I want to really share with you, that I wasn’t the best at having parenting be easy for me.
While I was born with a lot of ability to be a good mother, learning how to do the partnership dance with my husband, and sorting out the necessary inner resources that were required to have a really good relationship and a really good family life like I have now were not something that I was just born with.
I had to learn through my own experience.
With some of you, I’ve shared that I didn’t know how to do repair or deal with overwhelming feelings.
And one of the things that I understand and excel at now so deeply is that the primary job of a parent is to help their children feel regulated.
What I mean by regulated is to help them process experiences so that things are neither overwhelming nor underwhelming, but to keep them at a healthy level of engagement.
Well, given the dysfunctional family that I was born and, there were lots of regulation issues and also my husband had regulation issues as well, when it came to dealing with emotion.
I know there are thousands more like me because I have been hearing about it for over 25 years!
And so for us, for a long time we had to really endeavor to develop the inner resources so that we wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with any particular emotions.
There were times when I would look at him and say, “This is just too big and overwhelming, I don’t know what to do.”
And then he would say, I’m feeling that way too, I want to be bigger than this, but I just don’t know how to support you, I can barely even support myself.”
I know that I’m not alone when I speak of these things, and maybe you’ve tried your own ways to deal with overwhelm as well, and wondered how to do the management of your emotions really well.
It’s something I see every week in my practice.
One of the things I know from my work is learning how to deal with emotional overwhelm, by metabolizing the sensations in the body through movement, presence and release.
I knew I needed to do this through all my earliest formative experiences.
So both my husband and I had to go back to the drawing board of our earliest experiences and literally work our way through them by addressing all the difficult emotions that needed containment, and addressing them and giving them actually what they needed.
This meant we had to dig deep into our own ability to birth the inner mother and father that were deeply needed in order to support each one of us individually, and then we could come together as a family.
We had the support of many mentors, deep mature adult friendships with other couples, lots of trauma resources, and lots of support on how to literally hold presence through our hearts and our minds and our bodies, the sensations and thoughts and feelings that accompany overwhelm.
Not only did we do that, but we also learned to deeply repair and to take full responsibility for our own experience while also learning to be empathic and to care for each other’s experience as well.
I remember a time as we were working through this, that it would be so sweet when we could really deepen into the level of maturity that was needed in order to shepherd our relationship in a good way.
And I’m so glad that we did this, because now we have a relationship where we can attune to each other and this results along with healthy management of our feelings and sincere repair and throw in a sprinkle of good family rituals to honor the important things, that the amount of closeness and connection and intimacy skyrocketed.
We healed,
We forgave each other,
We learned how to master emotional regulation,
We learned how to do repair in a really sincere way,
and we learned how to create sacred and meaningful family rituals,
like saging the house together,
or pulling tarot cards together and having a family discussion about what was most helpful.
My job is to help each couple create their own family rituals that fit them and that it’s exactly what I do with my clients that help them experience closeness, family unity and collective healing and honoring amongst them. All of this leads to greater intimacy, ease, and energy freed up to create the hot sex, love and closeness relationship they desire.
Of course, the kids, they love this, even my sweet son would say when he was three, Mama can I ‘stage’ {of course he was talking about sage…} the house? (I didn’t have the heart to correct him and tell him that the t was an extra letter), because his sweetness and sincerity were so special.
I want you to have all these healing benefits as well, and I know that you can, when you do some of the things that I am suggesting above.
I want you to feel close and connected and have the healing resources that you need because you do need them, and you cannot survive and thrive in love where both people come together with their conditioning without it.
I hope you’ll drink this in and take in the good nourishment that’s here.
What’s the first step that you can take this week to start getting going on this for yourself?
For me, I’m going to take an inventory of any places where I still feel there is a need for this, and going to make a list and plan a time with my hubby to connect with him and I know he’ll listen to me even if it’s uncomfortable or even if it’s difficult because we’ve done that work. Wouldn’t it feel great to know the same was possible for you?
