How Forgiveness Dovetails with Peaceful Parenting

An age-old prescription for the weary heart, forgiveness is a miracle multi-tool for parenting peacefully. The two practices go hand-in-hand in these six life-changing ways.

1. Forgiveness Changes Us from the Inside-Out. When peaceful parenting is approached as a band-aide it doesn’t quite work as we had hoped. If we are masking, numbing, suppressing, and bypassing internal discord while we are trying our hardest to be peaceful, saying all the right things and using all the best techniques…the pressure still inevitably builds causing the cork of bottled emotion to burst into regrettable moments. Forgiveness goes beneath the surface dissolving internal disruption. It removes energetic blockages to our natural peaceful state, allowing non-causal peace to flow through us effortlessly. Waves of peace wash over us as an expression of who we are and exudes from our pores into our every interaction with our children. 
   
   
2. Forgiveness Frees Us to Let Go of the Past, to Be More Present with our Child. We live in a world of endless (de)vices and distractions. As humans, we are hardwired to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. If we are still holding painful events from our past, we must constantly distract ourselves from these feelings to have a moment’s relief. This renders us susceptible to habit-forming dopamine stimulants and ultimately compounds our pain rather than releasing it. Thus, our healed presence is withheld from our child. From time to time, I have a wee student in my classroom that is chronically holding their bowel movements. The parents tell me that their child has experienced severe constipation in the past, so associates going #2 with pain, and now avoids it altogether requiring help from the pediatrician. Like these dear little 3- and 4-year-olds, sometimes we adults do the same with our painful past experiences. We hold on to them avoiding the tender memories, in hopes that it will somehow just go away. But our emotional and spiritual anatomy just aren’t built that way. The more we ignore our bodily signals and fight against elimination, discomfort is sure to only increase. As the coarse but wise saying goes, we need to “let that sh*t go.” Forgiveness is the cleansing that allows us to parent from our healed presence rather than from our former wounds. It frees us to be more ourselves with our child, showing up in the now, from a place of wholeness.
   
   
3. Forgiveness Energizes Us. From baby-wearing up until we’re loading moving boxes out of the nest, as parents we’re already carrying enough. Adding emotional baggage to our cargo simply weighs us down. As my mentor, Mary Hayes Greico says in her book Unconditional Forgiveness, “If we do not completely process and release a hurt or resentment, we carry it in our energy fields, or in our muscles, joints, organs, and immune systems. We know this to be true, intuitively. If we are full of old issues, it feels almost the same as being 40 lbs overweight. We are tired. We get sick. We lose our joy.” By alleviating the strain and drain of lugging around unnecessary burdens, we can better keep up with our freely-forgiving, bounding-with-joyous-energy young ones.
   
   
4. Forgiveness Quiets our Buttons. I don’t know about you, but I’ve an aversion to loud, flashy, mindless mechanized toys marketed to children. I find them highly agitating and when my kids were little, I generally hid and rid them. Metaphorically, sometimes our children’s behavior invertedly pushes our buttons much like the unnerving noisemaking toys…over and over and over…again. Until one happy day, the batteries wear out and when the same button is pushed… nothing happens. This is the beauty of forgiveness work. One by one, the buttons stop working and we marvel at how we’ve somehow become unbothered.
   
   
5. Forgiveness Cleans the Lens, Helping Us to See Ourselves and our Children more Clearly. Some of us inherited an old paradigm in which children were judged as bad and therefore deserving of punishment, or they were good, therefore deserving reward. In this paradigm, where behavior modification is the only tool accessible to the parent, sometimes love is even withheld from a child who’s been labeled negatively. When I was six years old, my first-grade teacher had a wooden paddle that hung on the chalkboard in the front of the classroom, and every day she would threaten to hit us with it. Written on the paddle were the words, “For lazy and naughty children.” Corporal punishment was also practiced at home, which induced states of fear and shame inside me. It also created distance in my relationships with my beloved parents and this teacher. Even though I was very quiet and well behaved, the adults closest to me couldn’t really see me. An on-going forgiveness practice now helps me to remember who I am, to see myself through Divine eyes rather than through the well-meaning, but mistaken lens of the era in which I was raised. Recently, I put myself on the schedule for a self-forgiveness session. Just before the appointment with myself, I went for a trail-run in the woods. Two deer happened to emerge quite close by. One was just a fawn. In the Lakota way, deer medicine represents innocence. Instantly, I knew I was being reminded that my mistakes come from a place of innocence rather than the old identity, rooted in shame. Two contemporary parenting experts that particularly hold my admiration are Dr. Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside, and Janet Lansbury, author of No Bad Kids. I believe the secret to both remarkable women’s effectiveness in their work with families, is an unwavering commitment to unveiling innocence. Forgiveness work has an extraordinary way of opening our eyes to the scintillating goodness inside.
   
   
6. Forgiveness is Among the Most Important Skills we can Model for our Children. When we are at peace with God, with life, with others and ourselves, we are our happiest and healthiest. The ever-increasing peace that we start to embody, is felt by our children and they are far more equipped to find peace within themselves held in our energetic support. In our own early childhoods, we adored and looked up to our parents and mentors. At this stage, they were like gods to us and we were unable to see them diminished in any way, for this would have been a perceived threat to our survival. Naturally, we assumed we were at fault, even when we were not. I suspect this may be why self-forgiveness is hardest for most people. During our formative years, we internalized criticism, keeping our most beloved grown-ups on a pedestal. Now as parents, self-forgiveness grants us the grace we need to go to our children for repair. To admit our own error and to affirm that our child can trust their own discerning feelings, rather than taking on what is ours to correct. Self-forgiveness detoxifies our self-talk when we make inevitable parenting mistakes. This self-love enables us to hold space when our children experience their own self-judgments. 

All the wisdom traditions teach forgiveness. We know it’s important and what we should do. Yet, how to forgive isn’t always straight forward. This is why the Eight Steps to Freedom process, by Mary Hayes Greico, was developed. She has been guiding groups and individuals in this proven method for over 35 years. Mary offers these steps for free on her website www.maryhayesgreico.com where you will find her books and podcasts. After the unique privilege of internship with this masterful forgiveness expert, I’m excited to announce my new offering of forgiveness sessions to support your sacred parenting path. If this speaks to you, please contact me as you feel ready.

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