PART ONE

Your Parenting Legacy

The cliché is true: children do not do what we say; they do what we do. Before we even consider the behavior of our children, it's useful-essential, even-to look at their first role models. And one of them is you.

This section is all about you, because you will be a major influence on your child. In it, I'll give examples of how the past can affect the present when it comes to your relationship with your child. I will talk about how a child can often trigger old feelings in us that we then mistakenly act on in our dealings with them. I'll also be looking at the importance of examining our own inner critic so we do not pass too much of its damaging effects on to the next generation.

The past comes back to bite us (and our children)

A child needs warmth and acceptance, physical touch, your physical presence, love plus boundaries, understanding, play with people of all ages, soothing experiences, and a lot of your attention and your time. Oh, so that's simple then: the book can end here. Except it can't, because things get in the way. Your life can get in the way: circumstances, childcare, money, school, work, lack of time, and busyness . . . and this is not an exhaustive list, as you know.

What can get in the way more than any of this, however, is what was given to us when we ourselves were babies and children. If we don't look at how we were brought up and the legacy of that, it can come back to bite us. You might have found yourself saying something along the lines of: "I opened my mouth and my mother's words came out." Of course, if theirs were words that made you feel wanted, loved, and safe as a child, that would be fine. But so often they are the words that did the opposite.

What can get in the way are things like our own lack of confidence, our pessimism, our defenses, which block our feelings, and our fear of being overwhelmed by feelings. Or when it comes specifically to relating to our children, it could be what irritates us about them, our expectations for them, or our fears for them. We are but a link in a chain stretching back through millennia and forward until who knows when.

The good news is you can learn to reshape your link, and this will improve the life of your children and their children, and you can start now. You don't have to do everything that was done to you; you can ditch the things that were unhelpful. If you are a parent or are going to be one, you can unpack and become familiar with your childhood, examine what happened to you, how you felt about it then, how you feel about it now, and, after having done that unpacking and taken a good look at it all, put back only what you need.

If, when you were growing up, you were, for the most part, respected as a unique and valuable individual, shown unconditional love, and given enough positive attention, and you had rewarding relationships with your family members, you will have received a blueprint to create positive, functional relationships. In turn, this would have shown you that you could positively contribute to your family and to your community. If all this is true of you, then the exercise of examining your childhood is unlikely to be too painful.

If you did not have a childhood like this-and that's the case for a large proportion of us-looking back on it may bring emotional discomfort. I think it is necessary to become more self-aware around that discomfort so that we can become more mindful of ways to stop us passing it on. So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child's behavior or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.

I think this story will help to illustrate what I mean. It was told to me by Tay, a loving mom and senior psychotherapist who trains other psychotherapists. I'm mentioning both her roles to make it clear that even the most self-aware and well-meaning of us can slip into an emotional time warp and find ourselves reacting to our past rather than to what's happening here in the present. This story begins when Tay's daughter Emily, who was nearly seven, shouted to her that she was stuck on a jungle gym, that she needed help to get off.

I told her to get down and, when she said she couldn't, I suddenly felt furious. I thought she was being ridiculous-she could easily get down herself. I shouted, "Get down this minute!"

She eventually did. Then she tried to hold my hand, but I was still furious, and I said no, and then she howled.

Once we got home and made tea together she calmed down and I wrote off the whole thing to myself as "God, kids can be a pain."

Fast-forward a week: we're at the zoo and there's another jungle gym. Looking at it, I felt a flash of guilt. It obviously reminded Emily of the previous week too, because she looked up at me almost fearfully.

I asked her if she wanted to play on it. This time, instead of sitting on a bench looking at my phone, I stood by the jungle gym and watched her. When she felt she'd got stuck, she held out her arms to me for help. But this time I was more encouraging. I said, "Put one foot there and the other there and grab that and you'll be able to do it by yourself." And she did.

When she had got down, she said, "Why didn't you help me last time?"

I thought about it, and I said, "When I was little, Nana treated me like a princess and carried me everywhere, told me to 'be careful' all the time. It made me feel incapable of doing anything for myself and I ended up with no confidence. I don't want that to happen to you, which is why I didn't want to help when you asked to be lifted off the jungle gym last week. And it reminded me of being your age, when I wasn't allowed to get down by myself. I was overcome with anger and I took it out on you, and that wasn't fair."

Emily looked up at me and said, "Oh, I just thought you didn't care."

"Oh no," I said. "I care, but at that moment I didn't know that I was angry at Nana and not at you. And I'm sorry."

Like Tay, it's easy to fall into making instant judgments or assumptions about our emotional reaction without considering that it may have as much to do with what's being triggered in our own background as with what's happening now.

But when you feel anger-or any other difficult emotions, including resentment, frustration, envy, disgust, panic, irritation, dread, fear, et cetera-in response to something your child has done or requested, it's a good idea to think of it as a warning. Not a warning that your child or children are necessarily doing anything wrong but that your own buttons are being pressed.

Often the pattern works like this: when you react with anger or another overly charged emotion around your child it is because it's a way you have learned to defend yourself from feeling what you felt at their age. Outside of your awareness, their behavior is threatening to trigger your own past feelings of despair, of longing, of loneliness, jealousy, or neediness. And so you unknowingly take the easier option: rather than empathizing with what your child is feeling, you short-circuit to being angry or frustrated or panicked.

