Dr. Saliha Afridi On Her Motherhood Journey And Parenting From The Inside Out
The clinical psychologist, Managing Director of The LightHouse Arabia and Bazaar Arabia’s columnist discusses the importance of reparenting yourself alongside your children..
Many years ago, before I was expecting my first child, I was so anxious about how I would mother my own children. To cope with my anxiety, I did what many mothers do, and started reading books and doing parenting research. I read so much that I eventually ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on the topic of parenting (no, I wasn’t controlling at all!). Then as I had my children – 1, 2, 3, 4 – I realised that everything that I had learned about the ‘how-to’ of motherhood, didn’t seem to work in the moment when I was anxious or angry. I realised I could not implement the strategies or techniques from a true and deep place unless I was aware of the obstacles between who I wanted to be for my children versus how I was showing up for them. This is when my inner journey towards understanding my own triggers and healing my own childhood wounds began.
As mothers, we all want children who are capable, confident, value centered, and resilient but what we don’t realised is that we can unknowingly get in the way of our children’s development. This is because when we parent from an unconscious place, we blindly do what was done to us, and let our emotions rule, so parenting becomes a reactive process rather than something we are intentional and deliberate about. When this type of parenting is happening, history repeats itself and we pass down our unresolved issues and our unrecognised complexes to our children.
As I have become increasingly aware of my role in the ‘parenting’ dynamic, I have come to realise that my children came into my life to give me my greatest challenges and my greatest gifts. They came to me to bring forth what I needed to heal in me – and in doing that my children became my companions, my guides, and my healers at every stage of my journey towards becoming more conscious.
Here are a few things I have learned on my journey of motherhood…
As you pass on your genes, you also pass on our unhealed emotional wounds and traumas. If you did not heal those wounds or traumas, they become a part of your dynamic with your children and eventually it becomes internalised as their operating system. You cannot lecture your children into having healthier relationships, when you do not have healthy relationships. You cannot teach healthy boundaries when they see you never establishing those boundaries within your relationships. Children will do as you do, and they will be as you are.
You will need to reparent yourself alongside parenting your children. The inner child is a part of your psyche that is vulnerable and innocent and it carries emotions, memories and messages from the past. The very nature of childhood can be wounding because as children we are small, powerless, at the mercy of an adult. And the most well intentioned parents can be experienced as neglectful to a unknowing child who wants them to be present all the time.
It does not have to be a ‘capital T’ trauma for you to have an inner child that needs healing or care. Reparenting yourself means giving yourself plenty of what you needed as a child but might not have gotten: attention, acceptance, approval, compassion, understanding, or nurturance.
What triggers you about your children is something in your psyche that is asking to be made conscious. Children come into our lives as mirrors. They reflect back to us what we need to work on within ourselves. Control, guilt, shame, boundaries, patience, fear, trust, surrender, self-acceptance are all themes that will show up in the parent-child dynamic, and they are being summoned from the unconscious by your child’s behaviour and your reaction to it. As the saying goes, “where you stumble, there lies your treasure”.
Discipline is not the same thing as protection or control. Discipline is from the Latin word disciplina, meaning “instruction and training.” It is derived from the root word discere – to learn.” This is a very different meaning of discipline than what many parents are doing with their children, which falls within the category of control. When you protect your children from difficult life lessons in childhood, when you tell them what to do rather than help them find their own voice, when you punish and don’t allow for mistakes or failures in childhood – when you compromise their ability to grow up to be resilient, problem solving, capable individuals. It is in childhood they will learn how to handle moral dilemmas, how to live their values, how to cope with the consequences of their actions, as well as how they will be self-authoring individuals who are authentic and true to themselves.
You take more than you give when you spoil your children. Many parents say that they would like to give their children ‘everything they did not have’; and while it is a natural instinct to want to give to our children the best of what we can afford and to want them to have a life that is comfortable, whether unconsciously or in excess, we take away their opportunity to take responsibility for their own happiness. Some struggle is important to cultivate good character. Giving to children in excess where they did not earn those things or experiences results in children becoming adolescents and adults who are self-absorbed, lacking in self-control, and susceptible to learned helplessness as well as more serious clinical difficulties like depression or anxiety.
So as I continue onto a different phase in my journey as a parent, now with three teenagers and a seven-year old, I am becoming aware that it is our egoic self that believes that we ‘have children’ – no, we do not ‘have’ them; they are not our possession and they do not belong to us. Our children are separate and whole individuals, with their own spirits and their own minds. They have come into our life through us and we have a sacred contract to walk together in this life, discipline each other, and heal each other.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s July/August 2022 issue.