Dr David Lieberman: Revealing Transforming Relationships (Part 4)

hello everyone and welcome to transforming relationships as you'll know we have a fancy new background here i came over to the office and you'll let me know if you like this better or my uh very charming colorful bookshelf so thank you to hazak tarani time uh and chickens for shabbos amazing organizations that do everything they can to help improve the lives of everybody uh and certainly a big shout out in yashakar to rep david goldwasser who really is the icker of this i'm just a warm-up act so make sure you stay tuned for his very fascinating penetrating insightful look into perkiavos so we're speaking about relationships transforming relationships today we're going to focus on something that affects all of us and that is childhood um most of you out there have been children unless you've been hatched i suppose or you are a child in which case it's probably past your bedtime either way i'd like to share with you some very practical ideas in terms of what you can do to maybe i don't know it's it's not too late to have a happy childhood well we'll call we'll say we'll start with that and here's the thing though even when we strive every which way to be good and to do good we can still find a hole in our self-esteem thanks to childhood if we did not receive love from our parents as children or felt that our lives were out of control due to trauma domestic volatility we can needlessly spend the rest of our lives thirsting for love and acceptance and everything we do is intended to bring us to that end but there is no end because you can't fix what's not broken we already haul we've already we've always been whole and here's what's very very important to understand the love that parents give children is determined by their own meaning the parents limitations not those of the children it never occurs to us though as children that maybe it has nothing to do with us if a mother is capable of love she'll be loving to all the children even one who turns out to be a mass murderer but if she lacks the ability to love then even an innocent well-mannered child like yourself will be subject to her hostility because she's incapable of giving now as adults it can still you know we can still appreciate to some degree that our self-worth isn't contingent on our parents acceptance of us but it's still very very hard to do see the eco concocted this equation that how someone treats me is a reflection of my self-worth but it's not so we are not less because someone can't love us it's very important to understand this how someone treats you is a reflection of their self-esteem it speaks volumes of their own emotional health is their window into their character and to their being but it says nothing about you but knock weinberg that's how i used to say you give love and you give respect if you don't have it what do you have to give let's take an example if you saw someone in a wheelchair you wouldn't get mad at him because he can't get up and walk somebody who is emotionally handicapped is equally challenged does it make sense to resent the parent for not being able to give something to us that he or she simply didn't have do we want to hold on to anger because our mother or father was and maybe still is incapable of giving us love again people give love if they don't have it then they can't give it regardless of how desperately this their their their soul yearns to love their own child the question we want to ask ourselves is what kind of person would i be today if i were treated differently as a child whoever that person is is who you really are now when it comes to relationships with the parents it's a double whammy because our relationships with our parents very often affect our relationships with hashem our relationship with god uh is is dramatically impacted for two interlacing reasons one is let's say you've got a poor or call a complicated relationship with a parent because that injures our self-esteem we then have difficulty feeling and accepting hashem's love for us because we don't feel worthy we feel like somebody who is less somebody who is unworthy of good so why would i think the creator of the universe would want to give me any good so our love for him then inevitably suffers because our choices will further entangle the ego and continue to squeeze hashem out of the equation i just rephrase it like this is that i don't love me because i was treated poorly now i don't love me i'm not going to want to invest in me i'm going to make lousy choices that pushes god further out of the equation okay now secondly is that a parent is the first authority figure in a child's life so a child who was mistreated by a parent or even treated well but because of the child sensitivities wasn't able and there are children like this by the way cast no aspersions on your parents or don't feel guilty for yourself you can give everything to your children's parathetically all the same five children turn out one way six a different way not because you weren't good not because you weren't a kind parent but because that child sensitivities they will not allow for him or her to absorb the love a different conversations will have because there are too many parents walking around just with a lot of guilt for zero reason okay so a child was mistreated by a parent or by anyone in authority for that matter can have difficulty accepting let alone trusting the ultimate authority of hashem the ten commandments we know are divided into two categories right you've got the first that contain the man to god and then you've got the man to man revealingly the fifth commandment to honor one's parents is on the man to god's side of the tablets this is because we don't find it easy to love and to be loved by the career of the universe while we're holding on to anger towards our parents on many levels the relationship between a child and a parent symbolizes and often determines our relationship with hashem i tell parents this all the time when it comes to davening and should you you know with boys and teenagers and get them out of this and i said your relationship with that your child has with hashem will not likely be better than