Staying Afloat
This chapter offered more review, of the overall themes of the book and of the Circle. I just hoped to make it experiential.
Remember the Circle, it evolves as such.
And for infants, it looks like this.
With ever-shifting need states, emotions, and messages in behaviors. A new need now, and now, and now...
It's a moment to moment to moment world for them (as it is for adults in many ways). As the book suggests, focus on Being-With them in the moment and in each need. Focus on what they need now, rather than what you think they may need in the future.
And, you can't spoil an infant. This notion seemed to shake the class (perhaps as much as it shook me the first time reading it). Learning from a (even very) young age that one's needs will likely be met can have a significant effect on the trajectory of one's outlook and self-concept.
Here I decided for some additional disclosure to the class, on my path as a parent. I am imperfect, and I am embracing it.
-My favorite photograph to date, of my daughter and I. I am so burned out, and obviously not Being-With or maybe even capable of it. I love the look on her face, it's so perfect. Where the hell is dada? Ladies and gentlemen, we are off the Circle.
I reflected on that (I look at this photo often), and repair whenever I see a chance.
The book suggests that with infants and toddlers, parents 'talk and talk and talk', to help them understand the world and their emotions. So I asked the class to assume the mindset of a toddler or child. Let's experience talking, and listening through security, through the mindsets of younger people.
The book offers multiple example scenarios of through Shark Music and our Core Sensitivities. I asked students to volunteer one at a time to read aloud the secure-parenting scenarios for each age group. While listening, I asked the rest of the class to pretend they were at child or toddler in these scenarios. My hope was to create an experience where students only read, and only heard secure messages for the lecture hour.
I asked them to then process what it was like to read such words, or to hear them. Particularly in envisioning what it would be like to be the parent, or the child in each scenario.
The idea? If it sounds too easy, as the book posits it may, it's because these Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, and Kind messages of security may or may not exist as learned in our implicit relational knowing. Our procedural memory and our mirror neuron system can make sense of these messages, or may do so with discomfort, or not at all.
Every time we know security with someone (or don't). Every time we know we are not alone (or that we are), it wires as an experience in our psyche. For painful, lonely experiences, to me, every time we have an experience like this is like putting on a pair of sunglasses, one after another, until we are looking through hundreds or thousands of pairs of sunglasses at once. The world can seem very dark. Every repeated experience of being alone is another pair of sunglasses on top of the rest.
Here is a single experience of being-without.
All of the accumulating layers of sunglasses, the darkness, can be overwhelming, or maddening.
How does any light get in?.. We continued reading and listening through security.
We continued to process these words of security. Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, and Kind. I asked the students to find these elements if they could in the scenarios, or any elements or fortune cookies we covered through the text.
I reminded them of the following sensitivities during the readings.
-Separation Sensitive Shark Music warns us to defend ourselves against being alone.
-Esteem Sensitive Shark Music tells us that praise always trumps emotional pain.
-Separation Sensitive Shark Music tells us that self-sufficiency can resolve emotional pain.
*****
I then took the class right back where we started (even before chapter one, when I first met with them and even introduced myself). I asked again- What do humans need? What causes suffering?
The students had a lot of deep answers. From Being-With, to connection, to not being alone, to Strong-Kind-Committed mentors and peers. We talked about how their experience in this chapter and in this book matched with what was proposed by the chapter as far as the needs of parents.
Humans need connection. Just as they had known the first time they were asked, before opening or receiving the text. We need "and".
From cradle to grave.
I stole these images off Kent's Facebook page with the hopes he will forgive me later for using them. I wanted to drive the experience home.
Humans need connection.
From the book, the last page- 'We all love. We all Struggle. "And" is always hidden in plain sight'.
Intended Takeaways: Speaking and listening through security, experientially
Course Student Feedback:
-"I love the idea of rupture and repair"
-"The goal is to be imperfect"
-"It's scary at first, but with baby steps and some deep thinking you'll be on your way to learn a hidden world of human nature"
-"Imperfection is the key to perfection"
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