According to Dr. Gabor Maté, the most important quality that affects the circuitry of a child's brain is the quality of the parent child relationship. The neurocircuitry and biochemistry of a growing child's brain is reliant on a safe, attuned, and non-stressed attachment. The emotional relationship with the parent determines the psychology of the child's brain. The loss of the attuned, non-stressed relationship with the adult affects the healthy development of the child's brain. The human brain develops in interaction with the environment. When we as adults are stressed, it's hard to be attuned to our kids emotionally. This lack of emotional connection has a negative impact on children’s brain development.
So what is emotional attunement? It is to share the child's emotional space. It's when the adult “gets” the emotional space of another and communicates that they understand and that they “get” it. The adult “gets” what's happening emotionally with their child and they communicate that they get it. Empathy is a part of it, but it's also the capacity to get/understand the emotions of the child. It’s “getting” AND reflecting it back WITHOUT shutting it down.
Dr. Gabor Maté’s work emphasizes the intersectionality between physical and emotional health. This intersectionality is especially interesting and relevant to me because I am passionate about helping parents learn how to support their children’s emotional health so that they can have healthier behavior. Then, since being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer eleven months ago, I am now fascinated by the correlation between not knowing how to feel negative feelings and how this can be a contributing factor to disease development later in life. Even though I’m masterful at supporting kids in healthily feeling their difficult feelings, and I grew stronger in this knowledge in my recent Graduate Degree in Social and Emotional Learning, I personally never knew how to do this myself. “Feeling your feelings” seemed like an elusive cliche, something I knew was important and healthy, and something I “tried” to do, but really I had no clue how to do it. After 50 years of being conditioned otherwise, like most of us have, it’s just hard to change. When I am feeling the most troubling feelings of sadness, fear, anger, or despair, I turn to my phone and scroll and scroll, desperately pushing those feelings as far away from me as possible. I would also eat junk food, but I don’t do that anymore since I’m trusting God to heal naturally. There are many vices people use to not feel their difficult feelings, like shopping, drugs, alcohol, Netflix binging, etc.
Dr. Gabor Maté says that the more you don't know how to feel and process these feelings, the more you want to push them down, and this can lead to addictions, coping mechanisms, and ultimately disease. Or, in his experience, another way people can respond is to harden themselves and become ruthless and then end up in jail.
During this intense year of healing, I have found very special supports to help me personally to feel these difficult feelings, and it's been one of the hardest things I've ever done. I've had amazing breakthroughs and I've made great progress, however nevertheless, I still need a lot of support to feel these difficult feelings because my old neuropathways of pushing down difficult feelings are still very strong.
In my twelve video Get Kids To Behave and Be Empowered For Life program, I teach parents how to guide their kids to feel difficult feelings without judgment. I teach parents to “get” how their kids are feeling with empathy and objectiveness. I was passionate about this before, but now, I am even more passionate about this topic. Now I see that the potential repercussions of not emotionally attuning to your kid can be a lot more than just their frustration, exasperation, and bad behavior, but it's that you are setting them up for a lifetime of pushing down their own emotions and this could tragically lead to physical disease manifesting in their bodies! My goodness, now I see how much more this important emotional attunement really is.
Stored emotions never die. They can get trapped in our bodies and wreak havoc. We need to feel and process difficult feelings, and then release them. We need to let them run their course. In this culture, we mistakenly believe that we need to be happy 24/7 and if we’re not, we’ve failed or there’s something wrong with us. We have no capacity to sit with the feelings, so we push them down. However, over the years, the body suffers as a result of this. We need to not be so afraid of these feelings. There is no shame in them. And we do have the capacity to feel them.
“Getting” children’s emotional states does not mean we agree with why they feel that way. It doesn’t mean we will change our mind and turn our “no” into a “yes.” Attuning emotionally is to stop your opinions, judgments, and agenda, and to just “get” how your kid feels and communicate back to them that you understand how they feel. No distractions, no fixing, no advice, no worries.
This is explained more fully in my program, but here are some examples:
(Resist the urge to give advice, be positive, encourage, make suggestions, or tell your opinion!)
Kid: I hate him!
Parent: Awww, you really feel strongly. You feel hate toward him. Awww. I get it.
Kid: He took my toy! (has tantrum)
Parent: You are so angry that he took your toy. I see your anger. I’m here for you.
Kid: I feel so ugly!
Parent: Aw, you feel ugly? That’s a difficult feeling. Let me sit with you and hold you while you feel this.
See? By responding in these ways, you are emotionally attuning to your kids. This provides them with a very strong foundation for being willing to feel their difficult feelings themselves. You’re not acting so afraid of these difficult emotions that you desperately push them down as fast as you can. You’re showing your kid that these feelings are normal, they’re human, and you’re guiding your kids in how to handle them. Rough feelings need to be handled.
So stop fixing, distracting, encouraging, lecturing. Or at least do this AFTER you emotionally attune.
Here are the same examples with typical parent responses that neglect to emotionally attune:
Kid: I hate him!
Parent: Hey, that’s not nice. He’s your friend. Stop saying that.
Kid: He took my toy! (has tantrum)
Parent: You’ve had that toy for a long time, hey it’s good to share. Why don’t you play with something else?
Kid: I feel so ugly!
Parent: Don’t feel that way! You’re beautiful. I never want to hear you say that again, okay?
Good meaning parents respond in these ways because they love their kids so much that they cannot stand to see their kids go through difficult emotions. But we must be wiser! We must have a good understanding of emotional health and feeling difficult feelings IS very important.
Sometimes parents will tell me that they put on a good face for their kids, then cry after the kids are in bed. I challenge these parents to not hide it. Allow your kids to see you experience your own difficult feelings. Show them how you feel them and process them in healthy, constructive ways. This is so powerful! The reality of life is that we will go through tough times and have to deal with hard feelings. We can’t pretend this isn’t how life is. So, please provide your children with a good foundation of emotional health through emotional attunement.
In my program, I do go over the accidental blind spot many sweet parents have of falling into the slippery slope of attuning too much or with “worry” vibes that actually creates a welcome mat for horrible behavior when kids feel rough feelings. This is another topic so I won’t elaborate here. But I just want to conclude by saying that there is a good balance to shoot for with the correct kind of nuances and energy behind it. So, if you feel you are already good at emotionally attuning, but your kids are acting with mean behavior, then something in your approach is off. When done correctly, the bad behavior dissipates, not worsens.
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