The conscious mind, which contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment, makes up between 8-10 per cent of our mind. The subconscious mind, which is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness, makes up the rest, which is 90-92percent.
The subconscious mind is 6000 times stronger than the conscious mind. This raises the crucial question, what part of your mind is running your present life?
As children grow up, they learn not from being told, but from observation. When parents say one thing and do another the child observes and creates its beliefs much earlier than we think they do.
The first 8 years
During the first 8 years of the child’s growth, the child has already decided whether he/she is going to live in fight or flight mode based on its environment. There is a third behaviour that has become prevalent in the 20th and 21st Century, it’s called ‘the freeze' mode. The freeze mode is the cumulative of all the mental health imbalances and dis-ease in our world today. The ‘freeze’ response takes place when a person cannot fly (run) or fight (defend) themselves. It literally makes the child/person unable to respond; it creates all sorts of mental inabilities that affect them throughout their life.
For example, violence in a home, makes a small child feel totally helpless and he/she does not know how to defend the parent who is being violated and abused. Secondly, he/she feels unsafe. In addition, the child’s trust is broken at an early age and will be an issue in all their future relationships. If a child cannot trust its parents to protect it then how can it expect/anticipate trust in its world?
Changing the parenting story
We have not been taught about or know the impact of our behaviour on children so we keep repeating the ills and errors of the past and creating deep inner disharmony.
Be it physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, violence is grossly unspoken about nor acknowledged in Kenya.
It is essential to understand the deep debilitating influence it has on our children. Nannies that beat children, schools that still allow corporal punishment and making children feel ashamed of themselves, parents fighting, parents being absent as their careers are more important, etc... the list is long.
It is really time to re-examine ourselves. Until parents and adults re-examine their own shit-pots there can be no change. It is time to re-socialize our violent pasts, heal our wounds and make conscious choices to change the parenting story. This will then start to change future ways of living and bringing more peace into children’s upbringing.
