The Voices That Highjack Our Parenting

And why we are better than this.

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“We’re better than this,” I told him.

I could feel him listening intently as he shuffled around the kitchen after getting back from a surf.

I recounted what had happened earlier that morning.

I was getting Gia dressed for daycare. She wanted to wear her short-sleeved horse print dress, the one she affectionately calls ‘horsey dress’.

The house carried an autumn chill, so I looked for something she could wear underneath the dress.

I grabbed her soft burgundy tank top and pounced, quickly throwing it over her head, like an inverse shoot at a basketball hoop. Nailed it.

She was captivated by the tiny clay fairy in her hand, so she hadn’t noticed the top I was now guiding her little arms into.

Next, horsey dress went over her head. I thought I’d got away with it.

Gia looked down, saw a peek of burgundy and pulled at it. “Nooo, I don’t want this top!”

I foolishly tried to apply logic and reasoning about the cooler air outside, how she needs to stay warm, how the air con at daycare is (ridiculously) cold.

“But I don’t like it!”

Frustration was building fast, in me and in her.

‘She can’t get her own way all the time,’ a voice said, maybe Rob’s, maybe someone else’s.

Gia in her horsey dress, Ibiza, June 2022

I walked away to get myself dressed now, Gia followed me down the hallway, crying out, “But I don’t want this top on, I don’t like it!”

My body was holding the growing distress of my daughter and the growing tension of voices that were not my own.

Anger started flooding my body.

I did what I’ve done a handful of times, as an attempt to discharge my anger and jolt Gia into some laughter.

I picked her up and threw her around a bit, the way she usually loves to be thrown around.

Her crying got louder. This time she couldn’t speak through her tears, but her wailing exclaimed, ‘You’re not listening to me!’

The pressuring voices in my head got louder too, ‘Listen, you can’t let her get away with fussing.’

I threw Gia onto the big soft cushion on the sofa, something that would usually have her urging me: Again! Again!

Instead her tear-filled eyes grew wide and she looked up at me the way I don’t want my child to ever look at me again - she was frightened.

My heart hurt.

“Not this,” I told myself. NOT. THIS.

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I picked her up, held her and slowly deepened my breath. She dropped her head over my shoulder.

“Why don’t you want to wear it?”

Stupid question, but I was dropping into my body now, re-orienting myself.

“I just don’t like it,” she blubbed.

I took her back into the bedroom and sat on the bed with her.

My voice was softer now, my own.

“Shall we take it off?”

She nodded, her bottom was lip protruding but her crying had stopped.

I could sense the relief in her little body. She could feel me now, listening.

I gently took off her dress, then the burgundy tank, and checked if she still wanted to wear her horsey dress. Yes.

“Darling, I’m so sorry, do you feel better now?”

She nodded, looking at the floor.

All of this, because I was disassociated from my true voice and highjacked by someone else’s.

“We’re better than this,” I told him. He nodded.

I shared with him how, in those moments of ignoring her cries, that I’d dealt with it the way he would have dealt with it. The way it would have hurt me to watch.

I told him how she had clearly felt dismissed, invalidated, unworthy of being heard.

But this was not about attacking him, it was about rallying us together to be better.

The part of me that occasionally unconsciously adopts his way of parenting in those kinds of moments, was the part of me that needed to be scrutinised through the lens of worthiness.

In my five years as a writer and mentor playing close attention to the nature of worthiness, I’ve learned this:

Unworthiness plays out in our parenting more than anywhere else.

When we’re in the trance of unworthiness (Tara Brach’s term), we dissociate from our bodies and our true voices.

From the outside, when we witness #badparenting, it’s easy to condemn the parent.

But what’s going on inside the mother or father, in any given moment, is what determines our capacity to lovingly parent.

And I have to remind myself when my partner makes parenting choices that make me wince, that he’s likely in this trance of unworthiness, and judging him is entirely missing the point.

We need to wake each other up.

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Something rather silly, but typical of our time, happened immediately before the horsey-dress saga.

I saw something on Facebook that triggered me.

A woman I know from my previous life as a makeup artist posted something about how amazing her best friend is.

This best friend, I’d met twice, many years ago. Once at an engagement party and then a wedding.

At the moment we were introduced, I was warm and friendly, she was cold and disinterested.

I didn’t get it. Like, whyyy? But it stung.

The next time I saw her at the wedding, she was sat opposite me, and refused to make eye contact.

So I went into story about what a bitch she was, but barely thought about her again.

Fast forward to horsey dress morning… this woman I used to work with was heaping praise onto her ‘bestie’, online.

I didn’t get it. How could someone so blatantly cold be considered so amazing?

My pain-body wanted to hate her, it also wanted to tell me I obviously wasn’t cool enough for her to bother engaging with at the party.

Then my pain body ran wild, poking into forgotten childhood memories of how I wasn’t worthy of belonging to friendship groups, certainly not the cool types.

Ping Ping Ping

I was swallowed by the void, ricocheting from one shadowy thought to the next, an echo chanting, “I just don’t get it, but maybe I wasn’t good enough, I just don’t get it…”

As I dressed Gia, the echo lingered. And when she protested against the tank top, my pain body riled up.

I know now, the part of me that was reactive to Gia’s protest, didn’t want to be interrupted in its elaborate stories about what a bitch someone was, about how uncool I must be, and about how ‘right’ I was.

I know now,

-I’d spiralled into story, dissociated from my body and my own voice, entered the trance of unworthiness and was highjacked by its voice.

And then I’d parented - from that place.

Disaster.

Here’s the thing, the pain body is wired to get its hits.

It wants us complicit in our unworthiness so we don’t interrupt its looping stories.

But we, collectively, are better than this.

Unworthiness is inherited, systemic, cultural and habitual.

So we need to interrupt it, because unworthiness is not truth and it does not belong to our parenting.

We don’t need some forced ‘conscious parenting’ script to break ancestral cycles so our children don’t inherit unworthiness.

We need to pay attention to where unworthiness has a grip on us, and how background stories and voices are highjacking our parenting.

It’s the internal cycles we need to break, a shift from our pain-bodies and a return to the voice of our innate worthiness of love and belonging.

This is the voice from which we must parent. This is what our children are here to inherit.

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How did this land for you?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments. X

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Thanks to

Claire Venus

for the invitation to join her

Sparkle on Substack

essay club. This is the 2nd of at least 24 Substack essays I’ll be sharing before end of Jan 2025.

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