Sometimes the feelings from the past that are being re-triggered go back more than one generation. My mother used to find the shrieks of children at play irritating. I noticed that I, too, went into a sort of alert state when my own child and her friends were making a noise, even though they were enjoying themselves appropriately. I wanted to find out more, so I asked my mother what would have happened to her if she had played noisily as a child. She told me her father-my grandfather-had been over fifty when she was born, he often had bad headaches, and all the children had to tiptoe around the house or they got into trouble.

Maybe you're scared if you admit that, at times, your irritation with your child gets the upper hand, thinking it will intensify those angry feelings or somehow make them more real. But, in fact, naming our inconvenient feelings to ourselves and finding an alternative narrative for them-one where we don't hold our children responsible-means we won't judge our children as being somehow at fault for having triggered them. If you can do this, it makes you less likely to act out on that feeling at the expense of your child. You will not always be able to trace a story that makes sense of how you feel, but that doesn't mean there isn't one, and it can be helpful to hold on to that.

One issue might be that as a child you felt that the people who loved you perhaps didn't always like you. They might sometimes have found you annoying, hard work, disappointing, unimportant, exasperating, clumsy, or stupid. When you're reminded of this by your own child's behavior, you are triggered and you end up shouting or acting out whatever your default negative behavior is.

There's no doubt it can feel hard, becoming a parent. Overnight, your child becomes your most demanding priority, 24/7. Having a child may have even made you finally realize what your own parents had to deal with, maybe to appreciate them more, to identify with them more, or to feel more compassion for them. But you need to identify with your own child or children too. Time spent contemplating what it may have felt like for you as a baby or a child around the same age as your own child will help you develop empathy for your child. That will help you understand and feel with them when they behave in a way that triggers you into wanting to push them away.

I had a client, Oskar, who had adopted a little boy of eighteen months. Every time his son dropped food on the floor, or left his food, Oskar felt rage rise up in him. I asked him what would have happened to him as a child if he'd dropped or left food? He remembered his grandfather rapping his knuckles with the handle of a knife, then making him leave the room. After he got back in touch with what it had felt like for him as a little boy when he was treated like that, he found compassion for his own self as a toddler, which in turn helped him find patience for his child.

It's easy to assume our feelings belong with what's happening in front of us and are not simply a reaction to what happened in the past. As an example, imagine you have a four-year-old child who gets a huge pile of presents on their birthday and you sharply call them "spoiled" for not sharing one of their new toys.

What is happening here? Logically, it's not their fault if they are the recipient of so much stuff. You may unconsciously be assuming they are undeserving of so many things and your irritation at that leaks out in a sharp tone or by you unreasonably expecting them to be more mature.

If you stop to look back, to become interested in your irritation toward them, what you might find is that your own inner four-year-old is jealous or feels competitive. Maybe at the age of four you were told to share something you didn't want to share, or you simply weren't given many things, and, in order not to feel sad for four-year-old you, you lash out at your child.

I'm reminded of the hate mail and negative social media attention anyone in the public eye receives from anonymous sources. If you read between the lines, what it seems to be saying more than anything is, "It's not fair that you're famous and I'm not." It's not so unusual to feel jealous of our children. If you do, you need to own it, not act out negatively toward your child because of it. They don't need parental trolling.

Throughout this book I have put in exercises that may help you have a deeper understanding of what I'm talking about. If you find them unhelpful or overwhelming, you can skip them, and perhaps come back to them when you feel more ready.

Exercise: Where does this emotion come from?

The next time you feel anger toward your child (or any other overly charged emotion), rather than unthinkingly responding, stop to ask yourself: Does this feeling wholly belong to this situation and my child in the present? How am I stopping myself from seeing the situation from their standpoint?

One good way to stop yourself from reacting is to say, "I need some time to think about what's happening," and to use that time to calm down. Even if your child does need some guidance, there's not much point in doing it when you're angry. If you give it then, they will hear only your anger and not what you are trying to tell them.

You can do this second variation of the exercise even if you do not yet have a child. Just notice how often you feel angry, or self-righteous, or indignant, or panicky or perhaps ashamed, or self-loathing, or disconnected. Look for patterns in your responses. Look back to when you first felt this feeling, tracing it back to your childhood, where you began to respond like this, and you may begin to understand to what extent this reaction has become a habit. In other words, the response has at least as much to do with it having become a habit in you as it has to do with the situation in the present.

Rupture and repair

In an ideal world, we would catch ourselves before we ever acted out on a feeling inappropriately. We would never shout at our child or threaten them or make them feel bad about themselves in any way. Of course, it's unrealistic to think we would be able to do this every time. Look at Tay-she's an experienced psychotherapist and she still acted on her fury because she thought it belonged to the present. But one thing she did do to mend the hurt, and what we can all learn to do, is called "rupture and repair." Ruptures-those times when we misunderstand each other, when we make wrong assumptions, when we hurt someone-are inevitable in every important intimate and familial relationship. It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters.