The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

by Dr Shefali Tsabary

When our life doesn’t go according to plan and we respond with resistance and emotional velocity, it’s because we feel threatened.

As our fantasy of how life “should” be falls apart, our egoic need to control things shows

The goal isn’t to be flawlessly “perfect,” as the mother tried to be with respect to her son’s bar mitzvah, but to embrace our “perfectly flawed” self—and, in this mother’s case, embrace the fact that her son is also flawed like her and may mess up at the most inappropriate moment.

When you are comfortable acknowledging your flaws and daily mistakes, not in a self-flagellating manner but in a matter-of-fact manner, you convey to your children that mistakes are inevitable. By laughing at your errors and readily admitting your insecurities,

Setting aside hierarchy, you encourage your children to relate to you as human-to-human, spirit-to-spirit.

that of total acceptance of what is, including his misplaced behavior.

By delighting in our follies, we teach our children not to take themselves too seriously. By being willing to make a fool of ourselves as we try new things, we teach them to explore life with little care for how they “look” or perform.

When you relate to your children by honoring who they are at any given moment, you teach them to honor themselves. If, on the other hand, you seek to shift them from their present state, altering their behavior to meet your approval, you convey the message that their authentic being is inadequate. As a result, your children begin to adopt a persona, which takes them away from who they really are.

Letting go of your attachment to your vision of parenthood and your desire to write your children’s future is the hardest psychic death to endure. It demands that you drop all prior agendas and enter a state of pure release and surrender. It asks that you forego your fantasies of who you thought your child would be and instead respond to the actual child in front of you.

This is why parents have the hardest time with a child who breaks out of the family’s mold, choosing to be who they want to be, doing what they want to do, even if this means being a black sheep. If a child threatens our egoic attachment to conformity, we experience emotional turmoil.

different. Slower than her friends and difficult to handle, she experienced more emotional meltdowns than other girls, which tested her parents’ patience to the limit. She was lazy,

whereas her parents were just the opposite. She was a dreamer, whereas her parents were practical. She was unconcerned about her looks, whereas how her parents looked was of vital concern to them. Though she didn’t want to be, this teen knew she was an embarrassment to her parents. She was particularly irksome to her highly ambitious mother, who had taken great pains to carve her own place in society. The reality was that she didn’t kn...

When we resist our children’s way of being, it’s often because we secretly harbor the notion that we are somehow “above” what’s happening, especially if what’s happening is something we believe to be a mess. We tell ourselves that while what we consider undesirable aspec...

Many of us harbor the fantasy that, of all the people we have to deal with in life, at least our children will bend to our will. If they don’t, daring instead to live their own life, marching to their own beat, we feel insulted. When our more discreet methods of gaining compliance fail, we become louder and more forceful,

emotional control over emotional expression, we learn early how to painstakingly monitor our emotional responses, weeding out those that evoke disapproval. Because we believe an outburst of emotional expression is a weakness, suppressing our emotions becomes an automatic tactic.

we develop rigid standards for those around us, as well as for life itself. We feel a need to exert our control over life by passing judgment on situations and expressing disapproval.

The illusion of superiority gives us the feeling we are in charge of our emotions and somehow...

When a child never gets to witness its parents in a state of weakness or childishness, let alone as simply fumbling, bumbling humans, how can this child risk revealing its own weaknesses?

Of course, because we are “in control,” in school we are recognized by our teachers as little angels, a tag that comes at the cost of authenticity.

With this egoic imprint, our tendency is to view power and control as a means of security. Because we have bought into the belief that life is divided into those who wield power, often by virtue of their greater age or knowledge, and those who are powerless, we tell ourselves, “I must at all times be ‘together’ and in control of my emotions. I must always be logical, pragmatic, and ‘in the know.’” Children who grow up with such a worldview become adults who are unable to access their inner empowerment. As parents, they are likely to unleash their need for control particularly on those who are disenfranchised, such as when parenting their own children or as teachers in school. They become adults who are unable to tolerate any disrespect for their status, using their role to foster inhibition in others.

if parents are unable to tolerate their own emotions when things don’t go according to plan, their children soak up these emotions, which then form their emotional repertoire. Such individuals are triggered at every turn, apparently under the illusion that if they react strongly enough, life will bend to their will. When a person with this egoic imprint

Unaccustomed to sitting with the painful feeling of helplessness in a situation, their ego converts their insecurity into indignation and rage. Anger is a powerful stimulant, seducing us to believe we are strong and in control. Paradoxically, when we are in the grip of anger, we are anything but in control. We are prisoners of ego. YOU CAN TRANSITION OUT OF EGO I have found that it helps parents to differentiate between essence and ego when I share with them examples of responses to their children that come from ego, in contrast to responses that come from essence.

