Unconditional acceptance – Touch The Future

I think there’s the time when we need to step out of that and go to somebody who can help us go deeper. I always say that to parents. People will talk to me in workshops about a kid. They say I have a kid and I just don’t know. I say you know what, you’re a teacher and you’re a lot more than a teacher but you probably need somebody to come and take a look, somebody that can give you a little bit more objective view.

Things to think about

Have you had unconditional acceptance in your life?
How can you show unconditional acceptance to the children in your care?
What philosophies of your program negate unconditional acceptance?
Has your staff looked at the research surrounding praise and rewards system?
How does unconditional acceptance play a role in discipline in your program?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

Is rape, sexual exploitation, domestic violence against women and children, our many addictions, bullying, shaming, humiliation, cops pepper-spraying students, and our endless wars rooted in and symptoms of an impaired capacity to experience empathy, altruistic love and compassion? We assume that everyone has the capacity to love but, and here is the twist, like every other capacity, love must be developed. No development, no love. That’s the way nature works.

I know that many “believe” that pleasure is bad. Spare the rod and spoil the child. The body is dirty. Disembodied spirit, whatever that is, is closer to the divine. Repress temptation and be delivered from evil. All of this is anti-pleasure, anti-body, anti-love to the developing child. Clearly we are designed to experience pleasure. Pleasure is there for a reason. The absence of pleasure, safe touch, and being nurtured with its implicit play and joy, which are all sensory during the formative periods of physical and emotional development, create the foundation for the selfishness and the self-centeredness we experience later. And yes, once this self is formed, its implicit selfishness can and often does pervert play, joy and pleasure. A sensory-emotional system not deprived of pleasure, play and joy is not addicted, does not crave what has not been denied. James Prescott wrote:

“The epidemic of violence in our culture is due to impaired brain development and function. This singular fact has not been recognized by authorities and health professionals concerned with violence.”

I think the next condition is the easiest one to say and the hardest one to do. It’s unconditional acceptance. We need unconditional acceptors in our life, people who absolutely love us no matter what. And I think that, a lot of people talk about that, I think it’s a hard thing to do. Almost all of us like our children when they’re behaving at least kind of halfway human, when they’re not screaming and raging and their noses aren’t running everywhere. You know I think we don’t want to be embarrassed by them. I think that’s probably a natural reaction but I think that’s part of their jobs is to embarrass them. It’s part of our job to embarrass our children too sometimes. But you know unconditional love is a really, really tough thing. I love you no matter what, but boy it’s really, really important too. So in the support group that kind of person has to exist. And I think sometimes when there’s two people in a family, a mom and a dad, that sometimes that can kind of balance out. When one is over-wrought with what the kid is doing the other one can be there to stand close and to be that person who says we’ll get through this. We’re human beings and I think that those things are hard. We haven’t been parents before usually and we don’t know that it’s going to turn out alright, although we should know. The world just keeps going on all the time.

I also think that there’s a place where we need to know when we need professional help and while I think the idea of professional help to me is to get help and move on. It’s not to perhaps stay in therapy forever, that’s just somebody else’s point of view. I think one of the things we tend to do is to turn ___ and I think this is perfectly okay, to our own parents and to maybe our peer group and ask them what they think. But I think there’s the time when we need to step out of that and go to somebody who can help us go deeper. I always say that to parents. People will talk to me in workshops about a kid. They say I have a kid and I just don’t know. I say you know what, you’re a teacher and you’re a lot more than a teacher but you probably need somebody to come and take a look, somebody that can give you a little bit more objective view. Should I be concerned about this kid or shouldn’t I? I think sometimes we think we have to know everything. I’m going to tell a story, we may edit to this, but a good friend of mine, a teacher, sent her, she had four boys, she sent two of her boys, twins, to a church camp to be counselors. They were perhaps 14 or 15. They were going to help with the younger kids. And while they were gone she decided to redo their room and she went in the room and she started stripping things off and she found a note from one of them that said he was going to kill himself while he was gone. And she just ran to the phone and called a counselor that she knew, somebody that she thought could talk to her and he said, “What I hear you saying is” and she had the presence of mind to hang up. I mean that is something, you don’t talk like that when you’re talking to somebody who’s afraid that her kid is going to kill himself and he was at a camp where there was no phone. She called another person that she knew and he said, “Get in the car. Go as quickly as you can.” She said, “Can I let him stay?” And she said, “I expect you to be home in five days or six days, whenever the camp ends and I know that you will be fine.” And then you also clue in other people. You’ve got to make sure that he’s okay to stay. But she there’s a person that says one thing and another person says you’ve got to do this. So it’s a combination of those two; people who listen, people who do this. That idea of professional help is something that, you know I have to kind of say something, my mother and father would have been ashamed to go to anybody else, to talk about the issues that they had. My generation has done it a little bit better and I think this next generation says okay I need some help and I think it’s a really good thing that we’ve done.