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.
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?
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.
So You Want to be a good parent? It that true?
December 3, 2008 at 10:45 am | Posted in beliefs, family, parenting, society | 3 CommentsI’m guessing that about two out of every three readers of this blog are parents. (Okay, two out of THE three readers, and the other one is Pam – Hi Pam!)
If you’re not a parent you might think this post doesn’t apply to you, and I’d say that it might. As you read it, perhaps you can think of other situations where you think you want to be ‘good’ – a good spouse, employee, teacher.
There’s nothing obviously stressful about wanting to be good at something, so it might not seem worth questioning that belief. Yet I’ve found that often it’s the beliefs that seem so very reasonable that generate most stress. I’ve read that stress is caused either by trying to push away or to hold on. This makes a lot of sense to me. We push away what we think will do us harm, and try to hold on to what we think will bring us peace. Holding on creates tension. (If you find this hard to imagine stop reading for a moment and pick up something on your desk. Hold it tightly and notice what happens to your hand!) So the very act of trying to cling on makes it harder to do or be what we think we should.
Then there’s the word ‘want’. I want to be a good parent. Want can mean lack. If you want something you don’t have it (or at least you don’t believe you have it), so if I want to be a good parent, that implies that I’m not. For me, one of the most important sub-questions I’ve heard Katie ask is, “What images come into your mind when you think this thought?” What I’ve noticed, many times is that when I think I have to be or do something its opposite also comes into my mind. I think I want to be kind and patient, and images appear of me nagging and criticising my children. I think I should be a good parent, and my mind fills with pictures of people telling me I’m not. The day that I first noticed this was long before I’d discovered “The Work”.
The girls were still little – three and four. I had pain that a doctor told me was fybromyalgia. It could take years to get better, so I’d read. (It didn’t.) Some days I couldn’t lift the girls, couldn’t open the garage door. Yoga helped, so I had started doing yoga in the mornings. That particular morning I hadn’t done my yoga when the girls woke up. After breakfast they wanted to go swimming. I explained I needed to do yoga first, and they wanted to join in. Sounds idyllic doesn’t it? And wasn’t I such a wonderful mother, introducing my children to wholesome activities like yoga at such an young age? That was what I wanted to believe. How virtuous I felt saying, yes, I would show them what to do.
It didn’t work out like that. I can’t remember exactly what happened instead. Either they thought they’d do their own version of the exercises, or they climbed all over me when I lay down. It could have been cute and fun, we could have invented some new exercises, had I not had a head full of people telling me how a good parent should be. “You should take control, not let them run riot,” ran the commentary in my head. So I snapped at the girls to stop messing about and do what I showed them. The internal rant switched from taking my side to theirs, and carried on, “Look at you, you idiot. Yoga is supposed to be relaxing. How are they ever going to find it relaxing if you snap at them? They’re only little kids! Lighten up for goodness sake. If you’d been more organised and got up earlier you could have finished yoga ages ago.”
Strangely enough, this didn’t help me relax! Strangely enough, this snarling voice didn’t bring serenity to that yoga session! But that voice in my head didn’t shut up. I told the girls I knew they hadn’t done anything wrong, that I was trying not to be angry, and we got ready for the pool. Meanwhile old nagging-voice told me I was useless at getting organised. As we set off for the pool, it said, “You can’t go swimming now. It’s far too late. By the time you get back lunch will be late, and the girls will be hungry. Any decent mother would be better organised at feeding them.” We took a detour via a corner shop and bought muffins, but that only momentarily quieted my self-criticism. It wasn’t proper food, not the sort of thing a decent mother fed her kids. And lunch would still be far too late.
I kept listening to the voices in my head, trying to please them, not realising then that I didn’t have to believe a word they said. I had to be a good parent, and I was failing. Miserably. I’d say sorry to the girls, say I knew it wasn’t their fault, but the next minute I’d start snapping again. About the only time I stopped snapping that morning was when we were in the pool. My four-year-old pointed this out (who says wisdom comes with age?) Now, I can see that the reasons were simple – in the pool we were all doing something we loved, the self-criticism let up and I was able to focus on them and what we were doing instead of trying to please some imaginary audience.
