Reese Witherspoon Wants to Be Understood; Jennifer Anniston Wants to Have a Baby!
Alice Aspen March
December 01, 2008
What a title!!!
Parade Magazine, a national publication, has Reese Witherspoon on its recent cover. While today she is one of the world´s highest paid actresses, she grew up with an older brother in Middle America in a family with traditional, church-going values. Her father, a physician and her mother, a professor of nursing, raised their kids with discipline, love and taught them to be charitable, to care about others.
The part of the interview which really grabbed me was:
"I want to be understood. Even as a child, I didn´t feel like I was. I still see that part of myself that wants approval, and that´s a constant need."
What an honest, vulnerable, resonating statement. I have discovered, after much scientific and observable research, that all of us want to feel we´re understood and loved, no matter how or where we grow up. We all need positive attention to feel loved and approved of.
What does it take? How does that happen? I think I´ve discovered the answer. It can be simple or very complicated; when parents did not receive the love and approval that they needed, they simply do not know how to pass it along. This seems to be an intergenerational phenomenon. To parent in effectively healthy ways, we have to examine and heal our own personal family systems which have not worked well and have left us feeling unworthy, uncomfortable or powerless.
It happens in childhood, very early! Approval starts at birth, with mother-child bonding; it´s energetic. Children feel approved of or not approved of.
Children feel they´re understood or they´re not. Actually, between 55% and 70% of communication is non-verbal. Babies can see approval in their parents´ faces, eyes, body language, voice density and tone. Approval can be felt with a touch, a supportive, loving hug or in the way they´re held. Disapproval can also be felt with a hasty, rough grab, a hard arm tug or a spanking of any nature. Research continues to show that most communication is non-verbal in every relationship; communication between babies and their parents is no exception. Babies are able to take cues visually, physically or auditorally. A most important part of parenting is being consistent in all your interactions. Many years ago there was an experiment in which a mother and a baby were first close and smiling; then the mother was asked to withdraw her smile and have no affect on her face. Her child started to drool, hiccup, and finally to cry. That child felt the withdrawal of attention or energy. It´s really the same. That baby was hurt and this was all a non-verbal exercise. As parents, one of our main jobs is to make sure our kids believe that they´re ok, that we approve of them, always, every day. We may not approve of some of their behavior, but they must know we approve of them as people.
I´ve observed so much withheld approval, the consequences of which can be negative and last forever. We simply can no longer tell our kids that we will approve of them, when or if they do something. i.e. "I will love you when you clean up your room, do your homework, treat your little brother better, make me feel better!" These phrases can be spoken or not spoken, but they just do not work to create happy, healthy, whole adults.
I really am totally convinced now that we need to learn how to parent, before we even have kids. That would save everyone a lot of time and money. The kind of attention our kids get in their childhoods lasts forever, so not paying attention or not knowing enough about child rearing details can be extraordinarily damaging and costly.
Jennifer Aniston wants to have a baby, but does that mean she wants to be a mother? Mothering is difficult, it´s stressful, it´s wearing and sometimes mothers can feel out of control, helpless and even dumb. So much of the media/ magazine world today has Jennifer on their covers announcing that she´s going to have a baby.
She is fast approaching forty and has decided that her mothering clock is running out. Mothering clocks continue to run for a very long time. Women can and do adopt, at almost any age; there´s a monumental need for adopting here, there and around the world. Often after a woman adopts, it becomes easier for her to get pregnant later. In today´s world with modern medicine, older women are having healthy babies and are enjoying being mothers at a little later age.
Most importantly, it is really how and what we do with a baby after they are born that really counts. Here comes my soap box!
When we commit to being a mother, an effective one, we first have to complete our own emotional childhoods, work out our own family relationships. When we don´t, we bring unfinished "baggage" into our new roles, subconscious behavior that we role model and pass along to our kids, personal anxieties which create uncomfortable, inappropriate, dysfunctional behavior.
Our children´s needs are not the same as ours; we have got to understand that. Our children are separate beings; we have to do whatever it takes to prepare them for their life journeys. We've got to discover what our kids need from us emotionally and do whatever it takes to make them feel safe, comfortable, supported, understood and loved. When we´re still carrying unresolved emotions, we simply can´t do that, because we often see children as competition and belittle them, shame them, abuse them to where they neither feel understood nor loved. If we were shamed as children, we will shame our kids - unfortunately, that´s just historical patterning, until we intervene in family systems by learning to behave differently! I read somewhere that if we would stop shaming our kids, there would be little or no need for counseling or therapy. Childhood shame is a major component, root cause, of the pain of our not feeling good about ourselves.
Children need to feel accepted and loved for who they are and not for whom we want them to be. Receiving positive attention is a vital factor in feeling approved of and loved. Becoming a positive attention-giver gives our lives joy, health, emotional wealth and meaning. This is also a basic tenet of mothering. Having money, obviously, does not have to play a part in giving positive attention!
