How do you rebuild trust and mend the relationship

[lyno]

How do you rebuild trust and mend the relationship with your kids after yelling/spanking/etc.  I feel like I've traumatized my kids for life by not always being a calm, gentle mother.  I read things like girls who are spanked will end up  marrying an abuser etc. I want to change but sometimes just lose it.  Is there any hope for our realationship now, or are we perminantly emotionally separated?  Have I lost all attachment with my kids?  I have appologized, but then a week later I find myself yelling at them about something again, you know?

[a13xandra]

You can fix this and break the cycle!  But it won't just turn off like a lightswitch.  I'd suggest going to see a therapist, specifically Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, if you can. That way you can start recognizing triggers and developing coping habits that you'd prefer.  I just wanted to offer you some encouragement.  In my family, each generation has gotten better.  

[dalia]

What the pp said. You can do it with concious effort and help from a good therapist. If you can't find/afford therapy then get yourself some gentle discipline books and read them. Find the one that resonates with you the most and read it every night if you have to. Also, maybe you can find some other self help books about anger and surviving abuse (assuming here that you were spanked as a child). I also am afraid of one day I'll lose it and resort to doing to my ds what my parents did to me. But everyday I'm working on breaking that cycle. You can do it! We will do it together.

[happysmileylady]

I was spanked as a child, and my DH is not an abusive man at all.  I am also still close with my parents.  I harbor no resentment or anger towards them at all.  I am not and never was traumatized in any way.

Spanking does not automatically completely screw up a kid for life with no turning back.  If you don't want to spank your kids and find that you are doing so anyway, because you are reacting in the moment and not able to come up with a response that isn't spaking, there are plenty of books out there to read about discipline, in addition to the suggestions the previous posters have listed. 

I just wanted you to know that you haven't damaged the relationship beyond repair at all (if it was ever damaged in the first place...I don't think spanking damaged my relationship with my parents at all.)

[LynnS6]

I think you need to answer a couple of questions honestly for yourself:

How often do you yell, and how bad is it? Is it daily? hourly? Do you feel like you're often overboard or damaging your relationship? What behavior do you see in your children that suggests you've hurt them or destroyed their trust?

Or have you been reading about ideal parents who never lose their temper? (I like Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's work because she acknowledges that parents can lose it too, and she talks about the role that both the child's temperament and the parent's temperament plays).

Every parent loses it sometimes with their kids. That's part of being a parent. All healthy relationships have conflict at times.

If it's an occasional blow up, I don't think it's all that bad. There have been times when I've blown up at my kids every couple of days. It's usually brief, direct and targeted at a specific something. I try to apologize, I try to do better the next time. But I'm human. I think it's OK for my kids to see a real reaction, and to learn (via my modeling) about what to do when you're in the wrong.

I don't punish my kids for yelling or stomping off to their rooms because I do the same thing. That's what we do in our house when we're mad. It's OK to be mad. I also take it, in a round about way, as evidence that my kids haven't been too badly hurt by my losing it sometimes. They have enough confidence to yell back at me. We're all working together on being more polite. Or as dd put it "I'm working on my tone."

What's not OK is to call people names or to hit. I will confess that I have spanked my kids on a very few occasions. I'm ashamed of it, but it didn't ruin our relationship. I did have to work on repairing the relationship after that. But time spent together, focused on just being, following the child's lead and really taking time and energy with the child helped that.

A really, really good book that has helped me a ton is: Playful Parenting. While it sounds like "how to play with your kids" it's actually about building the relationship and keeping it healthy. The basic prescription from the book is: Spend 30 minutes a day playing with your child and letting them dictate what you do. With my dd, that involves playing either Playmobil or stuffed animals. With ds lately, it's been sports. We have a mean game of kitchen basketball, or we'll play soccer with stuffed animals. One of the things that ds does during those games is yell and argue with me a lot. He's a very very mild mannered kid and rarely argues. It's clear to me that he's using our sports games as a venue to try out these behaviors. It's a 'safe space' for him.

What can you do to make a 'safe space' for your kids? What's one behavior that you have right now that you'd like to change? Try changing one key thing at a time.