Show notes
KEY TOPICS AND TIMESTAMPS:
Zero: “This feeling of guilt that I believe holds me back”
—Asked by Sharon where she would like to take the conversation, Sasha says “very much around this feeling of guilt” and opens up about the relationship with her eldest daughter and her experience of “rage” during post-natal depression: “If someone asked how I was doing, I’d say, ‘perfectly fine’. Now I have clarity looking back. I shut my eldest daughter down, didn’t allow her emotions to be okay because I didn’t know emotions were okay … I really feel as though I didn’t allow her to be who she is. I feel as though there is so much more I could have done that I didn’t, and so much that I did that I probably shouldn’t have. So there is a very strong flavour of guilt and any time she’s not okay, I’m not okay ‘cos I take full responsibility for how she is in the world.”
—Sharon asks how the problem is showing up presently, and Sasha says she externalises and Her ans
7.27: No magic wand
—Sharon asks Sasha what, in the absence of a magic wand, is her ideal outcome in the coaching session: “My ideal would be to lessen the negativity and emotion and to see her.”
—Sharon: “I think I get it. For you, it’s about reduce the negative and the emotion. Remove the filter and see her more accurately.”
—Asked the feelings attached to seeing her daughter from a different angle, Sasha says “lightness, relief, a sense of possibility and a sense of exploration.”
—She gives a precis of her childhood: the eldest sister of four brothers, she had an “interesting time” growing up with parents who split up when she was five. She moved countries, gained a stepfather, and “it was chaos and swapping schools.”
—Sharon points out that Sasha is similarly making it “interesting” for her daughter: “I wonder how someone responds when they don’t know what’s going to happen next?”
12.35: “Why isn’t that enough?”
—Sasha notes there is “an enormous amount of love” in the family and she is seeing her daughter flourish: “That’s a good point—why isn’t that enough?”
—Sharon hears Sasha out about backward shifts and her fear that she’s caused issues “neurologically” with her daughter: “So your daughter has to be perfect?”
—Sasha: “No, I don’t believe she has to be perfect. (Pauses.) Let me check that. Hang on, I wouldn’t say perfect although her emotions frighten me, the intensity, and of how it can be flatline one moment then explosion … I find that very intense and I don’t have the tools for it.”
—Sharon “whirls” Sasha back about what she’s said: “As I said, your daughter has to be perfect. Another way of putting it, she better not cause you guilt … I’m just wondering what that is for her.”
—Sasha: “For her it would be, ‘Mum is there for me when everything is great. There is a rejection of me when it isn’t’ … which is the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve.”
—Sharon likes how Sasha’s daughter has learned to express herself “in a way that you can’t control. Good for her. I know what gets Mummy’s buttons pressed. I like that, that is so cool. Go her … what a wonderful spirit she has: ‘Finally something my mother doesn’t get to place her boundaries around.’
—Sasha says she worries she has “over controlled” her girl and “now she’s just a reflection of who she could have been.”
18.38 Happiness and early expressions of self
—Sharon asks Sasha what she thinks would make her daughter happiest, to accept her maternal conditions or find her own expression of her own way of life.
—The latter it is: “I’ve been feeling for a little while I need to give her more leverage, more responsibility. I think if I just said ‘go for it, you can do whatever you want now’ that would be way too much … she would love a bit more freedom. I’ve conditioned her to come to me for pretty much everything so I believe that’s a gradual process of letting her know she can do it and it’s okay.”
—Asked what it would look like, Sasha says “a conversation to start with” and admits while there’s a part of her that’s “uncomfortable”, maybe she needs to “take a little seat backwards and allow her to fill the gap rather than me thinking I need to do stuff to fill it.”
22.50 Be the mirror, not the glass
—Sharon asks what happens when Sasha’s daughter fills the gap and “totally makes a mess of it—what next? It’s inevitable because you’ve held on that she can only stumble, there is no way there’s going to be a good execution here. It’s going to be the train wreck. There’s literally going to be paint on the walls, good stuff is getting broken. Then?”
—Sasha says she believes when her daughter’s boundaries are loosened she’ll learn where her own boundaries are, “and I think that’s the difference—it’s always been mine. I can see that already, that’s where the growth is.”
—For Sharon, the “subtlety” is always the question of how to let the “mess” go: “How much shit gets broken before … and if you do step in, what does that look like? Serious stuff is getting broken, hearts, minds or jewellery, you put the good stuff out of reach but this moment is coming where she’s going to be looking at you, ‘Will this get my Mummy the way she used to be?’ If you do have a breaking point and look like old Mummy, she’ll know that if she behaves in a certain way she gets the old you back.”
—When asked by Sasha if she can do that, Sharon laughs and mimes pulling her hair out: “This is what you’re going to be doing a lot of in the pantry, with the loud rock music going.”
—Trying to describe how things might be different Sasha said she was thinking “where old me would jump in and save the day and try to recover control again, my new approach would be to check in with her, ‘How are you doing?’, validating and mirroring emotionally where she’s at. It’s okay to be confused … because Mummy’s confused as well.”
