Six Foundational Parenting Guidelines
connecting with yourself so you can nurture + teach + protect your children
Elle me manque. That’s how you say I miss her in my mother’s first language. Directly translated it means she is missing from me and it describes perfectly the absence an alienated parent carries in secret and can never put down. I crafted Missing From Me out of the triumph of my own mother’s life and from the embers of my own experience. Alienation can happen in different forms, not just divorce and separation, not just between parents. Sometimes your child simply cannot love you the way you need. Your role as a parent requires you to accept what your child cannot give you. You are the parent, you meet your own needs, your kids do not meet your needs for you.
That’s harsh and cruel. I’m sorry. It hurts to see it when you’ve walked around blind to this truth. You have yearning fear + rage burning away your insides. You have to work to fill that hole with a connection to yourself. You have a hole in your heart and nothing to fill or fix it now. No one can do that for you. We have been there. We certainly can help you reconnect with yourself. Know you aren’t alone even though you feel it.
So, what about this parenting thing, huh? Sh1t this stuff feels difficuuuuuult + impossible + heart destroying, doesn’t it? It really is your heart outside your body. You feel at complete mercy of the universe when something goes wrong with them. The seat of intention, the powerhouse of the body, the conductive system that perfuses the entire body — that’s the heart. What if our children served as the hearts of the family body, and when they suffer, the entire body ails? How do we do this parenting thing?
Here is our mission statement on parenting —
Lead them by example to live fully, completely in the body they have. Do everything possible to teach them skills, stuff that we were taught as kids like painting a room, building anything wood, mechanical. Time they spent with you away from an online culture that resembles A Clockwork Orange provides a space + time for you + your kid to mature in your connection with each other. Resist the temptation to pawn your kid off onto some team or other person. This is your child. Spend time with them, a lot more time than you can possibly imagine. Get to know them! This is yours job—you owe it to your heart walking outside your body to do everything you can to provide a secure and solid connection with you that can weather anything + provide the lifeline through all storms. It’s hard work and it’s absolutely necessary work. Go hug your kid + go for a walk. Notice things. Get them looking outside themselves. They’re waiting for you to be the parent. Be present + embodied in yourself so you can be all there for them in the way you + they each need. —Founders, Missing From Me Society
Connect with yourself. That means in your body. That means feeling your feelings rather than thinking them. Name it to tame it. Own your feelings and let others own and carry their own. Everything you do, every connection you have with the world and humans you process through the lens of your Self. Disconnection with Self will ripple outward in your connections with your kids, you may find yourself using them to mind the gaps and tangles of disconnect. This erodes connection. Connect with yourself. Build your capacity to tolerate emotional + psychological discomfort.
Notice + understand yourself in the high intensity moments. When you fly you go through the flight safety checklist reminder before takeoff where the flight crew member instructs you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping anyone else with theirs. Parenting is like this. See to your internal state first. Imagine yourself a nest for your child to safely and securely learn + practise emotional regulation — like a Matryoshka doll, with a smaller one inside. What self regulation tools do you engage to process whatever bolus of intense emotion you have so that you don’t compromise your connection with your kid?
Be a soft landing spot for yourself. Courage requires vulnerability. Vulnerability requires humble honesty. Take care to notice yourself when you respond to expressions of deep despair. Your kids are less inclined to confide in you if they think you will flip out and love bomb them with gushes of Tony Robbins motivational crap or call 911 to lock them up or drag them to some head shrink. You create a soft space to land when you model to your kid to trust big scary feelings. Tell them they can trust themselves by showing that you trust yourself. We forgot it’s okay to feel not okay. What story are you telling yourself about the feeling you have? There’s often a ridiculous myth that we carry around to beat ourselves with — know yours.
Notice your unmet needs. Notice the parts of yourself you have trouble accepting. You will see these in your kids because projection works like this. Remember your needs belong to you and not your kid. The way to teach self acceptance + self respect + self love to your child is to model those behaviours yourself. They watch what you do far more than follow what you say. Making friends with the asshole inside your head is a powerful way to reconnect with yourself and also to strengthen your connection with your kid and co-parent.
Humans have a phylogenetic drive to feel safe, all behaviour adapts towards this primal requirement. When you learn the science, ie physiology of safety, you realise that you never needed DSM nomenclature or any of that related underlying conception of human behaviour. Humans do not have original sin, we are born in a state of fitra. This influences how I see people, whether I see them as inherently bad or inherently good and simply misguided by the confines of being human. Safety is perceived at the level of neuroception — we are talking brain stem. We are talking below the level of conscious awareness.
Learn top-down emotional self regulation :: these are thought processes you can used to open a connection to yourself and engage emotional self regulation. Validate - Normalise - Permission. Validation = confirming that what you are feeling is real. Normalisation = confirming that what you are feeling is normal for your context + situation. Permission = allowing yourself to feel your feelings without judgement or shame. Practise these techniques, model them for your kid. These will help you align your thoughts with your inner experience of felt sense. Remember your kids watch what you do more than they listen to what you say. When your relationship with your kid has had at its core the sanctity of the connection, the provision of safety in yourself so you can lead and love and safeguard most effectively — then this creates a bond unlike any other, one that can weather storms.
At Missing From Me, we believe that parents hold the key and that supporting them benefits all of humanity. There are a few other organisations out there right now for parents battling overreaching progressive authoritarianism and there isn’t one whose purpose centres on understanding + mitigating the trauma of the culture that necessitates this battle and the one which it inadvertently cultivates.
You can take a look at this Twitter thread of German and Dutch cops forcibly taking Muslim children from their mothers to see the rupture. This is a Muslim experience in Europe and it’s happening in all communities and it’s happening on this side of the pond too — greedy overreaching states led by dictators kidnapping kids from parents for wrongthink. Parents who believe sex is real and extramarital sex is wrong apparently are abusive is the narrative here. Go look at the thread, please. I was taught this, all of my friends were too growing up. AYFKM???
Is it possible to [apprehend] a girl because her family teaches her that adultery is forbidden and cohabitation should be for the husband only?!
Social employee: Yes, these are ideas of honor, control, and preventing the girl from her freedom
What if removing a girl from her parents because they taught her self respect and sanctity of marriage is preventing that girl from her freedom you child abusing clowns?
Oh, I’ll bet this is the sex work is work gestapo too, huh? LOOOL.
Is that okay by you? In Canada we are dealing with a crisis from the past where zealots thought they could take kids away from parents whose culture they didn’t like. Here we are, repeating history, and over focussing and over inflating that past crisis — almost like a kind of projection. Remember projection is sending stuff you don’t like about yourself or stuff you did onto others and getting angry at those others. It’s a thing we do subconsciously when we cannot accept ourselves fully and what we think we have done.
Your donations will help us to —
Develop an outreach programme to serve parents living with the trauma of alienation from their child, including training a core group of outreach workers with Compassionate Inquiry, Polyvagal theory, Somatic Experiencing, Art Therapy + Spiritual Literacy Skills.
Develop a group coaching programme too serve parents living with the trauma of alienation from their child, to connect parents with one another to provide a supportive space for healing and growth and catharsis.
Write articles and create our own content articulating concerns we have over the erosion of the parent-child connection and the current culture of interference which sees rupturing the parent child-connection as affirming and protective to a child.
“Suppressed energy doesn’t go away, and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute; it must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface, seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease.”
― Thomas Hübl
We seem to be travelling in wild intense circles of human destruction. Humanity repeaters the same cycle of abuse and trauma again and again. What if we stopped doing that? What if we chose a different path?
We get to choose now.