A little break last Monday but I’m back today to talk about parenting styles and how it can affect us as adults, our relationship with ourselves and with others. Starting with…
The disapproving style
Disapproving is one of four parenting styles identified by John Gottman and his research team in 1996. Whilst Gottman’s research noted a dominant style in each of the parents, they generally switched between all four depending on a variety of factors. The other three are dismissive, laissez faire and emotion coaching and I’ll be discussing them in the coming weeks.
The disapproving style of parenting is a flat out rejection of emotions, feelings and the internal world of children, adolescents...and our own, if that was a dominant style when we were growing up.
It is a style of parenting that offers punishment for having a normal, human experience - feeling what we feel. We see it with, “boys don’t cry”, “stop being a big baby”, and room banishing.
How does is affect us as adults?
If our emotions are disapproved of as children and adolescents, we may grow up to believe that our emotions don’t matter, that we don’t matter. This can lead to all sorts of problems with self-esteem, self-identity, people pleasing and putting other people’s emotions before our own, and engaging in behaviour and making choices that don’t serve us.
We can have that very harsh internal critic who tells us off for having emotions, we don’t know how to handle big emotions, so we suppress or deny that we are even experiencing them. Interestingly this can happen even with ‘good’ emotions, if a child hasn’t been modelled healthy love, this can be something that could illicit the ‘fight or flight’ response in adulthood.
What is the way out?
If we find we are being harsh on ourselves or being disapproving of our own emotions, or the emotions of others, the best first step is step 1 of emotion coaching, which is empathy. Empathy is the ability to step into another’s shoes, so we need to step into our own shoes and ground ourselves in our emotional world, allowing them to be felt, recognised and used as our North Star to guide us to where we want to be.
We need to remind ourselves that every emotion we (and others) feel is acceptable and normal whilst also recognising that perhaps our behaviour, or the behaviour of others, is not acceptable, and that’s what we need to focus on changing.
If our emotions are causing us to make unhelpful choices in our lives (because we also don’t have our prefrontal cortex, thinking brain integrated and engaged), then we need to do what we can to recognise those patterns in ourselves. This is where self-awareness comes in, which is not an easy one for those who have been cut off from their emotions.
Remember, parenting styles are like a baton that is passed down from generation to generation and are most likely a result of external stressors and the environment in which people were brought up in, and all it takes is one person to stop passing the baton on.
To peace and prosperity,
jaxx x
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