Supressing ourselves as Parents

As adult humans who were once children too, we bring all our own woundings and internal stories about how safe the world is and how safe we are to truly be our imperfect selves. We bring these stories into our parenting journey in the context of modern, demanding lives. Parenting is certainly not the only hat we wear or the only dimension to us as human beings. We have our own rich inner worlds of feelings, fears, hopes and dreams that can feel like they are steadily being consumed by our day-to-day responsibilities. Our intense frustration at the process of getting a very resistant toddler into the car to go to day care, the annoyance from asking our school aged child to put on their school shoes 35 times and they ‘just need to do one more thing’. The mental load of making sure food is in lunchboxes, dinner is prepped, after school activities and driving logistics are planned and did anyone mention – work? We worry about bills, getting a child to the dentist and who will see our elderly parent this weekend, you know, the one we have the complicated relationship with. For me, the build up of constantly ignoring my own feelings or needs and surrendering over and over to the demands of being a modern parent meant that eventually I would tip. At the most inconvenient moment (think screaming child at 2am) a bubble of wild fury and rage would well inside me. Tightly controlled, but ferocious and daunting. I have since learnt that this bubble of rage is a sign that we may be experiencing depression, anxiety or burnout.

In my commitment to being a gentle, calm centre of gravity in my childs life with consistent and healthy boundaries, I found myself in a constant state of emotion regulation and keeping a tight clamp on my own feelings and needs. More often than not as conscious, well regulated parents we don’t act on or express our feelings in the moment. Instead we may push it aside and only dribbles of our feelings get through in a shouting outburst, we may frown sternly and get snappy or get cross and stomp around muttering under our breath. As parents who care, we know intuitively that it is not for our children to bear witness to our intense feelings and frustrations. But where do they go when we are in the middle of being present to them? So, we swallow it down, rein in our impulses and focus on the parenting task at hand. The emotional and mental labour of this was at times draining and over time I felt myself becoming increasingly exhausted and quicker to overwhelm. Eventually, these feelings bubble up and overwhelm us and instead of the individual nuance of each emotion it can feel like a tidal wave of emotional rage is welling up. I call this, parental suppression rage.

EMOTION Suppression and Parental Burnout – the other side of parenting rarely talked about

In 2018, a landmark Belgian study documented the relationship between parental exhaustion and the thematic thread of rage and guilt that turned up in parents experiences. The authors observed a relationship between parental exhaustion and burnout and ‘the fear of unlearning control and experiencing discontinuity of one’s sense of self’. Suppression of any feeling manifests itself in a variety of ways and its causes are equally mixed. For some parents of young children, feelings of overwhelm and bubbles of rage can often be a side effect of post-natal depression or anxiety and can also be a response to unresolved feelings of grief.

Rage can also be associated more broadly with ongoing parental anxiety and high levels of parental stress. Who hasn’t met a parent who wasn’t feeling pretty stressed and anxious at some point? What happens when those feelings are prolonged and the emotions sitting underneath the stress and anxiety is left unaddressed? A new area of study is emerging looking at Parental Burnout Syndrome which can appear to share some of the characteristics of post natal depression yet differs in that it more often occurs in parents of children over 18 months of age, is predominantly linked to parental traits and the depressive mood is felt specifically in relation to one’s parenting role and tasks.  The first round of stats from these studies suggests up to 14% of parents experience parental burnout.

For me, my rage was often associated with unexpressed feelings of anger and grief and a lot of internal resistance with accepting how motherhood had changed my life and the relationships around me. It is not uncommon that if you have high standards for yourself (self confessed high bar jumper over here!) and tend towards perfectionism then becoming a parent can really confront us on these values. In a culture of striving and achieving, allowing and unconditionally accepting is a euphemism for failure. When we resist the surrender to what is (ie the sick child, the constantly messy house, the artwork on our rental walls, the child who won’t sleep through), we can move into feelings of rage at our inability to control our situation and make choices we used to be able to make.

Grief can be a big culprit in the build up to rage. We are so unprepared for the complexity of change that comes with every new child we welcome into our lives. There is a massive shift in every aspect of our lives with each birth and sometimes it’s not until we are really in the trenches that aspects of the change and what that means for us really becomes known. The layers of grief are not exclusive to mothers either, fathers are just as likely to report experiencing levels of grief and to find themselves in the emotional suppression pattern. Couples can feel so consumed by the parenting gig that they describe themselves as ‘co-parents’ because there is so little space left at all for their relationship as partners and lovers. There is deep grief and loss for the sense of togetherness, intimacy and connection that existed prior to becoming parents.

All of these things lead to us having feelings, very human and very valid feelings. We might feel anxious, sad, angry, hurt, frustrated, down, unappreciated, desperate, hopeless, guilty, ashamed….and we may feel we don’t have the capacity to truly have our feelings particularly not at the time that they happen. We learn to suppress how we feel so we can be a calm good parent in the moment. On the outside we are emotion coaching and being the safe container for our child’s own outburst but inside we are just wanting to scream our frustration, our impatience, our hurt, our sheer fatigue and tiredness. In order for us to show up as parents, be focussed and perform at work, be organised and keep our lives running, we may resort to suppressing as a coping strategy.

