Parenting Process Workshop, June 4, Los Angeles

Most parents want help with their children's behavior. It is the meaning of a child's behavior that is essential for parents to understand. When parents have a way to attune to and attend to the emotions of their children, meeting their needs, the behavior of the child changes because the family system changes --both the child and parents benefit -- as does their relationship.

I am looking forward to presenting a Parenting Process Workshop. It will be held at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis on Saturday, June 4, from 10-5. The fee will be $95 per person and $150 per couple and lunch will be provided.

This workshop is designed for parents, new or experienced, living together, separated, divorced, or who live in alternatively-structured families and want to have warmer, deeper relationships with their children.

There are two parts to the Parenting Process. The first part is called the Legacy and helps parents understand their own “tender spots.” Parents who recognize when their child is “poking” a tender spot and know what to do about it are much more able to interrupt difficult relationship patterns from repeating. The second part of the Parenting Process is called Understanding Emotional Development. This section explores the themes of bonding, mirroring, and differentiating and helps parents develop the skills to support these themes. The workshop includes experiential exercises, lecture, and of course questions and answers.

The workshop is also open to mental health professionals. Please share this announcement with anyone you think might have an interest in attending -- parent or professional. Please contact me at my office 310-821-0502, if you would like more information or if you would like to register for the workshop.

Putting It All Together

Putting it all Together

When communicating with kids, keeping all three parenting process guidelines in mind creates an outline for how to be in a relationship, how to be with our children’s feelings, while still being ourselves.

Once again, here are The Parenting Process guidelines:


1. BONDING

: MAKE CONTACT. PROTECT THE BOND; DO NOT THREATEN EITHER EMOTIONAL ABANDONMENT OR INVASION.



2. MIRRORING: MIRROR AND REFLECT YOUR CHILD’S FEELINGS WITH EMPATHY.



3. DIFFERENTIATING
: REMEMBER YOUR CHILD IS DIFFERENT FROM YOU, WITH DIFFERENT THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS.

Using these guidelines, parents will nourish children to recognize and express their own
feelings and have empathy for others. These children have a better chance to grow into adults who are not torn between their need for intimacy and their need for independence. These children will be better prepared to meet the emotional demands of the future and to nurture the life of our planet.

Now that I have introduced you to The Parenting Process and shared my philosophy. The next posts will be about how to put this all into practice. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Differentiation

The Parenting Process Guidelines: Differentiation

Let's consider the third developmental theme.

REMEMBER YOUR CHILD IS DIFFERENT FROM YOU,

WITH DIFFERENT THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS

Differentiation is the psychological process in which adults and children differentiate themselves -- each clarifying and communicating a unique emotional identity in a context of connectedness. Differentiation means developing and managing a fluid, sense of boundaries that delineate each of us emotionally in our relationships. Another word to describe emotional boundary might be emotional interface, the contact boundary where two people meet in transaction.

Our children’s ability to delineate and manage their boundaries safely depends on our acceptance, support, and acknowledgment of their motivations, and their regulated and disregulated affects. The recognition of the existence of our children’s autonomous feelings supports them experiencing the value of their existence. When we address our children’s emotions and their meanings as differentiated from their actions, mirroring their emotions and setting limits with their actions, we socialize them without crushing their spirits. Drawing a firm line that protects a child and mirroring the protest allows us to take care of children without “winning” or “losing” a power struggle. When discussing our own feelings it is important to own them by using the pronoun I in our interactions with children e.g. I want instead of you need….

Recognition and acceptance of emotional differences creates the safety that nourishes the development of children’s capacities for:

The right to have and use their own mind

Self-representation

Internal narrative

A sense of interiority

The expansion of intimate relationships

Mirroring

The Parenting Process Guidelines: Mirroring

Let's consider the second developmental theme.

Empathic mirroring offers children the experience of feeling seen, heard, understood and taken seriously as you validate their communication. Infants and children bring themselves to us through their feelings and their actions. Because we human beings are more alike than different, we all know what it is like to feel joy, sadness, despair, love, pleasure, fear, anger, disappointment, etc. The process of empathic mirroring is one of imagining ourselves in our children’s “emotional shoes” and being able to convey to them what we believe they are feeling. Empathic mirroring includes both verbal and non-verbal recognition of the intensity, color, tone and meaning of our children’s communication. When we validate children’s feelings with empathy we communicate a sense of caring curiosity and a desire to elaborate our understanding. When we verbally reflect the emotions of children and match their affects with our tone of voice and facial expressions in a way that explores rather than defines their meaning, we make room for adjustments in our understanding based on their responses. Feeling with children also increases our compassion, even if their behaviour at first is disturbing or not comprehensible. Compassion lets children know that we are with them, connected – that they are not alone.

