Like some 60 million other kids in Canada and the USA, two of my youngest grandsons are about to go back to school. I find myself thinking about their emotional health and well-being. One of the grandsons doesn’t admit to his wounds very easily – physically or emotionally. He tends to withdraw into a sullen mood when hurting (very much like his grandfather). The social normality of going to school camouflages its emotional enormity.
School is stressful for most kids – even if they enjoy it and can’t wait to go. The reason for this is simple: stress is caused by facing separation of one kind or another. Like all mammals, we are dependent upon togetherness to survive, so it follows that facing separation is what threatens us to our very core. Since togetherness can be experienced in many ways – being with, being like, being on the same side, being part of, mattering to, feeling loved by, or even being known and understood – the ways of facing separation are equally varied. And for the most part they remain hidden from view, unless one knows how and to whom (or to what) a child is attached.
Going to school – no matter how much a child loves school – will involve facing separation from his or her working attachments. If one is attached to grades (as I was), school can be a never-ending source of alarm. School is even more stressful if the primary reason for going to school is to be with one’s friends. If one is attached to one’s peers (as most of my boyhood friends were), any sense of closeness is accompanied by an increased apprehension of the separation that can ensue, and ultimately does. And the more important one’s peers are to a child, the more stressful the peer interaction becomes and the deeper the wounding. So school, for all of these reasons and more, is stressful.
I find myself, like millions of other parents, hoping that the sensitivities of our children (and grandchildren) will not be too overwhelmed by what awaits them in the corridors, in the classroom, or in the school-yard. However, for many it will be overwhelming and there is little we can do about that. But I know something now that I didn’t know as a beginning parent. I now understand that what happens at school does not have to put their emotional health and well-being at risk. What happens AFTER school is key.
Let me explain.
The most amazing and paradoxical thing about stress is that the more we are subjected to it, the less we actually feel it, or feel anything for that matter. Our brains have evolved the most remarkable capacity to tune out our feelings when needing to perform in stressful or wounding situations. If school isn’t one of the most wounding or stressful scenarios in our society, one would be hard-pressed to figure out what was – except for a troubled home, of course.
Unfortunately our children are showing the increasing impact of this stress, along with the corresponding loss of feeling. All the indicators of stress are up – aggression, boredom, attention problems, bullying, anxiety, agitation, adrenalin-seeking, depression, suicide, and suicidal thoughts.
The irony is that this epidemic loss of feeling is largely going unnoticed and unrecognized. When children lose their feelings, they perform better in stressful and wounding situations. When children lose their feelings, they seem less troubled, less upset, less concerned, less impacted. When children lose their feelings, they can seem to most adults, experts included, that they are actually doing better.
The terrible truth of the matter is that this loss of feeling is at the very root of the troubles our children are having (and in turn, the troubles we are having with them). Developmental science has come to understand that feelings are essential to emotional health and well-being, to emotional maturation, to fulfilling togetherness, to becoming fully human and humane. Feelings are the heart of the matter, so to speak. We can only afford to lose our feelings for a relatively short period of time: when performance becomes more important than growth, when ‘doing’ becomes more important than ‘being’, when the conditions for the realization of potential need to be sacrificed for the work of the moment.
So what is the answer to this dilemma in which the children of today are spending a good portion of their day with their brains actively defending against feeling? The answer, in short, is not so much what happens IN school but what happens AFTER school! The very feelings that have been tuned out when under duress are meant to bounce back when the threat is over and the child feels safe. But this has to happen in a timely way, or the brain loses the ability to properly interpret the feelings and link them to the triggering events.
In other words, school children desperately need an end-of-the-school-day-experience where their feelings can bounce back. They need a safe place where emotions can thaw out, where emotional armour can be doffed, where their feelings can catch up with them, where the impact of stress can be reversed. This bounce-back experience is pivotal … and the sooner it happens after being shoehorned into a wounding environment, the better.
Safety is key. There are two natural oases of safety for children. A child feels safe when feeling close to someone to whom they are deeply attached. A child also feels safe when fully engaged in an emotional playground; this can be a piece of music, a favourite story, a solitary space, some pretend play, or even creating a piece of art. Screen play doesn’t serve as an emotional playground as it is too stimulating and outcome based to serve the emotions. My favourite emotional playground as a child was a swing my father built me. I recently realized that I have never grown out of this emotional playground nor my need for it; rarely does a summer day end that doesn’t have me on a swing in wait for my feelings to catch up with me. Unfortunately the end-of-the-day rituals and customs that enabled emotional recovery are fast disappearing in our society.
If, upon collecting our child after school, they should burst into tears and seemingly vomit their feelings all over us, we should take some comfort in the fact that all is right with their emotional recovery process. It is a good thing that their feelings are inhibited during school so that they can perform in a wounding environment and not become dysfunctional because of hurt feelings. It is a wonderful thing that our child experiences us as a safe space for their feelings to catch up with them. And it is pivotal to their emotional health that feelings are recovered so that they can do their work of cultivating resilience and growing our child up. This is all as it should be, emotionally speaking; we don’t need to know the details – about what happened in school or with their school-mates – for emotional recovery to happen.
So as our children go back to school, let us resolve to provide for them an après school experience where their feelings can catch up with them. There could be no better investment in their emotional health and well-being.
Last night I went to my youngest daughter’s final school music concert. It was a phenomenal evening of instrument and song, shared with a packed room of family and community members. Packed, because this school has earned a reputation and tonight would not disappoint. Can you remember the last time you witnessed a standing ovation for a high school band performance??
What came out of these young people, as they played their instruments and sang their songs together, was nothing short of inspirational. You could feel the music.
“Music is what cannot be said, but cannot be kept quiet.”
These words, written on the doors of the high school music room, speak to me of magic and of necessity. They speak to the mysterious power of music and its ability to move something deep inside – for both the one who plays and the one who listens. They also speak of the need to express what is inside in ways that words cannot always reach.
Reflecting on the evening, I found myself trying to unfold the layers and make sense of the magic that I witnessed.
