After each of these uncertain moments, that unsettled part of me would rear up and ask: What if I’m doing it wrong? What if I’ve failed? What if I’m not good enough? What if I’ve messed it all up? There was a constant battle between the ill-boding script running in my mind and my deeply felt sense that I could do this—that I was good enough, that there was no possible way I could mess this up as long as I listened to myself. My real self. Not my assumed self. My wise self. Not my fearful self. My intuitive self. Not my reactive self. I was self-assured enough to determine my own way about sleep training and co-sleeping, about compassionate discipline, and myriad other decisions. Sometimes I hit the mark and other times I didn’t.
As I walked on in my journey of parenthood and witnessed my children walking their journey of development, it would be some time before I understood what was happening inside of me for my own growth and, simultaneously, outside of me for the growth of each of my children. There were many fretful years of parenting a child with developmental and learning differences, a child with behavioural challenges, and a child with some medical hiccups; many years of figuring out who I was as a person and as a parent; and many years of struggling within a marriage in the context of this change. And then something happened.
I woke up.
You see, it was as though I was asleep, playing out my life in a dazed, dreamlike state. A true grasp of what was happening was ever so slightly beyond my reach. Unbeknownst to my rational and intellectual self, I was beginning to converge on a life-altering idea: that before I would be able to help my babies grow up to be the kind human beings I dreamed they would be, I first had to grow myself up. This meant realizing that my perspective, and all the feelings that flowed from that, was inspired by my internal self. That internal self was a culmination of my life’s experiences, especially those from childhood, when my impressionable mind was being formed. And so, in order to grow myself up, I had to understand my childhood experiences anew. This was the only way I’d be able to make sense of why I grew up to see the world as I do.
I didn’t have the luxury of doing my inner work on a therapist’s couch—I had to do it on my feet in the full colour of life. I had to accept that any angst I felt as a parent had nothing to do with my children, their apparent challenges, or the ups and downs of parenting. Rather, that angst came from the un-grown parts of myself. The two-year-old me who learned to be frightened when scary things happened. The four-year-old me who learned to be ashamed when scolded for my behaviour. The six-year-old me who learned to be unsettled when I worried my parents would divorce. And it isn’t like I had a terrible childhood. This is just my story, and these are my feelings. You will have your own. We all do. But when I started to make sense of where my feelings came from, I also started to make sense of why parenthood had unsettled me, why I had all this worry in me, and what needed to shift so I could step in with the energy in which I wanted my children to be bathed.
How did this—and does this continue—to play out in my life as a parent? Only every moment of every day! Some of those moments are big and some are small. For example, when my youngest son developed hearing and language exceptionalities, I had to connect with my fear of the future for him, my distress at how his school years would almost certainly play out, and my drive to control the factors that I perceived to be contributing to his circumstances. Once I connected with that fear, distress, and need for control, I realized those feelings came from a long-ago time, a time when my neural connections were wiring up and things around me felt distressing and out of control.
The mind sees only what it believes, and what it believes is based on our experiences. Those beliefs will colour everything that happens in our lives, as parents and otherwise. The best part is that as all-encompassing as beliefs are in their influence over our lives, there is nothing absolute about them. They can change. Our beliefs are misty, nebulous, and fabricated. They are a concocted narrative that emerges out of a collection of occurrences. As William Faulkner brilliantly wrote, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.”1 We see life only through the lens of our earlier experiences. Dr. Helen Schucman, clinical psychologist and author of A Course in Miracles, tells us that “we see only the past.”2 We aren’t seeing reality or absolute truth. We are seeing our version of it. When unaware of this, we are essentially blinded by our beliefs. We cannot see what is happening, and that means “we are never upset for the reasons we think.”3 We are upset because we are peering through a veil of childhood wounds. We fall into those wounds when a present-day circumstance sends us back in time and triggers the feelings we would have had as young children when—even with the best, well-intentioned parents—our needs were not fully met. When we are in a wound, we are by definition age-regressed. We are responding from our three-year-old or four-year-old self. My belief as a child that things were uncertain created the experience of fear and distress, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. So, when challenges arose in my adult life (as a parent or otherwise), I could only react through the lens of fear, distress, and overwhelm, seeking control.
My son’s situation provided a gift. It triggered those feelings, which gave me a chance to look at them and to grow myself up in light of the new understanding that was emerging from my self-growth process. I understood that it was my little-girl self who was scared, distressed, and even frantic for control, not my mama self. And with this realization, the little-girl pieces of me could rest in the assurance that all was well, that my grown-up self could be trusted to take the lead and find the way through.
With this more settled existence, my ability to be present for my son completely shifted. I could see the gift in the challenge and the veil that had been lifted to reveal a path of hope, support, intervention, and growth. Only through these experiences of growing myself have I become more available to my role as a parent. I know now that my boys’ earliest years, as well as their present growth and development, would have been different had I understood what was happening within me prior to their arrival. I would have parented right from the start with less angst and more swagger. If I’d known—through all the normal, beautiful, loud, chaotic, fun moments of my sons’ early years—that I was responding to them from my child self during periods of angst or uncertainty, they would have benefited from bathing in the warm energy of my contentment instead of the stifling energy of my alarm. It’s possible that this would have smoothed out parts of their path. But it didn’t turn out that way, and as a result, they have had the gift of figuring things out as have I—and that in itself is perfection.
MY JOB AS a psychologist is to help children grow in the best possible way. I always feel humbled and privileged to walk alongside parents in their journey of raising their children and helping them to grow up. Many of my clients are parents with children over the age of three who are presenting with challenges such as mental health issues, developmental exceptionalities, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, rebellion, or other difficulties along their developmental journey. During my almost twenty years of working to support parents and children through all sorts of challenges—and in figuring it out personally along the way—I have come to an understanding. I believe that many of these issues could potentially have been prevented if things had happened differently in the child’s first few years of life. These first precious years are crucial when it comes to laying the foundation for what follows.
And yet, the dominant pop culture often has parents raising their babies, toddlers, and preschoolers in ways that are no longer supported by the science of child development. We fall into this pop-culture parenting trap because of the transfer of beliefs, from one generation to the next, about who children really are. The “original sin” view of the child, for example, prevalent in the Middle Ages and into the early 1600s, propagated the sense that children are born full of evil and require adult direction to be purged of it. In the late 1600s, the “blank slate” view had adults believing that children were hollow vessels just waiting to be filled and moulded by our guiding hand. And let’s not forget the “flowery meadows” view, popular in the 1700s, which had grown-ups somewhat neglectfully releasing their children to the proverbial flowery meadows to blossom without adult interference. Though none among us would likely admit to a staunch espousing of any of these biases, the reality is that their influence continues to invade the minutiae of day-today parenting. We are irritated by the inconvenience of development and want to hurry it up with techniques