By Maureen Mueller
As joyful and heartwarming as parenting is, it comes with much bracing, questioning and wondering. Guilt and fear lurk in the shadows and sometimes out in the open. Then, when we come across books like “Parenting from the Inside Out” by Daniel Siegel which highlight how our children, as they grow, trigger our own issues; those times where we find ourselves reflexively doing or saying something of our mothers or fathers, even though we always promised ourselves we would never repeat that behaviour.
Our behaviour is wired in; it is biological, so are our beliefs.
We gain insight when we question our beliefs and actions using the Witnesser part of our consciousness. However, the neutral Witnesser only appears when we have completed the biological trauma cycle, when we have regulated and are able to assess if what we did was appropriate to the current stimulus from the environment.
From where was that reflexive activation charge propelled? From inside of us. It is adrenaline; your body produces it instantaneously. Were you responsible for it? No. It is like a sneeze, like a yawn. It is not your fault, nor was it your choice.
Adrenaline is what produces the charge which finds a way through your Nervous system and tells your body to do something.
If your body feels that the outside stimulus is a threat, actual or perceived or expected, your body will choose its reactions. You don’t have a conscious choice. Your body will do one of the four F’s: Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn.
The simplest example of a fight response is when you swat a mosquito; Fight is an action that takes you outwards towards the external stimulus. Flight is when you run from the stimulus. Running away takes many forms, including running away into work.
Fawning is when we appease; when the charge makes it reflexive that we make gestures and words to appease the other person by whom we feel overwhelmed or threatened. This includes feeling the need to appease when we feel threatened by abandonment; to avoid the pain of being left alone.
Freeze has an inward movement; the charge makes us constrict. There are two levels of freeze; constriction and collapse. Freeze is rooted in becoming invisible so we can survive an overwhelming or threatening event. Freeze is the common primary school “go-to” as we learn to stay still and not make a noise. Numb is when we have too many feelings for our current capacity and our body protects us from feeling too much.
When our bodies are braced and tense, so our mind is also hijacked and constricted. As long as we are threatened, our possible solutions to problems shrink and narrow to fit in with flight, flight, freeze or fawn.
We get out of our narrow body response when we have been able to metabolise the threat by our body realising the threat is over which we do by anchoring to safety. When our body feels safe, it will regulate. It is not a process we can tell our body to do, it is something that the body will do by itself when the conditions are right. This is why telling someone to “be calm” or “calm down”; never works; it only increases the stress on an already overwhelmed body that is remembering a perceived or expected threat that may or may not be happening now.
What is overwhelming at any one time depends on what else is going on in your life, the weather, traffic, if you have eaten, too much, too little, if one has had too much caffeine, or not enough sleep etc. etc.
You can see how this affects your parenting, and your ability to be the parent you want to be is also affected by how your child’s day has gone. What was school like? What happened to them that day? How had they slept? Etc etc.
Our capacity to be the parent we want to be, comes down to our own capacity to handle things. Activation is when the body becomes alive with the charge, activation is always a response. The response can be by thought, a memory (something triggers you) or an actual event. The charge of adrenaline propels you into one of the 4 F’s and the end of the cycle is when the body realises it is safe and the body attunes to its survival. When the body releases it bracing and defences, the adrenals stop producing excess adrenaline, blood pressure comes down, breath gets deeper and more oxygen flows through the veins and your physiology comes to rest.
This is the healthy cycle of a trauma response; it is what your body is designed to do. A traumatised body is not a broken body, it is an overworked body that needs some support.
If you are going through a divorce, all these issues get amped up and support is even more important.
One source of support is good legal advice. Family Lawyers know the lie of the land and they can help you navigate and rearrange legal relationships. Lawyers can assist by Litigating or Collaborating; many are trained to do both.
Litigation – this has come a long way since the 13th Century trial by combat. It is basically still adversarial; you find your legal warrior and they will go out there and fight for you and defend you to the hilt. It is very satisfying and makes one feel protected when your advocate goes out to do battle and land blows.
The thing is, the other party is usually doing the same thing back. You will have incoming blows. Each incoming email will be an external stimulus that keeps you braced, your body will adrenalise with one or more of the 4 F’s. A charge will come with any emails, letters, even the envelope that has your solicitor’s logo on it, much less the other party’s, as both will remind you of past and future experiences and your body will brace, constrict, and thoughts will get limited and repetitive.
