“Revenge is a confession of pain.”
– Latin Proverb
While parenting can be tough and tiring work, most parents are able to sit back, take a deep breath, and reflect on the joys of parenting.
Thoughts such as, “I love watching my kids learn and grow,” “I love seeing her smile at me first thing in the morning,” “I love having someone to hug who loves all the hugs I give,” or “I love unsolicited kisses with no strings attached” easily come to mind for most parents. However, it is typical for parents with challenging children to reflect on the joys of parenting, and reflect, and reflect, and be completely void of such positive thoughts.
Parents dealing with extreme behaviors from their children often find themselves empty, depleted, and hopeless. They begin to regret their decision to parent, they begin to feel completely incompetent, and they begin to hate their role as a parent. Ultimately, they may even reach the point of “it’s either him or me who has to go.” After years of living with a child who is unable to reciprocate respect, affection, and love, parents go from being a lavish rainforest of love to an arid dry desert – hostile, angry, and depleted.
After seven long years of parenting an attachment challenged child, a mother came into my office one morning. Although she was a beautiful woman, she looked older than her years from the years of pain and power struggles. She was doubled over, crying in anguish to me, “I can’t do this anymore; I’m dying. I’m dying inside.”
Traditional View
Literature from the traditional view recognizes that parents of attachment challenged children often appear unreasonably angry.1 The traditional view explains that these children have evolved into “masterful provocateurs, “2 proficient at pushing their parents’ buttons and arousing anger within the home 3 Instead of engaging fully in family activities, these children watch the connections and interactions in order to identify these “buttons” to push later on when the time is right.4 The traditional view further explains that due to this relentless provocation of anger, parents are truly victims of abuse within their own homes.5
This view explains that attachment challenged children purposely evoke this anger and that these children actually embrace their own negative behavioral acts.6 Through these intense behaviors, they purposely create relationships filled with anger so the parent or caretaker will have no reason or desire to develop a relationship with them. This traditional view concludes that inducing anger, generating frustration, and creating distance is the child’s principal goal.7
Parents giving advice to other parents from this traditional perspective often recommend that parents stay out of the “ick” by remaining detached from the child’s controlling behaviors. Parents have been told by their therapists, “Every time they suck us in (we get mad, or yell, or show our annoyance), they get a zing.”8 Parenting advice by professionals reinforces this concept. Unconventional parenting techniques are said to be necessary for attachment challenged children in order to depersonalize the child’s rebellion thus lowering the frustration level of parents.9
The key to success with these children, from this traditional view, is for parents to resist permitting the child to “activate” them. This model recognizes the difficulty for parents to stay out their anger, yet informs parents that this is the “family’s only chance at succeeding.”10 Success will only be seen when the parent’s anger decreases, which is an indication that the child is no longer “in control” of the parent’s emotions. The child is no longer in charge; thus, the attachment between the child and parent will be able to build.
A New View
Parenting a child who, day in and day out, is defiant, lies, runs away, is aggressive, and/or is hyperactive, can be completely nerve grinding. In fact, the behaviors demonstrated by challenging children are just that: they are nerve grinding behaviors. The problem is that outsiders cannot see and cannot relate to just how ground-up the parents’ nerves are becoming. The nerve grinding never ceases.
In an exploratory research study of adoptive mothers of children with special needs, it was found that 77 percent of the mothers either strongly agreed or agreed that since adopting, they experienced more rage and anger than ever before in their entire lives. One mother is quoted as saying, “I never had these feelings that I was capable of child abuse... just to feel this to such a degree is unnerving.” The behaviors from their children became so nerve grinding that 14 percent of the mothers in the study had thoughts of suicide since adopting.11
While difficult and scary to admit, it is not uncommon for parents of attachment challenged children to reach such a heightened state of rage and hostility that they either have thoughts of killing themselves or killing their children. Such thoughts are frightening and unsettling for parents. It leaves them asking the question: “Where does this amount of rage come from?” To understand this parental reaction to a child’s intense behaviors, we must revisit the concept outlined in Chapter 1 on the levels of memory. Four levels of memory were discussed: cognitive, emotional, motor, and state. It is in the state level of memory that trauma is stored and buried. Just as a child’s early traumatic experiences are stored at the state level of memory, so too are the parents’ earlier traumatic experiences.
