Jonice Webb's Blog, page 13
September 27, 2017
Are You A WMBNT Parent?
I know why you’re reading this article.
Two reasons, actually: First, because you are curious to know what a WMBNT parent is. Second, because you’re a caring parent. How do I know this? It’s simple. Only parents who care about their children and their parenting would be curious.
To understand the WMBNT Parent, meet Edward and Libby, both caring parents.
Edward the Child: Edward grew up in an abusive family. His alcoholic mother was mean, angry and physically abusive or threatening half the time, and ignored him the rest. Edward’s father loved his children. He worked 70 hours-a-week to support the family. In the few hours that he was home, he tried his hardest to appease his wife, and to smooth over and hide her bad behavior. Edward and his siblings grew up fending off their mother, and fending for themselves.
Edward the Father: Now Edward, to his great credit, wants to give his own children a better life. So he made sure that as soon as they each reached age 7, they started to master a musical instrument. He monitors their grades closely, and requires them to play a varsity sport. “All three of my children are on their way to the Ivy Leagues,” he can often be heard saying.
Libby the Child: Libby grew up in a loving but large and somewhat chaotic household. The second of six children, she often was called upon to care for her younger siblings. In fact, her opportunities and activities were often limited by her responsibilities in the household. Libby grew up feeling bored, burdened, and frustrated that she was held back from the activities that she knew she would enjoy.
Libby the Mother: Now a parent herself, Libby loves her children every bit as much as her own mother loved her. Born rapid-fire, each less than a year apart, her three boys all love soccer and ice-cream. Libby works part-time, but manages to schedule her hours so that she never misses a soccer game. Every day she drives the boys from one activity to the next, making sure they stay active, busy, and challenged.
In many ways, Edward and Libby are different. Edward was abused, and Libby was not. Libby’s family was large, and Edward’s was not. But in some very important ways, they are the same.
Indeed, they are each making a conscious effort to give their children a better life than they themselves had. For Edward, that’s attention and expectations. For Libby, it’s opportunity and activity. In these ways, they are both premium, top-grade parents who no one could ever fault.
But there is another factor, unseen and unknown, which unites these two. A factor which has left a profound mark upon them both, and is quietly, subliminally transferring, through them, to the next generation.
Edward and Libby are both WMBNT parents. They are both Well-Meaning-But Neglected-Themselves. They both grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), and they are unwittingly raising their own children with CEN.
CEN is automatically built into every abusive household. A parent who abuses a child emotionally, verbally, psychologically, sexually or physically is, by definition, emotionally neglecting him. So Edward grew up with massive Emotional Neglect from his mother. Although his father loved him, his primary attention and care went to his own alcoholic wife. No one in Edward’s life was attuned to his feelings and needs. No one ever asked Edward:
How do you feel?
What do you want?
What do you need?
Why are you angry, or sad, or hurt?
As an adult, Edward can remember his mother’s drinking and violence. He can remember his father’s love. But he can’t remember what he didn’t get. So now with his own children, he can correct the things he remembers. But he can’t correct the things that he does not. So Edward does not ask his children those questions, as his parents did not ask him.
Libby’s parents were both loving, and there was no abuse. But a very important ingredient was missing from her childhood. As an adult, Libby remembers her parents’ love for her, and she remembers caring for her siblings. She remembers feeling deprived of activities.
But what Libby cannot remember is what she did not get. So she does not ask her children those questions either. As she drives them back and forth, buys them ice-cream and cheers for them at games, she fails to notice what they are feeling. She fails to ask them what they need. She fails to see when they are hurt or sad or in pain. And she fails to teach them how to manage any of that.
Around and around the circle turns, delivering the numbing, isolating effects of CEN to another generation, and another and another.
All the while, loving, well-meaning, caring parents work hard, care for their kids, and correct the wrongs that were done to them, unaware that they are failing their children in a most vital way. Unaware that they can reverse the circle. Unaware that they must give their children what they never got themselves.
Unaware that they can.
