Philippa Perry

Think back to your childhood: were you made to feel ‘bad’ or in the wrong, or even responsible for your parents’ bad moods?

We would never shout at our child or threaten them or make them feel bad about themselves
in any way.

it is all too easy to try to repair your feeling of being wrong by making someone else feel wrong, and the victims of this are, far too often, our children.

One of my earliest memories is my mother looking in the mirror and picking fault with herself. And when, years later, I did the exact same thing in front of my astute teenage daughter, she told me she didn’t like it when I did this, and I listened and remembered how I hadn’t liked it either.

Partly due to these labels of ‘good mother’, ‘bad dad’, or vice versa, existing, to avoid the humiliation of being in the bad role, we get defensive about anything we may be doing wrong.

Praise effort, describe what you see and feel and encourage your child without judging.

Think of self-awareness as knowing where you are on a map: If you don’t know your starting point you won’t be able to figure out how to get to where you want to go. It’s important that we learn how we react to the world, how we get angry, how we make assumptions about other people and how we talk about ourselves, because until we know what we are doing and how we are doing it, we won’t know what we need to change.

What I tell them is that we can’t do anything about other people, but we do have the power to control ourselves.

We can change our priorities, our belief systems, our habitual responses.

What I’m interested in is how you are making yourself feel the way you’re feeling: how you love, argue, change, and find contentment.