Transcription
Right. So I wanted to start today with the mode that is at the center of everything we do, of schema mode therapy, which is the vulnerable child mode.
So, the vulnerable child mode. Tell us, tell us more about that.
Okay. So from a schema therapy point of view, and as I kind of showed on my conceptualization, the drawing with the rainbow arches and stuff like that, it's up on our website. It's up on YouTube. So have a look at that. Schema therapy conceptualizes that the vulnerable child is at the center of everything. It always comes back to the vulnerable child. And the rationale behind this is, as children, we are inherently vulnerable. So we, we're vulnerable simply by the fact that we can't do anything for ourselves. We are entirely reliant on our caregivers to do everything for us. And that is both from a physical point of view of feeding us and changing us and putting us to sleep, but really more from an emotional point of view. The primary kind of responsibility for caregivers is to meet the emotional needs of a child. So protection, safety, warmth, love, acceptance, those sort of things. Okay?
There's also stuff that we need around kind of autonomy and boundaries and stuff like that. But for the absolute core needs for an infant, they need to know that they're safe, that they're protected, and that they're wanted. Okay.
Yeah. And what happens if that doesn't happen?
Well, if those primary needs aren't met, then we have children who can't make sense of their world, who have difficulty self-regulating. They're likely to be more emotionally volatile. There's likely to be more tantrums. And there's likely to be a bunch of kids who don't understand why they're feeling what they're feeling, what their feelings are in the first place. So that inability to describe their internal experience, we call that alexithymia. So inability, kind of, or lack of words for describing mood. And they can't make sense of the world. And when they do feel really intense emotions, they don't know how to describe it. And they don't know what to do about it. Okay.
Get easily overwhelmed.
Easily overwhelmed, absolutely. But then when they are overwhelmed, they really lack the skills in being able to self-soothe or self-regulate because they didn't have, kind of, the supportive environment to be able to teach them how to do that as a child. So, it's kind of those fundamental skills of learning how to self-regulate. And I'm not talking about, kind of, cry it out therapy or anything like that, because that's not something I agree with. Uh, but from a schema therapy point of view, what you want is for a caregiver who is responsive to the needs of the child and who communicates that message of, "I see you're upset. I'm here with you. Let's work through this together." Kind of, "I'll, I'll hold you while you're having your tantrum or while you need to settle down." Kind of, if you're upset, then you come back to mom or dad or primary caregiver as, kind of, a safe base, as we refer to it. And in the absence of that, you've got kids who are disregulated, overwhelmed, and don't know how to calm themselves down. Who grow into adults who are still disregulated, overwhelmed, and don't know how to calm themselves down. Because ultimately, if you didn't learn these skills as a child, how are you expected to learn them as an adult if no one taught you? It's like learning a language. If you're not taught French as a child, then you're not going to know French as an adult unless you go to the effort of learning it.
Okay. So, so in, in schema therapy, we talked about the, the modes that get invoked to, kind of, protect the vulnerable child. So, can you expand on the vulnerable child?
When the vulnerable child is feeling triggered, which ultimately comes from the needs of the child not being met. Now, we refer to it as this kind of vulnerable child, which, look, a lot of my adult patients say, "Well, I'm not a child anymore. I don't like that I'm, I'm not a kid anymore." It comes from the idea that, as you and I have discussed previously, as adults, we're really just old children. We don't actually grow out of those fundamental needs of acceptance and love and safety and security, right? We get older on the outside, but those needs remain the same on the inside. So when those needs aren't being met and the vulnerable child kind of gets triggered or gets activated, then people will flip into kind of maladaptive coping modes as a way of trying to manage the feelings of vulnerability, which typically fall into the category of fight, flight, freeze. So I'm going to bring a series, add to this series of the videos of going into different modes, even within the coping modes and individuality. So I'm going to kind of hold off on those for a future talk and come back to the vulnerable child. But really, kind of, the attitude that I see in a lot of the patients that I work with is vulnerability is bad. Vulnerability equals weakness. Vulnerability is something that I should be ashamed of. Vulnerability is something I need to hide away from others. And if you grew up in the environment of, "Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about," then you're going to learn it's not okay to cry. It's not okay to show that I'm sad. It's not okay to show that I'm feeling lonely. It's not okay to ask for help. It's not okay to reach out to others. So we get people who become very, kind of, insular within their vulnerability. It's not okay to be vulnerable. It's not...
