Controlling Your Parenting Triggers

And then also, just to that question, too, of how do we not put our emotions on our kids - that's the work man. Join the club, that is your lifelong work - doing your work about your emotions and what triggered you in that moment, right? Because we could take all of us and put us all in a room, and we could throw our kids all in the middle and have our kids say, to us, what we would deem is the most hurtful thing that they could say. And what my kid says to me, will trigger me based on my past, my childhood, my wounds, my trauma, my shit, right? My kid, you could take that speech bubble and put it into any of the other kids in the room, and they could say it to each of you - it might not trigger you, or your kid over there might trigger me because they are piercing something that's unhealed and a need from my childhood that's unmet, right.

This is what's so amazing about our kids. This is why I always call kids little yodas, because they're our greatest teacher, because they will often highlight for you where your unmet needs are from your own childhood, where your unresolved shit is from childhood, all of your baggage. Your kids are just like, here's a mirror, hi, and just gonna hold that up for you and show you all the stuff that you got to work on. And all this stuff that hurts and all the stuff that's not healed. So when your child is being mean or hurtful, it's probably going to trigger stuff in you. Not all of us, some of us, but then the angry kid might trigger this parent doesn't trigger that parent, right? Because we all have different stuff from our past. So I would be getting curious about what is it that is coming up in me when my child says or does the thing and then what do I do with my emotions? How do I regulate myself? What work have I done on unpacking my childhood wounds, my old wounds. That's something we got to look at and your kids are great at making us look at all of that stuff.

 

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