congruence

Guilt, Shame & Effective Confrontation

Guilt, Shame & Effective Confrontation

Brene Brown, a mother herself, found that parenting is "a primary predictor of how prone our children will be to shame or guilt.” (page 224) She exhorts us to -- and I love her term for it -- parent with shame resilience as a goal.

So how to do this when confronting our offspring?

With a huge semantic tool: the Confrontive I-Message!

So . . . What About Anger?

So . . . What About Anger?

With all the talk in P.E.T. about how anger is a secondary emotion, however, some participants have seemed stumped and even sheepish when trying to identify their feelings

"All I know is I'm angry, but I'm not supposed to feel that, am I?"

"I know I have to find what's beneath the anger but what do I do about the fact that I want to strangle my kid?"

Gee, I guess we all must have missed the school lesson on how to deal with anger. Hah! So few of us -- are there any? -- have been supported with processing any emotion, much less this biggie.

Doing this important work now, though, means we can give a ginormous gift to our children through modeling and consulting!

My perfect witness

My perfect witness

Harrison, as you turn another year older, I wanted to tell you about my reframe. 

Instead of being my sorriest victim, I like to imagine you now as the perfect witness to my change. I hope you can draw strength from my journey as you face your own inevitable, painful challenges (some of which, yes, are based in childhood experiences).

"I Don't Care If You Don't Like Me. I love me!"

"I Don't Care If You Don't Like Me. I love me!"

A while back, I got tagged on a Facebook parents forum when a friend asked what I thought of this short little video. With a young daughter herself who was already experiencing unfriending -- "You're not my friend!" "I don't like you. Go away!" -- she wondered whether her little one should practice the following handy retort.

To Thine Own Self Be True

To Thine Own Self Be True

She quickly took the letter out, and then her brow furrowed; too long passed. I leaned over and saw she had failed by a couple of points.

I looked at her and she blinked and shrugged, “That’s fine. I can take it again.”

Committed to Congruence

Committed to Congruence

I had been so mired in the habit of ignoring myself that I faced the steepest of learning curves. I discovered that, when upset, I was grossly incongruent in the way I interacted with the outside world and, sadly, my kids. What I usually showed was only a sliver of the truth. Not surprisingly, the words I was most facile with on the feelings list were those that had to do with anger.