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Archive for Article – Page 3

Helping Teens Manage Big Emotions

Posted on July 21, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

Research indicates that emotional regulation is one of the most important skills we can teach our children. Teens who lack an effective way of managing distressing emotions may choose maladaptive ways of coping, such as avoidance or numbing through addictions. Managing difficult or complex feelings requires a capacity for self-reflection. The quality of interiority – an awareness of and interest in our inner, psychic landscape – is essential for self-reflection.

When we know ourselves to have a complex inner life, we are able to be curious about the thoughts and feelings that take place there. Being curious about our emotions allows us to see them as something that is distinct from us, and this in turn gives us choices about how we respond to them.

Imagine a teenager who has just gotten a failing grade on a quiz. He is devastated. Powerful emotions are compelling, and feel real. It is difficult for this student to find a mental frame of reference outside of the strong feeling of upset. He forgets that last week he did well on an assignment and felt good about himself. It is hard for him to imagine that he might feel good again next week.

By contrast, when we value our inner life, we can stand a little aside from strong feelings. They are still there, and still powerful, but we have cultivated just enough space in our inner world to stand back from them. We know that feelings are not facts. We still feel awful, but we see the emotion for what it is – just an emotion, not absolute truth. We can also look around our inner psychic landscape and see other features. Strong emotional experiences are relativized.

Feelings come with narratives, and these are often generated unconsciously, without our being aware of them. This means that it takes some degree of effort and insight to evaluate the accuracy of these narratives. Being panicked about a poor grade may lead to black and white thinking that tells us we are a failure who will now not get into a good college and will have a terrible life. If we can’t manage to keep the big feeling and its associated narrative in context, we may become attached to this understanding of what happened, which may mean that we decided to give up. We may avoid asking for help, or even drop the class.

With the distance that comes with self-reflection, we can contextualize our distress. This helps to generate more options when deciding how to respond. Even though we feel really frightened and hopeless, we might remember that the teacher told everyone this would be a difficult quiz. Perhaps doing poorly on it doesn’t mean we are stupid. Maybe we can ask for an opportunity to earn extra credit, or seek help so that we do better on the next assessment.

In this way, our degree of distress is decreased because we are better able to keep our difficulty in perspective. We are able to assess the situation more objectively, and we have a wider range of options to choose from when deciding on a response.

Developing interiority means appreciating our feelings and honoring them as important, even while we also recognize that they may not be true. It means neither overvaluing or undervaluing our emotional responses. We don’t want to tell ourselves that our feelings don’t matter, or that we are not allowed to feel certain things. On the other hand, we also don’t want to overvalue our feelings by deciding that the impulses that come with big feelings need to be acted on, or the narrative generated by the emotion is true.

Helping our children develop interiority will require us to develop it as well. What we model to our children in terms of dealing with our own distress – and theirs – will in large part determine what they learn about managing emotions. When something upsetting happens, all of us have an immediate impulse to make the problem go away as quickly as possible. It may be difficult to stay with upsetting feelings of fear or despair, and so we plunge headlong into action.

While this is an understandable response, in many case, it works against us. Rushing to fix a problem leaves us with little time to feel our feelings and be curious about them. It encourages our kids to see the inner life as something that needs to be managed rather than experienced. It is easy as a parent to fall into the trap of responding in this way. When children are upset, we feel an urgency to resolve their distress.

When our kid comes home from school teary with frustration about his friends calling him names on the playground, we may feel tempted to give advice or take action. While it is possible that either advice or action might be needed at some point, listening with openness and curiosity shows respect for the feelings in their own right. It gives those feelings space to just be there, and time to see if those feelings need to transform into something else of their own accord. Attending to our feelings helps us cultivate an awareness of and appreciation for our inner life.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

What if I Feel Envious of My Kid?

Posted on July 5, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

Janice had been seeing me for a few years, but I had never seen her quite this uncomfortable before. She was telling me about her daughter’s high school graduation party. Janice was a devoted mother who had worked hard to support her daughter through some academically tumultuous high school years. The daughter’s successful graduation and acceptance to one of her first-choice colleges ought to have been a cause for rejoicing, but Janice felt something much more complicated.

