Kad vieną dieną pakalbinsiu Marion, svajojau nuo… Matyt, nuo Pagarbios tėvystės atsiradimo pradžios. Moteris, iš kurios sklinda neišmatuojama šiluma ir išmintis. Gebėjimas kalbėti taip, kad po jos žodžių tarsi atsiranda daugiau erdvės ir atsipalaidavimo. Jei atrodo, kad esu visiškai ja susižavėjusi, tai TAIP, būtent taip ir yra.

O šiandien į pažintį su Marion kviečius ir jus. Kalbėjomės apie kūdikius, apie verksmą ir jos nuostabią knygą „The emotional life of babies” (liet. Kūdikių emocinis gyvenimas).

Kol sutarėme dėl tinkamo laiko pokalbiui, Marion Rose išleido ne tik antrą knygą „I’am here and I’m listening”, bet ir beveik pabaigė trečiąją.♥

Norėčiau, linkėčiau ir svajoju, kad šį pokalbį paklausytų, o ir Marion Rose knygą perskaitytų visi tėvai, auginantys kūdikius. Tikiu, kad tai atneštų jiems daugiau įžvalgumo ir atsipalaidavimo tėvystėje.

Naujame Mylu.lt tinklalaidės „Pagarbi tėvystė“ pokalbyje labai praktiškai sužinosite:

• Ko nežinome apie kūdikių verksmą?

• Kas gi tas išmintingas mechanizmas, kuris leidžia jiems gyti iš patirtų traumų ir streso?

• Kaip žinoti, ar kūdikio verksmas yra dėl nepatenkintų poreikių, ar dėl noro išlieti emocijas?

Atsakymai į šiuos ir dar daug kitų netikėtų klausimų – pokalbyje su Aware Parenting instruktore (2 lygio), knygų autore, daugybės kursų ir unikalaus Marion metodo kūrėja dr. Marion Rose. 

Pokalbį su dr. Marion Rose pamatykite ir mūsų Youtube kanale:

– Dovilė Šafranauskė 🤍 @pagarbitevyste 

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Dovilė: Hello everybody. And this is a good morning in Lithuania, but in Australia, that must be an afternoon. Hello, Marion.

Marion: Hello. Hello. I’m so glad to be here. Yes, it’s middle of the afternoon here.

Dovilė: So today I have a very special guest, special for me also personally, because Marion, you don’t know about it, but you’ve been inspiring me since, for the last seven years, I believe, as, as you have been inspiring so many parents all around the world for already quite many years, but you will tell about this.

So today, my very special guest is Marion Rose, PhD, the Aware parenting instructor and coordinator in Australia and New Zealand, creator of Marion method and now also author of the books. You’ve been publishing the books like you are publishing faster than I’m reading.

And today we will mainly talk about your book „The emotional life of babies”. But in the meantime, you’ve also published the book „I’am here and I’m listening”. That’s for older kids, which is amazing. I’m, I still haven’t read that, but, I’m really looking forward to this. So Marion, what would you like to add about yourself to the listeners?

Maybe something I haven’t mentioned.

Marion: Ah, well, you might hear birdsong. I have to have wild birds coming in and out of my house. I love animals as well as children, families. So, you can probably hear the little birds song and what you, you probably know this, but your listeners may not is that I’m really just so deeply passionate about helping more and more people really understand babies, really deeply understand babies and how wise they are, how sensitive they are, how they’re so deeply influenced by what they’re experiencing and how they’re constantly trying to heal from experiences they’ve had that might be stressful or traumatic.

So. Yeah. That’s, that’s the biggest thing.

Dovilė: And I’m really glad to hear the birds because, that’s something that’s very special about the Aware Parenting Podcast that you are hosting. I always look forward, well, will there be birds and your dogs?

Marion: It’s usually snoring in there because basically this is my kitchen.

I’m still at my kitchen table, really. And so is life going on along around me and the dogs, if they’re in another room, they’ll bark to try and get to me. And, I’m, I don’t close the doors to the birds cause they wouldn’t be able to get in. And it just seems so apt. That’s really so much about life, family life that is, you know, when we have a child or children, it’s unexpected and there’s noise and there’s movement and you know, I really value authenticity.

