Something I have discovered on my parenting journey has been that although new frameworks open space to consider what else is possible when riding the big waves with our children, the real growth happens when I get curious and move into what lies beneath, my undercurrent. Patterns repeat often out of our awareness.

I remember sitting in my daughter’s room during a moment of overwhelm, saying the supportive things I’d read in the books, trying a different approach to the situation, and allowing her to have space to unravel. I remember that forced calm inside of me that I perfected in my career as a nurse, and noticing the deeper undercurrents that most adoptive mothers start to notice very quickly, that contain the rules they had growing up, the fears of hoping you have what it takes to be a good mother, and the pressures that seem to come from every angle when you first start out.  I remember the stories that came up for me of all the what-ifs in the moment of unpredictability, wondering how long it would be like this.  Even in my calm voice, sitting on the floor nearby, a duality was occurring in me.  My expression didn’t match my deep undercurrent that was hidden under the knowledge I had accumulated.  With the best of intentions, I was inauthentic in that moment, hoping for an outcome and tightening into what was wanting to move in my neurology. At the time, I labeled it as just normal fear, something that could be managed, rather than recognizing that it was valuable information ready to be integrated so that my undercurrents could shift and be felt by my child.

The question I continued to hold onto was, how can I create safety pathways in my parenting so that my daughter could start to feel safer?  What did I need to learn to implement the right strategy in the best way?  I was always seeking what else was possible in the box of more knowledge to gain, hoping it was going to make a lasting difference.

At that time, I didn’t recognize that the more powerful line of inquiry was, who do I need to become to create a safer experience with my daughter.

I found so many amazing new frameworks. Dr. Ross Greene’s CPS model was something tangible that satisfied my intellect that I could just start with, and honestly, it was the permission for me to move back into a more trauma-informed lens that the well-intentioned behavioral therapists were teasing me out of in different ways with more compliance-based strategies. The schools were simply not willing to let go of any demands/expectations and felt strongly that consistency and functional behavior assessments would win the race, despite my monthly meetings trying to convince them otherwise. I got to experience different frameworks in practice and noticed how my daughter responded to each. Robyn Gobbels‘ work was another huge game-changer for me, as I started to play with the mindset that there was nothing going on other than a nervous system not feeling safe, and all behavior was related back to that. What seemed like rude behavior was her nervous system starting to move into stress pathways, and I could engage in ways that brought her back to feeling safe, rather than correcting her, which never went well. It again was a deep permission for me to let go of signals 2 and 3 (cultural expectations and what was programmed in me as a child). I remember relaxing into more moments because of her framework. I remember the shift I saw when I considered the saying, “See a child differently, and you will see a different child”.  I remember starting to discover how true that really was and how my daughter could literally feel that shift of perception. When I started to worry about her, I noticed the shift in her, and when I went back into the different mindsets, I noticed her move back into more regulated states. It was profound for me to notice that. Especially when others claimed she was being manipulative and doing it on purpose. That I needed a better approach, or it would not get better. That was a definitive choice point for me where fear was very present. I chose what was instinctual, digested the fear, stood alone in what I knew, and the behavior shifted on its own over time.  I got to experience how true the new science of behavior was.

What started to become a quest to shift everything I believed into neuroscience turned out to be another huge discovery for me over time. I still noticed my undercurrents were getting my attention in big moments.  Respite breaks and bubble baths were simply not enough, and my nervous system felt like it was always trying to catch up. Big moments still happened more than not, even though she was starting to heal from autistic burnout.

What I came to realize later was that, although the new information created space for some changes, it wasn’t enough. Gaining more information was sending me in circles.  In my attempts to understand my daughter and myself better and to be a good parent, I was moving away from something deep inside me, trying to get my attention in all of this.

It was my undercurrent. As babies, we are sponges, taking in everything we experience.  

We calibrate to how others engage, what moves deeply in their own undercurrents, and take that on as reality. We are programmed in many ways. Every single experience we have ever had has been part of our undercurrents that run and create our reality of what is happening out there. Even with the best of parenting, we all have experienced moments where our deep internal impulse was interrupted, and our attention was diverted from being connected to our bodies, up and out to an external reference (parent, daycare worker, teacher, boss, etc.). What never had space to fully move and integrate in every moment was stored in our neurology as anchors. We know that a fetus’s nervous system is affected by a mother feeling stressed during her pregnancy. So much becomes part of how we experience ourselves and our world before we are even born. Cultural conditions have taught us to manage our experiences rather than allow ourselves to be fully connected to our bodies through the movement that comes with that for integration. We have been programmed for compliance, and that is what fires off in those harder moments because we never had permission to move directly into our deep impulses.  Not fully, anyway.

In my adoption training, I remember learning about the cycle between a mother and infant that creates the child’s neuropathways to know if they are safe or not for regulation. The infant has a deep impulse that says, “I am hungry.” She cries, and her mother hears her baby cry. The mother’s deep impulse is to go to her baby, and, under slight stress activation in her nervous system, her own impulse dances with her undercurrents, and she goes to her baby and meets her need. If the mother shows up to her child without diluting the charge that was activated, her baby calibrates that as information in her own nervous system. It becomes an imprint in her own undercurrent. Later, a child can formulate their own beliefs about what has been programmed, which further creates more of the undercurrents that will dance when she experiences different things in her life. Ideally, a mother will be in her own activation and allow that to integrate and digest, and she will meet her baby in regulation. That in turn creates an imprint for her infant to start developing its own safety neuropathways, knowing that when she cries, her need for survival will be met.

