These days you can’t pass a magazine rack without seeing something about the power of mindfulness. We’re bombarded by news about mindfulness—that it helps reduce the effects of stress, that it improves immune function and even decision-making skills. In this chapter, we delve into how it can play a helpful, healing role in your parenting.
In this chapter you will:
Controlled scientific studies overwhelmingly establish mindfulness as valuable for living a healthy, engaged, less stressful life (Hoffman et al. 2010; Grossman et al. 2004). As discussed in chapter 1, mindfulness has been shown to change the structure of the brain in measurable and meaningful ways (Vestergaard-Poulsen et al. 2009).
And yet, the promise of mindfulness can seem far out of reach. Practicing mindfulness seems to take much more time than modern life allows. The bar seems too high for the non–Dalai Lamas among us to attain. For the parent of an angry teen, mindfulness can feel simply unmanageable. It’s not. You’re likely practicing mindfulness right now. The act of bringing your attention to bear on the words and ideas presented here, with an open, curious attitude, makes you as enlightened in this moment as a seasoned mediator.
Think of mindfulness as oxygen. When you’re mindful, you attend fully to what’s happening in the present moment. This attention to the now nourishes your mind and body, just like oxygen nourishes living things. Mindfulness helps people make good choices, relax, and enjoy things more. And, like a fresh breeze, mindfulness also blows away the dust coating our emotions and thoughts, bringing clarity to what previously was obscured.
This book teaches you how to be more mindful with your senses—as you see, touch, hear, taste, and smell—in order to heighten your capacity to manage your teen’s anger. Mindfulness helps cool the emotional heat of anger and rigid thinking. Just as a fresh breeze tempers the heat of a summer day, maintaining a mindful awareness of your sense experiences can help you manage the heat of the moment with your teen.
Take a moment to ask yourself the following questions about your situation with your teen:
Perhaps you answered yes to only one of the above questions. Perhaps you answered yes to all six. Don’t get lost in how many yes responses you had. Instead, simply notice yourself having any negative reactions—without judgment.
Each question points to a challenge that mindfulness skills can address. This chapter teaches you specific practices for doing so. The following matching mindfulness targets can help you identify where to focus going forward:
When you practice skills of mindful presence—the first of the four steps of the PURE method—you choose to shift your attention away from what your reactive mind is screaming at you and toward what is actually happening inside your body. Mindful presence takes you out of the unhelpful content of emotional thoughts and into the observation of bodily sensations as they are, without labels or judgments. Presence gives you space and flexibility, making situations less overwhelming.
When your teen is glaring at you as you clash about curfew yet again, mindfulness skills bring you out of the reactive mental chatter, and into the felt sensations of your body. Mindfulness deliteralizes what’s happening inside you. Mindfulness makes things less red-hot urgent, though the situation may be extremely challenging. Presence creates a strong yet adaptable foundation for parenting in the heat of the moment. Even in potentially dangerous situations, flexible action is better than reactive flailing.
Consider: when are you more likely to be able to take effective action, when you’re frantically trying to control painful feelings, or when you hold yourself calmly despite an unpleasant bodily experience?
Practice the following exercises so that you can begin to cultivate a flexible, mindful presence that will be increasingly available to you in the tough times.
Skill Practice: Ice Cubing Conflict
This activity will help you get a sense of what presence amid difficulties is all about.
With an ice cube, sit in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Hold the ice cube in an open palm and simply observe it.
Feel any and all sensations in your hand. Stinging, burning, pulsing—whatever sensations show up, just witness them without moving or doing anything.
Notice what your mind tells you. Maybe, “This is stupid,” or, “Just toss it away,” or something else. What does your mind suggest will happen if you continue to hold the ice cube? What does your mind want you to do with the ice as it becomes painful to hold it? Can you simply notice what your mind is saying and allow it to pass through your awareness, while continuing to hold the ice cube anyway?
What do you notice happening over the span of a minute or two? What’s happening to the ice? Are things changing?
What does this suggest about what you can choose to do during painful experiences with your teen?
