Modelling self-awareness for our kids

If we parents and teachers are mindful, we will take care to fit what we say into a pedagogical moment so there is a connection between new information and what is already in place.

When we share our experience of the world with children and have them share theirs, the structure we construct supports their narrative.

It is important that our information provides a narrative and follow-through, that it fits with something the child already knows, and provides relevance to the child. In this way we help kids build self-awareness and learn to recognize the relationships they have with others. As children build awareness they honour their curiosity.

Our kids may have the freedom to be curious but in order for their budding awareness to become their reality, that awareness must be used. 

Through their social interactions they become aware of the otherness of others, and come away with the understanding that others have different experiences. As they become more able to access their curiosity, and follow the interactive nature of relationship, the steps they take lead them towards  empathy.

This process, for children, is the beginning of mindfulness. 

Mindfulness, automaticity & curiosity

We have combined the singular concepts of mindfulness, automaticity, and curiosity in a reiterative way, back and forth, among all three.

Each of these ideas inter-operate with the others.

Now as we isolate into context the core concepts of mindfulness, automaticity, and curiosity, the connection between them remains visible.

Much like looking into the same room through different windows, when we combine these concepts we become aware of a more complete view.

Challenging our narrative

If our mindfulness doesn’t include the ability to challenge our own narrative, it will make us anxious.

Mindfulness is a deliberate act.

We can’t do mindfulness intuitively. Our narrative won’t let us. Since we know everything already, why would we examine what we don’t know?

That narrative, our automaticity, has been with us all of our life. It gets in the way of learning. It also allows us to acquire new learning, if we have an attitude of curiosity toward something new that affirms, “This is fun. This is something I don’t know – I’m going to try and know it”.

Most of us have anxiety about not knowing, though, and that is the problem with automaticity. When we withhold our curiosity, we don’t know that we don’t know, because we don’t easily move towards what we don’t know.

There is a paradoxical nature to challenging our narrative. If we are not curious and willing to listen to ideas that are not congruent with ours, how will new ideas come in?

To start, we need to have a fixed sense of self and a stable place to stand in order to provide comfort to ourselves. This enables us to move through our world and interact, perhaps drive a car, attend an event, or even engage in conversation about politics with someone.

And in order to explore the perspective of anyone else, we need to free up our own self.

At the very base, each of us makes that decision ourselves.

Being curious and mindful

One of the tenets of Interactive Mindfulness is curiosity.

Being curious, though, is a risk to the stability of our automaticity. There is always a threat when we learn something new.

Perhaps the other person has agenda that we don’t feel is in our best interest, and we feel that we are going to be shamed or blamed. We require within us that safe, secure base that attachment talks about, to be willing to explore relationship, or to have a new experience that we view as an adventure, not a threat.

We construct a sense of self, this narrative of self, this automatic self – and everything about the construct is a double bind. If we want to learn something new we have to put our narrative at risk because we are going to have to add something new to it.

After we spend a lifetime trying to get our narrative set down in a way that reduces our anxiety and makes us feel capable of taking a risk, we mess with it!

We have discovered some safe ways to mess with it. We know that examining ourselves through meditation allows us to be with ourselves in a way that we are safe with ourselves. We are not provoked by anxiety and we try and let our thoughts settle. We try not to ruminate. We just be in the moment.

The mindfulness concept is becoming more and more critical for health and understanding.

Our mindfulness allows us to see the rocks in the way.

Resistance to new ideas (automaticity)

We are not aware of how automated our thinking and doing systems can be.

Our narrative is in place to protect our sense of self – having a sense of right and wrong, an ethical position, and ideas – the whole construct that makes up our personality.

Our sense of self comes under attack when we question bits of it, or question our decision making, or question our process.

Without a stable sense of self, a number of disorders may arise.

For instance, it is easy to see anxiety in the context of not having a  stable sense of self. Some people fear specific events in the future, and may be afraid something bad will happen to them. They see events about to tumble out of control. Any of us might think or say, “I am an anxious person.” That self-talk becomes the narrative in our head that we play back and forth, which eventually becomes part of ourselves.

Sometimes our automatic thinking causes us to attack the relationship we have with another. We might question, “Am I good enough?” when the other person makes a minor comment. We might ruminate, and turn their comment into something more than it is, and threaten our stability of self.

 

The brain/skin connection

When you ask an adolescent why he or she cuts, or you talk to them about cutting, you need to be able to put it into a context so they can understand what it is they are doing.

It is more complex, and simpler than the mysterious action it seems.

Our skin is our largest sensory organ. Stimulating the skin can be a form of self-soothing that can be achieved by touching, rubbing, massaging, and piercing. Some of our children have discovered that scratching and cutting are stimulating.

This stimulation creates an external and an internal response. The internal response can be mediated by endorphins, and have a physical representation in the brain.

The rush of endorphins from the physical side is what people tend to focus on, but often we don’t take the next step, which is “Why is it necessary for a child to seek that response in order to change their mood?”

Typifying self-stimulation as an act of self-harm can cause us to miss the underlying meaning and purpose of the behaviour.

Whether the behaviour is in the context of the child themselves without any reference to the outside world, or whether the behaviour is an action that causes a response from the outside world are two separate things.

