Author: Seth

This is attunement. It is the pinnacle marker of health of every relationship. It means relational homeostasis. It’s the 90-year old couple holding hands on the couch and finishing each other’s sentences. It’s what my clients are asking me for when they say they need relationship “help.”

They need attune-up.

This couple is not attuned.

Fortunately, there is a well-established pathway to the goal. It’s called Active Listening, and there are 3 simple parts. You can listen your way to health. This is for every single relationship. I’m laying out all of my tricks here. If you can pull this off, you can avoid coming to people like me. Just send me a thank you note.

BRAINS AND BEING HEARD

Let’s start with how brains learn.

At which stage in this process would you say learning takes place?

We love to think learning takes place because we taught them.

So, Stage 1? (A.k.a., I told him so he must know…) Nope. Stage 1 is just instinctual imitation. Kid has no idea why he’s copying mom.

How about stage 2? (A.k.a., people learn by doing…) Getting warmer. An old saying of teachers goes: “They don’t learn it when you’ve taught it to them. They learn it when they’ve taught it back to you.”

The real learning cements and encodes in the brain in stage 3. When the effort was affirmed and vulnerability is rewarded with positive attention.

This process attunes two brains – baby and mama – to a common language via a common experience.

Lets move now to adults and DEEP attunement, or Emotional Attunement.

PROCESSING EMOTIONS

All day every day, your brain floats through one or more emotions like these, at varying levels of intensity:

See this top half? These are negative emotions. Parents and people scrolling Twitter spend a lot of time in this half:

Negative emotions are a pain signal to help us identify and heal from a bad experience. We call them wounds or traumas. When our relationship gets “off”, its because we haven’t successfully processed these together. By processing, I basically mean digesting your feelings (very different from eating your feelings, which is ironically a way to avoid digesting them).

We process/digest the experience – NOT JUST BY TALKING — but by being LISTENED TO.

For good reason, no one really wants to deal with the other person’s 💩. Thankfully, we don’t have to process it for them! We actually just need to hang out with them while they eat their sad pizza. And try a bite with them. No one should eat alone.

PROCESSING TOGETHER: THE THREE STEPS TO ATTUNEMENT IN ACTIVE LISTENING

STEP 1: REFLECTION is when we hold up a mirror to their emotions, and embrace them, like how Mom did with baby:

Most people don’t walk around saying “I feel sad”. It would be nice if they did. So this guy gets it. He is next level. He doesn’t need her to say it. So he can actually move to level 2: yellow belt.

This is a completely appropriate response to her statement. When someone is upset, all you need to do is make reflective statements back to them until they know you hear under the surface. Take them to their emotions.

And.

They.

Talk.

No questions, no rambling, no answers needed. No stories of my own. Just reflective statements. People in pain will talk for an hour if you let them, as we take them to deeper levels of themselves.

The tricky thing about reflection is we actually have to listen and don’t get to hijack the conversation with our agenda (sucks, I know). And as we listen, and reflect, the person opens up to deeper levels of what’s going on.

If we do this reflection job well, we will listen them to a point where we feel something within our own soul stirred because we get it. We feel their pain. Often, they will break down in tears.

This moves us to–

STEP TWO: EMPATHY, actually sharing the emotion. Homosapien magic.

You can’t fake this part. I’ve watched a lot of people try, and if there is one thing homosapien brains are good at, its detecting BS. If you’re not feeling them, they aren’t feeling you as you stumble through awkwardness. Fortunately, all you have to do is be real and your brain will do the rest.

STEP 3: ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY is when we move toward them, and eat a bite of their Sad Pizza.

We step in and share the load because we care. We may not have caused the problem — or maybe we did — but either way we take a tiny step closer to help them in their pain. This is where the magic happens:

OK, QUICK RECAP —

HOW THIS WORKS IN REALITY

Those are the bones of Active Listening. Now lets put some flesh and color to it.

Level 3: Active Listening and Reflecting Anger. This takes it to the next level because here is where we, the listener, can easily get flooded. Our emotions spike with theirs because we may be in danger. Anger is a trip circuit in our brain that heightens alertness and kickstarts defensiveness. No worries – keep calm and stick to the script. This is the brown belt test.

This time, someone is at fault and there is hell to pay. He likes his jaw located right where it is, so his brain may be freaking out and trying to deflect with these strategies:

All bad ideas that get you nowhere.

Also, telling her she is sad may not actually work in reality, because she doesn’t know she is sad. This hairball takes longer to untangle. So we start at the surface.

This guy read this article, so he remains calm and stays one step ahead.

Once she has responded with an affirmation, he knows she is feeling heard. Now she feels safe and more open to calming, where she can realize she is sad. You, the calm listener, are one step ahead. It is obvious to you, but she hasn’t realized it yet. Now that she feels safe, get to the point:

Now SHE knows she is feeling sad, because he helped her digest it. Now she can verbalize it and we can do that empathy thing.

LEVEL 4: Accusation is where we separate the grown-ups from the kids. Unfortunately, most of us will need a black belt for this.

This time, YOU’RE the target of the anger. Now, you REALLY have to play it cool. This one is less like untangling a hairball and more like defusing a bomb. At any point, our own emotions become triggered and our own quivering nerves will blow it all up.

SAME PROCESS: Start at the top, reflecting with a summary.

No defensiveness, no explaining. None of that. “You think” isn’t said with fear, anger, hostility, sarcasm, or mocking.

