Come Home to Your Body to Be Home to Your Child

Dear Parents and Caregivers (from tots to teens),

Are you feeling disconnected from your children?

Still exhausted or overwhelmed from pandemic parenting?

Wondering if the push/pull dynamics with your toddler are normal?

Wondering if the I-love-you-I-hate-you with your teens are normal?

Wonder how to reconnect and repair ruptures with your kids?

I invite you to practice being with your own body so you can eventually help to regulate and reconnect with your child. Coming home to a sense of being present and settled in your own body helps your child to feel connected, seen, heard, not alone. Co-regulation is an experience for you both, a relational way of one person (you as caregiver) offering another person (child as recipient) a sense of being grounded, supported and safe. Nervous system to nervous system, one affects the other. This body-based, felt-sense experience helps the child to feel home, wanted and safe to be present. Whether a child is two, 12 or 20, they are hungry for this experience of being wanted and safe.

But what if you—as the parent or caregiver—are feeling frazzled or depleted and are having a hard time feeling grounded and present for yourself? This is in important question. You might wonder how in the world to get in your own body in a way that offers co-regulation to another.

1. Let’s normalize that our culture and its many systems tend to be disembodying: From system to system, and even generation to generation to generation, we are often disconnected from our own physiological rhythms due to trauma response and nervous system patterning and could use some attuning and self-mothering. (*When “Mother” is referenced here, we are inviting the “mothering quality of oxytocin,” which plays a major role in signaling safety within our Social Engagement system functioning as related to nervous system science. Therefore, those who identify as female, male, or non-binary may offer and embody that “Mother” quality.)

2. When we know better, we get to do better: When we know more things—like how 70% of our primary love relationships involve mismatch and how those relationships can be deepened and heal when followed by relational repair—we get to not only own our humility but also the great possibility of deeply nourishing ourselves and our children. (*Psychologist and researcher of “The Still Face Experiment" Ed Tronick and pediatrician-turned-infant-mental-health-clinician Claudia Gold’s book The Power of Discord highlights the importance of mismatch as the path to meaningful and intimate connections.)

3. In a world where our Head-brains are on information overload, it helps to explore a felt-sense experience of support with a trained helper: Healing is relational. From womb to walking, we learn to parent ourselves when someone is there to healthily (re)parent us. Regardless of our upbringing—whether we experienced steady nurturance or a chaotic childhood—Many times we need these emotional redos and inner-parent fine-tuning when as adults. Re-learning and re-membering the mothering parts of you in accessible, practical ways can help you to re-feed, recharge and repair where you might be missing or low on your own emotional nourishment. This can help you regain your own creative energy for life to help offer your children the deep nourishment and attention they crave.

“The word mother sometimes elicits a negative response—a fact that displeases many…It must be remembered, however, that like fairy tales and fantasies, dreams use metaphorical language. The image ‘mother’ is a tuning fork that sets off vibrations far beyond the realm of the personal mother. It resonates in the creative matrix at the core of the psyche—the matrix that contains both the devouring mother and the cherishing mother….When the ego is strong enough to relate to the Mother without losing its own identity, then Mother becomes the source of all creativity.” - Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames

Interested in learning more? I’m happy to provide a free 15-minute phone conversation if you’d like some help on your parenting journey. Click here to connect with me.