I don't fix children

For anyone who comes here to work with horses, we do a lot with emotional intelligence. I've lost track of the number of times I've told someone that the horses don't care how you feel, they just want you to be aware of how you feel. Incongruence drives them literally wild it is so uncomfortable for them. (I've got stories... )

Today I was listening to someone who works with parents of autistic children. It kind of stopped me in my tracks when I heard her say (my paraphrase):

<<Parents need to do some work on themselves. They need to know how they are feeling and acknowledge it. These children don't care how their parents are feeling, but they want their parents to be aware of their feelings. It is very uncomfortable for them if the parents are pretending and that is when the behaviors escalate. If parents can get a handle on themselves then the emotional tone of the home changes and the big behaviors start to abate.>>

I don't know why I didn't put this together with parenting, but it is also very true when you are parenting, especially a child who has experienced trauma. These are hyper vigilant children and they will absolutely know if a parent is saying words which don't match their actual state or feelings. This disconnect is one of the biggest pieces missing when we talk about felt safety. 

Parents want to fix their child to make life more comfortable. I'm afraid I'm not very popular when I say out loud I don't fix children. (I also know I have a lot of potential clients not call me back after I say this.) Children don't need to be fixed because how they are behaving makes perfect sense given their own experiences and how they are currently experiencing the world. If we make their world safer, we offer space for their feelings of danger to ratchet down. 

I had to fix me first when we changed how we parented. I had to change how I viewed the situation, how I reacted, and I needed to be honest with what I was experiencing and the actual cause of those feelings. I thought I had done a lot, but learning to parent R. made me realize I still had a huge amount of work to do. Making those changes and doing that hard work was the beginning of my children being able to start healing. 

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