Rejection by Our Children

When our chidlren do not do what we want them to, our unconscious gets triggered. It may be fear that our child will get hurt or that something bad may happen to them. This is a fairly normal, common reaction. I ask parents to explore is how much their child’s disobedience felt like a rejection. Many parents are willing to go to that deeper level. Rejection carriers a tremendous amount of fear with it. That is because fear of rejection is usually a core issue with most people. As much as we don’t want to admit it, it truly is. Wednesday’s blog talked about a mother who medicated her hurt by giving a consequence. Consequences keep us out of relationship with our children. I understand why she did this. She didn’t want to be rejected again. However, she was allowing her fear of what would happen create a negative neurological feed back loop of mutual rejection. We do this so many times. Our fear of what happens creates dys-regulation. What we fear the most happens. As parents, we want our children to love us. We expect that, when in fact much of the time our children are not capable of loving themselves and therefore cannot love us. As parents, we have to feel good enough about ourselves to handle rejection from our children so that we can love them into a place of loving themselves and loving us back. Children experience consequences as a rejection of themselves. This causes them to be dys-regulated and reject us out of their fear of being hurt again. The challenge of parenting is to love yourself enough to be able to handle what ever your child brings to you. Isn’t that the way God does it? We are never rejected by God, even when we don’t or can’t love him. Remember, he loved us first and sought after us. Read my article “The Power of Relationship” for more on this at http://bit.ly/pBwc85.