The Conscious Parent

Nevertheless, because our children are vulnerable and mostly powerless,
we feel free to blame them for our reactivity. Only by facing up to the
fact that it isn’t our children who are the problem, but our own
unconsciousness, can transformation come about.
How did we become so reactive? Not only do we inherit certain egoic
scripts and roles from our family of origin, we also inherit an emotional
signature. Beneath every role and script is a unique emotional imprint.
This is the case because, as an infant, we are in a state of being, not ego,
which means our defenses are unformed and we are susceptible to the
emotional energy around us. We energetically interact with our parents’
emotional state, absorbing their emotional imprint, until this energy
becomes our own emotional stamp. Unless at some point in our life we
become conscious of the emotional energy we have absorbed from our
parents, we will inevitably transfer this imprint to our own children.
Because we weren’t taught by either our parents or society to access
our inner stillness and find the roots of our pain and pleasure within
ourselves, we are reactive to external circumstances. Since we didn’t
learn to simply observe our emotions, honor them, sit with them, and
grow from them, our response to external stimuli became increasingly
emotionally toxic, which is the root of our cyclones of drama.
When we are raised to suppress our darker emotions, these emotions
form a shadow from which we are cut off. When emotions are split from
our consciousness, they lie dormant, ready to be activated at a moment’s
notice, which is why so many of us erupt out of the blue. Whenever these
emotions are triggered by another’s shadow, we find ourselves upset
with the person who evoked these emotions in us. Again, let me