Vancouver Canada August, 2009
This article

will focus on troubled indigo children, youths and young adults, and how we can help them. The main characteristics of indigos are that they’re very intelligent, intuitive, sensitive, and powerful. I, and many others who are involved with them, see them as being advanced souls who have a great deal of capacity.

The downside is that many of them get off base and fall by the wayside, such as dropping out of school, and getting into drugs, or attempting suicide. I’ll discuss the types of difficulties experienced by indigos, parenting issues, education and helping professionals as well as how to help them most effectively. As part of this, I’m going to share some exciting information with you about what I’ve discovered over the years of working with indigos and their families.

As you’ll see in this article, there’s actually a great deal that we can do to help them to heal and be more balanced, and to use their gifts to help out in the world.
To begin with my background, I’m certified as an expert and trainer in individual, couple and family therapy.

I’ve trained many psychologists, family therapists, healers, and other professionals. I’m also an intuitive healer and I practice what is sometimes called energy psychotherapy, a combination of cutting edge Western and ancient Eastern modes of helping to quickly resolve people’s difficulties. I have extensive experience working with youths and their families, including ten years experience as a family therapist in a child protection setting, which included, among other things, violence, parent‐teen conflict, substance abuse, and youth running away from home.

I was able to help most families, and after receiving extensive training, our research showed that our program became as effective as any in North America. However, I wasn’t able to help families who had very sensitive but troubled youths who began showing up in my practice about 1988. There are two that I remember particularly clearly who were very destructive, but nothing I tried worked with them, even though I had the opportunity to work for about ten sessions with them.

I was using only traditional Western therapy / counseling methods at the time. These generally have little positive impact on most indigos because they mostly use cognitive and behavioural methods. Rather than simply writing these clients off and referring them elsewhere, as is usually done, these and other failures propelled me on a path of looking for solutions to help youths and adults who are very sensitive but are off base. I discovered in time that what’s needed by indigos is to work with energy, spirit, and emotional issues, and positive parenting and school setting

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Indigo refers to the colour in these children’s auras, the energy field around them, which is a different colour than that of other people. Indigos started showing up more in 1983 although there were some precursors before then - what are now referred to as indigo adults. About 1990, it was estimated that about 3% of children were indigos.

Now, the woman who discovered them, Nancy Tappe, estimates that 60% of children older than 15 are indigos at this point, as well as 97% of children younger than 10. The prediction is that all children will soon be born as indigos. This is truly a major step forward for humanity. We, parents, helping professionals and teachers, need to learn how to assist them more effectively if we want to help them to heal and be more productive in the world rather than simply try to get them to conform.

I’ll discuss the main characteristics now. They’re very intelligent, although not necessarily in all areas. Many of them don’t want to fulfill the requirements of the school system because they find it to be boring and irrelevant. For example, they may not want to answer all math questions in an assignment because they can understand the concepts quickly.

As an example of this, we had to home school our son for a couple of years because he was bored and acting out at school. The school labeled him as having ‘output difficulties’ because he didn’t want to do most of his homework and had difficulty putting some of his knowledge on paper at the time. He’s now in college and doing very well.

Indigos are intuitive. They know some things that others don’t. They’re willing to say if the emperor has no clothes, even if it’ll get them in trouble. As an example, they know it very clearly when a helping professional pretends to care about them and is not authentic. The indigo then acts accordingly.

They’re sensitive - they’re affected by negativity around them but more so than other people - such as toxins in their food, power lines, mom’s post‐partum depression, their parent’s divorce 8 years ago, and bullying at school. As an example of this, a young teen that I worked with went off base simply by seeing a child she didn’t know getting bullied at school.

She reacted by becoming aggressive toward her mother. This is an example of what is called secondary trauma, when we’re affected by others’ suffering. In my experience, indigos are more likely to act out this negativity than other people are.

They’re powerful. They know what they want and stick with it, and refuse to do what doesn’t make sense to them. They have a lot more integrity than most of the rest of us, who are all too often willing to go along with situations even if they’re not healthy for us. This can result in major power struggles between them and parents or educators who feel the children should be controlled more. Another aspect of this issue is that most have an angry edge, particularly when they feel a situation is unjust.

Many indigos have a variety of special gifts, such as being psychic, some are able to remember when they were two years old or younger, and a couple have told me that they’re able to communicate with animals. Indigos generally have a great deal of compassion and want the world to be a better place. They may get quite angry because of the world’s imperfections. In my view, it’s our role as adults to help harness their frustration to help make the world a better place.

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Let me tell you about some of the difficulties experienced by indigos. Many indigos are very sensitive to some things. My son, who’s now 19, was very sensitive to red dye, which greatly affects some children. As a result of this and other issues, he didn’t want to put up with authority and even ended up kicking the school principal when he was in grade one.

Many of them don’t want to take small boring steps to accomplish their goals. If we push them too much to perform when they don’t want to, some of them respond by simply going on strike and doing nothing, or quit school entirely. I’ve been involved with many youths and young adults who refuse to perform at school or get a job.