This activity is both metaphor and method. As a method, pausing in the midst of frustration to hold an ice cube can help you ride out your own emotional intensity without adding fuel to a bad situation. It’s also a metaphor that reminds you that difficult, painful emotions will change if you let them. Yes, you’ll end up with things to clean up (a wet hand, or a difficult situation unresolved), but that’s far better than throwing the ice cube around and making things worse. It’s not that you shouldn’t take action when there’s a problem to solve. But sometimes there’s no problem—sometimes things just feel hard. Are you willing to “ice cube” your reactions and watch as things shift and change on their own?
The next time tough feelings about your teen’s situation show up, try pausing in mindfulness to see another way forward. Let the ice cube practice remind you to hang in there with mindful presence even when the pain of parenting rises up in you.
Central to the PURE communication step of presence is to use your breathing to bring you fully into your bodily experience. Our breath is always here with us, but we tend to lose track of it when we become highly stressed, leading to high-chested, quick breaths that in turn increase the body’s stress response. Such mindless reactive breathing pulls us out of presence.
With the following two exercises, we practice breathing deeply to anchor and stabilize you and help you connect with your teen.
Skill Practice: Redwood Respiration
Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world, is 397.7 feet tall. Hyperion is a redwood, an ancient species of tree that can live to be 2,000 years old. Contrary to what you might guess, a redwood’s roots don’t extend more than five or six feet into the earth. Instead, redwoods achieve their incredible stability by spreading roots out, up to a hundred feet away from the trunk.
This basic breathing practice, anchored in the metaphor of these majestic trees, will help you create stability amid teenage storms.
Skill Practice: Math Breathing
For some people, the redwood respiration exercise may focus too much on imagination. Here’s another breathing practice that doesn’t require creative visualization, but will similarly help anchor you in mindful sensations of breathing. This technique is especially useful for counteracting a revved-up or upset state, and can be very helpful in times of stress with teens.
Ask Abblett
Q: I’ve heard people say “just take a deep breath” when things are stressful my whole life. But how is that actually going to help my kid not lash out and humiliate me in front of everyone at Thanksgiving dinner?
A: These breathing practices are meant to draw your attention away from raging thoughts and emotions and into the steady predictability of your breathing. Mindfulness of the breath can give you an anchor amid a storm, and conscious breathing can also have a significant soothing effect, allowing you to be that much more effective in your next move in a challenging situation.
If the Dalai Lama traded places with you and experienced an intense outburst from your teen, his body would register all that intensity with alarms not so different from yours. When asked in a Time interview if he experiences anger, His Holiness said, “Oh, yes, of course. I’m a human being. Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.” He ended the statement with a chuckle (Gyatso 2010).
Forget the notion that anyone is born with perfect, nonreactive patience. Reactions happen. If we’re not skilled in cultivating presence, they can scuttle our ability to respond in helpful ways to the agitation of our teen.
Throughout the book, as you work to connect with your teen, you will continue to turn your awareness to what’s happening in your body. The next two exercises will help you become more present in your physical sensations. The more you learn to do so, the better you will be able to handle difficult interactions without what’s happening in your body taking over.
Skill Practice: The SLOW Body Scan
With practice, you can do this body scanning exercise in a matter of seconds to slow yourself down and relax. This skill seems like commonsense, but it can elude your awareness during challenging moments with your teen. However, with practice, this skill can be rapidly executed, allowing you to claim its soothing benefits.
At each of the following four steps, pause for a moment with your awareness to feel that body part fully; consciously let go of any tension before moving on.
Repeat as necessary.
The SLOW body scan can be used daily to check in with your body and release any tension. Whether it’s the knot in your stomach after your teen slams the front door, or your white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel after being cut off in traffic, you can SLOW and loosen your physical tension. Let your teen see you do it—show your teen how you handle emotional heat. Your teen will learn from your example.
Skill Practice: Fist Full o’ Mindfulness
We all grip our thoughts and emotions too tightly from time to time, particularly in stressful situations. School and work can be hard. Kids can pester you. A partner can be a pain. Whatever the reason, we all sometimes grip ourselves so tightly that emotionally we shut down and close up. This activity helps you observe tensions, slowly opening to experience until the tensions change on their own.
As you repeat this exercise, try saying these phrases:
Practice open hand meditation both in moments of calm and tension. Try to remember this activity during challenging interactions at home. No one need know as you silently tense and release your fist. Let the tension of the situation release just as the tensions in your hand does.
