Thoughts
As a parent, I often feel anything but wise. You might think, because of my work, I would be great at parenting. Ha Ha….I’m great at giving parenting advice, taking it is a whole different ballgame! To give myself some credit my children were almost grown before I officially became a social worker, but I still am pretty good at screwing it up now and then. They will happy to tell you about it.
My opinion is that Letting Go is really about letting go of control and outcome but not actually closing a relationship or experience down completely. When we no longer have an investment in the outcome we can more fully enjoy the experience and be in the moment.
There is the one tall guy with the extra long mat who sets up first and throws off the rows, or the newbies in the back row who are just far enough from each other to not have room for a mat between them, but far enough that someone might just try and squeeze in (possibly to teach them a lesson.)
Most of us learn our relationship skills from our parents. “Whoa? What? I’m not like my parents!” Well I didn’t say that you would mimic them, but that you learned from them. For most of us, we do mimic some of our parents relationship habits. Others try so hard not to be like their parents that they go too far in another direction. For anyone who had healthy role models it is a good thing. But with a divorce rate of 50% or so many of us did not.
If you have not read the book or seen the movie, you surely have heard about it (assuming you are not living under a rock.) Very simply, a girl meets a powerful man, falls in love instantly (there is a connection!), he has some quirks, she changes for him, he becomes a sweet caring, more vulnerable man due to her love, they live happily ever after.
One of my earliest memories is of a street preacher who was shouting about “hypocrisy” when I was about six years old. It stuck with me all day and I later asked my parents what hypocrisy was. From that point on I was on the look out for it…and as you can imagine, I saw it everywhere, especially because we were a good southern church going family. And to this day the people that irk me the most are those who judge others before looking at their own faults first. (Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”)
On Sunday, I reluctantly went to see American Sniper with my husband. I say reluctantly because I was afraid the movie would depress me and I really didn’t want to spend the energy cheering myself up. All the hoopla made me believe that there would be some major injustices or glorification of war depicted in the film, so I was surprised by what my psychotherapist mind did see in the movie…resilience.
After reading my piece on Mindfulness my friend Julie asked “Why are we so hard on ourselves?” Of course there is no one answer and it is certainly not simple, but I thought I would explore the question today.
Many years ago there was a billboard that I passed often that had a picture of an African American in a suit and the words “He is a successful black man” on it (the word black had a line through it, something I cannot seem to replicate on this blog post). There were other words that basically said “racism will be gone when we see a person and not their race.” This was a powerful message and one that helps me understand the goal that I would like my community to work towards. Can we do this in America? I think even scholars of other races disagree on this one. We may need to recognize differences before we can accept our sameness. But the ultimate goal should be that we become race blind.
These are big questions and there are many answers, which is why it is so confusing. The first step is to understand that the answer does not have to be the same for everyone.
