CHANGING IT ALL WITH LOVING AND TEACHING 

We have learned a lot about love and the effects of the lack of it. In order to parent our children with the pure love of Christ, it can seem like there’s a lot to learn. There is, and we have to know the fundamentals first. You can’t win the Super Bowl until you know the rules of the game, and you’ve trained to be physically fit, and you’ve watched uncounted hours of game film, and you’ve been coached extensively. And make no mistake, as a parent you’re IN the Super Bowl. We’re going through the fundamentals and beginning the training and coaching right now.

PCSD

We all have some familiarity with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For example: A soldier experiences the noise, physical pain, fear, and emotional loss of combat sometimes for as little as a single hour—or less—and then he comes home anxious, withdrawn, triggered by a host of “small” events, and incapable of normal interactions, often for many years or even a lifetime. His entire nervous system has been reset, or hyper-excited or “amped up,” by one event. This phenomenon is well known.

Now, a civilian example: I met a woman who had been seriously assaulted on the concrete stairs of a parking garage by a man wearing an orange hoodie, who had just eaten food sauteed in a heavy garlic sauce. Although the entire event happened in ten minutes twenty years before, and though she had sustained no lasting physical injury, this woman still diligently avoided concrete stairs, never parked in a commercial garage, hated the color orange, and was repulsed by the smell of garlic.

Her twenty-minute trauma had immediately hyper-sensitized her to any subsequent stimuli or events that remotely resembled elements of the original trauma, and the effect had persisted for twenty years. So when this woman saw an orange hoodie, on occasion she would involuntarily fall to the ground shaking, because the orange hoodie in the present would “trigger” her—remind her of the past trauma—in a way that mentally and emotionally put her right back in the original trauma. She relived it.

This woman’s life was changed as a result of ONE trauma. But not everyone gets PTSD from trauma. So, what contributes to people getting PTSD after trauma? Studies have proven beyond doubt that trauma is MUCH more likely to cause PTSD if it has these characteristics:

• It repeats, over and over (kind of obvious: 5 traumatic events are worse than 1).
• It repeats regularly and frequently (no down time for recovery).
• The repetition occurs over a long period of time.
• There’s nothing you can do to stop it, so you feel utterly helpless.
• It happens at a young age, while the neurological system is still developing.
• It has no sense of meaning. There is no “higher cause”—God or country, for example—to justify your pain.
• It appears to be deliberate. Somebody is doing this specifically TO YOU.

Each one of these characteristics contributes strongly to whether someone will develop PTSD after trauma. AND these characteristics directly and clearly describe the trauma inflicted on most children EVERY DAY. Children are traumatized repeatedly and frequently, over a period of years. They’re helpless to stop it. It occurs during their young, formative years. To the child it certainly seems to be deliberate, and it makes no sense.

Every day parents injure their children. Mostly they don’t realize it. Thousands of parents have said to me words that are a variation on this: “But I didn’t know I was hurting them.” I really understand that. I hurt my children without knowing it too.

We do not need to feel guilty about making mistakes we were not aware of, as we’ve discussed. The Atonement specifically provides for these mistakes of ignorance. (Mosiah 3:11‑12) But NOT KNOWING that we’re hurting our children can actually be worse than knowing. How could that be? Because if we know we’re making a mistake, there is a chance that we can be motivated or inspired to learn, to change, to repent. If we don’t know we’re hurting our children, we are utterly condemned to repeat the injuries, over and over. We can’t stop what we don’t know we’re doing.

It’s an endless series of ignorant mistakes, and it’s so very destructive to our children. We don’t even remember making mistakes that have left a nearly-indelible mark on their tender little souls.

In our ignorance, we often behave like children who drop a plate full of food on the living room carpet. They look at you with those innocent eyes and say, “It was an accident.” Well, sort of. They piled the plate too full, and didn’t balance it, and shouldn’t have been in the living room in the first place. So not really an accident. Kind of a planned misadventure.

Or they say, “I didn’t mean to.” True, they didn’t MEAN to, but they also didn’t mean NOT to. They didn’t stay in the kitchen where accidents are easily cleaned up. They didn’t choose to hold their plate with two hands. And so on. And it’s similar with us as parents. It’s not enough that we “didn’t mean to hurt them.” We must mean NOT to hurt them. We must learn instead how to LOVE them. And that’s exactly what we’re learning here in this Training—how to love them and stop the wounding. Cool.

When we contemplate how we’ve wounded our children, it’s a natural and immediate reaction to defend ourselves. It is so tempting to list all the good things we did for them, the things we gave them, the things we did right. But if those things did not include a consistent pattern of unconditionally giving them the pure love of Christ, it doesn’t matter what else we did. It doesn’t matter that we wash the car, polish it, and change the oil if we don’t put gas in it.

RACHEL

As we learn to identify the mistakes we make with our children, sometimes it can be very helpful to see the end result of such mistakes. Let’s look at a physical example: In the past, when I would lay a concrete foundation or footing, I would just eyeball it—dumb—and SWEAR that the foundation was level. Ah, but the uneven contour of the surrounding ground and trees creates optical confusion, and I didn’t realize how NOT level I was until I put something on top of the footing—like a retaining wall—that was several feet high. At that point, the structure on TOP revealed OBVIOUSLY that the foundation could NOT have been level. Oops.

So for many years now I’ve used a contractor’s level when I pour concrete—every time—so I can avoid being fooled. Now let me give you an example of how seemingly insignificant emotional errors or omissions early in life can lead to a structure—a life—that is WAY off perpendicular—and can even fall over.

I talked to a woman named Rachel, who had been married for fifteen years and had three children. She and her husband, Blake, had been to eight previous counselors. She was at the end of her rope. Her marriage was falling apart, and she was falling steadily into a deeper depression. And her children—no surprise—were having increasing problems. Her face was filled with sadness and anger.

I said, “Tell me about your childhood.”

“I don’t wanna talk about that childhood stuff,” she said.

Me: “I can’t make you. I CAN tell you that it matters, and it won’t take long—just a few minutes.”

She agreed, so I asked her to describe her parents, and she assured me that they were “kind and loving all the time.” (I could see that that was impossible just by looking at HER, the product of their work as parents.)

“Describe HOW your father was loving toward you.”

“Well, he worked hard. We never felt like we didn’t have enough.”

“Enough . . .”

“Food, clothes, rides to school, nice house, that kind of thing.”

“What else did he do?”

“He taught us right and wrong. He was a good father.” (Let me say here that we’re often pretty attached to defending our parents—mostly because they TOLD us they were good parents—and certainly we’re attached to the image of being good parents ourselves, often in a way similar to how our parents were. I have no criticism of any parent, including you.)

Me: “I’m really not here to criticize him in any way. I firmly believe parents do the best they can, but quite often they unintentionally affect their children in a variety of ways that nobody understands. When you were obedient, responsible, and got good grades, what did he do?”

“He said he was proud of me.”

It was notable that as Rachel said this, her facial expression did not match her words. She wasn’t elated or delighted or even genuinely pleased with her father’s pride in her. Why? Because the only kind of love that truly satisfies a child’s soul—or an adult, for that matter—is unconditional love, the pure love of Christ. At this point Rachel could not have put words to what she was feeling, but deep down she sensed that her father’s pride in her—which was the primary way she felt “love” from him—came with a price. He spoke kind words and smiled at her—praised her—only when she was behaving in ways he approved of.

“What happened when you made mistakes?” I asked. “When you got bad grades, made too much noise, got in trouble?”

Her eyes widened as she said, “Oh, I didn’t do any of that. I tried very hard to be a good girl. And I was. I didn’t want to disappoint him. Besides, I saw what happened when my older brother did get in trouble. My father could be very stern—pretty angry sometimes—and I didn’t want that to happen to me.” (Rachel lived in terror of her father’s disapproval. THAT is NOT love.)

I pulled my chair close to where Rachel was sitting and held out my hand, palm up. She put her hand in mine, and I quietly sat and looked into her eyes for some time. Then I asked, “How often did your father hold your hand, look directly at you, hold your gaze, and ask you how you were doing, focused entirely on you?”

Tears fell down her cheeks as she finally said, “I would have given anything for a moment of THIS with him.”

I really believe that Rachel’s father did the best he could with her, but what he gave her was conditional approval, and she could FEEL that. He was not capable of giving pure love—to Rachel or anybody—because he’d never received it himself. Parents do not mean to withhold love from children. The very notion is ridiculous. I’ve never met a parent who thought, “You know, I could give my child the unconditional love she needs, but nah, I’ll ruin the rest of her life instead.”

