isn’t an easy task. It means that we need to sometimes act against our own anxieties and instincts. A simple example is learning how to climb stairs that involves the risk of falling down and we need to find a right moment and safe way to let our children practice this skill. If we overprotect our children and they don’t learn, they will be at a greater risk later in childhood, when they attempt this feat without any of the skills necessary. They will also internalise their parents anxiety about risk taking with many other consequences. 

Frustration

This also applies to letting our children to experience frustration and defeat, so they can learn how to deal with life challenges in the future and find their own solutions to overcoming problems. It’s a very empowering experience which builds child’s confidence in the world. 

Boundaries 

Finally, it’s also about the boundaries within which children can explore the world, test new things and draw their own lessons and conclusions. There are some things which are clearly too dangerous to try or explore, or learn from making mistakes. There are some things which are not socially accepted or experiments which go beyond our limits.The example from adolescent age might be the use of hard drugs – we don’t want our children to experiment with such a risk and we expect them to use their reasoning instead of practically testing dangerous things. In these cases children need to hear our strong and firm voice which allows both parents and children stay in touch with the reality principle and remain safe.  

There are three key questions we can ask ourselves that may help deal with these difficult issues: 
Is it age appropriate? 
Knowing your child, and the context in which he/she is growing up – you can asses what does it mean age appropriate frustration. Does it mean let the 2 year old try and put their shoes on? Is it allowing 13 year old to go to school unprepared and face consequences? Is it expecting 4 year old to wait when it is needed?

Is your initial reaction and judgement more about the child’s welfare or about your own emotions? 
 When seeing your child struggling with something: what is your emotional experience? Does it bring any memories of you as a child in similar circumstances? What was your parents reaction to you experiencing frustration and trying new things?

If you were observing another parent behaves towards their child as you do towards yours, would you think they are:

a) overprotective, b) taking too many risks, c) acting with care and thoughtfulness in the child’s best interest? 
This third person perspective may help you to decide what would you like to do differently.

Photo: http://www.hubpages.com

First published on: herfamily.ie 

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Do emotions live in brain? Brain development and self soothing


I recently had a fascinating conversation with my good friend, who is a Cognitive Neuroscientist – she knows a lot about brain and she can explain it to someone like me, who doesn’t know much. I will now share with you what she told me, as it is one of these things, we do want to get right as parents.It’s about this part of children’s brain which is responsible for understanding and managing emotions.

We don’t come to this world equipped with brain which can manage emotions. To learn how to deal with our emotions, our brain has to develop many connections between the neurones. The connections develop through repetition – we are exposed to certain situations many times and our brain learns, what does it mean to be in situation A and how to deal with it. With time our brain is physically getting bigger – more connections – bigger brain. This process is the fastest early in life, between 1 and 3 years of age. 

So we can look at brain as a tool to deal with emotions. Until we are 3 years old, this tool isn’t big enough to handle difficult emotional situation. There is not enough connections in small children’s brains to calm themselves down when they become angry, very anxious, very upset. These are the situations when children need help: 1. To calm the immediate storm, 2. To learn how to do it in the future.

This why the crucial role of parents (guardians) in early years of children’s lives is to assist them when they experience strong emotions. Assisting means:

  • repeatedly and as calmly as possible (in a given situation) explaining to children what is going on with them, 
  • talking to them, 
  • being emotionally available to them 
  • offering comfort and patience
  • containing theirs and our own emotions (I explained the process of containment here.

