Intercepting – The Ghost In the Nursery Part 2 The Importance of Mindfulness In Parenting On Intergenerational Transmission of Parenting Practices

I am driving down the dual carriageway, a few years ago and I have just had a report that my son did something in direct contradiction to what we have previously discussed he shouldn’t do. I am exhausted after a long day at work with its very own challenges and I catch myself shouting at the top of my voice at my 6 year old so much so I can literally feel my temperature rising. If anyone saw me I imagine they would have thought I was losing my mind. He is sitting in the back of the car and he is crying and I shout “stop crying or I will give you something to cry about!” I hear myself and I know at that very moment that I have been triggered. Those are not my words! I stopped, pulled the car over as soon as I could and breathed to pull myself together. This is not ok! What he has done is benign!  It is not deserving of my behavior. 

In Part 1 ‘Discovering The Ghost In the Nursery’, we explored clinical social worker and child psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg’s metaphor of “ghosts in the nursery.” The unseen presence of the past that influences the present, through the impact of a parent’s early experiences of the way they were raised, on their own parenting style. It is what we refer to as transgenerational or intergenerational transmission of parenting practices. 

Understanding The Past 

Freud speaks of “unlaid ghosts” in a similar way to how Fraiberg speaks of “ghost in the nursery”. If we do not take the time to understand our past traumas, whether little ‘t’ traumas or Big ‘T” traumas, they will keep returning to haunt us in one way or another in our parenting and particularly if this trauma was as a result of poor treatment by someone who we regarded as a parent. Unlaid ghosts reappear in our parenting much like the uninvited “ghost in the nursery” especially in response to behaviors in our children. It can give rise to unconscious fears, shame, insecurities, and wounds from our past, but particularly from our childhood, triggering unhelpful and damaging impulses and reactions. Reactions may appear in the form of anger towards and frustration with our children as a mask for these more vulnerable feelings. 

When I had the experience above, I had already been practicing gentle parenting. However, in that instance I found myself caught in what Fraiberg calls an “unguarded moment”. Although I was practicing gentle parenting, I was not yet practicing mindfulness in my parenting, something I eventually learned was an essential component to carrying out any type of positive parenting practice. I was physically there but my mind was elsewhere and as a result, I was ambushed by my past. My anger was a mask for my feelings of fear and embarrassment about what my son had done. What he had done was minor in the grand scheme of things, but I had my own held feelings about a similar incident from my childhood where it had been embarrassing and painful for me. I had somehow been taken straight back to that moment and was again arrested by the embarrassment, feeling it all over again.

The Shadow 

We hold these past hurts / wounds from our traumas in what Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the Shadow. The Shadow refers to that place within our psyche where we hold our deepest wounds and those parts of ourselves we prefer to keep out of our consciousness because we do not want to know about or remember them. It’s the place we hide those parts of ourselves which we want to hide from others. Where we hide those wounds which shame us or cause us to believe that we are less than, that we are flawed, undeserving, and difficult to love. Those wounds that we fear are too heavy and painful to carry in the open (consciousness). According to Jung “ EVERYONE carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” (Carl Jung, 1938. p.131) 

The Problem with Neurons 

I had not processed that particular childhood experience. As a matter of fact it was the last thing on my mind. I wouldn’t have thought of it ever. I don’t believe it was ever an issue for me until my son repeated the very thing I did as a child and that unlaid ghosts invaded our proverbial nursery, causing me to behave in a way that shamed me and hurt my son. My well meaning intentions of being a gentle mother were thwarted by an unprocessed painful memory. I was triggered because at the time I had my own experience as a child, my brain wired the neurons of what I did with the painful embarrassment that unfolded afterwards. So when my son repeated the same behavior, my brain made an association with my son’s behavior and my painful memory, pulling the feeling of that memory out of my Shadow and causing me to be back there in that embarrassing moment once again, because according to Donald Hebb (1949) “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” 

If there is an unprocessed area from our childhood where we have been hurt in the past, an area we hold in our Shadow parts, we can be sure that there is a high likelihood that our children’s behaviors will trigger it. Unfortunately, if we do not deal with these wounds from our traumas, we often end up inadvertently wounding our children with them and often passing on the same trauma to our children. A trauma which was most likely also passed down to us through intergenerational transmission of trauma. As Jung said, the less we are conscious of those wounds the blacker and denser they become. Very often, when a memory of a wound is triggered, it can cause us to react to a benign situation (behavior of our children) with such intensity that it can even surprise us. That unprocessed experience has caused a wound that continues to worsen, creating an unconscious snag that prevents us from carrying out our desires to be good parents. 