But even though Rachel’s father was not hurting her intentionally, his behavior was still wounding her. He was not truly loving his daughter, and that’s all that mattered to her. No child cares about the extenuating circumstances in a parent’s life. No young child looks at an angry, disapproving parent and thinks,

Dad/Mom, you really seem to be in pain, and I’m guessing that in this moment you’re reacting badly to me because of a lifetime of not feeling loved yourself. Let’s forget about my needs for the moment and concentrate on what you need.

No, children are primarily concerned about their own needs. Of course. They don’t analyze what’s happening. They don’t dwell on the past or the future. They focus on how they’re FEELING right now, and they are very sensitive to whether they’re being loved.

Each time Rachel’s father praised her for being good, she enjoyed it, but the feeling lasted only for a moment, and she knew that if she wanted that feeling to continue, she’d have to earn it again. It was exhausting, and she also knew what would happen if she didn’t behave in all the “right ways.” She’d heard her father’s lectures, felt the burden of his criticism on occasion, and witnessed what happened when her brother made mistakes. She sensed that she was buying his approval, so even when she succeeded in getting it, it failed to make her happy—because she’d bought it, so she felt the painful absence of the pure love she needed. She heard the I don’t love you message thousands of times, and each occasion inflicted a wound that was driven deeper and deeper by the wounds that followed.

Notice that Rachel’s parents didn’t yell at her. Didn’t hit her. Almost never criticized her. It was just the absence of pure love that wounded her.

So she left childhood wounded and weak. She sought out relationships that were FAMILIAR to her, relationships where she could trade conditional approval with people. (She knew that game.) Her husband was one such person, and together they traded the best they could, and as good as that can feel, it always fails. She tried raising her children the same way—trading approval—and that was guaranteed to fail too. She ended up lost and depressed, wondering how it all happened.

It all began with such little things, things that nobody would ever notice. Child Protective Services would never have come to her childhood home and found anything wrong. There was no obvious abuse or trauma. But the soil for growing a healthy child was all wrong, despite all the intermittent kindnesses, praise, and supply of THINGS for the kids. Rachel was being traumatized every day. She acquired a lifelong PTSD without anybody identifying the nature of the trauma—the simple LACK of the pure love of Christ in childhood.

When the original trauma of PTSD is childhood—CHILDHOOD itself and the lack of love, not just a particular thing that HAPPENED in childhood—I call it post-childhood stress disorder, or PCSD. It is astonishing to realize how little the mental health community addresses this subject—almost none at all. There is presently only one book in the world that directly addresses PCSD. If you’re interested, you can Google or Amazon it: Real Love (pure love of Christ) and post-childhood stress disorder, or PCSD.

Nearly every one of us has been traumatized like this. Then in our pain and PCSD, we hurt our children in similar ways, and nobody recognizes what’s happening, so we can’t change it without help. When an ex-soldier hears a plate drop to the floor, he dives to the ground in terror, triggered right back to the scenes of bloodshed and horror. In just as real a way, we all react hundreds of times a day to thousands of painful events from the past—all variations on the “I don’t love you” wound we talked about in Chapter One.

We over-react to our children, to our boss, to other drivers on the road, and all because some event in the present reminds us of how we were wounded in those young, formative years. Seems far-fetched at first, but it’s not. A driver cuts in front of us, for example. We feel out of control or helpless, which reminds us, quite unconsciously, of feeling controlled or helpless so many times in childhood. When another driver behaves irresponsibly, that brief moment of helplessness triggers all those past wounds, and then we honk the horn and make other indications that we’re hurt and angry. And we blame the driver, when he was only a MINOR contribution or our reaction. Those original wounds were often so subtle at the time that we didn’t recognize them then and don’t recognize or remember them now.

But we’re still crippled. When we’re wounded, it doesn’t matter a bit that the wound was inflicted accidentally or unconsciously. If you and I are digging a ditch together, and I accidentally hit you in the head with a shovel, it doesn’t hurt less because I didn’t “mean to.” Rachel’s father didn’t mean to hurt her, but he still did, and the effects lasted a lifetime.

Rachel’s story parallels your own story in more ways than you might realize. Here’s the important point: Rachel’s story also serves to describe what is likely to happen later in life for your children—although the details vary—if they are not loved while they’re young with the pure love of Christ they need.

All day long I talk to adults who are not happy because they’re still reacting to the apparently minor traumas of childhood—but it was trauma that was repeated thousands of times, and which occurred while they were young and still forming their entire notion of themselves, the world, and God. Every experience during that time is hugely important. These early experiences shape the form and function of their brains—really, proven by extensive studies and experience.

The “I don’t love you wound” of childhood is every bit as harmful as the trauma of battle. We can learn to prevent it, and to do something about it in children already wounded. How delightful.

A brief aside here: The more you learn about unconditional love, the more you’ll be tempted to think you’ve really messed things up with your life and your kids. Welcome to learning. It’s messy. The more we learn, the more stupid we realize we’ve been. The more we learn, the more we see that we just didn’t know much before. How could it be otherwise? Learning just sheds light on ignorance, often ignorance we were unaware of.

In the past we were just blissfully ignorant of what we didn’t know, but the more we learn, the more our ignorance is exposed, sometimes brutally. We might feel stupid. Keep going. We’ll always be stupid to some degree, but if we focus on the learning and growing, we learn that making mistakes is just the price we pay for repenting and reaching the tree of life.

So YOUR children—like virtually every other child on the planet—have heard “I don’t love you” from you on many, many occasions, more than you could possibly realize or remember. (The earliest wounds are the worst, and we remember them the least—bad combination.)

How can you KNOW that you wounded your children? Easy. You can SEE it in their reactions to pain, and in their Protecting Behaviors: lying, anger, acting like victims, running, and the seeking of praise, power, pleasure, and safety. You can see how PCSD has affected them (technically, they’re suffering both PCSD and simply CSD (no “post) because they’re IN the ongoing trauma. And very likely they would experience PCSD for the rest of their lives, except that NOW you’re DOING something about it. You’re creating the possibility that they WON’T simply react to pain all they’re lives. You’re a hero.

What I just said about how anger hurts your children, and how YOU hurt your children, is about the hardest thing for a parent to swallow. But we HAVE to start with that, ADMITTING that we have not been loving—that we DID use anger, disappointment, guilt, and more with them. Everything we build has to be founded on the truth. We have to admit we’ve been wrong. Then we can learn. Then we can repent and find joy.

Do you know what the real tragedy of PCSD is? That we instill in our children the pain that they REACT to now and for rest of their lives. In pain they no longer entirely CHOOSE their behavior. They simply REACT, like we all do to the pain of a hot stove, as we talked about in Chapter Two. When we’re in pain, to varying degrees we lose our agency. That’s big stuff, and we’ll talk more about that later in this chapter.

Protecting Behaviors and PCSD Everywhere

So, we’ve established that our children are in pain, use Protecting Behaviors, and have PCSD.

But now we MUST complete the answer to this question, over and over, until we really get it not only in our minds but in our hearts: WHY have we hurt our children? Yes, we’ve already stated that we didn’t know any better, but the rest of the answer is equally important. We’ve hurt them because WE haven’t been unconditionally loved and taught either. WE were raised without a consistent and sufficient supply of the pure love of Christ, so we were guaranteed NOT to be able to love our children as they need. We can’t give what we don’t have. It’s a law. WE learned to use the same Protecting Behaviors to minimize OUR pain that our children use, just with adult variations. Let’s look at those behaviors in us as adults:

PRAISE

The First Protecting Behavior: the seeking of praise or approval. From early childhood we learned to please our parents and others, and we’ve continued to do it as adults.

• We check our Facebook and other social media accounts, to see if people responded to those really attractive pictures and clever thoughts we shared with the world. Many of us are as addicted to this as any teenager. Desperate for approval.
• We go to enormous length to make sure we are physically attractive when we appear in public. This goes far beyond just being physically fit for our health.
• We talk about what we’re doing in ways meant to elicit positive opinions and comments from others.
• We talk about our success at work in order to look good.
• We share how many sessions we did at the temple (as though the number somehow indicated our righteousness).
• We talk about our children’s successes far more than people actually have an interest in, because we hope that will prove what great parents we are.
• We require our children from an early age to say “Thank you” whenever we give them something, which doesn’t teach gratitude, only obligation. It serves only to make us feel worthwhile.

