Relationships Part 2: How to Bond

Would you like to learn more about creating connection by giving emotional support?
This skill helps couples cleave, helps parents bond to children, helps singles connect to future spouses.  In this episode, parents of a 14 year old boy and a 16 year old girl experience the heartache and joy of giving emotional support when their children need it.

Transcript

Connection: How to bond  Part 2

Last week we talked about charity or service as one of the steps on the Happiness Ladder and how spending time alone with your loved ones facilitates secure attachment.  I received this from one of my listeners.  

This dad said, “After listening to your podcast on planting trees and time alone, I felt encouraged to do better. On Father’s day,  I skipped my nap (naps are a huge deal to this guy, he always stays up late) and played pickle ball with one son, then the other.”

Wow.  So good.  Ok, so some of you parents are loving your kids by spending quality time. That’s so good.  Please take a moment of parental satisfaction- you are creating a secure attachment.   Now in part two I’d like to explain how to amp things up from “time alone” to something just a little bit better.  I call it “Connection Time”

Connection time will help  fathers to heart-to-heart with daughters, will help moms to bond with sons, it will help  married couples  to cleave, it will help teens to fortify friendships, and it will help  singles to connect with prospective spouses; Human beings were engineered by God to develop fulfilling relationships. Profound connections bring profound happiness.

What is Connection Time and How do you do it?   Two words.  

Emotional support.  

For example, imagine you are the father of a 16-year-old daughter who comes in the door, slams her stuff on the kitchen table, and explodes: 

“I’m never speaking to Mason. Not ever. Today I found out he asked Olivia to the dance! I’ve been friends with him since we were in the same Sunday School class in 5th grade. She just moved in last year, he doesn’t even know her that well.” 

Big tears well up in her eyes. “He’s such an idiot. I make sure to talk to him every day. I thought he was flirting with me. This really hurts.”

Part of you wants to grab Mason and squeeze him into a tight headlock and do some type of painful intervention like kick his shins. He is hurting your daughter’s feelings. But she’d be so embarrassed if anyone saw you doing that.  Or if word got out…hmmm you wonder, what to do, what to say. 

But, you need to realize she’s come to you for emotional support, not retribution or to solve her problems. She’d never trust you with her private feelings again. So, you remember the formula emotional support:  

Step 1 Reflect: “You must feel so …” 

And you remember she used the word hurt. You search your brain for a good synonym for hurt:

Disrespected

Pain

Aches

Suffer

Upset

Injured

Disappointed

Wounded

Unhappy

Offended

“Hmm, you think.” Disappointed might fit the bill..

You say, “You must feel so disappointed.”   

Now what you said makes the damn burst and she really starts crying. “Yes,” she chokes out. “And he’s the only boy I like in the whole school.”   

Oh, dear, now she needs a Kleenex. Several. You realize she’s sobbing because of what you said. Oh no, did you do the right thing?

Yes, you did. She’d been enduring the ignominy of this affront all day at school. Now she’s home where it’s safe, she wants to let it out. For goodness sake, she couldn’t discuss it with her best friend Olivia. Oliva snatched Mason away. She needs to express her feelings to you. Think how emotional support affects your child. She is miserable, perhaps feeling all alone in her pain. When you say, “You must feel so disappointed,” you show her that you are trying to understand how unhappy she feels. It’s a great comfort to her to know you understand. Well, you are straining to understand. And you facilitated her getting it all out. She takes a breath.

“I’m so mad at Olivia. She knew I wanted to go with Mason to the dance. Why did she accept him when she knows I like him?”

Now here’s where you are tempted to get off track. You’ve observed the three of them at church. It’s a little love triangle. Your daughter is magnetized to Mason, and it appears he’s quite enthralled with Olivia.  Hmmmm. Your daughter is more of an athlete, she runs, bikes, plays volleyball and doesn’t wear makeup. Olivia appears to spend decent amounts of time on her clothing, her hair and unlike your daughter, she probably frequently smells nice..  

You are inclined to say, “Well, I’ve noticed that Mason likes Olivia. Maybe you could try wearing some body spray?”  

Wrong. No solutions! Saying that would make her feel deficient. You don’t point out people’s flaws when they are in pain. It’s not supportive, it’s shaming her. Your daughter is upset, and your perceptive insight and your helpful suggestion is “fixing.”  Fixing when she’s come to you for emotional support is absolutely the wrong thing to do.  Men are notorious fixers.  But Women do it too.

She’s so distraught, she’s not going to hear a single thing, a single helpful solution you might generate. The limbic system is activated…..strong emotional response, not logic. Instead she’s going to hear that she’s not good enough, and she might resent that you don’t understand how she feels. 

You have to be like a mirror. No matter how you feel about the speaker’s message, you don’t let it sink in, you have to reflect. You have opinions on how to solve the problem, but this is not the time.  

You think, “She used the word ‘mad.’ But a more precise word might be ‘stabbed in the back’ -- oh wait, that’s from the 1800’s, probably not the way teens talk now.”

