13
Listening
Connection is a two-way street
What are our deepest aspirations for our children? We want them to grow in physical and emotional health, with the capacity to love and be loved, to know themselves and what they want from life, and to have the confidence to go for it. We want to enjoy close and trusting bonds with them, and we want them to have clear personal boundaries and respect for others. All of these goals flow from the quality of connection we establish and maintain with our children, and connection relies on two-way communication. Later, we will look at how our own clear and emotionally authentic communication is the key to a strong, intimate and caring connection with our child, and how this authenticity is what makes interpersonal boundaries very clear (see chapter 14). In other words, the way we speak, the way we share our thoughts and feelings, is half of what decides the quality of connection with our children. The other half is determined by the way we listen to them.
Listening is the crux of human connection. It mends broken relationships and resolves conflicts. Listening carefully to our children’s feelings, from the beginning of their lives, is the best insurance for their considerate and caring behaviour. Best of all, when we make the space and time to hear – and be touched by – our children’s feelings, we can help them to heal from painful or traumatic experiences. Listening is crucial; it’s so important not to begrudge the time, attention and compassion it requires from us. Lending an ear to our child is an investment that cannot possibly be overestimated. In terms of better relations and our children’s emotional health, it yields returns tenfold.
But there are more immediate and fundamental rewards than our child’s considerate behaviour. When we let down our adult guard, and really let ourselves hear our children without judgement, they can touch our hearts so deeply as to transform us forever. The purity of a child’s emotions can rock the very core of our being, if we let them, evoking from us more love, loyalty and courage than we thought we had. Although at times this scares us or makes us uncomfortable, our souls crave such depth of emotional connection, and our hearts grow from it. When we open up to hearing our children’s voices, they enrich us and provoke us to become better persons.
How do I get my children to listen to me?
This is one of the questions most frequently asked by parents. The answer lies partly with the way we speak to our children, as we will see in the following chapter, but more fundamentally, it depends on how we have listened to them. If we want our children to listen to us, the number one step is for us to become good listeners. Children listen to us in direct proportion to how well they feel heard.
Why does my child so often not listen?
It is true that there are a number of neurological and psychological conditions that make it difficult for a small minority of children to listen to others, to focus their attention, to make eye contact, or to detect and understand others’ emotions. These can include Asperger’s syndrome, autism, ADHD or even hearing impairment. If it appears chronically difficult to make contact with your child, speak to your child’s preschool or schoolteachers, and consider a diagnostic consultation with a child psychologist.
But when otherwise healthy children don’t listen, it is often a sign that they don’t feel strongly connected to us. When children’s feelings are not seen, heard and responded to, they begin to detach from us emotionally. They don’t reach out to us as much, and they lose interest in listening to us. Even the earliest life experiences of not feeling heard can have this effect, as we saw in earlier chapters.
So there may be many reasons why your child fails to listen to you sometimes, but the first question should be: How well does my child feel listened to? Perhaps your child has felt that some of his feelings have gone unheard. Fortunately, there is good news: when children have become used to not being heard and they behave accordingly, this can be remedied through patient listening.
More than likely you have listened to and responded warmly to your child most of the time, which has already stimulated your child’s natural empathy. When your child shows a genuine interest in you, it is because you have shown an interest in him.
A child’s right to receive attention
One of the most commonly heard parental laments is about how children try to get attention. So many behaviours that adults don’t like are brushed off as ‘merely’ attention-seeking devices. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ we say, ‘he is just doing it to get attention.’
When children use oblique ways to get attention, such as causing a ruckus, exaggerating or feigning their hurts, picking on other children, showing off, being coquettish – they risk being ignored or put down, as nearby adults roll their eyes in exasperation. Sometimes, this also happens to children even when they directly and openly call for the attention they crave. Instead of scorning the child, why don’t we ask these questions: When a child is being manipulative, instead of direct, how did he learn to do this? How did he come to feel that he shouldn’t openly ask for a hug, an answer to his question, sympathy or just to be noticed or played with?
All children begin their lives with complete frankness about their needs. Babies and toddlers reveal their longings with no compunction: what you see is what you get. If a child reaches out for attention and for warmth and she gets it, her ability to be open and directly assertive is reinforced. By begrudging our children’s healthy attention-seeking behaviours, we unwittingly train them to be indirect. We leave them little room for much else, so they go for the attention they need and deserve through the back door.
