(Scroll down to "Learning to Parent Oneself" to read the foundation of this idea.)

I keep coming back to the idea that, “The one thing the Overly Critical Voice will never do is Praise.” It may give a back-handed acknowledgement like, “Great job. What took you so long?! Keep going…” But it will never praise...or say, "I love you."

This is incredibly Invalidating and Not Fair! Yet, this is what a person run by their Overly Critical Voice says to themselves (and others) even when they do the harder thing to do.
We can only tolerate such harsh Criticism for so long before we Give up and Quit, and then the Overly Lax Voice takes over.

Ever since I can remember, I have been run by the Overly Critical Voice in my head. The idea of Praising myself or feeling comfortable receiving Praise has been a foreign concept to me up until around writing "Learning to Parent Oneself."

I have continued to practice quieting my Overly Critical Voice, and continued to help others learn to be more Fair to themselves. In that process, I have come up with a (theoretically) Simple and Sound strategy to end the inevitability of the Pendulum swinging to the Overly Lax Voice that  leads us to Quit/ Give Up on our new Routines / Habits / Diets / Resolutions

This is how it works:
Step 1: Whenever we do the harder thing to do, we say: “I am proud of me for ______." Or, "I love me for ______."

Step 2: When the Overly Critical Voice pushes back (and it will), just ask yourself:
                                       What was the Easier thing to Do?
                                       What was the Harder thing to Do?

For example: I worked out for 5 minutes.
1) “I am proud of me for working out for 5 minutes.”

The Critical Voice will for surely want to push back with, "5 minutes?! You were supposed to work out for 30 minutes! And you didn’t do anything the past 3 days!”

2) Well…. Would it have been easier to work out for 5 minutes? Or Zero minutes??
Therefore, I am proud of me for working out for 5 minutes.

Step 3: Once you believe the Praise, keep repeating, “I am proud of me.”

Keep in mind:
The Overly Critical Voice is our default voice. Once we stop repeating the Praise, the Criticism will go right back on. Just like Fear, “Criticism always want to be fed. All we can do is learn to feed it less.”

How do we feed it less?
                                                           Do the 1 thing the Overly Critical Voice will never do…

As we are all painfully aware, we are in the midst of some very uncomfortable future unknowns looming in front of us.
We have been walking for months on a dimly lit path and as we look forward, we realize we cannot see what lies ahead for:
...the election outcome, the anomaly of this election process - no clear answers are going to come on election night, potential legal battles to follow, COVID rates and death rates rising, vaccines, etc.
-Just writing this has made my anxiety bubble up to the surface!
Given the state of these significant Unknowns, I figured it was time to go deeper into the process of How to Deal with Future Unknowns.

There are theoretically 2 components to dealing with a Future Unknown and feeling some sort of control in regards to the situation. For the record, there is only one thing we can control: ourselves; our thoughts, our emotions and our actions.

Part 1: “I did my part.”
The first is the one that we figured out how to do a long time ago:
Worried about a test? Study for it. We still may not be able to fall asleep the night before the test because we are worried we will not do well. But if we can authentically tell ourselves, “I studied hard,” then we can likely quiet our brain and fall asleep by knowing, "I did what I could do. I did my part.”

Doing my part can be very helpful to quiet the anxiety wanting to be fed within us. But, there is a limit to “Doing my part” to feel in control of a situation.

With the election, I can do my part:
I voted, I signed and put my ballot in a ballot drop box, I followed up to make sure they counted my vote. Or, I did my part by contributing to a candidate, or contributed to organizations that are fighting against voter suppression.

This is not helping me feel any better about the election this year… I did my part does not solve the true problem: I know I am not in control of the outcome of this election!

We can apply the same principal to getting COVID and giving it to someone on accident. We can do many things to do our part to prevent spreading COVID, but it is no guarantee we will not asymptomatically pass it to someone else. Wondering when a vaccine will come out, and how effective it will be shows how obvious the situation is out of our control.


Part 2: Knowing / Trusting/ Turning it Over
I began to address Part 2 in February 2020 in “Dealing with the Future Unknown.” Please check out the previous writing as well. The Timeline is a very helpful strategy.

