The blindness of childhood.

At one point in your life, you were a child.

I was a child.

In our childhood lives, we looked at our parents as super heroes. They could do no wrong. We thought they were the greatest people we’d ever met in our entire lives.

As we get older, we realize that our superhero parents were, in turn, some pretty shitty role models. We tend to remember the things that we blocked as a kid.

We come to forget about the emotional abuse that went down. We tend to forget about the amount of men that mom dated and moved in and out.

We forget about the fact that dad made promises that he never kept. We forget about that stuff when we’re kids because in turn we want our parents to be the greatest person we’ve ever met.

But, as we get older, we’re living through that.

Let’s say, for instance, your mother was a single mom and she shuffled men in and out of the house nonstop, relationship after relationship, moving van after moving van.

If you’re a woman, you start to think that men don’t really stick around. Men leave.

It also depends on how alert and how alive and how aware your mom was. I’m sure your mom spins the story that this man didn’t want this, this man did this to her. I’m sure she spun a victim story.

So in turn, you go into adulthood not trusting men at all and have the illusion that men leave.

How do I know this? Well I’ve coached so many of you and it’s so easy to see your relationship patterns were formed by what your parents did.

I’ve dealt with so many of you that have had bad dads. So many men whose dads just weren’t around, whose dads weren’t strong, powerful role models at all. They were just absent or just or just living there under the same roof, not being present.

I’ve had to coach you guys through having a weak role model, so you had no belief system on what a strong man is all about. Yet when you were a kid you looked at your dad and your mom as that beautiful super hero that can do no wrong. But as an adult, you’re playing all their fucked up decisions.

I’m never going to say I’m a perfect parent.

It doesn’t exist.

But the one thing that I’ve never done, in the time that I’ve been a parent, is introduce my daughter to anybody that I was with.

Why? Because I didn’t want her to see girlfriend after girlfriend.

I wanted her to have a positive influence in her life.

Now I’m dating somebody who she’s met, and I’m happy.

That’s all I really want her to see. She, as any other kid, is going to come into adulthood with their own issues and their own problems.

Her mom and I do the best job we possibly can, but she will definitely have her own issues and problems due to decisions and lives we live. That’s a given.

But I think if we really think about that, if we’re parents, and really go deep into that and realize that the decisions we’re making, the stories we’re spinning, are being passed down to our kids’ future relationships, maybe we’ll do things just a little bit differently.

You want to give your kids a fighting chance, especially in today’s world, where dating has become an absolute clusterfuck.

Men don’t court women like they used to. People are constantly looking for the bigger, better deal, evaluating, judging on pictures and it’s only going to get worse as time passes on because this technology and fads in dating will just continue to get more challenging.

So I strongly suggest you look at your own actions as a parent.

Instead of crafting a story, maybe it’s time you took some blame and showed your kids what integrity is all about. You never want to be the person that points out to a kid that everybody leaves you because then they will get a false picture of what relationships were all about.

I once coached a woman whose mother got left five times by men.

She and her two sisters had the most awful adult relationships. When she came to me, she was truly upset. Because what happened to them is the same thing that happens to most men. That was a story that they had so they never trusted.

They really took on their mother’s energy. They took on what their mother taught them. So men were always constantly in then out then in their lives. Constantly leaving because they never knew how to formulate a healthy relationship.

I worked with somebody recently who went through that, and through coaching, she’s now in a healthy, loving relationship where she’s actually formulating her story and not living her mother’s story over and over again.

But you can learn this lessons from your grandparents.

It’s all the stuff that we learn in childhood, really is the stuff we’re working on as an adult.

For those of us who have children in our lives, just be more self-conscious, be more self-aware of what your actions are doing, and just realize that this amazing little child is going to mimic your behaviors.

So teach them that it’s okay if a relationship ends, it’s okay if mom or dad has multiple relationships through their life.

Show them how each relationship teaches us a beautiful lesson and each person that comes into our lives is there for a reason.

And it’s okay.

The more we give this lesson to our kids, the healthier they are going to be when they get out there and negotiate adulthood.

That’s all we can do. And it’s really the best for ourselves, as well, because that’s the truth about relationships.

Some last, some don’t. But they are all beautiful, wonderful lessons.

And all of us — both us and our children — truly deserve to know that those lessons are there, and to learn from them.