Sneaky Enmeshment in Parenting - Liberating Cancer & Clean Capricorn

A Mythic Parenting Transmission

I’m holding the wisdom of the Cancer-Capricorn axis as scaffolding in this transmission.

We’re in Cancer season right now and Cancer transmissions are coming through for me.

I am thinking about how poisonous it can be when we have shame or insecurity/inadequacy or guilt or blame around parenting. Those are 4 emotional clues that we are giving our power away - sometimes (often) to our children.

And, as hard as it may be to look at this honestly and directly in ourselves (so be tender w/ yourself), these emotions indicate the presence of a really sneaky type of enmeshment or codependency. One where we are asking our children to carry the burden of our parenting success.

And we may ALSO be in codependency or victimhood or giving away our power even in our relationship to parenting success itself - to how we're defining this success. It may not even be an autonomous, sovereign definition of success.

It's may be what our family told us is successful parenting, or what our culture told us is successful parenting.

And so when we put the burden of our success, the evidence of the fact that we are succeeding, that we are good parents, onto our kids - that is the sneaky enmeshment I am describing here.

When we see our children through the lens of our OWN shame, our own inadequacy, our own blame, our own guilt, we create problems in the relationship - and it doesn’t FREE us from these 4 emotions - it actually increases the constriction - it’s a negative feedback loop.

We begin to get more and more reactive, and controlling, and destabilized, anytime our children do anything that activates our sense of shame or inadequacy.

And the main issue here is that we are over-coupling our own sense of “goodness” with how our children move through the world, what they do, how they act. We see them as a reflection of us. As evidence of our parenting.

And that’s not correct. It causes so much pain.

Ugh, the trap of “good parenting” or being a “good parent.”

(Let me just interlude here into another sign because I call the words “good/bad” and “right/wrong” Jupiter words.

Jupiter/the sign of Sagittarius kind of governs ethics and morals. And I have actually found that a better space to be in when it comes to relationships, including parenting, is a completely amoral space, a morally neutral space.

I don't want to get too into the weeds here. Back to:)

When we have shame or guilt or self-blame, or blame other people around parenting (like our own parents or the baby daddy or society for pressuring us - whatever), what can unconsciously happen is that whatever our kids do, whatever behavior they engage in, whatever judgments or analyses we or other people - including professionals that we choose to work with - put onto that behavior can make us feel overly responsible for who and how our children are. Especially in a cultural matrix of “good/bad behavior” OR another one that’s toxic: “normal/atypical” which our system actually reads as “normal/defective.”

We’re constantly thinking we need to FIX or CHANGE our kids, so we can FEEL BETTER OURSELVES.

We (actually not we - it’s our shame, inadequacy, guilt and blame) create this feedback loop, where we begin to feel lots of painful emotions around who/how our children are.

And the FIRST thing to do is to say: My children might be the STIMULUS for this emotion, but they are not the CAUSE.

Your own system is actually the cause, and that’s why it’s sooo important for the parent to stay with themselves and their own work, instead of externalizing onto their kids.

So many of my parents come to me TALKING ONLY ABOUT THEIR KIDS - not themselves.

Our children will trigger us through their behavior.

But the answer is NOT to change their behavior.

Instead consider: anytime we have an uncomfortable reaction or emotion that comes up, we deem their behavior is the cause, and instead of dealing with the emotion, we try to make it disappear by controlling our child’s behavior.

The clue is: we have to stay with ourselves and with those emotions. That’s where the healing is.

When we sort of double down on trying to control or eliminate that behavior, that is a way of like externalizing or projecting our own shit onto our kids. It is a clue that there is some self-inquiry and healing that needs to happen AND WE ARE OVERRIDING/IGNORING that message from our own system - and instead making our kid responsible - not for healing it, but for keeping it at bay.

Instead of processing the emotion, we prefer to avoid it, to run from it, to exile it - and we do this through dominating and blaming our children.

It's a form of enmeshment because we make them responsible for how we are feeling.

It’s also a form of self-avoidance.

I have a mini-course coming out soon that helps parents understand and apply nonviolent communication principles to parenting. Not only to parenting their children, but to re-parenting their inner children, which you will hear me harp on and on and on about - how critical that is.

If we don’t spend time with our inner children, we externalize our shit onto our outer children.

