Hellobee

Earlier this year, we were wrestling with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation with our son. Sometimes he would be the sweetest, most loving child ever, and other times he would turn into someone we just didn’t recognize: angry, defiant and sometimes even violent. We focused on love languages and upped the snuggles, and it all made a huge difference. My son is much more securely attached to us as parents, and that has made parenting so much easier.

But something still bothered me. A lot of the books about attachment issues say that “disrupted attachments” are often caused by serious traumas: an adoption, a change in custody, foster care, or child abuse. From my admittedly biased perspective, my kids seem to have a pretty good life! They don’t seem to have the sort of traumatic history that would result in attachment issues. So what in the world could be causing my son to doubt my love for him, and why was he wrestling with maintaining a secure attachment?

I kept on reading about attachment, and finally found the answer in a book series called, “Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control” by Heather Forbes and Bryan Post. There are three books in the series: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Dare to Love. Heather and Bryan are both Licensed Clinical Social Workers, and Heather adopted two kids from Russia – and struggled with attachment issues firsthand. Their books blew my mind, and transformed my understanding of parenting. And they finally explained to me why my son was doubting my love for him.

DISCIPLINE AND CONSEQUENCES

I’ve always been a big believer in discipline and boundaries. They’ve worked great for my daughter, and worked well for my son for the first few years of his life. But over time, they stopped working and so we started looking for alternative approaches.

One alternative we explored was from the book “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.” It was a form of discipline called natural consequences; for example, if your child borrows an item and returns it damaged, the owner of the item will be unhappy and probably won’t lend you the item again. I really related to the idea that any punishment should fit the crime: natural consequences felt like a more intuitive technique for discipline than a random punishment not tied to the action (like being put into timeout, or being grounded in your room).

Along those lines, if my son pushed his sister to the ground, then it felt natural for us to remove him from the room and take him to his room to talk about what just happened. Violence of any kind is so scary, and it feels important to set very strong boundaries. This is something I felt very strongly about and if my son acted up, we worked hard to establish firm boundaries and limits right away.

Well that sounded great in theory, but it did not work very well in practice. Removing him from the room would result in a huge tantrum, and talking with him would reveal an angry and unrepentant child. We tried switching to “time-ins” instead of time-outs, where we would go with him into his bedroom instead of putting him in his room alone. That didn’t really help either though, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

When my son acted up, I would often have no idea what was going through his mind. I’d make some wild guesses: maybe he felt jealous he wasn’t getting attention, or maybe he was angry that I had sent him to his room. I’d often assign all sorts of emotions to him, and act accordingly. Sometimes it works, but more often it blew up in my face.  Still though, I felt I had to do *something* and so we kept up the discipline and natural consequences.

THE BEYOND CONSEQUENCES MODEL

The Beyond Consequences folks rocked my world with a crazy theory: that there are only two primary emotions: Love and Fear.

Fear is caused by stress. Quick example: I took my son to visit a friend recently, and we had a fun day. But then we grabbed dinner and afterward he just wouldn’t listen to me, and started running towards the street even as I shouted at him to stop. I was so scared, and thankfully was able to catch up with him and pick him up. I told him that he had lost the privilege of walking without holding hands, and he fired back that he didn’t love me and that he wouldn’t listen to anything I said.

My first reaction was deep embarrassment: this was all happening on the streets of Brooklyn, and people were staring at me. Then I thought back to the Beyond Consequences book. If there are only two emotions, then he must have been in a state of fear to run off like he did. And clearly I was definitely in a state of fear myself: nothing scares me more than a threat to my kids’ safety. So after giving myself a little time to cool down, I had a talk with my son. I said, “You must’ve been really scared to run off like that! Are you ok?” After we talked for a while, he told me that he had felt like I didn’t love him any more, so he wanted to run away from me. We talked about his feelings for a while, and how scared he must’ve been feeling like I didn’t love him.

Once he had come down from his place of fear, I asked him what I could do to make him feel loved. He said the oddest thing: he told me that for him to feel loved, I would have to repeat “everything” that he said. Then he started saying some random things and for about a minute, I repeated them all back even though some of them were nonsensical. He started laughing and I told him that I loved him. He said that I didn’t tell him “I love you” enough, and I objected: I feel like I tell him I love him all the time! He said that it still wasn’t enough, and that he wanted to hear it 800 million times. So I said it a few times more, and I could tell that he had come back to that place of love. Then we talked about running away and not listening, and he promised not to do it again.

The idea that there are only two emotions, Love and Fear, has greatly simplified parenting for me. When he is in a place of Love, he is the good Dr. Jekyll. When he is in a place of Fear, he becomes the angry Mr. Hyde. My job as a parent is to get him to that place of Love, and then there’s no need for any discipline or behavioral modification: he’s a very warm and loving child, and naturally wants to please his parents.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

The tricky part of managing my son’s behavior is how quickly things sometimes seem to spiral out of control. We’ll enter a negative feedback cycle: he will do something that scares me, and I will get scared and sometimes even become angry. Then his behavior will escalate, and things go from there.

