Not knowing

We had a presentation about mindfulness the other day at parent group.  The concept of "not knowing" jumped out at me.

Parents do crazy, wasteful, destructive things in the name of 'not knowing.'  

They MUST know 
  where their son or daughter is
  whether they are using drugs
  if they are in a dangerous situation
  who their child is with
  etc

They will do almost anything to find this out.  The more worrisome the situation, the more they redouble their efforts.  How can they do anything if they don't know???  What kind of parent are they if they don't know what their child (used generally) is doing?  Knowing is the way to fixing.  Or controlling.  Or doing something!

Once walking our dogs around the block in the dark, a parent was so frustrated with her husband about knowing the whereabouts of her teenage daughter.  "We need to double check!" she insisted.  "And what if that doesn't work?" I asked.  "Triple check!!" she called out.  They had to know the location of her acting out substance using daughter.  "Maybe," I suggested. "you have to give up knowing where she is."  That seemed so unacceptable to that parent at that time.

Parents will drive themselves crazy trying to find out.  I found out early that trying to track my son just made me sleep deprived.  And I never found out anything useful.  Parents will make huge efforts at great cost to themselves and to their family to 'find out'.  But finding our about substance use is futile.  You can't know, they will always wriggle out of any trap.  There is no test that will prove it.  They feel they have to know for sure.  Even though there is no way.

They will keep their eyes glued to their phone to track their child's whereabouts.  They think they can reassure themselves but really it just saps their strength.

No wonder these parents are exhausted and their hair is on fire.

Not knowing where your teenage or adult child is, can make you nuts.  The first place to go in your head is catastrophe.

What if you could be satisfied with not knowing?  Could you calm yourself?  Could you move forward?  The fear is, if there is a catastrophe, it will be your fault because you should have known!  And done something!  And if you didn't  know, you should have tried harder.

See how easy it is to fall into the rabbit hole.

You deserve your own peace.

And sometime that's accepting that you not know,