It’s the final week of the traditional parenting styles and today I’m introducing the Laissez Faire style of parenting, also referred to as permissive. As adults looking back on how we were parented, this would be viewed as parents allowing us to do whatever we wanted, without consequence. Parents would have been ‘hands off’, ‘que sera sera’, how you express your emotions is fine - even when it’s not, your behaviour is acceptable - even when its not, as you will calm down eventually. This style of parenting has no boundaries, doesn’t teach children how to solve problems, or how to regulate their emotions. Instead as children, we would have been allowed to react in whatever way we wished. An analogy would be pulling back a toy car and letting it go wherever it wants without boundaries. The car is out of control.
How does this show up in adulthood?
Adults who received this style of parenting may struggle with chaos in their lives, as they never learned, because they were never shown, how to self-regulate, calm down or modelled boundaries and limits. They may find it difficult to cope with life’s ups and downs, have difficulty focusing and forming any kind of friendship or relationship with others.
Because of this, these are adults who may well be unable to connect to others because they haven’t been shown how to connect to their inner world. They may be quiet, uninvolved, shy, or completely disconnected from society. They might find it difficult to concentrate on any task, and their ability to even get started on something could be a challenge.
How can emotion coaching help overcome this?
I’ll be honest, I write what I know about and for me, this style of parenting, whilst possibly present, wasn’t the dominant one, not from my sketchy memory anyway.
But as with all emotion coaching, the first step when we realise this is affecting our life as an adult is to show empathy for ourselves. We have to realise we are not ‘broken’, we don’t need ‘fixed’, that the wiring in our brain and the conditioning that has caused us to behave as we do, was out of our control. We need to know this so we don’t blame ourselves for making the choices we did, or still do, that it’s merely a pattern that we can break.
I would suggest that this would then bring us to step four, ‘problem solving’. We have to first of all identify the problem that we want to solve in our lives and in the case of laissez faire consequences, this might be lack of motivation, making an effort to make friends or learning how to self-regulate and move into the parasympathetic nervous system as quickly as possible.
When we know what the problem is that needs to be solved, we move to step 3 of emotion coaching which is, ‘setting limits on behaviour’. Here is where we give ourselves boundaries. Using the examples above, this could be booking an exercise class once per week, finding an interesting club to join to connect with likeminded people, or it could be learning what our window of tolerance is so that we can try to prevent any possible stress responses and move quickly into a calm state.
Finally step 2, allows us to begin to tune in to our emotions that we have been so disconnected from that tell us why we could be reacting or behaving in the way we are. This is the deeper work that will take time, but will allow us to name the emotions we are feeling that created the lack of motivation, or not making an effort to make friends, or not knowing how to self-regulate, leading to a life of chaos and turmoil. This is when we might need to engage the help of a therapist or help to work through it.
For me, the purpose of emotion coaching ourselves as adults, isn’t to dwell on how we were parented, which might keep us stuck in unhelpful naval gazing. It allows us to the grace to feel how we do, to have empathy for ourselves, and to take steps to overcome and strengthen our emotional connection to ourselves and to others.
To peace and prosperity
jaxx x
Always seek the advice of a professional if you need to.
References
Comments