A Conversation with Lori Petro on Parenting and Emotional Overwhelm
What I keep coming back to is that the hardest part of parenting isn't the children themselves. It's what rises up in us when a small person refuses to cooperate, or stands between us and whatever we've decided we want in that moment. Our own reactions. The flood of feeling that takes over. Bringing a more conscious, relationship-based way of raising kids into a home means going back and tending to our own history, and that history is exactly how I ended up doing this work.
I was already drowning emotionally before I ever became a parent. Looking back, I could see that the family I grew up in leaned hard on rough, sharp ways of dealing with each other. Plenty of judgment. Plenty of blame, shame, guilt, fear. That was the vocabulary I absorbed, and it became the way I related to the people around me. None of it leaves you standing on solid emotional ground.
There isn't much emotional intelligence baked into those methods, and still they run most households, because they're what got handed down. The unspoken message is something like: listen to me right this second, or I'll judge you, blame you, shame you, make you feel guilty, or teach you to be afraid of me. My argument is that we have to return to the emotional footing underneath all of it.
Eric asked how a parent actually begins to change, especially someone who's just come across this kind of work. They sense that something is off in how they connect with their kids. Maybe the child seems shut down, or frustrated a lot of the time, and the parent has no idea what to do with that.
The starting point, I told him, is getting a handle on our own overwhelm first. The very first thing I ask parents to do is stop and breathe. When something triggers us, there are really only two directions to go. One is to let the old tape play, the automatic reaction we already know by heart, usually some version of anger. The other is to catch it and break the loop.
Lots of small tools can interrupt that pattern. Breathing is the plainest one, and it pulls us back toward calm. Just that pause. Some of the people I work with tie a little thread around the wrist as a cue: this week I'm paying attention to my breath, to my own awareness, to noticing when I'm about to get triggered. You begin with something tiny like that.
You can't march straight in and solve the frustration or the withdrawal in your child before you've steadied yourself. It's the oxygen mask on the airplane. Yours goes on first. So the real beginning is taking care of you.