interesting a bit of a departure from what we often do on my show with me today is dr jerry few stuff who is a psychotherapist and has worked with children for many years including he has run the largest treatment center in canada for troubled children and their families for more than twenty years and we are here today to he's making faces at me so to talk about his brand new book which is called don't let your kids be normal so this is a show on sustainability and we're going to be talking about sustainable relationships in a sense and how that sustainability helps create or could help create a more sustainable world because really your thesis gerri is that without sustainable relationships we cannot have proper relationship with the state of a relationship with the the earth the planet the environment or anything else well i think i'm going a little bit further than that lynn and saying that this is not just a part of it this is the essence of it we're talking about relatedness in the same way that we relate to our planet so we must relate to one another they part and parcel of the same thing and what i'm suggesting here is that if we can't learn to relate to each other in a different way we will not relate differently to the planet and we will continue on the same path with the disaster that we're heading on right now  will be toast and beyond that the thesis really is in learning in learning to relate to each other in different ways the best point of departure is to learn how to relate to our children not only because they more connected in a sense than them we are well you know it's a belief system i just happen to believe that we come into this world as collected part collective parts all related parts of the same does the title in your book refer to i mean most of us want to be normal we might all want to be ordinary but we want to be normal why why don't let your kids be normal well that comes from my old training you know and i was training to become a psychologist many many years ago i was trying to assess what was and what was not normal so we spent many hours days and months determining using all kinds of tests to  normal on what grounds they were normal and who wasn't normal knowing full well that we could pick up the ones that were non normal don't use the word abnormal but we know no because they were the people we could fix so normality then become something that we want that should be it should be like this people shouldn't be that way they should be this way so as we looked at our tests kids who were not part of the normal stream kids who are mother cultures kids from families that were different and so on a sofa got pushed outside of the normal stream and their job was to pull them back into that realm of normality now this is exactly what my physician does to me now when i go to my physician he doesn't look at me it doesn't even look at my body looks at the bloody computer screen where my normal profile is being shown with all the tests he's given me and there are spikes that are outside the normal range or so what he wants to do is bring me into the normal range and you know he does that he wants to medicate is exactly what we doing to the kid kids as well medication being one part of it is to drop children into this narrow stream and one of the normal things that we have talked about for years about in terms of children is that normality is a word they follow in our footsteps the normal child fall is in the footsteps of the parents so i say do we really want this do we want our kids to follow the now footsteps in the direction that we're going come on yeah you're break right so there's a whole normality thing ok yes do you want your child to be dysfunctional as you were and i guess most parents would probably say yes because at least that i recognize that i'm comfortable well i don't think i don't think most parents will accept it's not it's not true well part of it is true but the book actually came from a number of years of teaching well some of it was an old my was speech in the good old days and and i couldn't find couldn't find anything for my students in human development that in any way reflected my own position my beliefs my experiences and one of the things i did in that class was i stopped teaching in a formal didactic sense and so gathered the students around even though there were thirty of them a plus into a circle and rather than go through all just go through all the old child development theories that have a very little relevance these days we decided to use our own experience and judge these the according to the experience in that circle mind being part of it but everyone in that class had a family everyone in that class pretty well was born into some kind of relational setting everybody had a story to tell and so what i found out at the end was that these students were teaching me at least as much as i was teaching there but there was nothing that i could give them in the literature to say this reflects what we're all talking about now certainly p i she doesn't and mara doesn't and all of the classical theorists they don't do that what we're talking about here is real experience for human development this is not available in any book so i thought when i have a time in my golf score gets really lousy i doctor this book is targeted for absolutely everybody which is why i had such trouble with this because the first publisher that i had a very good publisher argued constantly that this book was not directed towards a specific market and i said i don't want it directed towards a specific market i want parents to be able to read this book as much as i would like professionals to be able to read this book and nobody talking down to anybody else and i would like to express theory in this book in a way that people who are not trained in this field can also understand what the so called experts are talking about so i wanted a book that would have a broad market appeal but it was not designed for a specific market as such amazon is in the first four weeks is so close to five hundred copies in total which isn't bad for a book that really hasn't been officially launched yet yeah i don't know