Robin Grille asks us to listen to our heart-voice and reassures parents that they know much more than they realise

Most parents know what a stranded tourist would feel like: lost, alone and without a phrase book, in the middle of an unknown country. A language barrier looms between us and our children. Why is my baby crying? What does it mean when my infant grizzles like that? Why is my toddler flipping out into a full-blown tantrum, and what can I do about it? Why is my teenager rolling her eyes at me and locking herself for hours in her room, and how can I help?

Ever been there? Helpless, confused, frustrated, not knowing what to do – these are all regular stops on the journey of parenting. This is in spite of the fact that parents today have access to a bewildering and unprecedented array of scientific information about child development. The problem is that we are overwhelmed by it all – there is so much to sift through. And to make matters worse, sometimes we are given conflicting information. Have you noticed that experts are often at loggerheads, polarised into opposing camps? So, although it is valid and important to take a look at what the experts advise, how do we avoid giving our power away to them? How much inner wisdom is each parent equipped with, and how can we use our own intuition to weigh up and filter the advice we are given?

Here is a clue: you weren’t born at 23 years of age, all educated, ready to get a job and start planning your retirement. You were once an unborn child, a helpless infant, a babbling baby, an uncontainable toddler, a child… and then an adolescent, with all the angst and smugness that a deluge of hormones can bring about. Not so long ago, you sounded, behaved and felt a lot like your child does now. You actually know a lot more about how your child feels than you might be consciously aware of – and this understanding can be the master key to your effectiveness.

All parents have parenting intuition; there is nothing magic about it. It is just a case of knowing how to hear its voice inside you. Listening to your intuition is as simple as this: learning to listen to the voice of your heart. But can we trust that voice? Doesn’t our culture tell us over and over not to let the heart lead? Don’t we value rationality and efficiency over the mushy, gooey quagmire of the world of feeling? Could it be that intuition and the voice of the heart are romantic confabulations, the stuff of fairy tales? Apparently not. Modern science has rescued intuition from the realm of sentimentality and located its biological base.

Your heart is a brain

Have you ever wondered why love poems and love songs speak about the heart – no matter what the language? In every culture around the word, people point to the centre of their chest when they talk about love.

Have you ever felt a warm glow, a melting feeling, some tingling or buzzy sensations in the centre of your chest when you are filled with love for your child, or for any other person? Do you know why that happens?

It was recently found that the human heart is far more than simply a muscle that pumps blood around – a revolutionary discovery that is sure to transform how we understand ourselves. The heart contains at least 40,000 of its own brain cells, much like the ones in the head. Just like the ‘head-brain’, this ‘heart-brain’ makes its own brain chemicals in copious amounts – one of the main ones being oxytocin, the hormone of love.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When they looked at the connections that join the head-brain and the heart-brain, neuroscientists found that more information travels upwards – in other words, the heart is wired up to tell the head how to think.

The heart rules the head

Much of how we live today, even the way we relate to our children, is a throwback to a period historians call the Age of Reason, from 17th- and 18th-century Europe. It was around that time that the French philosopher René Descartes made his mark in time with his sad utterance, “I think, therefore I am.” We Westerners must have thought that was good enough for us, for since then we seem to have prized rational thought over (and almost to the exclusion of) any other aspect of human consciousness. For centuries, we have been admonishing each other to not give sway to our emotions; not to let the heart rule the head. Look at the curricula of most schools, add up the proportion of time devoted to training the intellect as opposed to developing emotional intelligence, and you’ll soon construe the value we have given to matters of the heart.

Without the help of modern neurobiology, however, Descartes was bound to get it wrong. The truth about human beings is closer to this: “I feel, therefore I relate.”

Biologically speaking, the heart rules the head, and it always has, much as we have long feared to admit to ourselves. And even inside the ‘head-brain’, the emotions seem to run the show. The emotional centres of the human brain (limbic brain) make decisions much faster than the rational, logical part of the brain (frontal lobes) – so quickly in fact that this tends to happen subconsciously. The emotional brain then tells the rational brain, a more lumbering thinker, how to reason. The traffic of information is far busier from the faster, emotional brain to the rational brain than the other way around. There are far more neural connections flowing from the limbic brain to the frontal lobes than the reverse. But because the rational brain works slowly and above the threshold of conscious awareness, it gets all the credit. And yet, by the time you make what you thought was a cool-headed decision, your mind was already made up, based on your feelings about the matter.

So, when you think you are being purely rational, this is an illusion. The more we come to terms with the primacy of emotional intelligence, the more this will open us up to a new world of intuitive sensing, releasing us from a life of cold and analytic calculation. To get in touch with our deeply intuitive nature, all it takes is a commitment to reversing the way we have been trained and validating the inner voice of the heart: a quiet and often wordless voice.

How is this important for parents? Working out what our children need in order to thrive is definitely not simply a matter of knowing the right information about child development and having an armoury of clever techniques (the controlled cry, the ‘naughty step’, the gold-star reward charts, the ‘one-two-three magic’, ad infinitum). A deep and joy-filled connection with our children – the kind of connection that allows us to be a positive influence in their lives – rests on our ability to relate to their innermost feelings, to see more deeply than their surface behaviour. This kind of connection is far more powerful, influential and enriching than authoritarian behaviour-control – and it has something to do with our willingness to hear our intuition, the voice of the heart.