That day was the first time I realised that trying to live up to what I imagined other people believed a good parent should be was preventing me from being able to be the best parent I could. I didn’t know about The Work then, but it’s interesting to look back and see how I would have been different without the thought. It’s not hard to see, because for part of the day, I was that person. For part of even that day filled with self-doubt and frustration, I was a woman in a pool, playing with her children, enjoying their company. I can also see that what prevented me from staying that way when we left the pool was fear. Fear of other people’s disapproval, and also fear that without this constant nagging voice pointing out my errors I wouldn’t know how to do the right thing. A few years before this, as LB changed from baby into toddler I scoured bookshops looking for a parenting book that explained what was acceptable behaviour in a toddler, and what I should correct. It took me a while to realise that nobody could tell me this, that for each parent the answer is different. Later I came to realise that my confusion came from never having learned to trust my own inner voice, and that is why I find The Work so valuable. It’s not about adding any new rules, but about letting go. Even the turnarounds aren’t new rules to be followed, but options to explore.
What turnarounds might you find for ‘I want to be good parent”?
I don’t want to be a good parent. Not if it means following someone else’s ‘rules’, and trying to live based on what I imagine will get me approval.
I want to be a good child. Yes, is that a child is open to learn.
The thought “I want to be a good parent,” loosened its hold on me that day, but it came visiting many times since, and still occasionally does. When I write for this blog it whispers, “You can’t say that, people will think you’re a bad parent.” Now, after years of doing The Work, I know I don’t have to believe it, and that what people think is their business and doesn’t threaten me in any way.
Parent’s Intuition
June 23, 2008 at 11:53 am | Posted in family, parenting, society | Leave a commentTags: sleep problems
A different style of post today.
Yesterday in a newsagent I picked up a parenting magazine and flicked through it. I read a short article about research that claims to have shown that children whose parents are with them as they fall asleep or who are taken into the parental bed if they wake in the night will more likely continue to have sleep problems as older children.
Hmm, I wonder, could this be a bit like the research that showed babies who had a night light grew up to be short sighted? That research came out when LB was a year or so old, and I fretted about it long enough to switch her light off one night. She screamed, the light went back on, and some time later the researchers realised that they had overlooked one fairly vital piece of information – babies with night-lights tend to have parents who are short sighted! (And no, I’m not but my husband is.)
So am I now going to beat myself up over all those nights I picked LB up and took her through to our bed in the middle of the night? Am I going to assume that’s why she still occasionally has bad dreams? (The article suggested these children more often had bad dreams.) Or am I going to take a wild guess that these researchers may just have overlooked important information – for instance that children with high levels of anxiety or who get scared at night may well have parents who sit with them as they go to sleep and who soothe them when they wake in the night? It gets even more interesting – I looked up the magazine’s web-site and found a mass of information about children and sleep, including evidence that controlled crying creates stress chemicals in a child, whereas co-sleeping reduces them. So who do you believe?
This post is not a argument about whether you should take your baby to be with you or not – I think that what works for any family depends on so many factors unique to them that it is impossible to generalise. I can’t help feeling that instead of doing endless studies to prove one way of parenting is better then another, it would be more useful to encourage parents to trust their own intuition.
Going back to LB – not long after Lolo was born (and while she was still in hospital so our lives were somewhat disrupted) a “sleep expert” asked me what I did when LB woke in the night. I told her it depended how LB was – if I hugged her and laid her down and she settled quickly I tucked her up in her own bed. If she was clearly distressed and unable to settle I took her into my bed. “You’re confusing her,” the expert said. “You must always be consistent, always leave her, or always take her into your bed.” Being consistent was apparently more important than trusting my instincts or responding to the needs of my child at any given moment. Probably that sleep expert did my a huge favour – her advice seemed so utterly crazy to me that it may have been when I began to listen to that small voice of wisdom inside of me, the voice that told me I knew my daughter better than any expert.
We all have this wisdom, we all know instinctively how to look after our children and ourselves, and I sincerely hope that in some small way this blog can help others learn to trust that wisdom – others including well-meaning sleep experts!
Being Present With Our Children
June 19, 2008 at 6:27 pm | Posted in emotions, parenting | Leave a commentTags: anger, present moment awareness
“Compassionate self-discipline is nothing other than being present, rather than engaged in distracted, unfocused, addictive behaviors based in an I-need-to-fix-myself mentality. “
This quote is from Cheri Huber, whose wonderful writing I’ve recently come across. (More details at the end of this article.)Though she is writing about self discipline this could just as well apply to any form of discipline. 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!
