One Positive Thing Every Day

Someone told me recently that “I’m doing good” if I get just one positive thing accomplished every day. Today’s accomplishment: I made the arrangements for my 17-year old son Christopher to take violin lessons. The violin is his choice, but I can’t say I’m upset by the idea of him learning how to play it; it’s a beautiful instrument – I was more excited than I expected I would be just buying the damn thing, and it wasn’t even for me!?!!

I’ve always struggled with being a mother… truth be told, I’ve never believed myself to be very good at it. One reason: I’m extremely impatient. I hold my kid to the same unreasonable standard I hold myself – the irony being, I have significant self-esteem issues which means I can never measure up – so you can imagine how hard I must ride him! It can never be good enough, and it certainly can’t happen fast enough. Another reason: my mother wasn’t very good at the job either, so everything I did learn about parenting is negative – punishments, yelling, anger, commands which must be obeyed immediately – you get the picture. Not a lot of room for warmth and support. “Love is for sissies! Suck it up, you big loser!”

This problem has been with me for my entire life. I consider myself pretty good at working through my problems (lots of opportunity!), but the resolution of this particular one has always eluded me. I am a master communicator with everyone else on the entire planet, but with Christopher… I won’t allow myself to connect on any meaningful level. My little voice (you know, that one inside you that tells you when you are being an idiot – that blatantly honest one) will be screaming and cursing at me to loosen up, crack a smile, laugh, stop working for a minute and LISTEN! and I will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it. It’s not that I don’t love my son, I do. It’s that I don’t love myself. I have spent countless hours trying to deconstruct my behavior, my feelings, my thoughts on the subject. I finally decided that I have so much rage, fear, and hurt buried deep inside that is so painful to face, so much white-hot hatred at my own mother for not being the “perfect mom” she pretended to be for all of my friends, disbelief that I was such a rotten kid that I didn’t deserve to be loved… I think I’ve gone into survival mode; now as an adult and also a mother who can’t figure out how to get out from underneath the shadows of the past and accept the fact that she deserves this great kid as much as he deserves all the best parts of HIS mom.

As fate would have it, I recently decided to try to be more productive in terms of work (I’m one of those self-employed people, not a regular nine-to-fiver), so I joined a business networking group. One of the members of this group is a hypnotherapist. Her name is Sasha Carrion. For those of you who don’t know a damn thing about hypnotherapy, you can read about it here: http://www.sashacarrion.com/index.html but basically if you think of your brain as this super-computer (a la Matrix), hypnotherapy allows you to take out the “bad” programs you have stored in there and replace them with some other “good” programs. Which means all kinds of people can fix all sorts of things, like smoking or overeating, or helps a person figure stuff out like “Why do I keep dating all the losers?” It can also help someone to eliminate phobias, like the fear of flying.

So a few weeks ago I went to visit Sasha, and I let her try and hypnotize me (remember my philosophy: “Try most things at least once.”). I use the word “try” because I didn’t think it would work – not that I doubted her expertise in the matter, but because I know my brain, and it has a mind of its own (ba dum DAH!). Well, it took a bit of time – my brain put up a good fight – but Sasha was pretty patient, and I was hypnotized. It sounds crazy to talk about it, but really, being hypnotized (from my perspective) is simply becoming really, really focused; but what you are focused on is inside your head – nothing external. You can still hear what’s going on around you, you just aren’t paying any attention to it or giving it any energy. Sasha refers to this as a person’s “state of suggestibility.” We talked about my mother, and the words that came to my mind when I thought about her (all negative of course), and some of my long ago experiences that helped set the stage for the behavior I was acting out in my life… I was in tears for probably half the session. But Sasha planted a few seeds for me that day that I know took root, because I have seen things reflected in my behavior with Christopher since then: I’m more aware of trying to have conversations with him, I laugh when he says something funny – I even told him a funny story of my own and we shared a laugh together… what Sasha told me that day was that I’m NOT my mother; I am a good person, and I get to create new, happy memories with my son that he will be able to look back on when HE is an adult (this is significant, because one of my fears has always been Christopher will get old enough and decide to cut me out of his life, the way that I have cut my own mother out of mine).


I still have issues... life is full of issues, that’s what makes it thrilling and exciting. The difference is that THIS one – my mother issue – is evolving. And evolution is a good thing. But the best thing is, it’s not just TODAY’S accomplishment…