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the beautiful thing about what Brené Brown is doing for us at the moment is trying to get that message out there of vulnerability actually takes strength. You need to demonstrate courage.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So it takes courage to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is ultimately the center of our humanity. So at the start of everything to do with schema therapy, and while we recommend this is certainly something that's done with, kind of, a licensed and experienced practitioner, there is a little bit of an element of self-work that you can do around this. Okay.
So, first of all, it comes to a bit of an understanding that no matter how old you are, you still have needs. You need safety and belonging. You need love. You need affection of some sort. You need the opportunity to have play and spontaneity and fun. And you also need boundaries and discipline, okay? And they don't change, no matter what age we are. So, first, there needs to be an acceptance of the fact that those needs are there. You may not have had those needs met for a long period of time, but those needs are still there.
And then it comes down to what schema therapy actually refers to as limited reparenting. So the idea behind this is saying, "Right, you may have not had the ideal experience during childhood." And look, for some people, they've had fantastic experiences during childhood, and then later in life, they learned a bunch of messages to say vulnerability is not okay. Like the military personnel, beautiful example of that sort of thing, because their training says, "You can't show weakness. You can't be scared. You've got to run into the face of fire." Right? But for the majority of people who are seeking out schema therapy, we're looking towards early experiences being less than ideal. Okay.
Okay. So, there needs to be an acceptance that early childhood needs weren't met. And now that you're an adult, you can't really expect other people to be meeting those needs for you. Now, if you have the opportunity to have a wife, husband, best friend, partner, therapist meeting those needs for you, that's beautiful, and I congratulate you on having a really supportive support network. But at the same time, there needs to be a level of independence and autonomy in as an adult being able to meet our own needs. And that's going to be exceptionally challenging if people never learned how to do that as a child. How the hell do I do that as an adult? Okay.
So, that's where the reparenting stuff comes in.
So, what's that look like?
Reparenting is about, kind of, saying, "What I got in childhood didn't meet my needs, but as an adult, I need to figure out how to meet my own needs anyway." Okay? And in the context of the vulnerable child, the primary intervention that we look at for vulnerability is self-compassion and self-soothing. The ability to say, "What I'm feeling," and to, to kind of have an ownership of that feeling, to be able to say, "I feel sad. I feel lonely. I feel worthless. I feel scared. I feel empty." And knowing that whatever you feel is real for you, is true for you. No one else gets to tell you, "Oh, no, you're not feeling that way," or, "It's not okay to feel that way." But to have a sense of awareness and ownership over your emotions. Now, the reasons why those emotions may have been triggered in the first place may not be rational. There may be some work that we do around, kind of, your ideas about, kind of, why you were triggered or your perception of being abandoned or your belief that nobody likes you. Maybe in the thoughts, there's some work there. But the emotions, regardless of the legitimacy or the rationality of the thoughts, the emotions are true. The emotions are real. And so, vulnerable child is about, kind of, meeting the needs of the emotion. Okay.
And I guess overcoming the resistance to, um, not engaging self-compassion.
Yeah. So, a lot of people who haven't had the skills on how to manage their vulnerability then see their vulnerability as something that needs to be gotten rid of, shut down, not felt, dismissed, or it's problematic, let alone do something about. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, people who go, "I don't want to feel it. I can't tolerate feeling it. It's not safe to feel it. I'm scared to feel it." They're going to have a big disconnect from their vulnerable child. And there's going to be a tendency of, "There's a vulnerability, and I'm turning away from it."
