CHAPTER TWO

The Emotional Core

Cognitive and behavioral parenting approaches simply are not working with our children, especially children with difficult and severe behaviors. Currently, there are over five million children on drugs for psychiatric and behavioral issues. This is a 400 percent increase in psychotropic drug prescriptions to children in a 10 year period. When we read statistics such as these it is time to question these traditional approaches.

Researchers are showing that, “In adults as well as children, emotions are the central medium through which vital information, especially information about interpersonal relations is transmitted and received.” (Dorpat, Psychoanalystic Inquiry, 2001) In an article in Motivation and Emotion (2007), Ryan points out that, “After three decades of the dominance of cognitive approaches, motivational and emotional processes have roared back into the limelight.” We are living in a time period where we need to recognize that emotions do “matter” in areas such as healthcare, education, sports, religion, and especially parenting. Parenting is where it all begins.

Originally, Freud partitioned the mind into two parts, the conscious and the unconscious. In the last two decades, brain science has expanded on this concept to show that the brain is divided into the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. Verbal, conscious, and serial informational processing happens in the left hemisphere while nonverbal, unconscious, and emotional processing happens in the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the emotional brain that drives human behavior. This is the essential characteristic of what makes us uniquely human.

With this perspective, it is clear that children (as well as adults) transmit and receive information through their emotions. Life experiences and behavioral decisions stem from the right hemisphere, the emotional self. Dr. Allan Schore’s work shows that the right hemisphere filters and appraises our life’s experiences and that our response is influenced by how our right hemisphere interprets the event. The right hemisphere dominates the left hemisphere’s logical and analytical thought processes.

Additionally, the previous scientific practice of viewing the unconscious mind as a static memory bank that influenced our actions has been replaced. Current clinical models now refer to the unconscious as “relational unconscious,” meaning that we respond not from our own individual thoughts but from the interaction between us and another person. These relational interactions happen through right-brain to right-brain emotional communications. They happen through the parent/child relationship at the emotional level.

This is a call to rethink our parenting. Traditionally, parenting has been left-brain to left-brain interactions. We have been instructing our children, “If you do this behavior, then I will implement this as a consequence.” Such typical interactions stem solely from rational and logical thinking, void of emotional expressions, completely ignoring the dominate influence of the right hemisphere. If we align our parenting with science, it will mean shifting our communication to the emotional level.

Fear and Trauma

Fear is an important emotion to understand in human behavior, especially in terms of parenting. Fear is not conscious experience. Fearful responses happen when we are not even conscious of being afraid.

In response to an event we experience, our right hemisphere responds faster than our left hemisphere. The left hemisphere, after the initial response from the right hemisphere, will then perform a more correct and organized analysis of the event. Because the right hemisphere’s “first on the spot” response happens prior to the left-hemisphere’s interpretation, the signals are more physiological. The right hemisphere is directly connected to the body, and thus, our reactions of fear happen at the body level.

For a child whose negative behaviors are more intense, more frequent, and less responsive to traditional parenting techniques, we must consider the child’s earlier history of experiencing fear. Most likely, this child experienced a higher level of fear and is acting from an even deeper unconscious level of fear than other children. It is fear at the body level created from traumatic experiences.

We underestimate how life experiences influence a child’s response system and have been reluctant as a society to recognize how prevalent trauma is in children’s lives. Trauma is simply any threatening event that puts us in a state of being overwhelmed by fear, helplessness, and terror. In the past, the idea of trauma was limited to events that were “news noteworthy” such as 9/11, earthquakes, fires, and other significant events. Peter Levine, an expert in the understanding of trauma, states “trauma is the most avoided, ignored, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.” (Levine, Healing Trauma, 2005)

For a child, trauma can happen in what most adults consider normal life events. Falling off a bicycle can be traumatic for a child, if at that moment the child feels overwhelmed and in danger. Even more overlooked is trauma that happens at the emotional level for children. This is when a child experiences the lack of consistent love, affection, attunement, caring, understanding, and protection from a parent or parent figure. When a child feels like he was the cause of his parent’s divorce, feels like he is not special in his parent’s eyes, or feels like he is an interruption to the parent’s day, is when real trauma happens to children.

It is not the event itself that defines the trauma, but rather the emotional experience of fear during the event. This emotional experience happens in the right hemisphere. This part of the brain contains a well-defined network for rapidly responding to danger and other problems that are perceived as urgent. It initiates self-protective responses such as avoidance, escape, and retaliation. Schutz (2005) describes this emotionality as the right brain’s “red phone” to handle urgent matters without delay.

Children engaged fully in this response system have erroneously been interpreted as children with “bad behavior.” While all along, according to this new evidence, they are acting perfectly normal. It is their normal, not society’s normal in terms of acceptable behavior. The response from mental health professionals has been to label these children with diagnoses such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), reactive attachment disorder (RAD), bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and other childhood mental health disorders.

These children are simply operating out of their right hemispheres, yet we have been parenting them from the left hemisphere. We have been giving them logic and expecting to modify their behaviors and we have been asking them to think through their “choices,” both of which are left-hemisphere activities. We have neglected to address their deeper emotional states of fear. This is not the way the brain is designed. We cannot simply consciously “think away” our unconscious fears.

These mental health labels are indicative of children who are in a heightened state of fear, stress, and overwhelm. These children have experiences of not having their needs met, having been emotionally and/or physically hurt, having suffered significant relationship breaks, and/or intense medical experiences. Simply, these are children who have experienced trauma. They need to be loved in order to heal, not to have love removed from them through fear-based parenting techniques.

Reaching our children and parenting our children in a way that fosters strong relationships and teaches unconditional love will take operating from a new paradigm, an emotional paradigm that allows us to humanize our children again. It will require having the courage to set aside the behavior, digging deeper within ourselves to understand what it means to put love into action, and swimming upstream against what is...