This emotional overwhelm and bubbles of rage can come with such deep feelings of shame. What decent, loving, good parent feels this way so intensely? With no one else around me talking about feeling this way, I assumed there was something wrong with me. A sentiment expressed by other parents when they finally talk about this feeling in the safe confines of a counselling room. Since studying and learning a lot about how our emotions and nervous systems work, I now think of this as a completely understandable response to being in a constant state of emotion suppression. A by-product of needing to suppress and store away our own feelings and needs as human beings and never really having the time or strategies for returning to them and giving them a safe outlet. The perfect storm for parental burnout.

So what can we do about it?

There are three parts to consider when moving beyond patterns of emotion suppression while parenting:

1.       Acknowledge and validate what you are feeling while you are feeling it

The first suggestion is around developing safe and constructive ways to acknowledge and validate how you are feeling. We are the adults in the parenting scenario so we can’t go around throwing things, screaming and yelling and giving our emotions free rein in the moment we have them. We have to be the grown-ups! We can be the calm in our children’s storm and model emotion regulation and coaching that helps them develop resilience and self-esteem. The key is learning to show yourself compassion and kindness when its hard or challenging and validate the feelings you are having in the moment (hey mindfulness!). This helps mitigate the need for suppressing and creates some wiggle room for you to be a person too in the parenting dynamic – without it leading to adverse impacts on your relationship with your child. For example, when you next feel yourself experiencing a mildly uncomfortable emotion while parenting, in the back of your mind just note what it is and acknowledge it to yourself. ‘I’m feeling really annoyed and impatient with my child’s behaviour’. This is really annoying me’. The aim here is to create awareness of your emotion in any given interaction and put a name on it, so it doesn’t end up in the big suppression soup!

2.       Find constructive and safe ways to express the emotions and clear your backlog

The next step is to find strategies and ways to unpack and give your needs and feelings air-time when it’s appropriate and safe to do so. This can look different for different people. More traditional methods can include things like journalling, meditation and creative endeavours. Technology can be a really helpful tool in this space – because we can text, message, post in a social media forum – just generally connect more easily without having to be nearby. This type of connection can be provide great benefits to reduce the sense of isolation that can come with many of these situations. The second suggestion is making sure your ‘self care’ activities includes giving your emotions and needs an outlet. Exercise is fabulous and well documented to improve mood, but so is writing down how you feel, speaking the emotions out loud, reflective conversations with someone you trust and ensuring any underlying feelings such as grief, trauma and transition loss (the feelings of grief and loss that we experience from a major life and identity transition such as becoming a parent) is given space and processed.

Personally, I practice a lot of self-compassion and mindfulness strategies in the moment to help me manage my own feelings while I’m dealing with my children’s own mini hurricanes of emotions. Learning this has been a labour of love for me. It meant finding people I could talk really openly with about ALL parts of my experience with parenting. I found only 50% of this was with my partner and the rest was in a wider circle. Sometimes we have a thought, or stream of thoughts that one part of us really feels is our truth, while another part is horrified that we even thought about having that thought! It can be helpful if we can say this stuff out loud with someone we trust, knowing that they know we don’t mean it literally – it’s just how we feel at that moment; an expression of an intense feeling, and nothing more. Once we are done expressing it, we know we will probably feel differently. We just needed to get it out and say it in a space where we won’t be judged or fear being shamed for it.

3.       If you feel like you aren’t coping or there might be more going on, seek help and support

If you are wondering if maybe there are underlying reasons for the overwhelm and bubbles of rage, or feeling like you are having difficulty coping then it can be a good idea to seek wider support. You can talk to your GP about how you are feeling or book to see a mental health professional. PANDA (www.panda.org.au) is a fantastic national service for parents and have a free national hotline (1300 726 306) where you can talk to a telephone counsellor about what you are experiencing and be linked up to quality information and services. PANDA also have a How are you going? Mental health checklist to help you get a sense of how you are tracking and whether you might benefit from professional support.

As parents, we very rarely share all the challenges and tough stuff. Our social media feeds are filled with all the glowing and good moments. I am here to unequivocally tell you that your challenges are shared by many. I try to make an effort to remind myself how every parent feels this way at some point (if not regularly) and its ok to not like parts of parenting or to find moments really hard.   It helps me to not feel quite so alone.

I hope in reading this you feel a little less alone today too.

 By Kate Johnstone

If you would like to book a counselling session you can contact me on this website to make an enquiry.

References

Hubert, S., & Aujoulat, I. (2018). Parental Burnout: When Exhausted Mothers Open Up. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01021

Roskam, I., Raes, M. E., & Mikolajczak, M. (2017). Exhausted parents: Development and preliminary validation of the parental burnout inventory. Frontiers in psychology, 163.

Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australian (PANDA) https://www.panda.org.au/

DISCLAIMER: this article is not intended as professional medical advice and you should always consult with a medical health professional for your particular issues and needs. The author accepts no liability for any interpretation or action taken based on the content of this article.