To revisit a theme we might be getting tired of - explaining what's going on, or went on, behind my eyes for years when I didn't tell anyone what was going on. Not stating that anyone else needs to have this going on or believe what I have concluded. I'm in a unique situation, you're in a unique situation - you have tools that work for yours, I have amassed a collection in my toolbox that get me into, working, and through mine.
There's a concept we talk about sometimes, and the best label I've heard yet is "validating emotion." We don't have a handle like that for it at Camp - that's courtesy of one of my nursing friends who works as a counselor for the teen suicide unit. But it's part of what we do as counselors - listening to someone talk about how they feel, and letting them know that it's okay to feel that way.
Never, NEVER invalidate emotion. Invalidating is telling someone they shouldn't feel that way. You can lose a kid when you do. Not necessarily that they're going to kill themselves after that, though I've known some who tried just because they couldn't get the words out. But if they believe you when you say it's not okay to feel a certain way, they'll try to stop feeling that way, or more likely, they'll stop TELLING anyone they feel that way. Doesn't stop the emotion, just stops the outflow. And I have no way of knowing if I am the only person this kid trusts enough to share what's going on with him.
Emotion is not the same as action, at all. If I believe everyone should follow my moral code, I can tell someone that something is right or wrong. Example, one group I was friends with in college believed that rape under any circumstances was absolutely unforgivable, and therefore, murder was an acceptable response to rape. If I believe that everyone has their own moral code, then I can't actually tell someone that they're right or wrong, I can only observe, "Hey, you said you're going vegan, and you're eating a ham sandwich. What's up there?"
Short version, emotion does not translate to action. Never invalidate what a person is feeling. A kid's feelings aren't wrong - he can feel whatever he likes. But he can't DO whatever he likes. I may have a very frustrating child, and entertain fond fantasies of putting him in a box and taping the lid shut for the rest of the day, but what I'm more likely to do is go next door and say, "Hey, Sheila, I need a ten-minute break from Little Tarzan. Can you watch my kids for a minute?"
Thing is, I GET kids, or I did, a few years ago. My friend Shay realized we had something in common - she's basically that grumpy cat you see on the internet, who doesn't like anybody. I like people, but I usually didn't understand them. I understood animals. I understood anybody under fifth grade. I wasn't awful with teenagers. I had no idea how to relate to adults.
We were very blessed as kids, because our parents permitted quite the menagerie in our home. There were very short times when we didn't have a dog, and there was one point when I think we were up to ten pets, between the hamsters, rabbits, and more free-roaming companions. My dad once explained to me that while pets didn't bring in any additional income, they did enrich our lives. They taught us to care about something outside ourselves, because they depended on us.
Dog was also a companion I could hang out with who didn't have much in the way of expectations. When I came home feeling like I had underperformed (which was almost every day), and let everyone down (which I hated, and some people knew I hated it and would use it to dig deeper into me), the dog wasn't concerned about me letting HIM down. Walkies? Oh boy! Pet my ears? Oh boy! Dog was happy to see me as soon as I came in the door - eager to see me, really. That does a lot for helping one's self-esteem.
Animals I understand. The ones we keep as pets are usually smaller than we are, so they will sometimes feel threatened just by our size - getting down to their level, and being still so it's THEIR decision on whether to approach, makes a big difference. Cats and dogs are usually good about letting a person know whether they want pettings and closeness, or to be left alone. And if they're saying very clearly that they want to be left alone, a person does well to respect their space. A person who doesn't respect boundaries is a threat to anyone or anything that HAS boundaries.
Kids, same deal. The kids I have known were my campers at Camp, my Awana kids, my nursery babies, my Sunday School class, the morning preschoolers I hung out with for the MOPS moms, and my daycare preschoolers. They've got boundaries of their own, they're just not like adult boundaries. They usually just want another friend to play with who's tall enough to reach the scissors, and sees them as people, sees that they matter, is interested in what they think and have to say.
