Parenting Help for You

The Importance of the Care of the Mother During the Birthing Process

2010-05-24T18:19:24-04:00

A doula is a birth assistant whose job is to care for the mother during the labor and delivery. These trained birth assistants focus on the mother’s needs while the midwife or medical assistants focus on the infant's needs.

Doulas typically begin their work with the family during the prenatal period, preparing everyone for the birth process. They provide emotional support for mothers during the labor period if they get discouraged or scared and physical support through massage and holding.

Doulas are trained to help the mother stay focused on their connection with the baby and attend to the signals the child is sending to the mother so that she can maintain emotional synchrony with the child during the birthing process. Doulas also help parents maximize the bonding period immediately following birth. Every mother should have a doula before, during, and immediately after the birth of their child.

In Great Britain, for example, each mother is automatically assigned a personal doula when she checks into the birthing clinic. This became an accepted practice because it reduced the mother's hospital stay. The research revealed fewer Cesarean births and fewer birth complications, making the use of doulas an economic issue in Britain's socialized medical system.

Other Important Essentials for Strong Birth Bonding

There are other significant components of emotional attunement and bonding, such as eye contact between the mother and child. Until recently, adults assumed that newborn infants couldn't see. In fact, infants are myopic, or nearsighted, and able to see optimally at a distance of about 12 inches. Interestingly, this is the distance from the breast to the mother's face.

Nursing newborns or infants held close to the breast can focus their eyes on the faces of their mothers. Everything else they see is out of focus. Mother Nature is pretty intelligent. She creates newborns with the kind of eyesight needed for good bonding.

The first experiences of eye contact between parent and child are very important for bonding. Ideally, it allows you to see your child's essence and feel a sense of anticipation and discovery about this unique and unfolding individual.

If your parents looked at you and were unable to really see your essence, this impacted your ability to bond with them. Perhaps your mother thought, "I want you to grow up to be a beautiful actress" or your father thought, "I want you to grow up to be a doctor."

Parents often project their own unfulfilled wishes and dreams onto their children. Children, even newborns, are so attuned to their parents that they can perceive when they are being received unconditionally and when they are not.

In addition to the extended skin-to-skin contact recommended during the first 12 to 36 hours after birth, research indicates that a full body massage given to infants immediately after birth while lying in a tub of warm water, can enhance the bonding process.

It is best if the mother or father does this massage, although someone with formal massage training is next best. Head-to-toe touch activates the infant's nervous system and releases chemicals that activate brain cells. Repeated infant massages by the mother and/or father during the first several months after birth can also facilitate deeper bonding.

Singing to the young infant is also very important. Infants can recognize tunes they heard while they were in the womb. Michael Odent (1984) is famous for having groups of parents and prospective parents sing together around a piano.

It is also important to maintain eye contact while speaking to the infant in soft, loving tones. As the child begins to respond with smiles and laughter, the positive effects of resonance and early bonding emerge. Mirroring infants' sounds and smiles helps build early communication. Well-bonded infants naturally respond with curiosity to other friends and family. Mis-attuned infants will be fearful of others and cling to their parents or comfort objects.

The Importance of Birthing Positions

2010-05-24T18:10:55-04:00

Some hospitals are now installing large water tanks so that mothers can give birth underwater, which is a remarkable innovation. Underwater birthing has been practiced for since the 1970s years in France and Russia and appeared more recently in California.

This procedure makes sense because a child lives in water while in the womb. Water birth is also a natural way to give birth, as it allows the mother to deliver in a squatting position. This allows the forces of gravity and support of the water to assist in the birth process. The worst possible delivery position for a mother is on her back with her feet up in the air. In most "primitive" societies, women squat to give birth.

Waterbirth is felt by mothers and providers alike to be the gentlest of gentle births.

Warm luxurious water to cradle you and give you complete freedom to move during the greatest achievement of your life. Read the comments on the pages of this site - "In Mother's Words" - The women who have experienced the support and comfort of water for their labors and held their newborns in their arms speak more than any scientific article or paper on the subject.

