This is a bit longer than my usual posts, and comes in three parts!
FACILITATING TRUE RESILIENCE IN CHILDREN THROUGH LISTENING TO CRYING AND RAGING AFTER STRESSFUL EVENTS
There is a lot of talk nowadays about how to help children be resilient.
What I love about Aware Parenting is that it sees that children have inbuilt natural mechanisms to help them be truly resilient.
When we go into any new situation, we carry our past experiences with us.
If the present situation reminds us of something painful from the past, the painful experiences from the past will show up.
If children didn’t have the opportunity to express those feelings in a loving, supportive environment, those feelings will show up again, apparently about the present moment.
This can lead to children being reluctant to try new things, or being scared of new experiences, or rushing headlong into new things without awareness.
The wonderful thing is that they have these amazing healing mechanisms. They are born with them.
When a child experiences something stressful, which for them might be spending a day in a shopping centre or their parents being stressed or being separated from their parents, their body naturally goes into hyperarousal.
This is the body and nervous system doing its thing – ready to fight or flee.
Physiologically, this includes the production of stress hormones, an increase in heart rate, the inhibition of digestion, and blood flow is sent to the arms and legs (to fight or run).
Where fight or of flight isn’t possible, the child might go into freeze mode or to dissociate – where there is reduced physical movement and reduced heart rate – originally to be less likely to be seen by a predator.
After the stressful event, the body has natural ways to release this stress in the body.
Those main ways are:
Crying and raging;
Therapeutic and symbolic play;
Laughing and talking.
Children will often try to heal spontaneously after stressful events, using these mechanisms.
They might come home from preschool using the same words that were used by another child to them, wanting to heal through play.
They might try to cry, rage or tantrum, to release those stress hormones.
Emotional tears contain stress hormones. They literally help children feel less stressed.
Vigorous movement during the crying and raging helps release the energy held in the limbs that was mobilised, ready to fight or flee.
Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t often understand these amazing mechanisms that babies and children are born with.
As parents, we may often try to stop the crying or raging, or stop the play.
Unfortunately, this means that instead of being released, the stress hormones in a child’s body build and accumulate.
These are literally stress hormones that remain in their body.
Those accumulated feelings lead to agitation and discomfort.
They make it hard for children to feel relaxed enough to concentrate, cooperate, sleep, and sit still.
They can accumulate and lead to hitting, biting and throwing.
They can show up in numbing, such as withdrawal and isolation.
The feelings need to be held in – often through things like thumb sucking or using a dummy, hair twirling or repetitive behaviours.
They can lead to somatic experiences such as digestion issues and headaches.
And in terms of the resilience we talked about above, the more accumulated stress and feelings a child has, the more likely that they are either going to be afraid of new experiences, or rush headlong into anything new without listening in to their bodies.
The more accumulated stress and painful feelings a child has, the more that will affect their day to day life.
The less they are free to meet each new situation as it is, and the more they carry past feelings which affect present situations.
The wonderful thing is that our children retain these mechanisms, even if we didn’t know about them earlier on, or didn’t have the capacity to support them in these methods of emotional healing.
The more we can listen lovingly to our child’s tears and tantrums, hear their feelings, and join in with their therapeutic play, the more they can release stress from their bodies.
This helps them be more present, more resilient, feel calmer and more relaxed, be able to sleep peacefully, be more compassionate and cooperative, and be able to concentrate and think more clearly.
WHY I BELIEVE OUR CULTURE IS SO UNCOMFORTABLE WITH NATURAL HOMEOSTASIS MECHANISMS SUCH AS CRYING, RAGING, SWEATING, SHAKING, LAUGHING AND PLAYING.
I’ve been learning a lot recently about the history of human consciousness, and am applying that to modern perceptions about the body and feelings, and particularly in parenting to crying, tantrums and laughter.
In The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent talks about the lineage of ways of thinking in the West, and what jumps out at me most in that is the thousands of years of seeing the body and feelings as lesser, bad, wrong, dirty and generally to be transcended as much as possible.
