Where parenting is concerned, the problem with subconscious behaviour is that if you interpret your perceptions and feelings as truthful and use them to guide your responses, you are essentially parenting from the past. You are not responding to life as your grown-up self. Instead, you are responding as your child self. And children are not equipped to raise children. To parent as adults, we need to make sense of the workings of our subconscious mind, which is why parents today are being invited to do their own work. Raffi Cavoukian, the celebrated children’s troubadour, included “Conscious Parenting” as one of the nine principles of his Covenant for Child Honouring, one that is championed by the Dalai Lama.17
We must dive into the feelings that are potentially triggered by day-to-day living and parenting and make the link between these feelings and our formative past. Our next task is to take care of the child within us—that little boy or girl who was misunderstood or not fully seen or not completely heard or who otherwise didn’t get their needs met —and reassure our child selves that we see and hear them fully. Until there is connectivity between your adult and child self, you may feel at odds. You may have the unsettling experience of being disintegrated rather than integrated.
Recently, I sat in my office with a mom who was expressing her significant frustration at the mess her children seemed to constantly leave in their wake. She was beside herself, trying to get them to co-operate in keeping their home tidy. I listened to her story and to the long list of things she had tried in an attempt to get the situation under control. She joked that she must have the worst case of obsessive-compulsive disorder I had ever seen. I asked what her home was like when she was young. She described a large family of eight children with parents who were unavailable physically (they were workaholics) and emotionally, in that she and her siblings were more of a nuisance than celebrated beings. She said everything was loud and messy and out of control, and she’d hated that. In the middle of her description her eyes widened. “Oh my goodness!” she said. “It’s not them, it’s me, isn’t it?”
All of her frustration, her frantic efforts for control, and her feelings of desperation harkened back to the time when her mind was forming. And now, responding to her own children from her four-year-old mind, she was feeling the flood of it anew, and mistakenly finding cause in her children’s developmentally appropriate behaviour. The trigger occurred in present time, but her panicky, overwhelmed feelings came from her past experience as a panicky, overwhelmed child. The chaos in her childhood home had made this mom feel disoriented and unsafe. She’d been powerless to bring order to the home, and that powerlessness may have been even more frightening than the noise and mess that caused it. It’s also possible that she may have been temperamentally more sensitive to disorderly environments than her siblings, which would have made an already stressful home environment downright traumatizing.
As author and Jungian analyst James Hollis says, it is often our narrative about our childhood experiences rather than the experiences themselves that brings us stress in our adult lives.18 But as an adult, this mom knows now that she is not powerless. Although she can’t control everything, she can see to it that her home is functional and the most important things are attended to, even though there may be more mess in the house than she would ideally like. When we allow ourselves room to grow, we can be fully available to the growing of our own children. Thanks to the inevitable organizational upheaval that comes with having children, this mom was presented with a wonderful opportunity to tend to those little-girl experiences within and grow herself up that much more. And with this awareness, she became much more capable of acting as a competent guide for her own children.
Think about your own parents for a moment. Did they do this type of conscious, mindful work within themselves? If they did not, they likely responded as their child selves rather than their grown-up selves when parenting got tricky. In turn, this means it would have been almost impossible for you to come through your childhood completely unscathed. And that one simple recognition presents grown-up you with a fantastic opportunity. The bottom line is this: if we parent as we were parented—and fail to do the work to create consciousness around the process—then we can only bring our child as far as we were brought ourselves. This is truly the most amazing gift that is given to us as parents: the opportunity to recognize clearly what our work is, to do that work, and to grow both ourselves and our children in the process.
Creating a Program All Your Own
If the potential exists to change your programs at a cellular level, then it’s also possible to create your own program and eliminate those from the past that no longer serve the interests of you or your children. This requires taking the time to recognize, understand, and work through the programs that are living in your subconscious system; to connect those programs to the experiences in your present-day life that are bringing you stress and upset; and to grow from there.
But we also need to dismantle some of the societal programming surrounding the reason we become parents. One of the most insidious myths new parents face is the notion that becoming a parent is meant to make you happy—that parenting is a gigantic, euphoric, idyllic, heart-warming experience. This myth does not line up with the emotional reality of many new parents, who may be thinking one or all of these things: I will never get this right; my baby doesn’t like me; everybody thinks I’m doing this wrong; it’s pathetic how scared I am. This internal conflict can force even the most steady and even-tempered individual into their child self and ancestral family programming. Suddenly you are acting like your mother or your father, or even one of your grandparents.
The truth is—and some of you may find this shocking—we do not become parents to be happy. Multiple research studies show that parents are among the unhappiest groups of people.19 Instead, and unbeknownst to many prospective parents, becoming a parent is a precious invitation for growth that will either gently present itself or smack us in the face, as the need fits. One of the reasons we become parents is to finally get the chance to grow up ourselves. But the task of growing up is not for the faint of heart. It takes commitment and grit and a massive sense of humour and humility. The American scholar Joseph Campbell made this same point about marriage: “I think one of the problems in marriage is that people don’t realize what it is. They think it’s a long love affair and it isn’t. Marriage has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed, and when the transformation is realized it is a magnificent experience.”20 You can apply the same ideas to becoming a parent.
Know that you can change the story about challenging parenting situations while simultaneously accepting their difficulty. It’s a universal truth that parents of babies and young children may not get as much sleep as they are used to. If you find yourself in this boat, you have two choices. You can think to yourself: “I am so exhausted! I cannot cope!” Or you can turn over this negative mantra in your mind and say instead: “My body will do for me what it is supposed to do, and I am grateful for visits with my baby in the quiet of the night.” Maybe your toddler is having a lot of meltdowns. Do you choose to think, “I cannot believe that on top of everything else I now have to deal with an unruly toddler!” Or will you choose to think instead, “I love his ferocity of spirit”? Part of being an adult is to fully own your reality and to know that you have created it with your thoughts—the good and, yes, the bad. But more important is to fully embrace the idea that if you don’t like a thought, if your story isn’t working out for you, you can choose a different one. Parenting is not about waking up every day bathed in happiness; it’s about waking up every day fully alert to and immersed in the living of life. Understand that making sense of your own experiences of being parented will be essential to growing up yourself, and your child, in the best possible way. Through time, openness, and hard work, you will land on a universal truth: the best way to