The Role of Siblings in the Birthing Process

2010-05-24T17:58:19-04:00

Until recently, young siblings were not allowed to visit the hospital at a birth, and most are still prohibited or discouraged from being physically present at the birth of a brother or sister. In home births, members of the nuclear and extended family form a support system for the parents.

According to Marshall Klaus, John Kennell, & Phyllis Klaus, research indicates that people who attend a childbirth are automatically bonded with the child, reducing both sibling rivalry and child abuse. Hospitals may have to change their policies again as a result of the home-birthing movement and new research findings.

The Father's Role in the Birthing Process

2010-05-24T17:55:41-04:00

Marshall Klaus and John Kennell (1976) found that it was very important for the father to be present for the birth and be an active participant in it. In follow-up studies, they found fathers who were present at the birth were less likely to abuse that child.

Once the child has nursed initially, then the baby should be passed to the father and put on his chest. Klaus and Kennell believe that the optimal human-bonding period is the first 12 to 36 hours after birth. During this period, it is best if mother and father spend time in bed together holding the baby, passing the baby back and forth between them so there is extensive skin-to-skin contact between the parents and the child.

Few adults experienced this kind of bonding during their birth. If you were born in a hospital, you were probably whisked away to the nursery after only minimal contact with your mother and had little or no contact with your father. If there were any birth complications, you may have been separated from your mother for hours, days, or even weeks.

If this is true, you may carry imprints of this loss of emotional synchrony with your mother during your birth experience in ways that impact the amount of intimacy you are able to experience in your adult relationships. Pre- and perinatal research is just discovering the immense power of these very early experiences in creating relational templates that unconsciously direct an individual's life.

Creating Optimal Bonding at Birth

2010-05-24T17:51:09-04:00

A group of dedicated professionals, calling themselves the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services, formed a powerful alliance in the summer of 1996 to promote a wellness model of maternity care.

They outlined a set of ten principles they call "The Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative: Ten Steps to Mother-Friendly Hospitals, Birth Centers, and Home Birth Services." When all ten steps are achieved in an institution, it is designated as "Mother-Friendly." Here are the ten requirements:

1. Offering unrestricted access to birth companions (doulas) to provide continuous emotional and physical support during labor.

2. Access to midwifery care

3. Provision of accurate descriptions and statistical information to the public, on procedures, and outcomes

4. Freedom to walk, move about, and assume positions of choice during labor and birth

5. Policies of cooperation with other caregivers providing maternity services to this family

6. Dropping routine practices not supported by scientific evidence such as withholding nourishment, early rupture of membranes, electronic fetal monitoring, and IV drips

7. Educating staff in non-drug methods of pain relief

8. Breast-feeding encouragement and follow-up support

9. Discouraging nonreligious circumcision of newborn children.

10. To strive to include another ten-step initiative already designed by the World Health Organization/UNESCO called "The Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative." This initiative is currently being revised by the Coalition for inclusion with its "Mother-Friendly" program to educate all those involved in the birthing industry on the needs and conditions that promote optimal birth bonding.

A Developmental Perspective on Birthing & Bonding

2010-05-24T17:45:08-04:00

The birthing process itself can have profound effects on the development of a child. The research of Klaus and Kennell (1976), who popularized the word "bonding," created the first scenario for optimal birthing conditions. According to their findings, the nude newborn should be placed on the mother's chest near her breast immediately after birth. Then infants should be allowed to find the breast on their own and begin nursing.

Klaus (1995) found that babies who were placed on their mother's chest and engaged in extended mutual eye contact could find their mother's breast within a short time. The newborn's sense of smell helps them accomplish this important task.

Dr. Lennart Righard of Sweden (1992) has produced incredible videotape, “Delivery Self Attachment,” showing a newborn making this trek up his mother’s body to breastfeed.