Some time ago LB went through an angry phase – yelling that she hated me, hitting her sister, snapping at little things. It was stressful, very stressful. But not because of how she was. The stress came from my thoughts about her behaviour.
I noticed that I wasn’t seeing her as she was, I wasn’t with her as she was. Instead my mind was racing ahead imagining that she would grow up to be a monster, so bad-tempered no one would want to be her friend, and so she would be alone. I was predicting a life of misery and depression for her. As I noticed this I realised that there was no way I could know any of it. I also noticed something else – because I believed as a child (and often as an adult) that my anger was wrong and people didn’t like me if I got angry, and because I had bouts of feeling depressed and friendless from my teenage years onwards, I was assuming that unless she changed her behaviour, she would have the same experience. And I had to save her from that.
For all I knew, expressing her anger at eight years old could mean that she would grow up to be the most peaceful, relaxed adult on this planet. I have absolutely know way of knowing how she will be tomorrow, let alone in ten years time. Yet I was allowing this fear-filled vision to affect my relationship with her now. When I saw this it was obvious that by trying to stop or control her anger I was more likely to encourage the creation of the monster in my mind. If her reaction to my disapproval was to bury her anger it would simply simmer away looking for an outlet.
After this I began to notice how often parents’ problems with discipline turned out to have nothing to do with children as they were, but with how the parent imagined they would become. A friend’s five-year-old was openly defiant, according to my friend disobeying her ninety percent of the time. What was going on in my friend’s mind when this happened? “If I don’t stop him, if I don’t show him who is boss now, what will he be like when he’s a teenager?”
Another woman was terrified of her two-year-old’s tantrums. As we talked the same pattern became apparent – her husband had been an angry young man, and although he’d mellowed, she was imagining her child growing up to be the same way.
How often do families look at children and compare them in appearance and behaviour to family members from the past? After gender, the first thing people want to know about a new baby is who he or she looks like. How often have you thought your child is behaving exactly like Aunt Mabel/father/grandmother/crazy cousin used to do? And if you don’t like how your crazy cousin behaved, how to you react to your child? If you react by trying to stop the behaviour you’re not alone. When we feel uncomfortable about the ways our children behave, it’s good to remember that our past (or our relative’s past) is not our children’s future.
It’s also good to remember our child is hurting in some way – or they wouldn’t be behaving the way they are.
LB’s been raging again, these last few days. At times it has felt exhausting, as if she’s determined to push every button I’ve got. Yes, there have been times I’ve reacted by getting annoyed back. When that happens it’s because I listen to my thoughts and react to them, not to what she says. “You’re horrible,” she shouts. “I hate you.” And if I believe her, even for a second, then I start to think that I have to do something, that I have to make her see that I’m not horrible, or remind her that just a few minutes ago she was telling me how much she loves me. If instead I remember what it feels like to be caught up in the belief that someone in horrible and you hate them, then I can feel love and compassion for her.
A couple nights ago when I didn’t react she got even more angry. And then came the tears. Underneath the anger were fear and sadness. These related to several things, including a trip we’re soon about to make, and that she thought she might not enjoy without her dad there (he will be working). Everything she was upset about was in the future, things that may never happen.
I realised I was thinking I had to do something to change it for her. I also noticed my mind was filled with memories of people saying children should be happy, children shouldn’t worry about things. I noticed this led me to imagine these people say I was doing something wrong as a parent since my child was worrying, and there was something wrong with my child for being unhappy. And then I remembered that if I have a period of sadness or depression, it is generally followed by a time of understanding and expansion. So instead of trying to make things better, I just explained this to LB. She understood, and she understood that she wasn’t wrong or silly for feeling the way she did.
(The Cheri Huber quote comes from ‘Making a Change For Good – A Guide to Compassionate Self-Discipline. I also recommend: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be)
Once more with feeling
May 7, 2008 at 1:50 pm | Posted in emotions, parenting | Leave a commentIt had been one of those days. Husband was ill, had been for well over a week, LB was ill, had been for well over a week. Lolo wasn’t ill (okay, I guess I can’t add that to my list of moans then) – the house was a mess and I hadn’t had enough sleep to muster the energy to clean or tidy. Everything was piling on top of me: the garden that had been neglected all winter, the kitchen door that still needed painting months after the builders had finished, the clothes that needed washing, and as for all the bits of paper lying around the house… does everybody with children have bits of paper lying all over the house, or is that just mine? And socks? And batteries Lolo has removed from one toy that doesn’t work to put into another toy that doesn’t work.
