Ted Conferences feature some of the best thinkers of our time, and a recent video we came across shows Dr. Shefali Tsabary, author of “The Conscious Parent,”explaining how we all internalize the voice of our parents – what they say to us and what they do – and carry this into adulthood. The parental voice creates a blueprint by which we define ourselves, and in the below video she explains why the way we parent needs to change.
“We need to occupy the role of parenthood in an entirely different way … we cannot expect our children to embody an enlightened consciousness if we parents haven’t dared to model this ourselves. It all starts with us and how we parent,” she explains in the video.
Many are still suffering from our own childhood wounds, and whether they realize it or not, these are having an effect of their children – and who their children will become when they grown into adulthood.
“We don’t hurt our children because we are evil or ill-intentioned – certainly not out of a lack of love,” Tsabary said. “We hurt our children for one reason only – it’s because we are hurting ourselves and we barely know it. It’s because we are unconscious; because we have inherited legacies of emotional baggage from our own parents. We are sitting on emotional baggage that lies dormant, unconscious waiting to be triggered at a moment’s notice. And who better to trigger us then our children. They just know the buttons to push. Through our children, we get theater seats — orchestra seats — to the theatrics of our emotional immaturity.”
She continued: “When we lose our tempers with our children, and we believe they are devils and monsters, chances are it isn’t because they are that, but because they have triggered an old wound within us. They’ve made us feel feelings that we don’t care to feel. They’ve made us feel powerless and out of control, helpless, and in order to regain a sense of supremacy, we lash out at them in reactivity.”
Parents who have been conditioned to find self-worth outside of themselves are teaching these same values to their children. “Our children come to us whole, compete and worthy. They are happy with two sticks, a stone and a feather. But because we have been conditioned so deeply in an unconscious manner, so severed from our own sense of presence, wholeness, attunement and sense of self and abundance, that we project a sense of lack onto them,” she says in the talk.
“We teach them, do not depend on your sense of self and value, but look outward. Look to the Ferrari, the corporate corner office, to the casino, to the pill, to the bottle, to the needle, to spouse number one, two and three, to where you live, to where you graduate from – because we are severed from a sense of being. We are consumed by doing. This is how we know self-value…”
In her book “The Conscious Parent,” she shares the importance of transforming ourselves in order to empower our children with a new view.
“It is time for us to change the spotlight – to turn it inward – and change it from the child who needs to be fixed, the child as the one with the problem, [to] parental evolution as the solution … the time to awaken is now. The parenting paradigm needs to shift.”
See her 11 minute-talk in the video below: