Healing the Past Before Your Baby is Born
"You know you are face-to-face with the unfinished business of your own childhood when you respond with strong negative feelings to your child's behavior...
Disproportionate levels of fear, sadness, anger, or, conversely, elation or relief are signals to the parent that he has just activated an old wound and might do well to investigate further.
" ~~Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen Hunt, PhD...
Giving the Love that Heals: A Guide for Parents No matter how good our intentions, it can be hard to nurture our children emotionally if we were hurt badly or our own needs weren't met when we were children.
We may have thought we put it all behind us but are likely to find those memories or the emotional echoes of them coming back to us when we least expect them as we try to parent our own children.
Becoming aware that we have those wounds is the first step on the journey to healing them.
The Mistakes You Don't Want to Repeat If the parenting role models you had growing up made mistakes that hurt you, it may be harder than you think not to make similar ones.
Here's Why What happens is that you find yourself in the middle of a stressful parenting situation and without thinking, your reaction mirrors whatever you have seen or heard.
It's what's handiest and quickest to mind when you are casting around mentally for a response.
What to Do One way to strengthen your ability to make different choices is to heal the experiences that hurt you and then, think through some of the situations you are likely to face and create a parenting plan for handling them.
Memories and Beliefs that Need to Heal Are there parenting mistakes your parents made that you are committed to avoiding yourself as a parent? List them in your journal.
Are there painful experiences from your childhood that you know have not healed completely? Write down the ones you remember.
Once you have identified as many unhealed memories as you can, give each of them a rating on a scale of 1 to 10.
How much emotional charge does that memory hold for you today? Look at your list and think about how those experiences affected your view of the world.
What did you learn about life, about love, about relationships, about family, about being a parent, about being a child, about yourself? Write down as many potential limiting beliefs as you can.
Healing from the Past The next step is to choose a way to heal those memories and beliefs.
Disproportionate levels of fear, sadness, anger, or, conversely, elation or relief are signals to the parent that he has just activated an old wound and might do well to investigate further.
" ~~Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen Hunt, PhD...
Giving the Love that Heals: A Guide for Parents No matter how good our intentions, it can be hard to nurture our children emotionally if we were hurt badly or our own needs weren't met when we were children.
We may have thought we put it all behind us but are likely to find those memories or the emotional echoes of them coming back to us when we least expect them as we try to parent our own children.
Becoming aware that we have those wounds is the first step on the journey to healing them.
The Mistakes You Don't Want to Repeat If the parenting role models you had growing up made mistakes that hurt you, it may be harder than you think not to make similar ones.
Here's Why What happens is that you find yourself in the middle of a stressful parenting situation and without thinking, your reaction mirrors whatever you have seen or heard.
It's what's handiest and quickest to mind when you are casting around mentally for a response.
What to Do One way to strengthen your ability to make different choices is to heal the experiences that hurt you and then, think through some of the situations you are likely to face and create a parenting plan for handling them.
Memories and Beliefs that Need to Heal Are there parenting mistakes your parents made that you are committed to avoiding yourself as a parent? List them in your journal.
Are there painful experiences from your childhood that you know have not healed completely? Write down the ones you remember.
Once you have identified as many unhealed memories as you can, give each of them a rating on a scale of 1 to 10.
How much emotional charge does that memory hold for you today? Look at your list and think about how those experiences affected your view of the world.
What did you learn about life, about love, about relationships, about family, about being a parent, about being a child, about yourself? Write down as many potential limiting beliefs as you can.
Healing from the Past The next step is to choose a way to heal those memories and beliefs.