In addition to the nerve grinding day-in-and-day-out of living with a child with severe behaviors, this child’s emotional intensity works to “stir up” the parent’s own past trauma history – trauma history of which the parent may not have even been aware. The parent’s own state level of memory becomes activated at a deep unconscious level. Stephen Covey, in his national best seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People says, “Upset feelings never die, they are buried alive and come back as something uglier.”12 Parents feeling intense amounts of rage are experiencing buried upset feelings that are essentially coming back as “something uglier.”
To illustrate this, refer to the graphic of the file cabinet where each of the four drawers represents a memory state. The bottom drawer is the deepest level of memory, the state memory. This is where traumatic experiences that went unprocessed, unexpressed, and misunderstood are stored. Living with a child whose own behavior is driven out of this bottom drawer – a child driven out of a deep unconscious state of fear and overwhelm – eventually opens the parent’s bottom drawer. The buried trauma within the parent is directly related to the rage that then surfaces within the parent.
An example of the opening of this bottom drawer is in the words below from a mother parenting a daughter that ignited intense internal feelings of rage, revenge, and hostility:
I found myself being repelled by her mere presence. I couldn’t stand to even be in the same room as my daughter. I hated her! I had never in my life hated someone with such fervor. I found myself having thoughts of taking a knife and repeatedly stabbing her. One day while driving down the highway, I honestly wanted to just open the door while driving at 70 mph and push her out the door. As I imagined myself doing this, I felt no feeling of remorse, but rather revengeful feelings of justification and satisfaction. I often had feelings of wanting to beat her to an absolute pulp. As I would later reflect on these dreadful thoughts, I felt myself shift into a state of utter self-disgust, wanting to then end it all by killing myself. I was scared of myself and scared of my vengeful desires and thoughts.
As the quote says at the beginning of this chapter, “Revenge is a confession of pain.” The revengeful thoughts written by this mother demonstrate the level of intense pain that can surface when parenting a child with deep traumatic wounds. For this mother, her daughter was uncovering years of buried pain and fear from her own childhood. Research on trauma experienced in childhood has shown that childhood exposure to trauma may not surface until it is triggered in adulthood. Symptoms from traumatic experiences can emerge months, years, or even decades after exposure to the traumatic event.
The fear-based reactionary parenting behavior that then surfaces is an internal safety response mechanism used to avoid activating the trauma memories. The parent’s lack of resolution is maintained by cognitive and behavioral avoidance behaviors (anger and rage) that protect the core self from re-experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear and pain.13 The anger and hostility serve to decrease intrusive experiences stored in the parent’s memory,14 thus decreasing the parent’s ability to develop positive relationships.
For the mother in the above example, her daughter was an “associational connection” to her past experiences. “Associational connections may prime a link between memories of and ideas about a recent stressor event and those about a past trauma.”15 In his study to discern treatment strategies for traumatized children, Munson16 found that, “caregivers of traumatized children are often themselves survivors of unresolved trauma and victims of repetitive compulsion, dissociation, and aloneness.” In a pilot treatment study for traumatized children, the researchers acknowledged that, “this pain and distress is often unintentionally acted out onto the child by the wounded parent.”17 From this research, along with an understanding of the Stress Model, the traumatized child becomes the associational connection to the parent’s unresolved trauma and loss issues, shifting the parent into a deep fear state.
The traditional view directs parents to stay out of their anger, but for many parents, staying out of this anger proves to be humanly impossible. The drive from the unconscious is so powerful that it can literally take parents hostage. No amount of self-talk, pre-determined action plans, or cognitive awareness can override these emotional outpourings.
