In the course of voice dialoguing with clients over the years, I’ve noticed that there’s one specific voice that inevitably shows up: the Inner Critical Parent. It’s the part of you that criticizes, judges, or blames yourself. It’s the voice that just about everybody has inside that says things like: “You should be ashamed of yourself” or “You’re not trying hard enough” or “You’re too fat” or “You’re too loud.”
The specific messages vary from person to person, but the critical parent is typically in there somewhere. Why? Because very few of us had truly nurturing parents growing up. And that, of course, is because most of our parents never had truly nurturing parents. Again, I want to remind you that this process isn’t about casting blame on anyone. I hope you’ll develop compassion for your parents and yourself as you continue to move through your inner work. Remember, most parents’ operating styles are a product of their own experiences growing up—the patterns of their families of origin. In their own way, your parents have suffered just as you have.
So how do you break this self-defeating cycle and put an end to this painful legacy? By consciously developing what I call the Inner Nurturing Parent inside yourself. This technique is one of the cornerstones of mastering the art of aloneness, and it will significantly transform your life. With it comes the ability to love yourself, to nurture yourself, and to create ideal relationships—starting with your relationship with yourself.
If you step back and think about it, you may discover that you really don’t treat yourself very well. Most of us break promises to ourselves. We eat poorly. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t take good care of our bodies. We engage in relationships that are abusive, at worst, and unsupportive, at best. We settle for less at every turn. We allow ourselves to be undercompensated at work and undervalued in our relationships. It’s no wonder that so many of us look to others for our self-validation. We’re not very good at validating ourselves. In fact, if most people treated others the way they treat themselves, they wouldn’t have too many friends.
To begin treating yourself better, you’re going to develop your own Inner Nurturing Parent. How? Imagine you had a little child in your care. What would you do? You’d make every effort to keep him healthy and safe; to love and support and praise him; to be forgiving of his mistakes, his inevitable slips; and to let him know how special, how precious, how important he is. That’s what a loving parent does. Only, in this case, you’re going to be the parent and the child. Here, in the most practical terms, is what you do:
• Send loving messages to yourself. Tell yourself, “I love you and appreciate who you are.” When you do something well, give yourself a pat on the back. Say: “Great job! I’m so proud of you.” When you’re struggling or feeling low, be supportive by saying: “I’m here for you. You’re not alone.”
• Take good care of yourself. A loving parent would make sure you eat right and get plenty of rest, sleep, fresh air, and exercise. Keep yourself healthy and fit. Practicing good self-care is an essential step in this process.
• Do nice things for yourself. Get into the habit of doing special things for yourself. Make yourself a cup of tea with the nurturing energy that you’d have when preparing tea for someone you love, and find a relaxing place to sit and enjoy it. Visit the sauna, get a massage, or draw yourself a bath filled with special salts or bubbles. Linger in it and relax. Make yourself a candlelight dinner—a delicious meal in a special setting. Coddle yourself. Treat yourself as a loving parent would treat you.
• Set boundaries with other people. Let people know what you want and don’t want. Tell them what’s okay for you and what’s not. If you have a friend who’s always late and you end up waiting for her and feeling annoyed, tell her how you feel. Let people know when something’s bothering you. A nurturing parent wouldn’t let someone treat you badly. A loving parent makes sure his or her child’s needs are met.
• Become your own advocate. If someone is dis-respectful or hurtful to you, speak up. Tell them you don’t want to be spoken to that way. If someone was unkind, hostile, or verbally abusive to your child, you’d stand up for him. Protect yourself as a nurturing parent would protect you.
• Believe in yourself. A nurturing parent would highlight your uniqueness, tell you how special you are, encourage you to build on your strengths, and support you in a loving, nonjudgmental way. A nurturing parent says: “You can do it.” “I believe in you.” Become your strongest supporter, coach, and cheerleader.
• Be compassionate. Have compassion for your humanity and your flaws. You’re human and you’re going to make mistakes. Look at yourself through the eyes of a loving parent; don’t punish or criticize yourself. Reassure yourself. Comfort yourself. Accept yourself unconditionally. And show that same compassion for your own parents and others, because, remember, they too are human.
Becoming the Master of Your Emotions
When you begin to live more deliberately, you’ll find that your emotions will inevitably trip you up. You find yourself feeling sad and lonely on a Saturday night, and it drives you straight to the donut store—despite your intention to eat a healthier diet—because that’s your default pattern. Or you’re feeling good about yourself until someone’s sneering comment about your ideas at a meeting derails your presentation by tapping into your insecurities. Again, you’ve been pushed into default mode. Or maybe your ex-spouse disrupts your day, triggering old feelings of anger and resentment, and you blow up unexpectedly. Then you’re no longer treating yourself—or others—in a way that’s aligned with the results you want to have. It’s because your habitual behaviors—and the core limiting beliefs that underlie them—are driving your emotions. It takes a lot of work and energy to begin to internalize a new set of beliefs; until you do, you’ll be at the mercy of your feelings and your habitual reactions to them. Those reactions can drive you off course.