“Of course, I felt proud and happy. And of course I also felt sad. I will miss her terribly!” But she also felt something a little darker – something that she had trouble putting into words.

“We had a tent set up in the backyard, with strings of lights, and a DJ. I stopped in the middle of the rushing around getting the food and watched her. She was standing there, surrounded by dozens of other beautiful, vibrant, young people. Her hair is so shiny and full, and she has a gorgeous figure. And it was as if I suddenly saw something I hadn’t seen before. She is young and full of promise, and has her whole life before her. She doesn’t even realize. I was like that once, too. But now so much of my life is in the past. I am very proud of her, and happy for her, but if I am being honest, I have to admit that I also felt a pang of the most awful jealousy for a moment.”

It was brave of Janice to admit to me – and herself – that she felt envious of her daughter’s attractiveness and promising future. Janice’s own mother had been depressed. Left to raise Janice and her two siblings alone after her alcoholic husband disappeared, Janice’s mother struggled to cope and was often resentful of her own lost youth. In very many ways, Janice had transcended her difficult childhood. She was sending her own daughter out into the world feel safe, cared for, and confident. While she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, there was some envy there.

In the well-known fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” the young heroine becomes the object of her step-mother’s envy as she grows into a beautiful young woman. While it may be challenging to relate to the evil step-mother in the story, it in fact is not unusual to feel envy of our children at some point or another.

Feelings that are not fully felt can indeed become poisonous. Unredeemed envy can solidify into toxic resentment, which kills off new growth in our own life and also in our children’s life. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to feel the sting of envy and become intimate with it, we allow it to transform.

Befriending a feeling is different than indulging it. When we accept our feelings – however unacceptable they may be – we can be curious about our experience, and wonder about its meaning. Such an intimate exploration of our emotional landscape can yield the treasure of new knowledge that can deepen our self-understanding. This in turn helps us become more tolerant both of ourselves and others.

Indulging a feeling, on the other hand, means that we become attached to the feeling. We believe it is “right,” and we act from it. Acting from a place of envy can be very destructive, both for ourselves and for others.

Symbolically, the acid of envy may dissolve old psychic structures that need to be cleared away. In fact, poisonous envy may have a paradoxically healing effect. In the tale, Snow White is too trapped in her own innocence complex to protect herself. Her transitional state of keeping house for the dwarves represents a kind of interim, provisional solution to her dilemma – a sort of apprenticeship to shadow. (In the original versions of the tale, the dwarves are thieves.) Snow White is getting to know the darker, more transgressive parts of herself. Ingesting some of the step-mother’s poison apple is what allows her to awaken to her own authority.

Janice came to see that her own envy may have had a positive role to play as she and her daughter got ready to negotiate their next phase. Janice was dismayed to find that she had an impulse to pull away from her daughter in those months after the graduation party. The pain of feeling her own envy was too much. But Janice was able to be curious about this feeling. She could see how the envy functioned in part to protect her from the terrible grief she felt about her daughter’s immanent departure.

We were also able to excavate her own experience of being 18. Janice recalled her mother’s resentment and bitterness when Janice announced that she would be moving out. In our work, Janice was able to get in touch with anger at her mother, but also powerful feelings of guilt for abandoning her mother. Eventually, she was able to forgive herself for leaving her lonely, depressed mother.

As Janice was able to grieve some of these frozen feelings, the heat around her envy of her daughter dissipated. The hard-won wisdom she had gained about herself as a result of exploring these difficult feelings made it easier for Janice for her to release her daughter with joy and love.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Can Motherhood Make You Badass?

Posted on June 13, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
1 Comment

My mother was never very good at saying “no.” When as I teenager I would ask her for something she needed to deny me, it would tie her in knots. She would get angry at me for having even asked.

When my daughter became a toddler, we began to have battles over TV. She would scream and cry if I turned it off, and beg for me to turn it back on. I remember feeling tied in knots.

