No more self-coercion

I finally quit my marketing group this week. I'd been agonizing over the decision for months. I really like the people in the group, it has a wonderful energy and it has brought me business, but it meets every Wednesday at 7 am, at a time when I'm normally still asleep. Week by week, the dread was starting to seep into my Tuesday nights. I tried to get to bed early so that I could get up early, and I'd wake during the night, worried that I would oversleep or the alarm wouldn't go off. (And starting the day with a jolt of public speaking is not my ideal way to enter the conscious world either.)

Six or seven years ago, I wouldn't have recognized what I was doing to myself each week, that I was coercing myself (despite the stomach aches and anxiety -- how blind was I to the messages of my body and psyche??), and I certainly wouldn't have identified it as wrong. That's just life right? We have to do stuff we don't like, because it's good for us, or we should, or we don't have a choice, was how my thinking went. I don't believe that anymore. Parenting in so many ways has changed my life, and this is one way for which I'm tremendously grateful.

When I started trying to figure out how I wanted my parenting to evolve from attachment parenting (which is largely about those early months of life), I realized that I needed a different paradigm for relating with and guiding the kids as they got old enough to begin expressing their wants, needs and will. TCS (Taking Children Seriously) gave me a framework and a language for something that felt instinctively right to me, and one of its key tenets is not coercing our children or ourselves, but instead trying to see through apparent conflict to what is really going on, and finding solutions to true conflict that meet everyone's needs (far easier said than done, of course, but an invaluable skill for all aspects of human relations.)

I grasped pretty quickly why it was that I didn't want to coerce my children -- I wanted them to do what was right for them, to feel their own hunger, or tiredness, to experience a choice and its true natural consequence, to learn for themselves, to stay authentic and connected to their inner voice, to not distort their lives just to earn the approval of others. But it took me a while to realize that I could and should stop coercing myself as well. If I was resisting something, if it felt bad to me, then I shouldn't do it. At least not in that moment. I learned to notice and feel my resistance, to ask myself what was going on. Most of the time, I have found that I don't have to do what I'm resisting, that I'm only making myself do it out of fear or worry about what others will think or some other unconscious and unskillful driver. Sometimes, I find that it's the resistance that has at its heart a lie, a fearful story that I'm telling myself, and once I look at that closely, the resistance falls away.

So, I finally gave myself that grace, and realized that I was coming to dread those too-early Wednesday mornings, and I bowed out. I'm not letting the voice that says "But you need all the business you can get!" frighten me, because I know it's not true. I'm as busy as I want to be. And when it comes back with, "but business will slow down and then you'll be in trouble!" I take a deep breath and relax -- I know it's not true, I keep turning down work and quitting jobs, for heaven's sake, because I keep getting too busy.

I'm so grateful that I'm not driven by those fears and that I don't believe in coercing myself anymore, and I owe it all to my wonderful kids, who have never taken my coercive efforts quietly, they've always protested at the top of their lungs. Thanks, guys. Apparently, it has to get that loud to get through to me!