From an understanding of the Stress Model, we can see that it is the stress-triggering event that is putting the parent in such an overwhelming fear-based state. It takes first an understanding of where the rage is coming from; it takes addressing the rage’s origin, instead of addressing the rage itself. For some parents it may be as simple as taking a few deep breaths, breathing into the feelings of anger to identify connections to their own past experiences. For some parents, it may take journaling or meditation, creating a safe place for the unconscious fears to surface. Still, for other parents, it may take deep emotional therapy, such as psychosomatic therapy (therapy designed to activate the state level of memory at the body/mind level) to reach buried pain within the unconscious. Bruce Perry, M.D., remarks that, “You cannot change parts of the brain which are not activated. In order to change the ‘state’ you must activate the ‘state’!” For many parents with buried and unresolved trauma, it takes much more than cognitive/behavioral therapy. It takes therapy that activates the state memory, allowing the unconscious to surface to a conscious level, along with opening up the body’s sensory pathways.
Research on trauma
experienced in
childhood has shown
that childhood
exposure to trauma
may not surface
until it is triggered in
adulthood.
No matter the method of addressing buried trauma, the “control” over this anger has to ultimately happen at the level of understanding. It is not simply controlling the anger through thoughts of “I have to stay in control over my child in order for my child to attach.” It is not as easy as signing a contract in therapy about reducing the parent’s anger towards her child. 18 Candace Pert, in Molecules of Emotion, proved through scientific research that emotions connected to painful, adverse experiences are stored deep within the cells of the body.19 Thus, the dissipation of these emotions requires both thought and physical sensation. These stored molecules of emotions in the body/mind system cannot be controlled or maintained by cognitive thoughts or cognitive resolutions.
While it can feel as if the child is intentionally pressing the parent’s buttons, it is a matter of the dynamics of trauma surfacing within the household. When the parent reacts out of fear, thus becoming more threatening to the child, the child then sinks deeper into his own fear state, opening that bottom drawer a little wider, and behaving more intensely. The parent, in turn, sinks into her own fear state, opening her bottom drawer a little wider, and reacting towards the child more intensely. Hence, the negative neurological feedback loop is in full swing and building as each person reacts and falls deeper and deeper into his/her own fear state.
In order to interrupt this negative neurological feedback loop, the parent has to recognize her own fear reactions and take ownership of her anger. The first question the parent needs to ask is, “Whose anger (fear) are we dealing with here?” The parent needs to find the courage to open up to her own emotional wounds in order to open up to her child’s wounds. This can be an extremely scary place to enter. But if the parent is unwilling to address her own fears, the parent cannot expect the child to open up emotionally either.
As the parent is able to find healing, the parent will then be able to accept the child’s pain and create an environment of emotional safety – where anger can be accepted and not taken personally. In doing so, the parent then shifts out of the traditional model of seeing the child pushing buttons; moves out of a place of seeing the child as purposefully creating tension in the relationship in order to keep the parent at a distance. Once the child is given permission to be angry and given the opportunity to be accepted in his anger, the defensive walls will begin to crumble. As the parent understands the associational connections being activated by the child’s behaviors, the parent’s own reactionary anger will subside automatically. The parent will no longer have a need to react, but will be in a place of love in order to be responsive and emotionally open to the child.
The mother continues her story:
Once I realized the source of my anger and fear, I was able not only to change, but also to find healing from the deep wounds of my childhood. It wasn’t about going back and blaming my parents or siblings, but simply understanding who I was and who I’d become as an adult. It was about honoring my fears, honoring myself in a way that allowed me to start living life out of a place of love, instead of being motivated from a place of fear. My daughter is truly a gift to me. She opened me up in areas that I had closed off under lock and key early in my life. The dark, internal pockets of emptiness, loneliness, and abandonment that I had denied and buried for years are now open. I’m alive and feel whole for the first time in my life! Now when my daughter’s behaviors hit a sensitive nerve within me, I know that I don’t have to react. I know that in this moment of emotional turmoil, she is only keeping me in my process in order for me to be all that God has designed me to be.