Yes, Seth the counselor gets it. You didn’t kill the hamster. Or you didn’t mean to do it. Or you weren’t trying to do it.

I get it, I get it, I get it.

OR– You are tired of being accused. Or you are exhausted from the 15 years of back and forth with this person. I get it.

OR — Your partner is emotional and irrational and a lunatic and you are tired of giving in and all those things.

I get it, I get it, I get it. Sucky for you, but none of those justifications are helpful now. You’re going to have to suck it up, put on your big boy/girl pants, and flush all those excuses down the toilet during this exchange.

Just stick with them, and stick to the script. And remember:

This guy is ready, because he still remembers:

Keep reflecting until what they are saying makes sense, and you understand their reasoning. Don’t stop seeking more info until you understand.

If you are truly a cool hand and have black belt skills, you will even be free to admit the part(s) where you were actually wrong, or the character flaw that got you accused. And it actually HELPS the situation.

Notice what you haven’t done yet. You havent:

• Agreed with them
• Conceded
• Been defensive
• Criticized or mocked
• Made excuses
• Blamed
• Dismissed emotions
• Told them they are right or they have a point

All you have done is listen to get their narrative right.

Maybe they are completely wrong. Most people self-correct when they hear themselves out loud reflected by a safe person.

Maybe they have completely mischaracterized you. Maybe they have been misunderstanding, accusing, and mischaracterizing you for 15 years. I can assure you that there is no brilliant thing you can say in one moment that will change the thousands of memories, subconscious reads, and assumptions they have of you. He can’t explain her from thinking “this is a guy who might kill hamsters” into thinking, “this guy would NEVER hurt a hamster.” Trust isn’t built through debate. So quit trying.

Keep letting them know you understand that it makes sense, until they get that you get them — and that you DON’T think they are crazy. Instead, stick to the script: “it makes sense that you are accusing me.”

Now that she has been heard and supported in her anger, with no shame, she will start to calm down and be more reflective.

No need for explanations or guesses. Just sit with them and practice empathy. Silence can be golden.

Maybe you’ll even get a chance to explain your side. But you won’t need to.

Remember the primary emotion(s) under the anger. Once we’ve defused the bomb, this takes us all the way back to the beginning of Level 1 active listening.

Remember the steps from there.

The beautiful thing is that no one needs you to be perfect. They just need to be listened out of their negative emotions, and then a new bond will take place:

TRUST.

We call it a repair, like when your muscles develop tiny tears during exercise, and heal. When we heal WITH our partner, we not only heal their emotional muscles, but we grow back together closer and more in tune. In the end, attunement through active listening builds a more formidable couple than you could have ever been before the pain.

She was a mid-50’s Latina lady who had been abducted and raped as a little girl. She came me to find forgiveness for her husband. She felt used by him for decades as his own sort of sex slave, with he debasing her while she gave in time after time to make him happy. She despised him and was desperate for a way out of his grasp.

The true grasp was the resentment gripping her heart.

We discussed the complexities of forgiveness, and I made a simple chart for her to fill out:

Two of the sentences she gave me glared at me. Forgiveness means:

• “I surrender the work of fixing him to the LORD.”
• “I surrender judgment to the LORD.”

Fixing. Judging. Two sides of the same coin.

Judging is the necessary precursor to fixing. If a doctor or auto mechanic wants to fix, they must first analyze and judge.

The prize? Control.

The opposite of the tree of life ISNT the tree of death — but the tree of awareness. Awareness solves no problems, but simply magnifies them, so that our choices seem more costly.

Both burdens – fixing and judging – demand an analysis, a diagnosis, and a label. These are means to the end of control.

Analyzing, diagnosing, and labeling are avenues to pigeonhole someone into a Narrative that we construct, which keeps us as “Narrative Master,” putting them in our cage. We know the story, now. We control it. I am now incentivized to make sure that every move they now make feeds my carefully constructed, hard earned set of labels.

The Narrative grows with every thought of them. Soon, it is heavy and exhausting to maintain. Every new action must fit in our predetermined framework. The investment in my narrative grows, the capital compounds. The prize of a well-constructed narrative — control — is irresistible.

Once we have them in that tightly constructed narrative box, we can fix them OR judge them.

Fix them when they comply with my Narrative; judge them when they resist — or when my fix fails.

If I fix them, they owe me. If I judge them, well — they owe me.

Both keep me in the place of Narrative Master, and they my little subject rat in a cage, my Narrative Slave who must satisfy their debt to me by repentance of every action in my Narrative in order to regain their freedom from my damnation.

My Narrative Slave now bears the burden of keeping my Narrative propped up. They are the sufferers I judge, trample and use to building a Narrative Plantation on the backs of their Name. Every new action they make, every word they say, must fit my Narrative and keep it alive. With every analytical thought, I whip them into Narrative Submission until it all makes perfect sense.

Its not long before I’ve built a clockwork Narrative Economy with my Narrative Slave at the cost of my subject’s Name. My own economy infects and entagles with the Narratives of those around me, and the debt they must repay compounds. Their Name is the only capital they have from which they will pay the price for my judgment. Their reputation shrinks until they are hardly human. No one wanted that, but it is simply the price of keeping the Economy afloat.

Once an economy is built, abolition gets political.

Far too much invested to simply let the resentment go. To change my Narrative. To assume good of them. To drop the judgment of that person who owes me so much, who wounded me so badly.

