How to feel in control without controlling your kids

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It's pretty common, as a mother, to have moments when you feel completely out of control.

 When you are working with or spending all of your time with your children you won’t be anywhere near as in control of your environment as you would otherwise.

Children are running on an internal motivation, they're not really conscious a lot of the time of the needs of other people. They're moving fast paced, their world is quick and in the moment and changing rapidly. And all of that can really challenge our need for control.

And that need for control is an incredibly valid core instinctual need. It's often the base need that has to be addressed before addressing any other. We need to have our safety, our security, our stability in check before we can even consider meeting other needs. We need to feel in control of our life.

If you look at the core needs in so many of the psychological models, usually the fundamental base, core need is the need for certainty, the need for control, the need for safety (the need to have a food, shelter and water so you can survive).

 So, instead of trying to ignore that need or push it away (which is not possible for very long), we need to look at the ways that we’re trying to get that need met, and the ways that we’re focusing on getting that need met so we can now do so in an entirely new way.

Generally, when we're feeling stressed out, we go outwards. We try to get our need met in everyone else. We try to control other people, try to control our kids, try to control the environment. And that will pretty much let us down, because we can't - in a definite way, guarantee that we can control things outside of ourselves.

 And controlling other people is also extremely detrimental for your relationships. So your other needs are gonna be falling over, your needs for the relationship and the connection with your children.

So, what we're talking about is coming back to meeting that need for control or for certainty within yourself. And that's about being the person you need to be in order to meet that need for control.

 This is looking at that need for control from a totally different perspective and focusing first within, meeting the need internally.

So how can you, yourself meet your need for routine? Or control?

Or a clean space? or order? or whatever else is coming up for you?

 How can you meet that yourself?

How can you own that and take responsibility for your own needs?

Once you get into that space of meeting those needs internally, you can then start to request support externally.

 Because you have begun to meet your own needs, you've owned them and you've been taking responsibility for them, you’ve taken the edge off that manic triggered craziness that comes when you feel out of control and like you can't cope-

 eg. "Everyone do what I say right now, because I can't cope with the chaos,"

You can come at it from a much calmer approach. You'll be heard a lot more clearly, you’ll be more open and you'll just get those needs met even more.

So the practice for this video. When you feel yourself being driven by the need to control - to control the environment, to control your children, to control the people around you...

 Stop and take a breath and ask yourself any one of these questions-

How can I meet my needs for control from within?

How can I meet my needs to control the environment by controlling what I can myself?

How can I meet that need for security, for control, for stability in the way that I show up in the world?

How can I meet it in the way I show up, before I even venture to look outside of myself?

How can I create my own sense of certainty?

My own sense of routine?

My own sense of serenity?

How can I feel more in control, in myself right now, before I make any requests of anybody else?

That’s the practice, ask any of those questions and act on the answer :-)