EVEN MORE LOVING AND TEACHING

As I begin this last chapter, I’m well aware that many questions remain on your mind. But all the answers simply cannot be found in this one training. There are thousands of blogs and videos you can review at RealLove.com.

We need to know what a bright hope is created in parenting when we understand the principles of the gospel and love as they apply to raising children.

Examples of Loving and Teaching 

I know a man who learned Real Love—just like you’re doing now—and he actually did learn to love and teach his daughter. And yes, he still made mistakes, but he was steadily improving, and it was making a difference.

One day, I talked by phone to his teenage daughter, Teri, and she said, “I really hate my dad right now. I'm acting entitled and ungrateful, and I just want to be right, and it's really making me blind to what my dad is trying to teach me. I was feeling disconnected, so I tried to talk to him about it. Then he asked if I wanted to feel connected, but I said no, I'd rather be stubborn and right. I just really don't like how he handled it even if I am being an annoying brat right now.”

Notice how utterly honest she’s being with me. Why? I’ve talked to her before. She knows I’ll listen, won’t interrupt, and won’t tell her to change in any way. I asked her: “What do you get from being a brat?” (A question, not an accusation)

She paused, smiled, and said, “I think I want attention.”

Me: “YES, you do. You're not stupid, kid. Do you GET the attention you want from your mother (the parents were divorced)?

Teri: No, she doesn’t understand me at all.

Me: “You want to feel deeply connected with someone who really sees you. You’re dying for it. And right this minute, you're reaching out to me for that. That took guts, and right now I'm pouring my soul all over you. I feel privileged to connect with you. I know, I'm an old man living far away, but any genuine connection feels pretty great.”

Teri: “Yeah, it does. That’s why I called. I tried visiting mom, but then I felt ashamed of feeling so alone and needy. I didn't tell anybody about it because I assumed they wouldn’t understand me. When I talk about how I feel, people don’t listen. They give advice.

Me: Yes, they do. You have beautiful instincts. You feel shame, and you know it. You can name it. Most adults can’t identify that feeling. You feel ashamed because you don't quite feel worthwhile. You don't quite feel valued, so you withdraw from people instead of learning how to connect with them. Or you get entitled and bratty to get attention. But then you feel worse about yourself.

Teri: Yes, that’s it. When I tried to talk to my dad, it felt . . . I don’t know.

Me: “How about ‘misunderstood, empty, unfulfilled, painful, trapped, stuck, confused.’ Do any of those choices feel true? Take your time.”

Teri: All of it. I don’t want to feel like that anymore. I could stay stuck in my unhappy little shell and blame everyone, and not take responsibility, and be right, OR I could do something about it, like I’m doing with you right now.

Me: Brilliant, exactly what I've been saying. You're a sensitive soul, kid. Your dad is doing his best, and he’s getting better at loving you, but today you just needed a little more.

Teri started off in life earning praise, like most kids. Then she got tired of it. It was just too much work for the brief rewards of praise. She became bratty and right. She was getting tired of that. She was beginning to prefer being understood and loved unconditionally. Imagine that.

THIS is what YOUR children want. And I just gave you an example—as I talked to Teri—of how you could talk to your own child. They actually get TIRED of trying to replace the Real Love they don’t even know about—the love they’ve never seen—with everything else: praise, power, and all the rest.

An example:

A child does as well as he can in school. At first, he does feel valued. But eventually, nobody notices. So then, when being responsible doesn’t work, he gives up and begins to lie to get praise and avoid disapproval. His parent asks, for example, did you do your homework?”

Child: “Yes, I did my homework.”

OR the parent asks, “What did you do after school?”

Child: “I did my homework.” or “I took the dog for a walk.” (Lying about something he was supposed to do.)

We don’t realize that we parents cause all this. It all begins with us and our ignorance about loving them.

And if anger and lying aren’t enough for a child, then we see whining, everything is unfair (victimhood), poor me, and more. And they become profoundly selfish.

This selfishness will destroy our children. No exaggeration. Selfishness is death because there is no love, no connection, no joy, just being trapped in a cycle of pain and reacting to pain, which never ends.

Parents are Afraid of Their Children

We really can help our children change all this, but we’re afraid. WE don’t feel loved enough ourselves, and we simply cannot tolerate additional disapproval—especially from our children. I want to shout this:

Allow me to illustrate what I just said about how our children become profoundly selfish, and how we must overcome our fears in order to help them—regardless of their particular behavior or diagnosis.

I know a man—we’ll call him Dad—who had lived all his life trying to please people, but when it became obvious that those efforts were yielding less and less, he became angry and then withdrawn. He learned about Real Love—just like you’re doing now. Then he took steps to FEEL loved, as I described in Chapter Two. And he finally did get the sense of worth and confidence to begin lovingandteaching his children.

Now, a scene from a day in his life:

Dad walks into the kitchen one evening, where his son Ken, 19, is eating his sister’s ice cream. This might seem like such a small thing, but we have to loveandteach using hundreds, even thousands, of such events before our children learn what they need to know.

First, A little about Ken. As a child, he started off earning his parents’ approval—as nearly all of us do, since approval is so exhilarating and addictive—but then he tired of it, and tired of school, and everything that involved responsibility.

Ken dropped out of high school and decided that school AND anything that resembled work were just “not for him.” So he stayed at home, watched video games, and did NOTHING. At the time, both his parents were too afraid of his disapproval—actually his fiery wrath—to teach him and prepare him for real life. So they just let him make his own decisions, while FUNDING his lack of responsibility by giving him a house to live in, transportation, food, video games, and whatever he wanted. Sounds like a sweet deal for Ken, but it was a death sentence.

So, dad found Real Love and was just learning to love and teach—like you—when he approached Ken, who was eating his sister’s ice cream. (Listen slowly: THIS Approach could be very similar to that used with any child with ADHD, addictions, whatever—although details and possible consequences might vary according to age.)

Dad said to Ken: Hey, what’re you doing?

Ken: What do you mean? (He was acting dense because he didn’t WANT to understand)

Dad: What are you eating?

Ken (with attitude because it had always worked in the past to get people to back off): Ice cream.

Again, they love to pretend they don’t understand, to make you do the work—to control you—and then most of the time you get tired and give up. But not here, not this time.

Dad sat down at the table with Ken: I can sit here all night long until you answer me.

To some, this might sound harsh. Nah, the kid is 19 years old, almost 20, dropped out of traditional high school, and graduated from a special tutorial program with a 60.3% average. The required passing score was 60%. He took his last test 10 minutes before the published deadline. So you think he actually got 0.3% above the requirement for passing, or did they just pass him so they didn’t look bad? For an entire year, he’d been told by his parents to get a job, but he did nothing, not even an application. Each time they asked him what he was doing about a job, he said, “It was not a good time” for him. From age 16, he had refused to get a driver’s license. He liked everybody carting him around. He was completely and utterly irresponsible—like a four-year-old—and caused nothing but contention in the family, constantly fighting with siblings for his rights and demands.

