I love Robert Wright’s “None Zero Sum Game” concept.  Being an English major, I love words and terms… I like the sound of the phrase itself.  Still…I cannot avoid seeing the logic behind the ideal that it is for self preservation that we should/must work to gain deeper understanding of cultures that hate us, for when we do, we can figure out how to get them to not hate us.

I am thinking that this concept can also apply to personal relationships.

Here is what I mean…

It is all so easy and habitually natural at the least, to hold to resentment, to regurgitate the experiences of victimization and sometimes to expand the negative experience in our minds to further the need for anger and hate.

It is also just as easy to find flaw in others and replay those aspects both externally and internally to feed some sense of insecurity in our own selves.  Doing such a thing can make us feel good if only temporarily.  But lets be fair and discuss what this “good” feeling is.  It is not a true “good” emotion.  What I mean to say by this is that true good should last, when it comes to our emotional state, but the good feelings, the temporary feeling of superiority over others, does not give us long term good feelings.  Equivalent to doing drugs, we have to do it again to gain that good feeling.  And like drugs, possesing ill feelings toward others tears away the good nutrients from our hearts, souls and I propose, even from our physical bodies.

Why am I talking about this you may be asking?
I am talking about this because I have been in a long term discussion, more like an argument with my extremely articulate and highly intelligent twenty year old son.

I have been on a crusade.

My crusade has been to convince him of just that concept.. to attempt to understand some of those difficult people around him.  The reason why I use the term “crusade” is because I am really good at preaching when I feel that someone is being wrong, especially when it is my own son who I expect to be as good as God(I am agnostic by the way so I am not sure of the consequence of this word that I am using with little remorse).

But here is what I realized… just recently… and have been thinking about it…
I too do exactly the same thing that my son has been doing, what I have been trying to talk him out of…

I too often am unwilling to forgive or even just to move on.  In my heart, I designate, those who are good people vs. those who are bad.  Of course I would never admit that I do such a simplistic a thing, but really in the end, that is what my thinking or my judgment ends up amounting to.
Of course I could not guide him to think differently about these people.  I have showed him for the first twenty years of his life, how to hold a grudge, to judge, to shun those who hurt me, insult me, etc… much more often than attempting a deeper understanding, having compassion, love, etc…

It is not easy being  a parent, if one wants to be truly effective.  Sometimes, teaching or guiding is not about talking it but living it.  It takes a long time.

So here I am… from today forward, I will have to try my hat at deeper forgiveness, compassion, better understanding of those who hurt me or are difficult, or are prejudiced, etc.  As I write it, I am uncertain how easy it will be for me.  And that gives me the clue as to how hard it must be for my son.

I agree whole heartedly with Wright, that it is for self preservation that we must understand others and grow our morals.  If I want my son to honestly be happy, then I must teach him how to be truly compassionate and truly empathetic.  And to do so, I must be truly compassionate and truly empathetic.  I have hard work ahead… but a great writer once said, “We can do hard.”  I say, we must.

            Dictionary.com tells us that the word “selfish” is an adjective that carries the following meaning:

            1. devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one’s own

                 interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.

            2. characterized by or manifesting concern or care only for oneself.

 

            Thomas Leonard, the founder of Coachu University, sheds light on another way of looking at the word “selfish.”   His basic thesis is that unless one consciously takes good care of oneself, he or she cannot honestly be good to others.  When a person does not habitually meet his or her own needs, he or she tends to be needy.  In other words, a person who does not meet their own needs most often looks to others to meet them.

            When one is needy, they do not know how to unconditionally or effectively give.  One cannot give what one does not own.  Under the costume of being a giver, needy people in truth are takers.  Leonard recommends that we become selfish in order (amongst many other things) that we truly give.

            As parents we want to nurture our children to live their lives successfully and create positive imprints where ever they step.  The best possible way to do this is to model independent behaviors.  The wisest have said, we teach best by example. 

            How do we parents become selfish/self-ful people?  Thomas Leonard would say that we become self-ful people by taking excellent care of ourselves.  We take excellent care of ourselves by taking excellent care of our bodies, taking steps to resolve issues that cause stress in our lives, taking action to regularly experience pleasure and be willing to say no when we simply want to say no.  I am simplifying his message a bit here but doing these things is a good start toward selfish/self-ful life.

            We are no good to others if we are unable to or unwilling to take care of ourselves.  When we forget the passion of our hearts, our personal needs and voice, we can become needy people who in pretents of giving take that which we shouldn’t.

            An essential part of a successful life is knowing how to be happy by being in touch with what is meaningful.  Our children knowing this (practicing a life that offers them deep sense of meaning) offers us a confidence that they will very well live an optimal potentialed life.

            My brilliantly wonderful Psychology Of Woman professor once told my classmates and me, to be a good mother we must attend to our own sense of happiness (a healthy level of emotional wellbeing).  A happy mother is a good mother.  I know that when I have been the most impatient with my own child and not been my best is when I was stressed out and was not feeling very good emotionally.

            Going back then, to what Leonard argues for, that we should be selfish/self-ful to honestly be self-less, we should easily be able to acknowledge that his points make good and logical sense.  And as we live this way in view of our children, we will inspire them to continue the practice of honest giving by habitually practicing selfishness/self-fulness.  A self-ful parent is an awesome parent!

There are many good parenting methods.  We can all use a tip or two on how to raise responsible kids.  The following is about a technique that worked very well for one mom.  And it is a fun read.

http://www.svmoms.com/2009/11/the-secret-of-raising-responsible-kids.html

                        While I was coaching one of my students, I often felt very frustrated at the amount of homework that all of his teachers placed on him during his freshmen year.  I was doubtful whether they were clear on what outcome they wanted for their students. 