So I love that you expect that when you’re talking to me.

Dovilė: I was really hoping for that. And, and yeah, that’s true. That’s so much about life. I mean, we cannot be separated from, from life basically going around us same as our babies. They are experiencing everything, although they might seem very small, but they are experiencing the world.

Marion: Yeah, I love how you brought that in. Yes. And, well, I love to really talk about is how, if we, if your listeners and maybe you too, and I’m doing the same, if we’re to look around the room that we’re in or for outside, we see all these things, all these concepts, but babies, before they’ve developed concepts and particularly the, the close to the outer, having just been born, they see all this detail.

They don’t have concepts for things. So it’s so easy for them to feel deeply overwhelmed by all this, the noise and the shapes and the, the colors and the things that they don’t have these concepts for, they’re just experiencing the wholeness of it. It’s a profound difference. And I think to put ourselves into a baby’s shoes or to see what they might be experiencing, I think it’s really helpful to, to really, as much as possible in the first place, prevent them from experiencing stress and trauma, which is one of the three aspects of Aware parenting.

The first place is like to understand they’re so sensitive, they’re picking up everything.

Dovilė: Exactly. But, You mentioned Aware parenting, and I think Aware parenting is pretty known in Lithuania because of the four Aletha Solter books that have been translated to Lithuanian language. But still, there might be listeners who haven’t heard about it.

Would you mind just a few words? I mean, the basic principles of Aware parenting.

Marion: Yes. Beautiful. And I love hearing that about Lithuania and how amazing and wonderful, I love that. And yeah, so it was developed by Aletha Solter, PhD, who has written several books, which I highly recommend all of them. So amazing.

Starting off with „The Aware Baby”. And yeah. The Aware parenting has three core aspects. So the first aspect is attachment style parenting, which so many people will of course be aware of in terms of sensitive attunement to a baby or a child’s cues, responding promptly, really, prioritizing attachment needs and meeting attachment needs, lots of closeness, all of those things.

The second aspect is non punitive discipline. So that means not using punishments and rewards and instead really getting to the origin of a baby or a child’s behavior and really changing things on that. You know, on the causal level, rather than kind of trying to put these kind of, bandages on the top and the Aware parenting has such an incredible, profound understanding of why babies and children are doing what they’re doing.

So that’s the second one. And the third one is understanding about the effects of stress and trauma on babies and children. And so that means then preventing wherever possible them experiencing stress and trauma. But also knowing that particularly in the world that we live in nowadays, it’s impossible to protect babies and children from experiencing any stress or trauma.

All babies will experience stresses every day. All children will. And we understand that they have these inbuilt capacities and processes to heal from stress and trauma, which include for babies, that’s through crying in arms, which means when all their needs are met, we, of course, they’re not hungry and we’re holding them.

We’re making sure they’re not too hot, too cold. They’re wearing nappies, their nappies clean, that then they will express their feelings. They will release stress and trauma from their bodies through crying in our loving arms, which is a huge, incredibly different way of looking at babies in their capacities.

And yeah, and with children, they can also cry and rage with us. They don’t necessarily need to be held, but they also, they always need to have our loving support. But they can also heal through what’s called attachment play (and that’s one of the puppies). Through attachment play, which is through particular forms of play, where they actually, again, release stress and trauma from their bodies.

So it’s really understanding that babies and children are incredibly wise, and in many of the modern cultures we live in, we are taught to work against that innate wisdom for healing as well as for all the other things they have innate wisdom about. And Aware Parenting really supports us to peel away that conditioning so we can come back to really trusting babies and children and what they are inviting us to do.

Dovilė: Yeah. In your book, „The emotional life of babies”, I was really, what really, I mean, there were many things I would love to mention, but what really stood out for me, how you beautifully made those terms like about the feelings, the needs feelings and the healing feelings. And I understand this is not an official Aware parenting term, but, it really… What’s a completely different light about the babies, especially about the babies, because we are taught that they only have needs, I mean, and that, and if otherwise they are crying, then we need to do something to stop the crying.