The umbilical cord should not be cut until the umbilical blood separates, with part flowing into the mother and the other part into the child. This is the final piece of the child’s physical birth experience. Ideally, the mother is awake enough to participate in this important event. Many mothers, unfortunately, are drugged and unable to actively participate.

Research by Marshall Klaus (1995) and his colleagues regarding conditions for optimal maternal/infant bonding recommends extended skin-to-skin contact during the first 36 hours after birth, suckling during the first hour following birth, and "rooming in" arrangements that keep the parents and child together.

When these conditions were present at birth, Klaus found a marked drop in early child abuse. One study from a hospital in Thailand, quoted by Klaus (1995), indicated that the presence of these procedures at birth reduced the number of abandoned babies from 33 to 1. Klaus also found that babies cry when they are taken away from their mothers during the first 90 minutes after birth, but do not cry if kept together during this time period.

References:

Klaus, M. (1995). "The importance of post-natal relationships." Speech given at the 7^th International Congress Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health. San Francisco, CA, September 30, 1995.

Klaus, M. & J. Kennell (1976). Parent-Infant Bonding. Mosby: St. Louis.

Setting Limits With Toddlers

2010-02-25T11:54:36-05:00

The biggest daily challenge in parenting toddlers is enduring the upset they experience when faced with the physical and social limits that their parents impose on them. These and the natural limits they face everyday frustrate toddlers who are having a love affair with the world and are wanting to see how far they can push their passion to explore.

Setting and enforcing behavioral limits gradually deflates their natural narcissistic urges involving entitlement, euphoria, grandiosity, and omnipotence. It is important for caregivers to set these limits with compassion, understanding, and empathy, as they typically activate strong feelings of frustration, anger, guilt, and shame.

Toddlers need the assistance of attentive, sensitive, and understanding parents or adult caregivers to help them learn how to regulate these emotions, which are an integral part of the separation stage. It is important for parents and other adult caregivers to help children re-regulate their emotions and repair any mis-attunements during the bonding stage.

It is just as important to support children’s emotional re-regulation during the separation stage. Sensitive and cooperative adults must support toddlers in their transition between symbiosis and the psychological birth, and this can be a bumpy ride.

Toddlers are naturally ambivalent and oppositional in this stage of development, so adults must be both consistently loving and consistently firm to help them navigate this bumpy journey more easily. The most effective way to help toddlers regulate their emotions during this stage is for adults to keep their cool and not split or get triggered.

Having been through this stage with our children and grand- children, we understand the challenge behind these words and offer it as an ideal to work towards. The presence of calm adults also helps toddlers create healthy internal models of their adult caregivers.

Consistent love and affection during the bonding process helps build trust in the parent/child relationship, forming the foundation for the self-regulation of emotions. Trust is not innate but a product of repeated experiences of going in and out of attunement with the mother and other adult caregivers.

Children learn to trust that adults will re-attune with them and help them re-regulate their emotions. Once they have developed this trust, they carry this internal sense of security with them when they move into the separation stage.

If toddlers fall down and get an “owie,” they trust they can return to the soothing comfort of an adult’s lap and calm down. Then they quickly slide off the lap and return to exploring their world. Wilting and fatigued toddlers are also able to instantly recharge during this emotional refueling stop and return only when another limit deflates their narcissistic urges.

Pre- and Perinatal Development

2010-02-25T11:47:19-05:00

The ground-breaking research in pre-and perinatal development began with Thomas Verny's (1981) book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. He summarized all the relevant research in this field. Since the publication of his book, APPPAH has continued collecting and disseminating new research findings in this area. One of the important findings from pre- and perinatal research is the significance that pre- and perinatal period plays in laying the foundation for a person's internal working model of reality. Developmental trauma during this period begins shaping the brain and children's relationship with their parents and the world. This very early trauma is a major cause of intractable conflicts in adult relationships.