My pride, my Narrative of them, and finally, My narrative of Life itself has all become intertwined. My Story of life and justice and faith and meaning and the Divine is all at stake.

Letting resentment go would be far too costly. So costly that most people choose to harbor their resentment, or nurse their grudge. Those are verbs that require energy and payment to sustain. A Narrative Empire requires maintenance. The land on which our Narrative Slaves work to feed us demands payment. That maintenance, however, is far less expensive than abolition.

Forgiveness would be too costly. Its why we continue to feed harmful stories, insist on labels, and deepen our judgmental analyses.

He is a narcissist.
She is crazy.
He only married me for the sex.
She is out to get me.

Soon, I need my enemy to be evil just to satisfy the demands of the Narrative I am commanding. My assumptions jaded, my new mental economy no longer any has other sustenance, no flexibility, no life. No gratitude for the one made in the imago dei. My narrative of life and meaning and justice and hope itself is infected, becoming sicker and smaller by the day, with no way out but to keep the story going.

And in that day, I find my own self trapped in a cycle of slander, unable to break free, for I have no other means to build a Narrative Life but on the backs of those whose stories I refuse to liberate.

He who walls others out, walls himself in.

The true slave is the slaveowner.
The true rat in the cage — is me.

The human brain largely formed through a concept we now know as attachment.

What is the Something Bigger that you and I are attached to? 

That is the Human Question. 

And attention is our individual human answer.  Attention is where all the power of our 75 trillion cells is pointed.  It is a constant stream of consciousness always flowing towards something that receives it. 

You might say that all of the energy we consume becomes pointed towards whatever we give our attention to. 

The 11,000 watts you are burning right now are currently being burned so that you can sit in a temperate climate and read this book.  This book is the direction or flow of the entire you right now. If you were watching a cat video, the earth would be sacrificing those watts so you could bond with that cat.  But you’re not bonding with a cat video, obviously; the earth is paying for you to bond with this book.

In a few minutes or seconds, it will shift and you will focus your attention elsewhere, like your screaming kid or a work call. So attention is a meandering stream, always changing directions.

We can’t stop the flow. Trying to stop yourself from giving your attention to things is like trying to dam a stream with your hands or plug a water hose with your thumb.

Consciousness – attention – is the pinnacle of an individual’s existence and a magic gateway to higher levels.

What we give our attention to is, for that brief moment, our “why.” It is our purpose, albeit for a second. 

This girl is giving her attention to making an arrowhead.  Right now, all of her muscles, neurons, and tissues are working together in beautiful synchrony for one goal: 

a pointed rock. 

In one sense, she made it.  But in another, the universe did.  For the moment, she aligns all of her sunlight and earth toward this end.

This guy is giving his attention to flipping M&M’s in the air and catching them with his mouth to impress the ladies. 

Mother Earth’s 11,000 watts are paying for that, hoping for a return on the investment. It is also our investment of time and energy.  We give attention.  We pay attention.   

Then, something magical happens.  Our brains grow an emotional bond to its investments.  

Attachment. 

We grow hope for something in return.  Care grows.  It’s why you care about the stocks you own more than the ones you don’t.  You clean the house you live in, not your neighbor’s.  You invest in that which… you have already invested in.  It is a cycle of loyalty.

And, thanks to evolutionary hacks, these brains don’t really care whether the investment of attention is in something concrete or abstract, living or non-living.

And here we are, 8 billion ants scurrying around, each constantly investing this steady stream of energy.  It’s sort of like our power mountain is a volcano, and attention is high energy lava spewing out our eyeballs, except this lava is a stream of gold. 

She likes it.

Attention isn’t just the most powerful thing we have.   It is the culmination of everything we have in the present.

That which has our attention has our body and all its energy and power captive. 

That power is quite the prize.   Win Warren Buffett’s attention for a moment, and you now have a brief shot at accessing all that power he is sitting on. 

Whatever has your attention has a shot at getting some of your bank accounts, your work, your skill, your knowledge, and your loyalty.   

Interestingly, this golden stream is extremely narrow.  For all the giant reservoir of data stored up here in our head’s hard drive, the stream flowing out is pitiful in comparison.  We have billions of bytes of stored data in our memory, but our perceptual bandwidth of conscious attention is only a few bits.[1] That’s all we can focus on at a time.

And this tiny stream is guarded by a bouncer:  our conscious will or volition.  This bouncer is the boss, the head executive of a large corporation.  Unfortunately, the bouncer is not a particularly good one.[2]

If anything wants our attention, it needs to convince the bouncer.  Sweet talk this guy, and he is a sucker, always diverting the stream of our attention elsewhere like a Black Friday shopper looking for good deals.  His job is monumentally important: pay attention to the correct things, and our reservoir will continue to fill.  We will grow and become more powerful. 

Spend too much time paying attention to the wrong things, and we will be drained.  Others will siphon our power away, cashing in on our lack of discipline.

That is why there is such an epic battle going on for your attention, both inside and out.

THE CORPORATION

Internally, your body is fighting for the gold.  Our nervous system is its own competitive hierarchy – a corporation – full of dutiful workers constantly seeking attention for their needs.

Assuming your name is also Larry, we’ll call you Larry, Inc.  Your body has lots of internal divisions.

This is the executive boardroom (which conveniently meets in your body’s top floor office):

From the best we can tell,[3] your nervous system division reps (nerves) meet here all day with the executive team to tackle important company topics like dry skin, invading infections, bowel movements, wanting a college degree, and really liking sex. 

