A New Writing Venture For Me
October 13, 2011 at 3:42 pm | Posted in parenting, peace, society, Uncategorized | Leave a commentI’ve been very busy lately writing articles on Hub Pages, a site that brings my writing to a wider audience. As with this blog my hope is what I write may help make life a little easier for someone somewhere. Many of my “Hubs” are on aspects of parenting, some practical and several describing life in the early days after Lolo was born – these I hope will be of help to anyone coming to terms with having a premature baby.
You can read about the first time I held Lolo in this post: A Mother’s Experience
You might also like my latest post: The Meaning of Peace (be warned you may been in for a few suprises!!)
I will be back here soon with more posts on allowing family life to thrive with the Work and The Sedona Method.
So Simple a Child Can Teach It
August 24, 2011 at 12:52 pm | Posted in beliefs, family, fun, Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: learning from children, The Sedona Method
See, all you have to do is open your arms and let it go.
On the Sedona Method 4-in-1 Audio course a woman asks Hale how to introduce The Sedona Method to her kids and he recommends that with children the best thing to do is live it, and that even more than what you do children look at what you’re being. Hale goes on to say that many parents artificially try to ‘do the right thing’ around our children but feeling-wise we haven’t shifted. It struck me how similar this is to what Katie says: if I think someone needs to do The Work, I need to do it.
I’ve needed to hear these messages over and over as I have at times felt a strong urge to force my kids – and the whole world, including myself – to let go, be happy, peaceful… Nowadays I usually just welcome that urge, and allow it to pass, and this often has results I could never have imagined.
As well as being fluent in The Work, the girls both know the Method and that they can ask for support to release if they want it. LB often asks to release, particularly around bedtime if she has trouble getting to sleep. Lolo, on the other hand is pretty happy-go-lucky and only rarely worries about much. Although a while ago she liked listening to the story of how Lester Levenson originally developed the process, she has hardly ever done any Sedona Method. Or so I thought. Then a week or so ago I was feeling upset about something and Lolo asked if I’d like to release. Of course I said yes! Her version of The Sedona Method was a little different and really great for anyone who might have resistance to welcoming or letting go, as I was at that moment.
“What are you feeling?” she asked.
I told her I felt sad.
“Would you invite it in and give it a cup of tea?”
I was already smiling by then. Yes, I could invite my sadness in and give it a cup of tea.
“And a cookie?”
Oh, yes, that was no problem either.
“Would you let it choose when it’s time to leave?”
Yes, I would do that too.
“Could you watch it going off down the hill on a bouncy space-hopper?”
By then I was laughing and hugging Lolo. And she didn’t stop there. Sensing I was still holding on, she asked the questions again and up popped an underlying emotion I hadn’t even realised I was feeling. Releasing that has left me a lot freer around a long-standing issue.
So if you’re struggling with any issue that feels sticky, or if life has become a bit too serious, then I invite you try The Lolo Method. And please let me know how it works for you!
Allowing Happiness
June 23, 2011 at 2:29 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions, family patterns, parenting, peace | Leave a commentTags: beliefs, emotions, happiness, mirroring, withholding happiness
I’ve written before about how children are a mirror of what we don’t notice in ourselves, and about my surprise the first time I heard LB use expressions I only later noticed in myself. You’d think by now I’d have learned that if I see something in them it’s going to be lurking somewhere within this being I call myself. Sometimes, truth be told, there are times when I haven’t wanted to see it, and other times just as in a hall of mirrors, the reflection is distorted. It pays to look beneath the obvious.
A few months ago we went on a family outing to a large furniture store (you know the one, it’s all over the world). The plan was to buy a lamp for LB’s room to replace a broken one. As we walked round she saw other things she wanted: a set of pastry cutters, some ornaments and a plant. Mostly I said yes, occasionally no.
We then went to a large outlet warehouse, where LB got a new tee-shirt, but not some jackets she also wanted. Lolo asked for an alarm clock, and got it. We went to a pet shop for hamster food. LB wanted a frilled neck lizard. We said no.
All the way home LB raged. We were horrible parents. It wasn’t fair. She’d wanted one all her life, and we never let her have it. It would never happen. It just wasn’t fair.