On that note, Preschool Gems is a riot. I love preschoolers.
There's also the fact that, with some teenagers, if he's got more emotion and energy than he knows what to do with, we can usually work together to find a couple things he can do with all that. And if he really trusts me, and those things don't work, he'll come TELL me they didn't work, and we can figure out why they didn't. If I have good ideas but he doesn't trust me, he might use them, but I'll never see him again.
I didn't really feel like an adult until I was 25. I felt like I couldn't connect to adults, didn't understand what was expected of me. You ever see an eager-to-please dog that's frustrated because she wants to make people happy but, since she doesn't speak English, she doesn't know what's expected or what she did wrong? I don't know WHY, but I didn't understand what was expected of me, just that I wasn't meeting the expectations, so I was wrong as soon as I walked in.
Which goes back to that spending-a-lot-of-time-alone-in-the-woods thing. Also, spending a lot of time with kids and dogs. I made THEM happy. I made adult-people unhappy.
The bridge on that happened with my friend Lance, and Sara. Sara's work is all about working with dogs, training, their psyches, etc. She has a really excellent blog over at Paws 4 U. At some point, I noticed that a lot of the things she said about watching a dog's body language and responding to what they were communicating matched up with what I knew about interacting with the kids who are too young or too scared or just not interested in saying what's going on with them.
A thought on that - if a kid or an animal wants to be picked up, I have found that they're pretty good about communicating it. Being picked up means surrendering control - they have to trust a person to be that close to them, and they also have to trust that something they're going to want to run away from isn't going to happen. I have kids that I pick up and wrestle. I have kids who will gladly high-five me, and run off to play. I have cats that enjoy the closeness, and ones who will do their best to avoid it, and ones that will panic over being held and claw up my shoulder in their efforts to climb away and escape. If I want more closeness than the other individual wants, that's a boundary I have to respect.
And I think adults get that about each other, and don't extend it to animals. It was reversed for me - I understood a lot of interacting with them, and didn't understand how to connect it with my peers.
My friend Lance was the bridge there. Lance is my age, but a few years ago, was one of those delightful teenage boys whose mom recognized that he had more going on internally than was healthy, he wouldn't share with her and his dad was out of the picture, she sent him to a counselor and he just set about breaking the counselor. Or feeding her false information that would fit a stereotype so she would think her job was done and he could go home and get back to his video games. Of the ten guys I had as good friends, at least three of them did this.
Lance knew he was a mess. But he didn't want someone to come in and try to fix him. He would fix himself, or he wouldn't be fixed, plain and simple. I can't say he wanted a friend who would just let him be himself, because really, he didn't believe such a thing existed. The week we became friends, he kept coming back just to make sure he hadn't just imagined me into his world. I wasn't trying to fix Lance - I don't know that I was trying for anything. I was just happy to have another friend who liked stories, and who thought I was pretty cool. But there came a day when I realized that the way I listened to Lance talk about his stuff was identical to the way I'd listen to a frustrated sixteen-year-old boy.
And it clicked that everything I'd learned about interacting with kids and cats and dogs actually worked for adults, too. I was so used to the idea that adults had expectations of me and I wasn't meeting them, that that was all I saw, all I heard, and I was so focused on either trying to meet expectations I didn't understand, or trying to prove that I was fine without meeting them, that I missed it.
Long-distance relationships are still a mystery to me, though. Everything I do with the dog, the toddler, the rabbit, the ten-year-old, that's in the moment. Most of it is just about reading each other. When I can't read the other person, I'm at a loss.
Recap:
Validating emotions, good.
Invalidating emotions, very bad.
Validating emotions is not validating actions that would be the first response to said emotions.
Dogs are good. I know how to interact with dogs.
Kids are good. I knew how to interact with kids.
Felt expectations from adults, felt that I wasn't meeting them. Panic.
Go hang out with dogs, kids, and self. Not disappointing anyone there (unless it's naptime or they can't watch the movie they want.)
