Arthur Wenk, Psychotherapist
Wilson Counselling Associates
1242 Landfair Crescent
Oakville, Ontario L6H 2N3
Office: 905-842-8188
Fax: 905-842-8818
Email: arthur.wenk@live.com
www.arthurwenk.com
I have given talks for the Turtle Creek Early Years program, the Seminars for the Separated program of the Canadian Mental Health Association and the Oakville Parent-Child Centre. Click on the title to see the text of each presentation.
Change
Your Mind
Children and Music
Parenting
Psychology of Families
Separation and Divorce
Change Your Mind, Change
Your Life
I’m guessing that every person in
this room has at one time or another attempted to make a change in his
or her life. You may have decided to lose weight, quit smoking,
leave an abusive relationship, or overcome a troublesome fear or an
annoying habit. You may have sought counsel in a self-help book:
10 steps to surmount worry, defeat depression, fight anxiety, or improve
your self-esteem. You may have devoted all of your will power to
the effort, created a chart to measure your progress, or set up a system
of rewards to encourage positive behavior. Yet in less than a week
something has gone wrong: you’ve skipped a day, lost your impetus,
or given up the effort as a bad idea. What’s happening here?
You had such good intentions: why couldn’t you follow through?
You’re not the only one with this
experience: it seems to be almost universal. But when you
think about it, perhaps it’s not all that surprising. After all,
if all it took was ten steps to improve our lives, we’d all be perfect.
Clearly something else is going on here. In this talk, I’d like to
offer an explanation of the obstacles to change and outline some of the
methods by which change can be attained. My title talks about
changing your mind, and herein lies both the difficulty and the
solution.
Clients in psychotherapy often
blame their parents for their problems. In the case of the mind,
I’m going to lay some of the blame at the feet of Mother Nature for the
peculiar way in which she designed the human brain. Instead of
replacing earlier models of the brain with more sophisticated ones, she
simply added new sections on top of the old. It doesn’t require an
engineer to tell you that this kind of jury-rigged construction may
produce problems.
It turns out that you have a pretty
good model of your brain in the palm of your hands, so to speak, so I’m
going to invite you to examine this model along with me. Extend
your hands, palms up and facing you. Now place your thumbs against
your palms and wrap your fingers around them. Turn your hands
around, place the bottom knuckles of your thumbs against one another,
imagine that your third fingernails are eyes looking out at the world,
and you’ll have a pretty good model of the two hemispheres of your
brain.
In this model, your wrist and
forearm represents the spinal column and the bottom part of your palm
represents the brainstem, or reptilian brain, which controls respiratory and cardiac functions
and sleep cycles. Incidentally, this is the only part of the brain
fully wired up and ready for action before birth. The thumb
represents the limbic region, or
mammalian brain, the part of the brain we share with other mammals
like deer and bunny rabbits. The part that’s curled around the
outside, from your wrist to your fingertips, represents the cerebral
cortex, or human brain.
As I mentioned, it’s divided into two hemispheres: the left (for
logic, linearity and language—it’s easy to remember because of the L’s)
and the right (for holistic, spatial and relationship purposes).
For our purposes today I’m going to
concentrate on just two divisions of the brain: the mammalian
(which I’ll refer to from now on as the
emotional mind) and the human
(which I’ll refer to from now on the
rational mind). The emotional mind begins developing from the
time that you are born. You may have noticed that I’ve switched
from “brain,” the portion of the mind located within our skulls, to
“mind,” a more generalized concept that takes in the entire body.
During the first year and a half of
life our perceptions, sensations, images and feelings—input from the
entire body, not just the brain—cluster into mental models. These
models, which I call core beliefs,
represent generalized, nonverbal conclusions about the way life works.
Let me emphasize the word “nonverbal.” Remember that we share the
mammalian mind with deer and bunny rabbits. It’s not a very
sophisticated machine. In fact, it registers only two responses to
any situation: “good” (meaning safe and warm) and “bad” (meaning
not safe and warm). Moreover, for the first year and a half of our
lives, it operates only in the present tense. After eighteen
months the hippocampus (a part of the mammalian brain) integrates these
components and puts a time stamp on them, so that we begin to register
sequences of events and start to organize our memory into the story of
our lives.
Around age five or six the cerebral
cortex begins to come on line, but it isn’t fully developed until the
early twenties for young women and several years later for young men
(which helps to explain why auto insurance rates for young men are so
high). By the time we develop verbal abilities, the core beliefs,
those mental models for “The Way Life Works,” have become our personal
rules for dealing with the world, principles that we hold to be
self-evidently true. We’re not even aware of these core beliefs
because, after all, they’re self-evident.
What do these core beliefs look
like? We can put them into words but remember—they’ve been formed
well before our ability to use words. They represent completions
to the sentence stems: “I am …,” “Others are …,” “The world is …”,
and “Therefore I must …” A child fortunate enough to have loving,
nurturing parents may have core beliefs such as: “I am able;
others are protective of me; the world is safe; therefore I can explore
it.” But a lot of children end up with different core beliefs,
such as: “I am weak and helpless; others are powerful and
controlling; the world is dangerous; therefore I must do my best to
please others.” Other children end up with really corrosive core
beliefs, such as “People who say they love me hurt me.”
As we grow older we develop more
sophisticated pictures of the world and our place in it, but our core
beliefs remain, just waiting to be triggered. Those early
perceptions, sensations, images and feelings gather into a neural net
that represents our understanding of an event—our earliest, preverbal
memory. When one strand of that net is touched by a current
experience, the entire net may be activated, what we call remembering.
Now core beliefs have no attachment to time, so when we are triggered by
emotion or pain—some strong message of fear or anger or grief, for
example—we interpret the triggering as being entirely caused by
something occurring in the present moment.
It may be helpful to use the “tip
of the iceberg” metaphor here. You will recall that only one-tenth
of the volume of an iceberg is above water. You can think of the
nine tenths concealed beneath the surface as the contents of your
emotional mind. If something happens and your response registers
as a one on a scale from one to ten, you’re probably responding with
your rational mind. If the same event provokes a response of ten,
on the other hand, nine-tenths of that response has come from your
emotional mind, from the triggering of your core beliefs. So if
you find yourself (or your partner or your child) “over-reacting,” in a
situation, you can be pretty sure that the core beliefs of the emotional
mind have been triggered.
When you’re triggered, your
rational mind for all intents and purposes goes off-line and you’re left
with your emotional mind to deal with the emergency. Remember,
this is the mammalian brain we share with deer and bunny rabbits—not
exactly the intellect you want to have running the show. I’m going
to show you a bit of first-aid for getting the rational mind back.
It’s so simple that you may be reluctant to try it, but I beg your
indulgence.
All you have to do is breathe.
That may sound ridiculously easy, but bear with me. If I say “Take
a deep breath,” many of you will fill your chests. That’s not the
kind of breathing I’m talking about. Let me ask you to place a
hand over your stomach below your belly button. Now I’d like you
to breathe in such a way that when you breathe in, your hand goes out or
up, and when you breathe out, your hand comes in or down. Please
try it now, doing five or six belly breaths.
Focus on your breath. As you
breathe in, breathe in peacefulness; as you breathe out, breathe out
stress. Now, on the next out-breath, push out a little more air
than normal, an extra little exhale, and notice that your next in-breath
becomes longer: the air wants to flow in to replace the full
exhale. Let it come in slowly (if you do it too fast, you can
hyperventilate). As you breathe in, breathe in calm; as you
breathe out, breathe out tension. Before long you notice a relaxed
core at the centre of your body. Focus on that relaxed centre, and
allow that sense of relaxation to flow into every part of your body.
Do you feel more relaxed?
This is not only a great way to change a negative mood, it’s also a way
to get your rational mind back when you’re triggered. It takes
five full breaths to bring the body out of the stress response and into
the relaxation response, to lift the permeable membrane between the
amygdala and the neocortex, so that you get your adult brain back.
But you have to practice it to make it work. Imagine that you’re
in a restaurant and you see someone choking. In fact, he even has
placed his hands at his throat in the universal sign of distress.
You say to yourself, “This man needs CPR,” and you rush to the rescue.
You stand beside the unfortunate choker, pull out your CPR manual and
start to read the instructions. “Let’s see—what am I supposed to
do?” Forget about it. The guy’s going to croak. The
only way CPR works is if you’ve practiced it dozens of times on a dummy.
Same thing for breathing.
Suppose you get triggered in a stress situation. “Art said
something about breathing,” you recall. And so you puff, puff,
puff, hyperventilate, and pass out. Not a great strategy. So
let me encourage you to practice the belly breathing at least once a
day. It’s not a painful exercise, after all: it’s only going
to make you feel more relaxed. But if this becomes second nature,
then when you’re triggered, instead of turning the situation over to
your inner bunny rabbit, you can get your rational mind back and deal
with the matter judiciously.
Let’s return to the problem of
painful memories. These memories, engaging the emotional mind, lie
behind depression, anxiety and trauma. In depression, a present
negative experience, instead of being processed on its own, clusters
with other negative memories, and you slide down the slope into a
depressed state. In anxiety, the remembered image of a threat, or
even an imagined threat, is sufficient to trigger the stress-induced
chemical reactions of the fight-or-flight response. Animals,
lacking a neo-cortex, cannot experience anxiety. They may
experience fear, say in the presence of a tiger. But only humans
can induce the fight-or-flight response just by remembering or imagining
a tiger. In trauma, disturbing memories get locked into a part of
the brain where they cannot be processed so that, when triggered, one
returns immediately to the incident that produced the trauma, with all
of its emotions and perceptions undiminished.
Consider the title of this talk:
“Change Your Mind, Change Your Life.” We talked about the
difficulty of change. Now we have a way to understand it.
Let us imagine that you intend to make a change in your life: lose
weight, quit smoking, leave an abusive relationship, or overcome a
troublesome fear or an annoying habit. That “you” refers to your
rational mind, that part of the neocortex
that represents your conscious identity. But you fail to take into
account that other part of “you,” namely your emotional mind. Not
surprisingly, the emotional mind considers change to be a threat.
After all, the core beliefs that you formed in the earliest years of
your life have helped you to survive. When you announce a change,
your emotional mind may simply veto it, and in any conflict between the
rational mind and the emotional mind, the emotional mind usually wins.
To change your mind, in the sense
we mean, requires changing not just the rational mind but also the
emotional mind. Cognitive-behavioural
therapy that addresses only one’s conscious beliefs and
behaviours may have only limited or temporary
success. What we call psychodynamic therapy draws on
cognitive-behavioural techniques but also deals with long-standing core
beliefs.
How does psychotherapy
affect minds struggling with the fear and sadness of
painful histories? As Bonnie Badenoch writes, “when the recall of
such experiences is met with empathy and kindness, new synapses carry
that particular information throughout the brain, and blood flow changes
course to more soothing paths.” At Wilson
Counselling Associates we use a variety
of techniques for altering destructive core beliefs and liberating
clients from crippling thought patterns.
I like to tell clients that it’s
never too late to have a happy childhood. What do children
require? Obviously children need food and shelter but even more
important are the lessons they expect to learn from adults: “I am
lovable,” “I am acceptable,” “I am valuable,” and “I don’t have to do
anything to earn these things.” All children know what their
parents are supposed to tell them: “I love you,” “I will care for
you,” “You are okay just the way you are.” Now when parents fail
to provide these messages, when parents don’t say “I love you,” children
instinctively know that something is wrong. Unfortunately,
children assume it is their fault.
