By Sharon Faye
Feeling emotion deepens our human experience, improves health and wellbeing and enhances our relationships with self and others. It is a constant in everyday life and is experienced by each individual in a unique and different way.
Society however gives emotion a bad rap. Most of our lives we have been socialised into believing that emotion, especially ‘negative’ emotion, should be shut down, suppressed, or avoided.
We are continually trying to juggle expectations whilst keeping everything seemingly together ourselves. Then add a child/ren to the mix and everything changes.
As parents, we are not only dealing with our own feelings, experiences and thoughts, we are navigating all our child/ren has going on as well. The impact of parenting styles on children is incredibly important and is sometimes overlooked with all the challenges and competing priorities we face each day.
If we are not in our bodies, our role modelling declines.
A skill that will help immensely is being able to ‘Acknowledge, Feel and Respond’. This skill will help you to navigate and connect to intense emotion and improve how you present to the world and for your child/ren. Practice this daily in the car, at the beach, in the kitchen, and after time it will become more natural.
Acknowledge – acknowledge the emotion presenting. This is the first step, becoming aware of what you are experiencing in your body by recognising the sensations.
Feel – connect with the emotion and how it feels in your body. Feel it rise or fall or dissipate the more you focus on it. Connecting to the emotion develops your capacity to feel rather than act out.
Respond – responding is not about acting out or behaviour. When you learn how to connect with your feelings, especially intense emotion, you have more control over your actions. From this position, you can trust your response.
Emotion forms a huge part of our parenting experience and ultimately, we need to learn how to connect with our feelings to thrive. Below are some examples of how different emotions are beneficial to us as humans and can in-turn enhance our parenting style.
Our parenting style can be categorised in various ways; punitive parenting style, laissez-faire (neglect) parenting style, or Emotional Strength® parenting style. It is not the focus here to go into a deep analysis about parenting styles, however.
Anxiety is a common everyday experience and yet we are taught to shut it down. Shutting down anxiety doesn’t make sense as it is a very short-term strategy that takes a lot of energy to shut down an emotion that is required for our survival. From the Institute’s perspective, ‘negative’ emotion such as anxiety is required for high performance. For example, if we are feeling nervous about giving an important presentation, we need a level of anxiety to perform at our highest level. However, if we let our anxiety get too high, we can have a performance drop. Therefore, connecting to our anxiety will keep the anxiety at an optimal level for high performance. The moment we shut down our anxiety our performance also declines.
This change in perspective shapes our behaviour. Therefore, if we believe that anxiety is bad, we will be motivated to shut it down to protect ourselves. On the other hand, if we believe that anxiety is beneficial, we will be motivated to connect and engage to use it to our full advantage.
This perspective can be extended to other emotion that has been viewed as bad such as sadness and anger. The emotion sadness is a common human experience we have been taught to avoid.
However, sadness can be beneficial and taught as a life skill. When viewed as a healthy emotion, sadness is low energy that can be beneficial in giving us space to reflect. Sadness is also useful for developing a range of self-love experiences such as self-respect, self-compassion, self-awareness and gratitude. Sadness is common in the grieving process of loss. It could be the loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of a friend or relationship. Grieving is a healthy response to a variety of losses which are part of the human experience.
The emotion anger has been confused with the behaviour of aggression or violence. We view this emotion as a common human experience, similar to passion and separate to acting out. When anger is felt in a healthy way, it can be beneficial in setting boundaries and can be taught as a life skill. Remember, emotion is not the behaviour. Rather, anger is an internal feeling that can feel intense and usually rises from our feet to our jaw and head. If anger energy gets stuck in any part of your internal environment, try using ‘acknowledge, feel and respond’ that is useful for this intense emotion.
The skill of ‘acknowledge, feel and respond’ comes in handy when faced with the challenges of parenting. How many times have you regretted spontaneously yelling at your child? Developing the capacity to feel frustration (and/or anger) provides a parent with more options when responding to your child/ren. For example, feeling the frustration rise in your body is beneficial because you know what you are feeling. As mentioned earlier, connecting with your frustration develops your capacity to feel rather than ‘act out’. When you learn how to connect with your feelings, especially intense emotion, you have more control over your actions. In contrast, when you attempt to shut down frustration, you tend to act in a dysfunctional way which is unsafe to yourself or those around you.
The identity of our children starts with us as parents. To become a healthy role model, you need to pay attention to yourself first. Usually, we are taught to focus on others first, but remember the airplane drill, you put the oxygen mask on yourself first then the children. The reason for this is because if we don’t look after ourselves, then we are in no shape to take care of our children.
Children learn by observing those around them especially their parents. You can improve your role modelling to your children by acknowledging your own thoughts, feelings and behaviours which automatically teaches our children to acknowledge their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This is the simplest way to teach children.