How High Emotional Standards From Parents Can Negatively Affect Children’s Nervous System Development
When children grow up in an emotionally unstable environment, it can wreak havoc on their nervous system development. If adults struggle to tolerate their own emotional experience, it is likely that they can’t handle their child’s emotional experiences either. Therefore, many adults tend to hold their children at a higher emotional standard than they hold even themselves. Thereby teaching children that their age appropriate reactions are wrong and then leaving them with no resources to learn how to regulate their emotions.
Holding children to these impossible high emotional standards puts a ton of pressure on them to be okay–because if they aren’t, their parents can’t handle it. In order to survive in what feels like an unsafe environment, children will shift to a shutdown state as a way to protect themselves from discomfort. This tendency does not go away later in life, and in fact gets internalized as they become adults. Because these children never learn how to properly regulate their emotions, they become dysregulated adults and the cycle can repeat.
Good Behavior In Kids Doesn’t Always Translate to Healthy Internal Regulation
It’s easy to look at well-behaved children and assume that they are well behaved because they are emotionally regulated; however, not all well-behaved children are. Several of my clients grew up as the “good little girl” or “good little boy,” when in reality, they were just compensating for a lack of security at home or between them and their primary caregivers. They felt that if they could just be perfect enough, they might receive the acknowledgement and emotional support they desperately craved.
This typically leads them to a long road of trying to please everyone else in their lives as well. And while this may temporarily give you the response you’re hoping for, sometimes it comes at a cost. It teaches your nervous system that you’re not allowed to feel any discomfort and that your worth is entirely dependent on the reaction from the people around you. It takes a ton of energy to live this way.
Eventually, my clients realized that they had been living in a chronic freeze response where these pains could be suppressed. There is, in fact, a way out though.
How Can We End the Cycle?
The cycle ends when you show the nervous system it is safe to experience emotions again. This begins with slowly and gently discharging the stress that has accumulated through the years. This can be done through body based therapies, like somatic practice along with rebuilding new neural pathways in the brain associated with safe experiences. Breaking this cycle ends with your awareness and choice to learn to respond differently to your emotional experiences.
Over time, these exercises help you build your capacity to tolerate the emotions and sensations you experience. They also help you move through stressful experiences without shutting down.
If this sounds like you, I’d love to help you establish a new foundation of nourishment for yourself. If you would like to learn more about my current offers, click here. And if you would like to keep in touch & continue learning, be sure to follow me on Instagram, Pinterest, and to check out the rest of my blog posts. I think you may especially like my recent post titled: What Does it Mean to Be a Highly Sensitive Person?
Until next time–
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