Sounds like a contradiction hey! How can we ever be at peace while our child is suffering, it provokes so much stress and anxiety and helplessness in us parents when our child is clearly in physical or emotional pain. Yet at the same time, it’s also when our child needs us to be present and available and empathic, which gets harder and harder the more stressed we are!
I think that any parent whose watching their child suffering regardless of the cause or diagnosis, could gain something from this article. It’s SO easy to get pulled into the strong tides of fear and helplessness and anxiety and really hard to come back to a more accepting state, but knowing (or remembering) that that’s a good place to be heading is a big part of the pic.
I think if I’d read it at that time when my son was 15 and was in hospital and needed to have the op on his heart, it might have really helped me get centred. It was a really tough time, I had taken my daughter out of school for a year of de-schooling (which turned out to be a really good move), and it was so hard to manage and contain all my anxiety while trying to be calm, present and available to my son and my daughter. I can’t say I did an amazing job of it, I wished I could have done way better, but I absolutely did recognize that my old trauma was activated, and that a big part of me wanted to go back into that battle field fight flight mode and it took a LOT to choose peace and acceptance when I was scared for my son’s life. As ever, my meditation helped so much at the time. We all need to have ways that we can de-compress and let all that stress out to avoid toxic stress overload, to protect our children and be able to create lots of positive moments throughout the day that make everyone smile despite the struggles.
Michelle, one of our admins shared this in our admins group.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/stop-fight-against-brain-tumour/