I've been thinking about all of the kids that my youngest tends to get aggressive with, to see what they have in common. I think I've landed on: in the first few months of their lives, their mothers were distracted, feeling sorry for themselves, so these kids didn't get the mirroring they needed, to be able to have insight, into whether another is opened or closed for connection. My youngest is very obvious when she is opened or closed for connection, so she gets very angry if you don't respect her boundary (and turns up the volume with aggression to make it clear). She also has her own safety needs, which leads her not respect others, who touch, take, or hoard (as this is what they have learned to do, to meet their own safety needs).
Middle tends to trigger youngest the most, because she is so consumed with her own needs, and when she drops into poisonous cicada (a fear response beyond eldest's tendency to turtle), youngest, myself, and my husband, drop into watchdog mode, because we just can't stand it.
Middle doesn't always make the effort (or have the energy and social intelligence) to do things slow and kind enough, not piss youngest off.
It's my fault, and I think we need to get to that.
When middle was born, we didn't bond right away. I was itchy and we both swelled up in the days following her birth. The only time I attended a postpartum depression group was after her birth. I had a friend (who is no longer a friend, because she had very different opinions when it came to Covid that she stopped talking to me) staying with us for free, in exchange for spending some time with middle so I could continue to spend some time with eldest, who had become quite violent after middle's birth. When we finally asked my friend to move out, because she was adding stress instead of taking it away, middle spent most of the time in her car seat sleeping, as I shuttled eldest from program to program. I was also heavily emersed in learning some of the modalities that formed the initial foundation for my business. So I was not paying attention to her and her needs.
Before having kids, I almost had the opportunity to do my PhD with:
She was such a welcoming supportive person, my life (and I) would have been so different if I had had that opportunity. Unfortunately, she recognized, that after completing my Masters with:
...working with her would not give me the biological components I was looking for, essentially to prove that stress causes illness.
For some reason, I was on a mission, to nail my mother to the wall, because I felt she had all kinds of illnesses, that she used as a scapegoat, instead of realizing that the choices she was making, were what were making her sick. "When the body says no!"
I don't regret the path my life has taken, as volunteering at a Distreas Call Center made it clear, that unless you can tell someone who is suffering because they suffered why they suffered (aka they need to be seen), then they are unlikely to shift to make any lasting change.
This is part of why I recently changed my "job title" to "Answering the questions WHY and WHAT NEXT". I also changed my "tagline" to "Identifying and releasing patterns, inside and outside of the body" because that is what I do. Help my clients see the connections, between what their life experiences and physical symptoms are trying to tell them:
I am making this clear, because one of my pet peeves is people who do not respond to me when I send them messages. I recognize this is the same as not recognizing social cues of whether someone is opened or closed for connection. People are closed for connection when they do not respond. But I take it personally, because this is my experience with my parents, when I told them about my safety needs. I try to brush it off, and pretend that I don't have connection needs, but we all do, and that makes life hard, when people we are in relationship with, were never taught the skills, that make good relationships work.
My mother has prosopagnosia, she can not recognize faces. As a result, when she would "mirror" me, I took it as her "mocking" me.
It's terrifying not to be able to identify whether someone is someone who you know and can trust. When my mom was a child, her "friends" would deliberately take her into a crowd, and hide, so they could laugh at how anxious she got. My mother eventually went on disability, so she could retire early, and avoid the pressure, of people she could not decipher, as someone she should know, for the rest of her life. I felt like this, and partnering with someone who did everything for her, was a form of giving up, and it bothered me.
I like the modalities that I offer, because they offer the unique WHY for each person, and there are pieces that I bring in, that are not part of these modalities; like watchdog, turtle, and poison cicada felt safety (above), attachment theory, OT for sensory processing disorders, NVC needs behind our emotions, and more complete versions of history, for things like the school system, women's health, vaccines, and more.
Slowly I try to give my kids more insight into how they trigger each other. I narrate what I see out loud, especially when my kids are not paying attention to their surroundings or lose the ability to speak. This allows people to make better choices, to keep themselves safe, and to avoid making the same mistake in the future. While my kids (and the literature) give me more insight, into where I dropped the ball, when I put my needs ahead of theirs, because I didn't realize they had needs, beyond what I was already tending to.
A friend/client continues to point out that ROCK is there for parents who didn't get good parenting, so they can learn how to do better. I've had some good brief experiences with ROCK, but sometimes they try to cram me into a mold that doesn't consider the things that I have already processed about mainstream that are not right for me. That's the problem with mainstream services, the assumption that we are all the same, and there is only one way to break, and one way to fix. Each of our life curriculums are nuanced, and it takes time and contemplation, to figure out what feels right, and what to do next. Sometimes there is nothing to do but wait for more information, through our life experience.
I hope this is helpful for some. To know that I suffer, I make mistakes, I'm in it too, and yet, I can still look for the patterns and apply the treatments, that allow for an easier release. I study this material all the time, because I want answers for me, as well as for you.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Its not just my youngest who has several people that bother her, and trigger her to act in ugly ways. My older kids, my husband and I, do too. I think it's normal.
Everything that happens inside and outside of our body, is for us to see what in us still needs space to heal. We don't have to like everyone, but we would do ourselves a favor, to try to understand the pattern, of why we are triggered, and to forgive ourselves and others, because nothing is personal, we are all just trying to meet our needs, above all, for connection and safety. No one is wrong, and no one is free from their personal curriculum to work through. The more we engage with the process, the less of a toll it takes on our health, psyche, and life.
Maybe this is what I wanted my mom to learn too, but maybe it wasn't for her to learn in this lifetime, maybe her role, was to set the stage, so I would have the opportunity to learn it.
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