When there’s a lot happening at home, it’s easy to become distracted and overwhelmed. When the mind is unfocused and emotions surge and swirl, we’re more likely to say and do things that make situations develop in less than ideal ways. In the middle of chaos, it can be extremely useful to take a few seconds to center and steady awareness. A short balancing activity can help us find helpful resolutions for tough interactions.
Skill Practice: Unmoving Mind
This portable skill practice works on the same principle as does mastering the spinning teacup ride at an amusement park: find something in your line of sight that’s perfectly still, and keep your focus there in order to avoid becoming dizzy and nauseated. When your teen is creating a tempest and you’re noticing yourself getting mentally tossed about, this skill can help.
Skill Practice: Walking Away from Your Mind
What about when you just can’t take it any more and discover you’ve already walked away from your teen? First of all, give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Instead of completely shutting down, allow yourself to go offline for a bit. You’re not perfect and neither are your skills of presence. You can, however, turn this act of walking away itself into a mindfulness practice. Like the yogis of lore, you can walk the hot coals of the situation you’re in.
After exiting a challenging or upsetting situation, as soon as you can, walk to a space where you aren’t likely to be disturbed. Better yet, walk outside for a bit. This technique is much more than just taking a walk to cool off. This technique brings your mind back in touch with your body and back in touch with the firm ground around you.
Do this practice after moving away from your teen and you’ll find yourself returning to your awareness faster and faster. Do this practice enough and you may find yourself no longer walking away at all.
Many times in my work, I’ve observed talented staff members who, in working with challenging youth, become trapped by tunnel vision. Their perception of what’s actually going on in a difficult situation narrows, often around a sense of blame, such as “Johnny is manipulating me,” or, “Sarah is doing this on purpose!”
Tunnel vision can lead us to focus on just one causal conclusion, one explanation for what’s making things happen. As a result, we can miss a whole host of other relevant factors. This is analogous to the limits of human vision. The electromagnetic spectrum includes a vast array of types of radiation, not just visible light. Our eyes, however, see only a tiny fraction of what’s actually around us. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that what we see is all there is.
Parents of angry teens need to build a habit of asking, “What else?”—a habit of seeking a larger perspective in order to reduce rigid and reactive thinking. Teens can spot tunnel vision in adults, particularly their parents. Opening up to a wider angle lens, even for things that have little to do with your home life, is a valuable skill in and of itself. In chapter 3, we’ll explore how to broaden perspective using mindfulness and positive psychology. Here, you’ll begin to practice perspective by widening your awareness of your senses.
Skill Practice: Breathing Yourself Inside Out
When you’re upset or overwhelmed, it can be hard to even notice what’s happening, both in your body and in the world around you. Some people become distracted by the difficult circumstances happening around them. Others become focused on a particular unpleasant sensation in their body. All of that tensing, clenching, and distraction takes a toll on both your body and your brain—making it more likely you’ll manage tough interactions with family in a less than ideal way.
Try this activity to connect to what’s happening both inside and out.
Skill Practice: Fresh Eyes
This skill practice helps you break free of ingrained ways of viewing triggers—including your teen’s actions and speech—as well as their stuff, which can clutter the home and become a nexus of conflict. The idea here is to see something fresh in the familiar.
Decades ago, psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues (Klein, Fencil-Morse, and Seligman 1976) documented the phenomenon of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a feeling of complete and absolute resignation in the face of negative inputs that do not seem to stop no matter what you do. Does this sound familiar? It has for many of the parents I’ve worked with. When faced with an onslaught of anger from a teen, for weeks, months, or even years, it is completely understandable to sink into a feeling of hopelessness or defeat.
When pain is here and now, it’s important to rest into it rather than trying to fight it off. Do what you can to address and change a tough situation. Beyond that, acceptance—not resignation—can help you ride out the pain.
Acceptance is basically another way to look at presence itself. (Practicing acceptance is thus also a way to practice the other skills we’ve discussed in this chapter.) Acceptance is the full, nonjudgmental choice to rest in your moment-to-moment sense experience. The classic metaphor for understanding acceptance is that of quicksand. If you fall into a pit of quicksand, you have to consciously not do what your body and mind reflexively want to do—that is, flail about in panic. Instead, you have to lie back and rest into the quicksand, maximizing your surface area and floating. Doing so opens possible solutions for actually getting out of the trap you’re in. If you’re flailing about, you’re much more likely to miss that stranger in the distance who could come over and yank you out. That’s acceptance.
