Balancing parent and child boundaries, with Rose Clark
Apr 01, 2024Have you ever noticed how much the way you were raised influences the way you parent/teach? Honestly, I think it was a big factor in my decision to NOT have kids.
These human brains of ours only know what we've been exposed to, so they carry on with what we have been taught or have experienced. They just don't know any better.
In this week's podcast/YouTube episode, Rose Clark and I are talking about how to maintain your boundaries AND those of your child! I found this conversation with Rose very impactful for a few reasons:
1) She taught me strategies I have never been exposed to. And I've been doing this for a while...
2) I didn't agree with some of the tactics she was proposing, and I openly questioned them. Her responses were genuine and brilliant, and totally won me over. (Isn't it great to have a logical conversation with another rational human once in a while?)
3) We had similar upbringings, and I always love to meet people who use what they have experienced to help others avoid those same experiences.
Here's a clip from the episode:
What ends up happening when we're raised in this reward and punishment paradigm I guess we call it, we start to lose our connection to our preferences. We start to lose our connection to what we like and what we dislike and our needs and all those things. Because those are the things that are getting us in trouble. We're following who we are, we're following these feelings that kind of push us towards doing things. And we learn that we have to get really good at knowing what our parents, our caregivers, our teachers like and dislike, right? What they prefer, what their preferences are. The thing is, our likes and dislikes, I learned this from Language of Listening, our likes and dislikes are what make up our identity.
And so when we're setting aside our preferences and setting aside our awareness and our connection to them, we're setting aside who we are. And then we start to base our identity on these other people. And then we become adults and we don't know where our boundaries are. So we can either pick up and have the exact same boundaries as the people that raised us, but some of us are finding we don't like those boundaries or the way that they were held. And so we're left with what? We don't know what.
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