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I was still counselling until just a few weeks before my son's birth, five years ago, and so had to have supervision each month to talk about my work. A few months before he was due I had supervision with a visiting supervisor who I didn't know. He and I instantly had a rapport and both talked then about how we felt we'd somehow known each other before. As I was leaving this very powerful and nurturing session he said, "Try reading The Motherhood Constellation by Daniel Stern, you may find it helpful." It is, in fact, quite a technical and complex book and I was, at first, baffled by it and why he thought I should read it. But after my son's birth, when I was in the depths of post natal despair, wishing I was dead, hitting and biting myself in agony, screaming at my husband and running around in fields in the middle of the night in my nightie and wellies, like a crazy woman, I turned to the book again to try and find some understanding of myself and of my feelings and behaviour. And in this book I found it.
At the core of Stern's work with mothers and their children, he has observed that for a mother, each new day that her child is alive, each new stage that her child goes through, each new behaviour that her child exhibits and each feeling that her child expresses, stimulates within the mother, the internal memories from that time in her own childhood. These are not, however, necessarily memories held within our thinking system. The memories related to our early years, are likely to be bodily-held and emotionally-felt memories from prior to the development of our thinking selves. All of this influences how we feel in our selves, and how we experience and perceive our children and their feelings and behaviour. One of the consequences of this, is that we are likely to treat them the way we ourselves were treated at that stage of our development, unless we specifically decide to do otherwise.
However, deciding to do otherwise, and not just the same or the exact opposite, entails us having to feel our original childhood feelings and then integrate them into our adult selves. So we have to acknowledge the fear, despair and powerlessness that we experienced as children. So for example, deciding that I would look after our children full time rather than continuing work and "abandoning" them to someone else was very different from my own experience as a child. At six weeks my mother returned to work and I was left with a very neglectful and abusive grandmother and then later taken to nursery from 8 till 5 each day. Each day that I kept my son at home with me and didn't take him to someone else to be looked after, was agony for me. I felt my childhood feelings again, the deep despair and huge fear from being alone, the feeling of dying over and over again that babies feel if they are not held close. I know that if I had put him in a nursery I wouldn't have felt a lot of the feelings from the past that I did feel. But, like many of you, I wanted my child's childhood to be very different from my own. And although this may not be everyone's idea of nurturing themselves, having this knowledge from this book has really helped me many times to be kind to myself, to think of the little girl that I was and to feel compassion and sorrow and love for her, then, and for me, now.
The other thing which has really helped me to be kinder to myself has been the knowledge that usually when I am feeling angry and controlling with the children, when nothing they do seems to be right, when they just won't do what I want them to do (etc, etc, I'm sure you know the score) that I am, in truth feeling scared, well terrified actually. It's the classic animalistic fight, flight or freeze response to fear that we all have. Getting angry and fighting is often easier, more apparently powerful, than the powerless feeling of being scared.
In addition, knowing that usually the relatively small thing in the present that is scaring me, is being magnified many times over by the many and various scary feelings from the past that I was unable to express, helps me to be kinder to myself. I find it more nurturing to myself to say, "Joanna you are scared and your fear is being made even bigger by past scary experiences that you haven't resolved, so take care of yourself", than to say "don't be ridiculous there's nothing to be scared about". This magnification of present feelings by unexpressed past feelings doesn't only apply to fear, of course, but also to anger and sadness.
I'm not saying that I always remember these insights in the midst of my crazy
moments but they really have helped me to nurture myself and others and be
nurtured - it's easier for other people to be kind to me when I say, "help
me, I'm scared", rather than raging and ranting in anger.
I also love scented candles, walks by the river, the sea, gardening, Billy
Connolly and Eddie Izzard, my husband tickling my feet, and beautiful flowers.