Sharing our Insides

For the next few days I encourage you to pay attention to what you say and how you treat those you most care about. Listen to the words you use and how you say and use them. Pay attention to the emotional state or feeling behind your words and actions. Are you feeling irritated or angry? Maybe you feel lonely or disconnected like nothing much matters. Perhaps you are joyful or light hearted and you feel like nothing could change this good mood. Or maybe you are feeling bored. There is so much more in how we communicate than necessarily what we communicate.

When something is bothering you it is very difficult to shake the bother out. It sticks with you unless you just deny what bothers you and act like it doesn’t matter. Attempting to identify and sift out emotional responses can be very difficult for some. For others it comes easily and they know exactly how they are feeling and are able to identify the feeling. This is an incredibly important skill.

In the language of attachment, this is the ability of reflection. We are able to step back and observe our emotional reactions without being consumed or controlled by them. You are then able to talk about what you are feeling with some degree of objectivity. Reflection also includes our thoughts and physical sensations. It is self awareness of our internal life and without it we are unable to understand ourselves and consequently unable to empathize and emotionally connect with someone else.

Most of us have some capacity for reflection or self awareness. It is developed in the flow of our primary family relationships and it is directly related to our degree of emotional security. Children of chaotic, abusive, or emotionally neglectful families have very little capacity for identifying and communicating their emotional states. In emotionally charged moments they are likely to be caught up in a sea of swirling and sometimes violent emotions which carries them along in a fearful rush. They are emotionally hijacked and the thinking, self observing part of their brain, the prefrontal cortex, is disengaged. The only thing that is communicated is raw, negative feeling. And it likely overwhelms whoever is on the receiving end.

For the majority of us who are able to manage our emotional reactions and actions in the heat of the battle, we still experience them, along with negative thoughts and physical reactions to the battle. And we need to do something with them. If as children we were able to go to our parent and receive comfort, support and understanding then we likely are able to seek someone out and do the same thing.

It is very important that we realize how much we need each other to do this. Too often we stuff what we are experiencing inside. As you’re paying attention to the emotional background of your words and actions and you become aware of your thoughts and feelings, let the other person in on your experience. It is amazing how this simple act of sharing our insides opens the door to healing and deeper intimacy.

I have recently become aware of the connection for me between feeling bored and over eating. This might be obvious to many of you but it was a revelation to me. I never really realized how often I felt bored and that I really did not know what to do with the feeling. I had no self awareness or capacity for reflection regarding feeling bored. And I dealt with the emotional agitation this caused by eating. I am learning to pay more attention to when I am feeling bored and what is boring me. I am talking about this with my wife and other people I trust. And I am consuming fewer calories, and letting my wife get to know more of me.

 

Kids Without Shame

There were a couple of new events recently that caught anyone’s attention who saw them. One was the brutal beating of a young girl shown on You Tube by her so called friends and the other was a report on out of control behavior by students on spring break. According to the Florida story on www.momlogic.com spring break is not what it used to be. The extent and degree of drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity is significantly increased from twenty, fifteen and even ten years ago. If any of you went on spring break during those years then you can imagine how severely dysfunctional and self destructive the behavior must be for it to be considered distressingly worse. No wonder parents worry about their kids.

The O’Reilly Factor reported on this story and had a “Family Therapist” on to discuss and analyze the issue. Like the “animalistic beating” of the teenage girl by a gang of “girlfriends” these students were displaying and strutting their stuff for a camera and the video finds its way to the internet. After a shallow and silly comment by the family therapist that the problem is due to extended adolescence without adult responsibility O’Reilly redirects that a significant factor to this display of extreme behavior is a lack of shame. That is, they do not care who sees them. That is the point of shame; not wanting to be seen. If you have a sense of shame, you want to keep your shameful behavior in the dark so no one knows what you did. If you lack shame you put it on display and shove it into peoples’ faces.

Lack of shame is a calloused and hardened place to be. Most likely, many of the kids on spring break will wake up horrified by what they did and said for all to see once they are not under the influence of substances. The beating of the young girl is another story. There is no report that they were “under the influence” of anything other than brutal rage. All of this raises significant questions for our culture.

The two commentators rightly conclude that a lack of parenting plays a significant role in lack of shame. That begs the question how parenting affects the development of shame. A lack of shame reflects an absence of value, meaning and purpose. Kids without shame are those kids that have figured out whether consciously or not that they are on their own. Their lives feel purposeless, meaningless and valueless because they believe deeply in their being that what they do doesn’t matter to anyone. So what does it matter how they act or who sees it?

The most effective parents are those who have a meaningful relationship with their child. Their child knows, despite all the struggles, battles, arguments, and drama that their parents love them more than they love themselves. These are not “helicopter parents” hovering endlessly over their kids directing and protecting them. These are parents who genuinely love being with their kids and invest their lives in giving them life. Their kids know their life has value, meaning, and purpose because what is more important than anything else, more important than what they do or how successful they are or what kind of trouble they cause, is having a relationship with their child. “You are my son or my daughter and I love having you as a part of my life.”