Strategies to Ensure you Understand the Inside ‘Stuff’ Before Reacting - your child's internal world needs you!
When a parent or a child reacts in a certain way, we tend to focus on the behaviour rather than the underlying reasons why this behaviour occurred. While it feels natural to react to poor behaviour, what if we instead stopped and placed ourselves in the frame of reference of the other person?
When you squeeze an orange, what comes out?
Juice.
Why?
Because that’s what’s inside.
Emotional pressure, Stress, Tension; when an adult or a child is "squeezed" and they are somehow triggered, what comes out?
Maybe anger, frustration, fear, sadness, hatred, pain… Why?
Because that’s what’s inside. (Both the child and the adult.)
How did it get there? Many reasons and methods. Most importantly, what’s inside came from the outside through our senses (the five, we normally think of, plus our skin and muscles). It ends up stored there as memories, ideas, beliefs, suggestions, and yes, traumas.
When a parent or a child reacts in a certain way, we tend to focus on the behaviour rather than the underlying reasons why this behaviour occurred. While it feels natural to react to poor behaviour, what if we instead stopped and placed ourselves in the frame of reference of the other person?
If a child gets stuck in certain place, it’s about everyone else and they project it outwardly. If as a parent we raise our voice, lose our temper, or get irritated… none of that helps.
Through conversation with an Integrate Families therapist, we as parents can find the buttons/triggers. We can then explore what is it about our child’s inside world that makes us react. As parents, we need to review and go inside that moment. What are we thinking about ourselves and… what are we thinking about our child? (Because normally in that moment, there is very little, if any thinking going on. Neither the parent nor the child is in their thinking brain.)
If you need to shout over and over and nothing changes or reaches your child, that’s a clue something in your child is triggered and does not work. Too, if you as the parent cannot tolerate criticism, you can’t be critical of yourself. In that instance, you may end up blaming the child. And if the child gets stuck, in their mind, it’s always about everyone else.
So, we need to break down these interactions into component parts and practise daily thinking about what’s inside both our child AND us as the parents. We say a raised voice means danger. A raised voice also means something important has been triggered in either or maybe both parties.
We need to be honest inside ourselves. We feel assessed on our parenting ability when faced with a little soul who refuses to put their shoes away. What do we do? How can we handle this differently?
First, as parents, we need to know ourselves. We need to figure out our own internally wired belief system and why whatever our child does, has such an impact on our feelings. Where does this reaction come from?
Secondly, both parents need to be on the same page. There is both help and power in consistent repetition. If parents battle, then you are constantly mediating for the child. At Integrate, they know how to tweak your parenting, so the child always gets the same response. Repetition trains everyone’s brain to give and receive consistent messages which then helps the child.
Finally, what is the child’s story? There may be any number of unprocessed traumas. We need to establish a pattern of seeing our child’s inside world and be less worried about its outside manifestation. This helps us find experiences they should not have had; if the parent understands that, they can find gentler ways of thinking and helping both sides. Extremes such as the parent always being compliant, you end up as the child’s slave. If you constantly push your child to behave, what is the long-term cost to the relationship?
When we as adults put fixing our needs before tackling our child’s, it has a profound impact on re-shaping their inside world. It can profoundly end the battles when you acknowledge and name the feelings head on.
Change your inside world strategy to change outside world behaviours. Because… that’s what’s inside.