I felt annoyed. Couldn’t she feel grateful for what she had got instead of focusing on what she hadn’t? Yes, I remembered my blog post on gratitude, and knew that no, in that moment she couldn’t be grateful if she wasn’t. Yet still I longed to stem the seemingly endless wanting that I could see no way to satisfy. (Yes, I was trying to control her experience.) Actually she said she was grateful for what she’d got AND angry that we would never let her have the lizard. Later she said she didn’t really want any of the “other rubbish”, she only wanted the one thing she hadn’t got.
I tried to explain we did take her feelings into account. (Okay, really what I was trying to do was to get her to see it my way and to defend my decision – now, what is it Katie says about defence being the first act of war?) We had the debate about whether there’s room in our house for a another pet. That led nowhere except to me briefly wondering how on earth I’d managed to make such a mess of parenting that my child appeared to be a bottomless pit of wanting. I told LB that if I believed that giving her this lizard would make her truly happy I might have considered it, if it had been possible. (And yes, it crossed my mind that I wasn’t 100% honest, because of course it would be possible, just not very convenient. Our house already feels cramped to me, without a lizard that needs a large heated tank!) I said that I suspected she would feel pleased for a while but that the wanting would soon come back.
Not surprisingly, this didn’t satisfy her, and I felt frustrated at the apparent gulf between us. We began to bridge that gulf when I recognised that we both wanted for her to feel happy, we just had differing perspectives on how that could be achieved.
Then I noticed that she was not allowing herself to be happy unless she got this lizard, and it occurred to me that if she wasn’t allowing herself to be happy unless the various conditions were met, she’d learned to do that from someone. She certainly was capable of allowing herself to be happy as a baby!
Happiness comes naturally when our minds are still
So where to did I not allow myself to be happy? Not long before, on a Sedona Method weekend course, I had noticed a belief that I couldn’t be happy if others weren’t. And by others I did mean everyone in the entire world. No pressure there then! Nearer home I had not been allowing myself to be happy until LB was well (she’d been repeatedly ill for months.) And I need to make my mother happy first, the cats, the hamster, that sad looking person I saw on the bus…
Okay, so can I just start with me? Can I allow myself to feel the joy of sitting here typing, smiling at my own silly sense of humour?
Feeling miserable and guilty because others are unhappy doesn’t help them one bit, and yet there is such a tendency to think it’s selfish to be happy if others aren’t. I’ve begun to think of it this way: am I more likely to be of service to someone else if I am caught up in worry and fear or if I am peaceful? Being happy doesn’t stop me caring about another’s feelings, it just frees me to understand them better. Since the lizard incident there have been a couple more of these desperate wantings of LB’s, and I realised they occur just before she begins to recover from an illness. Lately it’s been easier to sit with her and not feel I have to do anything other than be there and allow the feelings to come and go. Lately too there are moments when joy simply erupts within me for no apparent reason.
Where do you withhold happiness from yourself? What needs to be fixed before you can allow yourself to feel bliss? Could you allow yourself to be happy even if your loved ones aren’t? Could you allow yourself to feel happy just because?
The Tao of Meow
January 19, 2011 at 3:48 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions, fun | Leave a commentTags: beliefs, present moment awareness
I am cooking. I notice my body feels tense, and then the cat comes in, meowing. She wants food, not just any old food but the kind that comes out of a little sachet and has lumps of meat and gravy, and is fish. (Or at least it says on the packet it’s fish though it never looks much like it to me.) She has already had some today and, according to the vet, she is overweight. Certainly she is a little barrel of fluff. I am fairly certain that if I put dry food into her bowl she won’t eat it, and that she is not really hungry.
I wonder why she wants food when she’s not hungry. Then I remember reading years ago that when animals live closely with humans they develop human-like traits. I have no idea if this is true, but it reminds me to look behind the obvious. That, and remembering that when I see something in someone else, even if that someone is a cat, most likely it’s also in me. Recognising that the cat’s meowing alerted me to my own wanting I say thank you to her and tell her she’s a wonderful little thing and I love her. She understood every word. (No, I don’t really believe that, but sometimes it’s fun to project.)
