Resilience

How does co-dependency work in parenting, I asked my therapist this morning. Or is that even the right term? I'm trying to figure out how to love life and remain hopeful and strong even while my children suffer. It seems impossible to divorce my happiness from my children's health and wellbeing, particularly while they're minors in my care.

My therapist talked about how when we take on the burdens of others, we deprive them of experiencing the burden or challenge themselves. This can be problematic because it can impede growth. For example, learning to navigate and survive the road bumps in my past, whether law school, my eating disorder, or depression, strengthened my "resilience muscles." It's the concept of trauma making us stronger as we learn the skills to of adaptation. Of course, I don't believe we need trauma. And, as a parent, I believe a huge of my job is to protect my children from trauma. But my therapist provided me with a helpful reframe by explaining that, although I was attempting to hold all the pain and suffering, to absorb it from my children in order to protect them from it, it was impossible to hold or contain it all. My children are still going to suffer. They're going to feel sad and they're going to struggle with big things in life, like depression and illness. What if they can learn the tools to navigate these difficult times? What if they already possess the tools and are learning to apply them during hard situations? I need to allow them the human experience. Even that sentence is funny, because of course I don't have the power to "allow" the human experience. Giving up the semblance of control might bring me a little peace.