When we home-educate, how does our mood affect our children?

We can’t be happy all the time. We’re not superhuman. In fact, we are only human, and it is our humanness that gives us our range of emotions.

Feeling low sometimes is a crucial part of our body’s affinity for health. It offers us a pause. A rest. Time to conserve energy and for introspection. Feelings are signposts to what we need.

If we can learn to go with it, not fight it or deny it, then it can offer us valuable insights that can even lead to healing.

Trying to hide our unpleasant feelings from our children is exhausting and inauthentic. It denies them the chance to witness this emotion in the safety of their family home and for us to model how we care for ourselves when it arrives.

If a child…

If a child never sees how the process of how we, as humans, feel low and then deal with it compassionately, how will they know a healthy way to deal with it when they experience it as an adult adventuring in the big wide world?

Similarly, what does it teach our children if we model suppression or denial? That whole ‘keep calm and carry on’ ethic; which to me screams a response of; hold your breath, tense up and pretend it’s not happening, continue to avoid it and distract yourself at all costs with socially acceptable forms of action, like keeping busy and working.

What would it be like if we could surrender to its blessings? Just be.

Could we use another strategy to approach low mood, sadness or stress? One that embraces it and sees it as an opportunity to care for our needs.

Self-compassion

How would it be if we brought in some self-compassion?

Is this medicine you are familiar with?

Does it come easily or involve resistance?

Wintering can provide us with the fallow time needed to take-stock and re-stock. A time when life slows, energy is minimal and we get an extended period to re-charge. Just as the trees contract and reserve, and the animals nestle in and hibernate, we too can go with the energy of the season.

Seasonal Darkness

This time of year can bring on a kind of ‘dark harvest’. When the year end is fast approaching and either consciously or unconsciously all the ‘downs’ of the year start to pop up and remind us of where we fell short, struggled to meet challenges or met with misfortune. We can end up holding on to a string of failures and focusing on the things that didn’t go as we’d hoped. Dark thoughts can follow and even the lack of light somehow accentuates our experience.

Descending into these darker territories can paradoxically be enlightening. What can we learn by becoming intentionally aware of these moments when they arrive?

Curiosity is expansive

Get curious. Be courageously vulnerable. Ask yourself, what are you really disappointed about? What are you grieving? What are your beliefs about yourself? Where are these thoughts leading you? I find my self-limiting beliefs keep me safely imprisoned in a little cage, steeling my freedom and sense of power. The key is aligning to my values and taking action from a place of love.

Start with compassion, then get curious.

One action that can be taken is to confront the unkind words your inner voice may be reciting. Catch them as they pass and recognise them as part of your brains attempt at keeping you safe. At one time they served you. Are they serving you now?

If they are ‘I’ statements then they are likely to be beliefs that you identify with. Ones that came about a long time ago and have become imbedded in your psyche. It’s important to realise that they are not a fixed part of your neurocircuitry, and once you bring conscious consideration to them you can choose to what stays and what goes.

Automations drive or inhibit our behaviour. Automations continue unconsciously to hold us back. Automations created from thoughts and beliefs can be in complete misalignment to our current understanding of the world. What new automations could you actively foster? What baseline would you like to be acting from?

Power of imagination

One thing I’ve learned from NVC and Lights-On Universe is how to consciously narrate my thoughts and feelings. To acknowledge what’s going on for me, in both body and mind, and bring awareness to my experiences. It gives me choice. It gives me power.

A strategy that I find particularly empowering is to identify with what I want, need or long for, then connect with the feelings that are elicited when this need is met. If I had a need for more joy in my life, then I can imagine a situation where I experience joy, and accept all the feelings that come with it, really feeling into them, benefitting from their presence, and flowing with the energy they bring.

A cool thing about the brain which we can use to our advantage is that when we imagine something, the part that creates our emotions sets to work whether the experience is real or imagined. Whether it’s in the past, present or future. If we use ‘smile-memory’ as Julia Black, of Lights-On Universe, calls it, we can benefit from all the feelings that arise from intentionally re-living it. It gives us a boost and raises our energy and motivation.

Or just do it

Imagination works a treat in times when we cannot carry out a self-soothing activity. However, once we are aware of what it is we need or want, we don’t just want to imagine it, we want to do it.

I like to have a ‘self-soothing’ menu. Something I can refer to when I’m feeling low, or out of kilter. A list of all my favourite most easeful, simple and nourishing activities. All of them serve to metabolise experiences of high emotional charge, whether real, re-lived or imagined. Activities that engage the body and involve movement are great! However, a bath and reading are also firm favourites!

On my list are light stroll, brisk walk, sunrise on the hill, bird watching, foraging, wild swim, dancing, singing, yoga, cuddles, massage, shake brakes, running, etc… you get the picture. Relaxing sensory experiences like a hot chocolate and hot water bottle are also super soothing and care for the needs of your nervous system, flooding it with happy hormones. Social co-regulatory experiences are fantastic too, like listening partnerships and being accompanied in any of the above activities free of judgement and full of love.

Summary

It’s the sequence of;

- identifying our limiting beliefs,

- feeling where they take us emotionally,

- metabolising what comes up,

- consciously considering if it’s time to let the unkind words go in favour of more life-giving ‘I’ statements,

- intentionally choosing a more aligned ‘I’ statement to identify with

- connecting to the associated feelings,

- then, like magic, we are raised out of our low mood

This is radical self-care, intentionally raising our experience of life, and models to our children how to manage our emotions with love and compassion. Skills that enable healthy self-leadership ongoing throughout life.