Right now I smile fondly as I think of Lolo’s habit of dismantling toys, torches or her dad’s laptop, but that day it was just one more thing to grind me into the carpet with the dirt. The girls were getting at each other all day long. “She’s got my Tamagotchi.” “Well she’s taken all the Littlest Pets, and they’re mine!” “She bit me.” “She scratched me.”
You know the sort of thing. Mostly it degenerates into “Aaaaaah! It’snotfair!” Aaaaaahhh!! Muummmm!!” (And that’s just me.)
I was trying, trying hard, so I thought, doing what I was supposed to do. I didn’t take sides, I told them to sort it out, told them I knew they could work it out. (That’s supposed to work, the experts say it does. So why isn’t it working…?Muummmm!!!) Mostly I just wanted them to stop fighting, and I wanted me to stop feeling grumpy and tired and fed up.
The day dragged on, and all that seemed appealing was getting them into bed, getting time to sit by myself and stare into space. I’d gone from quietly telling them I trusted them to work it out between themselves, to yelling that their fighting was giving me a headache. (No, it definitely wasn’t my shouting that gave me the headache!)
As I headed upstairs after doing the evening dishes, my heart sank as I heard them argue yet again. Then something hit me. All day long I’d been trying to stop their fights and to rationalize away my own anger. All day long I’d been believing that there was something wrong with us because they kept fighting and I couldn’t sort it. Maybe there was nothing wrong, maybe instead there was a lesson for us in this. What if instead of trying to get everything happy and peaceful, we needed to face the anger, get everything out in the open? I remembered reading on Bryon Katie’s blog about a Conflict Resolution process where two people fill out Judge-Your-Neighbor worksheets on each other and take turns to read them out. I had also seen a video clip of a mother listening while her son read his worksheet out. The person being ‘judged’ simply answers, “Thank you.” (They can also notice whether the statement they have just heard seems true to them, and can notice any desire to justify or defend, but in this process, would not act on that desire.)
I explained this to my daughters and asked if they were willing to give it a go. They were, so long as they didn’t have to write anything down, they would just say all that needed to be said. Lolo went first, telling LB, “You took my Tamagotchi.”
“Thank you.”
“She kicked me when I tried to get it back.”
“Tell her,” I said. “Not me.”
She did. There were several more moments like this, when the girl sharing her experience wanted to tell me instead. (And with that she usually started to whine.) Each time I asked her to tell her sister, not me.
As I’ve seen this process described, the participants would usually then go on to do The Work, questioning the statements on their worksheets, but I didn’t remember that at the time, so we didn’t do that bit. It didn’t matter, by the time the girls had both aired their grievances and listened to each other the animosity had gone. I then suggested they tell me all they were angry at me about. I expected a torrent.
Instead LB said, “Nothing.”
“What, even after I’ve snapped and been grumpy all day?” I asked.
She said, “Yes. I forgive you. You’re my mum and I forgive you.”
Lolo agreed.
This astonished me at the time. Later, I began to see that by accepting that their anger needed expression and by providing a way for them to safely express it, what I had done in essence was to say, “You’ve done nothing wrong. You are not wrong.” Without realising it, I had forgiven them (and myself.) This made it easy for them to forgive me. I recently read (in Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping) about a study done at Seattle University into forgiveness. The participants reported that the more they tried to forgive the harder it became. Those who came to feel empty of resentment did so not by an act of will, but by the sudden discovery that they had forgiven. What I found particularly interesting was that this discovery came after they had experienced being forgiven themselves – not necessarily by the person they subsequently forgave.
Having written this yesterday, I wasn’t sure how to finish this post. School had finished for the day and my husband had collected the girls and taken them to the leisure centre where Lolo was about to have a swimming lesson. When I met her she said, “I’m in a bad mood.”
“Are you?” I said, and hugged her.
“She is,” LB confirmed.
“Poor you,” her dad said, and hugged her.
I took Lolo to get changed for her lesson, and for the rest the day not a trace of that bad mood remained. I guess that’s what happens to feelings when we don’t try to resist.
