Am I Supposed to Be My Kid's Friend?

When seven-year-olds get an equal vote in family decisions...

I frequently give talks to parents on issues related to technology.  After my presentations, parents ask for advice in managing their children’s behavior.  I hear similar questions and worries everywhere I go, with slight variations depending on the population of my audience.  However, I am nearly always met with one specific concern that comes in response to my more challenging suggestions, the ones our kids don’t like. 

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 wants to use it 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.  The 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 adult and 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, then 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, 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 that they don’t, to stick with our knowing despite their railing, to be willing to tolerate their rants in service of 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.  We too 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 bottle of oxycontin and asking him to make his own rules on how to use.  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 belts 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, but 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. 

Can I Let My Child Be Bored?

Perhaps the most common question I get in all my talks to parents and families around the country is What should I do when my kid says he’s bored and I don’t want to give him the device? 

Just this week, a mom told me that her son is always asking her What’s next? I’m bored, what should I do next? This mom, like most parents these days, feels a tremendous pressure to occupy her son’s every moment, to urgently get rid of his boredom and provide him with activities to quell his what’s next? plea.

Children these days have remarkably busy schedules; their time is filled up to the last second of their day.  Our kids’ attention is unceasingly attended to and for.  Afterschool classes, sports, tutors, playdates, the list goes on.  Even at birthday parties, when a dozen kids are gathered together in the same room, the parents feel responsible for accounting for every moment of the children’s attention.  Fifteen minutes for arrival gift-placing, juice boxing, greeting… next the magician and balloon artist, (attention occupied, 45 mins)… next pizza, cake, and candles (20 mins)… next some kind of “freestyle” dance or art period led by an adult (10-15 mins)…next swag bag (5 mins) followed by shoes and coat retrieval (10 mins)… next, it’s time for the children to go (and someone else to occupy their attention). 

Being bored has become ....

Read More: http://nancycolier.com/can-let-child-bored/

How to Be a Good Parent in a Digitally Addicted World: 9 tips for parenting confident and happy children

I write and speak a lot on digital life, what it’s doing to us psychologically, spiritually, socially and as a society. What we can do to create a sense of wellbeing and freedom in the midst of what often feels like a world gone mad.  Regardless of where I am or to whom I’m speaking however, the question I get most from my audiences is this: How do we raise healthy kids in this tech-addicted society, when we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid and we’re all in on this condoned addiction? 

We the parents of today’s kids are true pioneers.  We’re facing a situation that no other generation of parents has faced.  People often say that previous parents had to deal with the television and telephone, and that every generation struggles with some new invention that changes everything, and that the Smartphone is really no different than anything that came before it. But in fact, where we are now, with the explosion of technology into every aspect of our lives (and our children’s lives) and our complete dependence upon it, is fundamentally different than any other time in history. Technology is a revolution and not like any other previous invention. 

For one thing, the television and telephone didn’t come with us everywhere we went.  We had to be in the world without them; the television and telephone were an addition to our lives, not the center of it.  In addition, the telephone and television were not used for every aspect of our lives, work, social, information, planning etc., as the Smartphone now is.  So too, we didn’t defer our authority and agency to the television, telephone or any other invention, asking it to make decisions for us.  We didn’t hand over our human skills, thinking and tasks to our televisions, rendering us helpless to its knowledge.

Furthermore, the makers of televisions and telephones were not employing neuroscientists and addiction specialists as they are now with the purpose of getting our kids (and all of us) hooked.  Addiction is good for business and our kids are the targets of very smart and strategic plans, by very informed experts, to make them dependent, so they can’t or are too anxious to live without their devices. Never before have our kids had legal access to something so addictive as the substance that is technology.  We’re giving our kids the equivalent of cocaine at a time in their lives when their front brains are not even developed, and they don’t have the skills, discernment or internal resources to be able to manage the drug of technology.

What we know from neuroscience is that using technology floods our brain with the feel-good chemical dopamine. Dopamine delivers pleasure and feeds the reward center in our brain.  This sets up a compulsion loop; we want more of this pleasure and thus want to engage in the activity more. What happens next however, is that each time we have a thought of using or hear or feel a notification come in, our adrenal glands send out a burst of the stress hormone cortisol, which sets off the fight or flight response and we become anxious.  We then opt to get back on our device to calm ourselves down.  Those who are addicted are, therefore, living in a constant state of fight or flight and saturating their bodies with cortisol, which besides causing chronic stress has also been linked to lowered immune function, increased sugar levels and weight gain.  It’s not a good thing.

Today’s moms and dads are stumbling down an untraveled path. More often than not, we don’t know what we’re doing.  How could we know, we’re in new territory, raising addicts in an addicted world.  Day by day we’re trying to understand how to maintain a loving connection with our children when the pull towards technology is so seemingly irresistible. We’re trying to figure out how to do our real job: to help them become happy, confident, grounded people in a society that feels increasingly anxious and untethered. 

First, it is important that we honor our intention to help our children and families stay emotionally connected and intact.  We have to be willing to work hard at this endeavor, to be good parents, because it profoundly matters. In some ways, our society depends upon it.  When the family crumbles, all else crumbles.  But also, because we want to deeply know our children, to spend time with them without a thousand other distractions, look into their eyes without the reflection of the screen inside their pupils.  As families, we don’t want to simply brush past each other at the charging station in the kitchen.

9 Tips for Good Parenting in a Digital World

1. Model It

Live the behavior you’re preaching. If you’re on your device constantly then your guidance is of no value, your rules are irrelevant.  If you don’t walk the walk, your kids won’t either. Limit your time on your device, particularly when you’re with your kids and partner.  Show your kids what it looks like to be engaged in activities that don’t involve technology. And absolutely do not leave your devices on or in sight during family meals. 