To learn more about WMBNT parenting and how to make sure you don’t pass Childhood Emotional Neglect down to the next generation, see EmotionalNeglect.com, or the book, Running on Empty.
This article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author and PsychCentral
3 New Psychology Research Findings You Should Know About
Lets face it. For us human beings, often the most difficult struggles in our lives come from inside of us.
We are all essentially walking, talking bundles of emotions and issues. We can’t sleep, we’re in conflict, we get obsessed or we suffer from anxiety. We’re angry, sad or grief-stricken. We are in pain.
Fortunately, science comes to the rescue. Psychologists, psychiatrists and neurologists are busy giving us answers. What makes us happy? What coping techniques work best? How do our emotions work, and what do we do with them?
Here are three new studies that offer important and helpful information about how we can all live our lives happier and healthier.
Study 1:
A huge study in the UK by Kinderman et al., 2013 surveyed over 32,000 adults about their levels of anxiety and depression, and the potential causes. They found that traumatic life events were the largest factor in creating both.
But here’s the surprise. They also found that people’s coping styles contributed to anxiety and depression almost as much as the traumatic events themselves.
Here are the three coping flaws that were identified as major contributors:
Rumination: excessive focus and fixation on negative thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
Lack of adaptive coping: failure to help yourself by talking to friends or family for support, or eating well and exercising; and failing to anticipate stressful events.
Self-blame: this is the toxic habit of turning things back on yourself (self-blame is very common for people who grew up with Emotional Neglect).
The Takeaway: Your coping style and skills are hugely important factors in whether you end up anxious or depressed. Avoid dwelling on the negative, seek support when you need it, eat well and exercise, and strive for self-acceptance rather than self-blame.
Study 2:
Falk et al., 2015, wanted to find out if certain kinds of thoughts could open up people’s minds to be more receptive to the kinds of healthy behaviors that we all struggle with, like exercise.
These researchers found that people who were first asked to think about something that’s meaningful to them, like family, helping someone or personal values, were more receptive to follow-up suggestions that they increase their exercise over the next month. Brain scans showed that the meaningful thoughts activated the entromedial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes self-relevant information. The meaningful thoughts opened up people’s minds to the healthy suggestions, rendering them more effective.
The Takeaway: Keep your core values alive, and reflect on them often. It may activate the part of your brain that takes healthy messages to heart.
Study 3:
Stellar, et al., 2015 looked at the connection between positive emotions and inflammatory cytokines, a chemical which has been linked to health problems like heart disease, arthritis, depression and alzheimer’s disease.
They asked 200 people to track their levels of positive emotions throughout their day: emotions like amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, joy, love and pride. They then compared their ratings with cheek swabs to determine levels of cytokines.
They found that the people who had the highest levels of positive emotions had the lowest levels of cytokines. The most powerful healthy emotion was found to be awe.
The Takeaway: It’s important to deal with the factors in your life that cause you negative feelings. Put in the effort to make changes when necessary, and seek positive emotions in your life.
Did your family subtly, or even actively, discourage talking about conflicts and problems, seeking support, and expression of anger and sadness (Childhood Emotional Neglect)? If so, you may feel alone, but you are not. Many, many wonderful people share your confusion and your pain.
Do take comfort in these answers:
Stop blaming yourself because it’s not your fault.
Share more thoughts, more feelings, more vulnerabilities, with the worthy people in your life.
Focus on your values, and keep them close to your heart.
Pay attention to the parts of your life that bring you pain, and start addressing them.
Surround yourself with compassion, contentment, love and pride.
Seek awe.
And you will find yourself living a happier and healthier life.
To learn more about Childhood Emotional Neglect, how it happens and how it affects the child in adulthood, see the book Running on Empty.
This article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author and PsychCentral
20 Questions to Raise Your Resilience
Will has no idea how he ended up in his career. In hindsight, he has some regrets….
Jonathan continually dates the wrong women, and then is completely shocked and devastated when they break up with him.
At the first sign of a problem in her pre-med program, Bella decided she wasn’t cut out for medicine, and switched to a different major.
“I don’t care, whatever you’d like,” is Sandy’s standard answer whenever someone asks what she prefers.
