Parenting Ourselves

Since I’m doing a workshop called “Parenting Ourselves,” I thought I would explain a bit what that’s about.

Have you ever had the experience of witnessing an adult behaving like a temper tantrumming child, an afraid child or an inconsolable, sobbing child? Do you recall perhaps behaving like one, despite your intentions to remain calm in trying situations?

What you may realize is how often this actually happens! How can we help ourselves in those moments when we feel we can’t cope?

Daily life triggers us into the hurt child quite easily. (The child is the metaphor for the feeling.) It is the desire of the child to be accepted and understood. We may recreate similar situations over and over until we learn from them. We call that imprinting or blueprinting. Who is the part of us that can and is willing to accept and bring understanding to the child? S/He is what we call, the Healer or Parental Self.

“Parenting Ourselves” is how we help ourselves instead of merely coping. It is the Healer taking the role of a new, supportive parent to the child inside, in the moment of the trigger. Our parents did the best they could with the tools they had, the same as we as adults do the best we can with our own children. But we know best what we need now (and what we needed in the past) though we usually don’t realize it.

We are all learning as we go. There are so many variables, it can be hard to know what to do in the moment, even with the seemingly best advice and experience we can get outside of ourselves through well-meaning friends and family. The biggest variable: children have different needs beyond basic survival. When we are triggered in the moment (or rather, out of the moment, into the past) acting as children raising children, we can hardly give our kids what they need when they need us the most! So we must do what we can to be there for them completely as adults, not as triggered children!

It is not impossible, but it takes some practice and exploring choices when we are triggered in order to help ourselves, and be better equipped to help our little ones.

Working in Retrospect

We practice by working in retrospect with the imagination. Just as you can prepare yourself for tough projects or practice a new skill by visualization, you can learn how to be more present by re-visiting past events with your imagination and bringing the new information—what you have learned as an adult from the very mistakes you have made—to the event. We call this “Repairing the Past” and “Regression.”

We can also change the mind by releasing judgments. Judgments and beliefs are decisions made as a child affect our whole lives until we are conscious of them and choose to let them go. The judgments and beliefs we are letting go are the ones that are not helping us have the life the way we truly want it to be. “Judgment Release” makes this easy.

The Parenting Workshop teaches you to apply this information and facilitates support with the teacher and fellow students. You can ask questions and practice the new tools until you are ready to do it on your own.(Next month: What are triggers? How do you identify them? And then what?)

With practice you will be able to always be there for yourself! In the meantime you can remove yourself from the trigger until you feel you can help yourself again (“Parenting Ourselves.”) If you are afraid to revisit the past, know that you are not “re-living” the past. You are bringing resources to the past. You are bringing the one that can help you the best! Your adult self.

http://processcoachingwithcathybreshears.eventbrite.com For Registration! 

***If you’ve already taken the Foundations Class, you may audit this class for free. (Future workshops can be audited for half the cost.)

***The early bird discount is extended until the day of the workshop, which starts next week!

How to Accept Our Loved One’s Choices

Often times we are going about fine, OK or we think “I shouldn’t complain, should I?” But when we look at others’ lives we really get set off.  We get angry or hurt and just plain “can’t understand” why they do what they do. Why do they hurt me? What did I do to deserve this?

Of course we often cannot understand absolutely what another’s choices are. But we can have compassion for them and listen to their reasoning or understanding  and begin to understand their choices by looking from their perspective.  But even with all the tools of compassion and understanding, what is most important is not why or what anyone has done, but how we feel about it.

We cannot change anyone. We often cannot get our loved ones to do what we want, but we are not meant to do that. All we can do is work with how we feel about it. It is a learning process for some to know what they are truly feeling in the moment. Often we are triggered into an earlier experience that is unresolved or there are beliefs and judgments confusing what we really feel. Unraveling or Releasing the Judgments takes the discomfort off of the emotions. The past trauma causing triggered emotions to resurface in the present isn’t even as important as the feeling that is coming up. The feeling needs to be loved and accepted just the way it is.

So another’s choice bothering us is actually an opportunity to bring support to feelings and parts of ourselves that we have never been able to accept or support until now. Learning to accept and support the feeling is loving the feeling and loving ourselves.

When we follow the feeling to find what is needed to support it and bring love to it, we can allow our loved ones to make the choices right for them and they will learn to do the same for us.
www.cathybreshears.com
www.processcoaching.com/cathy

Self Love and Hurting the Ones We Love

It can seem very difficult to do what we want also because we are empathic beings. We have the awareness and often it is sentient (feeling) awareness that our loved ones feel pain by our choices.  Discovering what we want is the easy part when speaking directly to our core desire. The second part is to give our desire what she wants and follow through to help, and make it so. Then, we must allow others to have the feelings they have about our choices.

Sometimes just that you exist is enough to hurt another, but again it is not you who is causing the pain.  It seems like we are the cause because we are the triggers. But we are not the cause. The cause can be difficult to see when the feelings are in a state of denial from the past, so we blame the trigger.

Then we avoid doing what we want or hiding the facts that we have done what we want in the moment, even if it’s a mistake that we would like to rewrite if we could, rather than hurt another. So now we are truly hurting ourselves in shame, another facet of guilt and judgment. Because we are so enmeshed in our relationships with each other we find it difficult to differentiate between the trigger, the other person’s feelings and our own feelings.

In Process work we use Perceptual Positions to differentiate and follow feelings back to the source of self denial and pain, to get to the real matter at hand. We practice in retrospect until we can use the tools in the moment of a trigger.

The Perceptual Positions and Judgment Release make it easy to let go of bad “feelings” of guilt, shame and even blame. Compassion and love are able to come through and shine light on the situation.

The bigger picture is revealed and it can be seen that what is best for one person, allows each to find their right place without tip toeing around to please the other.