Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

Encouragement and acknowledgment are so much more effective than punishment.

One of the moments that I think about a lot when I think about how much I love my Dad, is that once when I was a teenager prone to spending long hours alone in my room I emerged to spend time with the family, he joked “Oh look, it’s the lodger!”

And before I’d even processed what he meant (that I was behaving more like a tenant than a family member), he went on some kind of internal flashback journey, and said “My father used to say that to me and I hated it, I don’t know why I said it to you,” and he apologised, and never made a joke like that again.

It’s like he did a speedrun on overcoming generational trauma.