I am unable to comfort my oldest son when he is sad. He has never responded to my instinctual efforts as his mom: to reach out to him, to snuggle him, to tell him it is okay to be sad or it is okay to cry. Often, when he is sad about something and I move into his physical space to offer physical comfort, he punches or kicks at me; I have been kicked in the face more than once while he was crying in the back seat of the car and I leaned in to say, “Are you okay?” or “What’s wrong?” Now that he is older and a bit better at using his words, he will tell me to leave him alone, to get out of his room because I cannot help him. He says this with despair, as if he wished he did have a mother who could figure out how to help him feel better but realizes that his lot in life is to be raised by me, someone who clearly lacks the skills and ability to meet his emotional needs when he is upset. And as a result of this, I too have sometimes felt that God messed up when God made me his mother: God gave him the wrong mother, and thank goodness that he has the father that he has, for my husband is able to offer that quiet, unconditional acceptance that seems to reassure and re-center my son.
My good friend who listens to me lament about my conflicted and difficult relationship with my oldest son suggested I read What Do You Really Want for Your Children? by William Dyer. She has found this book to be an important touchstone in reminding her of what she wants to focus on as a parent and what her goals are for her own two children. I began reading the Introduction and found a simplified version of William Glasser’s Reality Therapy described:
“As a professional counselor I always knew precisely what formula it took to get people to change. First, I would get people to identify what it was that they were doing which could be labeled self-defeating, to simply identify the behaviors that were not working for them. Second, I would attempt to get them to see the payoffs, or the “neurotic dividends,” for these self-destructive behaviors. Finally, we would attempt to come up with intelligent, practical, and implementable behaviors to help them change…”
First, identify what it is that you may be doing in a given area of child rearing. Then look at your payoffs for continuing to treat your children this way. Finally, find out how to use new techniques that just might bring about your desired result.”
It resonated with me because I had just discovered Choice Theory while preparing a graduate level professional development course for a group of teachers at a high school in my state. We were to address the topic “Engaging Reluctant Writers,” so I turned to books that talked about Activating the Desire to Learn (Bob Sullo) and The Classroom of Choice: Giving Students What They Need and Getting What You Want (Jonathan Erwin). Both relied on Glasser’s basic premise that “All Behavior is Purposeful.” We are NOT reactive beings, according to this theory; rather, we have learned behaviors over the course of our lifetimes that we use to achieve a purpose, usually in trying to meet one of our five basic needs: Survival (Safety and Security), Love and Belonging, Power (Competence, Effective Cooperation, Achievement), Freedom, and Fun/Joy. Sullo explains that our basic needs “lead us to create a unique, idealized world that motivates us… Everything we place in our internal world relates to one or more of the basic needs…it is precisely because this person, activity, belief or value is need-satisfying that it becomes part of our internal world.” Sullo then goes on to point out the problems with our construction of our need-satisfying world, and thus our choice of behaviors: 1) our perception of reality is affected by what sensory information we actually take in from the external world; 2) we then filter that information to conform to our pre-existing model of “reality.” This is in essence because we try to make sense of everything around us—it meets our survival need and is hardwired into our brains; 3) we then assign positive or negative value to our perception of reality based on whether it satisfies our need at that moment. This last step is usually subconscious, and often we assume our own perception is accurate and real.
Sullo then goes on to say that the only way to engender change in behavior is to guide oneself (or be guided by a skilled teacher or therapist or even a good friend who asks challenging questions, as my friend does): “I will change my behavior only when I come to the conclusion that the world I perceive is substantially different from the world I want.”
So often, too often, I am unhappy with the quality of the relationship that I have with my oldest son. Erwin encapsulates Glasser’s approach to counseling with Choice Theory in 5 questions that are useful to use to evaluate purposeful behavior (and remember that in Choice Theory all behavior is purposeful!) in order to arrive at behavior that is more effective and responsible (i.e. behavior that better meets your own needs while not impinging on the needs of others):
1) What do you want in regard to______?
2) What are you currently doing regarding _________?
3) Is what you are doing getting you what you want?
4) Are you willing to try something different?
5) What is something that might work better for you?
A great activity in Erwin’s book invites teachers to create individual needs profiles of their students, and a “class” needs profile, in order to better understand and thus motivate students to learn. In the course I developed, I thought it made sense for teachers to also undertake this exercise, because we so often create a classroom that is needs-satisfying for us, and view student behavior that does not meet our needs as negative. I invited all of the participants, and myself, to write about which needs we thought were most important to us as teachers.