Our society tends to consider children’s needs for attention as a bother. No wonder children become indirect attention seekers, some even going to great lengths to fall ill or get injured in order to be noticed. Children who have too often been denied attention can become insatiable, as if no amount of limelight ever fills their cup.
Attention is life-giving, a basic need and a human right. Children deserve all the attention they want.
When you wholeheartedly give a child the attention she asks for from the beginning, she soon has her fill. This is precisely what helps her to become more autonomous. As she grows, she asks for less of your attention (research shows that well-attached babies grow into children who are more independent), and when she does want attention, she asks directly, boldly and clearly.
Punished for feeling
Time and time again children are heavily reprimanded for committing the offence of crying or being angry. Let’s get this straight: emotions are not bad behaviour. Emotions don’t hurt anyone. Suppressing children’s emotions does, on the other hand, cause them harm: over time, if done repeatedly, it unbalances their brain chemistry, it stresses their immune and digestive systems, and it undermines their ability to relate to others.
Emotional censorship starts early. One of the most common things we say to a crying baby is ‘Shhh!’ We say it soothingly, but why exactly do we shush them? Think of all the lullabies that start by telling our little babies to ‘hush’, and ‘don’t you cry’. Have you ever paused to wonder why, in trying to comfort our babies, we ask them to be quiet? It seems as if the first thing we want is for the crying to stop – instead of connecting with our baby until the reason for crying has gone.
Instead of berating your child for feeling her feelings, give her the space to feel, and comfort and support her if she needs it. Sometimes when our children cry, sob or yell in anger we feel overwhelmed, irritated or burdened. Our children don’t deserve the blame for this. When our child’s emotions press our buttons, we need to own the problem. We need to somehow honour our own need for support or rest without making our children responsible.
What does listening mean?
The listening I am talking about here is not just about receiving and storing information, not just about remembering what your child said. I am talking about listening with your heart, not just with your ears. Real listening is all about feelings. All you need to be a good listener is a genuine interest in your child’s emotional world. When you truly want to hear, no special skill is needed. Your child senses your interest in the tone of your voice, in your body language and the look in your eyes. You know you have listened when you feel moved. You might feel compassion, protectiveness, you might feel some pain about your child’s hurts, pride or excitement about his achievements, or joy to meet his joy. Listening means letting yourself feel touched somehow, and being aware of the feelings that move through you.
What listening is not
Sometimes listening comes easy. You find yourself intently listening in stillness, without even having decided to, and there is a wonderful and natural flow between you and your child. But sometimes listening can be hard. Our children’s emotions spark off our own, and in discomfort we turn away, or we try to talk them out of their feelings. Whether it’s because we cannot bear to see our children in pain or because they are freely feeling something that we were never allowed to express – anger, joy, sadness, fear, passion – we block them out, we nip the connection in the bud.
I remember the embarrassment many of us felt as students of counselling psychology as we awkwardly practised our listening skills together in the classroom, how often we appeared to be listening, while inside we were miles away, disengaged from the person speaking to us. It was often funny, and always quite confronting, to ask ourselves and each other: Are you listening right now, or just nodding your head a lot while you wait for your turn to speak? Are you actually listening, or sitting in judgement? Are you really listening, or just taking mental notes and storing facts? Are you listening, or just thinking about how you can change me?
How often we tell ourselves we are listening intently when in fact our minds are wandering elsewhere. It is unlikely that consistently good listeners exist. For most of us, good listening is a skill that comes and goes with our fluctuating moods. All counsellors, psychologists and anyone in the helping professions are imperfect (and sometimes lousy) listeners, and we should be honing our listening capacity for the rest of our lives. It is humbling to note that anyone can be a profoundly good listener without any training whatsoever, since all it takes is an open heart and an interest in the other person.
Blocking empathy
It’s a fact of human relationships that our capacity for listening is elusive; we lose it, we regain it, we lose it again. Sometimes it is hard to see whether we are listening so that our children really feel heard. We kid ourselves. We think we are listening when really we are avoiding contact – and then we are bewildered by and surprised at our child’s frustration. It can be very useful to get a clear picture of what is listening and what is not. When our own fears, our shame, our jealousies or our emotional exhaustion get in the way, we tend to play some pretty clever games to deflect our children’s communications so that their feelings won’t touch us. One of the biggest reasons we avoid listening is because our children’s disappointments make us feel guilty. Our evasive tactics are called ‘empathy blockers’. Empathy blockers save us the trouble of listening, but they cost us our connection with each other.