This list of ways we look for praise is endless. If you wonder how much you do it, I suggest a couple of questions:

1. How often do you describe something positive that you’ve done in a circumstance where the other person didn’t ask, and where they don’t need that information in any way? Now ask yourself whether you do it to look good, or can you honestly claim that this information truly increases the emotional and spiritual connection between you and the other person? (Clue: It’s rarely the second)
2. If you describe something positive about your life to another person, and they demonstrate NO interest in what you said, or they DON’T express approval, do you feel disappointed? Or annoyed? If so, it’s a lock that you were looking for approval.

Pay close attention, and you’ll begin to see how much you behave in ways that gather approval. We choose our FRIENDS based on whether they make us feel good by agreeing with us and approving of us. Look at how often you avoid situations or people where you might experience DISapproval. We avoid public speaking, voicing our opinions, and doing anything new and risky, all to avoid failing and feeling disapproval.

As Mormon said (paraphrasing), “Why do you sell yourselves for stuff that rusts? Why are you ashamed to take upon you the name of Christ? Why do you not realize that the value of endless happiness is greater than undying misery—because of the praise of the world?” (Moroni 8:38) And in Chapter Two we talked about the potential dangers of seeking praise, all of which apply equally to US as well as our children. I also told you the story of Mark, whose was crippled by praise from the time he was a child.

Briefly, let me list the negative effects of praise, mostly because they describe the dangers of all the other Protecting Behaviors (I won’t restate this list for all the other Behaviors):

• The effects are temporary and superficial.
• It never brings us genuine happiness.
• We become addicted to it (and all the Protecting Behaviors).
• Praise blinds us to the needs of others.
• It decreases cooperation with others, along with the ability to connect
• It destroys genuine motivation and creativity
• It lowers genuine confidence.
• It lowers our standards of excellence and our desire to do good.
• It makes us anxious
• Praise and all the Protecting Behaviors keep us from feeling the pure love of Christ. Things of the world—great and spacious building—are LOUD and distracting

The bottom line? We don’t need praise. We need information, teaching, understanding, confirmation of the direction we’re taking, and love, and praise is not part of those essential ingredients in the recipe for happiness.

The Second Protecting Behavior: POWER

As adults we get “hits” of power in somewhat more sophisticated ways than children do. We don’t generally flop down in the middle of the floor and scream “No!”—although I’ve certainly seen adults do that. How do we get power?

• Careers. I read a study long ago about pairs of men—strangers—speaking to each other. They couldn’t speak for more than like two minutes before one asked the other what he did for a living. We love to appear powerful, and often we tell “little lies” in the process. (Examples shortly)
• Physical appearance. Women especially can get men to do almost anything (power) with an implied, often unconscious promise of physical affection or even a fantasy.
• Money, which converts to power as we buy things and services, sometimes people. Great way to keep score too.
• Belongings. House, cars. Another way to keep score. People tend to listen to us better—which gives us a sense of power—when we present tangible evidence that we are “successful.”
• Winning, especially at sports. We feel STRONG when we win, when we beat another person or team. This is true even when we’re WATCHING our favorite team play. Look at half the spectators at an event after a loss. THEY look defeated (loss of power). We also get a real sense of power from winning arguments, from being RIGHT or always knowing stuff.
• Callings in the Church. How many times have I listened to people punctuate their conversations with “When I was a bishop,” or “When I was the stake relief society president,” on occasions when the story did not need that particular spice. This is not a flaw in the Church. It’s a flaw in US, that we think our callings make us better. President Nelson said, “Through a lifetime of service in this Church, I have learned that it really doesn’t matter where one serves. What the Lord cares about is how one serves.” (President Russell M. Nelson, Ensign May 2018) President Joseph F. Smith said, “The God‑given titles of the offices of the Priesthood are not to be used ... for adornment nor are they expressive of mastery but rather of appointment to humble service in the work of the Master.” (from talk by Pres Dallin H. Oaks, Ensign May 2018)

We use power with our children. Regularly.

• We intimidate them. If they don’t listen the first time we say something, we become irritated and say it not only louder, but with an intensity and tone that does not communicate the pure love of Christ. This is usually unconscious, but the intimidation is very real and is felt deeply by the child. And we put ourselves in a position of power that we enjoy more than we’d like to admit.
• We use our superior position of authority to claim being right in disagreements or arguments with them. Their view is often correct—or has elements of truth—but we maintain our power by being right. To paraphrase the Lord only a little: “When we cover up our mistakes, or gratify our pride, or to exercise control over our children, in any degree of unrighteousness, the heavens withdraw, the Spirit of the Lord is grieved, and our authority becomes empty.” (D&C 121:37)

All these uses of power are only continuations of and refinements of the more primitive ways we learned to get power as children. The problem with power is that we cannot have faith in Jesus Christ and follow Him while we’re pursuing power for ourselves.

The Third Protecting Behavior: PLEASURE

We adults have become accomplished masters at accumulating and enjoying the pleasures of the world, which are too numerous to mention, and which you know well. Just look at all the things we describe as “fun.”

I hasten to say, Pleasure by itself isn’t bad. But pursuing it to the point where it distracts us from serving God and feeling His love can be fatally distracting. Our children observe our use of pleasure, and they see other adults using pleasure in person and on screens of every kind everywhere. The influence on them is not good. The world has BECOME the great and spacious building, and our children have come to believe that the plastic ficus plant in the lobby is the tree of life, and that the water fountain is the “spring of living waters” (1 Nephi 11:25).

The Fourth Protecting Behavior: SAFETY

Safety might be described simply as the state of less pain, or no pain. If we can’t get sufficient Imitation Love—praise, power, and more—to distract us from our emotional pain, at least we can directly MINIMIZE any threats. How do we do this? We use other protecting Behaviors. We lie, we get angry, we withdraw, and we avoid making decisions or being in situations that involve risk. Avoiding risk affects everything, because “risk avoidance” means lack of faith. Faith always involves risk. Without risk, there is no faith, just as there is no courage without fear. As we avoid risk, we fail to flourish in our homes, our jobs, and our callings, all of which require stepping out into the unknown, waiting for the illumination that follows—and that is faith, as President Packer said more than once. (Pres. Boyd K. Packer, Ensign May 2005)

The Fifth Protecting Behavior: ATTACKING

We attack people with anger, criticism, pride, and more. To pick just one form of attacking, we’ve all learned that people tend to back off when we’re angry. We feel safer. We also feel less helpless and worthless while we’re indulging this addictive emotional rush.

But anger is completely selfish—Me-Me-Me—certainly not congruent with following Christ’s example of loving, nor does it follow his new and great commandment to “Love others as He has loved us.” (John 13:34) We’ve thoroughly discussed how anger is always wrong, and moments ago I described how we intimidate (attack) our children with anger in order to control them (for their own good, of course). Not.

The Sixth Protecting Behavior: LYING

Years ago a study was done at Boston University, comparing the videos of people talking with fact-checking interviews done afterward. They learned that, on average, people lie 3-5 times per minute while they’re speaking. How?

• Somebody asks you, “How are you?” There’s the first lie. Rarely does that person really want to know. Then the second lie: You say “Fine” whether you are or not. Yes, it’s become just a social custom, but it’s still lying—institutional and cultural lying.
• I say, “You look nice,” whether I mean it or not, because I’ve learned that you really want to hear that (first lie). Of course then you immediately respond, “You too’—usually another lie. (unless you’re saying it to me)
• I say, “What do you do for work?” You: “I manage a department at Wherever.” The truth is that you’re the only one in the department, but you don’t say that. Lie.
• You’re on a date and say, “Yes, me too. I love walking in the mountains.” And yes, you really did enjoy both times you stepped out of your car for a minute while driving in the mountains, but still not quite the truth, eh?

We lie to our children all day.

• They say, “What’s wrong?” We say, “Nothing” when that isn’t even close to the truth. And no, I’m not saying we have to share every personal feeling with our children, but there are so many ways to be more honest than we are, ways that establish an example for our children of emotional honesty.
• They ask do to something, and we say no. They ask why, and we give them some absurd reason about why that thing isn’t best for them, when the real reason is that we don’t want to get up and do our part in providing that particular thing. Our kids can FEEL our lies even when they’re not consciously aware of them.
• We tell them we disapprove of something they’re doing, and we add, “I’m not angry, just telling you what you need to know.” We deny our anger while flames shoot from our eyes and steam billows from our ears. They know we’re angry, and our lies confuse them and disillusion them.