My mind goes first to the music teachers: the ones who held the space and made room for the music to come out. Not just made room, but actually drew out of the students what was already there. The students didn’t know it yet; but the teacher knew.
After a particularly moving piece by one of the groups, we all laughed as the band teacher popped back to the microphone to declare his delight: “A 9/10 band isn’t supposed to have this much expression,” as he shook his head in disbelief.
However, I wasn’t as surprised because I saw something else. Yes, I witnessed the same things as the band teacher: I heard the expression in the brass, in the winds; I saw the emotion in their faces as they played; I felt it conveyed through their instruments.
But I also saw, behind the scenes, their intuitive leader – someone who believed in them, who inspired them, who created the kind of atmosphere that watered the seeds of potential in these young musicians.
Music like that doesn’t just happen.
This particular teacher has been at the school for over 25 years, quietly (and not so quietly, when the trumpets get involved!) working his magic. The fruit can be seen in the amazing world-class musicians that come out of those doors. An outside observer might say we were “lucky” to have this much talent in one little town.
But I don’t see this as luck. I’m looking from the inside and I believe I know the secret. Behind the scenes is someone who understands the key to unlocking the passion, the emotion and the music inside even the most “unmusical” of children. This secret is a master teacher, someone whose intuition and playfulness draw out music and emotion.
Experience may play a part, but I see this same spark in my daughter’s young twenty-something choir director. This same intuitive talent of drawing the music out, helping find the voice within, and creating a safe place to sing it out together, and to have FUN in the process.
In all my years coming to see these “performances”, I have never seen it be about performance. That is, the concerts have never been about getting things perfect or just right; it hasn’t been about the outcome at all. From what I can see, the concert is an opportunity to share the process – an inside peek at the joy and melancholy of making music together. And I feel privileged to have had a window seat.
A lump came to my throat as my daughter sang the last notes as part of this group. To see her face as she sang her heart out. And as she sang out with the others, I could see and hear things move in her. I could feel it. The music was alive in her, and would stay with her even as she graduated and moved on.
And I was grateful for this gift she had been given, for the opportunity to find her own voice, and to join her voice with others. I was thankful for the chance she was given to express what was inside and to let it come out.
Isn’t this what we all want for our children? Somewhere they feel safe to express what’s inside – whether it be …
- through the bass, the violin, the ukelele or the electric guitar;
- through song or art, in all its forms;
- through drama or dance;
- through nature or humor;
- through story or the written word.
These are the playgrounds our children need – whether they are 5, 15 or 50. We all need emotional playgrounds in our lives for what is inside to come out to play. So that our hearts stay soft enough and our souls stay free enough to experience life in its fullness. These playgrounds set the stage for learning and for living, and without these places to release and express ourselves, we can run into trouble.
So I wish for you, the reader, opportunities for emotional playgrounds – both for your children and for yourself. Whether you play tentatively at the edges or dive in head first, when you make some room and carve some space … magic can happen!
And as we come to the close of another school year (and the last one for my daughter), I want to extend my gratitude to all those who are behind the scenes, those who are creating these emotional playgrounds for their students – in their own way, in their own corner of the world. I hope you get a little glimpse of the difference you are making. A heartfelt thank you!
Stress seems to lie around every corner. It is there when change happens to us or when we are up against the things we cannot change. From the losses that are part of life to our unmet needs, how were we meant to find a way through?
Gordon Neufeld defines resilience as the “capacity to return to optimal functioning after stress or to thrive under duress.” (1) While we can’t avoid the ups and downs in life, we can harness the body’s natural way of healing and bounce back. The question is how do we do this and how do we set our children up to do the same?
The key to resilience is to realize that it cannot be found by “pitting our head against our heart,” as Neufeld states. It has always been our hearts that hold the secrets to healing. The problem is we have gotten lost in thinking that the mind holds all the answers when we are faced with problems. We lose sight that adversity will take us on an emotional journey and our feelings need to take the wheel in helping us find a way through.
There is a difference between “true resilience” and “false resilience.” False resilience arises when our emotions are suppressed and no longer become conscious or deeply felt. With false resilience there is an absence of feelings and the ‘calm’ exterior lulls us into thinking that perhaps we are okay and indeed resilient. It allows a child to function at school despite stress or an adult to show up at work and do a job. The problem is a hardened heart is like scar tissue, it isn’t very flexible nor does it feel very much.
True resilience is noisy. It is full of feelings that can be big and upsetting. You can hear it in the healthy teenager as they go through their final passage into adulthood and speak of the emptiness, fear, loneliness, or the insecurity they feel. You can hear it in the new parent who is wondering why they have so many emotions flooding them like alarm, frustration, and sadness as they take care of little people they love dearly.
False resilience stems from the absence of emotion whereas true resilience is about being hardy or of much heart. Resilience requires more feeling, not less.
If we are to play a role in our children unfolding as resilient beings we will need to play caretaker to their heart. We don’t need to chase them away or have them run away from their big feelings. We don’t need to toughen them up or suggest “not to let themselves get down” or that they “need to pick themself up.” It is the emotional mending of what has been broken that paves the way to being able to thrive and bounce back.
The problem is that when stress overwhelms or floods us, there are too many things to focus on or to feel. Our emotions are stirred up and they get busy trying to fix the challenges we face. A child can cling to a parent when it’s time to leave for school or a teen can refuse to talk about something because it hurts more when they do.
The brain jumps into action when we are full of emotion, and feelings are a luxury. Feelings are the emotions we can catch hold of and cry tears to, and make room for. But when we are overloaded, we have “more emotion and less feeling,” as Neufeld states.
We struggle to embrace the emotional journeys that come with stress and we have lost sight of how important they are to take our children on. The problem is we seem so scared of emotions that come big and strong in times of stress. We worry they will take us down the dark holes that are part of life and we will never get back up. We think we have to kick and scream and crawl our way out of the tunnels in life rather than to see that there has always been something to carry us through them. Resilience is an emotional journey and our emotions were meant to carry us forward when we no longer know the way. It isn’t the absence of vulnerable feelings that make us strong, but our capacity to embrace the ones that we have.