So, would you just tell a little bit more about these two types of feelings so that parents could understand how to distinguish and how to, how to look at the babies basically, how to understand them?

Marion: Yeah. Beautiful. I really love that you enjoy those terms. Yeah. I really like to find ways of helping parents see things more, even more clearly and simply.

And so it’s really understanding that all babies will have uncomfortable feelings when they have unmet needs, just like all of us that we’re the same as adults. And so they will feel uncomfortable in their bodies and they’re trying to communicate that discomfort. So obviously if they’re hungry or they’re, they’re uncomfortable or they’re too hot, too cold, whatever it is, they will communicate that.

And for babies, of course, they might start moving and wriggling and making noises. And eventually if we don’t respond, they will start crying. But in our culture, we tend to think exactly as you said, that that’s the only reason for crying. So if a baby’s crying or is agitated in some way, we’re, we are taught in this culture that there must be some unmet need.

So we will keep going until we’ve apparently met that need. But what will often happen then in that case is because if we don’t understand that there are healing feelings, we will often actually be distracting babies from healing feelings because we will think, Oh, you know, they just need to be jiggled or rocked or moved or bounced or given a dummy, all of these things, which seem to be, and, you know, of course, with so much compassion for all of us as parents, and, you know, throughout the book, I talk about this, this is, my invitation is for us all to drop what I call the emotional sticks and not to judge ourselves.

This is really hard because most of us were not brought up in this way and most of us don’t live around other people who are parenting this way. So it’s a massive learning curve to say, ah, okay, there are these needs feelings, but there are also healing feelings. And all babies will have these, even if they’ve had a beautifully calm birth, even if we’re carrying them everywhere and we’re co sleeping, it’s normal and natural for them to have these healing feelings.

And in terms of differentiating needs feelings from healings feelings, this is… I keep saying healings feelings. Healing feelings is one of the biggest and hardest things in Aware parenting and it really comes through understanding the theory and increasingly really observing babies. So what we can do is when we start to know what to look for, we can see, for example, perhaps we think a baby is uncomfortable and we start jiggling them and rocking them and they stop crying.

Or perhaps we’ve only just fed them recently, but they’re starting to cry so we feed them again. If we’re really truly meeting that need, we’ll be able to tell by how they are in their body. And usually that’s two things. One is their muscle tension or relaxation. And the other one is their eye contact.

So what we’re really doing here is we’re differentiating between the true relaxation that comes when a baby’s needs are met and more really dissociation, mild dissociation, which is what happening is when we’re actually not meeting a need. We’re actually suppressing their healing feelings. So we might notice that perhaps they’re, they’ve stopped crying, but they’re quite tense in their body.

Or perhaps they’ve stopped crying, but they’re kind of quite, almost like, I don’t know if the term spaced out is used anymore, but you know, they’re not quite here. They’re avoiding our eye contact. So these are ways that we can start to tell, ah, looks like maybe I wasn’t meeting a need. It looks like actually I was distracting them from their very real feelings.

And so as we get more and more familiar with this, we can start to, through observing them to notice, Oh, actually what happens if I fed them, I changed the nappy, I’m holding them and they’re starting to be antsy and agitated. And maybe it’s the evening time when they’re starting to cry, what would happen if I, Instead of jiggling and rocking and feeding and bouncing and giving a dummy and all the things that we do, distracting them, we just hold them and we’re still, and we’re present in our body as much as we possibly can be.

And we just say, I’m here, sweetheart. I’m listening to you. And do you have something you’d like to tell me? And to notice what happens then, which is often a massive process. You know, the first time we ever do that, I was still remembering, my daughter’s 22. And I remember when she was three months old and we first listened to her feelings, it’s huge to start to test out or experiment with, well, maybe, maybe all of her needs are met.

Maybe this is feelings and to, to be with that when we don’t have experience, I mean, what we do get after a while is this tangible feedback from them that actually, when the more we listen to their feelings, their healings feelings, the more, I keep calling them heal, I think I’m going to call them healings feelings from now on.

