Describe one or more areas in which you feel you
could be more effective as a parent.

When it comes to using Pain-2-Power as parents, the First Step is one in which you ask yourself, "What is it I most want to change about your relationship with my child or children?" It isn’t enough to say you want things to improve. Ask yourself how you want them to improve or what area of your child’s life you better want to understand. Do you want more closeness, more obedience, less drama? Do you wish that you could get past a specific event from the past that led to conflict between you?

Put your thoughts on paper and expand on whatever feels truest to you. What kind of fights happen a lot? When things are tense between you, what is the point of tension? You may feel like you have a million and one problems with your children, and that’s OK. Many, many parents do. But as you begin to think and write and then read what you’ve written, it’s likely one issue will initially stand out as the one that really nags at you or keeps you up at night, or seems to be the one that your son or daughter complains the most about. That area is where you want to put your energy—at first. Later, you’ll identify other areas, and address them one by one.

Don’t worry that by choosing your first issue to focus on that you’ll be neglecting the others. Think of whichever one you decide is the most pressing as the door that leads you into the house of your truth. It doesn’t matter how you enter, as long as you manage to get inside. Because once you start to move from room to room, you will eventually see the underlying emotions, fears and desires limiting the richness of your relationship with your child (or children). And once uncovered, all those feelings and realizations can give you the key to understanding not only what the trouble really is, but how to fix it.

I believe problems are linked. When you start to uncover the roots of the main problems in your relationship with your child, you’ll end up tracing the roots of other problems, too.

Here are some of the ways you might express a desire to become an even more powerful parent:

I wish my children felt safer turning to me for insight and support.

I wish my husband and I could present a more united front when it comes to disciplining our children.

I wish that my child and I did not fight so much.

I wish that I were able to help my child do better in school.

I wish I were not so obsessively worried about the health and safety of my children.

I wish that I could help my son past the resentment he feels about my divorce.

I wish that I could help my daughter identify worthy goals that move her.

You definitely want to feel when you read your statement that it strikes you as real, and maybe even touches you emotionally. But your goal isn’t set in stone. It isn’t crucial to identify the exact right issue or problem when you begin doing this work. What is important is you have decided to uncover the truth about why your relationship isn’t working. Because uncovering the truth, choosing to be reflective, rather than reactive, leads us to deeper truths. It leads us to question what we thought we wanted and needed as parents from ourselves and our kids, and to imagine positive changes.

It is possible that as you continue with the steps, you’ll learn that what you thought the central problem in your relationship with your son or daughter really wasn't the core issue at all.

Let’s take the first example: “I wish my child felt safe turning to me for insight and support.” You may realize, after working your way through the following steps, that what you really want is to feel more confident about giving this support. Maybe you never got it from your own parents.

Or consider the second example: “I wish my husband and I could present more of a united front when it comes to disciplining our kids.” Perhaps you will discover that more effective parenting is about you and your husband being able to spend more time together, to develop the kind of intimacy that would allow you to be more of one heart and mind.

Step One isn’t about hitting the nail on the head. It’s about finding a meaningful starting place for your journey to the truth.

Identify hurdles to you (or your child) changing in
the area or areas you identified above.

Step Two is about you telling the story of why it’s been challenging for you to get what you want or provide what you want to in this relationship. Ask yourself: Why have I not been able to make this work? What factors stand in the way? Whose emotions – either yours, or your child’s, or even someone else's involved in your lives – create a barrier to your moving away from tension, anger and resentment into harmony and understanding? The best way to locate and identify these hurdles is simply to take your goal from Step One, and add a “but” to it.

I wish my children felt safe turning to me for insight and support, but I feel like they’re afraid to bother me because I am so busy, and that makes me feel guilty.

I wish my husband and I could present more of a united front when it comes to disciplining our kids, but he is so rigid, and I am so flexible. I don’t see a compromise in sight.

I wish that my child and I did not fight so much, but her sarcasm and total disrespect for my rules infuriates me.

I wish that I were able to help my child do better in school, but I am so distracted and upset by my own divorce that I can’t seem to focus on it.

