I know what you’re thinking….well, no I don’t actually,… but I think it would be a pretty good guess that at the mention of mindfulness, people conjure up visions of robes, shaved heads, incense and chanting.
Yes, mindfulness has been practised in Eastern traditions for generations, but now there is an abundance of new scientific evidence that suggests that the practice of mindfulness has a really important part to play in health, mental health, relationships and focus at school and work. Psychologists and researchers have been working on ways we can apply mindful techniques to help people deal better with the troubles in their lives. Some of the research is even indicating significant changes in the brains of those who regularly practice mindfulness.
Mindfulness is all about how we gently use and focus our attention. We are being mindful when we purposely focus our attention on our experiences one moment at a time without expectations or preconceived ideas or judging. In essence, it is like watching our experiences of what we can see, feel, hear, taste, or smell, or what we are thinking or picturing in our mind one moment at a time.
In a busy, digital and highly automated world it’s easy for our clever brains to get busy and overstimulated and caught up with keeping up. For me, mindfulness is about stepping back from our minds and having a good, uninterrupted look at what they’re doing – Almost like stripping away the layers of busyness and giving intentional focus to what is going on around us or even what is going on inside our body and mind.
So, when we are talking mindfulness with children, you don’t have to picture them shaving their heads and wearing robes – in fact, you don’t really have to even picture them sitting still (although it is useful at the start). Picture them paying attention to things in a calm and focused way. Picture them being able to better manage big feelings. Picture them deriving more pleasure out of simple, everyday moments.
Try some mindfulness yourself
The best way to learn about mindfulness is to give it a try and there are many small or introductory examples of mindfulness for you to try. Many people start with the raisin exercise where they are encouraged to focus their attention intentionally on various aspects of a raisin. Mindfulness is paying attention to something like you have never seen it before or are experiencing it for the very first time. It separates experiences from judging or over-thinking. Mindfulness helps us to sustain or maintain attention, but also to deal with interrupting thoughts.
We can be more mindful with objects (like raisins) or body parts, but also with tastes, movements, thoughts and feelings. We can focus on the experience of many things one at a time, moment by moment. Mindfulness does not necessarily make troubling things go away, but it can alter our experiences of troubled feelings.
If we can apply mindful techniques to our feelings – especially to big, tough feelings like sadness or grief or pain – we can help people experience these feelings in a different way. Mindfulness provides a way for people to regulate their emotions that is not open to them when they maintain a judgemental and worrisome focus on their experiences.
Mindfulness also opens up pathways to experience relationships with others differently. Because mindfulness allows a certain clarity of thought, it can help children to focus better on school work and get along a little better with others. Mindfulness helps widen our options when we may feel distress and helps us make better choices. Taking a mindful focus also allows up to further develop our empathy and compassion.
Why mindfulness is important in childhood
From where I sit, children who can pay attention to their experiences mindfully are so much easier to help when there are big feelings that are causing trouble. Mindfulness is a very handy skill to practice and keep handy in our coping toolbox.
Young children are naturally inclined to want to immerse themselves in things – to touch and explore things, smell things without judging anything too harshly. I think this is an amazing window of opportunity for us to assist children to be able to hang on to this focus. As they get older, their brains will, in the clever ways that brains do, teach them how to evaluate and judge themselves and others and by the time they are teens, many will be “totally” living in a headspace that is all about “judgement” and standards – aware that others might be thinking about them and evaluating whether they fit in or not.
When I think of my childhood, I associate mindful time with my grandmother and great-grandmother who were happy in their gardens. (It’s not surprising at all then that I drew on a garden metaphor for a children’s book about mindfulness). They would take me and we would explore for bugs, marvel at flowers, and delight at seeds raising from the soil. I also remember a time, when I was a little older, when this became boring and the last thing I felt like doing – it became a bit of a chore. Somehow, while my brain was getting cleverer, it was losing its ability to just sit and be. In the teen years, there are lots of things going on in the brain and in relationships with friends and family that make it hard for the brain to enjoy moments unless they are really loud or intense. It’s still worth encouraging teens to get mindful, but I think it is much easier if we use the window and keep the practice going rather than try to open a closed window later in development. We need to get working with more mindful or “present moment” pathways while the window of early childhood makes it easy to practice.
