You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2009.
by Jeanne Denney
Last week I wrote a column here on The Committed Parent about my experience with a phenomenon I call Toxic Parent Brain (TPB). This is a state in which my more wise, mature and rational self disappears, leaving my nervous system subject to all kinds of irrational fears, anxieties, angers and criticisms of my children and/or myself as a parent.This state is certainly not optimal for my children’s development or self-esteem. I wrote about how TPB comes on for me and many others, and the seven things I found that were most likely to set it off. Fortunately there are a few things that I have found that help me remedy this phenomenon. I would like to share a few of them here.
Putting on Your Own Oxygen Mask First
The wisdom of “put your own oxygen mask on first” when resources are dangerously low, is one known, at least in theory, to most parents.Yet this wisdom is difficult to practice in the swell of need. Taking great care of myself certainly was not what I was shown or learned in my own family of origin. There are two really difficult pieces required to actually do this. The first is that you have to be able recognize that your resources are dangerously low (unfortunately no one ever pops one out and prompts me to put on the mask). I used to call this “Maternal Hypothermia.” Hypothermia is a condition in which low body temperature causes you to become disoriented and strips you of many self-protective survival instincts. This is a state that often requires someone else to help recognize and lead you out of, which brings us to the second challenging piece: from time to time we need support from others, and additional resources to help address the condition.
It is not clear that parenting was ever well-suited to be performed in isolation. Enlisting several caring friends outside of the immediate family to help us monitor our Parent Depletion Levels can help – something like a buddy system. Bodywork, yoga, psychotherapy, support groups, meditation practices and spiritual work of many kinds can be hugely beneficial for us and our children while we are raising them. Admittedly not all of these resources are affordable in time or money for many families with children. Still, even small external resources can create dramatic shifts in our inner resources and neuro/psychological balance. I call this practice “Creating Oasis.”
Creating Oasis
When I was deep in the 24/7 parenting years with four young children – two who were newborn twins – I had very few resources to spend on outside help. However, I was able to find and afford a doula for two hours twice a week. During that time I made a ritual of walking to a local coffee shop, ordering eggs, eating slowly in peace and writing in my journal. I have no doubt that the rituals of feeding, movement, expression and inner listening for four hours out of the 168 in a week changed the life of my children and helped me re-pattern the deeply-ingrained idea I had been raised with: that I had to utterly and completely sacrifice myself to my children’s care.
What is Oasis? It could be anything from focusing on a body part that is holding too much or too little tension, to imagining your summer vacation spot or favorite place of comfort, or to walking to get eggs in peace. It is something that tells your brain “you are safe,” that it’s okay to relax.
Now that I have studied and practice body psychotherapy, I understand the power of this small Oasis to my psyche and nervous system. Somatic psychologist, Peter Levine discovered that by attending to simple body sensations and inner images, we can begin a profound process of resetting the mind/body to begin healing from even large traumas in small amounts of time. If I can imagine and focus on being in Oasis even a few minutes a day, my mind/body begins to respond. Nervous system energy begins to dissipate from the body through vibration, breathing changes, changes in body temperature and emotion. Even fifteen dedicated minutes of self-care and self-inquiry a day can begin to shift the tide of unawareness to myself and attention to my inner needs and feelings. That awareness, of course, can raise other issues like the one below.
Speaking Truth about Feeling to the Self
Perhaps one of the downsides of gaining more self-contact and awareness is that you may discover things present that you would rather not know about, like feelings and behaviors that demonstrate our less-than-mature parts of self. Feelings truly felt through the body can be very challenging. Yet body and psyche react profoundly and positively to the genuine expression of them. This can create a problem for parents. Parenting often elicits strong emotions. At the same time, we often have no safe, socially sanctioned outlets for strong emotions and feel we should protect children from them. Children, meanwhile, are seldom fooled because they are so highly attuned to our emotional states. Indeed in the past several weeks I have encountered several cases in which young children were directly acting out emotions that the parents were working hard to suppress within themselves. It was a strong confirmation of something I already knew: that time and space set aside to claim and accept the presence of a parent’s own strong, even immature feelings, eventually benefits everyone. I need space to claim my truths, even the more difficult ones, whether in writing or while walking or stomping up and down the shoreline at dawn.
Movement alone is helpful. Pairing words with movement makes for an even more effective emotional release. I keep a heavy punching bag and gloves in the garage for the larger emotions. Statements lurking in the body such as “I hate picking up after you!” “I need a break!” “I am sick of folding laundry and tying shoes!” “Who is there for me?!” or even “I am sad that I can’t do anything else to change this,” often need full expression and bodily release. Body psychotherapy can be a wonderful way to work with some of these expressive needs. There are also ways to bring less charged tension and conflict into playful, safe release. Some favorites in my family are floor wrestling, tugs of war, snowballs, water guns and pillow fights. Children usually love being a part of this energy when it is done with good intention for coming back into connection.
Killing the Angel of the House
Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own wrote in 1929 that if a woman wanted to be a writer she needed money, a room of her own … and a knife to kill off what she called “the Angel of the House” (or the perfect caregiver). Parenting creatively and successfully has similar requirements. Who is the Angel of the House? She is the keeper of the perfect family photographs in which everyone is smiling, the Christmas letters in which all family members are thriving, and all problems are easily resolved. She is the keeper of images. The angel of the house is always seen with her natural sidekick and companion, the Critic, who is ever-available to evaluate whether she has managed to uphold the impossible family standards. This dynamic duo has probably done more harm to my children than any honestly expressed frustration ever has. They take me out of the healthy heart-truth that my children and I are okay as we are, that the world is good in its imperfection, that we are all in this together, and that our futures hold great possibility. If the Angel and the Critic are not murdered, they must at least be well-contained and be seen honestly for the neuro-nuisances they are.
Managing the Angel and the Critic
The main problem I find with managing the Angel and the Critic is that the world outside of the family often aids and abets them. Seeing that issue clearly and dealing with it is a column for another time. Interestingly, though, I find that when I take reasonable care of myself including plenty of time for finding and expressing the truth of how I am feeling, the Angel and the Critic stay in the attic closet where they belong. If they do escape to parade through the house one day (clipboard, stopwatch and halos in hand) I am usually able to find them funny. And then? I invite them to grab a water gun. Play…or die!
Jeanne Denney is a body psychotherapist, hospice worker, birth doula and mother of four children. She practices in and around New York City and sponsors the Rockland Instutute for Mind/Body Education. Jeanne is also a Global faculty mentor at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.
by Jeanne Denney
It happens less than it used to, but still more than I wish. Often it happens so suddenly that it catches me by surprise and I have no idea where it came from; and leaves just as suddenly, like a hit-and-run driver or a short-term hijacking. I have lived with it for most of my life as a parent. It’s a condition I’ve nicknamed Toxic Parent Brain (TPB) – that sudden state of revulsion – of myself as a parent and my children as children. It’s a jumbled state of fear, panic, shame, self-recrimination, over-analysis, anger, projection and worry, shaken and stirred into a toxic cocktail that occasionally overshadows much of my happiness and joy in being a parent. It is a dark cloud that I am suddenly enveloped in and then have to find a way to navigate through. My work with other parents has confirmed to me that I am not alone in this brain state. There are legions of us that struggle to manage it in guilt-ridden silence.
Encountering Toxic Parent Brain
Almost every parent will have to deal with Toxic Parent Brain at one time or another. In my case it is what happens when I find myself confronted with an experience of parenting that is not in accord with my inner image of either the Good Parent or the Ideal Child. Usually TPB strikes when my personal resilience and emotional resources are low.
