The only thing I can do for you...

“The only thing I can do for you is work on myself…” -Ram Dass

The core principle of the SMP can be stated in many ways, but I love the simplicity of this quote and believe it captures the message here well. Many think this is a selfish approach–to focus on one’s own growth instead of trying to rescue their child from a potentially devastating path. I think this indicates a misunderstanding of the point.

It certainly doesn’t mean that we stop providing quality parenting to our children, ensuring the love and structure they need from us, advocating for them when and where it’s appropriate, and conveying to them that we’re their best best.

In fact, if our children don’t feel secure in the world, believing, or rather knowing that family is their safe haven, their chances of fully maturing are greatly diminished. While we all grow to be adult-sized physically, we don’t all grow to our full capacity for wisdom and adaptation.

As mothers, we dance a difficult and often confusing line between our biological imperative to keep our children safe, ensuring their wellbeing—and nurturing our own capacity to provide the necessary conditions for our children’s maturity. It can seem a a cruel and impossible mission; especially when faced with the inevitable realization that we cannot do both, and at some point along the way, it becomes painfully apparent that only the latter is realistic.

When we recognize that we’re failing to protect our children from the world’s cruelty, it can be devastating, and we might feel compelled to drain ourselves to remedy any perceived gaps. Our feelings can overwhelm us, robbing us of our own capacity for engaging in Life; the altruistic notion that we’re supposed to be willing to die for our kids nags at us and our own self-worth seeps away. But, I think, this too misses the point, and sabotages our very efforts to raise healthy, well-adjusted humans.

For our children to feel “loved, held, guided, and never alone” (Dr. Lisa Miller’s words and she’s not referencing parenting but rather our spirituality. I’m generalizing her idea of our human birthright to the sense our children are seeking from their families,) our care needs to “cascade” from a secure, full sense of abundance in ourselves. When Rose and I talk about “alpha” energy in the Attachment Matters podcast, this is what we’re referencing. This energy is not needy; it does not demand that our children’s lives look a certain way, that they’re perfectly behaved, or that they see and appreciate the monumental effort that goes into parenting them.

Photo by sgcdesignco on Unsplash

I suspect many of us don’t even recognize how ill-equipped we are to provide this cascading care until we’re tapped out through something like the painful circumstance which likely led you to this project. I believe our generation grew up in a charmed time that deluded us into believing we could be perfect moms, creating perfect childhoods, resulting in easy, relatively painless lives for our offspring–and that this would indicate that we’d done this parenting thing “right.”

But we forgot that humans are wired for suffering, because for all of human history, Life has been hard. That’s why our adaptation mechanisms are what they are–and if our primary M.O. is pain-avoidance, we don’t get to mature. And if we don’t mature, we don’t really live. Our worlds get smaller and smaller, our habits of mind become more and more rigid, and we create our own prisons of comfort, which paradoxically, become ever more uncomfortable.

If fear becomes our main compass, it will steer us away from the pain and discomfort that demands our development. Discomfort is the key to maturity and breaking free from the unconscious cages we build for ourselves. If we’re the type of person who can’t tolerate pain and difficulty, and then our kids don’t play their role in our fantasies of comfort and ease, it’s going to be more than a little threatening—likely downright destabilizing.

Yet, I think this might be the whole point of parenting. To blast this illusion that perfection is attainable and to bring us to our knees in existential pain, humbling us. I’ve come to see Motherhood as a spiritual journey to authenticity, compassion and connectedness, and full human maturity. Up until something this shattering happens, our fragile sense of self and attachment to being a “good person/mom” demands a perfect performance, and we don’t even recognize when we’re inhabiting the darker sides of the mother archetype–the devouring aspects that need our children to behave in ways that support our carefully curated personas.

How do we hit middle age and not realize we’re co-dependent on our children? Btw, this was me too and I still grapple, so please don’t think I’m dissing on anyone. This is so normal these days that it would be more weird to not be enmeshed with our children. And the good news is, this enmeshment is actually the key to your own freedom; once you grasp this idea, painful circumstances provide the needed context for disentangling, freeing both you and your child from this burdensome dynamic—though not from pain. Being numb to pain isn’t the goal here.

I suspect it’s our own misguided belief that pain is bad and wrong–which then logically sends the message that there is something bad and wrong about us if we’re experiencing it–that is at the root of this challenging dynamic with our children. If we recognized pain as integral to our maturation process, we wouldn’t be so threatened when witnessing our children’s pain. Changing our relationship with pain, recognizing that it’s an invitation to grow bigger than our problems, allows us to mature and provide the necessary conditions for our children’s maturity to unfold.

This doesn’t mean we don’t come alongside our child in their pain—for them to feel secure in the world, we must be able to do this. If we didn’t hurt when our children hurt, we wouldn’t be moved to position ourselves in this way. This is why we need to reorient to pain and develop our capacity to be with our children in theirs. Otherwise the message that gets internalized is, “my family can’t tolerate my messes so I have to deal with them myself. I have to protect my family from me.”

So, I’d invite you to do some honest self-reflection and determine the relationship between your sense of wellbeing and the way you perceive your child’s life. Here’s the point that can be so scary and challenging to wrap our heads and hearts around. Do our children need us to feel pain when they do? Yes. But if our relationship to pain is to think we shouldn’t be feeling it, we’ll not be able to show up in the way our children need us to. Instead, we’ll likely believe that our children need to change for us to feel better.

I would argue that it is in these very moments that we are challenged to adapt and change for our children. It is in these times of crises that we develop our own maturity, our capacity to handle the messiest of things, so that our children don’t hide from us to avoid our pain—which will indeed be unbearable to them, especially if they feel they caused it. This is when they need us to be the most grounded—able to calmly guide them through the experience of suffering, so that their own maturity can unfold.

Is this beginning to make some sense? I want to acknowledge how tricky this all is. And if this still feels slippery to you or even downright confusing, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It just means you’re human, doing the best you can, like all of us are.

Plus it’s further complicated by all kinds of things: how we were raised and our parents’ relationships to pain, culture constantly reinforcing what’s “wrong” with us, a medical model that pathologizes discomfort of any kind, and frankly the message that pervades much of the gender world: that it is incumbent upon parents to rid the family of trans-identities, and anyone who hasn’t done this yet is failing… I think it’s a miracle that anyone ever makes it through these obstacles, yet it is embracing and navigating our unique course of obstacles that will determine the ways we get to grow.

This is deep work, and I think it’s coming for all of us in one way or another. Because until we do this work, in the words of Marianne Williamson, “until our knees hit the floor, we’re just playing at life” and our unconscious knows it. We’ll feel trapped in our desperate feelings, withdrawing from Life—or lashing out at the world in anger, consumed with fear, potentially even poisoning our hearts with hatred for those we think caused our suffering.

Finding the courage to tune out the noise and not only allow, but turn toward your pain to learn what it’s inviting you to develop in yourself–well, I think this is the ultimate parenting task and what our children need most from us. And the beauty here is that, while it might very well be the hardest thing you ever do (indeed, it will be your hero’s journey) it’s a win-win-win. By reorienting in this way, you’ll experience so much more self-worth, grace, and inner peace; your child will sense your strong presence, a quiet and attractive wisdom; and the world will get one more, (desperately-needed,) stabilizing and compassionate presence.

The SMP exists to help moms (and dads too!) recognize this call and to support them to tackle this heroic work.

Apply to become a member of the SMP Center (moms only here): bit.ly/SMPCenter

Learn more about Stoicmom, a certified Jungian depth coach.