In order to have a happy childhood
as an adult, you must re-parent yourself by providing what you missed.
You need to replace the inadequacy of that early voice with a new voice
that says “I am lovable,” “I am respectable,” “I am valuable,” “I am
acceptable.” One way to reframe negative core beliefs is through
T-Charting, in which the left-hand column contains the “rant” of the
emotional mind and the right-hand column contains the loving response of
the rational mind exploring new ways of thinking about the problem.
It is as if the adult part of you reaches out to soothe, protect and
guide your inner child.
Another technique employs a guided
meditation designed to put one’s Inner Child deeply in touch with one’s
Inner Adult. Such techniques help to reframe change as positive
rather than threatening, so that the emotional mind can support rather
than thwart the desired change.
I have had good success in helping
clients heal distressing memories using a technique called EMDR, which
stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This
form of psychotherapy aims to resolve symptoms resulting from disturbing
experiences. The technique has been extensively tested for, and is
now recognized as the most effective method for dealing with,
post-traumatic stress disorder. We tend to associate PTSD with
so-called Capital T traumas, such as military combat, natural disasters
or sexual assault. Victims of Capital T trauma, when triggered,
revert to the original situation, with all of its attendant sensations,
emotions and images. A soldier suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder, for example, when triggered, say by a truck backfiring,
will feel as if he is back on the battlefield, seeing the flares of
rockets, hearing the cries of his wounded comrades, feeling that he is
about to die. The victim of sexual assault, triggered by a casual
touch, may feel as if she has been transported back into the control of
her assailant and may experience all the fear and revulsion associated
with that experience.
You may be fortunate enough not to
have had any Capital T trauma in your life. But nearly all of us
have experienced small T trauma, which encompasses disturbing
experiences of all kinds, particularly those from childhood (such as
bullying, divorce, and experiencing or witnessing physical or emotional
abuse) or from adulthood (such as the loss of employment or the end of a
relationship). If I asked you to list your most disturbing
memories, you might be able to recall a number of situations which tend
to bring you down when you remember them, situations that you tend to
associate with negative beliefs about yourself: “I am worthless,”
“I am powerless,” “I am not lovable.” Obviously these messages
have a terrible influence on our sense of self-esteem and our ability to
function successfully in the world.
Now as a rule the mind tends to
heal itself just as the body does. When you scratch your arm it
may bleed, but before long the bleeding will stop, a scab will form, and
in a week you won’t even be able to tell where you scratched yourself.
The mind works the same way. If your boss humiliates you in front
of all your co-workers you’re probably going to feel upset and you may
not even be able to work for the rest of the day, but eventually you
will put the situation into perspective, you may learn a different
strategy for dealing with your boss, or you may look for a new job, and
in six months, while you may still be able to recall the incident, it
will no longer have the power to distress you. The experience was
painful but not traumatic.
Other experiences, the so-called
small T traumas, often as a result of triggering back into negative
early childhood experiences, somehow get misfiled in the brain.
The thoughts, sensations and feelings associated with the experience
cannot get in touch with the part of the brain that ordinarily processes
them. It’s as if you have a piece of food stuck in your throat.
The stomach enzymes that are supposed to digest it can’t reach it; the
mouth enzymes that are supposed to digest it can’t reach it. The
piece of food just sits there—undigested, unassimilated,
unmetabolized. EMDR helps put the
distressing memory in touch with parts of the brain that can process it
and results in a transformation of the memory so that it no longer
disturbs and no longer produces negative associations.
I’m not going to try to practice
psychotherapy in front of an audience but I believe that I can
demonstrate, on a very small scale, how changing your mind can change
your life. Before applying techniques of EMDR to a disturbing
memory I help a client install a Safe Place, to use as a way of shutting
down an incomplete session. I will ask all of you to try this but
for demonstration purposes it would be helpful if I could have a
volunteer. [Set two chairs in the “ships passing” formation.]
I’d like you to think about some place you have been
or imagine being that feels very safe or calm.
Perhaps being on the beach or sitting by a mountain stream.
[Pause]
Where would you be?
Focus on your safe place, its sights, sounds, smells
and body sensations.
[Pause] Tell me what you notice.
Bring up the image of your safe place.
Concentrate on where you feel pleasant sensations in your body
and allow yourself to enjoy them. Now concentrate on
those sensations and follow my fingers.
[4-6 passes]
How do you feel now?
Focus on that. [4-6 passes] What do you notice now?
Is there a word or phrase that represents your safe
place? Think of ______ and notice the positive
feelings you have when you think of that word. Now
concentrate on those sensations and the key word and following my
fingers. [4-6 passes]
How do you feel now?
[2 more sets of 4-6 passes]
Now I’d like you to say that key word and notice how
you feel.
Now imagine a minor annoyance and tell me how it
feels. [Pause] Now bring up
your safe place ________ and notice any shifts in your body.
Now I’d like you to think of another mildly annoying
incident and bring up your safe place by yourself, especially noticing
any changes in your body when you have gone to your safe place.
[Thank the volunteer]
I’m hoping that those of you trying this in your seats
experienced these shifts in your body, even without the eye moments to
reinforce the effect. Now a Safe Place in itself
isn’t going to cure your depression or anxiety or trauma.
But it does offer the possibility of changing your life if you
will let it. Every day the world offers us countless
invitations to become stressed. A driver on the QEW
who cuts too close in front you presents you with an invitation to grit
your teeth, pound the steering wheel, utter a curse if you’re so
inclined, and thereby set your fight-or-flight mechanism in operation:
your respiration increases, your blood pulses—in short, you are
stressed. During the day, as I’ve said, you receive
dozens of such invitations and, I’m sorry to say, some people accept
them all. By the end of the day, they’re a wreck.
Let’s consider an
alternative scenario. The driver on the QEW is still
going to cut too close in front of you—this is the real world we’re
talking about, after all. But this time you
respectfully decline the invitation. Instead, you go
to your Safe Place. Immediately you experience the
positive feelings that come with that word or phrase.
You become more peaceful, more relaxed, and you experience a sense of
well-being. But it doesn’t happen just that once.
As I’ve said, you receive lots of invitations to stress.
Imagine that you
decline them all; imagine that you respond to each invitation by going
to your Safe Place. By the end of the day you’ve had
a dozen moments of calm and tranquillity, oases of relaxation.
The experience of peacefulness is so much nicer than the
experience of stress that you may not have too much difficulty making
your Safe Place a habit. I encourage you to try it
and tell me how it works.
Using this technique
regularly may reduce the amount of stress I experience, you may be
saying, but can changing my mind really change my life?
Let me offer several examples from my own practice.
A young woman, the victim of sexual and parental abuse when
young, and raped when a teenager, was—not surprisingly—unable to sustain
an intimate relationship with a man. She could have
sex with a near-stranger while intoxicated but when a man wanted to
engage her in a healthy relationship she would back off and eventually
terminate it. I saw her for several sessions of EMDR,
one of them dealing with the rape. I need to point
out that EMDR is both non-invasive and non-traumatic.
I say non-invasive because the client never had to describe the details
of her experience. When I asked her what went through
her mind between sessions of eye movements, she responded “What he
said,” or “What I said,” or “What I wish I’d done.”
EMDR is non-traumatic since a client remembers an incident without being
forced to relive it. The division of attention
between the present (being in an office, following my fingers) and the
past (seeing mental images of prior experiences) prevents the therapy
from retraumatizing the client. Now the young woman
has a boyfriend with whom she seems to be building a normal healthy
relationship.
I have likened EMDR to
a train ride. I don’t decide where the train is going
to go, nor does the client, as least not on a conscious level.
Rather, I invite the client simply to observe what goes on during
the sets of eye movements without attempting to hold on to the
experience, or analyze it or judge it. Sometimes the
experience takes the form of images. One client,
working to overcome the trauma of his brother’s suicide, saw a series of
scenes: snapshots, as it were, of events they had
experienced together. In other cases the experience
takes the form of sentences. A client, dealing with a
troubled relationship with her mother, had a succession of thoughts run
through her mind: “I was never able to please her;”
“I never knew where I stood with her; “I tried to pretend it didn’t
hurt.” Still other clients experience EMDR as a
succession of emotions or physical sensations. A
woman dealing with a difficult relationship with a sibling reported a
succession of feelings: “I feel angry;” “I feel
frustrated;” “I feel fed up and mad.”
Whether the experience takes the
form of images, or sentences, or sensations, eventually the disturbing
experience loses its power to disturb, and the negative beliefs
associated with the experience become positive: “I am
lovable;” “I am now in control;” “I now have choices:
I am strong.” Depriving an experience of its power to
distress means more than simply eliminating a minor annoyance:
it removes an obstacle to living the way we were meant to live.
We now feel lovable, in control, strong in our day-to-day life
experiences with all their challenges.
One client writes: "EMDR
helped me process disturbing memories and let go of negative beliefs I
had about myself. After about five sessions I was
well on my way to regaining my self esteem. EMDR is a
powerful technique that enabled me to rapidly release negative emotions
and feelings that had caused me grief for years.
After each session of EMDR I felt exhausted, but also calm and
peaceful." Another client writes:
“I
have enjoyed much success with EMDR. In a matter of a few sessions,
long-term issues were resolved. EMDR is different from regular therapy
in that problems are resolved quickly and one can delve more deeply into
the core issues with seemingly little effort. EMDR has allowed me to
change my thought patterns in ways that have been extremely helpful.
After years of regular therapy, EMDR was like a jump-start to address
deeper issues in a timely manner. I would highly recommend it!”
These people have changed their lives by changing
their minds. Since the technique may seem strange to
those who have not experienced it directly, I would like to offer a free
one-hour demo of EMDR to anyone in this room interested in trying it.
Just call the number printed on my card to arrange an
appointment.
Whether you decide to use EMDR or traditional talk
therapy, you can succeed in making changes. It will
probably take more than following a ten-step program from a self-help
book, but you can change your life by changing your mind.
Children and Music
Changing Times
Music surrounds us, it seems, wherever we
go, to the point that we seldom experience true silence.
The world has changed a great deal in the course of a couple of
generations, with the musical world included. For
example, how many of you read music? … Okay, and of those who did not
raise your hands, how many of your parents knew how to read
music? … A similar question: how
many of you studied an instrument as a child? … Okay,
and of those who did not raise your hands, how many of your
parents play or played an instrument?
I grew up in a small town in New
Jersey—about 5,000 people—yet the town had a pretty fair symphony
orchestra. I played bass drum in the high school
marching band and flute in the orchestra. The
orchestra wasn’t very good, I have to say, but we actually had a string
section. Nowadays students can attend special schools
for the arts and the Toronto Youth Symphony offers exceptional
opportunities for the very talented, but we no longer take it for
granted that most kids will take piano lessons the way we take if for
granted that any kid will know how to play baseball and basketball.
When I was growing up we didn’t
have Muzak in the supermarket—in fact there wasn’t even a supermarket—in
those days they called it grocery store. Large-scale
amplification didn’t exist, so if you heard music playing, there was
probably somebody actually playing it. And church
bells were real bells, not electronic simulations.
