How to stop your anxiety from impacting your parenting

The human urge to protect our offspring is natural. Threats to our children send off alarms in our nervous system. This reaction is actually a nifty and necessary evolutionary adaptation! It’s protected the human species from every kind of threat– from mountain lions to speeding cars– for centuries. But what happens when our internal alarm system is malfunctioning? What if we see everything as a mountain lion? Anxiety. 

It’s easy for adult anxiety to get mixed up with our protective parental impulse. The ‘negative’ emotions our children feel become something to destroy, dodge or deny. Instead, we need to disable the alarm system and remind ourselves, and our children, that the feelings and experiences we fear are opportunities to grow.   

Ease Anxiety & Embrace Radical Acceptance

Don’t Fear (or Label) the Feelings

Face it: experiencing sadness, anger, or fear feels bad! We cry, we yell, we freeze. Seeing children struggling with these emotions can be agony, and we rush to change, deny, or diminish their pain. Don’t cry! There’s nothing to be afraid of! Just stop thinking about it! We want to magically take away whatever is making our child sad or scared or angry. Nobody wants to see their child in pain. But pain is not the same as harm. And protecting our children from big, difficult feelings doesn’t help them grow. 

By labeling some feelings ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ we paradoxically make them stronger. Emotions themselves are not good or bad, they simply are. Making a moral judgment about our feelings– which we cannot control!-- only makes the impact more powerful. We not only feel bad, we admonish ourselves for feeling bad! We should feel happy. We shouldn’t be anxious. The should and shouldn’ts make our unpleasant emotions feel even worse. And the actions we take when we are in the throes of denying or fighting our ‘bad’ feelings– numbing ourselves with food or alcohol, exploding at others, avoiding stressful situations– can cause harm. 

Model, Model, Model

The more we learn to tolerate distressing feelings, the more space we make for new and different feelings to emerge. As Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times, “The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” It is only when we let ourselves feel and notice our emotions that we loosen the hold they have on us. This is radical acceptance. It is transformative.

Model naming and sharing your feelings. Show your children that all feelings are part of being human, and nothing to be ashamed of. It is vital that children see that their parents feel and manage difficult emotions. Teach them healthy strategies for weathering emotional storms. Breathe. Talk to a loved one. Hug someone tight. Let them know you understand that what they are feeling is hard, but not bad. Help them feel intense emotions and congratulate them when they move through them. Shower children with praise when they can name and express their feelings.

Be The Sky

Show children that feelings pass like the weather. They are like the sky. Yes, a thunderstorm can be upsetting. But the sky is not hurt by storms, and they eventually pass. Just as you cannot control feelings, you cannot stop a storm from coming. But you can minimize the damage! Observing your own ‘dark clouds’ clues– increased agitation, sensitivity, rumination– can help you weather the storm safely. Finally, appreciate that the storm was natural and even necessary. After all, without the storm, there are no rainbows. Without some pain, there is no growth.

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

― Pema Chödrön

Learning to embrace and grow through difficult emotions takes practice and support. We can help. Schedule a free 15 minute consultation with us here.

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