How can we grow mindful children?
You can actively introduce mindfulness to a child directly or more subtly. Directly, you can use many wonderful resources. I love the free Smiling Mind App that provides small snippets of guided mindfulness activities that children and adults can practice. The people from Smiling Mind are also supporting teachers to introduce mindfulness into schools.
More subtly, you can pause with your children. Explore nature together or even marvel at human creations or art. Look in awe at day-to-day things – like you have just arrived from another planet or woken from a soap-opera-type coma and experienced them for the first time.
For best outcomes, its’ important that we encourage children to practice mindfulness often. Like any skill, the more we practice, the easier and more robust it becomes.
While Shona is regularly engaged to deliver assessments, reports and treatment for troubled children and young people, she is also available for consulting, speaking and workshops. Call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email: admin@shonainnes.com or contact us via this website.
Shona Innes is also the Author of “The Big Hug Series” of Children’s books Published by The Five Mile Press
John was 16. One day his mother took the family computer to be repaired. She was later contacted by police who told her that the IT people had found stored pornography of children on it. John was charged with offences relating to the storage and distribution of child pornography and needed help.
Sarah was 14. While she was too shy to talk to the boys at school Sarah started contacting boys via the internet. Things progressed and she performed online video sexual favours for them. Sarah’s family were shocked and horrified when the matter was brought to their attention by police.
Rory was 20. One tragic day, Rory was driving dangerously, his car hit a pole and his best mate, a passenger, was killed. Shona assisted Rory with his very complex grief, and when the time came, she assisted his legal team by preparing reports for court and advising the judge about appropriate options for Rory.
We live in an era of fast information and sadly, with that speed and efficiency comes more ways that information can be altered of changed. Internet advertising, pop ups and sidebar activities, fake news – there is plenty that we need to watch for in this space. With more and more information coming to children via the internet, including homework that requires researching topics online, how can we help kids detect what might be genuine information and facts from advertisers, opinion pieces and “fake” news?
I.T. savvy adults can of course install and use up to date security software, but I also think it’s a great idea to skill kids up with a radar so that they can detect what might be dodgy online. It can all get a bit muddy in the internet puddle. How can we help kids to avoid the murky bits?
For preschoolers and early school years
Young children are not really reading news but their screen time can still be interrupted by various dodgy online interference’s. Games and the videos they watch often come with much activity in the sidebars that can entice young minds and are just a click away.
With little ones, I find it useful to “externalise” these online issues. To “externalise means that we make the problem the problem and not have children internalise or blame themselves or others for online issues that are sometimes beyond their control. I like to externalise dodgy internet scams or intrusions as “the tricky internet monster”.
The tricky internet monster is really tricky and very naughty. The monster lives online so you don’t have to worry about him when you are going about your day to day stuff, but you do need to keep an eye out for the monster when you are on an internet device. Every now and then the internet monster might pop up so you need to keep an eye out for it. The monster can tell you fibs, it can show you stuff that is upsetting, can make you want to buy things and it can damage your (or Mum’s or Dad’s) device.
There are three ways that kids can catch an internet monster:
When young children notice something that could be the work of the internet monster, we need to be very attentive when they show us.
For older children
I love the idea of sitting down with older children and dissecting a piece of “fake news” or a dodgy internet post together. When you are examining something together, you can encourage them to Look, Ask and Think.
Just as we do in everyday “real” life, we want children to be able to spend time on the internet without being gullible or vulnerable to dodgy elements…and just like in everyday life, we have to find that balance between too much and too little supervision. As always, this balance will depend on your values as parents or educators as well as the many individual factors that vary from child to child and from situation to situation. There is a balance between light-hearted and full-on-scary that we need to find and if we nail it, we can actually get the Internet Monster to work on our side. Generally speaking, if we encourage children to be curious in the spaces they play and learn – to look, ask and think, we can help them to be savvy and safe.
