Welcome to Dear Cypress Zoo, I'm Susan McCord. Today's topic is, is your childhood have influence over your style of parenting? Some of my clients are very fearful about having children due to how they were raised in their own childhood. They are afraid that what they witnessed and how they were treated is going to become a repetitious pattern within their own children's lives. And I can understand how this would be a fearful situation because nobody wants to repeat something that was sad growing up. You want to remove yourself from that and grow and evolve moving forward. But it's hard when you've got that dialogue that stuck inside of you from a very early age. Especially if you came from maybe an abandoned situation. There was no love in your family, your parents split up and neither of them were there. You were maybe the latchkey kid that came and went on your own. And you just didn't have the love that you really needed to be nurtured as a young person. And it's so difficult to come from that environment because you don't know all the time what love is. You just don't have the total understanding of what it likes to come from a nurtured childhood where both parents are participating in raising you. It can be so heartbreaking to understand how you can become the person, the parent that you didn't have. So this is a really great question, I think, because I've heard this for many people and I've talked about it with just some of my friends too. How do you know you're going to be a good parent? How do you know that you're going to do a good job? Unfortunately, the answer is you don't know even if you came from a great childhood. And this is the problem with trying to figure it all out without having any doubts. You're always going to have some doubts about how you're going to come across in a motherly or fatherly position because you've never done it before. So it's a scary place for all of us to be. But if you have a big fear about making this happen, it can hold you back from having one of the most enjoyable parts of life that you can have. It's always imperative that if you have something that's stuck inside of you that is taking hold of big decisions. You can do the work on yourself to get into a happier mindset that makes you feel confident that you're ready to move forward and bring a child into your life. Just talk to a counselor and get to the bottom. Don't hold back on anything. They can truly help you with this. It's not your fault about what happened when you were younger and don't blame yourself for it, find a way to better who you are as an adult because you have the choice. Ultimately it's your choice how you move forward. You didn't have that choice when you were younger. You were stuck in a situation that maybe you couldn't get out of. But now you can do the work to better yourself and not have to have those demons constantly come back and haunt you all the time. We all handle our childhoods differently. For myself I wasn't angry but I definitely had a protective wall. But it was sort of numb. There just wasn't a lot of feeling because I wasn't really shown what that meant to really truly love somebody unconditionally. So it was a numb feeling that I had. So growing up it took me a while to understand when I was in a relationship whether it was a good relationship or not. If I got along with them I thought it was a great relationship but I didn't understand the depth of what love was. This can be a problem in a lot of dating scenarios today with people because they don't know what they're looking for. That's why you have to do the homework and you've got to talk to somebody if this is causing problems. So whether you're freaking out about maybe being a parent, you're freaking out about being in a committed relationship. These are all things that you can talk to a therapist about and get to the bottom of why it's become such a deep rooted fear because you deserve to have a lot more than that in your life. And holding on to something from a long time ago you're not evolving and moving into a better place. You're stuck. And that's not fair on you. It wasn't you who put yourself there. That was something that you were raised by. That's how you learned about life but you can change that. It is really important to understand how nurturing love between a parent and a child shapes who they become as an adult. If you are on the fence about having children because you're afraid of how you're going to be, spend some time around kids. Whether you've got friends or some family members who have little children, ask if you can be around them and spend some time with them. Maybe take them for an afternoon to the park or to McDonald's or something along those lines and interact with them. The more you interact with kids, the more trust you'll have in yourself on how you are with children. A lot of it's just the unknown. What am I going to be like? Well practice. Just spend some time with smaller children as much as you can and learn how to talk to them, learn how to be emotional with them, learn how to be loving with them, all the things that maybe you didn't have as a child. It's worth understanding how you can move forward rather than just close the door and say, no, I can't. I just don't want to bring a child into this. You're short-changing your own happiness by not doing the work to find a way to make this happen for you and to be understanding that you're going to be okay, that you will be okay with it as long as you do the work. If you've really got some deep rooted stuff going on in here, I really strongly suggest that you do see a therapist about it because that will help you decide whether you can move forward or whether this is something that you just decide, you know what? I just really don't think I want to be a parent. And that's okay too. Not everybody has to be a parent. You're always going to have questions as a parent. You're always going to have some guilty moments where you feel maybe you were too harsh or maybe you weren't strong enough because you're spoiling your child because of how you weren't loved as a child. Just take note of everything you do and just make it better the next time. Apologize to your children if you have a bad day and you're a little grumpy. Apologize to yourself that you were a young child that didn't know what to do and how to get out of something. Don't take this on into your adulthood as if you are destined to always have this pattern to follow you around forever because you're in charge of changing that pattern. Right off and our partners have dealt with things in their own childhood and together you can come to some really great compromising on how to be a better parent. There could be things that they didn't have and you did have and then you both bring those things into how you are as a parent. Doing the work to repair the damage that your heart felt as a young child is so important and it's the first step to help you to move on to being able to be a great parent. Please do everything you can because I can tell you from my own experience it's very, very well worth the effort put in. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Please leave any comments or questions you have below the video here and please subscribe if you haven't already done so. Thank you so much. Bye.