The more we heal our inner children, the better we show up with our outer children.

Without that inner child reparenting piece (around which we can feel really squeamish, tender and resistant - just naming + normalizing that) we're just going to continue and perpetuate the cycle of externalizing and projecting and making our kids the problem.

Watch where you're doing things in order to make your child into a different child that is more palatable to you. A child that never triggers you. So you don't actually have to sit with your difficult emotions, or your scary reactions.

The way our children trigger us is a gift. It’s an invitation into healing.

Let me now pull in Capricorn.

The reason this is a Cancer-Capricorn polarity transmission is because when we are overly enmeshed with our children in this way we can actually look to Capricorn which can help us delineate the boundaries of what is ours and what is not our kids.’

A shadow of both Cancer and Capricorn is this enmeshment - taking on too much responsibility and taking on too much control and it can be really sneaky.

It can be really sneaky, because we think we're doing it for the good of our child. It makes sense that we do have an obligation to our child, that they are completely dependent on us. So that can hide the unhealthy parts or the enmeshed parts from us because we just assume that to be a good parent, the more helicopter we are, the more that means we're good parent, the more that means like we're involved.

As parents we can conflate responsibility with control or domination.

Where are the places where we're actually taking on too much responsibility/being too controlling around our child's identity, our child's experience, our child's behavior, our child's emotions, our child's expression to manage (avoid) our OWN feelings and our own fragile identity and our own fragile sense of ok-ness?

This is a practice of noticing where you are externalizing onto your child to avoid your internal experience.

This is a practice of radical responsibility - where are you making your child the issue, instead of owning that the issue is YOU don’t want to feel uncomfortable?

One of the key parts of Mythic Parenting is you don't even have to know your natal chart at all, or be remotely interested in astrology, to use this kind of lensing and this kind of framing and this kind astrological wisdom workshop to begin to play with:

What do I need to pay a little bit more attention to in my life/my parenting?

Where might it be a courageous move for me to take a closer look at the themes in this post?

Mythic parenting is a container that I'm building where we come together for a year and we really grapple with parenting stuff in this mythic way, because what I have found is that the astrology and the mythological stories and the tarot, all the metaphors, the imagery… even being able to identify with the Greek gods, there's like this co-regulation with myth and mythological characters that creates spaciousness, playfulness, intrigue and excitement.

Parenting is a place where we often feel extremely heavy, and extremely uninspired and extremely bored and weighed down and resentful.

I have found that one of the reasons that I've been kind of resisting what I consider my ministry as a parent coach, is because I don't like that mundane heaviness. You know, the crying babies, the dirty diapers, having to wipe someone's butt 50 times a day. Sickness, homework, the public school system, grades, peer pressure, screens. HEAVY.

What we do in Mythic Parenting is exciting. It is liberating. It is energizing. It is full of HOPE. And that is where I want my system to be. That is much cleaner water - speaking of Cancer.

Let me come back to what I think is really important.

I think most parents have some sort of anxiety around being a good parent. I think most parents believe that in some way, shape or form, it reflects on their parenting, on THEM, whether their child ultimately turns out right, if their child turns out to be criminal or successful.

So if you suspect that is you - I don't want to like create a false sense of urgency or layer any more shame - and for the record, I’m still on this monumental unshaming parenting journey myself.

But - it can be really helpful and liberating for both you and your children if you claim responsibility around actively doing unshaming work around parenting.

If you do some sort of work around clarifying what your own unique sovereign definition of parenting success looks like.

This is all self inquiry work, by the way. (Also, radical self-compassion work.)

If you get really clear on right relationship with your children, so you're not taking too much responsibility/too much CONTROL in an unhealthy way. (I'm not saying neglect your kids. That's not at all what I'm saying. This is I'm talking about responsibility in a much more nuanced way.)

So those are kind of three areas to do active self inquiry work on.

We'll be doing that in my upcoming Mythic Parenting container. Sign up for the Mythic Parenting waitlist now. And if you want to start right away, you can always work with me one on one.

If this was resonant or helpful to you, please leave a comment, or drop a note.

In closing, I’m sending you the most abundant and most supportive and most enriching blessings to you and to your family, and to your children. And so it is.

Also - check out my upcoming Relating to Money course ENRICH: