These past few weeks we’ve been looking at one of the challenges of parenting – taking action, asking for support, when your intuition tells you that something needs attention and you have no idea where that might lead.
What can stop us from taking action?
Fear – our personality’s fear.
One client, whose 14 year old was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, told me she knew her daughter was in some sort of ‘trouble’, yet she failed to challenge her eating habits and excessive exercise regime. Fear that bringing up the subject would aggravate things, fear of ‘rocking the boat’, kept her silent for a long time. Also, she told me, she didn’t want to make her daughter eat as she had been forced to eat as a child by her ‘controlling’ mother.
Like her mother, she had control issues. Afraid to be seen to be weak, she needed to feel strong and in control at all times and this meant it was not easy to ask for help. Her journey with her daughter taught her that there are some things we can’t control. We can’t make our children think like us – they have their own lives, their own lessons. It taught her to surrender to the divine, to see that the divine knows far better than we what is for the highest good of us all.
Another client with an autistic son battled with a conventional school to provide her son with support even when they made it very clear they were unable to do so. She and her husband played the charade of being a ‘normal’ family and did not want to place their son in a ‘special’ school. She came for coaching exhausted – exhausted from all the pushing, trying to get what she wanted, the pretence and having to be on guard all the time.
Both clients had expectations and were focused on an outcome, as well how things looked, ie. appearance. Both were hurting.
If you have a hunch that your child needs support, I say go with it and do something. In the end, it can support all – there is no reason to struggle alone.
And yet, what do I know as a parent? I don’t know. I see now that “I” am the thought forms “I” created of who ‘I’ thought I ‘should’ be and who “I” thought my children should be.
With the best will in the world, most of us believe we truly love our children , yet whenever we have expectations, judgements, fears and beliefs, that love is conditional. Learn to move beyond your personality and align with your Higher Self and you will parent more consciously from your heart. With love. Accepting all that is.
All we need is love.