To be the best parent you can be involves understanding when you are at your best. Are you at your best when you are upset and stressed and muddled, or when you are calm and your mind is free and clear?To be the best parent you can be you just need to discern in what direction you are headed. Is it towards a stressed, muddled state of mind or towards calm? When you are headed in the "wrong" direction you just need to change directions and head back to calm.
Notice, it is not about staying calm. No one can do that. At least not yet. It is about heading back to calm as soon as you notice that you have lost it.
How to do that? REASSURANCE. When we get upset, we all need to be reassured. So look for what will reassure you. The thing is, there are times when nothing reassures us. Then what? WAIT, for eventually you will be reassured. That is guaranteed!
Why am I so confident? Experience. I have noticed that beyond our busy, frightened, muddled thoughts there is deep wisdom. We all have it. Mind, is innately intelligent, creative, and has an infinite capacity for learning and understanding. No matter how lost we get in our personal fantasies and nightmares that deep intelligence, the intelligence of life itself, is always there, just like the understanding and intelligent parent is there for the muddled, panicky child.
We just have to turn to it.
This is the same intelligence that knows when and how to divide your cells, beat your hart, digest you food, tell you when you are thirsty or hungry, heal a wound. It is the same intelligence that figured out how to use a stick as a tool, that figured out how to fly, that split the atom, that created the nano-chip, and that will discover and create unimaginable technology in the next 50 years.
There is no problem humans have faced that their wisdom has not met and solved. There is no problem you have faced up to now that your wisdom has not met and solved. And there is no parenting problem that you cannot face and solve.
We just need to stop long enough to get past our storming, frightened, pressured, racing, personalized thinking. The metaphor of quicksand comes to mind. The way out is to get very still. The more active we stay, the deeper we go. It is no different in the quicksand of our frightened fantasies. These terrifying, angry, despairing, frustrated, resentful thoughts never touch our innate calm, our innate wisdom - any more than the distress of a baby affects the calm of a parent that can see that all is and will be OK.
Every day I hear, "What shall I do to calm down?" because these individuals have not yet found anything that reassures them. And because they have not yet found anything to reassure them they imagine they will never calm down. Now that is a way to stay agitated! And how likely is it?
The truth is, when nothing reassures us there is nothing we need to do. There is nothing to do, but stop and wait. When we are able to stop and wait we allow the calm that is just beneath our agitation to re-surface. Being calm and returning to calm are hard wired into us. They are in your very nature. Even the most colicky, inconsolable child will eventually get exhausted and fall asleep (return to calm).
In summary, to be the best parent you can be you just need to stay as calm as you can and to return to calm as soon as you can. Then your own intelligence, your own wisdom will deliver all the ideas and thoughts you need to address any challenge that arises.
A final point - do you realize that you are ALREADY being the best parent you can be at each and every moment? How do I know? Because if you could do it any better in the reality of the moment you would.
I hope this brief article helps.
Happy Parenting.
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Seems like you and I continue to be on the same page RIc - nice article. Check out my latest blog post at blog.essentialparenting.com on my proposed 3 modes of being, or states of consciousness, that we tend to exist in and their impact on our relationships with our children.
ReplyDeleteOne refinement I would add to your article is that there are ways to help ourselves become reassured. In the coaching world we say that "confidence comes from competence." When we practice things like mindfulness and using breath and attention to become re-regulated when we are dis-regulated, we develop confidence over time that "we can weather this storm" and our innate intelligence will kick in. The ways these practices can help our children and ourselves are numerous. Happy New Years!
Hey Chris,
ReplyDeleteYes, we seem to be on the same page. Thank you for you comment. I love that we share our perspectives with/for parents.
I agree. There are many ways we can help ourselves become reassured, and, in my experience, they all have their limitations. Doing can only take us so far. Then "not doing" is needed.
I am speaking to the experience of the illusion of sheer, utter and total helplessness - when nothing works and there is nothing to do.
Then what reassures? Knowing the truth about our natures, about life. Seeing beyond the illusions that look so frightening.
Happy New Year to you
yes, totally true. so to discriminate some more: in some phase of development where agitation is so dysregulating that our (re)actions are causing more trouble we can use our attention to calm down our nervous systems where we can see/feel other possibilities lost on us while overwhelmed with agitation. For example, just following our breath in and out for 10 breaths can lower sympathetic activation and increase parasympathetic activation, thereby smoothing our nervous systems out and re-gaining some degree of functioning.
ReplyDeleteOr in another time in our life, we may decide that every time we feel overwhelmed and lacking, we may decide that it is time to remember to add gratitude to these situations, remembering all we do have, how lucky we are, and how different it all could be. This can be helpful to counter negative thinking that is contributing to the agitation.
And, as you are pointing out, all ego activity and doing is ultimately a constriction and distortion of reality. Thinking we can always effect change (or even that we ever are the ones to effect change in the first place!) is not a reflection of reality. And it stops development from proceeding. This is one of the "contraints" that Dan Siegel and complexity theory point to at the brain level, and this constraint (ego activity as a source of identity) tends to diminish growth towards maximal complexity. this is obviously a whole other discussion.
take home: different things are needed at different times in ones life. and yes, in the end we need to calm down and have faith in reality and our capacity for discriminating wisdom and the ethical action that follows.
thanks for the dialogue rick!!
check out blog.essentialparenting.com next weekend for a discussion of "knowing and not knowing in parenting".