Holding our children’s feelings

You don’t have to be Buddha to be able to hold your child’s feelings, even though it may sometimes feel that way.  You do have to be able to manage and contain your own feelings, which can be challenging – even impossible – in some situations.  Grounding yourself and leaning into your own support systems before you engage with your children can help us truly be there for them without all the ways we need to be held hanging over their little heads.  And, the truth is, support systems can be friends, family therapists, nature, meditation, movement, journaling, pets, art, body work, support groups – anything that supports you.  My last post, in fact, outlines ways to support and manage stress.

Taking exquisite care of our bodies is paramount at times of stress.  Which means getting enough sleep, eating nourishing food, and engaging with all the things and energies that are supportive for us.  It means taking our well-being seriously, since we can only support our kids if we are ok enough to do so.  

It can help to literally ground into our bodies before we engage with their emotions.  That can be a 4-7-8 breath or the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise. Or just feeling the sensation of your feet on the ground. All of these offer us presence and groundedness, so that we can just receive our children’s feelings, vs. respond with our reactions to their feelings.  They are profoundly different things.  When we receive our children, we can just sit beside them on their bench or in their whole and reflect their feelings back to them.  “This is really hard.”  “You feel really sad.”  Always with the reminder of “I love you, and I am right here with you.”  Receiving them instead of reacting to them helps us roll with their responses and needs.  We can see rebuffs as their showing us what they don’t need (touch, for example).  We can see their explosions as evidence of how hard this is for them.  

This is the time for connection, not correction.  And not instruction, either.  

So often, we want to arm our children with the knowledge and context and hard earned wisdom that we have, that brings us comfort.

But you know what gives our kids the most comfort?  Your loving presence.  Sometimes they are too flooded for words and for our well-meaning advice.  

They just need you to be with them, with all the love you have for them.

Good luck – this is hard.  But we are all in it together.