Yeah. The more relaxed they feel in their bodies, the more warm eye contact they make, the more they sleep restfully. They really communicate to us from what we observe in them and their behavior, that actually we meet their needs when they have unmet needs and we listen to their healing feelings when they have feelings.

That actually they feel much more comfortable in their bodies. So it’s such a long, ongoing journey with the way of parenting the baby to, to learn about the theory, to start experimenting and then to start observing. And the more we get this information back from our baby. Oh my gosh. Actually this evening I listened to this, them crying in my arms.

And after that, compared to if I’d been jiggling them or bouncing them or feeding them all evening, they were so much more relaxed or they just, you know, they were just smiling more. They’re just making more eye contact in a beautiful, open way. Or they just, their sleep was wonderful. They’re so much more able to concentrate. And, you know, it was my experience with my daughter. The first time she cried for about, I think it was 30 or 40 minutes and she came out the other end and she just gazed, I was her and her, her, dad and I were there with her and she just gazed into my eyes for like eternity, it was like this Buddha being, and she’d already been like quite present and calm, but this was something else, and it was so clear, like, oh my gosh, they’re really, there’s really something happening here.

So that was my first experience, and I, I’m, you know, every time I talk to a parent, I will always remember that first time.

Dovilė: Yeah. I was, when my, I have twin girls and when my girls were small, they were, they were babies. I didn’t know about healing feelings, unfortunately, and, but I still remember one moment that really stood out for me, in the, in the early months, in the evenings, they had moments of crying and at that time I was told that it’s colic and that we need to do something just to stop that crying. So we were jiggling them.

We were bouncing yoga ball. We were doing everything. And this evening I remember myself. I said I really don’t have, I mean, I was exhausted. And I didn’t have any power to, to do any jiggling anymore. So I just sat in this big armchair. I was breastfeeding them and I said like, okay, I will just hold you and I don’t know what to do just simply because I don’t know what to do.

And I remember she was crying and crying and I was sitting with her. Suddenly, just from one moment to another, she just looked at me and she fell asleep, but really relaxed, really like, and I was sitting there and thinking to myself, what has just happened? You know, she was just crying, you know, really hard.

But after a second, she’s soundly asleep and I’m still there, you know, my emotions are still bubbling. Yes. And if I would have known about the healing feelings, I think I would have immediately understood what is going on. But unfortunately, I found out about that much later, but still I have that experience where it was the proof of the power of feelings.

Really.

Marion: I imagine the first time you found out about Aware Parenting that probably you probably went, Oh, now I get it. That’s what was going on at that time.

Dovilė: Exactly. That was, that was this way. And, that brings me a little bit about to another question, which I often hear, from parents when I am talking about, listening to, to the feelings.

And they always ask me, but if that is so good, if that is so, you know, useful, why nobody’s talking about, or why not every doctor, when we go to the baby check, why, why don’t they don’t, they don’t tell us, you know, there are two types of crying, you know, there are. Why is that? Do you have any theory on that?

Marion: It’s a really interesting question, isn’t it? And I’d love to hear your thoughts because I know for me right from the beginning, having come from, reading books, like the continuum concept way, like a decade before I became a parent and always been curious, like, is it that humans did understand these two types of feelings, and maybe there are still some cultures who do, way back in the mists of time, and this was forgotten, perhaps even with, you know, industrialization, all the things, colonization, all the things that happened.

Or is it somehow something that hasn’t really actually been understood before about human beings, and we’re learning it for the first time. And I guess I tend to slightly towards the possibility that it was known and that we’ve forgotten about it just because occasionally I, you know, I often talk to people who, have a different lineage and perhaps have a more indigenous lineage.

And I asked them and some, and I have heard from a few people saying that that was something that did happen in the culture, but perhaps when, you know, colonizers came along into their culture, they didn’t share everything about what was really going on and certain things were hidden from the anthropologists and so on.

So it’s still something that’s, it’s, it’s such a vibrant and important question, I think, isn’t it? And I, I’d love to hear if you have any thoughts? Maybe you’ve already shared on your podcast, but it’s such an interesting question.

Dovilė: I also, this is also a mystery for me because I think that there is like, when, when people ask me and I always say like in certain, you know, people who are interested in certain things, it’s like, we talk about it, but it’s not enough.

