I’ve spent many years working with Australian indigenous children in remote communities. This presents all the challenges you might expect – distance and isolation, lack of services, a very foreign culture that is imploding with all the problems that go along with it, and students and families who don’t speak English and whose first language is oral. One place many of these issues collide is behaviour and social skills. I was involved in setting up a programme to explicitly teach mainstream Australian social skills and as part of this we worked with a psychologist.
We realised that our students only reported a very narrow range of emotions, it literally came down to happy, wild (extreme anger) and sad, and they interpreted a huge range of behaviours as teasing.
“E teasin me, E bin make me wild,” was something we heard over and over after a fight (I haven’t written that in a derogatory way it’s Kriol, the language spoken across much of northern Australia).
One of the questions we started to ask was – How do you experience emotions you cannot name/describe/identify? Obviously a large part of the problem was language based – our students had never been taught more than the basic emotions in English and we didn’t know enough about their home languages to find the nuances. Most of them spoke Kriol as a first language and only a smattering of their pre-Invasion language, and while it is a true language creoles tend to be stripped down. As part of the social skills programme we introduced strategies to teach a wide range of emotions and pretty much had to leave it there, but the question has stayed in the back of my mind.
I came across a similar idea when talking to other mothers of babies and toddlers about mother-guilt. This seems to be the defining characteristic of my generation of mothers, or at least the ones I talk to – we feel guilty about everything. Giving our children too much attention, not enough attention, the wrong sort of stimulation, the wrong food, not enough exercise, not enough free play, not enough sleep, every day can become a minefield of life or death decisions, or at least decisions that will have an enormous impact on and possibly ruin your child’s life. Most of us do know that it isn’t rational, but add in isolation and sleep deprivation and it’s a real problem. I’ve been fighting for the last year or two to try to quieten my demons and find a way to deal with them.
I mentioned this on another blog recently, talking about my reasons for enrolling my girls in part-time daycare, and I automatically included ‘dealing with the guilt.’ Until other Mums commented that they didn’t feel guilty about it at all! It made me stop and analyse my emotions and I realised that I didn’t actually feel guilty either. I’m worried about how my littlest one will cope, she’s never been away from her parents. The perfectionist in me feels like I’m admitting defeat by saying I need a break (don’t get me started on comparisons with my mother). I don’t want to miss out on seeing them play and enjoy themselves. I’m hurt by how excited the big girl is to be playing with other people and not me! I have concerns about the quality of the childcare and their discipline methods. These are all negative emotions, but they aren’t guilt. With all the advantages of education, maturity, example and language I had done exactly what my students did and pigeonholed myself. But when I analysed the situation and identified what was making me feel bad I now have some things I can actually do something about, or decide there is nothing I can do about it. It takes the dead end blame away from me and replaces it with something constructive.
And I realised I’ve seen this before. So often we are told not to discuss parenting because it will make people feel guilty. Especially things like breastfeeding, birthing and working. But do women who have negative emotions about using formula or having a caesarean or going back to work really feel guilty? Do women in general feel guilty over as many things as we are told we do? Or is that the only language and the only model we have been given? Are they angry, let down, hurt or scared? Are they grieving over time and lost moments?
Perhaps it is time for us to use the skills of critical thinking on our emotions and apply them on both a personal and societal level. By exploring our own feelings we can sometimes find a different and more productive way to act, as my experience with child care shows. And if we can apply this to more emotional public debates including reproductive rights, parenting and health it might lead to different strategies or discussions.
That’s why I am as outspoken as I am about such controversial topics, including when I *don’t* feel guilty (or bad in some other way) or like a bad person when I’m told I should. It’s also why I’m a bit pedantic when it comes to language and making sure we use terms correctly, or at least in the same way as each other, before we begin the discussion about that term.
For years I have not felt guilty where other people would have. I did not write my husband’s thank you notes for our wedding gifts (I wrote the ones to my side of the family) and told him that if he was comfortable with his family thinking I am a lazy wife, then I was cool with it too!
One day, after a fight with my husband caused by one of those silly things men say, I suddenly realized that what he’d said hadn’t actually offended me at all. I had acted offended, and it had turned into a fight, because I knew that it *should* offend me. Since then, I’ve been trying to slow down my reactions, to take the time to figure out how I really feel rather than simply taking the path of least resistance.