Realized about a year ago that everything I know about these interactions can translate to adult interactions. I did, in fact, know how to do this, I just didn't KNOW that I knew.
Still don't know how to handle long-distance.
There's a concept we talk about sometimes, and the best label I've heard yet is "validating emotion." We don't have a handle like that for it at Camp - that's courtesy of one of my nursing friends who works as a counselor for the teen suicide unit. But it's part of what we do as counselors - listening to someone talk about how they feel, and letting them know that it's okay to feel that way.
Never, NEVER invalidate emotion. Invalidating is telling someone they shouldn't feel that way. You can lose a kid when you do. Not necessarily that they're going to kill themselves after that, though I've known some who tried just because they couldn't get the words out. But if they believe you when you say it's not okay to feel a certain way, they'll try to stop feeling that way, or more likely, they'll stop TELLING anyone they feel that way. Doesn't stop the emotion, just stops the outflow. And I have no way of knowing if I am the only person this kid trusts enough to share what's going on with him.
Emotion is not the same as action, at all. If I believe everyone should follow my moral code, I can tell someone that something is right or wrong. Example, one group I was friends with in college believed that rape under any circumstances was absolutely unforgivable, and therefore, murder was an acceptable response to rape. If I believe that everyone has their own moral code, then I can't actually tell someone that they're right or wrong, I can only observe, "Hey, you said you're going vegan, and you're eating a ham sandwich. What's up there?"
Short version, emotion does not translate to action. Never invalidate what a person is feeling. A kid's feelings aren't wrong - he can feel whatever he likes. But he can't DO whatever he likes. I may have a very frustrating child, and entertain fond fantasies of putting him in a box and taping the lid shut for the rest of the day, but what I'm more likely to do is go next door and say, "Hey, Sheila, I need a ten-minute break from Little Tarzan. Can you watch my kids for a minute?"
Thing is, I GET kids, or I did, a few years ago. My friend Shay realized we had something in common - she's basically that grumpy cat you see on the internet, who doesn't like anybody. I like people, but I usually didn't understand them. I understood animals. I understood anybody under fifth grade. I wasn't awful with teenagers. I had no idea how to relate to adults.
We were very blessed as kids, because our parents permitted quite the menagerie in our home. There were very short times when we didn't have a dog, and there was one point when I think we were up to ten pets, between the hamsters, rabbits, and more free-roaming companions. My dad once explained to me that while pets didn't bring in any additional income, they did enrich our lives. They taught us to care about something outside ourselves, because they depended on us.
Dog was also a companion I could hang out with who didn't have much in the way of expectations. When I came home feeling like I had underperformed (which was almost every day), and let everyone down (which I hated, and some people knew I hated it and would use it to dig deeper into me), the dog wasn't concerned about me letting HIM down. Walkies? Oh boy! Pet my ears? Oh boy! Dog was happy to see me as soon as I came in the door - eager to see me, really. That does a lot for helping one's self-esteem.
Animals I understand. The ones we keep as pets are usually smaller than we are, so they will sometimes feel threatened just by our size - getting down to their level, and being still so it's THEIR decision on whether to approach, makes a big difference. Cats and dogs are usually good about letting a person know whether they want pettings and closeness, or to be left alone. And if they're saying very clearly that they want to be left alone, a person does well to respect their space. A person who doesn't respect boundaries is a threat to anyone or anything that HAS boundaries.
Kids, same deal. The kids I have known were my campers at Camp, my Awana kids, my nursery babies, my Sunday School class, the morning preschoolers I hung out with for the MOPS moms, and my daycare preschoolers. They've got boundaries of their own, they're just not like adult boundaries. They usually just want another friend to play with who's tall enough to reach the scissors, and sees them as people, sees that they matter, is interested in what they think and have to say.
On that note, Preschool Gems is a riot. I love preschoolers.