We have lost the keys to opening the heart at the time when we need it the most. We have become lost in our heads and believe thinking things out holds the ultimate answer. Reason doesn’t hold the answer when our heart is hurt. Resiliency isn’t a set of skills to learn nor is it a list of statements we tell our kids to write out and repeat. Resilience doesn’t come from a script, a worksheet or talking yourself into happy feelings either. The idea that we have to force healing down a particular path doesn’t understand the inherent capacity in humans to heal.
We need to embrace our feelings and allow what nature has given us to be able to journey through the stress and adversity that is part of our life.
We need to help our children express the sadness that will be there when things don’t go their way. We need to open channels for expression through play and free the muses to draw out their feelings through music, paint, dance, song, or clay. We can encourage them to tell us their stories and to “replay” all that has happened, says Neufeld.
What we all need most of all on emotional journeys are people who can come alongside our feelings. It is the people we hold onto at times of unrest, that carry us through our strong emotions. Our relationships provide an illusion of safety in the midst of all the things that don’t feel right. When we are in doubt about our chances of a safe return to well being, it is our relationships that can guide us and say hold onto me.
Our relationships are also what give us hope and help us believe that we are indeed strong enough to carry the heavy load we feel. It is a parent’s belief in a child that helps them feel there is a way out of it all.
When I think of the big things in my life that have had to be faced, it is people I am most attached to that have anchored me the most. They have become embedded in those emotional journeys. They are the people that helped keep my heart soft and helped me endure despite feelings of despair. And like all journeys, once you have travelled somewhere, you are never the same again. You become forever transformed by the things you see on the way, the experiences you have, and the emotions that are felt.
As Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” While you are in the midst of the emotional journey it is not important to make sense of it all, to have the pieces all fit together, but rather, to embrace the process of the emotional let down, and to use nature’s system to help release the emotions that need to come out and to rest from trying to make things different.
If we can do this for our kids, they will realize that healing wasn’t something we had to invent, wasn’t something we had to learn, something we had to work hard at or force, but rather, to release ourselves too. We already have inside of us the ingredients to allow healing to occur, we just need someone to go on the emotional journey with us. As parents we can set the stage for the feelings and the play to help our children too.
Emotions are not a nuisance, they are nature’s ways of taking care of us. It is our feelings that carry us when faced with the challenges that life presents. The more we make room for them, feel them, play with them, the more they can do their healing on us. The challenges in life must be embraced but we all need someone to lean on. There could be no greater gift to our kids nor no better message to leave them with.
Notes
(1) Gordon Neufeld, The Keys to Resilience, Keynote Address 9th Annual Neufeld Institute Conference, April 28, 2017, Richmond, BC
Dr. Deborah MacNamara is the author of the best selling book, Rest, Play, Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (or anyone who acts like one). She is also on Faculty at the Neufeld Institute and the Director of Kid’s Best Bet, a counselling and family resource centre. For more information please see www.macnamara.ca.
Each year around this time, I get the great honor of helping curate the list of books for the Neufeld Institute’s list of children’s literature recommendations, match-making parents and professionals with outstanding kids’ books.
Our list includes more than 200 titles — a mix of picture books, books for the very young, early readers and chapter books, middle-grade books, young-adult books, and books to enjoy as a family — sorted by categories such as connections to parents; books about grandparents, extended family, villages of attachment; books that help with the language of feelings; books that inspire or portray play; books about relationships to special teachers; books about or for transplanted children; along with books for special challenges such as death, divorce, allergies, cancer, learning disabilities, moving, and sensitivity/giftedness.
Let me just say how much I love this list, each and every one of the books we recommend, and the process that goes into pulling the list together. With three or four of my savvy and soft-hearted colleagues, we spend the day at Vancouver’s Kidsbooks poring over hundreds of books — books we’ve been keeping on our radars for the last year, books the Kidsbooks staff recommends, as well as the gems we discover in the store. We laugh. We cry. Sometimes we rant or pout. We discuss our attachment-based, developmental theory as it’s showing up (or not) in themes, dialogue, illustrations, plot, and emotions. And we do it all in the memory of Gail Carney, our mentor, artist, and friend who left this special legacy for the Neufeld Institute.
Each spring the list — which has grown to become a booklet — is updated and published in time for the Annual Vancouver Neufeld Conference. We have this year’s booklet locked in, ready for its debut at the upcoming conference taking place March 1st and 2nd and I am eager to share it with the world! Hopefully without stealing any thunder from the full list, over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing my personal reviews of some of the books that we’ve added to this year’s list that I’m especially excited about.
The first picture book is Captain Starfish, written by Davina Bell and illustrated by Allison Colpoys (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2015). I adore this book so much, and the story of Alfie, who wakes feeling worried about the Underwater Dress-Up Parade he is supposed to lead the next day dressed up in his starfish costume.
In spite of positive self-talk about his bravery and his very supportive parents, Alfie is still plagued with heavily weighted nightmares. “He dreamed that he was carrying the ocean, all on his own.”
He wakes up and shares with his mom that he’s not ready, fearing she will be angry. She’s not, she reassures him. Then she takes him somewhere special — the aquarium, where Alfie quietly works through his emotions.
On the way home, Alfie delightedly recounts his experience with a clown fish that seemed to connect with him. “‘He came out, but only for the tiniest second!’ said Alfie. ‘I think he smiled at me.’”
Mom’s soft response gently showers her son with both insight and acceptance:
“‘Sometimes clown fish need to hide away,’ said Mom. ‘It’s just what they do.’
‘People too,’ said Alfie, thinking of the dress-up parade, which didn’t seem quite so scary now.’”