Here – in the brain – the big decisions are made, and the body’s attention budget is allocated.  Most smaller needs are taken care of within their own lower department.  We call these departments our subconscious. 

But the toughest problems, or those the lower body can’t fix alone, get their moment with the executive team: the conscious mind.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, and you, Larry, have a mild itch on your southern abdomen.  Let’s have a peek at the neurons meeting inside your Lobe:

Ultimately, the issues are filtered by the team. For each, they ignore it, table it, or take immediate action.  They rank priorities, also a bit like March Madness, with thousands of whiny contestants all the time:

Here, the minor inflammation in the hips isn’t quite enough to present as conscious pain, so you, Larry, are never aware.  Neither does the infection issue, because the white blood cell team is so badass they almost always get the job done.  You thoughtlessly staved off an ephemeral urge to read a book for now.  So…hungry and horny battle it out yet again.

It is a very, very high stakes contest to capture the momentary abundance of the entire company by convincing the bouncer- the CEO – to take action.  The winner gets access to all the “voluntary” muscles of the body, the mind, and all the excess power under your control. 

The Lobe directs the whole body to go buy a cheeseburger, instead of making babies. 

But the attention battle is never over.

Say you fall and break a leg on the way to get your burger. 

The dynamic Lobe reacts and reprioritizes a broken leg over a cheeseburger.  It directs your hands to dial an ambulance, while your hypothalamus tells your stomach to shut his ass up and wait.  It taps all the resources under its power: voluntary muscles, networks of friends, 9-1-1 helpers, money, and transportation.

The same fingers that can type 911 could also be forking over $50 to someone on Venmo, or filling out paperwork for a mortgage, or typing out a Classic novel.  But in this moment, they’ve made their choice.  Larry needs help.  His leg is screaming and impossible to ignore.  And he is pouring out his assets to get attention.

We call this SPENDING.

If all we ever do is gratify our internal attention desires, our power does this:

So we must give away attention as well.

The river goes both ways, and the CEO/bouncer/consciousness – must constantly delegate access to not only internal forces, but external ones as well. 

They want the gold, too.   And they are quite loud.  And they are smart.  Mesmerize the bouncer, and you have opened the gate to Larry’s assets.

It should be no shock that the battle for attention is humanity’s last battleground.   The fight to capture attention is fierce, with giant multinational corporations at war over our 75 trillion cells and their resources. We call it the attention economy, and the prize of the attention economy is the human and everything the human controls, even if for a second.

This is the March Madness, external conference. 

All for control of a few bits of information for a few seconds at a time.

The truth is, the tiny stream of attention is in constant flow directing deals, transactions, and tradeoffs.   Every day, we wake up and spend the entire day giving our attention in exchange for something.  We trade it to feel something, or to acquire something in order to feel something later. 

We give our attention to a cat video to feel amused.  We give our attention to a Rom-Com to feel warm fuzzies. 

Or, we think longer term.  We might give our attention to a calculus professor –

to gain more intellectual power –

to exchange that for a job –

to exchange that for a paycheck –

to exchange that for a nice house –

to exchange that for —

well, others’ attention.

Leverage.

You’ve gotta give money to make money, and the same is true with attention.  Long term thinkers who routinely give their attention to friends and calculus probably stand to be more powerful than people who give all their attention to cat videos. Not only would they become more powerful, but they would become more mentally healthy.

That’s because we were born with a wonderful, unchangeable neural circuitry that lives in its sweet spot when we give our attention to– and attach to–humans.  We were wired each this way from birth, at a level deeper than we can control.  It is how we came to rule the world, how we created such a mess, and strangely enough, the only way out of the mess.

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[1] Brains are impossibly efficient.  The actual amount you process is widely debated, anywhere from 16 bits to 20,000 bits. But we almost universally agree on this point:  Conscious perception is a tiny fraction of the total information you can access. Can  you think of every single memory you’ve ever had – all at once?  In fact, your visual perception even sucks worse than you think.  Try out this neat trick with the playing card:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4898652/  Also, the bandwith of consciousness discussion, decent middle of the road explanation:  https://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp14/2014/03/09/the-bandwidth-of-consciousness/

[2] I mean, I should really give him/her some credit.  Brain pruning (discussed later) is pretty incredible.

[3] Pretty good explanation here: https://www.medicaldaily.com/human-brain-consciousness-episodic-memory-personal-narrative-social-structure-384757

[4] Okay, okay, it doesn’t.  Mine is worse.

What if autistic kids were actually among the most socially aware of all of us?

Last night, we played Apples to Apples with my family.  Later, when I tucked my 7 year old son into bed, I knew something was wrong.  He didn’t want me to leave.  After 5 minutes of haggling through his embarrassment and fear, he confessed his trauma:

Little man had no idea what computer hackers are, but he intuitively gleaned this: there are some scary guys out there, and they might get you if you aren’t careful on your computer.   And we have computers all over the house.

My son is not autistic.  But as the old saying goes, “we are all somewhere on the spectrum.” And my son has enough of the characteristics that they haven’t passed me by unnoticed:  avoidance of eye contact, poor listening skills, hates varying his routine, constant squirming, fidgeting, quirky ideas, and a slight loner tendency at recess.  He isn’t the only one in the family.  In fact, he got most of these behaviors from me.

I am not a doctor, nor even an autism specialist.  I am an ex-teacher and counselor-in-training who has done my fair share of hanging out with kids with autism, filling out diagnostic observation forms, helping parents communicate with their child, and helping them adapt to the stressful world of school.  In my 10 years of public schools, I was on the front lines, and enjoyed a special kinship with these kids.  I usually feel like I “get” them, and we have often made great progress.   I noticed that over and over, the same theme kept coming back: the need for felt safety.

Over and over, the same theme kept coming back:  the need for felt safety.  

To be sure, autism is born from a combination of multiple sources built on a hereditary predisposition.   Despite conspiracy theories abounding, there is no one “smoking gun.”  I wish it were so.  That would constitute an easy fix, which is a understandably a hopeful pipe dream many parents to cling to.  Instead, we have found that a myriad of factors co-conspire to exacerbate autism’s symptoms.  Food intolerances, exposure to environmental chemicals, psychosocial stress, immune dysfunction, and even hormones all contribute to what I call “a full nervous system assault.”

Suruchi Chandra, MD.  Autism Research Institute © 2013

If the 21st century has taught psychologists and neuroscientists anything, it may be the fallacy of the old “mind vs body” dichotomy.  Mind is body.  There is no obvious reason to suppose that the brain treats one of these types of stress separately.  This is where most of us get off.  We must stop thinking of the mind and consciousness as separate from our physicality.

But brains just see it like this:

When a brain is free and calm, it marches forward.  We are built to be doers and risk takers who go out and face life with courage.  We tackle challenges and overcome adversity to make a mark on the world.

When the brain is under assault from stress, we retreat inward to find safety.  We ball up like a roly poly. 

Now is not the time to chance making a new friend.

Children with autism seem to be in a near-constant state of facing inward.  From what we can tell, each small assault coming at the child exacerbates an already-stressed brain, eventually threatening the safety of the entire system.  The brain’s systemic answer to collective assaults is to socially, mentally, and physically retreat into places of comfort: routines, stimulating relaxants, safe people, quiet rooms.

If only it were one switch we could flip.  But the evidence keeps telling us:  this is a whole-brain retreat.  Think of your computer running Windows on “safe mode.” This, I believe, is the function of the brain of a child with autism.

Factors

While my son isn’t on the autism spectrum, he has absence seizures.  And he is often a walking ball of fear.  At the age of 6, he would not go to a room alone, even his bedroom or the bathroom in our own house.  His toy of choice is not a race car or light saber, but a stuffed animal.  He demands his daily snuggles.  He climbs in our lap, begging for squeezes.

Seizures, like autism, seem to be caused by an abundance of factors bearing down to assault the nervous system.  One of his was an unexplained physical stress from contortion on his skull and upper vertebrae.  We took him for several rounds of manipulative treatment through an osteopathic doctor.  Each time the doctor did adjustments, his body visibly relaxed right in front of my eyes… and then his demeanor would change.

He would often go from spasmodic, goofy, joking, and squirmy to fully relaxed and yawning in a matter of a couple of minutes.  The doctor said yawning was common during adjustments, because the body was finally relaxing a bit.   One day, to my surprise, he walked straight out of the adjustment room and into the bathroom.  When I told him to hang on, he just calmly said, “its okay, dad.  I’ll go alone.”  As if this were normal.  It was like some alien had kidnapped my little spas-ball or nerves and replaced him with a chilled out little boy.  You could have picked my jaw up off the floor.

I was finding out that physical body stress had the same impact as emotional and mental stress.  Physical adjustments were actually reducing his fears. 

If that sounds completely crazy, good, because that means that I’m not alone.  But its only crazy if the mind and body are separate.  And they’re not.

Let me stress that osteopathic adjustments will not cure seizures or autism.   Despite promises of some shaman-doctors, neither will your favorite vitamin, oil, detox plan, smoothie, or air purifier.  But there are far too many indicators that multiple interventions in concert can move the needle, even if a little.

In short, when you have 20 different assaults from all angles, removing 2 of them (or slathering on lavender) probably isn’t going to do much.  But removing 10 or 12 might, even if only a bit.

 

Back to last night.

Here’s where it gets interesting for me.  After counseling him through his fear of computer hackers, I thought, “Good Lord, Computer hackers??  Seriously?  A person can’t even mention anything remotely scary-sounding without tripping this kid off.”

Ambient fear clings to my son like a dust-bunny on an ionized Swiffer.  If someone in the room is afraid, he adopts the fear immediately, and I am stuck trying to un-convince him.  Loud noise? Explanation demanded.  Tornado warning?  Forget it.  Today its computer hackers.  Tomorrow it will be rabid squirrels or bioterrorism.

I went off to bed last night with an even fuller appreciation of his fear-dust-bunny-clinging-Swiffer of a brain.

The light began to come on.

A brain under assault becomes a brain heightened to risks all around it.  It desperately needs to know if there is anything in the room it should be further protecting itself from.

I believe that an autistic child is a fear magnet. 

His (or her) brain is constantly scanning the room for threats to protect itself from.    If a single person in a crowded room mentions or even sounds as if they are afraid, my son’s radar is triggered.  An unfamiliar noise pops up?  He is on it.  New, unfamiliar environment?  He feels like this guy:

My boy may not know what a computer hacker is, but he has enough context clues to know — it ain’t good.  He may not even realize he is afraid, because this is his default state. 