“Am I dealing with my child in an aware manner or am I being triggered by my past?” The focus is always

fulfilled, you will use your children to complete you. You will teach them how to live with your unacknowledged fears, your rejected emptiness, your forgotten lies—all the while unaware you are doing so. Such is the power of unacknowledged lostness.

Of course, our children don’t “make” us feel this way. They merely awaken our unresolved emotional issues from our childhood.

Nevertheless, because our children are vulnerable and mostly powerless, we feel free to blame them for our reactivity. Only by facing up to the fact that it isn’t our children who are the problem, but our own unconsciousness, can transformation come about.

didn’t learn to simply observe our emotions, honor them, sit with them, and grow from them, our response to external stimuli became increasingly emotionally toxic, which is the root of our cyclones of drama.

When we are raised to suppress our darker emotions, these emotions form a shadow from which we are cut off. When emotions are split from our consciousness,

they lie dormant, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice, which is why so many of us erup...

these emotions are triggered by another’s shadow, we find ourselves upset with the person who evoked these emotions i...

no one could evoke such emotions in us were they not already ...

Not realizing this, we seek to ease our discomfort at having to confront our shadow by projecting the...

if we were bullied as a child, unless we have resolved our own pain, we will be unable to tolerate our children’s pain when they are bullied. In such a situation, we are likely to foster in our children either an inability to handle their emotions, or a belief that under no circumstance must they ever portray themselves as vulnerable. Believing they must appear powerful and in control, they learn to be macho even if they don’t feel strong. In countless subtle ways, our own issues around power and control are imposed on our children. When

In other words, emotional reactivity is a reason to go inward, focusing on your own growth. Once you realize there are no enemies, only guides to inner growth, all who play a part in your life become mirrors of your forgotten self.

You recognize that the lack you perceive in your environment arose because of an internal sense of lack.

The split between yourself and the other is then no longer present because it’s not so much about

separate “other,” even though the person is a separate individual, but is a mirror of your internal state. You realize you brought this spiritual lesson into your life because your essential being desires change in your everyday behavior.

Since no other journey is able to evoke more emotional reactivity in us than parenting, to be a parent invites us to treat the reactions our children trigger ...

This willingness to look within, which doesn’t require introspection into the cause of your mood, just the simple awareness that it comes from within your own self and not from the other person’s actions, will enable you to suspend your thoughts long enough to shift out of reactivity and craft a response that’s more grounded.

To be triggered is to be in resistance to whatever may be happening in our life. By reacting, we are saying, “I don’t want this situation; I don’t like the way things are.” In other words, when we resist the way life manifests itself in our children, our intimate partner, or our friends, it’s because we refuse to accept life’s

The reason for this is that the ideal view of ourselves to which we are attached—our ego—is being shaken, which is threatening to us. In

make a conscious choice to flow with the current, without any desire to control it or need for it to be any different from what it is. We chant the mantra, “It is what it is.” This means we parent our children as our children are, not as we might wish them to be. It requires accepting our children in their as is form. I

mentioned earlier that when we refuse to accept our reality—be it our children for who they are, or our circumstances—we imagine that if we are angry enough, sad enough, happy enough, or domineering enough, things will somehow change. The opposite is the case. Our inability to embrace

our reality in its as is form keeps us stuck. For this reason, not resistance but acceptance of our reality i...

Once you have accepted your children’s as is state, even when this means their tantrums, with your acceptance there arises a pause. From this pause emerges an understanding of how to respond, rather than react.

Growing up with explosive, pouting, distancing, or otherwise emotionally manipulative parents, a child learns that life is to be dueled with. Situations are to be “managed,” brought to heel by unleashing our emotions.

entitlement, which causes them to repeatedly tell themselves such things as, “I deserve better.” Believing that life owes them only pleasurable experiences, they attempt to avoid pain at all costs. When life doesn’t comply, they are quick to blame someone else, declaring, “It’s all their fault.” They then assure themselves, “I have a right to be upset!”

If a child deviates from the parents’ plan for it, marching to its own rhythm instead of abiding by its parents’ decrees, the parent may resort to outrage in order to control the child.

up this way learn fear, not respect. They believe that the only way to effect change is through overpowering others, which leads to raising their own children to one day become dictators themselves, hostile in their reaction to the world, and perhaps even violent.

children shades of its abusive, raging parents. Feeling too insecure to claim respect, such a parent then allows its children to become narcissistic, which leads to the parent being overpowered