Where the transformational teaching of" Feminine Power" meets every day life....
Children
need education. I think we all agree on that. But what form of education? There
are many different opinions and concepts.
In the masculine paradigm children were
‘educated’ to follow the will of the parents, they are punished when they don’t
and they remain largely ignorant about why things are how they perceive them to be.
Nobody bothers to explain in words adapt to their age what is really going on
in the situations of their life when they are admonished, blamed or punished.
The young child is interpreting the world with its restricted means of
knowledge and understanding – and more often than not it comes to the
conclusion that there is something wrong with themselves, that they are bad or
unloved or what so ever. Children in the egocentric stage of development just
take everything as directly referred to themselves, even when it is not about
them at all, from the perspective of the adults around them. So it is
inevitable that they create a self-image which is very different from the
objective reality.
In the
attempt to overcome the authoritarian style of education people threw the baby
out with the bathwater. They tried to encourage their children to “be
themselves” by not setting any boundaries at all, creating little desperate
devils who have no framework to find orientation of what is right and what is
wrong, no possibility to define their world of reality. This leads equally to
erroneous assumptions about who they are and what the world is like.
Most parents
today are somewhere in between these poles, trying to do their best to bring up
their children. They have their opinions and behaviors of encouragement or
prohibition and handle their children accordingly. But there is one thing they
normally overlook: they don’t really connect and accept the present emotional
state these children are in, they don’t enter into their perspective, but see
things from their own – which necessarily is far more advanced and wide. If
they cling to the ideology of ‘no boundary’ they don’t realize the vital need
of the young creature to explore its territory and the helplessness and fear
which comes up when this territory seems endless, no direction where to go, no
goal visible.
Parents who
set boundaries and say NO when it needs to be said often disconnect with their
children ‘to make them understand better’. This might be their intent when they
keep staying in anger, don’t talk to the child for a while or remind him/her over
and over again of what he/she has done wrong. This emotional distance punishes the child in a way that
parents are not aware of. Saying NO and being angry at the spot is right. When
the emotional response of the child comes up, sadness, tears, then the child
needs the reassurance that he is all right as a human being, loved by his
parents; that she DID something wrong, but that she IS NOT wrong.
Most of us
have grown in an environment where our caregivers did not behave like that: or they didn’t care at all about our emotional responses, or they abandoned us, let us alone in moments of emotional distress with the conviction that we needed to find the way out ourselves – which we were unable to do in a healthy way – and therefore
we came up with all kind of believes about ourselves and the world and the
people around us. These convictions by the time froze into our sense of
identity, they continue to influence or even lead our lives in covert ways
during our whole life – if we don’t realize it, what we seldom do, since they have
become the water in which fish swim without knowing anything about it.
That’s why
there are all these contradictory voices talking in ourselves: if you have ever
listened to the dialog which is constantly going on in your head then you have
an idea of what I am speaking about: “chocolate is not good for you, only one piece”,
“I want the whole chocolate”, “no, don’t do that” “haha, I got another piece,
and another – I am a trickster…”
You can see these voices as younger versions of yourself who are still in contradiction with
your caregivers who have expressed a prohibition and menaced punishment of some
sort. Your childish reaction might have been to rebel openly or covertly, or
you have adopted as a fixed rule what those people told you. Your reaction to
what came to you from your immediate surrounding became your habit to react to
similar situations from then on. And when you were about 12 years old you took
over yourself the controlling business, and this inner controller often
developed even much more severe and merciless that the actual people who where
controlling your behavior so far. By the time you will have found good rationalizations
for why you could or could not do or be what you really wanted to do or be and
you always reinforced the original messages on a daily basis.
If you,
today, feel at a loss in any area of your life, if you feel unfulfilled,
without job or partner, without joy and a sense of the purpose of your life,
you can be sure that you are still guided by these covert old identities of
your childhood. You might even have an idea of what they are, you have talked
with a therapist and some of the crucial situations of your childhood came into light. Now you
might know where your difficulties in life come from, who is responsible for
the distortions of your childhood experience and understanding. You might have
tried to make up for it by allowing this inner child to come out of the closet
and to take over the show of your life – in many ways alike the parents who
don’t set boundaries for their children. Now what? Did it really change your
life, transform it to what you sense would be possible for you? Or are you
still blown from here to there between what you think you want now, or now, or
now, and what you think you should do instead?
What you
can do, now, whatever age you are: find out about these younger parts of
you, recognize in them the child you once where who has stopped his or her development
in the moment the false belief was adopted fully as truth. Then you can
caringly and lovingly help her to grow, to develop, to become mature, to
finally leave the pain and the feeling of inadequateness behind. And you do
that in the same way as you do it with your own children – if you are a
skillful parent for them. You will help them grow by really seeing and
acknowledging them, by recognizing their feelings and needs and never dismiss them,
negate them or talk them out of what is so for them. And you will give them
guidance as to what is ok and what is not and you will decisively, but in a
loving context, make sure that
they do what you want. And if it doesn’t make sense to them, then you need to be
able to explain it in a way which is appropriate to their age – and, by the way
– what you ask from them really needs to make sense and be consistent.
You might
find out that all this is much easier for you when you deal with your physical
child, but not so easy when you approach your inner child-like being. If so, you
might need to reinforce the ‘good parent’ in yourself and also have a look on
the interactions with your real child and see if you can improve your beingness
with him. You might think that you are a loving and understanding parent, but
when you look closer you might find out that you don’t really see and welcome
what they are feeling or what they needs from you, that you might only THINK that
you are doing 'your best', when you, in reality, are not, not really…..
