PRECEDE: Often it’s easiest to blame a child when in fact it’s us who are the problem!
But there is a blame-free way to get through this, writes Steve Biddulph.
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Desi is six. He has been seen by many specialists – paediatrician, art therapist, play therapist, psychologist.
The reason driving his parents to all this effort and cost is that he has ‘anger issues’. In plain language, flying off the handle, hitting or shouting or storming off when he gets stressed.
And Desi seems to be stressed nearly all the time.
But an important diagnostic clue is that at school he is mostly fine. So this was not likely to be a brain condition like ADHD – it was ‘situational’. It only happened at home.
So what might be wrong with him? Do we need to look a bit wider?
Forty-five years ago I got my first real psychology job. It was in a new clinic being set up by psychiatrist Colin McKenzie, who had a radical idea.
We would always and only see children along with their family. This idea set off explosions among referring doctors and parents.
Why could we not just see the child?
Dad wouldn’t want to come in, he saw it as his wife’s problem. Mum was too busy with other kids. And what did they have to do with it anyway?
In fact, our clinic was soon filled with families as word spread, in our small working-class town of Launceston, that this approach seemed to really help.
With the whole family in the room, nine times out of ten we could get to the root of what was going on from the very first session.
And there were actually solutions, once you sat down in a safe space and had time to really talk.
Kids do not have problems in isolation. And very often a child’s problems are just signs of things going wrong for the adults too.
A dad who is impossible to live with, angry or insecure, always making things worse. A mum who is drowning in stress. Other children in the family bullying each other or having anxiety issues of their own.
Families are great places when they are loving, but when they implode they can be hell on wheels.
Launceston was a struggle town back then. Low income, uneducated families are often smart and resilient when they are given some respect, a voice, and some good information.
Over and again we found that by carefully unpacking exactly how things went astray, we could help a family find out how to be happy again.
Family therapy is based on a single life-changing principle: NO BLAME.
Everyone in the family can help by changing some of their own actions or words. And small changes can lead to huge ones down the track.
Eventually, I came to focus on fathers because men were struggling the most. Many wanted to be a good dad above all else but had never seen a good dad in their lifetime.
I wrote Manhood, and then Raising Boys, because I felt we had to build a more loving and open-hearted kind of masculinity from the ruins of the industrial war-torn twentieth century.
So many men were traumatised and the dads of the past had often been violent, or critical and harsh, or distant and buried in work. Or had walked out on their families.
Men needed help and healing to become something different
Organizations like the Fathering Project sprang up and started dads groups in hundreds of schools, and resources and help for dads anywhere to link up and learn the craft of being a loving dad.
When Desi’s parents finally agreed to see a family therapist, their little boy’s anger issues were no mystery at all.
His dad was explosive whenever Desi was difficult, and the two detonated each other many times a day.
Desi’s dad had a terrible childhood and when he was helped, individually, to talk about and get past that, he was much easier to be around, and much happier too.
And Desi really improved as well.
Steve Biddulph’s new book on healing anxiety is called Wild Creature Mind. Published by Pan Macmillan.
The Fathering Project is at fatheringproject.org.
