We can not meet our children on a level of creating potential if we have no sense of what it means to meet them in their full, unique truth. The truth is: we were taught to move away from our truth. Culture has created and sustained behaviorism, and faith that it would teach us how to survive and contribute to society. What it failed to do was teach us how to be in our truth as it is for us in each moment, and to allow others the same respect. “I want” was replaced with “I should” in the most subtle ways until it became so out of our awareness that we started to believe that it was our identity and personality. When our children are screaming because they want, and they are feeling our undercurrents of ‘you should,’ it creates a perfect storm of essence bumping up against cultural conditioning and programming. We label it with a diagnosis if it fits a certain criterion, which can be helpful or very limiting.
I remember reading how important validation of my child’s experience was when it came to co-regulation. As a new mother, that was easy on the strategy level of thought; however, my intentions behind that were to create an outcome of my preference, which was to stop a behavior, have her feel heard, and transition to our night routine. It wasn’t wrong, and yet over time, I noticed it felt manipulative in a subtle way. In my explorations of Dr. Ross Greene’s work and the WEL-Systems®, I realized that my intention and belief behind my strategies were limiting, and for us, it was just not enough. My daughter’s nervous system required a lot more from the systems around us, including me. Saying the right things with care was simply not enough, nor was scaffolding to set her up for success. I started to get curious about how she was mirroring me back as a little girl, and from there, I continued to go deeper.
Neuroscience showed me what else was possible in understanding my child and how to meet her as a unique individual, away from a hierarchy and without an agenda behind it, apart from cultural conditioning.
WEL-Systems® showed me how to align with the “what else” by learning to own my own truth of my unique experience as mine when my essence danced with everything I was taught by culture. I was able to reconnect with my unique signal, the one that I was slowly disconnected from in the name of good parenting and culture.
When we move to different perspectives, our bodies are still going to ask permission to shift the undercurrents that have had a big part in creating the experiences, and sometimes, we forget that we are attached to our bodies that contain everything we have ever experienced. We were taught not to go in there and defer to our intellects and yet true change lives in the actual movement in our bodies that then allows our intellects to have new information to choose from. To bypass our experience in our body is to deny our own birthright of expansion. In that process, we can change our experience of everything without anything changing out there. This is what I hope to model to my daughter as she learns to trust her ability to surrender and hold space for her whole self in her own emergence.
Our children can feel when someone is saying something from their intellect, and what lives in their body doesn’t match. That is why it feels so hard when we try a new strategy and end up exhausted from trying to dodge our own movement. What we are dodging is our truth. Parenting can be hard at times, and the world is quick to shame us when things are not in flow. The last thing we feel safe doing is owning the truth of it as it is for us and holding that space to allow all of it to be fully felt and integrated. Without that, we just try and get by, hoping the bubble baths and respite can give us a bit of a chance to restore more energy. Especially when we are parenting children with active nervous systems! There is more possible beyond mastering more strategies.
In our attempts to label children oppositional, defiant, or manipulative, we have failed to see that we are the root of it all. Not as in we are doing it wrong, but rather in how we have become a culture that silences truth in the name of good parenting and cultural conditioning. We have learned to separate our awareness from the deep impulses that happen in our bodies, which, in my belief , is who we are awaiting to be discovered as we expand.
Without knowing how to own your own truth and move into the energetic charge in our own nervous system to shift it, we end up parenting from a place of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle manipulation, and we teach that to our children and call it reality. There is just so much that repeats out of our own awareness until we are faced with a child who has a nervous system that refuses to comply with it all. Not only do they refuse to live their own truth, but they also don’t feel safe in environments that try to gaslight them out of it. There were many times I saw that as absolute brilliance, as my daughter held strong to her truth about her experience and called me out for not knowing what her truth was or for knowing more than her about what she needed for herself. She was right, I didn’t know what was best for her in that moment, she did.
There were other times, though, that it created a tension inside of me that felt almost unbearable in the level of frustration playing out. Often, my mind went straight to believing that if she couldn’t do what I was asking of her, she would not be able to survive this life. What kind of mother was I if I couldn’t get her to learn to clean up after herself or to eat veggies? Lol. I have the skills to scaffold this, and why were they not working? What I discovered was that it wasn’t even about that, the level of signals dancing in my body was a message that I had bypassed my own truth of my moment and deferred to my intellect. It was too painful to move into the discomfort of what that truth wanted to say. I was scared that if I went into that, it would mean it was true in the sense of an ultimate fixed truth, and that triggered all kinds of things I didn’t want to feel. I forgot that in those moments, I can own my experience and move into the process of QTLC™ and shift it.
Neuroscience helps us discover that there is more, and yet it can also create a duality if our experience goes unexamined and is dismissed. If we fail to listen to the chaos inside of ourselves, begging for attention.
Beliefs that our children come first, and we come last, also create a resistance to just stopping in that uncomfortable moment and reconnecting to what is calling us deep inside. I remember feeling shame for not focusing on my child in a moment of a trigger. It was interesting to unpack that and become curious about what else lives in me that prevents me from owning my own truth and moving into it to create a different and more expansive one for myself and my child.
Owning a truth that I know doesn’t match what I think I should feel in this moment with my child will trigger movement in my nervous system. Movement that we have labeled shame, guilt, blame, good mother, bad mother, etc., in attempts to slow it down or push it back down. All these stem from everything we noticed others doing and how our parents related to themselves. If they could not be in their own truth and hold space for the experience to integrate, to open space for us, then how would we even know that was a possibility for ourselves? No one is to blame, and it is very powerful to stop and become curious about it all.
Amazing things shifted when I got curious about what was coming up in me to digest, and that could only happen in a bigger context that presupposed everything held intelligence and that the body was far more able to process than our intellects. For me, that has been the magic that only WEL-Systems® has been able to provide. When shame presented, I didn’t get lost because I knew how it came to be and could see it as something going right for me, not something going wrong. In that, I learned to trust that everything that moved in me held potential, and everything that moved in my child also held intelligence and potential. Everything we have learned to resist has been there, waiting to be freed so we can literally shift our reality and engage it differently. Hard things are not so hard afterward.
One question I continued to ask myself was, “Who else did I need to become to engage with my daughter so that we could both be in our own unique truths, create space, and embrace the movement that followed as intelligence so that we could live a life in flow”? I was taught my worth depended on my ability to know the answers, but it was the quality of my questions that always led me to more than I was searching for. That is why the CODE Model™ and the Logical levels of thinking diagram in Louise Lebrun’s work have been such powerful tools for opening space and for trusting the movement to dilute and integrate the truths.
“Should’s” end up being replaced with “wants” that come from a place of integrity, not survival, when I live the WEL-Systems paradigm. We create differently as we reclaim who we really are when the old shows up and starts to dance. We don’t get lost because we know how to separate what is us and what isn’t. That comes from learning to engage ourselves with the deep places inside us that know our truth and can continue to create new truths and experiences.
We don’t have to keep repeating patterns we have learned; we expand after we contract. Both are necessary.
Who else do you want to become to experience it all differently? That is the potential that awaits, and our children don’t have to ever feel like they need to be anything different than who they currently are as they learn how to trust and engage what calls them deep inside their own bodies. Imagine that kind of world!
