Play, Presence, and Praise

Who do we believe that we are?

Alright, y’all, relational psychology is included in the tagline of this newsletter, and doing some reading in that field was a foundational experience in my starting to write here, but I don’t touch on it as often as I wish I did. We’re taking a brief foray today into some psychology-adjacent topics, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this type of content!

Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash

If you haven’t heard of Rachel Norman over at A Mother Far From Home, honestly, why are you following me instead of her?

I jest. Mostly.

But in all seriousness, Rachel’s blog and podcast have been anchors for me in times when I’ve felt overwhelmed and incompetent in these first few years of parenting. Rachel had five kids in five or six years, so she gets it, and she came out of that experience with a real heart for mothers who are struggling. Her resources center on creating routines and patterns of behavior that meet the needs of each member of the family without becoming a total burnout factory.

So when she announced last fall that she would be hosting an online course inspired by play therapy, I jumped. on. that. train. I didn’t know anything about play therapy at the time, but I knew I needed guidance. Our toddler had just turned two, and our baby was still struggling with the effects of her four month sleep regression. James had gone back to work maybe six weeks before, and I was feeling all the feelings: mine, the toddler’s, the baby’s, James’… Rachel promised that the course would change the way we understand our kids’ behaviors—to see the ways in which they were already meeting their needs, and to help them redirect that energy to meet their needs in healthier, more appropriate ways.

Okay, I’m starting to feel like a marketing email, so I’ll cut myself off there. If you’re interested in getting on the wait list for the next time the course is offered—I get no credit or kickback for sharing this—you can click here.¹

The course took place over eight weeks in the fall semester, although I’ll be honest with y’all, I’m still catching up on the content and haven’t started doing the play times with our toddler yet. That being said, I’ve already gained a ton of insight just from listening to the materials. What I want to talk about today isn’t so much how these skills and mindset shifts can help us “coach” our children (after all, that’s Rachel’s job), but how they can help us as adults, as spouses and parents and employees and Christians and humans.

To start, let’s lay out a few principles from the course.² Please note that I’ll be using the word “children” here, but I encourage you to ask yourself whether or not this holds true for you (and your spouse) as well:

• Everything children do and say is a communication.
  Children must continue to communicate until they are heard.

• All children have every possible inner strength.
  Children act according to who they believe they are.

• All behaviors are driven by 3 healthy needs: experience, connection, power.
  Whatever children are doing is already meeting these needs.

• All growth is through acceptance.
  Children set exactly the right level of challenge for growth.

Everything children do and say is a communication.
Children must continue to communicate until they are heard.

I think, sometimes, that I’m being “obvious enough” in my signaling to my husband—I’m done with this situation, I’m anxious or overwhelmed, I’m ready to go home, I need you to stand up for me, whatever the case may be. This, of course, is the experience behind the old adage, “Don’t expect your husband to be able to read your mind.” He can’t read my mind, and more importantly, he can’t always read my behavior. I don’t say this as if it’s some sort of moral failing on his part—maybe he doesn’t know the language, maybe he’s exhausted or distracted or engaged with another person, maybe a million other reasons. We all have days where we can or can’t effectively interpret the behavior of some other person. It’s simply a statement of fact.

But there’s an unspoken assumption behind the experience as well: I am frustrated when my spouse can’t “read my mind” or interpret my behavior because my behavior is an important form of communication. This is also the fundamental assumption behind elimination communication, that our children are telling us their needs right from day one, and we can train ourselves to recognize and respond. We see the same thing with the endless graphics about hunger cues and sleepy cues and facial expressions… We know, implicitly, that our bodies are constantly communicating, and with our pre-verbal children, that bodily communication is the primary way in which they express themselves.

So where do we go wrong when it comes to other adults? Maybe we don’t train ourselves to pay attention to the unspoken bat-signals being lit by our loved ones. (Heck, half the time, we don’t even train ourselves to pay attention to our own body’s signals!) Maybe we assume that unspoken communication is too dangerous, too fraught with misunderstanding, too petty or childish or inefficient. Body language can be difficult for people, and the ability to accurately communicate and interpret body language can vary from individual to individual, even from moment to moment. It is certainly more direct to state what you need or to ask someone what they need.

But whether or not our minds are willing to acknowledge it, our bodies are constantly communicating with us and with those around us. It is when that unspoken signaling goes unrecognized that we escalate—and we don’t always escalate effectively. Maybe we do just tell our spouse, “I’m ready to go now!” and cheerfully head home. But that, at least in my experience, is not the norm. Sometimes, rather than choosing to ask for what we need, we hold things in. Or we escalate to more intense displays of emotion, hoping that someone will take us seriously if they can’t ignore us. Maybe we use physical means to release emotional tension—yelling, throwing, punching. We will continue to communicate until we feel heard.

We will continue to communicate until we are heard. Written out like that, it almost sounds like a threat (ha!), but I want to take it as a reassurance instead, as a promise. If I know that I will continue to communicate until I am heard, I can choose to communicate in ways that I know the intended recipient will understand. I can choose forms of communication that are functional, rather than relying only on instinct or habit, and I can learn to understand the ways in which my loved ones are communicating as well. Certainly, this is a long game, but it’s a game worth playing.

How could our family dynamics changed if we trained ourselves to recognize just one non-verbal act of communication from our spouse? From each of our children? From ourselves?

All children have every possible inner strength.
Children act according to who they believe they are.

This is the principle that’s hardest for me to explain without just telling you to take the course. But I think an example will help me to help you understand, so let’s start there:

No matter how many times James tells me I’m a good wife and a good mother, I’m not going to believe him if I don’t already believe those things are true. He can tell me a dozen times a day; he can thank me for loving our family well; he can praise me to the skies to our friends in front of me. If I don’t agree with him before he speaks, his words aren’t like to produce a lasting change in my opinion of myself. On my worst days, those words may even backfire, leaving me feeling unseen, unknown, and misunderstood because he clearly doesn’t know the real me if he thinks so highly of me.

If you don’t think that you do this, ask yourself if you’ve ever responded to a compliment with, “Well, thanks, but…” and then followed it up with a litany of reasons why that thing didn’t really “count”. We don’t want to take a compliment that isn’t true. We don’t want to be given credit when we feel we don’t deserve it. This is a good thing! But our perception isn’t always the truth, so this moment of “Thanks, but…” can serve as an invitation to conform our understanding of reality to reality itself. In other words, we want to believe things about ourselves that are true, rather than allowing our (prideful! not humble!) self-abasement to dictate our actions and relationships.

To go back to the example above: if James points out to me the things I’m already doing that are good [virtuous, sacrificial, sanctifying, loving], it’s harder for me to combat. When observable behavior comes into play, I am forced to reconsider my own pre-conceived notions about myself. If, instead of seeing my slip-ups as failures, I start to find in them a virtue I’m striving to practice, albeit imperfectly, then the way I see myself might start to change.

“Sara, thank you for washing and drying my work clothes! It means a lot to me that you’re taking care of me in that way while I’m work.” or even “Sara, I noticed that you wanted to say something rude earlier, but you chose not to. Thank you—I know that takes a lot of self-restraint.” These kind of statements can go a long way in helping me to shift my perception because I am forced to acknowledge, even if it’s against my will or against my self-image, that I already practice these things I don’t believe I can do.

And, as a result of my changing self-image, my behavior will also start to shift. I might start doing the laundry more often (even if I still only get through the washing and the drying and don’t get to the folding for weeks at a time) because I see myself as “the kind of mom who keeps up with the washing and drying”. I might choose to refrain from an unkind word, or hold off on eating more than I need, or refuse to let a bad mood ruin my family’s day because I see myself as a person with self-restraint.

“Every possible inner strength,” then, refers to virtues or virtue-adjacent behaviors for which we all have the capacity, in a similar way to our 10 Ways of Being series from the fall.

We’re discovering here that growth in holiness is just as much a question of attention as it is a question of identity. We already have the capacity to practice virtue, and if I can begin to notice the ways in which I am already striving to live a virtuous life, then I can begin to see myself as a person who is trying to grow in virtue, rather than a person who is just a slob and a turd and horrible to everyone I love. Of those two options, I know which “version” of me is more likely to continue pursuing holiness. Spoiler alert: it’s not the one with such a low self-image that any act of charity or self-control feels like too much to ask.

What inner strength or virtue can you notice in yourself today? In your spouse? In your children? How can you “name it and claim it” to allow your mindset to shift?

All behaviors are driven by three healthy needs for experience, connection, and/or power.
Whatever children are doing is already meeting these needs.

We all know that not every desire is healthy, not every desire is for our good. But I think we have also all experienced that not every desire is direct or immediate—sometimes we crave sweet foods, for example, because the taste is pleasurable, but other times, we might crave a sweet food because it reminds us of a loved one, or because we’re feeling lonely or overwhelmed and the lil dopamine hit is a happy boost on a hard day.

Whether you prefer “experience, connection, and/or power” or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or some other model in psychology or spirituality, the point remains the same: our behavior is our attempt to meet our needs, as we perceive them, in ways that we think are within our grasp.³

I linked to this article in the footnotes a couple weeks back, so you may have already read it, but I think it’s worth sharing again. Dixie’s point is that our tech use is already meeting our needs, although probably not in the most wholesome way. When we desire to reduce a particular behavior, whether tech-related or otherwise, we need to take into consideration the need behind the habit if we really want to effect a change.

I know we’re focusing on adults today, but here’s an example from my two-year-old: she can be, as one would expect of a child her age, very temperamental about her naps and her bedtime. It’s always “one more glass of water” or “I need to poop” or “there’s a scary lion in my room” or “there’s frogs everywhere”. But I’ve noticed (and forgotten, and noticed again, ad nauseam) that when I am intentional with her before sleep—when I put in the work to remain focused and present with her, to meet that need for positive connection according to her standards and her desires (albeit in a way that’s “okay with me”), then the number of “hey mommy” moments decreases dramatically, sometimes even down to zero.

She can sleep easily only when she feels safe and connected.

It’s not always easy to prioritize that moment of connection, but I never regret it when I do. Even if I’m in a rush to get her down—maybe I have a phone call to try and make, a nap I want to take myself, or a bit of writing I want to work on—the fruit of that moment is always generously disproportionate to the amount of time it takes to stop and connect with her.

We adults function much the same way. We might not be meeting our needs in healthy or functional ways—that’s the whole reason we can talk about unhealthy coping mechanisms—but our actions are, in some way or another, meeting a perceived need. Our spouses’ actions are, in some way or another, meeting their perceived needs. When we approach one another with this lens, it’s much easier to detach from the (also often dysfunctional!) emotional reaction or defensiveness we experience when we think their actions are “about us” somehow. We can then step out of ourselves and begin to problem solve.

Here’s an example. We’ve all had those days where we get to, say, 5:30pm and for some reason, it’s like every single thing that could be happening is happening all at once and your nervous system just gets so overwhelmed that you snap at everyone for every little thing and then all of the sudden you just shut down. Normally what happens is one of two things:

1. We push through, say and do things we regret, and eventually break down crying

2. We try to push through and get (curtly) told to please excuse ourselves because ~this~ is just not working (and then, if you’re me, go break down crying)

Which, to be fair, it’s not. But I wonder how the script would change if we tried to hold space for the needs being expressed here: “I need to feel in charge of my [body, nervous system, physical space, ability to prepare dinner uninterrupted, time, etc etc.]” or perhaps “I need to feel connected to another adult human person instead of just demanded like an object or a servant”.

What would it feel like to hear something like this: “Sara, you’re feeling really spent because you’ve had a long day, and you’re snapping at the kids as a result. That’s not how either of us wants our family to function. There must be something we can do to help you meet your needs.” Do you feel more seen? More loved? More important? Do you feel less judged? Less defensive? Less… wrong? We’re holding two things here—the truth that my behavior is meeting my needs and that it is dysfunctional—and we’re working together to find a solution that allows my needs to be met within our family’s boundaries around appropriate behavior.

Can you dig deeper with respect to one surface-level desire to understand what need you are trying to meet? Then, if needed, can you strategize and find another way to meet that need?

All growth is through acceptance.
Children set exactly the right level of challenge for growth.

“Hate the sin, love the sinner.” It’s so cliché by now, and just in case there was somehow a human person who’d never heard it, Lin-Manuel Miranda included it in Hamilton. Just in case. This last premise is really, in my mind, one way to put that cliché into practice: we can accept things as they are (instead of pretending they’re some other way, or wishing so hard for a different reality that we refuse to engage in our current one) while also holding as true that things need to change.

Let’s dig a little deeper here. “All growth is through acceptance.” Accepting what, you might ask? Accepting that we’re not there yet. Accepting that we need to walk each step to get there. Accepting our limits in this moment. (The same goes for others—we’re accepting their imperfections, their journey, their limits.) We’re not advocating here for an acceptance of vicious behavior; rather, we’re accepting the invitation to find attempts at virtue even in the midst of the biggest slip-ups.⁴ We’re accepting that we are all, in one way or another, works in progress. That sometimes miscommunication happens even between two parties with the best intentions.

I might not like, for example, that the folks in the house on the other side of our fence throw ragers once a month with music so loud and bass so deep that sometimes it keeps my kids awake. (Yes, that is a very specific situation.) But here’s the thing—pretending they’re not throwing a party isn’t going to change the fact that they’re throwing a party. Pretending that their music isn’t blaring won’t change the fact that my girls have trouble going to sleep. It is only when I accept that this is a behavior that they keep repeating that I can engage enough to invite them to growth. (Now, keep in mind that I’m an introverted housewife who’s never met them in person, so my “invitation to growth” looks like calling a noise complaint when it gets to be too late… but you know what I mean.)

