“Why don’t you talk to the other driver and see if the passengers are okay. I’ll look up the number for the insurance company for you.”
Focus on what to do rather than what went wrong. Particularly in situations where the incident will have its own natural consequences, the lesson is powerful enough without the added burden of lectures and recriminations from you.
If the driver is your child, make sure you let him or her handle the phone calls — supervised if necessary — and pay for any increased car insurance premiums. Those are life lessons that a young adult should not be shielded from.
"Individuals" by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you desire
Every family is an emotional system, where the functioning, behavior and beliefs of each person influence the others. Overfunctioning is different from simply doing kind things for another person or having distinct but equal roles and duties. It is an ongoing pattern of feeling responsible for the emotional well-being of another and working to compensate for the perceived or real deficits in that person.
Overfunctioning leads to the underfunctioning person feeling dependent and entrusting responsibility for decisions and effort on those willing to do the work. As a result, the underfunctioning person becomes “less capable” — a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As family members anxiously focus on these differences and try to “correct” the problem, the more polarized they tend to become. Examples of these polarities include “overadequate” and “inadequate,” “hard-working” and “lazy,” “decisive” and “indecisive,” “goal-oriented” and “drifting.”
The underfunctioning person feels resentful because he or she likes being taken care of but is also irritated by his or her dependence and helplessness. The care-taker feels stifled — “I have to take care of everything, or things will go wrong.” Resentment on both sides builds.
Solution
The way out of such polarities is to work on oneself, rather than to attempt to change others. A positive change in one person will have a positive impact on all others, though there may be a bit of resistance at first.
Do Less
Those who overfunction need to do less. When mistakes are made, the overfunctioning family member must resist jumping in to take charge, fix things, and make motivational speeches. He or she must be able to handle the frustration of seeing others fumble around and do things far from perfectly.
Gradual Change
Gradual change is often less shocking and deleterious than sudden change. If the overfunctioning partner has been in charge of all budgets, financial decisions, and bill paying, it’s wise to ease into sharing such duties.
Explaining Change
Overfunctioners can explain to the underfunctioning family member(s) that they realize that their own well-intentioned overfunctioning has contributed to the current unsatisfactory situation. Then they must stand back a bit and allow others to become more autonomous, make mistakes, suffer consequences, develop resilience, and determine their own individual paths.
Example: Teenager Laundary
For instance, if the overfunctioning parent has been doing all cleaning and laundry for the teenagers in the house, it’s helpful to explain how and why you’d like them to start doing their own. Teenagers like the idea of independence, though they resist doing “boring” chores that are at the core of being independent. So explain that such changes are intended to help them become more capable and independent as they will be moving out in a few years and need to develop the habit of taking care of themselves. “Embrace chores, for they are at the core of becoming independent!” Then you can either let their dirty laundry pile up in their closets, or tell them you won’t drive them anywhere until they’ve done their laundry. In either case, the consequences of not doing their own laundry will eventually provide its own motivation.
After initial resistance, those who underfunction will gain more autonomy, especially if those who overfunction allow them to suffer the natural consequences of their inaction. Although it’s hard work to break patterns, eventually, with more emotional separation and autonomy, a better balance of capabilities and contributions in the household will bring much needed harmony to the family.
"Indomitable Spirit" — Apa Sherpa by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
A crucial quality in achieving fulfillment and self-confidence is self-control — the ability to tolerate the discomfort of having unmet needs and desires. That ability is determined by brain development, genetics, personality, and upbringing.
The first time infants feel hungry or lonely, they feel discomfort, which turns into distress, which causes them to cry — until an adult responds. After many repetitions of this cycle, infants learn that an adult will respond to their needs.
With some confidence in the world around them, they are then able to handle small delays and “mistakes” that inevitably occur. It is through this combination of feeling secure and facing delays that children develop the ability to self-soothe and distract themselves in the face of unmet needs and desires.
Setting genetics and in-born personality aside, there are three ways in which this development of self-control can falter:
1. Coddling: The adult continues to respond instantly even as the child grows to be a toddler and young child. Without a gradual increase in the child’s autonomy and a delay of gratification, the child does not learn to do things independently and to self-soothe in situations where there is no instant gratification.
2. Dramatic Inconsistency: While small mistakes and delays are healthy, dramatic swings in parental response will make a child feel deeply insecure about the world.
3. Neglect: Children who can’t get much of a response from adults often lose hope and become angry or turn inward.
The attuned parent helps the child develop the capacity to be able to defer gratification and handle frustration. Newborns need to be responded to quickly. But as they become a bit older and particularly when their needs are replaced by mere desires, such as wanting candy rather than needing nourishment, we can start saying “no” and/or expect them to handle waiting or working toward what they want.
