When we're looking at those behaviors and wanting to change our behaviors or our children, we often will go to the surface level reasons like mentioning them earlier, and they're not listening. It can be even an external relationship, like your parents are ill and you’re trying to care for them and things like that, like our children aren't supporting us.
Even though we don't necessarily think of it in those exact words, we do have kind of a threat like we're not gonna be good enough. We're not gonna be able to take care of all of it. Our people are taking things away from me, like my sleep or my energy or my ability to go to fun things. And so we shift into a mindset where we're missing things, where we're afraid. And that's kind of where we jump to, reacting to our children in that way when we lose it.
It really has nothing to do with our children and it has everything to do with us because no matter what our children are doing, no matter how they respond to us, we are capable of staying calm and maintaining unconditional love for them. We just haven't had an opportunity to practice it, to feel it, to see it from other people, right?
We might have not seen that from our parents or from our teachers or from other adults in our lives so we've kind of taken that on to ourselves. We've allowed the beliefs or the thoughts or how they chose to respond to it to. Teach us because we don't know another way, because that's what we've seen or that's what we've seen more often so there have been times I bet in your life, if you really think about it, where your children can do something crazy and you've responded calm and there've been times where your children have acted. When you say crazy, you mean like disobedient or they've done something, you don’t even think that they’d be able to do something like that and you still respond.
Of course, other times, maybe even more often. We don't. When we really look at what's going on, those reactions and our responses are lost and it starts with the underlying thoughts that we don't even necessarily recognize and think that's just the way it is. That's the response that happens in our body and we go with that, so. When we take that step back. And observe ourselves because sometimes we want to just say that we’re not supposed to be grumpy. We’re not supposed to be upset and we think that it's where we need to jump to because that's how it's supposed to be.
Well, there's no way it's supposed to be. There's just us learning to move forward in the direction we want because we're learners too. And we don't start riding a bike instantly. We didn't learn to go from laying on our backs as an infant to walking. There are steps and processes. To think that we don't need to go through these steps and processes to learn a different way to respond to our children. Or to discover those thoughts that we have that we think are truths that aren't is just kind of silly. So you'll let that go, let that I need to be that way now, and instantly let it go, and you will progress so much faster.
It's OK to let our children know that we're learning. They can see us learning. They can hear us learning that you have been really working on loving them unconditionally and responding in a way that shows that unconditional love.
When we're honest with our children like that, It really helps them to see, to take on programming we'd rather they have, and then it helps us again to proceed more quickly in that direction. When we try and hide it and cover it up or blow it off or not dig deeper, that's when we slow or halt our progress. When we talk to our children openly about it, then it's another time that we're training our brain like, hey brain, this is what happened and this is the direction we're going in. So when we talk to ourselves that way, when we talk to our children, that's another time we're strengthening those neural connections in another direction.
The points that I want to leave with you. It's not our fault. It's not our parents fault. These are programs that have been handed down or ever. So we don't need to worry that it's our fault, but it is our responsibility to learn and move forward. This happens because we have fears or deficits, and our brain goes to those fears or those deficits, so switching our brain out of the fears and the deficits really helps us to change how we respond. And then third, be open and honest with our children, with ourselves and that will help our progress and change what we think is not changeable right now or not changeable for me.
So remember, children are great by their very natures, and we have that privilege and that responsibility to raise them.
