Clearing the path with Daniel - Parenting Edition
As we come out of a pandemic and slowly resume “normal” life, if there was ever a time we needed a little help with parenting it would be NOW.
Luckily we have our Emotional Empowerment coach, Daniel Dzikowski to guide us and we could not be more grateful. His final summary should be printed, laminated and given to every parent on the planet!
Take it away Daniel…
The Key to Parenting
Letting go allows you to have greater power over yourself, your emotions and even your external circumstances. It enables you to take greater responsibility by dealing with the root cause behind any parenting experience.
The first thing to acknowledge and accept is that we all carry suppressed emotions. However, often we are not even aware that this is the case. Most people carry so many hidden emotions and then frequently deny that they do. This is apparent though as seen by the frequent outbursts of irritation, fear, guilt and many other emotions found in the spectrum of human experience. It is also seen by how much violence exists in movies. People say this is normal, but I think it is sign of a deep-seated trauma inherent within our collective species.
Traditional Parenting
In the traditional parenting system, the focus is often on controlling the child’s behaviour through punishment and reward. I believe that both these methods can be successful to some degree in emergency situations but generally they do more damage than good. Rewarding your child might seem to be effective but it doesn’t address the root cause, the why. Punishment and rewards are dangerous because they condition the child not to listen to their intuition, to their internal guidance mechanism. At this point they become more susceptible to peer pressure and outside influence.
Most traditional methods are about setting parental boundaries and ensuring these are adhered to. You have to parent by setting external conditions on the child and then it is often a battle to make sure your children keep to these boundaries. These boundaries are often set only by the adult and thus there isn’t always accountability from the child. The child can be involved in doing this, but I believe there is a more effective way which creates deep seated shifts in the parent-child relationship that not only empowers the child but helps the parent heal their past trauma.
Parenting and Letting Go
The most powerful way to parent, in my opinion, is by focusing the awareness away from the behaviour of the child and into the realm of the emotion triggered within the adult. In other words, bringing your awareness into your own thoughts and unconscious feelings. Doing this addresses the root cause of your parenting experience. It addresses the ‘why’ underneath the surface of events.
Real change in your outside world comes when you begin to make changes inside. I believe that most of the time, we are blocking the child in developing in an effective way because of our own fears and anxieties. These are often issues that are hidden from view and because we are so conditioned, we continue this way of parenting without being conscious of what we are really doing. Most of our own issues are extremely well hidden so it is a rare parent indeed that really sees how his own suppressed anger, guilt or fear creates an environment where the child acts out.
If you can take a shift in perception by understanding the only reason you are experiencing your child misbehaving is so that YOU can heal then you can make massive shift in how you parent. When you take full responsibility for your part in your child’s behavior by dealing with your own emotional state then that is true power. Your childs’ behaviour then begins to mirror the change in yourself.
Effortless Parenting with an Emotional Detox
Embarking on an emotional detox enables you to be more balanced and see the world with clarity. This helps you take off the ‘glasses of fear’ and see life exactly as it is without distortion. Unclear seeing is based on your suppressed emotional energy which, in turn, are run by false belief systems. Even your cultural conditioning and biases have their roots in this. If you are wearing glasses of anger or guilt then this is how you will perceive your child, through those lenses. As a result, your child will mirror their behaviour in response to your own inner emotional state. At the spiritual level the child is doing this to help you heal.
Why would your own suppressed feelings influence the behavior of your child? I believe the reason this occurs is so that we can accurately see what is within us. Each erroneous belief we carry is supported with an unpleasant feeling and both feeling and belief are unconscious. This means we do not even know they exist. Now the only way we can free ourselves of these unpleasant energies is to become aware of them. This means they have to attract circumstances and people into our lives for them to be triggered. Once triggered, we can let go of this emotional energy.
