The day was perfect, not a cloud in the sky, horses grazing on lush green pastures, children running around. It was a typical day at my daughter’s summer equestrian camp on Long Island, New York. Today was the day when the parents had come to watch their children showcase their talents at the annual horse show. The children, each paired with their favorite horse, were joyfully and busily tacking, saddling, and grooming them.
As the horses were about to enter the ring, I heard a loud outburst. “I don’t want to ride this horse. I want to ride Rosie. I will only ride Rosie!” The voice was that of ten-year-old Savannah.
“Uh-oh,” I thought to myself, thankful it wasn’t my daughter. “Here we go. How will her parents handle this one?”
I watched her parents crouched by her, textbook perfect, their voices empathic. “We understand you feel sad you weren’t given Rosie. But can we try to find a solution, and—”
Savannah cut them off, her protests louder now. “I will not, I cannot. I want to go home. Take me home now!” By this time she was bawling, and the scene had caused a group of kids to gather around.
Oblivious to the scene she was making, Savannah cried, “You can’t make me. I hate you. I’m leaving.”
At this point the mother said, “You know, Savannah, if you just ride this new horse today, we’ll be so proud of you that we’ll take you to the water park on the weekend.”
I smiled inwardly: “Here come the carrots.” What else was this mother going to start promising in order to bribe her daughter to get on the new horse?
When Savannah appeared unimpressed, the mother cajoled, “And then we can go to your favorite store, Juicy, and buy those cute shorts you’ve been wanting.”
When there was still no response from Savannah, the mother raised the stakes. “If you’ll only ride your new horse,” she begged, “we can go to the Apple Store and get you the new iPad case you have always wanted. Don’t you want that?”
Digging her heels in, Savannah yelled, “I don’t care. Leave me alone. I’m going to the car.”
Now the father stepped in, grabbing Savannah’s arm and yanking her toward him. Holding her roughly by the shoulders, his teeth gritted, he snarled, “You do not speak to us in this fashion. Stop being a brat.”
“I’m not a brat! I just don’t want to be here anymore. Can we please go?” Savannah pleaded.
The father continued, “We have spent thousands of dollars on this camp. You are the one who begged to come here. So now you either ride the horse you’ve been given today or I’m never paying for you to ride again.”
Shaken up, Savannah whimpered, “I’m sorry, Daddy, but I just cannot do it.”
“It’s too late for sorry,” the mother jumped in. “Sorry doesn’t bring a dead man back to life. Look at the scene you’ve caused. I’m so embarrassed by you, so disappointed in you. We are leaving right now and never coming back.”
The mother stormed off, a disoriented Savannah in tow.
Before I could even collect my thoughts, my daughter and a group of her friends came running to me. “Did you see how mean her parents were?” Maia said.
“Poor Savannah, I feel so bad for her,” said Allison, tears in her eyes.
“Why couldn’t they just let her stay and watch us? What’s the big deal?” chimed in Paula, her tone indignant.
I was about to agree with them all and voice my utter disapproval of the way Savannah’s parents handled the situation. Had it been just five years earlier, I would have indulged in a self-righteous diatribe of “How could they! I would have handled it so differently. I would never raise my voice in such a situation. In fact, I wouldn’t have to because my daughter would never consider throwing such a tantrum.” Seeing the situation in the simplistic manner the children saw it, I would have blamed the parents for raising their child to be so narcissistic. Having been in the trenches myself, and witnessed my own reactivity, I have now developed a more humble and compassionate understanding of such situations.
I explained to the children, “It’s easy for us to judge Savannah’s parents, and you’re right that they shouldn’t have reacted so fiercely. But you have to understand that they were feeling helpless and didn’t have a clue what to do. They weren’t purposely being mean but were just caught in what seemed to them to be an impossible situation. When you become parents, you’ll understand how they felt.”
Although I understood the children’s sentiments, it was important they were aware that problems in relationships aren’t always one-sided or simple. Children often react to parents by declaring, “You are so mean!” While their underlying sentiment of feeling betrayed may be valid, it ultimately doesn’t serve them to feel victimized by anyone, least of all their parents.
