Something I hear often in spiritual counseling is worry about an adult child.
The child is thirty-two, or forty-five, and they’re struggling. Addiction. A marriage that isn’t working. A career that never launched. Depression. Lyme disease. It’s hard when a child is four or eight or twelve, and it’s every bit as hard when they’re grown and the flourishing we hoped for hasn’t arrived.
Underneath the worry there’s usually something heavier.
Many of the parents I talk with were in a very dark place themselves when they were raising those children. Unhappy marriages. Depression. Alcohol or drugs. A big mess of their own, right in the years the little ones were watching.
Now those little ones are adults who are struggling, and the parents are carrying tremendous guilt, judgment against themselves, and regret for choices made decades ago.
That’s a great deal to hold in one mind at one time. No wonder the imagination runs toward disaster.
Here’s what made a difference for me, and I offer it gently, because I know how tender this ground is.
What if the whole purpose of it is for everyone around them to have an opportunity to develop trust and faith?
Not that their pain was designed as our lesson. Everything works together, and the very situation we can’t control is the exact place where trust becomes possible, because trust that has nothing to lean on isn’t trust at all.
A Course in Miracles says, “Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and your brother experience is really past.”
The fear is really past. The disaster we keep imagining lives in a future that hasn’t arrived and a past that’s already been undone.
Our worry isn’t helping them. It’s the negative use of our imagination pointed at the people we love most.
Instead we can hold the vision. We can know that they’re divinely guided, guarded and protected, and we can release the guilt we’ve been carrying about who we were when they were small.
We CAN release the guilt, shame, worry – but how? If fear about someone you love has been running your days, that’s precisely the healing we do together in Finding Freedom From Fear.
They don’t need our worry. They need our faith.
For many of us those barriers were built early, and they’re held in place by grievances we’ve never set down. If you’d like a few hours of tender, practical company while you look at yours, that’s what my FREE Forgiveness Workshop is for.
I learned that the anger and the keeping people at a distance wasn’t the problem, they were the symptoms pointing me to the underlying cause which was my belief that there was something profoundly wrong with me. All the symptom experiences were inviting me to address that underlying belief. Triggers are helpful and healing.
SEPTEMBER: My Finding Freedom From Fear Bootcamp is 90 days of moving out of coping and into real trust, faith and listening to the higher wisdom, together. This is my longest running program – popular because it is such a game changer. Are you up for truly moving past fear? I only offer this once per year – We start in September! Click here now to learn more now.
SEPTEMBER: How about some free classes with great ACIM teachers? Living A Course in Miracles: Release the Worry, Rest in Trust is open for registration now! Worry isn’t natural. It’s a habit, and habits can be dissolved when we’re truly willing. That’s what we’re doing together September 10 through 13 in my FREE series. 5 teachers, 8 classes, 4 days, and every one of us has walked through the worry ourselves and come out the other side. We’ll look at what worry actually is in the mind, why willpower has never once dissolved it, and how to hand the future over so we can rest even while life is still unresolved. Not denial. Not pretending we’re fine. A real change of mind. It’s FREE, and I’d love to have you with us. Register now so you don’t forget at powerofloveministry.net/Release
Next Free Forgiveness Workshop is Monday, Labor Day, September 7th. Sign up now so you don’t forget.
LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: Why You Can’t Skip Forgiveness with Keith Kavanagh. In this episode of A Course in Miracles: Walking the Talk, Living the Love, Jennifer Hadley welcomes Keith Kavanagh, joining from just outside Dublin, for a conversation on ACIM, forgiveness, and true identity. Keith reveals why he carried the book for nearly thirty years before he’d say he was actually doing it, the surprising truth about the woman who scribed it and never practiced it, and the counterintuitive request Chapter 2 makes of anyone who’s afraid. There’s one step almost every student quietly skips, and there’s a reason it can’t be skipped.
