Lately, I have been feeling stuck. As a mom, I've experienced how my own frustration has been affecting my relationship with my kids, especially my daughter. She is very similar to me, not in appearance, but in her personality. That's why I felt like I didn't have the "tools" to manage her.
In the end, what I learned was that I wanted to control her and everything around me. As she is growing and showing her likes and dislikes, her personality, and who she is, a deep part of me felt kind of attacked, yes, attacked.
I'm not talking about a physical attack; I'm talking about our deepest side, our unconscious. This little disk that has a memory for everything, this area that connects all events in life and generates conclusions depending on how we feel at the moment.
It took me a while to realize that I was releasing my frustration with my daughter. Whatever she said made me feel uncomfortable, annoyed. I gave her “orders,” and as she did not follow them, my patience just ran out. But it was not because she did not obey to her mom that I was feeling frustrated; it was what I initially thought and what I said to her.
Yes, I left all the weight of my own emotions on her with the sentence: "I am grumpy now because you don’t hear what I am asking you to do!" Then I felt guilty, and day by day, the same cycle continued. So I got addicted to that vicious circle, to this dopamine that I felt when I let go of the burden of carrying the weight of my own emotions, which in the end are solely my responsibility.
This could be one of the many answers about why; it could be the main one or even the only one. Who knows? And after sharing the story, then the reason, so the conclusion to end this story could be the answer about "Okay, then what can I do?"
Alright. What I did was ask myself gently: what was that situation in my own life that was making me feel frustrated? The answer couldn't be that k
ids do not follow my rules…
For me, it was that at that stage of my life, I was trying to be more consistent with my own business - It could be another article for this blog -. For me, this business is my passion, my life mission and I want to spend time on that. But with all the mom tasks, chores, full-time work, and all my life, I was really struggling to find a balance, so this huge frustration that I was not able to recognize, named, and felt on my own, then I was passing on to someone - a little person who was receiving and carrying something that does not belong to her.
But mumma! STOP, it is not to make you feel guilty; no way, that's not the goal of this. I aim to give you tools for you to see, name, and validate your emotions, to hear what they want to tell you instead of passing them on to others or feel identifying with just one emotion. We are completely able to break the chain and live a better life.
Sabina Gonzalez