Making Sense of What Happened 

We have learnt over the years through science, that it’s not just what happened to us in our childhood that determines how well we turn out as parents but a major influencing factor is how well we make sense of what happened to us. Avoiding, running and hiding from those experiences isn’t going to support a positive parenting journey and a secure attachment with our children. Instead it is often the opposite. What will help is thinking about our experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly and honestly assessing and understanding how it impacted us, what was helpful and what was damaging to us as children. Sometimes it might be important to go over this with a trusted friend or a therapist so that we can safely and effectively make sense of our past, recognise when it is influencing our present and prevent it from invading our nurseries, and homes, “thwarting our most well meant intentions” as parents. 

In ‘Discovering the Ghost in the Nursery’ Part 1 we spoke about how the uninvited ghost in the nursery keeps inventing mischief in our lives and the lives of our children. We also discovered that the key to stopping the ghosts from intruding to invent mischief is in the “unguarded moments”. It is in these moments that the intruders from the parental past may break through “the magic circle”. (Fraiberg et al,1975, p.429)

For us to break the cycle, to prevent the wounds from our past from impacting our precious children, it is important that we guard our moments, and according to Bögels et al. (2010) an effective way to do this is by applying the practice of mindful parenting.

Mindfulness

Essentially mindfulness is being able to stay connected to the present moment. It involves intentionally paying attention to what we are experiencing and being curious about the experience. What we want is for our minds to be focused on the present and in so doing be aware of our emotions, of when we are triggered by something. It supports us being attuned to our children and helps us to make informed processed decisions.

It’s normal for the mind to wander but practice helps you to come back to the present. This practice of bringing your attention back to the present and being curious about what is happening in the moment is essential for keeping parenting moments guarded. It means that you can be present at the time you are having an experience with your child and recognise when something that your child may have done has triggered a wound in you. It is in the moment that you have been triggered that the unlaid ghosts begin their work and if you are not consciously present to stop them they will go on to invent mischief and thwart your good intentions.

When you recognise that you have been triggered, it provides emotional awareness. You can pause to process that feeling in the moment and respond to your child instead of reacting without thought. It means, you pay attention to how you are feeling, but you don’t allow that feeling to control your actions. So although your child may behave in a way that causes you to feel angry or frustrated, instead of reacting with a raised angry voice or by physically punishing your child, you observe your feelings, recognise it as shame, fear, helplessness or whatever it’s true form is and respond in a way that supports your child’s development and your relationship with them. 

Mindfulness also allows us to take that moment and further process our feelings about it later on, to make sense of what has happened. It allows us to see how our trigger is connected to past experiences and to make sense of those past experiences so that we can be better equipped to respond if the same or a similar behavior is repeated by our children. It supports us in guarding those moments when unlaid ghosts can visit and invent mischief in the proverbial nursery.

What Will You Do?

It’s important to see our past unprocessed experiences as frightening as “ghosts” creeping into our homes, invading our spaces, influencing our parenting, impacting our children’s lives and “inventing mischief”. Because they are in fact as frightening as ghosts. By far most of our parents had good intentions. Just like us they did the best they could with what they knew to be good parenting and very often did better than their parents did. But unfortunately most would have had unprocessed intergenerational traumas in their shadow that came back as ghosts and impacted their parenting without them even being aware of what was happening. When you know better you do better.  We can choose to let these ghosts be temporary unwanted visitors, by dealing with our past, bringing those unprocessed experiences and feelings to our consciousness and practicing mindful parenting or alternatively we can choose to let them take up residency and be destructive in our families.

You will not get it perfectly right, but if you are intentional about it you will make a difference in the way your children experience life and in the way they go on to parent their own children. They may not get it perfectly right either when they have children, but they will also go on to make an even greater difference in their children’s lives because of the work you do now. And this my friend is how you create a positive legacy. This is how you become the New Ancestor. What will you do? 

Read Discovering The Ghost In the Nursery Part 1

Come on over to @thewholeparenting to join the conversation and for more of the science and practical tips on best practice in parenting our precious little ones.