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Valentine
Moments With Your Children
By Margaret
Paul, Ph.D.
One
of the things I loved doing as a child was making very fancy and
creative valentines for my parents. I would spend hours designing
and building wonderful cards with little poems in them. The only
problem was that, while my mother would receive her card graciously,
she never received it with her heart. She would smile and tell me
how lovely it was, but I never felt her love coming back to me.
My mother did not know how to open her heart, how to smile at me
with love and cherishing in her eyes. My father would never even
notice his card.
I wanted
to connect with my parents, to share love with them, to know their
hearts, but their hearts were hidden. Sadly, my mother died last
year at the age of 85 without ever being able to truly share her
heart with me. My father is 91 and his heart has always been closed.
Your
children need to feel your heart and soul. They need you to take
the time to stop what you are doing and just be with them. They
need you to really see them – to see who they are beneath their
outward ways of being.
One
of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is to see their
essence, their true Self, their individual expression of Spirit
within them. When children are deeply seen and valued by their parents,
they learn to see and value themselves. All children need this profound
mirroring from their parents to feel intrinsically lovable and worthy.
The
problem is that we cannot see the souls of our children and embrace
their intrinsic worth unless we see our own intrinsic worth. If
you suffer from core shame - if you feel intrinsically unworthy,
unlovable, not good enough, unimportant, or inadequate - then you
cannot energetically communicate to your children their inherent
worth. Your own feelings of unworthiness will be projected upon
them, no matter how loving you try to be with them. You can let
them know in many ways how wonderful they are, but when they energetically
pick up your core shame, they will either integrate that shame into
their own beings, or move into the opposite direction, believing
that they are superior to you, which can cause entitlement issues.
In
order to love and cherish your children in the way they need to
be loved and cherished, you need to love and cherish yourself. The
greatest gift you can give your children this Valentine's Day and
every day is to embrace a daily process of healing your own core
shame, a process such as Inner Bonding.
Core
shame comes from two different sources:
* If
you were shamed as a child for who you are, you may have absorbed
these false beliefs about yourself and continue to act as if they
are true.
* If
you were not loved in the way you needed to be loved, you might
have decided at a young age that it was your fault that you were
not being loved – that you were flawed, inadequate, unworthy,
and so on. Core shame is often connected with a need to have control
over getting love, so a child may decide, "If it's my fault
that I'm not being loved because there is something wrong with me,
then there is something I can do about it. I can try to become the
"right" way and then people will love me." Sometimes
we stay attached to the belief in our core shame to maintain the
illusion that we can actually control how others feel about us and
treat us.
If
you commit to a daily Inner Bonding process of loving yourself and
letting go of trying to get love from others, you will find that
your core shame gradually resolves. Core shame resolves when we
let go of believing that we cause others to feel and behave the
way they do. As you heal your core shame, you can love your children
from your true Self, your own individual expression of Spirit within.
When your
children experience your love for them from your true Self rather
than from your wounded self that carries your core shame, they will
feel your heart and know that they are truly lovable and worthy
of being loved.
As
Valentine's Day approaches - this day of sharing love – why
not commit to learning to love yourself so that you can deeply share
love with your children? There is nothing more profound than the
sharing of love that comes from an open heart. Your children need
and deserve to have this sacred experience with you.
Margaret
Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books,
including "Do
I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?", "Do
I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By My Kids?", "Healing
Your Aloneness","Inner Bonding", and "Do I Have
To Give Up Me To Be Loved By God?" Visit her web
site for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com
or
mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com
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