One Simple Word

And then one day it hit me like someone throwing a brick through the window. If she asked to watch TV, I could say no. She might scream and throw a fit, but I could still say no. All I had to do was hold firm to that one simple word, “no,” and be prepared to tolerate her reaction.

This was the beginning of a new phase in my learning about how to carry authority.

Like many women, saying “no” in the face of fierce opposition and then tolerating the other’s unhappiness has never come easy for me. In my late 20’s, I achieved a senior management position at a non-profit. A seasoned employee came to my office with an outrageous request. He smiled, chatted me up, and asked nicely. I said yes. Some part of me knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t even imagine how to say no.

So having children taught me how to say no. I remember being curious as to whether being able to say “no” to a screaming four year old demanding dessert after consuming no dinner would carry over into “real” life. Would I now begin to feel more firmly rooted in my own authority in all areas of my life?

Dreams of Anger and Aggression

When my kids were small, I had the following dream:

I am in a beautiful boutique, and in a lit glass case is a priceless object carved in black stone. It is a gargoyle-type figure about the size of my fist. I somehow know that it had been carved and used for religious purposes a long time ago. It hangs on a cord. I ask the proprietor if I can see it. When I put it around my neck, its eyes begin to glow red, and it comes to life. It attacks the people I am with, choking off their breath, so that they clutch at their throats. I am frightened, but I fight to control the figure. To do so, I used the same counting technique I used with my strong-willed son when he was a toddler. “That’s one!” I tell the gargoyle firmly. It ceases its attack. My companions are alright. I have controlled this fiery power. I feel a little afraid, but also slightly exhilarated. The others in the shop agree that the totem obviously belongs to me by right.

I couldn’t really figure out how to describe the carved figure until the kids and I were driving past a local college campus and they asked me about the gargoyles on some of the dorm buildings. Then it hit me that the totem in the dream had been just like a gargoyle. “Mom,” my daughter asked. “Are the gargoyles there to scare things away?” “Yes,” I explained. I remembered the Chinese New Year celebration we had been to together, where dragons scare off evil spirits. “Sometimes you need one kind of demon to scare off another,” I found myself saying.

The Legend of the Gargoyle

This discussion gave me a new appreciation for my dream, and made me want to learn more about gargoyles. It turns out that gargoyles originated with a medieval French legend of a fire breathing dragon-like creature called the “gargouille” that inhabited the Seine, devouring boats and terrorizing villages. Saint Romanus subdued and conquered to creature with the help of a convict and brought its remains back to be burned. The head and neck would not burn, however, since they had been long tempered with the creature’s own fire. This head and neck were hung on the cathedral to serve as a water spout.

It’s significant that the saint is able to conquer the gargouille with the help of an outcast and criminal. The convict in the legend would correspond to Jung’s concept of the shadow. This was the name that Jung gave to those aspects of ourselves that we would rather not know were ours. The shadow often contains elements that are truly objectionable, but also those that were unacceptable to our parents or culture, but may be of great value. Anger and aggression are likely to be in the shadow for many women. Certainly, they have been for me. Just as in the legend, accessing disowned parts of ourselves can help us to conquer our demons in a way that produces something of lasting value. The terrifying gargouille becomes a helpful gargoyle. Its energy is no longer destructive, but can be used for scaring off evil spirits, and channeling water.

Motherhood Teaches Us to Hold Authority

My dream is showing me how, as a mother, I had begun to learn to tap into my own aggression and anger in a constructive way. My anger had always been somewhat frightening, but in part through my experiences holding authority with my kids, I was now able to access that side of myself in a way that made this tremendous power available to the conscious part of my personality.

My favorite quote about motherhood comes from the novelist Faye Weldon, who said that “The most wonderful thing about not having children must be that you can go on thinking of yourself as a nice person.” Maybe one of the gifts of motherhood is that we no longer have to be stuck thinking of ourselves as nice people.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Am I Raising a Narcissist?

