Reactivity Is Not Relief
Thoughts on mindful parenting through difficult situations
First, there’s the trigger. The kids are arguing with each other. Your child or your partner keeps unintentionally blocking your way as you’re moving about the kitchen to prepare a meal for your family. Your family is late in leaving the house to get somewhere on time. Or something else.
Next, there’s the sensation of discomfort in your body. Constriction of the brow or the scalp. Shallow breathing or racing thoughts. Tightness in the neck or the shoulders. Rigidness or puffing up of the chest. Anxious sparks in the skin. Or something else.
Then, without stopping to consider your intentions, you react. You raise your voice. Utter a barbed word. Sigh loudly with growing impatience. Or something else.
In the moment, you may think you’re doing these things in order to put the triggering situation back on the right track, but that’s not really the case. In fact, you’re doing these things because you want the discomfort to stop.
And perhaps the discomfort does stop, briefly. The shoes get put on. Someone gets out of your way. The kids turn away from each other in shared frustration, ceasing the noise of their argument. Or something else.
And because the discomfort has stopped, for the moment, you think you’ve succeeded in quashing it, rather than simply having been thrown by it. You think you’ve achieved relief.
But your actions don’t merely follow previous events: they also create the conditions for future ones. Moreover, your actions will be witnessed from multiple perspectives: not only by the “current you” who clings to a temporary feeling a relief, but also by your kids and/or your partner, each of whom will make evaluations of their own, and by the “future you” who, minutes or hours from now, will be capable of regret and remorse.
Your actions, whether you want them to or not, are teaching others what behavior to expect from you and whether you’re trustworthy in navigating the hard stuff. Your actions establish and reinforce norms of conduct for your kids and send a message about their own capacity to learn to navigate the hard stuff. And of course, your actions shape your own habits and the triggers to come.
This future-conditioning aspect of your action is where unskillful reactivity falls apart completely, because a house of reactivity is not a house that any of us wants to live in.
As parents, we must become skilled in recognizing our own discomforts in the moment and getting to know the kinds of situations that trigger us the most.
We must learn to feel discomfort without being thrown by it. And if the discomfort is too powerful in the moment to handle skillfully, we must learn to tell our loved ones that we’re struggling and need time to recover a sense of calm and get curious again about how we might help the situation rather than control it.
And when we engage with the situation, we must have the humility and the courage to do so with the goal of helping both our children and ourselves learn what it means to work through this challenge as a loving and connected family.