What I most cherish about this book is its unexpected ending. Where I thought we were going all along was: Thanks to the fish encounter, Alfie would now have the courage to rush over to the Underwater Dress-Up Parade and do his part, after all. I would have been okay with an ending like this. So many books convey the mixed feelings that Dr. Gordon Neufeld calls “dragon and the treasure,” and usually end up conquering the fear to get to the treasure in a very satisfying way, after all.
But Captain Starfish rises even further above because it takes a different approach. Conquering our fears doesn’t always happen so quickly. Sometimes the process takes more time, especially for our really sensitive kids.
Contrary to my expectation, Alfie missed the parade this year. In fact, when Alfie and Mom return home, “It was so late that … Dad had already run the bath.” It’s then that we realize how Mom had protected Alfie from shame and overwhelm by taking him to the aquarium, and how she accepted him exactly where he was without pushing him to meet society’s expectations.
Alfie is at peace with his decision not to be Captain Starfish that day. Underwater Dress-Up Parade or not, Alfie he has grown. He knows he’ll have the confidence to participate next year.
And he does … as a clown fish.
The 2019 Neufeld Institute Children’s Book List will be available to purchase on-site at the Eleventh Annual Vancouver Neufeld Conference and also on our website after the conference.
For more book reviews by Sara Easterly, visit Book Bonding.
Since this is our first newsletter of the season and thus my first greeting to our newsletter readers, I think a New Year’s greeting is still appropriate. At least indulge me in this, because I want to use this traditional greeting as a launching place for some reflection and as a segue to our upcoming Vancouver conference theme: Press Pause and Play: is this the answer for us all?
When we wish each other a Happy New Year, where do we think their happiness will come from – less sorrow and suffering? better success in their work? more fulfillment in their relationships? less negativity in their thinking? increased emotional health and well-being? greater accomplishments? more meaning in their life? all of the above?
Let me turn this question around to ourselves. What do we think the answer would be to greater sense of satisfaction and enjoyment this year? Most of us have a vague sense that something is missing in our lives and if this ‘missing’ could be lessened or eliminated, somehow things would be better. These core assumptions often exist in the IF ONLYs that rattle around in our minds. IF ONLY I had more money, more time, more leisure, more success, more family, more opportunity, more education, more recognition, more talent, more skill. IF ONLY I had less misfortune, less frustration, less distraction, fewer obligations, less alarm, less debt, or even less family.
These core assumptions heavily influence our decisions and infuse our interactions and our parenting. Of course, industry attempts to exploit these IF ONLYs, presenting their products as the answers to what is missing.
Could it be that there is something more elementary, more essential, perhaps even more elusive, to the sense of well-being that we seek? I believe there is. At this point I wish I could refer you to the book I wish I would have written on the subject. But alas, I will have to skip that part for now and offer you instead a few paragraphs, followed up by a conference keynote.
In short, I am becoming convinced that the elusive and naturally elegant answer is actually TRUE PLAY or a sense of PLAYFULNESS.
We have known for some time that REST is absolutely essential for healthy functioning and the realization of potential. In fact, the sense of well-being we are seeking would be impossible without sufficient REST. What wasn’t known – before neuroscience gave us a peek into the brain – is that PLAY is the main form of activated rest. The brain in the play mode is a delight to behold and in many ways the opposite of what it is in the work mode.
What also wasn’t known until recent times is that achieving togetherness is the main WORK of the brain and so we are not truly AT REST until that WORK is done or someone is taking care of that for us, at least in a given moment.
So could it be that PLAY is an essential answer to a sense of well-being? Could it be that TRUE PLAY is what is missing in our lives today? Could it be that the state of PLAYFULNESS is what will deliver the desired fruit, not only for us but for our children?
This was the conclusion of the very first philosophers in ancient Greece. In the last decade or so, science has rediscovered this surprising truth, spawning a whole new discipline dedicated to the subject. The emerging conclusion is that PLAY is NATURE INCOGNITO, the mysterious and invisible force behind the spontaneous unfolding of our potential. Could the answer really be that simple?
There was this thought in ancient philosophy that the answer to what is missing would lie in the most unlikely of places, disguised as ordinary, and probably even discarded as having no apparent use or value. I can’t think of a construct that has been more abused, distorted and truncated than play. We have thought of it as having no purpose, as frivolous, as what children do before they are capable of working, as something one does with a toy or an instrument. We have abused the term in thousands of ways and wrongly assume that play is what happens at recess, in sports, in video games, on playgrounds, and between children. We have been demonizing play for centuries as threatening our precious, and for some even sacred, work ethic. On the other hand, we have idealized expressive arts as play, when playfulness is just as difficult to realize in this arena as anywhere else.
Like a growing number of other scientists, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, theologians, evolutionary biologists, and historians, I am becoming convinced that playfulness is a significant part of the answer to what is missing and to the sense of well-being that we seek. The evidence is there; the dots are being joined; the conclusion seems inevitable. I’m in.
So what I would like to wish every one of you is more playfulness in this coming year. And I hope that because of you, your children and loved ones will also become more playful.
Have a Playful New Year!
Editors note: If you would like to hear more on this subject, or if more playfulness is what you seek for you or your loved ones, be sure to join us at this year’s Vancouver Conference if you can.
I tried preschool for my son. It was traumatic. I lost ten kilograms in eight weeks. My son started having nightmares, hitting himself over the head, biting himself, banging his head on his desk. It was clear this preschool thing had to stop! So I made it stop.
I was furious at myself for having caved in to the pressure of sending my son to preschool. But the entire horror did serve one purpose: I knew now that there was no way school was going to work. And it had to work – because homeschooling is illegal in Germany. It was clear to me that we were going to need help. Lots of it. And the only way to get it was to get a diagnosis.
Getting a diagnosis was not difficult. I knew the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s, I knew my son fulfilled them, and I knew we would walk out of that doctor’s office with official verification that my son was on the autistic spectrum. This did not devastate me. On the contrary, I NEEDED that diagnosis. And I needed it to be “dramatic” enough to get as many accommodations for my son as possible. I had to find a way to keep him safe. That was all that mattered.
