When the Five Year Old Takes Over

I was just on my way to bed. My son fell asleep early tonight and American Idol is now over...yes I am a closet Dave Cook fan...now officially uncloseted. But mostly I was checking out in front of the "boob tube". Kind of funny that we give it that short hand as the TV literally becomes the breast at which some of us go to for soothing.

And so, soothing is the topic. I became aware this weekend, at how, even being an adult woman rounding the corner to 40 and a mother that inside of me still lives the same 5 year old who learned to avoid criticism and relentless teasing by "being the best" and who equates any kind of authority as abusive power mongering. Is that the reality in which I live now...no but all of us unconsciously find the familiar from the past in situations now and respond as if "it were so". The brain just does this...kind of how we were built to protect ourselves from danger.

Because of this brain reality, changing our behaviour amidst old familiar dynamics is slow. Sometimes the finding the past in the present never changes, we simply get better at catching ourselves in the act of bringing that past forward and make different choices. BUT sometimes we forget and we walk around for an hour, a day or a whole weekend as our five-year-old self resonding to a current event as a five year old would and as the events actually took place then and not how it took place now.

You know, those days where you get so emotional about something that the rational part of your brain - if it ever comes on line - says "Whew, this is a rather strong emotion for a small situation". Like a tunnel vision or where all of the air in the room is being breathed through a straw and all of your attention is on the incident that got you so emotionally reactive that nothing else outside that incident can be seen. Somtimes we can feel the familiarity of our own reactivity. "Oh I used to do this exact thing when I was five." Most of the time, unless we have done a huge amount of work on ourselves in therapy or meditation, we don't even notice we are five.

One of the things I have noticed for myself, after years of self-work and working with clients, is these moments grab us when we least expect them and we have most been neglecting our self-care: I LOVE ME meditation, eating well, sleeping well, communing with friends etc. And as a new mom all of those have taken back seat to mothering my son and starting back to the corporate world. And so my own inner five year old got the best of me.

But I saw my way thru and I was reminded of this neat way to practice I LOVE ME. When we find ourselves in these "regressed" or "young" states we can imagine some figure of the ideal parent that lives inside of you/me/us and in those moments where the five-year-old has taken over, that ideal parent steps in to put that five year old in her lap, ask her what is wrong, hold her, rock her and tell her it is OK without telling her to "get over it" or ask "what is wrong with you". Total love and acceptance helps us see our way out of the reactivity...abusive judgement keeps us stuck there. We can't expect friends to do this for us either...it is most powerful and shifting when we can learn to hold the five year old. Just holding the five year old is another way of practicing I LOVE ME and in giving that child part the love and support it needs the air comes back into the room and we can make a better choice at how to respond to the present moment - the adult world.

Next time you find yourself five, try out finding that ideal mother inside of you and put that five year old in your lap and see how your outlook shifts. And for new moms, just because we are moms, our own inner child doesn't disappear...she is still there and the more we practice loving her the more loving we can be with our flesh and bone children. That is what I am finding anyway...

Off to bed.