As a mom, I talk to a lot of young people: middle schoolers, teens, and 20-somethings. As a psychotherapist, I also speak with a lot of adults. These conversations make it clear to me that the term “trauma” has entered the cultural conversation and made its way into everyday speech. It’s now part of our mindset, a way of describing and thinking about our lives. The frequency and casualness with which we now claim to have experienced “trauma” is disturbing.

According to the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5), trauma is defined as occurring when a person is exposed “to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). Although, in truth, psychological trauma can occur in any highly stressful, frightening, or distressing event or series of events—a situation in which the distress, fear, or shock associated with what’s happening overwhelms the person’s capacity to digest or process it emotionally.

Real trauma is a devastating, painful, and life-changing experience. There’s nothing light or desirable about trauma, and the fact that we’re talking about, acknowledging, and addressing the epidemic of trauma that exists in our society, awarding it with the seriousness it deserves, and developing new treatments is a remarkably positive step in our evolution.

Some might argue that any attention to the topic is a good thing. And yet, there’s also a shadow side to the term “trauma” going viral and a danger to the way we’re applying the idea of trauma to our lives.

At the most basic level, the popularization of the term “trauma” undermines and invalidates the suffering of those who have experienced real trauma. Placing our discomfort and daily life irritations on the same playing field with the suffering of someone who’s lived through terrifying, violating, or life-threatening events is absurd, disrespectful, and even unkind.

So, too, when we name an experience “trauma,” we’re saying that it shouldn’t be happening to us, which breeds an attitude of entitlement. When reality shows up in its uncomfortable forms, we feel personally punished. Trauma, as a pop-culture term, encourages an attitude of poor me and its underlying belief that “I should only have to experience the parts of life I like.”

But why shouldn’t disagreeable things happen to us? Are we too special, too fragile, or too whatever to have to experience life as it is?

Opening the floodgates for what’s considered “trauma” perpetuates a delusional perspective, the belief that a good life ought not to contain difficulty and should always be to our liking and, of course, Instagram-ready. Life’s irritations framed as “traumas” suggest that reality should always be pleasant if we’re doing it right and getting what we deserve. Consequently, when we experience life’s undesirable parts, we’re less willing to work with them, to use them as opportunities to become more resilient. We stay stuck in victim mode, clinging to our conviction that our experience shouldn’t be this. And yet it is.

Instead of stamping our feet like toddlers, demanding that life be what we want, insisting that we’re always entitled to be comfortable, we’re better off simply offering ourselves compassion for life’s unavoidable disagreeableness and supporting ourselves through the whole miracle and catastrophe that is a normal life. Seeing and claiming “trauma” everywhere we look won’t bring us relief. Relief, paradoxically, arrives when we give up our fight with reality and relax with life on life’s terms (which doesn’t mean we always enjoy it).

Then, we can turn our attention to making use of life’s “life-ness” to grow stronger, wiser, and, ultimately, happier.

The post Trauma is Not A Bad Date or Discontinued Starbucks Drink appeared first on Nancy Colier.

My friend was confused and frustrated that her child’s experience of camp, with all its remarkable activities, gorgeous setting, and kind people, could indeed be so negative. But, alas, such was the report coming from Vermont. 

This past summer, I heard many similar reports from parents. Their kids also came home from camp early or seriously considered it, and struggled with anxiety, relational difficulties, and other emotional issues. I checked in with the director of a popular summer camp, and she confirmed that at her camp, and many other camps, more kids this summer left or talked about leaving than she’d seen in her decades as a camp director.  

Exodus of the Uncomfortable

From my unscientific research, it seemed that children wanted to leave because they felt too anxious, annoyed, excluded, emotionally bullied, and sad (formerly called homesick). Children described an overall difficulty getting along with cabin mates, navigating social situations, adjusting to other people’s wants and needs, and figuring things out without their parents’ help.  

One 10-year-old girl, in explaining why she wanted to come home, described her bunk mate who twice told her that she shouldn’t wear “that” shirt with “those” shorts.  Another described the  rejection she felt when she was excluded from swinging on a hammock with other girls. For one tween, it was the overwhelming annoyance of a girl continually sitting on her bed, without asking. At the end of the day, the experience of summer camp was just too difficult to manage, and maybe more to the point, not something that should have to be managed.  