There is an internal psychological response to a physical action that affects the child’s mood, and an external response in relationship to how other people respond to the child’s action. The action was done in private, and the later observation of the effect of that action results in the response.

Often the person who is self-soothing in that way will be at pains to demonstrate that they have done it.

The internal soothing behaviour then becomes an external attempt to have others notice us and attend to us.

We can see this as part of the attachment configuration, both attachment to self and attachment to others.

A context for self-harm

When we discover our child is engaged in self-harming behaviour – whether burning, cutting, or otherwise interfering with their body – our automatic response as a parent is to be fearful. We fear because we don’t understand why our loved ones are doing this, and we intuitively know it relates to their attachment to themselves.

The child’s relationship to their harming behaviour is a private one. It provides him or her with a physical and emotional form of stimulation.

Our skin is our body’s largest organ, and we use it in many ways to soothe ourselves and to present ourselves to others. We manipulate our skin through dying and styling our hair; getting a tattoo; piercing a body part; tanning our skin; reshaping our body; or adjusting, and changing our appearance. This is a widespread phenomenon, and when taken to the extreme, it can result in what we refer to as self-harm.

When we take a step back from our concerns about the child’s behaviour, we can see the behaviour in attachment terms.

When we try and take choices away from our adolescents, we change the meaning of the behaviour and it becomes an interactive rather than a private one.

We relate to the behaviour as it appears to us. It becomes something we see as harmful, and we want them to stop. Therefore it has a different meaning. The behaviour moves into the relationship, and we begin to say, “I want to control you. I am determined to control you.”

When we intervene, the cutting becomes involved in the context of our relationship with the child.

The child has a personal and individual reason for the behaviour, and in order for them to stop they will have to meet that reason for doing it in another way.

By stepping back and offering proximity and conversation, we begin to understand the reason for the behaviour, and thus we are able to offer them substitute alternatives.

When we are triggered in this way by our adolescent’s behaviour, mindfulness helps us get past our automaticity and move into the present moment. Then we are more able to have a conversation in which we might ask, “How does that behaviour help you?” rather than, “How does it hurt you?” Our curiosity can be interactively mindful, non-judging, and intended for the benefit of the child.

In my practice I try to see behaviour, including self-harm, in the context of choice. I see the person separate from the behaviour. The harming is what they do, not who they are.

“I’ll do it myself”

Your three-year-old won’t be reciprocal. She says, “I’ll do it myself,” and pushes your hand away.

What goes into separation is appreciation for the other person’s ability to be separate. Do we let the three-year-old tie her own shoes when we see that she is struggling? Or do we do it for them?

The parent who is really attached to the child lets the child button her shoes by herself, because the parent is not anxious about their attachment.

Some of us can’t do that – can’t establish a bedtime for our children, or let the children go to bed by themselves.

These are building blocks.

At each developmental stage there is a new building block everyone has to engage in.

We can take joy in watching our children separate from us, and take pain as we watch their separation.

 

 

“Yes” and “No”

We want to be close but we know how dangerous it is to be close. In the balance between being connected and being separated, we put up boundaries to maintain separation; because when we offer love and support the other has the option to say they don’t want it.

We are two separate entities in the world, and we know losing the other is going to hurt. When we are bound to another, if they die, we die. Survival demands that we separate.

We can all run away from each other, or we can run towards and try to console each other.

At times we make up for lost years spent apart, and put out the flame of pain and separation through simply setting it aside. A little bit of joy can change everything.

When we have a  balance of pain and joy, the pain that comes along is not overwhelming. It doesn’t mean that we avoid the pain, but the affect becomes softer. Perhaps we return to someone we have lost and suddenly discover all of the things we had with them, and notice that those things still exist. We still have them. We may have lost the person but we have pieces of joy inside us as we remember the past, and we soothe ourselves with that joy.

It is magical how this structure comes together, and we see it happen around great pain, during periods of separation, or in times of danger.

In many cultures, funerals are safe places to express affection we have for the departed that we may have been afraid to fully express in life in the danger of being close. In that safety we say, “Yes”.

Consolation springs out of our shared experience, and everyone takes on a share of the pain.

Celebrating “No”

Just as we all have different ways of saying, “No” we all have different patterns and ways of separating that are habitual.

Much of our pain comes from our lack of balance between “Yes” and “No”. We tend to separate the two cognitively, but we don’t separate them affectively.

If we respect our partners we are able to say, “No” to each other in a way that cements the partnership.

We can think about this in terms of saying, “No” to other people, but we can also think about it in terms of, “How do we say, “No” to ourselves?” How that fits with attachment is that we have to be willing to say, “No” to ourselves in the moment so the other person can get their attachment needs met at this particular time.

Saying, “No” is fundamental and therefore is a principle of attachment. When we are born we say, “Yes” but we also say, “No”. The crux of it starts there.

The growing organism inside the mother is a “No” to her because it will stop being part of her. That is the price of being. Detachment from Mother is both a physical and emotional insult to her. But at birth, back to the paradox, the infant latches on and says, “Yes”. As we follow Nature, we learn that we go away in order to stay.