Ask a Facilitator: Won't My Kids Run Wild?

Q: Carol, those of us with kids could use some inspiration. I've had trouble applying The Work here at home. We are such an applications-oriented society (well, we're an applications-oriented family, anyway) that if you don't have a solution/process/procedure/outline you can throw at a perceived behavioral issue, you're sort of left gasping. So doing The Work hasn't felt adequate or proactive enough.

I've often wondered if there are people who use inquiry in their family life with terrific results. (Yeah, I know about Katie's daughter Roxanne, but she seems like a special case!) I think many of us parents are afraid to trust The Work. I certainly have this feeling that if all I did was do The Work, instead of intervening and dealing out consequences for fighting and rudeness, our entire household would blow up, the kids would run wild, my marriage would end, and the dog would run away.

A: Who says you'd just do The Work? Questioning your thoughts doesn't mean you won't have rules in your home. Still, like it or not, kids—like every other human being—do what they do. Sometimes they smack their sisters and brothers, cut classes, experiment with drugs and alcohol, talk back, have early sex, don't do their homework, won't clean their rooms, prefer others' company to ours, cling too tightly to us, are colicky and fussy infants, grow up to ride motorcycles, become philosophy majors instead of going to law school.

If what we're doing doesn't "get results," at the very least, we can understand the reasons why our children's behavior is troubling to us...which may alleviate the reactivity that doesn't help them or us. Out of that clarity might come better solutions than the ones that haven't worked...including kids who feel loved and heard, and who might come up with solutions themselves.

This is what I hear most often from parents who do The Work: they come to realize they love their children as they are. In the peace of that discovery, as parents they are better listeners, more supportive, and less fearful. Behavioral changes (in themselves as well as their children) often happen in ways never brought about by punishment.

Sometimes these parents also end up with kids who, when scolded, love to admonish mom and dad to "turn it around." Let's face it: aren't they right? (And that doesn't mean there are no consequences for them when they knowingly do something that's not okay with you.)


©2008 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

The Work Is Child's Play

Here's some video of the Children's Workshop for Kids, Teens, and Parents that was held last weekend in Ventura, California; kids getting clarity and having fun doing it. Fun is actually an enormous part of the experience of this investigation. It's a kick to see the correlation between thought and feeling, and to discover "that snake is a rope." And children, not having lived long enough to gather as much evidence as we can, don't put out as many "yeah buts."

I especially love hearing the mom at the end, who says that an eight year old was the best facilitator she ever had. (Perhaps I should take down my shingle!)(NOT!)


©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

All In the Family

Note: Names and some details have been changed to protect the innocent!

When my friend Eleanor came to The Work, she was just about ready to run away from home. In the past year, she has written dozens of Judge-Your-Neighbor worksheets on her husband and kids, most especially on her 12-year-old daughter, Ginger, whom she has found particularly challenging ever since Ginger was a colicky baby.

Not long ago, Eleanor wrote:

"Hey, Carol, thanks so much for yesterday. Things feel much clearer. And the funniest stuff has been happening since we worked on my one-liner 'Ginger's rudeness disrupts our family.'

"Last night, Ginger was going downstairs for a snack, and she voluntarily picked up her little sister's evening snack dishes which were on the linen chest in the hall, took them downstairs, and put them in the dishwasher. This morning, while I was making breakfast for the girls, Ginger got out stuff to put on her oatmeal, and also got the stuff that Margaret likes on her cereal, without being asked. She was incredibly sweet last night, she hung out with me for awhile late in the evening, and she was very sweet this morning as well.

"So I don't know exactly what happened yesterday--are you sure you didn't call her up and do The Work with her while I wasn't paying attention?"

Yes, I'm sure, and I wasn't surprised to hear this. When we do The Work with a modicum of willingness, we can discover that we don't need our children to change in order for us to be happy. When we realize this, things often change in the family. The children seem to pick up on our energy.

Amy came to The Work at the end of her rope. Her adopted daughter Bianca, age seven, has a diagnosis of detachment disorder. One of Bianca's "symptoms" is that she usually refuses to do anything Amy asks her to do, whether it's brushing her teeth, eating her lunch, doing her homework, or going to bed. Often Bianca reacts by hitting Amy or destroying things in the house, showing no remorse. Amy and Bianca have had a battle of the wills from the time Bianca was a toddler. Nothing they had tried previously, from therapy to forging agreements, from screaming fights to medication, seemed to make much difference.

