Prenatal, Postpartum, and Parenting Help

If you are a fan of Dr. Becky Kennedy and the Good Inside parenting approach, you are familiar with her saying that “parenting is the hardest and most important job” and I could not agree more with both of those components. Parenting is so significant and also relentless, triggering, joyful, maddening, exhilarating, heart-bursting, befuddling, and everything in between! 

So much of the discussion about modern parenting is around helping children build confidence and emotion regulation while also modeling these skills yourself. I think this is where the “hardest” part of the job comes in. You might have all of the ideal scripts and tools ready to go but if you are triggered by your child, those go out the window and you resort to the deeper, more implicit, norms you may have been taught or were passed down to you.

This can look like yelling more than you want, threatening, bribing, or accidentally losing your cool and getting swept away by your own emotions. I know from experience that this feels awful!! The truth is that knowing what to do when your child is having a hard time or acting out in a way that you don’t like is much different than responding to them when those things are actually happening. This is where our own personal growth work comes in as parents. 

Parenting can bring up so many triggers and grief about our own childhood - even if we grew up in a loving and supportive home. The truth is that somewhere along the way a trusted adult missed the mark and if that wasn’t accounted for and repaired, we likely internalized a negative message about ourselves as a result. Part of being able to model emotion regulation, emotional maturity, safety and security, and healthy relationships to our children is working on the barriers to these crucial pieces ourselves. 

Through sensorimotor psychotherapy, attachment work, EMDR, skill-building, and mindfulness we can show up as the parents we want to be - and repair in a healthy way when we make a mistake. This can look like digging deeper into the parts of parenting that are the most draining or frustrating for us and exploring what might be going on under the surface dating back to our own childhood experiences. 

If you are a “cycle breaker” and want to show up for your kids in a healthy, regulated, and warm way but, like all parents, struggle to do that sometimes you are not alone! I can help you work through your parenting triggers to help you be the parent and leader in your family that you want to be.