Chapter-Four

“Coping” in the Toddler Brain

Coping mechanisms are adaptations to environmental stress designed to comfort or give a sense of control. They differ from the old notion of unconscious defense mechanisms, which Freud believed defended the ego from unacceptable impulses, such as sexual feelings for or hostility toward parents or caregivers. Coping mechanisms are generally conscious, intentional, and often tactical or strategic.

Toddlers use coping mechanisms primarily to ward off threats to autonomy and connection, because they cannot keep these competing drives in balance. For example, if you go into a room to find a toddler alone with a broken lamp and ask what happened, you’ll hear, “Someone else did it” (blame) or “I don’t know” (denial), or the kid hides or runs away (avoidance). Psychologists used to believe that toddlers used blame, denial, and avoidance merely as attempts to avoid punishment and indirectly assert autonomy. Now we understand that they’re also trying to maintain or reinstate connection. After all, the real pain of punishment isn’t the sanction administered: a time-out or spanking. The grave pain of punishment is the Toddler brain’s experience of rejection and loss of connection.

Whatever short-term gain there might be for adults when we blame, deny responsibility, or avoid, emotional experience and social reprimand will most certainly come back to haunt us, sooner rather than later, usually in the form of resentful coworkers and family members.

Denial and avoidance are fairly universal and straightforward. (If you’re married, you’re probably convinced your spouse uses them all the time.) Denial can seem like stubbornness, deception, and insensitivity. It’s sometimes those things, too, but it’s also an attempt to assert autonomy at the cost of connection (“Just suck it up like I do!”) or gain connection at the cost of personal integrity (“I didn’t flirt. I love you!”). Adults in the Toddler brain tend to favor indirect avoidance tactics, including procrastination, stonewalling, overworking, overdrinking, overeating, over exercising, and so on. The most direct and usually the most damaging of the toddler coping mechanisms is blame.

The Road to Psychological Ruin Begins with Blame

If you feel bad about anything at all and blame it on someone else, what can you then do to make yourself feel better?

Not a thing. The act of blame renders you powerless, which is the internal source of all the frustration, anger, and resentment that go with blame. More important, blame strips painful emotions of their primary function, which is to motivate corrective behavior. As we saw in the previous chapter, pain—physical and psychological—is part of an alarm network that evolved to keep you safe and well. The function of guilt, shame, and anxiety is not to punish you. Their primary function is to motivate behavior that heals, corrects, or improves.

For example, guilt is about violating your values; the motivation of guilt is to act according to your values. Acting according to your deeper values is the only thing that resolves guilt. Shame is about failure and inadequacy; the motivation is to reevaluate, reconceptualize, and redouble efforts to achieve success, or if the failure is in attachment, to be more loving or compassionate. Those are the only things that will resolve shame. Anxiety is a dread of something bad occurring that will exceed or deplete resources; the motivation is to learn more about what might happen and develop plans to cope with it. Blame, denial, and avoidance might give momentary relief of guilt, shame, and anxiety but will soon worsen them by blocking their natural motivations.

Even a destructive emotion like jealousy has a motivation to heal, improve, and repair. A toddler who sees his parents hugging and kissing is likely to feel a stab of jealousy, which makes him feel left out and abandoned, and that makes him feel unlovable. His first instinct is to wedge himself between his mother and father and be as cute and loving as he possibly can be, to reattach and strengthen their bond. If his parents respond to his loving efforts with acceptance and affection, his feelings of being loved and lovable are reinforced. He will grow more secure in his basic worthiness of love, which allows him to become more tolerant of his parents’ expressions of affection for each other. But if his embracing parents grow annoyed with his “intrusion” or regard him as “spoiled,” they might push him away or chastise him as “selfish.” In that case he learns to interpret his pain as a sign of failure, inadequacy, and unworthiness. Stripped of the natural way to relieve his vulnerability, he feels powerless. Instead of becoming more loving when he feels bad, he becomes angry or resentful (blame), pretends it doesn’t matter (denial), or tries to focus on something else (avoidance).

