steps:
Step 1: Become acquainted
with your ‘auto-parent’
‘We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.’
Anais Nin
I know that most of my own ‘sins’ against my children’s confidence and well-being have been committed in spite of my good intentions. I used to hear myself saying:
‘How could I have done that?’
‘I didn’t mean to say that.’
‘I didn’t realize that I was doing that.’
I was doing and saying things I would never have done or said in other relationships. Quite often I was behaving in ways that I knew had hurt and restricted me as a child and that I had sworn no one would ever see me doing to my children. Why should this have been so?
The reason was that when my children were very young I was often acting in ‘auto-parent’ mode. Like many stressed and anxious mothers, I did not have the energy to think through and make conscious choices about what words and actions I would like to use, I just reacted and acted spontaneously. The difficulty was that my ‘spontaneity’ was (as is everybody’s) more the product of my own experiences as a child and my cultural conditioning than of any pure and virtuous maternal instinct. When I later began to try and understand my behaviour I realized that in my parenting role I was often acting as the people who reared me as a child behaved. This was a tremendous shock to me, because I had hitherto liked to consider myself a very different kind of mother! The hard truth I had to swallow was that, in spite of all my good intentions and studies of good child care, I was still under the powerful influence of my early role-models.
I had an unusually deprived childhood; hopefully you have more satisfactory parenting models lodged in your auto-parent. Nevertheless it may still be worth doing some serious self-reflection to enable you to make sure that, when your auto-parent is in operation (and it often has to be), it’s doing the job you want it to do (and not, for example, the job that anyone else may have programmed it to do!) Remember that even if the parenting you experienced was ‘good enough’ for you it may not be exactly right for building the confidence of your particular children. After all, some of the beliefs underlying your parents’ style may simply be out of date in today’s culture (e.g. the ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’ variety).
The exercise on page 28 will help you to become much more aware of the beliefs that may have been programmed into your auto-parent, and then replace those you want to change with alternatives.
Step 2: Become aware of
your wounded inner child
In the last exercise, you were working on what is often referred to in the world of therapy as the parent part of your personality. This is the part of you that not only wants and needs to look after others, but also to judge and direct them. Now we are going to turn our attention to another part which is commonly called the child part. When we use this term we are usually referring either to natural traits which, like every child, you inherited at birth – such as:
spontaneity, inquisitiveness, intuition, creativity, playfulness, adventurousness, sensuality, trustfulness, egocentredness
– or to adaptive traits which you developed in early childhood in response to the environment in which you grew up and the way your needs were (or were not) met. These might have been, for example:
compliancy, submissiveness, helplessness, attention-seeking, manipulativeness, rebelliousness, fearfulness.
With the arrival of our own children, the child part of us is restimulated and re-energized and can, of course, be a very positive force in our parenting. I know that some of the closest ‘bonding’ moments I have ever had with my children have been when I have just let myself get totally absorbed in their play or their fantasy world or, in contrast, when we have wept or laughed ‘uncontrollably’ in each other’s arms.
Exercise: Discovering my auto-parent
1 Would my parents have agreed with the belief behind this message? Or did they act as though they agreed with it?
2 Did any other significant figures hold this belief dear to their hearts (e.g. teacher or grandparent)?
3 As a child, was my confidence positively or adversely affected in any way by this belief?
Children are certain cares but uncertain comforts
Children should be seen and not heard
You cannot put an old head on young shoulders
The fine pullett shows excellence from the egg
A child may have too much of his mother’s blessing
Spare the rod spoil the child
Little things please little minds
Soon ripe soon rotten
‘Parents always know best’
‘You’re just a child, you could never understand’
‘Boys are more important than girls’
‘Girls are much better at relationships than boys’
‘I know you were very excited, but at lunchtime you were talking again way over the children’s heads and Paul couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’ (Children should be seen and not heard.)
‘Your tone of voice sounded a bit patronizing when you were talking to Jane about her Christmas list.’ (Little things please little minds.)
Not only were such experiences good for my relationships with my daughters, they also were feeding and satisfying some important needs in