Worry is not a gift, it is a way to curse your child. Here is why:

Remember the tale of Sleeping Beauty? The little baby is given two good wishes by two good fairies and then cursed with death by a bad fairy (Maleficent). After this the smallest good fairy gives the baby a healing wish which will wipe-out Maleficent’s curse.

It is a fairy tale that shows that worrying and getting obsessed with the picture of a bad future doesn’t help anyone. In the story all efforts to stop the curse, even burning all of the spinning wheels, didn’t work. All it did was make the child more fascinated when she found one! The story of Sleeping Beauty is about the effects of absorption with a curse. No-one was focused on the three good spells, or upon the knowing that the final spell would set things right. No-one gifted the child with this information so she stumbled blindly into the curse.

The Beady Eye of a Worry

Have you heard things like, “If I don’t worry about my child they won’t turn out right,” or, “If I don’t worry about them they won’t know I care”?

First of all, I hope you can recognize how crazy these ideas are!!!

These ideas are really the stuff of fairy tales. Worrying makes a child turn out right????? I mean….REALLY?????

Think about it: did your mother worrying about your weight help you lose weight? or did it cause you to stuff an extra cream bun in your mouth when you could? Similar to the King and Queen who burned all the Spinning Wheels and hid Sleeping Beauty instead of dealing rationally some mothers take on worrying as a “duty” they believe is going to “help.”

Depression is a form of mental exhaustion. It comes from trying to carry too much on one’s shoulders. This includes the weight of worry: worrying about your future, your child’s future, whether you just did the right thing. Worry is never ending. It is important that Mothers understand that, not only is worry not a gift, it is an endless wormhole that will wind on  forever.

Don’t believe me? Have a chat with your Mother who was worried when you were a child that you wouldn’t do well in school, that your teeth were too big, that you might not know how to catch the bus etc. etc. Is she still worried about you? If not you will find that she is now worried about her health, about your children’s health, about the number of caterpillars in her garden, about the new streetlights they want to install…something!

Worry is a bad habit that never ends. It fulfils no good purpose but will leave you feeling empty and despairing.

The good news is that you can stop worrying once you realize that it is a useless activity.

The way to STOP endless worrying is to hop out of the wormhole as soon as you find you are up to your knees in worm leavings!  Turn around and climb back out right away! You will find that there is plenty of sunshine, air and light topside.  It won’t be a perfect world but at least you will be able to see where you are going!

Ingredients of a Hex

Watching over your child and paying attention to what they need is very different to worrying. When you worry you notice something about your child and then you cast a hex on them. I mean that. A hex. A bad spell. A curse.

In olden times when people used to believe in and cast spells they used the following process: They took an idea (positive or negative), mixed it with belief and then bound that strongly so that it became reality. Worries, paranoias and fears are all really wishes wrapped up with negative beliefs – what we used to call a spell once upon a time – and they DO have to power to cast a hex on your child.

HERE’S HOW A HEX WORKS:

First, you notice something about your child that is neutral, mildly negative or even outrageously negative. Lets start with something mild: “O my goodness, she doesn’t like to sit and draw with crayons.” You then project whatever you have noticed fearfully into the future.  You are no longer in the present but now are weeks, months or usually years ahead.

Second, you combine the thing you noticed, which is usually neutral or mildly negative, with a strong negative prediction of the future. This is where your fortune telling and spell casting skills come in handy! You look in your mental crystal ball, predict disaster and tell a fortune:

“She won’t cope with school? She can’t sit still. She’s going to get into trouble. She’ll never learn. She won’t finish school. She’ll end up working at MacDonald’s!?” NOW you have a picture of final adult disaster. You are concocting a strong spell! The brew begins to swirl.

Third, the spell takes hold of your thinking and changes the way you view your child. You actually begin to see her through the eyes of the hex you have cast! You begin to relate to her in the NOW as if you are interacting with the 21 year old who is slumped behind the cash register and staring listlessly at the next customer ordering a BLT. (I know this is crazy but yes, haven’t we all done this?)

You WILL learn!

Fourth, your new,”hex affected” view of your child directs your interactions with her. First, you try to pep talk her into holding the crayon, into drawing a bigger circle, into colouring beside you. When this fails you try to bribe her, “if you will make Mummy a lovely picture I will buy you an icecream.”

