It isn’t a luxury.  It’s a necessity.

Or mad? Or scared? Or overwhelmed? Or shut-down?

Why do I make a mountain out of a mole hill?  Why can’t I keep it together?  

Being ignored (or yelled at or cussed at or disrespected or refusing to eat or do a chore or or or or the list is endless) is never going to feel good.  But- have you ever wondered why your brain goes into full on attacking watch dog mode when the reality is- refusing to do a chore, go to school, or even being ignored or yelled at, isn’t life threatening?

Keep reading or listen on the podcast!

If it isn’t life threatening, why does our brain go to attack mode?

A mode that really we only need in life threatening circumstances?

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the arousal continuum with regard to our kids – but as my friend Eileen Devine says, the brain is the brain is the brain.  And you have one, too 😉

Why does our brain go to attack mode- a mode that is intended to help us survive a life threatening circumstance- if we aren’t in a life threatening situation (and as much as it feels like it’s life threatening, a kid who is refusing to go to school or even yelling and cussing at us isn’t life threatening).

Narrow window of stress tolerance

For all sorts of reasons, many of us are walking around the world with a narrow window of stress tolerance.  Pandemic.  Economic uncertainty.  Virtual school.

Parenting kids with a history of trauma is stressful and overwhelming in the best of circumstances but now some (many?) families are cooped up, have lost their respire, can’t access the limited services they accessed before.  And kids are stressed, isolated, overwhelmed.  Their felt-safety has been shook to the core.  For many kids, this means their trauma-related dysregulation and challenging behaviors are at an all-time high.

There’s only so much we can take. 

Chronic stress and overwhelm- even when it’s not life-threatening- causes our window of stress tolerance to get smaller…and smaller….and smaller…….

When our window of stress tolerance is nice and wide….we can tolerate stress without freaking out.  We have a feeling that matches the stress.  Frustration.  Annoyance. 

To be clear….I’m not implying that when our window of tolerance is wide open we just bop through life like Pollyanna, never being frustrated or irritated.

When our window of stress tolerance is nice and wide, we can handle frustration, annoyance, irritation, nervousness, sadness…without completely losing it.  We can stay connected to the emotion and then use the emotion to help us know what to do next.

Frustration and annoyance might suggest you need to set a boundary.  But when our window of tolerance is nice and wide, we can set the boundary without screaming, yelling, threatening, or becoming overwhelmed.

We are all walking around with small windows of tolerances. 

And mole hills become mountains and teeny tiny little stressors feel like we are being chased by sabre tooth tigers.

Of course now you’re curious about how to increase your window of stress tolerance! 

You can read about playfulness and self-compassion– both which absolutely increase our ability to tolerate stress.

You can also check out The Club – a virtual group of education, connection, and co-regulation.  I teach some pretty cool things in the group but my focus is actually on facilitating and offering connection and co-regulation (because that changes the brain more than education does!!!).

Implicit Memory Awakenings

There’s another reason, too, that to the best of my experience, impacts every human on the planet.

Early early life experiences shape the way we perceive the world and our expectations about how things are going to go.  We adapt to painful experiences in brilliant ways that help us meet our needs the best way we know how and protect us from overwhelming, and often not co-regulated, pain.

Maybe when we were verrrrrry small, our own cries and needs went unanswered.  A lot.  When we are small, having our needs ignored a lot is indeed life threatening.  Our brain experiences the lack of response as something that is very very dangerous.

When we are 40, and our children ignore us, we aren’t in a life threatening situation.  But we have a very intricate and brilliant protective system that is always on alert and trapped in the past- so it can experience being ignored as life threatening and cause a “I’m in life threatening danger!!!!” response.

Maybe when we were verrrrrrry small, ignoring our parents was verrrrrrry dangerous.  We learned that if we didn’t immediately respond, and respond in a way that satisfied them (who knew what that was, but we sure tried!!!) we would get hurt- physically or emotionally.

Now we are 50, and when our children ignore us our own verrrrrrrry wise and still on alert and stuck in the past protective system actually is trying to protect our children by having an enormous reaction that gets a response from them.  It’s not safe to ignore!  I don’t want my child to be unsafe!  When they ignore me, I’m terrified for their safety and will spring in to action so they cannot possibly ignore me!!! (I understand this doesn’t make a lot of sense, practically speaking.  But it makes PERFECT sense to our implicit memories, and sometimes, they take charge).

Obviously, we aren’t consciously thinking these things through.

You see, behaviors are mostly part of our implicit (unconscious) world, too.  We like to think we have a lot of control over our behaviors- and sometimes we do and we can work to have more control- but a lot of behavior is actually implicit and behavioral impulses are triggered in the brain waaaaaaay faster than our conscious explicit mind could stop or pause them.

Consider a behavior your child has that awakens something really intense in you.

Maybe you have a child that is shut-down and seems lazy (I don’t believe in lazy but that’s another blog!!).  Maybe when you were small achievement is how you were safe. Or created your identity.  Or got seen by others.  Not being seen or not having an identity can feel annihilating- life threatening.

Maybe your child gets really rude and sassy and down right disrespectful.  I agree with you that it’s important to speak to each other with respect- so I’m not saying having a reaction to this isn’t warranted- but when we react with intensity, anger, or our own shut-down or ignoring behaviors, we aren’t able to help the real problem- supporting our kids in expressing their needs and feelings in a prosocial way!

Our reaction to their disrespect touches into our past when we learned to tow the line and never express any negative feelings, so that we kept the peace as much as possible.  Or we were treated with such extreme disrespect, but couldn’t have a strong boundary to keep it from happening again, so our bodies and implicit selves now want to react with all the power that we couldn’t when we were small.

Remember.  No behavior is maladaptive.

All behavior makes sense.  This is true of our children, and this is true of US.

You can explore the science behind our implicit awakenings (the stream of the past) in the blog post No Behavior is Maladaptive.

You can dive even further into the impact of memory on behaviors in the blog post Trauma, Memory, and Behaviors, as well as the FREE three-part video series (and short e-book) on Trauma, Memory, and Behaviors. 

Both resources are written with our children in mind, but see if you can read and watch the videos while thinking of yourself- yourself as a child, and yourself now.

This might help your behaviors make more sense.

And when behaviors make sense, we can have more compassion.

And we have more compassion, we create the opportunity for integration in our brain- so that the stream of the past and the present come together equally and we respond in a way that matches the present situation- not in a way that matches our past.

Robyn

Would you like to explore further into this complete paradigm-shift on how we see behavior? You can watch my F R E E 45(ish) minute-long masterclass on What Behavior Really Is and How to Change It.

Just let me know where to send the links!