Yeah. Schema therapy is all about saying that vulnerability is at the center of who you are. It's at the core of humanity. As humans, we feel. And to try and reject that or move away from that or shut that down is denying who you are. And ultimately, that will simply feed distress. Yeah. So schema therapy is about saying, "Here is your center of vulnerability," and what I'm asking you to do is turn towards it. And maybe when you first start this sort of therapy, the idea of turning entirely towards it is terrifying.
Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Too hard. Can't do it. You're crazy. I don't like it. I'm going to stop the video. If that's where you're at, if the idea of, kind of, turning towards your vulnerability is so abhorrent or terrifying, then maybe do, kind of, a 10-degree turn. Okay. Start somewhere. Okay.
Okay. And look, schema therapy uses a lot of the language around the vulnerable child. And the idea that, kind of, again, as, as children, we are vulnerable. And one of the techniques that we, kind of, recommend from a schema therapy point of view is to say, "Find the early experience or connect with the early experience of you as a young child, say four or five." Okay? At an age where realistically, a four-year-old does not have the capacity to make their own decisions, does not have the autonomy to be choosing whether or not to participate in a behavior that may later be seen as abusive, to be, um, acting in a way that would warrant parental dismissal, rejection, or abandonment. Yeah. So, and I'm, I'm trigger warning here. So for those people who grew up in abusive or neglectful environments, there can be this internalization of, "It was my fault." And usually that comes from parents or caregivers or whatever saying, "You're a bad child. This is your fault. You wanted it. Put yourself in that situation." Yeah. Yeah. So what that means is you've got an adult who rejects the idea or the representation of their inner child because, "Well, that child did all of this, and now I've got to deal with the consequences." But if you go back to a true, kind of, representation of what's happening for a four-year-old, four-year-olds don't have the capacity to make those sort of decisions. No, there's no, there's no understanding of that kind of stuff. No malevolence.
No, there's no malevolence. And generally, there is a really strong desire to be accepted, to, kind of, please their primary caregivers in terms of making them happy, and to ultimately have that connection, and to start developing that sense of, "I'm okay, and I'm wanted," and, and also to, if things go wrong, to, to blame themselves and sort of assume a, kind of, responsibility that can't possibly be theirs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of more responsibility than what is suitably appropriate for a child at the age of about four.
Okay. So for those of you who are having difficulty identifying or connecting with your vulnerable child, particularly if there's any sense of wanting to distance yourself from that early child, one of the things that I want you to consider trying, and this is up to you whether or not you want to follow through with it, I'm going to ask you to see whether or not you can get your hands on a photograph of you as a young child, about the age of four or five. Okay? And I actually have one here of me as about 5 years old. And we'll put this up a bit bigger in the video. So that's me at five. Hideous floral arrangement, but I say it was the early 90s, so not my fault. Okay. And when I look at that chart, look, I don't really remember being that young in this photo. I'm about five. I don't have a very strong memory. My memories really start more from about the age of seven. But as a 5-year-old, I look at this and I, I see my daughter in this, who's four years old, and I look at that and go, "My, my four-year-old has no capacity for adult decision-making or malevolence or taking responsibility for her behavior in a way that would deliberately cause me harm or deliberately cause her harm." Yeah, four-year-olds are just bumbling around having fun. She's happy playing with Barbies, watching Paw Patrol, and negotiating her way around her choices about dinner. That, that, that's the extent of what's happening in her world. Yeah. Okay.
So, I look at this and I kind of go, "Okay, if this were any child, not necessarily just me, not necessarily my child, but if this was any child, what would I want for her? For that child there." For that child there, I would want safety, security. I would want her to not be afraid in the world. I would want her to know that if something were to happen, someone's going to be there to look after her. Someone's going to be there to protect her. In other words, good parenting.
