01 Oct Symbolic behaviour, What your child isn’t saying

Symbolic behaviour – What your child isn’t saying.

A subject I hold very dear to my heart is the subject of how children express their feelings or “Symbolic behaviour”
Children most often experience their emotions internally as they don’t yet have the awareness of what emotions are a lot of the time and more importantly they don’t know how to process them.

Children when they are young have not yet learned the adequate verbal language to communicate their feelings to us in the same way we understand feelings as adults. This creates unchartered territory for both the child and quite often the adult as both find it incredibly difficult to understand what the other is trying to say without saying anything.

As children have not got the “words” for how they feel they resort to a universal type of expressive language I call “symbolic behaviour”

A child’s energy system from the moment they are conceived is aware of all information that is related to their creation and survival.
This energy system is the primal system of our development. It can be likened to the energetic blueprint that our human body develops from.
This energy system needs to be functioning at its optimum level for the body to follow its developmental instruction.
This is the most primal and intrinsic need we as human beings have.

From here our needs developed into not only energetic but also physical and emotional needs. Our emotional needs are what I will focus on here as these are the needs we need to re accustom ourselves with as a culture.

With this in mind a child before it is even born needs to feel loved even before they make their first appearance on the grand stage of life.
It’s not enough to just love your child but that love must be known and felt by that child.
This is the most basic and most important need that a child requires to be met in order for that child to evolve at an optimum level.

Other emotional needs that must be met in order for an infant or older child to evolve in a stress free manner include:

• Feeling loved
• Feeling safe
• Feeling wanted

This may not look like a lot when you see it written here but it is a huge deal for your child to be able to feel all of these needs and to know that they are being met.

What happens then if a child’s emotional needs are not met? When a child’s emotional needs are not met by simply being itself the belief system is created that holds true to the child that by being myself I am not fulfilled or ”as myself I am not good enough”
These belief systems are then suppressed within the child’s unconscious while at the same time a personality is developed to keep the child safe from these suppressed feelings leading to a feeling of lack and unhappiness on a deeper level.
This is an intrinsic protective strategy that kicks in to keep the child safe.

Now imagine for a moment that all this happens in the blink of an eye due to a traumatic birth process, an emotional shock as a child, being bullied in school etc etc . These are events that you as a parent might not even know ever happened. Your child may also be unaware that these events had any lasting effect on them.
This is why it is paramount that parent never judge themselves when a child is struggling with behavioural issues as there can be so much going on within the unconscious of the child that you couldn’t possibly know.
The most important thing for any parent is to be aware that this type of thing can and does happen and that there is help and hope out there.
Children just need to be understood and dealt with on a much deeper emotional level than most “mainstream” systems in the world offer today.

It’s easy to see from all this that the reasons our children are finding it so difficult to enjoy life as a child is due to the massive amounts of unconscious trauma and stress they are trying to process within their minds.
This can, does and is happening more and more frequently with all the stress that people are being exposed to and not processing effectively in today’s world.

Being labelled and medicated is not the answer for these children, it’s understanding and processing their unconscious emotional needs is what they really need and is in fact “what they are trying to say without saying anything”

I have witnessed thousands of children present with symptoms that I will share with you next and from my experience I have found that even though there was no medical reason for many of their symptoms there was in each case an emotional need unmet within and a psychological profile for each of them.
In simple terms every child had repressed emotions within their unconscious that was preventing them from expressing their true selves.

Over the past few years I have witnessed a steady increase in children presenting to the clinic with behavioural and emotional issues.
From infants at birth to teenagers in school the behavioural issues are becoming more and more common.
Parents describe the same types of symptoms
over and over again. These are examples of “symbolic behaviour”

”Some of these for infants and toddlers include:

• Infants with reflux
• Poor digestion and elimination ability
• Unsettled babies, poor sleep
• Screaming, temper tantrums
• Faces going bright red from holding their breath and pushing
• Excessive sweating at night

Older kids:

• Slow to speak
• Poor communication skills
• Dissociated and introverted
• Can’t make friends at school
• Fear of upsetting others
• Clingy to one parent more than the other
• Bed wetting
• Wanting to sleep in parents bed
• Aggressive and/or withdrawn
• Night terrors
• Headaches
• Eating disorders
• Self image/body shaming
• Self harm
• Fatigue
• Very particular with foods
• Craving sugars
• Sweating through the head at night
• Anxiety, not feeling safe
• Emotional outbursts of tears and anger
• Hypersensitivity to light and sound
• ADHD, ADD,
• Dyslexia, Dyspraxia
• Poor focus and concentration

The list goes on and on but the most important thing to remember here is this: every single child presenting with a behavioural or emotional issue no matter how big or small it was had repressed unconscious emotions within the foundations of their behavioural and emotional reactions.

I would go as far as saying that for every issue a child may be struggling with there will be an unconsciously repressed emotion at its core and by helping the child to understand and process these emotions in the correct way there would be more positive change in children’s health and happiness than has ever been seen before.

Parents please remember this:

You are all doing a fantastic job at raising your children. Never dispute that.
The more we know about how they communicate with us the better. We can never know enough when it comes to being able to connect and communicate with our children.

Learn the language of emotion and symbolic behaviour and uncover a beautiful world full of experiences and feelings that there are simply no words to describe.