Play is the Antidote to Fear: How To Help Your Children Deal With Self-Isolation
The virus gameFor the last couple weeks, the most popular game in our home has been something our kids call “the virus game.” In this game, our kids, five and eight, make me an incompetent, bumbling virus who’s on a seek-and-destroy mission to catch them. Only, I’m never quite able to accomplish my diabolical objective because they are constantly outrunning and outwitting me. I chase after them, bearing down on them while they giggle and laugh until, at the last possible second, time and again, they make a daring last-second get-away. Most of the time, they also wind up blindfolding me so as I’m pursuing them I’m also stumbling over laundry baskets, bumping into walls, walking into doors and sometimes falling on the floor like a klutz, howling in exaggerated pain while they laugh and giggle. Sometimes, when I finally do manage to nab one of them, I cackle like a triumphant super-villain, until I suddenly realize that what I have in my hands is not a child but a teddy-bear or a pillow. As I shake my fist, cursing them for fooling me once again, they laugh and snicker and snort. Other times, I do catch them but they freeze in my arms, bamboozling me into believing they’re teddy bears, so I foolishly let them go and they scamper off giggling at the dumb virus. Indignant, I bolt after them, but because I can’t see, I accidentally run head-long into the closet or the bathroom and they, of course, promptly slam the door behind me. I feign fear of the dark, begging and pleading to be let out, but they usually show me no mercy. While I try desperately to escape, bonking head-first into the door over and over again, they howl with laughter outside. Then, clumsy and inept germ that I am, I usually wind up infecting myself somehow and die alone in the closet. In this way, our kids seem to gain a sense of power and control over the scariest thing in their world right now. Play is the most powerful antidote to fearPlay is the universal language of childhood. It’s spoken in every country of the world. It’s how kids communicate. Asking them to stop playing is like asking an adult to stop talking on the phone or drinking coffee. It’s also one of the very best tools we parents have at our disposal to improve cooperation, boost confidence, relieve boredom, soothe sibling rivalries, and provide an outlet for their aggression. Like wipes or a trusty old Swiss Army Knife, it always comes in handy, but it’s especially helpful and important in times of crisis when stress starts to mount in the family or society. As Lawrence Cohen explains in his wonderful book Playful Parenting, “Play is where children show us the inner feelings and experiences that they can’t or won’t talk about.” How many kids do you know who are sitting down at the dinner table these days and saying, “Mom… dad… I’m really worried about this whole COVID-19 situation. Can we talk about it?” Probably not too many. Instead, most kids I know whine, lash out, mope, hang their heads, or just say, “Wanna play?” Play is how kids recover from the considerable stresses and strains of their pint-sized lives. When tensions run high, it functions like a pressure-release valve. It lets them discharge fear, lower stored tensions, offload whatever feelings they’ve tucked away, scrub out stress, and shed old hurts. Parenting expert Patty Wipfler puts it better than anyone when she says, “The most powerful antidote to fear is play.” Desperate times call for playful measuresMost of us parents already play with our kids. We horse around with them, roughhouse, act like goofballs, make silly jokes, give them the gears. This is all great stuff. But desperate times call for more playful measures. In times like these, the play that offers our kids the greatest outlet for their tensions and fears is the kind where they can invent precisely the types of games that will let them work on whatever it is they most need to work on. In the Hand-In-Hand parenting model this particular kind of play is called “Special Time.”Special Time is as simple as it is effective. You just set aside some time to play whatever your kid(s) want to play and then you give them warm, high-quality attention while they take the lead and you act a fool, looking for the slightest opportunity to make them giggle or laugh. It helps to kick off a session of special time by naming it, saying something like, “Okay, it’s special time. We can play anything you want, as long as it’s safe.” Then you set a timer, starting