Discipline Without Damage by Vanessa Lapointe

Author:Vanessa Lapointe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-928055-11-2
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2015-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

NURTURE YOUR OWN NEEDS

All big people who are responsible for growing up children must necessarily put the children’s needs first. This does not mean that the needs of big people cannot or should not be nurtured and tended to as well—just never by a child. There is a time and place and manner in which the needs of big people ought to be tended to, but when children are around it is the needs of the children that must remain supreme. How is this fair? Why must this be so? Children come into this world with no choice but to seek dependence on us. Their very survival hinges on us responding confidently and certainly. And while they might be able to physically survive being grown up by a big person whose own needs took center stage, they most certainly would not thrive emotionally nor become all that they were meant to be. That is, they would be robbed of the chance to grow up in the very best possible way. When children are born, and most importantly when a person chooses to step into the role of “big person” for those children, nature demands that the children’s needs be met. And so it is up to us as big people to meet that demand. In chapter 4, I explained the damage that can come about when children become hulked up and big people “dehulkified.”

Numerous different personal needs can get in the way of our ability as a big person to respond intuitively and grow up our children in the best possible way. Anxiety and depression are very common, and it is clear that many adults face the sometimes debilitating impact of these and other mental health challenges. Being “stuck,” agitated, or irritable, and having a reduced capacity to cope with stress or upset are prevailing symptoms of mood-based disorders, and existing in this kind of mindset can make it very challenging to find our inner Hulk.

Sometimes big people get taken by surprise when their own needs are awakened as they care for their children. When they engage in feeling it for their children, some adults begin to feel the weight of their own childhood experiences. For example, an enduring or intense experience of not having been responded to in caring and compassionate ways by your own big people when you were a child can be triggered by becoming a parent yourself. In other words, the actual act of being a big person to a child triggers this neurological and emotional trauma response that activates the upset connected to the earlier trauma, which may have been repressed and lain dormant for many years. The impact of this trauma may be that as a big person you are incapable of seeing your own child’s needs, as it would mean recognizing the incredible losses of your own childhood when your needs went unmet. The task of accepting and healing these old wounds is the responsibility of the big person. Whether it be from

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