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Archive for Initiation

Do Kids Have Too Much Power?

Posted on January 26, 2018
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

These days, there is a widespread tendency for children of all ages to have too much power relative to their parents. I realize it sounds a bit old-fashioned to say this, and in fact I believe this trend has developed in part as a reaction against overly authoritarian parenting styles that dominated earlier generations. However, the pendulum has perhaps swung too far.

In some circles, there appears to be an implicit assumption that children enter the world in a state of pure potential, which needs to be protected and sheltered by the parent so that it can emerge in its fullest form. Parents with this unconscious philosophy believe that it is their job to follow the child’s lead as much as possible. The aim appears to be to foster what naturally emerges rather than trying to shape or mold the child according to parental expectations and values.

Preschoolers don’t need to be consulted about their bedtime.

Though aspects of child-led parenting can work well for both parents and children, there are situations in which it is ill-advised. I once knew a woman who believed in letting her four-year-old take the lead in all things, including bedtime. According to this mom, imposing an arbitrary bedtime would be unnecessarily coercive and thereby do damage to his perfectly-formed little soul. So the little boy often stayed up until 11 pm or later. This meant he was often hours late for preschool. The mom would relate to me the long talks she would have with her son, discussing with him the reasons why going to sleep earlier might be preferable. She wanted to negotiate all of this with his input.

I recall feeling badly for the child in part because his unusual sleep patterns were disruptive and meant that it was difficult for him to participate normally with the things the other children did. But mostly I felt badly for him because of the enormous and wholly inappropriate degree of responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders. Deciding – or even substantially consulting on – when he ought to go to bed was not liberating. It was confusing and distressing for him. And it was unfair. He couldn’t possibly have the cognitive and emotional maturity to weigh the consequences of going to bed at 8 versus 11. And he couldn’t be expected to exercise judgment and restraint by making the wiser and less fun choice.

This mom would roll in several hours late for preschool, and I would watch her patiently negotiate with her son, readying him to join the other kids who had long been engaged together. It would take some coaxing, as he would be tired. He didn’t look happier or more care-free. He looked and acted care-worn.

Teens aren’t ready to make big decisions about their future solo.

When children become teens, the ways in which we give them too much power are likely to shift. These are somewhat more insidious, and unfortunately are also often supported by the wider culture. I sometimes speak with parents who have the mistaken assumption that, because their children have fully formed and loudly articulated opinions, they must be listened to and granted authority as if they were adults.

Teens can gain this kind of inappropriate power by claiming harm at our hands. “You’re triggering me, mom,” one teen I know said to her mother when discussing her lagging academic performance. “I don’t feel safe with you!”

One mother I worked with had a 13-year-old daughter who insisted that she had no intention of going to college and intended to start her own business at 18 instead. She was giving this as a reason for dragging her heels in applying to private high schools, which is what her parents had deemed in her best interest. For a brief period, the conflict on this issue became fairly intense in her household. This mother’s previous therapist encouraged her not to press the issue, instructing her that she shouldn’t expect to control every aspect of her daughter’s life! (This daughter is now a senior in high school, and is very much looking forward to going to college.)

Contrast this with advice given to me by a wise friend when I sought out her perspective on parenting my own teen. “Adolescence is the wrong time to take your hands off the wheel.” We all know this, right? Teens are not necessarily equipped to measure long-term consequences of their actions. They may not like us asserting parental authority when it comes to decisions with significant downstream consequences, but it isn’t fair to deprive them of the mature perspective of a caring adult just because we don’t want to upset them.

A Greek myth helps us know that this, like most things, is an ancient dynamic between adults and youth.

Phaethon

Helios was the god of the sun, who each day drove the fiery steeds across the heavens in his chariot. Helios had a mortal son named Phaethon, who was very proud of his Olympian father. One day, wishing to prove to taunting boys that he was indeed the son of a god, he begged his father to grant him whatever he wished. Helios swore on the river Styx to give him whatever he wanted because he wished to please his beloved son. Phaethon demanded that he be allowed to drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky. Helios knew that this would be a terrible mistake, but he had already given his word. He tried to convince his son to change his mind, but Phaethon would not be dissuaded.