Sometimes we use empathy blockers inadvertently because we are anxiously trying to save our children from emotional pain. Ironically, the greatest salve for our children comes from being heard, not from us trying to change how they feel. For all of these reasons, we all use empathy blockers from time to time, quite automatically and unconsciously. You could say we are all quite skilled at blocking. Here are some of the most common examples used when children become emotional.
As you can see, on the surface most empathy blockers are not malicious, they are not ostensibly attempts to shame the child, and sometimes they can even be well intentioned, but they do not help the child to feel heard and connected to you. It might seem surprising, even bewildering, to hear that when you try to cheer up a child who is upset, this can often backfire – she might even feel more distressed, even angry. This is because she feels that her feelings are not accepted when what she actually needs is support for feeling the way she does. If this is hard to understand, then think of the last time you felt deeply upset, offended or anxious and someone told you to lighten up. How did that make you feel? Empathy blockers leave anyone on the receiving end feeling shut out and frustrated, and as if there must be something wrong with them for feeling the way they do.
Take a few moments to check this out for yourself.
Have you ever heard yourself use one, a few or perhaps even all of the above empathy blockers with your child? How did your child respond? Can you imagine what you could have done instead? Now, in case you’re tempted to become self-critical, remember: we all put up barriers to listening from time to time. Those of us who teach others about empathy blockers know them too well because we’ve used them so much ourselves.
By the way, not all of the responses in the table above are always inappropriate. There sometimes is a place for advice or a helpful opinion, but unless we take the time to hear our children’s feelings first, advice comes too soon and it alienates our child from us. Before jumping in with advice, we need to ask our children if they want it. The most important thing for us to get is that primarily, our children just want to be heard. First and foremost they want evidence that they are not alone, that someone sees how they feel and cares about them. This makes more of a difference than all the advice in the world.
Empathy blockers really muddy the connection between parents and children; they create detachment and distance, and they frustrate children’s attempts to reach out. The more we use empathy blockers, the less our children are inclined to come to us with their feelings, the less they want to tell us about their lives and the less they want to listen to us. When we are concerned that our children don’t listen to us, perhaps we need to take an honest look at how well we have listened to them.
It is sad when blocked empathy diminishes our sense of closeness with each other, and particularly worrisome when our children feel lost or in some kind of trouble but don’t turn to us for help. Our children’s trust in us is a function of how safe they feel to open up to us without feeling manipulated, expected of, judged, put down or criticised. Listening is at the heart of connection, and if we can’t listen well, we cease to be an influence in our children’s lives.
How do we listen?
Listening requires you to do nothing. There is no complex skill or special talent needed. Listening is about allowing and about feeling, not about doing. It’s more than likely that you have already been a superb listener to your child umpteen times, and that has helped you to feel connected to each other.
Let’s look at how simple listening can be. To listen, simply make a space and set aside the time. Invite or just allow your child to speak, to let his emotion flow. Let your child decide if he needs you to hold him while he talks. Notice your own reactions, the feelings that are triggered in you by your child’s emotions. Accept these feelings, but delay your own responses for a little while – give your child his space first, watch and listen openly. Resist the temptation to interpret your child’s feelings, to cheer him up or to resolve his problem; just be with him and let him pour it all out.
When your child has expressed all he needs to, you might like to reflect back to him a very simple summary of what you heard to check with him that you heard him accurately. This can help him to feel that you were with him all the way. Only after your child feels fully heard, ask him if there is anything he would like you to do for him. Would he like a hug? Would he like some help with his problem? If he is very young or can’t think of what kind of help he’d like from you, you might like to suggest the kinds of help you could offer.
Love is a space in which all other emotions can be expressed. When your child knows he can count on you to hear his feelings through, you become a sanctuary for him. The way you listen to him gives him the template by which he will take care of his own emotions as he grows up. Children who are listened to without interruption learn to process and move through even their most difficult emotions more swiftly, emerging refreshed and renewed. Our listening and acceptance becomes the model for their self-acceptance, the basis for their resilience and a cornerstone of their emotional intelligence.