Posted on May 31, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

Recently, some research on parental overvaluation created a stir by suggesting that treating our kids as “special” can lead them to develop narcissistic traits. You can take parental overvaluation quiz here.

I imagine most of us know of a parent who consistently expects special treatment for their offspring. I knew of one mom who insisted that other kids play the game her child wanted to play because her child was “especially sensitive.”

On the other hand, I am sure that most of us can relate to feeling that, at least at times, our children do deserve special treatment. Where we may have been passed over, ignored, shamed, or otherwise injured, we desire to protect our children from similar wounds. We see their precious uniqueness and want the world to honor and protect this.

Needing Our Kids to Reflect Us

Overvaluing our kids can leave them poorly prepared for their future, as the research implies. The fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin” provides us with an illustration of how we can hamper our children’s development by overvaluing them, leaving them cut off from their creative energies.

The tale begins with a miller and his beautiful daughter.

Now it happened one day that he had an audience with the King, and in order to appear a person of some importance he told him that he had a daughter who could spin straw into gold.

Impressed, the king has the miller’s daughter brought to the palace. She is placed in a roomful of straw and told to spin it into gold. If she succeeds, she will become queen. If she fails, she will be killed. She sobs in despair, and is rescued by an odd little man who spins for her in exchange for her jewelry – and the promise of her first-born child. The miller’s daughter indeed becomes queen. When the little man comes to take her child as promised, she begs him not to. He gives her three chances to guess his name – and she finally does so successfully, at which point he disappears forever.

Overaluing Kids Creates Unrealistic Expectations

Wanting to make himself appear more important, the miller boasts about his daughter. This sets her up for a situation in which she is bound to fail. Her life – and the life of her future child – are endangered by the outsized expectations the father burdens her with.

The miller’s daughter is like many children who have served as a narcissistic extension for a parent. Valued above all for their accomplishments, they have a weak sense of themselves as individuals – the miller’s daughter is never even given a name in this tale. (This is especially noteworthy given that this is a tale in which one’s unique name is shown to have such power.)

For the miller’s daughter, failure becomes a life or death matter. For many young people, parental expectations to spin academic straw into college admissions gold can feel like a life or death matter.

Parents who overvalue their children feel that they are validating their child’s exceptionality. In fact, they are likely failing to see their child’s full personhood because they are focused instead on an inflated projection of their own making. When we overvalue our children, we unwittingly foster unrealistic expectations in them about how the world ought to treat them, setting them up for a life of disappointment, shallow relationships, and emotional fragility.

It is normal for parents to see in their children the sacred, precious kernel of potential. Our children contain within them futurity, the implied continuation of ourselves, our ancestors, and even humanity. It is not an accident that the archetype of the Divine Child is a central image in many religions, implying the core sacred principle that must be safeguarded to ensure the future.

Inevitably, this archetypal quality will be projected onto our individual children at times. But that is a big projection to carry! Parenting requires that we appreciate what is exceptional and unique in our child, while at the same time accepting them as utterly ordinary.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Can Mothering Help Us Love Our Worst Qualities

Posted on May 25, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “shadow” to refer to all those part of ourselves we would rather not know about.

As children, we learn early on that certain qualities are not acceptable and need to be hidden from view. Aggression, selfishness, boastfulness, avarice, sexuality – these are all traits that we likely learned were forbidden. Depending on the values of our family or culture, we may also have learned to divorce ourselves from emotionality, creativity, or playfulness.

Shadow

According to Jung’s theory, we split these qualities off so that they are not quite conscious. This allows us to go about life identifying with those part of ourselves considered more acceptable.

While this process may be necessary, those parts of ourselves that get stuffed into the shadow are often full of vitality, authenticity, and untapped potential. Becoming curious about our shadow qualities can be an important part of psychological growth and development, especially in the second half of life.

Parenting is sure to put us in touch with those qualities we least like in ourselves, as we will certainly see them in our children. When our offspring displays our very worst traits, we are likely to be especially irritated with her. At the same time, such a display may offer us a chance to get to know a part of ourselves we haven’t been accepting of in a long time.