This would be a good time to add counseling support as another person can create a holding and safe environment in which your body can regulate and complete the natural threat cycle. Capacity will not be gained, if the body does not feel safe. In fact, the body will generate thoughts that you keep your defenses in place as it may be that your body has learned that it is dangerous to be undefended.
Currently in Hong Kong it takes over two years to get to a trial for financial relief, and then it can take a further year to receive a judgment. That is equivalent to the three year Covid span. For those Hong Kongers who wore a mask for three years, and still sometimes look for the mask “they should be wearing”, this can show you how much the body is biologically wired in expectations.
Collaboration is the other route. In this process the two lawyers are guards that protect and advise the family as a team. Meetings are four-way or six-way. There is no “against”; there are no retaliations, no surprises and no “in coming” threat. You are all working together for an elegant solution. Your meetings are held in a safe and regulated space that is protected and encourages relaxed thought which produces the best outcome. This safe container is achieved by the contractual agreement that the solicitors may not take the case onto a Litigation footing. You are all bound to keep the process a safe space.
Reducing threat, allows you to build capacity to be a better parent whilst in the throes of divorce and helps you to make better decisions.
For those cases with a financial element, as financial discussions are usually triggering, the Collaborative Team can include a Financial Advisor who can hold meetings with both teams to help sort out what financial arrangements would best suit your family.
Another team member can be the Divorce Coach and/or Family Consultant. You can have one person come in and help you to produce a parenting plan, or you can produce your own. It is much easier to produce your own plan when both of you are regulated.
The Divorce Coach can help the parents be aware of triggers and reactions that will arise. Being in divorce is definitely a stressful and triggering event, even if the two of you are amicable. Your body will have formed an opinion about what is involved in a divorce and the pain it causes, even from having watched TV shows and movies and hearing stories as you were growing up and from any friends and acquaintances who had to go the litigation route.
Some may think that having a team of say six professionals may increase cost, but those six professionals will get you through the process in 6 – 8 months, without added aggravation and with more life capacity, whereas Litigation will be three years of battle.
The Divorce Coach will not do therapy; their role is to simply get you through the process, to help each parent understand that triggers are inherent to a person being activated. They will also help to diffuse situations where, as it is normal to be triggered, one person’s reflexive triggered response will trigger the other’s reflexive response – the pair then bond through trauma bonding (e.g. fight with fight, flight, freeze or fawn). Having a habitual pattern identified, helps each person to realize that it is the past that is interfering in the present and to disengage from that automatic behaviour.
A trigger is something that awakens a person’s subconscious. It means that a person has had a previous rupture which is being remembered by the body and hence the charge of activation as a learned protective response. Experiencing a rupture is not the same as experiencing aggression, and when one is in a Collaborative Team, the presence of others will help to distinguish and diffuse that. Whereas, in Litigation, what started out as a rupture frequently turns into a costly aggression as letters are sent back and forth. Ruptures then breed more ruptures which stress parents and reduce capacity to be the best parent.
Triggers are external and internal. We can be triggered by our own thoughts about people and things. That awakens something inside of us that we are already carrying. It is also helpful to have triggers distinguished from preference and from intuition. Briefly, if there is a charge of urgency and impetus, it is a trigger with a history. A preference, like intuition, does not mind if it happens or not. There is a gentleness to intuition, it does not need validation, it is an invitation that may be easily declined.
A trigger is hard to ignore, Intuition is easy to ignore. A trigger feels real, as if one’s life depended on it. Then you know it is fear based and your body is trying to protect you from something it has believed for a very long time, to keep it safe, but it is not true. The stronger an emotional reaction, the more it means a trigger is involved and one is having an emotional flashback (i.e. a memory compounding the present.)
There are times when Litigation may be the best route to divorce but when anything becomes a combative process you can see how an adversarial process can gear the body up to be a constricted fortress, with reduced capacity for alternative solutions that may have more flair and more pleasure for the whole family. Processes such as Collaborative Practice help to safeguard families and are attuned to issues around trauma and trauma responses aiming to help the individual and the family.
Maureen is a Parenting Coordinator and Family Mediator. Maureen also serves on the executive committees for the Hong Kong Family Law Association and the Hong Kong Collaborative Practice Group.
For more information about the Collaborative Process see the Hong Kong Collaborative Practice Group at HKCPG