Question: My wife does not trust me with our youngest child. She always hovers when we are together and if something happens when she is away (say she has to step away to use the bathroom), I never hear the end of it. I am so paranoid of doing something wrong and try so hard to prove I am just as good of a parent as she is. Things happen on her watch too, why can’t I have the same forgiveness?
Answer: l totally hear you… This in fact is a very common complaint and problem in marriages with new children… The love we feel for those little critters is so intense that it triggers all of our fears about death, about losing control, about superior inferior, about righteousness, and about how to communicate with kindness and honor in the face of fear.
It sounds like your wife is coming from a place of fear about the well-being of your child and has deemed you unfit. My experience with my clients is that when we feel afraid of being rejected that it puts us into a fight or flight or freeze. This disconnect us from our centers of intelligence in our brain as well as our creativity, and we end up making unwise decisions or simply goofing up. This solidifies the initial opinion that you were unfit to care for the child and the cycle worsens… And worsens… And worsens. This is another way of saying I completely understand your paranoia my friend!
Now, to turn this all around, in a healthy sustaining way, my experience is that couples counseling is tremendous to first identify these sabotaging behavior that’s creating separation and resentment within the marriage, second to heal the internal fears going on in both of you, then third from a place of centered confidence and intelligence and awareness, create new communications and structures to set you both up to win as a couple and as parents.
I took tons of parenting courses, even the best manuals don’t allow for the uniqueness of a child. Yet if you take any of these courses on top of the fears and resentments and paranoia and on kindness… That’s like putting sprinkles on an ice cream cone of shit! Clearly it doesn’t work. What does work is doing counseling and then together as a team create a path for success… I can’t be fun to be your children living in that angry fearful energetic environment… Do it for your marriage and for your family… Nothings wrong here, just the next level of your evolution and growth.
Go to www.AllanaPratt.com/connect and apply for a complementary strategy session so that the three of us can get on the phone or Skype and I can discover if you’re a fit for me to invite you to work with me to change all this right away… i’m so inspired that you took action and reached out… And I look forward to seeing your strategy session booked in my calendar 🙂
p.s. In the mean time please enjoy my complementary How To Be A Noble Badass Training at www.GetHerToSayYes.com to begin dissolving the paranoia into grounded certainty with your capacity as a man and a Dad.
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