Is It Okay To Have a Feeling Mum?
April 24, 2008 at 3:33 pm | Posted in emotions, parenting, society | Leave a comment
In the first article on this blog I wrote about how children unconsciously mirror parents. This article looks at the impact of the wider environment. Everything we come into contact with as children has some bearing on how we think and feel, be it family, friends or the society we grow up in. The effect can be blindingly obvious, or so subtle it’s hard to notice. It’s easy to see that children who grow up in alcoholic families or in a war zone are going to be affected by that environment, but subtle effects on our development can go unnoticed.
My daughters both love to swim. LB, the elder, joined a club a couple of years ago and has entered a few competitions. She has come second or third in several races, and has a small stash of medals. She has a dream that one day she may be a ‘really good’ swimmer and make it to the national team. Will she, won’t she? Who knows? I have Albert at UrbanMonk.net to thank for helping me see that doesn’t much matter right now. In an article about finding our purpose in life, he writes about years spent boxing, dreaming of glory, till one day he lost interest and stopped, to later realise the purpose of it hadn’t been to make him a brilliant boxer, but to give him confidence. (See link at the end of this post.)
So, LB has dreams and can swim well – she is also prone to minor, niggling illnesses. A few weeks ago she had a heavy cold and a big competition coming up. She was determined she was well enough to compete, and determined to enjoy her birthday a few days before. All week she had gone off to school coughing and sneezing and brimming with excitement. (Not her usual behaviour – more often she huddles in bed at the first sneeze.) On the morning of the event she was still coughing and her nose dripped a wonderful stream of green snot. But she was going!!!!
She didn’t win any medals, or even come close. People – including me - still told her she’d done well: pointing out she’d been the youngest in her races, had swum strokes she’s not confident in, hugely improved her time in one of them, and swam half a second faster than before in another stroke – and she had a cold. She smiled as people pointed this out to her, she smiled as people told her it’s not coming first or second that matters, but getting personal bests, or even just taking part. Not everyone can come first, people said, and she had done well just to enter a big long race. People asked if she was pleased with how she’d done – she smiled and said yes.
By evening she was in tears. All day she had tried to be upbeat, tried to keep thinking it was okay, that everything was fine, that she was pleased with the improvements she had made, that coming last in that long race didn’t bother her. She thought she was supposed to be happy, that was how people behaved. She was having huge doubts about whether she was any use at swimming at all, as she’d watched some of her friends knock three or four seconds off their personal bests in every race, and as she compared her times to the winning times.
I knew so well what she was feeling, and I told her it was okay to feel disappointed, frustrated, okay to feel sad. And I sent a little memo to my own mind to remember that too.
Thinking about it the next day I realised what had happened was something I often notice – that when we adults find it hard to deal with children’s feelings we try to stop them instead. It’s a mite confusing to tell children that what really matters in these competitions is personal bests, because if that was true the medals would go to the kids who knocked the most off their times, not to the ones who swim the fastest. This lie, because that’s what it is, is told with the intention of being kind and encouraging the children who will probably never win medals. So we throw children into competitions telling them it’s not winning that matters and yet get excited when they win, and expect them to go on smiling and not be jealous when they don’t. Likewise, we divide them in classrooms into reading groups and call them Owls and Pigeons and don’t let on to them that the myth of owls being intelligent isn’t true, till one day the Owls realise that the Pigeons are reading Dostoyevsky, while they are still on Spot the Dog. (Okay I’m exaggerating, but you get the picture.)
My gut feeling is that when we aren’t honest with children, even when our intentions are kind, deep down they know. Our lies don’t stop the feelings, they just stop the expression of those feelings and lead to children feeling something’s wrong with them. In the short term it might serve adults to dodge dealing with children’s more difficult emotions, but in the long term it comes back to us – if we’re lucky it’s later the same day when our children cry at bedtime. If we’re less lucky they stifle those feelings and go on stifling them and carry with them a simmering resentment. When I realised how disappointed my daughter was I couldn’t tell her she’ll win next time – she might , or she might not. Instead I guided her through The Work on some of her beliefs around that disappointment. Doing this she remembered the joy she gets from swimming, from feeling the water around her, the feel of moving quickly through it, the pleasure she gets at pushing herself to see how fast she can go – and her sense of purpose returned.