Ken continued to argue, first protesting that he was being ambushed. Wrong, he had been warned about leaving for a year, with NO action, then pretends that he doesn’t understand (not true), then it goes back and forth and around and around. But FINALLY, with considerable prompting and many questions from Dad, Ken says this:

“Okay, I ate Breanna’s ice cream (his sister). I knew it was hers, but I did it anyway because I wasn’t thinking about anybody but myself. I was being selfish, which I do a lot.” He wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about it, but he also wasn’t entirely just repeating what Dad was saying. It was as good as Ken could do—and it took more than an hour. Regrettably, on several occasions, Ken just refused to acknowledge the next step of his truth-telling, so Dad would take another day off the original two-week notice, and by the time Ken finally came around to sane thinking (mostly), he had to be out of the house in two days. He started to protest, but Dad reminded Ken that he (Dad) could make two days into two minutes pretty quickly.

This single example incorporates so many of the principles we’ve been discussing during this entire training.

• Dad recognized that something had to be done before his children were emotional cripples.
• He looked for help and found Real Love.
• He did what it took so that HE could feel unconditionally loved by other adults.
• Feeling loved, he talked to Ken with NO ANGER.
• It helped that Dad understood Event → Judgment → Feeling → Reaction, and he changed his judgment from Ken being annoying to Ken being just lost. Dad also recognized that the only way Ken was going to listen now—for his own benefit—was to experience the consequences of the real world.
• He decided to implement—finally—the principle of Zero Tolerance for Anger-Whining-Teasing-Lying-Withdrawal, which Ken did all day, every day.
• Dad recognized that Ken was addicted to video games, anger, victimhood, no responsibility, complaining, and more, and was wise enough to see that lovingandteaching-with-words wasn’t working, so consequences were simply the next step. Ken’s entitlement was getting in the way of his learning anything.
• He had done the First Truth Telling with Ken—as we talked about in Chapter Six—and repeated parts of it many times since.
• When the time came for the last consequence available, Dad was loving but firm and unwavering. He knew that Ken was not going to learn responsibility or get over his entitlement unless he left home and was required to take responsibility for himself.

Ken did leave home; he lived with one friend and then another because everyone eventually got tired of his irresponsible behaviors—surprise. He refused to look for a job, but finally went into the military, where he would be housed, clothed, fed, paid, taught a skill, and required to be responsible, including strict accountability—all exactly what he needed. (Not a solution for everybody, but it worked for him. He DID learn to be responsible there.)

In this brief story, Dad conducted a master class in lovingandteaching. Sometimes it’s very, very difficult—the resistance from the child can be astonishing—but he did it. And his son benefited.

Sometimes kids get tired of using all the Protecting Behaviors. They ARE exhausting, and the kid just gives up. He discovers that none of the forms of Imitation Love are rewarding anymore, except for ONE: Safety. Safety involves minimizing the pain with the least effort.

So some children withdraw into safety. They give up. I knew one teenager who simply moved to the basement of her parents’ house, where she stayed for several years. She never went upstairs, never went out. They put her meals at the top of the stairs to the basement. She withdrew from the pain of her family and from life. And mom and dad were lost enough themselves that they just let it happen. They had no idea what to do.

Almost invariably, though, if people withdraw far enough, they become completely isolated not only from other people but from their own feelings, their hopes, their dreams, everything but their PAIN. And this unremitting pain usually becomes clinical depression.

DEPRESSION

I could blow statistics at you all day about any given problem, but there are three problems with that approach:

1. Statistics lie. Numbers can be manipulated to say almost anything you want.
2. They’re out of date even the moment they’re published. And they don’t publish them yearly.
3. Statistics don’t matter much when we’re talking about YOUR unhappy child. If your child is unhappy (depressed), what do you care if the same problem exists in 5% of kids or 20%? It exists 100% in your child.

Despite the disadvantages of statistics, they can give you a general feel for something. Briefly:

• There are 3.5 million adolescents struggling with depression in this one country alone
• The National Institutes of Mental Health estimates that 8 percent of adolescents and 2% of children have symptoms of depression. (I am certain that that figure is low, because both children and parents tend to hide their depressive symptoms from people doing studies)

Feeling sad and alone occasionally is normal, even sometimes healthy in association with difficult events—illness, death of loved ones—but when chronic or overwhelming, it’s a problem. Prolonged withdrawal commonly turns into depression. You see chronic:

That’s a lot of stuff, and

All of these are also Symptoms of emotional PAIN.

One thread runs through it all: Disconnected. Or withdrawal or giving up.

Let me illustrate what depression is like with descriptions from people who were unusually capable of expressing themselves on the subject:

LINCOLN

Age 31: I am now the most miserable man living. Whether I shall ever be better, I can not tell; I awfully forebode (predict) I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better."

Rollo May (influential psychologist in the 90s)

"Depression can be usefully seen . . . as the inability to even see or construct a future."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."

William Styron

"Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain."

Depression is about disconnection (no love, just pain). It’s not feeling loved but hopeless (no way out of the pit where there is no love or light)

TREATMENT

The treatment of ADULTS isn’t well understood. With children, the confusion is even greater.

Anti-depressants are used a LOT: in recent years, they have been the #1 class of drugs prescribed

Do medications work?: 65% yes, but 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year. (So don’t remember 65% success, because that “success” fades, and people who have been depressed for so long that “less depressed” is so welcome that many people LESS depressed would say they are “not” when they are. They don’t know what genuine happiness even feels like, so how would they know what “not depressed” was?

Then slowly the depression tends to get worse, and they don’t notice the gradual slide until they’re deep in the pit again.

Talk Therapy has mixed results, possibly better than antidepressants.

I am NOT saying either would or would not be effective for you or your child, but for a moment, let’s look at what might make SENSE?

If depression is DISconnection, what could we easily imagine might be needed?

• Connection, which comes with LovingandTeaching.
• The First Truth-Telling—as we did in Chapter Six—is connecting. That’s just a beginning.
• Then we can connect using all the ways we described for loving, which you’re learning now: listening, touching, looking, and more, as we discussed in Chapter Nine and elsewhere. All connection.

We’ll talk more about how to treat depression shortly.

First, prevention is far easier than treatment.

What was one of the five zero-tolerance behaviors? Withdrawal, which precedes obvious depression.

Preventing and Treating Withdrawal

What is the solution to withdrawal? Loveandteach.

Loving a child—as we’ve described—creates bonds that are life-giving. Lifesaving. Life-long.

If you love a child from an early age, they will NOT withdraw.

AND if sufficiently loved, most children will recover from withdrawal and depression, even after years of not feeling loved.