Listening involves trusting your child
Listening may involve going against your impulses to quickly make your child feel better, because if you are trying to change how your child feels, she is likely to feel frustrated, ashamed of her own emotions. Listening involves doing nothing to change how your child feels, because it flows from an acknowledgement that no child ever becomes emotional for trivial reasons. There are only two reasons why any child becomes upset: either something upsetting has really happened, or something has triggered an emotional memory of something painful that occurred a long time ago. Either way, your child’s feelings are always real, they always have valid reasons, and she always deserves to be heard.
This is quite a big leap of faith that we all fail to take from time to time. It takes courage to trust your child, to trust that if you just connect with her and listen to her feelings, that is precisely what helps her to find the inner resources to get through her distress. Feelings change soon when we feel that someone has made a connection to us. Simply put: connection heals.
The moment we try to change how our children feel they resist our intervention and they are more likely to remain emotionally stuck. Our children don’t like our expectation that they should feel differently; it makes them feel disconnected from us. Have you ever noticed that children recoil from our efforts to cheer them up? They might feel even more upset when someone tries to lift them out of their grief, they might even get angry with the well-intentioned helper. Other children turn away from us; they withdraw and become defeated when we try to cheer them. The fact is, this holds true for adults also: none of us like to be told how we should feel (‘OK, you’ve cried long enough now, time to get over it’) – it makes us feel invalidated and inadequate.
Painful emotions behave paradoxically: when we give painful emotions our full acceptance, they begin to dissolve or to transform. When we try to change or eliminate them – they stay put, or they merely get buried only to resurface later. The opposite is true for love and joy: if we fully embrace those feelings, they grow, and they spread to others.
Listening is an art, not a science
Science can demonstrate to us why listening is so important and so healing, but the act of listening itself is an art. Like dance or any other creative skill, it is a faculty that we can – and should – keep honing throughout our lives, as it keeps bringing more love into our relationships. Psychologists and counsellors are professional listeners, yet none of them can say that they have no need to keep improving their listening ability in order to be more effective in their work.
What do our children want us to listen to?
If we remember how we felt as children, it’s easy to relate to our children’s longing to be heard. They want us to hear about their fears, their pain, their hurts, their anger, their joy and their delight. They want us to know about their loves, their hates, their hopes and fantasies. They want to share with us their triumphs and their failures, their stories and their dreams, their discoveries and inventions, their confusion and uncertainties.
At times, they need us to hear of their disappointments, and although this may be most confronting for us, this will include their disappointment in us. If we allow our children their voice without interference, if we respect their right to their feelings, it will do a lot to heal any rift in our connection. When our children feel understood, love flows more easily. When we speak our truth to each other, even the uncomfortable truths, this brings us back to love.
Why attention can be hard to give
The main reason we sometimes struggle to give our children the attention they ask for is that we didn’t get enough of it ourselves. Each new generation of parents does its best to give their children more than they received, but this is not always easy. Many of us were shamed or punished for having emotions, we were told things such as ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!’ Many of our role models for listening were not that great.
Exercise
Do you remember having strong emotions as a child? Think about these questions.
When you cried, were afraid, were angry, or when you were overcome with joy, how did your parents, your carers or teachers listen to you?
What kinds of things were said to you, or done for you, when you showed each of those emotions?
How did this make you feel at the time?
Now think about how you feel when your child becomes emotional.
How might the way your childhood emotionality was treated affect the way you listen to your child today?
Share your discoveries from the exercise above with your partner or with your most trusted friends. In order to be nurturing, we need to be nurtured ourselves. Parents are called upon to be listeners more than anyone else, and this means we need to honour our own need to be heard, to share our deepest feelings with others. There is something about simply being heard that is immediately healing and restorative. The deepest need in each one of us is to see evidence that we are not alone, and each time we connect deeply with others, it replenishes our hearts and charges us with aliveness. The more we establish meaningful and nourishing connections with others, the easier and more pleasurable we find it to listen carefully to our children.
Inner barriers to listening
There are all kinds of personal aversions to hearing our children’s feelings, and they vary from parent to parent. Below are some of the most common triggers that typically make us want to pull out our best empathy blockers, and use them. See if you can relate to any of the following.
