A word on how I show up as ‘Mum’.

For the last almost 14 years I've been practicing what has now become known as Conscious Parenting.

During this time I have learned a few things about dealing with my offspring’s ups and downs, especially when they have their own circumstances to deal with.

That can be tiredness, developmental leaps, feeling poorly, picking up on the emotions or stress of mum or dad or someone else who they're close to, etc.

Each one of these things can cause them to behave in ways that test our patience or cause us frustration as a mum, dad or carer.

How we deal with those things can have a lasting impact!

Having spent the last 4 years or so deeply unpicking the issues of my own childhood that ended up causing me to feel trapped in despair, I'm even more aware of what I do and what I say and how it may effect my children.

Now I am not yet perfect at the peaceful, calm, conscious approach, but I am aware that each action on my part not only has an effect on them, but more importantly I think, is a mirror of something within me I need to work on.

This allows me to forgive them quickly to start with! Then it allows me to explain my behaviour to them more clearly, and why I've got annoyed at their inactivity, messiness, loud playfulness, need for detail to be exact, etc. This in turn, I hope allows them to release some of any feelings that my problem was with them as individuals, and that the problem is in fact within me, and something I need to deal with.

It’s my hope that this offsets some of the trauma impact these interactions within the family have in a lasting way on the energy body and physical body.

It's commonly exclaimed now that if a person has a problem with you, it's their problem and not ours. But how often do we think this the other way around. If we have a problem with someone else, including our children, or maybe our partner, it's our problem, and not theirs?

So take a moment the next time you feel that anger or frustration rise within you at your offspring (or partner/parent/sibling) to take a deep breath! Ask: 'is this them or is it me?', and maybe just maybe you will find a more conscious way to tackle the situation.

If you'd like some support on unpicking your own journey that you may feel is impacting on those around you then feel free to get in touch. I would love to share some of the tools I've found helpful.

PS I am not a fan of any label specifically, it's been defined as attachment parent, gentle parenting, etc. Myself, I like to tune into my own intuition with raising offspring, and how this looks for one, may look totally different to another.