Parade Magazine, a national publication, has Reese Witherspoon on its recent cover. While today she is one of the world´s highest paid actresses, she grew up with an older brother in Middle America in a family with traditional, church-going values. Her father, a physician and her mother, a professor of nursing, raised their kids with discipline, love and taught them to be charitable, to care about others.
The part of the interview which really grabbed me was:
"I want to be understood. Even as a child, I didn´t feel like I was. I still see that part of myself that wants approval, and that´s a constant need."
What an honest, vulnerable, resonating statement. I have discovered, after much scientific and observable research, that all of us want to feel we´re understood and loved, no matter how or where we grow up. We all need positive attention to feel loved and approved of.
What does it take? How does that happen? I think I´ve discovered the answer. It can be simple or very complicated; when parents did not receive the love and approval that they needed, they simply do not know how to pass it along. This seems to be an intergenerational phenomenon. To parent in effectively healthy ways, we have to examine and heal our own personal family systems which have not worked well and have left us feeling unworthy, uncomfortable or powerless.
It happens in childhood, very early! Approval starts at birth, with mother-child bonding; it´s energetic. Children feel approved of or not approved of.
Children feel they´re understood or they´re not. Actually, between 55% and 70% of communication is non-verbal. Babies can see approval in their parents´ faces, eyes, body language, voice density and tone. Approval can be felt with a touch, a supportive, loving hug or in the way they´re held. Disapproval can also be felt with a hasty, rough grab, a hard arm tug or a spanking of any nature. Research continues to show that most communication is non-verbal in every relationship; communication between babies and their parents is no exception. Babies are able to take cues visually, physically or auditorally. A most important part of parenting is being consistent in all your interactions. Many years ago there was an experiment in which a mother and a baby were first close and smiling; then the mother was asked to withdraw her smile and have no affect on her face. Her child started to drool, hiccup, and finally to cry. That child felt the withdrawal of attention or energy. It´s really the same. That baby was hurt and this was all a non-verbal exercise. As parents, one of our main jobs is to make sure our kids believe that they´re ok, that we approve of them, always, every day. We may not approve of some of their behavior, but they must know we approve of them as people.
I´ve observed so much withheld approval, the consequences of which can be negative and last forever. We simply can no longer tell our kids that we will approve of them, when or if they do something. i.e. "I will love you when you clean up your room, do your homework, treat your little brother better, make me feel better!" These phrases can be spoken or not spoken, but they just do not work to create happy, healthy, whole adults.
I really am totally convinced now that we need to learn how to parent, before we even have kids. That would save everyone a lot of time and money. The kind of attention our kids get in their childhoods lasts forever, so not paying attention or not knowing enough about child rearing details can be extraordinarily damaging and costly.
Jennifer Aniston wants to have a baby, but does that mean she wants to be a mother? Mothering is difficult, it´s stressful, it´s wearing and sometimes mothers can feel out of control, helpless and even dumb. So much of the media/ magazine world today has Jennifer on their covers announcing that she´s going to have a baby.
She is fast approaching forty and has decided that her mothering clock is running out. Mothering clocks continue to run for a very long time. Women can and do adopt, at almost any age; there´s a monumental need for adopting here, there and around the world. Often after a woman adopts, it becomes easier for her to get pregnant later. In today´s world with modern medicine, older women are having healthy babies and are enjoying being mothers at a little later age.
Most importantly, it is really how and what we do with a baby after they are born that really counts. Here comes my soap box!
When we commit to being a mother, an effective one, we first have to complete our own emotional childhoods, work out our own family relationships. When we don´t, we bring unfinished "baggage" into our new roles, subconscious behavior that we role model and pass along to our kids, personal anxieties which create uncomfortable, inappropriate, dysfunctional behavior.
Our children´s needs are not the same as ours; we have got to understand that. Our children are separate beings; we have to do whatever it takes to prepare them for their life journeys. We've got to discover what our kids need from us emotionally and do whatever it takes to make them feel safe, comfortable, supported, understood and loved. When we´re still carrying unresolved emotions, we simply can´t do that, because we often see children as competition and belittle them, shame them, abuse them to where they neither feel understood nor loved. If we were shamed as children, we will shame our kids - unfortunately, that´s just historical patterning, until we intervene in family systems by learning to behave differently! I read somewhere that if we would stop shaming our kids, there would be little or no need for counseling or therapy. Childhood shame is a major component, root cause, of the pain of our not feeling good about ourselves.
Children need to feel accepted and loved for who they are and not for whom we want them to be. Receiving positive attention is a vital factor in feeling approved of and loved. Becoming a positive attention-giver gives our lives joy, health, emotional wealth and meaning. This is also a basic tenet of mothering. Having money, obviously, does not have to play a part in giving positive attention!
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