Parenting Ourselves First: The Transformative Work of Replacing Judgement with Curiosity.

How many of you have a voice in your head that is alway commenting unhelpfully on your every misstep? Do you have a habit of beating yourself when you make a mistake, instead of offering yourself empathy or compassion?

Even though my work focuses on how we can parent our teens through their struggles and help them to thrive, one thing I believe is that that work often begins with learning to parent ourselves. And many of us are still working on and learning how to do that. I'm starting here, with how we do this work in ourselves because I know a lot of amazing parents that are deeply loving and accepting of their children, but who talk about themselves in really unkind ways. So my first motivation here is sharing tools that help us all love and parent ourselves a little better--because that is what we deserve! And my second motive is that even when we're kind and loving and patient and accepting with our kids, they hear the way we talk about ourselves, and they are learning from us that that's an okay way for them to treat and talk to themselves.

So one strategy that I want to offer in our efforts towards parenting ourselves better is that of compassionate inquiry.

Compassionate inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach created by physician and international expert in trauma and attachment, Dr. Gabor Maté. Put most simply, compassionate inquiry involves replacing thoughts of judgement with curiosity. 

Let's look at what this looks like in practice.

Imagine that, as a busy parent, you rely a lot of carry-out dinner or pre-made meals, and you're starting to feel like you and your kids aren't eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables. You make plans to eat more fruits and vegetables, but keep finding yourself ordering pizza and eating oven snacks. Your thoughts about this might sound something like this:

I'm hopeless, I can never stick to anything. I guess I'm just doomed to feel like crap. I'm probably messing up my kids by not giving them the nutritious diet their growing bodies need. Whenever I go to Sarah's house, she always has beautiful, nutritious meals. What is wrong with me that I can't get it together enough to do that? I'm just not an organized person, I guess. 

Notice all the judgement in that thinking. "doomed," "I'm just not an organized person," "What is wrong with me..." Now let's take this same scenario, and apply a a compassionate inquiry approach.

Well, we had pizza again last night. That doesn't feel great, and I feel really bloated today, but I guess at least there are easy leftovers that the kids could bring for their lunches since they had swim practice early this morning. Last month, we were eating lots of healthy meals together. What was working then that isn't working now? That felt really good, and the kids really enjoyed those meals; why was it hard to sustain? What is different this month? Well, last month, I was doing meal prep on Sundays but this month we've been busy on the weekends and I haven't had as much time. I know this is important to me and I know I've done a good job of figuring this out in the past, so I just need to figure out what obstacles are in our way now, and come up with a new plan. What if I had the kids help me plan and cook two meals a week? That would take some of the load off of me, and be a good opportunity for skill-building for them. We could try that on Wednesdays and Thursdays when they don't have practice. And two really healthy meals a week feels doable and sustainable, no matter how busy we are. We could also try some easy frozen meals--like that frozen vegetable stir fry I saw last week at the grocery store. That could be a really good compromise, too, while we're all so busy...

When we approach our "failures" with curiosity instead of judgement, everything shifts. No one truly learns and grows from a place of shame or judgement. We aren't going to punish and humiliate ourselves into growth.

But when we get curious and empathetic...that changes everything! We're able to dig into our limiting beliefs about ourselves, and really interrogate them ("Am I really just 'not an organized person'--or do I need better systems?"). We are able to look at what habits or behaviors are serving us--and which ones aren't--and make a plan to change them. When we are able to be empathetic with ourselves, this gives us the courage to forge ahead, however imperfectly. Replacing judgement with curiosity orients us towards SOLUTIONS. This is powerful stuff.

Now, for many of us, learning to replacement the voice of judgment in our heads with curiosity and compassion will take time and practice. One way we can really build this way of thinking through a practice of journaling. What journaling does is it slows down our thinking, gives us space to be reflective, and allows us to identify what our thoughts of judgement are. And it gives us the time and space to be really intentional about reframing those thoughts of judgment. 

If you are reading all of this and thinking, "I'm a terrible person and terrible parent; I talk badly to and about myself all the time!"...let this be your first practice at reframing your thoughts of judgement to thoughts of curiosity and compassion. None of us come to this work of being human or this work of parenting as perfect, and if you're learning to parent yourself in kinder ways today, well, today is the perfect day to start. ❤️