Part 2 is the solution for when we are on the dimly lit path and as we look ahead, we realize we cannot see what lies out there. What do we do?! Bad things could be out in the dark!

This is why we created the ineffective strategy of preparing for the worst: we were scared and we did not know what else we could do. The truth is that there is no longer anything we can do to help control the outcome of this unknown situation. We are not in control. We know it, and we are terrified. So, we do what we have been trained to do our entire lives: feed our fear.

We can review everything the teacher told us to study, but we still do not know whether the test will have questions on the material we know well or the material we are not as confident about.
We can eat healthy, exercise consistently and go to the doctor regularly. But while we are anxiously awaiting our test results, we know that we cannot undo our genetics or that we may end up getting bad news.

As I said last time and say to many clients frequently,
“Fear always wants to be fed. It is insatiable. And the more we feed it, the hungrier it gets.”

The solution is simple in theory; though very difficult (at times) in application.

A. Focus on the Desired Emotion: "What do I want? Not, what do I not want?"

Anxiety looks to the details or Quantitative Level to be fed. It wants to play out every single possible scenario that could happen for a Future Unknown. This is not going to take us anywhere helpful. All we can do is train our brain to stop doing this by focusing on the Qualitative Level.

Think about it:
Why would we worry about how well we do in a job interview tomorrow if we knew we were getting the job? This would be illogical. We would not waste our time and energy worrying. We would just explain to ourselves, “You have every right to be nervous about your interview, but I promise you, it will be ok.”
                                                                      "I could choose peace instead of this."
Let's get to something more realistic:
I have no job, and I am applying to many jobs. I don't even know which job I really want, and I don't know if I have to settle for something I don't really want because it is so hard to find a job during a global pandemic. The infinite questions would be exhausting: Do I apply to this job, even though it sounds boring and I am overqualified? I think I want that job, but what if I get it and realize I don't like it?

Skip the infinite possible scenarios! Focus on the things you do know: How you would feel when you got THE job; that is the job you wanted even before you knew you wanted it! Think about it. How can we imagine working for a company we have never heard of? We cannot. But the feeling of relief and joy and happiness of knowing we got the job and now don't have to worry anymore is the same feeling we will feel whether or not we had heard of the company before.

Timeline for Future Unknown: Did I apply for, get and take the Right Job?
_______I__________________________________________I__________________________________
       Time A = present                                    Time G = I know whether or not it worked out
                                                                                                                                                   
*I do not get to control how long it takes until I know whether or not it worked out (If I applied for the right job, let alone if I will get it). The only thing I can Control is how miserable I feel between now (A) and when I actually have the answer to whether or not it worked out (G)?

Feeding Fear:
_______I__________________________________________________I_______________________
        A = present                                                                *G1 = “I applied for the wrong job!”
                                                                   
Trusting that it will work out/ I can have what I want:          
________I________________________________________________I_______________________
               A = present                                                         *G2 = “I got the job I wanted!"

The Past is over = no longer real
The Future has not occurred yet = Not Real

*G1 and G2 are equally unreal at time A = because they have not occurred yet!
So why feed Fear when it is as equally as unreal as my best case scenario??

B. Gather the Past Evidence that It Worked Out even when we didn't think it would:
                                        "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."
Think about difficult times we have had in our lives when we were terrified/ hopeless/ defeated. We made it through these moments to be here now. It was certainly rough when we were in the thick of it, but we made it through; we survived it. We are here, and we learned and grew because of these events. Sure, maybe if we could go back and never have had to live through it, we would skip it. But, something positive must have come from this difficult experience. *If you are not there yet with a past event in your life, a) this is totally a reasonable place to be, b) look to a future self who is further away from it.
I have been through some tough heart breaks. Historically, I have not been good at letting exes go and moving on. I have been in the thick of it; in denial and or grieving the loss for an amount of time I am embarrassed to say. But with enough time away, I have always been able to see how the emotional pain was in my favor. I hurt for a lot longer than I wanted to, but I learned from it and it made me a stronger, healthier person.
I have reflected a lot on the tough moments in my life. As painful as they were, I would not undo them because they made me into the person I am today. I may have wished I learned the lessons faster or easier, but I learned from them. I would not give up that learning.