Pre- and perinatal psychology validates many of the things once considered old wives' tales, such as the importance of talking, singing, and playing music in attuning with an unborn child. These are now recognized as some of the significant first steps in parent-child attunement.

Sound affects the physical activity of the fetus. In an experiment using ultrasound pictures, the fetus was shown to react to different types of music. From this experiment, researchers found that the largo movements from classical music quieted the fetus. Largo music has about 60 beats per minute, which is about the same as the mother's resting heartbeat. Music with a faster beat takes the child out of resonance with the mother's heartbeat.

There are a number of other conditions during pregnancy that affect the attunement between mother and child. Prenatal studies, for example, indicate that conflict between the parents and in the family disturbs the fetus. The secretion of adrenaline in the mother's blood not only causes stress reactions in the fetus, but can also cause both physical and psychological delays during prenatal development.

Families with little or no conflict and families with significant conflict were studied for five to ten years. These longitudinal studies found significant differences in growth rates, development rates, and psychological problems of the two groups of children. Verny's research indicates that babies are able to remember everything and are deeply impacted by the events around them. Unfortunately, they are not able to communicate this at the time.

Our breathwork therapy with clients supports this research. Many of them remember exact conversations adults present at their birth had with each other, while others knew what the adults were thinking. After breathwork experiences, several clients were able to verify the accuracy of these birth memories with their parents. This anecdotal information supports other research that newborns are able to tune into the thoughts and feelings of those around them.

Parentized Children & Co-dependency

2010-02-24T17:12:18-05:00

Parentizing children is perhaps the most common cause of adult co-dependency. This intergenerational phenomenon involves something known as the reversal process, in which parents and other caregiving adults unconsciously use children to meet their own emotional and psychological needs. Rather than the adults caring for their children, children learn to take care of the adults. Emotionally needy parents discourage their children from developing their own interests and identity and both subtly and overtly encourage them to stay close and become parental caretakers.

The “parentizing” process is particularly prevalent in parents and other adult caregivers who were emotionally and/or physically abandoned or neglected as children. While this theme is commonly discussed in alcoholic family systems, we believe that is characteristic of most family structures.

In a reversal situation, it’s quite common for parents to care for children until they are old enough to become self-sufficient. At this point, the nurturing energy stops flowing from parent to child and reverses, so that the children begin caring for their parents.

Children, sensing their parents’ emotionally unstable condition, may decide that the only way they can survive in this situation is to ignore their own needs and comply with their parents’ expectations. Children come to believe that if they take care of their parents’ needs, then the parents might be available again to care for their needs. Parentizing is very common in oldest children.

Another version of reversal happens when a parent looks into the eyes of his or her newborn baby and sees him or her not as a separate human being but as an extension of the parent. They project their own unfulfilled wishes and dreams on the child and expect him or her to become the successful doctor, lawyer, sports figure, musician, or other notable person the parent always wanted to be.

As a result, the parent focuses only on the child as an object of his or her own unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, and programs the child to live these dreams in order to earn the parent’s love. This is also known as conditional love.

Another way that parents engage in role reversal is by giving their children things that the parents wanted but didn’t get. Parentized children also learn to perform and make their parents look good so that their parents will love them. The parents’ focus is on meeting their own emotional needs rather than meeting their children’s needs.

Because so few adults are aware of parentizing and role reversals, many parents traumatize their children with these patterns. The reversal process is very difficult to identify and heal, because parentized children look like well-behaved and dutiful children to outside observers. However, the children almost always know when parents are engaging in reversals with them.

Nonetheless, they often believe that if they don’t sacrifice themselves for their parents, the parents will not or cannot take care of them and they might not survive. This co-dependent programming is rampant in a narcissistic culture such as the one that currently exists in the United States.

If the reversal process is not healed, it will be transferred into other adult relationships. If it is not healed there, it will show up when a couple has a family. If not healed at the family level, families will collectively imprint it on the functioning of organizations and even nation-states. Recognizing and healing the effects of this reversal process is essential to advance human evolution at all levels.