I spent a great deal of time writing about survival, my most important need. Actually, survival is probably everyone’s most important need, but many people feel much safer and more secure on a daily basis and therefore invest less time and energy in behaviors devoted to meeting survival needs. Moreover, for many people, fewer things, people, events challenge or upset their sense of survival. These people tend to rest easier in the world, to flow and roll better, to have higher self-confidence and a strong sense of core stability than I do.
In order for me to feel safe, I need to impose a great deal of order and control over my environment, including the people in it. I like rules, and lots of them, that are clear cut and rarely negotiable. I like to be in charge, especially in charge of children for whom I am the naturally assigned leader and rule-maker and enforcer. When I am learning a new task, I am often highly stressed and need the pace to be very slow and deliberate. I like to write everything down and then file it in my organized filing system. I hate to cook without first cleaning the kitchen, or to go to sleep while there are still clean clothes on the bed that need to be folded and put away. Often, the first way I learn to deal with a new situation is the only way I will ever use; I do not search out improvements or efficiencies when doing tasks such as housecleaning, budgeting money, planning agendas or lesson-plans. I am absorbed in details, like punctuality, try to micromanage situations and other people. When I am stressed to the extreme, I often choose activities that are almost obsessive-compulsive in their nature: playing solitaire over and over and over and over; playing Boggle against myself for hours; rocking on my hands and needs while banging my head against a wall as a young child before bedtime to the extent that I eventually made a hole in the plaster (and drove my sister in the adjoining bedroom crazy!), and most recently, ripping up the asphalt in the driveway by hand.
Writing about fun and joy was, by contrast, painful for me. Things that I enjoy include being intellectually stimulated in my work: designing lessons and units and courses that are creative, innovative, and that tie together historical trends and events in new ways. I love to read the newspaper and discuss current events or, in my current life in the absence of lots of adult colleagues, I write long letters to the editor. I enjoy feeling impassioned and empowered, feeling righteous anger about social justice issues, and ranting about them to practically anyone who will listen—captive audiences like workmen and school secretaries are my usual audiences these days. I love to work on projects that I think will make even small differences for the disenfranchised and invisible in our schools: poor kids, children of color, Muslims and other religious “minorities,” kids who live in non-traditional families, immigrants, and what I call “regionalism:” the orientation of many curriculum units and materials on a very tradition-bound view of history and life in the United States that reflects a strong New England bias.
Yet what I consider to be fun and joyful and for me deeply personally fulfilling is not readily recognizable as such by most people. I come across as very intense, super-smart, intimidating, needing to dominate and prevail in conversations that quickly become one-woman speeches. I have a great deal of difficulty relaxing, doing nothing, and giving myself permission for down time. Interestingly, as a classroom teacher I have successful developed a teaching persona that enjoys joking and laughing, that is upbeat and friendly with students, that emanates love, caring and concern. I am good at create a “Loving and Belonging” environment for students as well as a learning environment that they enjoy. I noticed this yesterday while leading my son’s 2nd grade cub scout troop, how easy it is for me to become the fun-loving camp counselor personality when I am in group settings with kids.
Yet in my own family, I am the parent who is so in need of structure that I often not only cannot initiate play and fun with my own children, nor participate in it when my husband is playing with them, but often try to squelch it when it conflicts with bedtime, meals, getting housework done, or following family rules. It is as if my husband and I, who both need to learn from each other how to be more like the other, have instead become more polarized in the arenas in which we already have a marked preference. I am definitely not the fun parent, and although I resent this role, it is in reality self-imposed. Perhaps if I truly believed and could trust that my husband would respect our basic family routines for mealtime, bedtime, getting ready for school and getting off the bus, I could let go, but I don’t see him stepping up and filling that role. Often we are not even on the same page about what I think we have “agreed on” as being non-negotiable or as optimal for the kids: consequences for hitting or other hurtful behavior, and when the kids need to eat and get ready for bed.
When I recently explained to my sister that my husband was not good at time management, she responded, “I like to phrase it this way in my relationship: my wife and I have different relationships to time.” Something shifted for me then, and I realized that I had been seeing my husband’s style and approach to family “schedules,” which are internalized and paramount in my mind to our children’s mental and physical well-being, as careless and clearly inferior to mine, rather than as different. Through the lens of Choice Theory, he was choosing behaviors that were needs-satisfying for him in playing with the kids and getting them revved up or distracted from what they needed to be focused on to get ready for school or bed, and in his internal ideal world it was also best for them; whereas his behavior was NOT meeting my own idealized internal world of punctuality and order.