In Savannah’s case, parents and child had allowed themselves to be hijacked by their anxiety, which led to them shutting out the several options before them. Both sides were paralyzed as a result of what they perceived as the other’s wrongdoing. This is how conflict leads to gridlock, leaving us feeling helpless to change the situation. It’s so easy for us to judge each other, pitting right against wrong. But I have found that this way of looking at the world doesn’t get us far.
When we ask questions such as what was causing the daughter to have a meltdown, we’ll no doubt at first make some kind of judgment, such as, “She’s just being a brat. She’s spoiled. She needs to learn she can’t have her way all the time. She ought to be more appreciative.” In other words, our initial reaction to negative situations is often something negative itself. It’s almost as if we are programmed to respond only negatively to a negative situation—as if to respond positively or even neutrally is to lose face. Once we have made this judgment, we will naturally conclude that the only way to treat a “brat” is to scold them or manipulate them in some way. In our mind we are being rational. Little do we realize that our judgments are faulty and completely biased.
The first step in detangling a reactive situation like Savannah’s is to become aware of how we project our biases, opinions, and judgments onto people’s behavior, without attempting to understand the deeper significance of what’s being communicated. Because they are “our” children, we unilaterally impose our projections onto them depending on our mood at a given moment. When they push back, we take offense and call their right to defend themselves “rude” and “disrespectful.” This is because we expect them to be passive recipients of our judgments just because they are children. There’s something not only inherently unfair about this but also detrimental to our children’s ability to protect themselves against unfair treatment in the future. We then wonder how it is that they allow themselves to be bullied or get into abusive relationships.
If we are to elevate our consciousness with regard to the common traps of parenting, we must move beyond judgments of right or wrong. So let’s examine this in a different way. Let’s not focus on the behavior, but instead ask what the individuals were experiencing on an internal level. All our behavior ultimately emerges from what we are feeling. Only by delving into our feelings can we discover what’s driving our behavior and discern the action we need to take.
What was Savannah feeling? For a start, she was clearly overwhelmed by the situation. Her emotions had been hijacked by the huge buildup of expectations around her performance. Her anxiety surpassed her capacity to cope with the pressure. The more her parents corralled her, the greater her reaction, until she finally disintegrated. Savannah’s parents missed all of this vital information.
Contrary to what her parents believed, none of this was willful or even conscious on Savannah’s part. It was all an unexpected and completely unconscious rise of anxious energy. Once anxiety overwhelms the individual, all attempts at rationalization are in vain. The language of logic falls on deaf ears. We need to employ a different language to communicate with anxiety. Parents haven’t been taught this language. It’s a language that comes from a heart-centered place instead of a mind-controlled one. It’s a language of openness and courage versus one of control and manipulation.
Parenting books give us techniques that appear to help us help our children, but in effect they mostly teach us to manipulate them out of feeling what they are feeling. Parenting books aim for “happy-happy” results as opposed to focusing on how we can deeply align with the “as is” of our own and our children’s feelings.
Although Savannah’s parents first tried the textbook response of attempting to empathize with their daughter, it was clear they were not helping her handle a difficult situation. Although they appeared to be compassionate and to empathize with her, it was clear from the way the situation escalated that they weren’t truly empathic. Rather, they had an agenda, and empathy was merely a technique they were using to get Savannah to do what they wanted her to do.
When we truly feel empathy for another, there is no agenda. A genuinely empathic response immediately recognizes that the other is in a state that’s vastly different from our own, and that in order to connect with them we will have to forgo completely our own agenda. This swift letting go requires an alive presence that understands how connection with another is an engagement in which energy flows back and forth moment by moment with no guarantee of how things will end up. We understand that it’s about the process of communicating, rather than where we need to end up or whose agenda needs to be met. It fully recognizes the importance of walking every step of the process together, with both parties engaged and empowered.
A mother tells me she empathizes with her daughter. “I understand what my child is going through,” she insists. “I realize she’s anxious, and I am trying to help her stop feeling so nervous.” Is this really empathy? On the one hand, the mother proclaims that she understands what her daughter is experiencing, so it sounds like empathy. But then she turns around and declares, in effect, “I don’t like what you are feeling. I want these feelings to disappear.” No, this isn’t empathy at all.
Our children pick up on this doublespeak and become confused about how they are supposed to feel. Most of us have made this mistake of thinking we are being empathetic when we really aren’t. We think we understand when in fact we don’t. This is why many kids yell at their parents, “You just don’t understand me!” They are absolutely right. We don’t get them.
Empathy is the ability to connect with what the other is feeling. This requires us to accept that it’s okay for our child, partner, or friend to feel a certain way. Of course they do, since we are two distinct beings. This is the natural order of things in a healthy relationship. We don’t need to change the other, any more than we need to change ourselves. We simply need to recognize the validity of the other’s feelings, even as we want our own feelings to be recognized. Initially, holding the space within ourselves for both perspectives is extremely challenging. We can do this only if we aren’t under siege from our own emotions. Anxiety constricts our inner space, causing it to quickly morph into control, which soon becomes anger. This is exactly what happened with Savannah’s parents.
Children can sense when parents are connecting with them versus when they are being manipulated so they will comply with the parents’ wishes. This serves only to make them feel that they are unheard and their wishes are unimportant, which further escalates their anxiety. When we don’t connect with them in a genuinely empathic manner, we make things harder for ourselves. When our children feel unheard, they shut down and stop cooperating. If only we knew how to genuinely empathize with our children, we would create wonderful gateways for a close, connected, and cooperative relationship.
In a situation like Savannah’s, if she could communicate what was truly going on, she would probably say something like, “It’s like there’s a storm inside me, swallowing me up, and you’re making it worse. I need you to calm down, laugh with me, and show me another way to deal with my fear rather than yelling at me.” The reality is that Savannah’s parents were interested in her anxiety only insofar as they were trying to find a way to bypass it so she would do what they wanted. Getting her onto the horse was all that mattered. But the more they focused on what Savannah needed to do to make them happy, the more anxious she became.
There’s a subtext to all of this. The real issue wasn’t whether Savannah rode the new horse. The issue was how to help her ride the waves of her anxiety. None of the parents’ strategies—sympathizing, commanding, bribing, or threatening—addressed this issue. The parents themselves now began to unravel, since Savannah’s anxiety had triggered their own. In this state, they couldn’t possibly help her work through her feelings.
Savannah’s parents needed to connect with her feelings. To do this, they would have to leave their own feelings out of the equation. If their own feelings were overwhelming, they needed to walk away and take care of them, as I described in earlier chapters.
The parents needed to turn their attention to Savannah, meeting her where she was. To do this, they needed to set aside their beliefs about what she “should” do and simply accept where she was. They might also say something like, “It’s okay that you don’t want to ride. There’ll be plenty of opportunities. Let’s go for a walk.” This is how we empathize with another’s feelings. We don’t shoo their feelings away. Neither do we allow ourselves to become unhinged. Rather, we take our children’s feelings in our stride. By so doing, we show them that anxiety is nothing to be afraid of.
Acceptance has to be real acceptance. We detach from trying to get a child to do what we had hoped they would do. Riding the horse is no longer on our radar. The only thing that matters is that we are present with our child, alongside them, calm and accepting. We abandon our agenda entirely.
The approach I’m suggesting runs counter to the common approach of telling a child in a situation like this, “Don’t be afraid.” Instead of urging them to face their anxiety and conquer it, what I’m proposing assures the child, “Anxiety is normal, so don’t worry about the fact that you are anxious. Treat it just like you do excitement or happiness. Just allow it to be, neither denying it nor resisting it.” When we either deny or resist it, anxiety turns rogue. Better to face it in its raw and natural state. Then, in its own time and way, it will diminish. Not because we have driven it away by force, but because we have grown out of it with grace.
If we could tune in to the parents’ anxiety over the fact that their daughter chose not to ride, we would hear thoughts such as:
If Savannah’s mother were not triggered, she might ask her to take her to the stables and show her all the horses. I wouldn’t push her to do this, only request it. If she agrees, she would demonstrate a genuine curiosity in everything she’s learned, affirming what she’s accomplished rather than focusing on what she still has to achieve. She might also ask her to tell her stories about the horses and her experiences with them. Her entire focus would be on her process of learning, omitting all talk of performance.
