When Ravit was a child, she promised herself that she would be a different kind of mother than her own.
When she became a mother, she discovered that despite her promise to herself, she was yelling at her children exactly like her mother yelled wen she wad a child.
She hats herself when this occurred.
I believe that this may well have happened to you—that you promised yourselves that you wouldn’t be like your parents and lo and behold something happened and you behaved exactly – but exactly – like your parents.
The feeling, the self-rebuke and disappointment when we hear our parents’ words out of our own mouths can often fell like a betrayal.
We betrayed ourselves. We betrayed our dream of parenthood.
And so we are angry with ourselves.
Ravit wanted to change this. She really wanted to be a different mother to her children. Therefore, she came to me.
And Ravit’s story is the story of many parents. Maybe even your story.
Ravit’s story can be divided into two. One part was Ravit’s expectations from herself and the second part involved learning how to stop yelling at her children.
In this article, I would like to focus on Ravit’s and my work regarding the first part.
I believe in acceptance—acceptance and compassion.
When we accept ourselves with our faults, with our own parents’ lack of perfection, and with the fact that we’re not the parents we wanted to be, only then can we change.
The more we rebuke ourselves and feel guiltier about our behavior—the more likely we are to return again and again to the same mistakes. And find ourselves stuck in a parenthood we don’t like.
I invite you now to take the time to write down those parental expectations you don’t succeed in fulfilling: the parents you want to be in contrast to the parents that you are daily.
How did I work with Ravit so that she could be herself and not her mother?
I’m sharing the different stages, and I invite you to either undergo or write down the processes as they appear.
We began by entering the anger, the pain, and the frustration that she experienced.
Everything in our lives that we try to uproot because of our dislike usually grows in force. Wisdom comes in acceptance.
Therefore, we let ourselves linger in the anger, pain, and the feeling of betrayal.
The more we allowed these difficult feelings to just be, and the more we looked at them without judgment or criticism and without trying to push them further away or to remove them from within her, the more they diminished.
What happened to Ravit? When she accepted the fact that her parenting isn’t what she expected and that she didn’t behave as she would have liked, magic took place – she could behave differently.
And this magic can happen to every one of you.
It’s bound with accepting who we are and compassion over who are.
Only with acceptance and compassion can a change take place.
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