Likewise, if I were to go talk to them (which I won’t), they would have to accept that their behavior was un-neighborly in order to even consider trying to grow in neighborliness. And maybe, at first, that would look like turning the music down a few notches around 10pm, then maybe 9pm, and so on. Or maybe it would look like a little “heads-up” a couple of hours—or even a couple days—before a party was planned, so that we could make a decision to stay the night elsewhere if we really felt it necessary.

My point being this: I wouldn’t expect them to just stop throwing parties cold turkey after one conversation (if at all, but just bear with me for the sake of the analogy). As much as I might daydream about that, I know that they are pursuing the good of connection with their friends, just in a way that I really don’t love. But those little acts of consideration would show me that there is a desire to grow in neighborliness, even if they’re not quite ready to just stop out of the blue, which would potentially leave them feeling stranded and alone.

This is where we can understand the relationship between acceptance and growth. Sometimes we need to psych ourselves up for a challenge, to build our confidence before taking the big leap. And, y’all, sometimes we need to give ourselves (or our spouses or children or friends) credit for the half-made attempts. This is why we talk so much here at Whole and Holy about growing in virtue in a “sandbox”—in one particular, relatively low-stakes environment where there’s a soft landing if we need it. This allows us to strengthen our virtue muscles on the kiddie gym before moving on to bigger, more demanding situations. And we might need to do this for a while before we feel brave enough to take that big leap.

If you really struggle with patience, and you really are trying your hardest to develop that habit, train yourself to recognize the attempts. So you were rough with your child while putting their shoes on because they still hadn’t put their shoes on after you’d asked them eight times to put their shoes on. No, that’s not something that a perfectly patient person would do. But you didn’t yell at them. Or vice versa. Or perhaps you did yell and you were rough, but you didn’t let the incident ruin your mood on the car ride to Mass. Friend, give yourself credit for being the type of person who is trying to grow in patience! Your progress proves that you are paying attention to your actions, that you have self-control, that you are growing in patience! No, you’re not perfect yet, but did you really expect it would be that easy?

St. Thérèse of Lisieux talks about herself as a little bird with the heart and eyes of an eagle—she has set her sights upon the great heights of holiness, but she knows her own weakness and knows that she would be unable to reach perfection by her own actions and merits. And so, like a little child who trusts her Father deeply, Thérèse intuited that her little actions and little sacrifices, when done with great love, would draw her ever deeper into the Father’s heart. This is where, I think she and I would both argue, her sanctity came from—her ability to accept her littleness instead of trying to demand greatness of herself now so that she could earn [God’s love, her sisters’ or superior’s affection, honor within her community, you fill in the blank] by sheer force of will.

We can (and should!) see ourselves constantly taking little steps, constantly building skills, constantly moving forward, even if we have to take the long way ‘round. Likewise, we can take time for recovery when we need it after a difficult attempt or a hard-won success. I’ve seen a not-insignificant number of liberal arts grads who burn out from reading for a few years after college (not me, what, how dare you) just because of the sheer volume of reading they accomplished while earning their degree. That burnout doesn’t mean that we’ll never get back to reading. It’s okay to take a little rest. It’s okay to give yourself a year—or a couple—or an easy “book candy” book or a few—before you sink your teeth into another hefty novel. The time will come. You don’t become “one of those people who never reads a book” just because you accept your limitations around reading for this temporary season. All growth comes through acceptance of where we’re at right now, and whatever your struggle is, you can allow yourself to ease into it (or ease back into it), trusting your intuition to set the level of challenge that is right for you.

Are you in a season of trying to white-knuckle something in your life? Is there an area where you are, perhaps, pushing too hard when encouraging a loved one? What is one thing you can do to take a step back, accept your/their littleness, and try to find and highlight the evidence of growth on its own terms and in its own time?

What do you think? Do these play therapy inspired principles apply to us adults as well as to children? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

1. For more on the topic of raising children and bonding through discipline, our pediatrician recently recommended this podcast episode to me. Optimal Work is co-hosted by Dr. Kevin Majeres, a cognitive behavioral therapist and member of Opus Dei.

2. These principles—and the original course itself—can be found at LanguageofListening.com. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll read that list and say, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FALL? What about concupiscence?” This is, I won’t lie to y’all, a question I’m still wrestling with. How do we hold the tension between “humans are mammals with survival instincts, social instincts, and complex language” and “we are a fallen-and-redeemed people”?

Keeping in mind that, as adults, we do have fully-developed rational minds and free will, let’s take a look at some of the ways these principles can manifest.

3. I’m thrilled to be working on a guest post with

The Catholic Behavior Analyst

to share with you all later this spring, but in the meantime, if this topic is interesting to you, I’d highly encourage you go check out his work.

4. NOT FOR ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR.