So much of psychospiritual therapy and spiritual direction involves helping people explore and transform the problematic internal structures in their soul that keep them from experiencing the Present moment and all the divine qualities of God’s Spirit that are trying to emerge to minister to what they are experiencing. These internal egoic structures include our unhelpful beliefs about self and others, our thinking patterns, our emotional coping strategies, our relationship patterns with others, our impulsive and compulsion behaviors, etc. The roots of all these egoic structures go back to our various key holding environments in our childhood, the primary one being the holding environment of our parents. This means that parenting plays a key role in the spiritual formation of children. My goal in this blog is to explore how parenting and spiritual formation come together. The Young Child as a Unified Field When a baby is born, it experiences all of its life as one unified reality including mother, father, bottle, diaper, cat, bassinette, etc. There is no sense of “me/I” and “you/other.” One way of understanding this unified reality is to see it as a unified field that has a physical aspect to it, but this field is far more than physical. This field has also emotional and spiritual aspects to it. Within the Diamond Approach, it teaches that this unified field has aspects of Basic trust, support, value, peace, calmness, love, compassion, strength, awareness, joy, pleasure, etc. already present in the field. When a parent expresses love to their baby, the baby connects more deeply to the love already present in their field. When a parent holds the baby in their arms, the baby connects more deeply to the inner support that is already present in their field. When a parent plays with their baby, the baby connects more deeply to the joy and playfulness already present in their field. When a parent comforts a crying baby, the baby connects more deeply to the compassion already present in their field. When parents respond appropriately to their baby, the child stays connected to the experience of Basic Trust already present in the field. Since a baby experiences life as one unified field of reality, a baby has no sense of an individual self. This then begs the question. How does a child develop its sense of self? How does a child discover who it is? Here, I find the insights of self psychology useful. Self psychology teaches that a child has three core self-object needs, needs that help it develop its sense of self. They include mirroring, idealizing, and twinning. Mirroring and The Internal God Mirror For a child to discover their true sense of self, that is, a soul-field or soul that is distinct from the soul of others, the child needs parents that can reflect back accurately their experience. For a parent to mirror their child well, a parent needs to be able to witness all of their child’s experiences without judgement. There is no such thing as a good or bad feeling; all feelings are simply information or signs that tells what is happening within our child. We need to reflect these feelings back accurately and non-anxiously so that our child develops a healthy understanding of their internal experience within their soul, and begin to trust this experience, and the truth it reveals to them. This trust and truth are spiritual qualities that emerge and develop within the child’s soul. When a parent mirrors well, a child develops their own internal mirror within their soul that allows them to witness and understand their internal experiences accurately and graciously. I sometimes call this healthy internal mirror that develops within people’s souls a God-mirror for it reflects to them exactly how God sees and is interacting with them. Can you begin to guess what happens when we, as parents, don’t mirror accurately? Our children will develop dirty or distorted internal mirrors that are full of unhelpful beliefs about self that creates much emotional and mental angst. If we, as parents, mirror that sadness or anger is wrong, how will our children view themselves when they find themselves crying or full of rage? They are going to believe that there is something wrong with them, that they are flawed, possibly even unlovable. It is essential that parents learn to mirror well their children. Mirroring is the first of three core needs that children need fulfilled by parents for them to develop a healthy experience of self. Lets turn to the child’s self-object of idealizing. Idealization and The Internal Comforter/Guide What happens to a child when they encounter a difficult experience in life? They go to their parents, the people they idealize and look up to in life, for comfort, protection, and guidance. When we, as parents, fulfill this idealizing role, not only are we able to mirror our child’s experience without judgement, but we are able to hold emotionally our child’s experience and validate it. When this type of parental holding happens regularly with our children, they experience the dynamics of comfort and soothing emerging in their soul-field which allows them to settle emotionally and feel held internally. Thanks to their parent’s ability to validate and hold their experiences, the child develops their spiritual ability to validate and hold their own experiences. Our children may even internalize our gentle soothing parental voice and begin to hear an internal voice or receive thoughts that brings comfort to them. Often, this soothing is called “self-soothing”, but this soothing, if it emerges naturally and not through intentional positive self-talk, is actually the dynamics of Essence arising in the child’s soul in response to their negative experience. Within the Christian tradition, this gentle soothing voice or through process is often interpreted as the Gentle Shepherd or guiding voice of God’s Spirit or Christ. I have just described what happens if we, as parents, fulfill the idealizing need of our children. Our children develop the spiritual ability or faith to allow their soul or God's Spirit to validate, comfort, and minister to their life experience, just as their parents did when they needed, as children, to idealize their parents. However, like mirroring, it is easy to fail our children in their needs around idealization. How often