11/05/2021
"But here’s the thing. When we do or say these awful things to our children, it is NOT a measure of how awful we are as a person.
It is a measure of how overwhelmed we are."
Losing it with our Children: Why we do it, and How to Stop.
Today, while out on a walk, I took a stick away from my son.
He was tired and too hot and a few minutes earlier he had accidentally stepped in a boggy patch and so had one wet muddy foot that was squelching loudly with every step. The combination of these things was causing him significant annoyance and the stick was waving in an accordingly wild and unpredictable way, altogether too close to the people around him.
As I took the stick away, I said the following to him:
“I can see that you are struggling, and while you are struggling it is hard for you to handle the stick safely, so I am going to look after it for you until you feel better.”
And in that moment I realised that this is what we all need in our lives. How wonderful it would be, in my moments of struggle, to have someone step in and take over until I felt better!
Except in my case (and in the case of many parents), it is not a stick that I am struggling to handle safely.
It is my children.
My children bear the brunt of my struggles. When I am tired, hungry, stressed, worried, arguing with my husband, overwhelmed, it is they who suffer. My overwhelm leads directly to the words and actions that I am most ashamed of. It leads to the moments when I say and do things that I look back on and deeply regret.
I’m guessing that you know the kind of moments I’m talking about. I have not yet worked with a parent who has a child over about 2 years old, who has not experienced these moments. The kind of anger that is really best described as rage. The moments where we snap, or we yell, or we grab, or we smack, or we threaten such awfulness that we fear we are actually a psychopath and we must have damaged our children for life.
But here’s the thing. When we do or say these awful things to our children, it is NOT a measure of how awful we are as a person.
It is a measure of how overwhelmed we are.
And there are so many reasons why we might be overwhelmed right now! Weeks and weeks of being with our children 24/7. Weeks and weeks of none of our usual supports in place. Weeks and weeks of the anxiety, and uncertainty, and utter relentless exhaustion of it all.
We are not meant to parent in isolation. We did not evolve this way. We evolved living in communities where there was support. Where the most critically intense moments of parenthood were shared with other people.
Even without the current lockdown measures this kind of community support for parents is vanishingly rare. And what we are currently expecting of ourselves is quite simply unrealistic and impossible.
It is so enormously important that we recognise that these moments come from our overwhelm, rather than from our nature. Because this recognition makes it possible for us to change.
If we believe that we say and do terrible things to our children because we are a terrible person, then we are stuck. We can’t change who we are as a person, and so we can’t see how to change what we are doing.
We might be able to apologise to our children and cross our fingers as tightly as we can that on another day we will be better, or stronger, or calmer, or more patient. I can look at my angelic sleeping children and be filled with such love that I feel sure that I will never say anything hurtful to them again. Of course I will be better!
But if we do this then we are destined to behave like the archetypical abuser. We apologise, promise it won’t happen again, and then the moment we are stressed again it happens again. And we are filled with guilt and self-loathing, and we wish again that we were better, calmer, stronger, more patient, and we repeat ad infinitum.
But if we can see that the behaviour comes from our overwhelm, then we CAN change that. We can look at all the things that cause us to feel overwhelmed, and we can choose to prioritise the things that help to ease this. We can see how certain situations lead to certain behaviours. We can choose to change how we engage in these situations. We can look for the people who help us feel better about ourselves, and choose to spend more time with these people, and less time with the ones with whom we feel judged or not good enough.
Right now, in these weird, weird coronavirus days, our ways to ease overwhelm are limited. We have to put much more energy and imagination into finding our ways to decompress and recharge. And so we have to grab hold of every tiny scrap that we can. We have to aggressively prioritise our own mental wellbeing in every moment that we possibly can.
One of the ways we can do this is to create this safe support within our relationships. If we are lucky enough to be parenting alongside somebody else, then we can learn how to take each other’s sticks when we see the struggles. If both of us are able to remember that struggle comes from overwhelm, then we can work together to overcome our shame, our fears of being judged, our judgement of ourselves, and so be able to give up that stick when we need to. To allow ourselves to step back and regroup, knowing that the person who is looking after our stick for us loves us, and wants us to be able to feel better.
We may need to agree which words and phrases we use in advance. So that we know how to step in for each other in ways that the other can hear and trust. We will all have our own individual preferences here. This is an opportunity to open up conversation around our most vulnerable moments, and learn what each other needs in these moments. We won’t get it right straight away. This will take time, and effort, and mistakes and improvements.
If we don’t have a co-parent then we might want to start these conversations with our friends, with our other family members, with whomever we spend time alongside.
This is our chance to start creating the kind of community that is truly supportive.
And if we want to be able to receive this kind of support from the people around us, then we need to learn how to give it to others too. To let go of our own judgements of others when we see them in their vulnerable moments.
My moments of greatest regret come from a place where either I did not have the knowledge I needed to handle the moment differently, or (and this one is the main one) I did not have the capacity in that moment to handle it differently.
If we ourselves have not done the thing we see another parent do, it is not necessarily because we know better, and it certainly is not that we are better.
It probably just means that we have not reached their level of overwhelm.
If you would like to learn more about how to make changes in your own behaviour with your children then please visit my webpage at https://www.calmfamily.org/alexandra-harris.html I work with parents in groups and individually to help them understand both their child’s behaviour and their own, and so be able to enjoy more connected and joyful relationships.
