I have had such a huge influx of questions from parents about their children’s increased frustration, overwhelm and anger, that I just had to address it as a blog.
Please remember that for just about every adult on this planet, the last few years have been a tad bit stressful. Just like any of us, children have different levels of resilience when it comes to managing stress. The way children manage stress is a learned behavior. Therefore your parents taught you their means of dealing with stress and unless integrated, you in turn taught that to your children.
Under the best of circumstances most adults can deal with fear and rationalize that it is temporary and thus deal with it, but that is not true if your whole life has been stressful. Under those circumstances, you only know stress. You only see stress.
These last three years have been far from “the best of circumstances”. In fact they have been filled with a constant diet of fear. That diet has been fed through the media, in your children’s schools and in conversations between adults that are assumed go “over the heads” of our children. Even the most capable at handling stress have themselves been stressed over the last few years.
So here is the rub. Just about every child on the planet at this time has a heightened degree of energetic sensitivity. This capacity makes them acutely aware of how fear energy is impacting their parents, peers, communities and the world at large. These children do not reflect what is seen, they reflect what is hidden.
Fear for life, well-being and safety is a common human stressor. What happens when EVERYONE is stressed about the same thing at the same time?
Well one thing that happens is that energetically sensitive children go on high alert. The first thing they do in this situation is they tap into their parents energetically to see how they are handling the stress. Some of the children consciously do this but most of them connect in this way unconsciously. They do not care how the “adult you” appears to be handling the stress, they care how the children within you are handling it.
Safety is an focus for every child and that includes the ones within you. When we have been triggered over the last few years, it was not the adult us that was reacting. It was some aspect of our child self. Energetically sensitive children are never mirroring your adult self, they are aways mirroring the child self. They mirror the parts of us that have not been loved back into the fold of wholeness.
So here is an example. Lets say that the last few years of a fear diet have left you feeling unsafe or just generally out of sorts. Maybe you got triggered by that lack of safety, and rightly so. If you learned as a child to deal with triggers related to safety by becoming frustrated, overwhelmed or angry, then that is what your children are going to reflect back.
PLEASE HEAR ME when I say, that your children are NOT reflecting this energy to tell you that you are a bad parent or to suggest that you are acting like a child. THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE.
What they are doing is showing you what has yet to be loved, supported and nurtured within you. They are reflecting to you the child within you that was conditioned to get frustrated overwhelmed and angry when safety was an issue.
We all have unhealed/ unintegrated aspects of ourselves and the children are feeling this not just within their families, but in their schools, at the doctor’s office, on playdates and everywhere that fear has been effecting the adults around them.
Our children can only process so much of this energy and then they have to mirror it back as a means of suggesting that you love the part of you that needs to be supported.
The GREAT part about this unconscious process is that for the first time in recent human history all humans are dealing with the same fears at the same time and we therefore all have the same opportunity to shift this energy once and for all, so that we are no longer dragged into or by patterns of fear!
So here are some suggestions. The next time your child demonstrates frustration, overwhelm, anger or outright aggression ask yourself the following questions.
- Who does this remind me of from my past?
- How did my child self handle that situation?
- How did it make my child self feel?
Then go about having love, compassion and understanding for the part of you that had that experience. How do you do that?
- Let the child in you tell you about his/her fears related to the situation. Write them down so you can see them.
- Validate the child in you. Remember it is not the adult who is creating the trigger. It is a child within you.
- Let him/her know that you (as the adult self) are right there and you will be there until the feeling subsides.
When we heal our inner children, our outer children feel more relaxed. When we integrate our inner children, our outer children feel more safe and thus handle stress in a more productive way. When we support our inner children, our outer children learn to support themselves. When we see our inner children, our outer children can also be seen for the gift they are providing us through their frustration, overwhelm and anger.
None of these emotions are wrong or bad. They aren’t wrong or bad within you either. They do however need our love and support so they can shift.
You as the parent, have all the power and can set an amazing energetic model for your children by loving the parts of you that need loved. It’s a practice, not a quick fix, but once you get the hang of it all can truly be well again!
Love yourselves deeply, have compassion and know that what you do for your inner children, you absolutely do for your physical children.