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finished Hollender emotional needs 1 emotional abuse 0 psychological abuse 0 Dysfunctional family / families 0 physical abuse 0 parent's 0 parents' 0 For whatever the reason—maybe it’s a design flaw—people are more willing to accept advice after they feel they’ve been understood. |
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| Kids Who Lash Out Alysa started her session with me by saying: “It happened again. My mother really pissed me off. We were at the mall and she wanted me to try on this sweater. She knows I hate it when she picks out clothes for me. I tried to be cool but she just kept insisting. Finally I just started screaming at her. People stared at me—I know I must have looked crazy, but I couldn’t stop myself. Finally she just walked away. I felt horrible. I couldn’t stand how awful I felt about losing it in the store with my mother. I went to the ladies’ room and cut myself.” Alysa belongs to the group of kids who manage their dysregulation by lashing out at the people around them. Anybody can be a target when these kids begin to get revved up. They are quick-tempered and poor at expressing their anger effectively. Once their anger subsides, however, they often feel a great deal of shame about how they behaved. When their shame (a secondary emotion) becomes intolerable, they are likely to engage in self-injury. -- He completely fails to mention that the mother was not respecting daughter's feelings in the store the first place. If the mother had respected Alysa's feelings about choosing her own clothes, the mother would not have started picking things out for her again. Then when Alysa tried to stop her mother from pressuring her, her mother ignored her and kept insisting, in other words, kept pressuring her. Another mother who was more emotionaly aware and less dominiating might have realized what she was doing and said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm pressuring you, huh?" Or she might have said, "Are you feeling pressured by me?" Or she might have said, "I'm sorry - I'm doing what you don't want me to do again, aren't I?" Hollander misses all of this. Instead, he just blames the whole thing on Alysa not being able to manage her "emotional dysregulation." It seems never to have occured to Hollander that children and teenagers would never have had to become so "dramatic" if their parents had made a habit out of listening to them and showing understanding without just trying to get their "kids" to always do what the parent wants them, or "needs" them to do. I put needs in quotes to emphasize that it is often the parents who believe something "needs" to be done or it is the parent who feels a strong need for something. In other words, Hollander also misses the fact that the parents of these "overly sensitive" children and teens are emotionally needy themselves and they are using, or trying their hardest to use, their children to try to fill their own unmet emotional needs- such as to feel in control. -- When a child feels invalidated, her emotions run high and she redoubles her efforts to be understood. Unfortunately, emotionally vulnerable kids are not skilled in this regard Again he fails to see that if someone had shown some understanding they would not need to try harder to get the understanding they need. It is like he is blaming or faulting a new born baby for not being able to express themselves in words when they are hungry. He simply does not acknowledge that the parents have held the power in the relationship since day one and they parents, as adults, should be the ones who are "skilled" in interpreting their own children and furthermore to teach them, from the beginning, how to label their feelings. It is painfully obvious that these parents didn't do that and now you can see the results. Hollander should begin the book by saying "You absolutely are to blame." It is like blaming someone in France, with French-speaking parents, for the fact that they can't speak German. Who's responsibility is it to teach children how to communicate? I say it is the paernts'. Who has failed in their responsibility then? The child or teenager? Or the parents? Hollander keeps trying to convince us that these "kids" are just more difficult to raise since they are more sensitive (ie too sensitive), etc etc. He might as well just call them moody and spoiled brats. |
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| Only one use of "emotional
need" When a child feels invalidated, her emotions run high and she redoubles her efforts to be understood. Unfortunately, emotionally vulnerable kids are not skilled in this regard and, like Floyd, usually just raise the decibel level rather than figuring out a way to express what they need. Naturally, the reaction from people around them—the environmental response—will be aimed at the “loud” behavior and not at the emotional need behind it. Consequently the child feels more invalidated, which intensifies her emotional dysregulation. Now overwhelmed with intense feelings and lacking regulation skills, the child is prone to self-injure. This transactional cycle takes on a life of its own, and over time it becomes a stable if dysfunctional communication pattern. |
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| They’re often very sensitive to perceived
rejections, - Unfortunately, Marie heard it only as a threat and slumped deeper into her chair. |
