Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘identity’

Recently, I ran a series of workshops with about 700 students in grades 6 and 8. The workshops were about diversity and acceptance and how to treat migrants coming from different cultural backgrounds. One of the questions that came up in every session was about names – what do you do with your name once you move to live in a different country?

I have been running these workshops over the last 4 years and have seen over 10,000 students from grade 4 to grade 12. In many places, the kids were convinced that changing a name is a must when you move to a new country and when I ask them if they know the meaning of their name, surprise, surprise (or maybe not), most of them do not know the meaning of their own name.

Out of 700 students, only about 30 raised their hands to share the meaning of their names with others, while the rest were nameless. They did not know what the meaning of their names was or why their parents had given them that name. They knew nothing about the story of their name.

I believe that explains why they people change their names once they move to another country and why the people in their new country expect them to “localize” their name.

To get the kids’ interest, I told them that in my tradition, the name you are given determines your destiny. You will have the character of the name or the character of the person you are named after. My name is a Hebrew name, which means “little happy song” (in a female form). I think I live up to my name, because I dedicate my life to “singing the happiness song” and teaching others to find their own happiness. It is no coincidence that my life coaching business is called “Be Happy in LIFE”.

I am also short…

Imagine you are faced with a problem, things are hectic and you are under a lot of pressure. Do you ask for help? Do you look around you and see kind people you can lean on in your time of need or do you see people you should be careful of, who might start perceiving you as weak and incapable?

Everyone starts life totally and utterly helpless. Excuse the French, but we cannot even wipe our own bum. We just lie there, wiggle out arms and legs and pray that someone will be kind to us and feed us when we are hungry, hold us when we need a cuddle and clean us when we feel uncomfortable for some strange reason.

Later on, we spend our life becoming more and more independent and developing more and more skills, but for the most part, we are told precisely what to do by people who think they know everything (and we think so too). Often, we try to do things on our own, but then those great people tell us off and instruct us in the “right” way of doing them.

So we build a sense of inadequacy into our identity during our first years of life and it is a serious challenge getting rid of it and starting to believe in our own power and abilities. It is tough to feel we are worthy, capable, responsible, “good enough” individuals.

When we face a difficult situation, our stress is often not a result of the level of technical or physical difficulty. It is a result of having a little identity crisis.

“Oh, my God, I have no idea how to do this, but I expect myself to be able to. What is the boss/Mom/my partner going to think of me now? I’m so useless and incompetent”.

This, in turn, causes our brain’s memory and creativity areas to be inhibited to the point of dysfunction, which makes matters even worse. It also causes us to fear the people around us, even those who can help us with our problem.

Last night, Ronit and I went out on our weekly date and watched a film called Oranges and Sunshine about a British social worker who uncovers the deportation of many children from England to Australia over many years.

The movie suggests that the British government was helping the Australian government keep Australia white and reducing its own population of poor people by shipping children in foster care and orphanages to Australia, where they were supposed to be educated and then allowed to live as citizens.

What actually happened (according to the movie) was that these children were used as slave labor and abused physically, sexually and emotionally. They grew up to be confused, troubled adults who wondered about their identity, felt rejected and abandoned by their parents and betrayed by the people who were meant to care for them.

For me, both Ed’s story and Oranges and Sunshine brought up a really troubling question, “How can anyone abuse a child?”

Relationship friction is as common as relationships. There is just no way to keep everything smooth all the time. Whether you interact with your partner, your boss, your colleagues, your kids or (ahem) your parents, there is bound to be some points when things feel a bit rough, faces turn redder, voices become sharper and all involved wonder what went wrong.

This happens very often between parents and teenagers. Considering what you are about to read, this is not too surprising, actually.

You see, every conversation we have takes place in the words we say, in the feelings we feel and in how we relate facts and feelings to the way we see ourselves. We all have a sense of identity and sometimes, when we feel our identity is being threatened, we go to “battle stations”, batten down the hatches and defend ourselves with all our might.

The teenage years are all about forming our independent identity, which means our identity is still very new and fragile and every possible comment could have a shattering effect on it and then what?

Luckily, there are just 3 common self-beliefs that can be threatened and if we avoid them, much of the friction in our communication with others, particularly with teens, can be eliminated. In fact, we can do a lot of good as parents, partners and friends by saying and doing things to strengthen others’ positive beliefs about who they are.

The best way to experience what others may be going through when you talk to them is to look at it from the receiving end. This will also allow you to deal better with potential threats to your identity that would result in your retaliatory action against others. Relationships, after all, are as much about us as they are about them.