That this state of mind has to do with my brain neurology is clear to me from the years I have spent as Mark Brady’s friend, bolstered additionally by my own study in neuroscience and somatic psychology. It is often highlighted by the sudden onset and the irrational conclusions I draw from seemingly innocuous events. For example, walking into the house and finding my thirteen year old children (I have twin boys, Gil and Peter) playing computer or video games, candy wrappers strewn across the floor, while still in their pajamas at two in the afternoon. Other examples: my older kids leaving me the car with no gas, or our kitchen looking like it needs federal emergency funding.
Doomsday Scenarios
Some wild neurons in the deep recesses of my brain fire “Danger! Danger!” and start a cascade of doomsday scenarios which result in imagining all kinds of disastrous futures: my children grow up to be social lepers, nincompoops living dependently at home well into their 40’s, unable to be responsible, hold a job, pay bills or do their own laundry, prepare their own meals. I imagine media-saturated, consumer-driven, ecologically-disastrous half-citizens who have no interest in engaging the world or moving their bodies out of bed, living like puppets in the constant distraction of text messages, driven solely by the lust for the next Big Entertainment Thing. This isn’t the picture of children I want to devote my life to raising. I feel angry and betrayed. By whom, or what though, is not quite so clear.
That I leap from the simple experience of seeing my children playing the Wii, or spying dishes in the sink, to “this means I am a complete failure as a parent in raising socially responsible, spiritually and emotionally astute adults” is clearly a gross distortion. Even though, in my more mature judgment, I might choose to find an opportunity to set better boundaries about use and timing of video games and family cars, Wii baseball in pajamas in any moment is clearly not immediate danger requiring either sudden rescue or hand-to-hand combat. There is no real evidence that their life is in peril, nor that my parenting, as a result of this short-term adrenaline-fueled distortion, has been a total failure. In a Toxic Brain state I cascade from small pieces of self-defined imperfection to the children’s ultimate demise. I cannot see them or myself compassionately as works in progress or in any way see the much deeper truth of their nascent beauty. I compare them to mental pictures of what I wanted my children to be like, the deal perhaps I thought I got into when I signed on. Why aren’t they dressed? Cleaning their rooms? Learning woodworking? Practicing viola? Reading the New York Times or playing outside?! Things that would make me feel like I really am a GOOD parent (since I’m clearly not feeling like too much of one).
Doing Psychic Harm
This sudden hijacking, as Mark likes to call it, is the state in which I am most likely to do psychic harm to my children. This is the state where I speak in frustration, judgment, anger. I shout, stomp, slam and humiliate, or conversely, I sink into the passivity of depression, or both. My Toxic Parent Brain permeates their world and becomes a natural disaster, one that they are hyper-vigilant to avoid or resist. For many of us, the fear of being stuck in Failure Projection Mode is the most painful part of parenting. Our heart knows how painful this is for them even as we often lack the resources in the moment to effectively inhibit it.
Examining the Causes
After a recent three day, post-holiday episode in this state, I took the opportunity to witness and observe some of the anatomy of this upset. Here are some of the things that I noticed about myself and others:
1. In almost all cases TPB occurs much more often when I am in a state of relative self-neglect and/or feeling low in confidence.
2. It occurs more often when I have not moved my body, expressed my emotions, or listened to or spoken personal truths to myself for an extended period of time.
3. It is often true that my children are trespassing on some sacred, but unconscious images I have of children I had hoped that I would raise. This ideal seems most likely to have its origins in some wound in my own soul, my own heart. It may also be a vestige of an unconscious parent judgment I carry from my own childhood, or perhaps some quality in myself that I unconsciously expect them to replicate (Gee, I was already a great seamstress at their age, why aren’t they?).
4. It occurs when I am feeling isolated or alone in the experience of parenting.
5. It also often occurs around experiences in larger community, such as extended family, school meetings or social gatherings when children are being judged or compared, either obviously or covertly, by a group (Awards Ceremonies are but one egregious example).
6. It occurs when I’m confronted with over-idealized images of family life in media or culture (for example, do you believe that when hunting for a photo for this column I could not find even one picture of families who were not completely happy like this?).
