Written by: Romana Hrivnakova, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I have heard many people say that parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world. There’s no denying that parenting is hard. However, raising an emotionally healthy and securely attached child might be harder than expected, especially once you realize what parenting is. As Gabor Mate said, “Parenting is not a role. It’s a relationship”. Forming a loving, nurturing, and meaningful relationship with your child is the most challenging aspect of parenting. And you won’t be able to create this relationship unless you have dealt with your unresolved feelings and issues from your past.
The main factor determining how you parent your children is your ability to make sense of your childhood experiences and how those experiences affected you. Not increasing your understanding of yourself will keep you trapped in the cycle of multigenerational trauma you experienced, and you will re-create the damage that was done to you. You will project the pain you suffered in your childhood onto your children, who will spend their lives yearning for unconditional love, attention, emotional connection, and respect that you withheld from them. You will act out behaviours that might terrify your children, and the sudden changes in your emotional states will alarm and confuse them.
Face your own history
The most crucial part of parenting is to explore your past, recognize the consequences of the early attachment injuries you sustained, process your unresolved trauma and take responsibility for your reactions in interactions with your children. The emotional atmosphere you lived in as a child fundamentally shaped who you are today. Your parents constantly conveyed their internal emotional states in their interactions with you. Growing up, you became hyperaware of your parents’ emotional states and responded intuitively to their needs. For instance, if your emotions upset or angered your parents, you learned to suppress them. If your need for attention was received with frustration, you stopped asking for it.
“Children cannot escape their own parents, so they cannot afford to see through them either. Blindness makes it possible to survive.” – Alice Miller
However, as a young child, you would not be aware that your parents’ short-tempered, frustrated, and aggressive responses resulted from their anxiety, depression, or increased stress. You would not understand that your parents could not listen to and understand you because their internal experiences based on their unresolved issues were so loud and powerful that they would make your behaviour intolerable for them. You would not have known that their emotional coldness and lack of attunement resulted from their challenging upbringings. But you would feel the impact of those behaviours and responses and change your behaviour immediately.
Over time, you would suppress your authentic self, develop a false self, and become a good boy or girl to ensure your safety and survival. Becoming a child your parents needed to manage their unconscious emotional states and unresolved issues was not a choice; it was a requirement to secure your survival in an environment where your parents’ love was conditional. And this requirement might have created the greatest of wounds in your childhood – that your parents did not love you as you truly were. They loved who you pretended to be.
Nevertheless, you would not be the only one trying to change your behaviour. Your parents might have often corrected your behaviour because of their inability to manage the unpleasant feelings your behaviour evoked. Their lack of understanding of themselves and their unresolved trauma would have prevented them from knowing that you did not cause their reactions. You might have triggered the unpleasant feelings they couldn’t regulate, but you were not responsible for them. You were not responsible for your parents’ triggers; they acquired them before you were born.
However, you learned how to deal with parents who did not understand themselves and continued to live in their repressed childhood situations. You learned how to deal with parents driven by unconscious memories and repressed feelings. You learned how to cope with them by suppressing who you were, suppressing your natural responses, repressing your emotions, or dissociating from your reality to feel their love and acceptance and live up to their expectations. Not because you wanted to; you didn’t have a choice.
Reparent yourself and become the parent you never had
But you have a choice now. You can choose to explore what happened to you in your childhood and how it affected you. You can choose to do the work necessary to process your unresolved trauma and heal your inner child. You can decide to become a parent who will do more than get their child through the day. You can become a parent who will not just be physically present but who will be emotionally accessible to their children. You can become more aware of how your responses, full of strong emotional reactions that might often have no direct connection to your children, affect their development and sense of self. This awareness will allow you to choose responses that would be helpful to your children’s development and stop talking to your children in the same hurtful way your parents did.
“The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone. We can, however, change ourselves.” – Alice Miller
It’s time for us to take childhood attachment injuries seriously and increase our understanding of their impact on our ability to be the parents who will stop the cycle of multigenerational trauma many families have been stuck in for generations. Our increased awareness will prevent us from projecting our unresolved issues onto our children. So, spare your children the repetition of patterns of behaviour you experienced with your parents and help your children feel secure, connected, understood, loved and seen.
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Romana Hrivnakova, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Romana Hrivnakova works as a Psychotherapist in Toronto. Romana has extensive experience working with individuals who use substances to cope with childhood trauma, overwhelming emotions, or painful life experiences. In her 13 years of working as a mental health and addiction professional, she obtained various degrees and diplomas; however, she places her experience of working in a homeless shelter in the UK for 9 years above all her qualifications. There she witnessed the terrible consequences of childhood trauma, attachment injury, and people’s desperate attempts to cope with what happened to them (or did not happen and should have happened) in their childhood. This experience and her childhood challenges and life experiences inspired Romana to help her clients connect with their wounded inner children and help them react to present and future challenges as adults rather than wounded children.
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