So Helios sadly crowned his son with his golden rays, and covered his son’s body with ointment to protect him from the burning heat. He barely had time to shout a few warnings about handling the fiery, spirited steeds, when the great gates opened and Phaethon flew up in the chariot of the sun.

For a while, all went well, and Phaethon stood beaming with pride in his father’s chariot, but the horses were not easily managed. Sensing a less steady hand upon the reins, they veered off the heavenly path, and careened too close to earth. Phaethon was unable to master the horses. Zeus saw that the sun chariot was in danger of creating great destruction. Sadly, he struck Phaethon down with a thunderbolt, killing him.

Grieving Helios never let anyone else drive the sun chariot again.

Phaethon was mortal, and was rashly asking to be treated as a god. Any parent of a teen will know that adolescents can be filled with an inflated sense that they are immortal and can do anything. Helios’s rash promise was made in part because he wanted to please his beloved son.

Undermining parents

Disturbingly, there are many in the wider culture who seem to share the view that kids have to be given more power, and even protected from their parents. In some subcultures, children are empowered by therapists, teachers, and other adults to view their parents as potentially harmful people with suspect motivations. When schools make major decisions at the request of a child without consultation with parents, the message gets reinforced that parents can’t be trusted to have their child’s best interest at heart.

When as a culture we overvalue the child perspective and undervalue that of the adult, we run the risk that young people won’t have the steady hand to guide their way to adulthood.

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Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Originally published on PsychCentral

Article

When Motherhood Defeats Us

Posted on August 3, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
No Comments

It is a human need to experience ourselves as competent. When we are mothering children, whether we feel competent can play a significant role in determining how satisfying we find this role. While some women come by a sense of competence easily after becoming a mother, others may have a more difficult time. Some women find the infant and baby stage easy, but feel at a loss when their child becomes a toddler. Others may not feel as though they hit their stride until their child is older.

Whatever our initial experience of motherhood may be, it is undeniably true that we will face defeat again and again as we parent our children. Some defeats are small – we throw up our hands and give up on trying to switch from white to whole wheat pasta. Other defeats carry grave and permanent consequences that alter the shape of our lives.

An Algonquin tale illustrates how we are defeated by motherhood, and gives us an idea of how we might grow from this experience

Glooscap and the Baby

Glooscap was the mighty hero of the Algonquin people. He had conquered a race of giants, and cunning sorcerers, wicked spirits, fiends, cannibals, and witches. He boasted that there was nothing left for him to defeat.

But an old woman laughed. “Are you so sure, oh Great One? There is one adversary who remains unsubdued, and no one can conquer him.”

Dismayed, Glooscap asked the name of this foe.

“His name is Wasis, but I advise you not to have any dealings with him!”

Wasis was a little baby who sat on the floor sucking a piece of maple candy and cooing to himself as he slobbered. Glooscap had never married, and had no idea how children were to be managed, but he was very confident that, if he could handle a race of giants, and a pack of witches, and some cannibals, he would make out just fine with one small baby.

He smiled at the child. “Come here, Wasis!” said the great Glooscap.

The baby smiled back, but didn’t move. Glooscap tried to coax the child by imitating a beautiful birdsong. Then he motioned again for the baby to come to him. Wasis laughed in delight, but still did not do as he was commanded. He just went on sucking on his candy.

Now Glooscap worked himself in a terrible rage. He was not used to being defied in this way! He shouted angrily at Wasis, demanding that he okay, but this only made the child erupt in deafening wails that were so loud and distracting, Glooscap could barely hear himself.

Then the mighty warrior summoned all his great powers. He recited all the magical incantations he knew, and recited all of the most powerful prayers. But Wasis just sat and sniffled a little.

Finally, Glooscap rushed from the hut in utter defeat, while Wasis the baby went back to cooing. 

For women who may have lived heroically before becoming having kids, motherhood can pose special challenges. If we have defeated the giants and witches of academic or professional challenges, we may be very used to feeling competent. For some women who fit this description, having a baby can indeed mean finally meeting their match.

Defeat

My client Aimee was a successful attorney. When she became pregnant with her first child, she was excited to become a mom. She shared that she wasn’t particularly worried about juggling parenting and work, because she had identified a trustworthy nanny, and her husband had a flexible schedule.  She first came to see me a few months after her daughter was born.