Then I ponder what is it I want? For a start, I want the tension in my body to go. I want a reply to an e-mail I’ve just sent and I want that reply to be favourable, for the recipient to think that I am wise or clever or some other such nonsense. I want a reply to something I’ve posted on a forum and I want it to be similar to the e-mail. So it would appear that what I want is approval. As I allow myself to welcome this wanting of approval the cat goes quiet and sits still and apparently peaceful. (Of course this could be more projection on my part, perhaps she’s really seething underneath and plotting her revenge.)
More to the point, as I allow myself to welcome this wanting approval I feel calmer. It leads me to contemplate the many ways I seek approval. As I type this now, remembering the story of cooking and the cat, am I again editing my thoughts to make myself look good and so create a favourable impression on any reader? Or am I being totally, ruthlessly honest? The truth right now, is I don’t know. This has perplexed me ever since I started writing this blog, and now it doesn’t matter any more. In the past I’ve agonised over whether I was writing it for the right reasons, as I’ve done about most of my writing. (A good way to develop writer’s block if anyone wants to know!) The right reasons being to do good, to help others, to be of service. And why would I want to do that? Well, so that I can approve of myself of course!
In I Need Your Love – Is That True, Byron Katie asks: “Who would you be without the thought you need to make an impression?” She also writes: “Seeking love becomes so much a part of our lives that it’s automatic. We hardly know we’re doing it. It’s easier to notice the anxiety it creates out there among our friends and colleagues.”
So it is, and Katie invites us to judge our neighbours so that we can see these traits in others and then turn the spotlight on ourselves. She does not invite us to do this so that we can judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, and force ourselves to do better. That’s pretty much what got us into the whole approval-seeking game in the first place, so it’s not likely to get us out again.
Can we ever be totally free of wanting approval? Perhaps that’s the wrong question to ask, perhaps a better one would be can we be free with wanting approval? I’m not sure the first question is even answerable, and so is likely to keep the mind spinning. I might imagine that a few awakened beings – Katie for instance – have transcended this need, and that if I try hard enough, do The Work rigorously enough, use the Sedona Method often enough, if I’m lucky I’ll eventually get rid of all my wanting approval and find the happiness I crave.
You may already have noticed a few flaws in this plan: for a start, though it seems possible that Katie never wants approval, I can’t absolutely know that’s the case. Then, if the whole reason for wanting to get rid of the feeling of wanting approval is to feel approved of this has much the same effect as the cat chasing her tail.
The second question is a different matter. Can we be free with wanting approval? I’d say the answer is yes. When I welcome that wanting there is freedom, or maybe more accurately there is awareness of freedom. All that ever stops me noticing that awareness is a thought or belief that I’m not free, that I need approval, that happiness is somewhere else at some other time: when I have got rid of all my accumulated baggage, when I’ve got my children to sleep, when they’ve grown up safe and well, when they have careers they love, when their children have grown up safe and well…
by which time this body would be
six
feet
under
Combining The Work and The Sedona Method
December 20, 2010 at 2:39 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions | Leave a comment
As well as continuing to use The Work to inquire into the stressful thoughts and beliefs that come visiting, for a year or two now, I have also been using The Sedona Method, and because it has become a huge part of my life it seems time to write a post about it. I’ve written before about the difficulties many of us have with feeling our feelings, and I’ve found The Sedona Method to be a great way to allow feelings to pass through.
At its most basic, The Sedona Method is about noticing whatever you are feeling, allowing that, and then being willing to let it go. Just allowing a feeling is often enough to let it automatically release. Small children naturally release their feelings, and the rest of us are also capable of doing so too just as easily and naturally – it’s just that over the years we’ve learned to suppress them instead. We also have a tendency to identify with our feelings, to the extent that we often say: “I’m angry,” or “I’m sad,” instead of: ‘I feel angry,” and “I feel sad.” This makes it hard to believe we can release ourselves from whatever state we are in, so we try to squash them or get rid of them by expressing. And though there is nothing wrong with either way neither of them actually get rid of emotions. A few years ago it was considered therapeutic to ‘get rid of’ strong emotions by expressing them for example punching pillows to vent suppressed anger. However recent studies indicate that venting anger simply leads to more anger.(1) When we express emotions to someone else and feel relief it’s probably because the other person’s response means we feel safe to release.