Of course nobody gets it always right and it’s very natural, that sometimes we loose patience or don’t have enough capacity to be available to our children. But this knowledge about brain developing the capacity to deal with emotions, helps us make judgements about emotional situation. With this information we now don’t have to consider wether we should let the baby cry a bit, to learn self-soothing – we now know that being alone with strong emotions doesn’t teach to deal with them. The baby needs us to hear what is going on and learn from this. We might not be able to be there for the child every single time, but at least we know the direction.
For me this finding is also very important, because it supports my belief, that containment is a main skill which parents should practice to help their children in healthy development. 
First published on xpose.ie
Photo: http://www.blog.yogaonbeach.com

Family traits and our parenting

  
How we parent our children is strongly influenced by our childhood experience and our parents become role models (for good and bad) for our own parenting. 
Some of us might hate the way our parents treated us in certain situations, or we may even have really bad memories of the childhood in general. We will then promise ourselves that we won’t be doing this to our children. We will be different! However we all find ourselves resembling our parents in some way. We might hear critical voice or angry voice of our father or mother, pouring out of our mouth when we are stressed. If we stop and think we know precisely where is it coming from: ‘this is exactly what I used to hear from him/her’. 
Our first relationships influence our life in the sense that we learn from them about relationships in general. We gather experience and we learn: what happens when someone’s gets angry, what happens if I do something wrong? how does it look like in the eyes of my mother when I am sad? How does it feel to be loved? How does my father show warmth towards me?

The way our parents deal with their own emotions and our emotions as children is the very thing which shapes our future relationships – among others – relationship with our own children. Some of these patterns are available to us and we can easily see them – for example: ‘I get angry when my child disobeys me. I remember my parents getting angry in the same way’. Some of them are unconscious hence more difficult to deal with; it’s then a matter of self reflection to discover them – for example: ‘I realised that I can’t say ‘no’ to my child even if I know I should – I feel hopeless in the same way I do with my mother. I can’t say ‘no’ to her either’.  

But we are not condemned to our past. Moreover, our task as parents is to learn from what we experienced as children and adapt differently. For example – talking about boundaries – it might be the case that someone used to be a teenager ‘crying out’ for boundaries and not getting them from parents, no matter what he/she was doing (extreme risk behaviour, abusing alcohol, breaking any rules, abandoning school, etc.). Later on when a parent, this person might find him/herself in the same position as his/her parents – using similar methods, maybe even resembling parents’ tone of voice or repeating the same set of sentences and messages, while speaking to own children: the feelings of hopelessness and worrying for the child overpower the parent and he/she is not able to be firm and strict with the child; sends mixed massages about rules and expectations, etc. 

How can we stop these repetitions and start doing things our own way?

The major task here is to recognise two things.

Needs 

Firstly, we need to recognise our needs, which weren’t met when we were children, and how this pattern repeats itself in our present behaviour. These might be the very needs which we now have to meet when relating to our children (for example by creating boundaries and providing sense of safety). 

This is the place from which we can develop our own way of doing things, make changes and go beyond the generational cycle. 

Priorities 

Secondly we need to prioritise our parenting. We can laugh at some patterns of our parenting. It may be frustrating to us, that we behave like our parents, but this is not harmful to our children’s development. Whereas other patterns can have big consequences. We need to make sure we don’t focus on the small things and ignore the big ones, because dealing with them seems much more difficult. 
We become who we are through relations with others, it is the nature of our development. It’s good to remember that in parent-child relationship it is mutual – children influence their parents too. We don’t have a full control over this process and accepting it gives us the opportunity to learn from the experience.

First published on herfamily.ie
Photo: http://www.welearntoday.com

Containing emotions – the key to healthy relationships


Emotions can be contagious, especially those experienced and expressed vividly by our loved ones. When it comes to difficult emotions, like anger, sadness, frustration, anxiety, this infectious nature of them, makes things more challenging. Thinking, making good judgments and decisions can be overridden by two (or more) people caught in the emotional circle.
If the first person, experiencing difficult emotions is a young child, it can be very hard to understand what is going on for her/him, and help accordingly.

The obvious complication is, that young children can’t explain what is going on, they themselves don’t have capacity to understand it. Their bodily reactions and emotional life are much more interdependent, than in adults. For example, bodily discomfort can cause huge emotional distress, and because the baby doesn’t have mechanisms to deal with it other than very dynamic, powerful expression, this in turn causes the discomfort getting worse.

