The Wisdom of Validating Our Kids
Happy New Year to all of you reading this! Welcome back to a LONG overdue entry from Wise Mind, Wise Life. I hope that you are healthy, joyful and blessed wherever you find yourselves at the moment. And I hope that all of life’s beautiful enchantments are opening to you as you enter into 2020, a #yearofclarity.
As a DBT practitioner, much of the work that I undertake with my clients is in excavating their histories within a social context. Specifically, we excavate their origin stories, their embedded and embodied experiences of coming into conscious existence in relationship to their attachment figures. These are usually parents but may also include close adult figures who were primary caregivers, such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents. What we find with those coming in for DBT is that they typically have emerged from DBT calls an invalidating environment which turned away from, and in some cases has turned against, the emotional needs and expressions of my clients from birth onward.
These invalidating environments exert potent and negative influences on children. Invalidating environments fail to teach children important emotional vocabulary which can be helpful for kids to learn how to identify their emotions, labeling them with words, which is one of many elements of effectively regulating emotions. These environments also fail to teach kids skills for self-soothing and distraction which are related to a failure to teach kids realistic problem-solving skills. Kids are left to figure things out for themselves, and “just know” what to do. Under harsher conditions, kids' emotional expressions and bids to connect with the others in their lives are countered with verbal insults, impossible comparisons or outright physical abuse.
All of this leaves these invalidated kids vulnerable to alternative problem-solving efforts such as self-harm, substance abuse or even suicidal behaviors. These are the kids who grow up with little or no impulse control and are likely to make myriad easy choices that lead to a hard life. On a deeper internal level, there can emerge a profound fear of real or imagined abandonment. A classic diagnostic criterion of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This fear becomes a filter through which BPD persons, and I suspect others, experience their relationships across the arc of their lives and become manifest in desperate efforts to keep important relationships that often destroy relationships rather than preserve them. These invalidated kids experience internal incoherence, poor self-organization to lead an effective life and often have a thin sense of self. For many, this is emotional hell.
In another series of origin stories, there are children whose attachment figures show up (as in the new Dan Siegel title: The Power of Showing Up). These parents and caregivers are responsive to the emotional experiences and bids of their kids, helping their kids feel safe and helping them make sense of their emotional experiences. These emotion coaches, as John Gottman calls them, validate their kids’ emotions and their bids to connect with the wider family and social world. These kids become robust, resilient and confident. They have been given strong interpersonal connections which in turn shape their inner personal (Siegel & Bryson, 2020), their very sense of identity. In the DBT dialectical framework, we learn that identity is relational (Linehan, 1993). That is, we know who we are through relationships. We only know ourselves as persons in relation to persons. And we learn what kind of person we are by the quality of connection and care we have with our attachment figures.
To all of us parents out there, let’s ask: How am I showing up for my kids? And assuming, as I do, that parents all want to be good parents (no one wants to suck), let’s widen the sphere of contemplation by also asking the following questions, whether we have infants or teens:
1. Am I a safe person for my children?
2. Am I responsive to my kids' bid for care and connection?
3. Am I generous with my attention and turning-toward my kids?
4. Am I teaching my kids emotional vocabulary?
5. Am I modeling how to engage in self-soothing and distraction?
6. Am I equipped to engage in co-regulation?
7. Am I equipped to regulate my own emotions with self-soothing, distractions, mindfulness, and psychological flexibility?
Let’s explore these questions together and in earnest in the coming posts on the wisdom of validation and emotion coaching. Not to the end of producing superhumans, but to the end that we may cultivate the humanity of our children, that they may become internally coherent, confident, secure and loving humans capable of success and recovery from their inevitable failures, knowing that they have their own internal resources as well as us: the most precious of all resources.
Engage, Enchant, Elevate,
Scott Spradlin
Wise Mind, Wise Life
#wisemindwiselife #dbt #mindfulness #wichita #wisemind #validation #parenting #recovery #mentalhealth #mindsight
As a DBT practitioner, much of the work that I undertake with my clients is in excavating their histories within a social context. Specifically, we excavate their origin stories, their embedded and embodied experiences of coming into conscious existence in relationship to their attachment figures. These are usually parents but may also include close adult figures who were primary caregivers, such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents. What we find with those coming in for DBT is that they typically have emerged from DBT calls an invalidating environment which turned away from, and in some cases has turned against, the emotional needs and expressions of my clients from birth onward.
These invalidating environments exert potent and negative influences on children. Invalidating environments fail to teach children important emotional vocabulary which can be helpful for kids to learn how to identify their emotions, labeling them with words, which is one of many elements of effectively regulating emotions. These environments also fail to teach kids skills for self-soothing and distraction which are related to a failure to teach kids realistic problem-solving skills. Kids are left to figure things out for themselves, and “just know” what to do. Under harsher conditions, kids' emotional expressions and bids to connect with the others in their lives are countered with verbal insults, impossible comparisons or outright physical abuse.
All of this leaves these invalidated kids vulnerable to alternative problem-solving efforts such as self-harm, substance abuse or even suicidal behaviors. These are the kids who grow up with little or no impulse control and are likely to make myriad easy choices that lead to a hard life. On a deeper internal level, there can emerge a profound fear of real or imagined abandonment. A classic diagnostic criterion of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This fear becomes a filter through which BPD persons, and I suspect others, experience their relationships across the arc of their lives and become manifest in desperate efforts to keep important relationships that often destroy relationships rather than preserve them. These invalidated kids experience internal incoherence, poor self-organization to lead an effective life and often have a thin sense of self. For many, this is emotional hell.
In another series of origin stories, there are children whose attachment figures show up (as in the new Dan Siegel title: The Power of Showing Up). These parents and caregivers are responsive to the emotional experiences and bids of their kids, helping their kids feel safe and helping them make sense of their emotional experiences. These emotion coaches, as John Gottman calls them, validate their kids’ emotions and their bids to connect with the wider family and social world. These kids become robust, resilient and confident. They have been given strong interpersonal connections which in turn shape their inner personal (Siegel & Bryson, 2020), their very sense of identity. In the DBT dialectical framework, we learn that identity is relational (Linehan, 1993). That is, we know who we are through relationships. We only know ourselves as persons in relation to persons. And we learn what kind of person we are by the quality of connection and care we have with our attachment figures.
To all of us parents out there, let’s ask: How am I showing up for my kids? And assuming, as I do, that parents all want to be good parents (no one wants to suck), let’s widen the sphere of contemplation by also asking the following questions, whether we have infants or teens:
1. Am I a safe person for my children?
2. Am I responsive to my kids' bid for care and connection?
3. Am I generous with my attention and turning-toward my kids?
4. Am I teaching my kids emotional vocabulary?
5. Am I modeling how to engage in self-soothing and distraction?
6. Am I equipped to engage in co-regulation?
7. Am I equipped to regulate my own emotions with self-soothing, distractions, mindfulness, and psychological flexibility?
Let’s explore these questions together and in earnest in the coming posts on the wisdom of validation and emotion coaching. Not to the end of producing superhumans, but to the end that we may cultivate the humanity of our children, that they may become internally coherent, confident, secure and loving humans capable of success and recovery from their inevitable failures, knowing that they have their own internal resources as well as us: the most precious of all resources.
Engage, Enchant, Elevate,
Scott Spradlin
Wise Mind, Wise Life
#wisemindwiselife #dbt #mindfulness #wichita #wisemind #validation #parenting #recovery #mentalhealth #mindsight
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Scott
(new)
Feb 17, 2020 01:33PM
Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life: How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Can Put You in Control
reply
|
flag