But let’s get practical. What do you do if you have a child who IS withdrawing (possibly on way to depression)? Signs of withdrawal include:

• Sad
• Doesn’t participate in family activities
• Stays in their room
• Sleeps long, or hardly sleeps
• Persistent aches/pains, headaches, cramps, digestive problems
• Discouragement, chronic (“I can’t do anything right.”)
• Doesn’t want to have discussions about anything. Stomps off to their room, often with a sneer, meaning, “You couldn’t understand how I feel.”

NONE of this can be allowed to just “happen,” without response. (Remember that there is a Zero Tolerance for withdrawal without addressing it.)

The goal is not to STOP a child from being sad, not wanting to participate, having aches and pains.

That’s not what I mean by “zero tolerance,” as I’ve said—but we do have to address it.

Don’t have a goal to change your child, only to love and teach. If your goal is to change them, they will feel that as further expectations and control, which will be accompanied by disappointment and not loving them.

But you do have to take action: First, feel loved yourself.

Then truth-telling, from you and from them. Then listen, touch, look.

Are there specific actions you can take? Oh yes. No screens. Zero. Why? Because screens just make withdrawal EASIER and depression worse.

What can you offer instead of screens? Many parents think there is nothing else because they have HAD nothing else to offer, which is the very reason children are using screens in the first place.

So, CONNECT. Start now. Don’t agonize over the past.

TALK. Ask how they’re doing? (They will likely say, “I don’t know.”)

Don’t stop. Ask easier questions: “What do you hate about your life?” Often, they’re eager to talk about that, because there is usually an element of blaming in the answer, and we all find blaming easier than talking about ourselves.

You can ask, “What do you wish were different with your life?”

“Name your classes at school.” As they do, “What do you like or hate about that class?”

“What do you hate about the kids at school?”

“What do you hate about the teachers?”

With every answer, you’ll learn something about your child. With every answer, they will tell you how they feel alone, unloved, discounted, criticized, shunned, bullied, and more.

With each of their answers, you have an opportunity to show them how their pain is really do to a lifetime of YOU not loving them as they needed.

Often, they will resist you. They might say, “It’s not your fault.”

Or, “I don’t want to hear that Real Love stuff.”

If they do that, simply repeat the importance of love, and repeat some elements of the Initial Truth-Telling from Chapter Six. You might say, “You might be tired of hearing this, but it’s exactly what you need to understand. Just like you might be tired of studying, but you’ll never learn anything without it. You might be tired ot taking your medication when you’re sick, but it’s still necessary. You might not want surgery for a broken leg, but you’d still do it. There are lots of things we don’t want—or that we’re tired of—but some of those things just have to be done.”

During all this, you can’t give up loving. You have to be a firm rock for a child who is withdrawn or depressed. You have to keep lovingandteaching, including touching, looking, and listening.

If they don’t want you in their room, just sit down in their room and very patiently wait. Let them know that you’re not leaving them—not out of stubbornness but because you care about them. You might say, “You’re not alone. I’m here, and I’m staying with you. I love you. I’ve made many mistakes, but I can’t fix those. I can only sit here with you and love you.”

Other examples of connecting with a withdrawn child:

• They don’t want to participate in a family activity, but you require them to come and at least sit with everyone. Don’t act like there’s anything wrong.
• You might allow them not to participate in a family, but you break from the family and spend time with the withdrawn child every 15 minutes or so.
• You go shopping or run errands. You take the child, even over their objections, and hold their hand

It’s all Loveandteach, as we’ve been illustrating all along

I didn’t say it at the time, but through this training, I’ve actually been giving you ways to connect with your child. Go back and watch again. Every conversation is about connecting, WAY more than correcting.

• Insist (gently, often without words) on Zero Tolerance for WITHDRAWAL.
  • Those behaviors poison the world for a child.

• If you can’t reach a child
  • After a long time of consistent loving and teaching (with NO anger)
  • After talking to other parents in Real Love to give you guidance and love for YOU
  • In the presence of genuine thoughts of suicide (maybe—we’ll talk about that in a minute)

Then seek medical treatment, while never stopping the lovingandteaching.

IF anti-depressants are prescribed, keep loving and teaching. MOST of the time—as a child trusts you and feels loved—you can taper the medications to nothing, consulting with your doctor.

As with ADHD meds, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of meds, so approaching withdrawal and depression with love is even more important.

Suicide

In 2018 (USA Today), there were 45,000 suicides a year.

I was THERE when AIDS first happened—reading the first reports and making the first diagnoses—and when doctors and the public realized what was happening, there was a public health panic. But we’re not panicked about depression and suicide, the numbers for which are much larger.

Let’s examine just the number, the 45,000 deaths. It’s not really accurate, because again in recent years, 142,000 died from drug or alcohol accidental overdoses. Drug addicts ain’t happy—not a one. A HUGE number feel suicidal—they’re already escaping with drugs to the point of unconsciousness (a condition right before death), and if all they have to do is take a little more of their medication to be “gone” entirely, why wouldn’t they?

That would be a suicide—which it often is—but it’s not counted in the statistics for suicide. It’s often incorrectly called a drug overdose. I’m just suggesting that the number of suicides is WAY higher than 45K if you factor in drug and alcohol overdose, car accidents (where people intentionally drive into something), smoking (a slow way to go, with the attitude of “who cares?”), and more.

One writer called our drug and alcohol use, and our suicides, an “Epidemic of despair”

It’s all about PAIN. People with depression are trying to disconnect from all the causes of pain in their lives. They use depression as a reason not to participate in activities and interactions that have any remote possibility of causing pain, while simultaneously wallowing in pain. Depression, of course, is not an effective way of dealing with pain, but those who suffer from it cannot see another choice. They lose their agency to choose happiness. Suicide is the ultimate disconnection.

What can you do with a serious threat of suicide?

If the child mentions dying, listen. We’ll talk shortly about things to say, but at some point, you need to ask if they’ve thought about HOW they will kill themselves.

If they have a PLAN, or you think they do, get professional help now.

OR

If you see your child doing things to prepare for death—like giving away stuff, or saying goodbye to people, get professional help now.

“Honey, you don’t want to kill yourself.”

“I’m really worried about you.”

Let me give you examples of responses I HAVE given many parents whose kids were considering suicide I offer these in no particular order. You could say all this, or just parts. The point is the listening. So, examples of YOU speaking to your child considering suicide:

“Of course you’ve thought about dying. I get it.” (This is LISTENING)

Then you say, “You were born to be happy, and that could only happen as you felt unconditionally loved—by me (remember, you, the parent speaking).

But you were not loved unconditionally. I didn’t know how."

OR you could say instead—or with what I just said: “I understand what you’re saying: Why would you want to live when you’re this unhappy? I get it completely. So, you could kill yourself now and never find out what unconditional love and genuine happiness are like. That’s one choice,

OR

You could believe me when I say that I’m going to learn HOW to love you, and give you a reason to live.”

