Mozza (5)

[Vanilla]

So, even if you were appointed by God to "improve" the people you're supposed to love, you'd be wrong to do it your way.

You know the old bible quote about the plank in your eye and the speck in theirs??

[/i]

A change in attitude and reading alone won't do this for you Mozza but it is a starting point. Changes in attitude aren't strong enough to provoke and help change endure. You need specific goals and to take action daily. It is what is on the inside that is important, this is an enormous opportunity for you to grow and develop as a father and as a man.

Achievement of material goals matters very little to the higher power within you as it wants you to achieve the growth on the inside.

At the end of your life what will matter most to you?
What your children have achieved or how personally successful they are as people. The external or the internal?
That they have a father who was brave enough to make the changes and encourage them as individuals or that they had a father who saw them as extensions of himself?

These are rhetorical questions.

As Wonka said, "Stfu with the criticisms" and when you feel the need to correct someone to "improve" them, with your uber "high expectations" (another cliched euphemism for being critical, imo), look in the mirror and work on yourself some more.

Mozza, Don't backslide on this b/c it will set you back a lot. I swear your kids will NOT BENEFIT by your criticism! They'll be damaged.

If you learn nothing else here today, please remember that we said this^^.

Mozza you speak so lovingly about your children in your posts and in the longer run that will get you through this process to being the best dad. I am not lucky enough to have children of my own but I have fostered with my first husband. We fostered teenagers mainly and the most damage I saw was because parents were controlling their kids through higher expectations.

You can channel love to your children rather than criticism. Replace one with the other, eliminating alone is not enough. Start this very moment, when you feel the need to criticize, pause, detach, feel the love and project as if acting as a prism. Say nothing, you will smile, your posture changes and love will flow.

Know your children's love language and give as they need to be given to.

Replace criticism with love.

There is just no excuse for you to keep this up b/c it's so unhealthy and so unhelpful and your own stated goals are NOT achieved with it.

So MAYBE the reality is that you just like feeling superior, and that might be the source of the critical nature you have been using. (Possibly??)

Usually we are at our worst when we are feeling inferior not superior. We use criticism to bolster ourselves, to make us higher than others. To uplift ourselves and to make us feel better. I wished that I had truly understood this earlier in my life as it would have made me stronger. In the end the strongest critics of ourselves we have are the voices inside us, those voices can assist our change, listen to them when your shadow critic feels mean and ask if it is yourself you are truly judging.

Working on ourselves is all we can ever really do to improve our interactions with others. Love Mozza and that will leak.

look in the mirror and work on yourself some more.

You'll be glad you did, and so will your family.

Apologise to your children. Simply and nicely with words your children can understand and make amends by changing yourself.

You can not change the past, its gone, when I first became aware of the damage I was doing to the people around me then I apologised and beat myself. I felt ashamed of my past behaviour.

My IC told me to say to myself: " Change has come, I used to be critical but now I am not like that any more. I have chosen to say nothing when I have nothing positive to say and I will encourage when I can."

I wished I had also added replace by love too.

I have been there and here is a much better place.

Vanilla