It’s like I’ve been travelling around all this time with “situations” in my head. Once I identify a particular situation as falling under X model, I switch to the corresponding script. The worst part? I realized that the vast majority of these scripts were from TV, from those horribly gender-stereotyped sitcom sorts of shows. It’s so much easier because situations, and reactions, are clearly defined, labeled, and familiar.
Once I made this discovery, fights with my husband dropped by nearly 50% (he says a bit more, I say a bit less – we should have kept score!). I talked to him about it and he realized that he had been doing much the same thing. Next thing we know, we’ve nearly stopped fighting entirely. We realized that we were happy together, and understood each other far better than our “scripts” allowed.
I wonder how many of us go through our entire lives on auto-pilot – being unhappy simply because we think that’s how someone should feel in our situation. And in a culture where more is always better, we should always be feeling discontent, right?
I’m so glad you posted this! I have a tendency to analyze things that happen to the point that I don’t respond to things, emotionally, the way others think I should. As a result, people that I have been in relationships with have frequently compared me to every dysfunctional genius character on television (seriously, I’ve been compared to Spock, House, Data, Bones, Sheldon, and many others). I always considered my approach to be more honest than adhering to whatever they thought was ideal, so I stuck with it, just accepting that it was something that made me different.
It isn’t that I don’t have maladaptive responses to things or that I never react poorly to things, it is just that I usually don’t and I’m usually very mellow, most of the time.
It makes me happy to know that others might encourage the same behavior that I have, instead of considering it wrong.
Yeah I have taught in Vermont, home of the 100% natural mom. I’m cool with it, I get that for THEM a special only organic diet and family bed and such works well. But I almost think they have to instill guilt in others, I DO THIS BECAUSE IT’S WHAT WE ALL SHOULD BE DOING. No do that because it’s what works for you. For me, formula, day care (baby day care even, half day from 5 weeks) and somehow they are all grown up and not in prison (yet).
For me it was having a great partner/parent…and giving him the freedom to be the imperfect dad he is (like when I went on a trip they ate Happy Meals every night for dinner for a week – no wonder they loved to be left with dad), and pets and laughter – worked well enough. And I know if I’d be busy scrubbing organic produce all day I’d have just been miserable.
Thankyou! I was a bit scared that maybe it was just me who was caught in this trap and everyone else could easily identify their emotions. I found it scary how easily I’ve been following these social scripts, they do seem to be pervasive. I hadn’t even thought about fictional ones, the expectations from the people around me are what’s been pushing me.
I suspect a lot of them help to smooth over social awkwardness or give us social rules for particular situations, but then we take on those rules as if they are reality.
oh boy…emotions. Can I say I can really suck at them, having had to suppress how I really feel for so so long? The reasons are long, complex and possibly trite. How I thought I was supposed to express emotions is now being called into question, by me mostly. Have I managed them correctly or not? and is my current method ok, or should I chuck it for another method?
Ok that thought process just gave me a headache.
Dear FSM the mother guilt!! My son just started first grade at the really great public school across the street from our house. Where they…serve conventionally-grown veggies in the cafeteria!11!…and ZOMG all the kids in his class are reading the same book at the same time in lockstep indoctrination…and he is expected to give the teacher his attention while she’s speaking!!! and holy crap…forced vaccinations… (He is thriving, his teacher is lovely, and he feels safe and happy.)
When I was in high school there was a horrible bus accident that killed a number of children including the older sibling of one of my classmates. Over a year later we were in class, and my classmate was distracted. The teacher mentioned the bus accident in passing, there was a collective intake of breath and all eyes turned to this girl. It took her a few minutes to realize what was going on and what was expected of her before she began weeping. Other girls began to cry as they vicariously identified with her experience.
I’m not a mother myself (yet…give it a few years!), but thank you for this post! It’s absolutely critical that we BE critical of our emotions since they so often act as a shield against reason. At the same time, which I like that you pointed out, we can’t just say “don’t be emotional”. We have to understand where these emotions are coming from both within ourselves and when dealing with others, and then we can seek to work with and past them instead of denying them.
Guilt and fear– that’s some pretty strong stuff!
I never let people make me feel guilty about my sons. I worked, I used a day care, I used formula. I made the best decisions with the best information I could obtain, and they did fine.
I am reminded of certain gender stereotypes as well: women should be caring, nurturing, gentle, blah, blah, blah… It’s not hard to buy into the ideas of what society expects us to be like and then we do it.
I can relate to the feeling that some ubiquitous script tells modern western women how to behave emotionally. That script was drilled into me too. Glad you posted this. It made sense. So, now that I recognize it, I feel pretty good about discarding it!