About the Ancient Greek lineage, Lent says, “Plato’s metaphors reveal a strong, visceral distaste for the body.” Perceptions in Ancient India were similar; “both cosmologies… shared the idea …. [of] the body itself as something bad which shackled the soul to mortality and suffering.
These core beliefs were different to those in Ancient China: “The Neo-Confucians recognised that the spiritual goal of a human being was not to transcend their natural emotions but to harmonise their emotions…. A Neo-Confucian philosopher. Wang Yang-min…. emphasised that harmony arose from the appropriate expression of all emotions in the human spectrum…. harmony emerges not from repressing or transcending sincere emotions but from honouring each of them as they arise….”
From an Aware Parenting perspective, we are born with an amazing natural capacity to return to homeostasis after stressful events.
On a physiological level, during stressful events, our amazing bodies go into flight or fight mode, with blood flow being diverted away from the stomach, to the legs (for flight) and the arms (for fighting).
In some situations, instead of fight or flight, we may go into freeze or dissociation, which were both important in earlier times to make a predator think their prey was already dead, or to numb pain to prepare for death.
Once the stressful event has passed, our bodies have another in-built mechanism, to help us recover from all that preparation to fight or flee.
These mechanisms are crying, raging, shaking, sweating, laughing and symbolic play (all with loving support).
Tears contain stress hormones which get excreted from the body during crying. Sweating is another way that stress hormones get released.
As for the vigorous movement in raging and shaking, this is the release of stored energy that was ready for the legs to flee and the arms to fight.
Children have these inbuilt mechanisms and will often try to use them after stressful events (which could be being around us when we are stressed, going to a busy shopping centre, or even enjoyable stressful events such as birthday parties).
If we welcome these mechanisms and stay with our children, they can release those stress hormones and stored energy, leading to homeostasis and calm.
I wonder if, just as the body, sensations and feelings have been perceived as lesser in the West for thousands of years, that is why these amazing natural mechanisms have been seen as ‘evil’ and bad.
Aletha Solter says in “Tears and Tantrums”; “During the Middle Ages in Europe, many people thought that babies and children who cried or raged a lot were possessed by a demon or devil. The treatment was to have a priest exorcise the devil from the child.” In more recent times, crying and tantrums have been seen as ‘misbehaviour’ or ‘manipulation’.
Could it be that these same beliefs about these natural physiological mechanisms to bring the body back to homeostasis after stress come from those Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian beliefs about the baseness and badness of the human body and feelings?
Paradoxically, when we don’t value these natural mechanisms, (which is not surprising, since we live in a culture that has a history of thousands of years of judging feelings and the body), then these stress hormones and physical energy accumulate in a child’s body, leading to them feeling agitated, not being able to sit still and concentrate, and making it hard for them to go to sleep and stay asleep.
We may also see the effects of this in aggression (eg. hitting), or in repression (eg. thumb sucking), or dissociation (eg. frozenness).
The wonderful thing is, that because all of these mechanisms are inbuilt, we can start to cooperate with them, or cooperate with them more, in our children.
This is also reclaiming a deep trust in the body, feelings, and human beings’ capacity for healing and homeostasis.
I love that children are constantly inviting us to free ourselves from millennia of judgment and devaluing of the body and feelings.
Instead of seeing a child’s tears or tantrums after a big day out as ‘misbehaviour’ or ‘overtiredness’, imagine the difference in seeing this as their natural relaxation mechanism, helping them release the feelings of the day so that they can feel calm in their bodies and be able to sleep soundly.
WHY CRYING, RAGING, SHAKING, LAUGHING AND PLAYING AFTER STRESSFUL EVENTS IS ADAPTIVE, AND WHEN NOT DOING THOSE THINGS IS ADAPTIVE TOO!
I’ve been talking lots lately about these natural adaptive mechanisms we are all born with.
