When should we step aside?
QUESTION: Masters, I love beyond everything my son. He`s adopted, but I feel in my heart that we are the same. He is very intelligent, funny, kind, and ingenious. Every day together with him, I learn new things. I love the way he sees the world. My heart also aches when I see him with other kids. He`s often misunderstood. They call him bad, and a lot of them will not play with him. He has a challenge playing with the others, because he`s weak-sighted. So it`s not so easy for him to run and play as the others. What I`m asking is how far should we go in helping our children in their experience here. I want him to make his own experience in solving the issues in life, but it´s also difficult not to get involved and fix everything. ~Anne Kathrine, Norway
ANSWER: You and your son have had several lives together, and you have alternated in being the helper and the one who needs help. Your life lessons are intertwined in this life because you emotionally feel everything that he is feeling. It is as if what is happening to him is being inflicted upon you. He doesn’t have to say anything to you for you to know exactly how he is feeling. And that makes it difficult not to want to step in and take onto yourself the harmful verbiage coming from his contemporaries, so he does not have to work his way through the abuse.
His lessons include figuring out all about self-image and self-worth. His response to situations now can be with anger and striking out. He has to learn that what is yelled at him can hurt only if he accepts it as truth and allows himself to feel bad because of it. He has to learn to love himself for who he is inside—the beautiful soul that you see. In this strength he can weather the winds of scorn and laugh at their attempt to cower him.
You must try to take a seat on the sideline and let him figure out the way to handle his situation. Advise him how to defuse the intended abuse in a comical way, such as by seeing the offenders themselves as so weak-sighted that they can’t see he is a gallant knight working through adversity to conquer the learning necessary to move up in society. Love him enough to let him find the way to be comfortable in his life.