This mother also realized that it was not that she had become a victim to her daughter, but that her daughter’s behaviors were simply activating her own unresolved fears. The traditional view presents the issue of parental anger in a victimhood framework, correlating the extreme anger the children evoke within the parents to abuse – abuse by the children to their parents. In order to see this dynamic in a truthful and blameless perspective, we have to step outside of our own pain to see who is the wounded one in this situation. Certainly, the child is the one who has had the fear of others projected onto him in his past trauma experiences.
Living in a state
of survival shifts
us into parenting
from a blame-based
perspective.
When we get to the point of being frustrated and desperate, it is easy to slip into a fear-based place of seeing ourselves as the victim. Yet with the understanding presented above, the truth is that the parent has slipped into her own survival mode. She has felt so threatened in her own ability to remain sane and hopeful for the future that she goes into a self-protective stance. She fights back, fueled by the energy and fear unleashed by the triggers connected to her child’s behaviors. She herself has now joined her child in living out of a place of survival.
Living in a state of survival shifts us into parenting from a blame-based perspective. Remember from the Stress Model that fear only sees problems; it cannot see solutions in the distortion it creates. So, the parent lives from a perspective of: “It’s Johnny’s fault. Our house wasn’t like this prior to him being here. Our marriage certainly wasn’t this bad before he brought his anger into this home!” When in this fear-based place, parents easily view their home as a prison where they are the prisoner. Driven by this fear, parents say to their children, “You have done everything you can to get out of this family. You have made me hate you.”20 The traditional view supports parents in seeing that the child is the source of this anger and that the child is the cause of this intense rage. Certainly these parents need to be first validated in their feelings, but then they need to be encouraged to reflect on their own past experiences that were buried – experiences that were unprocessed, unexpressed and essentially unfinished.
Parenting children with severe behaviors is not a simple job, yet it is a responsibility charged to us by God. It is a call to directly face our own fears, worries, and frustrations. Anytime those around us view our parenting struggles in a negative light, we are faced with the fear that perhaps we are not living up to the job bestowed upon us. Anytime we begin to feel as if we are ineffective parents, we are confronted with the fear of failing this calling. And anytime we see that we cannot help our children make better choices and begin fearing for our children’s futures as teenagers or adults, we again slip into a place of fear. This only sends us spiraling downward into our own internal negative feedback loop.
Instead, we need to open ourselves up to the buttons being pushed within us by our children. Yes, let us go over that again. We need to open ourselves up to the buttons being pushed within us by our children. Children exhibiting severe behaviors present opportunities for us to find healing in places deep within the caverns of our hearts – dark places we never knew existed. They present us with the opportunity to make relational connections far greater than those known to mankind. While this may sound too poetic and dripping with sugar and icing to you, it is the perspective from which we need to work and strive to attain in order to ultimately relate to our children. When a parent’s heart is open and operating out of a place of love, the parent has the emotional capacity to be in the child’s pain with him, instead of reacting against the child’s pain and against the child.
Continuing with this chapter’s parenting story:
Once I realized the source of my anger and fear, I was able not only to change, but also to find healing from the deep wounds of my childhood. It wasn’t about going back and blaming my parents or siblings, but simply understanding who I was and who I’d become as an adult. It was about honoring my fears, honoring myself in a way that allowed me to start living life out of a place of love, instead of being motivated from a place of fear. My daughter is truly a gift to me. She opened me up in areas that I had closed off under lock and key early in my life. The dark, internal pockets of emptiness, loneliness, and abandonment that I had denied and buried for years are now open. I’m alive and feel whole for the first time in my life! Now when my daughter’s behaviors hit a sensitive nerve within me, I know that I don’t have to react. I know that in this moment of emotional turmoil, she is only keeping me in my process in order for me to be all that God has designed me to be.
Scenario: Beth is the mother of a defiant and rebellious 12 year old birth child named Rachel. Rachel has been a difficult child since she was an infant – hard to soothe, difficult to interact with, and often cold and aloof. Rachel’s delivery was difficult and following birth, Rachel was colicky for the first two years of her life. Presently, Beth states that she is constantly angry with Rachel and that her relationship with her daughter is filled with tension, arguments, and power struggles. Beth admits that at this point, she has difficulty merely hugging her daughter and being in the same room with her.
