Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s teachings during
the “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group 9-3-09

(Participant’s names are changed to protect their privacy.)

To Rita: When people don’t receive what they need from their parents, they tend to make a limiting decision that they’re not going to get what they need.  Now, the limiting decision can be in the form of ‘Oh, gosh, I can’t get what I need.’  Or it can become a power-struggle in which you dig in your heels and say, ‘If I don’t get it from them, I won’t get it from anyone else,’ which means ‘I’m not going to accept it from anyone except from those people, because they’re suppose to give it to me because they’re the parents.’  But your parents are just bumbling souls like everyone else.  They don’t necessarily have the tools to be parents.  They’re just in that position. And they’re not necessarily more advanced than you are.  In fact they’re usually less advanced because that’s the way evolution works.  The children are more evolved than the parents.  The universe is filled with resources, with everything you could possibly need.  But it may not come in the form you decided it should come in.  So if you get into a power-struggle that it has to come from your parents or you’re not going to receive it, you are then holding that limiting decision in place with that power-struggle.  Then you have the channels closed and the universe can’t give you what you need, because you won’t accept it from any place but that person.  In this case it is your mother who has to give it to you.  And if she doesn’t, you decide, ‘That means, I’m not loved.’ Or ‘That means, ‘I’m not cared for.’  No that’s not what it means.  It means that, for whatever reason, your mother is on her own path, and just can’t do it, or won’t do it, or whatever. But you’re not dependent on her.  You’re dependent on a larger reality than her.  And the universe has exactly what you need, if you don’t get into a power-struggle and make a limiting decision.  You’re a perfectly capable woman, and you’ve proven that to yourself.  And it appears to me, that you may be causing yourself to be incapable in order to make her take care of you. And she’s not cooperating. You’re trying to get her to play a role that she cannot play.  For whatever reason, whatever her unhealed issues are, she can’t do it. And when you try to get her to do it, she freaks out.  So it’s not going to be solved through her.  Perhaps you are focused on getting her to take care of you, rather than getting out there and getting a job.  I don’t think you’re consciously doing this, but you may be undermining yourself.  And we keep clearing stuff that is undermining your ability to function and so you’re functioning a lot better now.  But you may be, on an unconscious level, undermining your efforts in order to get her to do what she’s ’supposed to do.’  And we can get to what that is, because it should be cleared.”

(Ren said she’d just have to accept not having a mother.)

“It’s not that you have to accept not getting what you need.  You don’t have to accept not having a mother.  The bottom line is life is meant to work.  That means you have everything you need.  You don’t have to accept not having enough.  But there’s a decision inside that you don’t have what you need, or a decision, in some form that boils down to that life is not meant to work.  That’s what needs to be changed.  It’s definitely not that you have to accept anything less than everything. But you won’t necessarily get it from your mother.  You’re never dependent on another person to get what you need.  The Universe is filled with resources.  The source for what you need is not out there.  The source for what you need is inside of you and your internal connection with the Divine.  That means if you are in alignment, then whatever it is you need will show up in some form. It may come from this person or that person or that person. But you’re not dependent on the person through which it shows up. They are just the vehicle through which the Divine is giving you what you need.  And if it doesn’t come from this person, it will come from someone else.

This is really important because this is what often happens when people who are more evolved get born into either a whole social context or to a family, who is less evolved.  And sometimes the gap between the parent (or social context) and the child is really large.  And the child often doesn’t realize that they’re more evolved.  They think the parent is older so they’re supposed to know more, they’re supposed to be wiser.  And ‘Why can’t they see what I see?  It’s perfectly obvious.  What’s wrong with you?’   So they are trying to lean on this less evolved person as if they should be able to support and help them.  And they can’t, and the pressure that the child puts on them to support them is more than the parent can handle, because it’s like trying to expand something that’s really tiny, and they can’t do it.  And some parents are really upset by this.”

Rita:  That’s how my mom acts.

“You’re trying to force her to be bigger than she is. She’s too small to expand to where you’re coming from.  On a soul level, she cannot be your parent. She is biologically your parent, and she fed you, etc.  But on a soul, spiritual level, she cannot do it.  She is too unevolved.  You can’t get it from her.  The child trying to make the parent expand to where they are is too much for the parent.  So it’s not that she doesn’t love you.  It’s not that she doesn’t care about you.  She’s just not big enough.  She’s not expanded enough.

And this goes back to the big shift that humanity is going through right now, which is that the source of what we need, the source of our safety and well-being is not out there.  We think it’s got to be the parent, it has to be the government, it has to be the banks, it has to be all of those different sources of safety.  That’s not where it comes from.  The real source is larger than all of us.  It’s the Universe, and we access it internally.  The source in inside not outside.  You can take comfort in the fact that this is the big shift that humanity is going through right now, so if you haven’t really gotten it, that’s because none of us have totally gotten it yet.  This is a huge transformation.  This is a really, really big deal.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings
during a “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” Group 7-9-09

(Participants’ names are change to protect their privacy.)