While Shona is regularly engaged to deliver assessments, reports and treatment for troubled children and young people, she is also available for consulting, speaking and workshops. Call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email: admin@shonainnes.com or contact us via this website.
Shona Innes is also the Author of “The Big Hug Series” of Children’s books Published by The Five Mile Press
All of the fanciest qualifications in the world won’t help a client if you cannot develop a working relationship with them so that you can deliver what it is they really need from you.
Neglect, abuse and violence, or an absence of reliability, warmth and safety can leave some clients seeing other people as a possible source of threat or abandonment, even the kind and helpful people.
Arming themselves against this likelihood of threat from others, some complex clients develop patterns of relating that minimise emotions and connection.
Clients may use other people just as a means to some ends, some clients may have a complete absence of warmth, and some may cling to anyone at all in the hope that they can get as many needs as possible met before the relationship falls apart.
When complex clients receive a service from an agency, the way they relate combines with the way that workers relate and either leads to a positive experience that assists the clients to meet their goals or it reinforces the clients previously held negative experiences about helpers and agencies.
Getting the client – agency relationship wrong can give the client a series of experiences that confirm their histories:
“no one listens”
“people will always abandon me, why should I bother?”
If you work for an agency that provides services to multiple complex clients, there is a risk of developing a negative culture among the agency team, that affects relationships with clients and contributes to the risk of burn out by making the workers feel ineffective and their work feels meaningless or overwhelming.
Here are 3 key ways you can relate to someone who needs help relating:
Professional peer consultation or supervision is crucial to each of these keys to relating with complex clients. Find a supervisor or mentor who you can have safe conversation with about your own patterns and goals. If a session doesn’t go well…take time to discuss it and pull it apart in supervision so you can repair ruptures early.
Shona regularly provides professional peer consultation, supervision or individually crafted workshops to help you and your team build and maintain relationships with complex clients
To find out more, please call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email admin@shonainnes.com or contact us via this website.
Are your client’s constant crises, big or small, stopping you from moving on with the treatment goals you’ve set together?
Do they keep presenting in an agitated state?
Are you spending all your time helping them to put out spot fires while the bigger issues keep burning away unable to be reached by your treatment?
Sadly, this pattern of recurring and distracting “crises” is common amongst those who have chaotic lives and complex histories. Often, service provision is on a time limit, driven by a budget or by a fixed set of available sessions. If you don’t address these sorts of treatment interfering presentations (or TIPs), it can appear as though your client is not motivated to get the most out of your service and they could leave your service without having managed to achieve any change. Also, letting these interfering presentations go unaddressed can leave you feeling ineffective or useless.
When you notice an ongoing pattern of treatment interfering presentations, it’s crucial to get on top of them before they erode hope, energy and workplace resources.
Here are three practice steps to deal with TIPs.
1. Analyse the common themes or threads of the interfering presentations.
What are the interruptions telling you? Common themes with complex young people are usually around independence, autonomy, or any perceived threat to their identity, relationships or sense of safety. It is not unusual for those who have experienced multiple traumas to deal with the world and everything in it as though it is an attack. As a result of seeing things as a threat, clients usually respond in attack mode – even if you are on “their side”. Watch for the collective themes in their narrative and behaviours.
2. Feedback what you’ve noticed about the interferences.
Talk about the patterns that you’ve noticed during their times with you. At the risk of seeming one sided (because this is a blog and not an actual conversation), a useful dialogue could go something like – I’ve noticed the last few times we’ve talked that you’ve seemed really upset by other people interfering or putting their nose in your business. There was that time with your landlord, then the time with your mum and then this time with your worker. What do you think is going on with that?
3. Invite them to address the apparent themes in more effective ways.
Again, a useful dialogue could go something like this – Would you like to talk more about other things you can do to manage when other interfere that might stop you from getting so upset? It seems really important to you that other people don’t interfere. We can’t change other people, but imagine what it might be like if you could handle these times differently.
Looking for the themes of the TIPs and opening up conversations about the common threads can lead to more effective time spent with your complex client. More time getting to the burning heart of the matter and less time on the spot fires.
Let me know how you go!
While Shona is regularly engaged to develop formulation and treatment plans for troubled children and young people, she is also available for peer supervision, consulting, speaking and workshops. Call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email admin@shonainnes.com
How can we spend so much of our ever-diminishing sense of available time looking at what people are eating for breakfast? Why do so many people want to know which cake best represents their life? What is it about the internet that gets to us? When you consider that amount of time you lose when you are on the internet, it is not hard to imagine how some people might fall completely for its Pokemon-hunting, stock-trading and hilarious-cat-video charms.
In short, researchers are starting to believe that it’s novelty that keeps us clicking. Scientists believe that humans have an important primitive drive to seek out new things – new foods, new people and new adventures. Our dopamine-fueled reward circuit in our brain affects much of what we do. Primitively, it would drive us to seek out food, bonding, and mates for reproduction. These drives are especially strong in teenagers and young adults. New or novel foods and new possible mates are healthier for our species. The internet provides many more novel experiences than any previous generation of humans have been exposed to in a lifetime and so appeals to out primitive brains very effectively. We just seem driven to keep clicking through all the internet has to offer.
Since the first psychological studies about internet usage started to emerge in the late ‘90s, much effort has been spent trying to define what might be an addiction or problematic usage and what could be considered normal internet use. Given that the internet is in most people’s homes and workplaces, most of us seem to manage it well and, indeed, benefit from the many wonderful ways it lets us interact with information, images, art, or communication.
The internet influences all of us in different ways.
Some, especially teens and young adults, can struggle to manage their use of the internet and get their lives completely out of balance to the point where it interferes with their relationships, work, school and health. While it is not yet listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx) , there is a lot of evidence that problematic internet use works much like an addiction. Some problematic internet use may be specific – gaming, porn, gambling or stock trading – or a general over use of the internet where a person demonstrates a preference or a reliance on virtual rather than face to face interpersonal communication.
Brain studies are really getting interesting and they are showing us that internet use can certainly look like other addictions in the brain. They appear to support the hypothesis about the roles of the brain’s reward circuit and the way that dopamine and opiates are released in the brain. During the teen years, our brain is very plastic and capable of learning much. It is also seeking more pleasures and novelties as it accommodates the need for our species to survive.
Teens also don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe system that we require to override primitive urges.
Teens still need monitoring and help to solve problems. They also need to know when their internet use is becoming a problem whether that be gaming, gambling or pornography.
There are many documented positives about internet gaming, but when the addiction is internet gaming, psychologists like to consider the all the possible contributing factors, including what might be going on in the young person’s family? What is the young person chasing and getting from internet gaming that they are not getting in other places – companionship, respect, accomplishment, do they get to be a hero at home?
Internet gambling in young people can actually be strongly linked to their gaming….remember everything is just a click away. Many online games give prizes (like “skins”) that can then be gambled on other sites for more game advantage or even money.
When it comes to internet porn, because it appeals to primitive sexual drives, young brains can be wired in certain ways as they learn both how “to do” sex and also “what turns them on”. The images on the internet are so much faster to access and so much more novel than the girls at school. Young people can click through millions of novel images very quickly and, if a certain set of images stop satisfying them, they are only a click away from something that is more intense and more exciting. The concern is that many may be rewiring their brain to prefer sex with the internet to sex with real people and there are a large number of erectile dysfunction issues that are now being attributed to internet porn. The good news is these can be treated and people can return to healthy functioning quite quickly. However, those who started using internet porn at an earlier age, take longer to respond to treatment.
One of the problems we have in treating internet addictions is that it is really not realistic to have people go completely cold turkey or absolutely abstain from internet use.