The experiences these children described can most certainly be challenging and painful, and it’s hard to live (often for the first time) in close quarters with other kids who aren’t family, and who are also navigating the turbulent social landscape of building identity and independence. Learning how to speak up for yourself, draw boundaries, and ask for what you want and need are no small tasks (at any age). Still, it behooves us to think more deeply about why these situations that used to be considered just regular life—the basic aggravations of living in a world that includes other people—have become so impossible and overwhelming for our children. Why do our kids seem less and less able to handle—for lack of a better term—life?  And indeed, according to a recent study published in Jama Pediatrics, children and teen depression and anxiety has increased over the last five years.  Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported a startling statistic on teen suicide: Emergency room visits for attempted suicide among teenage girls were up 51.6 percent in the first months of 2021, as compared to 2019.  This is a real issue.article continues after advertisement

COVID and Modern Problems

Is there something about our parenting that contributes to our children’s lack of resilience and difficulty with accepting, compromising, and, most importantly, finding solutions in challenging and uncomfortable situations? And why does it sometimes seem that our children, who often are given so much more than we were given, appreciate and enjoy so much less? 

The reasons our children lack resilience and feel so overwhelmed by life are, of course, multiple and complex. So, too, the aspects of modern parenting that contribute to this troubling quandary are intricate and difficult to discern. The reality, however, is that our kids are growing up in a world filled with profound and scary problems—frightening realities that children of previous generations didn’t have to consider. Will there be a planet at all for them to live on? Will they get shot when they go to school? Will an unseeable virus from a monkey or pangolin, or created in a lab, somehow kill their family, or them?

When it comes to things to worry about, our world is overwhelming, and not just for kids, but for all of us. So, when we think about why the small situations of everyday life might feel overwhelming and unmanageable, we have to remember that our children are already filled to the brim (and overflowing) with scary stuff.  It may be that there’s just no more room for worry and anxiety, about anything.

In addition, for more than two years, we’ve been isolated because of COVID-19, living in our own private bubbles, separated from everyone but those closest to us, which means separated from other people’s differing ideas, preferences, and needs. During this time, when we’ve lost control over so much, we’ve also, in some ways, ended up with more control over our immediate environments. Our kids haven’t had to work things out with their peers, compromise, be resourceful, or navigate challenging situations. As a result, they’ve missed out on two important years of emotional and social development, and the opportunity to build critical skills for living in their community.article continues after advertisement

Screened In

In addition to the pandemic, there’s the profound and inescapable issue of what screens and social media are doing to our children’s emotional resilience and ability to cope with real life (or, what they now call “RL”). While our screens have the capacity to connect us, they also isolate us, leaving each of us in our own individualized universe. Our screen is a place where we can hide, surround ourselves with our personal preferences and opinions, and minimize contact with any kind of other with whom we might disagree.  Our screen is a world in which we are the master, and we rarely, if ever, have to put up with anything we don’t approve of or want.

Other people—their behavior and choices—don’t need to bother us inside our self-designed universe. If they do, we can usually just delete them (which we can’t do as easily in RL). Our screens present an image of reality that isn’t real, a shiny, airbrushed image that’s absent two of the most reliable aspects of reality: difficulty and discomfort. Sadly, we’ve come to expect the real world to be like our screen world, and yet it isn’t.

Problems in Parenting?

This seeming diminishment in emotional resilience may also be tied to the increasing phenomenon of helicopter parenting—namely, overly involved and controlling parents who swoop in to take care of every problem their children might have, but without allowing their children to solve issues for themselves. In what’s usually an effort to be helpful and to protect their children from pain, such parents do their kids a disservice, depriving them of the opportunity to be resourceful and to learn how to manage life for themselves. Such kids can end up helpless, without the emotional and mental skills to work with other people and to manage the challenges of regular life.article continues after advertisement

Yet another contributing factor in camp exodus is our culture’s prevailing attitude that everything should be easy and comfortable—always. Our culture conditions us to believe that life should be how we want it to be, that we shouldn’t have to struggle, and that our children shouldn’t have to, either; we can’t bear our children’s discomfort and we’re teaching them that they can’t and shouldn’t have to bear it, either. 

Comfortable Expectations

We no longer view difficulty and discomfort as normal parts of life that offer opportunities for growth. If life is uncomfortable, something—or someone—must be changed to correct the situation, immediately.

I’ve written a lot about the importance of empathy and compassion in parenting, for both our children and ourselves. The essence of well-being is the ability to care about and be kind to our own experience—there’s nothing I believe more firmly. And yet, for the first time ever, I’m questioning whether our generation may have swung too far from previous generations, when “suck it up” was the only advice for kids who found themselves in a hard situation.  While a dismissive admonishment to “suck it up” doesn’t help children to develop an emotionally healthy internal life, treating every irritation and struggle as something that’s monumental, shouldn’t exist, and must immediately be fixed–might not be the right solution either. Perhaps the work, for now, is in parents learning to tolerate our children’s discomfort—and our own as well.