So, you say, “You must feel betrayed.”

“Yes,” she says. “They are both cheating on me.” And your daughter launches into ten minutes of how she heard that Olivia and Mason were real buddy-buddy at the last activity, when she was sick at home. And, she just wants to stay home forever. She never wants to show her face at school or church ever again. Now this is a little scary because you have a strong value about 16-year-old young women in your family attending church and attending school. However, you don’t get sidetracked on your values at the moment, you muster one more bit of emotional support. One more reflection.

“You must feel embarrassed… it must be difficult to face either one of them.”

Bravo, Dad. You score 100 points on this one. Because you're that helpful mirror, she can move from hurt to irritation.“Yes, I’ve been waiting for Mason to turn 16 so we could go to this dance.  But that was a big mistake!”

Now she’s truly angry. “I’ve wasted too much time thinking about those two losers. I have to go study my science.”

She jumps up, kisses you on the cheek, and says, “Thanks, Dad,” and she’s off.

What just happened? You didn’t fix anything. You didn’t give a single suggestion. What good is having an intelligent and experienced father such as yourself if he can’t give advice, fix things, and rescue the family?

By stifling your fixing mode and reflecting her feelings, you gave her a little bit of emotional support, a little bit of energy to have confidence in herself. Now she’s going to work on how to repair this dilemma. 

By the way, your daughter goes to school the next day and tries to make the best of her shattered romantic life. She decides it might be good to speak with Olivia. She comes home later and tells you that Olivia is really sorry that Mason asked her to the dance. She pacifies herself by directing her disappointment at Mason.

Your emotional support was the real fix in this incident. Your daughter was able to get her mind around her problem and move it from her limbic system or amygdala for fight or flight to her prefrontal cortex where she can use judgment, and consider the consequences. Who do you think she’ll go to for emotional support the next time she needs it?

So you ask, “When do I get to try and fix it? When do I get to share my thoughts?”

When a person is upset and agitated, they are simply not in the right brain to hear your helpful suggestions. Your daughter has a brain on fire. The amygdala has released catecholamines, neurotransmitters that make her want to take immediate action. Her brain is not in a state to hear your reasonable insights. Reflecting works as the stones to bank this emotional fire.

Usually after you’ve reflected enough, a speaker will sigh, and they can be calm. And you can tell the fire has moved to a different part of the brain, the executive control center or prefrontal cortex. Here she can exercise rational thought. Here she can consider the thoughts and feelings of others, including yours. If she gets calm sometime in the future, you can ask, “Do you want to hear an idea that might help?”  But, that might not happen today, and that’s okay. You’ve done the most important piece of the work by reflecting.

Reflection don’ts

1. Don’t say, “Oh, I understand how you are feeling.” Nope. Never. Show the speaker you understand how they are feeling with a thoughtful reflection word.   From the previous example:

“You must feel kind of betrayed.”

1. Don’t use the words sad, mad, glad, and bad. “You feel bad” is weak. The English language contains an elegant array of synonyms. You learned “Sad, mad, glad and bad” in first grade. It’s probably okay to use them with your six-year-old, not your 6th grader.
2. Don’t make her feel deficient. If you say, “Well, if you’d just pay more attention to your hygiene, or if you’d lose some weight.” That somehow Mason doesn’t like her because she doesn’t try hard enough. That she’ll never be good enough. This is shaming and a terrible thing to do.   Don’t.
3. Don’t say, “Can I say something and you promise not to get mad?” You know it will make the speaker mad.  You may feel it’s a helpful suggestion, but if it points out the speaker’s weaknesses, it also may be shaming.  Focus on reflecting and giving emotional support, not fixing.

Step 2:  Summarize When you’re new to summarizing, There’s an easy to start, you just say,:

“So what I hear you saying...”  

I’d like to share the story of a client I met when she and her husband had gigantic arguments.  I felt like a referee at a very nast street basketball game.  She and her husband had to learn to summarize and reflect in order to stop big arguments and play normal basketball, so she was pretty good at it when it came time to raise oldest son.  I’ve tried to disguise important bits to protect her identity, so just the import parts are true.  This is the story she told me, she said:

One Sunday my 14-year-old and I ambled along a tree-lined sidewalk for our Time Alone.

I said, “So, what are you most excited about this week?”

“Mom, I just wanted to tell you that I’m French kissing now.”

In our family we call this type of shock an “I’m losing my dentures” moment. I was not yet 40 years old. But if I’d had dentures, they’d be in the dirt. I wasn’t excited about his French kissing. Not one bit. But I could see he was really excited about this and I forced myself to summarize. 

“Hmm, so what I hear you saying is you’re so proud that you are already french kissing””

This was one of the hardest summaries of my entire life! I really just wanted to lock him up until his brain matured.  Say, age 32?

“Oh, yes,” he said, “and the girl I kissed last weekend, Arianna, was really cute.”

“So you’re saying you appreciate those huge blue eyes and long curly black hair. You think she’s really attractive”.

