Conscious Communication for Parents: Getting to the Root of Behavior
When I work with someone one on one, we begin with something manageable. The first question is simply what you want to focus on. Is it your own stress? Learning to take better care of yourself? Or is it the way you talk with your child? I run a communication course built around a specific idea: for parents, communicating consciously means stripping out the blame, the shame, the judgment, and the guilt. You do that by setting down the behavioral lens you've been looking through. Wipe it clean. Let go of the assumptions and the stories you carry into every interaction, and the way you read a situation starts to shift.
I lay this out in four steps, each one a different way of seeing. Changing the pattern only becomes possible once you change your own experience of it. That's the whole mechanism.
There are several ways people can work with me, and the details are all on my site, so I won't list them here. One thing I'm proud of is a free virtual retreat. It's a ten day sign up by email, no cost, and it drops you into a separate Facebook group called Chaos to Cooperation. The premise is the move away from thinking "my child is doing this to annoy me, to trigger me," toward understanding why you got triggered in the first place and then adjusting the words you use.
So the two things I keep returning to with parents are communication and mindfulness. When you change how you speak to your kids, the cooperation they offer back is genuinely surprising. They start wanting the connection. They want to hear what you have to say once you've become a steadier, calmer presence. Not every minute of every day, obviously. Nobody stays kind and unruffled all the time, and everyone has their moments. But communication doesn't have to be the uphill fight most of us make it into. Sorry, Eric, that was a long answer to a short question.
Eric asked what someone could actually do tonight, when they get home and see their kids, to start communicating more consciously. For me it comes down to three areas to pay attention to if you want to understand behavior instead of reacting to it. You want to find what's driving it, because behavior is communication. It never happens in a vacuum. It's tied to feelings, to needs, to past experiences. So when you watch your child do something, or refuse to do something, the work is figuring out the root cause underneath it.