ReParenting youyrself Article #1

Reparenting Article #1
Article one in ReParenting series by Dr. Art Martin
If you have seen the TV presentations by John Bradshaw from the late 1980's and 1990s, you can understand why most adults never grow up. As adult children it is very hard to be competent parents when we did not have a good parental model presented to us as children. We need to go through a basic internship on ReParenting before we take on the challenge of committed relationships and having children. I have found that it takes ten to fifteen years after you graduate from high school to recover your lost self and get yourself established in life, ready for the challenge of raising children.
Careers and children do not mix very well unless you can make the quality time to be with the children. It is next to impossible when you work full time to be able to provide the attention and support they need. One parent must be with the children from birth to five years of age. Children dropped into child care and Latch key children end up with many behavioral problems unless they are very independent chidden. Most dysfunctional children come from families where there is not a parent present full time for the first five years of the child's life.
In my practice, I find many clients who are making a conscious decision as to whether to become parents or to follow other agendas. If they decide that children are not the most important issue for them, family, church or society makes them feel guilty or tries to force them into having children anyway. So we have to reprogram their mind to take responsibility accepting their own beliefs and concepts.
My wife and I were aware of this 25 years before it hit the media, and we decided we had to get to know who we were before we had any children. We reasoned that if the marriage did not work, then we would not have children to deal with during a potential breakup if that should happen. If it was working after five years, then we would be ready to have children. We knew that the first five years are the critical period in most marriages. During this getting adjusted" period, children will take your attention and make life very complicated and stressful. So Susie and I set up a plan for our relationship and it worked well. We have just celebrated 45 years of marriage and live in peace, happiness, harmony and joy at all times. We worked hard to become good parents, and watched our sons grow up to be responsible, successful adults with good self-esteem, self-worth and self-confidence. They followed our lead and are beginning families of their own.
In your life drama, you are the writer, director, producer, choreographer and lead actor or actress. We must know how to play our part in that drama or the play will fail. The latest statistics show more than 50 % of the people often make unwise choices and end up in divorce. They were looking for love in the wrong places. The true casualties of the failure are the children, but we put them aside and try to find another partner to join the cast of our play and fire the failed actor or actress. Then we try to restage the same play without first evaluating why the previous attempt failed. We have to rewrite the new script so it won't fail again. Do we? Very seldom. Would people in business do this? I think not, their business would fail if they did not evaluate the causes of the failure, but we do it in relationships every day. Many of my clients have been shot down two to four times then wonder why they have dysfunctional children without really digging in and evaluating their relations for the cause. The children are the casualties of these failed dramas. Most of the time we blame the children.
Take note of this. It not what we think we did as parents. It is how the child is perceiving and interpreting what has happened according to them that causes conflicts. The child makes the decision about how she/he feels about the situation. It makes no difference how we think we handled the situation. The child will react according to their feelings and perception. The decisions they make are based on their perception. It will control the balance of their life until they can recognize the conflict. Many never recognize the conflicts they are facing because they refuse to face up to the issues from the past. So what do they do. Create more failures when they grow up. You have to rewrite the script if it failed the first time. Broadway show producers and movie producers do not try to restage a show or a movie that bombs at the box office. Why have we continued for the past hundreds of years to create a new plays without evaluating and finding out why we failed the first time. Do we want to know or should we find out why our relationships are corrupted and go bankrupt?
When I started my practice, my first two insights were: About one in four (25 percent) of my clients had been rejected before they were born. I had to reevaluate my theory after about ten years in practice. What I had discovered was that 75% of the children felt rejected before they were born. This is not my interpretation. It is from testing all my clients over the last 30 years. At least 60 percent of my clients did not love themselves nor could they receive love. That was my perception in the beginning of my practice. Again I had revise my percentages in the following years. What I discovered over the next ten years was the number increased to 90% had not felt loved, wanted or accepted as children. However, these numbers represent only those clients who were aware of their need to change.. The picture worsened considerably as I probed more deeply into the denial programs that were blocking many clients from knowing the reality of who they were and the programs that were running their lives. What we have come up with today is a staggering statistic; seven out of ten adults were rejected before they were born. This is not just about people born 50 – 75 years ago; the condition is more prevalent among people born in the last 25 years.
Prior to 1984, I worked in a traditional psychology practice. As I found that "talk therapy" produced very little long lasting results, I decided to investigate the causes of situations that I was finding my clients in. When I began, I had no way of documenting my findings because I was moving into a new, uncharted area of psycho physiological heath. I had no guidelines to follow, nor anyone to consult about this new avenue of therapy. Many therapists were skeptical of my newfound process, yet a few did refer clients to me because, most of the time, I could break through the blocks that were stalling their recovery. Most people do not want to face their issues.
The outcome of my research in Neuro Psychology was traumatic to me because I found that my own challenges stemmed from my childhood, with my mother at the root of most of them. I began to realize that there are very few functional families. I also began to understand the verse in the Bible: "we will suffer the sins of our fathers for seven generations." It is now clear to me that we observe and copy our parents' beliefs and behavior, and will pass those beliefs and behavior on to our children, who will do the same indefinitely in a cycle of behavior transfer that is destroying our society. The key to the challenge is before us. It is to stop this cycle. Over the last 30 years I have met seven people who were effective functional families. Quite devastating when you know want happens in dysfunctional families.
For my part, I refused to get married until I knew that I could handle the basic responsibilities that marriage entails, and that I could be compatible with my partner of choice. I had seen too many failures in my friends' relationships that rained extreme hardships on themselves and their children, so I vowed not to make the same mistake. As a result, I did not get married until I was almost thirty, and we decided to defer having children for five years so we could get ourselves established in life. Little did we know, this was one of the intelligent decisions we've ever made in our relationship. We were not able to begin creating a functional family until I decided to get out of the business world and try to find out who I was.
Over the last 30 years, I have compiled statistics on my clients, which has prompted me to write this book, detailing my findings that all the psycho/emotional physiological issues that adults have stem from childhood. My intent is to present a behavior program that parents can learn, and have readers understand how easy it is to set up a corrupted relationship without unconditional love which will damage a child's self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth, effectively destroying their life before they are four years old.
The first book in this series is "Your Body Is Talking; Are You Listening?" This book explains the concepts of what I call Neuro/Cellular Reprogramming. A process to release traumatic behaviour we accepted as children which is affecting us now. It points out that parents can seriously harm a child's mind until the dysfunctional beliefs are cleared and the programs are released. It covers all my work with illness, disease and emotional dysfunction. The second book is ReParenting Yourself which we discuss in these articles.
Summary
This article details how to revisit your childhood and ReParent yourself to correct the issues that caused us to accept our parents behaviour. Many of the behaviour patterns created seeds of discontent which may sprout and grow later in our adulthood. When we ReParent ourselves it will help you avoid treating your children in ways that cause the emotional problems that we had to endure as adults. If you are one of the nine out ten adults who did not have the childhood you would have wished for, you can clear the issues with your parents and forgive them because they did not know what they were doing. They were simply following the routine that their parents in turn had taught them. They did not know what the eight qualities of unconditional love are (attention, acceptance, approval, recognition, acknowledgement, affection, trust and respect) or how be an effective model for their children. You do not have to create another dysfunctional family if you follow the basic directions I am providing so you can recover your lost self, understand what unconditional love is and become who you really are. You and your children will be happy and succeed in life when you have a successful loving relationship with them. Happy traveling. Begin your transformation now; miracles do happen!
You can get more information about ReParenting at Dr. Martin's website www.ReParentingyourself.com or write to him at mailforat@gmail.com