If only Will knew that his true passion is helping others, he would never have become a computer coder.
If only Jonathan knew that he is actually very attractive and smart, he would choose different women to date, and be less vulnerable in his relationships.
If only Bella knew that her abilities in science far outweigh the small weakness she has in memorizing anatomy, she could have worked harder, hired a tutor, and continued on to become the thoracic surgeon she was meant to be.
If only Sandy knew what she likes, she wouldn’t be living in a house she doesn’t like, married to a man she doesn’t like, feeling trapped and depressed.
If only Will, Jonathan, Bella and Sandy knew themselves, they would be less damaged by the challenges they encounter. They would have made better choices for themselves. They would be more resilient.
One of the most important qualities for resilience is self-awareness, or in other words, knowing who you are. What you like, what you feel, your strengths and weaknesses. Your preferences, needs, wishes and proclivities. All of the positives and negatives, talents and faults, when all held in your own mind together, add up to a full and realistic, gut-held sense of who you are. That self-knowledge gives you strength and resilience, guides and informs you, and gets you through challenges, failures and mistakes.
Sadly, a huge segment of the population lacks this level of knowledge about themselves. A huge segment of the population struggles through life mystified by why they do things, how they feel, and what they want. They give up on pursuits as soon as they hit a snag, make the wrong choices for themselves, and end up doing what everyone else wants.
How did these masses of people get this way? Why don’t they know themselves? Because as children, when they looked into their father’s or mother’s eyes, they did not see their true selves reflected there.
Their parents weren’t looking at all, or were seeing only what they wanted to see, or saw a distorted picture of who their child really was. So all of these children grew up without the emotional attention and responses from their parents that would have told them so much about themselves. All of them grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN).
Can Will, Bella, Jonathan and Sandy, as adults, gain the self-knowledge that they need to be resilient? The answer is yes. But they may need a little extra help and guidance along the way.
So I have compiled this list of 20 questions. Write down four answers for each one. If you can’t think of four on a particular item, skip it and keep it in mind until more answers occur to you. It may take days or weeks to search inside yourself for your truths. Be sure to honor the process and do not write down glib answers that you do not feel or cannot fully own. All of your answers must be real and true.
20 Questions to Improve Your Resilience
List Four Answers to Each Question :
Things people do that make you angry
Things in your life that you find the most tedious
Life events that have helped to define you
Things that you struggle with the most in your life
Words that described you in high school
Words that describe you now
Things you feel passionate about
People you love and care about the most and why, for each
Things you must have in your life to be happy
People you like the least
Things people like about you
Things you are insecure about
Jobs you think you could do well at and like
Jobs you would not like or would not do well at
Skills or qualities that you definitely have
Things you truly believe in
Things you’re most afraid of
Qualities you like about yourself
Things you’re naturally good at
Things you’re naturally bad at
Will, Bella, Jonathan and Sandy, and all of you who cannot see yourselves, here is my message to you:
No, your parents were not looking. No, they did not see you. But that doesn’t mean that you are not worth seeing, or that you are not worth knowing. You are.
You deserve to be known, and loved for who you really are. You deserve to look inside yourself and know, deep down, that all of your qualities and struggles add up to something real and good.
You deserve to look in the mirror and know that you are looking at someone who is strong, someone who will thrive, someone who is lovable, someone who you love.
To learn more about how Childhood Emotional Neglect happens, how it leaves you less resilient, and how to heal from it, see the book, Running on Empty.
This article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author and PsychCentral
Raised By Parents With Low Emotional Intelligence
Ten-year-old Jasmine lies alone on her bed, glad to be sequestered behind the closed doors of her room. “It could happen,” she whispers quietly to herself. In her mind she’s reliving the fantasy that’s helped her to get her through her life so far: her father answers the doorbell and a kind, well-dressed couple explains to him that Jasmine was accidentally sent home with the wrong family at birth, and that she actually belongs to them. They then take her back to their home, where she feels loved, nurtured and cared for…
Jasmine doesn’t know it, but this is only the beginning of her struggle. She will spend the next twenty years wishing that she had different parents, and feeling guilty about it.