C. Turn it over to your Future Self:*
Einstein believed Time and Space are Relative. We have the ability to theoretically connect to our smarter and wiser Future Self who knows the outcome of this current Unknown, and this Future Self has words of calm and knowing to share with us.

“I know this is a really tough time for you. I know you are scared. You have every right to be scared, but I promise you it will be ok.”

Look at something that has happened in the past that we now know worked out. We in the present (reading this) are the Future Self to our Past Self still struggling to feel in control. Think about that past Unknown that worked out in our favor. Did we benefit from worrying about how it turned out? Did feeding the fear of innumerable possibilities somehow make the positive outcome happen? If we could, we would go back and tell our earlier selves to worry less or more? If we look to our past Unknown, we can connect to the same desired emotions we want now, from a time when we were hopeless or could not predict how it all actually worked out.

Connect to the Qualitative:
The key strategy to not feeding the near infinite possible outcomes to a Future Unknown (aka. Feeding the fear) is to focus on our desired emotion as the outcome we want and not get caught up in the details.

Gather the Past Emotional Evidence that accompanied it working out, lean into this Calm Knowing and project it onto your current Unknown by connecting to your Future Self who has the calm that we seek.

D. Turn it over to a Higher Power
Through my own spiritual practice, I have found a lot of peace in asking for help when I have struggled with things beyond my control over the last four years. This is not something I had thought a lot about, or felt very comfortable doing in the past.

I have believed for a long time that there is something that connects us all. This could be defined on a physical level as energy being our universal connector. We are all made up of energy. Energy exists in empty space and in living and non-living things. It is stored (potential) and moving (kinetic).
Others refer to the idea of a Collective Consciousness connecting us together on a mental level. I know that my mind is very limited as a human being. Certainly my expectations on how long something should take to be resolved / my ability to remain patient while anxiously awaiting an outcome is a huge limitation of mine. I also know that the more experiences I have and learn from, the slightly less limited my mind becomes. My Present Self knows more than my Past Self, and my Future Self knows more than my Present Self. I believe the Collective Consciousness and/or the Collective energy of everything in the Universe has far more information than I do. I do not think that the Universe is here working for me, but I do believe it has greater knowledge than I ever could alone. And I believe moments of intuition are our ability to tap into this greater knowing.

"Please help me with _______."
"It takes the Universe time to connect me to my ideal job."
“I put my future about ______ in the hands of the Universe/ God/ my higher self/ my future self.”
“Everything works out in the end. If it is has not worked out, it is not the end.”
“Everything is going to be ok.”
“I am going to be ok.”

For those who do not believe in a higher power/ collective consciousness/ Grand Organizing Designer (aka. Me until I was about 19 years-old), not to worry!

The skilled and respected Seattle therapist Hal Abbott told me that  "Adulthood is learning to parent oneself." He explained that learning to love oneself is learning how to parent oneself.  Which makes perfect sense, since no one knows us better than we do. We all have experiences from childhood in which we were left wanting something more or different from our parents. We may not be able to undo the past, but from here on out, we can make up for what we did not get. No one can be more loving and provide exactly what we need when we need it than ourselves.

Hal explained that we adopted two extreme parenting strategies based on our own parents, and have swung from one end of the pendulum to the other doing our best to care for ourselves:     The Critical/ Strict Parent VS The Lax Parent

The Overly Critical / Strict Parent , or Inner Critic, keeps us focused on our goals and achieving milestones. They want us to be a success, and to be a success we must do things [Quantitative Realm]. The Critical Parent keeps us dreaming and wanting more. They provide structure, but their boundaries are too rigid. If the child gets a "C" on a test, the Critical Parent tells us we "should" do better. The child comes back with a "B," and they point out we could have gotten a "B+." When the child comes back excited because we raised our grade from a "C" to an "A," they point out that it is not an "A+."
The Critical Parent is always looking to the Future for what to strive for next, or the Past to point out how we messed up and should have done it better or faster. The Critical Parent is not focused on the present. They expect perfection, are never satisfied, will never praise and can always find something to criticize about. The Critical/ Strict Parent's favorite word is "should," they are filled with judgements and they use anxiety to drive us.
The recent Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance allows us to hear which parent drove Michael Jordan to be arguably the best player ever. His internal and external Critical voice pushed him and his teammates to be at the height of their mental and physical abilities. And though he was respected by all of his teammates, the documentary hints at what is just under the surface: he was not liked by nearly any of them.