—Sharon notes that saying Mummy feels confused too is “co-opting her experience and now she has to take care of Mummy. The ideal as the parent is to be the mirror, not the glass.”
—Sasha: “I so get that. That really helps clarify where I’ve been so self focused in this, and I was her to the focus of her experience and all the good things that can happen within the mess. That’s really the shift I’m feeling in this.”
29.33 Let’s put it to the test
—Sharon asks what happens after Sasha’s daughter “goes after the metaphorical precious jewellery”, is it okay if she rejects her mum and what does that look like?
—Sasha isn’t sure and weights up if it would be more powerful for her daughter just to have the experience without a conversation: “If I’m thinking about how children learn, it’s all very much in the doing.”
—Sharon “loves” how Sasha is letting it be about her daughter: “To comment on the result is to freeze the child in the need to perform. To comment on the process and what she brought in terms of her strength is to bring more of the trust of the experience to it.”
She adds the next step is about coming up “with 100 different things you love about her which won’t have any other impact, and help frame her, so the part of you which rejected her earlier is celebrated, loved, accepted. She gets to embrace her ugliness, the bits of her she might have been trying to reject.”
—Sasha: “And the thing I see to she does try to reject is her emotions because I’ve rejected them in the past.”
—In the space of strong emotion, she’s “feeling bouyant and light and possibility filled and excited for the journey.”
—Sharon says it’s Sasha’s daughter’s “responsibility to fuck it all up.”
30.03 How would you have wanted to be parented?
—Asked how she would have wanted to be parented, Sasha said “ironically, a lot closer in some ways than what I was” but “at the same time closeness was rejected by me because I wanted my freedom. But that may not be her experience.”
—Discussion of appropriate boundaries and that “having a tantrum at the wrong time when you’re nine says a lot … can you be steady for me as I lose my shit. I don’t have the words to express what I’m feeling now but I am expressing it. If we try and shut that down, what the child is hearing is, ‘No, I’m not acceptable in full blown me.”
37.17: Finding and pushing boundaries
—Talking again about her childhood, Sasha says she “had very few boundaries” and because she had a stack of freedom, “I pushed as hard as I could to find the boundary and often if I found it, it was inconsistent.”
—Sharon notes a nine year old can handle a conversation about values and they could be discussed in a family meeting. She suggests asking which values were lived today, and putting them on a wall.
—Sasha says that could be an extension of how the family already does gratitudes.
—Sharon notes she thinks Sasha’s daughter “wants freedom from control, and it’s expressed in a very explosive way for her. I’m just wondering how much freedom we want from our values. I wonder if your daughter has experienced moments with you which have been about, ‘I want freedom from control’ which is a wrestle with you, versus the internal self esteem, which is the autonomy we’re looking for within her. One value is about you and one’s about her.”
43.37: Freedom from … what?
—Sharon notes Sasha says she wants freedom, “but I’m always really curious … freedom from what? If it’s freedom from an external party that’s trying to control us I think that’s healthy, but after a while if it becomes a pattern it ceases to be healthy.”
—Sasha: “It’s that richness of ‘I’m going to decide my values for me in line with the bigger family values’. There’s space for her to go and to decide to be here and she’s entirely capable of this. I suspect I’ve been clipping her wings around this.”
—Sharon asks Sasha what else she might draw on: “Patience for my old pattern of wanting to jump in vs not.”
—Sharon says that’s not about Sasha’s daughter, it’s about her intolerance of her own anxiety, and about “managing your own emotional reactivity which she just hones in on like a homing pigeon. She’s not responsible for your emotional reactivity.”
48.50 Love in the time of rejection
—Sharon asks what love looks like when Sasha’s daughter has moments of rejecting herself, which looks like rejection of her mother.
—She asks again when Sasha answers what it looks like in easy loving times.
—Sasha: “What I feel is empathy and compassion for whatever she’s going through. If there’s an angry rejection of self then I believe the most respectful way I could demonstrate love for her is to ask if she needs me, if I can help her. I believe that’s the space I probably haven’t given her to decide, and that would help her to know I’m here at any time.”
—Says she has “such heightened clarity” around the issue and will allow her daughter “to be messy … and just catch her at the other end.”
—Sharon: “I invite you to go to a time in the future when your daughter is in full on banshee mode because you kept passing the test, being good humoured and present and non reactive and loving and all the things she’s not expecting. Your desire to go back to controlling and shutting down this shit runs so strong in you.”
—Tells Sasha it’s a gift for her daughter to be able to reflect on her behaviour, see herself reasonably accurately and “be aware of how she was aligned with her values and she walks away better for knowing herself and what she did instead of knowing what you think of it. You gave her that gift.”
—"This is the gift for her. We’re preparing her for the 15 year old she’s going to be in the blink of an eye. We’re investing now for the next 10 or 15 years.”