It amazes me how often simply accepting whatever I am feeling, and to not trying to do anything to change it, can completely turn a situation around – particularly with my children. Most of the stress any emotion creates comes from fighting it, from trying not to feel it. The more you want to escape from any feeling the more intense it’s likely to seem. If you aren’t familiar with this then I suggest that when you feel a strong emotion stop for a moment and notice how it feels in your body. Instead of judging it as we usually do, get curious, notice where it hits the body and if it spreads. Notice your thoughts about the feeling, are you telling yourself it is unbearable, that you are wrong for having it or that you have to get rid of it? Notice how that affects the feeling. And notice what happens if you accept it, allow it to be there, and if you decide that it’s okay to let it go.
What I love about the Sedona Method is its gentleness and acceptance. It’s absolutely fine to answer: “No,” to any releasing question. Hale Dwoskin, the CEO of TSM says no is just as good as yes. It’s just a sound. The chances are the release will come anyway. And, whenever you ask yourself if you can allow a feeling or let it go, it’s always as best you can, and just for now – just in this moment.
I’ve no doubt that releasing has enhanced my inquiries. These days I release anywhere, any time, whenever I remember and feel the need. Then when a belief surfaces that seems sticky I get out pen and paper again and do a full inquiry. Sometimes releasing brings beliefs to the surface for inquiry, and sometimes inquiry brings feelings to the surface for release. When I answer question three nowadays (How do you react when you think that thought?) I find it easier to welcome those reactions instead of judging myself for having them.
The two processes have many similarities, particularly when using the Triple Welcoming Process of the Sedona Method, which is my favourite way to release. With that process you:
- Welcome (welcome means to greet in a friendly and polite manner, but if that seems too much of a stretch it’s fine to simply notice) your issue, the feelings, images and thoughts that accompany the issue.
- Then welcome any wanting to do anything about it – either to push it away, get rid of it, or to hold onto it. (Sometimes it can be hard to see where we are holding onto an issue, one major way we do this is by talking about it – whether to others or by replaying it in our minds).
- Finally welcome any sense that it’s personal, is you or about you.
- Often this welcoming is enough for feelings about an issue to dissolve, and if not you can ask:
- “Would I be open to letting it go”, or “Would it be okay if this just dissolved?”
I think the reason I like this process so much is because there is so little pressure to ‘do’ anything. For someone who has spent most of her life thinking she should be pushing and controlling herself, to have a process that is so gentle and works so easily is heaven.
(1) http://www.athealth.com/Consumer/disorders/angerproblem.html
The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin is published by Sedona Press
Website: http://www.sedona.com/
The Sedona forum, where coaches and other releasers will answer questions and make suggestions:
http://www.sedonamethodcommunity.com/forum.php
(I find this to be a great place, very loving and friendly.)
The link below is to The Letting Go movie, which is free to view throughout December. To watch it you will have to give your e-mail address, but that’s all.
I’m making a donation to Peace Direct: to stop conflict before it starts. Will you join me?
December 18, 2010 at 10:46 am | Posted in peace, society | Leave a commentI’m making a donation to Peace Direct: to stop conflict before it starts. Will you join me?.
Peace is what the the holiday season is all about. Giving love, giving understanding, acceptance, respect.
I believe in supporting organisations that are FOR, rather than against – for peace, for a clean healthy world, for kindness, for supporting others to support themselves. Peace Direct provides the means for local people to build bridges between communities in conflict. If you are interesting in learning more about what they do follow the link above! To learn more about Peace Direct, click this link below:
Gratitude and Guilt
October 23, 2010 at 5:58 am | Posted in emotions, society | 4 CommentsTags: beliefs, gratitude
If you’re reading this (which of course you are) there’s a good chance you also read personal development blogs and books. If so, you will probably have read that feeling gratitude is essential to finding happiness. It makes sense: there is nothing quite so joyful as feeling waves of gratitude pass through you, and there is little more painful than feeling consumed by resentment.
One way it is often suggested we cultivate gratitude is to “count your blessings”. There are many ways to do this, and one way is to keep a ‘gratitude diary’ each day, writing down all you feel grateful for. I have no argument with this, and have done it myself. If it works for you, that’s wonderful, and you may not be interested in the rest of this article. But if you want to read on, thank you in advance! I’m grateful!
Sometimes we all have off-days. (Okay, sometimes I have off-days and if you don’t you probably don’t bother with blogs like this, so I’ll assume you do.) Sometimes gratitude seems like the last thing you can ever feel, and if that’s you right now, perhaps this article can offer some peace in that.
