Survival on the playground
When I was a boy, recess at school was a free-for-all with lots of bullying and punching. I don’t remember specific moments, but there’s a phrase that has stuck with me, probably because I heard it all the time:
“I’m going to hit you back and show you how it feels!”
We boys thought this sounded tough, but now I’m not so sure. If we only wanted toughness, we would have just said, “I’m going to hit you back!” Or better yet: we would have just done it.
Why explain that we’re “showing you how it feels”? What did we really want?
What we really wanted
I have an idea. Go with me for a second here…
In psychotherapy, there’s this thing called countertransference. It’s a fancy name for a tool therapists use, but the idea is straightforward.
It means that therapists will not only have a natural, emotional response to each client, but that sometimes clients will provoke specific feelings in the therapist.
For example, let’s say a client keeps forgetting to pay for her sessions. As the bill gets bigger and bigger—yet the client keeps “forgetting” to pay it—the therapist will start to have some feelings about this. And that’s the point: the client is likely—and unconsciously—provoking anger or helplessness or needfulness in the therapist. Rather than act on those feelings, the therapist can use them to get a deeper understanding of the client and how she relates to others.
Now, back to the playground and threatening to hit each other…
When we threatened to hit someone, adding that we were going to “show you how it feels,” we really were trying to provoke feelings in the other kid, just like the client provoking feelings in the therapist.
If only we could have set aside the tough-guy talk and said, “I want you to know how it hurts to get hit. If you would just empathize and understand this, then you wouldn’t do it!”
Ha, right! This sounds more like a therapist speaking than a ten-year-old boy, yet weren’t we saying the same thing, just with tough-sounding words?
I call this the Rule of the Playground—the “hitting you back to show you how it feels”—because it’s still the go-to approach for virtually everyone, whether we’re ten or eighty. If we can make someone feel what we feel, then they’ll understand and empathize with us.
But not only that, perhaps we can get rid of the feeling, too, as if dumping it onto someone else. Of course, this isn’t how emotions work, but we—and especially young kids—can have this fantasy.
What does this mean for parents?
Here’s the key:
Your kid is trying to get you to feel exactly how he’s feeling so that you can understand and empathize with him.
The tricky part comes in not reacting to the feelings that your kid provokes in you. Yes, he’s being a total brat and you want to scream at him, but before you do so, consider how he might be wanting to provoke your anger so that you can better understand his anger. And perhaps he’s simply trying to get rid of his anger by giving it to you!
Remember, his feelings don’t have to become your feelings. As with the Rule of the Playground, he’s just trying to “show you how it feels.” When he threatens to throw a handful of crayons at you, is he trying to help you understand how scared or angry or overwhelmed he’s feeling?
If you only consider it an assault, then you will only react as if assaulted. But if you consider the behavior as an attempt to help you understand, then you can respond in a very different way by speaking to his behavior and his feelings. (For more on this, see “Voicing Your Child’s Feelings: the Direct Approach.”)
An important caveat: your own issues and triggers
There’s a catch here. Let’s say you grew up in a home where violence was the norm, where siblings were allowed to really hurt each other, where parents lost their sh*t and became scary. Now, when your kid threatens to throw crayons, you may be super triggering. Your past is coming into your present and muddying the water.
We all bring our own histories and triggers into the equation, which can make it hard to figure out how to respond to our child’s behavior. When we’re triggered, we get swamped with our own feelings, and that determines how we react. We no longer consider what our kid is telling us; we’re only reliving experiences from long before our kid was born.
It’s helpful to know your triggers and sensitive areas, especially because kids will not only pick up on them, but will focus on them to get a response! (For a more comprehensive look at triggers, check out the post, “How to Manage Emotional Triggers in 5 Steps.”)
Do some work around this, whether it’s therapy, joining a support group, reading some books, etc. It will help you and your kid. (For this same reason, I think all therapists should do their own therapy to understand themselves so as not to be reactive to their clients.) In the end, when we have more tools to understand what’s really going on inside our kid, we suddenly have more options for responding to our kid’s behavior.
Related Posts
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Why Young Children (Have To) Think We’re the Best
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1 thought on “A Key Technique Therapists Use to Figure Out Kids”
Thanks, this is really helpful. It’s not surprising that this is how kids (and all of us) work. It’s something that I’ve sort of known all along but never realized until I saw it here. It’s also helpful looking back on things my kids have done to see how they were actually just trying to get me to have the feelings they were having.