Couples to Parents

OK, parents, hand on your heart, how often do you do something romantic with your partner? Come on, don’t be shy, it’s all right. How often do you have a romantic dinner, go out dancing together or take time off just the two of you?

I bet your mind just filled with thoughts of “the children”, “my work commitments”, “that project I have to finish”, “how hard it is to get a babysitter nowadays” and various other seemingly-appropriate reasons for your romantic situation being what it is and why you should not be feeling too horrible about it. Besides, is this not what everyone experiences when they turn from a couple into parents?

Yes, they do, and yes, they all feel just as horrible as you do about it, but does that make it better?

Nope.

The natural progression of our life seems to be that we get really excited about finding a partner that turns us on and can be out friend at the same time. We dedicate much of our time and nearly all of our brainpower to finding that person. We embark on a journey of mutual exploration, during which we are typically so fascinated with the other person, they need to do something truly awful to turn us off.

Once we have found our body-and-soul mate, we go through what is commonly known as “settling down” (is this an ugly expression or what?), which includes some or all of the following: moving in together, getting married, joining finances, buying a home, getting a very large debt together (the mortgage) and, of course, having children. These steps seem to extract the interest and variety out of our life and replace them with certainty to the point of routine and with responsibility to the point of stress.

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Save Your Energy

It is not easy for people to understand that their thoughts, feelings and actions are forms of energy. I remember the first time I realized this. I was on the top of the snowy red mountains of Bryce Canyon in Utah, reading the book The Celestine Prophecy. For the first time, I found a visual explanation for feelings I had.

You see, as a child, I never learned to pay attention to my feelings. They seemed to be urges, strong impulses that repel me from doing something or being around others or attract me towards them. Considering emotions as a form of energy made a lot of sense to me and gave my feelings some credibility.

As I my emotional intelligence evolved, I learned that people with high EQ are very attractive, because they send good “vibes” to their environment and (surprise, surprise) the environment sends them good vibes right back, helping them live happy, healthy and successful lives.

Not everyone understands the connection between emotional ability, success and health, but it is necessary in order to control our destiny and our quality of life.

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A Question of Identity

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.

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Every Child Knows

Every parent knows that dealing with other human beings is not always smooth. We find ourselves interacting with different people all the time, with a wide variety of communication styles, values, beliefs and perspectives. That diversity can cause all kinds of misunderstandings, awkward moments and sometimes even serious friction.

Yet much of the time, most people operate under the assumption that “every child knows” what they know, that what seems clear and simple to them is as clear and simple to others. In fact, it is not the differences between us and the other people that create the friction, it is our expectation that they can see our point of view.

The TV series Lie to Me has brought the interpretation of facial expressions and body language into our living room, but unless you have developed these skills with a lot of supervised practice, it is likely that you can read what someone else is feeling correctly as often as not. If your partner walks in the door looking upset, are they sorry they are late, did they have a flat tire, did they get fired or did they just step in something unpleasant? It is hard to tell.

Here is an example.

John gets fires from work. He is so upset he cannot speak and decides to wait until the kids have gone to bed before sharing the bad news with Betty. Not knowing what has happened, Betty casually asks him if he can pick something up on his way back from work tomorrow.

John explodes.

Betty has no idea what just happened.

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Topsy Turvy World (3)

US gun ownership vs. gun deaths by state

As with the other posts in this series, the points below show that in life, there is no gain without a loss and no loss without a gain. Life is just wonderful that way.

Some of the points were inspired by Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, a high recommended book Ronit and I have been reading and discussing lately. Other points were just inspired by life.

Should police be armed better or will this lead to more violence?

Should possible offenders be chased down and captured or will this lead to unnecessary damage?

Do you really know why? What would happen if you had to explain yourself?

Is it better to be safe or does being safe sometimes make you sorry?

Do social media sites help us make friends or lose the ones we already have?

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Boiled Frog

From time to time, I get it by email. Now, with social media, I also get it on Facebook and Twitter. It is the story of the frog in hot water. In case you have never read it, here it is for your reading pleasure:

Frogs’ sense of heat actually detects differences in temperature. If you take a frog at room temperature and drop it into hot water, the frog will jump right back out as quickly as it can. However, if you put the frog into a pot of tap water and then gradually heat the water, the frog will just enjoy the nice wet environment and think nothing of it … until it is cooked.