He said, “Oh, my best friend Elijah was really impressed because he says she’sthe hottest girl in 8th grade.”

I said, “So you really stunned Elijah with your moves.” 

And let me stop her story to insert a comment here.

It’s important to mention here that you might not agree with your child, but in order to give emotional support, you still have to summarize and reflect. There will come a time later when a child has calmed down to help that child understand your ideas of right and wrong.  BTW,. some Connection Time parents have a rule that you can’t get in trouble if you confess during Connection Time. They say that works well for them. But, I think it’s a great time to discuss differences in a gentle, safe environment.  Summarizing makes Connection Time that kind of environment.  Anyway, back to my friend’s story, 

Her son bubbled on about how Elijah was jealous, and they devised their plans to get girls to kiss them.. Their plan came from watching the movie Twilight and realizing that just as the moon has a primal pull on werewolves, the moon must have some type of influence on young women. That perhaps if a girl basked in the glow of the full moon, she might kiss some guy she’d never kiss otherwise. So my client said, 

“The boys planned a party in our walk-out basement in which they walked out into the moonlight. Then they posted a sign on the door of the basement storage closet, “Make-out room,” and unscrewed the light bulb in there so it would be really dark. Then Elijah bet my  son he could be the first to use the room.

Even though my client’s thoughts were swimming, she managed to give her son a summary,  “Oh, I get it, this was a competition with Elijah.”

Her son explained that he had formulated a secret sauce. First, he nonchalantly lured Arianna outside to absorb a romantic lunar display. Then he gave a tour of the basement where he paused at the sign to say,  “Oh, can you believe Elijah would put up that sign on the door. ‘Make out room!’ He’s just such a player.” Then her son talked about pretending to take the high ground, that he thought kissing is really a “special thing” that you reserve for someone you really like. And his rationale here to break down barrier to kissing, you talk about kissing.  lThen my client summarized, “You put a moon spell on her and discussed kissing, so you won the bet.”

And my client was forcing a smile, But, she was thinking. “Oh goodness, he’s using psychology on girls to coax them to kiss him at age 14.  Were’s my sweet spiritual boy gone?   What kind of schemer have I raised?” Even though she wholeheartedly rejected the notion that French kissing was okay at 14, She chose to keep summarizing and reserved her ideas until he completed his triumphant narrative.

My client wondered, “How can I slow him down, on kissing for two years until he’s old enough to date?  How can I get him to give a little more thought to the idea of  girls as valuable human beings, not just as conquests? 

She thought about buying more chocolate so he’d break out in pimples and the girls might resist his advances. She thought about serving just onions and garlic for all three meals, throwing away his socks so his feet would stink,  spraying sour milk on his clothing, replacing his anti-perspirant stick with stinky cheese. He used mother nature to make himself more kissable. Perhaps she could use mother nature as a repellent.  

My client  jerked her thoughts back to the moment and asked her son, “Did I get all of that right? Did I do a good job listening to you?”

And her son said, “Yes mom, that’s the whole story.”

So she had done her job summarizing. 

She started up sharing her feelings, trying to convince him to see things a little differently. This comes from John Gottman, a famous marriage researcher.   It’s called the “soft start up” and  it’s one of my favorite I statements , “When you __(describe the behavior)_______I feel__describe your feelings___________because__talk about how it affects you______”

So my client said,  “When you tell me you are French kissing at age 14, I am deeply concerned because human sexual response means we have to go a little bit further each time in order to get the same dopamine charge. As affection progresses in a relationship, you can’t get the same high from holding hands or hugging, you have to go further.”  

My client said, “We talked about our family goal that we wait until we are sixteen to date.  We talked about future goals.  That in order to be worthy to serve a mission for our church at 18, he had to be morally clean and that meant waiting for marriage to have sex.  We talked about how young women are people with personalities and goals and dreams, not just a conquest so he can brag to his friend Elijah. Then she asked him to summarize her, and my client said, “I know he listened because he was able to see my side of things”.

Then she asked her son, because she was so curious, “Do any of your friends talk to their parents like this?”

He said, “None. My friends would never talk to their parents like this.”

She asked, “Really, why not?”  

He said, “I dunno, maybe they don’t know how to talk to each other. It's kind of a habit with us mom. I know I’m going to spend quality time with you and we'll have a good talk.”

So if you’d like to attach or bond securely to someone who’s having strong feelings,  remember the steps of emotional support

1) Reflect.  Start it off with… You must feel so,,,,,,,,.

2) Summarize. Start it off with  What I hear you saying is………..

And when they’ve emptied their emotions out and they kind of sigh that might be an indication that it’s a goo time to bring up your concerns. John Gottman, called it the “soft start up” and it goes like this…

When you do this (describe the behavior)  this is how it affects me and this is how it makes me feel.

If you know someone who might benefit from hearing these ideas on creating connection through giving emotional support,  please share this podcast. Until next time. Live like his son, help others on their way.