It was when I saw my son with the other children at school that I started feeling the pain – as a mother – of this diagnosis for my son. I had always known my son was different. From the day he was born. But because I could barely leave the house with him, I was pretty isolated. I spent all day, every day, playing with and loving my son for the sensitive, creative, intense individual he is. He was my first and only child. I had no point of comparison.
The comparisons started when I watched him in the classroom. His helplessness in contact with other children, his eccentric and often inappropriate topics of conversation, his intense emotional outbursts, and his glaring self-centeredness pained me – even embarrassed me. For the first time I was yearning for my son to try to be more “normal”. Not to be so conspicuous.
As we started being able to go out in the world more, I had to deal with looks of shock or disapproval when my son would have a meltdown in the supermarket, on the bus, in the street. I myself had always been such a “good” girl. Now I was being looked at as a bad mother. With a bad child. This felt intolerable to me. And I started getting angry at my son for “doing this” to me. As issues of aggression started arising for my son in school, I felt I was being pushed to my limit. This was more than the good girl in me could accept. MY son is aggressive?!!!
The tension in me at this time was excruciating: as a mother I was being driven by my love for my son, but as a “good girl” I was being driven by my lifelong pursuit of the love and approval of others. I felt I was being torn apart. My life had now brought me to a point where I had to take a stand. Either I submit to the temptation of being “good”, of avoiding conflict, of living up to expectations, of fitting in, or I come alongside my child.
But there was more to the story. Part of being a good girl was being “nice”. I had been a kind of Shirley Temple as a child, ringlets and all, whereas my son was hitting, kicking, biting, scratching, and screaming at people that they were Hitler! To come alongside my son meant that I also had to come alongside THIS attacking energy! To invite my son meant I had to be able to invite THIS – not only in him – but in myself, as well. There’s the rub.
I suppose this dilemma is inevitable. It makes sense that the impulse to extend a generous invitation to our children, to say yes to who they are, will bring us to tripping over the limits of the invitations we ourselves received. It is inevitable that we will stumble over the boxes we have been trying to squeeze ourselves into. And we will also encounter the pain of the rejections we have experienced – the rejection of those parts of us that were not wanted, were not loved, and which we ourselves now consider unwanted and un-loveable. I had already spent a lot of time looking at these things that I had edited out of me to be “good” and the price I had paid in doing so. Now my son’s urgent need to be invited and my deep love for him was demanding that I finally ACT on what I knew I must do. It was time to say an understanding but firm “no” to the good girl in me and a resounding “yes” to my son.
Which – like in an Escher painting – also meant finally extending my own “yes” to me. That is nature’s beautiful irony.
Editor’s Note: Jule will present a webinar on this topic on Friday, December 14, 2018, “The Generous Invitation: Nature’s Password for Unlocking the Potential of the Child Diagnosed with Autism”. For more information and to register, visit the event posting.
It was clear right from day one that there was something different about my son. He didn’t have that dreamy, half-conscious look of most newborns. He was unusually alert and awake with intense eye contact. The nurses on the maternity ward were calling him “the little professor“ or “Einstein”. Others said, “he’s an old soul”. What was it they were seeing when they looked into his eyes? Over time this became clearer.
Nursing him was only possible in the context of complete silence, as at any sound he would wrench away from me in alarm, turning his head to and fro, searching frantically for the source or alarm, while at the same time crying for the breast. When he finally calmed enough to find the breast again, he drank so desperately that he would get a stomach ache within minutes – long before he was actually satiated – and start screaming in pain. Once the pain receded, the hunger he experienced was so intense that the whole desperate process started all over again. Nursing became a never-ending story, so that it became almost impossible to leave the house. Not that leaving the house was a pleasant experience anyway. A dog barking. Another baby crying. The sound of traffic. Everything was distressing to him. Even in the safety of our home, a sudden sound like a sneeze, a cough, or the telephone ringing would elicit an intense startle response and end in panicky screams. Vacuuming was, of course, out of the question. Inviting visitors over – especially Moms with their own babies making who-knows-what sudden sounds at any given moment – was a nightmare. Idyllic visions of taking my baby to massage courses or swimming classes receded quickly into the unthinkable.
What was going on? I knew long before my son was diagnosed with autism that he was sensitive. Extremely sensitive. I knew long before I understood the nature of autism that my son had no filters – that the world penetrated into him and overwhelmed him. The intense, alert look in his eyes that sometimes seemed wise and knowing, and that often unnerved people, was somehow, as Dr. Neufeld coins it, an “unnatural brightness”. My son was taking in more than his brain could handle. And his brain was working very, very hard to handle it. Dr. Neufeld speaks of the rapid brain growth that ensues in autistic babies as their brains try to process the mass of sensory input they are receiving as a result of the problems in their sensory gating system. And that this rapid brain growth can sometimes result in an increased head circumference. That would fit to my son. Doctors were noticing his unusually large head. Nothing dangerous, nothing really alarming as such, but noticeable enough that the doctors kept measuring it. I had heard that Einstein had had a big head as a child, too, so I tried not to worry. Maybe my child was just really smart.
Well, he was smart. But that wasn’t the whole story. Intuitively I began orchestrating the world around us in order to make it more “palatable” for my son. I resisted pressures to “toughen him up” and, instead, tried to reduce input and protect him from overload – both sensory and emotional. I did these things intuitively – not strategically – although, as it turns out, these were wise things to be doing. Dr. Neufeld speaks of adults needing to take on the task of the sensory gating system for their hypersensitive child. In hindsight, I realize that this is what I was doing. At the same time, I was playing with my son as much as possible – singing, dancing, playing peek-a-boo, playing games with sounds and facial expressions – working very hard to engage him and create a shared world with him. As my son became a preschooler, we also started making up stories and wrote “books” about troublesome things like how scary playgrounds are or what it feels like when you hear a baby crying. Life was extremely intense and exhausting. I was working very hard, but at least my son was developing. At the age of 3 he taught himself to read. At the age of 5 he was able to google for information he was curious about (exotic musical instruments were his passion at the time) and he was trying to compose his first “symphonies”. He was also beginning to be able to tell me about how he experienced the world. How he could hear exactly what each instrument in a band was playing individually – which is why large orchestras and classical music were “way too much”; how he needed to touch things all the time when we were in the supermarket because otherwise the air would swallow him up. He was telling me clearly that he was taking in so many individual details that it was really hard to hold on to himself or a coherent whole. And that this was really scary.