Issues from the past are also very important for us to understand indigos because they’re more sensitive to this than other people are. One of the issues from the past that most people are not aware of is called historical trauma. This refers to the fact that we carry the trauma of our parents as well as of our ancestors.

For example, research has shown that Jewish children whose parents’ were in concentration camps in World War II were more easily traumatized than the rest of the general population. Research also shows that this also applies to Japanese people on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada who were put in internment camp during World War II.

Their offspring, born after the war, were also more easily traumatized than other people. The same applies to others whose parents or grandparents have experienced major difficulties. Indigos are more likely to be affected by these issues than other people because they’re so sensitive.

Some indigos cope with being off base with alcohol or drugs, or simply by avoiding responsibility. As an example of this, I worked with an 18 year old when there was a major fire just outside Kelowna, BC. She was affected by the community’s trauma energetically. This is termed secondary trauma. She then acted out by becoming suicidal.

I discovered in time that what’s needed by indigos is to work with energy, spirit, and emotional issues, as well as authoritative parenting and school setting. In my experience, most sensitive people, not only indigos, greatly benefit from these healing methods as well. In addition, research has shown that about 20% of helpers, including dentists, physicians, nurses, firemen, counsellors and others, are affected by the trauma of the people they assist.

They can also greatly benefit from clearing their clients’ or patients’ trauma that they carry with the use of energy psychotherapy.
I’ll give you my perspective on parenting indigos at this point. Energetically, indigos are much bigger than their parents because of their sensitivities and personal power.

It’s a bit like parenting a child who’s as big as a house. The parents and authorities who deal with them have to figure out how to handle this type of child effectively, as compared to other children who are generally much more willing to go along with what they’re told.

Having an Indigo child is a great opportunity for us to grow a great deal although it can often feel quite disturbing, such as when my son kicked the school principal. Parenting an indigo can be particularly painful for those of us who want to focus on the other guy being the problem, and would rather not

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look at how we may be part of the difficulties - especially when our child confronts us with our imperfections. Not only do we need to be compassionate toward our indigo and in our power with them, but we need to work together as a team with each other as parents and with helping professionals and the schools.

Otherwise, we have a much greater likelihood of having great difficulties with our indigo.
The bottom line is that parents’ and teachers’ reactiveness and controlling behavior to indigos’ difficulties directly results in their acting out more.

This leaves us parents with little choice but to clean up our own issues, develop more integrity, and go more fully into connection with our higher wiser side.
The traditional styles of parenting indigos used by a great many people do not work with these children. We need to be flexible and find ways that work with our child rather than listen to what our friends, relatives, and experts say we should do with them because most of them have no idea how to handle them.

As an example, a single mother that I worked with had three very powerful indigo daughters. The mother was completely overwhelmed by this and no one was in charge in this family. Rather than try to help establish regular forms of parenting, we developed a family team and they all governed the family together. I don’t normally work that way but this was quite effective for that family.

Authoritative parenting is needed rather than an authoritarian or laissez faire approach. An example of laissez faire is to say that Johnny, 15, only got drunk twice this month - so we don’t need to do anything about it. On the other hand, an example of an authoritarian approach I’ve often seen is the stepdad who is much tougher with the child than the mom is.

I have seen far too many children in these families leave home very young, which puts them at high risk. It’s not surprising that parenting issues are the biggest cause of divorce for second marriages.
Some of the most essential tasks of parents is to teach their children how to cope with negativity around them, help them learn how to heal from difficulties they experience and help them find their way regarding helping to create a better world.

This fits, in part, with the lessons, that have been learned in the area of emotional and social intelligence as well as in the field of energy psychotherapy over the last fifteen years. Parents need to assist their children and youths to channel their energies constructively, such as recycling to help with the environment, joining volunteer organizations, helping to clean up rubbish in their neighbourhood, do a collection for children in Africa, and so on.

Such activities need to be done with a parent’s or other adult’s active support and participation. If the parent is too busy, then other relatives or neighbours can help out. Even more so with indigos, it takes a village to raise a child. Simply looking after our children’s physical needs and not taking time for their other needs and concerns is resulting in many kids drifting off to unhealthy peer groups.

All too many parents have bought completely into the consumer society, buying that second car and TV and other luxury items, and have little time or energy for much else other than work, to the detriment of

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themselves, their spouse and kids. These people all too often end up in dead marriages or divorced, and their children become like roommates to them.
One of the tasks of parents is to protect their indigos from professionals who are very willing to label their special children, medicate them or provide them with other treatment modalities that ignore the heart and spirit of the child.

In my experience, about 10% of people in general who use medications for ADD, anti‐depressants and anxiety actually need them. Most of these helping professionals simply don’t know any better because of the training they’ve received and they don’t take the time to explore other options. Other professionals have the ability to use a combination of methods to assist the child holistically.

