Cause & Effect: Empowering Parents with the Awareness of “Co-Creation”

Our patterned belief systems have conditioned us to look outside for the reason for our unhappiness. We are habituated to look outward, believing that we are victims of external circumstances and events. Giving our power over to people and situations on the outside to sidestep our role in our own life is disempowering.

The key to living a conscious life is moving from external blame to internal responsibility.

To finally heal our inner wounds, it takes shifting from anger toward others, to self-accountability for our co-participation in our lives. Self-accountability is the only way forward. This can be a painful process when we finally realize that we are responsible for a part of our own misery. This is called co-creation.

We are active co-creators in our lives.

One of the most valuable tools we can use to recognize this is our ability to track the evolution of events back to this present moment. How did things arrive at this place?

Most of us forget that we are active co-creators in our lives. But it’s true - we are constantly crafting and contouring our lives according to our inner beliefs and outer circumstances. We like to pretend that things happen to us over which we have little control. In this way, we let ourselves off the hook and do not have to take responsibility for how we feel or for the situations we are in. Parents, in particular, rarely take responsibility for how they create the cause-and-effects in their children’s lives. They typically assume that they are faultless and their children are entirely responsible.

Co-Creation in The New Parenting Paradigm

Instead, The New Parenting Paradigm asks the parent to fully own their role and responsibility in the cause and effect of their current relationship with their children.

For example, if the teenager slams the door and curses the parent, the typical reaction is to yell at the teenager and punish them in some way. After all, we feel disrespected. But in The New Parenting Paradigm, co-creation demands that the parent reflect on how they contributed to that reaction from their child.

• How has their energy been with their child?
• Have they been present and connected?
• Are they unconsciously projecting their own stress onto their child?
• Are they mindful of their tone and their attitude toward their child?
• Are they aware of what their child is going through? 
• Are they taking things too personally?

I help parents go backwards from the current situation into the causes and effects that might have contributed to the present reality. This is how parents bring new awareness to their circumstances. This process often changes their perspective and helps them recognize how they got here, and uncover the root of the issue at hand.

Awareness of our role in our own lives and the choices we have made to bring us to this present moment is one of the most valuable tools we have. Doing this inquiry on our own is also key. We need to independently ask ourselves, “How did I co-create this reality?”