Parenting Right From the Start. Vanessa Lapointe

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СКАЧАТЬ father and I navigated the first year or two of separation and divorce, I was paralyzed by a single thought: What if they choose their dad over me?

      Why was I thinking this? As a child psychologist, I am supposed to be attuned to these types of misperceptions. But even my years of education and experience were no match for genetics. I felt angst over potentially losing my children because the loss of my family system is encoded in my DNA. No matter what is truly happening in my life, I will feel this loss at some level of my consciousness, and will look for ways that this trauma is “real” in my life’s circumstances. Knowing the story of my ancestral roots and being aware of the influence of genetically inherited family trauma, I was able to piece together this understanding relatively early on. It was oddly comforting to be able to make sense of my fears in this way, and freeing to know that in the simple act of making the link, I was resolving the issue. I have worked within my own therapeutic process to deepen this resolution and bring a sense of peace into my life instead of fear.

      The inheritance of family trauma through DNA is something anyone can experience. Almost always, it involves the replaying of unprocessed trauma—abuse, deaths, scandals, and/or losses that were never talked about, that may have been forbidden topics of conversation, or were buried deep in the skeleton closet. The entire spectacular reality, as Wolynn so aptly details, is a subconscious program coded in your genes. It isn’t anything you have done specifically, although if you are reliving family trauma you will likely feel wholly responsible for it. Sometimes inherited family trauma is discernable because of its peculiar and sudden onset, such as the young man who suddenly started having panic attacks after his twenty-first birthday, the age at which his grandfather was wounded in battle during the Second World War. Other times it will play out and continue to manifest in seemingly mysterious ways, and only when the family’s historical puzzle is pieced together will what is truly happening become obvious. Major life changes, milestone birthdays, and other notable happenings can often trigger the replaying of a family trauma story.

      Becoming a parent is certainly a major life change—and, not surprisingly, even this happy event can be the gateway to the reliving of family trauma. This may be because much of what people historically experience as traumatic within their families often involves children. It’s not that children experience traumatic things more often than adults; rather, it’s that when bad things happen to kids it tends to be more traumatic than when bad things happen to adults. Trauma has a more devastating impact on children because their brains are not yet developed enough to safeguard them against the effects. The traumatic experience then becomes the organizing force of the young, developing brain (rather than being processed and buffered by the mature brain of an adult).⁷ As a result, childhood trauma can have significant and lasting effects. A parent who carries trauma from their own childhood can be triggered when their own child reaches the same life stage at which the trauma was experienced.

      Although trauma can be genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, that does not mean there is no escape. The same cellular process that transmits family trauma contains the potential for healing it. Any individual can retroactively process their family’s historical experiences to effect real change in their own lives, and in the lives of the entire family system, so that their children will never suffer the same way. Occasionally, with self-reflection, people can accomplish this on their own. More often, especially with deep programs that are having a large impact on an individual’s life, reprocessing and healing will require the support of a trained coach, therapist, or healer.

      Let’s be real for a moment. I write parenting books and counsel parents and kids, but I needed someone to guide me. I couldn’t believe that my unconscious mind was running the show. I was reliving old patterns until my counsellor and teacher pointed them out—and then I couldn’t stop seeing them. My counsellor introduced me to modalities I’d never heard of. Some included talk therapy; others worked to bring my subconscious mind in line with my conscious mind. For example: I am a child psychologist and a fierce mama; I know that I am awesome and my kids are lucky to have me. Yet when they went to their father’s house for a night, I worried they were going to leave me. I tried to talk myself out of this thought but to no avail. My subconscious mind believed this, and my conscious mind doesn’t give the orders. My counsellor directed me to a subconscious “healer” who helped me absorb the statement, “My kids will never leave me” until I felt an internal shift. The worry still comes up, but I am able to tend to it now; the walls are no longer crashing down on me.

      I also looked for a village of people who would support my personal development. Thankfully, my counsellor had already created one. Every week, she holds a circle filled with people who are facing the challenges raised by their marriages, their children, other relationships, their finances, and their health. They are challenged by the same things I am, and I heal through witnessing their work. When I am challenged by life and stuck in blame and unable to find the opportunity for growth, I can put up my hand and ask for help. When I am not at the circle, I can call any of these people at any time to make sense of what is going on for me. I have created an entirely new village to help me grow myself up while I grow up my children.

       Attachment-Centred Parenting

      You now have a deeper understanding of the influences working away on how you parent. You know that you bring baggage into this wonderful and exciting role—some that you’ve carried in on your own, and some that has been passed down to you from generations past. Either way, this new knowledge has put you in a much stronger position to break free of habits that may not be in your child’s best interest, or yours. And there really is no better time to take that leap than right now. Society is in the relatively early days of a sea change in our understanding of human development, a change that is leading to a new understanding of what children need from their parents and how their parents can provide it. Thanks in part to contemporary advances in neuroscience and the science of child development, we now know that secure attachment in the relationship between a loving caregiver and a child is utterly essential to a child’s healthy growth.

      Attachment theory has brought about a radical shift in the study of child development since it was initially developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1940s,⁸ and more deeply studied and scientifically understood through the 1970s and 1980s. Psychologists such as Edward Tronick, Bruce Perry, Megan Gunnar, and Daniel Siegel have amassed a large body of evidence-based science irrefutably linking attachment to healthy child development.⁹ In fact, attachment may be more essential than food in terms of a young child’s hierarchy of needs.¹⁰ What this research tells us is that children need to be seen, heard, and responded to by someone who loves them in order to thrive. Along with the concept of consciousness—understanding the programs that live below the surface in us and run our lives—attachment theory is the philosophy on which this book is based.

       The Dominance of Behaviourism

      As intuitive as attachment-centred parenting might seem, it is a recent development in our pedagogical practices, coming hot on the heels of a far more pervasive and persuasive approach: behaviourism. The driving force behind behaviourist-influenced parenting was that if you wanted good behaviour in a child, your job as the parent was to manipulate that into being. Indeed, this behavioural manipulation would virtue signal that you were a “good” parent. Today’s parents (or anyone whose parents were born after the 1930s) were likely raised according to the tenets of behaviourism, which was the psychological and cultural norm of their own parents’ day.

      A disturbingly far cry from the science-based principles of attachment theory, behaviourism has its roots in Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in classical conditioning, such as the iconic one featuring the ringing bell and the salivating dog. But it was John B. Watson who established and promoted behaviourism as a game-changing psychological theory.¹¹ Watson was an early-twentieth-century American psychologist whose research focused on applying the science of prediction and behavioural control to child development. He went so far as to warn parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember СКАЧАТЬ