We’ll return to jealousy later. The point here is to emphasize that emotions are part of a motivational system; they exist not to punish but to motivate behavior that will help. Negative emotions do not indicate that you’re bad; they tell you to do better. They’re correction messages, not failure messages.

If you feel that your emotions are punishment, you will feel unfairly treated by other people, particularly loved ones. You’ll blame the very guilt, shame, and anxiety that evolved to make you more loving toward them. Once blame becomes a habit, it poisons your relationships and your very sense of self. It keeps you locked in the Toddler brain—a high price to pay for the temporary advantage of transferring guilt and shame onto others.

Blame vs. Solving Problems

Blame makes it almost impossible to find solutions to problems. Besides locking us in the Toddler brain, blame puts us in the wrong dimension of time. It’s always about the past—specifically, who caused the bad thing to happen. When I speak to groups, I usually ask for a show of hands to indicate how many people are able to go back to the past to solve a problem. Solutions, of course, must occur in the present and future.

Blame further obscures solutions by locking us into the problem. We focus on how bad it is and whose fault it is rather than on ways to improve. To justify blame, we focus on the damage or injury we’ve suffered, when growth and well-being require resilience, intelligence, and creativity.

Blame tends to make bad situations worse by putting us in punishment mode, rather than in improvement mode. In punishment mode, we’re likely to make everyone around us defensive and resistant. Even if we get people to do what we want, they’ll do it grudgingly, with hidden and often not-so-hidden resentment.

The bottom line is that we must choose between blaming and solving problems, because we cannot do both at the same time. Blame is a Toddler brain coping mechanism; solving problems is the domain of the Adult brain.

Blame and the Natural Purpose of Anger

Blame perverts the primary function of anger, which, in humans, is not self-protection. (If you doubt that, consider when you’re likely to get angrier: when I attack you, or your children.) The survival purpose of anger is to protect loved ones, which overrides self-protection. Most people who witnessed their children being harmed would experience enough rage to take on an assailant many times larger and stronger. The reason that humans are the only mammals that consistently use aggression against attachment figures is that we’ve developed a specialized, defensive form of anger unique among Earth’s inhabitants. It’s called resentment. While the primary purpose of anger is protection of loved ones, the purpose of resentment is protection of the ego. And no one can hurt our egos as much as loved ones.

Because their egos are newly emergent, toddlers resent a lot, although they don’t hold on to it for very long. Adults in the Toddler brain can hold on to resentment forever, thanks to their need to justify any negative emotion that might violate deeper values. The more we justify resentment, the stronger it feels, and the stronger it feels, the more we have to justify it. Resentment serves the ego in the short run by transferring guilt and shame through blame, but weakens the ego in the long run with chronic feelings of powerlessness. The more fragile the ego, the more we blame. The more we blame, the more fragile the ego becomes, and the more likely we are to subvert the natural function of anger by turning against loved ones.

How to Be Wrong Even When You’re Right

Blame-driven resentment makes you wrong, even if you’re right. You can start out factually correct, but if you fail to appreciate other people’s perspectives, you’ll soon get resentful and probably angry, and so will everyone around you. Resentment and anger simplify, amplify, and magnify negative stimuli. They make you reduce the object of your resentment or anger to one or two negative aspects. That’s fine if you’re dealing with a saber-toothed tiger, because then you don’t need to know about its kittenhood or the number of cubs it has to feed back at the den or whether it’s on the endangered species list. You reduce it to one negative aspect—the threat it poses—and you either attack or retreat.

But in human relationships, amplification, magnification, and oversimplification distort issues by blowing them out of proportion and taking them out of context. It’s easier to see how this works when you are the recipient of someone’s resentment or anger. Think of a time when people were resentful or angry at you, and they were factually right: you did make a mistake or do something wrong. Even though they were right, you probably felt they were making too much of it or overlooking crucial details or reducing you to that one mistake, as if all the good things you’ve ever done in your life didn’t count. Well, other people react to your resentment and anger in the same way. Most humans subjected to the amplification, magnification, and oversimplification of resentment or anger get resentful, contentious, or sulky in return, just like you do.