You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you. I think this is so, so important that I’m going to say it again. You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you.
Let’s go back to that gratitude journal. If you write it because you feel inspired by all the wonderful things in your life, it probably will make you feel even more grateful. If on the other hand, you’re trying to make yourself feel grateful because you’ve read this is how to get what you want in life, there’s a strong possibility it won’t work either at making yourself grateful or bringing you what you want. Gratitude is a joyful spontaneous feeling that comes naturally when we allow it to. But saying thank you, whether it is spoken or written, is not the same as feeling it.
It’s interesting to notice that most of the ways we try to make ourselves grateful induce guilt. Were you, as a child, as baffled as I was by urges to think of starving Biafrans or Ethopians when you didn’t like your dinner? It never even occurred to me then that it was supposed to make me feel grateful to be eating food I hated, and I couldn’t see how what I ate would help them. The trouble with trying to count our blessing by comparing ourselves to others is that instead of leading to gratitude it can lead to guilt when we notice the lack in someone else’s life.
When we have this sense of lack it can taint our natural ability to feel grateful. Let’s imagine you are feeling fed up, and try to cheer yourself up by thinking about the new shoes you bought yesterday or the kiss your child gave you at the school gates, or that your boss said you’d done an exceptionally good job today. Instead, you feel guilty for buying shoes you didn’t really need when you could have sent a cheque to charity, you remember the argument with your child as you walked to school, and you wonder if she only kissed you because she’s hoping you’ll relent and buy that iphone she wants, and then you wonder what your boss thinks of your usual standard of work if today was exceptional. And if this counting blessings lark works for everybody else, you must be the most ungrateful, churlish person on the planet.
Maybe there’s a different explanation. Remember the old grumpy great-aunt you used to have? You know – the one who gave you the hideous sweater she’d knitted herself in a style that went out of fashion twenty years before and still hasn’t come back into fashion thirty years later. As you tried it on and noticed the sleeves were far too short and the body far too wide, she snapped, “Well, aren’t you going to say ‘Thank you’?” If you didn’t have that great-aunt, I’m pretty confident you can remember some other adult hiss, “Say thank you,” as they shoved something into your sticky little hands. You may have loved whatever you’d been given, but how did you feel saying the words that were demanded of you? Were shame and guilt now mixed in?
What confused messages do we pass on about gratitude when we say this sort of thing to children? I’ve heard a parent tell a child to say thank you so that her grandparents will keep sending presents. Another justified asking her child to say, “Please,” when she didn’t say it herself, by explaining that adults show it in how we say things and in our gestures. Is this true? Or do they show it more? Which would you rather have: a child’s eyes light up with excitement as they eagerly grab a present – or a head cast down and a mumbled thank you?
Why should a child say “thank you” or “please”? Does learning these words teach them to be polite or to be inauthentic to get approval? And is our motivation to teach manners or because we fear disapproval from others if our children don’t say these supposedly magic words? And what do we teach them by calling “please” a magic word?
Is it possible that all this guilt is exactly what stops us from feeling gratitude? If you’re having a day where you find it hard to be grateful, I invite you to let yourself off the hook. Instead of insisting you count those blessings, or hissing, “Say thank you,” to yourself, take a few moments to notice and question the thoughts that make it hard to feel your gratitude. Like love, it’s there always, but sometimes it gets buried so far beneath ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ that it is impossible to find. Don’t force yourself to feel something you’re not feeling. Allow yourself to feel your resentment and lack of gratitude. You may be surprised to discover you can feel grateful for that!
A Tribute
October 2, 2009 at 2:30 pm | Posted in emotions | 2 CommentsTags: grief, love
Grief hits at odd moments, like on a sunny day when I walk down the hill towards home and remember a similar day that I met her coming up. She was coming to greet her children as they arrived home from school and couldn’t walk far because of the pain. I still believed then that she would get better, and I think she did too.
Another day I leave the kids at school and as I walk back I remember seeing her ahead of me on a morning years ago, I remember running to catch up, I remember the turn of her head as she waited for me, the way she cleared her throat and gave a little laugh, the quietness in her voice when she spoke.