Tatterhood

The Norwegian tale “Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins” is a fairy tale that illustrates this idea. In it, a Queen gives birth to two daughters – one who is pretty and delicate, and the other who, upon coming into the world, rides around on a goat with a wooden spoon in her hand whooping and hollering.

The Queen is ashamed of her unruly daughter, whom she names Tatterhood. She tries to hide her away and keep her out of sight. However, one day a pack of hobgoblins attack the palace. It is Tatterhood who knows how to fend them off! The King and Queen then learn to value both of their daughters.

What is it that your child does that gets under your skin the most? That thing that you find most irritating. That thing that is most embarrassing. That thing that makes you feel like you want to crawl out of your skin.

Parenting

Alison is a woman in my practice who has a young daughter named Emma. Emma is very bold and courageous. She likes to take risks and be the center of attention. She is, in a way, a little like Tatterhood.

Alison struggles at times to deal with her daughter’s spirited behavior, as any parent would. But Alison comes undone when her daughter is boastful or draws too much attention to herself in public.

As we explored why she finds this behavior particularly mortifying, Alison admitted that she had been a bit like this as a child – but her parents had responded with harsh reprimands. “Being modest was definitely valued in my house growing up,” said Alison. “I learned that early on!”

She recalled one gathering where she had been singing and “putting on a show” for the adults, and her father had responded sharply that she was making a fool of herself. Alison felt ashamed.

As we explored this together, Alison gained a better understanding of why her daughter’s theatrical style bothered her so much. She was able to approach this trait in her daughter – and eventually in herself – with greater curiosity and acceptance.

Over time, she was able to support her daughter’s healthy desire to be seen and appreciated. She even grew to value her owe wish to be in the spotlight at times. When Emma started school, Alison indulged a long-time secret desire to take an improv class. Not surprisingly, she discovered she had a natural talent for it, and doing improv became an important interest for her.

What we learn to shove into the shadow is often the thing that, when rediscovered in adulthood, can bring us renewed energy and joy. It may be the thing that keeps us psychologically alive.

If we allow ourselves to be curious about those traits in our children that bother us the most, they may lead us to know ourselves more deeply.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Managing Adolescent Volatility

Posted on May 16, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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If we are parenting an adolescent, we realize that the teen years come upon us as a second storm after the relative reprieve of the school years. Teenagers can be as changeable as toddlers, but their outbursts are more frightening, and carry more potential for real harm to self and others.

An old Scottish fairy tale called “Tam Lin” has an image in it that comes to my mind when I work with parents of teens.

“Tam Lin” tells the story a woman who meets a mysterious man named Tam Lin in the woods at night. When she learns she is pregnant with his child, she seeks him out and discovers that he is a captive of the faeries, who plan to sacrifice him as a tribute to hell. To rescue him, she must pull him from his horse as he passes by with the faeries on Halloween night. Then, she must hold him fast as he turns first into a lion, then an enormous serpent, then a blazing fire, then a scaly dragon. She must hold him firmly while he is transformed into these dreadful things, and only if she succeeds will he at last be free of the faery spell.

It turns out that this ancient fairy tale image provides an eloquent metaphor for the attitude we might take with someone who is experiencing overwhelming feelings – whether that person is our child, our partner – or ourselves.

Here’s the wisdom I glean from that image as it relates to parenting teens:

Don’t Be Reactive

The heroine in the tale just needs to hold on no matter what happens. She mustn’t be frightened or alarmed as Tam Lin shape shifts from one dangerous entity to the next.

When our teen transforms into something genuinely alarming – screaming, slamming doors, throwing things – our best bet is to be steady. It may be difficult for us to contain our own fear or anger, but doing so will allow our teen to keep the focus on himself in these moments, without having to worry about our out of control feelings as well.

Which brings me to my next point.

It’s Not About You

Say your kid who has always been a good student becomes sullen and withdrawn in adolescence and stops caring about school. Grades start to drop. The bright light that once shone has been shut off. You get to have your very personal feelings of distress, anger, and fear about this situation, but ideally you shouldn’t let her know about them.