We can distinguish three ways of dealing with child’s difficult emotions. We all use them from time to time, depending on the circumstances and our capacity to work out the situation.

Let’s imagine the child crying inconsolably, being perhaps angry or frustrated. There are three typical responses to how the parent or main carer deals with the child’s distress.

1. Blocking emotions

The mother or the father for various reasons might not be able to connect with this distressful emotional experience, and blocks their child’s emotions off. They might pick up the baby and rock him/her, circulating the room, but at an emotional and psychological level, they are absent and protect themselves from hearing or seeing what’s going on with the child because it’s too painful or too much to deal with at this particular moment.

2. Giving back emotions

The parent ‘takes in’ the child’s emotions, soaking them like a sponge, and gets upset and overwhelmed. She/he gets affected by the child’s emotional experience (gets sad or angry) and throughs back these emotions at the child in a raw and unprocessed way, adding some of his/her own feelings; for example, she gets very angry – and also anxious and guilty of becoming angry in the first place.

In two cases above, thinking gets overpowered by emotional experience and it’s impossible to figure out what is really happening and what actions should be undertaken to help the child.

3. Containing emotions

The mother/father/carer who in the particular situation has strength and ability, connects with the child and helps her/him go though difficult moment, containing the emotional experience. The parent does get affected by child’s emotion – feels and acknowledges them at a deep emotional level and at a thinking level. The containing parent tries to stay calm in the face of difficult situation. They talk to the baby calmly, rock the baby, and think for the baby, what might be the cause of the upset. This means, that they let the emotion go through their system: not trying to desperately get rid of it, but attempting to experience it without anxiety. With this process, the emotion usually fades away, the baby or child calms enough to eat or sleep, but if the baby doesn’t calm the parent knows it’s more serious – perhaps teething or something else – so the process of containment goes on until the problem is sorted out. This containing approach works at three levels – one to sort out the practical issues; two – to create an understanding within the infant of how to manage their own emotions – learning from the parent; three – the parent develops a greater capacity to care and to find their inner strength and peace.

The ability to contain our own emotions, as well as emotions of our children is in my view the most helpful of all parental ‘tools’. In fact it’s a basis for healthy, mature and caring relationships with all people who are important to us.

Writing this piece, I remembered the moment in my life, when I was held and contained by other person. It was just over a year ago when I was giving birth to my second child. The midwife who assisted me through all long process had a wonderful ability to help me dealing with my emotional experience of labour. She was there, as a gentle touch of reality, in these moments when I was loosing clear judgment. She patiently provided every possible comfort when I thought the pain was never going to end. She stayed composed and calm, what allowed her to make right decisions regarding the process (recommending movement, change of the position, listening to the child’s heartbeat, etc.). I felt emotionally connected to her and I believed, that whatever I experience, I’m in a safe place to feel it and I am going to be supported.

I think this is exactly what small baby, who understands very little of what is going on for him/her, needs when going through difficult time.

 

First published on herfamily.ie

Photo from: http://www.brushtouch.wordpress.com

What does it mean to be a confident parent

 
I have a confession to make.
I don’t think parents need much guidance and advice on the matter of their parenting skills. What they really need is reassurance and support in becoming more confident in their parenting.

Children need confident parents, because this sets an example for them and helps them go through life, making their own judgements and grow into emotionally mature adults.

Here is what’s worth remembering when practicing confident parenting:
1. The majority is not always right. 
Parents face immense social pressure to do things the way it’s perceived best by ‘general opinion’, fashion, major media. The fear of being rejected by the group and facing our child being not accepted pushes us into the arms of group thinking, which is unfortunately far from rational reasoning and even further away from caring, what’s best for our children. 

Don’t worry about others so much – think what is best for you and your family and act accordingly. If it happens to be against the mainstream, then well, so be it. People who you care about will respect you for being honest and authentic. Being outside the norm can be uncomfortable but often in years ahead, these people have shown us the way. For example I have a friend who brought his child up as a vegetarian many years ago, when it was very unusual. Today, many people realise the benefits of a much healthier non-meat diet, and you can get vegetarian food everywhere. Todays outsiders are often tomorrows leaders! 