The Beyond Consequences book floated a pretty touchy feely idea: that maybe my anger was coming from a childhood experience of my own. At first I scoffed at the idea, but then I remembered that childhood was a pretty stressful time for a number of reasons, and I’ve blocked out a lot of it. But in the interest of moving past all this, I thought long and hard and unpacked those memories.

I remember that one of my siblings just never listened to my parents, and it caused years of agony for everyone involved. I remember thinking, “Ugh, why don’t they just LISTEN!!!” It made life miserable and I had a lot of anger and resentment over it for years. But over time, I let it all go and it’s not something I’ve thought about in a long, long time. I realized with great surprise though, that these memories were still very much a part of my life and were affecting my parenting! When my son wouldn’t listen, I would have a flashback to that same thought: Ugh, why doesn’t he just listen?? And I would map the same anger and resentment and powerlessness onto him that I had felt as a kid myself.

Once I realized this, I realized that I’m no longer powerless and am able to short-circuit the cycle before it starts. Now when my son acts up, I still have those flashes of anger and resentment – but I see clearly now that it’s my own childhood triggering me, not my son’s. I get past it much more quickly now, and am able to make it about him and not me. I get past the fear and get us both to a place of love, and the change has been unbelievable.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

I always thought of myself as a loving parent, but I realize that I’ve been parenting from a place of fear, using a heavy dose of discipline and consequences. That works for a lot of kids (including my daughter), but for whatever reason, my son is highly sensitive and doesn’t respond well to discipline. So I’ve been trying out unconditional love, as described in Volume 2 of Heather and Bryan’s book:

Unconditional love is love without requiring anything in return — love no matter what. It is telling your child, “I love you” without expecting him* to say “I love you” in return. Love is asking your child, “What’s wrong, Billy? You seem upset.” while in return getting, “I don’t want to talk about it! I hate you!” yet still not reacting with negativity. Love is accepting that your child is in a state of fear when he is not able to connect with you at that moment. Love responds to such dysregulation by saying, “I’m here when you are ready, Billy.” ….

Love stays focused on the relationship and the experience, not the outcome. Love trusts that if the experience is void of fear, the outcome will take care of itself. If the child is asked to take the garbage out and he refuses to do so, the parent stops and focuses on the relationship. The parent recognizes that there must be a disconnect between the parent and the child and moves in to repair the disconnect, recognizing that the garbage is secondary at this moment. The parent says to the child, `You seem pretty stressed right now. Hard day at school?”

I have to admit: when I first read about the power of unconditional love in parenting, I was pretty skeptical. I believe so strongly in my core in immediately establishing boundaries and discipline. But it just wasn’t working with my son, so I was open to trying out something different. And wow, has unconditional love worked for him! And what we’ve done is move those conversations about boundaries to later, after the fear has passed. A quick example from Volume 2 of Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control:

Most importantly, love allows children to have their emotional space. When children have emotional space, free of fear, free of judgment, free of control, they then have the capacity to find their own way back to love. Love recognizes that the teaching of the life lesson is only effective when the child is regulated and back in relationship. So later that night, mom sits with her son and says, “Today when you stomped off and whispered those words under your breath, it was disrespectful to me. I understand you were frustrated, but I know we can work this out in a nicer way between the two of us. Would you work on this with me?”

Now when my son acts up, I have a game plan for handling the crisis – and know that we will talk about things later (including any consequences). Just knowing that there’s a game plan gives me a lot of comfort in the moment. It’s also taught me that for him, threats are never the way to go – especially in the moment.

I used to rely a lot on threats and bribes; my personal favorite was the bribe-threat, where first you offer a bribe and then you threaten to take it away. “Do you want to go to the playground with your sister tomorrow? Then you’d better put away your toys!” But things like this push him into a place of fear, and in the heat of a crisis, he needs love. It is extremely counter-intuitive for me to respond to poor behavior with unconditional love. I worry a lot about raising entitled kids, and the idea of having no consequences for poor behavior goes against everything I believe in.

But moving the conversation about consequences to later has been working for us. And unconditional love has been working wonders on my son’s behavior. I’ve been slowly moving from fear-based parenting to love-based parenting, and it’s turned out to be just what my son needs.

If you’re interested, here are links to the books in the series. I personally found Volume 2 to be the best read for non-adoptive parents (it got a 4.6/5 stars rating on Amazon, while the other two books got a 4.5/5 stars):

• Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control: Volume 1
• Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control: Volume 2
• Dare to Love

One last note: I agree with the “most helpful” Amazon review on the first volume that says, “I am skeptical about some of the supporting explanations for behavior the authors advance. … On the other hand, I would feel foolish contradicting it without more information. Instead, I urge readers not to dismiss the rest of the book without further reflection. The advice given by the book is eye-opening and often very helpful. I found that it made good sense. So I gave it try. With our own adopted child, we have seen a night-and-day difference in his behavior which I believe directly reflects the efficacy of the book’s general recommendations.”

That was my experience: I was pretty skeptical of some of the explanations offered by the authors (along with some of the possible causes of disrupted attachment). But wow, did these techniques work for my son! If you’re struggling with your own little Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this book is one of the few that made a big difference for me.