It’s probably not enough to the go to the level where like everybody knows about it. So it’s probably, but I was, was also was thinking, is there some kind of. We were so desperate about stopping the crying, we invented all the dummies and, you know, the prams and all these things, you know, some entertainment for the babies from the early days so they don’t cry.

So I think that we were like, as a culture, we were going the other direction for a long time. So now we have a chance to come back basically to what’s more natural.

Marion: Yes. Yeah. And I think the other thing to hold in mind that I think in more indigenous ways of living, that I think my theory is that there would have been often less stresses for babies.

And of course there might’ve been survival stress and. I don’t know, saber tooth tigers and so on, but in terms of like the amount of stimulation that, that even just if we have a, you know, I don’t know, we’re minimalist or something, but just living in houses away from the earth and the seasons and ancestors and just, just being in houses with, with kind of modern technology.

Even if we keep that to a minimum, I just also wonder whether there’s just so much more stress for babies and, you know, all the other things that go along that you talked about that we’ve created in this paradigm that we think are necessary for babies and during birth and all of those things that means that this is much more important than it used to be in cultures that were living, you know, close to the land and where.

Actually, most babies probably didn’t experience much in the way of big trauma.

Dovilė: Yeah. But on the other hand, I was thinking maybe there were also more people to listen to the feelings, you know, when now we are alone, like mom is alone with the baby. And if you say, you know, she listens to the feelings, that’s really a lot, but in the old days, there were grandmas and aunts and all the, all the village and they have probably listened to a bit of feelings there, a bit of feelings there. So. That was also a different process of raising the babies.

Marion: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m remembering actually now I did find something the other day and I shared it on Facebook where it was talking about a first nations community in the US where, and they were talking about… If a child kept on crying that the grandmothers would come in and cry with them to, you know, to help them know that their feelings were kind of honored and valued. And I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. So it’s kind of a fit, isn’t it? With, with what you’re saying.

Dovilė: All right. So, but, okay, well now we have mostly mom or dad with the baby and they say, okay.

We would love to listen to the healing feelings, but how long is okay? You know?

Marion: Yes. It’s the, it’s the very big question, isn’t it? And I think most of all, this question comes down to us and what shows up for us because babies in their innate wisdom will, if, if we knew about this from birth and we’d been brought up in this way and we had a whole community around us who all listening to feelings of babies and children and adults, we were just trust that babies would, would know how long they needed to cry for, as well as, you know, when they were hungry and when they needed to wee and poo and all of that. And, but for us, it’s a really big thing to actually get how many feelings babies can have. And I know for me, over the years, from when I first started, I discovered that actually babies have way more feelings than most of us could even, you know, imagine.

Imagine when we start, I don’t know if you found that too. But often it’s about starting small for us and to really look at, you know, what happens for us and what are we feeling and what happens, what are we reminded of from our own past? It’s really normal and natural that we will have really big feelings.

So it’s actually really normal for some babies to need to cry for several hours a day, especially if they’ve experienced stress in utero or a stressful birth or separation. A lot of, it’s really normal for them to have a lot of big feelings. And again, as you say, it’s for, for one parent or two parents to be listening to that much, that many feelings. It’s a huge ask.

Dovilė: I also often say like, if you can listen as long as you can, as long as it is still, You know, if you feel it’s too much, then that’s enough for that day, there will be another day.

Marion: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Well, I don’t know if you, I’m sure you remember that part in the book that I learned so much more. Every time I edit a book and Aletha goes through and edits it, I learn more about Aware parenting 22 years on through the conversations with her.

And so I was really surprised because I’ve always been teaching that, you know, if you can’t listen and, but you don’t think they’re hungry. But you just cannot listen because your own feelings are bubbling up, then just let them know that you can’t listen and then just feed them or jiggle them. But when talking to Aletha, she was suggesting that be fairly low down the list.

That actually, if you are confident that they’re not hungry and they don’t have any needs, she recommended things like, well, first of all, seeing if there’s someone else who can listen. Secondly, can you do something to distract yourself in a way, like by putting on headphones, for example, noise cancelling headphones, which is something I never used to suggest to people.

