Tag: parenting

equanimity + anger & emotional fluidity + self-compassion for flight response

#

I generally think of how equanimity will help me be graceful among suffering or misfortune that is not my fault ~ a sort of forbearance that’s easy to imagine compared to equanimity among suffering I perceive to be caused by my own mistakes and inadequacies, if I think I’ve done something wrong or fallen short, such as feeling insecure as a parent. But these are the times we need equanimity the most, when we are the most hard on ourselves. 

#

I wish I had a healthier relationship with anger. I wish we all did and our culture wasn’t so anger-averse. It is on the one hand celebrated (in movies and the aggrandisment of war) and on the other hand repressed (in our children). That’s a mixed message!

I lost my temper recently, yelled at my stepson for abusing his mother while she was trying to help him, threw a tube of hydrolytes across the room, slammed a few doors.

Nothing major ~ and it’s normal, you might say: teenagers are impossible and their moods and bullshit are acutely triggering. Maybe so, but is it normal for a situation like this to cause such an acute sense of shame and self-loathing and a powerful flight response in the form of suicidal ideation!? I guess nervous-system dysregulation is the new normal.

I need this to change. Nervous system balance and emotional fluidity needs to be the new black. Trauma-informed, transpersonal and holistic self-recovery from the damage we’ve done to ourselves and others with our moralistic view of the human-emotion spectrum: anger is bad; joy is good; surprise is neutral until cognitions force our reaction into duality.

Emotions evolved to keep us safe by motivating us to act without needing to rationalise. The social disgust that became anger this morning has a healthy evolutionary and social function if we can just let it be without casting judgement upon it.

To that end, a good place to learn about such emotional fluidity is Filipe Rocha’s Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) training and for nervous system mastery, see Jonny Miller.

#

I was talking to Nikki about the acute cognitive distortions I experience when I’m triggered about my capacity to be a good dad, which I wrote about recently. My wounded parts tell me I can’t participate in the family anymore because I need to keep my distance for the sake of harm-minimisation. If I lose my temper, I might cause trauma.

Between my own trauma and the toxic culture pitted against parents, I don’t feel I can do any good (certainly not with the perfectionism my personality subconsciously demands) and the result is that I just want to opt out or tap out. I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m not being a good dad anyway. I have so little to do with Zane, am I being a dad at all?

I did manage to call myself out on that language, remembering that I am being the only dad I know how to be, and that has to be good enough because I didn’t have a good model to start with.

And there would be some neuroscientific understanding about what my upbringing did to the development of my brain that has left me deficient in chemical pathways or something. Here I am trying to live values such as kindness and compassion

when perhaps my brain doesn’t actually know the pathway or the pathway may never have been laid down. I’m talking about how certain experiences in childhood leave a person with the right brain-plumbing. I may be fighting to cognitively apply values my brain physiology literally does not recognise.

When I was still triggered, Nikki tried to suggest a way things could be done differently next time and pointed out connection before correction. I could not entertain a way I would do things differently next time,

and the suggestion is predicated on the assumption I am capable of making connection in the first place. If I am not capable of maintaining that connection, I also lose capacity to assert boundaries and this leads to major anger-spectrum stuff.

I don’t know how to do connection safely in the context of the trauma I live with ~ I am afraid of rejection, so I don’t take the risk. And I find so many things triggering about Zane, I guess because of repressed shadow and disconnection from self.

My desire to flee from the family and no longer participate as a father may be a flee response and/or it may be a reasonable and logical conclusion of me being neither fit nor willing. It’s hard to tell among whirling thoughts.

I never wanted to have kids and there was a reason for that. Now I’m a stepdad and it simply may not be a good idea. I don’t believe in nuclear families anyway. The pressure between trauma and a toxic culture makes it extremely difficult to parent well. I have other things I could do well if I weren’t trying to live up to an illusory idea and paly roles I may not want to play and which don’t meet the other’s needs anyway.

I catch myself again, and remember we are progressive adults and can imagine new dynamics ~ we don’t need to play by the rules of a culture that has fucked us up, and in fact doing so would be cruel insanity.

The only way to respond to these kinds of cognitive distortions is by prioritising self-compassion. The same approach I was moving toward anyway: privacy, solitude, time alone to make connection with self; cultivating the heart qualities and dropping the identification with roles like ‘parent’ and ‘husband’; authenticity though it jeopardises attachment.