7. It often occurs when I am either obviously or covertly being criticized as a parent, for example by a teacher or other adult, or I’m asked to produce an outcome that is not within my control.
These last three experiences are remarkably common in our culture, and part of what I have previously written about.
What I can share, as part of my own experience as a parent and a parent counselor, is that this is a very common experience, one that our intellects alone cannot fully address. We can’t “think” our way out of the Toxic Parent Brain state. It takes great care and awareness of my own body, emotions and spiritual life. Perhaps it also really does take a village.
I hope to write more about some of the things that help me recognize and work with this painful condition in a future column. Until then I am offering you help with number 4. You are not alone. Oh, and the other thing 21 years of parenting has finally taught me: your children will invariably also surprise you.
When my daughter, Amanda was little, there was a Sesame Street segment that we loved to watch together. It featured children from all over the world singing a line from the song, My Name is You (“We All Sing with the Same Voice”). We both used to watch transfixed as one child after another sang their own name in smiling harmony. Additionally, when we would go out to play in the park, Amanda would become transfixed by the other kids there, watching them endlessly with avid interest. It was almost as if she recognized herself within them.
Heterotopagnosia
What brings these memories to mind is a scientific study I recently came across on something called heterotopagnosia (hetero- tōp- äg- ʼnōzh (ē)a). This condition is caused by accidental or deliberate brain lesions to the left portion of the parietal lobe. 
If you have this neurological predicament and I ask you to point to my arm, even though you fully understand my request, you will automatically point to your own arm. If I ask you to point to my leg, you will immediately point to your own leg. But if I ask you to point to the leg of a person in an illustration or a photograph, you will point correctly. Likewise if I ask you to point to the arm of a doll or mannequin, you will do so easily. Strange, isn’t it? When asked to describe his experience, one of the patients in this study said, “I couldn’t place you outside myself. You were in me.”
It’s almost as if the growth of that part of the brain, when it’s working “properly,” serves to automatically manufacture an artificial distinction between “I and Thou.” My sense is that because it will be many years before children have their own temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junctions fully wired and connected up, that is how young children experience other people, especially other children. It’s as if other children are “in” them.
Weakening T-P-O Connections
This seemingly natural neurological development, apparently works to produce the reification of others as separate from ourselves. Many spiritual traditions teach that such a perception is an illusion, a rather convincing one at that. But even though it seems that way, other people really aren’t separate from us, and some of us are able to sustain a kind of dusty, vague recollection of that Unity consciousness.
The lack of deep development of such consciousness, one that fuels and motivates compassionate action in the world, I personally feel lies at the root of much human suffering. Perhaps if Incognito Johnson or Bernie Madoff had early instruction that worked to diminish the strong T-P-O connections in their own brains, they would not have perpetrated the recent massive frauds they did. With socially appropriate T-P-O connections might corporate executives be loathe to exploit the world’s citizenry and its resources and their own companies? Would politicians abhor the very idea of going to war? Might they govern the world with the deep realization that by harming others or the environment, such actions deeply damage some real and essential pieces of themselves?
First People living here in America before they were invaded, raised and educated their children in ways that apparently did not develop “Separation Brain.” First People recognized the sacredness of their connection to other living beings as well as to Mother Earth. As contemporary parents we can do much to restore in our own children this sense of connection to others and to the world. We can both model and instruct. The Golden Rule shows up in every major world religion I suspect, for exactly this purpose – the recognition that other people in the world are not really separate from us. Nor are we separate from the planet. When looked at under an electron microscope, the billion neural connections made by the 100,000 cells in brain tissue the size of a grain of sand looks a lot like the root system of the earth’s trees. I don’t think it’s an accident that the macro and the micro reflect our deepest connections.
