Our children are a gift on so many levels. For me one of the most subtle, challenging, perplexing, frustrating, irritating, amazing aspects of having a child is their ability to pinpoint our shadow sides, our weaknesses, our buttons and push them. Only a primary partner or child generally has an intimate enough relationship with us to be able to mirror our wounds with such dead accuracy.
Initially of course this feels like less then good news. For me, projections are one of the most challenging facets of psychology, both within myself, with intimate family and for clients and students. The dictionary defines projections as the unconscious transfer of one’s own desires or emotions to another person. I studied this in school twenty years ago while getting my Master’s yet I am amazed how often subtle projections arise to which I have been completely blind. While not everything that irritates someone about another is a projection, I often can witness the mirror image of what is troublesome within the other person, be that a student, client, relative or myself.
Ironically this is one of the greatest opportunities to awaken out of the trance of ego. It is only when our buttons are pushed that we can begin to recognize the distortion or wound and unravel the lines of energy, of conditioning that keep us tied to that behavior. Numerous times in my life, it has only been when someone calls me on my distorted behavior can I even recognize it as unskillful.
Despite knowing all of this intellectually, when my daughter began acting like my father around age five, I was horrified. She gradually became very controlling, bossy, angry and stubborn. After struggling for years with HER behavior, someone pointed out that she saw my daughter’s anger as an introject, defined as the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others. It was only then that it began to dawn on me that I had disowned anger from being raised by a raging father. My father’s temper and wrath were so distasteful to me that I was literally blind to my own passive-aggressive behavior. I already knew I could be controlling and stubborn but did not fully own the damage I caused with these behaviors until I saw them within my daughter.
Trust me, initially I blamed my daughter and tried to change her. I used all kinds of techniques, behavior modification, tricks of psychology to get her to change. I became enraged by her stubbornness, her bossiness. Our relationship slowly dissolved from loving and intimate to conflictual and argumentative. Now remember I had studied psychology for years including family systems and the awareness that children often become the identified patient for a dysfunctional system. It was easy to see when I worked with clients in a family, especially when we used a two way mirror at our clinic to observe the families in action. It was obvious how the child was blamed for so many problems that usually existed within the system, the family. Yet in my own life I was blind as a bat.
My deep love for my daughter and my horror at watching our loving relationship begin to crumble fueled my intense search for awakening. It was not fun or pretty yet the quality of my current loving, harmonious, intimate, delightful relationship with my teenage daughter has made it all so absolutely worth it. When my daughter was five, I remember a women telling me how she and her mother hated each other. They were both powerful, strong willed women and their relationship had been destroyed by their conflicts. I was appalled to hear this and saw my future unfolding before me if I did not find a way to shift the developing dynamic with my strong willed daughter. We are a bull and lion, Tarsus and Leo and boy did it play out with fits of temper, yelling, drama and trauma.
Yet here is the kicker. I would find it very hard to believe, if it had not happened to me. As I owned my anger, my rage, my control issues, my stubbornness, my daughter began to morph into an agreeable, calm, even tempered child. Yes, she was and is extremely strong willed which I love despite it being a challenging aspect to parent. Yet so many troublesome behaviors simply evaporated.
The children of today need to be strong willed to face the future of our planet. They do not say yes and amen as my generation did. Their quality of not complying silently with whatever they are told to do will serve this earth well as they are system busters, evolved to break down archaic structures. It is difficult often for other generations to accept this, to grant them freedom and dignity, to allow the “seen and not heard” of previous generations to evaporate from child rearing. They will be heard.
The beauty is they unconsciously are the perfect antidote to our burdensome egos. They will push our buttons just where we need to recognize our unconscious wounds, fragmented selves. They will firmly yet lovingly reflect back our distortions, our disowned grief. They are a gift, zen masters programed to wake us up. It is not an easy journey, yet for those who answer the call, the gift of holy, whole, healed relationships is the closest we can come to heaven on earth. It is time to shift the paradigm of parenting from one of discipline and seeing children as blank slates on which we can paint whatever we wish, to a relationship based on mutual respect and acknowledgment of each child, each person’s inherent worth, value and wisdom. It is time for the hierarchy of dominance to be dismantled. Just as we have had to liberate different races, liberate women from the yoke of domination, it is time to free our children from that old way of child rearing. I am often stunned by the wisdom of my daughter and her friends. Let us open our eyes and see the magnificence of our children, let them shape us, mold us back to a remembrance of our true nature.
When my daughter began going to a Waldorf school, these words of Rudolf Steiner moved me to tears, “Receive the children with reverence, educate them with love, send them forth in freedom.” If all of us can embrace these words, I know we can and will shift the entire planet to one no longer torn by war and conflict but to one of peace and harmony, one child, one parent at a time.
Thank you for this it’s very helpful
You are welcome!