Parents are never perfect and most do the best they can. Generally, parents hope to provide a better childhood for their children than they experienced. However, life makes it difficult for parents to provide everything a child needs. Finances, work-life balance, trauma, relationship issues, and our childhood wounds become obstacles to being the ideal parent we dream of becoming.
Five childhood lessons are proven necessary for building healthy adult relationships which we also need to model and teach our children. Jan Bergstrom highlights them as areas for healing in her book Gifts from a Challenging Childhood—loving ourselves, protecting ourselves through internal and external boundaries, creating a sense of self, taking care of our needs and wants while establishing interdependence on others, and moderating or containing ourselves (2019).
Love of Self - The first essential skill is to love ourselves. When we view ourselves with contempt or scorn, we create a battle that is unwinnable. When we treat ourselves as the enemy, we feel worse about ourselves and continue to spiral downward. Someone who feels unloved and has no compassion for his or her mistakes and imperfections finds it difficult to offer love and safety to others, even one’s own children. This is especially challenging when our child seems to be a replica of ourselves. Instead, we must offer ourselves grace to grow and extend that same grace to others as well.
Helpful Boundaries - Another important lesson is protecting ourselves through internal and external boundaries. Boundaries allow us to designate where we end and others begin. External boundaries are a little easier to identify and maintain. Saying “no” to others, not allowing someone to cut in line, or limiting how much overtime you work are all examples of external boundaries. Internal boundaries are more subtle and require more deliberate monitoring. Internal boundaries represent what we allow to impact our thinking, emotions, and behaviors and which actions, words, or emotions we allow ourselves to express. For example, not allowing an insult to change the way you feel about yourself would be keeping the internal boundary in place. Keeping a lid on your frustration and patiently working through a disagreement is an example of using your internal boundary to guard what comes out of you.
Sense of Self - We also needed to establish a sense of self. To create a sense of self we must know ourselves. We need to know our preferences, needs, opinions, values, goals, and purpose. Having a sense of self helps us stay the course when we are in a challenging situation. When we know who we are and who we want to be, we can live in congruence and offer our authentic selves to those around us.
Assertiveness - Next, we needed to learn to advocate for our personal needs. There is no shame in having needs, and the assertiveness to communicate our needs is crucial to forming healthy relationships. As humans, we must live interdependently with those we love and trust. Every human needs safety and connection. We offer safety and connection to others and rely on them to reciprocate. Ignoring personal needs or expecting others to guess what we need, creates a lack of connection with oneself and others. This can result in anxiety, fear, anger, depression, or resorting to self-sabotaging behaviors like numbing, abusing substances, overworking, etc.
Containment - Lastly, we needed to learn how to moderate or contain ourselves. We have to learn to maintain a balance to live healthy lives. Overdoing something is not good, but neither is total deprivation. We must learn both to do hard things and to enjoy life, to endure and to celebrate. Without persevering through hard things, we never learn the satisfaction of accomplishment and without spontaneous fun, we can miss out on the exhilaration of living. Extremes do not promote flourishing and are unsustainable.
Even if we missed these valuable lessons in childhood, it is not too late. We can learn and change now. To do so, we must offer ourselves compassion and patience through the process. With intentional self-awareness and healthy relational support, wounds can be healed, and the unhelpful ways we meet legitimate needs can be replaced with healthy skills and habits. We can become healthy, whole adults who pass these lessons on to our children.
Therapy is a great place to learn the lessons you were not offered as a child. If you recognize one or more of these skills you would like to improve in, we would love to assist you in your personal growth and wellness journey. Please reach out to our office manager Jane at 615-377-1153 or admin@brentwoodcounseling.com to schedule your initial session.
Resource
Reference
Bergstrom, J. (2019). Gifts from a challenging childhood: Creating a practice for becoming your
healthiest self. Mountain Stream Publishing Company.
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