A key strategy for parents!
There is no perfect parent, the only solution and our most important obligation as parents is to take responsibility!
All of us who are parents know very well that no matter how much we want to, no matter how hard we try, there is no way we can avoid experiencing difficult situations with our children. We have all behaved in ways that we may have regretted or certainly knew we could or would have liked to have handled differently.
The question that arises thought, is now what? what could I have done in situations that went wrong and are now in the past. The solution is one and very basic. Repair!!!
We need to learn how to be good parents by learning to fix situations
Mending is the process where we go back to the moment when we lost connection and communication and took responsibility for what took place!!!
For a child it is an instinctive need to be able to adapt to the environment and circumstances. The way it does this is by internalizing the badness, i.e. the wrongness. This is because children need to feel that there is a safe environment. The evolutionary understanding of adaptation that happens automatically is that their environment is safe and good, parents are good. Therefore what is automatically internalized as an understanding is the belief that they are to blame, a sense of shame is created and a belief that they are to blame for the mistake and therefore do not deserve love but punishment.
They create an internal story that they don’t deserve love, that they are not good enough, that they are not lovable. This tendency to blame themselves makes them prone to too many mental difficulties such as depression, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness.
Therefore, as parents we must come in and fill in the missing critical factors in the events that took place so that they do not become traumatic for our children. Take responsibility and remove the guilt from the children. Restore truth, safety, connection and love. We take responsibility for what we did wrong, describe our feelings and behaviors, and recreate the scene with what we as parents should have done right! We acknowledge our vulnerability and our weaknesses and express them honestly to our children.
@Discover Growth Therapy/ parent counseling
Georgia Kryparakou
Psychologist MSc-Psychotherapist