After all, her parents are basically good people. They work hard, and Jasmine has a house, food, clothing and toys. She goes to school every day, and does her homework every afternoon. She has friends at school, and plays soccer. By all accounts, she is a very lucky child.
But despite Jasmine’s luck, and even though her parents love her, even at age ten she knows, deep down, that she is alone in this world.
How could a ten-year old know this? Why would she feel this way? The answer is as simple as it is complicated:
Jasmine is being raised by parents with low emotional intelligence. She is growing up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN).
Emotional Intelligence: The ability to identify, assess and control one’s own emotions, the emotions of others, and those of groups (as described by Daniel Goleman).
Childhood Emotional Neglect: A parent’s failure to respond enough to the child’s emotional needs.
When you are raised by parents who lack emotional awareness and skills, you struggle for good reasons:
1. Since your parents don’t know how to identify their own emotions, they don’t speak the language of emotion in your childhood home.
So instead of saying, “You look upset Sweetie. Did something happen at school today?”, your parents absent-mindedly say, “So how was school?”
When your grandmother passes away, your family marches through the funeral acting like it’s no big deal.
When your prom date stands you up, your family shows their support by making an effort to never speak of it. Or they tease you about it relentlessly, never seeming to notice or care how very mortified you are.
The Result: You don’t learn how to be self-aware. You don’t learn that your feelings are real or important. You don’t learn how to feel, sit with, talk about or express emotions.
2. Since your parents are not good at managing and controlling their own emotions, they are not able to teach you how to manage and control your own.
So when you get in trouble at school for calling your teacher “a jerk,” your parents do not ask you what was going on or why you lost your temper that way. They don’t explain to you how you could have handled that situation differently. Instead, they ground you or they yell at you or they blame it on your teacher, letting you off the hook.
The Result: You don’t learn how to control or manage your feelings or how to manage difficult situations.
3. Since your parents don’t understand emotions, they give you many wrong messages about yourself and the world through their words and behavior.
So your parents act as if you’re lazy because they haven’t noticed that it’s your anxiety that holds you back from doing things.
Your siblings call you crybaby and treat you as if you’re weak because you cried for days after your beloved cat was run over by a car.
The Result: You go forward into adulthood with the wrong voices in your head. “You’re lazy,” “You’re weak,” say The Voices of Low Emotional Intelligence at every opportunity.
All of these results leave you struggling, baffled and confused. You are out of touch with your true self (your emotional self), you see yourself through the eyes of people who never really knew you, and you have great difficulty handling situations that are stressful, conflictual or difficult.
You are living the life of Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Is it too late for Jasmine? Is it too late for you? What can be done if you grew up this way?
Fortunately, it is not too late for Jasmine or for you. There are things that you can do:
Learn everything you can about emotion. Start your own Emotion Training Program. Pay attention to what you feel, when and why. Start observing others’ feelings and behavior. Listen to how other people express their emotions, and start practicing yourself. Think about who in your life right now can teach you. Your wife, your husband, your sibling or friend? Practice talking about your feelings with someone you trust.
Talk back to those false messages in your head. When that “voice” from your childhood speaks, stop listening. Instead, take it on. Replace that voice with your own. The voice that knows you and has compassion for what you didn’t get from your parents. “I’m not lazy, I have anxiety and I’m trying my best to face it.” “I’m not weak. My emotions make me stronger.”
As an adult, Jasmine must stop fantasizing about a solution knocking on her door. The reality is, she must now learn these skills on her own.
Hopefully she will see that she missed out on some vital building blocks, simply because her parents did not know. Hopefully she will realize that she has emotions, and will learn how to value and hear and manage and speak them. Hopefully she will start beating down those Voices of Low Emotional Intelligence.
Hopefully she will learn who she really is. And dare to be it.
If you identify with Jasmine, see the book, Running on Empty for more information about how you may be affected by your parents’ low emotional intelligence and how to build your emotional skills.
This article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author and PsychCentral