Vicarious traumatization can also be a factor in parentizing families. Older children are often traumatized when they witness their younger siblings being emotionally neglected by parents who are overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Witnessing their younger siblings’ subtle reactions to the loss of emotional synchronization with their parents often triggers the older children’s memories of this same experience of emotional disconnect they experienced earlier in life.

We have had many clients who report how this vicarious retraumatization unconsciously triggered them when they witnessed their younger siblings being neglected. This often activated a set of instinctive caretaking behaviors that caused them to step into surrogate parent roles to rescue their younger siblings from being emotionally neglected and abandoned.

The parentizing process can also involve children caretaking their overwhelmed parents by assuming some of their daily responsibilities in hopes that the overburdened adults will be able to take care of them. Parentized children may take over shopping for food, cooking for the family, and providing essential care for younger children. Parentized children who end up taking care of their parents rather than vice versa, often sacrifice their own childhoods and grow up to become professional caretakers such as teachers, therapists, and ministers.

Barry’s False Self

2010-02-06T13:00:00-05:00

The false self can begin to develop very early in life. When you are a newborn infant and your mother or father is holding you, if they look into your eyes and see someone who is going to fulfill their unmet needs or their unrealized dreams. As a result they will not see your True Self but a False Self instead. If this happened to you, the disconnect was felt, even though you had no idea what it meant. It is easy to become identified with your False Self and think your True Self doesn’t even exit. To these people giving up their False Self means death.

In my case, the process of developing a False Self began just after I was born. I was the first-born male to young, poor working class parents. When the nurse brought me for my mother to see for the first time, my mother cried out, “This is not my baby. He is ugly and has dark hair all over his body.” The she reportedly said, “He looks like a monkey instead of my baby.”

The disconnect with my mother continued. My mother had a difficult time producing milk to breast-feed me. After a week of trying she quit and went back to work, thinking she was a failure as a mother. She turned me over to the care of a young baby-sitter who did her best to take care of me.

Actually, I believe my mother suffered from a post-partum psychosis and tried to drown me when I was about a month old. My father intervened and arranged for me to stay at my paternal grandmother and grandfather’s house during the week and my mother came to get me on the weekends when my father could be with her to protect me. I stayed there until I was ten months old.

While this arrangement was safer and more nurturing for me, clearly it was not working for me and by the time I was eight-weeks old I weighted less than I did when I was born. My parents had a baby book to record all the developmental growth markers like weight and other indicators. As an adult I looked at what was recorded for my weight at birth, which was six pounds and at eight weeks it showed my weight to be eight pounds. However, when I looked closely at the figure eight in my baby book, I could clearly see a five imbedded under it that was written over and turned into an eight. They actually faked my weight in my baby book. I suspect they had a lot of shame related to my failure to thrive, particularly my mother.

When I was about ten months I was with my parents for the weekend. They lived in an upstairs apartment with an inside long steep set of stairs leading up to it. Apparently, my mother “forgot” to close the gate at the top of the stairs and while I was wondering around in a walker, I fell down the whole flight of stairs. I was uninjured but my grandmother decided after that incident that it wasn’t safe for me to be in that apartment, so she immediately allowed my parents to move into a house she owned. My mother was still working so they hired a Mennonite girl to take care of me while my mother was working. This was another mother figure for me to learn to bond with, the fourth since I was born.

As the first-born male in a German-American family there was still the European tradition that the first-born male would be expected to be successful to improve the family’s social standing. I was always expected to go to college and they had me tested to see if I was college material when I was three years old. As a result, I was fussed over by my extended family, which by this time must have had severe judgments against my mother. While growing up, I was puzzled as to why my mother was always jealous about me getting more attention or gifts from my paternal grandmother and my aunt who lived with my grandparents. I evidentially learned to hide the joy and happiness I experienced when I was with them. I actually begged them not to give me things because I knew when I got home my mother would scold me for accepting their gifts.

