Calling us back to our truth

I often talk about the joy and connection of unschooling, and there are definitely many ways to harness all the good stuff. Yes to a positive attitude, yes to noticing all the wonderful things that are happening, yes to listening to podcasts and learning, and yes to self-compassion and taking great care of yourself. Yes to all of this as you move from a place of worry and fear to a place of trust and partnership.

But you may have had multiple times in your unschooling journey, and in other parts of your life and parenting, when absolutely none of that works. When you feel stuck and hopeless, and simply cannot muster up the energy to engage in anything remotely positive. In fact, in those moments, if you were to engage with any one of the above, it would most likely be insanely irritating and make the chasm between where you are now and where you wish you were seem even bigger.

In those difficult moments or seasons, we would do better to forget about moving forward and ask instead, “What is holding me back?”. Because the invisible pull of beliefs and stories we are not even aware of is a force to be reckoned with. We can often tell when there is some deeper part of ourselves calling the shots because we find that, no matter how much we try to change something, we always end up back in the same place. We repeat old patterns of approval-seeking, over-stretching ourselves, keeping ourselves small, needing to be the family “fixer”, and endless other ways in which some part of us feels validated, even when it comes at the expense of our happiness now. And until we start to see and question the validity of beliefs behind the patterns, we will have no idea how much they govern our lives.

By the time we started unschooling, I already had a pretty good grounding in self-enquiry. For some years I had been in psychotherapy, which I had started in my late twenties when the rules by which I was living my life had made me increasingly miserable—despite appearing outwardly successful and despite my painstaking efforts to move forward by doing all the positive things.

Then, when my children were young, I spent two years in a small and wonderful online cohort, taking a deep dive into shadow work. All of this made me far more aware of the hidden stories and beliefs that were often running my particular show and, alongside mindfulness, gave me many tools to unravel them. But nothing quite prepared me for how much more would need to be explored and unravelled as we embarked on unschooling.

It’s a common theme on the podcast, and in the interviews in my book, that unschooling is often deeply healing for the parent. To most people, I’m sure it just sounds wacky, a bit lazy, and potentially quite fun if you get on well enough with your children. After all, you are no longer doing all the hard bits of parenting: getting them ready and out of the house in the morning, the battles over homework, pushing them to do their best in exams. So potentially less stressful, yes. But healing?

Our children have a remarkable capacity to bring into glorious view all those old beliefs about ourselves that we had hoped to hide away forever. On my more romantic days, I imagine them as guides, shining a light on the next shadowy part of ourselves to be examined, hugged and welcomed back into the fold of our wholeness. Or, as my latest podcast guest, Olivia, beautifully puts it, “calling us home to our truth”.

If we are parenting in a more conventional way, a lot of the discomfort that arises when an old story is challenged can simply be projected right back at the child. You are justified for feeling annoyed at a child who doesn’t do as they are told. You are right to feel worried that your child is behind. Angry about chores not done, homework handed in late or too much time looking at a screen? Of course! It is equally justified in our culture to deride yourself for not being a good enough parent: too busy, too hands-on, too hands-off, not boundaried enough. All of this can stay safely within the familiar habits and patterns of the conscious mind. You certainly can dig deeper and, of course, many parents do, but if we want to radically shift how we live with our children, we don’t have a choice.

If you want to parent in partnership with your child, if you want your child to feel seen and respected, to be able to self-advocate, to make choices for themselves, and to be able to question the status quo, then alas, you have no option but to notice where they are shining the light and to take a closer look at what lies underneath your reactions. And you have no choice but to question the dominant social and cultural narratives of our times and your relationship to them.

This is the deschooling work—stopping, noticing and questioning.

It is hard work to go there and take a closer look. After all, there are good reasons that we once chose to push all this stuff down and, after maybe decades of practice, we are experts at rationalising it all and doing workarounds precisely so we don’t have to look at the painful parts that still hold sway. It will almost certainly mean visiting vulnerable places and sitting with feelings that at one point felt like too much. But if we can see the discomfort as an invitation for curiosity and enquiry, then our children can lead us to places we never dreamed we would go, and to unravelling stories about ourselves that have gone unchallenged for decades.

And this is why unschooling can be so transformative for us and our relationship with our children. Whilst it dredges up old beliefs and triggers old patterns, our huge desire for something different gives us a reason to start investigating what on earth is going on for us.

A wonderful tool for starting to question our old patterns and their underlying beliefs is Morning Pages, from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I did this fairly consistently for the first year of our unschooling, and I still return to it when I feel like I’ve hit something that my conscious mind just can’t fathom.

Write three pages of A4 by hand, ideally first thing in the morning, when your thinking, analytical brain hasn’t yet come fully online. Don’t worry about what you are going to write about, just scribble down whatever first comes into your head and keep going from there. As you write, notice what energy arises in you. Does something bring tension or relief? Can you notice when you have touched on something that feels important? I always get a surge of tension in my upper body when I am circling something that feels true to me, even though I may not yet understand it.

If you find it hard to start, you could use a prompt such as, “What am I feeling right now?”, or “What am I finding hard right now?”. You can keep hold of the pages, but the value is in the process not in the end result, so equally, you can throw them away, rip them up or ceremoniously burn them!

So there we have it. I would never say that our children are here to heal us. But, they will inevitably keep shining that light on all our own stories, and inviting us to stop, notice and to question whether those stories are even true. And every time we realise they are not, and that in fact they hold us back, we get a little closer to what really is true for us.