Depression and suicide are serious subjects. If you have doubts, ask a professional. But there’s a lot you can do before that and afterward. All the principles in this Training apply to treating depression, with or without professional help and medications. Depression is not a disease. It’s an expression of profound emotional pain.

Self-Harming (Cutting and more)

We talked about kids who earn praise, and then tire of it—or become completely frustrated—and then pursue anger, power, money, sex, excitement, whatever. But it all fails, so they go from one to another, or pursue one of those forms of Imitation Love to its bitter end. The bitter end may not happen until adulthood—often called a mid-life crisis.

And just now we talked about what happens when a child just GIVES UP the whole effort to fill their emptiness or dull their pain, with withdrawal, depression, and suicide.

There are so many ways to respond to pain, or to withdraw from it. Another way for our children to give up on their pain is self-harming, which includes cutting themselves, burning, hitting, and much more, which we’ll discuss.

This behavior makes sense when you see what is absolutely epidemic in kids and adults:

• There is just a vague sense of unhappiness that is not related to some identifiable traumatic event.
• I talk to kids about their lives, and the unhappiness is rampant.

Kids who earn praise and who appear to be “successful” in life, almost always hide their pain. They have to because openly expressing their pain would appear to be weak—or so they think—so they HAVE to hide it.

So I ask them:

Me: “How are you?”

“Fine,” they say.

Me: “No, HOW are you really? Do you feel like something is missing in your life?”

Commonly, this is followed by tears welling up in their eyes. The tears are a demonstration of their profound pain, but also an expression of great surprise and relief—even joy—that somebody has finally recognized that their “problem” is PAIN, not that they ARE a problem with a diagnosis.

Often these are the perfect kids, the compliant ones, the ones everybody likes. They’re addicted to succeeding and pleasing, and when would other people EVER stop that? Never. No, these are the kids who are obedient, cooperative, productive, clean, quiet, and compliant. They’re the “good” kids. Are you kidding? NOBODY stops THAT kind of behavior (successful, pleasing).

BUT Nobody is SEEING them, that they are screaming in pain, because we LIKE how they’re easy, convenient. They even make us look good.

The kids who earn praise SUCCESSFULLY tend to become lifetime people pleasers.

They become hollow shells. But they look so good on the outside. But their pain is boiling inside them, like a volcano. It MUST come out somehow.

There are so many ways for their pain to finally manifest itself. We could choose lots of things, but let’s talk about cutting, or any form of self-harm, which would include:

• Making cuts in their skin. Usually parallel lines. Often on arms, legs, sometimes genitals, shoulders, anywhere. Sometimes shallow, sometimes very deep.
• Burning themselves
• Pulling their hair out, which is relatively common and unrecognized, because kids do it in litte patches that may not be noticed. Trichotillomania (trich)
• Pulling out their eyelashes
• Picking at their skin and creating sores, which they then pick at endlessly, make the sores bigger, followed by more picking. Often on their face.
• Banging head against floor or wall—often not noticed unless skin is broken. Can actually cause brain damage by the time it’s finally noticed.
• Tattoos—sneaky form of self-mutilation that has the advantage to the user of being moderately socially acceptable... and even a form of art

I hope all of you parents are paying attention here, because if you don’t see your child self-harming, you will be one of the majority who won’t KNOW yet that it’s happening. And even if your child really is not self-harming, there is still a LOT you can learn here. Pain is pain, and self-harming is just ONE of thousands of ways to deal with it.

As I talk about pain, you can learn something about your child even if they’re NOT self-harming. My subject here is only PARTLY about cutting and the rest. It’s about how children respond to pain, so no matter how your child behaves, this is all about you and your child. It also turns out that all the behaviors I’ve listed throughout the Training ARE self-destructive, or a form of self-harming. Consider the self-injury and even self-destruction of anger, ADHD, withdrawal, depression, suicide, addiction—games, phone, drugs, alcohol—refusal to be responsible. All forms of hurting themselves, and we don’t see it.

The self-destruction of all unloving behaviors is virtually never recognized, but all responses to pain are similar in that they tend to cause additional pain to the person already in pain from a lack of love, and they cause pain to the people around them.

Now back to you parents WITH children known to be self-harming. Again, pain is pain, and this is just one of many ways to respond. Your child is not a freak. There is no shame in this. This is NOT a disease. Like with drug addiction or alcoholism or anger, it’s an expression of PAIN and an attempt to make it less. 

Again, back to self-harming. Why in the world would somebody hurt themselves physically? Oh, lots of reasons, which also apply to why somebody would knowingly take drugs, engage in high-risk behaviors, withdraw from everybody, attempt suicide, or simply fail to do schoolwork.

Kids who are in pain RARELY—if ever—can tell you clearly about their pain. They cannot say, “I’m in emotional pain. It’s unbearable. I’ve never felt enough unconditional love, so I feel empty and afraid all the time. When I act out—cut, use drugs, perform in front of audiences, be the class clown, get angry, get drunk, focus on my games or phone—I’m briefly distracted from my pain.” Nah, they don’t have that kind of insight? How could they? Nobody ever taught them.\

I have counseled thousands of ADULTS, and they can’t say what I just said either. We adults do not understand why we’re in pain. Usually not even THAT we’re in pain. No wonder we feel vaguely dissatisfied so much of the time, like something is just missing. If we can’t describe our pain, what chance do our children have to do that?

Why can we and our children not describe our pain?

If pain is the emotional water you have swum in from birth—even though it’s polluted water—if it’s the air you’ve always breathed (though toxic), you DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE. If any condition is all you’ve ever known yourself, and if it’s all you see in other people, too, then it becomes NORMAL. That is Death, because if pain becomes normal, you don’t notice it anymore, not consciously, but it KEEPS HURTING YOU, over and over.

People who harm themselves are ALWAYS in emotional pain. No exceptions. In fact, amongst all the diagnoses in the standard book that lists mental health disorders—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, used by everybody in the mental health field—people who cut themseleves (just one example of self-harming) SUCEED in killing themselves (not just threaten suicide) more than any other group, according to one authoritative book on the subject. This isn’t just acting out. It’s a desire to end all their pain, to die.

Ironically, cutters (forgive the short-hand reference to those who cut themselves—they call themselves that, as do most physicians) don’t kill themselves by cutting. They use pills or hang themselves, but the cutting is a profound scream of pain, not infrequently a scream just short of the ultimate pain relief, which is to be dead. The cutting, or hair pulling, or whatever, is a way for them to scream—like “I want to be dead” or “I hate my life and feel helpless”—when they don’t know how to physically scream or use words.