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| Desperate to Be Heard: Floyd and the Farmer One summer during my college years I hitchhiked through Europe with my brother and a college friend named Floyd. Floyd spoke a little French but not enough to get by. Soon after we arrived in France we were picked up by a farmer, and we attempted to communicate to him where we were headed. Floyd started using his French but couldn’t make himself understood. The farmer became increasingly frustrated with him. Floyd responded by speaking louder, as if he would be better understood at a higher volume. When it was clear that the farmer still had no idea what Floyd was saying, Floyd spoke even louder and began to introduce English words into the mix (albeit with a French accent). It was chaos. The farmer just dropped us off in the nearest town. I use this story as a metaphor for the transactional nature between an emotionally reactive child and an invalidating environment. When a child feels invalidated, her emotions run high and she redoubles her efforts to be understood. Unfortunately, emotionally vulnerable kids are not skilled in this regard and, like Floyd, usually just raise the decibel level rather than figuring out a way to express what they need. Naturally, the reaction from people around them—the environmental response—will be aimed at the “loud” behavior and not at the emotional need behind it. Consequently the child feels more invalidated, which intensifies her emotional dysregulation. Now overwhelmed with intense feelings and lacking regulation skills, the child is prone to self-injure. This transactional cycle takes on a life of its own, and over time it becomes a stable if dysfunctional communication pattern. |
What if I told the border police how I felt? He "blames" the "kids" "not figuring out" This is like blaming a baby for crying instead of "figuring out a way to express what they need." Would the parents care how the "kid" felt if the "kid" used feeling words? |
| Let me give you an example. TAMAR AND T HE PUPPY Tamar is a very bright college student who has a long history of self-injury and eating-disordered behavior. She has had several tries at more conventional individual talk therapies aimed at helping her understand the meaning of her eating-disordered behavior. Her parents divorced when she was in elementary school. Her mother and father are two high-powered professionals who travel often as part of their work. While Tamar had a good relationship with her parents, she felt they pressured her to conform to their ideas of success. Her eating- disordered behavior reached a level where she couldn’t remain at college and had to return to live with her mother, although she often spent time at her father’s house. After several hospitalizations, she began outpatient psychotherapy with me. An especially difficult problem for Tamar was binge eating in the middle of the night. At one point she had made some gains in this area by using skills she had learned in therapy with me, but we were not sure what triggered the behavior or what function it served for her. About 3 months into our meetings, she began to backslide. It was a puzzle to both of us. She started one of her sessions by saying, “I think I know why I started to binge again. It has to do with my father coming home from his business trips. fact versus fiction 25 I get really tense when he’s home. I just know that he wishes I would get my act together. He doesn’t understand how much I’m struggling.” As the therapy hour progressed, I learned that Tamar had recently acquired a puppy that she was in the process of housebreaking. As part of the training, Tamar would get up in the middle of the night to take the puppy outside. She told me that she was always fearful of waking her father on these late-night trips with the puppy. Furthermore, she complained of how intolerant her parents were of her puppy’s behavior and said she would become stressed and tense in response to their criticisms. What we learned when we went step by step looking at what happened when she took the puppy out was the following. Tamar would get extremely tense when she noticed that her puppy might have to go out. As we talked, she realized that when she went down the stairs and out the front door she didn’t binge, but when she went down the stairs and out the back door through the kitchen, she did. It seemed that seeing the refrigerator was the trigger for bingeing. If she didn’t see the refrigerator, she stood a better chance of accessing her new skills to help her manage her stress. The function of her bingeing, it became clear, was to reduce her stress. The remedy, then, was simply to go out the front door. This is the same type of solution that becomes accessible in treating selfinjury when we look at its function rather than try to discover its buried meaning. With the trigger out of the picture and a better understanding of the function her bingeing had for her, we were able to develop a treatment strategy that would make Tamar’s bingeing a thing of the past. If I had focused exclusively on the meaning of Tamar’s bingeing in relation to the complicated feelings she had about her father, her eating disorder would no doubt have continued much longer. |
If I would have focused on the father, the father wouldn't have paid my bills. |
| What we do know is that most kids who engage in deliberate self-harm are at the emotionally reactive end of the emotional continuum. If they don’t or can’t modulate their emotions, they’re more likely to make poor decisions, to fall prey to impulsive actions, and to be ineffective in their relationships. To modulate his emotions, your child needs to activate the part of his brain that controls logical thinking and reasoning, that part of the brain that helps him reappraise his emotional situation, rather than the part that leaves him wallowing in the emotion. As you can see, emotion modulation skills are absolutely critical to our well-being. |
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| And with their poor judgment and general sense of identity confusion, these kids are often at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to negotiating the normal tasks involved in becoming a competent adult. DBT directly addresses these skills deficits, both in individual therapy and in skills-training groups. In individual treatment the DBT therapist and the adolescent review recent events and work at figuring out what would have been a more skillful approach to the situation. Together they may practice the new skill through role playing or the therapist may assign “homework.” In skills-training groups the child is introduced to the four skills modules that are essential to DBT: mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance. |