Music education has changed a
lot, too. Who recognizes this tune?
(Hum: “The Happy Farmer.”)
Can you identify it? How do you know it?
Some of you will recognize it as the tune that accompanies Toto
in “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s actually called “The
Happy Farmer,” by Robert Schumann, from his Album for the Young, a
collection that many of us played from as early piano students:
anybody recall “Knight Rupert”?
In an earlier generation the
general public could be relied upon to recognize a considerable body of
classical music. “What’s Opera, Doc?”, a cartoon with
Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, presents an elaborate parody of the Wagner
Ring Cycle. This was mass entertainment, and the
cartoon makers could rely on the public to recognize “The Ride of the
Valkyrie” and other standards. If you showed this
cartoon to your children, they might possibly recognize Bugs Bunny, but
they wouldn’t get the musical references.
So times have changed.
Music may be ubiquitous but knowledge of music rather less so.
At the same time, opportunities for involving children in music
abound, and in the time we have together I should like to explore some
of these opportunities with you.
Kids making music
1. Kindermusik (http://www.kindermusik.com/locator/locator.asp
lists a dozen programs in
My daughter participated in the
Kindermusik program for three years from age 5 to 7.
She learned to play a number of simple instruments, including drums and
an elementary glockenspiel, and proudly showed off the recorder she
received at graduation. She recalls associating
animal names with rhythmic notation: thus, four
eighth notes were “Ca-ter-pil-lar” and two half notes were “big bear.”
The program includes a good deal of physical movement to
music—marching, dancing, stamping, and clapping—as well as singing.
Remarking on my daughter’s unusually long fingers, the teacher
urged her to consider piano or violin lessons after leaving the program,
but she didn’t have the patience for regular practice.
While instrumental lessons may not be appropriate for every
child, it seems to me that music education in the form of immersion in
lots of musical activities would benefit all young people.
Two other programs worth
mentioning include the Kodaly and Orff methods, both developed by
important twentieth-century composers with a strong interest in music
education. The Kodaly method emphasizes singing,
clapping, hand signs and other activities and relies heavily on folk
music. The Orff system uses special percussion
instruments invented for use in the program. The
Kodaly school does not seem to have a branch in the Oakville-Mississauga
area, but the Orff school does have a
2. The
essential principles of the Suzuki method include an early beginning,
parental participation, and rote learning. The children look, listen,
and imitate. According to their literature, “children
trained in the Suzuki method learn to play the same way they learn to
speak, by hearing a sound and then reproducing it. This is what Suzuki
calls the mother-tongue method.”
http://www.suzukiontario.org/mod.php?mod=userpage&page_id=5
I should like to comment on one
essential element of the Suzuki method: parental
participation. Parents commonly think about music for
their children in terms of locating a good teacher of piano, violin, or
what have you. In my experience, modelling plays a
crucial role in music as it does in every other area of a child’s life.
Children who grow up in a household full of books with parents
who read will learn to read and become habitual readers more readily
than children in a bookless environment with parents who watch
television. As a child, I went to sleep to the sounds
of my mother playing the piano. Moreover, a household
filled with music-making has no place for the “shy” performer.
When, as an adult, I brought a couple of student singers to visit
a colleague and his wife, he brought out scores to a Bach cantata,
handed instrumental parts to his children, and we spent an evening in an
impromptu reading.
“Wait a moment,” I hear you
saying. “You’re talking about children of
professional musicians. I can’t play the violin.”
But that’s the whole point of the Suzuki method.
Seeing a parent struggling to learn something new conveys a
powerful message to a child. “Like … Mom is worse at
this than I am.” And who knows?
You might even enjoy learning to play the violin.
3.
For those interested in
traditional private lessons for all ages (newborn to adult) children,
the Royal Conservatory of Music offers music classes to students of ages
(newborn to adults) and a graded program of private lessons in a number
of subjects including cello, clarinet, composition, flute, flamenco
guitar, classical guitar, jazz guitar, electric guitar, piano, recorder,
saxophone, singing, viola, and violin.
I should like to make the case
for studying real music by legitimate composers. My
first piano teacher had me working out of John Thomson collections of
anonymous pieces with romantic titles like “Prince Fleetfoot.”
Before long my parents switched me to a more serious teacher—a
concert pianist who graduated from the Paris Conservatoire—with whom I
learned easy pieces by Bach as well as exercises by Hannon, Czerny and
Stamaty as well as the usual scales and arpeggios.
J.S. Bach composed a considerable amount of music for the education of
his own children, an example followed by Bartók, Prokofiev and
Stravinsky, among others. Just as we want our
children to enjoy the classics of children’s literature, so we should
insure that they have the benefit of the best music.
What about practicing?
When I was growing up, my brother and sister also took piano
lessons and my mother had to set up a schedule assigning each of us so
many minutes before and after school. My own
daughter, after coming to the discouraging realization that I wasn’t
going to be able to show her the “trick” to playing the piano, like the
secret to a magician’s performance, lost interest in the whole idea.
Since she did show a strong interest in soccer, swimming and,
later, figure skating, we didn’t force the issue with music lessons.
Later, when the school she attended required all sixth-graders to
learn violin, she started out eagerly on her quarter-size instrument
but, once again, didn’t have any interest in practicing.
Eventually the director, seeing that she had a strong singing
voice, put her in the choir instead, a sensible move, I thought.
For those of you absolutely determined that your children have
the musical advantages you were denied, let me recommend either music
classes of the sort I’ve described, or else a shared experience like the
Suzuki method.
Music around the house
I’ve talked a fair bit about making music,
whether it be in an organized program such as Kindermusik or informally,
the way I played drums on my mother’s old set of pots and pans.
What about listening to music? Let me suggest
that the principle of modelling applies here as well.
I learned to love classical music not because my parents thought it
would be good for me but because that’s what they listened to.
My dad had a large collection of 78 rpm records that I listened
to repeatedly--I still remember the “break” point where the record had
to be turned over every time I listen to certain works--subsequently
replaced by LP records and then compact discs. I
would urge you to add Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and Britten’s
“Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” to your own collection if you
don’t already own them.
My daughter—the one who didn’t
want to practice the piano, or the violin (or even, later on, the
guitar)—loves listening to music, and like many of her
seventeen-year-old peers has an iPod in constant reach.
When she was younger we listened repeatedly to the Classical Kids
CDs produced by Susan Hammond, a great “fun” way to introduce kids to
classical music. (http://www.brooksmurphy.com/peiconservatory/leaders_hammond.htm)We’ve
enjoyed Beethoven Lives Upstairs, Mr. Bach Comes to Call, Mozart’s
Magic Fantasy (an inside view of a production of “The Magic Flute”),
Daydreams & Lullabies, Tchaikovsky Discovers America, Hallelujah
Handel!, Mozart’s Magnificent Voyage, and our favourite “Vivaldi’s Ring
of Mystery,” featuring an orphan’s tour of Venice in search of a stolen
violin. My daughter was delighted to be able to trace these
landmarks when she eventually visited the city.
We in Canada can be proud of the
number of performers of popular music for children that this country has
produced. I think of Sandra Beech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Beech)–how
many of you have sung “Inch by Inch” with your kids?
And Raffi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffi_%28musician%29)
–who can forget “Baby Beluga”?
Then there’s Fred Penner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Penner).
Sharon, Lois and Bram (http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=U1ARTU0003178)
have been around so long (though more recently as Sharon, Bram and
Friends), that some of you may have seen them as children yourselves.
We made the annual trek to what was then the O’Keefe Centre to
take our daughter to their performances, and at age seventeen she still
listens to “Candle, Snow and Mistletoe” every Christmas.
To tell the truth, so do I. When I told her
about this presentation she reminded me about Pete Seeger’s record
“Abiyoyo and other Stories,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger)
which received many listenings when she was young.
Music and Motives
Ever since I began thinking about this presentation I’ve assumed that
you’re here for the same reason that I am: that you
love music and want to share that love with your children.
But as I’ve studied the subject I find that what we might call
Type A Parents may have a different motivation, based not on music for
its own sake but for the non-musical benefits it may confer.
“Music for Young Children” (www.myc.com)
includes Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt as a patron and features an
endorsement by parenting expert Barbara Coloroso, so the program
presumably has a lot going for it. I don’t know the
organization myself, but it has branches in
What particularly impresses me
here, however, is not the quality of the program but its pitch to
parents. “Why Should Your Child Study Music?” asks
one section of the program’s website. First answer:
“Exposure to music makes children smarter.” Now we’ve all
seen this claim one place or another—I’ve even found it plastered on the
wall of a bus shelter. If you’re interested, there’s even research
on the subject by a professor at the
The idea that music makes you
smarter has received considerable attention from scholars and the media.
The present report is the first to test this hypothesis directly with
random assignment of a large sample of children (N 5 144) to two
different types of music lessons (keyboard or voice) or to control
groups that received drama lessons or no lessons. IQ was measured before
and after the lessons. Compared with children in the control groups,
children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale
IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ
subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic
achievement. Unexpectedly, children in the drama group exhibited
substantial pre- to post-test improvements in adaptive social behavior
that were not evident in the music groups.
Here are some other claims taken
from the “Music for Young Children” website:
Children who take piano lessons are able to learn complex math problems
earlier than those who’ve had no musical training.
Adults who studied music before the age of 12 had better memories for
words than those who did not. – researchers at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong
Significantly more of the brain is used during music making than
previously thought. – Dr. Lawrence Parsons of the University of Texas –
San Antonio
Rhythmic movement plays a critical role in the reading process – the
ability to keep a steady beat – simply clapping hands rhythmically –
figures prominently in cognitive development. – Phyllis Weikart the
University of Michigan
Music training, specifically piano instruction, is far superior to
computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children’s abstract
reasoning skills necessary for learning math and science. – psychologist
Dr. Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin
Preschoolers have lots to gain from listening to music because it
encourages movement. – Dr. Rosalie Pratt, Brigham Young University
If you’re here today because you’ve read the research and are interested
in music only to help your child get into U of T (or Harvard or Berkeley
or whatever) I’m not going to ask you to raise your hands.
Music outside the house
We’ve talked about recordings, and
individual and group study. The Greater Toronto Area
also offers an abundance of other opportunities for children to have fun
with music.
The outdoor water organ at The Ontario Science Centre (http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/)
is hard to describe but fun to play. Essentially, you
control sounds by interrupting streams of water. The
Science Centre also has a collection of Indonesian percussion
instruments (part of a gamelan orchestra), tuned to scales different
from the Western scales found, for example, on a piano.
The Young People’s Concerts of
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
http://www.tso.ca/season/youth/youth14.cfm are described as
appropriate for ages 5 to 12, but my daughter and her best friend kept
attending until just last year at age 16 , when we switched to the Light
Classics series. These concerts often include music
composed especially for the occasion, and the season usually features at
least one appearance by the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, a group of
talented musicians all under the age of 22, a real source of inspiration
for any young person seriously interested in music.
