Paved with good intentions

I think it must be a very tough season for families right now based on the number of conversations I've had with quite a few parents. Some families are really struggling right now. When I communicate with them, I can tell they're struggling and feeling scared and probably more than a little hopeless as well. I've been in that spot more than once and it is not a comfortable place to be. I get it. But having been in that spot, I've learned a few things. I learned them the extremely hard way, but I learned them all the same. This is about one of those hard lessons that can be difficult to communicate with parents. 

Desperate parents are desperate for a reason. Their child (or children) is struggling, and that struggle often comes out as less than desirable behaviors. Constantly navigating hard or scary behaviors can throw the entire family into chaos. Everyone is on edge, probably fatigued, grumpy, angry, and usually scared out of their wits, though that emotion isn't always evident. It is easy to try to clutch at straws in order to regain some semblance of normalcy. Often that straw is something that is seen as a quick fix towards making their child "better". The thinking often is: If the child would just behave well, then our family would be able to calm down and life would feel manageable. The focus is solely on the negative behavior of the child and how to make it stop. Popular quick fixes include supplements (tried that), MLM "miracle" shakes (didn't try that, but admit I was tempted because it felt so easy and miraculous), special diets (I had twelve children, other than generally healthy food, this one was never going to happen), and various types of therapy (this can help [this was a huge thing for us] but not if it occurs in a vacuum, separated from the family system). That would be both Therapy (the licensed kind) and processes with therapeutic value. This is where my horses and I are coming in on the provider end. 

While I love horses and believe that working with them can help us be better people, they are not miracle workers. Standing next to a horse can help someone's regulatory system co-regulate along with the much larger equine's regulatory system. This can provide an awareness of what a state of calmness can feel like, but it doesn't grant a person a perpetually calm system just because they stood next to a horse. Anyone who tells you otherwise might as well try selling you a side of snake oil as well. Yet I will often talk with parents who want to believe that I can "fix" their child because I will do some activities with their child and the horses. 

Finally, at the fourth paragraph I reach the point of my post. The short version is that I cannot fix anyone's child, with horses or without. It is this idea of a child needing fixing is the actual probably. If a child needs fixing, they must be broken, and believing a child is broken is the problem. Broken and not doing what an adult asks of them are two very different things. Broken implies damaged, unfixable, less than ideal. It is not a term that should never be used in conjunction with a human being. Broken implies that what is happening is solely isolated within the child, that their circumstances, their history, and their family have no part in what is happening. This couldn't be further from the truth. 

Humans exist in relationship with others. How we relate and interact with our fellow human influences how that other person is going to act and vice versa. Interactions and behavior never happen in isolation. As a parent, this can be a hard and humbling thing to understand.  have written extensively about my growing realization that I was as much of the behavior issues we experienced as my child. It was not a pleasant process. Once again, I am speaking from experience. 

Recently I had a teen out in the pasture working with one of the horses. He comes to learn horsemanship skills but learns a lot of other things in the process. I needed to see if Luke could be led by someone other than myself if the other horses were in the pasture. He has enough skills to do this but is also learning so would mimic a non-horsey client. My student was having trouble getting Luke to walk with him, so I coached him a bit and eventually they got moving. At one point, though, Luke comes to a dead stop and starts grazing. When I asked my student what had happened at that point., he said, "I stopped thinking about what I was supposed to be doing and started to think about what Luke was doing." I've done this work long enough that I was 99% sure that in that instant, my student had lost his intention. The horse will stop every time and stop instantaneously. Intention can be emotionally intuited. 

This isn't quite the non-sequitur that it seems. Let's think about two different parent-child relationships. In the first example, the parent is first focused on connecting with their child... loving them, supporting them, being curious about what is going on when things aren't going well. They may not be thrilled with some of the things they are seeing but understand that those behaviors are a response to an aggregate of other things. They believe their child is doing the best they can, even if that best is looking pretty meager. They want to help figure things out because it will make their child feel better and be more comfortable, but they position themselves alongside their child to do so. In the second example (and we'll assume the same behaviors in both), the parent loves their child but feels as though the child could do better; they aren't trying hard enough. The more pressure put on the child, the more consequences imposed, the more impatience and anger show, the more the child is dysregulated with being no closer to figuring things out. The variation is that there is something wrong (chemically, structurally, etc.) that if taken care of, the behavior will magically disappear. The focus becomes testing and trying different interventions to stop the behavior, not on what is actually going on for the child.

If a horse can sense when someone's intention in a simple leading exercise becomes focused on something else (and they can), it breaks the connection and the horse no longer feels the need to join in. How much greater is the child going to intuit the intention of their parent? Children know when their parents think something is wrong. Children who are already struggling to regulate themselves usually also have a pretty hefty sense of shame, so they are going to blame themselves for this wrongness. A child in this state is never going to be able to regulate, so is never going to be able to stop the behaviors. It becomes an exceedingly vicious cycle with the behavior of the child and reaction of the parent increasing with each turn of the cycle. Aiming to fix a child is the completely wrong intention. 

Let me be clear. I'm not blaming parents. Every parent I've met is doing the best they can with what they have. Just like their child. The trouble is they cannot see the similarities. Sometimes we need someone from outside to give us new tools and a new way of seeing. And here is where I am sure that I am going to make some people extremely angry. If you are a therapist and you are working with children exhibiting big, scary behaviors, listen to me. I am so tired of cleaning up your messes caused by clip charts and behavior contracts and time outs and endless, punitive consequences. If these are your tools, you are causing harm. You are helping these desperate parents escalate their child's behaviors. Consequences DO NOT WORK. Oh, they might in the short term, if you are just looking for compliance, but they absolutely do not in the long term. If you are a parent who is struggling with your child's behavior, I would not recommend seeing any therapist for help unless they have successfully survived parenting a child with significant past hurt and scary behaviors. No one can actually know what it is like unless you have lived it.