2. Make a Plan/Set the Rules Ahead of Time. 

If you want to make God laugh, make plans. If you want to make God roll on the clouds with laughter, make plans with kids and Smartphones.  And yet, we still have to set the rules ahead of time with regard to our kids’ usage. It can be a good idea to do this together as a family.  Write down specifically (and have everyone sign) what hours and under what circumstances device use (and what kind of use) will be acceptable.  For example: first half hour after school: full use including social media.  Next three hours: only computer use for homework, all social notifications off.  Half hour before bed all devices off. Whatever the rules you as parents decide on, make them specific, written down on paper, and hung up where they can be seen.  When the conflict (and screaming) begins, you will be able to point to these established rules without any hesitation or confusion.    

3. Create a Context.

Don’t just tell your kids they can’t use their devices, explain to them the larger intentions behind your rules.  For example, share that you don’t want them anxious all the time, and explain the effect that cortisol has on their growing body. Express that you actually want to know them and that technology gets in the way of that happening. Tell them perhaps that you miss them, miss talking or taking walks with them, and that it’s just that simple. Whatever the larger and more loving intentions are behind your rules, share them with your child. Create an open dialogue so the conversation can go deeper and become more connective, rather than simply arguing over screen time.

4. Ask Your Kids About Their Experience with Technology

Be curious about, specifically, how your kids experience their lives in the midst of this technology.  What it’s like for them to be kids in this kind of environment.  You might ask how it feels to be with a friend who’s constantly texting and snapchatting other people when they’re with them.  Or perhaps to be at a party when everyone is staring into their device and there’s no one there to really talk to. Ask what it’s like to have a boyfriend they text all day but feel incapable of talking to in real life. Whatever the issues that they’re pretending are okay, ask about them.  Turn these difficult experiences into something they question rather than just assume is normal.  Remember, there’s still a young person in there who’s probably feeling lonely, insecure, confused, anxious and overwhelmed by all of it.  Invite that young person to the table and give them your full attention.

5.Get Your Kids into Tech-Free Activities

It’s increasingly important to expose your kids to activities that don’t require technology and also allow them to connect with people and themselves in a different way. We need to show them that they can still enjoy experiences (like sports, music, nature) without their devices, and that there really is life outside their Smartphone. 

6. Emphasize (with Gusto) the Importance of Hard Work and Time Invested

Kids are now growing up in an age of immediacy and ease.  We value the quickest and easiest route to wherever we’re headed.  The problem is that by accepting immediacy and ease, we’re depriving our children of the invaluable rewards of hard work and time invested.  When our child lands on the top of the mountain by helicopter, he doesn’t reap the same confidence or inner strength as when he’s walked and struggled the path to the top.  As a result, he ends up feeling like imposter.  Encourage, again and again, the importance of putting in time and effort for building a confident and strong inner self, so ultimately, they will know that they can rely on themselves.

7. Be Fierce

A lot of parents these days say that the horse is already out of the barn and it’s a losing battle this technology thing.  When these parents give their kids the device, they claim they’re just giving their kid what he wants.  This is not good parenting.  As parents, we often need to take the harder path, the one our child doesn’t want, make the choice that creates more conflict, but ultimately, is better for our kids and our family.  We need to be able to hold our ground when our child is ranting and raging.  We need to dig deep, be fierce, stand our ground, and remember why we’re choosing this harder path, what’s really at stake.

8. Teach Your Kids Basic Meditation Techniques

Every child, no matter the age, can learn basic meditation practices.  Try teaching your kids the following techniques: 1. Breathing. Notice and feel your breath. Don’t control it, just pay attention to it.  Remember to breathe deeply, particularly when you’re anxious.  2. Body scan: bring your attention into each body part, one by one, and notice the sensations inside. As you go through, invite each part to relax.  3. Run a sense loop: bring your attention to each of your senses, one at a time.  Notice what you are hearing, seeing, feeling in your body, smelling, tasting and the sixth sense, thinking.  4. Visualize an elevator ride from your head down into the bottom of your belly.  Feel yourself getting calmer as you descend, floor by floor, into the stillness of your own presence.  5. Ask yourself if you’re actually here, paying attention to where you are. Notice/Feel what your own presence/here-ness feels like.

9. Bribery

As a last resort, never underestimate the power of bribery or more scientifically, cause and effect.  For every hour, afternoon or day your child stays off their device, consider gifting them with a non-tech related reward (it doesn't have to be big). The pleasure or pain they associate with their behavior will affect that behavior. Sometimes it might be the only thing that works and it’s not cheating to use the oldest trick in the book.    

Parenting these days is not for the faint of heart.  Although I don’t think there’s ever been a time that parenting was easy, the presence of these devices in our children’s lives makes now a particularly challenging and frustrating time to raise children. We’re living with addicts and they’re the very people we love the most and most want to be happy and well, the very thing that addiction prevents.

We parents have to be kind to ourselves too.  Sometimes we allow our child the device even when we know we shouldn’t, because we also know that it will make them stop whining or bitching (depending on their age) and because we desperately need peace and don’t have anything left in our own tank.  And that’s okay.  We also have needs and are not perfect. But what’s most important is not that we’re perfect, but that we keep trying.  And, that we stay in touch with what really matters to us, and behave in a way that’s in alignment with our deeper priorities. Our children and our families are what’s at stake here, and it doesn’t get more important than that.

