At face value that's obvious. But how often do you give up yourself in order to meet someone else's needs? How often does some part of you that has needs, feel abandoned and left behind?
I'm not saying to only ever consider yourself. I am saying that caregivers and parents are often put in positions where they have to tend to someone else's needs before they take care of their own. I am saying that when we grew up being the one who got into a pattern of letting go of (or ignoring) our own needs so that we could keep someone else (usually parents) to be calm or take care of business, we can get used to not tending to ourselves. Not tending ourselves is not sustainable. That's where burnout happens. That's where we revert to the behaviors we are most familiar with. That's why, even when we are trying to hard to parent differently than how we were raised, we end up sounding like our parents. We end up yelling or sulking or manipulating just like they did. And, if you're like me, it brings up grief and shame when I hear myself say some of the hurtful things they said. It feels like failure to end up behaving as they did even though I had such strong intentions to not repeat those wounds. But it's really not about being a "good parent" or a "bad parent," in most cases it's just about whether or not someone had the skills, tools, and good relationship modeling. It's about being able to be whole humans with good awareness and the desire to learn how to be together even when things are difficult. So when you find yourself sounding like your parents, and the grief and shame rolls in, know that you are likely over capacity and you are overriding your own needs. Compassion for yourself because you're managing a lot is the first step. It's ok if you mess up sometimes. It's part of being human. And your ability to do the relationship repair with your family members is part of creating strong ties. Don't leave yourself out. Taking care of you when you find yourself outside of your current capacity is not shameful, it is human. Tending to your relationships through your shifts in capacity is how you BECOME the person who is the parent you want to be. This is not accomplished through managing your behaviors and suppressing what's happening in you.
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Since the 1980's family therapists have recognized four different parenting styles and researched outcomes for children even into adulthood. The styles are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful. While other researchers went on to refine this and change the titles of the styles, I want to share what I think is most important about these studies collectively. 1. The degree to which parents support their children by guiding them through problem solving, being aware of what's going on for kids and involved in daily interactions, and by providing positive reinforcement has been shown to have positive impacts on children's behavior and academic performance. 2. The more parents tell their kids what to do and think, the more likely the kids will be behave in aggressive and controlling ways with their peers. They are likely to have low awareness of their emotional state or the emotions of others, lack empathy, and resort to control as way to interact with others. This makes sense, right? We treat others as we've been treated because it's the set of strategies we learned to interact with. 3. There is an insidious nature of neglect in which without rules or support, the child is seen as a resource for the adults to get their own needs met. The child is left feeling unseen, unvalidated, and has no framework for creating their sense of self. This can lead to co-dependency, and extraction of the energy of the child for the benefit of the parent. So, just because we're not brutalizing our children doesn't mean we don't hurt them. 4. These are somewhat artificial delineations. While some parents may employ some strategies more than others, know that it's possible, likely even, that a given parent may use all of these strategies at different times depending on their own capacity. The corollary to that is that even "good" parents sometimes punish or don't meet their kids' need for support sometimes. WHY DOES THIS MATTER? I am increasingly hearing public conversations about estrangement in which adult children and their parents disagree on the cause of separations. I'm not saying one side is right and the other is wrong, but it strikes me that there is a consistent lack of listening to each other's perceptions that keeps reconciliation off the table. Both sides appear to me to just be screaming to be heard and acknowledged in their perception. So, why would this be happening? Because there was a lack of empathy, communication skills, and capacity to truly understand and be understood by one another that long predates the estrangement. There is a lot of blame, blatant expectation, and shaming happening. These are the ways humans go about trying to coerce someone to give them the type of attention they want when the direct request is either not made or not met. I believe so much strife is rooted in the internal framework we have around our roles, the expectations our parents have of us, and the stories we are told about who we are. We are also limited by the relational skills we may have never learned from our parents. When we examine our past experience, our current desires, and our relational skillset, we can find our way to a way of healthier relating that leaves us feeling like our families are our refuge from the harsh world. RESOURCES
