More on Letting Go

More on letting go — Letting go is detaching from the need to either be right or to control. It’s dealing with the situation at hand, and with compassion.

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Many moons ago, a friend showed up on our doorstep. The mom of three daughters, she had also taught with Darbella for many years. 

Her eldest (whom we first “met” in the hos­pi­tal hours after she was born) was then in grade 8, puber­ty had hit, and things were get­ting interesting. 

By the time the mom showed up, there had been sev­er­al weeks of quite out-of-the-ordi­nary lousy behav­iour from the 13-year-old. The “bad” behav­iour was the absolute oppo­site of how the daugh­ter had behaved for the first 13 years. 

Mom looked bedrag­gled and tired and stoop-shoul­dered. She asked me if I had time for a talk, and quick­ly told me what had been hap­pen­ing — about the yelling and con­fronta­tions about rules, clothes; about the teen’s atti­tudes and behaviours.

The mom was really twisting her knickers into a knot.

The upshot of what I said to her was this:

• do what you can do to give struc­ture (cur­fews, min­i­mal accept­able grades, for example)
• let the kid do what she need­ed to in her room (puber­ty, remem­ber? — with­out break­ing house rules about smok­ing and drugs, boys in the room, etc.) She need­ed pri­va­cy to fig­ure her­self out.
• meet her anger with calm­ness and focus, not with yelling and con­fronta­tion (some­one has to be the adult)
• recog­nise that this, like every­thing, is a stage, and it will be some­thing else soon.

I reminded my friend that she was a teacher (of this exact age-group)
and that she dealt with weird behaviour for a living.

She was not pleased. She imme­di­ate­ly argued that it was “dif­fer­ent” because it was her own kid.

Well, no, it isn’t. 

It’s just that with her own kid, she want­ed to con­trol her daugh­ter’s per­son­al­i­ty.
With her stu­dents, her goal was behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion.

With her daugh­ter, the issue was all around the moth­er’s judge­ment about how her daugh­ter “should be.” With her stu­dents, there was much more accep­tance of the shift­ing per­son­al­i­ties of the stu­dents, and no get­ting furi­ous or tak­ing on blame when they misbehaved. 

I said,

“OK, so you treat your stu­dents with dig­ni­ty and respect, and with your daugh­ter, you yell, then ream her a new one?”
Mom: “But I don’t love my students!!!” 

Hmm. I sug­gest­ed that the mom sim­ply lis­ten and be under­stand­ing of the mon­u­men­tal changes her daugh­ter was going through. I also men­tioned that she had two more daugh­ters, so maybe fig­ur­ing this out was a good plan.

I remind­ed her that there’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly ter­ri­ble about kids yelling at adults. Many seem to go through this stage. If you try to force them not to, all you end up with is a pow­er strug­gle and more yelling.

On the oth­er hand, if the kid learns that yelling and scream­ing gets them noth­ing, (not even neg­a­tive results, like get­ting ground­ed) they ulti­mate­ly stop.

In this case, it took about 6 months for the young woman to fig­ure her adult self out. 

And sim­i­lar­ly, in many oth­er cas­es I saw over the years, 6 months seemed to be about right. 

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Parents tell themselves that they can’t (or better, shouldn’t have to) put up with the weird behaviour for six whole months. So, they try to control their kids. Try to force them to behave. 

I remem­ber see­ing a mom, at a mall, scream­ing at her daugh­ter, “Don’t you raise your voice to me, young lady!” Not helpful. 

Fight­ing what’s hap­pen­ing does­n’t work, and then the “cure” still takes about 6 months. So, the only real ques­tion is, do you want to get the 6 months out of the way now, or start after anoth­er 6 months (or longer) of fighting? 

Let me insert my favourite caveat: this is not about sanc­tion­ing neg­a­tive behav­iour. It’s about not get­ting caught in the kid’s dra­ma (or the adult’s, or the ex-spouse’s … etc.)

It’s not about the conflict: it’s about your response.

Here’s a quote:

To learn to trans­form con­flict, we must let go of the notion that some­thing or some­one is wrong or bad. This belief cre­ates fun­da­men­tal resis­tance, and it is the first obsta­cle to work­ing with con­flict. We can shift our point of view to see that con­flicts, like dreams, may pos­sess an ele­gant intel­li­gence that express­es truths we may not want to see clear­ly. For exam­ple, an old pat­tern needs to be aban­doned, or a rela­tion­ship needs to grow or change. We can, with prac­tice, learn to see this intel­li­gence at work and respond cre­ative­ly and con­struc­tive­ly. The con­flict isn’t the prob­lem; our response to it is. Excerpt­ed from: Every­thing is Work­able: A Zen Approach to Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion by Diane Musho Hamil­ton, page 3

What I’m getting at here is what the Buddhists call “detachment.”