But so there are different ways that we can do, it might be calling our listening partner at the same time and, and crying with them whilst we’re with our babies crying. So there are so many different ways we can go about it. I think there’s always, it’s so important for us to listen to what feels right for us as parents and to do what feels right and experiment with that.

Dovilė: Exactly. I think that, if we experiment and we trust the babies and ourselves. It’s really, it’s really goes well. I’m very thankful that you shared your own experience about being premature baby. This touched me so much because my girls were born prematurely and we were separated for pretty long time.

And with one of my daughter, I couldn’t even, it was one week after she was born when I for the first time could have her in my hands. So it really resonated with me. I mean, how this feeling of, you know, coming newly to the world and being separated and being not knowing where your most important person is must be really terrifying.

And so for me, it was, how to say, it was very easy to understand that my kids have a lot of feelings stored, a lot of stress and trauma, but very often, parents say like my baby, it was a beautiful birth, they are living a beautiful life, they are fed, they are warm and really I would like to elaborate a little bit about where this stress and trauma comes from and that this does not mean that we are doing something wrong, that our babies have, you know, stress is, yeah, exactly.

Marion: Yeah. And I so resonate with that. And that was really my journey because I found out about aware parenting when I was pregnant, and that was my background, developmental psychology, and I was a hundred percent in, and I read the. Well, only a couple of Aletha’s books. I was like, great, I’m going to do this.

But I just assumed that my daughter didn’t have any feelings because yeah, her birth was long, but I was really calm and relaxed. It was a beautiful birth. I co, we co slept, I carried her everywhere. We have quite a quiet life. So I say, Oh, you know, she, she doesn’t have any feelings to express. I know babies do, but not her.

And it was really only after three months when I started to see evidence of that, she was having feelings accumulating and that actually she did have feelings that I was suppressing that I started to look at, ah, actually, even if all of these beautiful things are happening, all babies will experience some stress every day.

And being born, even if it’s the most blissful birth for the mother, is still a massive experience for baby. It’s humongous, even if it’s a vaginal birth, it’s a humongous process. The amount of titanic forces that they’re going through, it’s huge. And even if we really, you know, we have muted light and we’re quiet and they come out and we have a baby moon and everything’s quiet.

It’s still the, the transition from in the womb to being out in the world is massive. Apart from the fact that their digestive systems are working differently, their, you know, the whole breathing, like everything in the way that their bodies is working is such a massive shift for them. So, you can hear the snoring, sorry.

It’s so big. So even if everything is beautiful, all babies will have feelings to tell us about their birth, about their time in utero. Even if we just occasionally got a bit stressed, they might have some feelings from that time. You know, if we had some worries, they might have feelings from that time.

And again, this isn’t to judge ourselves. This is a term that invites us to be really compassionate. We can see clearly what babies experience without judging ourselves. And also we do live in this culture where things are really busy and we’re probably taking them in a car, we’re probably, or a train or a bus, you know, there are noises of, I don’t know what other noises of, I don’t know, washing machines and various things that there, and just a lot of stuff to take in.

As we were talking about the beginning, it’s really normal for all babies to feel overwhelmed and overstimulated and to have feelings to share with us about that. So even if we do everything we can, all babies will, I believe that all babies will have some feelings every day to express to us in about the first year.

And for some babies, that might be like 15 minutes, for other babies that might be many hours, depending on how much stress and trauma they’ve experienced, but also how sensitive they are. So in terms of the highly sensitive work, some babies are more affected by what they experience, so they will also have more feelings after the same experience that another baby will maybe only have half the amount of feelings to express.

So we can do everything we can and be deeply compassionate with ourselves that all babies have feelings. Our baby will have feelings. Our baby will have healing feelings to express to us.

Dovilė: Very briefly in your book, you mentioned a few situations where you would say it’s not advisable to listen to the feelings. Can you mention those situations when we have to be more like, do like double check before listening?