The issue You are worried that your child is going to stay upset for ages. You feel that, unless you cheer her up, she will stay stuck in negative emotions and you will be overwhelmed and exhausted.
What to do Trust your child. When you simply seek to connect with her, this is what gets her through, what awakens her own resources and what gives her emotional resilience.
The issue You feel that unless you teach your child how to climb out of any painful emotions, she will have no resilience in future and will be helpless in the face of grief or anxiety.
What to do Realise that it is your unencumbered listening, with genuine interest and without expectation, that gives your child her resilience. Your expectation to feel better can be intrusive and can make her feel invalidated. Over time, the way you listen intently becomes the way she listens to herself – your patience and your trust in her will be replicated in the way she trusts her own feelings. A person who can recover from adversity by natural self-soothing, is usually a person who was well soothed as a child. We all tend to treat ourselves the way we were treated as children.
The issue Your child’s emotions bring up memories of your own childhood pain. You can’t bear to think that she might be feeling what you once felt – it is as if you are reliving a painful part of your childhood.
What to do Here, you would benefit from having some healing yourself. Talk about these feelings with your partner, a trusted friend or a counsellor. When you find relief for your own emotional hurts, you will feel less troubled by your child’s.
The issue You feel terribly helpless and inadequate in the face of your child’s distress, you can’t think how to fix it and you’re convinced it is up to you to find a way.
What to do You need to trust that by simply listening and holding your child you give her more than you know. Your connection will help her to feel that even when things are at their worst, she is not alone, that someone loves her and cares about her. This will give her the strength to cope with life’s unresolvable problems (see the anecdote in Chapter 13).
The issue You feel resentful of the attention your child receives because you didn’t get this kind of attention as a child, and perhaps as an adult you still feel a lack of emotional support in your life. Understandably, it is hard to keep giving what you have missed out on.
What to do This signals a time for your own needs for attention to be acknowledged and taken care of. You need to reach out to someone you trust and be listened to yourself. Talk to someone who cares about you, about how you have been feeling, and let yourself be supported. To bring water to your child, your own well must be replenished.
The issue Your child has a bone to pick with you. He feels let down and is angry with you. Perhaps this is the greatest challenge, and the deepest fear for each parent: to hear first-hand from our children when we have let them down. Our child’s appraisal of us as parents presses our most painful buttons. When parents feel sorrowful, guilty, unappreciated or inadequate, the empathy blockers come tumbling out.
What to do Even the best parents in the world let down or disappoint their children from time to time. So consider this: if your child can come to you with his grievances and you hear him out, it will go a long way to deepening the trust between you and bring more love to your relationship. It is so empowering for your child to be allowed to speak up for himself because if he can do so with you, he can do so with anybody. Imagine how you would have felt if you were allowed to stand up to your parents and your teachers. All children have a right to express their disappointments, even if it makes us uncomfortable. We are far more likely to earn our children’s respect when we are not defensive, when we give them a fair hearing and acknowledge their right to feel the way they do. It requires a lot of self-assurance for us to do this for our children, and it is something children look up to.
When you discover that you have failed to listen to your child, don’t beat yourself up. Just have an honest but compassionate look at the personal issues that got in the way.
The feelings that parents most often have difficulty with are the ones we call ‘negative’ – fear, anger or envy. We fight these feelings, we work hard to stop them, we deploy tremendous resources to make them go away. Let your child feel his feelings. It is by giving these feelings space that they begin to resolve – as long as we listen with acceptance. The moment we try to change these feelings, we have stopped listening, which breaks the very thing that makes healing possible: connection. Almost all of us have some difficulty trusting this process, so we can all stand to learn how to allow our children to feel and express their negative feelings. It is not our efforts to induce positive thinking, but our undivided empathy and acceptance that enable our children to move through their most difficult emotional terrain.
It’s worth repeating this: the feelings we call negative tend to pass when we listen without expectation and with an open heart. When we listen to – and join in with – our children’s joy, their joy does not pass – it increases. With listening, you and your child win, no matter what.
When does hurt become damage?