out with as little as 5-10 minutes a pop a few times a week, and let them take charge and just see where it takes you. While you’re playing whatever they want, you just delight in them, offering them extra warmth, extra eye contact, and showing extra interest in their choices. You don't offer advice, try to teach them, or modify their ideas. You just do what they want while remaining on the look-out for opportunities to make them bust a gut. Why? Because giggling and laughing are two of the main ways kids (and adults!) release their lighter tensions. This is why Patty Wipfler calls “play-with-laughter” the “frosting on the cake of play.” It’s also why she recently emphasized, “You want lots of frosting in times like this.” How to make kids crack upOne of the best ways to tickle a kid’s funny bone is not by tickling but by giving them the upper hand and letting them play the more powerful role while you act like a bumbling, inept klutz who gets everything wrong and loses every time. Think of the characters who have been making kids of all ages laugh their heads off since celluloid was first invented: bumbling Charlie Chaplin, clueless Costello, insufferable Sylvester the Puddy-Cat, hair-brained Wile E. Coyote, clumsy Kung-Fu Panda, inept Mr. Bean, bumbling Bernard, the incompetent burglars in Home Alone, any garden-variety birthday clown. Nothing gets a good chuckle out of a kid like giving them the power-position and letting them watch while the adults around them fumble and fail. It only makes sense. After being told to keep quiet, sit still and follow the rules all day, they need a bit of relief from being bossed around and made to feel smaller, weaker and less competent than grown-ups. Here’s a classic example of how and why it works. A four year-old comes home from getting a shot at the doctor’s office, and what does she want to play? Doctor, of course. And who does she want to be in this game? Not the patient, that’s for sure. She wants to be whoever gives the dang shot. And who’s she going to give it to? You, of course: her mom or dad or caregiver. In a pinch, she’ll take a toy or a stuffy. How does she want you to react when you get your shot, over and over again? She wants to hear you plead and yelp: “Noooo! Please don’t give me a shot. I hate shots. Ouch! Ow! Ouch! Ow!” It’s a simple game of role reversal – the one who got the shot is now giving the shot – but it does the trick. Your fear lets her be in the more powerful position and recover from her shot because she gets to see you as helpless, while she is in the position of power. (For an amazing grab-bag of other ideas to kick-start your play, check out The Art of Roughhousing by Anthony DeBenedet and Lawrence J. Cohen. For a more thorough break-down of how and why to do Special Time, see Patty Wipfler and Tosha Schore’s fabulous book Listen. For direct instruction on Special Time from a living master of the art, contact Isaac Romano.)Fill up your cup, somewhatBut wait. I know what you’re probably thinking. In addition to providing the kids a good-enough balance of structure, stimulation and connection, in the midst of all this fear and boredom and uncertainty, while trying to hold down a job, play teacher and keep the house in some semblance of order, this jerk is suggesting, to top it all off, that I play more with my kid(s)? Yup. That’s exactly what I’m saying. But not until you fill up your cup, somewhat. In other words, to give your kids the kind of warm, relaxed presence they need from you, you need to be as grounded and resourced as possible, under the circumstances. A “Listening Partnership” is probably the best tool available to help you replenish your energy for parenting, but it’s also worth bearing in mind what Lawrence Cohen points out: “When we are exhausted, or when we are at the end of our rope, we tend to think that play will just be an energy drain.But when we engage playfully with our children, we find we have more energy, both for fun and for finding creative solutions to thorny problems.” Nor can it hurt to know that after Patty Wipfler repeats that “the most powerful antidote to fear is play” she almost always adds, “It’s true for your child. It’s true for you.”More helpful articles:Self-Isolation As A Couple : Here Are 7 Helpful Tips To Get You Through ItBefore You Blame Self-Isolation For Your Relationship Issues, Do ThisWhat To Do And What Not To Do During Self-Isolation12 Powerfully Inspiring Things to Watch While You’re Stuck at Home
Is Appreciation Deficit Disorder Ruining Your Relationship?
