Category Archives: Interactive Mindfulness

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.

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.

Interactive Mindfulness and Change

As we grow and change we will encounter conflict in our close relationships. The practice of Interactive Mindfulness allows us to manage conflict with our children and others while we respect their unique process. In the moment it is at least possible to celebrate that we are connected, even if it seems we can celebrate nothing else. Practicing Interactive Mindfulness ensures a caring transfer of information that helps to build a structure from which we can explore our curiosity about each other.

Interactive Mindfulness helps us recognize that attachment is a basic human need that shapes our behaviour. Without judging our children’s actions we are able to interact with them with the awareness that all of our behaviour and theirs means something, although we might not know what the meaning is.

Although we are in a continual process of change, paradoxically, it is our stable sense of self that allows us to grow and change. At some point we may become comfortable living in the now, and accept that there is no “there”. Notwithstanding that the relationships within our family are developmental and will never stay the same, at least, in the present moment as we practice Interactive Mindfulness, our relationships can move into balance.