All children are hurt from time to time, and as parents we all do things that are hurtful to our children from time to time, often without realising it. It is important to acknowledge this fact of human relationships, but we don’t necessarily need to be consumed with worry that every hurt causes damage. Our children have natural healing mechanisms that help them to regulate their emotions and move through their hurts until they can feel love and joy again. In fact, that’s one of the main purposes of emotion. When children are hurt, frightened, disappointed or shocked, they cry, they scream, they emote. Children protest their pain and reach out to be heard, validated, held and comforted. When we acknowledge their feelings they feel connected to us once again and can move on.
It is when we deny children the right to feel as they do, when we try to convince them that there is no good reason for them to feel as they feel, that their pain sets in and risks becoming damage. Children whose feelings are repeatedly denied tend to internalise their pain, become ashamed for how they feel, doubt themselves and blame themselves. Everywhere there are wounded, depressed and angry adults who once tried to talk to their parents about their hurts, only to be faced with a parent who felt threatened and guilty, became defensive, hushed them, told them their treatment was normal, and berated them for complaining or for not being grateful. The message that there is nothing to complain about can do more to wound children than the mishap that first aroused their complaint. Even abused children can begin to recover once a caring and empathic individual listens to their story and honours their right to feel angry and hurt. But often, children are plunged into a deeper gloom or driven to outrage when they are told there is no good reason to feel as they do.
That’s why listening with empathy is immeasurably important, it prevents emotional wounds, heals the wounds that have already occurred, and renews a loving connection.
But whingeing and whining really drives me mad
Like anyone your tolerance and patience have limits. Almost everyone finds it hard to listen to their children when they drone on, complaining in a whiny voice. If you want to get your child past the whining, it certainly doesn’t help to judge him or to shut him up. Instead, help your child to be assertive by encouraging him to express his needs and feelings in a strong voice – and reinforce his self-assertion by listening with unmitigated empathy. If you want your child to be assertive (rather than whingey and whiny), then be sure that you are letting him be that. Hear him out and let his emotions be powerful.
When your child’s problems seem unfixable
From time to time, it will seem impossible to fathom our child’s feelings and to understand the source of his pain. Read the following anecdote and you will see what I mean. Who knows why Roger was crying so hard? Perhaps he was tired, perhaps he hated the fact that he couldn’t fix the train all by himself, perhaps the moment his train stopped moving it triggered an emotional memory of when his puppy dog was hit by a car and couldn’t be fixed. Understanding can make a big difference, but it is not always essential – and it is certainly not always possible. We give so much by simply acknowledging the strength of our children’s feelings and staying with them as a comforting presence. Connection is what counts.
Roger – An anecdote
Roger is a 7-year-old boy who became hysterical one day when his favourite toy, a battery-operated train, ceased to work. Roger seemed inconsolable, no matter what his dad did to comfort him. With some effort Roger’s dad fixed his train and got it running again, but to his surprise and frustration, this did little to settle Roger down. None of his efforts to calm Roger made a difference. Tired and cranky, Roger’s dad was ready to walk out in a huff, but he sensed that there was something deeper than a broken train bothering Roger. Had the father tried to convince Roger that there was nothing to cry about any more, it would have made matters worse.
Roger’s dad decided to let go of trying to stop the crying. He sat with his son, held him and said, ‘I’m not sure why you’re so upset right now, but I’ll just sit with you and hold you if you want. Is that OK?’
At first Roger cried even harder, but he was now crying for relief. Finally, someone had seen into his private emotional world. Even if he didn’t feel understood, Roger felt validated. When he began to feel emotionally supported, Roger began to sniff and calm down. Within moments he was playing again as if nothing had happened.
Listening is healing
It is possible for you to help your child to heal quite considerably from emotional wounds and traumas by listening with empathy. We live in a society in which parents have only a fraction of the support they need, and where many parents are isolated from the communal and extended family safety nets that make child-rearing far less stressful. Sadly, parenting can be compromised by the stressful conditions in which we do it, a lack of up-to-date and reliable information, or a lack of good role modelling – and none of these impediments are the parents’ fault. Your child may have endured emotional stress in utero, trauma at birth or in a battle with early weaning, conflict in the family, hurts from other children, siblings or teachers. Whatever circumstances have caused your child to feel wounded, healing is possible, and listening to her feelings is the key to healing.
Our children have a powerful healing mechanism inside them: their emotions. When they cry, scream or sob their hearts out, this is Nature’s way of restoring their nervous systems to a healthy balance. If they are listened to and allowed to feel, if they are held, comforted and helped to feel secure, this goes a long way towards restoring their emotional wellbeing.