Genuinely disconnected from whether she performs or not, she might next ask her if she wants to show her another horse to which she feels a connection. She might suggest that she could even ride that horse instead for a few minutes to see if she feels comfortable—but only if there’s a total willingness, without coaxing. Or perhaps she would prefer to walk that horse around the ring. But in no way would she attempt to persuade her to perform, which would need to come from her.
It’s crucial that she be entirely comfortable with her choosing to sit out this performance. It’s quite possible Savannah would pick up on her energy and detachment to the outcome. Absorbing her relaxed state, she might appreciate that she is indeed competent as a rider and capable of entering the show with any horse instead of just Rosie. However, if she is truly detached, either outcome is acceptable.
Someone may reason, “This approach could be taken to mean it’s okay for our children to quit.” My response to this is that even more than a love of riding, it’s Savannah’s desire to explore her interests that’s central, which holds true even if she decided to give up riding. Exploring an interest, perhaps enjoying it for a time, is all we ever do anyway, since nothing can ever be permanent. Sooner or later, no matter how much Savannah might love riding, she may be forced to give it up. This is the nature of our temporal existence.
What really matters is that we are true to ourselves, enjoying whatever we choose to engage in for as long as we choose to engage in it. Fulfillment exists only in this moment now, not in a concept of how long something is supposed to continue. Our inability to value moment-by-moment engagement with the learning process robs us of our ability to appreciate that nothing is ever really in vain, and neither is anything permanent.
We can never make our children guarantee that they will stick with something. Our children are allowed to have feelings and experiences that run counter to our expectations. As they grow, their interests often quite naturally change. This isn’t something to oppose, but something to encourage. The essential quality we are seeking to draw out has nothing to do with how long a child sticks with something, but the degree to which they have been able to engage their body, mind, and spirit. This engagement is unquantifiable, and therein lies our discomfort. We have been conditioned to prize tangible results. When we do this, we deprive ourselves of something inestimable, which is the moment-by-moment process of exploring new experiences.
We claim that we want our children to be fearless so they will participate fully in life. However, our obsession with the end result encourages fear in our children, handicapping them with anxiety that prevents them from trying their best. Our children sense when we don’t care about their efforts, only their successes. This is why they disengage. Not because they are lazy, but because they are anxious about failing. Savannah wasn’t being “difficult” when she wanted only Rosie. She was terrified that she would fail on another horse.
As we confront our own humanity and learn to accept it, we find ourselves experiencing a greater degree of empathy for our children. Empathy is heart-centered rather than mind-based. It’s about the other—about their feelings and experiences, not our own.
You might wonder, “What if my child experiences feelings I don’t have a solution for, such as if they don’t want to go to school and yet have to? Do I just allow them to sit with what they are feeling? Do I empathize with their desire to stay home? How is this going to solve anything?”
It’s important to be clear that we are not talking about raising our children in a bubble of feeling to the exclusion of living in the real world. Rather, the challenge is to help our children understand and negotiate their feelings. Their feelings rule them all the time anyway. They just don’t know it, and we don’t see it. When we teach our children how to become literate about their feelings, they learn that it’s possible to flow with each feeling instead of being overwhelmed by it. To teach this when a child doesn’t want to go to school, we start by allowing space for this feeling. Let’s be absolutely clear about what this means. Allowing space for their feelings—especially those of anxiety—means that we don’t experience any anxiety about the feelings’ existence. The moment we have anxiety about our children’s anxiety, our children will sense it and will undoubtedly unravel. Instead of convincing them not to be anxious, we need to embrace their feelings for what they are, accepting them as they rise.
Consider how different this is from the way many of us react. We might say something like, “Don’t be silly, you have to go to school,” “Stop being scared,” or “You’ll be punished if you don’t go to school.” Each of these reactions not only doesn’t disperse the fear, but it teaches the child to feel ashamed of their feelings and perhaps even afraid of them. Worse still would be to say, as I have heard many parents say, “Okay, I understand you don’t want to go to school. You don’t have to go.” This just teaches a child to capitulate to their fears and avoid reality.