Please be careful who you and your child work with. We experienced this with our son. As an example of the many professionals we sought help from, we saw a very kind and well‐meaning psychologist for an assessment of our son. Her results were completely focused on pathology because this is what she had been trained to do.

She had no idea of what our son’s special gifts were, to the detriment of our child. She made recommendations accordingly. You, the parent, are in charge, and you have the right to ask for a different teacher, or to take your child to a different school or practitioner.

The bottom line is that we need to help our indigos become bigger and wiser and assist them to help out in the world, not for us or others to work toward making them smaller and try to break their spirit, as has been done to most of us generation after generation.

Let me talk with you about indigos and education and other authority figures now. Schools that are child focused rather than lecturing the children all day while they sit quietly in their seat tend to work best with indigos although regular schools work quite well for some of them. Programs that encourage learning at the child’s pace in areas the child prefers such as Montessori and other similar programs often work well with children who are unable to cope with regular schools.

These children are very creative and need to move around and be in charge of their learning to a fair degree. Traditional schools have a tendency of requesting that the parents of indigos who are quite active get their child put on medication.

Medication like Ritalin is used to quiet down the child and make her more malleable. This is not in the best interests of these children, although these medications are required in a small minority of cases. There is no evidence that shows that children have better grades because they’re on medication.

If a teacher has an authoritarian style, and says ‘do what I say without questioning me’ ‐ an indigo is likely to say in words or actions. - “why should I listen to you when you’re behaving inappropriately”. And then, of course, the child, and not the teacher, is labeled as the problem. In many cases, the child in these situations soon ends up wanting to stay home rather than be at school.

I’ve seen a great many teens and young adults who don’t want to perform because of this and other types of negativity. They’ve learned that it’s best to avoid taking responsibility for their lives. They’ve given up on expressing their gifts because they’re either ignored or suppressed.

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Now, I’ll discuss healing work with indigos and their families. I’ve tried a very broad variety of methods over the years in working with troubled children and youths and their families. Most were of little or no help in working with indigos. Following are some methods that I have found to be very effective with them.

Focus on energy healing using energy psychotherapy. These are new approaches that have been developed in t he last fifteen years or less. Some of them are very effective with indigos.

• Visualizations. This is one of the most effective methods I’ve found. As a quick example of this, I’ll ask you to try the following exercise for a couple of minutes: Imagine light coming in from above through the top of your head and into every cell in your body and into your DNA.

Imagine it cleans out trauma that was experienced by your parents or grandparents during World War II as well as during the Great Depression. This method is very effective for about 90% of the people I work with. If this does not work, I use a variety of types of approaches to fit clients’ needs and experiences. You can learn more about healing visualizations and other healing approaches that I teach by checking my articles on my web site - at www.dynamicharmony.com.

A parent may need to heal some of his or her own issues. When my 19 year old son was small, he used to act out a fair amount. I didn’t know better then but came to realize that I was carrying what’s called vicarious trauma, negativity from my clients in my energy field.

My son would pick that up and act it out. As another example, I worked with a supervisor of a youth center that included probation officers, child protection workers, and others. He was not affected by this negativity at all but his daughter picked it up from his energy field when he came home, because she was so sensitive, She acted it out by refusing to listen to authority figures and running away from home.

For those of you who work in the helping field or in a negative environment, you can clear away vicarious trauma partly by imagining violet flame going into your aura and burning away the various types of negativity that are there from your work situation.

Coaching the parents in terms of how they can deal with their child can also be very helpful, as can family therapy if it also includes healing work rather than simply cognitive and behavioural approaches
Work with a parent or other concerned adult to do distance healing can be very effective to assist a youth who’s lost his way. For example, I worked with a mom whose 24 year old son hadn’t talked to her in 5 years.

He was living in another province and was caught up in drugs. We had one distance healing session, focusing on him and his suffering. He phoned his mother within a couple of days and said ‘mom, I want to clean up my life and I need your help’

SUMMARY In summary, the focus of this video has been on indigo children, youths and young adults and on how to help them and their families get unstuck when they get into difficulties. The bottom line is that we all need to help our indigos become bigger and wiser, not to work toward their

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becoming smaller and try to break their spirit. If you’re caught up in negativity with an indigo and are considering drastic measures or have already done so, please consider contacting us or other professionals who can do similar types of healing work. Focusing on our own growth toward being more fully in our heart, our power and our spirit, will not only help us with our indigo, it will help us to lead healthier lives and will make it more possible for us to bring our own gifts out into t he world more fully.

What a strain, and what a wonderful opportunity it is to have an indigo - we have little option but to grow a great deal from it.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about this, you can choose to read articles that I’ve written about them on my web site.

You can also choose to purchase my book on indigos and their families or take courses from our Dynamic Harmony Training Program either in Vancouver, Canada, or online. We are also willing to travel to provide training in your community. For more information, go to www.dynamicharmony.com.