Is It Impossible To Not Parent Like Your Parents?

When you first become a mother, you may well unconsciously repeat the destructive patterns of behaviour that you experienced as a child.

It’s not that you want to - you don’t.

But when you are stressed, overwhelmed, angry or tired, it is much more likely that the part of your brain that controls rational behaviour and that understands the consequences of your actions (the pre-frontal cortex) goes offline.

And without this regulatory influence, you re-enact instead the memories that are stored in the (evolutionarily) older parts of your brain - what you heard and saw as a developing child: the words shouted at you in anger or the actions that were inflicted on you as punishment.

It’s in this way that trauma cycles are perpetuated.

It’s why I used to slap my children, it’s why I have caught myself calling my daughter the same horrible term that was used to shame me and it’s the reason my client slammed on the breaks of her moving car in order to jolt her kids into submission.

Neither of us planned on doing these things.

Indeed, I shocked myself by calling her ‘poisonous’ - I’d never used that word before to describe someone and I’ve never used it since. I wondered where it had come from.

But that’s the point. I didn’t PLAN or MEAN to use it.

It had been stored unconsciously in the limbic part of my brain - wired into a distant memory - only to pop up in the present when I was feeling totally overwhelmed by the emotional chaos of a heated row.

I had crossed over into the ‘red’ zone, I was in full fight mode and my pre-frontal cortex was bypassed by my threat response.

My client and I both reacted to the stress of our situations in the same disproportionate ways that our parents had before us.

We become the perpetrators of the actions to which we had fallen victim as children.

The good news is, you don’t have to continue to allow history to repeat itself.

By acknowledging the wounds that you are carrying and by processing these past painful experiences consciously - releasing the blocked emotions that got stuck in you when they happened and soothing the inner child who felt so powerless at the time - you can integrate and heal these.

It is not impossible to break the generational trauma that was unconsciously passed onto you. Just as it is possible to not parent like your parents.

It requires emotional strength, bravery and commitment. It’s not a walk in the park.

But the rewards are infinite: you are no longer a clone - controlled by dysfunctional, ancestral patterns - but free of your past and able to be the mama that YOU want to be, parenting in the way YOU choose.

The question is, are you ready?