Aimee had a difficult birth, and healing from it took many weeks. She hadn’t expected that labor would carry such lingering physical difficulties. She was also unprepared for how all-engrossing caring for a newborn would be. Her physical difficulties, sleeplessness, and postpartum hormonal soup left her profoundly disoriented. Though she had hoped to go back to work after six weeks, she found that wasn’t possible. This significant defeat caused her to re-evaluate assumptions about herself and her life she had long taken for granted.

For Aimee, the reality of motherhood and birth was a significant defeat for that part of her determined that life should go on as before. She had to admit that things would never be the same for her. This admission opened her up to question values previously taken for granted. It gave her a chance to re-evaluate her priorities and engage with aspects of herself that had long been neglected.

Aimee did return to work eventually, though she admits she is a different person now than before her daughter was born. Though she did lose aspects of herself, she gained others.

“I have a broader perspective now. I think I am more accepting and understanding of the people I manage. Overall, I think I’m a better lawyer now because of this.”

Photo by Tim Bish on Unsplash

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

Listening to Our Parenting Intuition

Posted on April 6, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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Perhaps no human endeavor engenders as much well-meaning advice as parenting. Parenting books, websites abound. Friends, relatives (mothers in law?), strangers, and of course the media are happy to offer advice on all aspects of raising children – much of it wildly contradictory.

Despite all this advice – or because of it – raising children is full of uncertainty. Each child is different, and what works for one may not work for another. What works for one child in early childhood may backfire later. As parents, we must content ourselves with groping our way through the parenting process. Though it can be helpful to seek out advice and information, ultimately, we will have to rely to some extent on our intuition to choose the best course.

Listening to our intuition can be difficult, especially if we were raised in families that did not teach us to trust ourselves.

A fairy tale from South Africa called “The Three Little Eggs” shows how a woman’s use of her intuition can be the difference between life and death for her and her children.

A woman with two children lived with her abusive husband. One day, she decided that she had had enough, and she leaves with her two children. While fleeing, she noticed a bird’s nest with three eggs in it. She thought it would be a lovely plaything for her children, so she took the nest down from the tree and handed it to her children, reminding them to be careful not to break the eggs.

After a while, she came to a fork in the road, and did not know which way to go. “Go to the right!” commanded a little voice. The woman was startled because the voice came from one of the little eggs. She followed the egg’s advice, and found a cozy cottage filled with food. After she and her children had eaten and slept, they continued on their way, still following the advice of the little eggs.

As the story continues, the eggs don’t always steer them clear of danger. More than once, the eggs direct them to a place inhabited by an ogre or ogress. When there is a crisis, the eggs tell the woman what to do. Sometimes, they tell her to do the impossible, such as picking up a heavy rock. The mother does not think she can manage it, but she attempts it any way, only to find to her amazement that she can do it.

On two occasions, the initial advice of the eggs is wrong or incomplete. For example, the eggs instruct the mother to climb a tree and drop an axe on the head of the sleeping ogress. The woman does so, but the axe only wakes the ogress up! The eggs then tell the mother to climb down and kill the ogress with the axe.

This is in fact often how intuition works in our actual lives. We may be unsure of what to do, but we have a hunch. When we act on our instinct however, it may be that things get worse! Then we have to adjust our plan, and perhaps consult our intuition further.

Sometimes we just have a feeling.

A woman in my practice had a child who was not nursing well. The baby would pull of the breast, cry, and arch his back when feeding. My patient reported to me that she “just had a feeling” that something was wrong, although when she shared her concerns with her husband or pediatrician, they minimized her fears, explaining that the baby was just colicky.

This mom’s intuitions were persistent, however. She tried different solutions to the problem, but nothing seemed to help. Eventually, this mother was persistent enough with her pediatrician that the doctor checked the baby’s stool, which was found to have blood in it. The mother was advised to give up dairy, and the baby’s fussiness resolved.

Parenting offers us the opportunity to listen to our instincts more carefully. This is an important skill to model for our children – and a healing opportunity for us.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Get Rid of Your Teen

Posted on March 3, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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The title is a bit of an overstatement. However, there are some good reason to consider giving your adolescent a taste of independence. Throughout recorded history, children were often sent away from home to live with adults other than parents at the end of childhood, a practice known as extrusion. Not only was this a common practice in many pre-industrial cultures, something similar also happens among our close primate relatives.

