The Importance of Teaching Our Parents Well

I posted a personal experience in a group about an exchange I had with an ER doctor when my son was in the hospital and what my mother had said to him, basically swinging bats at me, telling him to do the same.

Other people I can navigate. Run circles around usually. But you know, the people who’ve raised us boundary-less make us freeze or fight. But cold nor blood are something I’m into these days. Notice I left out the last option.

“Flight.”

Some chic (rather than acknowledge the shiny entirety of my post) took that one sentence (out of many) and commented “your mother is toxic and should be kicked out of your life.” Many thumbs went up about it. But hey, opinions are like assholes, and my mom might be my asshole, but she’s mine, and prior me, empathic me, would’ve sponged in those words and took on this woman’s opinion as more valid than my own, but I didn’t. And full circle, here’s why.

Yesterday, nearing the end of our call, my client said to me, “Stacy, four years ago, I’d never even thought it was possible to be at this space with my dad.” She’s the perfect daughter, whose wrapped herself up tight to please those who have previously used her as a distraction to not have to deal with their own shit. They were dysfunctional. She watched. She knew being “good” (maybe even performing) worked somehow, so she came to me after years of suffocating herself behind an image of someone she had to be, not someone she “wanted” to be.

In tears, I said, “and this is the whole point of our session today. You’ve literally transformed situations from the inside out rather than having to “go out there,” to make it what you want.” (I can’t even list all of the ways she’s done this so far, but the list is mighty, and she’s gotten quite far).

I know where she is. I know the stairs I’ve just held her hand and walked up beside her on.

She lives right next to her parents at this point after years of finding that “flighting” doesn’t change anything at all. It just gives us the same problems, further away from the root, which is the only place the entirety of the problem can heal from.

So last night, I witnessed my second domestic dispute of the day. The second time I called the cops while I watched a girl paced frantically, sobbing, screaming behind her garage for someone to help while her mom and her mom’s boyfriend screamed, in attack, in the yard for everyone to hear at 10pm. There was a chase, it got weird.

The first time I didn’t intervene because I didn’t see the two kids who were hidden behind the pole I watched the scene from behind as a mother clearly using anger to cover up her hurt, hit her ex (aka baby daddy) for having her kids around a “criminal whore.” Problem was, the very kids I know she was there to defend, she perpetrated, while she wailed on their father and then left them to sit in the car with the man who was soooooo wrong he’d let his kids around a criminal whore. What were the kids to think? Did she really protect them? The woman didn’t even say goodbye as they, stunned, just stared in silence watching their father get beat up and then their mother speed off to leave them with him.

Those children, the three I would’ve done ANYTHING in my power to defend yesterday, were my mother.

She watched her father bloody her mother more consistently than any of them would like to admit. When her siblings intervened, his hands turned to them. My mother prides herself in crying in front of her father, only once (when her mom was dying of cancer when she was a teenager), only to be hit by him who asked, “What are you crying about?”

She was the two kids in the car I couldn’t see, who didn’t know how to ask for help, but knew they had to be strong and still while help was needed. Helpless, but strong. Bystander, but protector (because at least this way, the self, is protected). What a mindfuck for a juvenile psyche.

I don’t know about my clients father’s early childhood experiences. Ironically, I doubt she does either, and that’s the point. I hear all the time from clients that their therapists (and our culture at large) have told them to cut anyone toxic out of their lives. To be very angry with their exes whom they have children with and to cut off all communication. Well, sure that’s an option if you want to bury your head in the sand about the very real reality that even if you hate the schmuck you bore children with, that schmuck will be a part of your life forevermore, and it’s likely, that even though you may secretly wish he were dead, he won’t be anytime soon. What I’ve heard most of all, is that either the therapists themselves, or their own daughters, have cut off their own family members as a cure to their insanity.

Listen, I do believe at times in life, separation is necessary so one can feel into themselves enough to actually hear what they believe without the voices of everyone who wants to control what they believe about themselves. But let’s get clear; it is NOT the ultimate solution.

My client now holds in her heart, a gem she once didn’t even consider as a possibility, that is a gift no one who’s unwilling to receive it, sadly, will ever get to know. But it’s whole. It’s not a tiny stupid present wrapped in a really big and beautiful box. It’s a whole island on the inside, that no box could ever, in a billion years, do justice nor contain.

She has tried separation. Actually for the first time at the age of fourteen, and then for many, many years later. Flighting is no doubt easier on the nervous system than standing in the tension of having to freeze, or fight to protect your precious self, but in my experience, we cannot, cannot, cannot, heal something within ourselves by having to go “out there” to get something we’ve never even experienced. We may be blessed to receive things we’ve never experienced, but first, we must get all the way “in” to where we actually are, because it’s only from that place, we can make movements from within, rather than always vying for what’s without. Eventually when we face things as what they are rather than what we wish they’d be, our nervous system sets to a new normal where the things that froze or fought us, no longer demand our temperature change on their behalf.