Even children who have survived severe traumas can recover significantly and learn to trust and love again if they are in an environment in which their feelings are consistently validated and compassionately heard. Loving and empathic human connection has the power to literally rebuild damaged areas of the brain’s emotional centres. An empathic connection causes new and healthier neural pathways to grow, and can restore brain chemistry to a healthier balance. Since a child’s brain becomes progressively less amenable to change as she grows, then the older the child is, the more sustained attention emotional healing requires.
And this is the most important thing to understand: in order to heal, children need to feel welcome to express their feelings – their grief, their sorrow, their outrage – without anyone pressuring them to get over it or to feel better.
Nobody knows how far psychological healing can go, and we don’t know if complete healing of emotional trauma is possible. What we do know is that we can’t afford to be blasé about the things that emotionally wound children and assume that children simply bounce back. Children can heal only when there is a patient listener who validates their feelings just as they are, without pushing for change. For healing to be possible, connecting emotionally with the child is the key and listening is the conduit.
EMPATHY MAKES MIRACLES
In 2005, a team of Sydney psychologists delivered a paper regarding a grant they were given to test preschool children who had emotional and behavioural problems with the healing power of empathy. By instructing their teachers on how to be a steady and consistent presence for the children, always available to listen to their joys and grievances, they were able to dramatically reduce the levels of emotional and behavioural problems. The children felt emotionally secure and far more settled within the preschool environment, and the staff enjoyed the children a lot more. The success of this experiment exceeded the participants’ expectations.
In the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Youth Insearch operates healing workshops for some of Sydney’s most troubled teenagers. Over 27 000 teenagers have had their lives transformed by attending these remarkable programs. The stunning achievements of this organisation moved Australia’s prime minister to speak at their twenty-first birthday celebrations in 2006. I would urge readers to visit the Youth Insearch website (see References), download and view the audiovisual clips; they show profoundly moving evidence of how empathic connections can heal some of the deepest wounds. Even some of the most hardened, mistrustful and abused adolescents are able to melt their armour, rediscover their innocence and learn to love again, if they are immersed in an empathic community.
Mayumarri Healing Centre, another success story, has for years now demonstrated how survivors of childhood abuse can rebuild their lives and learn to love again by being surrounded by an empathic community where they have the freedom to express their feelings.
Researchers from the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne recently set out to test a new approach to healing some of the most severe childhood psychological disorders. Instead of treating the child, they instructed parents on ways to increase their empathy and improve the emotional care of the child. This strategy was highly successful: the researchers proved that empathy can greatly alleviate childhood depression and anxiety, even when symptoms are severe.
There is a central ingredient that each of these projects have in common, an ingredient that has underwritten their outstanding successes as healing ventures. In each example, it is necessary for the participants – preschool children, adolescents and adults alike – to be allowed their feelings, no matter how uncomfortable, including their hatred, outrage, terror, despair, grief and confusion. The healing journey begins with letting them have their truth and listening to them without judgement. Empathy can work miracles and, as parents, it is the most important relationship skill for us to cultivate.
The emotional wounds of childhood last until old age; they shape personalities because they change the brain, redirecting neural pathways and altering brain chemistry. Healing is only possible if it does the same thing in reverse. That’s why healing takes time. Healing does not come from one single healing experience. Children need to be regularly immersed in a more nurturing environment for emotional healing to take place. It takes time for new neural pathways to grow until the child begins to see himself and others differently and to relate to others in new ways. The older the child, the longer the healing process, because the brain becomes less amenable to change after early childhood. Empathy is not a one-stop shop: it is an ongoing commitment.
Helping your child express joy
Empathy is not only about listening to children’s emotional pain, but is also about meeting their joy and celebrating it with them. Kids need to see that their joy is mirrored; if this seldom happens, they risk losing touch with it. When a child jumps for joy and sees her joy reflected in her parents’ eyes, her joy is multiplied. Give in to your child’s joy and you will be infected with it – it is contagious.
The more we listen to our children, the more they listen to us and the more considerate and cooperative they are likely to become.
A child who feels heard will be in tune with her own feelings, needs and wants, and her sense of self-worth will be strong. Her connection with her parents will be rich and close, and she is more likely to confide in them when she needs their help and support.