Of course most of us worry about this. It's very normal. But I've also been thinking about where this comes from. And, I'm guessing that if you grew up in a family that knew how to communicate and take care of each other, the voices inside your head would be saying "Of course I'm a good parent." The reason you'd have that inner voice is that you had experiences of being parented well, so you have a foundation and a blueprint for how to parent. But the worry, I wonder if that's especially loud in the heads of those of us who have experienced isolation, distress, and even harm in our family. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it wasn't, and maybe they didn't even know what was happening to us, but the result was the same... we were left alone to deal with things we couldn't handle. So, without communication skills and a model of care, here we are trying to be parents, but how the heck are we supposed to know how to do that? If it's not in our experience we don't have the tools that make up connected relationship. Here's a video I made about asking ourselves about whether we're good parents or not, and the invitation to ask a different question instead. Just because we had a difficult childhood, doesn't leave us without resources though. As adults we can learn to relate to others, to care for and tend to ourselves, and to create a nourishing and protective household. In this video I talk about how nature can provide us with a template for our family that is connective, caring, and responsive. That is, how can we envision this family culture when we don't have a direct experience of it to work from? The answer is, we look to nature systems. We look for how members of an ecosystem work together. This works well for two reasons. One, nature tends to be soothing to our nervous system. The chemistry that plants put into the air tends to produce a calming response in the human brain and this de-escalation of stress and tension tends to open us up to new possibilities. The second reason is that our wounds often stem from interactions we've had with other humans, and so they can feel dangerous. But nature doesn't have an agenda for us. We can interact without vulnerability to someone's response. This dance between the calming of our nervous systems, and the safety provided in being able to observe nature, creates the conditions by which we are able to be creative, inspired, and original. We are able to be ourselves when we are not under the watchful eye of other humans, and yet we don't have to sacrifice a sense of belonging in order to to escape them. Do you have experiences of being yourself in nature? Where were you? What inspiration did you have? Some of our behavior is truly innate. That is, we have behaviors that we will exhibit without being taught. They are coded in our DNA and we do them without thinking very hard about them. One of those innate behaviors in social mammals is empathy. We know that a wide array of animals are not only aware of the suffering of their friends, but they will take actions to help them when they are suffering. This has been seen in mice, rats, dogs, and primates. It also seems to come with a sense of justice and equality. In a study with chimpanzees, researchers found that they were very sensitive to being given differential treatment. And better yet, this often worked both ways. It went something like this. Chimpanzees were given tokens that they could give back to the researcher in order to get a treat; a chunk of carrot or a grape. Like humans, they preferred the grape to the carrot, but would eat either. Until, they got treats in pairs. They began to refuse carrots when the other chimp in the room got a grape. When the reward for the same task was unfair, the chimps would refuse the lesser treat and often throw a tantrum instead. Better yet, when a chimp received a grape and his partner got a carrot, this chimp would refuse the grape! The chimp could see that his friend was being cheated and would refuse to play the researcher's game. It was an act of solidarity to refuse the desired treat when the chimp perceived the unfair reward to a friend, and it indicates a full understanding of fairness and equity. I would go a step further and say this also indicates that these types of social animals (which includes humans) are well aware that our lives are inextricably connected. We are in this life experience together, and what effects one of us effects us both, ultimately. It's a recognition that I could be in your shoes. First, in a larger context, I'd like to say that I think we ignore this at our peril. This is directly related to the world stage at the moment. I see over and over that when the oppressor dehumanizes the people they are attacking, they can justify horrendous acts. We have lost sight of what humanity means. To bring it closer to home, there are two things these social behaviors offer us in terms of our family dynamic. One is that humans are born with an innate sense of fairness, of what togetherness means and what we can expect from it. This is foundational in our psyche, and so we know that we can build on it. As parents we can look for this sense of fairness in our children and we can prepare ourselves to respond to it in a way that builds the kind of understanding of the world that we hope to instill in them. But we need to be prepared because the perceived unfairness will show up in small ways in their world every day. What do we want them to know? Growing up I received a lot of messages that "the world doesn't revolve around you" and "stop crying or I'll give you a reason to cry" or "well, the world isn't fair". And while at face value some of that is true, it taught me that it was ok that things were uneven and unfair. It taught me that my disappointment didn't matter. And I spent a lot of my first few decades on earth thinking it was ok that I was ignored, neglected, and treated badly. I wasn't the center of the world, what I felt didn't matter, and it was all ok because the world wasn't set up to meet my needs and wants. I'm not saying that will be everyone's experience, or that it's all my parent's fault that I accepted a lot of bad behavior from folks in my early years. But I am saying that I was taught a worldview that was in direct opposition to the innate truth inside me. It was confusing at best, and created a sense of powerlessness that was probably much more damaging. So again, I come back to the question, what kind of world do we want to tell our children is out there? What nuance do we need, that we do not currently have from our parenting experts, about giving our children a consistent and also true sense of the world they live in? I suspect this requires a little more thought than we usually put into answering such a question. Switching gears a little, I also want to cover a common behavior in children that I think is releated. When we perceive something as unfair and we don't know how to say so to the people who hold the power, we throw a tantrum. This too is a natural behavior, an innate response to perceiving that something isn't fair. How we respond as caregivers to this situation determines a lot about how our children learn about what to expect out of life and how to navigate unfair situations. That means that tantrums are a natural outgrowth of not being able to communicate with the person who has control of your environment. They are, in and of themselves, actually a communication of distress. So, what if we could see them as a natural instinct to communicate distress or displeasure, a need for someone to help us address our internal state of dysregulation? How would you behave if this was the lens you saw their tantrum through? Unfairness. It's literally an everyday occurrence. When do we stand up for others? When do we perceive that we have the power to do so? When do we feel solidarity? With whom? And how do we convey this worldview to our children? How do we want them to behave with their peers, with family, with folks they don't know? Just to be fair now, there is no right answer to this. It is just getting at being clear about when we are working with innate behaviors and how we want to build on those with our children. In chimpanzees, it turns out that there is a balance they are striking. They are more likely to boycott treats for friends or someone they experience reciprocity with in other social situations. Also, when resources are scarce, they are less likely to reject any food they are offered, even if it goes against their principles of fairness. I'm just inviting all of us to be clear about this balance. thinking about parenting and fairness:What kind of world do I want for my children?
What do I want them to do in the face of injustice? What perspective do they need in order to do that? What is the developmental path through childhood that supports this perspective?
If we think of this nuance as a continuum on a line between not empathetic and overly empathetic, is there anything else they need to know about when they're crossing into territory that is leaving someone out? (Remember that kindness includes them. Becoming people pleasers and catering to others is not the goal here. Healthy empathy lies where the needs of all people is being considered.) When our struggles become overwhelming and push us into corners that we feel we can’t get get free from, then it can be helpful to turn to nature. People have divorced themselves from nature, we have language that describes nature as unalive, not feeling, simply a resource. And this implies that its value lies in what we can get from it (and particularly, how much money we can make from it). We don’t perceive ourselves as having to operate by the same patterns and principles as nature. But what if we did? Indigenous people and some lingering practices from inside of extractive cultures remind us that it wasn’t always like this. There are other ways to perceive our relationship with nature. Landscape of Mothers encourages us to explore this new but ancient way of relating to earth and her inhabitants. As we do this it is important that we reconnect with our own ancestral path, and that we do not use someone else’s way. Even if our lineage of nature relationship has been lost, we can claim a new relationship with earth that is mutual through research of our family line, and most importantly, through our own bones and our own experience. Landscape of Mothers is a framework for having our own experience of nature, that can be mutual, interactive, and contemplative. But how does this happen? It happens because we intentionally step into a process with nature that facilitates a deeper relationship. Like any relationship it needs frequency, spaciousness, and reciprocity. So, we create a pattern out of those needs. We need to visit at a frequency appropriate to the kind of relationship we want to have. That is, if we want to go deep, it helps to visit more often. This is akin to how often we visit or interact with our friends. This is where we establish reliability and stability for all parties involved. It doesn't require perfection or rigidity, but a devotion and the creation of an ongoing conversation. We also want to intentionally create spaciousness, and by that I mean flexibility to listen, to simply be together, and to allow the meeting to take up space in you. This is a practice of letting the relationship touch you in ways you don't expect, making room for what you can learn from the natural world. Quiet, curiosity, and slowness tend to this part of the relationship. In the reciprocity of the relationship we can access depth. Not only only are we spending time in nature getting to know it, we are letting it know us. You can see animals respond to your presence in the wild, but do you know that the trees and plants do too? It makes sense, that our life force energy sees, notices, and responds to one another. (See the book The Secret Life of Trees for some spectacular stories about this). The parallel here is that if we want to change our family culture, we need somewhere new to build relationships that uphold the values and dynamics we wish to become more fluent with. Nature is a powerful place to begin this exploration because trees are non-judgmental as to where you are beginning from, and they release chemicals that interact with your nervous system that are calming. This is why it so often feels like a relief when you step into the forest. Let the blessing wash over you.
By Being Human, I mean that we are able to connect with other people, including (especially?) our children through listening, understanding, and reflecting what we hear and see in a way that is kind and caring. Perfection is most often a comparison to an external rubric that is set by someone else who doesn't necessarily have your values at the center of their process.
