The other day, I overheard Rachida watching a Ted Talk on parenting. It was titled something along the lines of “What Every New Parent Should Know”
What really caught our attention was a joke that the speaker made when she said something very telling about psychologists – specifically indicating the trouble they run into when they fall for The Psychological Illusion.
She said, jokingly…
“The more you study psychology, the more frightening parenting becomes, because we become painfully aware of the fact that we can really screw up our kids.”
When she said this, she got a good laugh from the audience and immediately Rachida paused the video and said:
“Hold on a second, Mamoon, that’s not true when you know the Psychological Reality, is it?”
And she was absolutely right.
The more deeply we understand the Psychological Reality that feeling always comes from thought in the moment, the LESS concerned we are about screwing up our kids.
It’s not that we deliberately go out of our way to do unsensible things when it comes to parenting, but the anxiety and the insecurity that so many parents have about messing up parenting melts away into the background and it’s replaced with confidence and a self-assuredness that we actually can’t screw up our kids.
Our kids have the same internal resources that we do. They have the same beautiful minds that we do. And just as it’s impossible for us to feel our past or to feel our circumstances, so it’s impossible for our children to, in the future, feel any mistakes we make now.
Now I know that a lot of kids grow up and blame their parents and the truth is that a lot of adults today are still blaming their parents.
I heard a funny saying once.
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents.
The truth is, our “issues” are not our parents’ fault. And if you’re a parent, you might be relieved to know that your kids’ issues are not your fault.
Our psychological problem is not what happened to us when we were a child and it’s not the adverse circumstances we might be facing now.
Our only psychological problem is that we fall for the illusion that any of those things, that anything other than thought itself, might have the power to cause our feelings. The moment we free ourselves from the Psychological Illusion, is the moment of our transformation.
