Did you ever watch a movie or read a book that you were so into that you couldn’t stop talking and thinking about it? A story can totally absorb us anytime, anywhere. In the next pages, you will discover some of the stories you have about your teen and yourself as a parent and how they impact your parenting life. Are you ready to start?
A couple of years ago, I received an e-mail from a parent, Stacey, who wrote, “I just opened Mark’s backpack and found new cutting gear, two packs of Marlboros, one opened, and his wallet with $50. I don’t know where that money is coming from…this is very disheartening to me, because my husband and I have talked to him multiple times. We have encouraged him to trust us, to tell us what’s going on, and he keeps rejecting any help we offer him. I honestly don’t know what else to do. I feel I have failed as a mother. I have managed so many difficult situations in my life successfully, but I can’t seem to help my own son. It seems I’m doing a poor job as a mother. It just seems I suck as a parent…and the truth is that I have been feeling like this for a long time now.”
Other times, Stacey has come to parent coaching sessions with other narratives: “I can’t take his disrespect anymore. Mark has become a verbally abusive teen, tells me anything he wants, he thinks he can get anything he wants, and that’s just not right. I’m going to take away all his electronic devices, and he can throw a tantrum if he wants or even move out, but all of this disrespect needs to stop right away. I have spent tons of money on helping him to get better, but he doesn’t want to get better, and until he changes his mind, I’m not going to support his vices.”
When Stacey fuses with the thought I am a failure as a mother, she usually disengages from parenting her son Mark, avoids saying no to him, and gives in to any request he has, whether it’s going out with friends, borrowing the car, or asking for money. On the other hand, when she fuses with the thought Mark is disrespectful, she adopts an authoritarian parenting behavior, disregards any potential explanation he may have, and acts as if doesn’t care for him.
In both situations, Stacey is hooked on a narrative, a story, about who she is and who Mark is. Let’s go a little bit more into these mind stories.
Our mind is a very active organ and has an incredible capacity to quickly come up with thoughts, images, hypotheses, fantasies, theories, cause-effect relationships, work projects, opinions, and narratives about all types of subjects, including ourselves and the people around us. Stories or narratives are one of these mind creations; when I use the term stories or narratives, I’m simply referring to a string of words, sentences, or paragraphs put together. Some of these stories are new, fun, and interesting, and others are old, harsh, and painful, and have been spinning over and over in our mind since we were young.
Has it ever happened to you that while you were driving, you were so trapped by a story in your mind that, without realizing it, you got lost and didn’t know when you took the wrong exit? Or have you ever been in a conversation with a friend or a significant other and, without realizing that your mind had taken you into a gripping story, the next thing you knew, you hadn’t heard a word of what the other person was saying? There are many examples of how we get caught up in a story as if we carried a master author within us. And guess what? No one is exempt from having that capacity: as long as we’re alive, the master author within our mind will continuously create stories about ourselves, others, and any other theme.
Exercise: What Are Your Stories?
Here is an exercise for you to check out some of the stories that your mind may have naturally come up with over the years about you and your teen. Pick up your parenting journal and complete the following sentences with the first narrative that comes to mind:
My story telling mind says that:
What did you come up with? Were there any similarities in these stories? Any differences? Any themes you may have noticed?
When I do this exercise with my clients, I often hear, “But those stories are true! All those stories about myself and my teen are true.” If you have a similar response, let me remind you that our minds naturally come up with thousands of narratives; some of them are certainly true, but that doesn’t mean that all of them are accurate. More often than not, the stories we have are far from being the truth. Imagine if all the thoughts, memories, or images that showed up in your mind throughout the day were real? Would that even be possible? Not really.
Don’t take my word for this. Just pay attention to your mind throughout the day and see what happens. By the end of the day, if you really paid attention, you would notice all types of narrations that went through your mind, sensical and nonsensical ones, to the point that you may have even thought about firing your mind or giving it a minivacation.
