Do you try to hide messy emotions from your kids? I know I do—mostly out of a belief that parents need to be strong and stoic in order for children to feel “secure.”
This came to mind recently, when I found out that a beloved uncle had unexpectedly passed away. I got the call on a Friday, and my children were lounging on the couch reading nearby. They immediately sensed from my tone on the phone that something was wrong. I had no time to make sense of the call and “smooth over” my grief before my eight- and six-year-olds were on top of me with questions. As I told them what happened, the tears spilled over. But instead of being perplexed and disturbed, the boys solemnly embraced me. “I’m so sorry, mom,” they said.
Cathy Cassani Adams, LCSW, one-half of the parenting duo that hosts my favorite podcast, Zen Parenting Radio, is a strong believer in emoting in front of children—and, sometimes even trickier, allowing them to do the same. She eloquently expands on this in a chapter of her just-released second book, Living What You Want Your Kids to Learn: The Power of Self-Aware Parenting. She’s shared an excerpt with HHK, below.
Why feeling emotion is essential for you and your kids
(an excerpt from Living What You Want Your Kids to Learn: The Power of Self-Aware Parenting, Be U publishing, 2014)
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just feel the good feelings? If we could bypass what makes us feel disappointed, sad, or uncomfortable?
While it would be wonderful to just feel love, joy, and a sense of peace, emotions are a package deal. We either feel them all, or it’s difficult to feel anything at all.
This doesn’t mean we have to suffer when painful feelings arise. To illustrate what I mean, we can acknowledge anxiety without becoming a worrier. We can feel the injustice of something without flying into a rage. Emotions don’t have to become a mode of being.
Too often we feel something, then push it away for fear of becoming angry, weak, or extremely sad. When we do so, we suppress the natural signals our body sends us to keep us aware.
Denying what we are feeling leads to a state of repression. Shoved out of sight, the emotion morphs into a state, such as constant anxiety, impatience, or a critical spirit. Such dysfunctional patterns of behavior become a hallmark of our personality. Consequently, we’re mad at everything, but we don’t know why; or sad much of the time, without anything in particular causing us sadness in the moment.
Emotions aren’t the problem. It’s our inability to fully feel our emotions that gets us in trouble. If we would just allow a feeling to come up, let the tears flow, face up to whatever it’s about—such as what’s making us angry—the emotion wouldn’t fester. Once acknowledged and felt, it can be released. Then we don’t waste our valuable energy pretending not to feel a certain way when we obviously do, or telling ourselves and others that things don’t bother us when everyone can see how bothered we are.
Distracting ourselves from what we are feeling—denying our emotions—is commonly referred to as numbing. This takes many forms, such as excessive use of alcohol, overeating, indulging in drugs or medicating ourselves, being a shopaholic, spending all our spare time with technology, and staying busy, which is the most socially acceptable form of numbing. How often do we keep ourselves busy so that we don’t have to deal with how we’re truly feeling? By being perpetually busy, we keep our focus away from what’s going on inside us, preferring anything to having to feel.
The really sad part about this is that anything going on inside us isn’t trying to harm us. It doesn’t come into our lives to hurt us. Rather, it’s trying to heal us, moving us toward greater wholeness. Its objective is to help us let go of something we no longer need in our lives, which enables us to return to a more peaceful way of being.
Children get this. They know how to have a good cry, and they know how to express disapproval or call out something that seems unjust. But what do we do when they express what they are feeling? We order them to “stop it.” We tell them they are being manipulative, too dramatic, or insensitive. In this way, we teach them their emotions aren’t desirable. So they learn to numb out and pretend.
What if we felt our feelings instead? What if we actually accepted our emotions, neither reacting to them nor suppressing them, but allowing them to pass through us?
To take this approach to our emotions is to appreciate our body’s natural ability to release what it doesn’t need. It also empowers us to teach our kids to do the same. We could share tools that would help them appropriately discuss and release whatever they may be feeling. In this way they learn to honor their feelings.
All of us—parents and children—need to embrace our emotions as normal, as an essential aspect of being human. Whether it’s a good feeling or not-so-good feeling, we all need to give ourselves and each other permission to feel it fully.
To read more of Cathy Cassani Adams’ newest book, buy it at Amazon, here.
Photo credits: Top: Sara Bjork, via Photo Pin, cc; bottom, Cathy Cassani Adams
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