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Just be with yourself for a few moments.
You’ll notice annoyance or impatience, but take a deep breath and look past your judgements (“Why can’t he just behave?!”) to the fears behind your anger (“What if he’s still doing this when he’s 20?… If I were a better parent, this wouldn’t be happening… What if I’ve ruined my child?”)
Behind our annoyance there’s usually fear or grief or hurt or powerlessness. The secret is that once you hold yourself with compassion and let yourself feel those emotions, they start to evaporate. Just don’t take action based on those feelings. That urgent need to set your child straight right now? That means you’re in fight mode. Instead, take a deep breath, hug yourself, and allow the more vulnerable feelings underneath to surface.
This is one of the most important steps toward emotional wholeness and healing you can take – just feeling those yucky emotions that come up in the course of your everyday life, instead of hiding in little addictions like screens, food and shopping. Many of these feelings are triggered by baggage that goes back to our childhoods.
Every time you simply love yourself through an emotion by letting yourself feel it without acting on it, you’re dissolving it, emptying it out of your emotional backpack. You’re actually rewiring your brain.
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Move your body to shift the emotion.
Take ten deep breaths. Shake out your hands. Jump up and down. Do a yoga stretch. Put on music and dance for five minutes. If you find yourself yawning or trembling, that’s just emotion leaving your body. Think of all that emotion as “energy in motion” and just let it move through you and on out.
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Give yourself a hug.
Acknowledge yourself for your courage in being willing to face those upsets that were making you irritable. Express gratitude for that red flag (your own impatience) that helped you do this small healing and get back on track before a major firestorm erupted. Take a deep breath and remind yourself “She’s acting like a child because she is a child….There’s no emergency…What would love do?”
The steps are easy – Notice, Choose Compassion, Feel, Move, Hug!
But actually doing them is some of the hardest work we do — taking responsibility for our own reactions. The good news is that you’re rewiring your brain, so it gets easier every time you do it. And you’ll notice over time that your irritable moments are less and less frequent. Which gives you lots more room for joyful connection.
Originally published here.
Dr. Laura Markham is the author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How To Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends For Life and Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How To Stop Yelling and Start Connecting. Find her online at AhaParenting.com
