What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families Series- Day 14

Consciously Parenting: What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families — *Book 1 of the Consciously Parenting series*

Principle 5: Parental interpretation of behaviors comes from both a conscious and subconscious place, resulting in positive or negative neurophysiologic feedback loops.

When our child does something, literally anything, we parents make connections, both consciously and unconsciously, to things that happened in our past.

Memory doesn’t work in a linear fashion; in our brain, something that happened this morning may not take precedence over something that happened to us when we were five. In other words, our brain may time travel with or without our conscious awareness or permission.

From the book Consciously Parenting: What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families

One mother I was working with was very anxious every time her children went out to play with dad. He was a responsible dad who wasn’t doing anything risky with the children and mom knew that. But something about the situation was really troubling to mom. She didn’t want her husband to stop playing with the kids, but she seriously wanted to wrap the kids in bubble wrap before they went outside to play.

As we made space for what it felt like for mom, she starting thinking about growing up in New York City and some of the unsafe situations she had experienced growing up. Her body started to react visibly, she started to shake and cry. After she had allowed the feelings to move through, she was able to differentiate her own story of growing up from her kids’ experience. They live in a safe neighborhood where everyone watches out for everyone else.

While she didn’t consciously remember the experience of growing up, it was showing up unconsciously in how it was feeling for her kids to start exploring the world, even with their dad. As she made her experiences more conscious, it was easier to discern her body’s memory of her being unsafe from what was actually safe or unsafe in present time for her children. Once she differentiated her experiences from the past, she was able to start to create some positive feedback loops with her kids and their exploration time with their dad.

Author

Rebecca Thompson Hitt

Rebecca Thompson Hitt, MS, MFT is the founder and executive director of The Consciously Parenting Project (2007). Rebecca loves supporting individuals and parents to grow themselves up in their current relationship challenges. She delights in empowering people to find peace and connection with their loved ones, supporting the transformation of the way we understand our connections. Her holistic approach, which includes our earliest experiences and nervous system patterns, her gentleness and compassion, and her deep listening without pathologizing, helps us to see ourselves and those we care about with new eyes, supporting the transformation needed in the world starting with our closest relationships. With over 30 years of professional experience working with individuals, couples, and families, in addition to her own personal healing work raising her now young adult sons, Rebecca is dedicated to transforming our relationships stories, one relationship and one family at a time.
View all posts Holistic Family Therapist