Miraculous Parenting - The Art of Deep Listening
IDAN MEIR, TUESDAY 4.6.2023
I came across Miraculous Parenting (MP) after a long search over my first five years of fatherhood. We had three significant major changes happening simultaneously that shook our little family. We moved to a new flat, opened our first Yoga Studio during the pandemic, and got our beloved twin girls Romy and Leni on the 34th week of pregnancy. A month after arriving home, after 3.5 weeks in the hospital, we moved to our newly renovated flat, lived around boxes for months and had long white sleepless nights in the mids of the covid lockdowns. It was all too much for us but especially for our 3.5 years old Jonathan, who probably experienced a significant loss of his sense of a safe home and felt left alone when both his parents were extremely busy with two little babies.
I was in the worth phase of my fatherhood. Jonathan and I were in constant struggle games, and I felt cold and disconnected from him. I could see his suffering and knew he was struggling, but I could not find compassion towards him. I was tired, overwhelmed, reactive, aggressive, and had no patience for his ‚bad behaviours’. I was far from being the loving father I used to be and felt like a failure. I knew something deep was happening underneath in both of us, but I couldn’t reach there. I knew I needed help but was not so good at asking and didn’t know where to start.
Miraculous Parenting (MP) was developed 25 years ago by the Israeli Writer, Teacher and Therapist Shai Or. This therapeutic approach sees the difficulties children bring home or to school as a language and a way of expressing their deeper needs that their parents are not seeing and answering.
I heard about MP from a friend who thought this approach suited me, and she was right. With the help of a great MP Therapist, I could see how a miracle had happened. My relationship with my son improved dramatically. I learned how to deepen my listening to him and differentiate when I am reacting from my immaturity and my own hurt child and when responding from the mature side of mine. I fell in love with Jonathan again, I could see his wonderful beauty, wisdom and uniqueness and could soften and embrace both his and my weaknesses. It didn’t happen in a day, it was a long deep process of learning and developing new awareness, but it was exciting and fascinating at the same time.
In the MP approach, every human comes to the world with seven basic requests: 1. The request for Home (security, nourishment and containment), 2. Enjoyment, 3. Uniqueness, 4. Proximity, closeness, and sense of togetherness, 5. Freedom of Expression, 6. Freedom of Thinking, and 7. Freedom of Being.
When the child is on the path of flourishment and growth, all the requests are naturally answered, and the child can grow to become a fulfilled, free and happy whole mature person. But, in many cases, along the way, something goes wrong, and the child somehow moves from the path of flourishment when one or more requests he is asking for are not being heard and answered.
For example: when a child is furious and shouts his rage spontaneously, his father or mother or both can get overwhelmed or even scared and try to control, change, shrink or sometimes even ignore it. Shutting the expression of anger off or giving signs that it’s not cool to be too angry, too loud or too wild can bring a child (after a long time of asking) to the conclusion that “when I am angry - I am not loved”. Or in other words, there is no home for my emotions (The first request for home, containment or the fifth request for freedom of expression). He may learn that it’s ok to show only nero comfortable range of emotions and will turn to be a very nice polite and good boy. A process of shrinking, filtering and controlling took over his wild nature of emotional expression.
Some parents think that’s how it should be. A child should learn to control himself and behave. It’s more convenient to have quiet children at home or in a restaurant, but there is a high price for it in the long term.
The underneath message that parents are giving their children when a request is not being answered can develop into an activating-blocking belief mechanism like: „I better shut up“, „My inner world is not interesting“, „I do not deserve to be loved“, and more. Those belief systems guard mechanisms that can remain an inner melody for life and rule the grown-up child even 30, 40, or 50 years later.
MP Therapy help parents to listen to their children’s deep requests, gives them practical tools to return to the route of flourishment, and develops deep listening skills for their own hurt child. This approach teaches parents to give what they never got, first to the parent and then to the child.
Recently I started my MP Therapist training and started working intensely with parents. I am excited to see the miracle happening in many other families from one week to the other. This approach brings a new meaning to parenting when realising, as Shai Or says: “Parenting is the manufacture of humanity”; in other words, by raising happy, free, and mature conscious adults, we promise a better future for humanity.
I still struggle with everyday challenges like many other parents, which are our daily routine with three little kids. But as a co-leading parent of my family, I have the tools to listen better to the underneath requests of our children, and my wife and I have learned how to look at every difficult situation as an opportunity for closeness. Sometimes we manage alone, many times, we get help, and sometimes we get confused, falling and rising back to the next challenge.