Shaming doesn’t disappear big feelings, shaming only hides big feelings. Turns them into secrets. Places them on the back burner until further notice to slowly heat up and keep a person from breathing right.
Validation on the other hand allows feelings to be heard and understood, and allows feelings to do what everything likes to do—change into something else—to evolve.
Being with our own feelings and creating safe spaces for others to be with their feelings, lets ourselves and each other experience the seasons of our emotions, and I think this is perhaps one of the greatest gifts there is.
The problem is that many of us parents have a lot of unresolved feelings on our back burners. And many of us are smoldering inside. And now we have these kids with the audacity to have feelings of their own, but we can’t deal with them, because we still haven’t dealt with our own.
And so we shame our kids because that’s the way we‘ve learned how to ‘get rid’ of feelings, and our kids start stacking up their own unresolved feelings on their own back burners and everyone starts to walk around smoldering together.
I think one way to heal this cycle is for us parents to address what’s on our back burners first, one feeling at a time. To bring our feelings to the forefront of our attention, feel them and validate them, whatever they are, so that they can be free.
And then, we can be available to let our children have their feelings without feeling threatened by them. We can welcome their feelings as they emerge and we can validate them, whatever they are, so that their feelings can do what everything wants to do—evolve into the next thing.
-JLK
