The Conscious Parent

she was made to believe that if she changed her outer appearance
enough, her peers would accept her. In this way, she was learning that
painful emotions are too painful to deal with and need to be swept under
the rug, or better still camouflaged by various forms of “doing,” such as
blaming others or fixing her outer appearance. Because all effort was
directed to squelching her pain and disguising it, with no effort made to
sit with it, the daughter was incorrectly coming to believe that her
external persona was more valid than her inner world of feelings. Of
course, she most desperately needed the tools to handle rejection.
When our children are permitted to feel their feelings, they are able to
release them amazingly quickly. They come out of the pain
understanding that pain is just another sensation. The anticipation of the
pain is often more intolerable than the actual pain. When our children
experience their pain in its pure form, without fueling it with resistance
or coloring it with a reaction, the pain transforms itself into wisdom and
perspective.
Once their emotions have been processed, children feel no need to hold
onto them long after they have passed in the way adults tend to do. They
intuitively know that, like the ebb and flow of the ocean, pain comes in
waves—and just as it comes, it also leaves. The reason we adults feel
like it stays forever is that our thoughts have become embroiled in it
based on a vestige from the past. It’s in the mind that the pain continues
to exist, not in the actual situation. This is because we don’t let go.
Part of our problem is that we are unused to handling pain alone. We
would much rather project our pain onto others, roping them into our
emotional drama through guilt, blame, or anger. Or we resort to an