The apple may not fall far from the tree. 🍎🌳. If your child is defensive, and combative, you may be defensive and combative and hurt too.
(That’s what defensiveness is. It’s hurt and pain bottled up and then projected out).
In essence, the environment (the parent’s own hurt and defensiveness) can teach the child how to be hurt and defensive.
If a parent is in pain, they likely tend toward over correcting and judging of their child. At some point children who have experienced this can reach their breaking point and start turning the judgment back on the parent.
My advice to a parent in this kind of situation would be to seek help.
Seek out a coach or a counsellor who can help you out of your own pain and judgment of yourself. You see, it is the parent’s own judgment of themselves that fuels the judgement of the child.
You can also get help with some skills in communication that will greatly improve the relationship between you and your child.
However, as I know from personal experience, defensive people generally don’t like getting help. It can make them feel wrong to get help. Defensive people don’t like feeling wrong.
Defensive people are often cheap too. 😬
Also, they usually like to try it on their own, and to be in control, because being vulnerable and getting help is hard. There were many years when I tried to do it all on my own. The truth is, that we cannot see our own blind spots. If we could we would have.
So then we get stuck. Stuck Stuck Stuck. Running the same patterns over and over again, and wishing things were different. But not really willing to do anything all that different.
However, asking for help and receiving it is often the key to unlocking the door that you so badly want to walk though.
In fact, there is a magic itself in asking for help that unlocks part of the door. In saying: “this is a problem, I need help please, this is important to me, I am going to invest my time, energy and resources here…”, a big shift often occurs even before much coaching happens.
This is because an energetic shift takes place: when a defensive person basically says, “I”m not going to be defensive anymore. I am going to trust, learn, grow…I can do this.” It shifts the energy from “I can’t, I’m alone, this is too hard” to “I can, I have support, I’m going to do this, it’s worth it, I’m worth it, my kids are worth it” 😀
Also consider reading: Dealing with a Defensive Child
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