(After a discussion about people in the group hiding their power.)

(To group) “Many people feel that if they let out their real self, they would be too much for other people. This originates from childhood, when children often can feel that if they came out with their real selves, it would be too much for their parents, and their parents couldn’t handle it and they’d fall apart, and therefore they (the child) wouldn’t survive. Children come in to this life, completely outside of the framework of their parents’ emotional defense systems. And in one moment, with one word, they can shatter the parents’ defense system. One look, one word of truth … something that’s outside of the control of the parents’ defense system, can be extremely upsetting to the parent. The parent can then act as though the child has done some horrible thing and has this huge power. But the child is just being a child, not doing anything but just expressing who they are, and just saying things the way they see them. But truth is enormously powerful. Often the child then makes limiting decisions based upon how the parent responds. But the parent’s response is not reflecting truth. And so the child can get a mistaken idea about what it means to be in your power and the effect it has.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings
during a “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group 6-25-09

(Clients’ names are changed to protect their privacy)

“Children, when they first are starting to express themselves, are entering into their parents’ frame-of-reference that the parents have very carefully built throughout the years. For the parents this frame-of-reference is a safe reality defense system, that they’ve built around themselves that makes them feel in control, and feel they have some degree of mastery over. And then in comes the child, knowing nothing of that, and coming straight from truth. And the child expresses the way they see things; and can in one second shatter through the defense system the parent has built, making them highly uncomfortable, and possibly violent, depending upon the circumstances. This is because the defense system that they’ve worked so hard at putting together, since it’s not based on truth, can be shattered very easily by a child who doesn’t know any better. In this case, some pretty heavy-duty stuff can occur and the child can make some major limiting decisions.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during a
“Shifting into your New Consciousness” group experience 6-11-09
(Names are changed to protect privacy)

(To Manning) “I know that you don’t like to hurt anyone, and you perceived that if you said your point-of-view that was different than your parents, you would hurt them. I’ve heard you say this many times. But this does not hurt your parents. It may butt up against their defense systems. It butts up against a dysfunctional view of reality that their defense system is holding in place. It may make them uncomfortable, but it is not harming them. It may be challenging their perception of things, but that’s how evolution occurs. Children are generally more evolved than their parents. So you probably see things more accurately then they do. And it is important that you do, and it’s important that you allow your perception of reality to express itself. When children reach adolescence, they start rebelling against their parents. They start saying ‘I don’t believe what you believe. I don’t think what you think. And I don’t want what you want.’ And either a parent is open-minded enough to allow that to happen — and this can be hard for the parent, a big challenge — or they’re not, in which case the relationship between them becomes very painful. But it has to happen. You have to be able to separate yourself. You didn’t do that. That’s the problem. And you are mistaken in thinking that this is actually harming your parents. This is what’s holding you back.”

What questions do you have?
Send it to “ASK JANE”
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page and fill out the contact form.

Below is a question from Alice of Los Angeles

Alice writes:

Did I make a grave error in judgment regarding my attempts to reconcile a failed relationship with my son? How would I ever know this, or what to do next? My attempts at reconnecting went unanswered. My 25 year old stopped communicating with me last year following my embarrassing him due to my unconventional and “crossing over the boundaries” action of actually seeking the chef to answer a question that the server was unable to provide me with following my question regarding the ingredients of the meal I was ordering… I am very sorry about my actions, and I sent a letter last week asking forgiveness, and also for any other mistakes I made in the past confirming I loved my son and wished to heal our relationship…should I have not sent the letter and just waited for him to “come around” on his own? I also mentioned I was writing a thesis on a subject that he was familiar with because of his current workplace affiliation, which is a non-profit organization that uses “open-source” software (that reveals the formatting code) in his web pages he develops, and that I was writing about the Benefits of the Internet Radio for the Visually Impaired (and that we were also now using open source code at our University for our new Internet radio web site on campus) hoping he might be able to contribute some comments or ideas that I might be able to include in the interesting innovative thesis… I also included some cash in the envelope because it’s his birthday in a few weeks as I normally do and hope he doesn’t think the money is a “bribe” for him to get back to me, and hope he has enough compassion to forgive me for embarrassing him in public through my actions…What should I do next, please, Jane, or should I just do nothing at all, this time?

Jane’s Response: The problem is most likely not about the specific incidents and actions you are describing, but rather dysfunctional relationship dynamics between you and your son, which are underlying them.  You appear to be leaning on his responses for how you feel about yourself.  Instead of focusing on him and his responses to you, I suggest you go inside and get some awareness about your own feelings about yourself, in the context of your relationship with him.  This is about your own unhealed issues, having nothing to do with him.  If you express your feelings toward him to him, it should be you giving something emotionally, as opposed to trying to get him to affirm you.  Let him respond or react as he chooses.  You leaning on him could be what is driving him away.

Alice’s Response to Jane’s response: Thanks for the helpful advice, yes, it was the best information I’ve ever received and I understand completely and it helped so much, Jane!!!