What is intuition?

More than a thinker, you are a feeler, a senser. Though you may not be consciously aware of this, your body remembers everything you felt as a child, as a baby and even as an unborn baby. The amygdala is a part of the brain that organises emotional memory, and it is fully functional by the third trimester in the womb. Even though most people have no conscious recall of their lives before around 3 years of age, our bodies remember all of our feelings since before we were born. That’s because narrative memory and emotional memory are organised by different parts of the brain. You have therefore retained a huge archive of emotional memories that can help you to empathise with your baby and child – if you are willing to lend these memories your attention.

Your emotional memory – what many people refer to as your ‘inner child’ – is actually your most important source of parenting wisdom. Your body has retained the knowledge of what you most needed when you cried just like your baby cries today, or how you wished to be treated when you once yelled just like your toddler does. The knowledge of what would have comforted you is not buried as deep as you might imagine.

To help you further, your brain contains a special and miraculous set of neurones that constitute the wiring of human empathy. Known as ‘mirror neurones’, they fire in sympathy with the feelings of people you care about, helping you to feel a little of what others feel. You know more than you realise about how your children feel and what they need, long before they can speak. Inside you is all the necessary hardware and circuitry needed for fully fledged intuition.

Your heart-brain and emotional memory centres speak to you in a quiet inner voice, and they speak to you through bodily sensations. A pang in the chest might be telling you, for instance, something about emotional hurt, while a knot in your stomach perhaps speaks about anxiety or worry. Could that flutter in your diaphragm be a sign of great excitement? That twisting in the gut: is it fear? And sadness might show up as a lump in your throat. Although at the core we all share a common emotionality, there is no perfectly universal formula; it’s a case of getting to know how your own body speaks to you about your feelings.

As a parent, it is useful to know that since you are organically designed for empathic connection, your body also speaks to you about your child’s inner world. So, when you feel lost and hopeless about how to interpret what your little ones are feeling, a good place to start to is pay attention to what your own body is saying to you.

How our culture obscures our heart-voice

The systematic dulling of the heart-voice begins very early in our lives. How many times have you been told, in one way or another, not to listen to your feelings? When you were a child, did anyone ever tell you to stop crying because “there is nothing to cry about”? Were you ever punished or shamed for expressing anger? Were you ever put down for being afraid? Or judged for being exuberant? When helping you to think about a future vocation, did the adults in your life orient you towards money and security rather than towards following your passion? No wonder we have lost so much of our connection to our feelings. No wonder we have lost touch with our heart-voice. The heart-voice still speaks, but we have learned to ignore it; we have in fact developed powerful and habitual ways of shutting it down.

Even as parents we add our part to a shared social trance: a collective and unwritten contract that agrees to downplay our children’s emotional world. When small babies cry often they risk being characterised as manipulators, burdens or ‘difficult’. Everywhere practitioners and handbooks admonish us to leave our babies to cry alone, without comforting, until they cry themselves out – especially if they should have the temerity to cry at night. We tell our children, “It’s nothing”, “Don’t be silly”, “Get over it”, “Cheer up” – while we remain embedded in a culture that says NO to human emotion. Sometimes it is our own finger-wagging elders who tell us we are spoiling our children if we listen to their feelings and allow them to express their views.

For too long the quiet voice of the heart has been hushed in our world, hampering our confidence and our effectiveness as parents. So how do we find the heart-voice again? How do we pick out its sound from the many noisy voices that vie for our attention?

Learning to listen to your parenting intuition

When you witness your child experiencing any strong emotion, or expressing some need (for example crying, screaming, acting out angrily), this acts as a trigger: it presses your buttons. Your child’s feelings and behaviours reactivate in your emotional memory systems any similar feelings and behaviours you have experienced throughout your life. Even if you have absolutely no conscious recall, your own childhood experiences are reawakened in the form of a fleeting body memory; a set of sensations and feelings.

In a micro-instant, your nervous system weighs up all you have personally experienced that is similar to what you now see your child going through. It’s amazing how fast your brain operates! Your nervous system examines these vast annals of feeling, the sum-total of your body’s emotional memory, scans what your mirror neurones are telling you about your child, and finally distils from all of these notes a single, meaningful impulse. Parenting intuition is the motivational signal that offers the most helpful suggestions, should we choose to stop dismissing it and to act upon it.

Learning to take instructions from our intuitive pulse is not unlike learning to speak a new language; there is, inescapably, quite a bit of trial and error involved. In order to develop your ability to hone in and listen to your intuition you need two simple things:

1. Attention

Bring your attention to your throat, your heart and your guts. Notice any sensations in and around those places. What do these sensations feel like? What do they seem to be saying? Begin a quiet inner dialogue with your body’s felt sense. When you get an idea of what your body-sense might be saying, check back by asking your body, “Is this what you are saying?” When you hit the right message, you will know because the sensation will immediately change: it will either become more intense, change in nature, or dissolve altogether.