I encourage singing under any
circumstances, whether it be around the piano at Christmastime or in the
car during long trips. Many churches have
age-appropriate choirs, and for serious young singers, grades 1 to 8,
there’s the world-famous Toronto Children’s Chorus
http://www.torontochildrenschorus.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=tm&tm=15&ts=0&tsb=0&CFID=5227461&CFTOKEN=44728929,
or for ages 10 to 16, the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus
http://www.canadianchildrensopera.com/index.asp
The Canadian Opera Company
offers a number of programs oriented toward children:
The Saturday Morning Opera Club gently introduces
kids (grades two to six) to the art form. The After School
Opera Program takes slightly older kids (grades three to seven) from the
basics through to the production of their own mini-opera:
http://www.coc.ca/education/school.html#k6
If you haven’t been to
Harbourfront during the summer, let me recommend it to you.
Virtually every weekend brings soul-stirring, foot-tapping music
from around the world to the waterfront stage, and it’s all free.
http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/noflash/frontpage.php
I have no personal acquaintance
with the “Music Together Program” but according to a piece in the
Toronto Life guide, the program “exposes kids to
a variety of tonality and metre, and includes culturally diverse music
(such as French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Greek). Hands-on playing with
rhythm sticks, drums, tambourines and other instruments leads to a big
jam session in every class.”
http://www.torontolife.com/guide/kids_and_parents/music/music-together/
Are there other programs you
know about that I’ve omitted?
John Cage
Before I finish I should like to invite
you to enlarge your definition of music. American
composer John Cage spent a great deal of his career trying to get people
to listen to sounds—not the relationship between notes in a musical
composition but sounds for their own sake. His ideas
may be found in two of his books,
Silence and A Year From
Monday. I’d like to share a few excerpts with
you:
“It is better to make a piece of
music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one,
better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction,
entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.’” (Silence, p.64)
“There is no such thing as
silence. Something is always happening that makes a
sound.” (Silence, p.191)
“Nothing is accomplished by
writing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by
hearing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by
playing a piece of music. Our ears are now in
excellent condition.” (Silence,
p.xii)
Elsewhere Cage has said that his
favourite music is the sounds that are constantly surrounding us if only
we had ears to listen.
As you continue to investigate
music with your children, I hope you will encourage them to listen
rather than just hear and to make playing music a real source of play,
and that in one way or another you will be their companions on this
journey.
Parenting Talk
What’s Your Type?
People’s communication styles generally
fall into four types: placater, blamer, computer and
distracter. Awareness of these styles as they appear
in families, and learning to replace them with a more authentic style,
can improve communication among family members.
In stress situations involving
our self-esteem, most of us adopt one of these four communication styles
to hide our feelings.
1. placater:
apologetic, eager to please (hides fear)
2.
blamer:
fault-finding, critical (hides pain)
3. computer:
super-reasonable, abstract (afraid of feelings)
4. distracter:
irrelevant, talkative (afraid of reality)
People use these styles to avoid
the threat of rejection. We
placate so that the other
person doesn’t become angry. We
blame so that the other
person thinks we’re strong. We
compute by using big words to show our self-worth; we
distract in hope that the
threat will go away.
Suppose you’re on a family
vacation and the car suddenly loses power. Dad, the
blamer, driving, pulls to the shoulder as the car comes to a stop, then
turns to his teenage son: “This is all your fault!
You must have done something to the engine when you were out last
night.” Mother, the placater, turns to her
husband and says, “It’s probably my fault. I should
have had the car checked at the service station before we left.”
Son, the computer, says, “Statistically there’s less than a 1%
chance of failure with this type of engine.”
Daughter, the distracter, says “Let’s use our cell-phone and order a
pizza.”
Of course, it’s unlikely to have
this particular make-up in a family. Virginia Satir,
who devised these labels, estimates that roughly 50% of the population
are placaters, 30% are blamers, 15% are computers, and ˝% are
distracters. (If you’re doing the math, that means
that only 4 ˝ % communicate authentically, but Satir’s associates have
said that even that figure is much too high.) But the
gender stereotypes do seem to apply: men tend to be
either blamers or computers; women tend to be either placaters or
distracters.
In order to see how these
communication styles interfere with real communication, I’d like to ask
for three volunteers to participate in a role-playing exercise.
[Three volunteers come forward and sit in three chairs]
Before we start the exercise,
I’d like each of you to experience the four styles.
Often our bodies respond to a
threat to self-esteem. Virginia Satir devised
physical stances that exaggerate aspects of each style to make them
obvious.
As a
placater you get down on your
knees, fold and lift your hand, and raise your head so that your voice
comes out whiny. She writes:
A big help in doing a good placating job is to think
of yourself as really worth nothing. You are lucky
just to be allowed to eat. You owe everybody
gratitude, and you really are responsible for everything that goes
wrong. You know you could have stopped the rain if
you used your brains, but you don’t have any.
Naturally you will agree with any criticism made about you.
You are, of course, grateful for the fact that anyone even talks
to you, no matter what they say or how they say it.
you would not think of asking anything for yourself.
After all, who are you to ask? Besides, if you can
just be good enough it will come by itself.
[p.64]
While you’re in this position,
practice saying things like, “I’m helpless; I’m worthless; whatever you
want; never mind about me.”
As a
blamer you stand with one
hand on your hip, the other arm extended with finger pointed.
Your throat muscles become tight, your eyes bulge and your
nostrils flare. Virginia Satir writes:
As a blamer it would be helpful to think of yourself
pointing your finger accusingly and to start your sentences with “You
never do this or you always do that or why do you always or why do you
never …: and so on. Don’t bother about an answer.
That is unimportant. The blamer is much more
interested in throwing his weight around than really finding out about
anything.” [p.66]
When you’re in this posture,
practice saying things like, “What is the matter with you?; I am the
boss around here; you’re just like your mother (father, etc.)”
As a
computer you sit on a chair
with legs crossed, hands folded on one knee, and you speak in a dry
monotone. Virginia Satir suggests:
When you are a computer, use the longest words
possible, even if you aren’t sure of their meanings.
You will at least sound intelligent. After one
paragraph no one will be listening anyway. To get
yourself really in the mood for this role, imagine that your spine is a
long, heavy steel rod reaching from your buttocks to the nape of your
neck, and you have a ten-inch-wide iron collar around your neck.
Keep everything about yourself as motionless as possible,
including your mouth. You will have to try hard to
keep your hands from moving, but do it.”
[p.68]
While in this posture, practice
saying things like “I’m calm, cool and collected; everybody knows that
…; obviously …”
As a
distracter you put your knees
together in an exaggerated knock-kneed position, hunch your shoulders,
stick your buttocks out, and send your arms and hands flailing in
opposite directions. Virginia Satir writes:
When you play the distracting role, it will help you
to think of yourself as a kind of lop-sided top, constantly spinning but
never knowing where you are going, and not realizing it when you get
there. You are too busy moving your mouth, your body,
your arms, your legs. Make sure you are never on the
point with your words. Ignore everyone’s questions;
maybe come back with one of your own on a different subject.
Take a piece of imaginary lint off someone’s garment, untie
shoelaces, and so on.” [p.70]
While in this position, be
frantically active and unfocused; avoid eye contact, change the subject
and say irrelevant things: “Problem?
What problem? Let’s go to the movies.”
Now that you’ve had a chance to
experience the four styles, let’s improvise an interaction.
Each of you will pick a role: Father, Mother,
Son, Daughter. [participants make the selections]
Now each will pick a
communication style. It’s all right to have two of
the same style in the game, but I don’t want all three of you to choose
the same style. [Participants announce their
choices.]
To get prepared for your role, I
want you to take the appropriate posture for the communication style
you’ve selected. [Participants get into
position.] While you’re in this position, I want you
to think about how you feel about yourself and about the other players.
[Give them a moment to internalize the posture.]
Now sit in the chairs use the
same communication styles, but this time in words.
For this first round I’ll announce a family conflict, but for the next
rounds I’m hoping to get suggestions from the group.
I’m going to ask you to plan a
Christmas vacation. You have five minutes. Go.
[When the timer rings]
I’d like you to sit back, close your eyes, and become aware of
your breathing, your thoughts, your feelings about yourself and other
family members. Try to imagine what it would be like
to live this way in your family all the time.
Now open your eyes, and tell us
about your experiences in playing the role. What were
your thoughts and feelings? How did you feel toward
other members in the group? [Each participant talks
in turn; possible interaction or observation from the group.]
I’d like to repeat the exercise
with three new volunteers. [Go through the postures
once again. Have the volunteers choose roles and
styles, in a different combination from the first group.
Ask the group to suggest a point of conflict.
Play the game for five minutes; when the timer rings, go through the
feedback session as before.]
Before we continue, I’d like to
ask members of the group who didn’t get a chance to participate in the
game to share recognitions of communication styles—either your own or
that of some member of your family. [Responses]
Ineffective communication makes
for entertaining viewing, as we have seen, but can create considerable
pain. Each of these communication styles attempts to
conceal or dismiss feelings and to avoid authenticity.
In the placating response you hide your needs for
yourself; in the blaming response you hide your needs for the other; the
computer hides his emotional need for himself and for others.
These same needs are ignored in the distracter, and in addition
he hides any relationship to time, space, or purpose.
[p.93]
There is a fifth communication
style that Virginia Satir describes as
levelling. In this response words, body posture,
tone of voice and facial expression are all congruent, all convey the
same message. Levelling shares feelings rather than
trying to conceal them.
Since most of us start with one
of the four ineffective styles, we can think of levelling as a way of
transforming them into more positive styles, that is, using the positive
aspects of an existing style. The
placater can be sensitive,
loving and empathic without being submissive or self-denying.
The blamer can be
self-assertive without trying to demolish the partner.
The computer can use
intelligence to analyze, plan and solve problems while still taking into
account his or her own feelings and those of the partner.
The distracter can
keep the ability to have fun and maintain a balance between pleasure and
purpose.
You can’t change a communication
style overnight. But one key to developing a
levelling style is to use mainly “I” messages: “I
feel …,” “It hurts me when …,” “I am afraid.”
Starting a message with “you” often makes it sound like blaming.
Levelling isn’t easy.
We’ve adopted ineffective communications styles for reasons
having to do with our early survival and they won’t go away just by our
wishing it. But playing a game like the one we’ve
played here today can help us to make conscious a style that may have
been unconscious. Playing this game with your partner
can help both of you to become more authentic communicators and to
provide healthy models for your children. If you
don’t level with your partner, you’re almost forcing your children into
inauthentic roles, because they can’t learn to be real if you’re not.
You don’t necessarily have to play this game with your children,
although it can be fun if you’re brave. But if you
and your partner have unhealthy roles, your children are going to
imitate you. If you and your partner learn to be
levellers, your children will imitate that.
irginia Satir writes:
What the levelling response does it make it possible for you to live as
a whole person—real, in touch with your head, your heart, your feelings,
and your body. Being a leveller enables you to have
integrity, commitment, honesty, intimacy, competence, creativity, and
the ability to work with real problems in a real way.
The other forms of communication result in doubtful integrity,
commitment by bargain, dishonesty, loneliness, shoddy competence,
strangulation by tradition, and dealing in a destructive way with
fantasy problems. [p.77]
Like It or Not, Your Parents Live With You
The way your parents raised you has a
great influence on the person you choose as a partner, since we tend to
attract people who embody our parents’ strongest traits, both positive
and negative. These inner parents reappear when it
comes to child-rearing, and woe betide the unaware.
Many of you will have read one
of the works of Harville Hendrix, the writer who popularized Imago
Theory. According to this theory, we use our partners
to work out unresolved conflicts with our parents.
Or, to put it more crudely, “You marry your mother (or father).”
This can be dismaying for young couples who thought they had
finally gotten away from their parents’ influence to lead independent
lives.
As with communication,
self-awareness is an important first step toward self-improvement.
I’m going to ask for a volunteer willing to share her partner’s
and parents’ traits as well as her own personality.
This may be very personal, but I hope it will be helpful.
[Draw a large circle in one
section of the blackboard and a horizontal line bisecting it.
Put a plus sign just above the horizontal line and a minus sign
just below it.] In the upper part of the circle I’d
like you to list the positive characteristics not only of your parents
but of all the most influential people in your life as a child.
It could include aunts or uncles, grandparents, older siblings,
or anyone else who had a significant influence on the way you turned
out.
Now I’d like you to list the
negative characteristics of the people who most influenced you.
You don’t need to separate them by person—just write these
characteristics in the lower half of the circle.
[Draw a second large circle
beside the first, again with a horizontal line and plus and minus
signs.] Now I’d like you to write down, in the upper
part of the circle, the positive attributes of your spouse.
And in the lower part of the
circle, please write down your spouse’s negative characteristics.
[Compare the two upper segments
and put stars next to traits that appear in both.
Then do the same with the two lower segments.]
Those stars in effect represent
aspects of your parents that still live with you in the person of your
spouse. The part that may be hard to accept is that
you selected him just for this purpose.
[Ask the volunteer to complete
these sentence stems:
Others are …….
In order to beloved and belong I
must …….]
Draw two more large circles and
label them Him and Her. (You can fill in the name of
the volunteer and her partner.) Draw a horizontal
dotted line toward the bottom third of each circle.
Under the line in each circle write “Emotional mind (kid = Little
[name]).” Above the line in each circle write
“Rational mind (adult = Big [name).”
Fill in characteristics of His
kid. Use volunteer’s sentence completions to fill in
characteristics of Her kid.
In a partnership we constantly
have four conversations going on at once: your adult
talking to his adult; your adult talking to his kid; his adult talking
to your kid; and your kid talking to his kid. (This
last combination is generally where your worst arguments take place.)
A dance of intimacy (also called
a vicious circle) operates out of the dynamics among these four
characters. For example, if she, feeling neglected,
pursues, he, feeling engulfed, flees, and the dance repeats itself
endlessly to the frustration of both partners. [Offer
example of the dynamics based on the actual characteristics in the
circles.]
Hendrix describes a successful
marriage as one in which each partner becomes aware of his or her inner
needs and communicates them directly to the other person.
In addition, in a successful marriage each partner treats the
other’s needs as equally important to his or her own.
These principles apply to the
entire family. Virginia Satir writes, “It
is my belief that any family communication not leading to realness or
straight, single levels of meaning cannot possibly lead to the trust and
love that, of course, nourish members of the family.” [p.62]
Identifying the extent to which
we have sought out our parents in our partners, and learning to be
authentic in our communication are two steps toward building a
successful marriage and, from there, a successful family.
Sources:
Gordon, Lori H. (1993).
Passage to Intimacy.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hendrix, Harville (1988).
Getting the Love You Want:
A Guide for Couples. New York:
Harper & Row, Publishers.
Satir, Virginia (1972).
Peoplemaking.
Palo Alto, California: Science and Behavior
Books, Inc.
The Psychology of Families
Oakville Parent-Child Center
March 4, 2010
Leo Tolstoy wrote one of the most
memorable opening sentences of any novel in
Anna Karenina: “All
happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way.” If we alter the word “happy” to “healthy,” we will have a
pretty good description of the psychology of families. If all
healthy families are alike, it may be useful to begin this presentation
by getting an idea of what healthy looks like. As an organizing
principle I should like to concentrate on the ABC’s of families, where
the letters in this case stand for Attachment, Boundaries and
Communication. As a subheading I’ll talk about the three R’s, in
this case, Rules, Roles, and Resulting Relationships. (I am using
the word “role” not to signify a part in a drama from in its second
dictionary definition, “the characteristic and expected social behaviour
of an individual.” The last two R’s refers to what happens when the
children in each situation grow up to become adults.)
Healthy Family
The ABC’s of a healthy family consist of secure
attachment, good boundaries, and open communication. Let’s see
what that looks like in detail in terms of our three R’s. The
rules for producing secure attachment in a child won’t come as any
surprise to you: react to a child’s needs; play with the child;
and engage in contingent communication, in which the quality, intensity
and timing of the parent’s response reflect the signals actually sent by
the child. In other words, the communication between parent and
child is truly a two-way street. What is the role of a securely
attached child? Such children are outgoing, empathic and
confident, knowing that if they communicate their needs, the world will
provide them with a way to get their needs met. The resulting
relationships when the child becomes an adult display a high level of
self-esteem, shared feelings, and intimacy.
A boundary, for our purposes,
represents the limit that defines you as separate from others. The
rules for good boundaries include the right to say no and the freedom to
say yes. With healthy boundaries, we choose what to let in and
what to keep out. Healthy boundaries apply not only to individuals
within the family but also to subsystems. For example, a healthy
family draws a boundary which protects the couple from intrusion by the
children. The role of someone with good boundaries includes a
healthy self-image and a strong sense of self that allows the individual
a healthy balance between separateness and belonging. The
resulting relationships display true intimacy, which requires the
participation of two separate individuals. (Symbiosis is not the
same as intimacy.)
The C in our ABC’s of healthy
families stands for open communication. The rule in this case
represents an absence of rigid rules or roles. In a healthy family
there are no family secrets. The role allows for personal privacy
that permits both emotional bonding and individual autonomy. The
healthy family allows outsiders into the system. The resulting
relationships when the child becomes an adult provide an open
communication of both thoughts and feelings and display a strong sense
of empathy--the ability to comprehend another person’s emotions.
The functional family is balanced
and flexible; it can adapt to the situation. Usually this
represents a middle ground, but that depends on the circumstances.
If you were defending a child against an abductor, you would want to be
abusive, angry and intrusive. If, on the other hand, you were a
bystander at a bank robbery, you would want to be passive, silent and
unattached, even though we would not think of these characteristics as
healthy in normal circumstances.
Unhealthy Family
The ABC’s of unhealthy, or dysfunctional, families
include insecure attachment, poor boundaries (either enmeshment or
disengagement), and closed communication. Psychologists
distinguish three forms of insecure attachment.
In
avoidant attachment the
parents are emotionally unavailable, unresponsive, and rejecting.
The children, not surprisingly, tend to avoid parents and caregivers.
When they grow up, avoidantly attached children sacrifice intimacy for
an exaggerated form of autonomy and display a dismissive attitude toward
attachment. When you see an adult who never seems to connect in an
intimate relationship, you may well be looking at the product of
avoidant attachment.
In
ambivalent attachment the
parents are inconsistently available—sometimes distant, at other times
intrusive. Children in these circumstances tend to be wary.
When they grow up, ambivalently attached children give up autonomy for
the sake of a dependent form of intimacy. They lack independent
self-esteem and display a desperate need for others and the fear that
their needs cannot be met.
Disorganized attachment is the worst of all since
parents, to whom children instinctively turn for protection, act as
figures of both fear and reassurance. Abusive parents fall into
this category. The children seem dazed or confused. When
they grow up, disorganizedly attached children have radically unstable
relationships and experience a sense of being unreal or internally
fragmented.
Dysfunctional families display poor
boundaries. There may be boundary violations, such as a father who
shares confidences with his daughter about his relationship with the
mother, or an adolescent boy who becomes a quasi-spouse to his mother
after the death or disappearance of the father. Physical, sexual
and emotional abuse all constitute boundary violations. In these
situations there is no personal privacy. Or there may be ambiguous
boundaries: it’s not clear, for example, whether a new stepparent
is a “real” parent with authority or just the spouse of the real parent.
Where the healthy family occupies the middle ground, unhealthy families
fall at the extremes. In an over-attached, or enmeshed family,
children have difficulty achieving autonomy. In an under-attached,
or “boarding house” family, with a neglectful or absent dad and a
neglected mom, children are treated as invisible, and often have
difficulty trusting others. In another form of poor boundaries,
known as triangulation, one family member may be used as messenger
between two others as a substitute for direct communication, or two
family members may align against a third. All of these boundary
problems prevent a family from functioning in a healthy way.
Dysfunctional families also display
poor communication. At one extreme we find no expression of
emotions, either verbally or physically. At the other extreme we
find an excessive display of emotions, a family in continual turmoil,
its members in a constant state of anxiety. Where families deny
their problems, children learn to distrust their feelings and their
senses. Dysfunctional families tend to maintain an atmosphere of
secrecy within the family and isolation from the outside community.
Let us consider three examples of
dysfunctional families: the alcoholic family, the abusive family,
and the autocratic family. Naturally individual families differ in
the degree to which they display the traits enumerated here, but we can
usefully summarize the rules, roles and resulting relationships in each
case.
Alcoholic Family
Most alcoholic families maintain three basic rules:
The Rule of Silence forbids
not only talking to people outside the family but also to talking to
members of the family itself. Children raised in this system may
experience difficulty expressing themselves for the rest of their lives.
The Rule of Denial requires children to ignore
the behaviour of the alcoholic
and pretend that nothing is wrong. Children raised in these
circumstances learn not to trust either themselves or others and never
learn to honestly express emotion.
The Rule of Isolation separates the family from
the community and isolates individual members from each other.
Children raised in this environment have difficulty forming intimate
relationships.
The Rule of Denial leads children
to adopt various roles as a way of deflecting attention from the
alcoholic. These roles may include:
The Golden Boy (or girl) who
tries to make family look good by achieving success in school or work
The Scapegoat who diverts
attention from the family by getting into trouble
The Peacemaker, or Placater,
who tries to reduce conflict in the family by smoothing things over
Growing up in an alcoholic family
can have devastating consequences. On an emotional level,
resulting relationships tend to be marked by numbness, distrust,
resentment, shame, and helplessness. The mental processes of an
adult raised in these circumstances reflect confused thinking,
hypervigilance and a tendency to think in absolutes. The actions
of such an adult tend toward crisis-oriented living, manipulative
behaviour, and problems with intimacy.
Abusive Family
Abusive families generally display the same rules as
alcoholic families, namely the rules of Silence, Denial, and Isolation.
We are not surprised to find some of the same roles appearing in an
abusive family, but we should consider the special drama associated with
this kind of dysfunctional family.
The Abuser often appears to
have no boundaries at all, but may attribute the abusive
behaviour to alcohol, anger, or some
other influence.
The Victim often accepts this
role in order to protect her children, in the case of a mother, or
younger siblings, in the case of a child.
The Bystander may be a passive
spouse who denies the problem or who conspires to remain unaware of it.
The pattern of abuse tends to
perpetuate itself in succeeding generations. We have all read how
victims of abuse often become abusers in their turn, but the cycle may
take a more insidious form. The son of an abusive father, for
example, absolutely determined to avoid these bad traits, may become
passive and unattached as an adult. As a consequence, his children
may grow up to be spoiled, coddled or narcissistic, characteristics that
may well contribute to their becoming abusers in the next generation.
Children who have suffered abuse generally lack healthy self-esteem and
the personal boundaries that go with good self-esteem. As adults
they may find themselves unable to stand up to a family member who
telephones every day, insisting that a lengthy monologue be heard.
Autocratic Family
Autocratic families may seem relatively innocuous in
comparison to the alcoholic or abusive family but they display similar
patterns of dysfunctional rules, roles and resulting relationships.
The rules in an autocratic family may include not talking back—a child
may not address an adult in the same tone with which the adult addresses
the child—or not talking at all, in the sense that conversation
involving a democratic give-and-take of opinions is frowned upon.
There may be rules against showing, or even talking about, emotions.
Children in an autocratic family
seem to display a number of distinctive roles:
The Rebel may continually
confront the autocrat without ever achieving victory, often the case
when the autocrat is simply too strong
The Peacemaker accepts
autocrat’s authority and urges others to do the same
The Fugitive avoids
confrontation by keeping out of sight. As an adult, the Fugitive
may visit as infrequently as possible and for as short a time as
possible.
Adult children of an autocratic
family may experience difficulty expressing emotions, reading other
people’s emotions and forming intimate relationships. They may
display low self-esteem, relying on the opinions of others to define
their self-image or failing to pick up on conventional social signals.
As with the case of a child growing up in an abusive family, the child
of an autocrat, determined to avoid that distasteful trait, may instead
become an excessively permissive parent.
I have offered the paradigm of
ABC’s—Attachment, Boundaries, and Communication—as a way of looking at
family systems, be they functional or dysfunctional, and I have
suggested the Three R’s—Rules, Roles and Resulting Relationships—as
subdivisions for each of the main headings. With this model in
mind, I invite you to consider families with which you are
acquainted—they don’t have to be your own. I guess it’s only fair
if I begin. I have no doubt that my parents did their very best in
raising three children, of whom I am the oldest. Yet I must also
acknowledge that I come from an autocratic family. My father
believed that he should be able to enter any room in his house unbidden,
whether the door was open or closed. (My brother took a measure of
solace in the tendency of his bedroom door to stick, allowing him a few
precious seconds to conceal anything he didn’t want my father to see.)
I guess I could be considered the rebel, although my confrontations
never seemed to get me anywhere. My younger sister, taking the
role of peacemaker, accepted my father’s authority and urged everyone
else to do the same. My younger brother was clearly the fugitive.
Rather than asking permission to go somewhere, he avoided confrontation
by simply disappearing. As an adult he visited as infrequently as
possible and arranged never to spend another night under my parents’
roof once he had left home.
Experiencing no expression or
discussion of feelings as a child, I had a terrible time with intimacy
as an adult (happily, psychotherapy can accomplish a good deal in that
area). I have tended to defer to the opinions of others and, yes,
I have been an overly permissive parent. The purpose of these
remarks, of course, is not to offer a
mea culpa but to furnish a
real-life example of the tendencies I have put forth.
Would anyone else like to offer
illustrations of rules, roles or relationships or give examples of how
attachment, boundaries, and communication operate in a family you know?
[Discussion from audience]
Perpetuating Dysfunction
As the “resulting relationships” portion of our model
would suggest, a family’s problems are apt to be transmitted to the next
generation unless corrective measures are taken. To begin with, as
adults we recreate our early experience: children leave home
taking what they have learned with them. By the time we are five
years old we have formed our core beliefs, our assumptions about the
nature of ourselves, others, the world, and how we must behave in order
to survive in it. Securely attached children are likely to have
positive core beliefs such as: The world is a safe place, I am
competent to explore it, others will look out for me, and so I can
follow the path of my curiosity. Others have less happy core
beliefs, such as a client of mine whose early experiences taught her
that those who say they love me hurt me.
You’ve doubtless heard the phrase,
“you marry your mother (or your father).” Indeed, we pick partners
who embody the strongest traits (both positive and negative) of our
parents. We should not be surprised that the woman I just cited
has had a series of relationships with abusive partners, even as her
rational mind tells her to avoid this pattern.
Furthermore, we parent as we’ve
been parented. Or, if we’re determined to avoid some particular
trait, we tend to embody its opposite, which still contributes to a
dysfunctional family by taking a particular characteristic to an
extreme. Unresolved issues can get triggered in the parent-child
relationship and impair our ability to think clearly and remain
flexible. We become flooded by intense emotions that can lead us
to knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful responses.
The perpetuation of destructive
patterns can be clearly seen in the case of alcoholism. I have a
client who has not had a drink in nearly two decades, and yet his family
continues to embody the rules and roles established in his drinking
days. The father of another client, having seen the destructive
impact of alcohol, never took a drink, yet my client shows clear
evidence of the pattern. How does that work? His
grandfather, as an alcoholic, simply did not have the emotional
resources to provide secure attachment, appropriate boundaries and open
communication for his son, my client’s father, who grew up emotionally
stunted. His parenting of my client, in turn, lacked the qualities
necessary for healthy intimacy. Even though my client never lived
in an alcoholic household, he was clearly the victim of alcoholism.
Another client has had to endure
growing up with a sibling with borderline personality disorder, a
terrifying condition characterized by uncontrolled rage and a more or
less complete absence of boundaries. The phrase “walking on
eggshells” well describes the behaviour
of those compelled to live with a borderline. When she came to me,
my client displayed the low self-esteem associated with someone
conditioned to believe that she had no entitlement to her own self.
Therapy included both EMDR to deal with early trauma and a
self-conscious erection of personal boundaries to preserve her own
integrity. Not surprisingly, she also had to impose these
boundaries in dealing with their mother: borderline personalities
tend to go from one generation to the next.
Case Study
Let’s try applying these categories
to an actual case. I invite you to offer comments that we might
use to fill in the blanks in the matrix.
Client Description:
Male, age 47, recovering alcoholic (sober nearly 10 years),
oldest of four children, father alcoholic, unavailable (as were all of
client’s aunts and uncles); mother scared. When
client was age 11, mother died, which effectively made client
responsible for siblings. Left at age 16.
|
|
Rules |
Roles |
Resulting
Relationships |
|
Attachment:avoidant
(parents emotionally unavailable) |
I must rescue and care
for others. |
sacrifice intimacy for
autonomy |
client uses free time
maintaining house, avoiding wife and son |
|
Boundaries:physically
abusive father;“boarding house family” |
client had to act as
father to younger brother and sisters |
client as Victim,
protecting younger siblings, eventually fled the unreasonable
responsibility |
adult may become abusive
or (as in this case) absent emotionally (alcoholic and
unavailable during his children’s childhoods) |
|
Communication:
isolation, secrecy |
Rule of Silence; Rule of
Denial; Rule of Isolation |
no honest expression of
emotion (except anger) |
difficulty forming
intimate relationships |
In pointing out the extremes of
family dysfunction I hope that I have not caused alarm.
Traditionally university health centres can identify each chapter that
the abnormal psych course takes up by the nature of symptoms reported by
impressionable undergraduates, certain that they fulfill the criteria
enumerated in their textbook. Personality disorders, happily,
occur rarely. We all embody mild departures from the norm of
mental health—we can all be considered mildly neurotic. Similarly,
even if you would not honestly describe your family as dysfunctional, it
probably exhibits some imperfections in attachment, boundaries or
communication. Becoming aware of these patterns makes us better
able to correct them rather than allowing our children to perpetuate
them. May you all create family happiness.
Recommended Books:
Christensen, Oscar C., ed. (1993)
Adlerian Family Counseling.
Minneapolis, Minnesota: Educational Media Corporation.
Doherty, William J. and McDaniel, Susan H. (2010).
Family Therapy.
Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Holmes, Jeremy (2001).
The Search for the Secure Base:
Attachment Theory and Psychotherapy.
London: Routledge.
Katherine, Anne (1991).
Boundaries:
Where You End and I Begin. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Kritsberg, Wayne (1985).
The Adult Children of Alcoholics
Syndrome: A Step-by-Step Guide to Discovery and
Recovery. New York: Bantam
Books.
Minuchin, Salvador (1974).
Families and Family Therapy; Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.
Siegel, Daniel and Hartzell, Mary. (2004).
Parenting from the Inside Out:
How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive.
New York: Penguin.
Separation and
Divorce
Conventional wisdom maintains that 50% of
marriages end in divorce. On closer study this turns
out to be a myth. The divorce rate in the United
States peaked at around 41% in 1980 and has been declining ever since,
with the rate standing at 31% in 2002, according to a study in the New
York Time quoted in Wikipedia. So let’s say that
roughly one marriage in three ends in divorce. That
makes divorce practically normal, and yet it feels incredibly abnormal.
It feels not okay. It’s probably the most
traumatic event that we go through in life. There’s
no other event in life that brings such an array of losses with it.
So what do you lose when you
lose a marriage? [Ask for feedback:
partner; home; financial losses; the friends that stay with your
partner; your partner’s family]
Nobody mentioned sex:
did you lose your sex life? [laughter]
It’s important to recognize that
there’s an enormous amount of loss and types of loss all hitting us at
once. There is where understanding the grief process
is really important, because grief is simply the way that we manage
loss. It is a process in which the attachments to the
lost person are not entirely given up, but are altered sufficiently to
allow you to admit the reality of the loss, to cope with it, and to
re-establish healthy relationships following the loss.
Why is it so hard to grieve?
There are a number of reasons.
(1) In
Western culture, grief is
socially discouraged. We’re not taught about
grief, we’re not taught how to grieve, and we’re not taught why it’s
important. Generally the whole idea of pain and
suffering tends to make others uncomfortable. How
many of you were given time off work to deal with this loss?
[ask question of audience] Interesting:
nobody. How many of you find that people
encourage you to talk about this? [ask question of
audience] [somebody may say that somebody at work who
went through a divorce talked to me]
We gravitate to people who have
recently gone through this kind of loss, because generally people don’t
want to hear about it. So that tends to discourage
you from expressing your feelings.
(2) Moreover,
there’s actually a stigma
attached to divorce. If you hadn’t done something
wrong, if you hadn’t been such a bad person, if you weren’t such a
loser, somehow this wouldn’t have happened. Most of
us take our marriage vows seriously, and we’re kind of shocked that it
didn’t work out. We have this message in our culture
that this isn’t supposed to happen.
(3) The third
reason is fear. Very few of us are taught that it’s okay to
experience negative emotions, that it’s a natural, normal healthy
process, that it’s how we move from the initial shock of the loss to
accepting the loss. Grief is painful; it’s
uncontrollable at times. It’s not particularly
predictable: the kinds of feelings you experience,
how long they last, the order they come in. In fact,
it’s pretty chaotic. But if you’re a reasonably
healthy person, grief is inevitable.
Many people avoid the grief
process by simply repressing their feelings, avoiding the opportunities
and the natural feelings that come up. This is not a
particularly good thing to do. Opting out of the
grief process is not that uncommon. We probably all
know people who just bounce right back. They have
rebound relationships a month later. They act as if
nothing happened. You ask how they are and they say,
“I’m fine!” They’re absolutely emphatic that they’re
just fine. They keep busier than you can imagine.
They’re doing something eight nights a week.
Generally, they are not going to grieve. So what’s
wrong with doing that? Seems like a nice, easy out.