who the who is reading no idea unless unless my my good my good relatives  buying buying it and it doesn't know the time but well it obviously is appealing to people and that's that's a very very good thing it's only been out what two months now yeah the twenty third of april yeah so  the ability and the willingness to be honest with yourself and with at least one other person to stop playing the games that we play in order to gain advantage over one another in order to manipulate one another in order to get our meat needs met from other people and so on to be honest in who we are honest in our expression of who we are to at least one person that's the that's the cornerstone that's the beginning and that's what sustainable because i believe that we have one very basic developmental need and that need is to be seen and heard by at least one other human being my heart you know if the one of the human being could be mama oh papa wouldn't that be something yeah so it's moving in that direction you know just thinking so many parents sense lie to children in order to get them to do what the parent wants them to do right or or in order to avoid goal wing to a place that's uncomfortable for the parent you know and children can feel that but they can't really make sense of it and i think that's what confuses us about who we are around and what you go on in life looking for that missing piece that they never got from their parents and they won't find it it's so different you know because it's not named it's not identify you know again we feel the dishonesty button or what's the truth well you know i get a lot of talking to parents over the years i get a lot of this this business of ok you don't expect me to be honest with my kids you know expect me to tell my kids everything about me and how i feel you don't expect me to tell my kids about my sex life and so on a sofa and i say absolutely not but there's nothing more truthful than right now i don't want to share this with you because this is personal to me and then maybe a day sometime when i will but right now i'm not willing and prepared to do that that's an honest statement which a kid can understand you know but you know to see even deflect and you know we associate honesty with divulging yes and if you're being honest you're divulging everything but it's not it's also being able to say i don't want to talk about this right now or i'm you know all about reli jerry i have a heart so i should have out so can you explain to us as you have tried many times explain to me the concept of a boundary and why it's important in of who we are and that experience is on the inside and it's essentially an energetic experience of being who we are and being in the world and that experience of so energetic experiences so moves out beyond the skin and into the world where we interact together where we come up to together we can we confront one another we come it you get in touch with one another at an energetic level and this this is the self in the external world this self has a boundary it's an energetic sense so if i'm too close to you right now i can feel that and sense that in my body that's the energetic boundary and i may back off to give much not because i'm rejecting you but to give myself the space that i need order to be fully here for you now i'm making a big point about this because a lot of people in my profession think of boundaries as walls the way of protecting ourselves from one another that's what most of us think i think so it's the no no no wall well i'm talking about the yes wall i'm talking about i'm talking about the boundary it says yes when i am here i can be fully here and present with you because i have taken the space that i need in order to be fully here if i diminish myself i only bring part of that to you to our engagement in the relationship if i allow you to push your nose into my space i will withdraw even further and bring bring a diminished self into our engagement that is my boundary and what i'm saying a lot a lot in this book is if we are able to teach our children boundaries rather than simply complying with rules don't do this and don't do that we teach them what a boundary is we have them experience a boundary we show them how boundaries operate through the way that we relate to our children then boundaries can replace pretty well all of the rules now when it comes to the broader scheme of things in society at large would you sooner live in a society that is absolutely absolutely weighed down with rules and regulations or a society that respects boundaries i know  but how does that relate to like the environment beyond beyond us that concept of boundaries because we all need the space that we need for the self isn't a ten story mansion in other words you know in a simplistic way there's enough space for us on this planet for us all to be who we are in connection with one another right and and again its boundaries rather than  territory creating vast amounts of space that we don't want overly consuming this resources and so on taking just the space that we need to be who we are you know so this is quite a complex concept really no  youth deadly simple just back off a little bit and with that we have to go into a station id and it's just a very quick one will remind you that you are listening to c h l y i want to one point seven f m your campus and community station based in the heart of downtown  of course heard around the world wherever there is internet access at triple w dot c h l wired dot ca or i think it's actually just c h l y dot ca but at any rate you can hear us in many places and we welcome our listeners from a far the program has changes and today in white and brock is talking with jerry fewster off of don't let your kids be normal and normal idea i think and one whose time i think has come could i just could i just throw in a thought on boundaries as well i think we need to respect nature's boundaries don't we if we did that maybe we wouldn't have quite the problem of environmental degradation that that we have if we understood what what nature needs in each place and is different everywhere right then we you know we we would respect that