Yeah, that, that's exactly it. It's, it's the good parent. And kind of, you go back to the schema model stuff that I did in the last video, and it talks about, kind of, that paradigm of the good parent being the one that coaches the healthy adult to then look after the needs of a vulnerable child. So, kind of, the good parent in me is then elicited by looking at this photo. And what I want for her is support and validation and empathy, and if there's something wrong for her, I want compassion. Right? But then I have to remember, this child was actually me, and that vulnerable child still exists within me. I still have days where I feel scared or I feel vulnerable. There are still moments where my critical voice jumps in and tells me that I'm worthless. There are still days where I feel lonely. Now, I can either turn away from those feelings and go, "Nah, that's too hard. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with it." And engage in a maladaptive coping mode. For me, it's typically more of a perfectionistic behavior. If I stay really, really busy, then I don't have to think about how lonely I am. But I know at the end of the day, that doesn't do my vulnerable child any favors. That, that doesn't help me soothe that vulnerability. It postpones that vulnerability. It pushes pause on it or it detaches from it and pushes it away. But in a moment of quietness at 2:00 in the morning when I've woken up for whatever reason and my head's worrying and I can't get back to sleep, this is the stuff that will pop up. Yeah. So you, you can't run from it indefinitely. Not so coming to that point of softening towards that vulnerability, not even liking it, not enjoying it, kind of, I'm not asking you to love it. If you can, that's brilliant, but I'm not asking you to start there. Some compassion, but to, to yes, to, to soften, even if it's just around the edges, to soften in your compassion towards that vulnerability. To start off with an acceptance of that vulnerability is there. Not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to acknowledge it. That vulnerability is there. It exists. Right?
And what I'm, in the process of doing, is I'm actually going to make up some worksheets that we have up on our website. It'll be up by the time this video goes up. So head to the sitecollective.com under our tab for distress or under the tab for our resources, and you'll find these worksheets. And what it'll do is work you through, kind of, what we call mode awareness and then into mode management. So the mode awareness is, what does it look like for you? What are your triggers? And then if you do get triggered, what does it feel like? Which emotions come up for you? What are your behaviors? What do you typically do? What's happening for you? What does it look like? Because so often, people will have their vulnerable child mode activated and out of instinct, they will flip into their kind of maladaptive coping mode without even realizing their vulnerable child has been triggered in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. And particularly if those coping modes are a form of avoidance where there's like a strong sense of detachment. People will detach without knowing why they've detached. So they'll be over here without realizing that they started there in the first place.
It is reflexive. It is. It is. So, what we're asking is for the mode awareness, get to know yourself. Get to know your vulnerability. Even if you can't fully be in your vulnerability, at least know what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like to start to develop that awareness? So, at least if it does get triggered, you've got a choice point. Because if you don't know it, you can't change it. So, what I'm asking you to do is know it. And then you've got a choice. You can choose to go into your maladaptive coping modes and doing the stuff that you've always done, which means you'll always get what you've always got. You might have heard that from me before. Or you could do something different. And what that looks like in terms of what we call mode management, which is, now that you know it, what are you going to do about it? Mode management for vulnerable child. It's self-soothing, it's self-compassion, and it's self-acceptance. And a lot of these are actually cognitive. A lot of this comes back down to your self-talk. What are you going to say to yourself? Okay. And a lot of the time when we're talking about the vulnerable child, what are you going to say to that child? And the sort of things you need to be kind of considering are things like, "I see you. I'm here with you. I understand what's going on for you. I accept that your experience is real. What you're feeling right now is true for you." Or you can, you can kind of do this two ways. You can imagine that you're having a conversation with a child, and therefore it's what we call externalized. So it's like you're talking to, "I hear you and I see you." Or if you can shift that back inwards, it's kind of, "I understand this is hard for me right now. This is really, really difficult for me to sit with, and I'm going to do it anyway." It's the ability to create some space around the vulnerability without trying to push it away or suppress it or hide it or get rid of it, but to simply say, "Here it is. It's hard. It's uncomfortable. It's distressing. I have this really strong urge to go do something about it," and get away from it, and choosing not to, ideally. And here it is anyway. Once there is an acceptance of the vulnerability, then we can, that will start to facilitate change in our other modes. Right? Angry child usually comes out because there's a vulnerability that hasn't been addressed. When you learn how to address the vulnerability, most of that anger from the angry child melts. It doesn't need to be there anymore. The, the need for the perfectionistic overcompensator to constantly be busy and do everything perfectly because you never want anyone to see you fail, that melts too because you know that it's okay to screw up sometimes. You're not going to get everything right all of the time, and people will still accept you for that, no matter what. The desire to detach from everything also starts to melt because you know that you can tolerate these uncomfortable feelings to start off with in small doses, and with practice, you get more and more skilled at this.