Marion: It’s really important. Yeah. Well, one of them would always be if a baby has had any kind of, medical procedures or they’ve got anything going on in terms of, you know, something going on physically, medically that it’s always really important to check out beforehand with a, if you’re working with a pediatrician, for example, before listening to crying in arms to make sure that that is safe for them.

Another would be if we are hearing, the beauty of this is when we actually listen to crying in arms, we get really attuned to when actually they’re feeling uncomfortable in a different way. And if they’re in physical pain, for example, the cry will be different. It’s usually more high pitched. So if the, if the cry is different and we’re concerned about it, really important to stop.

And the beautiful thing again, is if we’ve done some crying in arms, if we can actually stop our baby from crying and distract them, that’s often quite reassuring to know, ah, well, it’s likely then that there isn’t anything medically going on, but it’s always really important to check out, you know, if you’re concerned, always, always trust yourself, always see, you know, get support with that.

And the other one would be really, if we are in a position where we’ve got really big feelings showing up and we’re concerned that we might do something that we regret, it’s very, very important to really listen to that and to, you know, to stop as soon as possible. And that might be distracting them from their feelings or might even in the.

You know, the, the last scenario to actually leave the room and leave them in a safe place, because of course it’s preferable that they’re on their own rather than we hurt them in some way. So those are some of the things, but again, as we’ve been talking about, so important to trust yourself. If you feel concerned, it’s really important to, you know, share your concerns with somebody and check out, is that concern accurate or is it our own feelings bubbling up from the past

Dovilė: And talking about our own feelings, I think it’s also important to have some support on that, because I mean, we are told, I mean, we want to listen to all the feelings our babies have, but we don’t want to have the feelings, the feelings nobody listened to. So it’s so important also to have somebody to listen to our feelings, right?

Marion: It’s so central to be able to listen to even a child’s feelings, but particularly a baby’s feelings and especially if you’ve gone through something like you went through with your daughters to actually, because when they’re crying to heal, it’s common that we will also tap into that similar experience.

So for babies crying, in relation to their birth experience, or if they have been separated. Because we are so attuned to them, it’s, it’s very likely we will tap into our feelings of that time too. But it’s also really normal and natural that we’ll connect in with our baby feelings, feelings from when we were babies that never got to be heard, and that can feel really overwhelming. It’s really normal and natural for us to feel overwhelmed by those feelings when we’re not used to being with them. So having multiple listening partners, Aware parenting instructor support is so vital with this change now.

Dovilė: Yeah. And especially our logical mind is also making tricks out of that because when we listen and we kind of.

We’ve probably read about listening to the feelings, but when we listen, our logical mind is also like, ah, but that cannot be true. You know, this, maybe I’m doing something wrong, you know, so this is also quite tricky, isn’t it?

Marion: Yes. Yeah. And I think that’s partly where it’s like having our feelings hurt, but also that observation, keeping on observing so that, because we’re, I wonder if you have that too.

People often ask me, well, you know, where’s the scientific evidence? And at the moment there really isn’t. In terms of specifically, we’re parenting with babies, but each of us is a scientist. And it’s really only through our own experimentation and observation that we will get a hundred percent reassurance that what we are doing is helpful for them rather than harmful.

And we can only get that from ourselves. So I always like to say to people, you might’ve read my books, or Aletha’s amazing books, or listened to podcasts like ours. If it resonates, experiment with it. I talk about this in the book, as you know, and if it, if at some point it’s not a fit for you, or you’re not seeing the, the kind of results, I don’t really like that word, but you’re not seeing this, I invite you to go back to the drawing board.

Maybe you want to pause a bit. It’s so important to really trust yourself and to observe and to be doing this experiment. And only through the observation is each parent gonna get that reassurance that this is, this is not only helpful, but it’s life changingly helpful for babies.

Dovilė: One more thing about your book, which I really loved, among for all the others, were these small parts that are in another color and this was called self compassion moment because I think this was very, very needed because many parents like me who found out about listening to the feelings much later, I started to listen to my own girls feelings when they were toddlers. We have also a lot of feelings public.

I was reading and I was thinking, why is, why on Earth I didn’t know about it when they were born. I mean, they needed this so much and they showed me and there were these moments where I completely misunderstood what they were trying to do. So it’s very easy for parents, especially if they have older kids to think, Oh, I’ve did so much wrong.