I wish that I could help my son past the resentment he feels about my divorce, but I’m not used to sharing my own feelings about it.

I wish that I could help my daughter identify worthy goals that move her, but I feel myself getting very anxious and a little angry when she says she just wants to “enjoy” her senior year.

You should feel free to write as many “buts” as you want. For example: “I wish that my daughter and I didn’t fight … but she has such a bad temper… but her tone just gets under my skin… but she’s living in my house and not paying rent and doesn’t have any regard for my own financial pressures.”

You might feel like you’re complaining. In fact, you’re engaging in something far more constructive. If your relationship were a road, you are laying out a map of that road, finding where it curves, or seems blocked, or has detours. These twists and turns might scare you. You could think (consciously or unconsciously): “But I don’t want to get anywhere near her anger,” or, “Thinking about my own financial situation worries me, and I don’t want to explore whether my daughter is worried about it, too.” This fear or discomfort is an indication that you’re moving in a good direction. After all, the fact that these issues bring up emotions means those emotions are already there. You might as well look at them. Hide them, and they will wreak havoc from within. Find them, face them, and deal with them, and you hold the key to unlocking valuable truths about how to achieve a close, workable, and loving relationship with your child.

Assume that the hurdles you identified in Step Two are reflections of other relationship difficulties (perhaps even emotional experiences with your own parents.)

Up until now, you may have assumed that the solution to solving your problems with your child would be found within the narrow confines of that relationship: if you’d stop reacting, she’d stop acting out; if he’d do better in school, you wouldn’t have to be such a stickler for rules. Step Three seeks to free you from relationship lockdown by considering the idea that a solution might very well lie in exploring issues and feelings outside your relationship.

Imagine that you and your child are connected to each other in a kind of emotional circuit. The wiring in this circuit is frayed, or strung too tightly, or carries too much current. Step Three asks you to remember that the circuitry connecting you is not the only circuit each of you draws emotional power from or provides energy to. You are both connected to your spouse, to other family members, friends, employers, people in your community, and to society at large. If you have been unable to optimize your connection to your child it may well be because that connection is part of a vast and delicate system, and you can’t just fix that system by focusing narrowly on you and your child, in this moment. You have to consider it as a whole.

A central belief of Pain-2-Power is that buried conflicts and pain from your past find their way to the surface through tensions and problems in your current relationships. We are asking you to make a total paradigm shift—away from laser focus on your troubled relationship with your child and toward a firm conviction that the solution to your current relationship lies in looking both inside it and outside of it. This requires abandoning old behaviors and attitudes. It is a real leap of faith.

Even if your relationship with your child isn’t going well, it might be hard to give up the way you’ve been seeing it and the way you have been responding to it. You might not want to relinquish control. You might feel that if you can just continue to plow ahead you might get somewhere. You might be holding out for the day your child sees that you’re “right.”

We urge you to take that leap of faith. If you can accept that you had a life before you were a parent, and you have a life outside of being a parent, we want you to take the next step and consider that perhaps the answers to how to be a better parent (and how to motivate your child to be a more emotionally aware, balanced, genuine and powerful individual) lie outside the immediate confines of your parent-child relationship.

Here are some ways to think about Step Three.

Your child is doing badly in school, and you have been focusing on him improving his performance. In Step Three, you decide you are going to consider your own attitudes about success and your child’s fears about the lack of opportunities available to him as possible reasons for his lack of motivation.

Your child is having trouble making friends. You have been trying to force play dates, and the result is temper tantrums, not increased sociability. In Step Three, you decide that you’re going to reflect on whether your child fears losing you (either because you have been battling an illness or battling with your husband or have gone back to work) and is reticent to make new connections that might be interpreted as signaling that he is okay “without” you.

Your daughter picks one deadbeat guy after deadbeat guy after another, and you fight with her constantly about it. In Step Three, you decide to go back through your own relationship history to see what she may have learned from you that leads to poor choices now. You wonder whether

only young men with problems make her feel needed. You wonder whether her short-lived relationships with one troubled young man after another really mean she fears a more complete and lasting relationship with a balanced man.