and we would work with it and i think that's the same as as understanding what our children need and and working with energy that all life forms the whole universe has its own energetic movements it's an energetic shift that's what we need to respect whether we're talking about plant life or planetary life as a whole that energetic movement that energetic  mission that we need to respect and say that is life and that is the life form so the energy of a tree moves beyond simply its leaves and branches it creates energy that moves out into the world we have to respect that and it the interconnections and how everything is fishy in nature is so much more interconnected and is so many ways energetically being one of them of course that then we we are aware of all that we have knowledge because we don't we don't want to acknowledge quite often that into relatedness because we break that interrelatedness when we when we cover up a huge chunk of forest and plant houses instead or do whatever we do and therefore the interrelatedness is in some ways inconvenient for us and therefore we nora and i wonder how often that is true of human relationships that it is it is more  advantageous to me maybe to to ignore your boundaries because i want something from you i want to manipulate you i want to use you in some way and if i knowledge that you have boundaries i mean knowledge ing that you are a human being with the same rights and needs as myself which means that i don't have the right to manipulate you so that's not convenient for me well yes i mean if you stay strictly energetically having the right is really a cognitive idea you know i have the right to do this i have the right to do that a boundary is not a right it's a felt sense in the body so it's not so much that i give you the right to have a boundary and i want you to give me the right to have a boundary i sense my boundary in my relationship with you and you in your relationship with me not a word is spoken no rules to set down nothing is enforced just a simple knowing that this is your space and this is mine so we not about rights miss much as about being s so when we allow ourselves to experience that it becomes remarkably simple i read a study only last week unfortunately too late to put it in the book and it's quite a massive study and it was done by department of i've been business administration and economics in norway and it's along the children all study it's been done over many years and it was done with a large large population of children growing up from the age of two or three to the teen to teenagers and what they saw was quite remarkable and it's so borne out what i'm saying here that children are born when when babies come together they have that natural ability to relate to one another and they relate empathically a baby crowds another baby cries they feel it they know they get and you put them in close together and they know they can sense it energetically you know kids go even through the circle terrible twos when kids want best this is my get away from me i own the world  of that stuff and yet children even then when somebody else is hurting they even drop that developmental facade because they concerned about the person even in the twosome threes now what we this is this  worst when kids get into pre just well not preteens into their teens thirteen fourteen fifteen that begins to change their view of fairness the view of collaboration rather than competition everything begins to change around thirteen and fourteen so that by the time they're fifteen or sixteen they find themselves living in a highly competitive non co operative world where they believe that and personal achievement is the ultimate goal now you've got to ask yourself what happens during those years is that the developmental process taking place or is that what we do to our kids in these cultures yeah you know  it because because social yeah is it social is it cultural what is it you know as well as we direct their minds towards these kinds of things become a lawyer become a doctor you better do well you b well at school you better succeed and you better do better than jimmy harris who lives down the road because he's going down a swami and so it goes on and on and on and on this is what we do to our kids we take them away from the natural development of the self which is an energetic sense of me you all being together in this world which is and the knowing that when your hurting i'm also can feel the hurt which is socialization yeah well but our belief has been that we have to socialize our children in order to be good kids we have to socialize them in order to be ethical we have to teach them the difference between right and wrong and say no they come into this world knowing all of this things what we have to do is nurture those in them you know and if we try and if we try and do it from the outside then if we try and teach them to do things that they already want to do anyway then when they look back on that say why do i do the things that i do it's not because this is what i want to do is because this is what daddy tell me i should do this is what mummy tell me i must do this is what the priest says i have to do there was a brilliant article i think in the island parent magazine a month or two ago by a preschool teacher who talked about i don't mean it might have been a different parent magazine but had i known about this i would have brought it in she talked about kids in preschool playing bad guys and it's it's an interesting thing where they they they sort of need to explore that possibility but in a safe way is safe place so they're not just punished for that behavior does she was saying that too  often people will look at that and say oh this child is going to be a criminal when he crawls up or something like that you know they're there it's showing that there are aggressive and we need to do something about the behavior and in fact their play acting and they know their play acting and maybe they're even play acting because they've seen that on television and they just have to figure out what it is you know they have to get get their minds around what what they've witnessed so