do we actually hold our children’s experiences in a way that validates, brings comfort, and guides them? Attachment theory and research teaches that adults, based on their childhood, have two common attachment styles, that of anxious attachment or fearful withdrawal. An anxious-attachment parent will seek to maintain a merged relationship with their children through over-involvement with their children, solving their children’s problems, smoothing over all negative experiences, and undermining their child’s autonomy. The parent’s anxiety of losing connection with their children gets in the way of the parent having a healthy relationship with their children where the child’s idealization needs are met. A fearful-withdrawal parent is conditioned to distance themselves from all experiences and people that they judge as not safe. They avoid all vulnerability. These parents often avoid, dismiss, manage tightly or distance themselves from conflict or negative experiences with their children. Since fear-withdrawal parents manage so much of their life, these pent-on emotions sometimes burst into the family scene created much pain. Children of a fearful-withdrawal parent find their parent either not physically or emotionally available or not able to truly hold their life experiences, especially the difficult ones. I noted earlier how children, when they are held well by their parents, internalize their parent’s soothing and guiding voices within their own soul-field. Unfortunately, this internalization process works both ways. As a spiritual director, I spend a lot of time with my directees helping them understand and become liberated from the dynamics of their inner critic voice. Research indicates that our inner critic voice is the internalization of our caregivers, often our parents, when they were at their worst behavior, the times when we, as children, felt hurt or traumatized by them. As a result, many people struggle with critical voices and thoughts that they find very disempowering and often condemning, all because their idealizations needs were not met well throughout their childhood or at key times during their childhood. Twinning and the Experience of Being a Child of God So far, we have looked at the childhood needs of mirroring and idealization. Self Psychology also highlights a third childhood selfobject need, namely the need of twinship. A child needs to experience themselves in some way similar to their parents. If a child feels too different from their parents, they struggle in accepting themselves. This twinning is also true at the spiritual level. For me as a Christian spiritual director/psychospiritual therapist, this is why I believe the doctrine of the Incarnation is so essential to the Christian faith. In Jesus, we see how God’s spirit became manifested or embodied in a human person, just like you and me. There are many texts in the New Testament that describe us, humans, as children of God, just as Jesus was a child of God. When this childhood need of divine twinship is met, we realize deep within ourselves that God’s spirit can manifest in our lives in a similar way to how it manifested in Jesus’ life, and the lives of many other Christians who followed in the footsteps of Jesus. If we, as parents, don’t fulfill this twinship need well in our children, they will struggle in accepting themselves and their spiritual nature. Part of meeting this twinship need is helping our children see how their spiritual nature is similar to our spiritual nature, as parents, which is similar to the spiritual nature we see embodied in the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If all of these three selfobject needs are met well, our children will grow up to become adults with healthy spacious dynamic soul-fields that naturally meet their needs through:
The Parenting Role But as you, as parents, probably realize from your spiritual journey, nobody gets all of these core needs met perfectly in their childhood. None of us comes into our adult years with a perfectly formed internal God mirror. Our mirrors are often quite dirty or distorted at times. None of us are in touch with the comforting, guiding, and ministering presence of God’s spirit in our soul all the time. Many times we find ourselves operating very self-sufficient in our lives, totally disconnected from the present moment where God’s spirit actually responds and ministers to us. None of us experiences a continual sense of twinship with God based on our divine identity. In fact, many times we struggle in experiencing this sense of being worthy to be called a child of God. At least, this is how I experienced my Christian faith as I tried to raise three children with my wife. I felt quite incompetent as a parent around spiritual formation at times despite the fact I was a pastor, spiritual director, and psychospiritual therapist. Being now a parent of three adult children, I am well aware of both my successes and failures in meeting these core needs in my children. How I wish I could redo my parenting years so that I could replay key moments of my children’s lives differently? I can’t but I have discovered that I still can help my children process and become slowly liberated from their childhood wounds for these wounds continue to play havoc in their current adult lives. How can I do this as a parent, you may wonder? My son David and Me By meeting their core childhood needs now as they process their struggles and pain with me, their father. I have come to realize that I will never outgrow the father role in their lives, at least not until all their core self-object needs are met. My children still need me, as their father, to be their mirror, but now I can be a better mirror, one that mirrors more accurately their experiences. They still need me to hold and validate their experiences and provide comfort and guidance, but now I can perform this idealization role in a way that truly empowers them and builds that internal spiritual support system. They still need me to meet their twinship need, but now I can meet this need better so they can embrace more easily their spiritual nature and divine identity. And so, the role of parenting in the spiritual formation of our children never ends. It just changes.
Questions to ponder:
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