The Conscious Parent

react in a traditional me-versus-you way, we lose our power, and with it
the ability to be creative in our response. Our children are then felt to be
depriving us of something—whether our sanity, our ability to be in
control, our time, our dignity, or our honor. They become entities to be
worked against instead of with.
Rather than engaging in the typical “I” versus “you” battles, were we
to say to ourselves, “Everyone around me is a reflection of me,” we
would respond to our triggers in a quite different manner. The traditional
dynamic of parent-versus-child would yield to the realization that our
children are often wiser than us and able to advance us spiritually just as
effectively as we can advance them.
How this works even with teens can be seen from a father and his
daughter who were close when the daughter was young. Now that she
was a teen, their relationship had entered a dysfunctional stage, to the
point that she and her father were barely speaking and she was failing her
classes.
The daughter felt isolated and criticized. “My father always thinks I’m
lying and doesn’t trust me,” she lamented as we talked. “He doesn’t even
know me.” Feeling misunderstood, unheard, and unseen, the daughter
altered her personality to avoid her father’s harsh treatment by lying. “I
used to care, but now I don’t even care about telling the truth,” she told
me. “It’s so much easier to lie.”
At his wits’ end, the father kept repeating, “She always lies to me. She
must stop lying to me.” His way of stopping his daughter’s lies was to up
the ante by becoming even more critical and controlling. Regularly
interrogating her, their time together revolved around “getting to the