And finally, in this distracted and addicted world, there’s something we can do in every moment, and it may be the most important piece in this whole conundrum.  When we’re with our kids, we can really be there, be with them, present. Our grounded, undistracted presence is the ultimate antidote to the anxious, untethered, disappeared world in which they are living.  Land in the moment when you’re with your children.  Give them the experience of what it’s like to be with someone who cares about them.  Remember what they tell you about their lives and ask about it.  Create continuity in a world that appears and disappears faster than memory can grasp.  Be the light in the darkness, the sanity in the insanity.  Love means presence and in that, we, blessedly, have complete control. 

"Do I Look Hot?" Building Self Confidence With Selfies

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon at the swimming pool. I was happily ensconced in a good book on a chaise. Just in front of me, waist deep in water, stood four young teenage girls, 14 or 15 years-old. When I first noticed them it was noon and they were busily taking photos of each other, feverishly trading smartphones back and forth, posing in very obviously sexy positions. They flipped their hair from side to side, scrunched their shoulders to create cleavage, pouted their lips, assumed contemplative expressions with their eyes drifting off to nowhere, constricted their upper bodies to accentuate clavicles, splashed water  onto their bodies, and positioned their legs into various seductive shapes. Each time a photograph was taken, the subject would anxiously reach for her smartphone, stealing it from her friend’s hands to determine what she looked like in the most recent rendering. The girls would giggle or ooh and ah or consult on a possibly improved image. 

I watched them for a while, marveling at their ability to sustain interest and focus in the activity of photographing themselves. Eventually I went back to my book, but every now and again I would look up to see what they were up to. For two solid hours, until I left for lunch, the self-capturing went on, uninterrupted. It was interesting to notice as well that during those two hours, not one of the girls did any swimming or anything else other than posing, photographing, and evaluating. When I returned to the pool after 4, the same girls were still taking photos of themselves, but now out of the water and in new alluring poses as they reclined on their chaise lounges.

The scene that I witnessed at the pool is nothing out of the ordinary and my observations are in no way criticisms. I see the constant self-recording everywhere I look including my own home with my daughters and their friends. It seems that photographing oneself has become the primary leisure activity for girls these days. Recording and examining one’s own image serving as the most engaging, exciting and rewarding way to spend time.

While teenagers have always been concerned about their appearance, there’s never been a time when so much attention and energy has been spent on the creation and dissemination of a “hot” image or that a sexy identity was deemed so drastically necessary. (I say “hot” because it’s the word the girls most frequently use to describe the look they’re going for.) Now more than ever, with the explosion of technology that’s never turned off, young girls are saturated with media (including social media), literally living from inside it and becoming part of it. This media then shows them how they’re supposed to look, talk, think… be, and usually the message is "hot." The devices are being used, through the unceasing self-documentation, to show the world that they have successfully achieved the media-designed version of who they’re supposed to be. Know thyself has become show thyself. 

While my memories of 15 are definitely faded, I am not so far from that time of life that I can’t remember what it was like to be a teenage girl. What I know for sure is that when I was young and holding a camera, it made sense to turn the lens away from me, outward, and take pictures of the world. It would not have occurred to me nor would I have been particularly interested in taking photographs of myself. What I also know is that I didn’t spend one thousandth the amount of time that young women do now focused on my image as it appeared on camera. When I was a young girl, being perceived as “hot” was not a goal that we aspired to, and not a primary characteristic upon which we built our self-worth.    

When I ask girls and young women today (which I often do) why they spend so much time taking pictures of themselves and posting or sharing them, they usually tell me some version of this: They want other people to think they’re “hot” (both boys and girls) because if other people think they’re “hot” then they will be important and the world will like them, which will then make them like themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the experiences our girls are missing out on as a result of spending so much time posing for their smartphones—what else they might be doing that could build their self-esteem in more meaningful ways. What will be the consequences in terms of who these young women become if their experiences are more and more limited to selfie-taking? What skills and strengths are they not going to develop, what self-awareness are they going to be deprived of, as a result of all these hours devoted to creating the perfect image?

As a mother of two daughters I am deeply troubled by this selfie phenomenon. We are allowing technology to be used in a way that disempowers young women, keeps them busy staring at themselves, pursuing “hotness” as designed by the modern media, at the expense of living their lives fully, being curious about the world on the other side of the camera, engaging in life beyond their image.

Not surprisingly, we are seeing an epidemic in low self-esteem in young women as they devote less of their time and energy to activities that could build a true sense of reliable self-worth and instead, attempt to build a self out of “hot” selfies.  Unfortunately, however, the selfie-created self is wobbly and ephemeral, and can be obliterated by not enough “likes” on a single post.

As the mother of two daughters, I am concerned, and not just for my own, but for all the young women who are coming up in the age of selfie consciousness. Staring into their smartphones at themselves, being driven by the desire to create a “hot” pose—none of this is a wise use of young female energy and intelligence, nor does it create a garden in which to grow empowered and confident women. 

I write this today with many questions and few answers. But the questions are important and we need to start raising them more often, more vigorously, and on a societal level. What kind of women are we growing in this digital age, in this "Am I hot?" world? And, what can we do as the grown-ups, both men and women, to redirect our girls towards a life that will provide them with what they need to feel empowered, capable, confident and ultimately, happy? 

Forbes Magazine: Try the 30-Day Digital Detox Challenge

Have you ever caught yourself checking your smartphone while you’re behind the wheel — even though you know it’s dangerous? Do text alert chimes routinely make you interrupt conversations with the person sitting in front of you? Tech addiction is not just an idea. It’s here, it’s real and it’s taking over our lives.