I would rather have the authenticity from connection with self than any attachment relationship that requires the sacrifice of authenticity.

an open letter to men who think they are shit dads

Canva generated AI art depicting “dad feeling self-compassion and trying to pull himself together so he can be there for others on father’s day trauma recovery reintegration” looks uncannily like myself embracing my wounded inner child

To all the men today who think they are a shit dad, I see you through me. 

I see what constraints you are living with, between your childhood trauma and the toxic culture that has relegated us to the dustbin of the heartless-provider1. It’s very fucking hard to be compassionate and kind and patient with our kids today when generations behind us were not these things: we didn’t have the role models. 

I understand, as you do, that not having the role models doesn’t excuse us from the responsibility to be the good-hearted men we know our kids need. We understand it’s not our fault that our parents didn’t love us the way we needed, but we also understand it’s our responsibility to find the love we need to give ourselves and our kids. 

That though, is so fucking hard, especially in our culture, alone, divided, “the village” now a legend we hear about from traditional societies and pre-industrial Europe. It’s really really hard to act and live from our higher true self (where compassion and kindness are the default reactions) when our conditioning and ego and trauma is running the show most of the time because our nervous systems are fried and our default reactions are non-constructive, damaging, traumatising. 

It’s very fucking hard to be aware enough, awake enough, and self-compasionate enough to not pass on the trauma we are carrying from generations past. It takes work to reconnect with our true self enough that our default reactions transform out of destructive habitual maladaptions into constructive and compassionate active responses.

On the journey of trauma recovery and conscious evolution, we are gradually ascending in a spiral that brings us inexorably closer to reacting with compassion as a default because that’s all our true self knows. But it’s a journey and a spiral, meaning we have to go through the same tests and lessons over and over again, learning something new each time, and evolving if we are aware of where we tripped up last time. 

If you’re doing this, then you’re on the right track and you’re a much-better dad than you are probably giving yourself credit for.

Taking responsibility for your own love and healing and evolution is the absolute best fathering a man can do, because without that our kids are just getting some performance of what we think a father should be and that’s only ever going to be disingenuous, dishonest, not real. 

Be your flaws and do the work of overcoming them, of recovering from and transforming trauma and becoming whole again, and know that you’re setting an example of a man who takes genuine happiness seriously and will not settle for some performance of happiness we copied from a fucking beer ad or something.

.

.

.

I made a video of this post because I know that some folk out there just can’t do reading sometimes and I wanted this compassion missive to reach as many as possible 👇🏼

  1. What I mean by this is that we have been conditioned to provide materially for our families, at the expense of our own hearts and we are now expected to be loving and compassionate fathers despite having those parts of us conditioned out of us by culture. We were made into worker drones to serve the industrial economy and now we are trying to find our hearts again. ↩︎

ego … it’s just like, your opinion, man

During a compassion meditation just now, something came up that I’m really proud of ~ and perhaps an insight I think will be helpful for anyone who has become aware they are acting out a conditioned response and weren’t able to stop. It hurts to let go of our conditioning while we are in the middle of such an emotional reaction, because when we try to let go, our ego thinks it is dying.

But it’s okay ~ compassion to the rescue!

It can hurt to renounce our egoic position because we conflate the ego with ourself and we feel like we’re letting ourselves down, but we’re not ~ we’re letting our ego get out of the way so our higher self can come through.

So I share this story for anyone who has experienced the exquisite pain of relinquishing egoic conditioning to allow a heartfulness to come through instead of the controll-y fear that a lot of us put up with inside us because of maladaptive coping mechanisms. I’ll see if I can be concise.

Today a decision was made in our family that I didn’t agree with*;

it was a decision that really, ultimately, has nothing to do with me, and getting in the way of it would have caused more conflict and tension than it was worth;

my ego/conditioning thought otherwise ~ that I should step in and dictate values, make ultimatums, control the situation and ‘fix’ the ‘problem’;

but I saw the egoic conditioning for what it was, sat myself down, selected a guided meditation that seemed appropriate (this one here) and submitted myself to a bit of ‘cultural re-education’.

I’m deeply grateful for that guided meditation, because it helped me find the space to remember I can let go of how I think reality should be, and allow reality to unfold as it sees fit, and wow, what a relief it was!

The suffering of resistance fell away, and something like a higher (compassionate) self kicked in.

I can be honest and say I wasn’t all that happy about it: there is something exquisitely uncomfortable and painful about the micro-ego-death it felt like I went through.