The Lax Parent is always in the present moment. Though they mean well, and want to please the child, they are short-cited and end up not doing what is in the child’s long-term best interests. A child needs structure, boundaries and limits. The Lax Parent lets the child set the rules. A Lax Parent asks the child what they want for dinner, and when the child says, candy, they let them eat candy for dinner. This is totally fine on a rare occasion; especially after a tough day. But every night the child says they want candy for dinner, and every night the Lax Parent serves them candy. This is not healthy. The child does not know what is in their best interests, and the Lax Parent puts the child’s short-term wants over their long-term needs.
The Lax Parent is the parent that gives a child a trophy for 8th place in a race of 8 kids. They do not empower the child to grow (up) because they are too in the present moment, unintentionally coddle, support hopelessness, depression and lack of motivation. The Lax Parent is not preparing the child to for resilience and becoming an independent young adult. 

There are strengths and weaknesses to both parenting styles. But when the Strict Parent pushes too much without acknowledgment or praise, we all eventually give up.

"Why bother!? No matter how hard I work, you will never be satisfied! It is never good enough for you. I quit!"

I believe that most of life is dedicated to learning. If we are lucky, we have opportunities to learn gentler lessons. If we are unlucky, or avoid/ ignore/ do not learn from the gentle ones, then we are eventually left to learn from the painful lessons. We all have had a cut we did not properly clean. Because we did not take the few extra moments to properly clean it initially, the cut got infected and became a much larger and painful problem.

Most people enter therapy after many missed gentler lessons. I know that my second stint in therapy came after  the realization, “I cannot go another day like this. I will do anything not to feel this way anymore.”

Is it just me, or has this been 2020 in a nut shell for the world?

Pain brings growth or death. With the pile-on of grief, pain, uncertainty  and general discomfort over the past months, we are left with an ever looming choice:
Continue to ignore/ distract/ avoid -or- Look within and Grow.

So many of us have already had realizations in these months of COVID quarantining. Some of us cannot see family. Some of us cannot get away from family. Being stuck at home has led most of us to see all the ways we were so easily able to distract and avoid by staying busy: Busy for partners, friends and family, busy for work, busy running errands; busy out of necessity. …But, then the definition of necessity changed almost overnight.

Since mid March, we had already been forced to sit more still and silent than we have for decades to look within.

I have no control over this. How can I feel in control? What is really important to me? Who is really important to me?  What was I avoiding? What am I still avoiding? How do I healthily cope now that I lost most of my old ways of coping??

This past week seems to be another awakening point.

For many of us, the light is now shining on the outside world brighter than it has before. We are being given a gift to see what has always been lying just under the surface and in the shadows not even out of sight.

What do I value? What do I believe (in)? What am I willing to stand up for? What could I even do??

There continues to be so much uncertainty with the future of our daily lives, nation and world. When will this end? Will life ever go back to how it used to be? Do I want it to? Should it ever go back to how it was before? Can I even go back to how I used to be?

I say often, Fear always wants to be fed. All we can do is learn to feed it less.

Change is always scary. This is why feeding fear is our default: so we do not have to change, so we can feel in control at the cost of staying stuck.

COVID-19 and the shining of light onto the realities of inequality just for being a person of color in the US is no longer going to allow us to avoid/ distract/ deny. Even if we wanted to, I do not think, and truly hope we cannot trick ourselves into staying stuck any longer.

For those of us lucky enough to not have known what was always there, are we ready to heed the gentler lesson?

