Developing Emotional Skills We Didn't Learn From Our Parents
Let’s be honest, our parents aren’t perfect and that’s okay. Neither are we. But it’s unrealistic to think they’re the only ones responsible for our emotional development.
Remember, everyone is doing their best with the skills they currently have.
It’s important to develop the emotional skills our parents never had.
We learn behaviours both actively & passively from our parents, we need to strengthen the good ones while improving the bad ones.
Some of us may look back on our childhood with incredibly fond memories and when we do that, we can relive them and talk about how amazing they were. And all we remember from the past is positivity. While others may have trouble walking down memory lane due to past trauma and pain. The challenges that were horrific then are still held in our body so we still experience them in our lives today.
This work is for both of you, it isn’t just for those who had a tough childhood. Parenting skills are taught from multiple areas of our life.
Self-esteem and emotions are of course key pillars, and so are our views on success, happiness, money and relationships.
Whether you view your childhood as positive or negative, amazing or challenging, these words apply to you.
This isn’t about whether you came from a loving home or not, it’s about taking responsibility for our lives, taking charge of our future. It’s about recognising one of the skills you didn’t have, the emotional skills your parents probably didn’t have, that you need to develop and learn.
A lot of people think the only skill needed for parenting is to love their kids. Even if you’re not a parent, we have all been children and we all know that there’s much more than that.
So here’s to parenting yourself. We may not be aware of the skills our parents had or even the ones they still struggle with. But it’s so important for us to learn those skills for multiple reasons.
TIPS ON HOW TO DISCOVER THE EMOTIONS YOU NEED TO DEVELOP
Make a list of all the things you believe you learnt from your parents. It’s so important to be conscious about what you believe your parents really gave you.
I want you to feel grateful for this list.
The biggest thing to remember is that we didn’t learn everything they taught us from their active role. Many things were learned from the way they did something and how it made us feel.
Some of us follow in our parent's footsteps and do exactly what they did, while some of us notice the negative impact it had on us, or others around us, and decide to not act the same way.
So remember, our parents have taught us things actively and passively. Some things we learn by their example, and some things we learn from their mistakes.
Before we dive into the emotional skills our parents didn’t have, we need to be grateful for what we did learn from them. No matter how hard this is, we need to start there.
Once you’ve done that and truly acknowledge from a place of gratitude the good and bad, you’re ready to make a list of what you believe was missing.
And no matter what type of childhood you had, these lists can be confronting.
Some of these things could be anything from forgiveness, to focus, to work ethic or dedication. This is really a list of things from emotions to structure and limiting beliefs.
I know this feels like a lot, but it’s the best way to really unveil what skills you feel you need to develop.
Now is when you can sit and feel into the best way to embrace these changes.
If you’re unsure how to go about something, imagine how it would make you feel and then act from that place.
Subtle little changes in your everyday life will eventually add up to the big shifts you desire. Keep working at it, and appreciate yourself for every step that you take.
BREAKING FAMILY CYCLES
By looking closely at ourselves, we discover that our emotions, behaviours and beliefs are those that were impressed upon us during our youth by our parents, grandparents, and the generations that preceded them.
Much of our emotions evolve from passively witnessing our parents. We then unconsciously perpetuate cycles of the previous generations, such as fear of having enough, not showing affection, and secrecy patterns. Yet the transmission of negative patterns from one generation to the next is not inevitable.
It is possible to become the endpoint at which our emotions can let go of the negative family cycles that have thrived for generations, which is why we need to develop the emotional skills our parents didn’t have.
Breaking the pattern is a matter of overcoming those values imprinted upon us long ago in order to replace them with pure love, tolerance, and conscious awareness.
Even if you have emotionally struggled with the cumulative effects of family neglect, you can still liberate yourself from the effects of your family history.
You may one day simply realise that certain aspects of your early life have negatively affected your health, happiness, and ability to evolve as an individual. Or you may find that in order to transcend long-standing patterns of emotional neglect, limiting beliefs and irrational behaviour, you have to question your values and earnestly examine how your parents have impacted your personality.
Only when you fully understand how family traits have influenced you emotionally can you gain freedom from those cycles.
In order to truly change, you must give yourself permission to change. Breaking family patterns is in no way an act of defiance or betrayal.
It is important that you trust yourself implicitly when determining the behaviours and beliefs that will help you overwrite the emotional skills your parents weren’t able to teach you.