As my son got older, things got even scarier. What got added into the picture was the issue of separation. I hadn’t realized how much my strong attachment to my son had been shielding him and compensating for his hypersensitivity. I hadn’t realized how hard I had been working to “hold” his attention and help him focus on me. I had intuitively fine-tuned the dance of attachment with him so that I could “collect him, get his eyes, get a smile and a nod”, as Dr. Neufeld describes it, and “cut through” the swarm of details overwhelming him enough to weave an attachment “hammock” for him to rest in. This attachment “hammock” had always been fragile in a certain way – it was deep but easily broken and needed to be guarded carefully. So it was no surprise that it would break under the load of stimuli that school would bring.
At school, our attachment hammock developed giant holes and my son fell through them. He couldn’t hold on to me enough to be shielded emotionally. And he surely couldn’t handle the sensory cacophony. So he gradually began to lose the alertness in his eyes. My son had always had moments of overload where he would “space out”, but now this “spacy-ness” became systemic. I felt my son retreating, detaching. I felt a tremendous sadness about this, but I also saw the necessity. It was all way too much for him and, as Dr. Neufeld so poignantly describes, when survival is at stake, the brain will move to protect the child from unbearable wounding by retreating or “shutting down” – on sensory, emotional, or relational levels. The price for this strategic move of the brain is high – it results in a developmental “stuckness” that brings with it its own share of problems (impulsiveness, aggression problems, for example), not to mention the price in terms of the unfolding of individual potential. Of course, I tried my best to hold on to my son. I desperately tried to compensate even more than before. I fought for understanding and supports in the outside world. And – I played and played and played with him.
This was the time that we started making movies. We made up all kinds of stories; we played out every possible natural disaster: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes; we died and grieved and came back to life over and over again. We learned how to edit film and how to highlight the emotions in the story by adding the appropriate background music. When we were done, we watched our films over and over again. All of this we did together. It strengthened our attachment. And it emotionally kept my son’s head above water at school. He played out his anxiety and his aggression in his movies. Or he became the powerful musical super-hero whose magical compositions would save the day. Dr. Neufeld emphasizes the importance of play, particularly for the hypersensitive. I can surely attest to its life-jacket qualities – not just for my son, but also for the autistic children and adolescents I ended up working with. Whether it be making movies, or painting, or playing piano, or playing hide-and-seek, or re-playing traumatic events, or just running and jumping together – whatever kind of play holds the attention of the child and makes their eyes come alive – this is the “royal road” of healing and growth. And thank goodness we are drawn to it intuitively.
My journey with my son is still a very challenging one. Even as an adolescent, he is still plugging his ears at sudden noises, spacing out when overloaded, swinging for hours in his hammock to calm himself, or asking the same question over and over again. He is still needing what he needed as a child: someone who can help him “hold on” to his attachments; someone who can help him stay “soft” and adaptive; someone who will take the responsibility to do for him what his sensory gating system is not able to do (reduce stimuli, uphold structure). But he is beginning to develop a relationship with himself – getting a sense of who he is and what he needs – and beginning to move towards becoming his own person. He still has the impulse to play – nowadays it is mostly playing guitar and singing: Nirvana when he is frustrated; Morrissey when he is melancholic. Or to act out upsetting things that happen to him in order to vent and manage his emotions. And he still comes to me with his secrets, wanting to be his “true self” with me, as he tells me. Our relationship is deep and solid. So we are on a good path. We still have hurdles ahead. But I believe in him and in us. We will find our way through the maze.
I’m on my way up to the mountains with my husband and two young daughters. It’s early. Still a bit dark. That’s how it is this time of year – January, on the other side of the winter solstice, and yet not very far from the shortest, and darkest, day of the year. That’s how it is when we must wake up to be among the first to hit the slopes for a family ski day at our nearby mountain resort.
I grumble throughout the drive. I’m not a morning person. This is too early for me. I’m not a fan of skiing anymore, either – not since I moved from Colorado and its pristine powder to Washington, where there isn’t always a promise of fresh snowfall. Last week, in fact, we skied in the rain, pelted with water that leaked through our goggles and drained into our eyes.
My husband looks away from the road to flash a grin my way. He’s uncharacteristically jovial and energized, knowing we’re on the way to adventure. “This is going to be great,” he says as he taps his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of whatever celebratory jingle is looping in his head.
I grumble again and look the other way, out my dark passenger-seat window. He can’t hear what I’m saying. The grumble, more like a growl, is my cover for the profanities that yearn to spill out, though it doesn’t fully hide my upset and counterwill to his intense eagerness.
I glance in the back seat at my girls. They’re listening to an audiobook, all cuddled up in a blanket they’re sharing. Yes, I actually wrote that: sharing. They’re not fighting, which is rare when they’re in such close proximity in an enclosed chamber such as our car.
Clearly to my husband, and to my girls, skiing is all play. Whereas all I can think about is the Work. It’s Sunday. How late will we get back this afternoon? Will I have time to get all our outdoor gear dried off and washed? What about the rest of the week’s laundry I haven’t gotten to yet? The girls still have thank-you notes to write from Christmas. Their rooms need serious help, too. It’s as if their dolls, stuffies, and toys threw all-night parties throughout winter break. Come tomorrow morning, will we be fresh enough for school? What if the kids are too tuckered out? What if I am? What if dinner and bedtime run late tonight because of all this supposed fun? This is irresponsible, this ‘having fun’ business. Grrr. I mumble to the window again.
