When Do You Give Thanks for Your Difficult Children?
Do you give thanks for your trials and tribulations? Do you give thanks for your difficult child(ren) and/or offspring? How about giving thanks for all the challenges you face, whether its family, job, health or significant other?
Think of these challenges as a wake-up call to ‘change’, a call for ‘You’ to change. I’ll get into this a bit further in a moment. Let me just brake in with this prelude to my recommendation. We haven’t talked in a while:
“I hope this season of Thanksgiving and Love envelopes you with all of the loving intensity it embodies. Here we are, post ‘World Summit’. Even if you have no offspring, sincerely deep information, methods, systems and processes were given at the FROM PARENTING PAIN TO PARENTING PEACE World Summit to help make your life more peaceful now and ultimately most peaceful always! How much more peace and happiness can you tolerate in your life?
It’s most appropriate during this Season to highlight Dr. Joe Vitale’s interview from the summit as he shares the Ho’oponopono mantra, “I Love You, I’m Sorry, Please Forgive Me, Thank You”. Here, have a look at a 3 minute clip from the interview and see how he describes it:
How are the holidays influencing your feelings and sense of peace? Take the time this season to refresh and renew yourself and your family. Make it a daily priority. Engage the Ho’oponopono practice to produce magic and miracles in your life, if you don’t already have a practice that does that for you…”
Now back to ‘giving thanks for difficulty’.
“For within your flesh, deep within the center of your being, is the undaunted, waiting, longing, all-knowing. Is the ready, able, perfect. Within you, waiting its turn to emerge, piece by piece, with the dawn of every former test of trial and blackness, is the next unfolding, the great unfurling of wings, the re-forged backbone of a true Child of Light.” ― Jennifer DeLucy
Difficulties are a call for you to change. They are a blessing in disguise, an opportunity for your significant growth! This time of year is particularly potent for the hibernation or incubation of the seeds that expand your greatness. Our challenges and difficulties often heighten this time of year because the people we love gather energetically and physically around us and press those seeds into activation. As they germinate in the Winter months, we can choose to recognize the challenge/difficulty and choose to transcend our usual feelings of pain. THAT is the gift of the difficulty. Otherwise, our growth is stunted.
“A full structural equation model revealed that the effect of stress on well-being was mediated positively through a problem-focused coping process combined with a growth component. Stress was negatively mediated through an avoidant-focused coping process and a distress component. … The hypothesis that stress can produce both increased and decreased subjective well-being was confirmed.” ~ Karlsen E1, Dybdahl R, Vittersø J., NCBI, NIH
In other words,
settle, once and for all, your differences (that cause you pain) by intervening on your behalf (and on behalf of your loved ones) with “problem-focused coping processes” (like Ho’oponopono, Meditation, etc.) in answer to and the elimination of the problem, a “growth component”, you would not otherwise recognize if not for the ‘difficult person’ or situation!
Solving whatever that problem is frees you up emotionally and improves your overall living experience in addition to improving your health! When you do it for yourself, you’re simultaneously doing it for your kids. Gotta give thanks to that problem!!!
Stress continues when we attempt to ignore the problem, avoid it or actively engage in combat, “avoidant-focused coping processes and distress components”. Isn’t great to be at ‘choice’ about it? Deliberately recognize your choice in the matter. Own it! Do you feel a lot less like a victim now?
For example,
I have a client who was triggered by his wife’s parents when they got together at Thanksgiving and Christmas. These gatherings were impossible for him to avoid because of the family traditions they are instilling in their 3 kids. For him, the trigger happens as soon as he or they walk through the door. The parents would have preferred their daughter marry within their Jewish faith (he’s Catholic). Her parents are good people, they’re just steeped a lot deeper in their own traditions than is comfortable for him.
As a result, it feels to him that they come over to his home grudgingly and with a lot of self-righteous judgement. They bring up religious issues and argue over facts in The Bible. They won’t let it go if he tries to dismiss or change the subject. All of this was upsetting to his wife and children. The children were becoming difficult because they could feel the tension between their parents and grandparents. Because of some financial influence the grandparent have over the household, this anguish continued year in and year out. Seemed to me they were all being bullied by the grands.
When I met my clients 2 years ago, I’ll call them ‘The Gibsons’, the husband (Josh) had begun to have panic attacks, anger issues and problems at work, stemming from dealing with his kids on a daily basis and just the anticipation of these little family get-togethers! This had gone on now for about 5 years and his resistance was running very low. Family problems were starting to affect his health.
This was the very epitome of ‘recognizing the value of giving thanks for difficult children’ (and relatives)! When I met Josh he was riveted by this question, “Do you recognize the value of having difficult children?” (At the time, I thought the children were the main problem.) He said, “No”.
I explained how difficult children (or others, situations) are a signal to us to look within ourselves to question our triggers. OUR internal TRIGGERS are the source of our pain and discomfort, not the external person or situation that we ‘think’ caused it! Further, once this is recognized, healing begins. Now, isn’t THAT difficulty worthy of our thanks, our gratitude?
Here is one of the processes that I had him engage to help remedy problems in the ‘moment’ when the bad feelings come up:
Stop in the moment that you feel the first twinge of discomfort. Breathe. (That’s right. You need to start paying closer attention to yourself. We spend way too much time ‘external’ and reacting to the ‘external’).
Relax in the moment. Detach and deescalate as you breathe. Observe what’s happening with the other person as you breathe.
Assess and get to your most appropriate reaction from this calmer state.
Later, when the triggering moment has passed, take time for quiet reflection and investigation into what’s going on with YOU. Pinpoint THAT thing and begin to extricate it through Meditation, Ho’oponopono or whatever your method for clearing and cleansing your fears and negative emotions. If it runs deep and recurring, if you or someone you know has a fear, anxiety or phobia that is plaguing, sabotaging and holding you/them down, I am offering ‘emotion emancipation’. GET OUT OF FEARS, ANXIETIES and PHOBIAS in a matter of minutes rather than let them plague you for even one more month or years! Here’s the link to the service: www.emotionemancipation.com .
Today, Josh is very much at peace with what’s happening in his current situation. He says, “Rowena, I wish I had met you years ago. My life today is much more at peace. Very few things bother me and NOTHING triggers me. My in-laws seem to have chilled out. I guess my lack of reaction to their igging took the fun out of it for them (and my kids). Thank you for holding my hand as I worked through this process. Dalia (his wife) is very pleased with the ‘new me’.”
If you find yourself cursing difficult people or situations in your life, it’s a good idea to 1) Stop in the moment, 2) Relax, detach & observe what’s happening and 3) Assess what your next best steps that you can take are! This is the beauty of difficulty. This is how it serves you. Give Thanks for it as well as for all the beauty that is easily recognized in your life. The difficulty is the catalyst for your growth if you allow it to be so. If you don’t, you get more of the same as you’ve always gotten and possibly worse!
I urge you to take some quiet time now with a pen and paper and make a list of the things that ‘eat’ you. You already know what most of them are. Do the process above and begin to remedy these difficult situations with kids, family, friends, co-workers, etc. Melt through them one by one. Imagine a near future when the problem(s) have disappeared and are a distant memory.
Teach the children. We, parents, are shaping the future of our world, our children’s world. They are watching and learning from EVERYTHING WE DO!!! They’re learning how to handle difficult people and situations from us! If your kids are difficult to you, what feeling are they picking up about themselves that further exacerbates the ‘difficulty’? They’re learning from us how love and gratitude looks and feels. When are you ‘finished’ giving thanks?
I Love You. I Thank You.
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