But, actually, when I was reading your, these parts of self compassion, it was a very good reminder that it’s never too late and that feelings will come. So if you could just talk about this a little.

Marion: Yeah. So this is more, you talked about the Marian method and this is the work that I’ve developed really through the beauty of Aletha’s work and actually seeing like when working with parents, keeping on seeing these same kinds of things, like seeing parents over and over again, doing everything they can to listen to their babies or child’s feelings and not using punishments and just this amazingness that they were doing.

And yet doing all these things themselves, punishing themselves with guilt and shame and self judgment, ignoring their own needs. You know, judging themselves when they have their own feelings sharp. And so I really saw that it’s such a beautiful opportunity. And that was, that’s been my experience, as I imagine yours too, for this beautiful reparenting journey to happen at the same time for us to get to experience internally what we’re giving to our baby or child.

And so that’s where I really developed this, the Marion method. And one of it is really seeing that just like punish, when we were punished as children, because you grew up in this culture where that’s just what happened, we internalized that and we carried on doing it to ourselves. And so when we’re judging ourselves as a parent, that’s just a continuation of that.

And just like punishments don’t help children, they don’t help us. I always say, this is my latest thing I say to people, I say, guilt doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help your baby or child. It only helps what I call the disconnected domination consciousness. That’s all it doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t actually help us be more compassionate or more competent or anything as parents. It just actually makes us feel more pain, which means we’re less likely to be able to contribute to our children the way we want to. And that’s what I realized with my daughter when she was about two and I was still doing all this guilt stuff.

And I just realized, gosh, every time I do that to myself, I’m less available to her. I’m just not willing to do that anymore. So yeah, I’m really passionate about really this parallel journey that we can also increasingly get free from guilt and be really compassionate with ourselves and trust the timing.

And I love what you said about never being too late. I love how Aletha talks about that. And you might’ve heard my journey, you know, my mom’s 92. She’s here in the, in the room with me right now. We have done so much healing and I didn’t start reading till I was in my early twenties. So the fact that you started listening to your daughter’s feelings when they were toddlers is, you know, I want to cry that, you know, little baby, me thinking about what you are giving to them and you have ever since then and all the beautiful things you’re doing anyway, and holding them and, you know, meeting their needs.

It’s so exquisite. It’s, it really is never too late. Whatever age we start, even if we start when they’re teenagers or when they’re young adults, not too late, still never too late.

Dovilė: No, it’s never too late. Yeah. Basically that that was, these were all my questions there might be something you want to add to that and maybe something from your side to the, to the parents listening to you.

Marion: Yeah. Well, I wanted to say to, to everyone, I mean, I feel touched, I wanna learn more about Lithuania and what’s happening there. I feel really excited to hearing about what’s happening and just, I really want to acknowledge and appreciate and I still feel quite tearful from what we were just sharing about before to really acknowledge if you are willing to look into Aware parenting and start to offer in whatever way you can, these three aspects to your baby or child, I am so grateful to you.

I’m so appreciative of you. And now we’re all going to do it differently. We’ve all got our own histories and our own trauma and our own, whatever was going on in our lives and how much support we’ve got. But however, the extent we do it, if we do it, even a tiny bit is really transformative for children and particularly babies, as we’re talking about, to have their feelings heard.

Even once can be life changing for a baby, let alone many, many times. It’s amazing. It really is amazing. So thank you. Thank you to your lovely listeners for all that they’re doing. And thank you to you for all that you’re contributing and all the difference you’re making. In your beautiful country.

Dovilė: Thank you, Marion.

And I want to remind everybody listening that today we were mostly talking about the babies and the book from Marion, „The emotional life of babies”. But another book I’m hearing and listening is more for the age of one to eight. So depending if you have a baby or you have an older child, choose one of the books.

They’re available on Amazon, they are available on Kindle. I’m bringing them on Kindle. So just grab one copy and start your journey. Thank you very much, Marion. Thank you.

Marion: Oh, thank you. Lovely. Thank you!