There's also the fact that, with some teenagers, if he's got more emotion and energy than he knows what to do with, we can usually work together to find a couple things he can do with all that. And if he really trusts me, and those things don't work, he'll come TELL me they didn't work, and we can figure out why they didn't. If I have good ideas but he doesn't trust me, he might use them, but I'll never see him again.
I didn't really feel like an adult until I was 25. I felt like I couldn't connect to adults, didn't understand what was expected of me. You ever see an eager-to-please dog that's frustrated because she wants to make people happy but, since she doesn't speak English, she doesn't know what's expected or what she did wrong? I don't know WHY, but I didn't understand what was expected of me, just that I wasn't meeting the expectations, so I was wrong as soon as I walked in.
Which goes back to that spending-a-lot-of-time-alone-in-the-woods thing. Also, spending a lot of time with kids and dogs. I made THEM happy. I made adult-people unhappy.
The bridge on that happened with my friend Lance, and Sara. Sara's work is all about working with dogs, training, their psyches, etc. She has a really excellent blog over at Paws 4 U. At some point, I noticed that a lot of the things she said about watching a dog's body language and responding to what they were communicating matched up with what I knew about interacting with the kids who are too young or too scared or just not interested in saying what's going on with them.
A thought on that - if a kid or an animal wants to be picked up, I have found that they're pretty good about communicating it. Being picked up means surrendering control - they have to trust a person to be that close to them, and they also have to trust that something they're going to want to run away from isn't going to happen. I have kids that I pick up and wrestle. I have kids who will gladly high-five me, and run off to play. I have cats that enjoy the closeness, and ones who will do their best to avoid it, and ones that will panic over being held and claw up my shoulder in their efforts to climb away and escape. If I want more closeness than the other individual wants, that's a boundary I have to respect.
And I think adults get that about each other, and don't extend it to animals. It was reversed for me - I understood a lot of interacting with them, and didn't understand how to connect it with my peers.
My friend Lance was the bridge there. Lance is my age, but a few years ago, was one of those delightful teenage boys whose mom recognized that he had more going on internally than was healthy, he wouldn't share with her and his dad was out of the picture, she sent him to a counselor and he just set about breaking the counselor. Or feeding her false information that would fit a stereotype so she would think her job was done and he could go home and get back to his video games. Of the ten guys I had as good friends, at least three of them did this.
Lance knew he was a mess. But he didn't want someone to come in and try to fix him. He would fix himself, or he wouldn't be fixed, plain and simple. I can't say he wanted a friend who would just let him be himself, because really, he didn't believe such a thing existed. The week we became friends, he kept coming back just to make sure he hadn't just imagined me into his world. I wasn't trying to fix Lance - I don't know that I was trying for anything. I was just happy to have another friend who liked stories, and who thought I was pretty cool. But there came a day when I realized that the way I listened to Lance talk about his stuff was identical to the way I'd listen to a frustrated sixteen-year-old boy.
And it clicked that everything I'd learned about interacting with kids and cats and dogs actually worked for adults, too. I was so used to the idea that adults had expectations of me and I wasn't meeting them, that that was all I saw, all I heard, and I was so focused on either trying to meet expectations I didn't understand, or trying to prove that I was fine without meeting them, that I missed it.
Long-distance relationships are still a mystery to me, though. Everything I do with the dog, the toddler, the rabbit, the ten-year-old, that's in the moment. Most of it is just about reading each other. When I can't read the other person, I'm at a loss.
Recap:
Validating emotions, good.
Invalidating emotions, very bad.
Validating emotions is not validating actions that would be the first response to said emotions.
Dogs are good. I know how to interact with dogs.
Kids are good. I knew how to interact with kids.
Felt expectations from adults, felt that I wasn't meeting them. Panic.
Go hang out with dogs, kids, and self. Not disappointing anyone there (unless it's naptime or they can't watch the movie they want.)
Realized about a year ago that everything I know about these interactions can translate to adult interactions. I did, in fact, know how to do this, I just didn't KNOW that I knew.
Still don't know how to handle long-distance.
