Dear Cate

Thank you for your letter. Please feel free to write as much or as little as you wish at any time. I am always here to listen and to help if I can.

I will begin by pointing out something which is often difficult for parents to accept. You are not responsible for your daughter's happiness. She is. Nothing you can ever do or say can make her happy. Nothing you can do or say can 'let [your] daughter feel loved'. Your daughter very clearly is loved. She has to learn to let herself feel that. This may happen soon or it may not happen until she is well into adulthood. While you continue to think that it is your responsibility to make your daughter happy, you are contributing to preventing her from learning that it is solely her responsibility. When she feels bad, she is currently looking for someone to blame for that, and you are her scape-goat. If you make any attempts to modify your behaviour in order to make her feel happy, then you are reinforcing in her the false notion that it is you who should be doing something to change her mood. While she continues to think that it is you (or anyone else) who should be doing something to change her feelings, then she will continue to be very frustrated when they do not change.

The fact that she is feeling distress at this time does not have to be seen as a bad thing. I would suggest that it is actually a good thing. That is her emotional guidance telling her that her current thoughts and actions are not working for her. She has to learn by experience and although it may take longer than you would perhaps like it to, she will eventually learn. There is really no other way to learn this lesson than to experience pain and eventually realise that the way to become free of it is to accept complete responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings. In your letter you spoke of trying to teach your daughter that her actions have consequences. She is already experiencing a consequence. The consequence she is experiencing is that she feels bad.

If you wish to do something to help your daughter to learn this lesson, then the best (and I would suggest perhaps the only) thing you can do is lead by example.

"No written word nor spoken plea
Can teach our youth what they should be
Nor all the books on all the shelves,
It's what the teachers are themselves."

To lead by example, you must understand and accept that you are completely responsible for your feelings.

You state that you have learned to remain calm during times of conflict, yet your language indicates that below the surface you are far from calm about these situations. You refer to them as 'dramas', suggesting that you are judging the situations. I am not suggesting that this is unusual, it is a very natural human reaction, but if you are to be truly calm about these situations internally, you need to stop judging them and accept them. You need to stop resisting what is and just allow it to unfold. You do not need to refer to the situation as a drama. You do not have to judge it good or bad. You could just refer to it as some stuff that is happening. You can then freely choose what you want to think, how you want to feel and how you want to act. You will not react with an automatic pattern which you have learned for dealing with 'dramas'.

It is easy for us to love when everything is easy, when our loved one is being all sweetness and light. It is a wonderful testament to your undying and unconditional love that you are one person constant in her life that will allow her to get angry, allow her to feel whatever she is feeling and be whoever she is at this time in her life and continue to love with a burning passion regardless of that. Imagine if she did not have that outlet and ended up taking out her anger elsewhere, where the recipient is perhaps less loving and forgiving. There is a common phrase 'we hurt the ones we love the most'. You are heroically loving not when it is easy to love, but when it is really hard to love. That is what makes mothers so very special, the bedrock of humanity.

Let us imagine we are viewing a conflict situation from a different perspective. Imagine that you now understand that your daughter needs to experience this anger as part of her life learning process and it is not your task to do something to stop it happening. It is your task to allow it to happen. It is your task to be the space in which she can experience such difficult emotions safely. How are you going to feel when such a situation arises now? Do you have to feel bad about it? I would suggest that you do not. You can feel good. You can feel proud that you are the hero in her life who is prepared to love her without conditions and allow her to be whoever she is and to feel whatever she feels. This is when your love is shining at its very brightest.

This does not mean that you have to blindly accept abuse from you daughter or allow her to behave destructively. You can still state your preferences. You can still tell her how you would like yourself and your property to be respected. The difference is that you do not try to force a change in her behaviour and you take responsibility for how you are feeling by changing the way you think about what is unfolding.

You are leading by example.

Much love to you,

Happy Cow

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