Clients often ask me what does it mean to be doing our own healing work and how does it help our children? So this is what healing means to me and some of the ways that Aware Parenting has supported my own journey of emotional healing.
When we have stressful, overwhelming experiences as children or adults and don't get to release and heal through crying, raging, laughter or play, movement, and connection to our bodies, we have an incomplete and unintegrated stress response. That means that the energy of the stress and trauma stays inside us. If we are not supported to heal in the moment or soon afterwards, our nervous system remembers the threat and can easily be activated back into a perceived sense of threat by similar experiences. We notice this often as parents when we have big reactions to our children's behaviour or find ourselves stuck in big, painful feelings.
As Gabor Mate says "Trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies".
However, it's never too late to begin the journey of healing. Aletha Solter, the founder of Aware Parenting recognises the importance of us doing our healing work as parents and devotes 2 of the 10 principles of aware parenting to parents getting support. The journey of emotional healing is often a long one and is different for each individual. But there are many ways which can be deeply transformative for parents to tend to their wounds and to find their way back to what Gabor Mate calls "the natural movement towards wholeness" and "self-retrieval".
Sometimes when we think of healing, we might believe that there is something wrong with us and that we need to be mending ourselves or making good the parts we see as defective. But the healing work is not about fixing parts of us that we might think are broken. It's about allowing the big feelings to be there and resourcing ourselves to be able to accept them when they come up.
Healing is about surrendering to big feelings, unburdening ourselves, befriending all the parts of us, especially the parts we always imagined to be unlovable. It's about reassuring the younger parts of us that we are safe now. It's about crying and allowing the incomplete stress response to finally complete and be let go.
It's about offering ourselves compassion and learning to turn down the volume on the critical harsh voices that so many of us internalised. It's about acknowledging our feelings and caring about ourselves, leaning in with compassion and curiosity when we notice ourselves activated. It's about re-connecting, especially with the emotions that we have routinely been resisting. It's about bringing awareness, love and reassurance to the fear that has always protected us, so we can instead learn to be in the discomfort of big feelings, knowing we are safe now.
Often we need to be receiving support and compassion externally before we can offer and accept it ourselves. Often we need to be receiving reassurance that it is finally safe to feel, to express and to release our feelings. We need to be shown how to hold ourselves, to stay grounded and to befriend ourselves.
We need guidance to bring our awareness to what might be there for us, touched in that moment and awaiting our loving attention. We need to be shown that our feelings are valid and welcome, that we can finally let go of judgement and criticism of ourselves, to know where those voices came from. We need to experience from someone else an embodied sense of deep love and unconditional acceptance of ALL of ourselves in order to start to believe that that is what we deserve and to understand that that is what we always deserved.
Having our experiences acknowledged and validated is soothing. What many of us feel in these moments is a sense of relief. And yet, many of us struggle to acknowledge and validate our own emotional experiences.
We need to have someone hold our hand as we start to make space for our feelings as they arise, gently exploring with curiosity what the feeling might be trying to communicate to us.
We might need support to receive a tangible sense of safety after feeling so unsafe for so long.
We might need guidance on how to support our nervous system when we are feeling alarmed, full of rage or deep saddness.
We might need help to unpack our core beliefs and start to re-organise and alter our thoughts, connecting instead with thoughts that align more deeply with what we now believe to e true.
We need help to stay open and allow the sensations of our painful feelings to be there.
We might need warm and compassionate holding when we are moving into dissociation, so we can come back to presence and feeling.
We might need reminding that our needs matter, that they always mattered and that we deserve to be gently tending to our own needs, resting when we need to, tuning into the messages in our body.
We often need support to reconnect with the healing power of play, joy and laughter.
We might need support to explore how to set boundaries and how to become more connected with our "Yes" and "No".
We might need help to remember that we can be our authentic selves, unapologectically, and tuned in to our intrinsic knowing, so we no longer rely on external validation.
We may need to be helped to remember that it's safe to make mistakes and we can finally start to embrace our imperfection, celebrate our uniqueness, stop comparing ourselves to others, letting go of blame, shame and judgement.
This is powerful and transformative work but the healing journey is often a deeply painful one. However, getting support to do this work is what liberates our children and enables us to be the parent that we want to be so their experience in life can be different. If you would like support on your healing journey, I am here for you.