Detach­ment is the skill (it is a skill, and has to be learned, then prac­ticed) of let­ting go — for exam­ple, let­ting go of tying my self-per­cep­tion to what oth­ers are doing, say­ing, or even what I imag­ine they are thinking. 

Detach­ment means that I keep my atten­tion on myself and on how I am act­ing and respond­ing to the sur­round­ing sit­u­a­tions. I have no expec­ta­tion that any­one else on the plan­et is going to coop­er­ate with me, just because I want him or her to. 

We can’t con­trol oth­ers, or sit­u­a­tions, but, and here’s the kick­er: we have total con­trol over our response.

Eck­hart Tolle, in The Pow­er of Now, wrote that there are 4 ways to deal with uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions: The least effec­tive (and not worth talk­ing about) is grip­ing about the sit­u­a­tion. The oth­er 3 are: 

1. accep­tance,
2. chang­ing the sit­u­a­tion (from your side) or 
3. leav­ing.

The illustration above, with my friend and her daughter, demonstrates acceptance and change.

First, accep­tance is required. The daugh­ter was 13, and into her hor­mones, into try­ing on being an adult, and into teen rebellion. 

Fight­ing against that was not going to change this real­i­ty. It’s there; you’d best accept that this is so. 

Sec­ond, the mom changed her behav­iour from try­ing to force her daugh­ter to behave to the mom’s will­ing­ness to lis­ten to her daugh­ter vent and dump and hurt and cry and scream. While she nev­er liked lis­ten­ing to the 13-year-old harpy emerg­ing from the depths of her pre­vi­ous­ly “per­fect” daugh­ter, she learned to accept it. Through detachment.

She made her daughter’s behaviour about her daughter, and her own behaviour about herself.

The third option, “leav­ing”, is dif­fi­cult but available. 

Par­ents have to let their teens know that cer­tain behav­iours (drug use, fail­ing school, crim­i­nal­i­ty, vio­lence are a few that would not hap­pen in my home) will result in the teens being turfed out. Par­ents have this right and need to use it as a last resort — spar­ing­ly and com­pas­sion­ate­ly, but use it nonetheless. 

That’s, though, the nuclear option. 

And need­less to say, these 4 choic­es are avail­able in all rela­tion­ships. One caveat. Many peo­ple end­less­ly invoke the nuclear option: “If you don’t (fill in the blank) right now, I’m leav­ing!!!” And they nev­er fol­low through. So the threat becomes some­thing of a joke.

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Letting Go by Stepping Back

For most par­ent / child sit­u­a­tions, anoth­er leav­ing hap­pens when the child reach­es, say, 18. Or, at least it “should.” And it’s actu­al­ly more of an accep­tance and shift­ing of behaviour.

In my 20s I actively tried to get my mom to stop trying to run my life. 

The only thing that stilled the dra­ma was that I moved to Cana­da in 1975, and they moved to Mon­tana in 1976. 

Being a slow learn­er, I only began to under­stand what I write about in my books and blog arti­cles when I was 32. I real­ized that what I want­ed was for my moth­er to behave the way that would make is easy for me, and my moti­va­tion was exact­ly the same as hers. “If you loved me, you’d do it my way.” 

So, I gave up trying to control her. 

Now, inter­est­ing­ly, right after that, mom and dad moved to Cana­da. They nev­er lived more than 30 min­utes away. Back when I was doing the Min­is­ter thing, they attend­ed my church. Mom always intro­duced her­self, “Hi. I’m Erma Allen, the Min­is­ter’s mother.” 

She had an opin­ion about every­thing I did, what I wore, and how I cut my hair. (My pony­tail used to dri­ve her nuts. When she com­plained, I’d take out the elas­tic and let it hang loose.) 

She nev­er changed, not one iota. And I had no right to expect her to.

So, from when I first understood this until she died 20 or so years later, I just loved my mom for who she was. Not easy, but as Darbella reminded me only last night, I’m no prize some days, either.

I learned to lis­ten with­out attach­ing to what was being said. 

I accept­ed that she was going to use guilt as a tool to try to get me to toe her line. I accept­ed that she was going to get frus­trat­ed and angry when I would­n’t comply. 

But if I didn’t bite … if I wait­ed her out … she’d shake her head resigned­ly and say, “Well, I guess you’ll nev­er change.” And I’d agree. 

Because of my shift in approach and my refusal to engage in “guilt-moti­vat­ed behav­iour,” the last 20 years with mom were the best they could have been. We had much qual­i­ty time togeth­er, and I’d just smile and go home if she got too deeply “into herself.” 

Which I sup­pose means I was using all three behav­iours. What I was­n’t doing, emphat­i­cal­ly, was expect­ing her to change so I could be happy.

So, today’s les­son is this: in a chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion, accept, change your behav­iour, or leave. Mak­ing your­self mis­er­able over the behav­iour of anoth­er is real­ly the last choice.

And no, no one is going to change to make you happy.

And it does­n’t mat­ter, any­way, because let­ting go is the name of the game.

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