Dr. Lindsay Gibson

to join parenting groups, to watch TV shows on it.

I mean, you can get so much education for so little output right now in terms of what works best with children.

And so no matter when you start it, it's all to the good.

It's just like if you were in a relationship with another adult and

You know, they had maybe had treated you not so well and you'd been unhappy with them.

And then somehow they began to realize what they'd been doing and they start to change and they start to treat you with respect and they really are working on themselves.

I mean, we know what that would feel like.

We know what it feels like to be apologized to or to have someone say, oh, whoops, I'm starting to give advice.

Let me back up for a second.

Please go on.

I'm sorry.

It feels good and you feel closer to them and the relationship starts to build on a stronger basis when you do that.

Yeah, and we have to be aware of that.

If we're trying to never do anything wrong with our children...

That is putting so much pressure on ourselves that we're probably going to end up working against the very thing we're trying to do because it's going to make us stressed and we're not going to be in that nice fluid state of self-confidence that we need to do parenting day in and day out.

That is such a poignant example of someone who has grown to the point where they can now self-reflect and they can have a sense of how they're

behavior or how their reactions may have affected their children.

And also you can sort of read between the lines that this person was struggling with such big feelings, with such despair, with such helplessness, that they couldn't do anything except what they did.

They were trying to survive, probably, because those are the kinds of extreme behaviors that people use when they can't find any other way of coping.

So when you begin to get a little bit of self-insight and awareness of how you may have affected other people, there's a terribly difficult transitional time where you now know you have enough distance from that previous self, so to speak.