It’s not that the particular things we’re doing are bad, I definitely love restaurants, but it’s the system of separation that is the problem. And it goes far beyond what I’ve named here so far (you can follow some of the links provided for more examples and details).

When folks do gather it tends to be in identity groups, creating distance between not only us as individuals, but between people like ourselves and people who think or understand things differently than we do. The common phrasing “birds of a feather flock together” reflects this tendency, which in social science is called ‘homophily’.

This habit of gathering with people like ourselves is amplified by the ways that there is more space between us and other local folks. The affinity for someone who feels comfortable and reinforces what we already know, think, and believe, is enhanced by not interacting with people who are different within our communities.

And this impacts our ability to hold each other in our humanity.

When we see everyone outside of our affinity groups as “others” then they become mysterious entities that we need to defend ourselves from. They are perceived as threats to our own beliefs, expectations, assumptions, and perceptions.

And, when we center differences rather than our similarities, it’s easy to create narratives that pit us against each other. We can be convinced that other people are “bad” or any number of negative things. It’s easy to lose sight of how they are also just humans, trying to make ends meet too. It’s easy to feel like they are separate, and to withhold our compassion and empathy. But this continues the separation.

If we are really as lonely as the polls say we are, and we are lamenting not having “community” around us when we need them, we need to name and intentionally resist the narratives that create isolation.

The hard part here actually isn’t seeing the system, or noticing the effects, it’s in repair. I don’t actually believe that systemic repair must happen simultaneously with individual action... I truly think systemic repair is born of the small individual actions. Culture doesn’t arise magically, it comes from the actions of the humans participating in it.

How do we restore community? Because “community” doesn’t just mean someone is here when I need them, it means that I am also there when they need someone. Community is inconvenient, time consuming, and sometimes irritating. Being in community requires skills that individualists don’t tend to possess, because the skills of relationship aren’t prioritized when you spend most of your time alone, or with one or a few other folks, or when systems of hierarchy establish acceptable behavior with others.

And so being in community invites us to acknowledge, tolerate, and dance with difference. This requires communication skills, the ability to hold each other in humanity, compassion, empathy, and good listening, to name a few. So if we want more community, I suggest starting here. With our own skills. So that when we find that group of people we’ve been waiting so long for, we can engage with them in ways that affirm our lives and theirs.

That means we do the little things that feel hard: find out your neighbor’s name even though you’ve both been living there for years, linger at the local store for a tiny conversation with the cashier beyond “how are you?”, talk to another mom at the playground instead of scrolling on your phone. Small connections with others really matter.

Recent studies suggest that just 40 seconds of compassionate interaction between two people can have measurable, positive, and enduring physical benefits. Small acts of kindness and connection, like telling a short story in a group that doesn’t know each other, relaxes everyone. Repeated, these small acts change us, contributing to our own sense of belonging.

It turns out that culture is made of individual people taking small steps to collectively rewrite the dominant narrative. We can take small actions, and create community around them, we can build a different kind of system from the ground up.
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As we gather together, we gather momentum.

Belonging allows me to see myself as integral rather than apart from. Belonging, a felt sense of it, changes my perception and my inner dialogue. I am no longer separated from my needs through needing to justify them. I am no longer separated from others as a source of connection. My belonging is the foundation and framework.
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If my belonging is broken, if I perceive myself as an outsider, as unworthy of basic rights, or as subject to someone else’s control, then I am dehumanizing myself. I have internalized the dehumanization I received from others through abuse, neglect, abandonment, indifference, and rejection. I have agreed with them and deemed myself unworthy of having my needs met. I accept the position that I should not have an expectation of my needs being met.

This creates in me a suppression of the very things that make me human; my needs for connection, love, safety, and friendship. My needs become the very symbol of my brokenness and a vicious circle is created. I hide my needs away, refusing to tend to them, and I struggle with relationship and worthiness. I see myself as broken and irreparable.

But if my belonging is intact, if I can perceive myself as having a sense of belonging simply because I exist. I can find renewal and regeneration of humanizing and healing narratives. My needs become my path forward to connection and relationship. I become fortified by both the discernment that I learn in the process of reclaiming my needs, and in the building of relational skills.

With a foundation of belonging I am able to see rejection and abandonment when other people saying “no” in unskilled ways, but they no longer mean that I am bad, wrong, or unworthy. Those actions belong to the people who make them. Not to me. I am able to see abuse and neglect as actions of power that create inhumane conditions. And again, they are not mine to hold as the recipient of those actions. They belong to those who perpetrate them.

If I am unwilling to hold these inhumanities in others’ behavior, then I can reclaim my own humanity.

But individuals aren’t the only ones who hold power. Systems of dominance create a self-generating process that relies on creating inhumane conditions for others. In the face of these systems, how do I define my belonging? How far can I go in reclaiming my own humanity if I am still under the umbrella of these systems, trying to survive in them?

How do I not slip into conformity as a proxy for belonging? It is easy to do this when we swim in the water of dominance systems. We have to participate in them to some degree in order to have our needs met. In order to get food, housing, clean water, clothing, I must participate in capitalism as it exists where I live. It is extractive. It requires someone to be at the bottom, barely (if at all) able to get basic needs covered. It justifies those at the top continuing to make more money than they can spend because the system is set up to reinforce itself.

It is not easy to be in touch with our inherent belonging in the midst of these domination systems. But it is worth the effort. A friend and I started a group with others who were willing to explore what being together would be like if we all began with the premise that we belonged. It broke me open to my own sense of inherent belonging.

Where systems hold us in domination, we can gather as small groups that create a new kind of culture. We can experiment in these groups with what keeps these new foundations under our feet. How can we work together to create a culture in which we assume that all who join belong, and what practices do we cultivate that keep us together? It is an emergent process. It is unfolding with each gathering we have.
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It is up to us to create such connections. The practice of this is not easy, especially when we are embedded in and being acted on by systems that encourage and normalize dehumanization. It takes an effort to unlearn our ways of being together that undermine our humanity. It takes dedication to try and try again; to keep learning, listening, and finding a new way forward.

It’s the part of us that doesn’t understand, because the world is complex and relationships are intricate and often unspoken connections that we make in each other’s presence.

Our humanity is in our grief in the face of difficulty.

Our humanity is in our anger in the face of injustice.

Our humanity is in our ability to give grace and assistance to those in need, and to acknowledge that sometimes the person in need is us.

But instead we’re often taught to bypass our humanity, and that of others through judgment, criticism, and blame. We’re taught that we don’t have to feel the bad feelings, we can project them on others. We may learn that when we struggle we cannot expect anyone to help us. We learn that unless others find us pleasant and easy we are not welcomed.

We may find that we have thoughts bumping around in our heads that are mean, critical, judgmental, shaming, and some of them can get downright cruel. We may direct them at others, but the cruelest ones we may direct at ourselves with the intention of keeping ourselves in line, acceptable, nice, helpful.

We push back on our own desires, dreams, and hopes.

We decide before we ever start going after our dreams that we can’t have them, that someone important wouldn’t like it, that we’d never be allowed. And so we keep ourselves from trying.

We often end up feeling frustrated.

Internally we have a desire, we judge it as unworthy, and we pretend it doesn’t exist. We pretend we’re not so weak as to want something unattainable. We pretend we don’t need any of what it has to offer.

And the antidote to this self-defeating cycle is to acknowledge our humanity. The ways we aren’t perfect, that we don’t know all the answers, that we have needs, and that we want things.

The antidote is in feeling our grief, our anger, our joy, and our desire.

This isn’t easy to do when we’ve spent most of our lives avoiding them.

Maybe it can begin with just wishing yourself well? This was my way in when I was feeling trapped by the internalized judgment of my own desires, and it was clear I needed to let that old judgment go.

I started by saying the Buddhist loving kindness prayer, metta. Every single morning for a whole summer I said metta for myself. There are many versions of this prayer and many applications, but this is what I did...

I cleaned my front porch, set up a small concrete altar for a candle, made a place where I could safely burn incense, and I sat in my rocking chair. I lit the candle, the incense, and said, with my hand on my heart:
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May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no troubles or difficulties come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have the patience, courage, understanding, and perseverance, to meet and overcome the inevitable troubles, difficulties, and failures in life. May I know that I am loved, may I know that I am cared for, and may I know that I belong.

Offering the words, receiving the words, and repetition changed something in my nervous system that summer.

Parts of me relaxed and made room for the difficult part of my humanity, the parts that had historically felt like failures. I became a little easier on myself, and I noticed that, without trying, I also had more grace for others.

In retrospect, this was one of the most important acts of self-parenting I did. The one who offered the words was my developing Inner Mother. And the one who received the words and was soothed by them was the Inner Child who had never felt she could never be good enough. And developing this kind of internal relationship helped me change my external relationships with very little effort.

I brought more empathy to myself and to my beloveds. I stopped holding grudges. I allowed that we all make mistakes, that we all get tired, that we all fail sometimes. And it doesn’t make us failures. It makes us human.

Being human is one big trial-and-error process anyway. In relating to each other we are always trying to let someone else know what is going on inside of us, and they’re always trying to understand something that is fundamentally unknowable. We do our best, and sometimes, maybe even often, our best falls short.
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* To learn more about 1:1 Inner Mother Mentoring start here.
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* To buy the book Landscape of Mothers: Nature Archetypes as a Guide for Mothering you can go to Amazon or Bookshop.org.
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You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you feel tenderly toward your child self that understood the world to be harsh, uncaring, and critical. You don’t want to push her away anymore. You are sensing her need for comfort, acceptance, and care, and you really want to show up for that. You suspect there is much to be gained by seeing her in a new light.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you find that you keep repeating the same sorts of relationship dynamics with other people. You’re figuring out that the early relationship training that happens in families runs deep, and that you need some new skills in order to have the kinds of relationships that you want. This is powerful.You are claiming that you want something other than what you were trained to have.

You are getting in touch with your agency.
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You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you have begun to recognize and believe in your own value. You are starting to think that some of the things you grew up believing aren’t really true, aren’t really about you, aren’t yours to carry. You are finding that there is more room than you thought for you to figure out who you really are, and that maybe those who told you who you were early on weren’t correct.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, and you may wish they would see what you see. But they might not want to. That only makes you feel like more of an outsider, and it brings up the grief. They can’t see what you see. They see the world differently. It’s both true that it means that a unique part of you is alive and well inside of the training you’ve had to be who someone else wants you to be, AND that it can feel really sad to acknowledge this.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you are resisting being who they want in favor of being who you are.
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That’s powerful. It’s befriending your agency. It’s claiming your birthright to be yourself.

This article is cross-posted with Substack

1. Focus on relationship not behavior

Much of parenting advice is about how to modify your children’s behavior. This perspective makes it likely we’ll make two critical mistakes if we’re also trying to parent our children with care and respect.
The first problem with focus on behavior over relationship is that we start perceiving our kids' behavior falling into one of two categories: behaviors we want, and behaviors we don’t want. When we see behaviors we don’t want, don’t like, or that we feel strongly about, we tend to call those “bad behaviors” and we go about trying to modify them.

If we respond to our children’s difficult behaviors by trying to change them, they never get a chance to learn how to work through the difficulty. They are being shown that it’s better to avoid the problem than to face it. But the behavior isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom of a struggle that they are having. They don’t know what to do about what’s happening and so they get bigger; louder, more physical, more erratic. By focusing on the behavior we ignore the deeper struggle, and so kids learn that they won’t be met and helped. They will instead be punished for their outburst.

This often leads to the familiar accusations we hear from teens; that their parents don’t understand them and don’t care about them.

Instead, if an adult came to them, helped them regulate in the face of difficulty, and walked them through the solution, they learn tools for getting through the actual discomfort. They are able to use some of those tools a little bit better next time, and a little bit better the time after that. Offering a solution that aligns with the way that kids learn (by example and by practice) they are better equipped to help themselves through future difficulty.

The second problem we face when we focus on our childrens’ behavior rather than our relationship is that the goals are different. The goal of behavior modification is really to get the child to comply with your expectations. This ignores the child’s experience that is difficult in the first place, and then it goes on to demand compliance with expectations, regardless of whether the child is actually able to do it or not. It teaches them to override their nervous system, ignore their own experience, and to prioritize others’ expectations over their own needs.

If we are not trying to teach our kids to override their own experience and prioritize others, then we may want to reconsider the behavior approach. Instead, we may want to examine what it might look like to see this child through a relational lens.

We might see a child who is having difficulty. We would notice that they are losing their ability to regulate themselves and behave appropriately. We would step in with the goal of helping them navigate the difficulty going on in their emotional world. We would use age appropriate connection, words, and solutions. We would help them notice what was going on, let them know they’re not alone, and help them start to think things through. We would let them use our nervous systems to self-regulate.

Humans don’t learn to regulate by being isolated or punished. They learn through a calm adult showing up to model it for them. When the adult stays steady and faces their difficulty, they learn that they can do it too.

None of this can be diluted to a meme or hack about how to do this. What connections will be accepted by a particular distressed child is probably only known by a few of the child’s closest caregivers, if even they know. Every person is different about how easy it is to respond to touch, to words, to quiet presence. Think about when you feel distressed, what kind of response by a friend brings you comfort? It’s a really personal thing.

So how this actually looks for everyone will be different. The relationship is built slowly, over time. There is no one right way to do it. And the nuances will be different for every person.

2. Slow down, relationships aren’t efficient, they can’t be done quickly

To build relationships we have to slow down. In the midst of urgency our relational skills fall apart. We lose the ability to observe and listen deeply. We discard curiosity for taking everything at face value and not asking questions. To move quickly we have to make lots of assumptions and we do not spend time checking them to make sure we are working together.

Relationships also require more than one connection. We don’t usually consider people to be “friends” that we’ve only met once. It takes more meetings, more conversation, and more exploration to get to know a person. And truly, that job of knowing someone, is never done. There will never be a day when there is nothing else to learn about the experience of another human being.

Relationships take time, and they take repeated connection points. Therefore, a commitment is necessary for a relationship. A decision to come back again and again to keep being curious and getting to know someone.

It’s so common (and I’m totally guilty of this, ask my 19 year old) that we think we know. This is one of the biggest hurdles to relationship with our children. We remember being kids, we had our experiences, we look back and see how things worked, we better understand what the adults were doing. So, not only do we think we know our kids’ experience, but we feel like we understand the whole thing better than we did as a kid. It’s easy to think we know more than them.

If we are focused on relationship, then we remember that the person in front of us isn’t us. They are not a small version of us, or of their other parent. Not only that, they are living in a different time. So, while we have some idea of what they might be going through, when we slow down and focus on relationship, we find curiosity. We can get interested in what THIS person is experiencing. We can start to check our childhood experience against theirs to see if there is common ground. But we approach the whole thing differently.

Again, this kind of relating isn’t just communication. It takes time, spaciousness, repeated connection, and lots of curiosity to facilitate. But it does have a higher likelihood of resulting in kids that share their experiences with us, are willing to admit their failures and learn from us, and in the long term, they’re more likely to stay in relationship with us as adults.

3. Do family time with less pressure

In the spirit of focusing on relationships rather than behavior, and slowing down, I’ll share one piece of hard-earned wisdom from my own experience. Do less stuff with your kids that requires you to plan or organize or lead. Do more stuff that allows you to be together informally and without structure.

The kids will begin to lead, you will be better able to see their innate strengths, and they will have time to feel more connected to you as fellow humans. It also gives them some experience at being a responsible leader in a low stakes environment, since you’re still there if anything goes awry.

Because family events and holidays can also create a lot of urgency and tons of extra work, especially for moms, I recommend choosing a few holidays or celebrations that you want to make traditions and don’t overextend yourself for the others.

This was a terrible mistake I made early on in parenting.

I wanted to make my children feel special because I was neglected and often left alone in my childhood. So I tried to engage in every single holiday. Not only was I shocked to realize that in the U.S. the kids celebrate some special day at school at least once a month, I quickly became overwhelmed with all of the logistics of keeping up.

Also, I eventually figured out that I didn’t have to do everything for every celebration (I realized that I didn’t have to spend 2 days making special cakes every year for their birthday… they equally enjoyed store bought cakes). Besides, if I focused on having a good relationship with my kid, I was more likely to know the one or two things that make them feel really special and do those, instead of doing a bunch of stuff they didn’t really care about.

If my goal was to make them feel special, then knowing what made them special was way better than a picture perfect birthday celebration.

My advice to new parents is to consider which holidays and celebrations are important to you. Choose no more than three (really, choose what you want, but try to narrow it to three). What about those holidays is important? What values do they exhibit and what do you want your kids to know about those values? What family traditions would you like to pass on? What new things would you like to create?
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Finding the why behind the celebrations and holidays helps stay focused. If it’s been a tough couple of weeks or months, you can scale back but still keep what’s most important to you. It allows you to have flexibility with less risk that you’ll look back and regret the way you did family holidays. It will also help convey those values to your children because they will be consistent (remember, they learn through repetition and practice).

Changing family patterns is the kind of work we do for a lifetime.

It’s many small meaningful acts, rooted in care, repeated again and again. But it doesn’t have to be a huge lift, it doesn’t have to empty you to fill your kids up.

That brings us to our first fallacy:

1. If it’s hard I suck at it.

Yes, parenting is hard. Especially the way it’s set up with one (or maybe two) adults trying to work for wages to keep the whole family afloat, as well as meeting a whole suite of needs for their children on a long developmental path.

This is the work of a village, and humans evolved under the conditions of having many adults available to help raise children born into the community. It’s hard because you’re missing the support network, not because you are not good at being a parent.

