Veronika Khlebova About The Parent Container

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

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For parents

In order to endure childish affection, which can seem clingy and annoying, as well as childhood affects like outbursts of hatred towards younger brothers and sisters, and children's whims, and dissatisfaction with various inconveniences, and even more so attacks of anger towards oneself (the parent), about bans and other unpopular decisions, you need to have a pretty impressive container.

That is, you need a mental space, with the help of which you could endure, withstand these immediate experiences associated with the child's natural development.

Endure them without self-destruction (tolerating what you cannot tolerate) or destroying the child (forbidding his experience, and suppressing him).

However, if you do not have experience of careful handling of your child's processes, that is, when you yourself were a child, you could not stand you, could not bear your feelings and affection, then, most likely, your mental container is overflowing with your own not expressed feelings, and those feelings that your caregivers have placed in you - for example, shame and guilt for being bad.

In this case, you have very little - not even the skill, but the mental space to withstand the child's feelings, and your own too.

Many parents try to cope with this by increasing their patience, that is, without emptying the container, reduce the "material resistance".

Endure, endure, suppressing your irritation, impatience, rejection, but do not show it.

Realizing that they need a new, different from what they themselves experienced, style of parenting, they, nevertheless, try to solve the problem at the expense of their frail resources, or (and there are a lot of them now!), Generally refuse to have children.

However, simple logic dictates that changing the resistance of a material is many times more difficult than emptying a container for new emotional content.

It should also be borne in mind that from the container, like from Pandora's box, at the most inopportune moment, no matter how you endure, “unwanted” feelings burst out - irritation, impatience and rejection, and also, from it, part of childhood itself is projected onto the child parent.

For example, that part of you that your parent did not accept for one reason or another can be projected onto it …. He waited for something, and did not wait, was disappointed and pulled back. Therefore, you in your child can, just like your parent, be annoyed by attachment, "stickiness", "not adulthood." You can demand from him the same that was demanded of you: for example, he will "owe" you the lack of self-respect, or he "should not" show fatigue, disappointment and discontent.

Or you can project onto him that part of yourself that needed love and care, and was wounded by excessive severity, exorbitant demands.

And then you will make a "happy" version of yourself out of the child, forgetting about your healthy boundaries, and not attaching importance to instilling in him a healthy responsibility.

Sometimes in the same family an “unhappy” version of a parent can grow up - an older one, for example, a child, and a “happy” version of a younger one.

A parent's childhood experience that is not meaningful, not lived through to the end, will influence, one way or another, despite all attempts to increase your patience, and build up your knowledge.

Therefore, the most effective thing is to work temporarily as a sewer, to clear up emotional blockages in your mental space, that is, no matter how banal, to undergo treatment yourself first.

In a cleaned container, you can place, without much difficulty - and whims, and anger, and the needs of the child, not being burdened by his affection, but, on the contrary, receiving his parental pleasure, contributing to the formation of a new "I".