27/12/2023
ā”ļøā”ļøā”ļøWhat is the something that gets triggered, when you are triggered?ā”ļøā”ļøā”ļø
Do you know where it comes from?
When my first child was about a year old, one day I found myself āincandescentā with rage.
I completely lost it. My child not cooperating with a nappy change seemed to release a monster. I blared, bellowed, and bawled. And then I cried.
I thought I was such a āniceā person. My infant was just being a tiny little kid. How could I āexplodeā, and apparently for no reason?
There must be a reason, and it pertained to emotions Iād never processed or expressed, from many years before.
As my journey as a parent progressed, there were more episodes of rage, āred mistā, loss of control, triggered by my unwitting children, but not caused by them.
The shame of it built, and I realised, that this was what had happened for my Dad. My pattern had been experienced by me, before. When I was a frightened child who didnāt understand the stuff that adults carried around in their heads.
My Dad is in the photo below. Heās the one sitting in the middle at the back.
My parenting experiences allowed me to feel ever more compassionate for my Dad, after having hated him as a young adult.
One day, as we sat together in my Momās room at their nursing home, I took a chance while she had left the room, to ask him about what I was beginning to grasp.
āDad, sometimes Iāve been so angry with my children, have completely lost my temper. And I know that the way I felt was nothing to do with them. It was anger from somewhere else, that I was carrying around.
You had this when we were children.ā
He nodded, slowly.
āDad, do you know where your anger came from?ā
There was a long pause, whilst he considered. My Dad was 97 at the time, and had vascular dementia which created huge blanks in his memory of recent minutes. And his recall of times gone by was great.
āWell,ā he said at last, āI hated my Dadā.
I asked him if he wanted to talk about that, and he related memories of times he had either felt angered, frightened, or shamed by his Dad.
I realised these things had been traumas that never got processed. Like his memories from wartime, of unspeakable things done by one people to another, he had been carrying them around ever since.
I have learned that repressed emotions can be elusive so-and-soās. And with the right help, and a firm intention, patience and determined self awareness, we can unveil them bit by bit.
And deactivate. On I go, to learn more and more about breaking that pattern!
ā¤ļøleave me a heart if something here has started echoes from your experience. Please do share if you would like toā¤ļø.
šæMessage me if you would like to talk about it. Did you find yourself playing out your parentsā patterns, even when you thought you would avoid them? Has it meant that you have more compassion for them, than you ever did before?šæ