To look at just a few examples, the bar mitzvah celebrates a young man becoming a full adult upon reaching the age of 13. The final blessing in a traditional bar mitzvah is the Baruch Sheptarani, which translates as “Blessed is He who has now freed me from the responsibility of this boy.” In Biblical times, a boy reaching the age of 13 was ready to leave his parents.

Even until fairly recently, young people were “placed out” at the end of childhood to live with other adults. In medieval Europe, boys and girls were often apprenticed to live with other families and learn a trade. Though it sometimes happened that a child would be apprenticed to his or her own parent, this was relatively rare.

Why would this be such a widespread practice, found even among our non-human cousins? The universality points to a deep, archetypal need that young people have to separate from their parents as they seek the story they came into the world to tell. Leaving home psychologically is a necessity for those who would set out on the hero’s journey, and this psychological development can be kindled by an actual, physical leave-taking. In leaving home, the young person is challenged for the first time in his life to manage without the close support of his own parents. He is therefore able to test himself and experience a sense of his own efficacy and agency.

To our parents, who have known us since birth, we will always be children. When a young person at the cusp of adolescence ventures into the wider world, she has a chance to be experienced as a budding adult individual – and to experience herself in the same way. This experience of being seen and seeing ourselves as other or more than our parents even imagined is often vitally important as the young person seeks to find their individual sense of meaning and purpose. As Michael Meade writes, “It’s difficult for parents to see through the veil of their own expectations to the inner nature of the child born to them. And each child carries something that waits to be born in the world beyond the parent’s door” (The Water of Life, p. 35). Today, where are the opportunities to let our young adolescents go beyond our parental door?

Though our modern practice of sending children away to boarding school at age 13 or 14 is similar to these historical practices, there is a substantial difference. In traditional versions of extrusion, young people lived in semi-autonomy with close non-parental adult guidance. In modern boarding schools, the milieu is more peer focused, and there is less close adult mentorship.

There are still a few opportunities for an experience that is a bit more like the traditional practice of extrusion. When my daughter was 12, she asked that we allow her to go overseas as part of an exchange program called Adolesco. For three months, she lived with another family in France, and in this way learned another language through immersion. As wonderful as it was to see her learn French, I have come to understand that the gift of gaining some psychological independence at this critical time in her development was just as valuable, if not more so.

According to psychologists, conflict between teenagers and their parents goes back as far as recorded history. This likely reflects young people’s urgent need to separate and seek their own path. Throughout history – and perhaps never more than now – a young person’s negotiation of separation can be fraught and dangerous. When young people aren’t allowed to have this separation in a way that is safe and supported by other adults, they can resort to less healthy ways to address their need for independence. Seeking the extremes of experience that will help them initiate, teens can use drugs, acting out, and unhealthy identity exploration to establish for themselves and their parents that they are unique individuals who have their own destinies.

It is no coincidence, surely, that extrusion traditionally occurred around the same time or even in conjunction with a formal initiation into adulthood. “…Initiation was one way in which ancient cultures sought to break the spells of childhood and open the life of each person to inspiration and meaning” (Meade, p. 122). Leaving one’s childhood home is itself an initiation. The experience of leaving home as a young person is likely always terrifying and thrilling. The young person casts herself into life’s depths. In struggling with new challenges, she learns both awe and something about what she is made of. My daughter returned from France not just with a new language, but with a new appreciation for what the world has to offer, and what she might offer it. This first taste of initiation has helped her open to where her life needs to lead.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Late Adolescence and the Need for Meaning, Part II

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

In part one of this blog post, I noted that adolescents are prone to face questions of meaning as they enter adulthood. At such a time, they often look to us to see how we have negotiated these existential matters. Often, youth find that the adults in their lives are suffering from spiritual sickness due to a lack of meaning.

The Water of Life

The Grimm’s fairy tale “The Water of Life” tells the story of such a spiritual affliction. In the tale, the father’s spiritual thirst must be answered for by the son, who goes on a quest to find the water of life that will restore the father. So it is often true in life as well that when a young person sees a parent suffering from spiritual desiccation, he or she spends many years in search of transcendent values that can heal the parent.

