Has The Parenting 'Life Bomb' Blown Apart Your Relationship?
Has the parenting life bomb blown apart your relationship? Are you:
- Feeling 'unseen' by your partner?
- Feeling like you are both just on 'co-parenting' auto-pilot? ⠀
- Craving a deeper, more intimate, more authentic connection?⠀
- Trying to communicate your needs but ending up shouting, blaming and causing an argument? ⠀
- Feeling scared to ask for time-out for the things that are important to you?⠀
- Feeling like your needs are at the bottom of the family pile?⠀
- Having your feelings described as 'unreasonable'? ⠀
- Feeling unappreciated, resentful and angry?⠀
- Feeling desperate for meaningful attention/⠀
- Feeling like you just want to run away and leave it all behind? ⠀
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If any of these statements resonate, then the answer might be YES.
Before kids, you probably felt like you were one half of an exciting, fun and equal partnership: you shared laughter, tears and deep conversations; you shared experiences but also respected each other’s independence; you were able to voice your concerns and feel heard and you both had ambitious plans for success. ⠀
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But then you became parents. And everything changed. And now you feel stuck in a life that you didn’t choose. Why?
Because relationships are one of the
FIRST things to suffer when we
transition into motherhooD
Just like our kids, we take out our longest-held resentments and frustrations on those with whom we feel the safest. Which means our partners often become the pressure valve to our cooker as well as the mirror to our deepest woundings.
This is necessary and healthy - we all need support. But it’s not sustainable for just one person to be our everything, and without becoming aware of what we are demanding of our partners, the physical intimacy can dissolves and we can become co-parenting robots.
Don’t let your relationship reach this breaking point!
However kind and caring your partner might be, it is not his responsibility to take care of your emotional welfare. This can only come down to you, because only you know exactly what you need.
It can be hard to accept this if you have been heavily reliant on your partner since the kids were born, especially if your social and professional network outside of the family narrowed as a result of becoming a parent.
However, to nurture our relationships and create balance within them, we must accept that we need a range of inputs to feed the various parts of our multi-faceted selves - we need to distribute our needs EVENLY rather than relying on just one person, which not only puts too much pressure on them but also sets them up to fail.
So, widen your circle of support by:
writing a list of all the parts of you that need regular tending to (eg creativity, intellectual stimulation, mentoring, laughter, exercising)
allocating someone (friend, family member or colleague) to each of these needs by either creating new relationships or nurturing those that have fallen by the wayside
And nurture your self-worth by no longer looking outside of yourself for happiness or wholeness.
Accept that there is a level of validation, nourishment and fulfillment
which can NEVER come from other people, things, actions or places.
And recognise that what can and always will provide you with unconditional, sustainable, never-ending, hit-the-spot feelings of safety, belonging, worth, fulfillment, joy and inner peace is loving YOURSELF.
When you take full responsibility for filling your own emotional cup, you will see that your partner is no longer there just to plug a hole in you.
You can start to mend the damage caused by the parenting life bomb, and replace the robotic co-parenting with authentic connection once more.