My beloved child

“I can hardly feel you!”

…when love between parents and children fails.

A good attachment between us parents and our children is the foundation they need to develop properly, to enter life full of confidence and to unfold a healthy and stable personality. It is the ground on which our children build their lives.

It is a bond of the heart: we feel a vital and pulsing love from the first time we look at our baby and later as our child grows up. However, this bond of the heart is sometimes interrupted, so love is no longer perceptible, or it is overshadowed by other unnerving feelings.

External circumstances can be of great importance here. Maybe the newborn was taken from his or her mother shortly after birth and both had to be separated for a long time due to illness or medical reasons. This could have prevented the baby from turning towards the mother. It could also be that something terrible happened during the pregnancy, like the loss of a beloved uncle, or that giving birth was a difficult experience. All this can hamper the bond between a mother and her baby. Perhaps the mother is unable to build a bond with her child. Or maybe one of the three is bonded to another system and cannot relate freely to the other two. There can be many different reasons why the bond of the heart is blocked.

“You make me so angry!”

…when children cause emotional triggers on their parents

Sometimes we disproportionately react to our children’s behaviour. This can be an indicator of wounds we suffered during our own childhood in a particular situation. When we face this situation again as adults, the fury, pain or helplessness of our inner child makes its way and turns with all its might against our biological child, inflicting the very same wound on him or her, at the very same point. We repeat unfortunate aspects of our own childhood with our biological children. It is not as easy as it might seem to understand what is happening to us at that moment, but the severity and disproportion in which we react to the behaviour of our children is revealing. We then get excessively frustrated, angry or stressed about our child and later wonder why we acted that way and maybe even blame ourselves for it.

“How can I help you?”

…when parents sense that their child is under stress.

Sometimes as concerned parents we feel that our child is under stress. In these situations, we often find it difficult to calm down and feel anxiety as soon as our child shows even the most harmless symptoms, if he or she comes back home a bit too late or climbs up a tree. We are instantly affected by this gnawing feeling that something bad is about to happen. It is a sort of inner restlessness that weighs steadily upon us. It is true, some children are prone to have accidents more often than others. Sometimes children just appear to be very passive, extremely shy or fearful, as if they went through life restrained. Or we may notice that our child is unusually aggressive or restless, or that he or she doesn’t seem to stand on firm ground.