He isn’t a good listener because he is actually a great listener.  He often missed our actual words because his brain is too busy deciphering the more basic features of tone, emotion, and other signs of threat.  In the brain’s economy, these are far more important indicators of safety than how to carry the remainder on a long division problem.  I’ve noticed that my son, like my students with autism, are always tuned in, even when they are missing large chunks of instruction.

Well meaning adults get frustrated because he isn’t listening, only to turn up the negative emotion and compound the problem.

For the longest time, we have thought that autistic children are the most socially unaware among us.  I posit that they are the most aware of all. 

After settling my boy in, I happened upon this article referencing this study:

It immediately caught my eye.  The amygdala?  Altruism?  Seriously?  (If you are unfamiliar, the amygdala draws its notoriety and infamy for being the “fight-flight-or-freeze part of our brain,” lighting up when danger shows up).  The study indicated that extreme altruists seem to have an amygdala that is 8-10% bigger.  How could that be?

And then it hit me.

Fear is largely a social construct.  Aside from a few basic primal fears, almost all fears are taught.  If, then, my son is a fear-magnet, it isn’t because he is anti-social.  It is because he is hyper-social.

The researchers mentioned call the amygdala the “seat of empathy and emotions.”  

“If my son is a fear magnet, it isn’t because he is anti-social.  It is because he is hyper-social.”

Think about it:

Bigger amygdala = more empathy = more adoption of other’s negative emotions

When you fight, flee, or freeze, you are usually doing so based on social cues you are gleaning from those around you.  To contrast – psychopaths, criminals, and those with antisocial disorders have been shown to have less volume and lower activity in the amygdala.

No wonder he wouldn’t be running out to play with everybody at recess.  Its not because he doesn’t like people.  It’s because, for him, that is like running through a mine field of new possible fears to assault him.

A kickback might be, “Wouldn’t it be also true that a child with a heightened emotional sensitivity would glean positive emotions as well?”

Yes, but there is a caveat.   Unfortunately, brains care way less about positivity.  With all humans, positive emotions have been shown to “slide off like Teflon”, while negative emotions “stick like Velcro.”  This keeps us safe.  It is why we all remember where we were on 9-11-2001.

Over time, each and every negative memory becomes encoded with experiences.  The unknown world out there becomes a frightening maze of Velcro walls, with danger lurking at every turn.  Most every experience out there being connected to a negative memory our kids find it difficult to get past.  Their brains retreat inward to find homeostasis.

For kids barely on the spectrum, this appears as non-social or anti-social behavior.

As soon as I read the article, my brain jumped up and immediately began to wonder– If my theory of autism were true, then kids with autism should have a larger amygdala.

Turns out, they do. 

Researchers have long tended to believe that the amygdala is connected to anxiety, and that anxiety can be connected with autism, as if mysteriously.  Up to 40% of kids with autism have diagnosable anxiety.

But my theory is that all kids with autism have anxious brains, whether it expresses itself socially or not.

I’d like to hear your feedback on this.  Take a look at the research and see if I’m off.  Hit me up in the comments.  We’ll be listening.

 

 

*more of a hypothesis; not the same ring to it. 

It was a Tuesday night in December, and I was in Podunk, Texas, population 226. My students were playing basketball – the lowest-level of ball you can watch that you still have to pay admission for. This was 7th grade boys B Team, in a 1A school, in the middle of corn fields. About 16 fans were there, along with some crickets.

But there’s always that one. You know. That guy.

He was three rows behind me, yelling. Our boys were getting beat something like 12-8 and it was nearing the end of the game.

“Come on boys!!! Get your head in the game!!”‘

The yells got louder.

“You boys don’t even care– come on! You’re not even trying! Get your head in the game!”

“What you boys need to do is HUSTLE!!!”

Whose voice was this? I’m too curious. I know I should resist looking, but in a moment of weakness I turn around, and I’ll never forget the sight: a 400+ lb man, hunched over with a chili dog in one hand and a Coca-Cola in the other. Snapping.

“HUSTLE!!!”

We swim in a culture of spectators and judges.

Reality TV. Fantasy Sports. Talent Competitions. Social Media.

We’ve done it so much, it has us believing we’re somehow entitled to judge anyone actually doing something.

I sat the other night watching 9 year olds on Masterchef Jr. making Lobster rolls, and by the time it was over, I caught myself nodding with the judges and mumbling, eww, yeah, he DID brown the edges a bit…

Then it smacked me — this is A NINE YEAR OLD making LOBSTER ROLLS. When I was nine, I could microwave a Jimmy Dean biscuit.

Spectator culture has so many of us terrified of doing. My kids, as a rule, won’t even attempt anything that might end up on YouTube. Too dangerous.

And we’ve done it enough ourselves, it has us believing we’re somehow entitled to judge those we watch. After all, we paid.

Friends, no matter what you do– there will always be a fat guy in the stand, eating his chili dog, and reminding you you’re not good enough at something he could never do. Telling you you’re not trying hard enough. Laughing at your mistakes. Telling you how you SHOULD have done it.

Make no mistake– critique will flow most freely and sharply from those who CAN’T or WON’T do what you’re doing. Or from those who think they are entitled because they used to do it. Back then.

You have work to do. And you’re going to have to do it amidst the noise of the spectators. This is life.

You cant escape them. You will be watched. There are far more viewers than doers.

So, paint that picture.

Write that book.

Start that business.

Ask her out.

Play ball. Even amidst the yells, the critiques, the judges, or the comment feeds. Do your thing. Take a shot. And when you miss, turn and give the big guy a wink– and go get that rebound.

No, state tests do not single handedly Make a Murderer. There are no simple answers to systemic problems. So, contrary to the obnoxiousness we witness in our news feeds, there is no cause of school shootings.

But there are conditions.

An explosion is synergy at work. It can’t happen easily. It actually takes quite a few steps to make something – or someone – explode. Perhaps even design and skill. There are hundreds of ways that something will NOT ignite. So when it does, you know that conditions had to be just wrong.

A myriad of prerequisites drove the atmosphere from stable to volatile to violent.

Dry wood — stacked together — refined fuel — and a source of ignition.

It’s the conditions that matter.

We are a nation weary of fighting to guard against every possible spark that might threaten our tepee-stacked, gasoline-soaked piles of tinder. And too many educators like me have reluctantly participated in pouring more fuel on the stack.

Wait a minute— our kids are burn-ready, gas-soaked piles of wood??

Yep.

Volatile. Have you been in our schools? Looked at depression and anxiety rates? Suicide rates? While Americans pontificate with our millions of debate-hours trying to protect them from school shooters, far more of them are killing themselves. (Suicide recently passed homicide as the #2 cause of teen death.)

Can we back up?

How did our kids ever get to be one spark away from disaster? Honestly, you can have all those spark prevention debates with your congressman or your Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving. I want to talk about our volatile kids.

These conditions did not just happen. This took a system – one that has been honed. Remember- every system perfectly executes what its perfectly designed to do.

Unfortunately, I know, all too well. I helped create them for too long. And here is how.

How to Systematically Create Volatile Kids

Say you asked me to design a system, from scratch, that would produce optimal conditions for wide-scale depression, anxiety, suicide, and, of course, school shootings. I could sadly concoct an awful, dreadful, brutally effective one.

The key is– control the weather. Any park ranger knows that it’s the weather that determines fire risk. On rain-soaked cloudy days, a fire just can’t take off.

An old adage goes, “Teachers aren’t weather forecasters; we are weather creators.” We don’t just report the rain. We make it rain. Rain that gives life to our kids is positive relationship. No fire can survive a downpour of this. Explosions won’t happen. So I’d begin with drying out the wood. Create an atmosphere of scarcity and make bullying weather.

Bullying Weather

This really does the trick. This year, there were 1 or 2 bullies in my class, sometimes 3. Depends on the week — and on the weak. It’s widely verified that bullies are created, not just randomly selected by a celestial lottery. Bullies wax and wane. Heck, “bully” itself is a bit of an arbitrary label to stick on a moving target. Humans are dynamic and fluid.

Many days, when conditions are right, I can become a bit of a bully.

“Sit down, get quiet, and get to work!”

“John– WHAT in the WORLD are you doing??”

“Shaniya– for the seventh time, GET. IN. LINE!”

I just get tired, folks. Run out of steam. Spent. I’m human. So I vent, pass the buck, react. I know I shouldn’t. But against the best of intentions, I begin to create threatening- bullying- weather. It happens all too easily in a climate of accusation and scarcity.

I know full well how this plays out. I can turn students against each other with a snap of the tongue. They wont even know I’m the problem. They’ll think their classmate are. Just turn on my Accuser voice and watch as they all turn against each other.

The Accuser voice creates a perception of scarcity. Scarcity creates competition. And competition creates enemies.

The way my kids treat each other is a direct reflection of how I treat them.

Say I were to come in with a high energy smile, an engaging lesson, positive words, relaxed humor, and a contagious enthusiasm. What are the odds that fights break out?

Slim to none. Too much rain.

But if I come in grouchy and yelling? Start your timer. It won’t be long before the fights begin.

Having that snapshot, I now give you my 8 Step systematic plan to create the bullying weather necessary to produce long term, widespread volatility.

Step 1: Put many kids in a room with only one adult. Busy adults are best. Only give them the illusion of a relationship – even better than no relationship.

Step 2: Engage kids with fun. A gateway. A hook. A quick micro-burst of relational energy to attract their hearts before we distract them. Then, seamlessly transition into work. This gets them invested with as little relationship (rain) required as possible.

Step 3: Praise the successes of top kids to make the most relationship-starved ones desire praise and work harder. More work = more investment. The more investment now, the more despair we can create later.

Step 4: Analyze, analyze, analyze. Plaster successes (and implicit failures) on charts and graphs. Be specific. Make them keep track of it all, so they always remember. Emphasize their ability to get there with hard work — dried out, lonely kids will just hear, “Your shortcomings are your fault.”

Step 5: Focus, focus, focus on what’s still not right. This is especially important when students get really parched toward the end of the year. Continually remind them — even the best of them — that they are “almost there.”

Step 6: Make success a mirage. When the kids get “there,” celebrate quickly so you can move them up to the next level. Over time, this creates hopelessness.

Step 7: Repeat the cycle, day after day, year after year. More investment. Exponential growth of despair. After a while, a treadmill, but they still won’t get off. Why? They’ve invested too much. Like a man stuck at a quarter slot machine. Might as well keep going now.

Step 8: Emphasize clearly and often how much is at stake. Their college, careers, and even relationships depend on whether they will continue to run on this treadmill — whether they will keep working hard enough to earn the approval they are still seeking.

In short, if I were to design a system to create despair and hopelessness, I would essentially design the American Classroom.

Now, I know this sounds a dreadfully pessimistic caricature of what only the worst, most selfish educators would allow in their rooms. And thankfully, it is. At first.

Most teachers are just too darn joyful and positive. There is no way they would purposefully create this environment. They would only succumb to it if their own conditions were just right.

So, to create volatility, we don’t begin with students. We need concoct a way to drain teachers of their positivity and joy — and create volatility in them.

Got it. New article:

How to Create Volatile Teachers

Step 1: Put one teacher alone in a room with many kids. Kids with busy parents are best. When it’s budget crunch time, apply for a state waiver to cram even more students in.

Step 2: Engage teachers with fun trainings and emotional videos about how much they can touch students lives, and how much purpose there is in their job. Entice new teachers with promises of great vacation time and decent first year pay. Newbies will shrug at the fact that they’ll never get a raise.

Step 3: Praise the successes of the top teachers who look good in photos. Or, of the school across the lake. They must be doing such cool high-energy activities all the time. Highlight that one teacher with an awesome Pinterest wall who has no family at home and works every night and weekend.

Step 4: Analyze, analyze, analyze. Scores. Spreadsheets. Data Analyses. Do this well enough, and teachers will eventually forget to think of their students as humans with stories anymore. They will first and foremost think of them as a number. The lowest numbers will become pebbles in our shoes– problems– objects to be fixed. Relationship kills fire.

Step 5: Focus, focus, focus on what’s still not right. Forget the blood, sweat and sacrifice. Have lots of meetings that begin with a quick celebration and then get to the point – the few failures among all the success.

Repeat steps 3, 4, & 5 as often as necessary to achieve proper dehydration.

Step 6: Make success a mirage. Next failing kid. Next year. Next, next, next.

Step 7: Repeat the cycle, day after day, year after year. Treadmill.

Step 8: Emphasize, clearly and often, how much is at stake. Yes, their jobs and licenses, for sure, but even more- their students’ futures. Remind them that those mamajamas will be flipping burgers for the kids at the school across the lake if you don’t pound another 20 minutes of intervention in them today.

Follow these 8 steps faithfully, and, over time, you will see your teachers do this:

(same actual lady pictured)
Dried out.

Once again, if I were to design a system to create teachers who are dried out (or walking out), I would essentially design the American Public School System.

In fact, I would argue that great teachers are one of the primary reasons why our suicide and mass shootings rates are so low. I’m not surprised that we have suicides and homicides every day among our students. I’m surprised that we have so few, given the climate we’ve systematically engineered. Thanks, teachers.

Where does it end? Where does it Begin?

You may be wondering about the next level up. Are administrators just evil? Of course not.

Hopefully you’re catching on. Just repeat the steps at each higher level. Which is even easier.

Easier?

Fortunately (for volatility’s sake), the higher you ascend the pyramid, the more the 8 Steps begin to create themselves.

How?

First, it takes strong personal boundaries to not succumb to the 8 Steps. Thankfully (for our evil system), we don’t typically promote people with great boundaries. On average, we’ll promote the ones who are willing to sacrifice more and more of themselves for the company.

Secondly, the farther you are up the Pyramid, the more distant from your kids. Less empathy. It will be easy, almost necessary, for you to only interact with your schools’ highlight reels. Things will seem much more wonderful than they are on the ground.

Thirdly, your underlings will pretend all is well, just so you’ll like them. Just by your walking into classrooms, teachers and principals will rush to sweep their house in order.

Fourthly, leaders know full well they are still human. So the higher up they are, the more they naturally underestimate how big of a deal their words and actions are. They will utter crushing words without even knowing it.

See, a pyramid of structured leadership, in a system whose goal is to be the best, inevitably creates an inverted pyramid of pressure.

The higher you ascend, the more invested you are. The more invested, the more pressure to please your superior. The more pressure we feel, the more we pass down. Who, in this situation, feels the most pressure? Tiny directives by lawmakers easily become crushing weights by the time they trickle to our students. This may well create diamonds out of a few, but far too many are just turning to coal. Hard, charred, explosive coal.

Added Fuels

Now, to be clear, these are just wood-prepping basics. I didn’t mention the dozens of added fuels from the American Family system, such as parents distracted on their phones, overly competitive sports, unhealthy foods, or other factors you might throw in.

The bad news is this problem took millions of people decades to create. The good news is there are millions of us connected to one another who can begin to deconstruct tired old norms of racing rats. We do this by setting up personal boundaries, and living by a higher purpose than to keep our job or get higher scores.

We can reclaim our kids as humans with stories, rather than numbers on spreadsheets, when we keep their humanity our top priority.

It will take risks, for sure. It will take secure people who aren’t distracted by photoshopped highlights of the school across the lake, or threatened by their coworkers’ charming Pinterest walls. It will take millions of us being secure, amidst the insecurities and accusations of bosses, parents, and even our own selves.

Believing that we are enough and striving for more of what matters instead of more of what the system demands. It may look like lower scores at first, but if the trade-off is healthier kids, is it worth it?

Here’s to a change in climate for the 2018-2019 American School System: May it rain. May it pour down love and grace and peace. May teachers be free from the pressure to conform to the singular focus of higher numbers, and may our kids be freed from the weight of too much pressure. Then, when our kids can be fully accepted as fully themselves, will those dried up piles of tinder cease to look so threatening.