We Are the World
There are many spiritual and psychological practices we, as parents and people, can use to help us loosen the hold our Separation Brains have on us. Various contemplative practices can serve as a beginning basis. Scientific research reported here has repeatedly indicated that teaching and modeling Random Acts of Kindness and other creative altruistic possibilities is enormously beneficial for the human brain. Anything we can think of that provides us and our children with the deep realizations that My Name is You truly implies, I would suggest be wholeheartedly and joyously put into service. This compelling video captures the transition we each need to make quite wonderfully: What About Me? It’s well worth watching.
Young kids inherently get this connection, and by dispelling the illusion of separation as it begins growing in the brain early on, might we ultimately provide great service to the planet and everything living upon it?
Any time I walk into a classroom, meeting or party, my assumption is that roughly fifty to eighty percent of the women present have been sexually, physically or emotionally abused before the age of 18; and that these experiences have compromised optimal neural integration and development to some degree; and that the same is true for between half and ten percent of the men in the room. While very likely true, these are assumptions I might be well-served to examine more closely.
When I first got wind of these statistics, my first response was much like Sigmund Freud’s, which Harvard psychiatrist, Judith Herman details in her book Trauma and Recovery – “This can’t be true! There must be something else to account for these reports.” But then I took a look at my own personal history. It’s one that includes multiple incidents of each form of abuse. None of these incidents were reported to anyone who would ever make them part of any national statistical database. They were, in fact, never reported to anyone period. But the important issue here isn’t one of statistical accuracy – few professionals can even agree on what actually constitutes a truly traumatic experience. The important issue is that our children have been robbed of their ability to smile.
I think that losing our smile happens like this: somebody (most often someone we trust or are dependent upon for our survival and well-being) perpetrates something our neurophysiology isn’t adequately developed enough to be easily able to handle. In any form of abuse, there is often pain, shame, threat, violation and isolation. These are significant pieces; perhaps an even more significant piece is that many times we are immobilized by the abuse and often left with few direct ways to freely express the experience out of our brains and bodies. As Mark Twain observed, most of us are only afforded free expression from the grave. What a sad shame.
Awakening to Reality
One of the great findings of social neuroscience research, I think, are the findings which confirm that traumatic experiences, unaddressed, definitely do impact neural integration and development. And they do so for our whole lifetime, often without us even realizing it! I’d like to repeat here what noted neurologist Bob Scaer has said on the subject: “The cumulative experiences of ‘life’s little traumas’ shape virtually every single aspect of existence. This accumulation of negative life experiences molds one’s personality, choices of mate, profession, clothes, appetite, pet peeves, social behaviors, posture, and most specifically, our state of physical and mental health.”
But every instance of abuse is unique, and such experiences can’t be painted with a broad brush. I recall being at a writing workshop once where one of the women wrote intimately about her own incest experience. What was most traumatizing to her was not the incest experience itself – it was the fact that there was no room in her world to express the real truth of the experience – the fact that she liked it! She didn’t feel coerced or abused or violated in any way, except by what came afterward. It was the abhorrence, denial, hysteria, shock, shame and avoidance she encountered in other people after the fact that caused her problems. That’s what made her lose her smile. Does this mean that we should accept and condone incest? Not in the least. But it could mean that we might be serving those who’ve had the experience best by examining our own assumptions and impulsive reactivity first. Doing so might help make it safe for them to tell the real and whole, complex and multi-layered truth of an overwhelming experience. And by allowing this truth-telling, might we also be allowing them the ability to maintain their smile?
The Eye of the Heart
Attar, the great 17th century Moroccan rabbi said, “If the eye of the heart is open, in each atom there will be 100 secrets.” How might each of us open the eye of our own hearts and place its secrets in the service of reclaiming and protecting the innocent, trusting smiles that our children were born with? How might you, reading this, begin the work of reclaiming your own Beginner’s Smile?
* Previously published on Mindful Mom.
Here are three short recent videos of two people who have been very inspirational in my life. They are both nearing the end of theirs, and are doing so with honesty, humor, forgiveness and compassion. Click on their names to witness two exemplars of temporal and transpirational brain integration …
