The Moment Everything Shifted

A couple of weeks before Christmas, my ten-year-old didn’t want to clean his desk. He had projects on it he was working on, and I kept holding the line - “An ordered environment is an ordered mind.” He kept pushing back. I kept repeating myself.

He’d been struggling lately. His teacher uses shame to motivate, and he brings that home. When he started screaming, I felt myself getting activated. Being screamed at is a significant trigger for me. I said I was going to go for a drive, but his younger brother didn’t want me to leave. I felt trapped.

So I went into his room and cleared the desk in one fell swoop.

Just before I did, he said “No Mommy no!” And I did it anyway.

That was my rock bottom. That was the moment everything shifted.

I should have stopped. I should have hugged him. The desk wasn’t that messy - he had projects on it that he cared about. He was trying to assert his independence, and I wasn’t listening. I had let the need for control become more powerful than love.

In a session afterward, my practitioner had me go back to the moment and had me hug him instead. She also reflected something important: I had been operating in the role of the masculine in my parenting. When the boys fought, I would insert myself to stop it But our ten-year-old was almost my size now. And whenever the feminine tries to step into the role of the masculine, it distorts.

The feminine role in those moments is to offer comfort once the storm has passed. The masculine role is to step in and regulate the conflict. I hadn’t been leaning on their dad to do that - and he hadn’t been stepping up to do it either.

Our trauma shows up in the way our nervous system responds under stress. Some of us fight. Some flee. Some freeze. Spe fawn - appeasing everyone around us to stay safe. None of these are choices we consciously make. they’re survival responses, rooted in evolution and shaped by our earliest experiences.

When the boys started fighting again, I asked their dad to step in. I watched him freeze.

And then I understood. When he was young, conflict at home meant danger. Freezing had kept him safe. But what protected him as a child was now leaving our family without a protector.

I said it plainly “You’re freezing because that’s what kept you safe when you were little. But we need you to go in there.”

I watched him take a few deep breaths. Then he went in and broke up the fight. When it was over and the tears came, I held each of the boys - which is exactly where I’m meant to be.

We’re no longer in distorted roles. The energy is shifting. It’s a new way to begin a new year.