Perfection in parenting is trying to do it all "right", Being Human in parenting is learning to connect. When we operate our family systems by the value systems of others, we often find that there is conflict, demand, pressure to conform, and a requirement to abandon your own wants and needs for the ones upholding the family system. At best this creates disconnection, mistrust, feelings of not being seen or understood, and isolation. From the child's perspective there is no one to help them, and so they learn not to look for help. This is often carried into adulthood and creates a likelihood of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. If this is your family legacy, as it is mine, I'm so sorry. I know what it is to feel alone to solve problems and situations that you may not be able to articulate, much less understand, as a child. If, like me, you don't want this to be your children's experience of childhood, I am here for you. Setting up an environment that does not repeat these childhood experiences requires a change to the family culture. If we want to change our family legacy of harm we must learn to inhabit a different perspective than the one that supports behaviors of harm. Changing our own behavior without changing the underlying narrative isn’t enough. If we don’t change the narrative that supported harm it is inevitable that the harm will continue to happen. That we enable others in the family to continue their poor behavior and even we will respond from those old perspectives and narratives when we are tired, overwhelmed, or stressed. In my family my parents' primary mode of communication was yelling. So, when my kids were little and I was frustrated, overwhelmed, and exhausted, I would yell at them. And every time I felt so awful, knowing, even as I was doing it, that I didn't want to repeat this old family pattern. Changing my behavior looked like "just don't yell", but it wasn't that easy. It wasn't about willpower, it was about learning new techniques for expressing my disappointment, or for taking care of myself when (and before) I was beyond exhausted. It required a change in my narrative about how to meet everyone's needs, and who I was to my children. A change in family culture is the only way to stop the behaviors from being transmitted from one generation to the next. It looks so simple. Four short words, I understand them all, and yet, it feels so familiar to be uncertain in the face of this question.
To want is powerful. So it behooves us to know what we want. Wants are impulses. They can be momentary, frivolous, wants can morph into longing, and they can be a compass to our life purpose. They can also be driven by the teachings of our society, parents, religion, and education, such that what others want us to do overrides our connection with what we want. Impulses are signals from the nervous system and can originate from one of three places: the internal guidance system (also known as our intuition, following our hearts, or body wisdom), instinct (a somatic response to a stimulus), or learned patterns of avoidance (moving away from something we’ve been taught is dangerous - also known as internalized systems). Internal guidance system impulses are the ones we are often looking to follow when we are searching for our own way. They are the pull to do the thing from our congruence, and from befriending our will. They are the things that are “correct” for us, even if they’re difficult or require us to travel through the unknown. Instincts are a somatic response to a stimulus. They bypass the conscious brain and create an impulse to pick up our foot when we step on legos, or to swerve when the car in front of us suddenly stops. Learned patterns of avoidance are internalized responses to stimuli based on “how the world works.” This can be wildly different for different folks, but gets at our internalized (but learned) rules about what we are “allowed” to be like. This is where we can say “I followed my heart” but really mean “I operated according to the rules that said I shouldn’t disappoint someone else.” The bottom line is that learned patterns of avoidance are not always wrong, but they can be. The learned patterns of avoidance that are incorrect undermine our ability to trust our internal guidance system because the impulses it creates can often feel similar. One of our tasks in deepening our self-understanding and finding our congruence is to learn to tell one from the other. This is an experiential task. One that we do through paying attention, through befriending ourselves, through learning how to recognize our congruence (or lack thereof). It is something we spend our whole lives doing. The Mothers that help me when I'm looking for my congruence, to know what I want, are Wind Mother, Island Mother, and Mountain Mother. The three of them provide the skills and hold me in the tasks of unhooking from those learned responses, noticing what is arising in me, and befriending my own will. They are available to you too, should you want to call on them. Over the last year I apprenticed myself to the land burned in the CZU fires with the intention of learning how to navigate catastrophe. This year, other land in the US west is burning. May the land teach us how to witness and how to respond, not just to these fires, but to all of the catastrophes unfolding before us. On August 16th, 2020 fires were ignited by lightning in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, California. My first visit to the burned area was on September 10th. I stepped onto the land and immediately noticed that the ground was different. It was otherworldly, made of fine ash that puffed around my boots and stuck to my pant legs. The foundation of everything had been changed, the good nourishing duff of the forest floor was gone. It is like this, isn’t it, when a catastrophe happens? That the very ground seems to shift under our feet. Everything feels off kilter, unbalanced, even surreal. And finding our bearings can feel impossible. It requires more attention, more care, to walk across this now unfamiliar terrain. I would not know for weeks or even months what had lived and what had died in the fire. Trees that looked like they survived would still die and fall. It took time for the catastrophe to fully play itself out, for the losses to be known and the true extent to be revealed. I had long thought of catastrophe in nature and in my life as momentary, confined to a single place in time. But they are not, or not always. There was a deep quiet in the forest as the effects of the fire continued to unfold. Animals had fled, including humans. What could not leave was destroyed, like the snail shells that turned to dust when I touched them, and bones that fell apart when I tried to pick them up. While it was clear that things had changed drastically, it was unclear how it would continue to unfold, what would be left, what would be revealed, what would be truly lost. This is a liminal space, the in-between, where the unknown is palpable.
