Daily Voice Dialogue - Issue 33

by Astra Niedra

WELCOME to the thirty-third edition of Daily Voice Dialogue, a newsletter about using Voice Dialogue to help you with the challenges in your daily life.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to a friend or colleague.

Best wishes,
Astra Niedra

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TOPIC OF THE MONTH

How your relationship changes when you have children

All relationships change when a couple has children. You are now a family, rather than a couple. Even though it is crucial for the happy continuation of your family for the two parents to maintain their 'coupledom' with each other, it is very difficult to do.

Even the language we use in everyday life and in official documents no longer describes you as a couple any longer. It is as though our whole culture places more importance now on your connection with your children rather than your connection with each other.

One of the causes of this change in focus is the dramatically reduced amount of time you now have for each other. Everything else seems to be more important than spending time with each other: the children need feeding, bathing, cuddling with, talking to, reading to, driving to and from school, activities and friends houses; their laundry needs doing; toys need to be sorted and put away; shopping now takes twice as long; dinner takes twenty times as long; sorting out the more complex and strained finances takes forever, and by the end of the day you have just enough time and energy left to crawl into bed (to sleep!).

This lack of time is one of the main factors making it easy to stay identified with only a small group of selves when you have children, such as the responsible mother and nurturing mother. And those selves are not that interested in your relationship with your partner - except in how you both parent together and take care of household matters. It's no wonder that so many relationships fall apart after people have children!

Why does time affect whether we stay identified with only one or two selves? The reality of raising children, unless you have nannies or other regular help, is that they need your attention, either directly or indirectly, almost 100% of the time. This means you will be identified with those selves who's concern is raising children. This is particularly so for the mother, who, in most cases still, stays home for some time with the children while they are young.

Before having children you still identify with only a few selves until you start an aware ego process and then slowly you have more facets of yourself available to you. But in my experience, it is easier to unhook from your primary self when you are still childless and you do not have such an immediate and dependent attention-grabber always by your side. When you are a full-time mother you don't really have much opportunity to take your focus off your baby. When the baby sleeps and you think you have some time to yourself, suddenly it wakes, or makes a noise which brings your attention back to it. Even when you sleep, you have an awareness that the baby will be up in a few hours for its next feed. This makes it difficult, even if you have done some aware ego work, to use any aware ego. It's almost as if those early months (or years) of parenthood dissolve much of the aware ego 'muscle' you had previously built up and your mother self is there to stay.

It is easier for the father to maintain some sense of separation from his father self, for in most cases men still leave the home on a daily basis to work. This physical separation from the family home helps to separate from the family selves. There is still difficulty for fathers however, because once you step through the front door of your home, you either automatically fall into your 'father' role, and so now both of you are completely focused on the children, or you stay in your work role where you feel a little uncomfortable in the family setting and don't quite know what to do in this environment which your partner 'owns'. From here you can feel that the main connection or link is between your partner and the children and you might feel a little left out.

The most important thing you can do for your relationship's sake, which will also benefit your children, is to re-establish the connection between the two parents. It only requires one of you to begin this. You can start by simply paying attention to your partner. Stop to look at them when they arrive home rather than just say 'hello' and continue whatever you are doing. Listen to them. Tell the children they will have to wait if they interrupt while you both are talking and listening.

You need to see each other as adults again, who are people in their own right and not just parents in relationship to your children. It will help if you spend time together outside the home, so that it will be easier to not be pulled into the roles you play there. You can go out for a meal, go for a walk, sit in a park, go away for a night, go for a bushwalk, do a dance class together, or whatever you are interested in. It is important that you spend time together regularly - do not make your date with each other only once a year. When you are at home, try to become aware of which aspects of yourself you are identified with as you go about your day. When are you being responsible? When your child falls over, how do you feel? What part of yourself comes into play? This attention to becoming more aware will help you to separate more easily from those aspects later when the kids are in bed and you can get in touch with other parts of yourself.

Bonding Patterns

As in all relationships, both adults in a family situation form bonding patterns with each other, but also with the children. The bonding patterns between you both are, as all bonding patterns are, between the mother/father self in one of you and the child self in the other. (See Issues 7-9 for an explanation of bonding patterns.)

When children arrive, these are often strengthened and become more difficult to become aware of. For example, if one of your bonding patterns before you had children was based on one of you being identified with a tidy self and the other with a messy self, then after children come along your tidy self now has even more messy children to tidy up after.