they need to go through that  process and we we misinterpret it basically and we cut it off or punish or do it do whatever and we we short circuit that process which is really unfortunate well you know i think i'm the only person on this planet who doesn't have some aspect of self that isn't nice seeing the real self or the child no the child never becomes seen we just want to see what we want to some and because the other part of the self which no one is interested in nobody wants to see somebody has clapped this great big sign on it to say that's bad that's evil that shouldn't be said that's me you're talking about that gets a locked away on the inside never to be shown and what we do in adulthood we run around showing that part of ourselves that we think people parent might be very very nice out in the business world and then comes home and screams and beats people and does seven miles what you know in order to act out i suppose that side  under the circumstances with the resources that they had and they didn't meet all of our needs but that's our job now we've grown up and you know i've spent so many so many years in this field listening to people blame their parents because this happened all this didn't happen and so on but the time has got to come when we become conscious beings and move on if we don't we simply pass on what we were abused on to our own children we pass that down the line so this is the work and this book is not so much about what to do with kids this book is about how you begin to work with self in order you can be there fully for the i also think we hear you saying that do we want to overcome some of this so that we do create a healthy space for our children when they say i like to use the term interruptions rather than abuse or injur in childhood these are developmental interruptions and once we become aware of them we can do one of two things you can say well why parents are to blame therefore that's the way it is and my parents did this to me and that's me we can slip into that victim place all can say yes these interruptions occurred and yes some of that might be termed abuse in some circles however it's time now for me to move on and work with myself that i can move developmentally move through that now so that i can be with my own kids in a different way from the way that my parents were with me my friend who wrote a book i'll never do to my kids what my parents did to me which is a beautiful title and a brilliant little book and it just  talks just about that get over it and move on and be with you know but you can't give kids what you don't have so if you if you still have all that claim stuff about your own self that has yet to come forward you can't give that to children because you don't have it right so that's the work of the parent really it's the work of the parents have to to work through that yeah this is all this book is all about the work of the really sorry about that it's and it's not full of prescriptions child there is no complete healthy relationship the relationship is out the moving towards health or it's moving towards closure which you could say ill health there is no such thing what does it look like it's in what direction is this taking ok is this relationship moving towards increasing degrees of openness and sharing or is this relationship moving towards closing down that communication so that each is only showing to the other what the other wants to see ok so let's go back to that question  then what does a relationship that is moving towards look like well what does it look like what does it feel like what is it feel like what does it look like it feels like more and more i am becoming aware of myself in my relationship with you and more and more i am able to share that with you and the more and more i believe that this is happening for you too that you are sharing more and more taken from you know the history of humanistic psychology for generations well many years and that is i see you and i hear you and it's moving towards when in my relationship with you i feel increasingly seen and heard for who i really am i mean i can't put it simpler than that and i can cloak all of that in theoretical terminology but it's that simple but what about the other person like if i say if you say in my relationship i feel that i am being seen and heard for what i am where is the place for the other person the contact boundary yeah but there is and what you're saying there's increasingly believe that i am being seen and heard by you for who i really am and the only way i'm going to know who i really am is through being seen and heard by another person it takes both people to say that this is why the book is called a partnership not a parenting for a different planet a partnership because the parent learns in that relationship with the child as much as the child learns in that relationship with the parent they're learning different things right and a lot of people have taken that and said oh i know what you're talking about here you're talking about permissive parenting anything the kid absolutely not the opposite as a parent you have the obligation to teach this child what they need to know in order to survive and live in this world however inadequate and contaminated we may feel this will to be you have a very definite teaching role if you don't fulfill  fulfill any partnership part is what now can i also get from this child who is seeing the world almost for the first time who is seeing things and experiencing things that maybe i did see one time and i forgotten maybe i never did because my childhood was closed in the areas maybe this child this young being coming into this world is offering me something to that i can learn from and so there's an exchange of knowledge here in the same way that when i say without a cliche my students taught me so much because because they shared with me their experience of their family growing up in many parts of different parts of the world you know and what i what they taught me was equally as least as important as when i was teaching them about developmental theory teaching about for ojt a p r g whoever so in your book you talk about an