Fundamentals of communicating with parents

The most important thing you need to know is that your parents absolutely love you.

No matter what you believe, what they say, how they act, or how they treat you, they absolutely love you.

If you are not experiencing their love it's because they are carrying around thousands (yes, thousands) of incompletes from childhood. These incompletes serve as barriers to the experience of communication.* Love is a function of, is expressed through, communication.

What's an "incomplete" and how does it serve as a barrier to expressing and experiencing love?

An incomplete is any communication, any interaction, that does not end in satisfaction, specifically, mutual satisfaction.

For example: When your Dad was your age his father yelled at him with tremendous anger in his voice, "I TOLD YOU, NO TELEVISION UNTIL YOU'VE DONE YOUR HOMEWORK!" Your father tried to say, "But dad, I don't have any homework tonight." but he was cut off, "DON'T GIVE ME ANY CRAP. GO TO YOUR ROOM!"

It's obvious that interaction (or one pretty much like it) wasn't satisfying. It certainly didn't feel good to your Dad. He went to his room, read for a while, and then went to sleep. Going to sleep with an upset is referred to as going unconscious.** It's called putting unconsciousness on top of a non-experienced experience.

In communication coaching we say that an incident that "happened" to you is a non-experienced experience.

Continuing with the example: From your Dad's point of view he did not cause his father to yell at him therefore it can be said that it "happened" to him. It's most likely the memory of that incident is buried beneath thousands of other such incidents—both in your Dad's mind and his father's mind.

A "non-experienced experience" is one in which the mind, to protect itself, will partially shut down, it zones out, it shifts from experiencing to surviving. A parent will often blame you for his/her own inability to cause communication to take place. They might say, "It just goes in one ear and out the other" (an irresponsible blame statement) whereas the truth is—the minute they start lecturing (instead of communicating) they cause your mind to shut down to protect itself from the abuse. Lecturing, raised voice, or yelling is abusive, it invalidates you. It's condescending. Most importantly, it reveals that at that moment they have forgotten how the mind works. They have become at effect of their own childhood incompletes. They have in fact, gone unconscious.

When the mind experiences abuse it partly shuts down to protect you. During this shut-down period you are no longer experiencing. You are in fact reacting. For example, just prior to the incident you were having a stomach ache and were just about to close the window because you were cold. The minute the yelling began your mind shut down part of your body, specifically your senses. During the abuse, you completely forgot all about your stomach ache and the temperature. You were partly shut down, no longer experiencing life, merely in survival mode.

You can't complete something you didn't cause.

You can only complete an incident in which you are willing to look at it from how you caused/intended it. That is to say, you can't complete an argument in which you blame another for starting it.

In our example your dad carries the "homework" incident as an incomplete, as a victim of abuse. The incident is stored as an incomplete. Instead of completing the incident he went to sleep. The sleep is not begun from satisfaction and contentment, with happiness and kisses and bed-time small talk. It is in fact a restless sleep. He went to sleep not feeling whole and complete. He did not feel good about himself, his father, or life. There was no experience of love in the space. He was in fact out-integrity (not whole, not complete—something missing or something added).

The next morning he went to school and the incident was never ever mentioned again. This incident is what's referred to as an incomplete. Your grandfather was abusive to your father. He yelled abusively and he made your father wrong—

—however, this in itself is not the problem. Stuff like that happens. It's not right, it's not fair, but that's what most parents do from time to time.

The problem, and why it's referred to as an incomplete, is because your grandfather never went up to your father later and said, "I get that I was abusive to you."

In other words, he never verbally, responsibly, acknowledged his abuse. That's all your father would have needed to hear so as to be complete. Instead, the yelling was one more incident in which he felt invalidated, not gotten—another incident in which he went to bed incomplete and unhappy. Unbeknownst to your father that incident is still effecting him to this day.

Now in present-time your father is trying to communicate with you but he can't. No one has modeled for him how to acknowledge abuse. He has been programmed. He has had absolutely no choice. He has become a yelling, make-others-wrong, machine. He can't feel good about himself. He is too bound up (it looks like stubbornness or arrogance) to even ask someone for directions on how to get to happiness from here. It pains him to yell at you, more so because when he thinks about apologizing, try as he may, he can't get it out. Even more so because he vowed that he wouldn't treat his own child like his Dad treated him.

Your parents are expressing their love as best as they can.

The words you need to hear just can't come out. "I love you" comes out as, "Did you do your homework?" Their expressions of love are bound up inside. They have been so hurt that they can't be here now. They need coaching/counseling. They can function, they can make it though each day. They have learned how to survive, but at the end of each day they don't feel good about the way they have been making you wrong, yelling at and invalidating you.  In truth they are operating on automatic. They are doing their "parenting act." They have lost their ability to communicate. Instead they are doing their imitation of communication. How do we know? We know from the results. Communication always results in the experience of love.

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* During a communication clearing session with a communication skills coach an individual, couple, or family can complete life's most important incompletes. The effect is a lifting of guilt. The Clearing Process is the next best thing to doing a clearing with a coach. It's an experience unlike any other It's transformational, one is simply not the same person any more.

** "unconsciousness" Later in life someone (perhaps a communication-skills coach) will ask your father, "Think of a time you were abused" and nothing will come to mind. But, because a communicologist communicates from intention they keep asking the same question over and over (through the layers of unconsciousness, each time he went to bed on top of the hurt) until they are able to extract the memory. This is because the incident is hidden under layers of unconsciousness. It's hidden by thousands of other incompletes that happened later. Your Dad still goes to sleep when he's upset or frustrated, that, or he yells or pouts.

Note: The word "parents" refers to one or more parents or a guardian.

Conclusion: The greatest gift you could possibly give your parents is to say to them: "What I want for my birthday is for us all to do a clearing session with a communicologist" (see consult). The courage it will take to ask them will itself produce a lifetime of value for you. It will bring to the front of everyone's mind that there is a communication problem. If nothing else, the mind, to be right, will start doing a better imitation of communication, not communication but the illusion of communication. Like teachers, your parents honestly and sincerely believe they are in communication with you. You and I know better.  The fact that you are afraid to ask them and believe they wouldn't attend a coaching session just for you reveals that there is fear and disappointment in your relationship with them. Now here's the kicker. If you don't invite them to a clearing, if you let your fear run you, you can never ever blame them for the way they relate with you because you now have a choice, to intend that they continue to treat you as they do or to do what it takes to effect mutual satisfaction.

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