Recently, thousands of parents around the world gathered together with Byron Katie and I as we embarked on an adventure to help untangle some of the thoughts and beliefs that make parenting difficult. I have known about Katie’s work for years (The Work of Byron Katie), but this was the first time we had collaborated, and let me tell you…the room was dripping with love.
Twenty-six years ago, Katie stumbled on a revelation that changed her life, and subsequently, the lives of millions of people around the world. Simply put, she understood that suffering is the result of our stressful thinking.
As I watched her do The Work with parents in our webinar, I glimpsed a world where parents don’t move their day burdened with guilt and shame, and children are raised in an atmosphere where they get to be who they are, without an overlay of a parent’s neediness or disapproval.
Imagine parenting your children without needing them to behave a certain way so that you don’t feel embarrassed, or without needing them to cooperate so you don’t feel out of control. This isn’t to say that we don’t want our children to behave well or cooperate! But in my work, I have long said that when we need our children to be or behave a particular way, we throw off the natural hierarchy of parenting, prompting the very behaviors we don’t want to see.
One of the highlights of this first in a series of three webcasts with Byron Katie was when a caller expressed that she felt like a failure as a parent because her twenty-year old son wouldn’t talk with her. She said it was impossible to live with him because there was no communication. As I listened, I thought that if her son didn’t feel her desperation for communication, it might give him more space to respond to her gestures of connection to a degree and at a rate that he could manage. In other words, her need for him to open up was probably contributing to his refusal to do so.
Katie brought this mother to that very understanding, suggesting that she simply tell her truth to him without pushing for any kind of response. She invited her to say something to her son like, “I love you, and I don’t know how to connect with you. I miss you” without pushing to try to elicit a promise from him to try harder to communicate.
This last bit is so essential. When we declare our truth in a loving way to our children without needing a particular response, we give them space to come toward us.
I hope you’ll tune in to the next broadcast of this special series on The Work of Byron Katie to learn more about how to neutralize the harmful thoughts and beliefs that get in the way of enjoying the experience of parenting.