Difficulty and discomfort build resilience and character; we don’t do our kids any favors when we treat these normal parts of life as the enemy and something that must be  eliminated. In fact, when we do, we create people who are dissatisfied and unhappy, and ultimately, are unable to deal with real life.  While it might not be easy (which might be a good thing), we can do better for our kids, and ourselves.

The post What’s Happened to Emotional Resilience? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

To name a few: “Live life on your own terms,” “Whatever is good for your soul, do that,” “Find the magic in every moment,” “You only live once, so live it your way,” “You’re right where you need to be,” “No one can make you feel less-than without your consent,” “You decide your destiny,” “If you’re always trying to be normal, you’ll never know how amazing you can be,” “Own your life,” “Everything happens for a reason, you decide the reason,” “You go girl,” “You be you” … well, you get the point.

While I was touched by my sitter’s efforts, and most of all, by the absolute delight and pride in my daughter’s eyes as she flipped through the book for the hundredth time that night, truth be told, I was also disturbed by what I read on those pages.

Many argue that these uber-positive, social-media-driven messages inspire confidence and power in girls. I’m not so sure. I’m also not sure they’re harmless.

At a basic level, most of these aphorisms are simply gobbledy-gook.  They may feel good to say or hear in the moment, and may offer a fleeting burst of inspiration, but they’re not helpful in any real way. They don’t change the way someone feels, or provide any lasting confidence, or comfort for that matter.

For that girl who feels insecure and unpopular, telling herself she’s crushing it will not change what it feels like to walk into her middle school cafeteria. While these positive mantras may distract her from the deafening negative thoughts informing her she’s not pretty enough, not cool enough, or not (fill in the blank) enough, they’re not going to make a dent in her self-doubt or create a boost in her self-esteem. Her inner reality cannot be corrected or soothed with such empty clichés. And yet, she has to pretend they can, and she believes they should.

What’s problematic about such vernacular becoming standard speak is that it promotes a way of thinking, imagining, and being with one’s own feelings. These sorts of quotes create a climate in which young women believe they “should” feel brave, “should” know their worth, “should” know how to be who they are, “should” be able to “crush it.” This diet of positive platitudes on which our girls are feasting is a set-up for inadequacy: it ends up creating yet another way for a young woman to fail at being the fabulous, Instagram-ready superstar she’s supposed to be (and everyone else seems to be).

Furthermore, these snappy sayings, designed to make our girls feel powerful, are disturbingly superficial and inadequate. Being a girl, a teenager, a young woman, heck a grown woman with confidence in this society is hard. Trying to build and hold onto self-esteem in a culture that implores females to be beautiful, have fabulous bodies, blaze a trail, be warriors, and also be kind, selfless, compassionate, brave, and always positive, not to mention, make everyone else feel good in the process, is a daunting task indeed. True self-esteem, the kind that’s personal, reliable, and lasting, the kind that holds up under real challenge, requires more than wearing a “You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think” tank top.

Growing up in this social-media madness, our girls need real psychological and spiritual tools, guidance that contains substance and depth. They need support that acknowledges the challenges they face, not only as young people, but young people growing up in this digital carnival. Sadly, what we offer our girls, as nourishment, protection, and fuel for their journey into womanhood in this society, is woefully deficient. We tell them “You’re worth it,” but without teaching them why that is, or on what to base their worth. We tell them “you be you,” but without teaching them what that means, or what values to base that “you” on. We let our girls down and then leave them to feel ashamed for not being able to make use of such artificial nonsense.

Perhaps the most prevalent message in all these cheerleading memes is that of being the master of our own universe, and the idea that our destiny is in our control, that anything and everything is possible if we set our mind to it. (If you can dream it, you can do it.)

There’s no doubt that we need to feel a sense of control in our life, at every age. It’s a central aspect of our well-being. We must believe that we can create our reality, that what we do makes a difference in what happens to us. And yet, this social-media-fueled “you control your destiny” message has left out a vitally important aspect of this truth.

Here’s the rub: Our destiny is up to us and also not up to us. Sometimes we control what happens to us and sometimes we can only control how we respond to what life decides for us. No matter how much you’re crushing it, there are things in life that we just can’t control.

We convince our girls that they can control their destiny, but we don’t prepare them for the experience of not being in control. Most young people these days are desperately ill-equipped to deal with or soothe themselves when it comes to what they can’t control and what they didn’t wish for. At the same time, they blame themselves for life taking its own path, as if they had failed in some way because they couldn’t make it happen the way it happens on Instagram.

Our girls are growing up on empty platitudes that are fun to shout at a softball game or write in bubble letters in a scrapbook. But sadly, there’s nothing in these cheerleading fumes that help our girls become confident women, trust themselves, or manage life as it is. These useless words quickly disappear into the shallow cultural sea in which our kids are swimming and growing.