There is no simple answer or fix to our Inside World and Outside World problems. But sitting still long enough to hear and answer the questions our bodies and minds are asking us as we continue to be stuck at home, uncomfortable and irritable will allow us to begin to grow into a healthier individual and member of our community.

Fear is an attempt to feel in control. It is planning for the worst case scenario because we tricked ourselves in believing that if we are prepared for the worst, then we can handle anything; and somehow this means we get to be in control of our reality. Planning for the worst possible future (or a not ideal one) is no more real than planning for the ideal future. More so, if we look at the evidence from our past experiences, the worst or near worst never occurred. It was far more often that a pretty good to great outcome was the normal result from previous future unknowns. Yet, we continuously let anxiety lead us down the road of planning for the worst case scenario. We do this not because we think we are actually in control, but because we do not believe we can control our anxiety. Anxiety has led us to feed our fear, and the more we have fed our fear, the less we feel we can control it.

“We cannot control what other people say or do, but we can control how we react to what other people say and do.” We control how we react by controlling our thoughts.

Fear always wants to be fed, and it will never get full. The more we feed our fear, the hungrier it gets. The only way we can control our fear is to learn to feed it less/ stop feeding it.


                   Timeline for Future Unknown:

_____________________________________________________________________________
                          Time A = present                                                              Time G = I know whether or not it worked out
                                                                                                                                                   
How miserable do I want to feel between now (A) and when I actually have the answer to whether or not it worked out (G)?

Feeding Fear
_____________________________________________________________________________
        A = present                                                                             *G1 = “I failed!”
                                                                    
               Trusting that it will work out/ I can have what I want              
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                   A = present                                                                       *G2 = “Everything worked out!”

The Past is over = no longer real
The Future has not occurred yet = Not Real

*G1 and G2 are equally unreal at time A = because they have not occurred yet!

So why feed Fear when it is as equally as unreal as my best case scenario??

*If Neither are real, which do I want to focus on? aka. “Do I want to be Right or Happy?” When we choose to be right, we are choosing our fear: “See, I knew I couldn’t have what I wanted!/ I knew it wouldn’t work out!/ I knew I was not good enough!”

Solution: Feed Happiness over being right.
“I am allowed ______ : to have what I want/ to have it work out/ to be happy/ to be provided for.”

A terrific Therapist in Seattle, Hal Abbot, explained to me the concept of “Qualitative and Quantitative Realms.” He explained that the Qualitative Realm consists of Emotions and Sensory Feelings. While, the Quantitative Realm is Thoughts and Doing things. Hal explained that our Emotional Wounds are Qualitative problems.

"Qualitative Problems can only be solved with Qualitative Solutions.
Just as, Quantitative Problems can only be solved with Quantitative Solutions."

The reason that we have not healed our Emotional (Qualitative) Wounds is because we have attempted to solve them with Quantitative Solutions.

Quantitative Attempts to solve Qualitative problems include:
1. Doing things
2. Using Logic or Rational thinking to invalidate our Emotions

Children are consciously or unconsciously taught, “If you behave well, or get good grades, or score a goal, or make a great drawing, then I will praise you. If I praise you, then you are a good boy/ good girl. If I don’t praise you, or if I yell at you, then you will think that you are bad/ or not good enough/ or not smart enough/ or not pretty enough.”

These are the negative skipping records that create deep emotional wounds inside of us. These records started skipping by age 3, said Hal, (I think that probably by age 1 our first records began), and they have kept skipping all day every day right up to our reading this.

1. Doing Things:
Let’s look at striving for Perfection: Striving to Do everything perfectly is a Quantitative attempt to resolve a Qualitative (emotional) problem.
Lots of people think, “If I do this perfectly, then I will be praised and told that I did a great job. If I don’t do it perfectly, then they will be upset with me/ they will fire me/ they will know I am a fraud or a failure.”
This attempt to Do is masking an Emotional wound that tricked us into thinking that we could solve our lack by doing it perfectly: "If I do everything perfectly, then everyone will be happy with me, and then I will finally be able to believe I am good enough." This is an impossible standard people create for themselves. Perfection is impossible.