The land left me with a strong need for presence, for being with what had happened, for witnessing the continued unfolding of the event. The request I felt from the land was for dedication, to keep returning, to follow and notice. So often I have rushed over the uncomfortable and devastating parts of life, trying to hurry on to a place I was more at ease. But here, nature was going at its own pace, so much slower than mine. And the request was for me to slow down and be with the forest. What does life look like when we go through something difficult? What happens in me when uncertainty is the only thing in front of me? What do I do in the in-between time? A key piece of Landscape of Mothers is that we want to remember to give ourselves credit for what we're doing. Remember that we're in a world that devalues caring for others, whether that's children, the elderly, or the disabled. Needing care is often seen as a characteristic of weakness. But the world needs true caregivers. We need one another as a fundamental part of our humanity. And so it's helpful when we're in caregiving situations that we make sure that we celebrate and honor our own work. This is downright countercultural in a time where we are all familiar with the term Mommy Wars. We can go about this differently. Landscape of Mothers gives us a map to do this differently. But, I digress.
When we are willing to celebrate, when we honor our caregiving work, we can be simultaneously building from the shore of "this-doesn't-work-I-want-it-to-be-better" and from "woohoo-I-know-what-does-work". And building on what works is so much easier than trying to create an entirely new foundation for something we can only hope will be better than what we've got goin' on! And... my invitation to you is to write what you are celebrating below. No celebration is too small! A shower without an audience, one meal that felt nourishing, something begun that feels like it's going somewhere good... it's all part of honoring what we're in. Once you have your celebration, notice the reaction in your body. Notice and name the sensation. Archetypes can help us get unstuck when we feel like we are out of options through giving us perspectives or lenses that we might not otherwise entertain. This removes us from the habitual neural patterns that have us stuck in a loop that doesn't feel good. Patterns in which we have to lose or let go of something that feels important. Archetypes can also help us choose a path when we feel overwhelmed. By looking to an archetype that has a particular perspective and personality, we have perspectives available to us that we don't have to create. That is, we don't have to know what we want the situation to look like, we can just know that we don't want what's happening. We step into the perspective of an archetype and try it on. What works for us? What is possible? Does this feel better? What can we do with this understanding? It's important because when we are parenting we are so often sure of what we don't want, and not as sure of what's possible. If we also have to create that whole dream world of what we do want and how to get there... it can just be overwhelming. And limited. Working with archetypes invites us to step back a bit, give more room to the situation, and to slow down. From there we are able to locate the context of what we're doing. We can see more clearly, we have more options, and we have choice about what we can do. We see different facets of what's important to us, where we're stuck, where we're having success (oh... never forget that last bit... notice and appreciate your successes! Don't gloss over them... they are the strengths that you build with!).
Archetypes are particularly helpful where we are in situations that feel hopelessly tangled, messy, and every question is met with more questions. By stepping into the perspective of a particular archetype we get a finite perspective that has particular possibilities and we are able to manage some understanding or insight from it. The perspective of the archetype has an inherent understanding and knowledge there to build on. When we personify the archetype we can relate to their perspective easily and we can often find guidance in the perspective. We are not obligated to act on that guidance, but the simplicity of having an offering of a way to proceed can open the power of the brain to locate other possibilities. This was not available to us when we were feeling stuck or overwhelmed. I explore this further in a YouTube Video if you'd like more of my thoughts on archetype as parenting help. You can also sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to hear more. |
Author: Jill cliftonHi, I'm Jill, creator of Landscape of Mothers. I'm here to talk about breaking family patterns of harm so that we can parent our children in ways that support them becoming fully themselves. I'm happy to have you here! Archives
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