Raising Our Children to Be Who They Are Without Breaking their Wills--Or their Hearts






Create your parent-digm shift.

DON’T SQUASH MY SPIRIT

All site content and photographs are copyrighted material. Copyright 2009 Lu Hanessian. All rights reserved. Photos by Lisa Trakis for WYSH, LLC. No part of this site may be reproduced without prior written permission from Lu Hanessian.

Sometimes, in spite of our best intentions, we can suppress our children’s exuberance, vitality and authenticity. Why would we ever do this if we love our children and only want the best for them? Without awareness, we tend to re-live the residual pain of our own childhood traumas, our own unmet needs, and our own “stories” through our parenting journey. If we are not conscious of these stories or unhealed parts, we can easily sense an emotional (and sometimes physical) “threat” to our system from our kids’ reactions, emotions and behaviors. This is how a baby or toddler’s intense display of feeling, discomfort, or displeasure can “trip” our internal alarms and spark rage, fear, and pain in us. Or how a “willful” child’s “resistance” can unwittingly activate our fight-flight-freeze response. In order for us to preserve our child’s true self and not squash her spirit, we must unlock the place where our own spirit has been suppressed, how our own vitality has gone into hiding, and uncover the delicate interplay between how our child and we resist each other: the dynamic of our child’s need for acceptance and our learned habit of protecting our wounds from exposure. Without this self-understanding, we may habitually resist our child’s expression of her “will,” and inadvertently break it--along with her heart.
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