You would never try to fix a house that was falling apart by just nailing the part that was collapsing back together. You would look at the foundation, the land it was built on, the texture of the soil, and even the rainfall patterns. Widening the scope of your vision of your relationship with your child and starting to see it in the context of other relationships, other sources of anger and fear and the impact of past events is critical to healing it.

Connect today’s parenting hurdles to specific emotional
and behavioral patterns rooted in the past.

In Step Three, you began to accept the idea that you might heal your relationship with your child not by focusing narrowly on the problems with that relationship itself, at this moment, but on tensions and issues connected to it, including ones from the past.

In Step Four, we want to start examining what those tensions and issues are, and how they are related to patterns in both of your lives. You want to ask yourself, "What has happened to me in my past – or is happening to me right now – that might cause me to react the way I do to my son? And what about him? What has he dealt with, and what does he continue to deal with, that might cause him to behave this way with me?"

Let’s take the examples above from Step Three and see how an understanding of these issues might deepen in Step Four.

Your son’s academic performance is lagging, and you have been focusing on getting him to study. Now, you think about how getting good grades to please your parents and your teachers was the only way you could ever get validation. In fact, doing anything less than perfectly in your family was considered shameful. Your son always seemed to react against this. As a child, he cried when he made mistakes. He eventually gravitated toward more artistic forms of expression, where things could be judged subjectively.

Your daughter is having trouble making friends. You have been trying to force it. You remember that you yourself were very shy as a child. Your parents were immigrants, and you were the only one in the family who spoke English. Not being outgoing with strangers wasn’t an option, so you pushed your fear of people way down, and had feelings of both pride and anger around this. Your husband’s job has you moving around a lot, and your third-grade daughter is on her third school. You are terrified by every move, and though you keep a smile on your face, your daughter’s extreme shyness indicates that the hidden emotional conflict inside of you has found a home in her.

Your daughter picks deadbeat guy after deadbeat guy, and you fight with her constantly about what you perceive as bad taste. But in Step Four, you remember the days following your divorce, when she was very young. You spent a lot of time back in those days crying over various disastrous relationships. You felt used, and unloved, and you would date unsuitable people to avoid being alone. And thinking back, though your mother never divorced, she did wait up for your dad to come home from the bar most nights. You now begin to see that your daughter’s “bad taste” is a pattern, set in motion long before she was even born.

Here is your opportunity to stop focusing narrowly on your conflict with your child and to widen your view of the problem. You reflect on the conflicts in your past and your child’s past that inform and will heal this one.

Naturally, how you yourself were parented has the absolute greatest influence on how you parent now. Are you reacting against your overly strict upbringing by not providing good boundaries, or are you duplicating it, and creating a child who fears and resents you?

Do your problems with intimacy express themselves in your child’s lack of interest in making friends?

When your kid looks at you with accusing eyes, do you see the kid brother who you always had to take care of, who never appreciated that you sacrificed your adolescence for him?

And how about your child? Is she expressing anger toward you because painful shyness prevents her from making friends and giving her a sense of competence as a person? Is she distancing herself from you because the family has moved three times and she is “projecting” onto you her pain from being far from friends? Is your son overbearing and hard to discipline because he unconsciously believes he needs to be “the man of the house” to fill the gap left by his under-involved father in the household?

You and your child did not arrive on this planet fully formed with the same morals, ideas and personalities. Step Four allows you to see that every person you have ever met, every experience you have ever had, every triumph you have enjoyed and every disappointment you have suffered plays a part in how you parent your child. And your child also brings his (or her) own past—though these experiences are much less vast—into the relationship with you.

Step Four is about realizing the ways in which the past has unconsciously taken control of your relationship with your child. Once you become aware of how these patterns work, you are on your way to changing them.

Put the past behind you.

In Step Five, you make the conscious decision to think more deeply about the insights that you’ve unlocked. You will want, especially, to allow yourself to think about the ways that you were parented. This will bring up complicated emotions. But remember that these emotions were always there. Before, they came up unconsciously as conflict and tension. Now, you will be actively calling upon them. You are unearthing buried treasures of insight. You will be learning invaluable lessons to change the trajectory of your relationship with your child.

