Bearing Witness to Terror: Alana and the Apricots
After a few moments Kayleigh broke the silence. “This is what she does whenever we talk about food.” They now saw the fear in their daughter, but when I asked how long this fear had been present, Charese immediately thought of herself. She said softly, “Since she was born.” For Charese and Kayleigh the terror we saw in Alana connected directly to their own memory of terror that their daughter might die. The feeling now expressed in Alana’s behavior held a grip on the whole family. The therapy setting allowed us to slow the process down.
The Exquisite Pain of a Child’s Sadness: Finding Confidence to Bear It
Toni held the drawing up to the Zoom camera. for me to see A stick figure stood in the middle: big blue tears the size of her head lined the page reaching from her eyes to the ground below at her feet. Even through the screen I could feel the heart wrenching pain portrayed in the picture. Toni surprised me by then saying, “I want her to be able to feel sad.” I asked if she would tell me more. She vividly recalled experiences from her own childhood when she sensed that her parents could not accept her feelings. Sadness transformed to anger and then uncontrolled rage. The frustration of not being seen felt alive in her now as she held her daughter close.
Becoming Unstuck: Listening for Meaning in a Child’s Behavior
In my years of practice it never ceases to amaze me how effectively young children can communicate the source of a problem through their behavior. Of course Harry did not know or understand the role of unmourned loss in his parents lives and in their relationships. But he absorbed the distress and “acted out” as if to say, “I need you to deal with this so you can see me as myself.”
Parenting and the Stigma of Emotional Suffering
Families who struggle with substance use disorders can face enormous obstacles in their recovery. In caring for Leila and her parents I felt license to talk openly about stigma as a well-recognized part of the problem. Perhaps this experience can offer us a lesson for all families with young children.
Born Into Violence: Listening as Prevention
In that moment of connection, Calvin made hopeful meaning of himself. If he had words, he might have said, “I can change my world to make it better.” He communicated with his mother in a way that also changed the meaning she made of his behavior. Her negative attribution based on her experience of violence shifted. Psychoanalyst Lou Sander referred to this kind of interaction as a “moment of meeting.” Parents and infants make meaning of themselves in the world through hundreds of thousands of moments. Unfortunately for this family, their circumstances did not allow for the calm space for listening offered that night in the hospital.
Parenting Through Grief: “I’m Her Only Mother”
I refer to this process as “bringing in the baby” in clinical work with parents struggling emotionally around the time of childbirth. While certainly this mother’s grief remained front and center in my thinking, my unique role was to support her relationship with her newborn child. I have found that rather than various forms of “talk therapy,” the actual baby and their communication often offers the most powerful voice for growth and change.
Peter and the Bear: Finding Hope in Child’s Play
3-year-old Peter and his family were referred to my behavioral pediatrics practice for help with “managing his aggression.” In the second session, having taken a full hour to listen to the story from his parents Jonathan and Jalissa the previous week, we are all sitting on the floor. Peter drapes himself across his father Jonathan’s lap, wriggling around while drawing with markers on a pad on the floor. His mother quietly observes. There is a long moment when it feels like nothing is happening. I notice in myself that feeling of not knowing what’s going on, but will myself to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty.
The Examined Life: Listening to the Baby
No matter how messy the situation in which we find ourselves, this singular focus on the transformative impact of facilitating moments of meeting between parents and their young children brings a sense of calm purpose to the work. Again and again we observe how such moments produce extraordinary changes in families, shifting the narrative from generational trauma and disconnection to possibility for healing and growth.
Mother, Father, and Baby: A Pandemic Moment of Meeting
In the final minutes I remarked on the unusual way Zoom sessions allowed for a kind off photo op by screen shot framing their family of three. Of course I wouldn’t take a photo of them as that would have been inappropriate for the setting, but I wanted to share with them what I saw. In our hour visit, with opportunity to slow things down and make meaning of everyone’s experience, we created a moment of meeting. As together we navigated from mismatch to repair, both Alice and Carter appeared to feel a renewed sense of confidence. With hope, moments like this strung together over time will serve to buffer this growing family from the storm of challenges the world presents in this time of unprecedented anxiety and uncertainty.
Parenting and Empathy: An Essential Partnership
Last week I had the privilege of reconnecting with Anna Ornstein, a brilliant child psychiatrist and one of my original mentors. In preparation for our meeting, I re-read a paper she had given me back in 2004* (written with her husband Paul Ornstein, MD about 20 years before that), when I was just beginning to develop the ideas now described in my book, Keeping Your Child in Mind. While I do not reference the paper in my book, it is filled with such wisdom that I felt compelled to quote large segments of it in this blog post. Interestingly, much of what she says is similar to what in the current world of developmental psychology is referred to as “reflective functioning, ” or what I refer to in my book as “holding a child’s mind in mind.” While in that language, empathy is included as one component of the more complex task of reflective functioning, in Dr. Ornstein’s language “empathy” encompasses the many components of reflective functioning