Resentment also creates hyperfocus on one’s own perspective to the exclusion of everyone else’s. Did you ever go out to lunch with someone resentful about something that happened that morning at work and try to talk about anything other than what he’s upset about? You could probably say, “I was thinking about killing myself last night,” and you’d get a reply of, “Oh, really? But did you hear what she said to me this morning?” Of course this hyperfocus makes it impossible to see another person’s perspective, which creates a prison of self-obsession in the Toddler brain.

Resentment wounds relationships at work, but it kills close relationships. Blame-driven resentment and the anger that rises from it are for dominating and devaluing, not for negotiating or improving relationships. If you’re resentful or angry when discussing family finances, for instance, you don’t just want your spouse to agree with you, you want her to feel stupid for not agreeing with you. Resentment and anger exist exclusively to devalue, reject, warn, threaten, intimidate, or attack—in your head or in reality, behind their backs or in their faces. You may feel as if you’re doing these things defensively, but you are nevertheless rejecting, warning, threatening, intimidating, or attacking.

You can trust that resentment in the workplace will increase complaints, absenteeism, turnover, tardiness, healthcare utilization, and sabotage. At home it causes disconnection, alienation, abuse, and divorce.

Feeling Powerful vs. Being Powerful

The new mobility that toddlers experience makes them feel more powerful. At the same time, their utter dependency on their caregivers makes them feel powerless, which threatens their emerging sense of autonomy. So it’s perfectly understandable that toddlers use coping mechanisms to feel more powerful momentarily, even though blame, denial, and avoidance actually make them less powerful. It’s not so understandable when adults, with their powerful prefrontal cortex, repeatedly do the same.

I grew up with angry and resentful people and have struggled my whole career to help thousands of resentful and angry clients achieve a better life. The hardest truth for any of them to grasp is the difference between feeling powerful and being powerful. Most anger and resentment are attempts to feel powerful at the cost of being powerful.

Anger is activated in all mammals by a dual perception of vulnerability and threat, which is why wounded animals are so ferocious. In humans, most anger results from blaming the feelings of vulnerability—guilt, shame, anxiety—on someone else, whom we then perceive as a threat. The feeling of power gained from anger is transitory, coming from the amphetamine effect of the adrenaline spurt that fuels it. Amphetamine effects create a sense of power and confidence; it feels like you can do anything! Like all amphetamine effects, the sense of power and confidence gained from anger resolves in depleted energy, self-doubt, and a diminished sense of self. It always drops you down lower than where you started, which is why most people feel depressed after a bout of anger.

In the Toddler brain, we try to cut off those hills and valleys with persistent resentment. As a low-grade, defensive form of anger, resentment lacks sufficient adrenaline to cause the immediate overreactions of its more intense cousin, but it has enough of the effect to ward off self-doubt and maintain the feeling of being right. This mediating effect of resentment makes it self-reinforcing in that it creates the need it temporarily gratifies. That is, the blame inherent in resentment makes us powerless, while its adrenaline makes us temporarily feel more powerful. Like resentment, drugs make you feel better for a while then much worse, creating a need to feel better again by taking the drug. People justifying resentment sound like alcoholics describing the “trace” vitamins in beer, which makes consumption of large quantities a health necessity.

We’ll see in later chapters how to be powerful and eliminate the doomed Toddler brain quest to feel powerful. Hopefully by now it’s apparent that the toddler coping mechanisms of blame, denial, and avoidance make us feel powerful for a time but render us powerless over our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. If you wouldn’t drive a car designed by a toddler, don’t use coping mechanisms designed by a toddler.

Next we’ll see how toddler coping mechanisms form entrenched habits that ruin the very best of adult intentions.