My best teacher, our toddler Tommy, reminded me of the following and I thought I would share it with you all as it's an important part of the human condition.

Because he cannot express verbally with words how he is feeling, he will express it by showing how he is feeling outwardly.

The basic mechanism is that as parents, we start feeling how he is feeling, and thus with this information we can take appropriate action to give him what he needs. This is emotional attunement.

For example, if he’s frustrated because he is hungry, he will start getting very upset and refuse any toy or show or anything that we offer him other than food. His on-going frustration will probably lead to a tantrum and crying ... and guess what ... we will become frustrated. We will start getting angry (and hopefully not have a tantrum as well).

We don’t want to feel that way, and neither does he, so we finally figure out that he is extra hungry today and everyone can relax again. It’s been a great survival mechanism for thousands of years.

But, sometimes children, because of triggering their parents ‘stuff’, and the parents not being able to hold space or be trauma informed or work on themselves ... start to inflict the anger back ... yelling and wanting the child to stop so they can feel better within themselves.

What does this create?

Adults who cannot express how they feel, as it was shutdown at a young age.

So as adults when we feel hurt, we just try and hurt the other person reactively. When we feel alone we ignore and isolate the other person... we are still trying to use this parent child empathy as an adult with other adults.

This causes more conflicts, resentments, passive aggressiveness and relationship breakdowns and many other issues accumulatively.

It’s because we were made not to feel safe for expressing how we felt all those years ago.

Let’s break the cycle... let’s start to heal our own childhoods so we can hold space for our own children.

In peace,

Melissa Hiemann
Co-Founder of The Centre for Healing
Author of The Natural High - Secrets to Overcoming Instant Gratification and Finding Inner Peace