I learned to perform for the whole extended family to keep their hopes alive that I would advance the family’s standing in the eyes of others. I remember that when I was about 3 or 4 years old I was asked to perform in front of the whole extended family as my uncle made a sound recording of me reciting nursery rhymes and telling them what I recalled after being taken uptown to the local farm show. I still have that recording and when I play it I realize how terrified I was and how I wanted to flee, but I couldn’t.

After that I shut down even more and began developing an inner life that I tried desperately to hide from everybody around me. It seemed to me that every time I truly opened my heart to others around me, I would get punished particularly by my mother. My False Self consisted mostly of a deflated self that was depressed, withdrawn and tried to please others. I felt very alone and only after school started did I find a few neighborhood friends to play with, but I still preferred playing by myself. When my parents went to visit my relatives I asked to stay home by myself. I felt safer and less anxious when I stayed away from my extended family, even though they were prone to fuss over me when I was with them. I knew that they wanted me to perform and be the good little boy they wanted to see, not who I really was. I felt like a stranger in a strange land most of the time.

My mother continued to attack me verbally whenever something in her life did not go as she had hoped. This seemed to happen quite often to where I was afraid to come home and practiced walking on eggs so I would not do anything to upset her. My father was often present when my mother attacked me and did nothing to stop her, but after she left the room he would say to me, “She doesn’t mean what she said to you.”

I remember my maternal grandmother saying to me when I was about 5 or 6, “Be a good boy and don’t cause your parents any trouble. They have enough trouble of their own.” I tried to live up to her request and never talked back or did anything to cause my parents any trouble. I tried to accommodate to them and fix their relationship by sacrificing myself and my needs. I also felt that somehow I must have deserved the verbal abuse.

I was teased a lot in school so that was not much fun either. I had curly blonde hair and the kids called me, “Curly-girly.” I tried to comb my curls out and put the “greasy kid-stuff” on my hair to hide my curls. This usually didn’t work. I did get elected to a leadership position in sixth grade as the Lieutenant of the School Patrol. My job was to be the first one at school every day to hang the American flag out the second floor window over the entrance to the school. I felt proud to be chosen for this task at first but later saw it as a meaningless task.

I began to be interested in girls at this time and had a “steady” girlfriend, but her family ended up moving away at the end of my freshman year. This really set me back and I retreated into my deflated false self again. I did get a part-time job bagging groceries after school and that forced me to interact with more people and it got me out of the house away from my mother.

By junior high school I began to take some small steps to break out of my depression. I tried out for the school basketball team as a freshman, but was cut because I was too short (5’2” at that time). I remember I became obsessed with growing taller and also practiced basketball every evening after school. I grew 8” in the next year and made the Junior Varsity basketball team. That was a big turning point to help me break out of my deflated false self because being a member of an athletic team ended the harassment or bullying in school. I still did not like to perform but at least it was a team sport and I wasn’t on the spot.

I dated very little in high school and college. I met my first wife on a blind date while I was in college and we married the year after I graduated. I got a job teaching social studies in an area high school and my wife worked as a medical secretary many evenings a week leaving me with lots of alone time where I felt most comfortable.

After teaching for three years I got hired in a junior high school as a guidance counselor. I loved working one-on-one with kids and this led me to think about graduate school. I applied to a number of schools and was accepted at the University of Minnesota on a full-ride fellowship to get my masters degree. I thought I was just going to get my masters degree and then return to being a guidance counselor. After some very unexpected encouragement from my advisor, I eventually decided to stay on to get my doctorate.

It was during my doctoral studies that I began to find I could not maintain my deflated false self any longer. In a group counseling class while we were in a practice group, my instructor confronted me saying, “Barry, I don’t think you are close to anyone. There is a huge wall around you that prevents people from getting to know you.” I was exposed. I felt angry at this instructor for calling me out in front of my peers, but I knew what he said was true. I decided to get psychotherapy to help me find my True Self. Because I had operated out of my False Self for 27 years, I didn’t know who I really was.

