Experience the Parent Training from a teenager's point of view in this Video Answer and what you can learn in implementing this training with your family.
Timestamps:
00:00 A daughter's experience of her mother learning to love and teach with Real Love and thinks she is doing it wrong.
02:16 First problem: Mother is learning as she goes and inevitably making mistakes.
03:13 Second problem: Daughter has a long history of fighting her mother and finding fault.
05:01 Solution: surrender and have faith in what the mother is teaching.
06:50 Most common mistake is inconsistency due to child's resistance.
08:38 Children see your irritation on your face, hear it in your tone. You can't hide it.
10:16 Both the daughter's attitude and the mother's inexperience are the problems.
12:10 Daughter felt loved by Greg's coaching and could recognize her mom's love.
Transcript:
I received an email from the teenage daughter of a woman who had completed the REPT and was implementing it with her three children. I’ll be answering the daughter Leah, but all this is potentially very useful to parents, who can get a better idea about what’s happening with THEIR children as they listen to this girl and my responses to her.
Kids Notice Your Mistakes
Leah: You already know Karen, my mom. This is Leah, one of her daughters. My mom has been doing Real Love with us for almost a year now. Now I’ve read a few of the books about Real Love myself, and watched videos, and I have some questions about how my mom is teaching it to us. It seems like she doesn’t do the Loving part of lovingandteaching.
**(to all) Your kids watch you closely, and if you screw up, they’re right there to help you see it. Or they WON’T tell you, but they’ll disregard what you say if you’re not loving while you talk about loving. Your behavior and words have to match, or they write you off as a hypocrite.
Leah: Today I brought this up with my mom, but she told me I was very wrong, and that I had to email you about it. So I’m writing you. I think I understand Real Love well enough to see that she doesn’t live what she teaches.
**I believe that you DO understand the principles IN YOUR HEAD, but it’s quite another thing to FEEL the concept as a result of living it. So we actually have two problems going on here:
- Your mother is learning as she goes. She understands in her head too, but her ability to love as she teaches is lagging behind. That is INEVITABLE. You’re RIGHT that she doesn’t quite love as well as she claims, but so what? You’re missing her efforts to learn to be loving. Very easy to see mistakes, much harder to FEEL love, especially when the giver is just learning.
- YOU are learning as you go. You have a long history of fighting change and not admitting that you’re wrong. (I know her) So as your mother is learning how to love you, you fight her and find fault with her. That would make her job MUCH harder, wouldn’t it?
**She's just learning, kid, but her courage is amazing. Imagine what it's like for her to try to practice these principles while her children are fighting her every step of the way—and no, I’m not criticizing you. Just stating how difficult this is for her.
Why a Parent’s Mistakes Seem Exaggerated
**Your pain and fear still poison the way you hear what your mother tries to teach you. So yes, she makes mistakes, but you’re also very sensitive to her mistakes—understandably, considering how many times she HAS hurt you by being not loving. PCSD and automatic reaction.
Because you’re extra sensitive to her mistakes, (1) you tend to exaggerate her mistakes, and (2) sometimes you create mistakes where there were none. No criticism, just a description of the effect of past pain.
**Solution? I’m NOT telling you what to do. I am suggesting that you might consider just surrendering and having faith in what you're being taught. Try LIVING what she teaches, and you’ll begin to feel the astonishing happiness that follows. And yes, I know how difficult faith is, especially after the pain of life has beaten you down enough that faith actually seems stupid.
**You don’t mean to do this consciously, but you expect her to be perfectly loving while she teaches you. Good luck with that. And until she's perfectly loving, you hold back and resist her. That makes her job pretty impossible, and in the process you deny yourself the happiness that you could be feeling.
Leah: I know that I am not the right person to tell her what to do, but every time she tells me what to do, all I can think of is that she’s doing it wrong, and it's very distracting for me.
**I know your mother quite well, and she's doing amazingly well, especially considering the resistance she gets from you and the other kids (no blaming, just explaining to you). Her most common mistake is that NOT that she’s teaching a principle wrong, or a principle that is wrong, but that she sometimes backs down from you and the others when you fight her. So she’s inconsistent, and it's kind of ironic that you criticize her for inconsistency that you are contributing to.
**For example, you fault her for repeating herself and talking a lot, when she wouldn't be doing any of that if you simply cooperated. Try it. Surrender and cooperate, and see what happens.
Impact of Tone and Facial Expressions
Leah: Sometimes, when she's telling us about all the things we're doing wrong, she doesn't yell or anything, but her voice gets louder, and her eyebrows knit together in the middle, which often makes me feel like she thinks I'm stupid.
**What you're saying is that she's human. I'm trying to help you understand.
(To every parent. Children FEEL your irritation, see it in the wrinkles of your face, hear it in your tone. You think you get away with it, but you don’t.)
**I have vast experience with this. For a long time, you’ve manipulated, lied, and distorted reality. It’s keeping you from seeing anything clearly: your mother, love, and yourself. Again and again, I say I have no criticism to offer, but I CAN tell you about the effects of your behaviors and attitudes. If you keep the old ones, you'll never see life clearly, and you won't be happy. You're simply too distracted by your behaviors and feelings to judge anything accurately.
Child’s Resistance Can Cause Parenting Mistakes
Leah: Lately I’ve been overwhelmed more frequently, and I am constantly stressed and anxious about the decisions I have to make throughout the day, because I know if I make the wrong one, I could get a serious consequence that I really won't like. And I know that the purpose of a consequence is to learn something, but I feel like if I really learnt from them, I wouldn't be making the same mistakes, but I am, and my question is why? Is it because of me and my own flaws, or is it in the way my mom's teaching me?
**Great question. There's NO way that your mother is doing this perfectly. Who could? So she DOES confuse you. Yes, you’re right. But your resistance is just as big a problem.
**So I taught Mom more about how to make sure she’s loving when she teaches, and then I spent considerable time with daughter, just loving and teaching her. For reasons that don’t matter, she needed much more of the LOVE in loveandteach. I offered that. Now, I had huge advantages:
- I’ve been doing this a very long time. I can almost smell what people need.
- I haven’t hurt her in the past, as mom has. So my love is clean, free mostly of triggers of PCSD.
- I don’t have to tell her every day to do her chores, her homework, etc.
So I was just an additional asset, and daughter began to get how wonderful it felt to be loved. As she did, she could surrender more to MOM’s love. And now she LIKES being loved by her mother. She’s listening to Mom, appreciating her. She admires her mother.
So, all of you, Love and teach. Get help as needed. Keep loving and teaching. It works.