We might want someone to upload their homework on the net or research for that assignment, but we don’t want them accessing pron or gaming sites. In that way, it’s a little like compulsive eating. We don’t want people to abstain from food, we want them to make better food choices. However, the brain changes that can accompany internet addictions can make it hard for people to make these better choices on their own. The other thing that separates the novelty offered by the internet to that provided by food is that we can keep binging on the internet.
With food we eventually get full or sick, even with illicit substances that make us feel good we might eventually pass out, but with the internet we can keep clicking.
Psychologically and socially, the internet is often used for escape. You can get lost in all sorts of amazing ways. Time just disappears.
The internet can also seem to compensate for any deficits you think you have. Some find it much easier to ‘speak’ to others on the internet rather than face to face.
When you are lonely, feel like you’re not worthwhile, or if you are suicidal, there are many kind people who will respond to you in all hours of the day or night from anywhere in the world. Some of the kind people are well-intentioned. Some are trying to meet their own needs and not all are well-intentioned! We need to watch for young people using the internet in ways that might put them at risk as they try to compensate or escape problems.
When it comes to internet addictions, there are many ways that psychologists can help people to recover and the earlier treatment is sought, the better. A good psychologist will examine the social factors, the psychological factors and the possible brain changes and individualise a treatment plan. CBT can be used to monitor peoples thoughts and beliefs about their use , work out which thought go with urges to use the internet and work out coping skills if a person in avoiding problems by spending time on the net.
It also helps to ……
Your client has had some difficult times and likely not a lot of success.
How do you get them back into a competency cycle, so they feel good about what they can do?
When people speak about confidence, I think they generally mean that a person has strength in the belief that they will be able to do something.
In psychology, thanks to Bandura https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1977PR.pdf , we call this self-efficacy – the idea that we have capabilities and we have a strong belief in those capabilities. If a person doesn’t think that he or she can do something, then that person may be disinclined to even start and if they do start and they have low self-efficacy, it won’t take much for them to give up if they hit an obstacle or feel like they are failing.
Efficacy has a profound effect on personal development because it affects the challenges people choose to undertake, how much effort they expend, how long they persevere in the face of obstacles and whether they are motivated or demoralised by failure.
Some clients are stuck in a cycle of low efficacy. They have not had much success dealing with their issues, their low self-efficacy makes them reluctant to change meaning they stay stuck.
If left unchecked, low self-efficacy can lead to sabotage or a disinclination to chase up opportunities that you many have worked hard to set up for them.
To break away from this cycle of “there’s no way I can do this”, a person needs some “wins”.
Here are five steps towards getting your client a foothold on that competency cycle and gain some self-efficacy:
“We need to do more than tell people what to do – if we want to persuade someone to attempt something we need to also arrange conditions to help them perform, because if we persuade them and they continue to fail then their efficacy and the effects of our persuasion will both drop”
I’m happy to assist with peer consultation, supervision or individually crafted workshops to help you get some momentum going for your client with low self-efficacy.
To find out more, please call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email admin@shonainnes.com or contact us via the website.
Wouldn’t it be handy if you could go and get some confidence in a jar?
I don’t think confidence is available in jar form as yet. I’m also not entirely sure that confidence necessarily comes from a “certificate of participation, either, but I can see where people are coming from when they try this. I think they just need to think a little more about the concept and perhaps understand the psychological science behind it so that they can modify the “Certificate of Participation” scheme they plan so that it actually assists in building confidence.
When people speak about confidence, I think they generally mean that a person has strength in the belief that they will be able to do something. In psychology, we call this self-efficacy – the idea that we have capabilities and we have a strong belief in those capabilities.
The concept of self-efficacy has been pivotal in psychology. In the 1970s, psychology was very behavioural. We believed that things happened because an individual was rewarded for it and things didn’t happen or happened less often because they were punished. It was Albert Bandura in the late 1970s who started to write about the idea that success had something to do with reward and failure, but it also had a lot to do with whether we had a strong belief in our capabilities.