There’s nothing wrong with a good “You Go Girl” refrigerator magnet.  Our happy memes are yummy in the way that cotton candy is yummy. They’re pleasurable, but they can also rot our teeth. But whatever we do, let’s not mistake these hollow words, this fleeting emotional dust for anything like real nourishment, or real empowerment. They’re not that. Our girls deserve that.

The post You Go, Girl: Growing Up On Cotton Candy Cliches appeared first on Nancy Colier.

After four years of going to bed with our stomachs in knots, hearts heavy and brains on fire, trying to make peace with yet another horrible thing, it will be a while before our shoulders fully drop and the knots in our stomachs unravel. It will take time to trust that the world might, at some point, be fundamentally OK.

At the same time, more than 73 million people chose to support our outgoing leader. This fact gives pause to the many others who cannot fathom that choice. And yet it happened, which leaves us with a difficult conundrum.

This conundrum is not a place to stop and get comfortable with a new kind of outrage, a new version of “what the hell is wrong with them?” If we use this conundrum as a doorway, not a destination, perhaps we can move the dialogue forward and create something that brings out our humanity once again.

In a country where the average American has to work more than a month to earn what the average CEO makes in an hour, there’s no doubt that our rage wasn’t born in 2016. But, even if this leader didn’t officially create the hatred and contempt that now pervades our society, he did create a system in which everyone feels the right to shout their opinions and disgust through a megaphone, to publicly point fingers at whomever they think is to blame for their discontent. This leader has empowered the mental garbage that floats through almost every human being’s mind and entitled it to an audience.

Over these last four years, there’s been no attempt whatsoever to rein in our grievances, to be kind or behave in any sort of civilized manner. The current leadership has modeled an attitude of bullying, blaming, and shaming, an attitude utterly devoid of empathy. A leader who feels perpetually persecuted and is always looking for someone to blame creates a sentiment that mirrors his own.

Many moons ago, there was a saying … if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Today, this saying might sound absurd, ignorant, and even dangerous to free speech. Most Americans believe that not nice words are important for creating change and making the world a better place. I agree; the idea that we would only speak if we had good things to say sounds like a recipe for becoming sheep.

But over these last four years, with a leader who spews venom and toxicity, we have twisted that original expression into its modern form, namely, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

I frequently find myself wondering, what happened to our basic sense of decency and decorum, to integrity and basic kindness? While it may seem old-fashioned to follow some sort of public etiquette, at this moment in history we could use an infusion of old-fashioned values. We could use what Senator Cory Booker called a “resurrection of grace.”

It’s hard for us to agree on anything these days, but I hope we can agree that a regular diet of anger and intolerance does something dreadful to us, to who we are as a species. It poisons our consciousness and brings out the worst in us.

What if each one of us made a commitment to stop contributing to this cesspool of hatred? What if we each made the choice to stop using the public square to announce and celebrate every angry thought or grievance that floats through our minds? Just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true, and it doesn’t mean that we have to say it. In fact, when we stop awarding our angry thoughts with so much attention, stop providing these floating mental flotsam with a megaphone, they tend to get a lot quieter inside our own heads.

We cannot control anyone else’s behavior, but we can control our own. What if, crazy though it may sound, we just acted a little kinder than we felt, or thought?

We don’t have to wait for our leaders to change our country. We can start a revolution right now by making the choice to use our words and our own behavior as a means to resurrect decency and decorum, to bring back goodness and integrity as fundamental societal values. And maybe even, to invite grace back into the conversation.

The post What If We Acted a Little Kinder Than We Felt, or Thought? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

There’s something profoundly disturbing going on in our culture right now. Well, truth be told, there are a multitude of profoundly disturbing things going on. But at the center of our toxic culture is a rapidly metastasizing and malignant sense of entitlement—a righteousness. And specifically, the right to cast judgment.

As a society, we have become astoundingly judgmental. We feel entitled and emboldened to cast judgment on absolutely everything and everyone. We not only judge what everyone is saying, doing, and believing right now, but we judge what everyone said, did, and believed throughout history. We feel entitled to criticize and condemn those who came before us, specifically, for being less aware and evolved than we are now. We shame who we used to be, and at the same time, deny that that’s who we were.  

We do this judging not only on a public stage, to other people, but also personally—to ourselves. We are constantly attacking, shaming, and rejecting earlier versions of ourselves, judging and blaming who we used to be. But we judge and blame through the lens of who we are now—who we’ve become.

Oddly, we expect ourselves to have always known and understood what we now know and understand. We shame ourselves for being works in progress, for having to grow up and keep growing up, for not coming out of the womb fully formed and perfect. As we become more awake and aware beings, sadly, we look back at less mature incarnations of ourselves with disdain and contempt. 