relationship he has with you so before you do anything make sure you ask yourself is this improving my relationship with my child or injuring it okay a lot to talk about the relationships by the way so by honoring our parents or at least not hating and acknowledging that they have their own baggage and their own stuff and they too are suffering themselves we cultivate and appreciate an appreciation for and an understanding of how much our parents love us or perhaps long to despite their limitations this in this awareness enhances our relationship with hashem because it helps us to recognize that there are no limitations to hashem's total unconditional love for us see our parents are limited which is why we too are limited and when we acknowledge the fact that our parents treatment of us has nothing to do with us but again reflects everything about them we did nothing to deserve uh whatever improper or unwell or unproductive or unhealthy treatment we got it was our parents limitations not ours it frees us to have a greater sense of self-esteem and in doing so now we can redefine our relationship with hashem there's more to it than that but just i don't make the mistake of thinking that's all we need an emotionally healthy person will not have considerable rather emotionally unhealthy person who has considerable unresolved anger toward a parent it's highly probable that he'll have difficulty enjoying let alone having really deep meaningful relationships with hashem or quite frankly with other people to a large extent because while this anger exists uh it's very very damaging to our own self-esteem and again a person who doesn't love themselves is a hard time giving and receiving love this is something we spoke about or we'll speak about at some point so if i don't love me because i'm working around a lot of stuff i have a hard time establishing that healthy relationship with other people it doesn't make it impossible and doesn't mean that everyone who had a difficult childhood is incapable absolutely positively not what i am saying is the degree to which we generally love ourselves more is the degree to which we can give and receive love i mean that much makes sense so anyone who feels anger toward a parent must make it a priority to move past it or better to reframe the negative feelings into more accurate and positive feelings so let's spend a few minutes now just on refrain reframing the past i missed my shabbos snap so okay so reframing the past a shift in our perspective in how we see a shift in perspective now allows for us to undo our perception of the past by reframing it and it permanently alters how we see ourselves in our world something we spoke to spoke about um something we didn't speak about but something that's important is that context gives rise to meaning and meaning changes how we see something so by reframing the past and putting it into a different context we change what it means instantly and automatically changes our relationship with it i know that just sounds very convoluted so i'm going to give a very banal example from everyday life how often does a book's ending make or break the book do we find it less enjoyable because of a silly ending well sort of we read it and enjoy it but the ending changes the enjoyment of what we just read and two an exciting twist at the end shines a new light on the entirety of the story we replay in our minds the scenes we thought meant one thing and ah now we see something else entirely and so on everything changes it's difficult for us to grasp the concept that reality isn't linear and that a shift in perspective now can create retroactive changes in our attitude in our thoughts and our feelings but le marshall let's imagine an elderly woman after believing that she was happily married for 60 years is told on her deathbed that her recently departed husband never really loved her that her parents had paid him 10 million dollars to marry her and on top of that uh you know he had a whole different life for a different city and so on can we say that she was happy her entire life and that only the last 30 seconds were a little schwa did the birthdays the celebrations the walks conversations laughters and memories do they all disappear no they're there but her memory how they've changed her past is now different if after she heard this revelation someone were to ask this woman how was your life how would she answer would she easily say a wonderful more likely she would say awful sad heartbreaking see the characters and events are still locked in time but we can get a glimpse of the now or rather how the now is impacted by rewind we get a glimpse of how the past can be impacted by how we see things now see rabbi goldwater is a lot more smooth everything just comes out so much more smoothly there you go i gotta i gotta get some tips from him okay now this is not to say that we should try to convince ourselves that our past carries no meaning it's not we're saying at all we are simply saying that we should allow for the possibility that the meaning we assign to events might not be true and how we feel about ourselves today based on a damaged relationship or trauma is an accurately formed conclusion and we don't have to hate ourselves because someone in our life can't love us we don't have to harm ourselves because someone else harmed us we are not unlovable because someone else is incapable of loving us the quality of our relationships is based on our ability to give it and to receive today and by reframing our past relationships and asking ourselves maybe i attached an erroneous meaning the fact that i was not treated well as a child what does it really mean about me it means nothing once again how somebody treats you speaks volumes to that person but says nothing about you and your self-worth you are not less because someone cannot love you when you own that you'll enjoy different quality relationships today and a different quality emotional health and reflection about past relationships with that i wish you a beautiful week i know that's a lot maybe there's a way to to re-listen to this certainly not too many options to redo it anyway have an amazing week mirzasham see you back here next time multichavis