Suffering: The Series Part 12 ~ The Gamble

A very common question I get to answer in my office is, “How do I know I am doing better by my children than my parents did by me?”

Of course, there are many versions of the question. “Which mistakes are the wrong ones to make with my children?” “At what point should I worry that my children are responding to my correction and discipline the way I responded to my own parents’ shortcomings?” “At what point will my frustration or impatience with my kids be harmful to them or communicate that I don’t love them?”

(I could offer more versions, but I have a point to make. If you are interested, feel free to message me directly to discuss this further.)

At the end of the day, what all parents seem to want to know is, “How do I know when my imperfections are harming my children in a lasting way?”

There are two answers to this. The first, and probably most discouraging, is: you can’t.

I am not saying that you can’t know or discern whether an action will harm your children, we certainly have ways of determining that with moral and ethical principles. What I am saying is that there isn’t a formula for which particular imperfection is harmful or not.

Which brings me to the next answer: It’s more about the recovery than the action itself.

Again, I’d like to repeat that there are definitely actions that are damaging no matter what. Things like abuse, neglect and violence will always leave a mark on the mental health of a child. However, even within those categories, there is some space to recover, and I have seen it happen time and time again in my office and in the lives of my clients.

I can tell you very certainly that every person who has come to see me for therapy has had something happen to them, either by a parent or a loved one or even a stranger. But the one, solitary difference between what they carry and how much they carry comes down to whether or not they were given the context for what happened to them.

Put another way, when a child knows that the suffering they are subjected to does not have to do with their worth, their value or their belovedness, their resiliency with be greater than that of a child who was never given context or the assurance that their suffering was something they didn’t deserve.

In short, what makes the biggest difference is pursuit. The pursuit of an apology, the pursuit of an explanation, and even just the pursuit of a conversation in which the child is able to wonder “Why did this happen?” and not hear something that sounds like, “Because you asked for it,” or “Because you made me angry.”

Because the truth is children see the world as if everything that happens to them is in response to their existence, and the messages they are given by those in charge of telling them how to think about the world will develop into how to think about themselves in the end.

The children of the world are the most important humans to exist, and therefore our responsibility to guide correctly. And a child who suffers without context and guidance will become an adult who suffers long into adulthood, and even potentially continue that suffering to the children of the next generation.

So, how do we become better? We serve the children of today with compassion, empathy and understanding. And if that serves as a struggle for us internally, our only choice is to look inward and change the way we respond to ourselves as the children of the past who deserve the same compassion, empathy and understanding as well.