If I don’t think I can do something, then I may be disinclined to even start and if I do start and I have low self-efficacy, it won’t take much for me to give up if I hit an obstacle or feel like I’m failing.
According to Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, our expectation for our individual self-efficacy or how well we think we can do something comes from four places:
1. Performance accomplishments – our own personal experiences from having tried something before. If we have repeated successes, our expectations that we can do the task are high. If we have failures, especially at the beginning of trying something, then our belief about our ability is lowered. If mishaps occur early, people can give up. If mishaps occur after some success, the negative impact of occasional failure is reduced. So there are patterns of timing and a pattern of experience that are important to the development of self-efficacy. We need to plan for success early if we are teaching someone something that is difficult – start with baby steps that increase the chance that they will be successful early, then throw in a few more difficult challenges between the successes. Once we establish self efficacy, it can generalise to other areas.
2. Vicarious experience – seeing other people try and have success or try and fail can affect our level of self efficacy. Having positive models can help.
3. Verbal persuasion – telling people to “give it a go” and that “you can do it” might help, but it can also backfire if we are not careful.
We need to do more than tell people what to do – if we want to persuade someone to attempt something we need to also arrange conditions to help them perform, because if we persuade them and they continue to fail the their efficacy and the effects of our persuasion will both drop.
Also, a person’s own self talk or inner dialogue about their abilities can persuade or dissuade them. If a person tells themselves that “I got this Certificate of Participation because I wasn’t good enough to win”, that conversation is likely to be one that erodes their sense of self-efficacy. If they tell themselves that the certificate is a genuine representation of effort, it may have a different outcome on their efficacy.
4. Physiological states – difficult and stressful situations get us emotionally aroused. If people feel really anxious, they are less likely to expect success. Helping people to manage their emotional arousal can help. Tricking them to manage their emotional arousal can have worsening consequences. How a person experiences and makes meaning of their anxiety or stress will affect their motivation to try. Giving deceptive feedback is unhelpful because we need reliability and durability across time.
Bandura also explained that efficacy has a profound effect on personal development because it affects the challenges people choose to undertake, how much effort they expend, how long they persevere in the face of obstacles and whether they are motivated or demoralised by failure . If a person sees themselves as having a strong sense of coping, it reduces their vulnerability to stress in difficult times and strengthens their resilience.
We need to give young people lots of opportunities. We need to make sure that we model the behaviour we would like to see them do. We need to verbally encourage but not without setting it up so that they can achieve some success. We need to understand how it is they are thinking about their own abilities and, if some of those thoughts appear inaccurate or unhelpful, we need to help them to challenge those thoughts. We also need to help them to manage their anxious arousal with techniques to self calm and soothe. We also need to celebrate and make sure they take notice of their own successes, too. We want them to take the right message away from their attempts.
If you can wrap up all of those helpful and motivating aspects of self-efficacy into a “Certificate of Participation”, then go right ahead! If not, please refrain.
For more information about Shona Innes you can always check out www.shonainnespsychology.com.
You can walk into just about any community welfare of counselling space and see images of the Stage of Change model hung proudly on the walls – sometimes in multiple languages or in indigenous art in an attempt to make it more responsive to those who might be stuck. You probably know it off by heart – precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. But sometimes the Stages of Change model just doesn’t seem to be working for you. It’s not enough. Indeed, sometimes, it’s just a reminder of how stuck you feel with a client.
You open your calendar for the day and see the name of the client who is stuck and keeps avoiding appointments, coming late, being rude and challenging to those who attempt to reach out to help.
Your body reacts with a massive slump in energy and a feeling of helplessness. You feel ineffective and stuck, the young person (or the client of any age, really) just doesn’t seem to be moving towards any change for the better.
If you stay in this stuck space, the client or even you and your service may end up giving up on change. The client may disengage and you may be tempted to find reasons or excuses to pass them on to another agency or service because their lack of change is draining you.