So, so just to try and make this a bit actionable from what you've said. So how do, how do I mean, the, it sounds like the photograph is an important kind of tool, if you like, to, to access that. So what do you suggest people do?
I, I like the photograph because it makes it a bit more tangible. It puts it back into the context. It's not perhaps our distorted memory of ourselves, but an actual, kind of, representation of what we truly were. Okay. So, it lessens the distortion. Yeah. And if you don't have access to your early childhood photos for whatever reason, could you try drawing it? And if you're a terrible drawer, as I am, then maybe like, as a last case resort, could you Google it and try and find a photo of a child who's exactly that? A kid who looks like you, kind of, close enough-ish. And, and for some people, that might actually even help more because then it's not you, particularly if you have, kind of, strong feelings of self-hatred, but a child, kind of, who looked kind of like you, who was about that early age of say, four to five, and imagine what would you want for that child? And if it's okay for that child, then it would be okay for you. So it's not okay for you.
So the exercise is, so you've got the photograph, okay? You're looking at yourself or someone who looks a bit like you at that age. What do I, what do I do with that?
I want you to talk to it. Okay. Okay. And I want you to look at these, this kind of, this child and kind of say things like, "I wish that you could have some empathy. My hope for you is that you could have some compassion. I care about you. I, I hear you. I see you. I will be there for you if you are upset, in, in whatever frame you can manage." And to start off with, some people are going to find this completely repulsive and really, really, really difficult. But without the compassion towards themselves, there's limited capacity for growth. Yeah. Yeah.
I agree. I mean, this is sort of a foundation, and without, without the foundation, everything's going to be a bit wonky. So, so the idea here is we, by, by looking at that photograph of our young self, we can acknowledge that maybe we haven't been as compassionate with ourselves, or maybe we just forget about it. Compassion doesn't even enter the equation, but that's what's missing. That's what should have been there when, when, when I was younger, and it wasn't there, and I recognize that. So now it's time for me to give that compassion to myself. Yes. Is that what we're saying?
That's ultimately where we're heading, right? If, and, and you're, it's okay for you to do this in baby steps. It's okay for you to, kind of, kind of, look at that photo. Maybe we need a bit of graded exposure towards that photo or towards, kind of, early experiences or early memories, because looking at that photo for some people might trigger memories of all the things that was happening for that child at that time in that photo. And that's okay, because that's also part of your vulnerability. And so what it really comes down to is, I want you to develop an awareness of your vulnerable child mode. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What do you do? What are the emotions, the sensations, and all of that sort of stuff, right? So, build an awareness. The photograph may help with that. Secondly, notice when that mode has been activated. Notice when you've flicked into it, and then make a choice. What am I going to do about it? I can continue to push it away and use my coping modes, or I can turn towards it and I can learn to practice to engage with it. "This is really hard for me right now. I'm really struggling right now. I'm going to make a point of looking after myself while I go through this difficult experience. These emotions are challenging for me, and I can still look after myself while I'm experiencing them." That's the dialectic.
Yeah. I mean, I, I think it might be difficult for people when they're first starting to do this to, I mean, to have an awareness of what you're doing and how that relates to your past is, is a pretty tall order off the bat. Um, but sometimes what might be helpful is when the dust settles. So, yeah, something's happened that's that's stirred you up, and you entered your perfectionistic overcompensator or whatever other mode, and you've done all this stuff, and you've madly been cleaning or whatever for, whatever perfectionistic overcompensators might do. Afterwards, when the dust has settled, is it then a matter of, "Okay, let's look back on what happened. Okay, what happened that that stirred me up? Okay, and and what is that? What vulnerability has been activated there? Okay, what unmet need triggered the vulnerability in the first place?" Because it'll usually come back to what was missing.
