This shouldn't be happening...

Have you heard this before? (An SMP community member stumbled across it and shared it with us but was unsure who to credit.)   

Humans can tolerate just about anything as long as they don’t believe it shouldn’t be happening. 

Whether or not it should be happening doesn’t change the fact that it is happening. On the other side of acceptance is new creative energy to support us to explore possible paths forward, paths that were previously unknown to us.

I’m a little obsessed these days with Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s ideas on frustration and it’s important role in change and human adaptation. We’ll be exploring this as next month’s theme in the SMP and doing a deep dive into Neufeld’s “Traffic Circle Model of Frustration” and how it connects to grief, radical acceptance, maturity, etc., but for now, here’s an extremely brief explanation:

Frustration is the primal emotion we feel when a circumstance in our life is not working for us. We’re driven by our frustration to attempt to change it. If we’re successful, our frustration goes away and we can move on with our lives. 

When we’re unable to change the circumstance, we’re invited to change ourselves as we encounter what Neufeld describes as futility.  

This is probably starting to sound a little like the Serenity Prayer, eh? The “serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can…” I’ll get to wisdom here in a minute…

Since the formation of the SMP online community, I have intentionally avoided tackling the topic of parenting as one of our monthly themes. Mostly because it’s a loaded topic, and I don’t want to reinforce the notion that anyone parented “wrong” or increase anyone’s sense of shame around current circumstances in the home.

We did finally tackle it this month though. Because there are plenty of moms who are seeking to have as much influence as possible over their child(ren). They know that the attachment isn’t as strong as they’d like it to be, and they’re ready to do what they can to change that. 

And because I just may be one of the very few people from whom moms can hear this message: there’s a good chance you could benefit from some growing up yourself. I get away with it because I’ve had to assess my own frayed attachment with my children, and I continue to try to repair the damage I did that made my trans-identified child feel unsafe to share her most confusing and painful challenges with me. 

The mom I want to be is the one whose daughter knows she can come to me with anything, confident that I’ll support her however I can to move through Life’s challenges, and that I’ll do it without judgment. I can’t plow that path for her, but I’d love the opportunity to listen to all of it. Then if she’s open to it, I may be able to offer her some tips or just share the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Yet I suspect that open-hearted listening might be plenty.

But I’m not much good to her if she doesn’t trust me to be able to handle the messy things she brings to me. This is the repair I’m still working on. I think we’ve made much progress and I’m confident it’s because I chose to move toward the difficult feelings of guilt and sadness, and the regret that maybe I wasn’t always the alpha she needed me to be. (For more on the concept of “alpha” and how it relates to attachment, I’d steer you toward the Attachment Matters podcast episodes; Rose and I will revisit it in future conversations as well.)

Does this mean that I’m implicated in her adoption of a trans-identity? Does admitting to making some parenting mistakes mean I’m culpable in her capture? I don’t know, maybe? Frankly, I’m just not that interested in blame and don’t find these questions very useful. I’m interested in where I have agency. I want to know what is within my power to change so that I can come as close as possible to being the mom she needs me to be. 

This doesn’t mean that I was previously a bad mom. I wasn’t. I can clearly see the things I did well and know my children benefited from those parts of me.

But I also wasn’t a perfect mom. And even if I had been, my daughter might still have tried on a trans-identity. No one escapes childhood without some baggage, and we’ll inevitably project shadow onto our parents, whether it’s painful or golden. Our tendency to judge everything as good or bad, right or wrong, plays heavily into what keeps us stuck. 

During one of our SMP monthly meetings, we were grappling with the difference between self-pity and self-compassion. It occurred to me that maybe self-pity is when we’re stuck in the belief that what is happening shouldn’t be. 

I recently posted this Substack note to expand my ideas a bit, 

Thoughts on the difference between self-pity and self-compassion:

Self-pity is a stuck place. This is when we’re victims of our circumstances and past decisions. We believe what’s happening is wrong and “shouldn’t” be happening. We’re scanning the environment for who to blame, relieving us of responsibility to change something about ourselves.

(Not included in the note was the acknowledgment that it’s a normal initial response to something that’s not working for us to be consumed with the emotion of frustration and it’s secondary emotions like anger, grief, sadness, and regret as we come to full realization about what we cannot change.) 

Self-compassion is grace. It recognizes we’re all imperfect and doing the best we can. It can be an invitation to recognize where our agency is so we can continue to learn and grow. We forgive ourselves what we didn’t know or had yet to be developed in us, and we do what we must to expand our capacity for difficult feelings and circumstances.

Now rereading this, I want to point out that the second part of that last sentence is not inevitable, even for those practicing self-compassion. To expand our capacity requires that we not end the story at, “I did the best I could” and let ourselves off the hook. Like this SMP subscriber commented (on The Wilderness of Modern Parenting,)

I am doing my best, AND I can evolve and do better. I want [my children] to feel open enough with me to say "you hurt me" without having to defend me. I am strong enough to sit with their pain and hear the ways I have failed at the most important task I can ever possibly imagine: being a parent to these beautiful beings who entrusted their lives to my care. What a gift and what a responsibility.

“…who entrusted their lives to my care.” Our children have no choice but to entrust their early lives to our care. And we will all fail in ways at this “most important task” imaginable. This mama inspired me to also want my children to have the level of openness with me that they feel they can express the hurts my parenting might have caused them, knowing I can handle and will process the feedback.

Moms are not all-powerful. If you could have prevented your child from adopting a trans-identity, you would have. You were limited by what you didn’t know, your current capacity, your child’s drive to explore identity... Plus, culture will invade your home. You can’t escape it.

To blame moms for their children’s struggles is a way to pin the easiest target and maybe even a way to grapple with one’s own mother complex; it’s certainly a way to distance and absolve other people and institutions from responsibility for the current state of things. This is the function of blame. It’s like a hot potato.

It also assumes that moms have some magical ability to transcend their own imperfect upbringings and somehow just know how to perfectly raise humans in a profoundly sick society without having that society influence our children’s outcomes. This sounds like an impossible task to me. 

However, this also doesn’t mean you’re powerless. If you adopt a Stoic orientation, “the obstacle is the way” then you’ll recognize the many opportunities parenting will offer you to build your capacity. You’ll recognize the context of family and motherhood as the fire that will forge you, inviting you to keep maturing into bigger, better, wiser versions of your self. 

We come with the blueprint to develop, but we don’t come with our wisdom already formed. That happens through the crucible of painful circumstances—the ones that fill us with sadness and regret; the most growth happening when we encounter Life’s inevitable “dark nights of the soul” that hurt so bad we have to change and adapt to be able to get through them…or we stay stuck in our resistance, wishing things were different, our attitudes calcifying and our world shrinking as we do our damnedest to not feel the pain our expansion is forcing. 

Whether we’re equipped or not, moms will encounter the invitation; a reckoning with that “awesome gift and responsibility” to continue to evolve for our children and to indeed find a way to transcend our own imperfect upbringings and cultural conditioning to do even just a little better by these amazing beings we birthed into the world. We can trust we gave them the best foundation we were capable at the time to give, and we can keep maturing and modeling what it looks like to milk the wisdom that Life’s most painful and messy circumstances hold for us.

If in our dark times, we resist taking an honest look at ourselves to determine what about our own behavior, attitudes, capacities–worldview even–is in need of an upgrade, we miss out on the wisdom that comes with doing this work. And frankly, our children miss out on what we could be for them with this new wisdom and capacity. 

To end, I’ll quote holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl who captured the gist of adaptation decades before Neufeld in this single sentence, 

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.