The Stages of Change model helps us see that the client is not resistant or purposely staying stuck, but it doesn’t really allow us to understand all of the complexities associated for a client or in the system the client is living in nor the problems with the system of procedures and protocols that you and your client have to work in. You may have mapped through that complexity and you are ready to proceed with your well crafted intervention, but your client is not ready.
In my experience, when you find that after all of your hard work to understand their complexity your client is difficult to engage, it is worth considering spending more time on your alliance with the client. Of course, this does not mean making your interpersonal and professional boundaries sloppy. But, it does mean considering whether your goal for the client is anywhere close to the client’s goal for accessing your service. It can help to consider modifying your goals for the client to be closer to their goals to promote earlier engagement. This can be an investment in getting closer to the goals you would like as the intervention progresses.
If your client feels like they are nowhere near taking action towards change, then perhaps you should consider taking action.
Use your next supervision or peer consultation session to discuss how to modify your goals for the client without losing sight of the big picture or of important ethical and interpersonal boundaries. Get some support to meet your client closer to where they would like to be.
While Shona is regularly engaged to develop formulation and treatment plans for troubled children and young people, she is also available for consulting, speaking and workshops. Call Shona Innes Psychology on 0400 150 106 or email admin@shonainnes.com
What secrets do you keep about yourself? What are you ashamed about?
Shame is the feeling that arises when we think about ourselves as being “bad”, or “wrong”, or “broken”. Shame is a negative evaluation of the self – different from guilt which is a negative evaluation of our actions or behaviour. Guilt is where we wish we hadn’t done something. Shame is much more about an attack on our “selves” rather than a regret about our behaviour. Shame is much more closely linked to being self-critical.
Of course, like all feelings, shame serves a function. It helps to guide us and treat others in certain ways. However, we need to be sure that we don’t magnify our shame, nor avoid it completely.
Shame is something we hide so it’s hard to find out a lot about it. In my practice over the years, I have seen shame go hand in hand with depression, social anxiety, substance use, self injury and gambling.
We all have thoughts and it’s when we go looking at people’s thinking patterns that we can often see the patterns on their mood and behaviour. The stuff we say inside our head has a huge impact on our mood and our behaviour. Some people are a little more visual in their thoughts than others, but most report having an ongoing commentary in their heads – thoughts that guide, notice, and trigger certain feelings in us. These same thoughts can also judge us. Some people are really high in self criticism. Their thoughts about themselves are pretty toxic. Self critical thoughts and shame have a close relationship. Shame and self criticism can make it hard to take risks, learn and make mistakes.
It can be easy for people to get stuck in a cycle where they try to avoid their feelings about themselves that they distract themselves with something that ultimately serves to make them feel worse about themselves.
Shame can be a very painful experience and it may stop people connecting with others. Because it can be a painful experience and often linked to fear, many people tend to isolate or attempt to remove the bad feelings or run away from the bad emotions like shame. If left unchecked, shame can develop into self hatred.
Shame, like other feelings, has a variety of origins – essentially anything that has us judging ourselves harshly will likely impact on feelings of shame. Of course, we all need to get feedback on our behaviour. As we grow up, we rely less on adults to remind us how to behave or what to do in certain situations and we start to internalise the rules for ourselves. The way we are disciplined as children can speak to this harsh treatment of ourselves. If we have hard harsh, strict and critical discipline, we can internalise this harshness and it can be easy for us to experience shame in response to a range of triggers. Typically, adolescence is a time where we start to notice our internal judge.
It’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of shame.
Sometimes, it can feel like, if we are just more critical of ourselves, we could be lovable or a better person and so some people can continue to elevate their standards and get harsher on themselves in order to make themselves more lovable or acceptable.
Of course, as soon as we make strict rules for ourselves, it is easier to break them. So essentially, self criticism can spiral – we make a bad choice and break one of our rules, we feel bad and vow to make the rules for ourselves tighter and stricter, making them easier to break again.
How can we help people with overbearing feelings of shame and harsh self-criticism? Here are a few ideas to contemplate:
For a long time now we have known that people need people.
