Archives for May 2019

Bored in staff meetings? Feeling stuck in or wanting to improve your relationships? Wish to enhance your teaching? Strive to be a better therapist?

Let interpersonal design enhance the way you relate and interact in any situation or relationship that is relevant for you.

What is it? How can it help me?

Interpersonal design is a construct that can add a new dimension to the way you perceive your world. It is a practically applicable idea that has the potential to enrich your personal and professional relationships, and your home and work environments.

Interpersonal design involves consciously and purposefully “designing” how you interact with and relate to others, and how you create your physical and interpersonal space. Through increasing your awareness of your interpersonal and physical environment you can implement positive change. Interpersonal design is an approach and a way of seeing things that can be useful for parents, marriage partners, employers, employees, health practitioners, counselors, therapists, coaches, teachers, lecturers, and rabbis in a wide range of settings. Through interpersonal design, you are able to be more effective with what you are already doing.

Most of you, most of the time, experience and perceive your immediate surroundings and relate to others as if you are independent, separate, isolated units. This is in contrast to acting as if you are part of a larger whole or system. Interpersonal design entails making a seemingly subtle shift in perspective, similar to replacing your regular glasses or eyes with a different and powerful new pair. These new glasses or eyes, when you choose to wear them, allow you to alter your experience of your world from being ego-centric and me-focused to thinking systems.

“Inter-personal“. “Inter” means between, and “personal” refers to people or persons. Generally speaking, interpersonal refers to the way any two or more persons relate, react, and interact with each other. “Design” has to do with deliberate, purposive, planning and arrangement of elements. It implies being able to alter, change, and choreograph the way you interact, in any number of ways. You can consciously choose to implement and customize specific interpersonal-designs in specific situations [e.g., business meeting, counseling sessions, dealing with customers, time with family, social events, lectures, classes]. It also involves placement of elements within, and selection of interpersonal space.

Interpersonal design is a model that involves conscious and deliberate “designing” of the way you interact [act, react, relate, and respond] with others. Being aware that you are constantly “dancing” with others is, in and of itself, a powerful tool. This then allows you to choose and decide how to design your dances.

In the interpersonal design model you consciously think about a particular situation, preferably before you enter it. You plan the design and structure that you believe is appropriate and that you wish to apply to the circumstances.

Ideally, you prepare ahead, and prevent potential difficulties. You then anticipate, are more ready for what may occur, and can reduce the “unforeseen”. Interpersonal design also provides a framework that allows you to enhance and optimize any particular situation.

How do I find out more? Feel free to contact me [see below] if you have any questions, or if you would like an interpersonal design consultation.

 

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Every moment your child communicates messages, verbal and non-verbal. The way you react and respond to these messages has a powerful impact on how your child feels, in general, and how he feels about and perceives himself, in particular. Listening – “shema” – is one way to nourish your child, and to enable your child to feel better about himself.

Genuinely listening to and validating your child’s feelings are the fundamental skills and building blocks of the “Conscious Parenting” approach. The value and importance of effective listening, in my opinion, should not be underestimated. This skill entails that you- the parent- recognize, accept, acknowledge and validate your child’s feelings and experiences.

Effective listening is discussed and described in numerous parenting books and programs and in most books about communication. In the “How to Talk So Kids will Listen and Listen So Kids will Talk” series of books for parents by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, the authors describe this skill in a way that is clear and user-friendly.

In advocating this skill of listening to and validating your child’s feelings, I assume that-as discussed in the first part of this series-all of us, and especially our children, have a deep need to feel heard and understood.

I also assume that there’s a connection between how kids feel and how they act. This is to say, there is a connection between a child’s emotional state and his or her behavior. As the well-known child psychologist and parent expert Dr. Haim Ginott stated, “When kids feel right, they’ll behave right.”

Each and every moment, we all experience a continuous flow of different feelings. Feelings are dynamic; they change and shift. My preferred way to help children feel right about themselves is by accepting and validating their present feelings. I notice that, over time, feeling validated is associated with more appropriate behavior.

In the realm of education [Chinuch], psychologists have discovered that there is an optimal arousal level for learning. This is a state of being both alert and relaxed. It is much more likely that your child will be in this optimal state when he is feeling right – that is when he is feeling okay about himself and when he feels heard.

As parents and teachers, you can optimize a child’s ability to understand, process and absorb information by creating a climate conducive to learning. An effective first step to create this climate is to listen to your child. When a child feels heard, listened to, acknowledged and validated, he often feels calmer and better about himself. He is then able to focus on the task or material at hand.

Take for example a child who feels bothered and upset by something his sibling or classmate has done to him. You, the child’s parent/teacher, acknowledge and validate the child’s feeling upset and distress. The child feels heard and is able to “let go” of the negative feelings. In other words, the feelings of being bothered and upset tend to naturally dissipate when the parent or teacher affirms and acknowledges them. It is easier for the child to move on to something else.

How exactly do I listen to my child?

