Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 7: Good Enough

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You may have heard the term “good enough parent”. If you have, bear with me while I quickly explain it because I’m actually going to turn the tables and bend this toward trauma recovery as an adult. For those that haven’t heard this term, it’s a concept that comes from British psychoanalyst and pediatrician, Donald Winnicott. He coined the term “good enough mother” which was his observations about how mothers hold and nurture their children, while attending to their needs. He called this the devoted mother, and further realized how the mother’s holding techniques helped the child recognize they were safe in their own body as a tiny human. He went on to see how this holding and safety translated to how the child felt safe around others as its human circle grew with other relatives, eventually friends, then lovers. Later, Bruno Bettelheim’s book, A Good Enough Parent, really psychoanalyzed this idea. A lot of the focus in his book is on a good enough parent’s ability to not attempt to be perfect, which in turn lets them recognize that the tiny human they created also isn’t perfect. It allows for flaws, and in willingness to accept said flaws, it teaches the child how to cope someday with a world that also will not be perfect. The author insists that there is a proper balance between too much parenting and too little parenting. (As you probably remember from weeks ago, I’m a huge fan of balancing things. It’s the Libra in me!)

One can over-parent into oblivion with massive expectations of the child’s accomplishments, servanthood, always demanding the child have a great attitude, and helicoptering to ensure the child is always safe. This teaches the child that they are only as worthy as their achievements. That they are only loved by those who they are serving and only when they are serving. That any emotions are not welcome because they interfere with the need to whitewash the family dynamic to look perfect. That the child is only safe when a caregiver is there to make certain they are. It creates a perfectionist tendency, an inability to feel and live out their own dreams and desires, a lack of emotional intelligent, and a feeling of being unsafe with oneself as an adult.

Of course, we know more about the under-parenting dynamic because this often looks like neglect, abuse, or abandonment. However, it’s important to understand the coping skill developed by an under-parented child is often parentification of their caregivers, themselves, and to anyone else who looks like they need it. This begins an adult power and control cycle from a child who felt like nothing was in their control. Neglect is one of the trickiest psychological abuses because, in those developmental years that we spoke on a couple weeks ago, this leaves a child with a void that can be nearly impossible to fill. It’s said that, as painful as what happened to you was, sometimes it’s what didn’t happen to you that was worse. And not being loved, cared for, heard, respected, chosen, sought after, or attended to as a baby/child has devastating after effects.

The good enough parent allows a child to be a child and is more focused on their current development than on what they’ll become someday as an adult. They parent them because they love them not because of what value they’ll bring to them someday by way of pride and accolades. A good enough parent allows the child a safe space with some distance to learn to trust themselves, and a place to grow, play, laugh, be free, make mistakes, learn some consequences, apologize, forgive, understand that all this is part of the human experience. Good enough parents don’t overreact at one bad grade or blame the child’s worthiness on a lack of ability to do something. Good enough parents allow their kids to make mistakes and make atonements. They even admit their own mistakes as well and allow the child to see humility and reparations! They include their child in just enough adult activities and conversations that they get a taste, but not enough that the child gets overwhelmed by adult problems. They give their child just enough responsibility to foster skills of diligence and industry, but not so much that they are workaholic perfectionists who feel terrible resting and playing as adults.

So what does all this have to do with trauma recovery? For me and most other trauma survivors, one of the hardest things we have to work through in our journey is re-parenting ourselves. In my opinion, it’s also one of the most beautiful parts. Re-parenting is a topic for an entire other episode, but in re-parenting yourself, you can actually find for yourself a “good enough life” along the way. You can be a good enough parent as an internal adult now and be the good enough parents you maybe didn’t have.

With that, I also can attest that this re-parenting has layers — layers that look a lot like a childhood path from infancy to independence. Starting the re-parenting process can look like giving birth to yourself all over again. It’s painful because the first thing you have to realize and accept is that you didn’t have good enough parenting in your childhood. You spend the next while of your recovery in the infancy stage — which is a bit overly self-focused. You need to cry and attend to yourself, hold space for your big emotions, be gentle with yourself, allow yourself to be needy as often as you must, and to give yourself the basic unconditional, tender love an infant is innately worthy of having.

From there, you are sifting through re-parenting yourself like a toddler and preschooler metaphorically looking for independence by trying new things, encouraging yourself along, giving yourself comfort when you fall down and get hurt, allowing yourself to try and fail and make mistakes and to be okay with all that.

Then comes the primary grade stage re-parenting yourself with symbolic self-help talks as you build (or rebuild) your adult social life — one that has boundaries, where you have a voice and choice, deciding who you want to hang around with, and what kinds of activities you want to engage in.

Middle school parabolic self then enters into being good enough as your voice grows stronger, you start to discover who you are and who you want to be, looking at yourself in the mirror and (no matter what) being okay with the weird body that’s staring back at you. (If only we could go back to crazy hormonal junior high and not say all those creepy things, not wear those weird styles, and not announce to everyone we were definitely going to be X career because that’s what your parents want!)

When you step into the maturing stage of re-parenting the inner teenager, this is where you really start to shine on your trauma recovery journey. If the inner infant and inner child can have some serious healing and post traumatic growth by learning to be okay with themselves, to feel safe inside their body, use their voice and boundaries, make healthy relationship choices, fall in love with who they are, understand that failure is just a perception, and not be afraid to try new things because they know they’ll always have their own back — this is the good stuff because now you’re re-parenting of teenagehood doesn’t have to be as painful as it was when you were a bag of trauma bones. You will know that as your now-stand-in-good-enough-parent-self that you are free to decide who you actually want to grow up to be, what you are good at, what you love, and to never be afraid to follow your dreams. This part of the recovery road can often look like a few big life changes. When you start realizing you’ve been living your life without proper love or care for yourself, going along with societal norms, trapped for years listening to your own inner critic, afraid of your own body and wants and needs, too nervous to speak your mind or reveal your true self with the world — that’s when you now have built good enough freedom through trauma recovery to leave a bad relationship, walk away from a job you aren’t passionate about, take that mini-retirement trip, end a friendship that’s been holding you back, not accepting indifference or ambivalence in any area of your life.

Well, friends, to me that looks like Full Circle healing if I do say so myself. The self-loved, confident, non-judgmental good enough person you can become is the reason you started making the pivot and changing the course of your path in the first place. Like I said, I know personally that re-parenting is an uppermost step in healing. I welcome you to start small by just letting yourself mourn for what happened to you, or for what you lacked, in your developmental years. One of my favorite passions right now is helping people heal inner child wounds. If this episode has you recognizing a need to re-parent yourself, I’d love to hear from you. Click on the “connect” tab on my website in the link below and send me a message. Maybe it’s time to see if my “good enough coaching” is right for you. Either way, never give up on your inner child. Healing is completely possible and possible to complete. You’ve got this, Survivor.