“Our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other”
– Bonnie BadenochThe Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Helping her breath through a micro mountain range was absolutely me living my best life.”
– Me
“I let myself have a moment to grieve for four-year-old me who was taught that my emotions were a problem, and never sherpa-ed (is that a word-adjacent term?) to the valley after the mountains of so much that didn’t feel safe or good to me.“
– Also Me
A couple nights ago, kid got mad at an iPad app.
(I let her play on my iPad very sparingly. I really wanted a five minute shower and no other grownups were around. so babysitting via screens.)
She threw the iPad on the floor and began to weep bitterly.
I told her I could fix the problem in a matter of seconds but i needed her heart and body to be calm first so that we don’t risk her throwing the iPad and breaking it.
We went back and forth about how she should but wouldn’t calm down.
I reminded her that it is ok to just be so sad and want to wiggle our bodies with big sads and mads, if we do so safely. I reminded her that if she wanted to demonstrate her feeling by throwing something, she could do that. but it needed to be a pillow or stuffy.
If her goal was to finish her game on the iPad, her body needed to be calm enough not to hurt the ipad.
It was ok if that wasn’t her goal. But if it was, we needed to find calm together.
Finally, the heart of it:
“But i don’t know how to be calm!”
I asked if i could hold her hands and help her breathe.
We pretended her left pointer was a mountain climber climbing her right fingers.
on the climb up her thumb, she breathed in through her nose. on the slide down the crevasse between her thumb and pointer, she breathed out through her mouth. and we did this for each finger.
she began to settle. but she wasn’t quite there yet.
I asked if her pointer needed to climb the mountains again. this time through she didn’t need me to move her pointer.
She found her calm and got a little more iPad time.
As I felt my and my partner’s discomfort with her loud extravagant emotions, I realized the reason I wanted her to *just calm down* is that so often, I also “don’t know how to be calm.” so I fake calm. and it’s effective. Until the next thing happens.
And I found my discomfort with her big demonstrative feelings fade when i asked myself, “What greater thing could I possibly do with this exact moment than help a small person discover they can do what most adults can’t do because we were told to “just calm down.”
There was no available greater purpose for those ten minutes.
Helping her breath through a micro mountain range was absolutely me living my best life.
And I let myself have a moment to grieve for four-year-old me who was taught that my emotions were a problem and never sherpa-ed (is that a word adjacent term?) to the valley after the mountains of so much that didn’t feel safe or good to me.
And then i said, “ok. that’s enough iPad. let’s do something silly.”
Rebecca Sumner 