The Value of Rethinking 'How Was Your Day?' |
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I talk a lot about the power of focusing on and rather than or in my work on maternal ambivalence. It’s the idea that we don't need to limit our thinking and our feelings to the binary by splitting and constraining ourselves to one way of being or the other. As mothers, at all stages of our mothering, when we open ourselves up so we can appreciate all our feelings, the light and the dark ones, and when we recognize the difficult ones as an opportunity for growth, we can learn about ourselves and our children.
Often, as moms, we get trapped in this binary way of being. We see ourselves as happy or sad, full or depleted, angry or calm, exhausted or energized. We often don't make a place for our full range of emotions, the and, the possibility that oppositional feelings exist together and that this is our truth and our reality. This is for all of us, and this is normal.
I am always looking for ways to refigure and revitalize this idea, to extend it in new ways and give it deeper meaning.
My colleague Belinda Blecher, a psychologist who works with children, has just released a new children’s book, Not That Question Again, which brings into focus how our everyday exchanges can thrust us into binary thinking and how this impacts us. It takes the story of 5-year-old Jack to challenge us, to get us to rethink our language, and to suggest a novel way to think about our truth via a question that he is perpetually asked and that he........