1. The adaptive capacity to be ready to fight or flee in stressful situations – with the blood flow being diverted away from the digestive system and towards the arms and legs, for fighting and fleeing.
2. If fighting and fleeing isn’t possible, we have the capacity to freeze – stillness, restricted breathing and not feeling – both to avoid being eaten, but also to reduce what we feel if we are being eaten.
(As Lawrence Cohen says in The Opposite of Worry, “relaxation, digestion and sleep can wait until after a crisis passes.”
3. After the stressful event has passed, we have more inbuilt mechanisms to help our bodies return to homeostasis. Crying releases the stress hormones in tears, sweating releases them through sweat, shaking, raging and laughing release the stored up energy in the body that was ready to be used in the fighting or fleeing.
4. If we might still be in a dangerous situation – eg there might be a sabre tooth tiger still waiting around the corner, then we also have other amazing systems to prevent us from crying, raging, laughing etc., all which would have alerted the predator to our presence. We have many physical ways, many of them to do with muscular tension to stop us from crying, raging, shaking, laughing etc.
5. These repression mechanisms also come in handy when we live in a culture that has, for thousands of years, devalued the body and feelings, and highly valued the intellect.
As I talked about above, I believe that this cultural history is one of the reasons why crying and tantrums and ‘silliness’ are often seen in some parenting paradigms as a sign of ‘misbehaviour’, ‘manipulation’ and general ‘badness’.
If we grew up in a culture where crying, tantrums, shaking, laughing and playing are seen as signs of badness, we would have used the next adaptive thing – the ability to repress those mechanisms that would release the stress hormones and tension.
If you’ve done any body psychotherapy or looked into the work of Reich and body armouring, you will probably know a lot about this!
We can use muscle tension to stop these release mechanisms.
See how this is also adaptive? If we live in a culture and a family where crying, raging, shaking etc. are judged and shamed, we will use these muscular tensions to stop the release of stress hormones and tension.
As babies and children, we fundamentally need adults around us who can signal to us that crying, raging, laughing etc. are welcome – signalled through posture and tone, through all the ways that babies and children read.
If we see from those around us that the crying, raging, shaking, laughing etc. isn’t welcome, then those mechanisms kick in to keep us safe – just as they would if we were about to cry and there was a sabre tooth tiger waiting around the corner.
So, rather than seeing the repression mechanisms that we learnt as children as wrong or bad, we can see them as another part of our bodymind system that is there to protect us.
So, with this compassionate lens, we can notice this dialogue that is often going on in us, between this inbuilt system designed to release and excrete stress from our bodies, with this other system that is designed to stop us from releasing, to protect ourselves.
One of the key ways that we can help our bodies know that we are safe now to express those tears, is being with someone else who feels comfortable with those feelings and that release in their body, who signal to us in many verbal and nonverbal ways that we can let our release mechanisms do their thing.
This is such an essential part of parenting too. If we want our children to be relatively free to stay connected with their natural stress-release mechanisms, a vital part of the work is us actually feeling comfortable with crying, tantrums, laughter and play, and signalling to them that the environment welcomes those expressions.
The more we can signal to them and communicate with them that those actions are welcome, the more they are free to use those amazing mechanisms that they’re born with, which naturally help them return to homeostasis, also freeing the relaxation, digestion and sleep that Lawrence Cohen referred to above!
If you want to learn more, I have a number of offerings which range from free courses, free live trainings, a low cost online workshop, courses with 4 weeks of live trainings, a membership, up to 1-1 mentoring.
FREE COURSES:
FREE Intro to Making Friends with Children’s Feelings
FREE Powerful Present Time Practice
FREE Intro to Attachment Play ebook
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#WHY IS MY CHILD? SERIES $33includes: Why is my child not cooperating?
Why is my child not sleeping?
Why is my child hitting, biting, pushing, taking or throwing?
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COURSES
Attachment Play Course $150 or 4 payments of $40
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MEMBERSHIP:
Aware Parenting with Marion Membership $55.55 per month