I developed a 30-Day Tech Detox after a woman I know and respect — someone I consider wise and aware and thus immune to tech addiction — literally begged...

Read More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/01/04/try-the-30-day-digital-detox-challenge/#33e660717dbe

Are You an Enabler?

I am an aware person--and--I was an enabler.

My path to becoming an enabler started out as most do, as someone trying to help, and thinking that I could. A dear friend who is also a relative came to me in trouble, having lost her job, about to lose her health insurance and unable to pay rent. An intelligent, honest and kind woman, she was not afraid of hard work and had always demonstrated a strong moral character. She desperately wanted to work and was trying diligently to find employment. When she first asked me for financial help, a short- term loan, it was a no-brainer. She’d never had trouble paying her bills, and there was no reason to think that she wouldn’t get herself out of this recent financial pickle. And so, without much thought, I wrote her a check…

Eight years later, she was still in that pickle only that pickle had morphed itself into a malignant sub-machine gun. For eight years she came to me for money on an increasingly frequent basis, with increasingly dire potential consequences, and with an increasing sense of entitlement. For the most part she paid me back although sometimes not for a long time, and sometimes after I had already loaned her more on top of what she already owed me.

Complicating the matter, she wasn’t just a relative and friend, she was also deeply involved in my children’s lives; she loved my children…and was also someone I loved, and still love. I didn’t want her to suffer as she was suffering or be tormented by the relentless fear and desperation she felt.

Also, I was in a position where I had a good job and some money in the bank; she had neither. I could help, which in my mind meant that I should help. She was in pain and also family after all.

Year after year she continued to ask me for money. But no matter how much I “helped,” her financial situation got worse. She was also growing more despondent and angry, more aggressive in her behavior towards me. She spent money that she didn’t have, assuming that I would cover her. Despite many frank and difficult conversations, nothing changed. Finally, despite great ambivalence, I told her that I could not continue to play this role in her life. I didn’t want us to resent each other. Difficult as it was, I laid down an official “no more” declaration.

Although I sounded clear outwardly, inside I was anything but. I felt terrible about the decision to stop “helping,” selfish, un-loving, and incapable of deep compassion. In light of my longtime Buddhist practice, I felt like a spiritual fraud.

She was on her knees, begging literally, and also threatening terrible things, if I didn’t rescue her. She looked like an animal with its leg in a trap, helpless and terrified, and enraged—at me. Looking at her face, white with terror, furious with desperation and humiliation, still I held my ground. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but some part of me knew I had to do it.

The result was that she acted out her threats and I believe, punished me for attempting to stop the cycle.  She stopped taking care of her life, on every front, and ended up homeless (except if I would have her) and ill, without health care, and without any community. I spoke with relatives and former friends, but no one was willing/able to help her.

As I experienced it, she was now my third child, my charge. In truth, I still loved her, and wanted her to find her way back to independence, to enjoy her life. Nonetheless, I also knew that I had been bullied into saving her, despite my decision to stop, but it would not happen again.

Two years later, back on her feet at least minimally, having never paid me back the large amount of money she now owed me, she asked again. “Just to cover her for a short time” was how she put it, as if it were a small and casual affair, with no history. The tone of the request was perhaps even more shocking than the request itself. But this time when I said “no” I was certain I would not waver. What followed however, I could never have imagined.

This friend and relative, whom I thought I had been (lovingly) taking care of for years, ferociously attacked me verbally and emotionally. She abused me with her words and anger, accused me of wanting to destroy her, of being a terrible and sadistic person, the antithesis of family. And, she blamed me, fiercely, for the impending consequences she would suffer as a result of my not fixing her life. As she saw it, I was not only to blame for what would happen to her but actually intended for her destruction. I had abandoned her, and my abandonment was the cause of the horrible pain she was enduring. Finally, she assured me that I would go down with her when she fell, that she would make sure of it.

It was nearly impossible to process—violent rage and hatred from a person that I believed I had been “helping” for nearly a decade, someone that I loved and that I believed loved me!

She continued to bully me emotionally for months, to make me know and feel her suffering. She made life extraordinarily stressful not just for me, but also for my children. Her fury was terrifying and seemingly bottomless. Occasionally, between rages, she would approach me with kindness, express deep gratitude for all that I had done for her, and acknowledge my generosity. Still, no matter her approach, wrath and hatred or gratitude and responsibility, I painstakingly continued to say “no.”

I had become an enabler. Realizing this truth was like waking up from a terrible dream. With my role named, I was suddenly able to change. What was it that allowed me to know myself as an enabler, finally, after years of co-creating this disastrous situation—all with the best of intentions?

Has Social Media Turned Life Into a Popularity Contest?

Is it my imagination or has life regressed into a giant popularity contest, measurable (thanks to the Internet) in numbers of followers, views, “likes,” etc.? Is the new goal for our existence, the new virtue to aspire to, being popular, or at least perceived as such?

A young woman recently came to me excited and proud of herself. When I asked why, she told me that she had managed to acquire 20 new Instagram followers, cracking a ceiling that she had been unable to reach. She had achieved this “accomplishment” by using her Instagram credits in a particular way that I didn’t quite understand. While it was not clear if the new followers actually signed up themselves, she was quick to inform me that they were indeed real people, even if she didn’t know them personally. This is the new definition of “accomplishment"—raising your numbers of followers, thereby achieving the impression that you are interesting and, of course, popular. Who needs actual athletic, personal, or academic accomplishments, when you can feel the real pride that comes from having your selfie earn a one-minute spot on Instagram’s front page!