There was once a King who had an illness, and no one believed that he would come out of it with his life. He had three sons who were much distressed about it, and went down into the palace-garden and wept. There they met an old man who inquired as to the cause of their grief. They told him that their father was so ill that he would most certainly die, for nothing seemed to cure him. Then the old man said, “I know of one more remedy, and that is the water of life; if he drinks of it he will become well again; but it is hard to find.”

So begins the story. One by one, each son sets off in turn to find the water of life. The oldest two sons are too preoccupied with narrow ambitions, and therefore become stuck. The youngest son has the humility to listen to the wisdom of lowly intuition, which appears to him in the form of an ugly dwarf. He alone finds the enchanted castle where the water of life is found.

Spiritual Emptiness

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung describes his own experience of being an adolescent and realizing that his father was suffering to his core from an absence of meaning. Though a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, Carl’s father Paul suffered from crippling religious doubts that he never explored or engaged. Young Carl gradually realized that the faith professed by his father was in fact empty and meaningless, and failed to sustain the elder Jung. As in the fairy tale, this awareness of his father’s suffering set the young man a task that would define his life’s work. C.G. Jung’s psychology addresses itself above all else to this question of meaning, and is in this sense an answer to and redemption of his father’s sickness.

What do our adolescents see when they look to us for meaning? Perhaps we have come to terms with our life. We find our existence meaningful and we are at peace with ourselves, but our children see our lives as lacking in intensity, adventure, or purpose. They will need their own quest, and we can set them off on it with the detachment that comes with wisdom. (This is the scenario depicted in the Cat Stevens song “Father and Son.”)

Looking for Meaning at Midlife

But what if we are thirsting after an abiding sense of purpose? We may have abandoned ourselves to materialistic acquisition or egoistic ambitions. We may have allowed ourselves to live through our children, needing them to succeed and be happy for our sakes. Or we may live in the past, content only when recalling a time when our life spread before us with promise. C. G Jung realized as a college freshman that his father’s life had stopped moving forward upon the elder Jung’s graduation from university. “Once upon a time he too had been an enthusiastic student in his first year, as I was now; the world had opened out for him, as it was doing for me; the infinite treasures of knowledge had spread before him, as now before me. How can it have happened that everything was blighted for him, had turned to sourness and bitterness?” (p. 95).

If we have avoided coming to terms with meaning in our own lives – or have lost touch with that which once sustained us – seeing this reflected to us by our children can be an opportunity to address our spiritual thirst. As we release our children to their fate, we have a chance to renew our connection with the water of life as we enter midlife.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

Late Adolescence and the Need for Meaning, Part 1

Posted on February 14, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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“The young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded….They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
-- Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“The secret is that there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.”
-- Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

In adolescence or young adulthood, our children confront the big questions of meaning. As the quotes above illustrate, youth must come to terms with the disappearance of mystery that accompanies coming of age. I remember a phone conversation with a friend who had been a passionate student of French language and culture in college. A year or two after graduation, she found herself ordering office supplies and scheduling meetings at a small firm that imported French goods. I still recall the deep sense of betrayal she expressed. “In college, we explored these incredibly fascinating ideas, and now there’s no place for that.” And it wasn’t just that her entry level job was unsatisfying. It was that she perceived that adulthood was an “arid and precipitous country” that must be crossed. We had been fooled. The adults had made false promises that life might be full of adventure and meaning, when really it was about trying to pay the bills.

Perhaps nowhere is this theme more poignantly explored than in the 1967 film “The Graduate.” As the film opens, Benjamin Braddock has just graduated from college and come home to California for the summer. While his parents boast to their friends about his academic achievements, Ben is lost, staring into a future that is as meaningless and banal as “plastics.” That the high-brow pursuits of college become meaningless nothings is underscored when Ben attempts to talk to Mrs. Robinson about art, but she declares she is not interested in the subject. Later, he asks her what she studied in college. “Art,” she replies.

Benjamin’s sense of alienation from himself and the hollow lives of the adults around him is strikingly portrayed in the scuba scene which marks his 21st birthday – his official entry into adulthood.

 

Feeling lost and adrift, Benjamin looks to the adults around him and realizes that they have never figured it out either. Their lives are superficial and devoid of purpose. So too, Maugham’s protagonist returns from abroad as a young man and is “appalled” at the waste of life that he finds when he greets his aunt and uncle. “They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been.”

