to find a seat. Then I saw some of the older boys pointing. My son turned back and walked toward the front of the bus, where he took a seat. I nearly leapt out of my car and onto that bus to tell those awful kids that they weren’t going to dictate where my son sat, much less say or do any of the other unkind things they’d been up to. I held onto myself, though, trusting the bus driver to manage the situation. All day I told myself stories. All day I played out the exact way I would put those boys in their place once and for all.
At the end of the day my son hopped off the bus and into our car for the ride home. I waited for the right moment in the conversation and did my best to be relaxed as I asked him what was up with the older boys on the bus that morning. He looked at me, confused, and so I explained that I’d seen him walk toward the back and then turn around to take a seat near the front after they pointed at him. And then the most fabulous thing happened. He laughed.
Now it was my turn to be confused. He explained that the boys weren’t being mean at all; rather, they were being kind. He said he likes sitting near the front; he gets less motion sick, plus it’s quieter. He didn’t often get that seat because a younger boy sits there. On that day, however, the younger boy was not on the bus and so the older boys had generously let him know the seat was available, should he want it. Well. How had I so misinterpreted what I saw through the windows of the bus that morning?
The answer is that my perception was distorted. Without any distortion, what I would have seen that morning is my son getting on the bus, the boys pointing, and my son turning back to sit down near the front. The end. True, my son’s earlier experiences on the bus had distorted my lens, but the bigger distortion came from my mind, my experiences. In fact, throughout the whole experience, a pre-existing “program” from my subconscious mind was running the show.
When I replay the experience of believing that the older boys on the bus were unkind to my son, I relive feelings of panic, fear, indignation, and shame. I would love to tell you with absolute certainty where those feelings came from, but the truth is I cannot. Perhaps they reflected a previous childhood experience of feeling unsafe around other children, or older kids, or people in a position of power over me. Perhaps they flowed from a time in my childhood when I was in trouble for something, unable to defend myself, and then punished accordingly. Or perhaps it was the result of a buildup of childhood experiences that led me—and perhaps you in your own circumstances—to feel as I did. Here is the important thing to know: the knowledge of where these feelings and thoughts flow from does not have to be crystal clear for you to work through them. You just need to understand that your thoughts are not always grounded in objective reality. And this is where consciousness comes into play.
The subconscious mind is formed by our past experiences. As a result, living consciously requires that we understand that our reactive thoughts and feelings in any given situation, and the resulting behaviours, are going to be a reflection of our past.
In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton tells us that the subconscious mind is running the show, and at twenty million bits of information per second, no less (the conscious mind can process merely forty bits of information per second.)16
Being consciously oriented means bringing the subconscious mind to the surface and making sense of those beliefs with the conscious mind. To be conscious is to deeply understand that when you feel unsettled or upset or angry or sad, those feelings are not purely a reflection of the current situation but are influenced by the experiences you had when your mind was being formed. Most often you won’t be able to pin these feelings of upset to a specific event. They may be an accumulation of early experiences, or they may be the result of something that happened when you were pre-verbal, leaving you no known narrative with which to link them. Either way, when you are experiencing a big, loud, overwhelming feeling, know that you will be best served by making sense of that feeling by understanding its links to the forming of your mind.
Where parenting is concerned, the problem with subconscious behaviour is that if you interpret your perceptions and feelings as truthful and use them to guide your responses, you are essentially parenting from the past. You are not responding to life as your grown-up self. Instead, you are responding as your child self. And children are not equipped to raise children. To parent as adults, we need to make sense of the workings of our subconscious mind, which is why parents today are being invited to do their own work. Raffi Cavoukian, the celebrated children’s troubadour, included “Conscious Parenting” as one of the nine principles of his Covenant for Child Honouring, one that is championed by the Dalai Lama.17
We must dive into the feelings that are potentially triggered by day-to-day living and parenting and make the link between these feelings and our formative past. Our next task is to take care of the child within us—that little boy or girl who was misunderstood or not fully seen or not completely heard or who otherwise didn’t get their needs met —and reassure our child selves that we see and hear them fully. Until there is connectivity between your adult and child self, you may feel at odds. You may have the unsettling experience of being disintegrated rather than integrated.
Recently, I sat in my office with a mom who was expressing her significant frustration at the mess her children seemed to constantly leave in their wake. She was beside herself, trying to get them to co-operate in keeping their home tidy. I listened to her story and to the long list of things she had tried in an attempt to get the situation under control. She joked that she must have the worst case of obsessive-compulsive disorder I had ever seen. I asked what her home was like when she was young. She described a large family of eight children with parents who were unavailable physically (they were workaholics) and emotionally, in that she and her siblings were more of a nuisance than celebrated beings. She said everything was loud and messy and out of control, and she’d hated that. In the middle of her description her eyes widened. “Oh my goodness!” she said. “It’s not them, it’s me, isn’t it?”
All of her frustration, her frantic efforts for control, and her feelings of desperation harkened back to the time when her mind was forming. And now, responding to her own children from her four-year-old mind, she was feeling the flood of it anew, and mistakenly finding cause in her children’s developmentally appropriate behaviour. The trigger occurred in present time, but her panicky, overwhelmed feelings came from her past experience as a panicky, overwhelmed child. The chaos in her childhood home had made this mom feel disoriented and unsafe. She’d been powerless to bring order to the home, and that powerlessness may have been even more frightening than the noise and mess that caused it. It’s also possible that she may have been temperamentally more sensitive to disorderly environments than her siblings, which would have made an already stressful home environment downright traumatizing.
As author and Jungian analyst James Hollis says, it is often our narrative about our childhood experiences rather than the experiences themselves that brings us stress in our adult lives.18 But as an adult, this mom knows now that she is not powerless. Although she can’t control everything, she can see to it that her home is functional and the most important things are attended to, even though there may be more mess in the house than she would ideally like. When we allow ourselves room to grow, we can be fully available to the growing of our own children. Thanks to the inevitable organizational upheaval that comes with having children, this mom was presented with a wonderful opportunity to tend to those little-girl experiences within and grow herself up that much more. And with this awareness, she became much more capable of acting as a competent guide for her own children.
Think about your own parents for a moment. Did they do this type of conscious, mindful work within themselves? If they did not, they likely responded as their child selves rather than their grown-up selves when parenting got tricky. In turn, this means it would have been almost impossible for you to come through your childhood completely unscathed. And that one simple recognition presents grown-up you with a fantastic opportunity. The bottom line is this: if we parent as we were parented—and fail to do the work to create consciousness around the process—then we can only bring our child
