"Letting go of your attachment to your vision of parenthood and your desire to write your children's future is the hardest psychic death to endure. It demands that you drop all prior agendas and enter a state of pure release and surrender. It asks that you forgo your fantasies of who you thought your child would be and instead respond to the actual child in front of you." Dr. Shefali Tsabary
This works in reverse in how we see or don't see our parents...as well as how we see or don't see our children.
Sometimes it seems that our dreams of people are meeting their dreams of us. Neither are willing to endure the psychic death, which would endanger our relationships (Dreams of each other).
Imagine meeting the actual person compared to our vision of who they are?
Imagine further being able to be who you are and not have to worry about whether you are 'fitting into their dream'?
I have seen this both ways.
I have been the dreamer for my children and I have killed my dreams for them...my only desire is for them to be happy doing what they want to do. If I am upset with what they do, it isn't their problem it is mine. More of my psychic ideas have to die.
I also have been a dream girl in so many dreams and then their nightmare when I stopped pleasing them. I have felt the disappointment from them when I no longer cared about their dreams of me. When I stopped worrying about how being me impacted their dreams of me.
Life was incredibly hard and prison like when I was dancing for their dreams.
It left me completely out of my own desires.
The girl/woman I was for 46 years was held in place by what they needed me to be.
Who I am today, is a free woman.
I wasn't set free by them...for if they had their way, I would return to the fold and be the old me.
In springing myself free from my parent's dreams...it released my children. For as I saw myself locked into my mother's needs...I could see how my needs locked up my children.
Many parents may believe that their dreams, beliefs and desire to have their children 'in the faith' that they hold dear...is kind. It isn't. You are separating your child from their spirit and merging them into you. Making them in your image. Like you are God also.
I didn't have this book but I did what she is suggesting. I became conscious.
Conscious of my prison...and the prison I was building for my children.
The legacy of dysfunction...
Freedom is love.
When there is a battle of wills, it is our spirits trying to be free.