2. Experts are not always right

It’s important to listen to experts – especially when they talk interestingly. But we have to apply their advice with caution, you need to think critically about what they say. Does it apply to your context? Does it fit with your system of values? Does it make you feel incompetent and uncertain (because the experts seem to have answer for every question which even didn’t come to your mind?). If so, stop listening and summarise what you know from your experience. Remember that you know your child and you are capable of making decisions and the most important judgement: what’s the best for your child. Also experts argue – there is often one expert proving this by research and another proving the opposite by different research. So we have to find a way through the mass data presented to us. At the centre of this should be our own common sense and thoughtful reflections.   

3. Reach out for Support

Social and family support are very important aspects of being a parent. Don’t fell guilty or inadequate when not knowing what to do. You have right to feel vulnerable and to seek help. In every crisis there is a potential for finding better, more creative ways of doing things (it is often through crisis that our children achieve next stages of development). Just think, who can help you to figure it out. Having a trusted person outside the immediate family who will give you helpful feedback – that can challenge your thinking without blaming you is really important. Can you be a like this for your friends too? 

4. Let your children be themselves

Children can be great teachers of authenticity if only we let them express themselves the way they feel like, rather than expect that they’ll perform the image of the perfect child we or others carry in their heads. This particularly applies to gender – we often try to get boys to perform like boys should and girls to perform like girls should – what about letting them just play as they want to play?

5. Don’t be too hard on yourself
Vast majority of parents are doing fantastic work, taking care of their children. When things get tough don’t be too hard on yourself, don’t judge yourself too much. Parenting is demanding and joyful at the same time. No parent is perfect, we all do the best to our ability. The best we can do is keep giving love, providing emotional containment (link to post about containment) and staying in touch with reality, prioritising what is best for your children, and observe your confidence growing!

First published on herfamily.ie

Parenting Anxiety can be contagious: how not to pass it on to your children

  
It’s very understandable to feel anxious about the arrival of a new baby. The life is going to change drastically, we might worry if the baby will be healthy and is the birth going to go well. It’s different and personal experience for everyone, but we can say in general, that around this special moment in life, very strong feelings come to play, and possibly anxiety is among the strongest..

Some emotions are more difficult to deal with then others. Sometimes we even don’t know that we feel something. The emotion is experienced unconsciously and dealt with through defence mechanisms – the various ways in which we protect ourselves from confronting the emotion and the reason for which it appeared. For example, we sometimes displace unwanted emotion onto some other object (something else than the thing which made us feel sad, angry, anxious, etc) hence the expression, ‘kicking the cat’ .We place our attention on some peripheral issue, which becomes our main concern and we are so preoccupied with it, that we loose ability to look around and see what is really important and what else is going on for us and within ourselves.

Anxiety Driven Shopping

The example of displacing anxiety is when parents fixate on buying expensive baby gear and they focus all their efforts and attention on getting “bits and pieces” ready. The extensive baby market is riding on parental anxiety and makes enormous profit on it. So many of us bought so much equipment, which has never been used. Parents to be are surrounded by carefully crafted messages, which say that we need all these things, for the sake of our children’s safety, our peace of mind, etc. In short: when we feel anxious, it’s very easy to fall into trap of excessive shopping for the baby and forget to check with ourselves, if the emotion isn’t also about something else, than only about ‘nesting’.

As a result, some parents don’t talk about their emotions in different areas (changes in their relationship, reality of caring for the child, division of tasks, work-life balance, etc.); they are focused on getting the right buggy and a cot bed and a car seat. Their anxiety speaks through the issue of shopping for the baby.

Our Anxiety and Our Children 
Unfortunately we sometimes displace emotions when relating to our children. We might be over-preoccupied about some aspect of our child’s well being and not noticing that underneath something else worries us. 

It’s not to say, that we all should strive to eliminate our ‘issues’, and be always aware of deeper dynamics of what’s going on inside of us. This wouldn’t be a realistic or desirable goal. We are who we are and our issues or special ways of dealing with difficult emotions are what constitutes our personality. From time to time we all use defence mechanisms to deal with emotions. What we need as parents is to have some psychological awareness around these issues, in order to be able to awake and realise, when our emotions influence our children too much, and when we project onto children our own difficulties and emotions. Dealing constantly with a parents’ emotions is too heavy baggage for our children to carry through their lives.

Reflection into practice approach
It’s not an easy task – to be aware of our deeper emotions, when displacement develops and we are in the realm of our substitute concerns. We are talking about subtle matter of communication between our rational thinking and our emotional life. These two worlds aren’t separate and emotions influence our thinking even if we are convinced they don’t. 

Part of a challenge is getting the right balance between self reflection (which is needed to bring unconscious emotions on surface) and action (which has to happen in order to start doing things differently). 

Stay in Touch with Yourself and Use a Social Mirror

The first step, when learning to deal differently with tough emotions, is to spot our own ‘suspicious’ behaviour. Are you very preoccupied about some issue, concerning your child? Did you notice that similar ‘theme’ usually appears to be a big problem, when you are under stress? 
What people around you say about this issue? Are you getting signals from anyone, that your worry might be disproportionate? 

Is something else, ‘bigger” happening in your life at the moment? 

Who could you talk to about your emotions and help you understand what is going on for yourself?

***

When under big pressure financial or relational perhaps, or going through difficult transitions, moving house, splitting up or having concerns about your relatives, experiencing loss, it is important to ask yourself these questions:

– How do I feel about it?  

– Am I acknowledging difficult feelings such as sadness or fear? 

– How do I manage and cope with these feelings?

– How do my feelings affect my children? 

– What do my children need to know about this situation and how do I tell them?  

– Who can I trust to help me?

Children pick up emotions quickly, and it is not a good thing to try and protect our children from all emotions we feel. 
Our task as parents is to share what is important for the child’s welfare, and to manage our own emotions that overburden them and are not theirs to deal with. Finally, we should all remember that none of us manage this perfectly – we are all learning and trying to do our best! 

First published on herfamily.ie
Photo: http://www.mommyish.com

The Fathers as we see them (through the lens of our culture) 

  
Lego started to recognise the changing role of fathers in our culture. We have now Lego figurines with happy fathers pushing buggies and staying at home with the children. And it’s great, the message sent by main players on the market is heard by many families and it does have an impact on our perception of social norms. Role playing toys are powerful medium through which our children receive hints on what are the accepted ways of doing things in our society. 

But do we really know what we expect from fathers these days?
I think fathers have several reasons to feel confused about their role in the family.

Stupid jokes
The thing which strikes me each time I come across it in social media, is circulation of insensitive jokes about fathers. Fathers are patronised, pictured as incompetent, silly people, who seek woman’s help in all the tasks concerning children. I recently saw a joke-chart on FB saying mummy is the one answering all sorts of questions children might have and father who is presented with the only single question: where is mummy? Other example is an image of a family bed, where father sleeps uninterrupted on ‘his half’ of the bed, while mother is awake on her side, having have to accommodate the children (and the dog and the cat) there; and obviously – doesn’t get any sleep at all. It might put a smile on someone’s tired face when after many sleepless nights. It can be viewed as a sort of acting out-frustrations joke. But in fact this enhances the false picture of fathers as those uninvolved and disinterested parents. Whereas in every single family I know, fathers take a big part in minding small babies at night (even when they have to get up the earliest and go to work).
I understand these jokes as displacement of anger and frustration onto fathers (husbands, partners). These difficult emotions are completely normal and understandable, but dealing with these feelings through partners and leaving them look incompetent and selfish is not fair.

Segregation
Fathers face contradictory expectations regarding their participation in bringing up children. The question I often heard when our first child was born, was: “Is your partner helping?”. I didn’t feel word ‘helping’ was accurate description of our arrangement. It wasn’t him helping with the child, it was us bringing up the new baby together; each of us bonding with our daughter in our ways. It wasn’t me giving him access to the child for the time of ‘helping’ or him thinking: ‘I’d better help out a bit here’.
But the most vivid example of fathers being expected to get involved but in some special, father-like way is a gender segregated parenting. Parent-toddlers groups are mainly attended by mothers from obvious reason – they are still main care givers – staying at home parents, who seek for social support and company for their children; it’s mainly mother-toddlers group we are speaking about. 

Nevertheless, there are stay-at-home-fathers and single fathers, who would also benefit from attending toddler groups. It is much more difficult for fathers to make an appearance in such groups. When fathers enter a toddler group it’s like they invade the space reserved for mothers. It seems to be uncomfortable for both mothers and fathers. A few times I experienced weekend meet ups, where few fathers turned up. They usually ended up half hidden, in the corner of the room, or squeezed between two mothers turned back, chatting with someone else. Latter on, those fathers, who made it to the meeting was labelled as ‘brave’. There was also a suggestion, that fathers should have their own, fathers’ meeting set up. 

Why is it brave to attend a meeting, which should be a joint pleasure – an occasion to see a child interacting with other children? Why isn’t it ‘normal’ to meet and talk about parenting (or something else, for that matter), in a mixed – mothers and fathers group?
The reason might be our deeply rooted traditional way of thinking about parenting. It is not necessarily helpful these days, but it’s there, as an artefact of the old order.

On the other hand, it preserves the importance of mothers’ role and gives them power to lead and dictate the conditions in the world of bringing up children. 
All parties: children, mothers and fathers are benefiting from shifting power relations and more engagement of fathers and mothers in family life. Change isn’t easy and some fathers might need more encouragement in taking up the roles which traditionally belonged to women, and mothers might need to find ways to be more open to change too.

What Fathers definitely don’t need is a prejudice attitude that comes from the past and is often unconscious, that pushes them to the sidelines. This isn’t good for fathers or mothers, but most importantly it isn’t good for our children.
Photo source

New mum joins the club – getting support from the group

  
BBC Radio4 broadcasted an interesting interview with sociologist Dr Jennie Bristow and editor-in-chief of Netmums Anne-Marie O’Leary about supportive role of friendship during early stages of motherhood. (Woman’s hour on BBC4 podcast, interview starts at app.33 min of the program http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z255x). They spoke of early parenthood as one of these times in life when we need friends the most. This brought also questions of what is friendship, to what extent we can expect friends to be answering our needs and what kind of friends do we look for, over the course of life. The toddlers groups were mentioned as very valuable source of social support from people who are going through similar challenges.
In my experience as a stay-at-home mother, the various toddlers’ groups me and my children attend are indeed a great way to socialise and meet new interesting people. It helps me to remain active (and sane). It’s very rewarding to see my children playing with others. Going to groups makes me feel part of a wider community.
On the other hand, I find that groups can be sometimes a bit overwhelming and that they do have an unspoken, more difficult side which can make this group experience somehow stressful. This can be a reason for some mums who are feeling vulnerable, for whatever reason, to stay at home, rather than reach out for help and face the Group. 

Unfortunately, when we need the groups support most, we may find it most difficult to attend.  

Why is a toddler group a challenge?
As a group facilitator, I work with people who come to my classes with specific expectations. They want to be part of learning experience which will help them better understand themselves as parents and resolve their issues. This is the first, visible and spoken reason for joining the group. 
But when we form groups of any type, group dynamics are unleashed that we have to cope with. * These processes are powerful and not always easy to deal with, especially when we are not fully aware of them. When becoming part of a group, we tend to take up certain roles; sometimes we benefit from them, at other times, they make our experience very difficult. Common group dynamics evoke our competitiveness, our defence mechanisms, and trigger our deep emotional issues. .

Competition
Some of us have strong desire to compete with others and perceive competition as a fight for the badge “I’m the best”. This can provoke tensions between group members, make some people feel inferior or excluded. Sometimes the competition becomes a main figure of the meeting and dominant group feelings are that of tension and hostility; in these cases group no longer serves as a support group or safe haven. 

Defence Mechanisms
To understand the way we relate to the group, we need to go back to our own-early-childhood experience. The first group we are born into is the family group, and we learn about the world from relating to others: initially from our first care givers and our siblings. In relation to others we define who we are and what is important to us. We need others to see ourselves in their eyes, to figure out who we are from the way they react to us. What is more, we often need them to deal with our emotions. Early in life, we develop mechanisms which help us avoid emotions, which are too overwhelming. For example, children split the world into good and bad, and in this way they don’t have to deal with ambivalence and mixed feelings e.g. Mummy is all good, or all bad, pending on the mood the infant is in. Over the course of life we are expected to learn more mature ways of dealing with emotions. We as grown ups, should be able to face and process the fact that our parents can be right at some points, and completely wrong at others. Mature people should be able to accept the fact that sometimes they get angry, they experience envy and that is part of who they are. But even if we are capable of this kind of ‘mature’ emotional processes, we sometimes still turn to our defence mechanisms and use them to avoid some feelings. We might for instance project our feeling of sadness onto someone else. When we do this, we really can see evidences of the person being very sad and we intensely focus on this other person’s sadness. While doing this, we don’t acknowledge our own sadness. These mechanisms operate in groups. They can become very powerful, when group as a whole starts using them and prevents its members from embracing what they feel and who they are. Projections often hit the most vulnerable people in the room. Single parents for example can easily become ‘objects’ for projecting our own feelings of vulnerability, loneliness, dislocation. Group may be focusing on expressing pity and sorrow over one person, who starts feeling overwhelmed by the emotions, which belong to other people.  

Roles
In this way people play different roles in the group. Our life situation and personality are main contributors to the way we appear in the group. We might realise, that we often take up similar role in different groups we attend.  

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek or cannot count on group support when feeling vulnerable. It’s just important to be aware that this deep emotional processes are circulating in the room and when we feel that something is put to us and we are perceived as more outside the group or more sad that we actually feel ourselves, we don’t have to consent to it. We can try and do something differently, engage with someone else that we usually do, change anything which we are able to change and see how it impacts our emotions and the way other people see us.
Getting group support which we need, often demands being proactive and as conscious as possible.

*my work on group dynamics is informed by relational psychoanalysis, concepts of defence mechanisms and group as a whole come from Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion

Photo: http://www.kcmetromoms.com

First published on xpose.ie

Full time parents: Re-connecting with the world 

  
Being a full time-stay at home parent for many people means disconnection from professional career. The distance from what we used to do before becoming a parent vary and we also take a break for a different period of time.
There are some circumstances in which come back to work can be particularly difficult.

Sometimes the break from work is very long and detachment from a job market is total. Some people left or lost their careers before becoming parents. Many families move to new cites or countries to have a fresh start. Without a network, with language barrier, differences in qualification system, building a career in foreign place is a huge task in itself. It becomes bigger when for a period of time we were preoccupied with the inner world of our family life and most importantly – with the youngest family members (some call this effect a ‘baby brain’).
In any case, planning to come back to work often triggers many emotions and brings to life questions regarding our identity, self esteem, skill set, belonging.