One of our main challenges in life is that we don’t know what we don’t know. To overcome this challenge, we must actively question our own point of view and make conscious choices, instead of accepting what we have grown into as the only possibility.

A few weeks ago, Ronit had a few sessions with a lovely little boy called Lenny (not really). He was very intelligent and very curious and bombarded Ronit with “unfiltered” questions, which got me thinking about perspective.

While he was working away on one of his assignments, Lenny asked Ronit, “Do you know that you sometimes talk to me in a different language?”

She explained to him that because we talk to our kids in a different language, she sometimes confused the languages.

He asked, “So they don’t understand what you’re saying too?”

Ronit explained that our kids understand her when she speaks the other language, because they know two languages.

Lenny said, “I don’t know any language”.

Ronit said, “You know English”.

He looked at her surprised and then said in excitement, “Yes!”

Being only 6 years old, Lenny accepts everything in his life as the only thing possible, so sometimes, he does not even need to call it by name. It is just “the thing that is” for him. The language he speaks is so obvious to him, he had never counted it as such. It was just part of life. And it never occurred to him that other kids might know other languages, simply because he doesn’t.

Many parents say parenting has changed their life.

As young woman, I wanted to join a course to become a facilitator of parenting workshops. The director of the project said to me, “Ronit, in order to be a parent educator, you need to be a parent first”. And she declined my application.

No matter what I said, she just replied, “When you have your first child, you will understand”. She was determined and I failed to convince her to accept me into the program.

Later that year, when I held Eden in my arms after a long, hard labor that ended in a caesarian section, I understood why.

Today, in this chapter of Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss, our experts answer the question “How has parenting changed your life?”

In the last 25 years, while I was working with teens and collecting information for my book Be Special, Be Yourself for Teenagers, I have discovered many important things about being a teenager. It was funny to discover these things when I was no longer a teen myself. This is the paradox of being a teen – you only understand what has happened to you when you are no longer a teen. Catch 22, don’t you think?

Fundamentally, I do not believe anything is “too late”. There is always something you can do with a new learning to improve your situation now and in the future. However, many bits of information have lot less value when your situation changes.

How many times have you said, “I wish I knew this when I was a teen?”

Events in our life shape our thinking, beliefs and overall attitude. When I ask people about the things that have shaped their life, they come up with big things, mainly traumatic events that were hard to ignore.

I can relate to this too, because when I worked on my own list, the first things that came up were the big things – moving house, changing city, changing country, the birth of my kids, loss and painful failures. I did have some positive, wonderful, exciting events too, like the birth of my kids and winning prizes and awards, but there were not as many of them as there were hits.

Focusing on the big things is natural. However, I believe that the small things, the ones we neglect to pay attention to, may contribute a lot to how we conduct ourselves in a way that we hardly recognize. The reason I am saying this is because very often, when my clients bring up their past and examine it, they talk about small incidents that were big for them at the time, even out of proportion.

For example, a woman put on tons of make up on her face, because “When I was 16, my father commented about me going out with my skin disease that creates different shades to the skin on my face”. A friend told me, “For years, I couldn’t speak out because when I was 13, I stood in front of many people and my voice sounded funny. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life”. One of my clients felt rejected by her mother, because “When I was 12 (30 years ago), my mom said to my aunt she had not wanted to have another child and that I had been ‘an accident’”.

Let’s start with some big words. According to Wikipedia, “Intimacy generally refers to the feeling of being in a close personal association and belonging together. Genuine intimacy in human relationships requires dialogue, transparency, vulnerability and reciprocity”.

When I mention intimacy to people, many of them immediately think of romance and physical closeness, but this is only a borrowed meaning. In fact, many sexual relationships have little or no intimacy in them, while other relationships are based on deep spiritual bonding without any physical contact whatsoever.

In a family, some relationships are chosen for us (parents, siblings and extended family), while we get to choose the others (spouse and kids). Either way, the degree of intimacy in a relationship determines its quality and importance for us, not the kind of relationship. In a sense, when we rate a relationship as “good”, it is because there is enough intimacy in it for us.

Jill was one of the most beautiful, sexiest, most gorgeous woman on Earth. Miss Universe! She could easily have been Miss Universe, and there was not one person in the world – child, adult, man, woman, even really old person – that would want to take their eyes off her. She was stunning. Everything in her was perfect – her body, her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her skin and her nose.