No matter how good our intentions, how intelligent our approaches, if our parenting is coming through underground channels of our needs, it is inevitable that it will come out contaminated.
The unconscious evil
We’re scared at the thought of physically abusing or harming our children in any way. We put ourselves in a different category from those who do; we take our job as parents seriously. But every day, parents are putting their emotional and psychological interests before those of their children. Chances are, they are never aware of it.
Living an illusion
Our children become our victims when we hide from ourselves, when we don’t experience who we are and what we do, when we give altruistic reasons to explain our actions.
The most common reason given is we want what is best for our children. Parents who are unwilling or incapable of confronting themselves, their inner wishes and needs, live behind a mask of distortion, they exist in an illusion.
Any emotional use of children by parents will undermine their development. Psychiatrists say that as soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over her, her vital growth will be violently interrupted.
We use our children as our possessions when we focus our own needs on them. A father uses his child as his possession when his ambition for his daughter is overlaid on the boy’s interests and talents.
“Music is not a profession! You must be a lawyer.” At 48, the lawyer daughter is deep in a mid-life crisis. Her days feel empty, her husband complains that she acts like an old woman. Twenty years married to work while her heart was elsewhere has taken its toll.
Not remote controlled
We perpetrate this when we attempt to become the constant directors of our children’s experience, when we “know what is best for them,” not only in how to use the new toy the ‘right’ way, but what, when, and how to feel and express themselves.
We encase them in a veneer that reflects our needs and our shadows, prompting them to conceal from the world, and eventually from themselves, who and how they truly are. We minimise their sense of self, we disqualify the validity of their experiences, we disqualify them.
Parents make a deliberate effort to provide their child with quality experiences in all areas of life. Unfortunately, this deliberate effort is often counter to their unacknowledged inner wishes and needs, and therefore result in a profoundly negative outcome.
Well-intentioned we may be, but as long as we are blind to the reality of ourselves and our intention with our children, we are living an illusion.
As children discover, they can’t get through the wall of the parents’ interests and get hold of a true response, they gradually lose touch with their own experience as well, since to voice their reality is a threat to their parents’ illusion. They will always lose, for a child’s sense of wholeness depends on the parents’ integrity.