Being What Your Kid Needs (Internal Family Systems, pt 3)

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Today, we’re wrapping up the 3-part series on Internal Family Systems (IFS). This episode is all about being what your kid needs, with lots of strategies to show up as the calm, connected parent you want to be.

Note: If you haven’t listened to the first 2 episodes in this series, I recommend you go back and do that. There’s a lot of background information that will help this all make a lot more sense.

Preventing Childhood Trauma

A lot of parents come to me with the goal of not f*cking up their kids. They don’t want to do something that creates trauma in their children. But when you are parenting from a place of reactivity, insecurity, stress, or overwhelm (your wounded parts), you may end up accidentally injuring parts of your kid. 

Trauma happens when we have a difficult experience and the emotional pain is not processed. It gets stuck inside of us. If your child’s pain is not validated and seen by the grown-ups in their life, they may end up confused or thinking that something is wrong with them. They might feel worthless, unlovable, or shameful. 

One common example of this is bypassing emotion. It can look like rescuing, jumping quickly to logic or a solution, bribes, looking to the future. Doing this can give your kid the message that their emotion isn’t okay or valid. 

If you’re sitting there thinking, “Great, I’ve already done all these bad things to my kids. I’ve already created trauma,” take a deep breath. Your children are still children, and they’re still processing their feelings. 

You can start now being that compassionate leader for your family. I’ve seen it thousands of times. Mom changes >> Kids change. They heal in real time. It’s incredible and so, so beautiful. 

Compassionate parenting is not about making sure our kids don't ever feel badly. It's helping them learn what to do with those bad feelings when they happen (i.e. growing up to be emotionally healthy).

I think of emotional health in terms of emotional literacy:

1. I know what I’m feeling
2. I know how to talk about my feelings
3. I know what to do with my feelings
4. I can recognize and understand how others are feeling (aka empathy)

And just like literacy in reading or writing, these are skills that can be taught and must be practiced. 

Being What Your Kid Needs

Ultimately, your kid needs you to be available to help them process their big feelings and provide a model for emotional health.

Once you’ve begun to step into your SELF energy (like I talked about in the last episode), you start leading your life from a more grounded, calm place. You become less reactive toward your children. 

Here are some ways to bring that SELF-led energy to your kid.

Be a witness

It can be difficult to be around someone who is very emotional and activated. Your child’s big feelings might trigger emotion in you (that’s your amygdala at work). A lot of parents fall apart when their kids fall apart. And this is actually pretty terrifying for the child. 

When you are willing to witness your child’s pain and help them process it, it can be released. Your kid needs you to be the grown-up in the room. And they need to feel safe enough to express their authentic pain, desires, and whatever else is going on inside of them - their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, the circumstances or situations in their life where they're being hurt. 

A witness is not a participant. You are not participating in your child’s pain. You’re holding the energy that they are going to be okay.

This isn’t about being dismissive or bypassing their pain. It’s about you being in your SELF energy so that you can be a witness to their pain without getting sucked into it. You've been through hard things, and you know that they pass. So when your child is struggling, you can have the perspective that this difficult moment won’t last forever. 

Not sure if you’re in a place to be what your kid needs? Ask yourself a few simple questions:

Am I calm? 
Am I able to witness this pain right now without needing to fix it?
Can I be curious and compassionate right now?

If the answer to these questions is no, and you’re stuck in your own feelings, take a pause break, soothe yourself, reset, and try again. Remind yourself, “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”

Model emotional health

Your responsibility as the parent is to model the experiences that our kids need, and this includes emotional health and regulation. 

When you’re in SELF-led energy, you can let your kid borrow your sense of self, your strong, calm, grounded center - until they get better and stronger at tapping into their own. In IFS, this is called being a “hope merchant”.

Get curious

Kids give us clues about how they’re feeling through their behavior. Supporting them requires you to get curious about the feelings that are driving the behavior. Why are they acting the way they are? Do you notice any patterns, like times of day they tend to act out or certain circumstances that trigger them? How can you support them and help them process their big feelings?

Curiosity is also a clue that you’re tapping into SELF energy, that you are getting closer to being in that truly compassionate, connected space with your kids. 

Use the Connection Tool

The Connection Tool is made up of 3 parts:

1. Narrate the behavior you see.
2. Name the feeling. Try saying, “I wonder if you’re feeling…?”
3. Now what? Validate the feeling and ask what they want to do now (or give some ideas of what they can do with the feeling).

Walk your child through this process to help them work through their emotions.

Create a positive vision of the future

It can be really challenging to listen to your kid’s pain without trying to fix it, especially because you love them so, so much. When I’m worried about my kids, I actively think positive thoughts about their future. 

If you want your kid to believe that they’re going to be okay, you have to believe it first. You are the light in their life that offers peace and perspective. 

Give it some time

If you’ve been reactive or tried to bypass your child’s emotion in the past, they might not trust this new calm energy right away. Allow time for them to learn that you’re not going to fall apart, you’re not going to jump into the fix it/change it/stop it/solve it energy. Show them that they’re safe with you. You’re ready, and you can handle it.

Keep working on your relationship with your SELF. 

When you notice that your inner voice is critical and negative, that means there’s a part of you that is trying to protect you from pain. Ask that voice if it would be willing to be quiet. Get curious about what it's worried about. What's it protecting you from? Can you soothe that? Can you let that part of you know it's safe? 

The more you can tap into your SELF energy, the more your children will be able to access their whole SELF, as well.

You’ll Learn:

• The 4 parts of emotional literacy
• How to let your child “borrow” your nervous system as they build their own emotional strength
• 3 things all kids want to hear from their parents
• 7 strategies for leading your child toward emotional health

Resources:

• Episode 183: Internal Family Systems, pt 1
• Episode 184: Finding Your SELF (Internal Family Systems, pt 2)
• How To Heal series
• Episode 3: Connection is Key to Improving Behavior (learn how to use the Connection Tool)
• Learn how to take a Pause Break