Adults commonly come to me and say, “I don’t understand. I’m miserable, I feel alone, I’m depressed, I’m in pain, BUT I wasn’t abused as a child, I’m not being hit by my husband now. Why am I so unhappy?”

The absence of Real Love is so common that we don’t recognize it as the cause of virtually all emotional pain. It’s become—again—normal, the air we breathe. The life-sucking trauma is not dramatic—just a sigh from another person, disappointment, quiet neglect, irritation justified by mistake—so how could something we’ve lived with all our lives be the cause of our pain? (This is very much like people miles downstream from an industrial plant dying of cancer while the sun shines and kids bounce on trampolines, blow up balloons for birthdays, ride their bikes. When everything APPEARS normal, how could they be dying of cancer in greatly exaggerated numbers? They don’t SEE the cause of the cancer: tiny, invisible molecules in the water they drink and bathe in.

So we don’t see the CAUSE of the pain we’re in. We adults don’t. Not all children do. Specifically—since we’re on the subject—cutters don’t. So, quite unconsciously, cutting can eliminate the CONFUSION that cutters ALWAYS live in. You’ll have to listen slowly to get this.

First, the child is in emotional pain—severe—but doesn’t know it and can’t express it. They just know that they’re not happy, that something is missing, something is wrong. He or she learns that if she CUTS, for example, she has a tangible reason to be in pain. Now, for a moment, she can SEE her pain. It makes sense. At least she is less confused by her pain, a condition she can’t even identify. It’s a desperation to understand. It’s a scream.

Confusion always makes pain worse. It’s bad enough to be in pain, worse not to know WHY, so even though this physical expression of emotional pain doesn’t OBVIOUSLY decrease the real causes of the emotional pain, it DOES decrease the confusion that makes pain worse. So, secondarily, cutting can actually make the emotional pain better by eliminating confusion. (Whew, complicated, but not to a cutter) I knew a kid who hurt herself by banging her head on the floor—sometimes to the point of concussion—and she told me she felt better when she was banging, because at least she knew why she was in pain.

Another reason to use Self-harm—sometimes called self-mutilating:

Their emotional pain is unbearable, and in the moment they are cutting—or angry, or threatening suicide—they have an intense focus. It physically HURTS, and in those few moments, everything else disappears. Any distraction from pain is welcome, even if it’s another form of pain. If the distraction from pain is not another pain, that’s great too—like gaming, porn, alcohol, or drugs.

It’s easy to illustrate the concept of distraction for yourself. Imagine that you’re worried about your financial situation, your marriage, your job, whatever. I get a large fork from the kitchen—again—and come in to where you’re sitting, and stab you in the leg, twisting it violently. In that moment, you have NO OTHER problems. Your focus is on the fork in your leg, so other pains go away. That’s what distractions do.

Cutting—and picking at skin and the other forms of self-harm I named—can have that effect. It’s a distraction, and when we’re in pain, we’ll do anything to reduce the pain or distract ourselves from it.

Which of Protecting Behaviors are involved in cutting? Oh, maybe lying. They believe their pain is the cutting for a moment, but they hide their underlying emotional pain. It is unconscious, but it’s still a self-deception. It’s also usually a dark secret they keep from you—their parents—and there is an element of power they get from that.

Acting like a victim? Little bit. People who feel victimized feel justified in doing anything.

Running from pain? Sure, but not conscious.

These kids are in so much pain that there is no joy in the world

Translate: Without joy, they feel dead, or they want to be. They’re utterly alone.

In the moments they cut, they feel alive. Really. Focused mentally, visually. There is color and tangible pain. They feel alive, and that beats the feeling of absolutely nothing.

Again, this isn’t about just cutting. There is a similar motivation with video games, phone addiction, drugs, and anger: they all produce FEELING. And distraction. I know a family where they had a 23-year-old son living with them. He had completely fooled his parents into believing that he couldn’t find a job and that school just wasn’t for him. So he lived at home with the responsibility of a four-year-old. But what produces happiness? Loved, loving, responsible. He had NONE of that, so he felt dead. There was no joy in his life. SO, although he wasn’t a cutter, he used porn, alcohol, video games, and his phone. Mostly his phone. Utterly addicted. I instructed parents in how to begin the steps to help him find loved, loving, responsible, and one of the first steps was no electronics of any kind. They took them, and he threw himself on the floor, where he cried for an hour. He said he could not live without his devices. As with cutters, his phone was a way to feel alive in an otherwise dead world.

SO I repeat, as I talk about cutters, I’m talking about your child, whatever form of pain relief they use.

Children who don’t feel loved have NOTHING. Doesn’t matter how much they have in the way of housing, phones, wealth, vehicles, toys, vacations, clothes, and on and on. In fact, wealthy children tend to self-harm more than poorer ones.

When you have nothing, and you’ve tried everything, you feel HELPLESS. When you’re not loved, every instruction or piece of advice or directive—from parent or teacher or whoever—becomes a controlling, unbearable prison or set of chains.

That condition is intolerable, and some kids learn that by cutting or hurting themselves, they are briefly IN CONTROL. Every cut is being made by THEM, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Oh, there’s more. The cuts TEND to be meticulously straight and often utterly parallel, precise to the point of surgical. They get a sense of POWER, self-mastery.

What Protecting Behaviors are involved?

Attacking. Themselves. (And parents, since the message is ”I hate you, and here’s the undeniable and visible proof—with the cutting—and you can’t stop me.”)

Lying. They almost always hide it. If they cut their arms, they wear long sleeves, if legs, they wear long-legged pants or long shorts (then they make cuts very high, near the groin)

What Imitation Love do kids get from this particular reward of cutting—from lying? They create the illusion of power or self-mastery. Self-evident: They create the ILLUSION of SAFETY and POWER. But only an illusion. (Sounds insane. YES, the decisions we make in pain ARE insane. Cutting yourself for power? That seems to make no sense, but if it’s all you have, you do it.) Like Bulimics (commonly believed that bulimia is about self-image, but it’s more about control—controlling whatever). Not real, doesn’t last.

And the problem with the illusion is that it seems real, and the kids get their hopes up, so that then when the safety and power don’t last, they’re crushed, and then they become depressed or kill themselves.

That almost seems ridiculous. That’s like, “Yesterday I touched a hot stove and burned myself. Today I think I’ll put my hand in the fire.” It appears absurd on the surface.

Yes, kind of. But the “original trauma” here is a child’s entire life of experiencing the pain of living in a vacuum without love. That is unbearable. But it becomes FAMILIAR to them. They don’t become entirely USED to it, however. Never. Though familiar, not feeling loved always hurts, but we learn to react to it, or hide i,t or bury it so deep that it’s almost gone.

I’ve compared not feeling loved to living like a fish out of water, or like us living in a vacuum, or like us drowning. It’s unbearably painful, and we MUST do something about it, even if that action doesn’t work.