A key element of this phase of mastering the art of aloneness involves managing your emotions. That takes a conscious effort. It means stepping back from yourself and looking at your emotions from a place of detachment, as if through the lens of the neutral observer, without ego attachment or judgment. It means deciding consciously how you want to respond, instead of simply reacting and letting your emotional impulses take over.
Different people have different levels of emotionality. Some are more feeling-oriented; they experience their emotions more intensely. For them, emotions can swell like a tidal wave, so they can easily find themselves completely at the mercy of their feelings and reactions. It might be their innate nature or it might be that they grew up in a family where people thrived on drama. Or it could be a combination of factors. If you’re a person who can be ruled by or overwhelmed by your feelings, you may find managing them a bit more challenging. For other people, who are more analytical and thinking-oriented, emotions may feel like a ripple instead of a wave. Still others are so used to suppressing their feelings that they might not even recognize them when they arise. But recognizing your feelings is the first step toward managing them.
Daniel Goleman, in his landmark book Emotional Intelligence, made the case that a high level of emotional intelligence—which includes such fundamental characteristics as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and the ability to manage relationships1—is just as important to success in life as a high IQ, and that, ultimately, moral instincts spring from such “underlying emotional capacities” as impulse control and empathy.2
For our purposes, emotional intelligence involves impulse control and self-management. It means being able to exercise enough self-discipline when you’re in the middle of an emotional reaction to make a conscious decision about what kind of behavior you want to exhibit or what action you want to take. Take the incident I described earlier when my car was keyed. At the time, I lacked self-awareness and impulse control. I wasn’t thinking about anything except parking my car and running off to lunch, and I reacted to anger with anger. Today, I would decide that it’s more
emotionally intelligent to let the angry man have the space. I certainly understand now that when you greet anger with anger, it’s like natural combustion: everything escalates. And I know more now about how to defuse such a situation.
To begin to develop greater emotional intelligence, ask yourself: What kind of inner emotional state do I want to walk around in? Do I want to walk around with a junkyard inside of me—full of negative feelings such as anger, sadness, and resentment? Or do I want to walk around feeling loving, joyful, and compassionate? Wouldn’t I rather walk around with a beautiful garden inside of me?
Imagine you’re at the grocery store, riffling through your wallet and you’re taking too long. Somebody behind you snaps, “Can’t you hurry up?” You have a choice. You can react emotionally and snap back in anger, or you can say, “I’m sorry I’m taking so long. I’ll just be a minute.” That will defuse the situation immediately. It’s like when you’re on the phone waiting for a customer service representative to come on the line, very nearly at your wit’s end, and then this friendly, warm voice comes on and says, “I’m really sorry you’re having a problem. How can I help you?” It naturally defuses your irritation. The key to emotional intelligence is to consistently and deliberately respond to situations in ways that say: I’m not interested in escalating this situation; I’m interested in letting my inner garden flourish, and I’m not going to let other people’s emotions pollute my internal environment.
Often, when people react emotionally to a situation, it’s their egos that have been triggered. The ego is saying something like: You can’t push me around. You can’t take my space. Who do you think you are? All too often, the short-term gratification of getting back at somebody becomes more important than the long-term gratification of living a peaceful, joyful, happy life.
Of course, anger and irritability are just two emotions that can derail your sense of well-being and relationships with others. Sadness, pain, hopelessness, frustration, disappointment—all are feelings that can derail you. For many people grappling with aloneness, depression can be a major stumbling block. Depression can be experienced in different ways, from a mild sense of the blues related to a specific situation to a full-blown clinical depression driven by biological factors. A biologically based depression typically can’t be remedied by simply refocusing your thoughts, and in many cases it requires medication. But refocusing your thoughts can be a valuable way to handle a mild or situational depression. In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman notes that the worst way to deal with a case of the blues is rumination—giving in to your feelings and thinking and rethinking through what’s bothering you. According to Goleman, the best response is to focus your attention on something else—get up and get out; be around other people; engage in some activity to get your mind off it and get out of yourself. That’s a great example of living deliberately.
Enlisting the Power of Thought
“Every thought you have has an energy that will either strengthen or weaken you,” writes Wayne Dyer in The Power of Intention.3Early in this book, I talked about the importance of changing the way you think about being alone and about the fact that “you are what you think.” In this chapter, I’ve talked about some of the undermining messages we send to ourselves. What we think plays a significant role in transforming our lives. It goes beyond having a positive attitude; it extends to directing your thinking toward your purpose.
