Today is my mom’s birthday. If you really knew me, you’d know that my maternal relationship is one of the most challenging relationships of my life. It’s also the relationship that has most shaped who I am and what I do today.
Talking about challenging parental relationships is super personal. I want to preface what I’m sharing by saying that my mother is an incredible person. She’s given me my life and sacrificed a lot in her life to make sure that my life was better than hers.
I encounter many people who are not at peace with their parents. It’s a tough place to be in. Ultimately, as long as we blame our parents for anything, we can’t help but somehow continuously overcompensate for what we perceive to be missing in our lives.
It’s easy to step into relationships expecting the other person to change. But some relationships just aren’t like that. We always have a choice to walk away. And, as long as we choose to stay in the relationship, it’s up to us to take full responsibility for that choice without putting it on the other person.
Recognizing this and really owning it has transformed my life, my personal relationships, and my effectiveness as an entrepreneur.
Here are some of the things that really helped me on the path:
Immunity to Change - this is a body of work developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey at Harvard. There are so many ways this work has served me. In the context of my maternal relationship it gave me a simple and specific process to identify and test key assumptions I was holding in a way that helped me transform them.
Enneagram - this is a personality assessment framework that helped me recognize that my mother and I actually share the same dominant personality type. Somehow, this realization was a big aha moment for me. It also helped me better understand our very different expression of the same underlying personality orientation.
Kundalini Yoga - I’ve had a lot of intense emotional stuff come up in my maternal relationship. Kundalini Yoga combines breathwork and movement in a way that makes it particularly suitable for processing this kind of content. There have been many times when I felt completely overwhelmed with anger or frustration and, one hour of practice later, felt completely at peace. This has been one of my main practices for self regulation.
Landmark - one of the pillars of Landmark is getting complete with your family. Nobody does this better than Landmark. Whether it’s your parents or an ex-spouse or a child, if you’re estranged or super challenged, Landmark is powerful. Ultimately, the conversation that gave me the most freedom with my mother was a conversation directly inspired by my participation in Landmark’s Advanced Course.
Forgiving myself - the journey of a challenging parental relationship is a windy road. It’s ancestral, it’s deep, it goes to the very earliest root of our lived experience and beyond. Inevitably, you will not meet your own expectations, you will lose your shit, and, at times, feel like you haven’t made any progress. You have. Just the fact that you’re committed and have the capacity to be aware of and hold space for everything that’s coming up for you, is progress. Witnessing your internal experience is literally the work. So, when stuff does overwhelm you, forgive yourself. And that makes it much easier to forgive anyone else. Forgiveness is the ultimate path.
Commitment - about 15 years ago, I made a commitment to have a good relationship with my mother. The rest of the journey was just about who I had to become to live up to that commitment. Much of my work with relational spaces and emotional intelligence is woven into that journey. I would not have the relational intelligence I have today or the capacity to hold space the way I do were it not for who I’ve had to become to hold space for my mother.
My maternal relationship has been one of the biggest teachers of my life. Thank you mom for being one of the wildest free spirits that I have ever encountered.
My mother is a life long artist. If you’re curious to learn more about her, you can check out her website here: http://www.sellryazanoff.com/