Introduction to "Rewiring Our Perceptions of Discipline... Connections Over Compliance" January 2021
“We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.”
ANNE LAMOTT
I am writing this book during our global COVID-19 pandemic. It has been a challenging, heartbreaking, thought-filled, and soul-searching endeavor as I watch from both the outside and inside. What am I observing? A living collective organism, our world, is trying to discover and grasp ways to make sense and meaning through the vast unknown of this disease and the time that its spread has both taken from us and given to us. And yet, life has always been plagued with the unknown, and we have always managed to work through challenging and extraordinary historical periods as traditional ways of living break open and the emergent “new” is met with resistance, grief, confusion, innovation, and sometimes resolve.
As I write these words, the United States has more confirmed cases of and deaths from this current virus than any other nation. The traumatic conditions of isolation, chronic unpredictability, and physical/emotional restraint are affecting all of us at some level. And although this is a learning experience that nobody wants, perhaps we can now understand how these conditions of “trauma” are what so many families, children, and communities live with daily.
The existing adversities of poverty, racism, mental illness, criminalized addiction, healthcare inadequacies, and marginalized living conditions all contribute to extreme levels of depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges for youth who must cope with them every day. These societal adversities correlate highly to adverse childhood experiences--and we now face an additional layer of pandemic trauma on top of all this existing trauma and adversity. COVID-19 is producing a growing “viral fear” throughout the world, and our youth and children feel it all! CNN reported that nine of the 20 largest metropolitan police departments reported "double-digit percentage jumps" in domestic violence 911 calls or cases in March, 2020, compared to last year or the months of January or February 2020.1 "Domestic violence is rooted in power and control, and all of us are feeling a loss of power and control right now,” Katie Ray-Jones, the CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told CNN.2 I share these statistics because many of our children and youth are being impacted by the fears, violence, and loss of a felt-safe place of connection when schools abruptly closed in March of 2020. Our students and educators across the country and world walked out of school on a Friday afternoon… and many will not return for several months, with possible additional extensions. We did not have the closure we normally expect at the end of a school year. Many students lost their safe place and their meals. They didn’t get to say goodbye. They missed that needed, predictable, safe closure with the adults whom they trust and who are their lifelines through challenging times.
How do children and youth express their feelings of abandonment, loss, grief, and confusion? How do adults express these same feelings? Often, our behaviors tell our stories, signaling the pain we can barely speak of or understand. Our behaviors are always communicating our needs, our feelings, and quite possibly our fears that feel too big to contain. And how does the world receive and tolerate these expressions?[AL5] [LD6]
Psychiatrist and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist shares that when there is a serious jolt to the world community and landscape, much like a global pandemic, a crisis develops alongside a turning point. He refers to this type of event as a “meaning crisis.” A meaning crisis communicates a common cause and a call to bring out the best in one another, giving us an opportunity to belong, to shift our perspectives, and to reframe these benign developments.
I am addressing this conceptual shift in the introduction of this book because our perceptions, thought processes, and current actions with regard to school and home discipline protocols have left many learning and home environments stalled in the outdated mindsets of punishment, harsh consequences, and behaviorism, and often completely out of touch with current research. We continue to act and react upon past belief systems with discussions, guidelines, and policies that exclude the sciences of attachment, adverse childhood experiences, and the effects on developing brain architecture.
In this time, we have been plunged into a state of global uncertainty. And as we try to comprehend our best responses on the scale of human interaction with these uncertainties, starved for anything that feels familiar, safe, and nonthreatening, we may find ourselves subconsciously forcing outcomes. Sadly, this response is all too familiar. We have often unintentionally--through educational preparation, professional developments, extensive teacher trainings, and histories of unexamined, patterned, and repetitive ways of being and doing--created experiences of recycled discipline and behavioral policies that resemble an outdated rule-book for order and obedience. We have grasped fixes while forgetting that human behaviors are always communicating a desire to connect, feel better, and re-calibrate toward equilibrium.
In writing this book at this time, I believe we are presented with a “hermeneutic circle” challenge. Hermeneutics is defined by the understanding and interpretation of an experience through contextual dependency. For example, if you begin to see the world as a machine, everything in your interpretation of this view becomes machine-like, and the elements of a machine become a model of your personal understanding based on your angle of vision. Our visions hold our belief systems, private logic, and cultural values. If you see the world as a fluid, interpersonal, dynamic entity, then your experiences and angle of vision begin to show you many events, relationships, and conditions through this relational context. Whenever any of us pursue knowledge, it is context dependent, leading us to take the unfamiliar and subconsciously infuse what we know and believe as we weave it into a new model. How do our current discipline protocols mirror our hermeneutic circles? How do our belief systems, cultural heritage, and generational tales affect our vision and biases regarding traditional discipline protocols? It feels as if we have repackaged similar behavior management models, systems, and practices with new labels and fancy terms.
Traditional discipline programs and practices have often embraced the concepts of right, wrong, logic, consequence, reward, punishment, exclusion, pain, discomfort, disobedience, noncompliance, and correction, all with a singular focus on student behavior. We now are called to explore and redefine discipline protocols from a place of crisis and opportunity with the initial perceptual shift on adult behaviors--that is to say, the behavior of the adults interacting with the students .
Our world systems do not operate separately, and this is also true for the systems within our learning environments. The school-to-prison pipeline is an example of how improperly blended systems can and have distorted, stifled, and compromised human growth and development while intimately impacting a pathological evolution that affects the well-being of children, adolescents, adults, and eventually communities as a whole. We see this now. We are living this pathology now. But the human organism is built for resiliency. We are created to bend, wobble, heal, and repair, and this calls for an emphasis on relational discipline frameworks through a brain-aligned lens. When we begin to deeply understand that all experiences build brain architecture, we will uphold our ordinary experiences as sacred and tangible teaching moments that support and prioritize safety and connection throughout our children’s lives.
The behaviors to which we should give the most attention are the behaviors that we want to sprout and flourish. This intentional attention begins with adults who are willing to dive into their uncontested and possibly unexplored perspectives and belief systems--individual, familial, communal, and generational. These are the perspectives and belief systems that we have unintentionally carried into this moment, and that we should examine with the intention of doing what is best for our students.
May you find personal and professional grace within this book, written to acknowledge and share the new focus on adult well-being as the cornerstone to this discipline shift that we hope to see in the educational arena, in our homes, and in our communities. This is the discipline shift that will inform our future, brain-aligned, and relational discipline policies. May you find connection to your inner source of well-being, and may you share the contagion of this discovery with every student and colleague that you encounter! It is said that the greatest gift we can give our children and youth rests with the care we give ourselves.
In the compelling words of Dr. Bruce D. Perry: “The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections. And this is especially true for children. Being harmed by the people who are supposed to love you, being abandoned by them, being robbed of the one-on-one relationships that allow you to feel safe and valued and to become humane--these are profoundly destructive experiences. Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss. As a result, recovery from trauma and neglect is also all about relationships--rebuilding trust, regaining confidence, returning to a sense of security, and reconnecting to love. Of course, medications can help relieve symptoms and talking to a therapist can be incredibly useful. But healing and recovery are impossible--even with the best medications and therapy in the world--without lasting, caring connections to others.”3