In the 1930’s, Harry Harlow conducted studies with baby rhesus monkeys. He made surrogate monkey mothers out of wire and wood and some he covered with cloth. The babies had a preference for the soft covered monkeys, even if the wire monkeys held the bottle of food. The babies clung to the cloth mother. Babies raised with just a wire mother had troubles with digesting their food and frequently suffered diarrhoea. Baby monkeys were braver in the presence of a surrogate and would huddle in fear without them. Harlow concluded that contact comfort was essential to the development of psychological and physical health and lack of contact can be psychologically distressing.
Another important researcher of this era was John Bowlby. He studied maternal deprivation and sought to understand the problems experienced by infants and children raised in institutions. Prior to this research, institutions were large and busy places where children were fed, but the atmosphere tended to be clinical rather than warm. He suggested that babies need physical contact and emotional attachments to others in order to survive and that they cry and cling to make and maintain important survival connections. If an infant has regular, steady contact with a reliable and caring attachment figure, they are likely to develop a secure attachment.
If there was trouble with early attachment, the child grew up with a different attachment style – insecure in their attachments – either constantly anxious about attachments and needing to check or expect abandonment, or avoidant of attachments altogether.
Attachment theory is starting to make a re-emergence as a way of understanding human behaviour, especially in terms of how others are in interpersonal relationships and now how well people deal with trauma. We usually seek attachments when we are unwell or tired or under threat. The way we go about doing this and the success we have in feeling soothed by others may well be influenced by our early experiences.
Move ahead from psychology history to now, the early 2010s, and we find that contact with people is important not just in infancy, but throughout life.
Professor Richard Bryant is one of the world’s foremost researchers in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak at a recent congress. His group has studied trauma in laboratory settings and also in those people affected by many of Australia’s natural disasters. Some of the information they use has come through from the terrible bushfires of 2009 and is providing important information about attachments styles and how well people recover from traumatic circumstances.
In the laboratory studies, the team have used the cold pressor test. A test where people are asked to put their hand into icy cold water, a stressful situation, and they measure various stress responses in their body. Some who did the test were asked to think about a person they really loved during the test and others were asked to think about something else. The group that were primed to think about their loved ones, showed lower stress responses in the test.
However, when they assessed the participants for their attachment style, they found that those who were avoidant in their attachment style reacted differently. When those with an avoidant attachment style were asked to think about their loved one, there was no protective effect of doing so during the cold pressor stress. Individuals with secure attachment seemed to benefit from thinking about loved ones more than those who had a pattern of avoidant attachment.
Based on these studies, you can see why researchers are speculating that attachment can affect how we learn about and deal with fear.
Then, beyond the lab and in the real world, Richard Bryant’s team looked at distress following real world disaster. The team have followed those who survived the Ash Wednesday bush fires. They have done some follow up with those children who were separated from their families when the fire came through and those who were with their families. It seems that those children who were separated during the fire experienced more long term distressing effects, avoidance, numbing and arousal. So, it seems it does not have to be long term separation from an attachment figure (like in an institution or care facility) for there to be an impact on long term trauma.
After Black Saturday in 2009, the team followed up with survivors again and looked at their social maps. Social maps indicate the connections and friendships that people have to each other – who is friends with whom. When they looked closely at the maps it indicated that the social connections people had correlated with how much trauma they experienced. The more connections people had to other people, the less trauma they had and the connections seemed especially healthy if they were reciprocal rather than just one way.
A large proportion of our population have an insecure attachment style and not all of these respond to trauma in distressing ways. Clearly, there are lots of other strategies that people use to get by, but this research confirms the importance of our early attachment and our need for people. Secure attachment is obviously a priority for many with their infant and children. To me, this research also suggests that it is wise to ensure that children who are separated from parents during fearful events are reunited quickly and that communities that have experienced trauma get support to continue to network. Also, it seems important that those who go through trauma alone are given chances to work on building and maintaining reciprocal relationships.
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