Remember the woman I mentioned earlier who made a simple rule: she wasn’t going to spend time with anyone who made her feel bad. Once she started living more deliberately, she found herself drawn to people who exuded what she called “positive energy,” because they made her feel good. She made a study of them. Who were these people? What did they have in common? She found that either they’d been brought up in loving, nurturing families—meaning that they had close, supportive relationships with their parents and siblings, believed in themselves, and were comfortable being supportive of others—or, more often, they had done intensive personal-development work through therapy, support groups, coaching, or some spiritual practice. Some were practitioners of yoga and meditation; they were people who made a conscious effort to stay centered, to live a healthy life, to be loving and compassionate. Others were deeply spiritual; they were connected to a higher power; they looked for the good in others; they were deliberate in their desire to be loving and compassionate, and they were neither judgmental nor self-righteous nor critical. Their positive energy infused everything they did.
Countless books have been written about the power of positive energy and of directing your thinking toward your goals, often called the power of attraction. These range from Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, first published in 1952 and read by millions of people, to Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention, to the many books of Deepak Chopra and of Tony Robbins. Each offers a unique philosophy and approach for tapping into positive energy and directing it toward the achievement of a central purpose. Like my fellow writers, I, too, believe that positive thinking—and harnessing the power of positive energy—is an essential piece of the work that’s necessary for aligning your actions with your purpose. But I do believe that it’s work. While deliberately focusing your thinking on the results you want to create is essential to personal transformation, the work doesn’t stop there. You must take action to produce the results you want; you can’t rely solely on meditation, harnessing the energy of the universe, thinking positively, or aligning your thoughts with your purpose. Even so, I believe that your thoughts are a powerful tool that support and help facilitate your actions. I also believe that people emit positive and negative energy through their thoughts, and that by directing your thoughts toward the results you desire, you are far more likely to move in that direction.
There is a growing body of scientific evidence that the mind is a far more powerful force than ever imagined. For almost three decades, Bernie Siegel, M.D., has been working in the area of mind-body healing. His credentials are impressive: a medical doctorate from Cornell Medical College and surgical training at Yale. Siegel has been the proponent of such techniques as visualization, imagery, and positive thinking to help patients heal and to increase the effectiveness of standard medical and surgical treatments. Research has shown that, by using visual imagery, people are able to control body functions such as heart rate and bleeding, and Siegel maintains that he has seen patients cure themselves of cancer using visualization and positive thinking.
In fact, evidence of a mind-body connection abounds in the field of medical science. Once found almost exclusively in New Age books about energy and healing, evidence of the power of positive thinking can now be found in an increasing number of clinical studies. In a testament to the legitimacy of the field, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dedicated an estimated $153 million in 2005 to research related to the mind-body connection and continues to fund such studies. Research has demonstrated links between higher levels of well-being and lower cardiovascular risk, lower levels of stress hormones and lower levels of inflammation.4Other studies clearly demonstrate that chronic stress can compromise the healing of wounds and may impair the effectiveness of vaccines.5A host of studies of the so-called placebo effect suggests that believing you are getting medication can actually trigger the body’s natural curative powers. In one study, brain scans showed that subjects who believed they were receiving painkillers released endorphins—a natural pain reliever—and felt better despite the fact that they weren’t given any real medicine.6When patients in an Italian study of Parkinson’s disease were given a placebo, their bodies began firing the neurons responsible for their muscle rigidity and they were able to move more easily.7Similarly, new research suggests that once Alzheimer’s disease robs someone of the ability to expect that a proven painkiller will help him or her, it doesn’t work nearly as well.8
The entire field of psychoimmunology is based on the premise of a mind-body connection, springing from the fact that a clear relationship has bee
n documented between the human brain and the immune system. Studies have amply demonstrated that stress affects the body’s ability to resist disease, and psychological factors have been shown to have an effect on many illnesses, including rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and inflammatory bowel disease.
Just as compelling is the body of evidence being amassed to support the validity of the field of parapsychology—the study of extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis (moving physical objects with the mind), and mental telepathy. You’ve probably had the experience of thinking about someone you haven’t heard from in years, then getting a call from that person the next day—or even in the next moment. How often do you call someone who says, “I was just thinking about you?” People in close relationships sometimes report that they raise a subject only to find that their mother or husband or sister was thinking the same thing at the same time. We usually chalk it up to coincidence, but studies of the paranormal demonstrate that there may be something else at work.
The field of parapsychology is gaining credibility, thanks in part to Dean Radin, Ph.D. In his book, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, he reviews almost a century of increasingly rigorous scientific experiments that demonstrate the existence of paranormal phenomena. Minds have been shown to move objects. Subjects in these studies have demonstrated the capacity for telepathic communication. And, in some studies, the subjects have picked up information from photographs, actual scenes, and events about which they knew nothing, apparently through extrasensory perception. Radin calls the entire body of research “evidence of our deep interconnectedness.” At the very least, it suggests that there are paths of communication or energy fields that remain untapped.
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