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during an NLP TimeLine Therapy session with Janet 2/25/09

(For a definition of “TimeLine Therapy,” click here.)
For a definition of “limiting decisions,” click here.)

(Client’s name is changed to protect privacy.)
“I think we’ve cleared enough so that you don’t experience yourself as a powerless, victim anymore. It’s more an unconscious choice now against being in a place of power. Perhaps you feel there is a discrepancy between having power and going towards the highest good. I think in order for you to relate to your children, seeing them as in their full power, you’ll have to be in your full power yourself, otherwise you won’t have common ground to relate to them on. That goes for all your relationships with everyone. You have to relate to them as being without their power, because you keep yourself without your power. That’s very commonly how parents hold their children back; they try to relate to them on the level they see themselves on, and try to limit their children to the limits they find themselves in — which is really unfortunate.”

The limiting decision Janet cleared during a TimeLine process: “Having power would corrupt her.”

The first event in which the limiting decision was made: She was 12 years old, and pretended to go to bed, and then snuck out to a friend’s house instead. Although she felt powerful because she had planned it out and successfully executed it, she felt guilty about it, felt it was wrong.

Excerpt of Jane’s teaching during the TimeLine Process: ”From your parent’s point of view, you disobeying them (as representing authority), was a morally bad thing. What I see is that adolescence is a time when children start differentiating themselves from their parents, start becoming independent, thinking through things on their own, making decisions on their own. But it didn’t seem as though your parents were open to the idea that you might have ideas or wishes different than theirs that needed to start getting heard. There couldn’t be a discussion with them about that. It was either their way or no way. Often what parents do is keep their children limited to their own frame-of-reference, as the safe or wise thing. However children are generally more evolved than their parents, which seems to be the way evolution works. And even though children have less experience, and knowledge, still there is something in them that must expand beyond their parents. And that’s coming into their power. Now, if you took on your parents’ perspective and thought that what you wanted to do was morally bad, rather than a process of exploring, finding out, and understanding — then that would cause you to decide that making your own decisions is bad.

The point here was this is a natural part of a child’s development. At a certain age in adolescence children need to start doing things their own way, differently than what their parents would want them to do, and it may not even be a wise choice, but it’s necessary for them in order become independent, differentiated people moving toward adulthood. They’re moving toward being able to make decisions from their own perspective, from their own inner wisdom, from their own knowing what’s true. And it’s a process. It’s not something you can do well when you start, but you have to learn how this thing works, and you can only learn when you are starting to experience and make decisions about reality from your own perspective, not from the perspective of parents or some outside authority. That’s a totally necessary stage in development. And there was nothing to feel guilty about that.

Your parents probably had an attitude that it’s a moral mandate that you must do what your parents tell you to do. You must be obedient, no matter what they say, just for the sake of being obedient, rather than look at what they’re saying, make sense of it and decide, ‘OK, this is how they feel about it. Does this make sense for me?’ This dictates that you must not understand life from your own perspective, your own understanding of what is true and real, in order for you parents to have control over you. And this basically is what is handed down from generation to generation.

This has to do with a false moral attitude, which puts people in a false relationship to authority, so they never grow up learning to decide or evaluate reality from their own direct experience. It creates followers who can’t bring to the world their own perception of reality. Because you took on your parents’ false idea of morality, coming into your own power, by definition, was doing something bad. That means, being distinct from them, being who you are from your own point-of-view, accessing reality from your own perspective was considered to be immoral and bad. This is profoundly important to understand. This is an evolutionary issue for humanity in general, because this whole idea of how parents relate to children, and the idea of following authority, versus being guided to understand what reality is — that’s an old paradigm, and it holds humanity back.

This is a trap that many people get into who have a very strong internal mandate for being good, and righteous and moral. A lot of people have a very strong mandate for being that. And when they get the wrong idea of what that means, it’s very confounding and confusing, and people make a lot of very dysfunctional decisions based on this misconception of what being good really is. And at the bottom of that struggle is the belief that who you really are is basically bad — the whole idea of original sin. If you know that who you really are is totally good, then you would know that whatever is really true for you would have to be good.

Know that whenever your daughter does whatever she needs to do to differential herself, it will probably trigger you, because it could very easily be a step beyond where you feel comfortable. It is in the nature of children in the evolutionary process to go beyond where their parents already are. So it will very likely be outside of your comfort zone. That doesn’t mean you have to allow whatever she wants to do. It can be difficult to make the distinction. It has to do with not standing on your high moral horse, like your parents did. You parents were coming from leaning on authority, perhaps originating with the church. So they’re mindlessly obeying the church, and then they, in turn, expected you to mindlessly obey them. So it’s just a chain of dysfunctional thinking. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t provide any structure or guidance. But you have to make sure it isn’t just some rote thing that you’re following, but rather something in reality that she can understand and can follow. And it’s not just your will against hers. It’s that you’re guiding her to figure out what really is the best thing from her point of view.

(For a definition of “TimeLine Therapy,” click here.)
For a definition of “limiting decisions,” click here.)