Hi,
Here we are again.  Let me tell you a little story.  Once upon a time there were 4 little windows!  No, no, no, no, no!  Just kidding.  Let's take a break from the GD windows for a while.  Not that it's not a great model, but a change is as good as a rest.

When I checked my emails this morning, I found this from Bob Proctor:

"Years ago I heard a story of a dad named Paul who gave his young son a small chalkboard to practice writing on. One evening his son called out from the bedroom, "Dad, how do you spell best?"

"Paul answered him. Moments later, the boy hollered, "How do you spell kid?"

"Finally he asked, "How do you spell ever?"

"When the boy showed him what he'd written on the chalkboard, Paul expected to see 'I'm the best kid ever.' Instead, the boy beamed as Paul read the message: 'You're the best dad a kid can ever have.'

"Paul recalled that it was one of the best days of his life. In fact, he had to buy his son another chalkboard because he wanted to save this message forever and hang it on his wall. It's still there."

Perhaps Bob thought this message would inspire me, uplift me, and show what a great inspiration he is.  Unfortunately, I have more than one kid in my life who does not appreciate me.  And am I alone in that?  Not at all.  Most children judge their parents, and if the parents are lucky their kids might eventually get 'off it' and forgive the parents for being fallible and imperfect human beings.  But not before the age of 30, or 40, and often not until the cuffing funeral oration.

"My (dad/mum) was the best (dad/mum) I could ever have asked for.  What a pity I never got a chance to tell them!"

Duh!  Grow up!

Unlike Bob Proctor, Kalil Gibran knows a bit about being wise.  In his book, The Prophet, Gibran has the prophet tell his massed audience, when they asked him to speak about children, 'Our children are NOT our children.  They are an expression of life's longing for itself'.

In other words, our children come through us, but are not of us.  We (parents) are just like a long-bow that is stretched to launch an arrow (a child) into the world.  Our job is done when the arrow is safely launched.  The children are the future, and we are the past.  They learn from us, and benefit from our protection and care.  But they have to break from us, during adolescence, in order to form a sense of their own individuality - because that is how the western world is shaped: individualistically.  But they will always carry us in their heads.  And they are in truth made up of bits of us and bits of other people, and bits of their own experience of us and other people.

But they exist because nature wanted them to exist, and we were just pawns in nature's game - that is Gibran's message.

Back in the eighties, I went through a process called Erhard Seminar Training (EST) - as one of more than a dozen systems of inquiry that I explored.  EST seminars normally contained more than 60 participants and one trainer, with half a dozen assistants.  Among the participants, there were always more than a dozen who were hung up on their relationship with their parents.  They 'knew' that their cuffing parents should not have been the crummy way that they were, and only if the parents got off it, and learned to kiss the participant's ass, would the participant get off it and love them back.

The EST trainer's role was to persuade the participant that "You've got to complete your relationship with your parents; allow them to be the way they naturally are, completely; to let them know that, in their role as a parent they made it; they did that; they succeeded; you know!"

But why must we complete our relationship with our parents?  Because to not do so means we carry a civil war in our heads for all of our days, at great cost to our own inner harmony and sense of happiness and well being.  If we are not complete with our parents, we are not allowing a part of our own non-conscious mind to be the way it happens to be.  We are rejecting reality!  We have got to get off it with our parents so we can let go of them, and move on.  We have to give up on our hatred of our parents, for not parenting us according to our blueprint, our instructions and commands, and instead implementing their own crummy ideas with us.  We have to learn to love our parents, because our parents are part of us.

Our children are not our children, in that they came from nature because of a plan by nature.  But our parents ARE our parents, because in the process of protecting us for 15 to 20 years of our lives, they give us huge chunks of their minds, their souls, which we carry with us to the end of our wriggling, struggling, resisting, rebellious days in this vale of cuffing tears.

But let us here flush out the question of child abuse.  About 80% of all child abuse is probably carried out by about 20% of parents.  So only about 20% of children are 'on it' with their parents (or sipped off with their parents) because the parents were BAD - physically or sexually abusing them.

But we as (GOOD) parents had better expect, in about 80% of cases, that our children will not automatically, or easily, learn to accept our error-prone ways of being.  We are too imperfect for that!  And they (the children) are, of course, perfect in every way!

So what should we do?  Do not court love from your children.  That would be an abdication of our role as parents, as boundary setters, and standard setters, and so on.  So to hell with being appreciated.  If the choice is between being loved and approved by your kids, or doing your job as a parent, you have an over-riding moral responsibility to do your cuffing, thankless job!

But doesn't that doom you to a life of being hated by the kids for whom you gave up twenty years of your cuffing life?  Probably.  Or if not hated, then denigrated or ignored, or treated to an occasional condescending visit.  But that's life.  You do your job, and you accept the outcome.  The alternative is a nightmare scenario.  As you try to court approval and love from your child, you create a worse kind of monster: A moral imbecile who has no internal boundaries, and who learns to manipulate others by giving and withholding love as a weapon.

So grow up, take your medicine, and don't expect Bob Proctor to write a little ditty about how your kids thought you were brilliant.  This is not Hollywood!

Moving on: The next email down my list this morning was from a client who recently completed her counselling with me.  She wrote - unprompted - to say how much she appreciated the way I was with her.  That I was gentle, helpful, informative, and not at all possessive or controlling; not at all labelling of her because of her difficulties.

That was nice.  I was appreciated by somebody.  It is nice to be appreciated.  But I do not relate to my clients in a way that will produce that appreciation.  I am genuine in my encounters with them.  Sometimes what I say is easy for them to hear.  Sometimes it is difficult, or challenging.  But because they are not my kids, they can see me a lot more clearly than my kids can.  So they can tell me how much they got from me.

When I lie in my coffin, I expect there will be, all around me, kids, and other relatives, who 'never realized' how much I meant to them.  Who 'never got a chance' to tell me how much they appreciated me. 

But I already know how much I meant to them.  I don't need them to tell me.  I gave them a huge chunk of my life, of my love, of my time, of my devotion, of my dedication, of my moral guidance, of my compassion.  I don't need them to tell me how GOOD I WAS!

YOU TOO!  Think about it.  Do you really need anybody to tell you how good you were being to them?  Don't you already know in your heart how loving you are and were?

Grow up!

Love,

Jim

Dr Jim Byrne
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

Email: Jim Byrne at ABC Coaching

PS: If this is the best Bob Proctor can do, he'd better go back to whatever he did before he took up coaching.

PPS: Next week: The Wind in the Windows!

PPPS: New content on this website includes: Courses on the Training Page; and Bits and bats on Dr Jim's Life Tips.

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