Grief brings memories that seem almost alive, that make it almost impossible to believe she isn’t. One of our children says something cute and I remember how we used to laugh in pleasure at those little sayings, at their sweet ways. I dig in our garden and pull out the beautiful weeds that she told me were poisonous. I can’t remember how she advised to dispose of these weeds, and I can’t ask her now. Then I see her gentle smile. The image expands to become her standing in jeans and a loose tee-shirt, hands in her pockets. The memory is filled with warmth, the pleasure of having known her. Images flow through my mind daily: hundreds of images: sometimes nothing more than flashes, sometimes little movies. Some of these images aren’t even memories, but my mind constructing pictures from what people have told me of her last days in hospital. I wasn’t there: I had a virus and, still thinking she would recover, at least for a while, I didn’t want to infect her.
Months ago I read an extract from a novel, Shadow Child, by Libby Purves in which the main character has lost her son in freak accident. This character goes to the various places her son used to go, and her son is dead there too. I can relate to that; it makes no sense, yet death defies sense, defies understanding. Yes the person, the body is gone, and yet something of her remains.
My daughter googles her name and finds her website, and tears flow down my face. This isn’t sadness, and I don’t know what it is. To see her name still in cyberspace touches how I feel, touches the sense that I sometimes get that she too is still somehow in the air around us, in the flowers she planted last spring, in the park where we first met when our children were small. As my daughter chatters on I start to write this tribute to my friend, Alison, who died at the beginning of the summer. Quiet, accepting, brave: these are words that come when I try to describe her, and words can never give the essence of who she was.
On Youtube is a video of a man doing ‘The Work’ on his sister who he thinks should get over her daughter’s death, and at the end of his inquiry he reaches the turnaround and falls silent. After a few moments he says “Wow, I thought I was over it.” Byron Katie replies, “You can’t get over love.”
(This is a link to the video referred to above.)
A Little Wisdom
August 22, 2009 at 6:46 pm | Posted in fun | Leave a comment
When LB was four, she often called me by name rather than ‘Mummy’. One day we were discussing my middle name – which I rarely use as I don’t particularly like it. I said what it was (and no I’m not telling you!)
She replied, “No it isn’t. Your name is Mummy Yvonne.”
I asked then why it was she called me Yvonne.
“Well,” she said. “Mummy is such a common name. Yvonne is so much nicer.”
The wisdom of four-year-olds. Why do we get them to call us such a common name?
Not Crying Over Spilt Milk
August 20, 2009 at 10:12 pm | Posted in emotions, family, parenting | Leave a comment
“When we are present discipline isn’t even an issue, whereas when we are distracted by beliefs about how children should be life becomes a battle of wills, an endless task of trying to mould children into whatever they currently are not!”
That quote is from one of my earlier posts. Being present, aware, awake - whatever you like to call it - is something I sometimes am, and sometimes am not. I’ve written quite a bit about what it’s like when I’m not present (by which I mean reacting in a conditioned way instead of being aware of what’s going on inside of me and what might be going on inside of someone else) so this article is about the difference awareness brings to discipline.
One recent Sunday morning the girls were downstairs eating breakfast, my husband was at work, and I was upstairs doing one of those Sunday morning somethings, like reading a book or taking the cat off the bed because his paws were muddy. I heard the sound of an argument from below and then LB came screaming up stairs and past the bedroom door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Or fresh from reading Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, I may even have shown more empathy, saying, “You are upset.” But I can’t guarantee it. I can’t guarantee that any of what I’m about to write is exactly as it happened, but it’s near enough.
LB replied, between wails, that she and Lolo had had a fight. “She was by the fridge and I asked her to get me a spoon. She said no.”Choke, sob. “So I shouted at her please do it and she still wouldn’t.”Choke, sob. “And then I went to hit her and she was holding the milk, and I hit the milk and now it’s everywhere!” Huge choke, huge sob, and then back to wailing.
“The milk is everywhere?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s everywhere.”
“Is it on the carpet?” (We have a Turkish rug fairly close to the table.)
She shook her head.
“Then it’s not everywhere,” I said. “And if it’s not on the carpet it can be cleaned. Have you wiped any of it up?”