One day, Amy worked with me on her beliefs about Bianca's homework. Amy believed that if she didn't sit with Bianca and "make" her do her homework, it would never get done. Even with this belief, Bianca was not completing her work, often furiously scribbling in her notebook in the early morning on the way to school. Amy began forbidding Bianca to do her homework in the car, resulting in more battles, sometimes physical.

Seeing Amy's frustration and anger about the homework situation, Bianca's teacher had told Amy to back off and let the homework be a matter between the teacher and Bianca, but Amy would not let go. She felt strongly that it was her job as a mother to make sure Bianca's homework was done. We worked on that thought, and Amy left the session feeling she had gotten nowhere; she needed to be right about this one! Something terrible would happen if Bianca didn't do her schoolwork; she'd fail at school, have early sex, take drugs, drop out, live on the street. (I am not making this up; Amy really believed this.)

Later that day, Amy sent me an email:

"Good news...amazingly, effortlessly I gave up getting involved in Bianca's homework today. I didn't do The Work on it at all after our session, but something from talking with you this morning slid into place. One big thing I realized is that I have been holding back doing fun things with Bianca--such as reading aloud to her--until her homework was done. I saw that I didn't want to punish myself, so I decided to go ahead and offer to read, and see what Bianca said. She could have said she had to do her homework, but she didn't say that, so I read aloud to her, and enjoyed myself. She enjoyed the reading too. She will have to deal with the teacher on Friday if her work isn't done!"

How did The Work help this situation? Without realizing it, Amy became aware that night of Question 3, "How do you react when you believe that thought?" She realized that in being rigid and controlling with Bianca, she was being rigid and controlling with herself. There was no way for Amy to have a happy family life if she couldn't allow herself to be happy until all conditions were met. When I last heard from Amy, sometimes Bianca was doing her homework, sometimes not. Amy was still stressing about it, but less. It's a beginning.

What if your issue with your child has nothing to do with behavior? Corinne wrote to me as ask if she should use The Work with her young daughter, who was experiencing night terrors about death. If the child were interested in inquiry, she could certainly benefit from The Work, I told Corinne, and she might benefit most from having a mother who works with her own fears. I suggested Corinne work with the belief she was voicing, "My daughter is suffering," with her own thoughts about death, and with her beliefs about her daughter: "Allison is fearful and withdrawn, and it means that..."

Corinne wrote back to say that she understood she could not expect her daughter to overcome her fears if she as a mother wasn't willing to face her own. She discovered she was holding beliefs that were at least as terrifying as her daughter's fear of death, such as "I am the cause of Allison's suffering," and "I am responsible for my children's happiness." About death: "If I died, no one would love and care for my children as I do."

Children--like our neighbors, spouses, bosses, parents, siblings, friends, perceived enemies, cats, dogs, and elected officials--are here to support us, to point us toward the way to freedom. Whose business are you in mentally when you believe the thought, "My child should...?"

If we can look to ourselves for our happiness, it doesn't mean the kids aren't going to behave, or thrive, or grow up to be good citizens. It's like that old saw about the oxygen mask on the airplane: in case of emergency, affix your own mask before attempting to assist another. We can be of no use to our children if we are suffocating in the name of love.

Byron Katie has said,

"You live as the example of how lovely it is to serve yourself, to create for yourself the world you want to live in, by cleaning up what you want cleaned up. If you love it, [your children] begin to love it also. They become attracted to you and how you live, and all the while you can lovingly ask for what you want, and that is their help. You can ask over and over and over, from a place of love and gratitude for your own life lived well. And they will help you or not. And that is what is happening anyway. It's just, how are you going to live out what you are doing? In peace and joy, or in resentment? If doing what you do brings unhappiness and resentment, why would they want to do it? Notice what you are teaching--is it joy or grievance?"

©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

If you were a subscriber to Transformational Inquiry, today you would have received an en excerpt from an exclusive and unpublished interview I conducted with Byron Katie in 2003 about The Work and parenting issues. Transformational Inquiry is my ezine, and subscriber benefits include a free report, subcriber-only discounts on my products and facilitation, and news of my teleclasses and in-person events. It arrives monthly (or bi-monthly, or weekly, or sporadically, truth be told), at no cost. To subscribe, visit my website, or go directly to http://www.clearlifesolutions.com/newsletter.htm

Turn Your Mother Around

Katie: So, sweetheart, let's turn this whole thing around: "I"...

