"Aha!" Moment

This is sort of long, but worth the read. Occasionally I will TiVO Oprah and watch it at night. I was so glad I did that today. After having a hard few days and thus feeling guilty at my disconnectedness to my children this week, I needed to hear this. It's worth reading a few times till you "get it". (I typed this up from what was actually said by Dr. Martha Beck on the show):

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A mother was talking about her guilt over mistakes she had made by staying in a physically abusive relationship for the sake of her children. She ended the relationship, but not before her children had witnessed this abuse. She felt extreme sadness and guilt for this and said she could see the unforgiveness in her son’s eyes. Dr. Martha Beck went on to say the following to her:

"Children model what we do to ourselves, not what we do to them. If the mother is unforgiving to herself, then the child is unforgiving to the mother and the child."

She went on to relate this story: A psychiatrist dealt with troubled patients for 20+ years, and they’d always say “I know my mother loved me, BUT..” and they’d go on to explain their problems. One day she met a really healthy man, and wondered “Gee, I wonder what a normal person’s mother is like”. So, she asked him. She imagined that he’d say that his mother loved him perfectly and made no mistakes at all. But instead he said something she had never heard before from a patient. He simply said “My mother loved life”.

The number one thing you can do to teach your children to be happy is to love your own life. And then love for others comes as a natural outpouring after that. If you raise kids and you only love them and not yourself, then they grow up to be people who can’t love themselves. They don’t treat themselves the way YOU treat THEM, they treat themselves the way YOU treat YOU.

She also suggested we try this exercise….
Imagine that you are caring for a loved one (maybe a sick child, elderly mother or heartbroken friend, etc), and imagine that you’ve tucked them into bed and later, feeling worried about them, you check in on them. You are standing there over the bed watching them sleep, feeling such compassion for them and just wanting them to feel better. When you feel all the compassion you can, imagine the person rolls over in bed, and it’s YOU. Maybe just for a second you can imagine all of the compassion you are PULLING out of yourself to give to others, imagine that same compassion directed at YOURSELF…the possibilities for your life are endless.