Lying is so common that it’s just accepted and rarely even identified. (Remember 3-5 times per minute, average) But lying distances us from the Spirit, one of whose names is the “Spirit of truth.” (John 14:17)

The Seventh Protecting Behavior: ACTING LIKE VICTIMS

Examples:

• When we’re confronted about a mistake, we blame people or circumstances. We might say “I couldn’t help it” or “I didn’t have time” or “It wasn’t my fault.” We deny responsibility for our own choices and instead claim to be helpless victims of circumstance or the actions of other people. Rarely is that true.
• When we get less of something than we believe we deserve—privileges, pay, attention—we whine that it’s “not fair.” We claim to be victimized by others in the hope that they will feel obligated to eliminate these grave injustices and give us what we want.
• When we are inconvenienced by the behavior of other people, we become incensed that they could be so thoughtless. We behave as though people intentionally hurt us. (victims)
• Anger is a strong manifestation of victimhood. Anytime we’re angry AT a person or thing, we’re blaming that person or thing for how we feel. Often without realizing it, we are stating that we have been involuntarily victimized. President Monson said, “No one can make us angry. It is our choice.” (Ensign Nov. 2009)

Our children see and hear us act like victims with alarming regularity.

• We act like babies when other drivers on the road inconvenience our royal highnesses.
• We complain about what our bosses, friends, and spouses did TO US.
• We act “hurt” by what our children did or did not do. They need our loving and teaching, not our being offended. Ever.
• We have little tantrums when things are broken, or lost, or when we are otherwise inconvenienced

Victimhood is very dangerous, primarily because we are choosing to give up our agency. We deny the ability to choose our feelings and behavior, and without agency, we are nothing. We cannot become like God. Lehi taught that “Men are free to choose freedom and eternal life or captivity and death.” (2 Ne. 2:11, 16, 27)

And our children see us do this, and they learn to mimic us—which would be ideal if our example were one of love and peace.

The Eighth Protecting Behavior: RUNNING

If all else fails in our dealing with pain, we can simply run away from it. Some forms of running would include:

• Withdrawal. Adults who habitually withdraw are called “shy.”
• Sulking. Our spouse says something we don’t like, and we just stomp off into the next room.
• We avoid taking risks, which we talked about earlier in conjunction with safety. The goal of running IS safety, so the behaviors of running and seeking safety are closely related.
• Depression. People with depression often are just running away from the world and all the potential sources of pain they see everywhere.
• We withdraw from situations at work and elsewhere that we find unacceptably difficult.

Our children see us run, and they learn from us. And they see the occasions when we run from them:

• We tend to emotionally withdraw from them when they’re behaving badly. This is a very natural response on our part, but our children sense it as our withdrawing our love—which it is.

• If a discussion with a child becomes sufficiently annoying to us, we say, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” or “Just do what I say.” (bit of power and attacking in there too)

The Reflex of Protecting

Notice that all these Protective Behaviors are responses to pain, attempts to reduce pain.

Almost always they’re REFLEXIVE and unconscious, which is the nature of PCSD.

Mostly we don’t CHOOSE them.

Somebody sent me a hysterical video of toddler who obviously had been stuffing his face with sprinkles, those little candies you might put on cupcakes. They were all over his face, glued by sugar, saliva, and mucous.

His mother asked him a dozen ways if he had eaten them. “Are you sure you didn’t?” “What’s on your face?” She showed them to him. He kept repeating, “No, no, I didn’t. I ate nothing. No, nothing, not anything.” This child had learned that disapproval feels so bad that he REFLEXIVELY responded in a way that he could avoid the disapproval. He lied.          

Adults do the same. Exactly. I talked to a couple one day, and he was very angry at her about who-remembers-what? I asked him, “Do you realize how angry you are?”

He said, “I AM NOT angry.” He believed it. His anger was reflexive.

I talked to a woman destroying her family by controlling everything with intimidation, righteous commands, bribing, praise, anything. Her husband and children looked like they could have posed for a poster condemning human trafficking (looked beaten and trapped).

She said, “I do NOT having a controlling problem. and you can’t talk to me like that.” (Trying to control my discussion of her controlling.) We’ll talk more about her later in this chapter, and the effect she had on her children.

All our reflexive protecting behaviors are PROOF of two things:

1. We’re NOT making choices. Choices are conscious and deliberate. Reflexes are immediate and mindless, and almost always in response to pain.
2. We’ve been traumatized in the past, and now we’re primarily reacting to past pain: PCSD. You can write this down. If you respond to something in the present immediately and with more emotion than the event would truly justify, you’re responding to past pain. Not complicated.

The Messages of Protecting Behaviors

In Chapter One we discovered that whenever we get angry, the people around us hear only four words: I don't love you. Of that there is no doubt whatever. Now let's consider the message of the other Protecting Behaviors:

• Praise. I seek praise from others for WHOSE benefit? MINE. Entirely selfish. Another “I don’t love you.”
• Power. I get power for MYSELF, certainly not for you. No loving there.
• Pleasure? Me again.
• Safety. All about me.
• Lying. When I lie to you, my goal is to protect whom? Myself. I’m not caring about you.
• Acting like a victim. When I act like a victim, my aim is to protect whom? ME. And I act like a victim to get sympathy, attention, and power for? ME. “I don’t love you.”
• Running is designed to protect ME.

This is not a subtle pattern. We use all the Protecting Behaviors to benefit ourselves, and while we’re using them other people really can feel that our interests are selfish. They feel that our primary concern is not for them, which means we couldn't possibly be unconditionally loving them.

In short, when we use Protecting Behaviors other people hear us say I don't love you, and in those moments that is what we’re saying. After communicating that message, how could any conversation possibly go well? Mostly the problem is not the words we speak. The greatest obstacle in our conversations and in our relationships is the Protecting Behaviors we use.

You can write this down as a law: The truth is found in our behavior, not our words. The Savior said that: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:30, JST)

If I’m irritated at you—or acting like a victim or running or clinging—it doesn’t matter how cleverly I craft my words, because what you’ll still hear is “I don’t love you,” and then you’ll likely respond with Protecting Behaviors of your own. At that point our conversation is doomed, because we’re each acting reflexively from our own conditions of PCSD. We’re reacting—not choosing—and agency becomes a sad casualty of our pain.

The Other Message

There’s another message embedded in these Protecting Behaviors. In addition to “I don’t love you,” we’re also communicating that we don’t feel loved. Always. So we’re saying, Please love me, or at least “I need to be loved” and Please don’t hurt me. (hence “Protecting Behaviors”) Sometimes we’re demanding to be loved at the same time that we’re screaming “I don’t love you.” That never goes well, and it describes MOST arguments between any two people.

I know that’s not obvious, so look at the behaviors. When I’m angry, yes, I’m saying “I don’t love you,” but I’m also begging for someone to love me. Anger comes from PAIN, and I want the relief that only love can provide. But rarely do we REALIZE that when we’re angry, we’re pleading for love. I was once speaking at a seminar when a man stood up in the back and began to scream at me that I was wrong and teaching lies, all the while clenching his fists and moving toward me menacingly. What I didn’t know was that his wife was changing as she learned about unconditional love, and her changes in behavior—even though loving—were threatening to him by virtue only of their being unfamiliar to him. I also learned later that this man was viewed as threatening and dangerous by everyone who knew him.

I knew that his anger was born of pain, and that he really wanted to be loved—even though that was far from obvious from looking at him. I slowly walked up to him as I spoke, in the middle of hundreds of people, and I gently put my arms around him and said, “You’re safe. You don’t NEED to be angry anymore.” He unclenched his fists, put his arms around me, and wept on my shoulder. Through his sobs, he said, “This is all I ever wanted.” Every person protecting themselves WANTS to be loved, but they don’t know how to ask for it.

By the time we’re using any of the Protecting Behaviors, we’re in a lot of pain, mostly accumulated over a lifetime. So we’re not just asking people to fill our emptiness—Please love me. Oh no, our demands are fierce, so we are really shouting, You must love me—and right now! We’re screaming for the people around us—especially those closest to us—to make up for the pain of our entire lives. We even try to make them feel RESPONSIBLE for our lifetime of pain. Imagine how that feels to them—especially to our children, who are confused and horrified by our demands.

The Perfect Storm

Understanding how we respond to pain, with Protecting Behaviors, along with the “I don’t love you” message and “Love me right now” message, brings us to the Perfect Storm that results when the pain and needs of a parent and child collide.

When we don’t know how to love and teach our children, they grow up in pain and scream their discomfort in so many ways, using their own flavors of Protecting Behaviors. They scream in our faces, “Love me, love me.”

By itself that is not a problem. Every lonely and hungry infant screams that message. Children are SUPPOSED to turn to us for love, even when they can’t verbalize it clearly.