Laura, a client, started to tell me about a recent, wonderful experience in which she did something profoundly kind for her neighbor. She felt really good about her choice, and about herself. But before she had gotten even a few sentences into her story, Laura veered off into a shaming and critical diatribe on herself—specifically, about a past experience from 20 years ago, when she had acted with less kindness and less generosity.

The opportunity to honor this lovely experience, and also fully inhabit the person she had become as a woman in her forties, was hijacked by her need to vilify and condemn who she had been in her twenties. In an instant, she had abandoned her present-day self and was back in self-loathing and shame, caught in an old narrative, and an ocean of regret about who she used to be.

It’s odd really. We don’t expect our children to be able to run the moment they’re born. We all understand that, as human beings, we need to roll around for 9 or 10 months, then slide along on our butts for another few months, then crawl, then stand up and fall down, then toddle for a while holding onto something, then take a couple of steps on our own, then fall down some more, then take more steps, then fall down, and then walk. 

We accept that we need to grow into ourselves on a physical level, to fail until we can succeed. And to some degree, we hold this same acceptance with regard to our mental evolution, recognizing our need for education. And yet, for some reason, when it comes to our emotional and spiritual evolution, the maturation of our character and awareness, we expect perfection right out of the gate. We deny ourselves the right to learn and evolve over a lifetime, and similarly, to change and grow over generations, as a species.  article continues after advertisement

Life is a process of endless becoming. We’re never fully done growing, never done becoming. We are works in progress, throughout life. Over time and through our lived experiences, we learn who we want to be, who we are capable of being.

The truth is, we don’t come out as our best self; we grow into and learn how to be our best self. Particularly if we didn’t have parents or caretakers that could serve as models for our best behavior. We become more evolved and aware, and hopefully more compassionate, through trial and error, good examples, failure, time, and experience; we become the people we can respect and be proud of. That’s precisely the journey of life, precisely the point of it. To deny this truth or demand that it should be otherwise is to deny reality. 

When we judge and condemn our past behaviors and level of awareness based on what we are capable of now; when we shame the toddler in our past for, well… being a toddler, we not only deny reality, but we reject and abandon our more evolved selves. We refuse ourselves the privilege to change, to become and be better versions of ourselves. We cling to our past failures in the face of our current successes as a way of holding onto an old identity, an outdated narrative on ourselves as bad or not who we should have been. 

Often, at the root of our judging is shame. We shame ourselves for having to spiritually and morally mature, as if there were some other way for our evolution to happen. We condemn ourselves for having to grow into our best self. And of course, for ever having been imperfect.

In the process, we turn our backs on who we actually are, now. We dishonor the ways we’ve evolved. Simultaneously, we block the self we’ve become from becoming even more, and from fulfilling its potential. By focusing on the missteps and failures of who we used to be, we prevent ourselves from stepping into the shoes of the person we’ve become. In so doing, we get in our own way and slow down our continuing evolution.  

As human beings, we are works in progress. We grow into who we are on a daily basis. There’s no point at which we reach our final destination, a completed self. Again and again, we realize that what we thought and believed before, maybe even yesterday, we no longer think and believe now. Again and again, we discover that how we want to behave and how we can behave has changed.article continues after advertisementhttps://86b187bc2b58c4d1800c54a967d26945.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

The same holds true for us as a species. Who we were at other times in history is not who we are now. There’s no shame in that; it’s just what is. But each minute we spend condemning and judging who we were; each present moment we waste expecting and demanding a past self to have known what a present self knows, is not only a complete rejection of reality, of the human condition, but it’s also a moment we’ve lost, one that could have been spent living our life from and as the more evolved self we are right now.  

The post We Weren’t Always As Good As We Are Now, So What? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

It goes like this: parent asks a question about something their kid is doing or wants to do with technology, something they’re worried about, usually the amount of time the child want to use or the kind of tech he/she is using.  I respond with a suggestion or intervention that requires limit-setting and a set of guidelines for incorporating that change.  Parent then says some form of this: “But if I do what you’re suggesting, I’m going to be yelled at or hated by my kid; it’s going to cause a huge problem.”  I usually smile and say yes.  This however seems to confuse the said parent, as if they’re waiting for me to offer a solution to their problem that doesn’t require discomfort or disagreement, a policy that’s easy to implement.  I then deliver the following, sometimes surprising news alert: “As a parent, you’re not supposed to be your child’s friend.”