The next day LB came to me with some drawings she was doing and told me she couldn’t get them right, saying that her friend is better at drawing than she is. Having worked as an art teacher years ago I noticed that children often approach drawing with their minds, not their eyes, drawing what they think they should see, not what they do see, in an attempt to get it right. I showed LB how to look more closely and to draw what she sees and not what she knows. Five minutes later she was back with another drawing, pleased as punch that she had discovered she could draw well after all. Was this coincidence or did it have something to do with working through her disappointment the night before? Hmm, I wonder…
(Read the full article at:
Mirrors
March 20, 2008 at 5:41 pm | Posted in family patterns, parenting | Leave a commentOne night when my elder daughter was about eighteen months old, she and I were upstairs getting ready for her bath. She wandered out onto the landing and stood on tiptoe peeping over the stair gate. In a sing-song voice she called out, “Jeh-eee!” (My husband’s name is Jerry.) She stood quietly for a few moments, and then she said, “Oh-uh.”
What a funny thing to do, I thought. Why is she doing that?
A few nights later it was bath-time again, and I realised I’d forgotten the little blanket she took to bed. My husband was downstairs in the kitchen, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out to him (yes you’ve guessed – in a sing-song voice.) After a while I realised that with the kitchen door shut and radio on he couldn’t hear me. Feeling a bit stupid that I’d ever imagined he might, I said, “Oh-uh.”
So now I knew why she did it.
Of course I’d been aware that children copy adults: I’d seen her clap when I did, heard her repeat songs we’d sung to her. I’d seen that she wanted to carry her own little backpack like everyone else when we went on holiday with her older cousins. Yet somehow I didn’t, till then, realise how closely she watched, how much she absorbed, how in some ways she knew me better than I knew myself.
Children are like mirrors to the unknown depths of ourselves. We see our own behaviours and sayings repeated in them, and it’s not always what we want to see. I felt like a terrible mother the day I heard my child scold her dolls for not going to sleep. (Even now I feel the urge to explain myself to you, to tell you in detail about the sleepless nights that led me to that. But you can guess: you’ve been there too, if not with sleep issues, then with some other.) I have also experienced moments of amazement upon realising that she had absorbed what I saw as the good in me, like the time, aged 2 or 3, that she crouched down, and said to her little sister, “I love you. Even when I’m angry at you, I still love you.”
And of course, we too were once children, we too once absorbed all that our parents were and did. My daughter may have stood at the stair gate and called her father’s name because she wanted to see him, but did she have the faintest idea why she waited a few moments and then said ‘Oh,’ in that particular way? Do we adults have any idea why we believe half the things we do?
In some ways it’s easy to see that patterns of being are passed down through generations – we notice that we react like our own parents did when our child refuses to do as bidden – or more likely we notice that our spouse does! What’s harder to notice is that this happens because we go on believing thoughts that aren’t even ours, that are passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes we even think we are doing the opposite of what our parents did (and when we think that we usually believe ours is the right way). Yet underneath the reactive actions could be the exact same thoughts our parents had. Nancy Friday describes this in My Mother, My Self. She writes about how women she interviewed often believed their lives were very different from their mothers’. “Mother lived in a house, the woman I was talking to lived in an apartment. Mother never worked a day in her life, the daughter held down a job. We cling to these ‘facts’ as proof that we have created our own lives, different from hers. We overlook….that we have taken on her anxieties, fears angers; the way we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others is patterned on what we had with her.”
As I’ve written on the ‘About’ page on this blog, the best way that I know to open out from thought patterns that have existed for generations is to use The Work, the process developed by Bryon Katie. (There will be other ways that work for other parents, and I invite readers of this blog to use the comments section to describe what works for you.) When I read Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is, I was at first surprised to read that she realised she didn’t think, she was ‘being thought’. For me now, what that means is thoughts come unbidden into my mind, and I have a choice to believe them or not. I’ve found that when I believe things should be a certain way, far from bringing what I want, this creates stress and prevents me from being able to find other solutions. It’s as if my mind is so stuffed full that there’s no room for other possibilities, and using The Work loosens up whatever barriers there might be to finding new solutions. Instead of frantically believing I have to know the answers, when the old thought patterns get undone it’s as if the mind relaxes enough to naturally open up and allow new possibilities. We become like children again, ready to learn – only now with some choice in what we absorb!
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