Contrary to appearances, Netflix’s hit movie Marriage Story is not a story about divorce. It is, as its title indicates, a story about marriage. More specifically, it is the story of how a good marriage goes bad for one simple reason: Appreciation Deficit Disorder. What is appreciation deficit disorder?While Appreciation Deficit Disorder isn't a clinical disorder, if it was it would be defined as something like this: a “disorder” characteristic of couples like Marriage Story's Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson)-- who are in decent, functional relationships, but who are "appreciation-deficient" with regards to themselves, their spouses, and their relationship as a whole.In fact, the failed marriage between Charlie and Nicole could be considered a textbook example of this as-yet undiagnosed “disorder” because it displays all the classic symptoms of this brand-new, made-up malaise.Here are the symptoms of appreciation deficit disorder:1. Physical and emotional withdrawal Example: Charlie and Nicole have been living parallel lives for the last joyless and sexless year of their marriage.2. Criticism Example: Nicole repeatedly criticizes Charlie for being selfish, whereas Charlie repeatedly criticizes Nicole for being… Nicole;3. Contempt Example: Charlie claims that Nicole hated him during the last year of their marriage, whereas Nicole feels Charlie has been contemptuously ignoring her core needs; 4. Negative sentiment override Example: The spouses are both so flooded with negative emotion that they each accuse one another of rewriting their shared past, as when Charlie insists that Nicole has only decided, after the fact, that she wasn’t happy with their life in Brooklyn, when at the time she was. Fortunately, appreciation deficit disorder contains, embedded within itself, its own obvious cure: appreciation. Indeed, the renowned couples therapist Terry Real considers appreciation not only the single “most effective” strategy for improving a relationship, but he goes so far as to say, “This one principle is equal to all the others combined.” As we will see, most of the top couples therapists in the world agree. How to avoid appreciation deficit disorder:Step 1. Appreciate one anotherMarriage Story opens with tender and heart-warming expressions of mutual appreciation between Nicole and Charlie. At first sight, it certainly doesn’t seem like they suffer appreciation deficit.The world’s pre-eminent marriage researcher, John Gottman, would say (with one important reservation) that Charlie and Nicole both have good “love maps,” a term that evokes the amount of “cognitive room” one has for all the little quirks of their spouse’s personality and personal history, as well as the marriage itself. Gottman’s research shows that having good love maps is the very foundation of the seven-story “sound marital house” that constitutes a strong, sustainable relationship. His research also shows that having good love maps is a necessary prerequisite for building the next level up in the sound marital house, “fondness and admiration."Step 2. Be grateful for the things you appreciateResearchers like Sara Algoe, Amie Gordon, Emily Impett, and Samantha Joel would also be impressed with the way that Charlie and Nicole express gratitude for how their partner invests in their relationship-- a tendency that functions as a “booster shot” for relationship commitment and overall happiness. For instance, even when Charlie complains about Nicole’s untidiness – “It’s not easy for her to put away a sock, or close a cabinet, or do a dish” – he nevertheless expresses his gratitude for her effort and attributes it to her fondness for him: “but she tries for me.” Likewise, Nicole peppers her appreciations of Charlie with generous expressions of gratitude, singling out, for example: He takes all of my moods steadily, he doesn’t give in to them or make me feel bad about them.As the marriage historian Eli Finkel explains in his widely-praised book The All-or-Nothing Marriage, “In the long run, people who experience elevated levels of gratitude also experience stronger relationship commitment and are less likely to break up.”But if Charlie and Nicole are so good at appreciating one another in all of these ways, then why do they break up?Step 3. Express your appreciation While they feel appreciation, Charlie and Nicole don’t express their appreciation out loud to one another. When we finally hear Nicole’s appreciation of Charlie articulated out loud, we come to understand that one of the main factors that causes both their marriage and their divorce to unravel is the unwillingness to give voice to appreciation. Most of the top couples therapists in the world – John Gottman, Sue Johnson, and Terry Real – emphasize the crucial importance of not just appreciating our partners but expressing that appreciation. For instance, Terry Real writes, ”When I speak of cherishing, I do not mean just feeling warm and fuzzy inside. I mean doing something to let your partner know what you are appreciating.” Gottman makes the same basic point:When you acknowledge and openly discuss positive aspects of your partner and your marriage, your bond is strengthened. Why is expressing appreciation so important? Perhaps for the same reason that it’s so important not just to appreciate a house plant, but also to water it. Step 4. Appreciate one another’s life dreamsWhy does Nicole refuse to read her appreciations out loud to Charlie? While there are many answers to this question, they all ultimately boil down to