Both our family therapist and our marriage counselor have been challenging me lately on my belief that rules, schedules, routine and order are in fact what are best for the kids. Clearly, I see that these things help me feel more safe and secure in when under stress; after my husband’s bypass surgery, we reinstituted family meetings where we listed issues, made new rules and consequences, and then tried to follow them for a week. Although I wrote them down, I was the only one who regularly referred to them; my husband did not, and only my oldest child can even read. And the fact that rules and consequences were negotiated and could change each week didn’t help the kids or my husband keep track of what the bottom line was for not hurting, being kind and gentle, staying safe, listening and cooperating. When our family therapist heard that we were trying to deal with five issues at a meeting, that the kids couldn’t focus that long, and that the process was actually confusing everyone about being on the same page, she said, “Simplify.” And when she and my marriage counselor heard my list of rules and concerns about my oldest son’s consumption of video games and junk food, and all the restrictions and guidelines I had put in place, they both said, “When are you going to let go?” In back to back sessions one Tuesday, it was as if I was hanging off the edge of a tall building, holding on white-knuckled and afraid of dropping into the abyss, and they came and stamped and stamped on my fingers until finally, finally, I let go. I had been given permission, and by people who I knew understood me and also valued children’s best interests. They would not give me advice that would irreparably damage my son. I had to trust. I let go, at least a tiny bit, and I didn’t plunge into darkness and fear. Nor did my son. We have survived, and he is definitely happier out from under the microscope and with the thumbscrews off—as any child would be.
And yet I am still unable to stop myself from doing some of the other basic things I know he needs that somehow, somehow, do not meet my own deep needs when he is upset. I am a very verbal person, and very extroverted, whereas he needs solitude and quiet when he is upset. My sister once told me that growing up in our family, she constantly felt like her emotional space was being violated, because when she was upset, our analytical mother would ask over and over, “What’s wrong? How are you feeling? How can we fix it?” and offer useless advice like punching a pillow when you were mad at someone. My sister was never able to just have her feelings, to just be in them. I am that same analytical mother, trying to figure out what is wrong with my son, trying to fix him somehow so that he will be “perfect”—polite, respectful, cooperative, and yet also his own wonderful, creative and unique self. I can’t parent well and get both results: I can’t put him in a straitjacket and try to change what I perceive is wrong with him and love and accept him unconditionally and allow him to just be and become his own self. Every counselor and occupational therapist who has ever worked with my oldest son and me has said the same thing, that I must talk less, respect his need for space and privacy more, no matter how counterintuitive this seems to me, no matter how much it runs against my own nature, my own perception of what a person needs when they are upset or sad. I have gotten angry more than once over this advice, this observation; therapists are asking me to change something that is so fundamental to who I am. They are in essence telling me that I cannot parent my oldest son in the way that he needs and be myself. And I have despaired more than once that he was given the wrong mother, not only someone who didn’t meet his emotional needs at the outset, but someone who couldn’t, who wouldn’t, change herself—or at least her behavior– in order to do so.
And yet Choice Theory offers the hope that I don’t have to sacrifice myself in order to be a better mother to my oldest. All I have to do is recognize that the behaviors I cling to are dysfunctional in that they drive my son away from me when what I want most is to be able to give him a feeling of safety, comfort and reassurance, and try new behaviors that may work better. I will get my need for Love and Belonging met, instead of experiencing over and over his rejection of me. I will get my need for Power met as I feel more competent as his mother, better able to meet his needs, instead of feeling the wretched failure I so often do. And I may even be able meet my need for Survival by letting go. All of those rules and regulations that keep me safe also produce a great deal of stress for me and for my family, and it becomes a self-feeding monster as I then create more structure, rigidity and rules to deal with that stress.
Although I know and have known for a long time that the ways I meet my Survival instinct are in many ways dysfunctional, they still have the power to resurge and take over my thinking, embedding themselves as rational and logical, and resisting with anger and stubbornness any attempts to dislodge them. They are well armored by defense mechanisms on every side. Of all the needs I have, and of all the behaviors I have developed over the years to meet those needs, my survival behaviors are far and away the most consuming, and the most damaging, in my life. They brought me almost to the point of self-destruction more than once in my 20s, and now they are creating a child who is also a perfectionist who feels unsafe and out-of-control in an unsafe and out-of-control world. For his sake, for my love of him, when I cannot find the self-love, I must strive to change, to unlearn the old ways and practice new ones until they become my second nature.
