Parenting is without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
My partner and I joke that if we’d had any idea about this whole raising kids thing, we never would’ve opted in. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t send any of my kids back for a refund. But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t looked into the return policy once or twice.
Recently, one of my own children has been particularly challenging. The losing of sleep, hair, and sanity kind of challenging.
When you have a child that is making dangerous choices, and hurting himself and others in profound ways, you feel it in your entire body. The waves of sorrow, fear, compassion, concern, love, anger, apathy, and guilt toss you mercilessly, about and it’s all you can do to keep your head above the water. You feel wrecked, bruised, exhausted. I found myself nearing the end of my capacity and starting to buffer with old habits, binge eating, Netflixing, and generally disappearing from life. I knew it was time to call for help.
I got coached around the thoughts and feelings I was having about the circumstance of my child’s situation. As is the magic of working with a coach, she reflected the storm in my head back to me. We worked through quite a bit to clean up my thinking, but I’ll share one “aha” I took away in hopes that it might be an anchor for anyone going through a similar storm.
Most of my suffering was coming from avoiding a painful emotion. My buffering, my body aches, the brain fog I was lost in was my attempt to avoid the very difficult feeling of failure. I felt like a failure as a mother. Underneath my rational mind was a deeply rooted feeling of guilt for the mistakes I felt I’d made as his mom.
It wasn’t until I sat with my coach and allowed the difficult feelings to be there that I was able to process them and disentangle myself from the thoughts that were not helpful in this situation.
I was making his struggle mean that I was a bad mother. That story doesn’t serve anyone. It makes me want to hide and it also makes me unable to make healthy decisions about how I want to respond to his behavior. To avoid failure, I was trying to control him by making decisions that would lead to specific outcomes, so that I could no longer feel like a failure as a mother. I needed him to succeed so I could feel better.
How many times have I done that as a parent? Yes, I want the best for my kids. But what if what I believe is best isn’t their path? What if, for reasons yet unknown, my child needs to walk this difficult road and it would’ve happened no matter what kind of mother I had been?
What would it look like if I released my child from the responsibility of making me feel like a good mother? What if I could love him and love myself unconditionally in this moment?
This doesn’t mean I abdicate responsibility for my offspring. I still provide healthy guidance, boundaries and resources to offer him every chance for success. But I no longer let his choices define what I think about myself as a parent. I release him to choose his own path and create his own stories. I allow for the possibility that my idea of success might not be what he needs to reach his highest self. I focus on what I can control, my thoughts, feelings and actions.
Letting go of our children does not mean there will not be pain. But it does mean we will no longer be inflicting that pain on ourselves by trying to control something or someone we never really had any control over in the first place.
Rebecca Stark is a Mastery Certified Health and Life Coach. She is the owner of Rebecca Stark Coaching. You can contact her at 720-412-6148 or visit rebeccastarkcoaching.com If you have questions you would like answered in this article, please submit to rebeccastarkcoaching@gmail.com.
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August 01, 2020 at 07:26PM
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