another, more fundamental symptom of ADD.Nicole is both hurt by and angry at Charlie because he has failed to listen for and appreciate her deepest needs and most-cherished longings.According to Gottman, whenever there is a gridlocked conflict in a relationship the thing to do is dig down to what he calls the “dream within the conflict.” By “dream” he means the hopes, aspirations and wishes that are part of people’s very identity and that give purpose and meaning to their lives. In Gottman’s experience, the best way to drill down to the dream beneath the conflict is to explore the underlying symbolism of the surface-level desires at play in the disagreement. If he had taken me in a big hug and said ‘Baby, I’m so excited for your adventure and of course I want you to have your own piece of earth’ then we might not be getting divorced.The marriage researchers Shelly Gable and Harry Reis have shown that when partners communicate and celebrate their individual successes with one another they both feel greater positive emotions and mental health, and also experience increased feelings of trust, intimacy, and satisfaction in the relationship. As Eli Finkel explains, “Enthusiastic responses are beneficial because they convey the listener’s shared joy in the event and appreciation of the personal significance of the event for the discloser.” Step 5. Appreciate (or, at the very least, accept) your partner’s influenceIn Marriage Story, Nicole complains that all of the furniture in their apartment was Charlie’s taste. She bemoans the fact she didn’t even get to pick their apartment but just moved into his. More generally, and perhaps most significantly, she remarks that during their marriage:It would be so weird if he had turned to me and said ‘And what do you want to do today?’In their long-term study of 131 newly-wed couples who they followed for nine years, Gottman and his fellow researchers found that even in the first few months of marriage, men who allowed their wives to influence them had happier relationships and were less likely to eventually divorce than men who resisted their wives influence. "Statistically speaking," he writes, "when a man is not willing to share power with his partner there is an 81% chance that his marriage will self-destruct."Step 6. Appreciate and assert your own needs and dreamsIt seems fair to say that Nicole also fails to appreciate her own dreams and assert her influence in a way that Charlie can understand. She says, “I made noises about wanting to move back to LA, but they came to nothing, but "making noises" is a far cry from clearly and insistently articulating your dreams and desires. And unfortunately, as Terry Real writes: You cannot create an extraordinary relationship unless you’re willing to do the hard work of identifying what it is that you want and pursuing it.It is for this reason that, out of the many possible forms of appreciation that exist, Real prioritizes the cultivation of self-appreciation. “First and foremost,” he says, “I want you to cherish yourself. I want you to value your own wants and needs. I want you to value your voice.” Real has a confrontational way of encouraging people to appreciate and express their own wants up front. He invites them to swallow this bitter pill: You don’t have the right to complain about not getting what you never asked for.Step 7. Appreciate relationalityIf Nicole had discerned and appreciated her own dreams more fully, she might have been able to summon the courage to not only stand up for herself but to speak up for herself and ask for more out of Charlie and for more out of their marriage. This is the very essence of what Real calls “fierce intimacy” or “daring to rock the boat." Grabbing your partner by the collar and saying, ‘Such-and-such is really important to me. You better take it seriously. I’m not kidding.” Unfortunately, because Nicole doesn’t fully appreciate her own needs, she cannot articulate them to Charlie, let alone roll up her sleeves and fight like hell to make sure he meets them. Rather than moving from disempowerment to what Real calls “relationship empowerment,” she moves directly from disempowerment to what he calls “personal empowerment.” In Real’s view, “traditional femininity” teaches women disempowerment (i.e. “shut up and eat it”). In contrast, third-wave feminism teaches women “personal empowerment” (i.e. “speak out and leave it”). But the next step is what he calls “relationship empowerment,” which encourages women to "stand firm and mean it."What is real “relationship empowerment”? Something like this: "How are we going to be together in a way that works for both of us? How are we going to negotiate our needs? This is what I’d like. Tell me what you’d like. And tell me what you need from me to help you deliver."Of course, there’s no guarantee that if Nicole and Charlie had had the guts to have this kind of conversation they would have been able to work things out. But it certainly would have upped the odds. And it certainly would have been better than either staying in a marriage plagued by Appreciation Deficit Disorder, or complaining after the fact about never getting what neither of them ever asked for. By identifying the problem and addressing it maturely with these tools, you're well on your way from moving from "appreciation deficit" to "relationship empowerment."Where to go from here:Your Relationship is Strong Enough to Survive — but You Need SpaceHow to Identify Your Relationship Blind SpotsWhat is the Correct “Love Ratio” for Your Relationship?
