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Subject: My son
Hello Dr. Childress.
I saw some of your videos on ehow. Thank you for posting them. My son is 11 years old he has ADHD and now he is having difficulties at school because he is lying and hitting girls, and he makes excuses for his mistakes. I can’t afford a consultation with you because I don’t have insurance. I am frustrated that nobody wants to be his friend and he is getting worse, please help.
Janet
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Here is my response:
Hello Janet,
Professional standards of practice prevent me from commenting on your specific situation because of complex professional issues related to online therapy and the development of a professional client-therapist relationship. But I can offer a general discussion of family issues.
Behavior is a symptom. It is the integration, or non-integration of brain systems that is the cause.
Just like a situation in which a child has an infection that causes a fever. The fever itself is not itself a “problem behavior,” it is a symptom of the underlying problem in the body. The fever (the symptom) is the body’s communication that there is some underlying difficulty that the body is having, such as the infection.
Similarly, for a child, the child’s “behavior problem” is a communication from the child’s brain systems about some underlying difficulty that is causing the behavior. In general, the presentation of “behavior problems” represents a communication (what's called a "behavioral communication") that some area of the child’s life is painful.
Most often, this emotional pain arises from difficulty in two systems. The primary source involves problems in the Relationship Systems (Attachment Security and Psychological Connection); with secondary difficulties arising within the Emotional Systems (typically involving feelings of psychological loneliness-alienation).
Oftentimes the primary difficulty in the Relationship Systems is a disruption in Psychological Connection. The Psychological Connection system allows us to feel what other people feel “as-if” their emotions were our own. There is a wonderful little video regarding the underlying brain cells (called “mirror neurons”) that are associated with this Psychological Connection system at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html
The Psychological Connection system is what allows us to feel what the actors feel in the movies. We feel the actors’ emotions “as-if” these emotions were our own.
Children feel what their parents feel, just like we feel what the actors feel in the movies. But what happens when we're watching a movie that becomes too scary? What do we do? We look away - we break connection. So what do children do when their parents are too stressed, too angry, too sad, too anxious? All of these feelings are imported into our children just "as-if" they were feeling these feelings themselves. What do children do when our feelings as parents become too painful for them? They break psychological connection with us. They don't allow themselves to remain psychologically connected to our brain state, to our feelings.
When there is a break in this psychological connection, the feeling becomes one of psychological loneliness-alienation, which is an extremely painful state for humans. Our children typically do not understand why they're in pain (that it's a feeling of psychological loneliness caused by having to break psychological connection with us); they may just feel the pain... "something's wrong and I don't know what it is. I'm loved, so it's not that. But I'm just not comfortable, I'm just not happy. It must be because of <this or that attribution of meaning - I need this or that thing - this or that person hurt my feelings, etc.>
In terms of the Emotional System’s effect on the Relationship Systems, the emotion of anger always breaks psychological connection. The positive emotion of happy builds psychological connection. Based on this feature alone, I typically recommend a strong reduction in the amount of expressed anger and a corresponding increase in expressions of positive, happy, and affectionate feelings within the parent-child relationship.
Anger signals two things: 1) "this is important," and 2) "you hurt me so I hurt you." Anger is an emotion of violence and is designed to be targeted toward outside threats (i.e., the predator in the jungle). Anger is too violent an emotion for use within the family or social group of companions.
Within the family or social group of companions anger should, at most, be expressed as annoyance and irritation. Within the family or social group, the signaling of anger should be quickly translated to hurt ("you hurt me so I hurt you") so that the hurt can be metabolized through communication and relationship rather than remaining in an expressive form of anger, which damages relationships because of anger's inherent interpersonal violence.
Emotional pain is metabolized through the Relationship and Communication Systems. If there are disruptions within either of these systems, pain cannot be effectively metabolized through the social field.
Happiness integrates brain systems and promotes social bonding. This is our biggest ally. We need to find and increase this emotion. The positive emotion of happiness also signals "this is good - move toward this" and so provides us with a positive motivational pull and direction. Find this emotion. Build this emotion. Within the marriage; within yourself; with your children. If there are barriers to this emotion, begin to problem solve getting rid of these barriers. Find this emotion, because its job is to help us find the direction out of difficult situations.