Many people are on the earth at this time to break family cycles, for all of you are true pioneers. In breaking negative family cycles, you will discover that your ability to express your feelings and needs grows exponentially and that you will embark upon a journey toward greater well-being that can positively impact generations to come.
6 REASONS WE NEED TO DEVELOP THE EMOTIONAL SKILLS OUR PARENTS NEVER HAD
1) When we try to develop the emotional skills our parents didn’t have, we realise how hard it is.
This may help us realise, that was their best attempt. It’s easy to judge our parents and believe they didn’t give us the best. Even if you’re right, even if you could objectively show it is totally true, that thought doesn’t benefit you. Instead, it creates a victim mindset and a belief that your life is worse than anyone else’s.
How many times have you met someone who is just lost, with that feeling of being a victim, as if their life is the worst and they’ve just had a hard deal?
When you try to develop the skills your parents didn’t have, you recognise just how hard those skills are. You recognise you may never perfect them yourself, and this gives you a new perspective. It stops us from judging our parents and helps us focus on how we can develop them.
72% of people learn hard work by watching their parents work hard. So how do we parent ourselves in the process?
We may have seen our parents work hard, but did they work hard for something that was meaningful to them?
The challenge is, we usually take the external and not the internal lesson. Why were they working hard? What were they working hard on? Those are the nuances where you have to parent yourself.
They may have taught you hard work ethics, but not passion and purpose, meaning or fulfilment. That’s where you come in. That’s the reason why you need to dial into those emotional skills, so that you can coach yourself.
Now it’s hard for anyone to coach passion or purpose. Parenting experts say kids learn hard work when you let them experience failure to prepare and work hard… So what you need to do is observe when you don’t prepare and you put in the work and you fail and make mistakes. How does that feel? Use that as a fuel to create the work ethic you desire.
So the reason why we need to develop the emotional skills our parents didn’t have is to first of all, realise how hard they are, stop judging them, and to give yourself the time and perspective to recognise that we have to look at the gaps. Even if we did learn hard work, what was missing that can improve our lives from a meaningful perspective.
2) So we can parent ourselves. It’s our job to give ourselves the upbringing that we believe we deserve.
Otherwise, you constantly live in this bubble of, ‘I didn’t get what I needed. And now I can’t get it.’
That’s giving away your power. We live in this world of ‘I didn’t get it, so I can never get it’. And that’s just not true, because you can parent yourself.
You can give yourself the parenting you didn’t receive. This is empowering. It’s energising the fact that even if there was something you missed out on, you can get it today. It’s not as easy to sit here and judge our parents parenting styles, when we have to parent ourselves. This approach is about taking a personal sense of responsibility to help ourselves heal.
If we don’t learn the skills of forgiveness, compassion and love, then we cannot parent ourselves.
Even if we feel there is nothing to heal, sometimes the wounds are so deep that we can’t see them anymore. It’s easy to think we’re fine, but it’s so important to address this. So many of us feel that we’re okay, that we don’t let it affect us, but we have to take stock.
52% of people say, their parents taught them discipline, but in an unhealthy way. We learn discipline by doing things completely. How many of us start a course and don’t complete it? Or maybe a book or a podcast? We have this habit of starting things and not completing them. Pushing ourselves to completion on something that matters, is a great way of parenting ourselves. We give ourselves that confidence boost. We feel our self-worth when we do that.
Another thing, when we develop compassion and love we develop those skills. We actually allow ourselves to feel what our parents could have given us, but we’re giving it to ourselves now. And that also gives us a sense of worth and meaning and reason.
3) We have to learn the emotional development that our parents didn’t have, so we can give them to our children.
I actually did it a bit skew whiff.. because this is where I started. I didn’t understand I needed to do it for myself in the beginning, I just knew I needed to do it for my kids. So please learn from my mistakes and recognise that you really do need to do it for yourself to be able to help others. Sometimes we have to learn things the hard way though, or perhaps I should say the non linear way.
To be of service to others (including your children) it’s about giving them the opportunities you didn’t have.
If we wait to get, we may never give. And what we don’t realise is by giving, we receive.
So by giving our children what we didn’t have, we actually create that environment for ourselves to live in. This rings the truest for me and touches my heart deep in the very core of my inner child.
66% of people learn responsibility from their parents. They said the best way to get there, is to focus on an objective and figure out how to get there on your own.