As infants become children and then teens, they should be able to handle more time lapse, more disappointment, and more frustration, because their desires are becoming more complex, less necessary, and often something that they should learn to work or save for themselves.
How do we create an environment that best fosters self-regulation?
By gradually increasing our expectations of our children and tolerating our own anxiety of disappointing them when they don’t get what they want. Changes often causes some anxiety. But incremental changes allow children to learn to handle increasing amounts of anxiety, and thereby gain skills, self-control, and realistic confidence in themselves and the world around them.
It is important to be able to say “No.” Yet always being told “No” is discouraging. It is more encouraging to be given appropriate caveats, “Yes, you may have this, but I’d like you to clean your room first/wait until I’m finished doing my work/save money for it and wait until next summer.”
A little deprivation can help children learn to work and wait for what they want. As a result they learn to see that the future is an important part of their reality.
"Wisdom" — Einstein by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was a momentous study on the significance of the ability to delay gratification.* A preschool child would be seated at a table in front of a marshmallow, and was given the choice to eat the marshmallow immediately or to receive a second one if he or she could resist eating it for fifteen minutes.
A minority ate the marshmallow immediately while 30% were able to control their impulses long enough to get the second marshmallow. Most tried to resist temptation but soon gave up.
Many years later, the original researcher, Dr. Mischel, discovered that the children who were able to delay gratification became significantly more competent, emotionally balanced, and dependable than those who could not resist instant gratification. They also scored 250 points higher on the SATs, worked well under pressure and in groups, were more confident, and reported being happier in their lives.
Brain imaging showed key differences between the two groups in two areas: the prefrontal cortex (more active in high delayers) and the ventral striatum (more active in the more impulsive children, an area also linked to addictions.)
Mischel’s studies suggest that the ability to wait for a reward involves the “strategic allocation of attention”, that is, the ability to purposely focus one’s attention away from the desirable object. The successful preschoolers, for instance, would distract themselves by moving around, pretending the marshmallow was a stuffed animal, covering their eyes, tapping their fingers, or looking at anything other than the marshmallow.
They also had the ability to consider and hold in their minds the future outcome rather than being swept away by the present temptation. Either through a genetic predisposition or by having been raised in an environment where they learned to wait for what they wanted, they had the capacity to act on the basis of long-term satisfaction rather than instantaneous pleasure.
Ideally, we can learn to enjoy much of the present while working toward a desirable future. In fact, once we’re able to consider both the present and the future simultaneously, then instant gratification loses some of its allure when we know that it could harm our future.
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
~Albert Einstein
by Alison Poulsen, PhD
* The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was conducted in 1972 by psychologist Walter Mischel.
Generally, people experience a parent as either too involved or not involved enough. In the first case, the parent may seem controlling, overwhelming, or hovering. In the second case, a parent may seem indifferent, abandoning, or not present.
It is normal to develop mild defense mechanisms even with good parenting. These defenses are healthy when used consciously. However, they limit our choices when we react unconsciously or in an extreme way.
A child can develop defense mechanisms to the under-involved parent. Abandonment includes not only the indifference of the parent, but also environmental insufficiency, for instance, poverty, prejudice, or a wartime childhood.
Children tend to engage in magical thinking, which says to them that the world around them is a message about them.” If my mother neglects me, or I am poor and never have enough food, I must be unworthy and bad.” There are four typical responses to a sense of lack, the first two of which involve internalizing poor self-esteem.*
1. Self-sabbotage: Patterns of self-sabotage develop as a way to confirm poor self-esteem—that I am not worthy of success, happiness or good things happening. The child feels a certain comfort in the familiarity of continuing to fail.
2. Grandiosity: Some people over-compensate for an unconscious sense of poor self-esteem. They try to prove they are worthwhile by driving an expensive car, having a big house, achieving many milestones, and/or developing an impressive outer appearance. If all one’s effort is spent in these pursuits, little time is left for less showy and more personal fulfillment.
3. Serving the narcissist: A chronic sense of emptiness leads children to serve the narcissistic parents, who are stage-door mothers or hockey-team fathers. Even when the child makes the parent proud, there’s a feeling of lack in the relationship. The parent is simply unable to relate to the child other than to use his or her accomplishments to feed the parent’s narcissism. Even after growing up, the narcissist’s child experiences a sense of living someone else’s life.
4. Neediness: Through an inordinate search for reassurance or pats on the back the needy person seeks to feel worthwhile. The birth of addictions can occur as an attempt to manage anxiety by connection. For instance, excessive materialism, serial relationships, and distraction result from a longing to satiate. The longing never stops as the human spirit is never satisfied in these ways.
While our defense mechanisms originally served to help us survive or thrive in our childhood environment, as adults, reflexive responses disempower us. Once we recognize that a defense mechanism may imprison us, we can begin to think twice before acting and make new choices to live the life we desire.
