[HORS SERIE] Rethinking parenting to raise you child with conscience with Dr Shefali

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[HORS SERIE] Rethinking parenting to raise you child with conscience with Dr Shefali

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00:00 / 57:44

GREGORY : So. Hi, everyone. Hi, Dr. Shefali. How are you doing? Hi.

SHEFALI : I’m so excited to be here with you.

GREGORY : I’m very excited. I’m so happy to see you and to have such a chance to talk to you. I think that’s just amazing. We’re going to talk about family. We’re going to talk about conscious parenting, because I think and maybe we’re going to talk about other subjects, actually. But I think the the first question is your own story. You when you had your daughter, you you realised that you were complaining somehow about your daughter and you realised that maybe the issue was within you. Can you explain that? Because you did a PhD, you did a lot of research and yet you find yourself in that situation. I’m super interesting into that, yes.

SHEFALI : So I started writing about conscious parenting because of two things. One was my own experience, which I’ll talk about, but also because I was as a therapist treating so many adults. And I saw that most of the problems that the adults were having could be traced back to their childhood. So I began to see, Wow, every adult I’m treating has issues from their parents. So that was one observation. And then I had this fantasy that when I become a parent, I’m going to not screw up my kid. And then very quickly I realised that I was screwing up my kid and I was screwing up my kid because I had all these fantasies, all these expectations for my child that had nothing to do with who my child was, but all to do with how bad I felt about myself. So if I was yelling at her, it was less to do with her because she was just being a child. But it had to do with me wanting control. So I felt good about myself. So I began to observe how the ego, my ego, was so active in childhood, in my child’s childhood, that it really stopped me in my tracks and made me re-evaluate how messed up I was. And I realised that the first child I needed to raise was my inner child. I needed to parent myself like I was a mess. And I think parents don’t want to be honest about this because culture tells us that we know best, that children are to be seen, not heard. So culture allows the parent to feel superior and like you don’t have to worry. You just have to tell your child what to do and your child should listen. So we believe we know what we know what we’re doing, but we don’t know what we’re doing. And so any time the child makes us feel like we don’t know what we’re doing because culture tells us we should know what we’re doing. So if we don’t know what we’re doing, it’s not our fault. It’s the child’s fault. So any time the child makes us feel helpless or out of control, we get so angry with the child because we’ve been told that we should never feel like that. So you see, it’s a vicious cycle. The more the child makes us feel out of control, the more we yell at the child, the more the child feels out of control, the more we yell it. It’s just constant. But the place where we need to stop is why am I feeling so out of control? It has nothing to do with my child. My child is just being a child. It has to do with my issues from childhood. And looking in the mirror is a very scary thing and parents don’t want to do that. But that’s what I teach parents. And once we begin to uncover that and heal the parent, it’s a game changer. Like parents will tell me, like I’ve helped them change their whole relationship with their families with themselves. So that’s what my work is about, changing the parent from inside. Then the child changes. The minute the parent changes, it’s like they’re raising a new child. It’s like a whole new child. Wow.

GREGORY : Whatever the age. Or is it whatever.

SHEFALI : The age, you can literally have a whole new relationship with your child based on how you heal yourself and you don’t realise that. You don’t realise that you are dealing with the child based on your projections, based on your own healing. I call it the ceiling of healing. So based on your ceiling is how you look at the world. You know that. How? Based on how how many issues we have on how damaged we are. The world looks good or bad. The more damaged we are, the more the world looks scary, The more the world looks messed up, the more the world looks threatening. Because we grew up with that from childhood, the more healed we are, the more trusting we are, the more happy we are. So it’s based on our ceiling of healing. Similarly with our children if we are very damaged from inside. Everything the child does is bad, bad, bad, bad. It’s fascinating, right? And so many times I’ll show the parent your child is not bad. Your child is good. It’s you who’s fucked up. You who’s messed up. And the minute they realise that, they’re like, Oh my God, my child is not bad, right? It’s so scary what we do to our children and how we see them with so much negativity and judgement. But it’s because we see ourselves with judgement. It’s really scary when we do it to our children. You’re not a parent yet, right? Not yet. Yeah, not.

GREGORY : Yet. Yeah.

SHEFALI : And you may think you’re okay till you become a parent. Because. Because you will not judge another adult in the same way. So you’re like, No, I’m not a judging person. I didn’t think I was a judgemental person till I had my child then because I thought I owned my child and my child was a mirror of me. I began to treat my child like how I was treating myself. And I saw, Wow, I don’t like myself because I was seeing how I was angry with my child all the time. And it was nothing to do with my child. It was because I was an unhappy person, but I didn’t know that about myself. Yeah, it comes out when you have a child.

GREGORY : So when you have a child, I guess what happens is that all the things that you try to bury somehow is coming back. And especially in the couples who both person. But I guess for women it’s harder because they are still the caretaker.

SHEFALI : We’re still the caretaker and all the things we suppressed about ourselves and we thought we were healed now comes back up with our children because with our children, we think we can do what we cannot do with other people, with other adults. So all our raw, very raw, true self comes out with our children. That’s why our children will say to us things like, Wow, you’re so unhappy, mom, or why are you always angry, Mom? And we’ll be like, I’m not an angry person, but our children will see a side to us that we don’t show to the outside world. Our poor children. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

GREGORY : I have many questions. Um, first one, I guess, is what you’re describing means that you are aware of your, if not weaknesses, at least your dysfunction. Uh, because we are all dysfunctional. We all have things in our head because of the way we were raised, basically. And so. But it means that you need to work on yourself to be aware that you have those, because a lot of people, I think they’re not even aware that they have those traumas somehow or dysfunction.

SHEFALI : Absolutely not aware. Right. So take a mother and we’re just talking about mothers. It could be a father, but take the mother with her 12 year old girl. Okay. And the girl comes home and says, oh, everybody called me fat and ugly and stupid. Say, you know, most of us women have issues with one of them. Okay, one of these three things, because we haven’t healed our issue, we suddenly begin to do it in a treat our daughter in a dysfunctional way. Either we’ll put her on a diet or we’ll tell her, Why are you so stupid? Why don’t you become smarter? We’ll fix her because we think that the problem is her, because we never fixed our inner problem with those issues and we project onto the child that they are they are weak in some way or damaged in some way, as opposed to telling the child, Oh, don’t bother, who cares? You’ll find the way you are. It’s very hard for us to treat our children as whole and complete until and unless we feel whole and complete. And for the most part, we don’t feel whole and complete. So we are fixing our children from day one. From day one, we are fixing our children. Wow. You know, and and micromanaging them to become a trophy so we can feel okay about ourselves.

GREGORY : A lot of I saw a lot of parents saying, oh, my my child is so, so good at school is, you know, whatever is the word in English. But, you know.

SHEFALI : Super achiever.

GREGORY : Super achiever, super whatever. They want to have their child to be special.

SHEFALI : The reason we parents need our children to be superstars and super achievers is because we feel so much inner insecurity inside ourselves. You know, we are not okay being ordinary. We are not okay being average. You know, it’s a dirty word for us. Totally. And because of that, we don’t allow our children to just be themselves. We’re constantly manicuring them and curating them like they are a museum piece that we they have to go to the Olympics. They have to. Be a superstar. Get trophies. Put them on Facebook. Why? Why are children? They come into the world just okay being themselves. But we are not okay with them being okay.