SoulTending.com

This is part I of the series:

Emotions, Behaviors and our Kids

In the first 16 years of my life I experienced repeated molestations from various different sources and directions. Being the polite, nice girl I never learned to speak up. I never learned to set boundaries. I never learned that I could share my misery with a caring adult, who listens and doesn’t judge. So I internalized it all. I withdrew and became even more shy. Since I never experienced any adults around me empathizing with my feelings and validating them, I too started to discount them and even started telling myself that the molestation was not really that bad, that I didn’t really get hurt and worst of all that I was safe.

So it is no wonder that 20 years later, when I hear a caregiver say to my 2 year old: “Oh don’t cry, it is nothing.” I go out there and teach her about empathy. I tell her that in our parenting style we are doing something that is called empathy. “It is about validating his feelings.” I then proceeded by asking my child who was still crying in my arms: ”Did you hurt yourself? Where are you hurting? You must feel shocked that this happened. Are you still crying because you feel upset that you fell?”

If the emphasis of parenting is on validating what is going on for everybody involved and less on politeness and being a nice girl or a good boy, our relationships would look way different. We would have learned to set appropriate boundaries. Say “Yes” when we mean yes and “No” when we mean no. We would have learned the skill of feeling into any given situation and person and the willingness to understand life as they see it. We would have learned that we matter and that we can make a difference. In the old style of parenting we are left to feel different, not part of, me versus the rest of the world, alienated from our truth and full of inner struggle between what we think we should do and what we want to do.

I am now healing the thought patterns of the effects of my upbringing. I am a lucky one. We all are. There is so much more information out and readily available. The subconscious mind of our species is realizing more about the subtleties of existence at a rapid pace. This means that we do not have to be bound to the past as much as just the generation before us was. With this gift comes also a responsibility. We owe it to our selves, to the generations before and after us, to do as much as we can to stop the perpetuation of hurt.

Every one of us is so unique, so stopping the perpetuation of hurt means different things to each one of us. The way I believe I serve the best is to continually search to uncover old patterns of behavior and thought that don’t serve me anymore. I do this by engaging into what I am passionate about: Writing, dancing, singing, drawing, organizing, being creative, teaching, loving, serving and following my bliss.

I am happy and proud of my past. It made me the person I am. I do not regret anything. I know that I and everybody around me did the best we knew. Life is a dance and we are the prima ballerina as well as the stage hand, the make up artist, the seamstress, the choreographer, the chorus girls, the audience, the light and sound engineers. My dance with life made me more caring, courageous, deep, graceful, passionate, powerful and certainly stronger.

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