Permission to feel
🎂All the feels🎂
Yesterday was my birthday. Although, actually, I’m writing this on Wednesday so my birthday is tomorrow, and now I have confused you and me and I am left wondering if this authenticity milarkey, telling you the absolute truth, is always worth it.
ANYWAY the feeling I was going to write about today was resentment, but as it is/was/willbe 🤪 my birthday I thought I’d write about all the feelings that birthdays can bring up. Yes, resentment may still feature.
Let’s start with a poem for a change.
I wrote this poem about 4 years ago after my eldest son turned 13. He had conflicting feelings about his birthday because he was, well, disappointed about his ‘birthday experience’; yet he also felt guilty for feeling disappointed, because it wasn’t that anything was lacking as such - presents, party, plenty of cake.
He just thought, expected even, that marking his transition into teenage years would be bigger, better, brighter, bolder.
Oh bother!
Now, don’t judge the poor kid. He’s not selfish. Privileged, yes, thanks to my parenting approach, but that’s on me, not him.
The very thing that I had tried to avoid, a feeling of disappointment on his birthday, I had created because I had set ridiculous expectations about what I would deliver for his birthday.
Why?
Because I had a little parcel of unresolved birthday disappointments of my own; like the time my birthday present of a puppy had to be handed back, or my birthday surprise trip on a boat was cancelled due to the aforementioned boat being taken by someone else - along with all of my presents on board.
I imagine, just like me, my parents were trying to give their child wonderful experiences; maybe to make up for their own past disappointments. And yes, I can also say that my disappointments were privileged disappointments. Yet, to a young child who does not have the cognitive maturity to see such disappointments with perspective they are just… unresolved disappointments.
And how often, in order to resolve our unresolved disappointment from childhood, do we try to ‘fix it’ through how we behave in relationships? Especially with our children. How often do you hear people say,
‘I want them to have the childhood that I never had’.
Yet disappointment and resentment still end up being served alongside the lashings of cake and ginger beer.
Why is that? Well, who was I actually serving by increasing my expectations of what to provide my children on their birthday?
Me!
When we give out of unresolved hurt and disappointment it is actually a selfish act, because we are trying to heal our wound through our action.
How painful it is, setting such unrealistic expectations! We do it to alleviate the residing sense of shame that we form from our own disappointments, but we can never do that because we try and fix the outside, rather than heal the inside.
Of course, children are disappointed by their parents, but what children need when that happens is to be able to express their full experience, without feeling like they have to caretake their parents’ emotions. When my puppy was taken away, I understood why, and that was ok, but when I cried about it I was told not to by my mother because it was too upsetting for her. THAT was where the damage was done, the shame was built, because in that moment I was (albeit unconsciously by my mother) being taught that it wasn’t ok for me to feel the way I naturally felt.
As a mother myself, I didn’t want my children to feel the upset that I had felt, and thought that the answer to that was to create a magical experience for their birthdays. Actually, what I needed to do was have a clear set of boundaries with myself about what we would do for his birthday and how much we would spend and then if my son was disappointed, meet him in that disappointment. As Banksy said,
‘A lot of parents will do anything for their kids, except let them be themselves.’1
So the greatest gift that I could give my son that birthday was to hear his disappointment without judgment, advice or defence, take ownership for my set up and readjust the boundaries around the Power ‘birthday experience’!
And me? I still needed to heal that young part of me that felt grief about my birthday experiences. How? Well, sometimes a ‘do-over’ can help you heal. You’re never too old to throw yourself a children’s birthday party when your own birthday comes around!
Of course, you can’t do a do-over for every painful experience in this way, but you can with Matrix Reimprinting. I trained in this last weekend and am already starting to see great improvements with my clients. Matrix Reimprinting is a way of accessing traumatic memories in a stabilised (non-re-traumatising) way so that they can be processed and resolved. If you want to know more, or are interested in a session then get in touch. I’d love to tell you more about it!
I’d love to know how you are about your birthday and whether any of this resonated. When I perform ‘The Day of Birth Disease’ it always gets knowing nods in the audience!
Wishing you all a fabulous week,
That’s it for now!
‘Til next time
Jacky x
This quote was from Dr. Brad Reedy’s book ‘The Audacity to be You’ which I highly recommend. You can listen to Dr. Brad on my podcast here.