Published On: July 18, 20242.9 min read

How To Cope With Difficult Situations?

How To Cope With Difficult Situations?

When everything is going well in a parent life, we feel we’ve got it figured it out, and we might also be praising ourselves for being such a great parent. However, when things are more challenging for us then it can be overwhelming and we can have difficulties to manage all these feelings we are experiencing. It is not an easy thing to be an assertive parent, be empathetic and an active listener when we have to respond to all sorts of demands from our family members. All this being mixed up in the daily rush, it can quickly get out of hands. Suddenly, without wanting to, we find ourselves screaming and punishing to finally regretting it 5 min later. We all have experienced this kind of situations, it’s inevitable.

So, what can we learn from it to do it differently the next time?

The idea is that we want to help ourselves to maintain as much as possible our inner peace and stay calm. The first thing that really helps is to pause instead of reacting. P-A-U-S-E. and then answer. It gives us the time to make up our mind and not let our feelings take over our thoughts. When we let that happen, we go from being emotionally balanced to emotionally flooded, meaning we cannot rationalize properly. It is not helpful for us. So, taking a few minutes to breathe or even remove ourselves from the situation will allow us to calm down*. Also, it’s good to remember that on the long run refilling our jug by finding time for ourselves will give us the energy to face the challenging things life throws at us.

Then, after listening to everyone’s demands, we can take them one by one starting by the most important/urgent. We can let the others know that we’ll be helping them too in a few minutes. It’s important to use self-positive talk during these moments as they will make us realise that the problem is not as big as we think. Using mantras such as: “Everything is fine!” or empowering affirmations: “I am able to do this”.

By trying to act and answer from a place of self-compassion and love, you will not only show your entourage that being good enough is actually enough, but you will also model that. We have to remember that we are the adults and they are the children. They are learning who they are, how to behave, how to respect boundaries, how to self-regulate and so on. We wouldn’t be angry at them when they were learning how to walk and had to practice for a couple of weeks, right? Or when they were learning how to write? We were patient at that time too. Recalibrating our expectations seem to be the answer in many occasions too.

After the event, it doesn’t serve us to hold a grudge, the easiest thing for our mental health is to just let it go. If we feel it’s necessary, we can plan a family reunion where we could organise ourselves better and assign tasks to each member of the family to avoid any future disagreements.

*There are many different techniques which work marvellously to protect our energy (I would be happy to talk about it with you during a private session, onceupontatimeaparent.co.uk.)