Choosing Security - Testing New Waters
This chapter begins the consolidation of the previous chapters. For the students, one thing at the beginning of the chapter was continually important.
We all have insecurities. It's okay! It's okay to not be okay!
The book asks, as I did to the class, "Where do you struggle? Where do you notice discomfort, and do you run from it? Do you keep certain emotions or other people at an arms length"?
As parents, and as the book posits as a major key to attachment theory, security is always available. We can always choose security with our children. If we mess up, or is our Shark Music and Core Sensitivities get in the way, we just rupture and focus on repair and focus on the relationship. But again, we can always choose security with one another.
As the students suggested weeks ago, discussing chapter one, they often feel alone.
Or they feel alone AND out of control.
Babies, toddlers, infants, children, adolescents, young adults, adults, students, teachers, even therapists... we all feel like this from time to time. And, not everyone has access to someone who sees our needs through our ways of asking. Not everyone has someone who can read our messages. People often have no one, and they have no one from an early age.
The goal then, is to reflect on our needs, and find just one person who can be Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, and Kind with us. This is the caregiver roadmap. We can benefit greatly from just one person who offers us access to these.
Over the last couple of years, in spending time with a class next door (the class designed for students that are significantly underprivileged and underperforming), I observed Kent offer a similar roadmap designed for students. Commitment through Strength and Kindness. Strong, Kind, Committed. My posture to the students mirrored this. Find just one person who is Strong, Kind, and Committed with you. Just have access to one, whenever possible.
Once again, as the book so eloquently states "Every heart is still seeking the love it was born to know"-
Attachment theory, and the developmental psychology research the book references, suggest this as universal. And, when we don't have access to one person who is Strong, Kind, and Committed with us, we feel lost but must find access somewhere. Access to resonance, Being-With, or some kind of experience where we can confirm we are the center of the universe, to a pet, or even through being in nature.
My visualization of finding resonance in pets, or nature, I visualize as half of the Burning Man sculpture.
The book states , 'Even into early adulthood, it is helpful and necessary for children to have someone to turn to who isn’t a peer and isn’t needy, but rather available with support, wisdom, and compassion'.
Further posited by the text is that security, or the lack of it, can be passed on. "All children find a way to incorporate their caregiver's strengths and struggles into their own unique personality"... "Parents who can't reflect on their Shark Music pass it on".
So exercise empathy with others and yourself. Learn and practice Being-With.
When we feel an unmet need, or feel discomfort, remember to reflect.
The intended focus is recognizing our struggles, start with awareness, and choosing security even if we are not accustomed to it.
This chapter also writes about Being-With as a powerful option to offering praise, as many parents do. This is proposed as a component of our self esteem. Asked of the excitement level in the class to have a discussion about self-esteem, the class was not outwardly thrilled... but they acquiesced, and many offered self-reports that self concept was not especially high. Most of them. Good grief the standards they appeared to try to meet in their roles as students, sons and daughters, employees, friends... feeling like they have to jump through impossible hoops to belong, and often feeling like they don't and never will.
Returning to the book, self esteem is a byproduct of Being-With, not of praise. We develop healthy and functional self-concept when we have one person that shows us "I like being with you because you're you, not because of what you do". Many of the student reported having a friend or sibling that offered such experience, but not all. 'Self-esteem is built from acceptance, not from praise'. What a concept, huh?
Chapter Eight is dense, though, with further concepts related to the Core Sensitivities and Shark Music, such as Fusion, Too-Precious Parenting, Protection, Clinging, etc. I told the students that we could discuss these if they had questions, but I wanted to stick to larger themes of the chapter and of the book, such as, the Bigger, Stronger, Wiser and Kind parenting mantra, that I believe can translate to our later relationships and attachments.
Remember our roadmap. Focus on the relationship.
And when we're not perfect? When we miss the mark or hurt others and rupture? Focus on repair. This helps us keep our hands on the Circle.
Wisdom is knowing our fears, our experiences, reflecting, revising, (and also knowing security is always available).
Wisdom is knowing whether we are in balance. Balance between being big, strong and kind with others and ourselves. Balance in knowing security is accessible. Balance in our reflective functioning.
And in our reflective functioning, when we see things that we regret or things that we want to change. We very often feel shame or guilt when we see things that we did, or places we've come from. It's a tradition, seemingly, that in order to learn from the past we have to feel bad for it. We see something in ourselves that we don't like and immediately go one of two places.
But we don't often embrace the possibility of another option, because we haven't known it is there. There is a third option. It is simply learning, and doing so through compassion, forgiveness, and grace of self and others. This is so important to me when dealing with parents, but in dealing with clients and students alike.
When we hold onto our negative self-appraisals, and appraisals we get from other people, (such as our caregivers), pain is inevitable. Reflective functioning can be painful. and when we have pain the psyche doesn't have a digestive tract. What we push down, we don't get to poop it out.
And as my favorite poet says-
So to find balance as a parent (or as I propose, any person), we must reflect and embrace that our pain is our way to resolution, peace, and changed relationships.
To achieve this insight, we have to think outside the box. We have to embrace possibilities that we didn't know we didn't know about. This is meta-not-knowing. Remember, the stars are out during the day, but we don't see them because we are "Dayblind". The stars are freakin' there, don't you see?!
How do we open up the realm of possibilities in our experience? Consider the exercise wherein we try to connect all of the dots using only four lines.
I made slides to show the example in the book. We can connect all the dots using four connected lines, but we have to allow ourselves to escape the rules and confines were are used to looking through. Thinking outside the box! Embracing infinite possibilities. Embracing the unknown, outside of our implicit relational knowing/procedural memory.
We can even connect the dots in three lines.
Is your mind blown? Probably not if you read the chapter before this lecture.
But can you connect all the dots in one line?
Huzzah! Envision a continuum. It can be done! Embrace infinite possibilities! We are Dayblind.
To illustrate another way, how do we win at this game? Life... parenting... seems futile.
How do we win? Surely there is no possible way... the spaces are already filled.
As parents, as people and students, we need to know we can cheat. Not in the sense of cheating on our tests or homework (ahem, don't do that), but we need to be able to cheat what we think we know. We have to hack the system, because our system probably doesn't show us everything.
We need to embrace infinite possibilities. We need to know that all of our memories, experiences, thought patterns, they are not fixed as the only operable facets in our reality. Our procedural memories, our implicit relational knowing, may be limited by our long-known understanding that there are no other possibilities or options when there are actually infinity. Always choose security. Likewise, always embrace possibilities.
Intended Takeaways: inding just one person who is Strong, Kind, and Committed; Choosing security through opening our minds to possibilities
Course Student Feedback:
-"[I was surprised by] the abuse part. How some parents are abusive, but they could have grown up that way and it's normal to them and they don't know better"
-"I learned that I am esteem sensitive and separation sensitive. I now know that I need to be aware from this and learn from it"
-"Take off your sunglasses, go into the world, and search for your 'And'"
-"This was downright my favorite class ever!!"
-"Being imperfect is perfect"
-"This book is challenging, but in a good way. It will expose and help you realize your emotions and how your parents raised you"
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