2. Trust

Be willing to validate what your body is telling you and, tentatively, to act upon it. The next step is to trust your baby’s or child’s response. Any changes you see in your child’s mood or behaviour will be invaluable feedback about the appropriateness of your response. If what you offer seems wrong for your child, don’t beat yourself up – be willing to adjust and try to offer your child something different.

Your body signal may be telling you what to do, or what not to do.

Countless harried mothers have been told by their nurse or doctor that when their baby cries too much, they should let her cry it out: train her to ‘self-soothe’. Inside, most mothers’ hearts would beg to differ: they feel profound grief for their babies if they are unable to pick them up and comfort them. I have spoken to so many who, having ignored their own intuition and followed this advice, suffer great remorse for years afterwards. On the other hand, parents who listen to their hearts and remain a consistent holding presence for their babies tend to have calmer babies and more self-assured children in the long run.

Your own childhood memories

The more you practise connecting to how you once felt as a child, the stronger your intuition will be.

Sylvia was having trouble coping with her 10-year-old daughter’s angry outbursts. Most of the things she tried to quieten her daughter would only make her angrier. When Sylvia began to recall what she most needed from her parents whenever she felt angry as a child, this changed her perspective fundamentally. She resolved to listen intently and non-judgementally to her daughter’s feelings, to validate her anger instead of trying to quell it. This made an immediate and palpable difference. Conflicts were greatly reduced and an enduring warmth and lightness returned to Sylvia’s relationship with her daughter.

Tim was having trouble coping with his rambunctious toddler, whose games were often noisy and messy – and he felt awkward about joining in his child’s play. His discomfort around his boy melted when he began to recall how his own strict, controlling parents used to suffocate his spontaneity as a child. This memory liberated Tim, who decided to learn how to be a ‘child’ – that is, more playful and spontaneous – again. The result: he felt much closer to his son and his son trusted and listened to him more.

Allan was a father who couldn’t stand the sound of his baby crying. It was only once he got in touch with how little he felt held as a baby and child, and once he was able to grieve for his childhood loneliness, that his empathy began to flow towards his own baby. From contacting this emotional memory, Allan knew that he needed to pick up, cuddle and rock his baby more generously. Over time, his baby responded well to Allan’s newfound nurturance, and he became more settled.

Candace tended to be anxiously overprotective of her little toddler, too often frustrating his attempts to run, climb and explore. This was leading to growing tension between them, but she did not see why. It helped Candace to recall how she felt as a toddler when her own anxious mother filled her mind with warnings of peril. She remembered how smothering and how frustrating her own mother’s fretfulness felt to her as a toddler, and how her mother’s over-anxious interference stifled her self-confidence. Seeing the world from a child’s point of view helped Candace to begin letting go and trusting her toddler, to have faith in his strength and self-preservation instincts. A more joyful, playful and independent little boy was the reward for Candace’s insights.

Your inner child holds the password that unlocks your parenting intuition in times of confusion. In fact, connecting to your inner child and emotional memory is the most important study-guide for being a parent. Without the intuitive wisdom of the inner child, we are at the mercy of confusing social and cultural forces, or excessively dependent on experts.

Here is a process you can follow whenever you feel stuck:

1.  Think of a troubling and recurrent problem you keep encountering with your child.

2.  Ask yourself what was going on around you when you were the same age as your child is now. How were you treated by your elders when you felt like your child seems to be feeling right now – or acted similarly to the way your child is acting now?

3.  How did that make you feel at the time? Be sure you recall your own emotions, not what others told you about yourself. Do not censor anything that comes up by telling yourself things such as “This is unreasonable”.

4.  If you could have full permission to wish for anything, what do you wish would have been done for you differently? What did you most long for at that moment of your childhood? How did you want the adults around you to respond? Also: was there anything you really wanted to say, or shout, or do, that you were too afraid to say, shout or do because of threatened consequences?

5.  If there are any emotions that come up for you while doing this exercise, give that emotion some expression: write it down, yell it or cry it, speak it out loud, talk about it to someone you trust.

6.  Now think about your own child. What do you now think your child needs when this issue arises between you? Did your connecting with childhood memories help you to understand your own child differently?

As parents we need to balance the best information science can bring us with the intuitive signals that spring from our hearts. This involves gathering up-to-date information about childhood development, and balancing this with an ongoing journey to rediscover the inner child. Our intuition speaks to us constantly via our bodies, through the voice of the heart – all we need is the willingness to practise listening to and trusting this voice.

 

Robin Grille is a Sydney-based psychologist and parenting educator and is the author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart to Heart Parenting. To find out more about his work, visit

www.our-emotional-health.com

www.hearttoheartparenting.org

Robin will be the keynote speaker at the Light on Parenting conference in London in May 2012. He will talk about parenting for a peaceful world and also run an experiential workshop for parents, connecting them to the time when they were children themselves.

‘Early bird’ reductions on tickets are available until 4 February 2012. www.lightonparenting.com