When this fails you become frantic to “save” her from her sure future at McDonalds. In your hex hazed brain this rationalizes you being hostile, controlling and demanding, because you are saving her from an awful fate.  you end up yelling, “You will sit here until you draw something!” (or you become highly anxious and distressed).

Fifth: Spell Transfer occurs. Your perfectly healthy but crayon-avoidant daughter is wondering what is going on. She has picked up that there is some fear but it makes no sense to her. She doesn’t understand that her disinterest in drawing has set off the Mata-hari in your brain. All she knows is that you are frightened, that it is about her and that she is going to be forced. It seems you don’t like her because she doesn’t like drawing, therefore it is not okay for her to like what she likes.

She also knows (usually from how we are reacting more than what we say) that whether she is okay is somehow linked to her dislike of drawing….VOILA! You have transferred your fear to your child. She now believes that the fact she doesn’t enjoy sitting and drawing means something is wrong with her.

In effect, she has now developed an anxiety about herself that undermines her confidence. It also affects how she will engage with drawing in the future. What was once a neutral activity now has strong negative emotion attached. That combination of belief “something is wrong with me and my drawing or both” combined with fear “negative emotion” (the spell) has created a hex that now interacts on her for the future.

I have sat with mothers with babies in their arms saying, “I am just worried she might turn out to be a heroin addict.” These poor new mothers are in their heads already living in late adolescence when they only have a newborn!

WORRY IS NOTHING BUT A CURSE FOR BOTH MOTHER AND CHILD. Once we begin to recognize worries for the illusions and the bullies that they are we begin to have some power over them.

THE GOOD NEWS is that this doesn’t usually happen in one isolated incident (unless we get very violent and aggressive with a child) but a parent’s repetitive, intrusive worrying gets transferred to the child as fear. Fear that there is something wrong with them, that they won’t do well, that they aren’t smart and so forth.

It is at this point that the hex blossoms into a fully fledged curse which has very real effects on the child’s capacity to perform in school or whatever. The parent’s worry has cast enough of a spell to create something real in the world!

HOW DO I STOP WORRYING?

Well, first of all notice how powerful you are. You are able to transfer thoughts and beliefs to your child in a powerful way that influences their behaviour and capacities.

If that is true for the worries, it is doubly true for the confidences!! Positive expectation and spell casting is always more powerful than fears and children naturally will absorb the positive more deeply. Remember in Sleeping Beauty that the wish of one small good fairy was enough to overcome the curse of the powerful Maleficent.

Children become who they will.

Second understand that the trick with a worry is to capture its energy and to use it for good. To turn it around. Maybe your child doesn’t like drawing and has a bit of difficulty with a crayon, or throws tantrums or doesn’t sleep well or whatever. Rather than worrying and going into the perpetual wormhole of fear, anxiety and despair, let the fact that you have noticed this work for you AND the child. Even Maleficent’s curse had a good aspect to it! By the end of the story you had a young Queen who kept all of her good qualities, was conscious and could recognize true love.

Next week we will look at how to turn the negative energy of a worry into a positive.

JUST FOR NOW

1. Notice how often you are “worrying” about your child. Have a look at the bad images of the future that are intruding. Don’t feel bad about them but DO NOTICE how these images frighten you, make you feel uptight and don’t help you.

2. Notice your worries and ALSO notice that they are NOT REAL. They are not in the present. They are fear telling you bad stories about the future. Instead of running around looking for Spinning Wheels to burn… just for now calm yourself. Remind yourself that even a large fear (Maleficent) was neutralized by a small bit of hope (the smallest fairy). Because worries aren’t REAL you don’t need to be frightened by them.

3. Just for this week use a “What if” to counter your worry. For the example, “I am worried my son will be violent like his father” would be countered with, “AND WHAT IF HE ISN’T!….What if he becomes a strong, good, kind man who has wonderful relationships? What if he respects me and all women? What if this is easier than I think?…..” (you can let your mind ramble here)

For the worry, “What if my child doesn’t do well at school?” you could counter with, “AND WHAT IF SHE DOES OK….What if she enjoys school? Makes some good friends. Has a good life…”

Training your brain to do this switch will prepare you for the next blog where we will cover how to turn your worry hexes into good spells.

Give your worries a dose of “what if” for the week to come and remember that worry is not a gift!