I also began a deep friendship with a female graduate student who also seemed to need a friend to come out of her shell. I remember our long talks about many things and for the first time I knew what it felt like to be in relationship with someone where I could truly be myself. It was uplifting and exciting. That relationship lasted through my doctoral program and almost caused me to end my marriage. I was still unable to be myself in my marriage and this was troubling to me. Eventually, with the help of a wonderful therapist, I began to take more risks to be myself in my marriage. I still remember some of the breakthrough moments although they were still rare.

While I was teaching at the University of Colorado, I became more and more aware that I needed to repair the bonding-breaks I had with my mother in order to recover my True Self. I joined an outpatient reparenting therapy group in Denver and my therapist became my “contract mom.” I remember how frightened I was to be close to her and bond with her. I felt she would see who I really was and expose me like the others had done. Gradually, I learned to trust her and could be close and get nurturing from her. I felt seen for who I really was and this gave me confidence that I didn’t have to live out of my False Self any longer.

My next challenge came one afternoon after class when one of my female students lingered and asked to talk to me. Barbara was a good-looking, intelligent woman slightly older than me. When I asked her about what she wanted to talk to me, she blurted out, “I would like to be your friend.” No one had ever said that to me in my whole life and I was blown away. I said, “Let’s have lunch and talk about what that means to you.”

This was the beginning of a deep and abiding ten-year friendship that culminated in us each getting divorced and marrying. While much trust had been created in our friendship, after we got married Barbra’s old unresolved incest conflicts came to the surface making intimacy very difficult to sustain. It also brought up some of my old False Self coping patterns.

I saw how was replaying some of my own family patterns with her by being the Rescuer and spending much of my time trying to fix her so I could get my needs met. In addition, I found that when I opened my heart to Barbara many times I got the same results I got with my mother. Both of them became frightened at the intimacy and pushed me away by verbally attacking me. I still thought there must be something wrong with my True Self and so I retreated to the comfort of my False Self and accommodated to their needs.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in my relationship with Barbara was to “surrender.” My challenge was to “receive without resistance,” the feminine form of surrender. Instead of trying to fix Barbara’s problems, I decided to simply listen and received what Barbara was sharing with me without resistance and without trying to fix her. The results were miraculous and Barbara seemed to shift dramatically out of her fear of intimacy. Unfortunately, within six weeks Barbara was dead, as the result of a skiing accident.

Fortunately, I was able to carry that lesson into my current relationship with Janae. Many times I was tempted to Rescue her or fix her, but instead I listened and took in what she was saying. This helped create more authentic encounters between us because I could really see her not as I wanted her to be but who she really was and then accept and love her True Self. I also learned that I could only do that if I accepted and loved my True Self.

My False Self still shows up with Janae and I can feel myself falling into the old familiar patterns. My biggest challenge has been to avoid falling back into my deflated False Self. I also can act strong and defensive when I feel threatened, so I also access my inflated False Self as well as a protective measure. What is different now is that I am more aware when I do these things and I can think differently about my options and then act on them. Most of the time I can go to Janae and tell her what happened to me and we can work through any conflicts that occurred. I have been able to let my hurt child speak directly at times and tell others how and why I am hurting and then ask for what I want or need.

This is a huge improvement over sulking and retreating into acting out the old patterns of my deflated or inflated False Self. I like myself much more now and feel I can take care of myself without having to withdraw seeking the protection of my old deflated or inflated False Self. My challenge still is to be authentic all the time and be awake to times when I am pulled off center and “triggered” by a memory of an old unhealed developmental shock, trauma or stress. My measure of progress is the amount of time it takes me to return to center after being pulled off by an old memory. Now I can return to my centered True Self much quicker and easier.