Woman: I am angry at myself because I am selfish, controlling, and manipulative.

Katie: Especially towards your mother....

If you believe your mother is controlling, you may want to watch this one before Mother's Day...and do a "Judge-Your-Mother" worksheet.

©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

Why Is Mother's Day Stressful?

Got a mother? Wish you were a mom...or, sometimes, that you weren't? Wish yours were alive...or dead?

As the anonymous Middle English lyricist might have written, if he'd had mother-issues and the holiday had already been invented,

"Mother's Day's icumin in
Lhude sing Cuckoo!"

If you are feeling a bit nuts in anticipation of this holiday, you are not alone. Many of us dread Mother's Day either because we want our mothers to love us, we want our children or partners to appreciate us, we hate family gatherings, we have no family, or we think it's a silly holiday. It's a great time for inquiry.

Here is a sample from Chapter 6 of my eBook, Transformational Inquiry: Working on Mothers and Others:

Your Mother is Your Projection

I became interested in The Work when I heard about Byron Katie’s life story; before her “moment of clarity,” she was remarkably like my own mother: overweight, enraged, paranoid, addicted to pain-killers, bedridden for years. Depressed for most of my life and still despairing after having done all sorts of therapies and spiritual modalities, I was certain that one day I would follow in my mother’s footsteps…except it would be much worse because, unlike my mother, I had no husband or kids as enablers.

I’d been scaring myself half to death with that “my mother, myself” story for many years. So when I heard that there was someone who had been in that same kind of sickbed and had gotten out, I knew that whatever she was selling, I was going to buy it, however weird it seemed. (And it sure seemed weird to me at the time.)

Years later, when I met Roxann, Katie’s daughter, I introduced myself and said, “I’ve always wanted to meet you because we had the same mother.” She replied, “Hopefully we have the same mother now.”

I’m not quite there. However, my mother is no longer who I thought she was…and that frees me up to love her.

“Sweetheart, when you take the medicine, we get better. It’s a law.”
—Byron Katie


In Mothers and Others, you will find exercises and insights that can help you with your "mother story." What better gift can you give your mother, or your children, than getting clarity around the stressful concepts of Mother that we have held dearer than the person herself?

You may purchase Transformational Inquiry: Working on Mothers and Others at my website, http://clearlifesolutions.com/clearlifestore.htm

Do The Work for Sunday brunch this week, and have a Happy Mother's Day!

©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

My Guru, Aunt B.

One of my Hin-Jew or Jew-Bu brethren (the quote has been attributed both to Ram Dass and Jack Kornfeld) once said "If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family." I've never thought I was enlightened, but I have believed I had a pretty good handle on myself after years of working with inquiry. I'd like to attribute my (hopefully temporary) insanity to perimenopause, but I can't in all honesty not see my very conscious and deliberate part in the folie a deux I was living last week. Or, more accurately, the folie a une and that une would be moi.

My kind, innocent, loving, fun-loving and (for me) hard to live with 80-year-old Aunt B. came to stay for a week and I projected both "mother" and "child" all over her almost from the moment she set foot in my crackerbox-sized apartment. (Note to self: no more week-long visitors until I get a larger living space.) As she proceeded to take up "too much" space, make "too much" noise at night when I wanted to sleep, break things, almost break things, ask for things (I heard her requests as demands), comment on the way I do things (I heard her comments as criticism...and how dare she, after all I'd done to make great plans, stock up on good food, clean my house, spend big bucks and do without in order to ensure her comfort and pleasure—and, um, her approval and appreciation of me), I developed a list of shoulds and shouldn'ts that I never thought I'd believe the likes of again...and I hate confessing all this here.

I further confess, dear readers, that I did not do any writing of The Work while Aunt B. was with me...not simply because it was difficult to get a moment of privacy (I could have gotten up earlier, stayed up later, taken a "walk," gone into the bathroom), but because I was right! (That old-time religion.) Of course she shouldn't drive 75 miles an hour on the corkscrew-like Highway 17...or at all, if I had any say about it, since we had a parking lot fender bender the day after she arrived, she doesn't signal for turns, she doesn't look when she's backing up and she can't see well enough to park properly. (Not having a driver's license myself, I have never been a backseat driver...until last week.)