By distinguishing feelings from actions and exploring with children what we believe is being emotionally communicated, we have a chance to learn and discover together more about the meaning of their behavior.

This exploration of meaning can also help transform toxic meanings that kids have arrived at on their own, to new, co-created meanings that nourish development i.e. “my frustration at attempting to master a task doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It means sometimes the process of learning new things is hard and frustrating”.

Recognizing children’s emotions validates their individual existence, making it safe for them to express their genuine feelings in their relationship with us.

Kids need to feel that they have been successful at communicating who they are, and that their emotions can be held and tolerated, thus expanding their ability to contain and tolerate the intensity of their own feelings without becoming disorganized or fragmented. Additionally, when children become overwhelmed and fragmented, being seen and heard is calming. Thus, we can help kids regain their emotional balance through accurate enough mirroring. In addition, being mirrored develops the capacity for self-reflection and teaches children to verbally identify and communicate their feelings. This means children develop an increasing ability to talk to parents instead of trying to be understood and recognized by dramatizing their feelings through their actions.

Mirroring is a process that both strengthens the connection and supports the unfolding of individual differences in the relationships between parents and children.

When we empathize with our children’s feelings, it doesn’t mean we agree with their meaning or interpretation of events. We have the ability to empathize and still stay connected to our own feelings, to tolerate the emotional expression of others while still feeling ourselves when either does not overwhelm us. Mirroring our children’s emotions can also give us the emotional space to regulate ourselves. Instead of on-going power struggles, and repeated misunderstandings, mirroring a child’s emotions while setting limits or while negotiating differences creates the real possibility of conflict leading to growth. Mirroring also gives us a way to recognize our contribution to our children’s upset feelings by validating their experience instead of discounting them. This gives us a way to repair misunderstandings. By remembering that we are not perfect (and neither are our kids) we can better to tolerate the shame of our own missteps, this in turn supports our children’s ability to tolerate the shame of their missteps. Thus neither parent nor child need feel humiliation, shame or loss of self-esteem or intimacy.

Without accurate enough mirroring children are confronted with having to choose between the bond with their caregivers or their own feelings. Most children instinctively choose the bond, and disavow their own feelings as a natural unconscious reaction to protect the empathy they depend on to survive.

THE PARENTING PROCESS GUIDELINE FOR MIRRORING IS:

MIRROR AND REFLECT YOUR CHILD’S FEELINGS WITH EMPATHY

To accurately mirror another:
Listen for and identify a specific emotion you hear and then reflect it back, conveying through tone and intensity that you get as best you can the experiential feel of their communication.

For example: My little girl comes home from school with castdown eys and says, "Nobody likes me." And instead of trying to reassure her by telling her not to be silly, I say in a matching soft tone, "You sound so sad. Feeling like nobody likes you? Sounds like you had a really hard day". A mirroring response will lead to an opening of a genuine opportunity for connection.

My little one saying,"Yes, mommy. I'm sad. Suzie wouldn't sit next to me today and yesterday she was my best friend."gives us a place to start.

Empathic mirroring is a heart skill, and like any skill improves with practice.

The Parenting Process Guidelines: Bonding

Let's consider the first developmental theme:

BONDING

In truth, bonding begins even before a baby is born and continues for a lifetime. We never outgrow our need for secure attachments. We can understand bonding as shared attention and shared engagement between parents and children.

Infants bond through their experiences of:
Scent
Touch
Tone of voice
Facial recognition
And Emotional energy

Parents often amplify their babies’ joy through eye contact. Additionally, using a gently rising tone of voice expands the babies’ ability to tolerate intensity. Parents also use touch and tone of voice to soothe painful affects, which helps babies develop self-soothing abilities.

In addition, parents and children often experience what is called “separation anxiety.” Its purpose is to keep parents and children in close enough proximity and contact to protect them from danger. This anxiety is also part of the non-verbal language of bonding. Adults (both men and women) experience separation anxiety when their babies are in distress.

Babies and children also can experience separation anxiety when they lose contact with their mommies and daddies. For example, I’m 18 months old and looking at a leaf, I look up see my caregiver, and return my attention to the leaf. Or, I look up and don’t see my caregiver, drop the leaf, and anxiously look for him or her.

When adults have an experience of anxiety upon hearing their child in distress, they want to take actions that relieve the cry of distress in the child, which also relieves their own anxiety. This empathy moves us to feed, soothe, and warm our babies. When infants and children become more regulated as their needs are met, the distress changes to satisfaction, and we become more regulated as well.


THE PARENTING PROCESS GUIDELINE FOR BONDING IS:

MAKE CONTACT. PROTECT THE BOND; DO NOT THREATEN EITHER EMOTIONAL ABANDONMENT OR INVASION.