How Emma Stone's Mom Turned Her Daughter's Crippling Anxiety Into Her Superpower
You’d never know it from the many self-assured and sometimes ass-kicking characters she plays in movies like Zombieland 2, but there was a time early on in Emma Stone’s life when she found herself living in an anxiety-ridden Zombieland of her own.No, she wasn’t being chased by mobs of ragged hipsters with mad zombie disease. But when she was seven years old she got bitten by a panic bug and found herself part of the growing epidemic of anxious kids.The way she learned to overcome her anxiety holds some powerful and inspiring lessons for kids and parents alike. As it happens, the basic approach she used can also be applied with equal effectiveness to a multitude of other issues, like perfectionism, self-criticism and procrastination.Emma's anxiety hit her hardLike many anxious kids, Emma was born sensitive. In fact, her mom often says she was “born with her nerves outside of her body.” While there isn’t always a link between sensitivity and anxiety, in Emma’s case there certainly was. And when she was seven years old this link got so strong it nearly turned into a heavy chain that prevented her from becoming who she is.As a second-grader, she was hanging out in a friend’s bedroom when she suddenly became absolutely convinced that the house was burning down. Rationally, she knew it wasn’t happening. But emotionally, in every fibre of her being, she believed it was.After that, she refused to go over to her friends’ houses, she stopped wanting to hang out with her friends in general, she clung to her mom as much as possible, and she started asking her mom to tell her over and over again what was going to happen with her day.“I’m bigger than my anxiety!”Finally, her mom took her to see a therapist, a decision that Emma emphasizes she is “so grateful" for.Her gratitude is well-founded. As Lynn Lyons, co-author of the book Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents says, “If you have [untreated] anxiety as a kid, it will likely get worse as you get older.” She also adds, “Untreated anxiety disorders in children are one of the top predictors of depression in young adulthood and adolescence.”So what did Emma find most “transformative” about her sessions? A story book she wrote called I Am Bigger than My Anxiety!The power of storytellingHere’s how Emma summarizes the story she wrote: “I drew a little green monster on my shoulder that speaks to me in my ear and tells me all these things that aren’t true. And every time I listen to it, it grows bigger."If I listen to it enough, it crushes me."But if I turn my head and keep doing what I’m doing – let it speak to me, but don’t give it the credit it needs – then it shrinks down and fades away.”It was this little tale that ultimately allowed Emma to pivot out of her distress: “Once I could externalize [my anxiety] and get more perspective, things really started moving.”Reid Wilson, one of the world’s leading authorities on panic and anxiety, explains: “Externalization puts anxious worry outside of you, allowing you to see the worry and its messages from a different perspective. With the help of a little distance, worriers can hear and see how anxiety operates without immediately accepting the validity of its fears and demands.”During her first panic attack, Emma said, “there was nothing in me that didn’t think we were going to die.” But learning to personify her worry as a character outside of herself helped her realize that her anxiety is “something that is a part of me but is not who I am.”So who is she? She’s the one who can see and hear the little green monster.She’s the one who can tell that all the fears it incessantly whispers in her ear “aren’t true.” She’s the one who understands that turning away from the monster and focusing on the task-at-hand makes the monster shrink.Your own little monsterWhile Emma chose to personify her anxiety as a little green monster, kids can get creative about this to suit their own needs.They can, for example, picture their anxiety as a cruel bully, a fascist dictator, a slick salesman, a master storyteller. Or they can personify it as Voldemort from Harry Potter, Fear from Inside Out, or a supervillian like Birdman from, well, Birdman. The options are endless.In addition to giving them some distance from their worries, personifying anxiety in these sorts of ways can also help kids (and their parents) understand what makes it tick.For instance, as far as characters go, anxiety is a bit of a one-hit wonder, a one-note Johnny, a one-trick pony. Sure, the content of what it says may vary, but whether it’s piping up about a scary dog, a soccer try-out, a thunderstorm, bad grades or the dark, the process is always the same.It has one main message: you can’t handle it! It wants two main things: certainty and comfort. And it makes the same