Before children, this bonding pattern might have been quite innocuous, sometimes causing irritation with each other, occasionally an argument. But now, with young children running around making a mess, who don't have the ability to clean up after themselves, there really is a need for a tidy parent to be around. So chances are that whoever was the tidy person in the relationship before, will be now also. With no aware ego to regulate matters, it will be easy for this tidy self to be around a lot of the time. So you can imagine how such a scenario might look. If you are the mother and the tidy one, you will probably be identified with that part of yourself for much of the day as you clean up after your children. So if your partner falls into the messy child role in the bonding pattern with you, along with your children, it becomes even more difficult to become aware of the pattern and work on the underlying vulnerability which causes us to so strongly identify with a particular self. Not only do you bond with your partner's inner messy child, but now you bond also with your children's inner messy children. And because your children will continue to be messy, for a number of years at least (if not forever if you don't learn to separate from your tidy self), you are constantly being pulled into your tidy self.

It really requires a commitment of time and energy to examine the bonding patterns between you and your partner and between you and your children. And the only way I can see to do this, is to make sure you have time away from the family home without your children there, or at least time away from your children at home, so you can get some space to help you become aware of your bonding patterns and begin to separate from them.

Of course, the most direct way to do this is to do some voice dialogue. But if you can't, then my book The Perfect Relationship will give you some additional ideas and explanations. And you can also do some journalling to express how the various parts of you feel which will give you some more awareness of what might be going on in your particular relationship.

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BOOK

Discover how to make your relationship fulfilling, loving and exciting in Astra's book THE PERFECT RELATIONSHIP, available from our web site at http://www.voicedialogue.com/bookshop.htm

FAMILY CIRCLE MAGAZINE says: "Terrific …"

DR HAL STONE AND DR SIDRA STONE say "... a wonderfully simple, clear and practical book on relationship that will be of great help to anyone who reads it ... Astra has an ability to work with very profound ideas and translate them into language that makes them available to people with little psychological experience."

MICHAEL ROWLAND, Personal Development teacher and author says: "I recommend this book wholeheartedly."

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BABY DIALOGUE

Examples from my experiences with my three daughters to illustrate how I try(!) to use Voice Dialogue in my life.

Creating space for me

Since the last issue of DVD I've had another baby, who is now 19 months old, and this is the main reason you haven't seen much of this newsletter. As discussed above, time is also an issue for me, with three children to care for, and I'm doing all I can to create some balance in my life. My older two daughters are both at school but little Freya is mainly in my care. And after school, when all three are at home or I accompany them to their various activities and playdates, life becomes very busy indeed.

When each of my daughters has reached pre-school age, somehow the hard work of their early years is lost to my memory and it becomes an easy choice to have an other child, as I have chosen to do more than once! But then the hard rock of reality, of round-the-clock feeding, nappy changing, pacing to ease hours of colicky crying, comes crashing back to earth. And with each subsequent child, there is even more work than previously - and obviously will continue this way until they are much older and more independent.

My way of creating space for myself is to take Freya to child care for a couple of days a week - for me, as I work from home, it is necessary to have the children out of home. Each mother needs to find the best way to create space for herself, whether that's to have a nanny at home, help from family at home or out, or no help at all until she feels she is ready.

But at some point, preferably before your children are grown up, you need time to yourself, especially if you want to spend time on your relationship with yourself and with your partner. I've also found that it's okay to show different parts of myself to my children when I'm with them so that they are not always dealing with the "Mother". They enjoy it when I access a playful energy and muck around with them on the floor, being silly and childlike. They love joining me for a dance or yoga too, and offer me their honest advice and comments: Athena, now 7, says it's good that I'm exercising because it will help my tummy to not be so fat! While Tinkerbell copies what I'm doing and then clambers all over me, adding extra resistance to my exercises. Freya tries to copy too and that looks so cute that I can't help but smile. It's a great way to break up any tension if the girls have been arguing with each other or with me and we all need to let go of anger or frustration.

If I need time out I've found it's okay to tell my kids that I need to just read the paper or have a coffee in silence for a while while they keep themselves entertained. When I let them know clearly that I have needs too, they seem to accept that. Even Freya, if she's not hungry or needy in some other way, will quite happily sit and play with something if I place her there without any fuss. If you can do this naturally, that's great, but if you have trouble setting boundaries with your children then being aware of how entwined you are energetically with them and learning to pull your energy back a little will help: see the early past issues of this newsletter for exercises to help with setting boundaries.

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IMPORTANT NOTE

This newsletter is not to be taken as psychological or medical advice. If you require such advice you should seek it from an appropriate health care professional. This newsletter is also not intended for you to use in making life-altering decisions without communication between you and the appropriate health care professional. Copyright 2000-2006 - Astra Niedra. ISSN 1444-6022. PO Box 1266, Rozelle NSW 2039, Australia. No part of Daily Voice Dialogue may be reproduced, in any form, without the written permission of the author, Astra Niedra, except for forwarding an issue, in its entirety and complete with copyright information, to a friend.