It’s sad enough to value popularity as a goal in life, but tragic when we realize that the so-called followers we consider valuable and important are not actually followers at all, in the true sense of the word. Followers used to mean people who believed in us or our ideas—devotees. It had a qualitative meaning. Now followers are numbers we amass by using the Internet in increasingly clever ways. Often our followers know nothing about us or what it is they are supposedly following. The new follower is simply a statistic that we buy with the “like” of someone else’s post or the promotion of someone else’s page. People even advertise: If you follow me, I will follow you. It's a game of smoke and mirrors.

In even more extreme cases, some followers are not even real humans but rather BOTs, otherwise known as web robots. These followers don’t exist at all, except as lines of computer code. They are in fact computer programs designed to behave like humans. Such lines of code pump up someone’s followers number, which then makes it look as if they are more popular. And here’s where it gets really high-school-ish: Other people then follow that person because they think he or she is popular. The emperor not only naked, but downright mad!

There used to be a developmental stage in life, usually sometime in our thirties, when we moved from the outside to the inside. That is, we would stop defining ourselves by what others thought of us and became more interested in what we thought about ourselves and the world, regardless of whether it was popular or not.

This stage could also be called “growing up.”

It seems, though, that this stage of life has now been canceled. More and more, no matter our age, our sense of self and what is important to us is determined by what others think, or at least what it looks like they think.

Young adults run much of the internet industry and for that generation, popularity as a pursuit is not appropriate. But as the internet becomes more pervasive in our lives, the rest of us, who are not creating code, and not twenty-somethings, are gradually taking on the values of the generation that is.

In truth, we still have a choice of how we want to behave. All great movements of change began because someone was willing to stand for something that wasn’t popular. I wonder if we still have the courage to put our name on something that has no followers? If it had always been this way, could any great revolution ever have come to pass?

Is being popular really what we want to hold up as the most meaningful aspect of life, or the truest sign of achievement? Because this is precisely what we are now modeling. We are encouraging children to chase approval, no matter how shallow, and view their own worth as determined by external sources, often people they don’t even know or respect. “Likes” are flimsy planks on which to build a house of self-worth and moral structure. If we adults don’t re-establish a firm gauge for what is important in life, for what sustains and nourishes us, makes us feel genuinely well, and gives us a deeper sense of meaning, we will emotionally and spiritually bankrupt ourselves and future generations.

We will certainly rob our children of the experience of true self-esteem. 

The values I consider important may be irrelevant in 10 years. Perhaps by then, "followers" will come to mean something entirely different, and take on a profundity we can’t yet imagine. Perhaps there won’t even be a private, internal self left to consult with on what is important, and all that will remain is a universal, internet-based selfie.

In the meantime, I will encourage my children to like themselves, to become their own destination regardless of what’s gone viral, and to view accomplishment as something internally-driven, earned, and reliable. This is the best lesson we can offer. At the very least, it gives children a chance at having real confidence, and a life that will nourish them with substance and meaning. But, we adults have to model this mindset and behavior—by assigning worth back where it belongs, and not letting the internet dictate our larger human priorities and values. We can do better than popularity as our mission statement and purpose in life. We can all graduate from high school—yet again.

Mindfulness For the Uncooperative Mind

Mindfulness is hot, and like all hot topics, it comes with a lot of truths and a lot of falsehoods. Teaching mindfulness, I hear the same questions arising time and again, misunderstandings really about what mindfulness is and what it means as a practice or way of life. Indeed, most of the obstacles that we believe stand in the way of living mindfully are, in fact, not obstacles at all.

The Big Three: Misconceptions about Mindfulness

#1  Mindfulness is not for the everyday Joe—not applicable to a regular life.

As one client expressed, I have kids, which means that I am constantly planning for then… camps, holidays, dinner recipes, weekend babysitting, etc. etc. I can’t just be here in the now, it’s not practical for real life. Mindfulness doesn’t apply to my always-planning mom existence!

Many of my clients arrive with the belief that having to do anything that involves or is about the future disqualifies them from being mindful. In truth, mindfulness simply means being conscious or aware of what is happening inside and outside of you right now. Being awake to life as it is unfolding. Planning for the future and attending to the past are necessities in modern life, and neither has anything to do with being mindful. While the contents of what we are planning may be related to the future, the planning itself is something that is happening right now. Perhaps we are making an airplane reservation—the airplane will take off in the future but conversing with the agent, experiencing sensations in the hand holding the phone, receiving thoughts about what you are hearing, taking in sounds from the room, feeling emotions about the upcoming travel, all of it and a thousand other events are all occurring right now. Making plans, with mindfulness, simply means paying attention to the experience of making plans, being awake to what it is like for you to live this moment of planning. The subject of the moment is irrelevant; the moment itself is always happening right here and right now. Nothing can ever be happening in any time but now. If at this moment your body is breathing, then there is a present experience available to you, and thus mindfulness is possible.

#2  Mindfulness means focusing on my breath or meditating, which isn’t always possible in everyday life. Hence, mindfulness is a step away from or out of life. A client put it this way, when a strong emotion comes up, like when I get really angry at my boss at work, I can’t always just check out of the conversation and start listening to my breath or chanting om. Mindfulness, for this reason, is not really viable in real life tough situations.

The truth is, practicing mindfulness does not require checking out of life, but just the opposite, checking into life. When a strong feeling such as anger arises, mindfulness simply means paying attention to what that anger feels like in the body, how it manifests, what thoughts and stories accompany it, everything that is happening inside and outside you as you experience the anger right now. Mindfulness means witnessing that strong emotion with full presence, watching the weather of anger erupt in the sky of awareness. Sometimes it does help to come back to the breath, just for a moment, to get grounded in your body and not spin off in the storm of mind, but this is not necessary for practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness means staying here where you are—with whatever is here in the present moment, and meeting your direct experience, your life, as it actually is.

