Negative attitude can happen to all of us, but the more you have it, the more it will affect your life, especially when it comes to maintaining relationships, especially with family members. Many times, we try very hard to maintain that relationship, but the harder we try, the worse it becomes.
Is this a result of too much effort, or is it a result of inappropriate effort that comes from a negative attitude?
Let’s take a look at the real life story of a mother and daughter. Her name is Sara. She is a single mom with a 16-year-old daughter. Sara’s husband died in a car accident (drink driving) when her daughter was not even 1 year old.
This makes Sara work hard because she needs money and advancement because she believes that this is the way to earn money to support her children and to be able to send them to good schools in the future.
As a result of Sara having to work hard, she decided to send her daughter to live with her grandmother in a foreign country when she was not even 2 years old. As a result, Sara only had the opportunity to see her daughter during the holidays.
After 14 years, when her daughter was 16 years old, Sara saw that her daughter was old enough and could take care of herself to some extent, so she decided to let her daughter move in with her again. This time, Sara hoped that she and her daughter would be able to be happy together as a mother and daughter again.
But in reality, it wasn’t like that at all. After moving in with her, Sara’s daughter had the behavior of being introverted, liking to be alone. When they met, she would answer with one word, trying to avoid her until Sara had to call her several times to ask what happened, but she never got a clear answer from her daughter.
With this problem, Sara thought (thought) that her child must have done something bad or wrong, so she didn’t want her to know and tried to avoid her.
Her daughter’s grades continued to decline, so much so that the homeroom teacher had to call Sara in and inform her of her daughter’s problems. The teacher said that her daughter had been seldom submitting her homework and skipping class on several occasions, which was causing her grades to decline.
When Sara found out about this, she was very angry and dissatisfied with her daughter. After she got home, she called her daughter to be disciplined. Sara started by scolding her daughter, “Why don’t you care or pay attention to your studies? Mommy has been sending you to a good school, but you don’t care and act like a fool.”
“Mom, listen to me explain first,” the daughter said back. But before she could continue, Sara interrupted her angrily, saying:
“You can only learn this much. Your intelligence must be this much, right? If you can only learn this much, then don’t study it. I worked so hard to earn money so that you can study, but look at what you’ve done. It’s really useless.” When the daughter heard this, she started crying and ran away into her bedroom.
After that incident, her daughter started coming home later and later, or sometimes she would stay over at a friend’s house for 2-3 days at a time. When Sara encountered these incidents more frequently, she could not help but call her daughter in to warn her (to scold her), and this last time, a huge fight broke out.
Sara spoke to her daughter angrily, thinking that her daughter was irresponsible, lazy, not interested in studying, just living her life day by day, not having the patience like her, not having the determination to study or being good at studying like other children. She also said that she would not let her daughter study anymore and would send her back to live with her grandmother in another city instead.
The daughter became sarcastic when she heard this and told her mother, “I don’t love you. I won’t live with you anymore.” After she finished speaking, she ran away from home.
After her child left home, Sara muttered to herself, “ I tried everything, worked hard, worked hard, to earn money to send my child to school, to give my child a good life. I tried to be the best mother I could be, but what is this? Why is my only child so useless?”
Three days passed and her daughter did not return home or go to school. Sara tried to contact her daughter’s friends to ask where her daughter was, but no one knew. She decided to call the police to help in the search.
Sara felt very sorry. “Is it because of me that my daughter is like this?”
She tried to think to find the answer, and all she could do was hope that she would find her daughter, that her daughter would be safe, and that she wanted to resolve the issues that had happened.
The police searched for about 2 days and found her daughter in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town, a hangout for drug addicts. Her daughter was intoxicated.
Sara is happy to see her daughter, but how will she handle her daughter’s situation going forward?
Her daughter had to undergo recuperation and treatment at the hospital. Sara decided to take time off work to be close to her daughter during her stay at the hospital.
During the days when her daughter was asleep, she kept thinking about how she could solve these problems.
Then she remembered that her office had bought a book for employees to read during the New Year. The book was called The Outward Mindset “Seeing Beyond Ourselves.” She happened to bring the book with her. She thought that she might get some answers from this book. She decided to open her mind and give it a read.
And it was found that
“Time, connection and trust are the key to maintaining a relationship.”
Sara revisits the past. “Or maybe I never spend time with my child. I hardly ever have quality time with my child because when I get home it’s already late. I’m so busy thinking about work that I forget my child is at home.”
“Or maybe I never listen to my child. I never even give my child a chance to talk or tell me what he wants to tell me.” These things may be part of the problem that makes my child not trust me, and I myself do not trust my child because he himself does not tell me anything (because he does not have a chance to talk, so it leads to a big misunderstanding).
“It was my fault that I neglected him and never even cared about his feelings or needs. It was my fault that I kept finding all sorts of reasons to support myself that I was a good mother, that I was tired, that I earned money for the family, that the reason my child was bad was not because of me, it was because of him, which was not true at all. The cause was me that made my child like this.”
When neither of us listens to the other, we won’t know what each of us wants. When we don’t know or understand each other, we will show bad behavior. The more bad behavior I show, the more my child will respond with bad behavior.
The beginning of not listening and not talking to each other, which was caused by a negative attitude, made the relationship between me and my child worse and worse, even though we lived in the same house.
So if I don’t do anything now, I might lose my daughter for the rest of my life.
I have to change myself first because the starting point is me. Because I have proven that trying to change my daughter will never work (the more you change her, the worse the results will be).
I need to start listening to him seriously to really understand him more. Because if I listen and understand him, then I will be able to adjust my methods and efforts to benefit my daughter more easily.
Then find a way to measure and evaluate together with her daughter.
She spent her time in the hospital doing exactly what she said she would do. She apologized to her daughter and made up, starting a new relationship that was centered around her daughter again.
“Mom, I’m sorry. I love you so much.” Now, Sara has her only daughter back in her arms again. She can feel the great love that her daughter sends through her hug. “Darling, I’m sorry too. I love you so much.”
Sara’s story is an example of how fragile family relationships can be, and the consequences that come with it, and how it’s not worth it if we cause or allow similar incidents to happen.
After hearing this story, it immediately reminded me of my family relationships.
I grew up in a family where my father was absent since I was young. My mother had to work. My siblings and I grew up on our own without the time or close relationships that other families have. In the past, the Inward Mindset often happened to me because I thought I was unlucky. My father died when I was young and my mother did not have time to take care of me (I accused my mother of being wrong, but in reality, she worked hard to raise us). As a child, I was very naughty. I did not pay much attention to my studies and often caused trouble for my family.
Fortunately, when I grew up, I understood more that the behavior of resisting or blaming others is the result of us deceiving ourselves (in English, it is called Self-Deception). Self-deception is when we try to deny that we have a problem by distorting the view of things around us and trying to find reasons to support ourselves or whatever is the problem instead or blaming other things instead, in this case, blaming father or mother, etc. Thinking like this is truly self-destructive and also destroys the love and good feelings of people in the family.
Therefore, Outward Mindset is considered very important. If we want to maintain good relationships with family members or people around us, we should live our lives by reducing the importance of ourselves and increasing the importance of others. If we can do this, the problems in relationships between family members will be reduced and the family will live together happier.
We can start now. Try to find some time to review the relationship problems with family members. Maybe we can find the root of the problem and find a good way to strengthen the relationship with family members.
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Source:
https://arbingerinstitute.com/Landing/TheOutwardMindset.html