Here’s another metaphor—can’t be too many metaphors to make the point or teach the principles that explain nearly all of human interaction.

Living without love is like living in a cave, so deep that there is no light. It’s all you know, because you’ve never had enough love. You’ve always lived in the cave. Everybody around you is living in the cave. So the cave becomes the WORLD. It CHANGES you. You believe the lie that the cave IS the world. You bang around in the dark, bumping into rock walls and into other people. It’s normal.

That’s how it is for an unloved child. It’s a tangible, visible way to create more of the emotional pain that is normal. It’s familiar. It re-creates the pain she finds everywhere.

Much like a child who is repeatedly, regularly sexually abused will sometimes become promiscuous, sexually hyperactive—exactly what you’d think she’d avoid. So why does she do it? Because it’s familiar. She knows how it goes, knows the rules, and isn’t lost. Insanely, she now has a measure of control because it’s something she KNOWS. Cutting re-creates the familiarity of pain, which is a bizarre kind of comfort.

These children in pain feel so unbearably alone. That feeling is chronic and debilitating. Studies are now showing that feeling alone is a health risk in the same class as smoking. It’s that dangerous, and we can’t stand it.

So these self-harmers will take any kind of attention. Any attention is better than none. It has been proven that kids would rather be yelled at than ignored. They’d rather get the attention for cutting than be ignored.

So cutters get sympathy, which feels wonderful (make sounds of it). They get concerned (which is dangerous because it demonstrates to the child that something is wrong with her), then irritation from parents when it happens over and over, then doctors’ visits, then hospitalization, and on and on. It’s not a happy ending, but it seems better than being alone in a cave.

We’ve talked about how children hear the message of “I don’t love you” if we’re angry, if we’re habitually quiet or withdrawn, if we criticize, and on and on. Anything unloving is traumatic to a child. Very traumatic.

And when we parents are unkind, do we EVER say to a child, “That was entirely my fault. I didn’t feel loved myself, so I took my pain out on you. You are NOT to blame for my behavior. I was WRONG.” Do we ever say that?

NO, so what does the child hear EVERY time we’re angry? Not only do we not love them, but it’s THEIR fault.

When they cut, they viciously attack themselves, just like they’ve been attacked by us and others. Cutters are doing what they know: attacking, blaming.

What Imitation Love do they get from their cutting? Mostly power: THEY are in control of the blaming. Not parents, not anybody else. Bizarre but true.

Oddly, they get an element of safety. Maybe if they blame themselves and punish themselves enough—by cutting—others won’t. This isn’t conscious, but I promise you it’s happening in their heads, unconsciously. Sometimes, with help, they later see the safety part of this and light up as they realize it’s true.

Children in pain feel helpless. Cutting can be an expression of anger at the world. They were born entitled to love and happiness. Divinely entitled. When that doesn’t happen, they just KNOW—deep in their inner sensors—something is deadly wrong, and finally they explode in anger, and in this case at themselves. Some kids cut themselves as an expression of anger AT their parents. But it’s just a reactive explosion. It’s the Protecting Behavior of anger, some lying, and some feeling victimized.

And for a moment, there is the pleasure of excitement and power. Insane, yes, but pain makes us insane.

Sometimes, self-harming is a screaming plea for help. They hope their parents will notice the last fresh cut just below their shirt sleeve or pair of shorts. “Please, please notice me and help me. You haven’t before, I feel hopeless, but maybe this time you’ll notice me.” Heartbreaking.

So, wow, that list is a lot of things that a child can get from self-harming, and often it continues into adulthood. Some kids use being hyperactive sexually as a form of self-harming, women offering themselves to be used by man after man (usually women who do this) as a form of self-abuse. It’s the only world they know, and this one—sex—can continue for a very long time.

Now, you UNDERSTAND your child better. Much better. Including you parents whose children don’t self-harm. Or so you think. Just because they’re not cutting or obviously injuring the bodies does not mean that they’re not self-harming:

Look at all the other ways we’ve talked about for a child to act out:

Are any of those behaviors productive? Helpful? Do they lead to a happy, loving, and responsible life? Better relationships?

NO. A resounding NO to all. And who chooses all those behaviors? Our children. And it hurts them. So they’re ALL forms of self-harming. This discussion about self-harming applies to nearly every child I know in some way.

If you missed how my discussion on self-harming applies to your child, go back to the beginning of this chapter and watch it again. Really. It DOES apply to you.

There are even more forms of self-harming, ones that are usually not identified: people who frequently get into car accidents, who often fall down and break bones, who “accidentally” burn themselves and have other harmful accidents, who accidentally take poisons of various kinds, or “forget” and take their medications multiple times, and more.

Self-harming is uniformly caused by feelings of worthlessness, loneliness, panic, anger, guilt, rejection, and self-hatred. Just “lack of love”

Let me practically illustrate self-harming by sharing a conversation I had with the mother of a teenage girl, Lucy:

Mom said, “My ex-husband, Mason, has been telling our daughter, Lucy, that he’ll be moving out of the state soon. He’s been saying this for years, and I think he brings it up periodically just to terrify her and to get at me. He can be pretty cruel. The other day, I started seeing cuts on her forearms. She had great excuses about this accident or that, but she finally admitted she was cutting herself because she was upset about her dad’s threat. This cutting terrifies me. Do you have any suggestions?”

Me: Lucy is screaming to feel loved. Her behavior proves that she hasn’t been getting it all her life—from either you or your ex. She’s learned to settle for whatever attention she can get from either of you, and your ex is threatening to withdraw some of that attention by moving. What she needs, though, is some unconditional love.

I continued: “It’s clear that your husband can’t love her, but YOU are also adding to the problem. When she acts out—with cutting or any other unhappy behavior—YOU feel threatened too: in your words, “terrified.” You feel helpless. You feel like a horrible mother: Here’s your own daughter cutting herself, and you can’t stop it. You want her pain to stop, and in part because you want YOUR pain to stop. She can feel your fear and your needs, and it’s making things worse because while you’re afraid, you’re less available to love her. Feeling your fear, she’s likely to cut MORE.”

So now I’m speaking to everyone listening, not just to Lucy’s mom. What can Mom actually say to Lucy? She can tell Lucy the truth about Lucy’s life—perhaps a version of the Initial Truth Telling we discussed in Chapter 6—which includes telling Lucy that she’s not been loved unconditionally. Mom can give Lucy examples of where Mom was unloving. After this training, all parents have plenty of examples to choose from. Mom can tell her that SHE will be learning to love Lucy, but that her father is unlikely to change, and his threats to leave just prove that he’d rather manipulate her than love her.

(Yes, I know the old saying, If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. But, on the whole, that is bad advice when it comes to children. If we don’t tell our children the truth, they will be confused, so then they blame THEMSELVES—for their own unhappiness, for the fears of their parents, and often blame themselves for their parents’ divorcing. We have to tell them what’s really going on, taking into account their age, of course. Lucy needs to know that her father is not interested in loving her, or she will stay confused.)