We are living in a time when, as parents, we’re supposed to be our children’s best friends at the same time we’re being their parents.  Moms and dads hang out with their kids as if they’re hanging out with peers.  When there’s a disagreement, parents believe we’re supposed to negotiate with our kids as if we’re negotiating with equals.  Parents of seven-year-olds report to me (with a straight face) all the reasons their child doesn’t agree with their decisions regarding the child’s behavior.  I see parents of children under the age of five who get an equal vote in setting up the rules of the house, which includes the rules that will apply to the children.  I hear the delight of parents who are friended by their kids on social media.  We’re spoon-fed the message that we’re supposed to be buddies with our kids and that they should like us, all the time.  And, that we’re bad parents if they are upset by our decisions.

We have thrown away the distinction between an adult and a child, undermined the wisdom of our adult experience, all so that we can be liked by our kids. We’re choosing to be our children’s playmates rather than to do what’s best for them.  There’s no wonder kids now hurl profanities at their parents in public places, to which the parents giggle awkwardly, and wonder if this too is part of the new hip friend/parent milieu.

As parents, we’re taking the easy path, the path of least resistance, telling ourselves that if our kids like us we must be doing this parenting thing right.  In the process of trying to be friends with our kids however, we are giving away our authority, depriving them of the experience of being taken care of, denying them the serenity, trust, and confidence that arises from knowing that we can stand our ground and protect them even when it incites their anger.  It is precisely because we love our children that we need to be able to tolerate their not liking us all the time.

When we’re driven by the desire or responsibility to be liked, we’re giving ourselves an impossible task.  We simply cannot prioritize being liked and simultaneously raise healthy, sane, human beings who can tolerate frustration and disappointment.  We are setting ourselves up for suffering and failure.  We survive on the ephemeral crumbs of being liked—liked for giving them what they want, while denying ourselves the real nourishment of the experience of providing our kids with what we know they really need, pleasing or otherwise.  We are, as with many other things, opting for the easiest, most immediate and pleasurable option over the deeper, harder, and more thoughtful and ultimately satisfying choice.

We are also, in this friending over parenting process, doing a great disservice to our kids.  Our kids need boundaries and guidelines.  A woman I work with who was raised by a parent who, above all, wanted to be her friend, put it this way: “I never felt like there was someone to stop me if I got to the end of the earth and was going to dive off.”  Our kids, even though they may scream and throw things, also want us to know things they don’t, to stick with our wisdom despite their railing, to be willing to tolerate their rants in service to their best interests—to take care of them in ways they can’t yet take care of themselves.  Our kids want us to demonstrate fierce grace.  So too, we feel our best when we walk the walk of fierce grace.

Often, children do not know what’s best for them, and almost never do they know what’s best for them when it comes to technology use.  It’s hard enough for us grownups to realize what’s best for ourselves and children have front brains that are not anywhere near fully-developed.  Allowing children to make their own rules around technology is like handing an opioid addict a vial of heroin or a bottle of oxycontin and asking him to make his own rules whether or not to us.  Young children and teenagers should not get an equal vote in matters that relate to their tech use, nor in many other matters. As parents, we usually possess at least a couple or more decades of experience under our belt that our children don’t possess. Put simply, we know things they don’t, and we can tell them this truth. This makes our kids not equal in matters that require discipline or hard choices, ones that go against what their brains’ pleasure centers, hormones, or inexperienced thinking tells them is best.

Remember this: it’s okay for your child to be upset with you; it’s okay if they don’t like or agree with the decisions you make; it’s okay if your child is madder than a wet hornet at you for setting limits and sticking to those limits. You’re allowed to say no; it takes great courage to say no.  You’re not a bad parent if it gets bumpy and your child goes through periods when he/she doesn’t like you—at all—and maybe even says she hates you for a while. It probably means you’re doing your job as a parent.

Assuming your role as the authority in your child’s life is critical and the more you assume that role, the more you will feel the wisdom of your own authority.  Being the authority doesn’t mean turning a deaf ear to your child’s anger, disappointment, or anything else they feel.  We can listen to our kids’ emotions and thoughts while simultaneously holding our ground on what we know is best for them.  Being the authority in your kid’s life doesn’t mean being callous or insensitive, it does mean being brave enough to stay strong in the face of a tsunami that might come back at you, knowing that your role is to be the grown up in the parent-child relationship, to be loving in your willingness to do what’s best for your kids.  Your role is not to be your child’s friend.