#3  I can’t be mindful with this mind, my mind as it is; if and when my mind is different, calmer perhaps, then possibly, mindfulness can happen. Many people believe that mindfulness requires a certain kind of mind, a baseline of peacefulness or tranquility, and that their mind as it is is far too wild to practice such a skill.

In fact, mindfulness does not depend on any particular kind of mind and certainly not a calm one. If mindfulness required a calm mind, it would have died out as a practice a long time ago. In the same way that meditation is an investigation of your inner world as it is, right now, without preference or judgment, similarly, mindfulness is just an honest look at the way your mind, your direct experience, and your life is at any given moment. You are not more mindful if what you discover is that you like the moment you are living and no less mindful if what you become aware of is not pleasing. Mindfulness only means that you are noticing, becoming conscious of and dwelling in your direct experience, not pushing it away, or if you are trying to push it away, noticing that too. Mindfulness is not about what you find when you drop down into yourself, but that you do drop down into yourself, and that you do so with an attitude of compassionate curiosity. If, in turning the lens on yourself, what you notice is that your mind is judging your experience unkindly, then mindfulness would entail bringing an open and kind curiosity to that unkind and judging mind. And so it goes. There are no right answers in mindfulness, no better things to discover under the lens of your own attention, and no better kind of mind to practice with. The only things needed for mindfulness are a mind to practice with, a willingness to try and stay present, and an interest to meet yourself and your actual experience.

The next time you hear the thought that mindfulness doesn’t apply to you, with the way your life is, your mind is, your circumstances are, notice that thought, and maybe the feeling or sensation that comes along with it. Pay attention to what it feels like in your body to be listening to that thought. Before you know it, the you who can’t practice mindfulness will be practicing mindfulness in its most authentic and powerful form! 

Has Technology Killed Downtime?

A woman I know is afraid to go to bed at night. She’s not afraid of the dark or of having a nightmare. She’s not afraid of someone breaking into her apartment or of dying in her sleep. What she’s afraid of is open time with herself, the unfocused down time that bedtime brings, time when she is not doing anything specific, not focused on any external something.

Someone else I know described the experience of lying in bed one morning, not having anything particular to get up for, and not being able to "find" anything to really think about. He said he felt like he had nowhere to “put his mind" and as a result, felt like he was going insane. The lack of a focus for his attention sent him into a full-fledged panic attack.

These scenarios may sound strange, but they are more common than you might imagine. With the advent of the digital age, our attention is almost always focused on something. We are playing a game, texting, researching, watching, or talking, but always doing something, with our mind turned toward and engaged with something outside of ourselves. We treat our own undirected attention like a parent might treat a toddler on a long plane ride, frantically shoving activities and videos in front of his face until he either passes out or the ride comes to an end.

Today we share this same fear of our own unentertained adult mind.

The gap, that space between activities, or what we used to call "down time" is disappearing from our lives. Our attention is now almost always narrowed onto a task or activity and we are losing the spaces in which our attention is open, without a specific focus. People say that we are becoming unfocused as a society but in fact we are becoming hyper-focused, always looking at something and never just looking—without a specific object or goal of our gaze.

Open awareness, down time, the gap—whatever you call it—serves an important  purpose in our lives. When I have a problem I can’t solve, I will often go for a walk and drop the problem altogether. Later that day, after not thinking about it for some time, the solution generally appears in my mind. I am not unique in having this experience. Something is actually happening in that down time. The mind is putting things together, making associations, doing a different kind of work, that happens outside our awareness. For many people, it is in these gaps that they have their best flashes of insight, as if we need to take our mind off of something in order to gain access to our intuition and really, to our everything.

So too, the mind needs recess periods in its day—like a child does—when it can just run and play, jump from thing to thing and not have to direct its energy toward any particular object or event. The mind needs to be able to flow freely from thought to thought, or simply rest in no thought. Down time between tasks allows our mind to rest. Gaps in our day give us time to just float about, space out or take a much-needed break from mental activity. This float time then allows us to re-boot our system and come back with renewed juice to bring to the next object of our attention. With our attention flipped on and at something all the time, we become mentally exhausted and while more time is spent focusing on tasks, we in fact become, qualitatively, less productive.

Furthermore, unfocused attention in our day allows us to spend time with ourselves, to make ourselves the focus of our attention. While not playing a game or engaging in a Google search, we can contemplate our own experience, check in, and discover how we are doing in the middle of all this noise, this life. Now, because our attention is always focused on something else, we have ceased to be a destination for our own attention. 

And yet the media says that we are becoming pathological narcissists. Aren’t we focusing more on ourselves than ever? Yes, we are spending far more time reporting on ourselves, focusing on our identity, describing where we’ve been, what we are doing and so on, but at the same time, we are spending far less time actually being with ourselves, inside our own attention, asking and answering to our self. As a result of always having an external focus, we have, sadly, come to view being with ourselves, without something else to focus on, as a void, a panic-inducing non-place.

From a spiritual perspective, the spaces between—between tasks, between thoughts, between breaths, between all the objects of our attention—are profoundly important. It's the space we inhabit during meditation. It's in the spaces between thoughts that we connect with the awareness within which thought happens. It's in this open awareness that we gain a sense of detachment and freedom from the mind. When we lose the ability or opportunity to live in the gaps, we become slaves to the mind, and subsequently terrified of any moment when the mind is not occupied. Gaps then become a kind of death—when we cannot feel our mind’s presence or experience our own presence, as if we cease to exist. On the other hand, a deep and lasting confidence arises when we can tolerate and even enjoy open, undirected space, when being with just our self is not something to be feared.