Now let me share with you a more conscious approach. Invite the feelings into the room. Ask the child to draw a picture of the feelings and tell a story about them. Share stories from your own childhood that address your feelings. Then, to assuage your child’s anxiety, explain that such feelings are normal and natural. In this way, the child learns neither to be driven by fear nor to run from it, but to accept it for what it is and tolerate it.
Once a child is able to accept their fear, there’s a sense in which they make friends with it, which has a soothing effect. This is how we show empathy—not by feeling sorry for the child or trying to rescue them, but by helping them face their fear in a safe setting. Often fear will simply dissipate when we take this approach, not necessarily immediately but in its own time. To rush this process defeats the point of allowing the child to integrate it. To learn to tolerate fear and allow it to take its own course helps a child navigate their internal landscape successfully.
If this process is done with our children from an early age, they will be able to integrate their fear so that the energy invested in it becomes available for finding creative solutions to issues. A child who may initially resist going to school will eventually find a solution for themself, one that doesn’t involve blind surrender but empowers them. As mentioned earlier, techniques such as role-playing and role reversal are great for finding new ways to express the energy that has been invested in fear, since they offer opportunities to be creative, fun, and adventurous.
Because so many of us are addicted to a need to take action, I help parents create a new to-do list for when their children are in pain. I ask them to “do” specific things that will help them align with their children’s state of being. Here are some examples:
When feelings are expressed and held sacred in a safe space, our children are able to process them and let them go without having to reincarnate them in indirect ways. This is a powerful gift indeed to offer our children.
Sometimes we entomb our children in fear of the practicalities of life without realizing it. For instance, when Alice was eight years old, she began expressing a fear of elevators. Outings in the city with her were extremely stressful for her parents. Things got so bad that she refused to take any elevator. So the parents began taking the stairs whenever they entered a high-rise. “I so understand her,” Alice’s mother said. “I was also a really anxious kid and used to be terrified of many things myself. This is why I don’t push my daughter to confront her fears. I feel like I should empathize with her, but I don’t know whether I’m helping her or causing her to be more of a nervous wreck.”
Unlike Savannah’s parents, this mother was trying to fully bond with her daughter’s experience. As I remarked earlier, this is a positive move. However, she fails to understand the difference between empathy and overly identifying with her daughter. Because the daughter’s anxiety mirrors the mother’s own experiences in childhood and reminds her of her own fragility, she has become overprotective, shielding her daughter from the pain of confronting her fear.
The issue isn’t the elevator, but instead the daughter’s fear that she’s too fragile to confront this challenge. This fragility has been directly absorbed from the mother’s own early experiences. This is how a state of inadequacy gets passed down from generation to generation.
What should the mother do? The first step is to recognize that empathy is different from collusion. Empathy says, “I understand that elevators can be scary. I will be by your side to help you deal with this struggle. We will face this together.” In contrast, collusion says, “I also used to get scared in elevators. Let’s take the stairs.” The daughter’s fear is endorsed as a valid way of life, when it needs to be felt and confronted.
Do you see the fear in this mother’s solution of taking the stairs? She’s saying that her daughter doesn’t have the resilience to overcome a quite normal fear. She believes she’s normalizing her daughter’s fear by relating it to her own childhood, when in fact she’s projecting her experience onto the situation. This overprotective approach doesn’t normalize the daughter’s fear but instead pathologizes it. Instead of liberating her, it paralyzes her.
To help Alice confront her fear, there are a number of avenues her mother can take. She might create a playful situation in the safety of their home in which the daughter draws her fear, writes stories about it, and the two of them pretend to ride an elevator. In this harmless way, the mother could help her daughter not only to confront her fear in a head-on manner but also to defuse the emotional charge around it.
Role-playing the situation, the mother says to her daughter, “I wonder whether your favorite bear would like an exciting ride in the elevator. How about I take him up one floor and see how he does? You can go up the stairs and meet us off the elevator. If he enjoys his ride, you might like to come back down with us. If he doesn’t enjoy his ride, then you can help me teach him how safe it is to ride an elevator. We can teach him which buttons to press to make the elevator go, and we can show him how much fun a ride can be.”