Eighty minutes later, we arrive at the ski hill. We spend 20 minutes squeezed together in the minivan like wiggly breakfast sausages as the four of us shake and shimmy into our ski gear. Bundled up and bundling more, we steam up the windows with our hot breath. Why all these layers? I’m sweating my pits off as I help stuff my kids’ feet into their fuzzy ski boots.
Once the kids are ready, I put on my balaclava. They didn’t have these things when I was my girls’ age. In theory, they’re a marvel of an invention – a thin layer of polyester to keep my head, ears, cheeks, and chin toasty and dry and still fit under my helmet (which we didn’t have when I was a kid, either!). But the packaging failed to issue a warning statement: If you have long hair, pulling your hair back is a must. As motherly luck would have it, I donated the last of the ponytail holders I scrounged up from the car’s cup holders to my daughters … none left for me. My hair underneath the balaclava is fanned out all medusa-like. Some of it’s going into my mouth or poking my nose, my eyes. It may be one of the most irritating things I’ve ever experienced. I can’t seem to get my hair to settle. The combination of static-prone polyester, the dry air, the fact that I didn’t bother to shower or brush my tresses this morning has made my hair a stringy mess. I will spend every chair lift ride throughout the day trying to spit the hairs out of my mouth, and after that approach fails, carefully removing my gloves to wedge my fingers up through my neck warmer, then underneath the balaclava to try and solve the problem. How can people with beards stand this? I wonder.
My feet are claustrophobic. My boots, even though they’re brand-new – perhaps because they’re brand-new – feel like Medieval torture devices. I can’t move my toes. I’ve never been a toe-tapper, but knowing that I can’t tap them now is suddenly so restrictive I’m ready to scream.
But I can’t. I am a Mom. Because I’m a Mom, I can’t act like the child I feel like inside – the one who wants to throw herself down in the slush for a full-on temper tantrum. I can’t do so right now, anyway, with my kids and their skis in tow.
Instead, I coach my daughters along as we slide up to the chair lift. I hold on to their ski poles and let them squeeze my arm while they bumpily sit onto the chair. I fake a smile, even though I’m not fully confident getting on chair lifts, and am waiting for my youngest to slip and drag me under the chair with her.
Thankfully, that doesn’t happen and before long we’re on our first run of the day. I can’t help myself. Another grumble escapes from my lips. The snow is crusty. My fingers are cold. It’s foggy up here. Another dratted hair in my mouth! This just isn’t my thing, I remind myself over and over.
Then I look up to see my daughters. Eight and nine – they’re not babies anymore. Still, they look so little against the backdrop of the massive mountain before us, the tall evergreens flanking the ski run. The girls have been skiing since they were three. To my surprise, they’re getting pretty good! They’re also pretty darling in their new ski gear from their grandparents. (I’m reminded again about those thank-you notes we must get out!) I’m enjoying watching my daughters and their comfort on the slopes … even if my slow, meandering style means I have to push myself to keep up with the new family pace.
My youngest is eager to show me all her tricks. She keeps looking back at me, calling for me to check out her jumps, the way she squats down to help her speed up. She’s inviting me to play. She’s inviting me to see her, to know her.
So of course, I have to accept the invitation! I also know I have to trump it. I don’t want her feeling like she has to pursue my affection. Just like that, my focus for the day switches from whining about my personal upset to getting ahead and relishing my daughter.
After a couple of runs, it’s working. As one daughter pairs up with Daddy, my youngest and I partner together. We are having so much fun skiing as a team that we don’t notice the fork in the run, or that we’ve veered onto a different path from the other two. To meet back up with them, my daughter and I ski the rest of the way down the mountain and then ride a little two-seat lift together. The whole time, she’s smiling, laughing, and yakking my ear off.
I delight in this time we’re sharing, these precious moments of connection. This little girl of mine is so sensitive, so easily wounded. The world wounds her. Sadly I wound her – no matter how developmentally educated I am, no matter my good intentions. Sometimes it’s as simple as choosing laundry over choosing her. She so easily shuts down.
But today, even while dragging my boot-wearing feet, even if pressured by my overeager husband, I put the laundry aside, the Work aside, and finally, the work part of skiing aside.
Instead, I choose my daughter.
She feels it. I feel it. The difference it makes for her, for our relationship, is almost magical – even if it is Nature’s should-be-obvious design. I watch her defenses visibly melt away.
Oh, yes. That’s right. This is why I ski, why I agreed to season passes, why I’ve succumbed to my husband’s vision of family ski excursions all winter long. It’s not about the ritual of skiing, but about the ritual of holding on to my kids.
This is why I’ll return to the slopes with my family again next weekend. And the weekend after that. And the one after that … until, like my daughter’s defenses, the snow melts and growth springs forth. This is a reason to ski.
Twelve years ago, when choosing the motto for the Neufeld Institute – making sense of kids – I was convinced that insight was what was needed most. I am now more convinced of this than ever.
There would be no need for insight if our culture still carried its wisdom and our society was conducive to healthy development. There would be no need to make sense of our children if maturing was automatic or if there was a pill to grow children up. There would be little need for understanding if life was a skill that could be learned or if acting mature would make it real. There would be less need for insight if the ‘experts’ who parents and teachers depend upon had sufficient insight themselves.
The paradox of the information age seems to be that the more knowledge we accumulate, the less wisdom we retain. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing when blinded to its meaning. For example, knowledge about what works when managing a child’s behaviour, when devoid of an understanding about what has caused the problem and how development unfolds, can actually make matters worse. Yet this kind of superficial advice is rampant these days. It is rather irresponsible of us, and even risky, to attempt to address problems when we do not understand what is wrong. The more information we have, the more insight is required to turn this knowledge into wisdom.
We also need insight more than ever because of the loss of a culture that draws out our natural intuition. Just as our bodies seem more able to find their natural rhythms when out in Nature, our intuitions are easier to access when in the context of a culture that is developmentally friendly. Given that intuition is knowledge without consciousness, it is culture that needs to provide the wisdom through its rituals, traditions, and customs. Once our culture loses its embedded wisdom, we also lose access to our natural intuition. In this case, insight becomes our only hope for restoring our natural intuition with regards to our children.