When a child does not listen to you, this is a gift for more connection. The parent may at this point experience anger and if this is felt consciously and without blame then that anger will be integrated and let go of. At this point, the parent will carry less anger within his or her emotional body and therefore will be able to communicate from a greater foundation of love and connection. At this point the barriers to listening have been broken or are in the process of being broken.
As adults, we have suppressed a tremendous amount of emotional energy and as mentioned previously what happens is that the universe creates the world outside as an identical replica to what is inside of us. It does this by the law of attraction so that eventually we can face and own up to how we are creating our universe and life experience.
This mirror image of our own emotional state is reflected most well in those closest to us especially our children. Most people are well aware of how easily they can be triggered by their partners, friends and children. All that is happening is that their own hidden emotions are being made conscious so that they can be released.
Projection
Circumstances, people and especially our children will continue to trigger our suppressed emotions as long as they exist within us. These emotions which were once dormant within us are made conscious. Once conscious, two things happen, either we project the cause of that feeling onto the child or other external circumstance or we take responsibility for that emotion then let it go. If projection occurs then we re-suppress the emotion.
If we re-suppress that feeling then life will continue to provide us with events and people that continue to trigger it. It does this and with ever increasing intensity so that eventually we take responsibility for the world outside and our creation of it. If we do not deal with the causal aspect of our experience, which is our suppressed feelings then the same patterns of our life will repeat, our children will continue to act out and we will be faced with similar challenges and situations.
When an emotion is triggered, the mind usually does not want to take responsibility and so refuses to do so. Instead, the cause of the feeling is attributed to the external world. That mechanism is called projection. Projection is the fundamental cause of disagreements, conflict and the wars on this planet. Projection happens because it is too painful to turn inwards to find the real cause of the pain.
When a child’s actions trigger their parents’ latent anger, projection causes the parent to believe that what the child did is the cause of their anger. However, that is not true. The child’s actions were only the trigger. The true cause of the anger was a suppressed feeling and belief found within the parent.
Improving Relationships through Letting Go
Changing the outside world to make us feel better only delays the surfacing of inner feelings which are the true cause of the way we feel the way we do. This applies to all relationships and not just to parenting. This also why we often resort to controlling others. We do so because we are too scared to face those painful feelings inside of us. Control allows us to avoid these feelings and with our children these feelings are often those that we were not allowed to feel and express during our childhood. It is also the reason why we come into relationships with expectations. Expectations are a protection mechanism designed to hide that which we do not want to look at.
Facing your hidden feelings unconditionally are the key to parenting well and you cannot truly give your child unconditional love if you are placing conditions on what you are and are not meant to feel. As you gain the courage and strength to face and let them go then amazing things start to happen. Your child starts to change in response to your own inner work. The reason behind this is because when you have fully let go, there is no need for circumstances or people to trigger your internal feelings. This is because the feelings have been successfully integrated.
As you continue to face, embrace and finally let go of all feelings and emotions all your relationships change. You become more balanced and begin to parent more from intuition and love then from past conditioning. You see things clearly and where previously you might have judged your child as bad or their actions as wrong, you now understand this is a misperception and so you being to see perfection in every situation.
See the Gift in Every Challenging Circumstance
As you begin this journey into the world of your feelings, you will very quickly see that each argument, altercation, and misbehavior is a gift to you. Each time you are triggered emotionally is an opportunity to let go. Each time your child refuses to listen to you is a gift for you to become more loving and more connected. There may even come a time where you welcome these unpleasant experiences because you understand the true meaning behind them.
Parenting using letting go is an immensely powerful way of taking the power back into your own hands. However, letting go is something that must be done consistently all day every day. It is a way of life.
To summarise:
Your external world is a mirror of your internal world
Your suppressed emotions attract circumstances and people into your life. They influence how your child behaves around you.
Projection is when you abdicate responsibility for your emotions to something outside of you.
You can change the relationship with your child by letting go
Your child’s behaviour begins to change in response to your work.
There is an opportunity to let go in every challenging circumstance.
