Giving Amy Wings
Becoming a parent is hard. While the love that we feel for our children surpasses the challenge a million times over, what a ride. At every stage there’s another challenge. Hey, you could call it the ultimate tool in self-development as it gives us every opportunity to grow.
Meet my client. New parent. Infatuated. High on unconditional love, but experiencing an internal dialogue that is stripping the joy out of this process and putting her on the fringe of post-natal depression. She’s no idea where it came from, though it does feel vaguely familiar and she has no idea how to get rid of it, aside from stopping her child crying.
Stats
37-year-old new mum.
In a loving relationship with a new dad.
Struggled significantly with family relationships, but has come out the other side.
Lots of loving and supportive friendships.
Objective
To smash a defence system that is making this beautiful time unbearable.
Issues to address
On giving birth to her beautiful daughter, a change occurred that Amy was unprepared for.
It went like this, baby cried, voice in head told her, very aggressively, that she was inadequate. It sounded like this…you are hopeless, you are a bad mum, you can’t do anything right, you don’t know what you are doing… and it went on and on. It stopped when the crying stopped. It returned when the crying started.
Now, as we all know, crying is a very big part of a new-borns activities. Hell, they are trying to get used to a whole new world that they have been ejected into very quickly. They are learning how to eat, sleep, feel, everything. And crying is their only language. Crying is not only normal, it is necessary. But this poor mother and many parents like her, had a really bad reaction to it.
For Amy, her babies cries, hit the untruth that she is in adequate.
For Amy, on this untruth being hit, her defence system kicks in and it works to get her to quit and it used her very own thinking to do this.
If we look at her life…that is what Amy had done in relationships and in her career. She’s done a lot of quitting. Her defence system is set up to convince her to do this, because on quitting it moves her away from that emotion that accompanies inadequacy, emotions that feel like failure and looser – and it puts her into the space of much nicer and calmer emotions.
The issue – while you can stop your career acceleration and give up your boyfriend, you can’t quit being a Mum.
Background
Amy’s been working with me for a while. We’ve tackled relationships, her childhood and we’ve put these in healthy places. So moving into parenthood was exciting. She had already learnt how to seek the knowledge needed for each stage of the process and she had tackled pregnancy and the birthing process with gusto. She could communicate well with her partner, she was gearing up for a fabulous experience, in fact the position most new mothers dream of, financial security, partner security, championed and internally very healthy.
She wasn’t expecting a tyrant to appear in her very own head.
Genius You journey
Amy was good at this. She knew how to follow my lead and quickly got into the zone of investigating so we could see what was going on.
One of the things we do in Genius You is we work on the set-up, which is our framework of self-understanding, all the invisible rules we have inherited and unconsciously developed about ourselves.
If parts of the set-up is wrong, it means the system of our mind, had literally been feed bad data content.
Amy’s set up, communicated that she couldn’t handle inadequacy. Her system fought her to quit, using her thoughts to do this.
Now because the system uses our thoughts, we think it’s how we feel about ourselves. But it isn’t. We are much more than our thoughts. And when we know how we work, we get to choose and literally re-programme ourselves.
Imagine if on the emotion of inadequacy, instead of Amy’s system, screaming at her to quit, it was programmed to gently say, new task, let’s be kind to ourselves on this one, remember we have got this. We know the process. Learn, practice, tweak, master…
A lot of programmes are advocating this, are talking about the importance of positive self-talk and affirmations. But…when we are in full flight defence mode, when a situation has triggered an emotion that our system wants us to get away from, it is very hard to do this, unless we get to see how it all works and we are given a process which enables us to revise it.
Which is what we do.
Outcomes
Amy learnt how to overcome her defence system and is in the process of re-writing it.
She learnt to revise her set up and change her response to the feeling of inadequacy.
And she moved to into becoming the mother she wanted to be. One that has learnt how to grow and develop with her child. And she gets to joy in this process. We are not saying that there aren’t hard bit. Of course. Every time there is a new milestone, the trigger will be hit, the feeling of inadequacy will move her defence system to try and get her to quit, using whatever rationale that her mind can buy into. But she will know and understand it and be able to move it, until at some point, inadequacy triggers another way to approach learning new things, and that becomes second nature.
Investment
Amy undertook a round of defence smashing because she had already completed the foundational programme.
Cost $1,000
Time
1 hour a week, half an hour work per day
Conclusion
This journey was priceless. While there was no chance the Amy was going to quit being a Mum, there was every chance that her mental health and relationships with her daughter and partner would suffer.
This process meant that Amy can be the Mum was wants. She can continue getting stronger, parent with love and has tools to revise the set-up that was in place before she became aware that your insides creates your outsides.
Also, when you smash a defence system, it feels like you have wings, because you are liberated, and Amy certainly suits them.