Let's consider what this means.

In making contact with our kids, we need to be sensitive to their non-verbal body language in order not to activate stress responses which will interfere with our ability to connect.

Are they present or dissociated? Are their muscles very tense? Do they appear collapsed? Are they averting their gaze? If we physically move too close or too far away, depending on the sensibilities of each unique child, we may trigger a defensive reaction in our relationships, no matter what our words are. Changing our rhythm from chase and dodge to contact and play depends on our ability to stay present enough to track ourselves and our kids in order to create a rhythm of safe contact. Sensitivity to non-verbal cues also lets us track when we are verbally “too close or too far away” for our kids to feel safe and inhibits us from making verbal threats like, “If you don’t listen and get in the car right now, I will leave you in the supermarket!”

Remember: having a non-verbal experience of either invasion or abandonment can disrupt the feeling of closeness.

Welcome to the Parenting Process

My name is Eileen Paris, Ph.D., and I am a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in California. I have been listening to the needs of children and families for more than forty years. In addition, I co-authored the book, "I'll Never Do To My Kids What My Parents Did to Me!" A Guide to Conscious Parenting (available through Amazon) and have given numerous presentations and seminars to mental health professionals and educators around the world.

I have developed a model for parent education called, The Parenting Process. In order to bring a psychological change to our “global society”, we not only need a vision, but also a healing intervention. To become more fully ourselves, more related to others and our planet, we must begin with the way that we parent. I am speaking here of raising children who have a sense of self, and who experience their capacity to live in relationship. Raising emotionally healthy children touches the concerns of all of us because a foundation of emotional health underlies our ability to maintain a connection with ourselves, each other and our planet.

It is crucial to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. As Theodore Roszak states in The Voice of the Earth., “....as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.” He continues... “The great changes our runaway industrial civilization must make if we are to keep the planet healthy will not come about by the force of reason alone or the influence of fact. Rather, they will come by way of psychological transformation.”

The goal of the Parenting Process is to enable children to develop an experience a positive sense of self. Children who can recognize and express their own unique feelings and still have empathy for others will grow into adults who are not torn between their need for intimacy and for independence.These children will be more prepared to meet the emotional demands of the future and to nurture the life of the planet.

The Parenting Process draws on the theories of developmental psychology, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and infant research and is a culmination of years of practice as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and infant mental health specialist. I have taken my experience as a parent and grandparent, as well as my education as a professional and have developed an original method that serves to facilitate a healthy parent-child relationship.

Here is an Outline of the Parenting Process.

Part One:

Legacies: When we interpret experiences with our children in the present through the emotional lens of our own early painful experiences, we can miss understanding and attending to their meanings and developmental needs. I call this susceptibility a “tender spot”. We are going to explore together how we can begin to identify our own history of “tender spots.”

Fragmentation: When “tender spots” organize our interpretation of an experience our nervous system can become dysregulated. The meaning or intensity of the feeling can overwhelm our sense of safety, and we can potentially lose our sense of emotional balance and our bodily sense of well-being.

Grounding: Refers to regaining our emotional balance, our bodily sense of well-being. Instead of being caught in repetitive and painful interpretations of events, regaining a more regulated state of calm and presence often helps us give more attuned attention to both the needs of our kids and ourselves.

Part Two: Understanding Our Children’s Emotional Development

Healthy relationship patterns support a child’s ability to have relationships in which both self and other matter. We are going to look at using three developmental themes that underlie our abilities to create healthy relationships.

1. Bonding refers to the lifelong process of attachment and connection, which infuses the organization of safety and trust. When children can rely on the connection to their caregivers for attuned nurturing, they feel safe. Babies acquire the knowledge of safety and trust through their emotions. Emotional safety nurtures physical and emotional development.

2. Mirroring: refers to the process of providing a child with the experience of feeling seen, heard, understood, and taken seriously. Children need to feel they have been successful at communicating their emotions and that their emotions can be held, tolerated, contained, and regulated by their parents. Mirroring is a process that both strengthens the connection and supports the unfolding of individual differences in the relationships between parents and children.

3. Differentiating: refers to the process of delineating self and other in a relationship. When parents can recognize and support the right of their children to have distinct feelings of their own, they learn to differentiate themselves in a relationship safely. This enables children to experience an expanding sense of authorship of their own lives as they grow and to experience having their own mind. Deep authentic emotional closeness takes place in a dialogue between two connected, yet delineated people.

In my next blog I will discuss guidelines that support these themes and provide an opportunity for skill building. Putting the guidelines together gives us a way to think about a healthy parent/child relationship that interrupts painful family legacies from being handed down.