Understand Your Triggers and Re-Establish Your Purpose As A Muslim Mother 

To build a sanctuary within yourself, you have to become consciously aware of your triggers, wounds and painful patterns, discovering what lies beneath.

You can only give others what you have practiced giving to yourself. To change the struggles and issues you experience daily in your daily life with your children, you have to become consciously aware of how you operate, your patterns of behavior, your reactions, your triggers, and what angers or upsets you.

We each have our own unique, internal lens through which we view the external world. Interpretation is the cause of much discord because we all interpret and perceive the world so differently that it can significantly affect our interactions and relationships. Each person views someone’s thoughts, actions, and behaviors in totally different ways.

Every experience that we have in life shapes the next one by contributing to our lens. We are conditioned to believe certain things in our life based on how we have been raised, the societal expectations of our culture, and our parents’ perceptions. Ultimately, over time, this creates part of our lens. It dictates how we view, judge and process the things in front of us.

Often when we react in anger, upset, hurt, at our child’s behavior, we’re actually reacting to the trigger of something else from the past. Often, our triggers are experiences, situations, or stressors that unconsciously remind us of past traumas or emotional upsets. They “re-trigger” memories in the form of overwhelming feelings of sadness, anxiety, or panic.

What fires together, wires together in our brain

The brain forms an association between the trigger and your response to it, so that every time your child’s behavior happens again, you have the same behavioral response.

We have a choice!

To either remain in a state of upset, stress, and reactive behavior towards our children, OR we can decide to make the necessary changes within, so that we can respond instead of react.

It’s not always easy to identify your triggers

It requires us to stop and reflect on our reactions and explore how our children’s behavior could be triggering us at times. When we understand our feelings are coming from what we think is happening, we understand that our perception is impacting our relationship with our children.

Healing begins when we are compassionate towards ourselves and our experiences, when we begin to feel and process our internal wounds. It’s when we tend to ourselves in ways that weren’t available to us as children.

It’s about understanding how our early relationships impact our current relationship dynamics and the way we treat our children.

It’s about breaking the cycle of screaming, anger, and lashing out

We can grow when we confront our past issues and limiting beliefs and build an internal sanctuary within and purposeful life.

But we have got to do the internal work. We have to spend time reflecting and we must make the effort to change.

We’ve got to be willing to shift our mindset around certain things and that may require us to seek coaching or counselling programs or support to learn and unearth what is keeping us in overwhelm, anger, frustration and stress.

It may be that we need to learn specific strategies and effective ways to address, manage and calm those challenging behaviors like children’s screaming, rudeness, not listening and hurting others.

If you answered yes to the questions at the beginning of this article, and you’re ready to make some changes, then you’ve got to be willing to let go of certain things.

You need to be willing to step into the woman and become the Mother that you need to be for your children, as this amanat that is given to you is a responsibility to handle with care. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the fitrah upon which Allah has created each of our children that is innately good.

It is absolutely possible to surrender old beliefs and stories and see yourself and what’s possible for you through the lens of your fitra or through the lens with which Allah sees the potential in you.

If you can change how you see yourself, it’s possible to start seeing your children from a different perspective too. Being a mother is one of the hardest roles in this life and unconsciously we can pass down hurt and pain to our children from our own wounds.

Everyone has different situations that they’re in, and it’s a choice to say I am ready to make these changes.

Ask yourself:

“Who is the Mother that I want to be to rise up in my situation?”

“How do I need to act so that I look back and say – Alhamdulillah, I did that right to my children?”