So your child calls you and is feeling sad. His feelings were hurt and all you can feel as a parent is frustration. When they are sad you want to fix it and make it go away. You want your child to be happy and feel adequate and loved. Many parents teach their child when they are sad, to shift their focus on something different. Something positive. Something that will mask the ‘sad’ state of emotion. Parents will also negate their sad feeling. This only shifts them out of the present moment, and teaches them not to feel, and not to act upon those natural feelings. We all have basic emotional states. When one of those basic emotional states are out of balance, we experience our ‘natural feelings’ which act as indicators of that, and are meant to lead us to an action that brings us back into the present moment. In the case above, the child is put in an emotional state of inadequacy. It triggers a natural feeling of sadness within the child. The action to be taken here, when they are sad is to address it, and close the curtain on that experience. We can use sadness to complete an experience and keep perspective. That will bring the child back to an emotional state of adequacy, and into the present moment again, ready to begin his/her new experience. Every experience has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its important to understand that, keep perspective, get back to the present moment and to teach our children the same. Negating and judging others or situations because they made us feel inadequate is not a healthy choice. When they are sad, we should not judge or negate. The conscious choice would be to close that experience completely. Then you can start a new experience without thinking into the past and without latching onto made up thoughts in your mind of guilt and regrets from the past experience. Those thoughts are of zero value, and will bring you out of the present moment…which is always ultimately where you want to be!
Contact me today to learn to effectively apply ‘being present’ into your life, and how to model that same life principal for your child!
Live in love,
Lily