Making Repairs When You Mess Up
Your Buttons and Your Child
The closer we are to people and the more we value our connection to them, the more vulnerable we are to having our unresolved childhood issues triggered within the context of the relationship we have with them. The relationships we have with our partners and parents tend to be the ones that call out our most reactive, least flexible responses. Our children too seem born with a unique capability for pushing our “buttons”, and we often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when it is actually our own past life experience that is triggering our upset feelings about their behavior. We blame our children for “making us angry”. We find ourselves unable to see the situation from a child’s point of view, unable to access higher brain functions, or act from a place of conscious intention. Our worst parenting moments arise when our “buttons” are pushed and we cave before the power of our reactive responses to our children’s behavior. And it is the nature of family systems that “buttons” get passed on. The reactive behavior we direct towards our kids when we are in the grip of powerful emotions, produces just the kind of interaction that fosters the creation of such emotions within them; just as our own parents’ powerlessness in the face of their emotions were the source of the scary and painful interactions that helped form the “buttons” that we carry now.
There is good news. Recent research on parent/child attachment indicates that it is never too late to improve the attachment you have with your child. No parents is perfect, and almost all parents “lose it” once and awhile. There are ways in which a caregiver can go back to repair the relationship in the aftermath of an event that was scary or painful for a child, to help the child make sense of the event and moderate future vulnerability to negative emotion within the child.
The following tool is offered by Daniel Siegel in his book Parenting From the Inside Out as a wonderful way to begin healing a breech in the parent/child attachment after a rift is made.
A. First take time to calm down and pull yourself back together. Soothe yourself until you feel confident that you can interact with your child without flying off the handle again.
B. Consider your own history. Ask yourself, “Why was my negative emotion triggered?” “How does this situation look like events from my past?” Get a sense of where your strong reaction was came from.
C. Consider your child’s point of view. Ask yourself what it was like to be him/her in the situation, and how s/he might tell the story of what happened if allowed to use his/her own words.
D. Engage with your child, and state your intention to make a repair. ie. “I am feeling badly about what happened a little while ago and I would like to talk about it.”
E. Apologize. Many many parents believe that they must never apologize to their children. There is a sense somehow, that if parents were to ever admit to being wrong, they would lose credibility. Or sometimes parents carry a mistaken belief that children need to see them as infallible in order to feel safe in the world. Children don’t need parents who are perfect. In fact, parents who set themselves up in their children’s eyes as perfect, create an environment in which children feel shame when they make mistakes, and don’t feel as if they can go to their parents for help when they need it. Children learn to respect and trust you when you model trustworthy and respectful behavior, not when you pretend as if you are never wrong. Admit it when you are wrong, and apologize!
F. Encourage the child to talk about their experience of the event with their own words and paraphrase their words back to them so they can see that you are understanding them. Do this without defending or making their experience wrong. When our children tell us what they think or how they feel, it is important to respect their experience whether or not it is the same as our own. Forget trying to keep your children from feeling what they are feeling, or shutting them down so you won’t have to experience the discomfort of having someone disagree with or be upset with you. You can hear and reflect back the experience of a child, sending the message that “I get why you might feel the way you are feeling.” without letting their feelings overwhelm, define, or trigger you all over again!
G. Finally, broaden and contextualize the experience, and help your child create meaning around it. This may look something like this: “I was sitting at my desk feeling really worried about our family having enough money when you knocked my coffee cup over. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. It was wrong of me to yell at you and call you an “idiot”. I do not really believe that you are an idiot. Because I was feeling so stressed-out when you knocked over my coffee, I let out my worried feelings by yelling at you. Sometimes moms and dads make mistakes, just like kids do, and I am sorry. I wish I could take it back and do it over. Have you ever done anything that you really really wished you hadn’t done?”
One more thing, and this is terribly important: It is vital that you unhook from outcome as you pursue these repair experiences with your children. It is not fair to your child or healthy for the relationship if your motivation for engaging in a repair is to help you feel better, i.e. “absolve you of your guilt”. Holding the expectation that your child will comfort you, or “forgive” you places a developmentally inappropriate pressure on him/her, and it turns what should be a beautiful gift from you to your child into a occasion of emotional extortion. Over time, as your child learns to trust you it is likely that you will reap the benefits of your skillful parenting in the form of a greater level of trust and intimacy between you and your kids, but those things can not be taken or expected. They must grow organically.
Your Buttons and Your Child
The closer we are to people and the more we value our connection to them, the more vulnerable we are to having our unresolved childhood issues triggered within the context of the relationship we have with them. The relationships we have with our partners and parents tend to be the ones that call out our most reactive, least flexible responses. Our children too seem born with a unique capability for pushing our “buttons”, and we often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when it is actually our own past life experience that is triggering our upset feelings about their behavior. We blame our children for “making us angry”. We find ourselves unable to see the situation from a child’s point of view, unable to access higher brain functions, or act from a place of conscious intention. Our worst parenting moments arise when our “buttons” are pushed and we cave before the power of our reactive responses to our children’s behavior. And it is the nature of family systems that “buttons” get passed on. The reactive behavior we direct towards our kids when we are in the grip of powerful emotions, produces just the kind of interaction that fosters the creation of such emotions within them; just as our own parents’ powerlessness in the face of their emotions were the source of the scary and painful interactions that helped form the “buttons” that we carry now.
There is good news. Recent research on parent/child attachment indicates that it is never too late to improve the attachment you have with your child. No parents is perfect, and almost all parents “lose it” once and awhile. There are ways in which a caregiver can go back to repair the relationship in the aftermath of an event that was scary or painful for a child, to help the child make sense of the event and moderate future vulnerability to negative emotion within the child.
The following tool is offered by Daniel Siegel in his book Parenting From the Inside Out as a wonderful way to begin healing a breech in the parent/child attachment after a rift is made.
A. First take time to calm down and pull yourself back together. Soothe yourself until you feel confident that you can interact with your child without flying off the handle again.
B. Consider your own history. Ask yourself, “Why was my negative emotion triggered?” “How does this situation look like events from my past?” Get a sense of where your strong reaction was came from.
C. Consider your child’s point of view. Ask yourself what it was like to be him/her in the situation, and how s/he might tell the story of what happened if allowed to use his/her own words.
D. Engage with your child, and state your intention to make a repair. ie. “I am feeling badly about what happened a little while ago and I would like to talk about it.”
E. Apologize. Many many parents believe that they must never apologize to their children. There is a sense somehow, that if parents were to ever admit to being wrong, they would lose credibility. Or sometimes parents carry a mistaken belief that children need to see them as infallible in order to feel safe in the world. Children don’t need parents who are perfect. In fact, parents who set themselves up in their children’s eyes as perfect, create an environment in which children feel shame when they make mistakes, and don’t feel as if they can go to their parents for help when they need it. Children learn to respect and trust you when you model trustworthy and respectful behavior, not when you pretend as if you are never wrong. Admit it when you are wrong, and apologize!
F. Encourage the child to talk about their experience of the event with their own words and paraphrase their words back to them so they can see that you are understanding them. Do this without defending or making their experience wrong. When our children tell us what they think or how they feel, it is important to respect their experience whether or not it is the same as our own. Forget trying to keep your children from feeling what they are feeling, or shutting them down so you won’t have to experience the discomfort of having someone disagree with or be upset with you. You can hear and reflect back the experience of a child, sending the message that “I get why you might feel the way you are feeling.” without letting their feelings overwhelm, define, or trigger you all over again!
G. Finally, broaden and contextualize the experience, and help your child create meaning around it. This may look something like this: “I was sitting at my desk feeling really worried about our family having enough money when you knocked my coffee cup over. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. It was wrong of me to yell at you and call you an “idiot”. I do not really believe that you are an idiot. Because I was feeling so stressed-out when you knocked over my coffee, I let out my worried feelings by yelling at you. Sometimes moms and dads make mistakes, just like kids do, and I am sorry. I wish I could take it back and do it over. Have you ever done anything that you really really wished you hadn’t done?”
One more thing, and this is terribly important: It is vital that you unhook from outcome as you pursue these repair experiences with your children. It is not fair to your child or healthy for the relationship if your motivation for engaging in a repair is to help you feel better, i.e. “absolve you of your guilt”. Holding the expectation that your child will comfort you, or “forgive” you places a developmentally inappropriate pressure on him/her, and it turns what should be a beautiful gift from you to your child into a occasion of emotional extortion. Over time, as your child learns to trust you it is likely that you will reap the benefits of your skillful parenting in the form of a greater level of trust and intimacy between you and your kids, but those things can not be taken or expected. They must grow organically.
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