This chapter’s final PURE presence practice offers you a strategy for building acceptance when the pain of a situation is not immediately going to change: take a NAPP.
Skill Practice: Taking a NAPP During Difficult Interactions
When you’re in the midst of tough emotions like sadness, frustration, anger, hopelessness, and loneliness, struggling often only makes it worse. It’s only when you relax into a painful moment that you have a chance to get unstuck.
NAPP is a method to help you float on the quicksand and create options for getting unstuck. It’s a mantra you can repeat in the moment as well as a series of steps to both help you think more clearly about the situation you’re in and keep from adding to your pain.
The idea here isn’t for you to just suck it up and passively resign yourself to a bad situation. When you take a NAPP you choose to let go of struggling, to notice your bodily sensations rather than the hamster wheel of your mind. When you take a NAPP you ride things out until ideas for improving your situation become clear.
Fight to solve problems, but don’t fight against your thoughts and feelings—it just doesn’t work. Don’t worry, you will still take action. However, you must cultivate mindfulness to manage situations effectively. Presence is the first step to improving communication with your teen.
The PURE method requires that you carry presence into each of the other steps. Like a board game sending you back to the start square, if something happens to dislodge your mindfulness, you must go back and start again. Go back to presence. This is why practice is so important. Mindfulness is central to moving beyond the heat with your teen.
Ask Abblett
Q: So with acceptance, I should just throw up my hands and get used to the fact that my child is a lost cause? That our family is broken?
A: Acceptance is about acknowledging the truth of what’s already here. It doesn’t say anything about what might be. Your flexibility, your ability to avoid reacting on autopilot, create the possibility of change. Resignation leaves no room for change.
All contemporary parents trip over time. It is impossible to fit everything in and get everything done in the daily twenty-four-hour pittance we’re allotted. You don’t need a psychologist to tell you that. However, sometimes we all need to be reminded to let go of our expectation that we should be getting everything done on time.
Again, the parental mind typically focuses on the future or past and has difficulty with the present moment. Instead of worrying that there will never be enough time to take on the skill practices of this book, remember what is at stake here for your teen and for you. Can you afford not to take the time to practice? Formal meditation on a cushion every morning for forty-five minutes is not the point. Mindful parenting doesn’t mean trying to practice something you don’t have time for; it means minding the moments you’re in. That is what the majority of the practices in this book are about—being more fully present in the moments of your parenting, however chaotic, intense, or painful they may be.
That said, if you can carve out the time, a consistent meditation practice can be helpful. Here are the basics of meditation. These basics have stood the test of centuries and served millions of practitioners.
Peaceful Parent Practice: Meditation—Taking Your “One Seat”
Psychologist, meditation teacher, and former Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield (1993) has said that, with meditation, it’s important to learn to take your “one seat.” That is, to find a method or practice and use it consistently. There’s a nearly endless array of meditation and mindfulness practices to choose from. It’s easy to get lost in constant experimenting with new techniques (believe me, I’ve been there). What follows is one of the most time-honored and simple seats for you to sit your attention on.
Again, the goal of these Peaceful Parent Practices is to build yourself a firm foundation of mindfulness and positive self-management. This will allow you to rise to moments of difficulty and manage interactions with your teen with more flexibility, poise, and presence.
Follow these basic instructions for mindfulness meditation of the breath:
I recommend establishing a daily habit. Practice a sitting meditation such as this for at least three to five minutes to start. It usually helps to pick a consistent time and place. After several days, increase your sitting time to ten minutes. Try to work your way up to thirty consecutive minutes of meditation if possible. Again, don’t use lack of time as an excuse for not doing the practices in this chapter. Do this sitting practice when and if you can. Over time, you’ll notice benefits in terms of reduced tension as well as increased alertness, flexibility in thinking, and overall well-being.
Before you move on to the next chapter:
If you haven’t already, complete the parenting self-assessment. Note in your journal the mindfulness skill domains (such as anchoring and focus) that are most needed in your situation. Try to identify specific situations and behaviors from your teen that make a particular domain more challenging.
Consult appendix A (available for download at http://www.newharbinger.com/35760) for further guidance in tailoring your presence practices to fit your needs.
Take your “one seat” with a daily meditation practice.