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Rather than trying to shelter our children from life’s inevitable difficulties, we can help them integrate those experiences into their understanding of the world and learn from them.
In allowing Marco to repeatedly retell the story, Marianna was helping him understand what had happened so he could begin to deal with it emotionally.
The key to thriving is to help these parts work well together—to integrate them.
being present with your children so you can help them become better integrated. As a result, they will thrive emotionally, intellectually, and socially.
Your left brain loves and desires order. It is logical, literal, linguistic (it likes words), and linear (it puts things in a sequence or order). The left brain loves that all four of these words begin with the letter L. (It also loves lists.)
But when a toddler begins asking “Why?” all the time, you know that the left brain is beginning to really kick in. Why? Because our left brain likes to know the linear cause-effect relationships in the world—and to express that logic with language.
It’s also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child’s feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child.
Rules about respect and behavior aren’t thrown out the window simply because a child’s left hemisphere is disengaged.
is what storytelling does: it allows us to understand ourselves and our world by using both our left and right hemispheres together. To tell a story that makes sense, the left brain must put things in order, using words and logic.
When we help our children name their pain and their fears, we help them tame them.
Since upstairs tantrums are intentional, children will stop returning to that particular strategy when they learn that it’s ineffective—and
When your child is old enough to be able to write—or even just draw—you might give him a journal and encourage daily writing or drawing. This ritual can enhance his ability to pay attention to and understand his internal landscape.
Research shows that when we change our physical state—through movement or relaxation, for example—we can change our emotional state.
As we explained in the introduction, this means that every experience literally changes the physical makeup of the brain, since neurons are constantly being connected (and separated) based on our experiences.
Even though we’re not aware of their origins in the past, implicit memories can still create fear, avoidance, sadness, and other painful emotions and bodily sensations. That helps explain why children (as well as adults) often react strongly to situations without being aware of why they are so upset.
It’s crucial, therefore, that we assemble these implicit puzzle pieces into explicit form in order to be able to reflect on their impact on our lives. That’s where the hippocampus comes in.
When we don’t offer a place for children to express their feelings and recall what happened after an overwhelming event, their implicit-only memories remain in dis-integrated form, leaving the children with no way to make sense of their experience.
Unexamined (or dis-integrated) memories cause all kinds of problems for any adult trying to live a healthy, relational life. But for parents, these hidden memories are especially dangerous, for two main reasons. First of all, even when they’re very young, our kids can pick up on our feelings of dread or distress or inadequacy, even if we don’t realize we’re experiencing them. And when a parent is upset, it’s very difficult for a child to remain calm and happy. Second, implicit memories can trigger responses from us that cause us to act in ways we don’t want to. Old feelings of being left out,
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Those fears and worries were definitely part of him, but they didn’t represent the totality of his being. Instead, from his hub at the center of the wheel, which was the most thoughtful and objective part of himself, he could choose how much attention to give them, as well as which other rim points he wanted to focus on.
The danger is that the temporary state of mind can be perceived as a permanent part of their self. The state comes to be seen as a trait that defines who they are.
The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.
By directing our attention, we can go from being influenced by factors within and around us to influencing them.
One reason kids often don’t express the complexity of a particular emotion is that they haven’t yet learned to think about their feelings in a sophisticated way that recognizes the variety and richness within them. As a result, they don’t use a full spectrum of emotions in their responses, and instead paint their emotional pictures primarily in black and white.
The nervous system extends throughout our body, functioning like powerful antennae that read the different physical sensations from our five senses. Then we draw on the images from the right hemisphere of the brain, combining these with the feelings that arise from the right brain and the limbic system. Then ultimately we link everything together with the conscious thoughts that originate in our left hemisphere and the analytical skills from our upstairs brain. SIFTing
All of the points on the rim—sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts—can influence the others, and together they create our state of mind.
Interpersonal integration means that we honor and nurture our differences while cultivating our connections with one another.
When interacting with our kids, it can be extremely helpful to decipher whether they’re in a reactive or receptive state of mind.
When we break through our children’s defensiveness and their reluctance to accept responsibility, we can help them be thoughtful about others they’ve hurt, and make an effort toward reconnection.
Mindsight permits children to sense the importance of the inner life of thoughts and feelings. Without such development, behaviors become just interactions a child responds to from the surface, something to “deal with” as an automatic reaction without reflection.
because through mirror neurons and implicit memory, we directly pass on our emotional life to our children—for
When you’ve become the active author of your life story and not merely the passive scribe of history as it unfolds, you can create a life that you love.