I’m not talking about communicating to your child that you have expectations of her, that you are disappointed she is not meeting them, and that there will be consequences for not getting back on track. Of course, all of that is important. But the heartache you feel when you realize she might not be headed for a top tier school? That’s about you. And when your child is going through the violent changes of adolescence, the last thing she needs is to try and help you manage your feelings when she is having enough trouble managing hers.

Let Them Know You Got This

No matter what the issue is, when teens act out, they are feeling out of control. To the extent that we can remain firm and solid, we communicate to them that they can count on us. We can provide a place for them to have their feelings while we also contain the negative consequences of their outburst.

In this way, we give them space to come back to themselves, just like Tam Lin does in the tale.

By providing the steady container for our kids when they feel out of control, we are helping them internalize the vitally important skill of regulating their emotions.

To help our kids manage their emotions, we need to be able to manage our own. This isn’t always easy to do, especially when we live with raging lunaticsteenagers. For parents who themselves struggle with anxiety, containing emotions can be especially challenging. Remembering to be calm and steady with ourselves can help us do the same for our children.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Parenting When Depleted

Posted on May 7, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

Kathryn’s eyes filled with tears as she related to me how worn and spent she felt caring for her twin boys, now two. Kathryn’s own mother had been emotionally absent, pursuing one affair after another while leaving Kathryn and her siblings with a succession of babysitters.

Now, Kathryn strove to make sure she didn’t repeat those mistakes. She held herself to impossibly high standards, attempting to meet every need her two boys had.

As she related these feelings, the image of a sieve came to mind.

Carrying Water in a Sieve

It is a common task assigned to a heroine in fairy tales to carry water in a sieve. Trying to give to others when we ourselves are so depleted can feel just like that.

An American folktale collected by Zora Neale Hurston entitled “The Orphan Boy and Girl and the Witches” uses this image of a sieve being used to carry water to illustrate how profoundly depleted we can feel when we ourselves have been inadequately mothered.

We know from the title that the two children in the story have not received adequate parental care – they are orphans. Though Kathryn was not literally an orphan, she had been abandoned by her mother emotionally at a critical time in her childhood.

The boy and the girl in the folktale are cared for by a grandmother, but she is absent when the tale begins, and therefore the boy and girl are at the mercy of three witches.

The witches wanted to eat them at once, but they begged to be spared until their grandmother returned at sundown. The witches didn’t want to wait, so they said that they would not eat them if they would go and get some water from the spring. The children gladly said they would go. The witches gave them a sieve to fill with water, and told them that if they did not return with it at once they would be eaten immediately. The boy and the girl went to the spring for the water and dipped and dipped to try to fill the sieve, but the water always ran out faster than they could fill it. At last they saw the witches coming. Their teeth were far longer than their lips.

Later in the story, the grandmother returns, but falls asleep, and in the end it is only the dogs who save the children.

Permission to Care for Ourselves

Depressed and depleted, Kathryn could not connect with a sense of pleasure as she parented. Rather, she did for her children out of a sense of duty. She found herself dragging herself through the day, stumbling from one task to the next without any joy. She needed permission to take care of herself and make sure that she was getting some of her own needs met.

Over time, Kathryn learned to recognize when her own needs had been pushed aside for too long. Although it was difficult for her, she accepted that she did not always have to be flawless in how she parented. She could trust that her children would be fine even if she didn’t always respond to their needs perfectly. She began to trust herself as well, listening to the signals that came from her body and through her dreams.

Any one of us can become depleted when caring for children, but we may be especially susceptible to feeling drained if we were not properly mothered when we were children. This can lead to us feeling deadened and out of touch with a sense of pleasure and purpose in our lives. In such circumstances, we will likely have trouble listening to our instincts, which we need to care for both ourselves and our children.

In some fairy tales that feature sieves, the heroin learns to plug the holes with ashes or mud, and is then able to carry the needed water. When we recognize our depletion, we can take care of ourselves, patching the holes in our selves so that we have the inner resources to parent joyfully.

Hurston, Z. N., & Kaplan, C. (2003). Every tongue got to confess: negro folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York, NY: Perennial.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Childhood’s Impermanence

Posted on April 29, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

I was doing some spring cleaning in the yard last week, when I found a small plastic T. Rex. He was somewhat muddied, but otherwise showed no signs of significant wear from his decade long exile from the toy box, and even retained his fearsome posture.

Finding him immediately swept me back to the days when dinosaurs regularly roamed the backyard, and a little knot of pain grew in my chest.

Every year in April, the Japanese mark the blossoming of the cherry trees. Many American cities now host cherry blossom festivals of their own. The blossoms peak for a brief few days before falling to the ground in a rain of petals. The ephemeral nature of the cherry blossom’s beauty is symbolic of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, which roughly means an awareness of life’s impermanence.

If you are a parent, you don’t need cherry blossoms to remind you of life’s impermanence.

There are many fairy tales that capture the gentle sadness we feel as we watch our children’s fleeting childhoods speed past. The European tale “Snowflake” tells the story of a childless couple who craft for themselves a child out of snow. To their surprise, she comes to life. She grows quickly until she looks to be about 12 or 13, and of course she is extraordinarily beautiful. As the days lengthen and summer comes, Snowflake grows sad and wistful. On Mid Summer’s Eve, a group of girls from the village ask Snowflake to join them in their revels. They take turns leaping over a bonfire. When Snowflake’s turn comes, she disappears with a slight hiss just at the moment she leaps over the fire.

Buddhism teaches that impermanence is an essential feature of existence. Everything about our lives is in a constant state of coming into being, growing, and then declining, decaying, and dying. If we have been able to avoid direct knowledge of this before becoming parents, motherhood will certainly show us this truth.

Like the muddy T. Rex, material objects can take on significance as if they embody the essence of the moments with which they are associated. I remember sorting through my baby daughter’s clothes every few months, removing the tiny outfits that no longer fit to make room for larger things. Little baby outfits outgrown, like so many cherry blossom petals falling. It was always wrenching.

Sitting with the melancholy of impermanence can be hard. Most of us have an impulse to hold onto those sweet, transient moments. A Japanese fairy tale called “Princess Moonbeam” is another that features a child magically given to a barren couple. As her name implies, Princess Moonbeam is really the daughter of the moon mother, and must return there one day. Moonbeam’s parents beg her to stay, and the emperor threatens to shoot the moon’s messengers who have come to take her home.

When they loose their arrows, they are turned to stone. We can’t hold on forever. Trying only results in life feeling deadened and stultified.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Is There a Right Way to Parent?

Posted on April 21, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

My Facebook feed abounds with articles and book reviews about parenting. Apparently, we are overvaluing, overscheduling, and overprotecting our children. The underlying message in all of these stories is this: We are doing it wrong. And if we are doing it wrong, then there must be some way to do it right. Some fine-tuned adjustment of the dial could help me tune in to just the right frequency, with an implied promise of happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.

A deeper consideration of the issue reveals that the goal of “perfect” parenting is of course illusory. Consider the ironic – and instructive – news that all of our efforts to protect our kids from food allergies may have in fact contributed to the alarming epidemic. Somehow, all of this trying so hard to get it right brings about the very thing we were trying to avoid, at least in some instances. Sometimes we get things wrong by trying so hard to do them right.

Wholeness, Not Perfection

According to Jung, the goal of our life’s journey should be wholeness, not perfection. He famously said that the “right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.” In other words, sometimes we get things right by doing them wrong.

The wisdom of fairy tales supports Jung’s observations. In many tales, it is the witch, the giant, or the evil sorcerer who paradoxically bring about the happy development of the hero in their apparent efforts to thwart him. At the end of the Hungarian tale The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret, a young man wronged as a child by his cruel mother acknowledges his gratitude to her. “If you had not beaten me nothing would have happened that has happened, and I should not now be King of Hungary.” If she hadn’t beaten him, he never would have set out on his hero’s journey.

No Formula

In the end, we don’t know what is “right.” What helps one child may be exactly wrong for another. Just as in the fairy tale, sometimes things have paradoxical effects. I have worked with people in therapy whose parents did everything wrong — abuse, addiction, poverty, etc. And yet in spite of all this — or because of it? — some people survive and even excel with such backgrounds. Others grow up with loving parents and every advantage, and struggle.

There is no formula for being a good parent. All we can do is parent as consciously as possible, while knowing that our “mistakes” may have surprising outcomes in the end.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com

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Why Does Motherhood Make Women So Judgy?

Posted on April 17, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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Christine was uncharacteristically upset when she arrived for our appointment. She had just gotten off the phone with Marni, someone she had felt was a good friend.

“Marni asked me whether I was worried about Josie being too busy and not getting enough sleep now that she is on the swim team,” Christine explained, referring to her 13-year-old daughter.

Though the question may sound innocuous, it stung Christine, who sat across from me tearing up as she talked. This is because in this innocent sounding question, she perceived – I believe accurately – a scathing judgment on her parenting.

Christine and Marni had met at a breast-feeding support group when their girls were babies, and had formed a quick friendship. Christine explained that it felt as though she and Marni saw eye to eye on most parenting issues.

“As the girls got older, we both felt it was important to give them lots of unstructured time. I suppose we judged the other mothers who were always overscheduling their kids.”

“If I thought she were doing the right thing, I’d be doing it too.”

But when the girls hit adolescence, Christine could see that she and Marni were no longer on the same page as often. Believing that physical activity was important for mental and physical health, Christine and her husband encouraged Josie to get more involved in athletics – and Josie responded enthusiastically.

“Marni’s daughter Katie didn’t do sports – Marni still feels sort of self-righteous about not overscheduling her. But now that she’s a teenager, Katie just spends her free time on social media. She’s gaining weight and seems depressed.”

Christine admitted that she was aware she was feeling judgmental of Marni’s parenting choices, just as Marni was apparently judgmental of hers.

“I want good things for Marni and Katie. But I suppose if I am being honest with myself, I don’t think she is making the right decision. If I thought she were doing the right thing, I’d be doing it too.”

Out in the Open

Our parenting decisions reveal our beliefs and values in a more public way than many of us would wish. If we disagree with friends or family on managing finances, practicing religion, or politics, we can usually count on some degree of privacy about these issues. If differences do become obvious, social conventions dictate that we politely ignore these in most cases.

But somehow when we parent, the choices that we make often wind up being on display for all the world to see.

And this can be awkward.

Another mother in my practice named Jeannie had ample experience with this. Her six-year-old son Daniel had significant sensory issues and became easily overwrought. When in this state, he could not be easily soothed and had even become physical with other children.

Jeannie had worked out a method of dealing with her son’s “meltdowns” that was effective and compassionate. She would withdraw with Daniel to a quiet space to make it clear that hurting others wouldn’t be allowed, but she would let him scream and cry until he felt better. The very noisy nature of these outbursts usually drew sideways glances from other moms.

“I know what I’m doing is right for Daniel,” Jeannie told me. “But boy is it hard to know everyone is looking at me wondering why I don’t deal with me out of control kid!”

Looking for Validation

Parenting decisions invite judgment not only because of their visibility, but also because mothers so often look to each other for validation. What endeavor has higher stakes than raising our children? And where in life is the “right” way to do it less clear?

No wonder we look to each other to be reassured. And no wonder we have such strong feelings when we see someone doing things differently – it raises the specter that we have been doing it “wrong.”

Living our Truth

Christine’s task was to become comfortable with her own parenting decisions so that Marni’s covert criticisms didn’t affect her so much. Becoming at home with our own preferences, opinions, and choices is part of the life-long task of sorting out what really matters to us. Parenting provides plenty of opportunities for us to learn about our own values, and stand up for them – even  in the face of other’s judgments.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

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