2. Using Logic or Rational thinking to invalidate our Emotions:
I almost proudly used to refer to myself as a “Recovering Robot.” I did not try to Do enough things to solve my Emotional Wounds, but I did try to rationalize away my emotions by floating away in the Thought Realm. I believed I could solve my emotional problems if I just thought about the issue enough and I could conceptualize it so well that I would get over it without ever having to feel the pain of sadness.
This was me Avoiding* feeling the emotional pain because it was too painful to feel; too scary and overwhelming to face. Of course Avoiding is another word for Denying.*

The only way to solve our Emotional Wounds is to sit and feel the emotions that were created by our Negative Skipping Records. A Qualitative Wound must be solved with a Qualitative Solution. No amount of Doing or Thinking Away our Emotions will heal our Emotional pain.

The only way we can heal from any Emotional/ Qualitative Wound is by feeling and Accepting it.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross famously identified the Stages of Grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Kubler-Ross explained that to heal from grief and loss, we must go through the stages of grief to get to Accepting that the person is gone and not coming back. She explained that stages do not go in an exact order, and we can go through a stage and then return to it again later; we can jump from one to the other, and back again. Or, we can be stuck in a stage for a very long time.
But, healing is Acceptance. By Accepting, we can truly let them go and keep moving forward.

 I understood for a very long time that death is not the only way we lose someone or something. We lose people to breakups, moving away, friendships that grow apart, children growing up, accidents or injuries that change people physically or mentally. We lose our identity with job losses, career changes, growing older, retiring, illness, or tragic events.

But, Melody Beattie in Codependent No More recently helped me realize that every Emotion, as every loss, must be Accepted to truly be healed and let go.
Until we are brave enough to face and Accept any and all emotions tied to any event, we cannot fully heal, be free of the pain, or truly move on.

To find empathy for oneself is a noble goal that takes great courage and dedication. I am convinced that we cannot heal our emotional wounds without learning to have empathy for ourselves.
The foundation for this premise is tied to Accepting (not denying or avoiding) our emotions. By learning to accept that how we think and feel is valid and appropriate, we learn to love ourselves unconditionally.
My old professor at the University of Arizona, Dr Gary Schwartz, created an acronym for LOVE: Listen -Observe -Value -Empower. From my memory, he presented the acronym as a guideline to truly love another, and within it was the insinuation this could be used to love oneself. Upon my own reflection and work recently, I have added to Gary’s inspiring Acronym to more fully and clearly love oneself and others.
To truly empathize with ourselves, or any other being, we must Listen to them; Observe the context in which their perspective was created; make sure they feel that their perspective is of Value/ acknowledge and Validate their perspective; Empathize with the emotions that were created from their thoughts and perspective/ and finally Empower them by Challenging and Replacing their misinterpretation of their experience.
The key to the process of Empathy appears to lie in making sure that the person (and ourselves) feels Heard and Understood. When we are trying to reason with an arguing person, there is no point in taking the time to explain how there was a miscommunication until the arguing person feels Heard and Understood by us. Once they feel as though we understand their perspective (and maybe add an "I'm sorry"), then they will calm down enough to listen to us explain how this was a simple misunderstanding.
The same process exists within our own minds. We all have ongoing dialogues in our head, and at times engage in arguments with ourselves. We get stuck with old wounds because we never felt Validated or Heard by ourselves. Until this voice/ perspective feels heard, we will never fully Accept and Heal this wound.
Emotional wounds are the arguing, crying, tantruming voices in our head that still do not feel Heard and Understood by us. A big part of why we never felt Heard was due to the conflicting emotions that were created. One of the most obvious examples of conflicting emotions can be identified in being cheated on by someone we love. Anger, of course comes up as a valid reason to invalidate/ argue away our sadness, grief, loss and shock of finding out the person we love was unfaithful. “We are better off without them,” is the nicest, most rational voice that finds its way into the discussion to invalidate our anger, sadness and loss brought on by this event.
To fully Accept and Heal from any emotional wound, we must L.O.V.E. each and every thought and emotion that comes up.