What happens is that unresolved
grief--which is really unexpressed feelings—doesn’t go away:
it just stays knotted up inside of you. These
feelings tend to affect our day-to-day life. You
might find that you’re short-tempered and less patient, that you cry
inexplicably at movies—these feelings will seep out in unexpected ways.
Another problem with people who
don’t experience grief is that they tend to repeat relationships if they
don’t learn from it. How many of you have known
people who marry or get into another relationship following the
separation with someone who is virtually identical to the horrible
spouse they married. You just shake your head and
say, “I can’t belief it; they married the same person but in a different
body.” I confess that I have done this in my own
life. My present wife insists that it doesn’t matter
as long as you eventually get it right. But not
learning from mistakes is an awful waste of time.
The only way we resolve our
issues is by experiencing the emotions and making meaning out of them,
understanding them: why was I attracted to this
person? Why did I get involved? Why did
I marry him or her? Why did I stay married for so
long? Why was it okay that he or she cheated, spent
all of our money, whatever: you can fill in the blank.
Until you can answer those questions, you’re not really using the
grief process to grow and learn.
Now for the bad news [laughter].
The grief process takes about two years, following a divorce, on
average. We’d like to think that a couple of nasty
months and it will be over, but it does take time. It
doesn’t mean that for the entire two years you’ll be depressed or in
shock or having anxiety attacks. Quite often there
will be severe symptoms in the beginning, though it doesn’t mean that
you’ll be stuck in this severe stage for the whole time.
But it really does take some time. Some people
may get through it in less, but on the average it takes two years.
But this process entails feeling
what you’re feeling, actually experiencing the nastiness of some of
those emotions. It entails change:
going through those emotions to new ways of dealing with the world, new
ways of thinking. It requires acceptance of the
process. You can’t try to short-cut it or avoid it or
cut out the nasty bits. “I don’t mind feeling sad,”
you may say to yourself, “but I’m sure not going to feel angry.
Anger’s bad—we all know that.” Or, “I’m not
going to feel sad. I’m a man, and men don’t cry.”
We’re more comfortable with some emotions than with others, but
acceptance of the process is the only way through it.
You may have heard the expression, “What you resist, persists.”
Without the acceptance of these feelings, you’re likely to take
longer to get through it.
It’s helpful if you know someone
who’s been through it--it’s helpful if you have a coach—because there’s
a tendency to get discouraged and think, “I’m angry again?
I was really angry four months ago and now I’m angry again.
This can’t be. This isn’t working.
Something’s wrong.” There’s a tendency to
believe that if I still feel this way after a year and a half, I’m never
going to get better. But that’s not true.
There is an end, and you will integrate it all.
The grief process is a normal,
natural human process. It’s an innate ability that we
have that enables us to tolerate change and loss, to adapt.
My wife had two dogs, one of which died, and the remaining dog
grieved. It only lasted for a few weeks but my wife
watched her not wanting to play, not wanting to be petted, not wanting
to eat particularly. The dog was grieving.
People say, “Are there books on
grief? How do I learn?” You don’t
have to learn how to grieve: you will naturally do it
in the precise perfect way that you are meant to be.
Just as we all have different learning styles and communication styles
we all have different grieving styles. No two people
have the exact same emotions for the exact same duration.
It’s going to vary from person to person. One
of the most important things in coming to understand this is being
really patient with yourself and just accepting that you’re going to
feel what you’re going to feel.
Feelings are never wrong.
They can be nasty, they can be difficult, but they’re never
wrong. They just are. The thinking
behind the feelings is irrational: “I hate her and I
wish she was dead.” That’s not something you want to
act on, but there’s nothing wrong with the feelings.
Knowing that it’s okay, accepting your particular path through this
process is critical.
Stages of Grief
So what are the stages and the tasks of
grieving? Essentially there are three stages.
(1) The first
is called evasion, when you’re in a state of shock or denial.
If any of you have been in an accident of any sort, quite often
you have five or ten minutes before you realize that you’re injured.
That state of shock protects you in a situation of physical
injury and often accompanies an emotional loss as well.
It’s actually a healthy defense mechanism that recognizes that
you can’t take this in all at once—that you need a little time to deal
with the reality of this loss. If you’re the one who
initiated the separation, the chances are you’re not in shock because
you’ve been thinking about it for some time. But if
you’re the person who’s been left, there can be period of shock and
denial. Then gradually you’re able to come to terms
with what’s going on. Some people describe it as
feeling numb, or feeling as if everything is going in slow motion, or
they may feel wired and they’re just busy all the time.
In order to get through this stage it’s important to be able to
name the loss and to feel the feelings associated with it.
That will happen when you’re ready.
(2) The main
stage in grief is called the
encounter stage. There you deal with your
feelings. It’s sometimes called the “going crazy
syndrome.” It’s where all the feelings come up and
it’s where the real work of grieving takes place—the opportunity for
growth and learning and transformation. What do we
know about these feelings? We know that these intense
emotions often come in waves. You can have a period
of intense anger, a period of intense anxiety, which may be followed by
a period of calm or peace. You say, “Whew—I’m glad
that’s over.” Then a new wave of anxiety comes.
These waves are often associated with the seasons.
You tend to be depression prone. They can come
with anniversary dates, or any celebrations that you and your partner
shared: Easter, Christmas—on such occasions the
feelings will intensify. But often feelings will come
for no reason that you can explain.
A year after my first divorce I
visited a friend—actually a psychotherapist. We
happened to go into a supermarket that I used to frequent and I suddenly
found myself in tears. He explained that there are
ghosts lurking in unexpected corners. You just have
to get used to their coming out and spooking you.
I used to eat ice cream as a way
of fighting off depression after this divorce. I was
living in Boston at the time, a city wonderfully equipped with both
bookstores and ice cream parlours. I wrote a poem
called “The Ice Cream Blues” which began
It's harder to be sad
After my second divorce I
entered a new relationship and found to my dismay that my feelings would
not support a commitment. Up to this point in my life
I had always thought of myself as a responsible individual:
when I made a pledge, you could count on my keeping it.
But in this “going crazy” time, you’re well advised to avoid any
commitments based on feelings, because there’s a pretty good chance you
won’t be able to keep them.
An initial response to the news
of the loss is anger. Anger, hatred, revenge—they’re
all variations on the feeling of anger. Anger is
interesting: it’s like the little red light that goes
on in your car that tells you that you need to check under the hood.
You may have no idea of what’s going on under there—you may know
enough to drive to your local car dealer and ask them to look
under your hood. But it’s a warning—it tells you that
something’s not okay. So anger is really important.
People who don’t feel anger
often are not in touch with the pain and hurt and the emotional issues
that are going on inside. Anger points a finger at
what you need to look at. So it’s important to
express and to feel anger. Some people get stuck in
anger—they never get beyond feeling angry. They never
feel any of the more subtle feelings of sadness or hurt.
Other people, on the other hand, are unable to feel anger.
And both of those extremes are not healthy.
Probably it’s a good idea to seek professional help if you find yourself
in either of those emotional extremes in the anger department.
Another interesting thing that
can happen during this encounter stage is that you can trigger earlier
unresolved grief. So if you have a series of losses,
or another major loss, prior to the separation, you may find that the
intensity of your grief is much greater than you would have expected.
As I mentioned earlier, unresolved grief, or grief that you don’t
work through, doesn’t go away: it sits inside,
waiting to pounce on you the next time something bad comes along.
It’s not uncommon for people to just fall apart if they’ve
recently lost a parent or a job or lost their health, or some other
loss. Then the separation piles up on top of that.
The two divorces I mentioned were both accompanied by loss of
job. But I was a man: I just
blocked feelings and soldiered on. (I don’t recommend
this, mind you; I’m just trying to be honest. Much
better to let the feelings in.)
In this stage of encountering
feeling, what do you need to do to get through? You
need to feel reality. In our society, as I mentioned,
we’re really not happy with bad feelings. We want to
have just good feelings, and nice feelings, and happy feelings, and
peaceful feelings. We have this belief that that’s
all there should be, and that any negative feelings are bad and we
should get rid of them.
One of my favourite Peanuts
cartoons has Linus, the philosophical character in the series, consoling
Lucy, who is complaining about some recent disappointment.
“Life has it’s ups and downs,” Linus tells her.
“Not my life!” Lucy insists. “My life is ups
and ups and ups!” This is a really limited view of what it
means to be human. To be human is to have the full
range of emotions. If the proportion of negative
emotions is much higher than that of positive emotions, day in and day
out, you might have a problem. But to say that you
want to get rid of the negative feelings and refuse to feel them is
quite unrealistic. During the grief period, you may
have a majority of hours in the day, or days in the week, when you feel
the pain and the hurt. This can manifest itself in
depression or anxiety. (We’ll talk about those a
little bit later.) So it’s really important to
acknowledge, and process and discharge these feelings as they come up.
It’s a big job, one that
requires a lot of energy and work in dealing with the feelings.
We imagine that we can do it on the side, while we’re doing
something else, but it doesn’t work that way. It
takes time, effort and commitment. You need to take a
bit of time every day to consider what you’re feeling, and to express
this to yourself (writing in your journal, talking to yourself, talking
to your dog while you’re taking it for a walk, or talking to a friend).
Discharging these feelings is really important.
It’s important to have a plan of how you’re going to process
these feelings. Pencil it into your schedule; make
time for it. Don’t just assume that the feelings will
take care of themselves. They won’t.
I’ve talked a lot about
discharging feelings, but I want to be clear that venting or discharging
does not have the word “at” after them. You don’t
vent “at” somebody or discharge “on” somebody. This
is a therapeutic technique that you’re going to use alone.
You might have a support person, like a therapist or a close
friend who listens to you. But it’s not a matter of
expressing your feelings to or dumping them on somebody.
It’s all about self-learning and self-understanding.
It’s a very personal process. If you’re angry
at somebody, that person does not need to know it.
I’m not saying you should never communicate with your ex.
But I’m saying that you want to experience your feelings first,
for you. You want to get the juice out of them;
they’re yours. You want to understand them, process
them, and learn from them. You don’t want to be just
dumping them on somebody else. In this series I think
there will be other speakers talking about communicating with your ex.
I’m not suggesting that you never communicate your feelings, but
you communicate them after you’ve felt them.
For example, if you’re really
angry at your ex for some reason, instead of calling him up and
screaming at him, sit down and journal, or write a letter to the ex as
if you were talking, but get in touch with the feelings yourself.
You will find that there is always a more subtle feeling under
the anger. The anger is like one of those plate
covers that they bring you in fancy restaurants. You
lift the plate cover up and there’s this beautiful plate of food.
The anger is just a cover, and when you lift it up there’s an
array of other emotions, typically emotions that would relate to pain,
fear or hurt. These emotions are often difficult to
face, and so we hide behind the anger because it’s a lot easier to feel,
but it’s important to get past the anger to the deeper feeling that lies
underneath. Then the next day, when you’re calm, when
you’re in your rational mind, you might try communicating with your ex
if it’s important.
What you don’t want to do is
turn the anger inward: this only leads to depression.
When I was young I considered my father too powerful to be angry
at so I turned the anger against myself. Bad move.
It took years of therapy to deal with the resulting depression.
So express that anger.