            In this video, Carl Honore talks about the advantage of slowing down our lives.  I think we are all susceptible to moving too fast, taking on too much and missing out on what may be truly important in our lives. 

While enjoying a cup of coffee in one of my favorite cafés, I witnessed a family dynamic that ended up saddening me.

            A brother and a sister walked up to a table right across from me.  The girl appeared to be about nine or ten and the boy looked a few years older.  The smiles and the warmth in their interactions were very heartwarming.  I was mostly intriged by the very intentional and thoughtful behavior of the brother.  He handed his sister a cup of water and placed his unusually large back pack(about 2/3^rd of his height) behind the chair then carfully cliped it so that it would not fall off.  I was impressed with his seemingly very mindful and mature behavior as he walked away and came back with four more cups of water and carfully placed them on the table for four more people who are going to arrive next. 

            When his mother walked in with a woman who looked to be a family friend, I was excited to see their intreactions with one another.  The friend set down next to the boy who was sitting on a chair where he had cliped his back pack on.

             The first thing his mother told him to do was to move to another seat.  She must have wanted to sit next to her friend.  She pointed to the chair across from her friend.  He protested by saying that his drink was already in front of the seat where he was sitting and that he had already drank some out of it.  She told him that she is ok with his germs and again told him to move.  She impatiently pointed with her index finger.    He moved.

            I hated seeing the sadness come over his previous smile filled face.  I wished I would have seen some tenderness in his mother’s expression.  I wished that she would have prevented the sadness in his heart by expressing what she wanted in a more kind and affectionate manner.  Instead she just gave him an order that he had to comply with.  I continued to watch.  What if she had thanked or given him some positive feed back for being so nice to get everyone water (even if she had told him to do it ahead of time) and made him feel appreciated, which she did not do.

            When he got himself to forget the event and began studying the display case and asked if he can go and buy something to eat, she harshly answered, “I want the change back!”  It wasn’t so much that she asked for her change but it was the tone of her voice which was filled with distrust, that would have easily told him that he was not trust worthy with money.  He may steal from her.

            When I was a child I was a trouble maker.  I got into way too many fights in school.  If someone made me angry, I hit them.  It wasn’t until when I became an adult that I realized why I was hitting in school.  I also realized that I was actually kind of a good kid at home and even at school.  I fought physically because I was regularly receiving beatings at home from both my mother and father.  I lived in constant fear. 

            I never received an acknowledgment that I used to get up early mornings to make apple juice for my mother for her health with antiquated tools.  It was very tidious and physically tiring.  I also did almost all the housework(cooking, dishes, most of the shopping, laundry by hand and the cleaning of the house).  Burns on my hands were a reguar part of my childhood.

            My positive attributes not being acknowledged as a child lead to my inability to recognize my own self worth.  No matter how hard I worked, I found it challengeing to see if I’ve done well enough.

            I had been refusing to ask my son to do any thing around the house (due to my own childhood) when he was little.  When he was nine years old, he volunteered to help me put the dishes away. I was immensely thankful for his doing it for me and I let him know not only how thankful I was but how much difference he was making in my life.  He has never said no to helping me since that day.

            Children, like the rest of us enjoy causing happiness for others.  When those good things that they do go unnoticed, they usually stop doing them.  They may also grow up with a lack of self esteem or self appreciation.  And a lack of self appreciation causes many things like attracting less than healthy mates, less than good career choices and, less than what they want in life in most everything. 

            As I was watching the dynamic between that mother and son, I wanted so much to grab that mother and say, “hey look at your son, do you see how good he is, what a sweet person he is?  Notice it and tell him, so that he does not lose that goodness.  Give him praise, give him love and give him a chance to show you that he is honest.  Don’t cause him to become dishonest by treating him like he’s untrustworthy.  Humanbeings are not born theives or liers.  Those who become theives are taught to be that.”            

           It’s just too easy, getting into a pattern of noticing the negatives, whether it be general issues of life or actions and habits of those around us.  This habitual pattern may stem from our desires for things to be good, or more aptly… our fear of failure.  

            I know that when I seem to focus on the negatives of my life, I think I am attempting to prevent something that I fear.    And when I am in this place of fear, I tend to overly correct and criticize everyone including myself.  And when I am in that constant habit of correcting or criticizing everyone, I am not empowering those around me as I want to be doing or as I think I am doing.  Instead I am most likely disempowering everyone.

            If as a child one is often criticized without receiving much in the way of positive feed back, he or she may then, as an adult, not know what it means to just be a part of life, to just know that things are right, just as they are.  It may be that as he or she felt picked apart, he or she learned to pick a part their own world, looking for areas to fix and make better to prevent from being picked a part by those who were in charge of loving them.

            The only problem with this way of being as a parent, is that as a parent our deepest desire is to empower our children and being overly critical contradicts what we want for our children.  We all want our children to be confident, strong and know how wonderful they are.  We want them to go out and conquer the greatest of obstacles and be on top of their world.  We don’t want them to become overly self-critical and spend even one minute doubting them-selves.

            I think about what it feels like to be overly criticized, to have someone notice only the negatives and have those negatives become the only focal point from which they view me.  It feels awful, to say the least. 

            And then I think about my friend, Mara.  Whenever I am in front of her I always feel like I’m on top of the world.  I know that I feel the way I do because she always sees the best in me and therefore connects with the best part of me.

            Our children need for us to be their critiques at various times, but if we find ourselves predominantly in that mode, and not as often their accepter and admirer, then we may need to step out, take a deep breath, clear our lenses and take a new look at our perfectly beautiful and beautifully perfect children.