Regrettably, however—tragically, actually—when our children scream at us for love, most of us are suffering from our own PCSD, so we’re not in a position to give them the pure love of Christ they need. We never got it ourselves. So we react to their pain by expressing our own. How?

When we tell children to go to bed on time, or put away their phones for dinner, or whatever, rarely are we simply requiring them to keep a rule that will be for THEIR benefit. How do I know? Because of what follows if the child fails to do as expected, especially if they respond with defiance. What do we tend to do then? We tend to get angry, which reveals in an instant that we need them to behave a certain way for us to feel respected, obeyed, worthwhile, and more. We’re USING our children for the feelings of praise and power and safety we get from them. Our anger PROVES that.

And why would we want praise, power, and safety? Because those things are imitation of the pure love of Christ that we never got. What I’m really trying to say is that we use our children to feel some kind of “loved.” They are disobedient because THEY don’t feel loved, and with our anger or disappointment or controlling, we respond by saying “I don’t love you” AND “You need to love ME.”

Children are not SUPPOSED to love their parents. OH, MY, what did I just say? Do you know that the NUMBER ONE reason parents have children is so that SOMEBODY will finally love them? And they believe children will do that because when they’re small they’re so cooperative (which parents take as love), so immediately rewarding with their smiles (love), so cute (parents take as a reflection on them).

But children CAN’T unconditionally care about a parent. If they’ve never received that pure love, they can’t give it. And you can’t love someone if you NEED them. It’s not unconditional. Children need us far too much to be able to love us unconditionally.

Ideally, children should never have to love. (I know, heresy)

Proclamation on the Family: “Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another [and] observe the commandments of God.”

Notice that the Proclamation declares the PARENTS have a sacred duty to love their children, but there is nothing about children having the duty to love their parents. (diff verb, Chap 2). And in the Ten Commandments we are not told to love our parents but to HONOR them, which means to respect them, certainly to obey them when we’re children in the home.

It’s a wrong notion in the heads of so many parents that their children are supposed to love them. They might not state this misconception out loud, but they demonstrate it with their words and actions every time they get disappointed or irritated or controlling when their children DON’T deliver the respect, gratitude, obedience, and more that parents perceive as love.

I got off on a bit of a tangent. The important point is that while our children are screaming “Love me, love me,” SO ARE WE with our impatience, irritation, controlling, frustration, and so on.

Both we and our children are screaming “I don’t love you” while we’re in pain and protecting ourselves.

What are other ways we demand love, other than the example of obedience to bedtime, phone time, whatever?

• If a child is disrespectful, we don’t just teach them the principle of respect, while loving them. No, we say things like, “You can’t talk to me like that.” “You come back here right now, young lady.” And so on. Because we NEED their respect. This is the important point. We’re not just loving and teaching. We’re NEEDING their respect or obedience.
• If a child lies, we don’t teach about telling the truth as a desirable virtue. No, we’re offended personally because their lying is disrespectful to US, it demonstrates that we’re not in control (power). We get annoyed because we’re not getting what WE want, and THAT makes unconditionally loving a child impossible.

An Example of the Storm

Let’s illustrate all this with a simple example:

Mom says to a child, “Did you make this mess in the kitchen?” With her anger, she is saying, “I don’t love you (whoever you are)” And “I am incapable of loving right now.”

But she is also saying, “I NEED you to be obedient and controlled to make me feel less helpless,” which is a form of power. “I need your respect,” a cheap imitation of love.

Many of us deny that we have these feelings, but observe yourself more closely and honestly as you get angry, or watch others when they’re angry. Anger is all about control:

• We control the behavior of the other person.
• We control our own sense of helplessness.
• We control the conversation by being right, which is a form of power.

Control yields power.

After Mom is angry and aggressive, the child is now in pain—unavoidable after hearing “I don’t love you.” He WILL protect himself using some behavior. He might get angry right back, “It wasn’t ME.” (with a tone) He’s spitting right back in Mom’s face and lying at the same time, refusing to be controlled. He looks defiant and difficult, but actually he’s just afraid and defending himself. OUR Pain and defending lead to more pain and defending in our children, and THEIR defending makes us feel unloved, so we do MORE defending, and we all go straight down the drain together.

It becomes a mess, with parent and child essentially screaming these volleys back and forth (doesn’t matter who starts it):

Love me.

Love me first.

I don’t care about you. It’s your job to care about me.

I asked first.

But I need love most.

I asked louder.

BOTH parent and child are two desperately empty children, in pain and afraid.

And these interchanges happen about chores, phone use, homework, video games, use of the car—endless list.

Everybody in almost every family has PCSD. Everybody is hypersensitive to everybody else and defending themselves Their pain clashes with ours, and the result is a nightmare that mystifies and frustrates us. 

Even the very best of us will respond to pain. We can’t HELP it. The Savior said that in the last days, even “the very elect will be deceived.” (Matthew 24:24) What does “deceived” mean? A deception is anything that will cause us to deviate from the truth, which would include not just outright lies and intentional deception but also pain and PCSD. Yes, the deceptions of the devil are obviously evil and damaging, but so are the deceptions of PAIN. Pain leads to confusion, bad judgment, addictive use of Protecting Behaviors, loss of agency with PCSD. We have to understand what is happening so that we are not deceived.

So look at the mess. Our children are drowning—metaphor from Chapter Two—and we’re drowning at the same time. We can’t help them. They surely can’t help us, even though we demand that they do. Two drowning people can’t save each other. SOMEBODY has to get out of the water in order to be able to help the other, and that is OUR job as parents. That’s why we’re here in this training.

In many ways, Latter-day Saint children are in a worse position than most kids. Children everywhere are confused by the ways of the world and by pain and by Satan—including Latter-day Saints. But many children in the Church have the additional burden of being taught all the time what they SHOULD and SHOULDN’T do. And we’re commanded to teach them that, so how is teaching them worse?

Children out in the mists of darkness—who are NOT taught the truth—can at least rationalize that everybody else is behaving badly, and there’s no law against sin, so what’s the big deal? Latter-day Saints kids can’t use the “I didn’t know” excuse. But so many LDS kids are only TAUGHT what they SHOULD and SHOULDN’T do. They’re not loved, which leaves them in pain, so naturally they respond with all the Protecting Behavior (anger, lying, phones, addictions) to diminish their pain. But then they’re told they SHOULDN’T use the only forms of pain relief they have, and that makes them crazy.

They think—unconsciously—“I’m in pain, I HAVE to relieve the pain, and you’re telling me I can’t?” No wonder the cognitive dissonance and the weight of all those commandments crushes them. No wonder Utah has the highest rate of teen suicide in the country.

Let me illustrate with a story how parents and children enable and cripple each other.

Controlling the Perfect Child

Not long ago in this chapter I mentioned that I had spoken with a woman who was destroying her family by controlling everything and everyone with intimidation, righteous commands, bribing, praise, anything. She denied any possibility of her being controlling but then asked me—without realizing it—how she could better control her husband and children.

Her name is Sarah, and she has vigorously controlled her oldest son, Matthew, from birth to be perfect, or—when that was not possible—at the very least to LOOK perfect. So he got great grades, was a leader in school government, was president of his seminary class, had perfect attendance at church and seminary meetings.

Now, let’s look at the perfect storm:

What was MOM doing here? She had never felt loved—my extensive interview with her left no doubt about that subject, despite her being raised in what looked like a “good” Latter-day Saint home. Without love, she naturally resorted to reducing her pain and filling her emptiness with  power, praise, control, lying, attacking, and acting like a victim. She was especially good at control, praise, and power.

What was Matthew doing? He had no idea that unconditional love even existed, because he was taught from birth to behave in ways that would earn his mother’s approval—along with the approval of others. He was obedient, successful, cooperative, and so on, which gave him a sense of worth. It earned him praise, some measure of control of others, and safety from his mother’s endless criticism.

Sarah and Matthew TRADED, and I emphasize that this is FAR more common than you might suppose:

He gave her respect and obedience. And more.

She gave him approval mostly, but that meant a lot to him, as it does to any child.

Matthew went on a mission. He kept the mission rules and did all the right things. Was “promoted” to all the right leadership positions. Yes, I know there are no promotions, but look at the faces of parents who brag about their son being zone leader, or assistant to the president, and then tell me with a straight face that THEY and others don’t see church callings as promotions. We do it everywhere in the Church. We brighten up at the mention of a friend or relative being called to be a stake or mission president, but we do NOT have the same reaction to someone being called as a nursery leader or teacher of the 9 y.o.s. That’s a flaw in us, not the Church.

A little more than halfway through his mission, this boy suddenly lost the use of both legs, and he couldn’t see (blind). Local doctors where he was serving examined him carefully, did lab tests, did an MRI. Nothing. They brought him home to the teaching hospital of the University of Wherever, where he got even more tests, saw neurological specialists. The whole time, I was telling Sarah that her son suffered from one condition, “Stress.”

The doctors concluded that there was nothing wrong, but at one point they had indicated to Mom that they were looking for a rare viral infection, or for the residual effects of a virus (can happen). Nah.

I told Mom that she was seeing firsthand the effects of her controlling Matthew, but she didn’t want to hear that. And she couldn’t live with the shame of her son “failing” to complete his mission, so she told everyone that he’d gotten a rare virus. She never mentioned stress, even though the doctors did finally tell her that stress was the most likely cause of all of it. Occasionally she would experiment with loving Matthew in ways she had learned from this Training, and miraculously he would get better. Immediately and completely.

But then she would change her mind, and tell him to get busy DOING things, to succeed in school, and make her look good. His symptoms would immediately return. We don’t need a test much more conclusive than that. It was stress.

But Mom couldn’t live with the responsibility of her contribution to his symptoms, so she abandoned all pursuit of the pure love of Christ, and gave up any effort to give that to her son. Instead she chose to keep controlling, lying about her controlling, using anger and approval to control everyone around her, and more.

This boy is going to have miserable and recurring problems with his career, his relationships, future children, and more, all his life. Mom came perilously close to being able to genuinely help him, but she wouldn’t acknowledge the perfect storm going on in her family. Her husband was being as supportive as he could be from a position of pure love, but she was threatened by that too, so she divorced him. Perfect storm, and Dad got out before he was drowned in the tsunami of controlling. Rachel and Matthew are still drowning. It’s tragic to watch.

Did Matthew CHOOSE to be paralyzed? No, just as most of us in a given day have very little choice about what we do, because of the choices we’ve made before and because of the pain that was inflicted upon us. When we’re in pain, our ability to choose is significantly impaired. Now, let’s talk more about choice, or agency.

The Ultimate Miracle of Agency

President Harold B. Lee said, “Next to life itself, agency is God’s greatest gift to mankind.” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Harold B. Lee, p. 4) This greatest gift from God is the right to make our own choices between good and evil, and thereby to learn to become like God. The war in heaven was fought over preservation of that right. The Atonement of Jesus Christ was offered and executed as a necessity because He and the Father knew that we would exercise our agency and make mistakes requiring the cleansing power of that sacrifice. Agency is the single most important principle of the gospel, closely associated with the gifts of life, love, and the Atonement.

UNDERSTANDING AGENCY: Freedom and Ability

Although we all understand the importance of agency, often we are confused about what it really is and how it operates. Elder Dallin H. Oaks confirms this when he refers to agency as “a basic principle given in modern revelation but not as well understood or applied as it should be.” (Ensign, Oct 2012)

Our failure to understand agency has a high price. Because of agency we’re born free, but because of our ignorance of agency and because of our pain, we tend to live our lives in chains. We all like the idea of being free, but because don’t understand it, often we end up forfeiting our freedom needlessly.

Agency is well known as the FREEDOM to choose, but agency actually has two component parts that complement each other:

1. The FREEDOM or right to choose
2. The ABILITY to choose, which includes both responsibility and accountability

Freedom cannot truly exist without ability, and ability is meaningless without freedom.

To complete the concept, Ability involves “responsibility” (the ability to respond) and “accountability” (the ability to be counted or held accountable).

Putting it all together, we must recognize that agency has two component parts that complement each other:

Freedom

and

Responsibility and Accountability

In the words of Elder Lynn Robbins, then of the Presidency of the Seventy, “Assuming responsibility for and being accountable for our choices are agency’s complementary principles (see D&C 101:78).” (BYU Education Week, Aug. 22, 2017)

This is digging deeper into a principle we always thought we understood, so take your time. We must understand agency better in order to more effectively help our children repent and be happy—not to mention the effect on our own repentance. 

To complement a thing means to complete it or to bring it to perfection.

Freedom and ability complement each other, which means that without ability, there is no complete freedom, and without freedom there is no full ability.

THE TWO HALVES

Let’s describe the first “half” of agency, the freedom to choose, which by itself is a right, not a power:

The prophet Lehi said that because of the coming of the Messiah, men are “free forever ... to act for themselves and not to be acted upon ...” (2 Nephi 2:26)

Samuel the Lamanite said, “Ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves ...” (Hel. 14:30)

Notice the words “free” and “permitted.” This first half of agency is a right or gift given to us from God. President Thomas S. Monson said, “I mention first the right of choice. I am so grateful to a loving Heavenly Father for His gift of agency, or the right to choose.” (Ensign Nov 2010)

But agency is incomplete until there is also the ABILITY to choose, which includes responsibility and accountability. So now let’s examine the second “half” of agency: the ability to choose. We can do this by rendering a more complete version of both verses I just quoted—inserting the words I left out above.

1. (2 Nephi 2:26) Lehi: “[Men are] “free forever, (I read that before, about FREEDOM, but not the next part)

“knowing good from evil;” And then—with the right to choose, AND also the knowledge to choose (“knowing good from evil,” they are truly free ...

“to act for themselves and not to be acted upon ...”

Notice that the principal of agency is not complete until we add “knowing good from evil”—the ABILITY to see a choice—to the “freedom” to make that choice. 

2. (Helaman 14:30) Samuel the Lamanite: “Ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves;"

We read that above, but then Samuel adds

“God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free.”

Again, agency is complete only if God has given us “knowledge”—ability—in addition to the gift of freedom.

Probably the best scriptural reference about knowledge leading to the freedom to choose is found in something Lehi said to his son Jacob. He said, “Men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil.” (2 Nephi 2:5)

Let me repeat, with slight editing that will make the meaning even clearer: “Men SHOULD be instructed sufficiently so that they can know good from evil.”

Great verse, probably should have led with that.

Simply HAVING agency does not make us free. First we have to have knowledge AND OTHER abilities—like feeling God’s love, the power that makes everything else possible, the fruit that is “the most desirable above all things." (1 Nephi 11:22)

Our children are free—at least in name—to make any choice they like, but unless we give them the ABILITY to choose—which involves LOVING them and teaching them responsibility and accountability—their choices become limited to the point where they’re not really free, where they don’t truly possess agency.

Proving this is easy: Look at the behavior of children who are entitled, whining, angry, or addicted. In any of those conditions—where responsibility and accountability are limited because they haven’t been loved and taught—the children don’t really make choices. They’re simply responding to their pain. They’re trapped by their pain and the lack of any ability—responsibility or accountability—to choose wisely. They are reacting much like animals do.

We’ve talked about the chains of pain a lot. Remember Mark, who was trapped by a lifetime of pain and praise? Or the girl in chapter one who wanted nothing to do with the Church because of the pain she felt at home? Or Matthew, whose emotional and spiritual pain led to him being paralyzed? He didn’t CHOOSE that.

Allow me to use an old metaphor: Imagine that you are walking in the woods, and you come to a fork in the road. The path to the right leads directly out of the woods and safely to your home. The path to the left leads to forests, dense jungles, impassable rivers, waterfalls, wild beasts, and potential death.

You might immediately assume that you would take the path to the right—to freedom—but what if you couldn’t SEE the path to the right? What if, long before your arrival at the fork, the path to the right had been blocked by a brick wall, which was then covered with ivy and trees to the point that the path was completely hidden?

Given those conditions, can you really make a choice? Do you have agency? No. You can’t make a choice you can’t see—you have no ABILITY to make the choice, one of the two complementary components to agency—so in this case do you really have a choice? No. Theoretically, you do have the RIGHT or freedom to take the path to the right, but you don’t have ABILITY. You can’t be held responsible for what you don’t know, and if you really don’t know, how can you be held accountable?

AGENCY AND OUR CHILDREN

How does all this directly apply to our children? And why does it matter so much?

Because our children are born only with the freedom to choose—the first “half” of agency. Studies have thoroughly proven that children as young as six months consciously do make some choices—for example, they learn preferences and even learn to lie—certainly long before the age of eight. But they are not accountable for their choices yet—not until they’re eight, as Mormon emphatically stated in Moroni 8—so their agency is not complete until age eight.

Our role in all this is to love them and give them the knowledge—to teach them—in order to complete their agency, as we illustrated by reading the complete versions of what Lehi and Samuel said moments ago.