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I’ve purchased and participated in a lot of these types of experiences and the feeling I almost always walk away with is one of emptiness and a low-level despair. There’s a depressing quality to the whole experience of experience-chasing. These cool, unique, manufactured experiences feel inauthentic and disconnected and I’m left with a deep feeling of meaninglessness and alienation. I’m supposed to feel like I’m participating in the experience, part of what’s happening, but I actually feel like I’m a witness, and specifically, a witness to the end of the world. The experience itself feels isolated and disconnected and that’s exactly how I feel, no matter how loud the music’s pumping or yummy the snacks taste. So too, I walk away with an awareness of relentless chasing, of getting caught yet again searching for something outside myself to make my life complete. I’m left with a deep sense of the tragedy of the human condition. The emotional residue from these “amazing” experiences is a sense of disappointment, not just for the event, but in myself—that I bit the hook yet again, buying into the dream, the illusion, that my well-being or even happiness could be found in yet another unique experience, which like everything of this sort, will disappear even quicker than the pop-up shop it’s housed in.

We’ve turned experience itself into a product. No longer “in” life or part of the stream of life, we consume our experiences like we would any other object. As a result, we’re cut off, alienated from our direct experience, like fish trapped inside a baggie floating in the ocean—eternally thirsty. We crave the flow experience—full immersion in an activity, with no separation from experience, no separate “I” who’s living it. And yet, the more we crave immersion, the real experience of living, the more we’re compelled to create and consume these “amazing” representations of life, which only intensify our alienation from life.

So too, social media has convinced us that we’re supposed to be living a spectacular life without interruption. “Amazing” should be the norm. Extraordinary should be our ordinary. Why shouldn’t it?  Everyone else seems to be living an “amazing” life. We’re inundated with photos of those hanging off catamarans in Ibiza, clinking champagne glasses in Bali, dining on lobster at the coolest rooftop bar ever created, zip lining through a rain forest canopy, or just floating in the infinity pool of a lifetime. Why not?  It’s up to us to go and get it.

That said, we’re constantly searching for that fabulous experience that will make our life fabulous, and perhaps most importantly, make us fabulous. We’re always trying to keep up with the competition, to not end up the loser in the virtual war of comparison. There’s enormous pressure, all the time, to be doing something uber interesting, different, that no one else has ever done; we’re in search of that great experience that makes it sound like we’re someone who really “has” a life.

The effect of all these “amazing” experiences on us, paradoxically, is to drain the “amazingness” out of our lives. If we’re not experiencing something unique and extraordinary, we feel our lives to be boring, empty, and even meaningless. And yet, so often when we consume these manufactured experiences, we’re left back where we started: bored, empty and without a sense of meaning. Our pursuit of fun and the never-before experienced causes us to stop noticing and appreciating the mundane and routine, which is most of life. We’re putting all our eggs in the “amazing” experience basket and turning away, ignoring the vast majority of what makes up a life.

In the endless search to create aliveness, we deaden our appreciation for our inherent aliveness, the profundity of just being. Here, no matter where we are, disappears in our relentless quest for the next “amazing” there.

The more we chase experiences, the more convinced we become that meaning lies outside of us, in the next experience, the next hashtag.  And, if we could just find the right foam-pit/champagne-bubble/zip-line/haiku combination, we’d be okay. There would be a place we want to be, a place where we can finally be satisfied.

Furthermore, these one-off experiences are not connected to us, not integrated into our lives.  They don’t arise organically out of who we are. And perhaps more importantly even, we haven’t put any time or effort into creating them. We are just the disconnected consumers, ready with our Smartphones to record the sparkly emptiness. Real enjoyment happens, most often, when the experience is connected to us in some way and we have some skin in the game. While interesting in the moment, sometimes, the taste we’re left with is of our own craving and failure to create connection and meaning. But because the message is so strong that we can find what we need outside ourselves, the more we fail, the more desperately we search.

It’s important to ask ourselves what we’re looking for, really looking for, when we chase after experiences. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing interesting and fun things, being entertained or even distracted, but we seek experiences, often, with deeper ulterior motives, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. We chase unique and amazing experiences to complete us, create an interesting life, believe or prove that we are somebody, satisfy our longing for meaning, and many other reasons. All experiences are impermanent; they will end, and as such, cannot be fully satisfying.

We’re confusing new experiences with life, believing that life is something we have to go out and find, schedule, buy, and usually, post. We’ve forgotten that life is already happening with or without our effort; it’s already here, and the fact that this moment is happening is already “amazing.” We want to remember this and pay attention to what’s here in between the bubble pools and escape rooms. In truth, experience is happening without our needing to do or buy anything.

Where are your feet right now? Can you turn your attention here? What’s happening here? What’s to be learned from here? And maybe even, what’s already amazing about here?

