leaving her with her nanny. By doing things her own mother never did
for her, this mother imagined she was being a devoted parent. Ironically,
her desire for her children to have the childhood she was deprived of
resulted in her children feeling as lonely and neglected as she had. Only,
in her children’s case, they had buried their feelings beneath their
busyness because they sensed they had to keep performing for their
mother’s sake.
The lesson is that if we teach our children to predicate their sense of
identity on “doing,” they will be unhappy every time life fails them in
some way.ARE YOU AWARE THAT ANXIETY IS A FORM OF
“DOING?”
One of the most common forms of “doing” that we use to cover up our
inability to just be is anxiety.
When parents react to their circumstances with doubt, hesitation,
pessimism, or distrust, unable to sit calmly in their present reality,
anxiously seeking answers to how their future will look, children orient
themselves to life in the same way. Because such parents don’t see life’s
difficulties as an invitation to connect to their resilience, instead
developing an attitude of “woe is me,” their children develop the same
emotional response to their own difficulties. Inheriting the anxiety
imprint creates a feeling of victimhood and a desire to play the role of a
martyr.
Similarly, when parents interact with the present moment in such a
way that they focus on what they feel is missing, lack becomes their