Give Yourself the Power to Choose

“…happiness is the result of love coming out of you…”
Don Miguel Ruiz, Mastery of Love, A Toltec Wisdom Book

​A forty-something, tired-looking woman (who looks nothing like a younger version of me) stares at her daughter with dismay.
 “You are not going out of this house dressed like that!”

Her daughter slams the front door she had just opened, turns and looks at her mother, eyes narrowed, and disgust distorting the outline of her mouth. She runs upstairs to her room, screaming,    
“I hate you!”

If you were me, uh .. I mean this mother, how might you choose to feel in this situation?

For the sake of argument let’s pretend that you have forgotten you have a choice about how you want to feel and that you respond with a knee-jerk reaction. Your feelings are hurt. You feel anger and fear. You are trying to protect your daughter. Who knows what teen-aged boys might assume if they saw her parading around in that 6 inch skirt and tight, low cut, cropped t-shirt?

When your daughter comes back downstairs wearing an 8 inch skirt and a tight, low-cut, uncropped t-shirt, and looking at you as if you were condemning her to death, your hurt, anger and fear for her causes you to overreact.

“Get back up to your room, young lady! You are grounded! No phone, no mall, nothing, till you can learn how to dress properly!”

And so, it repeats, in many homes, in many variations, with many different teenaged daughters and sons.

This is an old road, traveled by many an irate parent of a teenager.

You may not have teenagers. You may not be a parent. Your life may not look anything like this. The learned behavior patterns of this scene may not be one of your patterns, but most likely you will have others.

We all have our individual behavior patterns, based on fear and built in response to family patterns as we were growing up.

Our hypothetical mother had a choice of how to respond to her daughter, though she may not have been aware of it at the time. (In fact, I can say for sure that she wasn’t. She knee-jerked much of her way through motherhood, sigh…)

We are constantly confronted with situations in which we choose how we will respond. The choice is not always conscious, but it is always a choice. Many of us forget this.

We are trained from infancy to perceive the world around us as our parents, family and society perceived the world, a process known as acculturation. It is the way we learn how to be in the world.

During the process of acculturation, we learn about how our world works and where we fit into it. As infants and children, we swallow whole the view of our world from those around us. Later, as adults we may question this view, but the foundation is laid.

We learn to make the choices about how we feel without conscious thought, based upon what those around us have taught us. We learn knee-jerk responses to certain kinds of experiences. 

We learn that we need certain things or events to happen in order for us to respond lovingly and feel happy. If those things do not happen, or other things happen instead, we respond with fear and we feel unhappy.

It doesn’t feel like a choice for us. It feels like our happiness depends on events outside of ourselves.

This is an unhappy way to live, because we give up our power to choose. We forget that we have the power to choose a loving response, to choose to feel happy. We believe that our happiness lives outside ourselves, when in fact just the opposite is true.

How do we choose to feel happy? We have these learned patterns that tell us when we can feel happy and when we have to feel unhappy. How do we unlearn these patterns and start over?

How do we give ourselves back the power to choose? We retrain our automatic responses through attention, time and practice.

Learning anything new requires attention, time and practice. My granddaughter will repeat a new skill over and over, day after day, until she has mastered it. Whether it is riding her bike without training wheels, drawing a human figure, or hanging upside down on the monkey bars, she is driven to practice again and again, until one day she has it. Then she will lose interest and move on to something new.

Our brains are hard-wired to learn this way. When mastering a desired new skill, we feel a driving need to practice. We are creating new pathways in our brains that allow us to master new skills.

In time, the pathways in the brain associated with any particular bit of learning become like well-traveled roads.

What happens when we want to relearn these responses? We have to stop using the old roads and build new roads in their place.

Relearning requires the repeated practice that any new learning requires. It also requires paying attention and catching ourselves before we start down an old response road, then reorienting ourselves to the new response road we are building.

When you choose to relearn old behavior patterns be patient with yourself.

You are rebuilding the learned pathways in your brain. You are learning to choose a love-based response over a fear-based response.

Relearning takes attention, time and practice.

Chances are there will be times when you suddenly find yourself on the old roads, responding in a knee-jerk negative fashion to familiar stimuli. You will have by-passed all the detour signs and gone barreling down the old road. That’s OK. Wherever you find yourself you can choose to reorient and keep rebuilding.

It’s worth it, because our choice of response, whether we respond from fear or from love, determines how we feel about any situation.

When we choose to respond from love we choose to feel happy.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in his book Mastery of Love, explains that we are only happy when we are expressing love.

A feeling of happiness is a side effect, a beneficial result of expressing love into the world. When we choose the loving response, we feel happy.

Give yourself the power to choose love.

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

Your Spiritual Toolbox

​Imagine that you are the parent of the teenager we met earlier.

Your beloved child has just screamed, “I hate you!”

You find yourself at the entranceway to the fear-filled road of hurt, anger and overreaction.

But with your new understanding, instead of traveling its well-worn path you stop. You remember that you have a choice.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself, what is positive about this situation?

Well, your daughter stopped. She didn’t go out that front door. She accepted the structure you imposed and went back upstairs to change. She did what you asked of her.

You could go on, thinking of how blessed you are to be the mother of such a high-spirited young woman. How lucky you are that she has good health, and that you are able to give her enough food to eat and a comfortable place to live.

Of course, you may not be feeling blessed by these things at the moment.

You have to choose to think of those things which feel positive to you.

Counting your blessings is an excellent tool for short-circuiting knee-jerk reactions.

Remember too to lighten up; it is not all so serious. Can you imagine what a cartoon of this situation would look like?

Remember what Erma Bombeck says, “If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.”

Now think about this - today is exactly perfect just as it is. Every annoying detail is exactly as it should be.

We put so much of our energy into annoyance with small details of everyday life that are as they are. See the  perfection. You can trust that your daughter is learning how to make her own choices. This is a good thing, even if it requires you to occasionally butt heads.

You have the ability to choose love. Love would give your daughter a calm choice with full knowledge of appropriate consequences.
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The next time you find yourself reacting in a fearful or angry, knee-jerk reaction, take a deep breath, count your blessings, lighten up, see the perfection, and ask yourself, “What would love do here?”