Parenting Blog

Today is Step 2 of Ten Steps to Unconditional Love: Unconditional love is like a muscle. It needs a daily workout.

"Love is not a feeling, love is an action...Love is as love does." -- M. Scott Peck

Yesterday,  Step 1 encouraged you to renounce perfection and shoot higher -- for love!  If you change nothing else, that will change your life. But why stop there? Why not really give your love muscle a workout?

Commit to treating yourself and everyone around you with compassion. Every time you notice harshness creeping in, toward yourself, your child, or anyone else, stop and find something to appreciate about that person. No exceptions.  If you could choose compassion in every interaction with everyone, including yourself, you'd be enlightened by the end of the month.

Sound good?  Now let's go for the gold. It's easy to be loving when everything goes our way. What about when you're stressed out, when your desires are thwarted or your needs aren't met? When you're in fight or flight and even the people you love look like the enemy?  When life crashes into you and knocks you over? In other words, at least once a day, and for some of use, many times a day?

Can you take a deep breath and ease from anger to compassion?

I know you're not a saint. I'm not asking you to greet a murderer, or even that woman who was mean to your kid, with love. But what about that guy who just cut you off in traffic? Or the preschooler who punched your child on the playground last week? Or the rude grocery store clerk?

Maybe all those folks just had very hard days.  Maybe you don't want to be near them, but can you think of them with compassion, even while you remove yourself from their presence?

What about your spouse, who looks at this moment clueless and lazy and selfish?  Maybe your spouse is as overwhelmed as you are, but showing it in a different way.

What about your child, who is being impossible today?  Maybe he's feeling disconnected from you.  (Kids don't act out when they feel deeply connected, but that connection gets frayed during daily life and has to be constantly renewed.)  Maybe he's actually afraid -- of the mean kid at school, or the monsters in his closet, or losing your love to his sibling, or of never being good enough to stop you from yelling at him.

If you can't imagine shifting from anger to compassion, start with baby steps.

1. Stop and take a deep breath.

2. Recognize your anger as a physiological hijacking that is poisoning the situation you're in. Take another deep breath.

3. See it from the other person's point of view.  That will switch off the blood-wrath of your inner critic. Remind yourself that the other person is having a hard day too. Find something to appreciate about the other person. 

4. Ask yourself what's under your anger.  Hug yourself and meet that need. Do you need a good cry?  A hug?  To give yourself permission not to get it all done?  To cut back your expectations and try again tomorrow?

5. If you still need to, express the anger safely.  Go shake out your hands, scream in your car with the windows up, or work out.  No time to work out?  Do ten sit-ups. (At the very least, you'll have a flat stomach in a few weeks.)

This is basic emotional self-regulation, and it's arguably the most critical emotional intelligence skill.  Most of us don't come by it naturally.  But the more you practice shifting from judgment to compassion as you move through your day, the more you'll be able to shift into compassion when your child acts up.

Because love isn't a feeling. Love is an action, an act of creating love where there wasn't any.  Love is the hard internal work you do to shift from your automatic reaction of anger into a place of compassion.

Compassion is the heavy lifting of life. You know it takes daily practice to build that kind of muscle. Why should your heart be an exception?

Repeat daily. Watch your life transform.