![]() Anne Bulger, “Bitter or Better”,, (August 21, 2020). Show yourself compassion for being a human being and unconditionally love yourself. Do not allow your child’s unkind behavior to extinguish your good nature. Do not look for redemption from others - redeem yourself. ![]() I just cannot love them the same way as I used to because of how they have chosen to treat me during the past 10 years.Ĭontinue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. We have a responsibility to hold to the power of love that we know to be true and do not allow the world around us to deaden that in ourselves. I have no doubt that my children did not learn about a lack of compassion and understanding from any of my lessons. Our responsibility is to learn from our mistakes since it is impossible not to make them. Being human is an incredibly active process with great potential to learn from experiences.Īs a mother, I said to myself that I wanted to show my children that I valued who they were and loved them as they were learning from their experiences and making mistakes. Generally speaking, human behavior is described as a response to internal and external stimuli throughout our lives, driven in part by our thoughts and feelings. What does it mean to be human? Discussing humanity includes an examination of human behavior. When I raised my children, I did not want to repeat this pattern (I do not believe my Mother was loved unconditionally either) and I intentionally endeavored to be a different kind of mother. So, I did not learn about unconditional love from my own mother. Today, I understand that she lived a frightening inner life and felt threatened by too many people. I felt that she desired connection through blaming others for her unhappiness littered with a judgment against others, to include our extended family members. My nature just could not resonate with hers. Unfortunately, she struggled with her own nature and had serious difficulties in developing any significant interpersonal relationships. My Mother and I were not cut from the same cloth. It distresses me deeply to say that is not true anymore. Here comes the part where I have no doubt. They may forget the preponderance of our unconditional love. Our children do not remember all that we strived for in their best interests. What if your child grows up and holds resentment towards you because you held a boundary with them? What if they grow up and now believe you were an angry person or cold and heartless because you would not let them hit their sister? They may not recall that memory, but you do as their parent. And we do not stop loving them because of their mistake. We set a condition that teaches them that loving someone is not about hurting someone. However, we should not accept that they try to hit or kick us. As we teach our children, we can accept that they may not like a limitation we may impose on them. We cannot expect love to flourish under insensitive conditions. Unconditional love for another must take into consideration certain conditions since we must unconditionally love ourselves as well. Unconditional love is not, “Love me and supply what I need…despite how I treat you.” The condition is that we unconditionally love someone freely with specific boundaries. However, I believe a more thorough definition would include a conscious choice to love someone by accepting whom they are-with a condition. Unconditional love can be defined as love without conditions: I love you no matter what. In a home where my children received unconditional love and proper emotional support from me and material comfort from their father, what are the sources of alienation? Why do they refuse to have an adult relationship with me? I have expressed self-doubt and questioned my own role in my adult children’s estrangement from me. In my last article, I posed the question as to whether, as a Mother, you can love your children too much.
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