single demand over and over again: avoid!Other tools for dealing with childhood anxietyUnderstanding how worry operates in turn opens up a bunch of other ways of responding to it. While Emma found it helpful to “turn [her] head away” from the little green monster on her shoulder, other kids may find it more effective to turn toward it and actively talk back to the monster.As Reid Wilson and Lynn Lyons explain, “Children can choose three broad ways to talk to their anxious worry: assume worry will show up this time (expect it), offer reassurance to the insecure part of them (take care of it), or if they’re annoyed by bothersome worry, tell it to get lost (boss it around).”Another thing that helped Emma handle her anxiety was finding acting at the age of eleven. Why was this so incredibly helpful to her?Anxiety as a superpowerFirst of all, after isolating herself from her peers for nearly three years because of her anxiety, acting gave her both a sense of community and “a sense of purpose.”Second, she found the “absolute presence” and “intent listening” required of acting to be so “meditative” that, at times, it completely silenced her little green monster.However, acting also allowed Emma to operationalize the upside of anxiety. As someone who always had big feelings, for example, she found the theatre “a safe, great place to feel a lot.”It gave her a “productive,” redemptive and socially-useful outlet into which she could channel many of her feelings from previous life experiences. As she says, “Then it at least feels productive to have all these feelings, which is why I started acting in general.”Fourth, it allowed her to leverage another upside of anxiety: a heightened capacity for empathy. In her view, anxiety grows out of the same soil – smarts and sensitivity – that also produces the high degree of empathy necessary to understand characters deeply. Finally, her anxiety is the fuel that has driven her high-energy personality and her high-achieving career. Just as it ensured she got “all As” even though she never liked school, it also motivated her to nail each of her roles. From burden to blessingIn all of these ways acting helped her flip her perspective on anxiety and shift from viewing it as a “burden” to seeing it as something “invaluable” that she’s actually “grateful for.” In fact, she says, “If you don’t let it cripple you and you use it for something positive or productive, it’s like a superpower.” But Emma is also careful to emphasize that you don’t have to be an “actor” or a “writer” to overcome anxiety: “You just have to find that thing within you that you are drawn to." In fact, she sometimes calls theatre “my sport,” a nod to the fact that many other kids find a similar sense of presence, purpose and belonging in athletics. Still others may find it in music or science or spirituality or counseling. Avoid avoidance by being uncertain and uncomfortable on purpose.How Emma faced her fearsFinally, and perhaps most importantly, after learning to externalize her anxiety, turn away from its harmful messages and leverage its upside, she began turning toward the situations she feared. This was precisely the opposite of what she was doing when she was in the depths of her distress as a child. After her first panic attack, for example, she says, “I would ask my mom to tell me exactly how the day was going to be, then ask again 30 seconds later.” How did her mom initially respond? Initially, Emma says, “She would repeat it over and over to me.” Like most parents and teachers who try to soothe anxious kids with reassurance, she meant well. But Emma’s therapist knew this response was not only unhelpful but potentially harmful to Emma. So she told her Emma’s mom, “You’re allowed to tell her once and then you can’t say it anymore.” Why? Because she knew that Emma needed to practice tolerating discomfort and uncertainty, on purpose. As Lynn Lyons says: Letting your child be uncertain and uncomfortable is the key.This sends worry the message that you can not only handle it, but want more of it. Embracing the fearThis is another crucial element of Emma’s inspiring story. Since the age of eleven, she has bravely plunged into a dizzying array of uncertain roles and uncomfortable interviews. And this is something she continues to do on the daily. Despite the fact that she was thrown from a horse as a kid, Emma learned how to horseback ride for her role in The Favourite. Despite the fact that she finds sports "stressful," she nevertheless managed to nail her role as a tennis player in Battle of the Sexes and even hit a ball around with Billie Jean King.It’s precisely this spirit of willingness that has allowed Emma Stone to appreciate the many blessings inside her burdens. As she once said:What sets you apart can sometimes feel like a burden and it’s not. And a lot of the time, it’s what makes you great.