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PART 2: WHY, WHY, WHY? #2 PAINFUL CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
“Why can’t all parents keep their children feeling safe and secure?”
My clients wonder about this a lot, and it’s especially poignant when they’re parents themselves. They want to know:
“Why can’t some parents soothe their children when they’re scared or distressed?”
“What stops parents giving children the confidence they need to explore the world around them?”
These are massive questions with complex answers and every situation is different. But the most important thing to remember is this…
“Almost all parents love their children and want to do the best for them. So when they don’t manage to meet their children’s emotional needs it’s usually not down to unwillingness or lack of effort but something else that’s getting in the way.”
Here are some of the factors that make it difficult for them:
- Children’s needs are very varied and different, and lots of parents don’t have the skills and sensitivity to understand what their particular child requires. This is especially difficult if the child and the parent have very different temperaments.
- Parents often handle their children the same way as their own parents, family or friends do – which might be far from what their child needs
- Or they might go to the other extreme and do the opposite of everything that made them unhappy during their own childhood, (for example someone who had parents who were never around might be overly possessive and smothering with their own child).
- If parents have an ANXIOUS or AVOIDANT attachment style themselves, this can affect how they interact with their children. For example an ANXIOUS parent can be too tense to calm a child down or let her explore, while an AVOIDANT parent might feel more comfortable keeping an emotional distance.
- Families go through difficult life events and stressful circumstances that absorb parents’ attention and energy, making it more difficult to focus on the child’s needs. There are many research studies showing that adults who have an ANXIOUS or AVOIDANT attachment style are more likely to have been though some of the stressful events in our checklist of Painful experiences when you were growing up (e.g. parental divorce, mental illness, alcoholism, abuse or absence). One study found that 73% of 18 year olds who had an ANXIOUS attachment style had experienced parental divorce before the age of 8, compared with only 28% of the SECURE 18 year olds.
- There’s also some evidence of a genetic component that makes people more susceptible to becoming ANXIOUS or AVOIDANT. Insecure parents may pass this on to their children so everyone’s starting off with the odds stacked against them.
I find this last point especially intriguing as it helps me to answer a question that my clients often ask at this point: ‘WHY ME?’. In other words, why did experiences that happen to lots of children leave them with Emotional Baggage that messes up their relationships, while other women get through far worse experiences apparently unscathed and go on to have ‘normal’ relationships?