A third reason we need insight these days is that our children are different than the children of yesteryear. We deal best with children who are intensely and deeply attached to us, with children who are motivated to be good for us, with children who are taking their cues from us. Today’s children are less likely to be in right relationship with the adults who are responsible for them. We push the wrong buttons in them and they push the wrong buttons in us. Only insight can compensate for attachments that are not properly aligned.
A fourth reason that insight is needed is that understanding, and only understanding, can truly answer our questions of what to do while at the same time restore our confidence in ourselves. The science of perception informs us that what we do is the primary result of what we see – not what we know or what we’ve learned. When my students in university would ask me what to do, I often retorted, “I see that you do not yet see”. But there is still another problem. Ironically, when we blindly follow instructions, we lose our inner confidence, something we cannot afford as parents or teachers. Once again, the solution is INSIGHT. Only when we can truly make sense of our children do we find our way back to interaction that is effective and satisfying and confidence-producing.
To clarify, I am NOT talking about insight regarding ourselves or our reactions to our children, although this certainly helps. Self-understanding has become the focus of a growing number of approaches to parenting today. There is certainly merit in self-reflection and in becoming conscious of ourselves, but in my opinion this does not really provide the answer to lost intuition. For example, no matter how reflective or conscious one may be, if one perceives a child as angry when they are really just frustrated, the interaction will be correspondingly misguided. I am convinced that, despite one’s past experience, the best way through is to truly make sense of our children. It is to this end that we continue to commit our efforts in the Neufeld Institute. In keeping with this, we have also chosen ‘making sense of kids’ as our over-arching theme for the Tenth Annual Vancouver Neufeld Conference on April 14th of 2018.
For more information and to register for the conference, visit our Conference Page.
This is a story about our little Mexican dog, Poquito, and his journey with food.
It wasn’t too long after we had moved to Vancouver Island that my husband, Andrew, went on a special trip to Mazatlan with a group of youth. About halfway in, I received a phone call. Through a fuzzy connection, Andrew asked how I would feel if he brought home a Chihuahua. Confused, but not opposed, I gave my okay. He said it wasn’t for sure, don’t tell the girls, I have to go.
It came to the end of the week and I went to the ferry with the girls, still in suspense, to pick up their father. He was wearing his oversize parka as he walked off (climate adjustment from Mexico, we figured) and we all walked together to the van. It was at the van that Andrew pulled out a little colorful hamster cage from under his parka, and a tiny bedraggled Chihuahua-ish puppy poked his head out to greet the girls. Squeals of delight erupted, undoubtedly frightening the already trembling creature.
We decided to call him Poquito, “a little bit” in Spanish. We had one dog already – a big bear of a dog we called Briggs. So “a little bit” seemed to fit!
My husband had brought him from the streets of Mexico, and we figured he was about three months old. Andrew had stopped eating part way through this trip so that he had enough cash to bring him on the flight home. And so I had two starving creatures before me. It wasn’t long before Andrew had his fill and was back to eating normally. However, I can’t say the same for Poquito.
Poquito was frantic about food. No sooner would we give him his kibble than he would desperately devour it – so fast sometimes that we thought he would choke. We figured out that if we put a rock in his food bowl, it slowed him down a bit as he had to work around the rock to get at the food. We also decided to spread out his meals – feeding him a little bit five times a day – rather than the usual twice, like we did for our Briggs Bear.
Poquito always stayed close by in the kitchen, or by the table when we ate, just in case anyone dropped something … anything. It made sense to us, this obsession with food. After all, this little guy lived on the streets – he had to fight for any food he got – or he had to work those puppy dog eyes! Either way, it was work and it was up to him. And it was all-consuming. He lived with a daily fear that there would not be enough.
It took time and patience on our part before he was able to let up in his pursuit and find some rest, before he was able to let his guard down and trust that the food would come, even if he wasn’t begging for it. And once we recognized where this obsessive behaviour was coming from, we were less annoyed (because it was annoying sometimes!) and more compassionate. It wasn’t intentional on his part to make our lives difficult. In fact, he had little to no control over his impulses. He was driven from within.
How different things are now! Where once he would stay neurotically by his bowl waiting for his food, and gobble it all up, now he’ll stroll over and even leave some in the bowl for later, if he’s too full now. Where once he would stay by your feet in the kitchen waiting for ANYTHING to drop, now he lies in his bed and only gets up if it’s cheese you have dropped. Cheese is his favourite and somehow he knows the difference between a piece of cheese dropping and say, a blueberry – which he isn’t particularly interested in.
And I let out a sigh of relief, knowing that he is finally at rest, and finally trusting that the provision will always be greater than the pursuit.
And don’t we all need to know this? Dog, child, adult alike – that there is more than enough food to go around. More than enough love – that we don’t have to work for it, and that we can take it for granted, without worrying that it will be taken away.
I can’t help but think of those children in our foster care system – children who have had to take matters into their own hands to keep themselves safe and fed. When you cannot count on those around you to be there, when you may be up and moved yet again, how do you rest in that place?? No wonder some obsess about their belongings, or hoard food, or keep themselves at a distance from anyone who has love to give. For in their experience, these things can’t be taken for granted; they could be taken away.
In fact any child who has been faced with a separation too much to bear, who has taken matters into their own hands, who is in relentless pursuit and high alarm, may have a hard time being convinced that there will be enough – that there will be more than enough. That you care and will continue to care – no matter what. When we have a child in this place, it can be challenging to bring them to rest. We have to work harder – so that they don’t have to work. We need to get there first, providing what the child needs – contact, closeness, a sign that they are special, that they matter – before they ask for it. Or at least providing MORE than what they ask for.
And in time, the hunger that seems insatiable will become easier to satiate. For just as Poquito let down his guard, so the child will start to trust that there is indeed enough, and there will still be more tomorrow!