We’re trying to get to a point
where we accept feelings and accept what we learn about ourselves from
our feelings. For example, if you find that you’re
scared, you might realize that you’re very dependent on your
partner—perhaps more dependent than you want to admit—that you’re very
scared to be alone, and that you’ve never really learned to live all by
yourself. This might be the first time you’ve ever
lived alone. You need to accept this.
That doesn’t mean you won’t change it. But you
can’t change something until you have compassion and acceptance for that
trait within yourself. This is all part of the
personal growth that comes from the grief process.
The feelings teach you about yourself. You learn
things about yourself, and as you learn things about yourself I hope
that you begin to learn compassion for that person, that person who
feels great sadness at life turning out the way it has for you.
You want to have the same kind of compassion for yourself that
you would have for your own child: to sit and listen,
to care and feel empathy. You need to feel that for
yourself as well.
Many people say that grief has
to be shared in order to be healed. I’m not sure
that’s absolutely true, but it sure is helpful. This
is what you’ll be doing throughout this whole series:
sharing with others, allowing others to understand your feelings.
In a sense, others are teaching you how to treat yourself.
To go through this process, to make your feelings a priority, in
order to understand and accept them, you have to learn how to look after
yourself, to nurture yourself, knowing that you are Number 1.
Many people, when I say that,
kind of recoil in horror. “Oh, I’m not #1.
That would be selfish!” There are two
extremes, there’s selfish and there’s selfless, and many people fall
into one category or the other. If you’re sitting out
there thinking, “I should never be #1—that’s selfish,” then there’s a
good chance that you might be selfless. Selfless
means that you’re really not very good at looking after yourself.
Any time you have an opportunity to do so, you tend to feel
guilty. The middle ground, which I call
self-interested, or self-loving, is where we need to be.
You don’t have to be selfish, but you can be self-loving, and by
nurturing yourself you’ll have even more love and more energy to give to
others. If you haven’t learned this lesson, then this
is a really good time to do it.
The final portion of the
encounter stage, when all these feelings are coming up, is adaptation or
adjustment to your new life, which really means adjusting to the loss.
A tip for helping you do this is to realize that you’re going to
begin a very unstable grief process for awhile and to avoid making big
decisions. Right now you have to find somewhere new
to live, to separate finances, and to deal with all those other
decisions, but try not to jump into a rebound relationship.
Try to make new friends; try to realize that there’s a whole
world of singles out there. You’re a part of it, and
it’s important to tap into that world. Otherwise
you’ll continue to try to live in a world of couples, and you’re not
one. It’s a very stressful period.
It’s important to understand stress management and find ways to cope.
Get plenty of sleep, etc.
Let’s talk a bit more about
these feelings. In particular, I want to talk about
anger, depression, and anxiety. We’ve talked a little
about anger, what it is and
how it works. Let’s talk about what to do with it.
There are typically two problems you have with anger.
One is having too much and the other is having too little.
If you have trouble controlling your anger, look for
opportunities to vent or discharge anger when you’re alone.
When you do vent, don’t stop with anger: find
out what’s under it. Always ask yourself, what’s the
hurt or pain under the anger? Don’t let yourself off
the hook until you find it, because then you’re getting down to the real
issues. Physical exercise is often helpful when you
have an overload of anger, but it’s important to understand that you
can’t sidestep anger. You can’t vent anger just by
running or by hitting a punch bag or by screaming:
you have to attach the activity to the actual hurt.
You always have to figure out what you’re angry about.
Otherwise, it actually builds more anger.
You’re compounding the anger by teaching yourself to stay angry.
If you have trouble getting
angry, you need to find a way to stir up the anger.
You can do that by saying to yourself, “I am angry,” and then saying it
louder, “I am angry with you.” Sometimes just making
yourself express it verbally will help you get in touch with the
feeling. Getting your body involved can be
helpful—punching or smashing a pillow, whacking a pillow against a
sofa—will sometimes get the body involved in such a way that you start
to stir up some anger. Assuming that something’s been
done to you that would make a normal person angry, if you’re not feeling
angry, you should be.
Sometimes it may be inconvenient
to vent your anger in the house, especially if you’re still living with
the person you’re angry with. In getting in touch
with anger against a woman I eventually divorced, I drove around town
until I found a semi-industrial area where I could go at night and shout
to my heart’s content without fear of being overheard.
Before turning to depression and
anxiety, let’s consider a model of the mind.
|
HIGHER
MIND (Neo-cortex) - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - (permeable membrane) EMOTIONAL
MIND (Amygdala) |
The neo-cortex doesn’t begin
developing until you’re five or six, and it doesn’t complete its
development until late teens for girls and early twenties for boys,
which is one reason why teenage boys take so many risks and have such
high auto insurance premiums.
Before you’re five or six, all
you’ve got is the amygdala, the emotional mind responsible for your
survival as an animal. As an animal in crisis you
have only two choices: fight or flight.
The amygdala has only one important function:
keeping you alive.
There are different portions of
the amygdala dealing with different areas of crisis:
stress, anxiety, sex. And as a small child trying to
survive in a confusing world without the benefit of a rational mind—that
won’t come until later—you learn lessons that the amygdala provides to
keep you alive. One message may be “I am helpless.”
Another may be “It’s no use—the situation is hopeless.”
These may seem to be pretty negative messages, but keep in mind
we’re not talking about you as a competent adult—we’re talking about you
as a weak, confused five-year-old.
As you grow up the neo-cortex,
the rational part of the mind, develops, and along with it a much more
sophisticated, creative way of dealing with the world.
Now you’re not just an animal, you’re an intelligent human being,
endowed with powers of problem-solving, imagination, and understanding.
Hail the almighty human!
The problem comes when you enter
a crisis situation, of the sort we’ve been talking about this evening.
When that happens, you become triggered, and the permeable
membrane separating the rational mind from the emotional mind—which
under favourable circumstances allows you to draw on the strengths of
each—crashes shut like the drawbridge of a castle under attack.
And guess which side of the drawbridge you’re on:
the proud possessor of a neo-cortex? Not a
chance. You’re back in your five-year-old emotional
mind, desperately trying to survive. And what advice
does the five-year-old mind have? Well, you may get
the message: “I am helpless.”
That’s an emotional message that feeds a feeling of anxiety.
Or the trigger may set off the message “It’s no use.
The situation is hopeless.” There’s a good
depression-builder. And as long as you stay in the
emotional brain, you’re operating with all the sophistication of a
five-year-old. The longer you remain there, the
longer the feelings of anxiety or depression persist.
How do you escape?
You need to open up that permeable membrane, raise the drawbridge
so you can get to the neo-cortex and do some intelligent
problem-solving. And the way to do that is so simple
that you won’t believe it when I tell you. You just
breathe. Not the kind of shallow, fearful breathing
you do when you’re anxious or depressed, but deep, relaxed
belly-breathing. If you’re a singer you’ll know what
I’m talking about: when you breathe in you don’t
raise your chest but you fill your diaphragm. If you
put your hand on your belly and take a nice, relaxed breath, your hand
will move outward. So when you’re in a state of
anxiety or depression, stop everything and take five deep, relaxed
breaths. Not panting, even though that’s what you may
feel like doing, but drawn-out belly breaths.
Afterwards not only will you
feel different but you’ll be delighted to discover that you have your
favourite part of the brain back again. And once
you’ve finished celebrating the return of the neo-cortex, you want to
make use of it to start correcting some of those messages from the
five-year-old that’s been running your life whenever you hit a crisis.
Instead of “I’m helpless,” say
to yourself, repeatedly, forcefully, with conviction:
“I AM CAPABLE.” Instead of “The situation is
hopeless,” tell yourself, “This may be difficult, but I can handle it,
perhaps by breaking the problem down into manageable bits.”
Do this enough and eventually those old messages—which were
absolutely essential for your survival when you were little, but which
really get in your way now—will dry up and be replaced by the kinds of
messages you want to be telling yourself as a competent adult.
With this model in mind, let’s
turn to depression and anxiety.
Depression—what is
depression? Depression and anxiety are what we call
the common colds of mental health. They’re certainly
often a part of grief. However, if you get stuck in
depression or stuck in anxiety—it’s not just a passing wave but you’re
stuck there week after week--then you really should seek professional
help. Physical symptoms of depression include changes
in eating and sleeping habits, changes in energy, change in mood
(sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, a sense of not caring, a sense of
not being worthwhile), a loss of interest in things that you used to
enjoy doing: if these symptoms hang on for a long
time, you really should talk to your doctor.
What can you do to cope with
depression? One of the best ways to cope with
depression is to express the feelings, to process them, and to
understand what’s driving them—to understand what those feelings are and
why they’re there. Intense feelings usually arise
from intense childhood experiences and this is an opportunity to heal
those childhood wounds. Find ways to move on in spite
of the loss. Basically it’s a matter of learning how
to take care of yourself by understanding your emotions.
With depression there’s always a skewed way of thinking.
It’s called depressed thinking. It has to do
with feeling hopeless, actually thinking that the situation is hopeless,
actually thinking that you’re helpless and that there’s nothing you can
do, that you’re bad and you deserve this. If you find
yourself thinking any of those things, it’s really important to realize
that it’s the depression talking, and perhaps talk to someone.
Sometimes you can rescue
yourself from depressed thinking. I used to maintain
a list of what I thought of as lifelines that I could draw on to pull
myself out of the rusty pool of depression. These
were activities like listening to music, going to the movies, eating
chocolate, going for a run, that I could count on to change my mood.
Of course, if you’re really depressed, you don’t even want to
pull on the lifeline: you come to enjoy your
depressed thinking. At that point you probably need
to seek counselling.
Anxiety is even more
physical than depression. Essentially it’s the
fight-or-flight response in the body that’s being triggered by the fear
that comes up as a result of all the changes you’re going through.
Some anxiety symptoms include a lump in the throat, trouble
digesting, trouble swallowing, upset stomach or butterflies in the
stomach, diarrhea, and constipation. Your breathing
tends to be shallow; your heart may race. You might
feel shaky. Anxiety will often affect your ability to
sleep, so it’s important not to let severe anxiety go unchecked for a
long time.
If you’re experiencing anxiety,
it’s really important to understand relaxation techniques.
There are excellent breathing techniques that you can learn by
picking up a book on stress management. Yoga teaches
these same breathing techniques. It comes down to
looking at your thinking as well as looking at your feelings.
Essentially you’re scaring yourself. You’re
telling yourself, “This is catastrophic; I can’t handle it; it will
never get better.” It’s important to pay attention to
the messages you give yourself. Tell yourself, “This
is really tough, but I can get through it. This is
really frightening, but I’m going to learn a lot from it and end up on
top.” Talk to yourself positively.
Ultimately, do not let anxiety stop you from moving forward. You
cannot let anxiety or fear win. If you find that
you’re freezing or not acting because you’re so afraid, you probably
need some support or some help.
(3) The final
stage of grief is called
reconciliation. That doesn’t mean reconciling
with your ex! It means that you’re reconciled with
the loss. (Too bad! or maybe Yay!)
Essentially, the intensity of the feelings decreases.
You’re no longer looking back but you’re beginning to look forward to
the future. Your energy returns, along with a sense
of enjoyment and happiness. You know you’ve made it
through.