Connection. Both the simplicity of it and how hard it is to come by continue to both sadden and surprise me. The Circle speaks to its importance so clearly. For anyone who knows the Circle of Security, you’ll know that for our children to overcome their worries, test their limits and explore new solutions – scout out the vastness of their world – they need to feel the closeness, commitment and comfort of an adult.
The strength required to navigate our world healthily at the top of the Circle comes from having reliable support at the bottom. The vehicle by which we travel from top to bottom are the Hands – limited as they might be – they need to be aware and attuned, often enough, to create a sense of trust in the young voyager that they’ve not been left alone, at the mercy of the tides.
The power of ‘being with’ on the Circle hit home for me again on two separate and recent occasions.
In the first, I was floundering. A less than restful holiday at home with sickness, domestic troubleshooting and water-supply issues meant that by the start of the school term my tank was low. My husband’s work travel, during the first week back at school - which also included our son’s 11th birthday party - hadn’t clearly computed. I found myself feeling abandoned, overwhelmed, frustrated and more than a little angry. These feelings scrape at former wounds.
Connecting with these emotions is never straight-forward. Neither for the one caught up in their waves, nor always for the Hands – the Harbour (to really stretch the analogy!) – to which the voyager is attempting to come in. In this instance, rightly or wrongly, I looked to my husband to help me organize all these emotions. It took a few attempts as his default is to deflect being made to feel overly responsible by presenting me with logic and spreadsheets. Instead of connecting with how I was feeling, his well-made arguments left me feeling invalidated and even more alone.
Eventually, we got there. I was able to contain my anger. He was able to hear my feebly-worded protestations: 'I had a lot on my plate...I needed to feel his support... to know that he had me in mind. I wasn’t asking him to do more, or to fix or to rationalize anything. I was asking him to acknowledge how I was feeling and to ‘be with’ me in my turmoil.'
When he did my sense of playfulness, energy and humor returned. And while the need to draft in practical support was necessary too, I was in a place where I could reach for it on my own. I could access the solutions required because I felt connected to my Hands. From work problems to birthday-party disasters, I could tackle challenges with ease again because I felt his commitment and connection.
The same is true of my son. A tendency to avoid homework had him reeling one school morning in fear that he was going to get a detention. He had kept putting the work off, procrastinating and delaying the inevitable outcome. All sounds like a problem Logic might have easily solved: 'Sit down (we’ll even sit with you), get the work down, and free yourself from the threat of ‘demerits.'
Not that easy. His emotions were too far gone for clear-thinking and problem-solving. Increasing parental and sibling frustration at the clock ticking, and the pain of having been here before, were not helping. Again, it was a messy 'getting back on' the Circle but eventually we got there. Dad, as the bigger pair of hands on this occasion, was able set his anger and frustration aside and offer enough emotional presence to allow Josh to express what he needed to. The results were mind-blowing.
Josh did not get his work done but Josh felt heard. Rather than paralysed by the fear of a detention, Josh was sailing and whistling his way to the car. He even managed to stay cool in response to his big sister’s poorly-timed complaints about the impact of his choices on her punctuality record. Josh felt then safe enough to take responsibility and to apologise. And when she carried on moaning, as she sometimes like to do, he was able to draw on an apt metaphor to explain that her words had the effect of 'being punched when his face was already sore'.
In all of this, dad felt good because he'd managed to 'manage himself' enabling him to get further insight into his son's struggles, and feeling greater compassion and connection to him than before.
Connection may not solve all our problems but it carries us through. We need just enough ‘being with’ to get us around the Circle and to sustain the knocks in life that might otherwise flatten us. This is what is truly at the heart of resilience. It is not a carrying on ‘regardless’, a white-knuckling through difficulty until you’re burnt-out. It is a ‘carrying on’ through the relationships that sustain us. As humans, that is how we are made. Our children need us. We need each other.