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This morning I was on a train listening to a mother talking to her young son. The mother’s words were unkind and deliberately hurtful, in a way that demonstrated their damage instantaneously.  Yesterday I worked with a couple who came to see me to learn how to communicate better. For an hour, I listened to both of them using their words to criticize and humiliate each other.  Last week I said something to a friend that was not helpful for our relationship and not skillful in terms of expressing myself in a way that she could hear.  Add to all that, I just received an unsupportive email from a family member telling me all the reasons why I was wrong (and he was right) about something we had discussed.

It’s been a week of thinking about words, those spoken as well as those left unspoken. We’ve all had the experience of saying something and wishing we hadn’t.  And, we all know that once we do say something out loud to someone, we can never really take it back.  In Buddhism, there’s an important practice called “Right Speech.”  Right speech is part of the Noble Eightfold Path, the fundamental, eight-part instruction manual for  ending our suffering.  According to the Buddha, our own wellbeing is built upon the practice of not lying, not slandering, not using unkind or abusive language, and not gossiping.  In order to end our own suffering, we’re taught to speak truthfully and use words to promote harmony and understanding, reduce anger, and most of all, be helpful.

Sometimes I read the Buddha’s words on words and think about how radically different our world would be if more people practiced his version of right speech, as a path to happiness.  We’re living in a time when communication is constant and words are cheap; we throw our words around on social media and the like as if they hold no consequences and are without any real or lasting impact on those who receive them, and our world. Because we don’t have to witness or hear the impact of our words online or via text, we’ve forgotten (or are purposing ignoring) the effects of the words we choose to put into our world.

As we age, our relationship with words and speech changes.  When we’re young we tend to believe that what we have to say is extraordinary, original, and right in some overarching, universal way.  We have a strong need to be known and recognized, to establish who we are.  It feels important thus to have our words heard and to use our words to correct any wrongs we encounter.  Our words are representations of our self; without them, we don’t feel we exist.

But as we evolve and hopefully a bit of humility sets in, we often realize how little we actually know, how much less we have to say than we thought.  And, how much has already been said by those before us.  So too, we recognize how many versions of “right” actually exist—in addition to our own. If we’re lucky, we start to lose the sense of awe we have for our own words.  Furthermore, we come to understand how powerful our words actually are, how deeply the words we choose impact our relationships and our own wellbeing.  If we’re paying attention, we assume a greater sense of responsibility for the words we put into the world.

In my own life, I’ve been actively paying attention to and practicing (or doing my best to practice) right speech for some time now.  I do this in many ways but three in particular stand out.

First, I consciously try to use my words to provide support and encouragement.  Before speaking, I think about how my words can point the other person towards something positive in themselves, something they do well or that might feel helpful.  I see my words as having the potential and purpose to remind another person of their own goodness and possibility.

Second, I choose to relieve my words of the burden of having to perfectly and completely capture my actual experience.  Words are powerful and at the same time layers of experience exist that are not conveyable or formulate-able with words. And so, rather than demanding that my words be absolute representations of my experience, and furthermore that I be understood by others, completely, through my words, I now accept that some of what we live internally is simply is not language-able…and that’s okay.  It has to be okay because it is.

Finally, I used to believe that when my partner said something I disagreed with, it was my responsibility to explain why he was wrong.  I felt I had to engage with and correct the wrongs I perceived.

Right or mindful speech, blessedly, has taught me how to say less not more.  I now practice restraint of pen, tongue and thumb.  Not speaking, writing or texting when I feel bothered or perceive a wrong, has in fact been most significant in my practice because of how directly and deeply I feel its results, both in myself and in my relationships.  It turns out that silence, particularly at the times when I most want to use a lot of words, is in fact more powerful than anything I could say.  Saying nothing says a lot.

Practicing right speech, I see that when my partner says something I don’t agree with, remarkably, I don’t have to say anything at all.  I can leave anything and everything just as it is.  I don’t need to change anyone else’s ideas to own my own ideas; my truth does not depend on adjusting anyone else’s truth.  My partner and everyone else can have their experience and I can have my own, simultaneously.  If it’s something that we need to find consensus on, perhaps something about the kids, I can also choose to press the pause button when I hear something that feels very wrong.  I can say nothing in the moment and take time to think about what I want to say, if anything, and how to say it in a way that can be helpful to the situation and that the other person can hear.  I have learned, in fact, that I have all sorts of choices in how to employ the power of speech.

I have discovered that relationships run far more smoothly when I take the path of saying less not more, and even nothing at all sometimes.  And, that the peace I’m trying to create through words, the peace that is always my end goal, is paradoxically maintained through the absence of words.  It feels miraculous every time I say nothing and simply let go without a response or reaction, other than silence.  This, for me, is emotional freedom.  Many moons ago, Mahatma Ghandi beautifully used his words to say this: “Speak only if it improves upon the silence.”  And I would add, before using our words, we can ask, will these words help or harm?

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