experience you had going into a classroom i think it was a kindergarten classroom and at a time when you were pretty stressed out with with other things in your life and you want to go there what you did because the teacher was a friend of yours and you found be a marvelous experience you want to elaborate on that i found i had been an adult for too long and i had been taking on an adult role for too long i had lost the simplicity of my childhood many years before that i was then running a very large treatment center i was taking on the difficulties and troubles of over ninety five children raised it done some another hundred kids and families in the community outpatient program and it was  just lost that spirit of the really the spirit of childhood so what i was able to do thanks to an absolutely brilliant teacher and wonderful children i was able to regress and spend and go back to my the parts of me in childhood that i don't look back on with a great deal of affection all of that came back and i was like can and i learned again so much about myself that really i and but i had locked in all the way in order to become an adult in order to face up to all of these incredible onerous responsibilities and so it was a wonderful beautiful piece of regressive therapy and did it give you did it reenergize you for going back will give you a whole new perspective when you went live to say that it did my life change from there after it didn't but it was another piece for me to understand so i'm sure within forty eight hours i was back on the treadmill again yeah you know that maybe looking at the children that i was working with in a little different way yeah little bit more from their june tenth there's going to be a fundraiser for the vi you community garden they are striving to promote our local food systems and they will be sharing some great local foods from local farmers and producers designed into tasty creations by the vi you cool an airy students event is to raise awareness about our local food producers accessible gardening and community building the funds raised will assist in the installment of the therapeutic community garden which will be presumably at vi you and of course that some marvelous kind of a resource to have tickets for this are seventy five dollars with a sliding scale thirty five to fifty for students and for tickets you can contact stephen at two five zero zero eight zero two soil or seven six four five so again two five zero eight zero two seven six four five four the vi you community garden fundraiser thursday june tenth from four till eight pm in building three hundred at vi you than i am a campus something interesting and rather different happening on saturday you are invited to play the city you may not know it but the city of and imo is a musical instrument on saturday june twelfth at one thirty and you are invited to diana krall plaza to play the city this is going to be a mixture of sounds that have been prerecorded around and imo but also live sounds where you get to drama things around the plaza  the those involved in recording sound bites from the imo core include the central vancouver island multicultural society and then imo youth services association one stop program based community development project to sponsored by the british columbia arts council so again that's one thirty saturday june twelfth play the city for more information you can visit the then i am arts council website  which is simply not imo arts council dot ca and you can get involved by calling odette laramie at the n a c community art space two five zero six one nine zero three three one and i'm sure you can just wander by and have a look also on saturday afternoon and while you're doing that you might also take advantage of the used book sale that will be happening at the harbor front branch of the library brought to us by friends of the library that's taking place saturday june twelfth actually from ten am to three pm in the up stairs meeting room of the library the books are mainly library discards with the addition of donations which of not little library life selection includes adult and children's fit and nonfiction hardcover and paperback bring bags boxes and load up at cheap cheap prices these books need homes all proceeds will benefit them and i'm a downtown library and it says here that friends of the library has raised over thirty thousand dollars for the harbor front branch since starting in two thousand and three that's quite amazing you can still donate books or volunteer for the sale or just get information by phoning two five zero seven five three six one five four and the program is changes in today lyn white america is talking with gerri fewster about well don't don't let your kids be normal or how to have sustainable to get your perspective on this so many people who are saying well we need government intervention to deal with the issues that we have dealing with environmentally which of course to some degree is true but this is a big debate on how much government intervention do we how much of this is person or all that kind of thing so really can we solve these issues what direction do we need to go and i know that you've said that we need to be in a relationship an energetic relationship with the with the planet cells but what about as a society as a culture as a as a race human race  how do we basically achieve the great shift that we need to achieve to survive well i think suzanne summed it up very clearly when she talked about from the personal to the collective or from the collective to the personal which direction are we really heading in here and i think this is one of the big myth ology is about time that we believe that we can change all of this by changing governments to become more active  whether they call this people who do business these days the corporate world in terms of its practices new idiology is new belief new prescriptions for cleaning up the planet and so on i believe all of those will come to naught as long as that's the direction we're putting our focus i believe change will come from the inside out it will come from the personal out of the collective i think it means that overall