Everything Lucy is doing is a reaction to fear, and without realizing it, Mom is making things worse because SHE is reacting to HER own fears. She’s afraid of what her ex-husband will do. She’s afraid that Lucy will be hurt. She’s afraid that Lucy will make her look like an incompetent parent. She’s afraid Lucy won’t love her. That’s a lot of fear. And Lucy can FEEL it. We don’t think about this, but the moment we parents are afraid, we’re focused on OURSELVES and become ineligible and unable to love our children. And they know it. Mom has to get unconditionally loved herself, and then with confidence she can learn to love Lucy. It will take time and effort, but well worth it. (She could complete this training, for example)

Lucy only wants to know ONE thing here. No matter how complicated the divorce is, or custody, or her father moving, she wants to know if SHE will be loved. That’s the central question of her life. Really. And if Mom can answer that question for her, her fears will diminish dramatically. Lucy WANTS her father’s love—not going to happen—but if MOM can learn to love her, Lucy will have a guaranteed source of Real Love, and she’ll be fine. Really. In most cases, just ONE loving parent is sufficient.

Now, to make this closer to home: Let’s make you the mother of Lucy. Not only do you do a version of Initial Truth Telling, but you tell her that you’re not disappointed or anxious about what she’s done—the cutting. Your unconditional acceptance of her will have a huge bearing on how she feels about her cutting. Explain that the only reason she is cutting herself is because she’s in pain, and she’s in pain because she doesn’t feel loved. And now you’re going to learn how. YOU are going to make it your mission in life to learn how to love her better as her mother.

You’ll keep attending parenting conference calls and watching the training, over and over. And you’ll watch the video answers to questions that are posted on the site every week. Do everything offered on the Parenting website. Do everything you can to get all the Real Love you can get. Participate in Real Love groups. Tell the truth about yourself to other adults and create the opportunities you need to feel loved. You can learn how to do all this.

If you do all this, your daughter will have an excellent chance of becoming whole and healthy, and then she’ll simply have no need to act out in the ways she is now. She’ll lose the NEED to cut herself. In the process, you’ll become a great deal happier, too, because it’s all about Real Love—for all of us. This conversation about Lucy would almost be the same whether Lucy were cutting, or angry, or addicted to games or drugs, or whatever. It’s all about treating the pain.

Eating Disorders

First, it is quite the rage among supposed “experts” in this field that anorexia and bulimia are DISEASES. They actually tell their patients that they’re just WIRED differently in the brain, which causes their eating disorder. And they tell their patients that they’ll be struggling with their disease for the rest of their lives. This is dead wrong, and it’s misleading, and it leads to kids who believe they’re permanently defective. It’s monstrously irresponsible.

Eating disorders are NOT a disease. They’re a response to pain—whether the child eats too little or too much. What do they get from their behavior? It’s almost the same as for cutting and other self-harming. In fact, eating disorders could be considered a KIND of self-harming.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of children having an eating disorder:

1. Over-eaters get the obvious benefit of their eating distracting them from pain. With a mouthful of delicious food, the pain in their lives can seem temporarily better. Some experts say that overeating leads to obesity, which keeps people away, thereby isolating the over-eater, who wants to keep people away. Too complicated. Eating is simply a form of comfort.
2. All eating disorders tend to get attention. People comment on children being so thin, which is regarded increasingly in the world as a good thing, and they make comments on children being too heavy, which is also attention, and we talked about how negative attention is better than none.
3. Eating, not eating, and bulimia all create the illusion of power or control. For a child who feels helpless and without choices, this is not a small thing. All day, children hear what they have to do and shouldn’t do, so when they make choices about eating, they feel in control.

Solution? Do NOT emphasize the eating or not eating. This just increases the child’s belief that something is wrong with her, which leads to a sense of painful decreased worth and a greater likelihood of perpetuating the eating problem.

Love them. Tell them how little you care about how much they eat. Engage them in activities with you, some of which involve you eating. They will notice that you’re happy regardless of whether you eat or not, and, most importantly, they will notice that you don’t CARE whether they’re thin or heavy. It’s LOVE that changes these eating habits, not techniques. Follow all the illustrations in the Training about how to love your children, without specific reference to their “disease,” and you’ll begin to see a child who is happy. In most such children, the disorder disappears.

If a child becomes dangerously thin, medical intervention is sometimes necessary, but before and after hospitalization, there is much loving and teaching to be done. Love and teaching are always part of any solution with a child.

I once sat with a 17-year-old girl who was becoming increasingly anorexic. As she sat in the chair opposite me, I pulled my chair close to the point that our knees were touching. As I looked directly into her eyes, I held out both my hands, palm up, and she understood what I meant. As she placed her hand in mind, I asked her to recall the last time either parent—or any adult—had touched her, looked into her eyes, and asked her how she felt or how she was doing, without any obvious agenda.

She just wept, finally shaking her head while saying, “It’s never happened.” We had a lovely conversation after that, and I began to teach her parents to love her. Gradually, she began to eat, quit withdrawing from the family, and was obviously much happier. She did not have a disease. She did not need therapy. She needed the love and teaching of her parents.

LovingandTeaching Together

Two parents presented their teenage daughter, Gwen, hoping that I could help them with her depression, cutting, complete withdrawal from the family, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They were baffled by her behavior because they claimed that they loved her consistently.

With more questions, I discovered that neither parent had any idea what unconditional love was. Neither had ever received it or seen it, so there was no chance of their giving it to Gwen. So why did they believe they were loving her?

Mom constantly found fault with everyone, including Gwen. She interrupted every sentence I attempted to speak, doing the same with her husband. She contradicted people and criticized them all day—including Gwen.

Between them, they believed that they loved Gwen (Dad’s pacifying) and taught her (Mom’s lectures) all day, but the truth is that neither parent loved NOR taught. Dad thought that loving Gwen meant to give her whatever she wanted, but he simply INDULGED her, so she was entitled, demanding, snotty, and ungrateful—along with the cutting, bulimia, depression, and more. Mom thought she was teaching, but without love, she was only nagging, criticizing, and making Gwen feel worthless.

The combined result was a pit of pain for Gwen, who then reacted with all her harmful and isolating behaviors.

Parents must love and teach simultaneously, and if we have the definition of either “love” or “teach” wrong, we get results similar to those of Gwen’s parents. Don’t fall for fake love and teaching. It doesn’t work. It’s even worse than nothing, because the fake stuff fools us into believing that we’re doing the right thing. In this Parenting Training, you’re learning what Real Love and teaching look like. Keep going. You will be rewarded manyfold.

Role-Playing

We’ve talked about so many ways to teach children: pointing out their behaviors in the moment, using the examples of other people, reading scriptures, using movies, and other media. Another powerful way to teach children the Course of Life is to use role-playing, where we help them create in-the-moment situations that they will encounter in their lives. As they play different roles in the “play” we write and produce on the spot, they apply true principles, practice loving, and gain confidence in teaching with circumstances that otherwise might confuse or even overwhelm them.

Positive Consequences

We’ve talked a lot about problem behaviors. And loving and teaching. And consequences.

We also need to let our children experience POSITIVE consequences, much like the positive feedback we talked about in Chapter Two and elsewhere.

Let me illustrate positive consequences with a story about a teenage boy, Kyle, and his father, Luke.

Kyle had been quite a mess: Angry, irresponsible, using alcohol and weed to numb his pain, playing endless video games. Eventually, he became depressed and lost all interest in everything. On occasion, he talked about how he’d like to be dead. 

Luke (Dad) learned to find the Real Love he had always needed, and as his own wounds and pain healed, he learned to loveandteach Kyle.

Step by step, Luke consistently loved and taught Kyle. It was amazing to watch. Kyle became less depressed and began to enjoy spending time with his father.

Kyle learned to be responsible and enjoyed the sense of fulfillment he got from that, which is the POINT of being responsible.

One day, Kyle wanted to go out to a friend’s house overnight—an unthinkable desire in days past, because it would certainly have ended in some kind of trouble—and Luke said Sure, but he needed to be back by noon the next day.

The next morning, Kyle texted and said that everybody wanted to go to a movie, but that if he went to the movie, then he couldn’t be back until 2:00 pm, two hours later than their agreement.

Luke texted me right then—after Kyle had texted him—and said that Kyle had been SO consistent with times and results and consequences, but Luke was afraid he was being manipulated by Kyle to get what he wanted—as he often had done in the past.

Gradually, Kyle was allowed to make more and more choices: Driving a car, some computer game time, grades still up, Kyle was given a later curfew, which he enjoyed.

Summary

We’ve talked much about how to respond to unloving behaviors. Each time I’ve described such a response, whether you realize it or not, we’ve been talking about:

• Teaching them how to feel loved
• How to be loving
• How to be responsible—for tasks and for their own feelings

These are all your duties as a parent. You’re so much more prepared—but of course, there will always be more.

Loving and Teaching a Child Who is Different

Now, let’s talk about loving and teaching from a different perspective, mixed with understanding our children’s gifts, which we talked about in Chapter Nine.

I know a young woman, well past her teens, who was raised in a home where they had no clue how to love her. The parents had never seen or felt unconditional love, never. To make the conditions much worse, this little girl was just born different. She saw things differently, she had different needs, she expressed herself in ways that other people thought were “odd.” There was no particular diagnosis to be made here, but she was genuinely weird in many ways. She still is. But her peculiarities made it even harder for her parents to understand and accept her. That was tragic, because they already didn’t know how to unconditionally accept and love anyone. Bottom line: this kid barely got any attention at all, much less unconditional love.

Her parents never did learn anything about unconditional love, so this little girl spent her entire life without any. Nothing. She was neglected, occasionally dismissed, and even mocked and criticized. She tried traditional schooling, but she was too odd for that. The other children teased and mocked her, which became intolerable. She had to do homeschooling, which meant no education at all, because her parents didn’t participate. But she found books and educated herself.

A few years after reaching the age of high school graduation, she left home and moved away, primarily to avoid the visible evidence every day that she didn’t matter—just an absence of understanding and attention, without any overt abuse. Oh, but the world was no great treat either. It would be a massive understatement to say that she didn’t fit in. She questioned her gender; she had a difficult time keeping jobs—many of them—and forming and developing relationships. Again, there was no obvious diagnosis of anything. She was just different and further handicapped by never having been loved.

To illustrate just a little, Beethoven and Mozart—possibly two of the greatest three musical geniuses ever—were considered pretty bizarre as far as their personalities and ability to get along with people. After listening to their music, would anyone look back and wish they had been more “normal”? Would we wish they had been more average? Laughably absurd. No, different is not bad or less. Another illustration: watch the movie, Temple Grandin. It demonstrates a child being strikingly different, and how that became an enormous asset through loving and teaching from a parent. Stunning.

Back to this young woman I’ve been describing. I simply loved and taught her. For years. Many times she asked how to respond to people in this situation, and that. I offered options, without telling her what to do. Finally, after an endless series of questions and confusion from her, I wrote this to her:

“You really need to learn something. I'm going to state it very clearly, to minimize the confusion in your mind and in your heart. You are different—different from the average, different from everyone. You have different genes, epigenome, the way you were raised, hormones, brain chemistry, whatever. To most people, you are different to the point of being peculiar or weird. You MUST learn to live with that. You being different IS NOT BAD, it just means that you are more than a little outside the norm. People are—on the whole—are quite limited in their perspectives, and they DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT, so they tend to avoid them or even condemn them.

I continued with her: “I don't find you difficult, and you sense that. I just accept you, and occasionally offer you options that would minimize your friction with others, without changing who you are. You have to embrace your being different. Celebrate it. Enjoy it. Accept that you will likely never have a LOT of friends, which will free you to just enjoy the few who can understand and love you.

She responded:

“All through reading your email, I cried. I really am just different, not disgusting. I never wear makeup. I cut my hair with scissors from the Dollar Store, and have for the last thirteen years. I wear sneakers to church. I tend to speak directly to people—sometimes with an unusual intensity—instead of putting on a fake smile and speaking so that people will like what I say. I sometimes ride my bicycle around in circles while composing songs or piecing together ideas for stories I write. I get some weird looks, but I don't care.

In great part because of your acceptance of me, I FINALLY LIKE those things about myself. They are part of who I am, and I wouldn't want to change them to suit someone else's idea of what I should be. Some of my oddities are the best parts of me.

While some part of me already knew this intuitively, hearing you say it makes it much more real, and it’s incredibly freeing. Why would I waste time trying to get people to understand me and accept me, when instead I can simply FIND the people who DO understand me and accept me?”

THIS young lady typifies what we can do as parents, and the effect we have on our children. Nearly all children feel unacceptable in some way, and we must be there to love and teach them. We must first refine our own abilities to love and teach. We MUST feel loved by other adults.

Then we help our children discover their gifts (Chapter Nine) and help them to develop THEIR gifts—to become who THEY are, as the young lady I just described—which can happen only WITHIN the guidelines we teach them of feeling loved, being loving, and being responsible. If we can help them accomplish all that, we will have helped to create happy children, possibly the greatest thing a human being can do.

There is nothing you’ll ever do in the world more important than raising a happy child.

I look forward to interacting with you on the website and in other ways.

You can do this, and we’ll be helping you.

Study the thousands of videos and blogs found on RealLove.com and YouTube.