While the specifics of the positive-happy emotion may not be fully accurate, there is nevertheless something in the zone surrounding the triggering of that positive-happy emotion that represents truth; that offers direction.
Affection is always in order with children. Affection prompts happy. Random affection bursts with your spouse (if available) and with your children may help improve the overall family environment, even if specific issues remain.
As parents, the most important thing we can give our children is a calm, relaxed, and pleasant brain state of our own, which will allow our children to remain psychologically connected to us. By remaining psychologically connected to us, our children are not psychologically alone, they belong; they are part of the social group; and the intact relationship systems of love and connection can help them metabolize their hurts and sadnesses through the communication and relationship systems of social relationship.
It’s not about “behavior,” --- behavior is a symptom --- it is about communication and social relationship.
Communication is much more complex than simply verbal language. The mirror neurons of the Psychological Connection System are designed to register the intentions of other people. We read other people's intent, what's motivating their actions. The most important thing we can do as parents is attend to what our intent is that is organizing our response to our children; what is our intent that is motivating our response.
There are four primary intents:
The Intent to Understand
The Intent to Be-With
The Intent to Task
The Intent to Change
The Intent to Understand (a simple curiosity to understand the other person's experience from the other person's perspective) fosters productive communication.
The Intent to Be-With communicates self-value and builds self-worth and personal confidence.
The Intent to Task and the Intent to Change shut down communication (although they can have other positive benefits).
The Intent to Understand and Intent to Be-With both promote positive psychological connection and help to resolve problems in the Relationship Systems. However, these two motivating intentions are very fragile and can be easily destroyed by the Intent to Task and Intent to Change.
Typically, I recommend a three-step approach to responding to children’s "protest behavior" (classically referred to as “problem behavior”).
1. Approach the child with an Intent to Understand
Usually I offer three responses to the child from an Intent to Understand the child’s experience from the child’s point of view. This response set involves a simple curiosity, and includes the complete absence of an Intent to Task or an Intent to Change.
Many times children will say "I don't know" in response to our efforts to understand their experience from their perspective. This is typically an accurate response, they don't know what their experience means, and they lack the thinking and communication abilities to identify and describe their experience.
When this occurs, simply take your best guess as to what they might be feeling or experiencing ("I wonder if your feeling xyz...?" "it seems like you might be feeling abc”). Offering children the opportunity to describe their experience, even if they can't, is nevertheless a valuable communication process in that it will ultimately serve to develop their ability to communicate their experience.
In other cases of "I don't know," it can be helpful to ask the child to simply describe the events leading up to the child's activity or response ("so tell me what happened... ok, wait, and then what happened next?... hold on, wait, wait wait, before we go there, so first xyz happened, then abc occurred, and then what happened next?"). This process can offer us information that we can use to help us offer guesses as to the child's inner experience ("so I wonder if you were feeling abc?") and it promotes our children's ability to describe their experience, first in concrete form, then later with more emotional-psychological complexity.
We can also offer a guess based on the general principle of, "people make us feel the way they feel." ("I wonder if you might be feeling frustrated and helpless, like you’re all alone and nobody is helping, and everybody is just criticizing you all the time?" --- offered because you, as a parent, feel frustrated and helpless, like you're alone in trying to deal with your child's "problem behavior” (even your child is not helping), and you find yourself correcting and criticizing your child all the time. Take a guess that this might be what your child is feeling and is creating in you as a form of "bond-of-understanding.")
2. Orient the child to the social context
The next step after sincerely seeking to understand the child’s experience from the child’s point of view, is to bring into the discussion all of the relevant context factors, such as rules, restrictions, limitations, and the wants and needs of other people.
“So you were feeling xyz because abc happened. I see. But the problem is… <describe the rule, restriction, limitation, the rights and needs of others, etc.>”
Often times, this is where we stop as parents, and we simply command our children to do what we want them to do based on these external context demands. But it can be very useful to take the dialogue one step further…
3. Negotiate a mutual intention with the child
This involves coming up with a solution that meets both the child’s needs (based on an understanding for the child’s experience from the child’s point of view) AND the needs of others expressed by rules and restrictions, limits, and the expressed likes, needs, and wants of others.
The goal is a communication "pendulum swing" back-and-forth between the child's needs/desires/intentions and then back to the parent's needs/desires/intentions then back to the child's needs/desires/intentions... Back and forth in a dialogue-of-understanding and context.
In following these three steps we build three important brain systems (“we build what we use), 1) the child’s own self-awareness and ability to appropriately communicate his or her experience, 2) an awareness of the context of self-experience involving the rules and restrictions of the setting and the wants and needs of others, and 3) the ability to socially resolve his or her own self-experience within the context of social restrictions and limitations. In addition, by sequencing these three steps, we build (“we build what we use”) the transition networks between these three systems, with the goal of ultimately building the brain networks that will allow the child to become aware of self-experience, transition seamlessly to recognizing the social context of limitations and the needs of others, and transition seamlessly to negotiating a socially appropriate resolution that considers both the child’s inner experience but also the social context defined by others.
The principle of "people make us feel the way they feel" can be a helpful approach to developing guesses about the child's experience. How do your child's actions make you feel? Frustrated? Helpless? Not listened to? Hurt? (anger is hurt: “you hurt me so I hurt you”). Your feelings may offer a window into your child’s feelings, because your child may be creating in you (and in others) the child’s own inner experience as a primitive way of achieving a “bond-of-understanding” with others. The child is essentially communicating, “Now YOU know what I feel, because I’m making you feel it too.”
When we provide the child with a “bond-of-understanding” experience through our Intent to Understand as part of Step 1, the child no longer needs to make us feel the way the child feels to achieve this relationship bond, and we help the child to develop a more sophisticated way of achieving this “bond-pf-understanding” experience through social communication rather than by simply inducing the feeling of frustration/anger/hurt etc. in us.
A more productive way of achieving this “bond-of-understanding” is therefore to actively approach our children with an Intent to Understand their experience from their perspective (before we instruct them in the social context of rules-limitations-restrictions-and the needs of others), instead of responding FIRST with instructing the child regarding the limitations of the social context involving the rules, restrictions, and needs of others. Instead, when we respond first with the limitations, restrictions, and needs of others our children will often resist in an effort to first achieve a bond-of-understanding (i.e., our understanding of their world, their experience, from their point of view.
While we always need to immediately stop aggression and respond to "meanness" ("Michael! Stop that!"), we should quickly move into an Intent to Understand ("What's going on?") and then return later (after 3 or 4 responses born from a simple curiosity to understand the child's experience from the child's point of view) to the social context of rules, limitations, restrictions, and wants-needs-desires of others ("Okay, so you're feeling xyz because abc took place. <becoming stern> But you cannot do qrs!").
Finally, because children import our feelings and stresses into themselves, just “as-if” these feelings and stresses were the child’s own, it becomes very important that we work out our excessive stress, anger, sadness, and anxiety. We need to find our calm-and-relaxed place of gently positive happiness. If we can find and enter this brain state often, then our children can join with us in this brain state of relaxed happiness, which is very healing and supportive of successful social relationships and task performance.
Because mothers typically are the emotional-psychological core for the children, I typically recommend that father’s support their children’s healthy emotional, social, and psychological development by pouring love and support into the mother. If mom is happy and relaxed, she will be psychologically available for connection with the children. If mom is angry-hurt-stressed, then the children may break psychological connection with her and their behavior will become “problematic.”
If there is anger in the marital relationship, try to quickly translate the anger into hurt (you hurt me so I hurt you). If your spouse is angry at you, ask what you did to hurt his or her feelings. Anger typically involves criticism of the other (… so I hurt you). Criticism provokes defensive counter-anger (i.e., an anger-hurt-anger-hurt-anger-hurt two person cycling). Try to disrupt this exchange of hurt-anger-hurt-anger by focusing and discussing the hurt not the anger. Provide nurturance for the hurt. Heal the hurt with compassion, love and understanding. Anger, as an emotion, is not meant to be used within the family or social group. Try to limit anger, try to increase happy.
I hope this information may be of some help to you. I'm afraid I can't offer much more at this time because of professional limits on my ability to comment on specifics using online media.
Good luck to you and your family in finding more positive and affectionate relationships.
Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, PSY 18857
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