These insights, far from defeating or overwhelming you, will empower you to act in healing and effective ways.

Why might unearthing your buried treasure feel like stepping into quicksand? One central reason is that the thoughts and emotions that set the stage for the tenor and tone of your relationship with your son or daughter have roots back in much earlier chapters in your life story.

If you feared that your parents would divorce, or you nursed anger at your dad’s drinking, or you resented the overly controlling nature of your mom, you experienced these emotions with a child or adolescent’s heart and mind. You didn’t have the resources to deal with them effectively back then. They seemed overwhelming. And they may still feel that way. But the truth is that now, as an adult, with so much more life experience and so many more resources at your disposal, you can afford to resurrect the past and learn from it.

No one who is willing to look over her shoulder at the road she has traveled in life gets lost that way. We see the road ahead in life more clearly when we glance in the rearview mirror to understand the twists and turns we have already lived through.


The roots of our emotional and behavioral patterns partly set the stage for our successes or failures as parents. We know that we must understand the events and relationships that make up our histories before we can understand the ways we have been relating to our children, and the more powerful ways in which we can move forward with them.

Here are some ways to think about the above issues in Step Five.

Your son is doing poorly in school and you have decided to shift the focus away from his failure to your feelings. Why are you reticent to express your disappointment directly, for example? Why does it make your heart sink to get tutors involved in his life? Why have you been wary of insisting that he structure his day to include homework? You remember what praise felt like from your parents when you were little, and how it felt to disappoint them. Maybe you’ve been unwilling to challenge your son about his performance in school and put in place the resources and rules to make him more successful because you’ve been avoiding your own feelings about your parents’ reaction to your academic performance. Don’t just try to feel the feelings, remember the experience as vividly as you can. In which room in your house did your father yell at you about getting a C in Algebra? What was the tone of his voice? What towel did you use to dry your face when you were crying after that?

Your daughter is shy, and you are no longer going to berate her for her lack of courage, you are going to reflect on your own mixed feelings about sociability. What did it feel like when your parents didn’t understand the language being used by the people they did business with, and you had to translate for them? Did anyone from school ever make fun of them? What did you do? Did you cry? Who was the little girl who came over in class and comforted you, until your family moved, and you attended another school?

Using Pain-2-Power as parents is about creating a paradigm shift—to see our conflicts with our kids not as an inevitable clash of opposing forces but as a dynamic between two loving individuals acting out dramas that no longer serve either of them. We create this paradigm shift when we take ourselves into the past and deal with the feelings there. It also gives us context. When we start to fight with our child and think, “Wow, this sounds like the way I used to fight with my dad,” we see this fight for what it is: an outdated, no longer useful way of expressing our buried emotions. The more we know why we do something, the less we are compelled to do it. This is living in consciousness. This is Pain-2-Power parenting.

Use the same reasoning with your children: Assume they
struggle with you as a way of acting out other struggles
(perhaps with their peers or with their own impulses).

You have opened up the lens on your own life and seen that your conflicts with your children are not just about them. You have a job, you have relationship problems, you have parents. All of these elements have affected how you parent. Now it’s time to open up the lens on your child’s life and to consider the demands and pressures that influence how he or she behaves.

It is very easy to think that your children are doing things to you. If they don’t obey your rules, they’re disrespecting you. If they lie, they’re insulting your intelligence or not honoring the care you’ve taken to teach them right from wrong. If they hang around kids you don’t like, it’s to worry you or make you mad.

Can you imagine that the choices that your child makes that you don’t like are not necessarily made consciously, and not intended to upset or punish you?

Can you imagine that perhaps they have pressure from other areas of their lives you know little about? Let’s say you don’t like what your child wears to school. Well, maybe she is desperately trying to fit in. Maybe she has an exaggerated need for acceptance from her peers because she felt isolated from your two older children.

Or, imagine also that your child is not getting good grades. Could it be that he is unconsciously hoping that if he creates a big need for parental attention, that it could bring you and your estranged spouse back together?