Coming back to professional work after a long break means reinventing ourselves and face all the challenges we faced when getting a job for the first time.
Re-connecting with the outside world of people who are get paid money for the work they do, is an emotional and strategic exercise. It is also an interesting phenomena in our culture. Our society tends to assign more value and importance to all the jobs happening outside the family home. It can make parents (in most countries – in majority – mothers) feel as if they are contributing less to the community or indeed to the family (not providing any financial income). It can also feel as if all the outside world was moving forward and learning new things, when in the meantime, home makers were just a home makers, doing all the things which all the generations have done before.
The value of staying at home parents is for me unquestionable. They not only dedicate themselves to offer care and support to those they love. They also rise people, who are the future of our communities. They do have a connection with previous generations, by committing to the same task which our grand and great grandmothers did. They learn – everyday of their lives – about relationships, emotions, themselves, their loved ones. They reach their limits and they learn to overcome their weaknesses. They manage family life and they care for the quality of it – food, aesthetics, warmth. They work and learn a lot and they do not have ‘baby brains’.
I am picturing this heroic image of staying at home parents and I am not mentioning the other part – those who make this arrangement possible, by earning money and contributing in many different ways. I will dedicate them a different post.
It’s because I sometimes hear when mothers who are planning to go back to work express their feelings of dislocation, inadequacy, low self-esteem, lack of clear direction and confidence. I also share some of these feelings.

And I think they need a strong encouragement and appreciation. They should remind themselves, that when staying at home, they are not disappearing in a vacuum. They are important part of the world ‘out there’ and that they can come back to work or do whatever they plan to do, reacher for the experience of being a home makers. Yes, it requires focus, commitment and strategic planning. Yes, it’s challenging and can be intimidating. Yes, they need a reality check and see what short term and long term goals are within their reach (considering support, actual opportunities, financial situation, further childcare).

But experience of being a full time parent is a great starting point and strong asset. Even if it is not being portrayed like this often enough.

Parents: children will be impressed with your new careers! Good luck.
First published on xpose.ie

Photo: http://www.scarymommy.com

Is Christmas a challenge for you?

Christmas is a mirror in which families see themselves. 

  
In many homes Christmas is a non religious event these days. Nevertheless for most of us it still carries the important message linked to the Biblical story: it’s about family. An excluded (holy) family searching for home is a symbol of hope, despair, love and trust. Symbol of sadness and happiness, care and carelessness – all lying side by side. All residing in each of us and reflecting the reality of life. Life is diverse and complex, life is contradictory. Life is about good and bad things happening at the same time. Life is not all happy and all perfect, and it will at some point end (and only some of us believe that it won’t be the end of everything), which is itself a daunting thought. 
During Christmas period families get on well or just opposite, are present or absent, united or separated. We carry our families in our minds and we spend this time of the year in relation to our parents, siblings, grandparents, and importantly: in relation to the tradition that we know. We can contest it, go along with it or look for some middle ground. 
This reflection can be difficult to bare. Our culture indulges in just opposite association: Christmas equals festive, happy, great time for everyone. Christmas is about shiny lights, reindeers, presents, food and drink and spending a lot of money: all in excess.

I understand this excess as a collective run away from a powerful impact, that Christmas can have on our emotional life. 

 Of course Christmas Markets can be enjoyable and well known songs on radio can bring us a warm glow giving us an impression that we are part of safe and familiar universe. There are many beautiful reasons to celebrate Christmas, share joy with our loved ones and be happy. But because it is such an intense period, it inevitably brings some challenging situations, memories and reflections to the table. And for some people the difficult part of Christmas will be more present than the other one – those who recently experienced bereavement, or who are separated from the family, or are having health problems – this season simply won’t be that festive for them.

So there is an important aspect of Christmas which should not be lost in the flashiness of decorations:

To be authentic and honest with ourselves and our families. We should try and embrace the complexity of our emotional experience. We should let ourselves to feel all range of emotions and learn how to deal with them. Not only homeless people need our charity and are vulnerable during this time of the year. We might feel fragile too and it is how it is – we need to see it and stay with it. To be authentic is also the best way to share these moments with our children and I think this is what they expect us to do. What I mean in practical sense – if we are experiencing difficult time, The ‘abundance’ of Christmas offers us an easy escape from our feelings – the excess which I mentioned above. Our task is to refrain from this route, step aside and think how can we take better care of ourselves and our families. Christmas is a time for giving; but presents are only symbolic of what giving really means. What we really need to ourselves, friends and families at Christmas are love, care, sensitivity and comfort. Happy Christmas to all of you.

Photo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com