How you react afterwards will either feed the cycle of abuse (self and other) or be an opportunity to grow and change

After years of beating up on myself for blowing up on the kids, I am not at all blasé about the effects of blowing up on the kids. However I also see clearly now that my reaction to blowing it used to cause a cycle of further blow-ups. The more I beat myself up for blowing up, the more I felt like a monster. The more I felt like a monster, the more I was capable of proving the point the next time my anger flew out of control. The movie The Secret really is right; what I focus on expands, and focusing on the times I fell dramatically short of my parenting ideas was part of the problem.

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Thanks to Dr. Gordon Neufeld, best-selling author of Hold on to Your Kids, I’ve known for years now that for kids to adapt to what isn’t working in their life, they need to feel their sorrow, which often involves tears. Sometimes kids get stuck developmentally and they don’t feel their sadness or have their tears. The sad thing is that when kids lose their tears, they aren’t able to learn from what isn’t working for them, and are often destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

My daughter got stuck in being defended against her tears and vulnerability when she was young. As a result, I have had to over the years help her to feel her tears, instead of reacting harshly and lashing out verbally or physically. Last night was a perfect example of where helping her find her sadness stopped her from reacting angrily to a situation she didn’t like.

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Today was one of the countless times when I gave thanks to Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s for his brilliant parenting information. Without knowing how best to handle conflict with kids, I would have had a destructive fight with my son today. Instead, we ended up closer for the conflict! Talk about win-win.

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