shift in all of our lives not another set of prescriptions for us to follow and for me that comes from relationship it comes from doing something i mean this is not this is not a pitch to stop doing all the things we're doing to clean up our planet to clean up our act to have you know our garbage recycled and sauna so it's not a pitch to do that i mean we have to stop doing that we can all do that but it's never going to be sustained unless it comes from a very personal place unless it comes from a deep understanding that you and i are connected on this point or as the great philosopher red green said well we're all in this thing together folks so you know it's that recognition that you and i are in a connected we're in this thing together and from here we don't need prescriptions we don't need new rules and regulations as much as we need  commonly held commitment to be together on this planet in a different way and what i'm saying in this book is we can start that ball rolling by changing the way that we are with our children this is change from the inside out and this is something that we can all do you know to make a difference so many parents i know say i don't say i don't but i worry about the future for our kids what can i do you know what can i do i say there is something you can do  will be with your kid in a different way don't force your kid to follow in your footsteps encourage your kid to use the resources that she or he has on the inside not just to come up with new solutions but ask different questions and to walk along a different pathway but your kids are not going to do that unless you have the courage you have the guts to start walking that pathway yourself when that happens then children will walk with you they will discover new ways of being on this planet ways that hopefully will not be as destructive as the ways that we've chosen over the past to how many generations  that that makes perfect sense the question i would have that comes from that is that is a very very slow process you are looking at generations before that is likely to be widespread and we don't necessarily have generations left to to heal the planet you know i'll stop damaging it i'm not so sure it is a slow process i think people who have children now who are three or four or five years old in four or five years ago to be ten five more years the going to be fifty they already going to be shaping the world in a different way kids who are twelve thirteen  fourteen in five years are going to be out there in the world making different making decisions hopefully different decisions from the wants that we've been making i don't think it is a slow process i think we have the institutions through which to do this in our schools our educational system is one where we really can begin to change the life in the classroom so it becomes a relational experience not an experience of of crime in kids with irrelevant information that may put them can make a difference that is immediate and that is short term and you know i personally if that if we in the meantime if we have to try to hold this thing together by bringing in new rules and regulations for the time being so be it but you know no do we have time so you think that this is doable then that will hand change the foundations of the way we relate and our society that's changing the foundations of our society or yes oh yes i do and i  think the parents who can see this are likely to be having like you to have children who are going to be leaders out there anyway parents who are prepared to walk this path who have the courage to be with each other to be with themselves and be with their children in the way that i'm advocating in this book are likely to create have the children who will lead the future generation and so i yeah i'm expecting before i die i'm expecting to see some change financial profit it is for hopefully the profit of the readers who want to learn something incredibly useful in their own lives and there are relationships and also for the profit of this very with while  zation well what i like about the ref you're going to is ation is it speaks for all children it's not directed towards a particular group of children however deprived or whatever but for children in general and i think that's what we need to be taking a look at it now is not just children who are in need that's not to say that we are going to take our resources away from children who are in need but we have to take a look at children in general we think to take another look at childhood as we understand it not just from what the experts tell us about childhood but from the experience that we've all had in coming into this world and to go back to that place and rediscover childhood from the inside out right then we can talk to our kids and they can listen and they will talk to us and we will this right i think you just touched on something that is very very important we do tend to focus our energies on children who come from some kind of all children who are being boarded up in what is considered the norm of the society being very seriously deprived of their their experience of themselves yes that is valuable and then becoming  whole whole human beings and therefore human beings who can be whole with each other and with the planet yes so really we we have to look at all children except for those from the few exceptional homes with children are in fact being encouraged and allowed to truly be seen and heard in the ways that you've talked about absolutely i couldn't agree more write that down and we'll jerry in today once again jerry fewster author of don't let your kids being normal a brand new book available through amazon and chapters and  oh you do well we need to let people know that website is simply w w w w w don't let your kids be normal dot com ha splendid and the website for the center for child honoring on salt spring island founded as you mentioned by rafi kabuki and their web site is triple w dot child honoring dot org and honoring is spelled the canadian way with a you  theme is actually by rafi so thank you so much sherry fewster lyn white and brock and to our listeners thanks so much for listening