You know that the choices you make that seem to drive your kids crazy are not to punish them. You may date people they don’t like, work hours they don’t like, or forbid them go on a trip to Hawaii where there will be two chaperones for 88 kids. These are choices made to protect your child. These are choices that reflect what you think is appropriate. If you can see that behaviors of yours that they don’t like or agree with are not personal attacks, can you imagine that your children’s unwanted behaviors are not personal attacks either?

Perhaps what you see as acting out, they see as the best route to self-protection, or a way to feel powerful in a situation where they feel powerless.

Step 6 is about recognizing that your child isn’t just a reflection of you, nor someone making choices based on today’s stresses and choices alone. He or she is a whole person, with emotional roots reaching back to childhood, and with an emotional legacy tied inextricably to yours. Such recognition creates empathy for the pressures, responsibilities and fears they endure, and this empathy will open you up to their truths. In turn, they can open up to yours.

Ask your children questions to help them express their
underlying anger, anxiety, frustration or sadness.

You have decided that you are going to look at the whole story of your child’s life—past and present—rather than just at the point at which that story intersects yours.

In order to get access to that story, you are going to want to ask open-ended questions about whatever might be fueling your children’s personal dramas—questions that excavate the truth. Whatever it is that you have identified that they may be reacting to in their lives, you want to get at what their feelings are about those things, to let them know that you have opened your mind and heart to really hearing their truths.

Approaching them with kindness and gentle curiosity should encourage them to open up.

Here are some examples of what you might say:

I know we haven’t talked about your Dad leaving in a long time. I guess I thought you were doing OK with it because you don’t mention it, but I realize that it’s been a year, and I want to check in about how you’re doing.

We haven’t talked much since I told you that I wasn’t going to let you travel alone to California. And while I’m still firm about your not going, I want to know what was so important to you about making that trip. Did you feel like you wanted to show you could do it and be okay? Did you want an opportunity to strike out on your own? Is there something else you could do that might satisfy you that you think I might accept?

I want to talk to you about school, but not your grades. I want to know what you don’t like about it, and what you do like. Is there anything we can do for you that might make you like it more?

Your child might very well resist. Your job is to be persistent without being overbearing. Let him or her know that you are not afraid to go deeper, even if the truth may include painful information about what he or she feels about you or your spouse or about their habits or desires. Be patient and remember you are on the path to a more harmonious, loving relationship.

Develop your new parenting plan and put it into action.

This step is about action. It is about moving ahead your dreams of being a better parent with a concrete plan. In Step 8 you look back at Steps 1-7 and distill what you now know about your life history, about your child’s, and about the dynamics in your family. You consider everything you’ve learned, and you ask yourself, what is the best way we as a family can move forward?

Here are some courses of action someone wanting to turn pain into power as a parent might take:

I am going to accept that my kid is not an academic superstar. I am going to stop monitoring his every move in school and instead start commenting on his abilities as an athlete, or his skills as a salesperson. I am going to sign on with his aspirations, even if they are not what I had initially expected for him.

I am not going to be afraid to set clearer expectations for my daughter to live up to academically and socially. My dad went too far in that regard, so I’ve been too “hands-off.” But that was about him and me; this is about my daughter and me.

I am going to stop yelling at my daughter for the guys she picks. I am going to start being more open with her about my own romantic choices in the past, not to scare her, or to hint at what she should do, but as a way of keeping a dialogue between us, and in the hope that my support and love will give her the emotional groundwork to improve her choices.

I am going to stop expecting my daughter to do whatever I did as a parent. I have been withholding my help as a sort of punishment for what I see as bad parenting, but I am going to start offering to babysit again. Though she still harbors resentment about what she considers my “meddling” in the past, I hope my sincere offers of generosity will encourage forgiveness. I am going to continue to think about the ways in which my mother’s own inflexibility makes me tend to want to tell her what she should do and how to do it, and to concentrate on being helpful, rather than being right.

Remember, action is essential to change. Start moving in the direction of your truth and your children’s and you can forge relationships that feel loving, supportive and real. You have taken the first steps to using Pain-2-Power as a parent. Now, even more gifts will come from staying on the path.