I’m about to go into labor with my fourth baby. This will be (prayers please) my second all natural vaginal birth after two cesareans. Childbirth has much to teach us about life, but mainly, it’s taught me what I’m trying to teach you.

If I’m being honest, I’m scared. I have many reasons to be scared. I had my last seizure less than a year ago and the memory of that frequency has haunted me since. Ironically, the absolute surrender just before I fall, is the same frequency birth asks me to rest in. What it means to me is pure unconsciousness. What it means to birth, is giving up my resistance to pure consciousness, to the vulnerability of life. Either way, I resist going there, and I’m about to “have” to. The only way I will get “through” labor consciously, is to sink all the scary way “in” to labor, so I can see a new life on the other side of it. And, such is life.

If we want to heal the parts of ourselves we feel have been robbed from us, separating from the people who hold them, rather than learning how to be “in” relationship to ourselves in the face of those relationships, will create the same exact pattern we’re trying to get away from, in some other area of our lives. Truly also, even if you only have an invisible, etheric, healthy relationship with your dead family members, or family members that you’ve separated from, getting fully “into” that relationship and knowing your power play in it, is essential for knowing yourself.

We may have been victims to the projections of others, and it may’ve really fucked us up, but if we stay victims to our victimhood by thinking the big bad monster is so strong and so much bigger than us that it’ll swallow us whole so we have to escape it at all costs, we’ll never know ourselves, and our family members, carrying our broken parts, will never know themselves with the weight of us on their shoulders.

After all, our family members most likely didn’t become insane-like because they had cushy, well designed lives. They got there because they had to be the kids, they’ve asked us to be, stuffing themselves in there, pissed at the world that they never stood a chance in the face of the insanity, so they skipped out not only on doing their work to get sane, but on relationships and intimacy in general, and then they got us, a living sentient being they had not a clue what to do with, and most definitely, not a clue how to actually “be” with.

Our parents “are” us, as much as we’d hate to admit it. Loving them, for all that they never got to become, isn’t a gift to them, it’s a gift to our healing.

Withholding because they’re assholes is literally the same exact thing as what we hated about them. They withheld love. This is where we must...actually, “be” the change.

Separation may be a band-aid, but it’s not healing. Integration, is healing, and even for those of us who feel it impossible, it IS possible if you understand how true it is that cutting off your arm because you have a cut, created more of a problem, not lesser of one.

You can gladly (it is your sovereign right after all) reorganize your life around no longer having an arm, which may be a great lesson, but wouldn’t it be nice to have it all. Isn’t what you really wanted, to be seen, heard, valued, loved for who you are, and to keep an arm? It’s a deep wound I know, but staring at it with fresh oxygen, sinking into the pain of staring at it, breathing new life on it, will be the only way to heal it, truly. When we shift, the whole system shifts. It just does.

Point is, that woman’s opinion that my mother is toxic so should be cut off, is toxic culture. She has a point in her perspective, but I boundaried the shit out of my mother right after I saw her swing, and guess what, she put the bat down.

It took us YEARS to get here. And I do mean, more like decades than “years,” but in a culture that tells me separation is a solution, when I have a client tell me that unification has gifted her an answer so inarticulate, so profound, that she once had no idea such a world and such a relationship could exist, and I know exactly what wave she’s riding because I’m riding it too, I just want to be yet again, a bit counter culture in my field and say, even if separation is a band-aid, it is not a cure, and eventually, band-aids fall off and require just as much tending to as the wound itself. Basically, separation as an answer, is just the trading of wounds, so that the same questions follow you just decorated in a different expressive tone.

Separate if you “must” but unite if you Will. The truth is, most of us aren’t Willing. Not because we don’t want genuine change but because we feel we’ve always had to be the ones to change ourselves on the behalf of people who didn’t even appreciate it, so now it’s “their” turn to make it right. We almost punish ourselves into this mentality. But no my love, if we are willing, our change in the direction of truth, will be the very truth that changes them, and the gift in that is to watch our once demon, morph into an a loving parent who did the best they could with what they had after being the frozen, scared little kids you’d at one point, have done anything to protect. They’re still in there, waiting to be allowed to come out. All the while you were waiting on their permission for your “coming out” into your own authentic skin, they’ve been waiting on the world’s permission for them to do the same. Your coming out, is their permission.

Children, teach your parents well. It doesn’t matter who should’ve/would’ve/could’ve prior to this moment. What matters is that now, if healing is what you genuinely want over being right, you’re in a position to teach your parents well. Use that position wisely, even if they didn’t. 😉