Traditional View
From the traditional view, it can be seen that Rachel’s early years of being colicky have created an attachment break in the parent/ child relationship. It is critical that Beth gain control over Rachel prior to Rachel becoming a full-blown teenager and, eventually, an adult. Notorious examples, such as Ted Bundy, have shown that even birth children who experienced breaks with their parents due to medical issues have the potential for growing up to be criminals.21 Beth needs to see that Rachel is maintaining control in this relationship by keeping her mother angry, and she has been doing quite a good job at it for 12 years! Beth’s first and primary objective needs to be to not let Rachel provoke her into anger. Beth needs to understand that every time Rachel is able to inflame her, Rachel wins control in the relationship. In order for Beth to lower her frustration, she must depersonalize herself from Rachel’s behaviors – Rachel’s behaviors are no longer Beth’s responsibility. The onus is on Rachel, not Beth. In order for Rachel’s behaviors to be central, distractions of anger from Beth need to be eliminated. In doing this, Rachel will be given the opportunity to understand that she cannot push her mother away with her power struggles. Her arguments will prove to be useless in activating her mother. Thus, Beth commits to changing her reactions to Rachel’s behaviors. She wakes up every morning and repeats her mantra of, “I’m in charge; Rachel does not have the power to make me angry today.” However, after two months of working hard not to react, Beth finds herself time and time again, slipping into complete anger against Rachel. Even when Beth is able to control her outbursts, she finds herself unhappy and lacking the desire to engage with her daughter. Beth talks to her therapist and her therapist encourages Beth to simply work harder to stay in control, avoid getting “zinged,” and avoid a control battle, emphasizing that Beth must win. 22 The therapist reminds Beth that these must be accomplished in order for her to be able to reach her daughter.
A New View
Implementing the Stress Model, Beth realizes that the intense anger she is experiencing is being driven from an unconscious place within her. At this point, it is about Beth, not Rachel. The onus is on Beth to identify the source of her over-reactions to her daughter. The next time Rachel acts out and Beth feels herself about to react in anger, Beth steps back, sits down, takes a deep breath, and says to herself, “I’m scared.” Beth realizes that in doing this, she is speaking to the unconscious fear within her. Yet, Beth feels herself getting even angrier by stepping back. She continues breathing and realizes that her body literally feels like it is on fire at this point and she feels as if there is an emotional tornado swirling within her. Beth tells her daughter that she is going to her room for her own parental time-out, being mindful to break the negative feedback loop. Later that evening, once Rachel is in bed, Beth sits down at the computer. She begins breathing, closes her eyes, and begins typing the thoughts that surface. By closing off her visual sensory pathway, Beth is making space for her unconscious thoughts to surface. After a time of typing random thoughts, she types, “My sister would always have to have the last word.” Beth opens her eyes and exclaims out loud, “That’s it! That’s it!!!” Beth realizes that growing up with two alcoholic parents, she would always back down from arguments with her sister in order to keep peace in the home. Beth’s parents could not handle outward expressions of anger. Beth realizes that now, as an adult, she is re-enacting those moments. Yet, this time around, Beth is going to have the last word. When her daughter argues with her, she is really seeing her sister. Being driven out of a state of fear in order to ensure that she is finally going to be acknowledged and heard, Beth ignites into a rage-filled state with Rachel. Beth makes this associational connection so that the next time Rachel enters into an argument or talks back to her, Beth can acknowledge her unconscious desire to have the last word, which will then enable her to shift into a state of love with Rachel. She can then remain present with Rachel, without having to control her. As Rachel feels heard, her need to argue and set power struggles into motion will decrease.
Quick Reference PARENTS APPEAR HOSTILE AND ANGRY
Remember that being hostile and angry as a parent is:
When feeling angry and hostile, recognize that your child needs you to: