Last week my clients Jim and Nancy came in so overwhelmed and frustrated.
Jim was feeling overwhelmed with work. The startup owners were disorganized and chaotic.
Nancy ran her own online business, managed a team of three, and was pregnant with their second child.
Their first child was three, and had been in the ‘terrible two’s’ long past the second year it was apparently ascribed to. I normalized it for them, and said it should frankly be called the ‘tantrum threes,’ and they laughed and it broke the ice.
Parents are so vulnerable, to all the stresses in many of the same way non-parent couples are..and with the additional overwhelm of how to be conscious parents, cultivating hot sex, love and closeness while in the midst of work, parenting and dealing with kids who can drive you nuts, push every last trigger button, and get on every remaining good nerve…
This was what Jim and Nancy had been dealing with for a year. Their little one who was three, would do the opposite of everything they asked him to do. And when natural consequences were presented impulse control was out the door with their little one.. which would then do the same with both of them.
Everyone was losing their shit.
And it was making them feel ashamed which I normalized pretty quickly and it was a pleasant surprise that parents do indeed, lose their shit from time to time with their kids. It’s more common than most of social media would have you believe.
And I could see that they needed transformation support.. otherwise they were going to continue being disconnected, and sexual and loving connection was going to suffer even more. Not an option either wanted to engage.
From my deep study of shamanism and developmental psychology, I understand about emotional organizing systems, sacred mirrors, and karma. From my studies of Diamond Heart, I know the value of deep inquiry into the nature of what is appearing to provide deep illumination to exactly how to give you the support you’ll need to reduce the suffering and heal the disconnection..
Kids play out our unresolved stuff.
They don’t mean to.
There’s not much consciousness to it.
They just DO it..because they are impressionable little beings who absorb frequency, vibration and imprints…and then, because they don’t have adult language to think or speak about it.. they play it out.. act it out…and then disaster hits.
“What awareness is trying to get born…through what the kids are showing you in their annoying or stressing patterns?”, I asked.
This was key! And it stopped them dead in their tracks.
We looked at the acting out of their kids simply.
“What was it trying to say, from the inside?” I asked…
We sat in the open space about it together.
And they removed the blame and shame. Because they became curious.
About their own impulse control places.
And when being more supportive to their inner impulses of impatience, and they focused on it, then they could then respond creatively with the kids.
They could give their own impulses exactly the containment and resources of love, patience, understanding and support that they needed. Something they had not known what to do before.
And then guess what happened?
At the end of our time working together, the pattern was gone, just like that.
The impulses were met with presence.
The overwhelm was met with compassion.
The anxiety was met with inquiry and curiosity.
And the struggle was not held in those qualities were served as containers.
And, the kids weren’t driving them crazy because they could feel the calm too.
Now that’s exciting.
Love to hear the ONE thing that you’re kid’s doing this week that’s driving you nuts or stressing you out, and how you might be able to think about it differently.