Drawing on a spirit of adventure, one could imagine many ways to acclimate Alice to elevators through role-playing. If she has a favorite musical group, the mother could suggest that they take iPods and listen to their favorite tunes as they ride. They could eat Alice’s favorite ice cream in the elevator. They could take her best friend with them. The mother’s ability to be enthusiastic in the face of this challenge—neither pushing and controlling nor giving up in despair—can make all the difference.
Through this approach, children learn that fears aren’t something to be avoided but are instead to be confronted creatively. The mother’s determination not to allow the daughter to capitulate to her fear is crucial. But the determination has to stem from a belief that anxiety must be faced. It may also be necessary for the mother to be resilient over a period of time.
Remember, the focus can’t be on whether the daughter learns to love elevators, any more than Savannah’s issue was with riding a particular horse. A person may actually not like elevators. Nothing says we can’t climb stairs instead, and in fact there can be a health benefit. The issue is how we deal with anxiety as it arises. Once the anxiety is no longer a problem, whether we use the elevator or take the stairs is purely a matter of personal choice.
Anxiety drives the majority of our behavior. Learning to deal with our fear as parents is the real challenge, since it’s what enables us to equip our children to deal with their own fears.
The way out of fear isn’t to try to annihilate it, which will serve only to increase it. Instead, the way forward is to accept and befriend our fear. As I have said before, those who are fearless are those who have learned to tolerate their anxiety. It is not that they don’t have anxiety, but instead that they fully expect the anxiety, and once it is experienced, they fully allow it to sit beside them without overwhelming them. I offer clients the visual image of taking fear out of the driver’s seat and placing it on the seat beside them. Allowing it to sit beside us while we go about our tasks despite its presence provides an opportunity for it to become integrated.
To make sense of your fear, ask yourself the following kinds of questions:
Once we are aware of what our fear is really about, we can figure out how to work with it. Awareness is the key. As long as we are being unconsciously driven by a fear, it will have power over us. This is why investigating what the fear is really about is so important.
Although I am encouraging you to ask yourself key questions about your fear, I’m not advocating that you engage in self-talk, which even when it’s positive is entirely unhelpful. Awareness is fundamentally different from having an internal dialogue with yourself. Most of us indulge in a great deal of self-talk, chattering endlessly within ourselves—much of the chatter being in the form of judging, worrying, comparing, and admonishing.
You might think, as some teach, that you can channel your mind’s self-talk to a higher good, perhaps overriding your fear, but this is precisely the opposite of mindfulness. When we are mindful, we simply observe our internal dialogue, but we don’t get involved in it. Awareness is transformative, whereas self-talk is debilitating, since we can never talk ourselves into a more effective way of living.
Say you feel anxious when you awaken in the morning. The conscious approach would have you pause and notice your anxiety. All that’s required is to simply observe what you are feeling. There’s nothing you need to do about it. Of course, the mind will tell you otherwise, because it loves to chew on things like this. Simple mindfulness—just noticing what you are feeling—allows you to own and honor your anxiety. By using this approach, you won’t attempt to process it by dumping it on your children or partner. It’s not something to be acted out or talked about with others, but something to be contained mindfully.
If having a mental discussion with ourselves about our anxiety isn’t helpful, neither is overriding it beneficial, as I mentioned a moment ago. When we do either of these, the anxiety simply shows up elsewhere. Being mindful allows us to stay attuned and present, which empowers us to process what’s happening. You might say that mindfulness—learning to observe ourselves in an ongoing way, so that we become aware of what’s going on inside us—is akin to the daily flossing we do to prevent plaque from building up on our teeth.
As we observe ourselves, we need to ask questions such as:
Children who are raised by parents who are authentic and transparent learn to have little fear of their inner states. Grounded in who they are, they feel sure of their inherent goodness and are unafraid to engage the world with an open heart that’s connected to the goodness of others.
~ A New Commitment to Shedding Judgment ~
My judgment against others
Erupts from a place of lack within,
From an old blueprint
Where I was judged by others in the same way.
Though judgment is far easier than introspection,
I realize that it keeps my heart closed.
It is only when I can enter compassion for others
That I ultimately can forgive myself.