Breaks from focused attention are beneficial in myriad ways. They bring insight, allow us to solve problems without trying, give our mind a chance to rest, and to play without an agenda. Gaps give us time to spend time with ourselves, to experience our own being, and to know ourselves as more than just what we are doing and thinking. Gaps give us the confidence to stop trying to out-run open space, escape down time, and ultimately, dodge ourselves.

In the digital age, we value action, information, and entertainment, and we are encouraged to keep the mind busy at all times. If we want to create down time, to make space, we have to actively do it. Ironically, creating space in which we can be unfocused now takes focused attention.

On a practical level, you can create down time in very small ways, by taking five minutes every day and consciously resisting the urge to give your mind something to chew on. When your mind tells you it’s time to play a game, email a friend, research a vacation, figure out a work problem, or write a to-do list, just say, "No. Not now." The mind will always search for something to attend to. You however, can practice being present without having an object of that presence, being aware without having to direct your awareness atsomething. Try it in short stretches, and notice what unfolds, and if you feel differently. Or, similarly, take a walk without your phone (or any device) and let your mind just wander, or slip away. Set aside times for an approved space out. Give yourself the gift of the gap, the privilege of the space that used to be built into life but is no longer.

As a result, you may not only feel less brain-weary and mentally fatigued. You may also discover a sense of internal spaciousness, a wider and more panoramic view of life which is not frantic and not dependent on external material to escape an internal void. With enough practice, your own presence may become a place unto itself, and you may discover that it is in the spaces between your objects of attention that you feel most spacious, whole, calm, and ultimately, well. 

Are You Feeding On Your Pain... Past Its Expiration Date?

Intimate relationships include pain, at least every intimate relationship I have ever been in or witnessed. And most, if we’re lucky, include pleasure, too. We cannot change the fact that pain is included in intimacy, but how much pain we endure is, in part, up to us. As a therapist and a wife, I think a lot about how we can decrease the pain that we experience in relationships, and increase the amount of joy and gratitude that we feel.

Once we’ve been in a relationship for some time, most of us have written a plethora of stories about our partners: we have many ideas about what they do that we don’t like, what their problems are, why they are the way they are, how and why they hurt us, and on it goes. Basically, we have figured out what’s wrong with them. Some of our story lines we share with our partners and some we don’t. We could fill volumes with the convictions we have compiled on our partners, most if not all of which we believe to be the truth. Our story lines have a lot to do with what increases our pain in relationships.

When difficulty arises with our partner, we might feel hurt, angry, frustrated, or perhaps a cocktail of all three and more. We might feel intense pain for some time. But then, oddly, we do something which intensifies and extends that pain. You could say we throw gasoline on the fire of pain. The incident or fight is over, in real time, but not for us, not a chance. We’ve still got a long way to go with the story of it. The hurt might have passed, its shelf life in our body over, but we opt to spend days, weeks, sometimes even lifetimes rehashing it in our minds, crafting new stories filled with our partner’s crimes and our grievances, breathing new life into what is in fact ready to pass. If our pain were a child, we would be nursing it long into its adulthood.

The shelf life of most intense feelings is quite short. A strong feeling, which is not fed by our thoughts about it, can pass through us in a rather short time. It is our mind that, counter-intuitively, does not want us to let go of our pain. The mind desperately wants us to pay attention to our pain, and to how any new hurt fits into the larger script that we have written on our partner and the relationship. Perhaps it is the mind’s effort to figure out the pain, to make sense of what seems nonsensical, not understandable. Or maybe the mind believes that if we allow the pain to pass when it has come to its natural end, it is not enough somehow, that we haven’t done the pain justice if we do not extend it by way of our own continued attention. Perhaps the mind believes that we further punish our partner by holding onto and ruminating on the pain they have caused us. Or, maybe the mind wants us to keep chewing on the pain simply because the mind loves a problem; a problem for the mind is like an extravaganza with which to entertain itself. In truth, spending more time re-thinking and rehashing our pain does not serve our pain, or us.

When we start paying attention to our mind, we see that it is always beckoning us to reenter the story of our pain. Something amazing happens, however, when we make the choice to refrain from taking the mind’s bait, resist engaging with such thoughts. Our relationship gets a whole lot better, and feels, suddenly, like it’s happening in the present tense, like we're meeting our partner freshly. I am absolutely not suggesting that we deny pain when it is felt intensely and directly, in the body, but rather that we choose not to extend, intensify and freeze it, keeping it alive in our mind when it (possibly) might not need to be there. Pain is a truth, but if we don't feed it, it has a natural life span. It is we who (often) make pain immortal.

To this end, it is important that we notice when we are actually feeling okay, not in pain, not resentful, not hurt, and we still choose to jump on board a thought train to pain. It is important that we become conscious of this habit to get back in the saddle of hurt. It is an odd choice really, but one that we all make, until we don’t anymore, until we become aware that we are choosing it. 

The next time you catch your mind inviting you to dive into the negative story line of your relationship and your partner, to again crack open the great tome on their failings, politely decline the mind’s invitation. Return to where you are and the breath about to happen. By simply decreasing the amount of time we spend telling ourself the story of what’s wrong, we can profoundly improve the experience we have in our relationships. The more we can refrain from stoking the fire of how we have been hurt, the more room there is to discover how we actually appreciate our partners, and to see them in the moments when all is well. The less we obscure our present moment with the history of our scars, the more possibility there is for new relationship skin to grow.