“Eew, gross”, you say, or maybe, “How cruel”. OK, gross or cruel it may be, but it is just a story to illustrate a point. And the point is … drum roll …

When we believe everything is good and we do not need to change, reality eventually bites. No matter how subtle, we still need to pay attention to change in our life and do something about it.

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How to Stop Parental Bullying (2)

The previous post of the bullying series talked about stopping bully parents with awareness, because awareness is the first step towards any change. The following posts will show how we can stop bully parents by introducing personal development.

I believe that happy parents raise happy kids and that parents with good emotional skills raise children with good emotional skills, so this will also stop many kids from being bullies and others from being victims.

In the next 10 anti-bullying posts, I will list more than 50 bullying items and expand on some personal development technique to overcome some bullying behavior or help your kids stop being bullies or victims. Consider this your free parent coaching course to recognize, avoid and eliminate bullying from their life.

Some bullying behaviors are much more severe than others, but this activity is not meant to judge you or any other parent. It is there to give you tools to overcome snappy, fearful, aggressive or manipulative behaviors that arise from feeling powerless.

It will help you regain personal power so you do not try to get this power from abusing your kids, your partner or your employees (remember, every bully is also a victim and even if you are feeling like a victim, you may be bullying others).

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Approval Trap (4): How to get yourself out

If you have followed the activity in the previous post, you probably understand that it is impossible to be totally free from needing approval. Again, do not blame yourself or others for this mindset, because you always do the best you can and your parents always did the best they could. But now that you know how dangerous approval can be to live with, you cannot afford to pass it on to your children, because doing what was done to you is not longer the best you can do.

To change, we need to make a conscious decision to change!

If you need some help in motivating yourself to change, think of how much pain you have endured over the years while seeking others’ approval and about how much more heartache and pain you will have to endure through in a year, 5 years and 10 years if you do nothing.

Think how cruel you will be to your kids by continuing this cycle. My mentor life coach did this trick to me when I faced a difficult change. He said to me, “Would you want Eden to be like this?” and I understood that I managed to live with the pain as a survival mechanism, but I could not live with the pain of being a role model to my daughter and making her suffer for it. I made the change immediately!

The good news is that you can minimize several approval-seeking behaviors at once by developing a single skill. For example, if many of your approval-seeking behaviors are due to lack of significance, working on your sense of uniqueness and learning to feel special will reduce or even eliminate about a third of the behaviors mentioned.

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How to Stop Parental Bullying

In the last chapter of the bullying series, I wrote about bully parents (some people call them toxic parents) and although I think there is sometimes a fine line between carrying out our parenting responsibility and bullying, there is no doubt that bullying is a cycle that will never end unless we help parents stop it.

Yes, we have law enforcement officers whose job is making sure it does not continue, but if parents stop bullying their kids from fear of the police or the authorities, it will only increase their sense of disempowerment. Their focus will be again on gaining power without the authorities’ knowledge, which will create another cycle of making kids afraid of reporting and worse, hiding their physical injuries and hurts from others. This reduces the support structure available to bullied children and the chances of stopping the bullying or recovering from it.

Parents must stop the bullying cycle not because of the fear of being caught, but because they have gained power and understanding through developing their emotional intelligence. This way, the parents will be happy too.

We must stop the cycle of bullying so that in 10 years, we will talk about it as history and say, “This is what people did in the past, but we are more civilized and in control and we are better parents for our children”. We need to be proud of making a difference.

In this post, I want to help parents discover if they were bullied themselves when they were young and if there is a form of bullying in their home towards their own children.

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Approval Trap (3): Approval-Seeking Behavior

The first step of getting out of any emotional trap is recognizing that you are caged by a mindset that blocks you from being happy and fulfilled – that you are the one giving others power over your life.

People in the approval trap have some common character traits, all related to fear (is there anything besides love and fear?). They lack significance, have low self-esteem and use attention-seeking behavior to gain more significance, although that cannot remove the fear or raise their self-esteem.

Trapped individuals have the idea that to be highly thought of by some important others, they need to stick out, gain superiority by making others feel inferior, pretend to be someone they are not or, in other cases, never take risks to avoid conflict and judgment.

Everyone is trapped somehow, but it is the magnitude of the problem that matters. Use the list of approval-seeking behaviors below to discover if you are trapped or not and how deep are you in the trap of approval.

Give each item a rating from 0 to 10 (0 means you never do it and 10 means you do it all the time). My suggestion is to focus on those you gave high scores, indicating you have that behavior and the next post will give great tips to change that and get yourself out of the trap.

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