Add & Subtract - Parenting

Today's there is Parenting.

ADD LOVE AND PROTECTION

I often comment to clients with young children, that “you get a lot of value for money doing therapy at this time, because your children are getting the direct benefit too of your own healing!”

There can be so much deep pain from our own past that the light struggles to break through. Our shadow work is essential for clearing what was not love in the past and filling the space with the love we can now access.

As we heal, we have more connection to both feminine, nurturing love and masculine, protective love. We can then bring these expressions of love to children in our outer lives and to our wounded child within.

Suggestion: Search for images, movie scenes, stories of healthy, loving parents with their children. Create a vision board or screen savers so you absorb these images into your subconscious mind.

This is good modelling for our outward dealings with children, and excellent preparation for our inner work of childhood rescuing and bringing in good mother and father.

Psychotherapist Pete Walker on reparenting:

“Reparenting is primarily a process of addressing the many developmentally arrested needs of the traumatised child, the two most fundamental of these needs being love and protection.

An important, yin/yang dynamic of reparenting involves balancing self-mothering and self-fathering. When a child’s mothering needs are adequately met, self-compassion is installed at the core of her being. When the same is true of her fathering needs, self-protection also becomes deeply embedded”

Source: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

SUBTRACT FEAR-BASED IDENTITY

Undoing our dysfunctional beliefs, clearing trauma, transmuting blocked emotion: the hard work of personal healing creates the strong foundation for relationship with ourselves, our partners and our children.

Therapy always eventually becomes a spiritual process, because we are relinquishing the fear-based, ego or separated part of our mind and reconnecting with our love-based greater Self. It is this love that brings forgiveness, connection and joy.

Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira on the unseen child:

“When a parent is still predominantly ego-self identified, he or she will perceive the child through the eyes of the conditioned ego and not through the vision of the Unified Self. The child’s pure Self is then unseen.

This weakens the child’s trust; they will invariably lack true validation and recognition…

[However, if] our parents had some understanding of their own Unified Selves, they would have taught us the art of unconditional love, contemplation and observation, self-inquiry and self-nurturing.

They would have imparted to us a deep sense of inner security that emerged from Absolute Trust in a Higher Order that always has our own best interests at heart.

As children we would have revelled in wonder at the profound sense of interconnectedness that surrounded us”

Source: Take Me to Truth: Undoing the Ego