Okay. So this sounds important. Okay. So I'm, I'm all, I'm all, I was all set up, but I've settled down now. Now I want to sort of dissect that and figure out what was going on. So what would be the process there?
Okay. So again, you, if you want to do it in retrospect, which for many people is going to be the starting point. They don't catch at the beginning, they'll catch, as you said, at the end. Presumably, this is where people are, right? So really, it comes back down to vulnerability is activated when there's a need that's been unmet. So our needs are safety, security, autonomy, acceptance, belonging, and those sort of things. So, figuring out what need, what need was unmet at the time. Yeah. Absolutely. If you're able to do that, because it's like, "I don't have a, my need for safety is not being met." That means I feel unsafe. Feeling unsafe is a form of vulnerability, right? Or I felt excluded from my group, which meant that my need for belonging was not met, which triggers my vulnerability because I feel lonely. Yep. Right. So being able to kind of go back and go, "What, what was the trigger and what was the unmet need as part of that trigger that activated the vulnerable child mode?"
Okay. Is the worksheet going to have all those different needs?
So we're going to go through, kind of, what are your triggers? What are your needs? What are the emotions that come up when the needs are unmet? What are the physical sensations? Because there can be quite a lot of, kind of, somatic experiences for people who are in their vulnerable child mode. It can be, look, a lot of it's going to mimic the anxiety symptoms. So it can be, kind of, butterflies in the stomach, kind of, tightness in the chest. Some, for some people, there's an absence of feeling. So there can be that kind of numbness as they start to flip into the detach protector sort of stuff. Um, so looking at, what, what was the need? What was happening? Okay. And then, if you're looking this in retrospect, what could I have done differently, right? Which then starts to open up your options for the next time this mode has been activated. What choices do I have? I can go to a coping mode, or I can go move towards compassion, empathy, self-care, and basically talk nicely to yourself. That's really what it kind of comes down to. And for some people, kind of, that critical voice can jump in and you're useless, you're worthless, you're a failure, and all those sort of things. There's a, and, and we'll do another video on this, that, that ability to kind of distance yourself and go, "Not listening to you right now. Right now, this is where my attention needs to be," and to go, "I'm okay. I'm safe. I can sit with this. This is really hard for me. I'm going to do something that's nice for myself." For me, that's things like, "I'm going to go make a cup of tea." But rather than just, kind of, boil a kettle and whack in a tea bag, I'm going to make a point of sitting down with my tea set, and I'm going to, kind of, have my honey and I have my milk jug, and I have, kind of, I pick my good tea, and, and actually, not quite a ceremony, but it's, it's putting in effort into me. No one else benefits from it. Just me. It's validating yourself. It's soothing yourself. It's, it's being compassionate to yourself. Yep. And that empathy. And that is going to take practice. If you've never done this, if you've never had this done for you, then this is going to take practice. And to start off with, this is probably going to feel really forced and really unfamiliar and really uncomfortable. That's okay. That's part of your vulnerability. What I'm asking you to do is to sit with that and to persevere with that, to acknowledge that, and to keep practicing this stuff anyway. And head to our website again for that worksheet that I'll have up, which will be around, kind of, giving you some steps of how to actually try and work through this and start to action this stuff. Ultimately, again, best if you can do this with a licensed practitioner, psychologist, whatever. Someone who's experienced in schema therapy would be helpful. Um, and there's also a book you can get on some of this schema therapy stuff that's written more for patients as opposed to clinicians called "Reinventing Your Life." That might be worth a look at on, um, Amazon and wherever you want to buy your books from. Uh, that has more of a, a focus on the schemas themselves, but gives you more of, kind of, that understanding of what some of those early triggers might be of those unmet needs. We might put a link of that book up on our web page for this as well.
That's good. Okay. So, get to know it. Then you can learn how to change it and commit to practicing this. It's going to be uncomfortable, but ultimately, it's about you learning to be nicer towards yourself. And from that, we can facilitate change in the other modes as well.