“No,” LB wailed, and tried to run off. She often runs off and hides in a cupboard if she thinks she’s done something wrong or if she’s in conflict with someone. I could have let her, go, and sometimes I might have, but that day instead I held her and hugged her. “You feel ashamed,” I said. “Will hiding away change that feeling?” As she continued to wail, I asked what she thought would help. She wailed some more.
I told her I thought she’d feel better after she’d cleaned it up, that hiding wouldn’t stop the feelings of shame, and that she’d be better off coming downstairs. She angrily told me to stop repeating myself. (I hadn’t noticed that I had, but I’d mentioned the word shame twice, and that’s what LB objected to.) I suggested we go and clean up the mess together. She hesitantly agreed.
Downstairs Lolo was busy mopping up the table with a hand towel, so I suggested to LB that she could clean the milk off the floor and wall. “I can’t do it!” She wailed. “There’s too much.”
“You feel overwhelmed, but looks worse than it is,” I replied. “Liquid always does.
Lolo held up the milk carton and said, “Look there’s not very much spilled at all.”
As I filled a bucket with soapy water, Lolo said, “I like mopping up, can I do it?”
I heard myself say, “Thank you, but no. I know you’re trying to be kind to LB, but she needs the feeling of having cleared up the mess. I would be kinder to let her do it.” (It was one of those times when words come out and afterwards I realise their truth. To me, those moments are pure joy, moments when I know I’m not in control, and something wonderful is taking place. I often experience similar moments when I’m writing fiction and a story goes off in a direction I never imagined.)
Lolo understood, and while she and I finished cleaning the table LB mopped the wall and floor.
LB’s relief after she’d cleaned up was obvious. We’ve talked about it since, and she says that she felt self-forgiveness afterwards. Later that same morning the girls were in their bedroom tidying out some boxes. I heard LB’s raised voice again. “I did hit you,” she was saying, “and I’m sorry.”
It turned out she’d thrown something to Lolo and had hit her. Lolo said it was okay, but LB wanted the chance to apologise!
I’ve long believed that punishment doesn’t work. Yet, I’ve resorted to it many times. There are so many beliefs in Western culture that children are bad or wild and need to be tamed that it is challenging to simply trust ourselves and our children. If I had followed a punishing route that Sunday I would have ordered LB downstairs to clean up the mess she made, and I would have reprimanded her for hitting Lolo. I might have worried that I ‘should’ issue some sort of sanction, have tried to think up one that fitted the crime, and felt guilty because I couldn’t come up with anything. She, meantime, would have been screaming that wasn’t fair, that I always picked on her and that if Lolo hadn’t refused to bring her a spoon it wouldn’t have happened. If I had managed to force her to clean up the mess she would have done it with resentment. We would have had a morning of misery and she would have learned that the way to get people to do what you want is to use force, and that as she was being punished for doing just that adults weren’t to be trusted. And she would have had no sense that I understood how she was feeling.
Instead what she learned was that cleaning up a mess she’d made wasn’t so hard as she’d imagined, and that she felt better afterwards. She was able to use that learning a few days later. She was in the bathroom making flower waters (as eleven year-old girls do). Petals were soaking in pots on top of a chest of drawers full of swimming gear. She knocked a pot. Water and petals floated towards the swimming costumes. LB wailed. “Oh no! It’s everywhere. It’s all ruined!”
I reminded her that the milk hadn’t been as hard to clean up as she’d imagined, and she calmed right down. Within seconds she had wiped it up.
It also got me thinking about making amends and wondering where I run away instead of cleaning up messes I’ve made. Hmm…
PS
I mentioned Non-Violent Communication at the beginning of this article. “Nonviolent Communication (also called Compassionate Communication) can be used in any interaction. NVC provides practical skills in language, awareness, and using power to communicate in ways that inspire compassionate giving and receiving toward meeting the needs of all concerned.” (From the web-site: http://www.cnvc.org/ )
I go on reading about other processes not because The Work doesn’t work, but because it does. As my thinking changes I understand in ways I couldn’t in the past. I read an introduction to NVC years ago, and thought I’d never be able to do it properly, so I didn’t explore it. Then a few months ago I saw a video clip of an interview with Marshall Rosenberg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEXGNui2OQ and realised that NVC wasn’t about getting the words right, but about learning to think in terms of needs instead of judgements. Rosenberg says, “All language which criticises others is simply an expression of an unmet need.” And that applies to ourselves as much as to others.
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