2. I want to do better than my parents did, so I’ll do the opposite of what they did.

This one is tricky. It’s rare that I’ve heard someone say that worked for them. Most often this “opposite” comes with another, related, set of problems. It contributes to the polarizing idea that there are only two ways and you must choose one of them. From authoritarianism, where parents exert strict control over their children and expect compliance, the swing goes to permissiveness in which parents try not to control and enforce, but often find themselves lacking boundaries and routines.

When we buy into the polarity of one right answer and one wrong answer we pit the two extreme ends of a spectrum against each other and skip over everything in between. And honestly, if we just do the opposite, we often just end up with different problems. There are no fewer of them and they are no less problematic.

The key is to find something in the middle that is obscured by black and white thinking. What lies in the middle is healthy boundaries, clear communication, and cooperation. When you find yourself in a double bind (you have two terrible options and it’s difficult to choose between them) it’s often helpful to look for the third thing, the middle ground, the option no one is seeing.

3. I have no idea what I’m doing

I think you do know what you’re doing. You are following your gut because you don’t want your kids to feel the way you did. You want something better for them. And you’re willing to work for it.

At this moment, though, your actions may be motivated by getting away from what you don’t want. You may still not feel rooted in what you DO want. That’s different from not knowing what you’re doing.

4. I have to toughen up my child for the “real” world.

This is often used as a reason not to be kind, empathetic, and meet the child where they are. It’s used an excuse to not have to consider the impact of parental actions on children.

It’s often used in conjunction with a “what if they still do that when they’re 25?” They won’t. Kids don’t go off to their first apartment or to college still wanting to sleep in your bed, or believing in Santa Claus. They grow out of things. That’s what development means.

And early in development they need a lot of guidance about how to use their bodies, growing knowledge and capability, and their creativity to build their lives.

So, what happens if we let these perspectives go? Or at least update them a bit? We get to a place where difficulty with our kids doesn’t make us bad parents.

I know it’s often said that parenting is so hard because kids don’t come with a manual. But they used to.

For most of human history we lived in tribal groups of around 100 people that worked together to take care of one another. They gathered and cooked food together, shared the tasks of maintaining structures, and raised their children collectively.

In this way, parenting was a shared activity of most, if not all, members of the community. Children played in multi-aged groups and took care of younger kids. Adults were nearby if anything was needed, but most of their day the children spent time together.

Adults in those tribal communities had two things working in their favor that we don’t always have anymore. One is, that they had lots of previous experience with children because they were part of those multi-aged groups when they were younger. Folks of different ages were not separated into cohorts the way they are today.
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Second, they had other adults to turn to if they needed help. The how-to-care-for-a-kid-manual existed in the many available people in the group who had parented before them. No one was left to deal with situations in isolation. Help was available.

This is the resource that’s missing these days. And it used to be contained inside of multi-age communities that we don’t really have anymore. There is a continuity of care missing from our family units. And in that continuity was the lived knowledge and experience of the community.

This is why we feel like we’re parenting alone and doing it by the seat of our (exhausted) pants!

Since we’re unlikely to restore the multi-age familial unit in a big way anytime soon (it would require so much more repair than just moving us all in together again), I think we start by looking to systems we do have access to in order to find someone who has navigated this territory before. I hope you already have that in your life; other mamas who are parenting kids a little older than yours, or a wise grandmother, or a friendly neighbor. I wish that for you, and I wish I’d had that when I was a young parent.

We may not have the ideal community, but I do think we are often still more connected than we think. We don’t have to have the whole thing to have elements of it. Maybe it’s worth considering the imperfect ways that these resources do exist?

What about the friends you call, the other mom’s you talk to, or even the other exhausted moms you pass in the grocery store that give soothing and knowing looks at your screaming toddler or your sleeping baby?
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We need solidarity. Give it. Receive it when you get it. Let it in.

And if that still isn’t cutting it, you can find a professional mentor. Think of it as a rent-a-grandmother. I have thought a great deal about parenting in the 35+ years since I had my first baby. I’ve raised my kids, all wildly different human beings who have taught me the value of care, of being seen, and of the impact that seemingly small things can have on us all.

I am a resource for working through the kind of parent you want to be and how to pull it off. I have a lot of skills from all of the repair I’ve done with my children over large and small things. I’ve learned (and still am learning) what it takes to have relationships with my children based on love, support, and shared humanity. I’ve learned how to listen deeply, have good boundaries, and love wholly.

Please do reach out if you’re feeling lonely, isolated, and overwhelmed. Whether you hire me or not, knowing that you’re not alone is often a large piece of the puzzle. I care how your parenting is going. I care how under-resourced you are. Parenting doesn’t have to be this big of a struggle.