Our teaching gives our children knowledge, and our love gives them the added power they need to properly use that knowledge in order exercise their freedom to choose. Love gives them power because it eliminates the pain and fear that make clear choices impossible. “Perfect love casteth out fear.” (1 John 4:18) Love and knowledge remove the brick wall and the ivy and reveal the path to the right. With knowledge and the power of love—with our loving and teaching—we enable our children to exercise full agency, which is indispensable to eternal life. (2 Nephi 2:27)

One more proof is warranted to demonstrate that true agency must include both the right and ability to choose.

Elder M. Russell Ballard said, “The battle over man’s God‑given agency continues today. Satan and his minions have their (traps) lures all around us, hoping that we will falter and take his (bait) flies so he can reel us in with counterfeit means. He uses addiction to steal away agency ... Addiction of any kind means to surrender to something, thus relinquishing agency and becoming dependent on some life‑destroying substance or behavior ... [Addiction] overpowers the part of our brain that governs our willpower, judgment, logic, and morality. This leads the addict to abandon what he or she knows is right. And when that happens, the hook is set and Lucifer takes control.” (Ensign Nov 2010)

We’ll discuss addictions more in a bit, but it is sufficient for now to say that we can become addicted to ANYTHING that temporarily reduces our pain—anything: not just drugs and alcohol, but as Elder Ballard says, also any behavior that we depend on to quench the fires of our pain: being right, anger, lying, seeking praise, power, phones, video games, and on and on.

It is important to realize that all addictions are variations on a single theme: We’re addicted to pain relief. This is VERY natural, but the natural man is an enemy to God. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, our PCSD—our compulsive reaction to pain—strips away our agency. We become little more than REACTIONS to pain—all the Protecting Behaviors—instead of truly being free to CHOOSE. That’s a problem because we’re here on earth to learn to choose. As Lehi taught, “Men are free to choose freedom and eternal life or captivity and death.” (2 Ne. 2:11, 16, 27)

As long as we are imprisoned by our reactions to pain, we are NOT free to choose freedom or captivity, not free to choose life or death. As Jean‑Jacques Rousseau said, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

It is tempting to say that we must simply tell children to choose to come to Christ and enjoy the embrace of His mercy and the power of His Atonement. Of course there is no doubt whatever about Christ being central in our lives, nor that He is the Savior of all mankind. But when we only TELL our children that they should follow Christ and be obedient, often we are telling them to make a choice they CANNOT SEE while they are blind and deaf as a result of pain. What if we’re telling them to take the right fork in the road when it’s bricked up and overgrown with ivy?

Elder Ballard clearly states what we have scripturally documented earlier: agency is both a right and an ability. If the ability is removed—through sin, addiction, or ignorance, for example—we can surrender or lose our agency. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, “the very elect” of the Church will be led away from the path to eternal life by ignorance and pride, but just as much by PAIN, which strips us of agency. We parents are here to do all we can so our children will have full function of their agency and will not lose it.

Instead of telling our children what they should do, let us ask ourselves, What if they CAN’T choose? What if they are trapped by reacting to pain, not choosing?

When children are in sufficient pain, they are reduced to reacting. It is only with love that we eliminate their pain and give them the ability to really make conscious choices in difficult circumstances. Again and again, we must love them and teach them, and as we do, their choices multiply, as does their ability to see them clearly and make the wise ones.

The prophet Jacob talked about agency and accountability when he said that God “has given a law; and where there is no law given there is no punishment (which mean no accountability); and where there is no punishment (or accountability) there is no condemnation.” 2 Nephi 9:25

Jacob is talking about a condition where there is NO law given. Let’s render this same verse instead in a form where the law HAS been given:

Jacob is saying that “God has given a law; and where there is a law given there is accountability and judgment.”

Accountability exists—an essential component of true agency—where the law has been “given.” But when has the law been truly GIVEN?

What if the law is on the other side of the ivy-covered brick wall we described moments ago? Can we describe the law as “given” to you if it’s placed such that you are blind to it—on the other side of a wall of pain and PCSD, for example? President Ballard says that we “relinquish agency”—we are no longer accountable—when we rely on any life‑destroying substance or behavior, and that’s exactly what happens when we’re in pain to the point where all we can do is protect ourselves and find substitutes for God’s love—in substances or behaviors. In Elder Ballard’s words, our judgment and morality are overpowered by addictions, which can be to any substance or behavior that eventually we use mindlessly and reflexively to diminish our pain.

Children are especially susceptible to losing their agency, because without love we injure them, and they learn to react to pain with little if any choice.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks said, “Sometimes the same act can be [either] an error or a sin according to what is in the mind of the actor (the person choosing). Something like an automobile collision that does great harm to another can be an error if it was unintended or a transgression if it was intended. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. highlighted the distinction between an unintended act and an intended one in his famous observation that “even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked” (The Common Law [1963], 7). (Ensign October 1996)

God understands how easily we can allow patterns of unintended mistakes to grow into spiritual death. He illustrates it repeatedly in the Book of Mormon.

Alma said, “There are many promises extended to the Lamanites BECAUSE remaining in their state of ignorance was CAUSED by the traditions of their fathers.” They did not choose to be ignorant and to sin. (Alma 9:16‑17)

Samuel the Lamanite spoke to the Nephites about the Lamanites: 

“Their deeds have been evil ...” Why? Because they chose iniquity? No, “BECAUSE,” Samuel says, “of the evil of the tradition of their fathers.” (Helaman 15:4)

Alma and Samuel clearly state that the Lamanites were not to be held accountable because they were taught WRONGLY. The traditions of their fathers were evil, JUST AS OUR traditions—and those of our children—are wrong if those traditions (which means simply what we and our children were taught) were a lack of love, subsequent pain, and how to protect ourselves with behaviors that are selfish and therefore qualify as SIN.

Samuel continued, justifying the Lamanites, “It will be better for them than for you [the Nephites] unless you repent. If they had been shown the mighty works shown to you, they would not have weakened in unbelief because of the traditions of their fathers.” (Helaman 15:14-15)

And Alma completes this beautiful cycle of God’s mercy by saying that “at some period of time they [the Lamanites] will be brought to believe in his word, and to know of the incorrectness of the traditions of their fathers; and many of them will be saved, because the Lord will be merciful unto all who call on his name.” (Alma 9:16‑17)

In other words, despite our ignorance and pain, despite the incorrectness of the patterns or traditions of our fathers, we can be loved and taught and learn to call on His name and be saved through the grace of Him who chose to shed His blood for us.

I know from experience that at this point many people would object to discussing even the possibility that our agency varies with experience, parenting, age, circumstances, and more. But we have so many examples that this is so, and how could it be otherwise?

Agency is not just a RIGHT. It involves ability—responsibility and accountability—as we’ve discussed, and both of those components increase with love (which eliminates pain and fear) and knowledge. If accountability and agency don’t grow with loving and teaching, WHY BOTHER to TEACH ANYBODY? Why LEARN? We learn SO THAT we can know good from evil—which is one description of agency.

Remember, Lehi said to his son, “Men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil.” (2 Nephi 2:5)

As we are instructed more—which is what the leaders of the Church are occupied with more than anything else—we become more EMPOWERED to make choices. Power and agency are inextricably related. With more agency comes more power. With more power, our agency—our ability to use it—grows.

And what power enables and empowers agency more than any other? Love. It’s the power by which Christ taught, the power that baffled the scribes—which we talked about in Chapter Two. It’s the power He brought to the Nephites after his resurrection, which changed them far more than simply the teaching of the word ever had, causing a peace that lasted for more than 100 years.

As YOU listen to the words of this training, your knowledge grows. You will feel more understood and loved. And you also will become increasingly accountable for what you know, moving you along the path you desire.

Allow me to illustrate from real life an undeniable example of agency being LIMITED by a lack of knowledge, love, and correct traditions. Many years ago I baptized a young man, age twelve, from a family I had home taught for years. The simple act of approaching the house was like entering a movie set, where backwoods hill people are depicted rocking on their front porch while smoking a pipe, with a working still producing moonshine in the backyard. (It was all there.) I always carried a police riot baton—tucked in my scriptures—in case one of the many ravenous dogs escaped their inadequate ropes staked to the ground. The father was a known drug dealer, who had spent time in jail and who had been the SUPPLIER of his own son’s drug habit in the past.

For a time—before and after his baptism—the boy did pretty well. I visited and taught him often. I had him over to my home many times. I picked him up from the backwoods where he lived so he could attend priesthood meeting, Sunday School, and sacrament meeting.

And then the “traditions of his fathers” (just like the Lamanites) proved to be too great, too overwhelming. The times he was loved and taught were just too intermittent and soft compared to the very loud voices of his entire past and present life. He began to slip back into old ways and gradually disappeared from the Church and from the path he had walked for a time.