Our mind never shuts up, it never gets quiet, it’s ceaselessly generating content. A key question to ask when getting caught in a mind story, or any sticky thoughts or narratives, is not whether the story is accurate or not, true or not, but whether it’s helpful or not at a given moment in our life. There is a time and place for getting hooked on your mind stories: when you’re planning a trip, thinking about a new project for the house, or watching a film, for example; in those moments, getting fused with your mind stories can drive very effective behavior in the moment. Here is a different scenario: how many hours do you spend at night going over stories of sadness, frustration, worry, blame, or anger about your teen or yourself? Is getting hooked on those stories helpful to you at those particular times? Maybe not.
If you hold rigidly to those mind stories about yourself or your teen, they become like a filter through which you see everything; eventually, you will not be able to see your teen for who he is or yourself for who you are as a parent. This is especially complicated when parenting a teen who struggles with emotion dysregulation problems since, more often than not, you have to deal with ongoing fights, arguments, and erratic behaviors, to name a few challenging situations. Getting fused onto mind stories in moments of high emotionality makes things very challenging for you and your teen; this is because mind narratives can be so persuasive that you won’t even listen to your teen, since your mind is simply adding data to the “truth” about who your teen is, and you will quickly lose your ability to distinguish your mind narrative from your teen’s behavior even though they can be very different. Finally, you end up taking steps that are far from handling the situation effectively.
In Stacey’s case, when she gets fused with and behaves according to her failure story, she disengages from parenting Mark, and when she believes the mind story of Mark being disrespectful at all times, she assumes an authoritarian parenting style, which increases conflict with him.
Keep in mind that your teen will remember you as a parent based on what you did, not on what you felt, thought, or imagined doing. Getting fused with a single narrative that your mind comes up with about your teen will simply make you a prisoner of the story of that moment. What can you do instead of continuing to get fused to your mind stories? Any thoughts? What about…
What about getting unhooked from your mind stories, so you can behave as the parent you want to be and not as the parent that the master author of your mind pushes you to be? If, after reading this last sentence, you’re thinking about telling yourself positive stories as a way to counter the negative ones you have about yourself as a parent or your teen, let’s take a look into this. Let me walk you through a classic ACT exercise developed by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson (2012) and adapted for this book.
Exercise: Think About a Chessboard
See if you can find a relaxed position and imagine for a second a chessboard. Imagine that your stories, narratives, or tales about who you are as a parent are like pieces on a chessboard; sometimes, your mind comes up with negative stories you dislike about who you are as a parent, and then, naturally your mind comes up with positive tales about who you are as a parent as a way of countering the adverse ones. And as in chess, the pieces make moves and fight against each other, as your positive and negative stories do at times, pulling you forward and backward across the board. Sometimes, you get hooked on the positive ones; sometimes you get hooked on the negative ones.
Now imagine for a second that you’re the chessboard itself, and instead of getting hooked on the chess battle between your positive and negative narratives, you just watch them. You just observe them as they play out their game; you just have them.
Any reactions to this exercise? Can you notice the difference between being hooked on positive and negative stories about yourself and just having these stories without acting on them? Although a counterargument approach was very popular in pop psychology, research over the last decade has consistently shown us that countering or arguing against our negative narratives actually reinforces them and increases their frequency. As long as we’re alive, our master author will come up with all types of elaborate narratives about all types of situations, objects, people, and themes, both positive and negative ones. Mind stories come and go, one after another, and it’s hard to keep track of them or fight against them, because they’re so many, and guess what? There will be many more mind stories to come and go as long as you’re alive.
Are you willing to do something more helpful for the relationship with your teen than getting fused to those mind stories and acting on them? If so, turn on the defusion switch. How? By noticing and naming the story about yourself or your teen. Naming the story is simply giving it a name that helps you to recognize it when it’s showing up and to look at it for what it is: a collection of thoughts. When Stacey got introduced to defusion, she named her story as “the sucking story.” She also decided to name the story about Mark as “the disrespectful story.” Naming is like pressing the brake when driving the car; it invites you to pause. By naming her stories, Stacey was able to pause, breathe, check whether those stories were helpful or not, and choose a response to her son’s behavior in the moment, instead of going on automatic pilot mode.