Children are more responsible when we boost their self-esteem through appreciation. We have to appreciate ourselves. Talk to yourself like someone you love. You may think that sounds self-centered or cheesy, but we have to give ourselves that encouragement. You have to provide yourself with that environment to grow in.
It’s about recognising that everyone requires different things and everyone needs different things.
4) So we can stop resenting them and stop being bitter towards them.
When we develop the emotional skills our parents didn’t have, we stop the negativity. These are terrible emotions to carry around. The last thing you want to do, especially when a parent passes away is to carry resentment or bitterness around.
It’s so important that we purify and cleanse this negative emotion that we have in our lives so that we don’t have that feeling towards them.
It’s not surprising that only 47% of people learn trust from their parents. And this is because we actually learn to lie from around the age of 3. One of the biggest challenges is learning how to speak honestly. We lie because we’re scared of letting someone else down.
So we have to encourage truthfulness in ourselves as an act of courage. If we don’t rewire and reparent ourselves to give that act of courage through truth, then we’re going to continue living that journey.
The 4 austerities of speech.
To only speak that which is truthful
To only speak that which is beneficial to all.
To speak in a way that doesn’t agitate the minds of others.
Consistency with spiritual words.
You may read that and think ’well what am I going to say then’ and that’s the thing about it. When you hear that, what you should be thinking is ‘how can I speak in such a way, to myself and to others that is truthful, beneficial to all and doesn’t agitate others’.
When you can speak in that way. You start having power over how you speak to yourself and how you speak to others. You start removing that bitterness and resentment that can often be there.
5) To actually help your parents.
This one potentially can be the hardest one for some. But the reason why we need to develop the emotional skill our parents didn’t have, is so we can help them back.
We can be their coach or guide or even mediator. Not because we know more or are better, but because we want to have that compassion and service and guidance and we can actually offer that back to them. Because today we have so much more access to information and role models in our lives that didn’t exist for them. So when our parents didn’t give us certain things, it may not be because they didn’t want to, they might just not have known how. This is something huge that I truly recommend you think about.
6) We mirror in relationships what we saw in our parents.
We look for our partner to fill the gap our parents left. If we don’t unpack our own issues that are missing, we’ll expect our partner to do it for us.
Only 43% of people learn to be resourceful from their parents. The way children are taught these skills is by not giving them every part of the puzzle. We don’t give all the answers.
Similarly, with ourselves, our partner will never do all the work, our partner isn’t going to fill every gap. They’re not going to unpack our emotional baggage for us. This is something we have to do. And the problem is, if we don’t do it ourselves, we make the same mistakes in our relationship.
Notice how if your parents always played the guilt trip, you do that to your partner or even to your kids.
How many of you have done something like that to your partner? Where you’re repeating the pattern your parents did to you.
Or if your parents always put you down, after you messed up or succeeded, do you do that to your partner?
Just think about this for a moment: What habits are you mirroring that are ruining your relationship? What habits (from observing your parents) are you now re-enacting and distorting, that are putting challenges into your relationship?
This is actually the biggest one. We start to mirror in our relationships what we saw in our parents. We start acting like our mother or father when we don’t heal, when we don’t develop emotional skills to remove these traits, to recognise these traits. We end up bringing them into our relationships and reliving the same thing.
Some of us saw what happened with our parents and we decided we didn’t want the same thing. Some of us didn’t consciously learn that skill and so we’ve just recreated the same thing.
And then the second part of that is, we look for a partner to fill our parents' gap. So if our parents left a gap emotionally and we’re looking for our partners to fill it, we’re adding a lot of pressure onto our partner.
That’s why it’s so deeply important that we heal ourselves.
That we go through that process ourselves.
If you didn’t have the best parenting, become the best parent for yourself.
Whatever you believe you didn’t have, you can provide that for yourself.
If you didn’t believe you had the best education, go and find the best education for yourself.
The truth is, it’s never too late. You’re not ahead, you’re not behind.
You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
Start where you are.
Whatever you didn’t have, find it for yourself now. Become it for yourself now.
Because the truth is, nothing is stopping you, except for yourself.
And the best part is, you’re going to try your best, you’re going to make mistakes, you're going to fail just like your parents may have. And that’s fine.
Nobody can perfect it and make exactly the right atmosphere all the time and provide all the amazing ways to get parented and learn.
We won’t even do it all with our children and that’s what gives us this freedom and liberation of recognising, we didn’t receive perfection, and we can’t give perfection. And that’s okay because we can try our best.
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