Is there anyone who has the arrogance to say that this boy’s agency—his ABILITY to choose—was the same as that of a child raised in the gospel, loved from birth, and immersed in the truth? Not a chance. None.

Proclamation on the Family: “The family is ordained of God ... Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”

So if happiness is “most likely to be achieved” with faith and love—to shorten the list—then it is unavoidable to conclude that without those qualities happiness is LESS likely

In Proverbs we have read many times, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) IF we say that a child trained in the way he SHOULD go will stay on that path, we MUST also say that a child trained in the way he SHOULD NOT go will likely stay on that path too. We cannot say one without the other.

What we experience in childhood usually sets the tone—often the entire pattern, in concrete—for the rest of our lives. I have seen that truth proven in thousands of people I have interviewed. If we are not given sufficient pure love of Christ during the critical time where our beliefs—even our brains—are formed, we are virtually guaranteed to experience lives of pain, emptiness, and fear, with the accompanying Protecting Behaviors and PCSD.

Remember that as I explain the factors that affect agency, I have no intention whatever to excuse anyone. I explain how our agency is limited by pain and that it grows with loving and teaching precisely SO THAT (1) we CAN teach our children to BECOME more accountable, and (2) so we are not frustrated by unrealistic expectations in the beginning of their learning of responsibility and accountability.

The THIRD reason to understand pain, Protecting Behaviors, and agency is the most important: We want to understand all the distractions from agency and the ability to repent, so we can DO something about the distractions—avoid them, stay out of the mists of darkness and instead see the light “shedding itself abroad” from the tree of life.

These matters of pain, sin, and accountability are unspeakably complex, certainly beyond us mortals. As Elder Ballard has said: “When [God] does judge us ... he will take all things into consideration: our genetic and chemical makeup, our mental state, our intellectual capacity, the teachings we have received, the traditions of our fathers, our health, and so forth.” (Ensign Oct 1987) We don’t have to understand all that. We need only take the next step we are CAPABLE of to repent and draw closer unto Him. That’s all He would ever expect of us.

Explaining how pain leads to sin is NOT an excuse to sin or to blame other people for our bad choices. NO. Understanding pain is a powerful way to EXPLAIN sin in a way that we can BETTER REPENT—as we discussed extensively in Chapter Two. It always comes back to repentance. No matter what the REASON is for sin, we still have to repent.

OH, how much easier it is to repent if we feel loved, knowing that pain and fear lead to sin, and love casts out all fear and pain (1 John 4:18).

Little Things, “Little” Sins

In Chapter One, we talked about how one key to effective parenting is consistency. Consistency is not some manifestation of controlling or obsessive-compulsion. No, consistency is the nature of the universe, which is governed by laws that never vary. This is one of those immutable laws, that we consistently study and apply true principles.

Moroni said, “[God] changeth not; if so he would cease to be God ...” (Mormon 9:19)

The Prophet Joseph Smith wrote, “We know that there is a God in heaven, who is infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God ...” (D&C 20:17)

We as parents are instructed to “look to God” and live. (Alma 37:47; Helaman 8:15) God is unchangeable, and so must we be. We must be aware of the smallest things that could injure our children, and we must address them consistently—not like police but like tender shepherds.

Alma said, “What shepherd is there among you [who] doth not watch over [his sheep], so the wolves don’t enter and devour his flock? And if a wolf enters his flock, does he not drive him out?” (Alma 5:59) Note that a shepherd (or parent) watches over the flock. To “watch over” doesn’t mean to “occasionally glance in the direction of.”

And what are the wolves? We tend to think of people who enter in and cause an evil influence, but today the wolves are everywhere. Phones can be wolves, as well as social media, and some friends, and photos of other people we compare ourselves to. Whining can be a wolf, and arguing, and reluctance, and defiance, and just overall “attitude.” We are told to WATCH for these so we can drive them out—drive out, not tolerate until half the flock is eaten.

When Alma and his group fled the waters of Mormon and established their first community, Alma and the leaders of the church “did watch over their people, and did nourish them with things pertaining to righteousness.” (Mosiah 23:18) That is OUR job, to watch over our children, to watch for any deviation from the path, and to “nourish” or love them, because it takes but a single slip to find the mists of darkness. There is no fear here, or hypervigilance, only watchful care.

Let me illustrate the importance of watchful care with a story:

The first step in making iron is to dig the ore from the ground, almost always using large open pits. Then they crush the ore and chemically process it to extract the iron. What remains is called the tailings, consisting of finely ground rock particles—from sand to silt—mixed with water and processing chemicals. It’s called slurry and has the consistency of wet mud.

The tailings are transported to a dumping site, where they pile up over a period of years. The first layer of tailings dries out on the top, but beneath this crust is still the slurry, which still can be quite fluid. Load after load is dumped on the pile, until it can become very large.

One such dam was built near the town of Brumadinho (Broom-ah-JEEN-yo) in Brazil, where tailings were piled in an elongated oval shape for about 38 years, until 2014. By then the dam was nearly 300 feet high, 2400 feet wide. The pile just sat there, certified by engineers as safe, until January 25, 2019, when suddenly all that wet slurry broke through the surface crust on the downhill side. 415 million cubic feet of mud slid down the hill, crushing buildings, farms, roads downstream. 270 people died. I watched a video of the event, and within minutes of the dam bursting, the valley was transformed by a monstrous “filthy river,” right out of Lehi and Nephi’s dream.

The disaster began with the dumping of a single load of tailings on a hill—not a big deal, much like dropping a handful of mud on the floor. But then it grew with every load, roughly a million dump truck loads.

If unattended, there are no “little” behaviors. When kids do “little” things like whine, complain, pick on a sibling, tell “little” lies, make demands, and get angry, they’re protecting themselves instead of feasting on the fruit of the tree of life. And with each protecting act, they wander further from the tree. They dump another load of mud on the hill.

When they’re young enough, they can’t sin—they’re not accountable—but with each unChrist-like behavior, they CAN still build patterns of behavior that can explode like a mountain of mud and render them powerless to truly exercise their agency in choosing righteousness. It’s OUR responsibility as parents to love them, teach them, and protect them from the avalanche of feelings and behaviors that could bury them in a “filthy river” that would sweep them away from the tree of life, whether they had sinned or not.

As they get old enough to sin, these patterns, this building of mud piles, is just as important. A child can repent of a single transgression, but that one act can still contribute to a pattern that may drown him or her. A drug addict can repent of a single drug use—over and over—but even after repentance, and God’s forgiveness and cleansing, repeated use can still build that muddy dam that can at some point drown the person who built it, one handful or truckload at a time.

Each mistake can seem so small, but they combine to create effects beyond words. The Grand Canyon resulted from one drop and then another, over a great many years. As one philosopher said, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec) But each flake DOES matter and IS responsible.

In Chapter One we watched Jenny, a mother who was responding to her son Billy, who was whining about getting a cookie. She gave him two choices, and finally he said, “Ooookay then, I’ll take the carrots.”

But Mom was WATCHFUL like a shepherd and said (light-heartedly), “Nope, you still have an attitude.” And they talked until he understood more clearly and lost his attitude. Jenny understood the importance of consistency, that it’s not about keeping RULES. It’s about staying on the path, acquiring humility, and coming unto Christ.  She understood that there is no “little whining,” and that obedience alone means little.

Changing one word here that we don’t use much now, Michelangelo said, “Little things make perfection, and perfection is no little thing.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “Moments are the molecules that make up eternity! Years ago, President Hinckley counseled: “It is not so much the major events as the small day‑to‑day decisions that map the course of our living. ¼ Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions” (Ensign Nov 2000)

Nephi talked about the rampant evil in the last days, specifically about “the devil, who leads us by the neck with a small thin string until he binds us with his strong cords forever.” (2 Nephi 26:20-22) The power of Satan and the distractions of the world don’t begin with great, ponderous chains. No, they begin with string. I’ve watched workers secure a 150,000 ton ship to the dock, and they begin with a string that you could coil and carry around on your shoulder. They throw that to shore, and then use that to pull a thicker rope, then another, until the ship is secured to the dock with ropes thicker than my arm.

We parents are responsible to identify the little strings, and to cut them—or help our children cut them—while they’re small and easy. But even if they become larger, there is still much we can do. We have our own wisdom and love, and we have the redemptive love of the Savior of the world.

Now, in the next chapters, let’s learn much more about how to become loving enough and experienced enough to begin cutting those binding strings without unnecessarily cutting our children in the process.