Of course she shouldn't tell me how to cook in my own home—sheesh! Naturally she should not break my $60 glass lotus tchotchke. Of course she ought not to blast the TV and keep the lights on at 1 a.m. to read when she's dozing off and not even watching the tube or reading the magazine (and snoring too!). When I tell her not to wear shoes in my place, not to wash dishes if she can't tolerate using the hot water and not to close the bathroom doors when she's showering because I'm very allergic and not doing these simple things that I ask breeds deadly allergens...she should comply, damn it. Oh, and when she chats with a very kind and helpful state park docent whose nephew is a dancer in the New York City ballet, where Aunt B. has a ticket subscription...she soooo totally should not say, "So let me ask you the obvious question...is he gay?"

How do I react when I believe these thoughts? I am nasty as hell; you could say verbally abusive. (At one point I told her—yelled it, actually—that she was the world's worst house guest, which really hurt her feelings.) I try to micromanage her life. I'm resentful, touchy, scared to death...and when I get scared, it comes out as mean and grouchy. I see her as inconsiderate, self-involved, high-maintenance, childish, not too bright. (Great turnarounds for me, especially regarding her.) I pretend I'm being generous but I deny her what she wants, things that would have been so easy to give her if I hadn't been resenting her the whole time. I eat too much, drink too much coffee, drink too much alcohol. (For me, one drink is too much alcohol; any amount affects my body and moods adversely. But Aunt B. loves her daily drink and I was "keeping her company." Yeah, right.)

Here's the truth: she said things like, "How long are you going cook that egg?!! I don't boil them, I heat the water first and then take it off the stove," etc. Is that criticism? Only if you are touchy like me and take everything personally.

Here's more truth: I don't really know if she broke the glass lotus; I only know that before she arrived, all the petals were intact; after she arrived, one was off, and her perfume bottle was next to it. It could have fallen off; it can easily be glued back, but boy did I give her a lecture about needing her to be more mindful in such a small space as this. Meanwhile, I could be more mindful and put things away that I don't want broken.

About the driving thing...Aunt B. shouldn't drive? Well, I knew that if I invited her, she'd want to rent a car, because it's not easy getting in, around and out of Santa Cruz without one. And I'd been in a fender-bender with her two years ago. Why did I say yes to this? (For one thing, I like being driven around, it's a rare occurance in my life these days.) Who is the one who is not mindful? (Rhetorical question.) Aunt B. should not drive, turned around: I should not drive...when she's driving. And, as my friend Anil sagely pointed out this morning when I was working with that statement, I should not drive Aunt B. crazy. Guilty as charged. (Although she never got crazy, despite my best efforts. She's amazing.)

When my clients are hard on themselves, I ask them if they were doing the best they could with what they had going on at the time; they can almost always answer in the affirmative. I am having a hard time at the moment seeing this for myself. Aunt B., however, took me into her arms on Sunday night when I was losing it, crying and mentally beating myself, after I'd been a total horror show all day and pretty much every day prior to that. She told me that in a few days she would remember only the good things about our visit: the giant redwoods, the two movies we caught in town, the show in San Francisco, the fabulous lunch at Chez Pannisse, our morning coffee (I make really good coffee), my extraordinarily comfortable bed...and that, no matter what, she loved me.

The following morning I made a little practice of observing Aunt B. without my story. If she were not who I say she is, would it annoy me that she is doing or saying this now? If I trusted that all is well and we were not in charge of this thing called life, would I be so terrified and tense in the car with her? If she were, say, Byron Katie, would I care if we were running late? Wouldn't I think it was cute that she was talking to me while one or the other of us was going to the bathroom...or that she wanted her coffee served exactly in this certain "high-maintenance" way...or that she asked "embarrassing" or "outrageous" questions?

I don't know what-all happened to me last week, how I could be so very insane, observe it all happening and not be able to stop myself. What I know for sure is that Aunt B. is a great teacher. As I watched her pull out of the garage on her way back to San Francisco airport, she bumped into the curb as she made the turn. My body tensed up just as it had while we were in the car together, speeding and tailgating and making sudden stops on curvy mountain roads. And then I realized whose business I was in mentally...that I was believing I knew best how and when anyone should die...that the entire week had been about the suffering that comes when we believe there are such things as a you, a me, a future.

It's a beginning.


©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick. All rights reserved.