Giving Your Kids Better, Part 3: Becoming A Parent Can Shine a Light on the Love You Did Not Receive
A patient came into my office one afternoon saying, “Heather, I feel so angry”. When I asked to hear more, they talked about their experience as a parent of a young child saying, “it’s so easy, it’s so easy to love (the child). Why couldn’t my mother do this for me?”.
As I have written about a lot so far, becoming a parent can raise so much about how you yourself were parented. It can make the stakes of giving your child better feel so high and it can make the roadmap of how to parent well feel blurry and unknown.
A piece I have not yet talked about is that there are parts of parenthood that likely will come easy to adults who did not experience good enough parenting firsthand. In the example above, this parent reflects on the ease in which they could love their child, which they later defined as finding genuine enjoyment and affection for them. This insight was bittersweet. This parent relished and felt pride in the ease in which they felt love for their child while feeling loss and anguish over not having received that themselves.
Parenting Connects Us to Our Own Hunger to be Parented
A supervisor once defined “healing from trauma” as a process in which the mourning must be commensurate with the size of the loss. It’s hard for humans to imagine something they themselves have not experienced. So in the case of not receiving the attunement, safety, and stability of good enough parenting, how do you process and mourn something that you haven't experienced? It may be easy for an adult to pinpoint a way that a parent hurt them but it is hard to pinpoint a way in which they were not loved.
Parenting offers an opportunity to get closer to and to experience secondhand good enough parenting. It may be through the very act of parenting that you get a taste of what you yourself did not receive. This can be an important source of pride for parents who fall into this category. Even with all I have written about in regards to the unknowns and anxieties of parenting, it can be fortifying to really know and believe that you are giving your kid some good, good love. However, this may also put into perspective what you did not have, which can cause a lot of grief and heavy emotions for the parent and may kick off a period of mourning for them where they grieve and feel sadness and anger in some new and deeper ways for their childhood self.
Self-Parenting Leaves Less Energy Leftover for Actual Parenting
An important part of my work with all adult patients is to locate the young parts of themselves that did not get what they needed so they can be tended to and grow. These young parts can exist along the sophisticated and impressive adult parts of themselves that did develop. We do not get to re-do our childhoods but there is a version of reparenting that takes place in therapy that is the next best thing.
Tending to the parts of us that are hungry and underdeveloped is a version of self-parenting. Self-parenting takes a lot of energy and work. If you are someone with Complex PTSD, it can take work to create stable relationships and it can take work to assess threat levels and be in a level and unactivated place. Self-parenting leaves less energy leftover for actual parenting. Having new insights and discoveries in what you did not get as a child can be disruptive and stir up old, hard feelings. This may add extra work to the already tough job of parenting.
Normalizing Parental Ambivalence
Just like any other feeling, we want to welcome these feelings of ambivalence, resentment, and depletion with open arms. These feelings are an indication that there is more mourning that is needed. Not to mention, all parents are ambivalent about parenting. After all, what is parenting? Giving up your independence and autonomy to raise and be responsible for a being that is underdeveloped, needy, and helpless. Doesn’t sound so appealing, does it? This ambivalence is taboo to talk about, even when mixed in is a tremendous amount of joy and pleasure.
