Parenting with Respect

Helping parents discover that children who experience genuine respect are more prepared to generate meaningful respect, is key to RFT oriented family therapy.  With that understanding, parents frequently begin to explore their own inner child needs for respect and initiate a deeper understanding of respect for themselves as well.

Forward and Buck (2002) say in Toxic Parents, that it is not the parents who make occasional mistakes who are truly harmful to their children, but those “whose negative patterns of behavior are consistent and dominant in a child’s life.” She goes on to describe “toxic” behavior as verbal, physical, and/or sexual abuse, drug or alcohol dependency, emotional unavailability because of mental/physical illness, rage, or instilling fear. Now some of these do not have to be consistent to be dominant, such as physical or sexual abuse. One incident of this severity can create lifetime damage.

Fear is probably the biggest underlying problem in any family. Any parent-child relationship based in fear has fundamental problems. Children who are afraid cannot develop a healthy sense of confidence and will either grow up to be intimidated by the world or will be reactionary, angry, full of rage, and not have a clue as to what real respect is all about.

We need to be able to distinguish here between respect and fear. While fear is a negative emotion, respect is a positive one. To respect is to have high regard, to appreciate, to feel good about another human being. Respect, then, is very different from fear because it is freely given.

This means helping clients truly honor their children by creating appropriate guidelines and limits that keep them safe along their developmental journey, combined with nurturing validation of the child’s unique abilities, personality, and spirit. Modeling this kind of supportive behavior for the parent as well as for the child is key in therapy.

Good parents, then, are ones, who know that they are not infallible, who know that they will and do make mistakes. They try, to the best of their ability, not to repeat their own parents’ mistakes, work at building respect between themselves and their children that is not fear-based, but, rather based on trust, caring, and positive regard. Finally, they set limits and guidelines for their children for their safety and teach responsibility through their own actions. Above all, they listen with their hearts to give them wisdom and guidance, as they continue to take on the tremendous challenge of raising another human being.

Mistakes, Regrets and Self-Forgiveness

We all make decisions we later regret. For many of us, this happens much more frequently than we like to admit. Our culture supports, defends, even molds this denial of imperfection through media, advertising, etc. leaving us with the concept that idealistic perfection exists, and we can all have it if we all look just like the emaciated models, buy the right car, have the right job and friends, live in the right neighborhood.  Most of us know that this is myth and marketing deception, but we get ourselves wrapped up in it to some degree anyway.

It is, in my opinion, when we can let loose our tight grip and angst for perfection, when we can start admitting our mistakes to ourselves and others, that we can then have the freedom to make better choices. Not only can we learn from our mistakes, we can clear out the emotional space to be more able to make more rational choices.

Notably, some mistakes are more devastating than others. Some can result in real trauma or loss, which can lead one into a lifetime or shame and self-degradation. Aiding our clients in clearing out shame, guilt and overburdened regret is essential in order for them to have the potential for self-forgiveness, acceptance and confident humility.

This process of self-forgiveness, an integral piece of RFT, is truly acknowledging wrongdoings done with grace, letting go self-imposed penalties, self-regret, hatred or other forms of disregard.  It is also about being able and willing to make amends and correcting hurtful behavior where and when possible in context of relating to others. (Halling, 2006)

Forgiveness gives credence to positive possibility in our lives and opens the door to making better choices. Help clients learn to embrace mistakes and learn to use them wisely in the future. Short of mistakes, there will be many hard decisions, not necessarily labeled good or bad, which, unfortunately, involve sacrifice, pain and/or loss.  But so is there much greater chance for real, sustainable and substantive joy and peace when we are willing to believe in ourselves enough to take risks, that are not completely calculated, but also based on our faith, sense of values, a daring expectation for good to come from it and, always, the willingness to attach responsible action behind it.

 

Respect-Focused Therapy (RFT) is a foundation on which all modalities and techniques used in therapy can be strongly grounded, in order to produce sound, effective outcomes. This approach offers clients the opportunity to gain experiential understanding of being respected, possibly for the first time, from the therapeutic relationship and then be able to heal old wounds by creating more respect for self and others in the therapeutic process.

What Respect Really Means

For many of our clients, there is little experiential connection with the concept of respect, because it feels contrived, obligatory or simply nonexistent—often from childhood. Predominantly, they don’t feel privy to getting any of its benefits, as it seems only to be for others, primarily “elders” or those in authority positions. Far too often the lack of genuinely feeling respected, honored by others authentically, can lead to lifetimes of never respecting oneself and therefore not having the grounding to be able to adequately respect others.

Our job as therapists, then, is to help clients realize that respect—in its truest form—is not contrived and is not hierarchical. In fact, to be genuine and grounded it needs to be mutual, shared symmetrically. To have high esteem for someone and that is unreturned by that person, it becomes at some point, meaningless for both. For example, if a child adores his father who is admissive or abusive towards his child, the adoration becomes unfulfilling and may, in fact, turn into resentment or despair. Respect needs to come from a place of authenticity and symmetrical balance to have any true validity.

Respect is more than a noun; it is also a verb. It is action. The Latin origin of the word is ‘respectare,’ which means to look back or look again. To reconsider. The realization that respect cannot be demanded or coerced in any meaningful way opens the possibility to a surprising new awareness of another person we thought we knew well, but upon intentional reconsideration, we find something wonderful we may have never noticed before.

Challenge your clients to take the next opportunity to “look again” at the person they most take for granted or get annoyed by, themselves first, or maybe a spouse or family member, a neighbor or coworker, and try assisting them to look through a lens of respect that can filter out the negatives enough to find one new positive perspective they may not have seen in the same way before. This may take some practice, but the more chances we take on this new path of interpersonal discovery, the more we may be delightfully surprised.

 

Respect-Focused Therapy (RFT) is a foundation on which all modalities and techniques used in therapy can be strongly grounded, in order to produce sound, effective outcomes. This approach offers clients the opportunity to gain experiential understanding of being respected, possibly for the first time, from the therapeutic relationship and then be able to heal old wounds by creating more respect for self and others in the therapeutic process.