We need to pay attention to what is actually true for us; to meet ourself and our partner, as freshly as we can in each new moment. We need not go looking for past pain, need not dive into every pain story the mind presents. Simply by choosing to decline the invitation to engage with old pain, we end up feeling a whole lot lighter, happier, more present, and available to love.

Is Anyone Worth Turning Off Your Phone?

A friend of mine is separating from her husband because he cannot separate from his iPhone.

These days, when couples go out to eat together, the first thing they do is pull out their devices, if they are not already in their clutches, and place them on the table between each other. There is nothing stranger than watching two lovers in a dark and quiet restaurant, drinking wine, feeding each other treats, while simultaneously checking every few minutes or so until that darkness and quiet are impaled by the light and buzzing coming from one of their devices. And then, even stranger, the person to whom it belongs actually putting down his wine, unraveling his foot from his partner’s calf and pulling his gaze away from his lover’s in order to check that device—perhaps to find out that his Groupon for a pair of sneakers has now expired.

There are no more tables for two; tables for four are our most intimate encounters—two humans and two devices. In the digital age, we no longer give any one person our full attention. When we are together, even in our most intimate relationships, some part of us is not there, not present. We are anticipating, subtly and not so subtly awaiting the next alert, waiting for something else to appear on the screen. The message is that the person in front of us is not enough, or not enough to warrant our turning off what else is possible, the "what else" with which our smartphone constantly beckons.

When our phone or our partner’s phone is on the table with us, it is there, a part of the encounter. We can’t fully settle in to what is happening in the relationship. Some part of our consciousness is on alert for signals coming in. Even when not answering the chime or bugle that calls out for our attention, we often pick up the phone, check what the call was about, place the phone back on the table in its proper place, and only then return to our partner. This whole process interrupts the experience with another person. There is a re-entry into the conversation, and the person who is now returned to feels different with that interruption. At some level, she feel less important, that her company is not deserving of exclusivity.

I notice with my psychotherapy clients that what people do next is determined by their own psychology. Some try to be more interesting so as to make themselves worthy of their partner's turning off his device. Others retreat into insecurity and loneliness. Still others just get on their own device, and find their own way out of the moment and the relationship, thereby balancing the disconnection. At this moment in history, we are changing psychologically as we generate new defense mechanisms to manage our own devaluation in one another’s lives and the downgrading of our place on partners' priority list. However we compensate or don’t, that phone on the table, lighting up, sounding off, and just being a presence, making it a foursome not a twosome, fundamentally alters the relationship and its intimacy. Even when it is not delivering an email, the phone at the table is conveying a message of enormous meaning.

Attention is a profoundly important method by which we show someone that we matter in each other’s lives. The gaze of a person really with us, not distracted, not elsewhere, fully here, is a gift of the most divine substance. There is a flow of energy, an energetic circle that occurs when two people are wholly with each other, undistracted, fully landed. In this circle it is possible for both individual “I”s to disappear, and for us to discover a third entity—the energy and flow of the relationship itself, without separation. This happens when both parties agree to be present and make the choice to close the door to the potential “what elses” and “what’s nexts” that call out from the blinking lights of technology. When we include our devices in our intimate interactions, we disrupt the circle of intimacy and, with it, the possibility of two “I”s becoming one “we.” When our phones are on the table with us, between us, we remain a group of individual entities. We don’t have to risk joining each other, slipping into the experience and our partner, and leaving ourself behind. At the same time, sadly, we don’t get to leave ourself behind, to join the experience and our partner, and taste the real sweetness of intimacy.

Just as we downgrade the importance of our human friends and award equal status to our technological companions, another trend is also contributing to the loss of intimacy and value in our relationships: With the explosion of technology, we have lost the distinction between public and private space. We no longer have places where we are unreachable. There are no longer times and places where the outside world is not allowed, special places that are for the special people in our lives, not everyone, that add to the sense of importance of those private spaces and the relationships within them.

Now, always on, always available to everyone through our devices, always interacting with the public through social media, we don’t assign a special importance to those in our private world. With technology going everywhere with us, the public is now as important as the private.

If we still want private space to feel different from public space, intimate relationships to feel different from non-intimate relationships, it is up to us to separate the two and treat them differently. We need to have times and places where we are not with everyone, but rather, only with those who really matter. The choice to deem certain people and places worthy of turning off the “what else?” button infuses such people and places with meaning. The system delivers what we put into it: If we treat someone as important, they become important. If we treat them as on a par with the public, no more important than any business associate, fundraiser, or acquaintance, they will assume that generic value in our life. Ultimately, our behavior determines the depth of our relationships and the amount of nourishment that we receive from them.

The next time you go out with, or stay home with, someone you care about, turn the smartphone off, turn the tablet off, turn it all off, and better yet, put it away—out of sight. Make the decision to make private time different. Take the risk that for the two hours you will be at the restaurant, you won’t be reached. Ask yourself: Is what I am checking for really as important as this person in front of me? This system, of being in one place with one other person, worked for eons, before technology made it something strange, before it became something that we need to consciously choose, that goes against the social stream. The small act of simply refraining from putting your phone on the table, or dare I suggest leaving it off altogether, has the power to create an entirely different, more intimate experience.

There are so many things that we can do to make our lives better. Some are quite difficult and require a lot of effort. But this one, this tiny choice to put away our devices when with a friend, has the power to improve our life in a way that far outweighs the effort required. The cost-benefit ratio is staggering.