Effective listening is a skill that requires ongoing awareness and practice. In future articles I will discuss specific tips and ways to nourish your child with this valuable tool.

 

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When you and your child interact, what often happens is that your child communicates or conveys a message to you, and in response feels partially heard, or does not feel heard at all. For instance, your child’s message may be to express an idea, a thought, or a feeling-emotion, to you, and your response may be to problem-solve and to give a solution or to provide parental advice and wisdom to him.

One consequence of this “dance” is that your child may have a sense of not being heard and understood. He may experience this as an empty feeling. For your child this may also be accompanied by a vague unsatisfied sense. This empty and unsatisfied feeling may be outside of your child’s conscious awareness and is often very subtle. In families where these poor communicating patterns occur repeatedly, children may get used to not feeling heard.

A deep human need is not being fulfilled. A consequence of this is that your child may end up feeling frustrated. If this feeling unheard happens a lot, he may also feel invisible, unloved, unimportant, alone, and insecure. Your child may sense that it is not safe for him to express his feelings.

Children cope with this lack of being heard and their corresponding feelings in different ways. Children who are still developing their verbal skills or who have difficulty with knowing, labeling, and communicating their feelings, may resort to indirect strategies for getting across their inner experience. Shutting-down and keeping their feelings to themselves is one possible action. “Turning up the volume” is another. While the former action may manifest as the child “going quiet” and not verbalizing, the latter may manifest more externally and noisily as crying, temper-tantrum-ing, screaming, nagging, acting out, or any number of behaviors.

As an adult and a parent you are able to turn to friends, close family, or your spouse to vent your feelings, to talk, and to feel witnessed and heard. If you are able to recall an instance when you experienced feeling really and truly heard and understood, you most likely felt positive about this interaction. Truly being heard feels satisfying, complete, and feeds the soul. Some adults and parents seek a professional ear [counselor, doctor, psychologist, rabbi] as a means to feel heard and to fulfill this need.

Feeling heard and understood is often accompanied by a sense of clarity. People who talk and feel heard are often better able to sort out what is going on for themselves, what is important to them, and what they are thinking and feeling. This ideally enables them to move on. Feeling heard can provide the opportunity to get unstuck and to allow for movement and action. It can be energizing, enlivening, and motivating.

A classic example in parent-child interacting can be used to illustrate this point. Suppose a child falls and lightly hurts himself, and then, crying, approaches his parent. The child may wish to let his parent know that he fell and that he is experiencing some degree of pain. In the perfect world, the parent would validate and empathize with her child’s feelings of pain, the child would feel heard, stop crying, and then run off to continue playing. In a non-perfect world, the parent would respond to her child by getting frustrated, angry, or by being non-attentive to the child’s message. In this scenario the child may feel worse, continue to cry, and may feel irritated and annoyed.

In the perfect world scenario, the parent nourishes the child by responding in an attuned, empathic, and genuine way to the child’s experience. The child then is often able to move on to their next activity. Parents living in the real and non-perfect world, however, may be tired, busy with other kids or people, self-absorbed in another task or activity, distracted, overwhelmed, preoccupied with their thoughts, or perhaps engrossed in their own strong feelings. For whatever reason, parents may be unable to and unavailable to witness and to listen to the child in that moment.

Expect that this will happen. Expect that there will be many occasions where you will not really listen to your child. You may be relieved to know that the next opportunity to correct this “error” will arrive soon. We can also think about this as opportunities to do t’shuvah for a het [sin; going off the mark]. G-d continually provides us with chances to correct our path, and to get us back on the mark and back on track.

The unfortunate truth is that it is often incredibly difficult to really listen to others who are closest to us; and this includes our children. It can be easier to listen to and to respond positively to a stranger or a casual acquaintance. It is less likely that these individuals are setting off all of our reactive triggers and pushing our buttons. It is easier to listen to someone when we are not as invested in the relationship.

The choice to improve listening habits is yours. If you decide to pursue this path, expect that changing the dynamics and the interaction patterns between you and your children will require ongoing work, conscious effort, and continuous practice. Active and sincere listening is a skill. Unpracticed skills get rusty. Your child deserves to be nourished. Are you willing to work at de-rusting your listening habits?

Children long to experience being understood, being heard, and being truly seen by their parents. Opportunities for you to provide this gift to your child arise each and every moment.

Strive to increase the nourishing responses and to decrease the non-nourishing responses to your children. Modifying this nourishing to non-nourishing ratio, I believe, is a do-able, reasonable, and worthy endeavor. Practical ways to implement this idea will be described in upcoming articles.

It may be worthwhile for you to take a moment and reflect on the following:

When you “listen” to someone [your child] are you truly listening to him? Are you truly present and “with” him?

Is it hard for you to hear your child? Do your own thoughts, feelings, and reactions get in the way? Do you find yourself reacting [e.g., getting angry, frustrated, impatient] to what he is saying?

When you “listen” to someone [your child] are you thinking ahead to what you will say next, in response to his comment? Are you truly listening or are you more invested in working hard to get your own point across?

 

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