Exercise: Name That Story
Grab your parenting journal, look back at your previous entry where you listed what your storytelling mind says about you and your teen, and follow this defusion exercise:
Write down your responses to this defusion exercise and do your best to go back to it when a new narrative shows up in your mind and you’re getting hooked on it.
This defusion exercise is going to give you more space to be present with yourself and your teen, so you can choose your parenting behavior. Completing this defusion exercise in your journal at first is a good way to practice this skill; eventually, you want to get to the point where you practice defusion every time a triggering situation shows up and you’re getting trapped by a narrative.
Some of the narratives you carry may come along with deep pain, sadness, or disappointment; defusing from the story is not about denying the pain that comes with it but about simply allowing you to be present in the moment instead of having the narrative take over the moment. A former client of mine lost her oldest son in a car accident; her mind came up with the story I’m not a good mother because of this experience. Sadly, when talking to her youngest son, the story was so loud that she missed the moment when the little one started calling her Mom or when his hands tried to hold on to her for a couple of moments.
Once again, the master author of your mind will come up with all types of narratives, but you can learn to catch them in action before they hijack you away from the present moment and take away your opportunity to choose your response.
This chapter was focused on noticing how our minds naturally come with all types of stories or narratives about ourselves, others, and any situation we’re exposed to. Our minds, like popcorn machines, are incessantly active and will continue to come up with all types of narratives throughout our life. Is this a problem? You may not like the stories, you may not feel comfortable with them, but having them is not really the problem. The problem is when you get fused with every single narrative you have and act based on these narratives as if they were absolute truths, without checking whether they are helpful or not in that particular moment.
As you have read in earlier chapters, looking at the workability of each type of mind noise (judgments, criticisms, evaluations, narratives, rules, past and future thoughts) is a touchstone within ACT. In your parenting job, you’re going to encounter an infinite number of mind stories about your teen and yourself, especially if your teen suffers with emotion dysregulation problems, since his behaviors may be more often erratic than constant. Defusing and defusing again from those mind stories is a key skill for being the parent you want to be, and not what the author mind of your mind pushes you to be, in a given moment. You can choose how to behave; it’s doable.
Here is another defusion exercise. After choosing and naming a mind story about yourself as a parent, imagine you’re calling for a taxi cab, and visualize your mind story in the form of a name—a string of words with color, shape, and size—taking the cab, and then see the mind story getting in the cab and leaving.
You can also create your own defusion exercises. For instance, a client of mine imagined the T-shirts of his favorite football players having a slogan based on his story as a parent, “Failure,” and then saw the players run onto the field.
For this next defusion exercise, find a comfortable position and give yourself approximately ten minutes to complete it; first read the directions, so you know what to expect, record them at a slow pace, and then listen to them privately.
For a couple of minutes, see if you can bring your attention to your breathing and the qualities of it every time you’re breathing in and breathing out. Gently, allow yourself to be present in this precise moment; see if you can bring into your mind one of those stories you have been carrying about yourself as a parent and, while holding on to it, notice how it feels to have this narrative…see if you can scan your body from head to toe searching for any physical sensation…breathe slowly…see if there is any emotion associated with it…breathe slowly again…see if there are any urges to get rid of this emotion or any other urges to do something about it…breathe slowly again. Gently notice how it is to have the story without becoming the story, see if you can make room for those sensations, emotions, and action urges that come with this narrative…take a deep breath and notice one more time what it feels like for you to have the story without fighting against it, pushing it away, or denying it…but simply having it. Breathe again and after taking three deep breaths, open your eyes and bring yourself back into the room.