For some young people, disillusionment sparks a crisis that can result in depression, acting out, or underachieving. If young people feel dread or despair as they face into the future, they may resign themselves to meaninglessness, becoming bitter and hopeless. Or they may escape into numbing addictions, attempting to fill the emptiness with alcohol, television, or other distractions.

When youth reach the point where they peer into their grown-up futures and try to discern therein a path of meaning, they look to their parents and other adults to see whether we might have discovered some answer. If they can see that we have successfully wrestled with the issue of meaning, we can be a hopeful example to them. If on the other hand, we have deferred or avoided the question of meaning, our children’s quest may be a lonelier one. If being a parent has been the sole thing from which we have derived meaning, our children may feel this as a significant burden as they confront their futures.

Therefore, our children’s adolescence or early adulthood – which in many cases corresponds to our own midlife – may stir up our own unresolved questions about our place and purpose. This is an opportunity for us to do our own work at a critical time in our lives – and our children’s. How we as parents influence our children’s search for meaning is a theme that is explored in the Grimm’s fairy tale “The Water of Life,” which I will discuss in part 2 of this post.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Article

When Our Child is Suffering

Posted on February 3, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
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There were a few days last fall when both of my children were away on overnight school trips. The first childless evening, I found myself disturbingly… happy. Happy, calm, relaxed. What was wrong with me? Wasn’t I supposed to feel lonely? Unsettled by the preternatural quiet of the house? Why did it feel so darned good to have my kids gone?

I thought for a minute about what felt different, and the answer came quickly. I wasn’t listening for slamming doors or raised voices. I wasn’t anticipating complaints about dinner. I wasn’t preoccupied because someone came home from school dispirited. In short, I wasn’t worried about one of my kids being unhappy.

It’s not easy for parents to watch kids suffer – or even struggle. Parenting experts warn us that we need to let our kids skin their knees and bear the consequences of forgotten homework. Doing so teaches our children resilience and grit. But I also wonder about deeper, more essential wounds that we sometimes must watch our children bear. What is the right way to approach these crises?

Sasha started treatment with me after her husband abruptly announced he wanted a divorce. Admirably, she quickly landed on her feet and managed the separation so that it had the least possible impact on her kids. Sasha’s fourteen-year-old son hardly skipped a beat. Her eleven-year-old daughter, however, was a quiet sensitive child who took the loss of her father and the life she had known hard. Melanie cried often, wanted to sleep in her mother’s bed at night, and had frequent nightmares. Once, when Sasha asked her why she was crying, Melanie responded philosophically between sobs, “I remember being little, and I know I’ll never be a child again!”

Sasha’s family expressed alarm at Melanie’s sadness, and even encouraged Sasha to have her evaluated for medication. Sasha confessed to me that she had a different instinct. “Wouldn’t it be wrong to try to take her sadness away?”

Melanie’s tears and philosophic reflection about endings were an intimate introduction to her inner life. So long as those feelings didn’t become disruptive or dangerous – so long as she was able to go to school and wasn’t feeling suicidal – they were healthy and normal. She was learning about the deep, tender places within herself. Strong emotions fully felt are relieving and clarifying, but they also serve to enlarge us. Through such powerful feelings, we have intimations of our own inestimable vastness. Becoming “acquainted with grief,” we can become intimates with our soul.

When we can embrace suffering, it becomes soul-making. Our heart expands, our capacity for empathy is enlarged, and our ability to experience beauty and awe increases. Humans understand this instinctively, and this is perhaps why initiation rites the world over often require of the initiate that he or she suffer. Beatings, mutilation, and scarification are common aspects of tribal initiations. Fear and confusion are also often present. Passing through these trials – suffering them – tests the young person, and opens him or her up to the deep meaning of existence. Most of the trials faced by young people in our culture don’t involve scarification or beatings. However, adolescence can be a difficult and painful passage for many. As a parent this can be particularly difficult to watch.

Susan had always felt particularly close to her youngest son, who shared her quiet, intellectual temperament. When Jason was 17, he fell in love for the first time – and he fell hard. When his girlfriend broke up with him a few months before graduation, he was devastated. He stopped showering, his grades plummeted, and he seldom left his room. Susan was worried. When Jason asked if he could forego a planned family vacation to hike the Spanish camino alone, Susan was understandably hesitant. Given his fragility, would it be wise to let him test himself in this manner? A part of her longed to see him brush himself off and have fun with his cousins that summer, but another part of her recognized that walking Spain’s ancient pilgrimage trail was an effort on his part to make meaning of his suffering and allow it to work on him. With some trepidation, Susan allowed Jason to go to Spain. He not only survived, but also connected with the universal substrate underneath his personal experience of heartbreak. He became a passionate reader of poetry, a love which sustains him many years later.

When we focus too much on our children’s happiness as an indicator of how they are doing, we may miss an opportunity to let them experience the transformative potential of suffering. Many of us can remember learning what really mattered to us because of an experience of initiatory suffering. Perhaps an illness or disappointment awakened us to a sense of personal destiny. The art of parenthood lies in part in knowing when suffering genuinely needs to be alleviated or addressed with a real-world solution, and when it is an aspect of a descent into oneself that brings with it the possibility for transformation. Certainly, it can be very difficult to make this judgment call. It can be even harder to bear witness to our child’s distress. Doing so will likely bring suffering for us as well, which may in turn offer opportunities for our own growth.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

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Big Picture Parenting: How Parenthood Helps Us Grow

Posted on January 31, 2017
by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW
1 Comment

Before I became a mother, I asked an older woman who was a mentor to me what she would have done differently if she could live her life over. “I would have had more children,” she said. “Being a mother was my refiner’s fire. Who would I have become if I had had more?”

This story was related to me by a young mother in one of my workshops. The reflections of her wise friend have stayed with me through the years as I have been on my own parenting journey, and have helped others on theirs. Parenting certainly can be a fiery endeavor. We get angry, even enraged. We feel terror, rapture, pride, and heartbreak. With its extremes of emotion, parenthood is a little like a crucible in which we are cooked. The superfluous gets burnt away, the soul becomes tempered.

Parenthood and Personal Growth

Before becoming a mother, I imagined that the work of raising children would be a sort of pause in the self-development process. Parenthood might bring many joys and satisfactions, but it would likely make personal and professional growth more difficult. Instead, I was surprised to find that motherhood has been an invitation to greet parts of myself previously unknown. It has helped me to claim what really matters, and aided me in finding my firm ground. Where I expected to be impoverished, instead I was enriched.

According to Carl Jung, the goal of psychological growth is individuation, Jung’s term for wholeness. Individuation is a life-long process of unfolding, a gradual development of the particular individual we came into the world to become. It is characterized by an awareness of an abiding sense of self, steady presence in the world, and aliveness even in the face of difficulties. Being a mother is not a distraction from the process of individuation. Parenting children can be an opportunity for deepening into our stories, claiming our truths, and becoming who we were meant to be.

The Stolen Baby

Fairy tales have a way of communicating ineffable truths in beautiful, timeless imagery. The Scottish tale “The Stolen Bairn and the Sidh” helps express how parenthood allows us to grow into the fullest version of ourselves.

A young mother sets her baby down for a minute to fetch some water for him. While she is gone, two members of the fairy tribe known as the Sidh come and steal him away. The young mother is bereft when she finds her baby gone, and seeks far and wide for her child. A wise woman helps her to find her way to the secret land of the Sidh, and advises her to bring a rare gift with her that she can use to exchange for her child. But the young mother is poor, and has nothing to bring. She makes a harp from green wood, and strings it with her own golden hair. The king of the Sidh is so taken by the beautiful harp and its enchanting tones that he gladly gives her the baby in return. The mother is overjoyed to have her child back in her arms, and she never again leaves him alone.

Becoming Who We Truly Are

In spite of being poor, the mother in the story came to realize that she had within her everything she needed to take care of her baby – and herself. This is the lesson that awaits all of us when we parent with a curiosity about our inner life.

Raising our children will likely be our life’s great adventure, regardless of what else we may do or achieve. Being a parent will disabuse us of our beliefs about what we can control. It will force us to come to terms with the dark, unswept corners of our soul, and demand that we take a stand for what really matters to us. Motherhood will invite us to undergo our own heroine’s journey – a journey that will ask us to become who we truly are.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com

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