In my experience there is something really painful about relinquishing egoic control and recognising that my opinions about reality don’t mean shit to reality … in recognising that my conditioned ideas about how we should be raising our son are probably a bit shit.

But the pain is just my ego taking a hit, and that’s okay, necessary, especially as there is a compassion practice in my life to support that death and rebirth.

After some compassionate reflection, I feel lighter and liberated and refreshed and grateful because now there is more room in me for compassion to move in where egoic conditioning had once been “man-spreading”.

By renouncing my conditioned attachment to expectations and to values I borrowed from my parents and upbringing, I am able to move into alignment with compassionate values that tell me Zane’s mental health is more important than whether he’s going to school.

~ ~ ~

* The details are not super relevant, but sometimes they can help a person to relate to a story, so, what happened is: Zane was allowed to go out and see his mates after he bullshitted his way out of school for the second day in a row ~ after being out of school for six months. Whether this was a good or bad decision is not the point ~ he’s having a hard time lately, and forcing him to go to school would only make that worse, but I was worried that rewarding him for wagging would establish a problematic precedent. Any argument made on compassionate grounds is bound to trump what my ego thinks is best.

reaching out ~ what to do with a truant teen

Zane buggered off again today ~ skipped school and bailed on meeting us to drop his uniform to him. We found him, but boy has it brought up a lot of stuff!

My conditioning dictates that I should be angry, but I’m trying to be positive and bring a compassionate perspective.

This is all in the context of me trying to rediscover my place in the dynamics of the family, so I’m feeling very unsure about what my part should be in responding to this truancy again.

I’m a step-dad who has minimal-to-no relationship with Zane, and therefore limited agency for either discipline or influence. The only part I know is supporting Nikki, but she insisted I stay at the library while she drove around looking for him.

At least if I’m not there for the potential confrontation when Zane decides to show up and face the consequences of breaking our trust again, maybe I’ll have the chance to calm down a bit and play the part of compassionate supporter ~ I do want to understand why he’s making these decisions, but in which parallel universe is a 13-year-old boy going to share this with his step-dad?

In which parallel universe does a 13-year-old boy know himself why he behaves one way or another?

We need the skills of introspection and emotional intelligence to know the nuances of our internal motivations ~ skills that are not taught in our sausage-factory schools.

This gap in our education culture is a huge part of why I’m doing Kokoro 心 Heart: we need to learn how to manage our own psychospiritual wellbeing enough to stop perpetuating a culture that results in 13-year-old kids wagging class to smoke bongs down the creek. (That’s just one specific symptom of the cultural malaise I hope to address in the posts here and in the work I’m doing in the business around Kokoro 心 Heart.)

I spent my whole high-school career smoking bongs down the creek, and my decades-long drug and alcohol dependency left me in my late 20s with the emotional development of the teenager I was when I started using drugs, because I didn’t have the mentors to help me learn how to deal with my emotions any other way.

We are letting down our children and our future by allowing these gaps to remain in the upbringing of the emerging generations.

Nikki and I are doing all that we can to access services that will make up for the deficits in our own and Zane’s development.

If you’re going through or have been through this, let me know in the comments. We need all the guidance we can get, lest our son become like Trent from Punchy.

~ ~ ~

For more post updates, find me on Twitter, on WordPress at the follow link below, or sign up for my little mailing-list newsletter here. I’m also on LinkedIn and Unifyd.

the importance of connection in parenting

connection in parenting — obviously important, difficult to achieve

We spoke to a parenting coach today through an organisation called ReachOut, and it was very helpful — she validated and confirmed a lot of what we’ve been learning about some changes we’d like to make in our approach to parenting, as well as gently challenging some of those ideas.

For example, I had started to understand and experiment with using “I” statements if I want to intervene with Zane’s behaviour. Say, “I don’t like it when you swing the cat by her tail,” instead of “Don’t do that!” This is more of a boundary statement than a disciplinary action or a criticism.

We were advised recently by our counsellor that discipline is not my role: I am not his bio-father, Zane is therefore not individuating from me but from Nikki, his bio-mother; and my attempts at discipline without much of a relationship through other interactions were mostly just contributing to conflict.

The coach agreed that using “I” statements is a healthy way to assert a boundary without crossing … well, the boundary between discipline and boundary-setting. But after talking about where my relationship is at with Zane, the coach encouraged me to pull back even from making “I” statements at this stage, until Zane and I have got our relationship into a condition where boundaries will be respected.

Continue reading “the importance of connection in parenting” →