This is something I have always kept very close to me when faced with big moments. I had to replicate that stage, except she was eight and I was a brand-new mother. My activation and what I did with it were the key to my daughter having access to it herself. In short, my undercurrents explored and integrated while I parent is the very thing that will have the most impact on our experiences. I still reach for strategies and seek out new education on everything nervous system related, and I also know there is more to engage deep inside of my body. Both are valuable, and for me, both are necessary.

The day I let go of everything I had learned and turned my attention from her to my body was the day everything changed.

It was a massive pattern interrupt in a lot of chaos, when strategy made zero difference, and I had stories come up in me that it was selfish to focus on myself rather than my daughter in that moment. The shift of my attention inward felt more intense, and it felt easier to just keep focusing out there on her. I sat on my sofa and put my attention deep at the base of my spine and felt so much fear and pain moving. It was all beautiful information begging to have space to move to be freed, and it was mine. It had so many stories, and I chose to let each go as they came and kept focusing on where I felt the sensations firing off in my body. I opened to it, surrendered to it, and followed where it went deep inside me. Tears came, heat flushed over my face, and I just kept inviting it all, giving it space.  My daughter was in the room, and I noticed her energy shifting. Eventually, we were both completely regulated after the integration was completed. I had literally just processed a massive amount of stored information that was in my undercurrents, ready to expand so that I could start to evolve to become the mother that my child needed to be able to build the new neuropathways that would take her out of her stress responses. It took massive intensity to ignite the movement in me so that she could rewire. Her behavior had huge intelligence for that very reason. Everything changed that day. I couldn’t not know what I knew. My body was able to process much faster than my mind could ever possibly handle in under five minutes of deeply opening into the resistance and pain that was surfacing. As I continued to allow myself to be in this process of what the WEL-Systems Institute® labels Quantum Triggering Life Choices (QTLC™), her nervous system shifted dramatically. It eventually became less dramatic as my body was able to trust what I wanted to tighten initially, and I was able to open and use breath to pump the information to move as I was engaging with her.

There is just so much to the adoptive parent’s experience. We don’t get to start off with attachment to our children; we have to create that as we go, and often it takes a lot for our children to trust us with their hearts. After talking with other adoptive parents who have children with sensitive nervous systems, we all agree that you just can’t even begin to fully understand unless you are living it yourself. We are often judged by others who have no clue the dynamics involved when our children are not behaving the way society expects, because their undercurrents contain so much. We love our children and wonder why the world remains so ignorant.

Our undercurrents often turn into rapids, and that feels overwhelming. Especially when we care so deeply.

In the process of trying on the WEL-Systems® paradigm I have come to engage the process of QTLC TM as often as I can remember to pattern interrupt a habitual response, move my attention away from what is happening out there and into my own body at the base of my spine, recognize the signals dancing so that I remember who I am which is the signal 1 that is a clear and direct knowing, not the stories and mind chatter that starts in a triggered moment.  I intentionally open into the resistance, and my breath pumps the information/emotion through my nervous system. In that I own the truth of my own experience, stay in that tough conversation with myself, not trying to dilute or dodge the sensations that present in my undercurrent, I dare to be willing to stand alone, and I end up shaping my experience moving forward when the integration completes. I then have access to new information that I didn’t have before because my nervous system literally changes. My undercurrent shifts, and my daughter changes in my experience of her. As I have come to be used to allowing more intensity to move more easily, I have noticed my daughter being able to have her intensity move more easily without manifestations of things becoming unsafe. We still have big moments at times as we meet new layers of information ready to be integrated. Those will always be there; what is changing is how we move through those big moments of nervous system intensity.  It looks different, and it certainly feels different.

I have discovered that my undercurrent really matters in how I show up as a parent to her, and I can not pretend it isn’t there when I feel things. I can no longer rationalize it back down into my nervous system, and why would I? For me, it is worth the work to get curious and explore what presents that is mine and not hers so that I don’t pass my own generational patterns to her as a set reality. No one has been spared their own undercurrent, yet culture has somehow convinced us that we can detach from it with our intellects and manage our lives that way. We shame others for feeling what they feel when their own generational patterns surface. We have been taught to push it away rather than meet it with curiosity. That might be enough for some, but for the ones like us, we are ready for the more that awaits deep inside of us, calling us. It is often disguised as issues with our children, but deeper under that is an inner world just waiting to be reclaimed. The joy and deep meaning that come from moving directly into what we have been taught to avoid at all costs is worth it.  For most of us, our children are here for the more that they are as well.  It is no coincidence that we have the children that we do. They are here as a gift for our own evolution if we know how to access that. Life can change very fast, and it’s deep inner work that can be engaged in every moment with the reconnection to our body, where all the scary stuff lives deeply embedded underneath all the strategies we learned to keep it at bay.  The triggers that ignite hold potential for both our children and us.  Why would we not want to fully engage it? There are ways to do so and presuppositions that allow for bigger contexts than the ones we keep recycling and calling reality. The greatest gift we can give our children is the unspoken permission for them to move directly into their own impulses in the undercurrents they have, and they can not do that unless we go first.