Feeding The Baby
This particluar blog is more aimed at practtioners than clients but contains a very useful point for anyone to keep in mind (in my opinion).
I don’t know how many of you have had the joy of training a young child to eat ‘properly’. Most of them seem to go through a phase when they discover the absolute delight of hurling their food onto the floor, they can find it very amusing...
Now what does not work at this point is pointing at the food on the floor and saying,
‘Stop throwing your food on the floor, Agamemnon, food costs money, you know!’ And young Agamemnon looks at the food on the floor and....
What works best, naturally, is when you totally ignore the food on the floor and say to your child.
‘Here you are, darling, do this,’ and you encourage the child to do what you WANT it to do, that is, in this case, eat from the plate.
Then, what the child does, inevitably, is look at the food, grin at you, and throw it on the floor again. And the wise parent, at this point, begins to pass smaller amounts of food to Agamemnon, repeating the process of ignoring the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour and helping to get their child to imagine eating from the plate. With patience, (and it does take some...) your child begins to imagine doing what you want it to do, and then starts doing it, and then it becomes established as a habituated pattern of thought and behaviour. Hooray!
However, that is not to say that a couple of weeks into the new ‘proper’ way of eating, that young Agamemnon isn’t going to have a ‘relapse’. He might, he might not. And this usually happens, of course, when you are escorting a visiting friend into the kitchen having just informed them proudly of how quickly your son has learned to eat well.
If you are luckier than I was then the rusk won’t actually hit your friend on the forehead.
So what are you going to do at this point (apart from apologise)? Are you going to give up? Are you going to say, ‘Oh crap, my training of my son has just worn off, now he’ll never eat properly, he has gone back to his old behaviour! I was afraid this might happen! I am a failure, and so is he!’
Well you might, briefly. But it would be pretty stupid to keep saying that to yourself, wouldn’t it!?
What you do, naturally, is go over to the child and again encourage it to eat ‘properly’, aiming their thinking and imagination towards eating from the plate.
Obviously if their behaviour is dangerous then a little ‘away from’ motivation wouldn’t go amiss as well...
When I see clients I almost invariably run these kinds of metaphors to inoculate against them feeling like a failure if they relapse into the behaviour they came to see me to change. I don’t sort every client I see in one session. Do you? This kind of story is obviously particularly appropriate for something like bulimia but it would be helpful for many ‘issues’. It frames the ‘relapse’ as something that might or might not happen, but if it does, it’s OK, and it would be silly and stupid to view the relapse as a complete failure. I also use analogue marking to make the 'relapse' as unlikely as I can, by the way.
And, naturally, the thing is this, to get your child, or client, to be aware that whatever happens, it is important to continue to aim, and re-aim their thinking to imagine more appropriate behaviour.
When your client is smiling or laughing at the silliness of treating a 'relapse' as failure, when you get your client to fully realise that the important thing thing is to always aim and re-aim towards more appropriate behaviour, in any event, whatever happens, you massively enhance their chances of rapid and sustainable change for good.
And, by the way, I didn't name my son Agamemnon. My wife wouldn’t let me.
I don’t know how many of you have had the joy of training a young child to eat ‘properly’. Most of them seem to go through a phase when they discover the absolute delight of hurling their food onto the floor, they can find it very amusing...
Now what does not work at this point is pointing at the food on the floor and saying,
‘Stop throwing your food on the floor, Agamemnon, food costs money, you know!’ And young Agamemnon looks at the food on the floor and....
What works best, naturally, is when you totally ignore the food on the floor and say to your child.
‘Here you are, darling, do this,’ and you encourage the child to do what you WANT it to do, that is, in this case, eat from the plate.
Then, what the child does, inevitably, is look at the food, grin at you, and throw it on the floor again. And the wise parent, at this point, begins to pass smaller amounts of food to Agamemnon, repeating the process of ignoring the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour and helping to get their child to imagine eating from the plate. With patience, (and it does take some...) your child begins to imagine doing what you want it to do, and then starts doing it, and then it becomes established as a habituated pattern of thought and behaviour. Hooray!
However, that is not to say that a couple of weeks into the new ‘proper’ way of eating, that young Agamemnon isn’t going to have a ‘relapse’. He might, he might not. And this usually happens, of course, when you are escorting a visiting friend into the kitchen having just informed them proudly of how quickly your son has learned to eat well.
If you are luckier than I was then the rusk won’t actually hit your friend on the forehead.
So what are you going to do at this point (apart from apologise)? Are you going to give up? Are you going to say, ‘Oh crap, my training of my son has just worn off, now he’ll never eat properly, he has gone back to his old behaviour! I was afraid this might happen! I am a failure, and so is he!’
Well you might, briefly. But it would be pretty stupid to keep saying that to yourself, wouldn’t it!?
What you do, naturally, is go over to the child and again encourage it to eat ‘properly’, aiming their thinking and imagination towards eating from the plate.
Obviously if their behaviour is dangerous then a little ‘away from’ motivation wouldn’t go amiss as well...
When I see clients I almost invariably run these kinds of metaphors to inoculate against them feeling like a failure if they relapse into the behaviour they came to see me to change. I don’t sort every client I see in one session. Do you? This kind of story is obviously particularly appropriate for something like bulimia but it would be helpful for many ‘issues’. It frames the ‘relapse’ as something that might or might not happen, but if it does, it’s OK, and it would be silly and stupid to view the relapse as a complete failure. I also use analogue marking to make the 'relapse' as unlikely as I can, by the way.
And, naturally, the thing is this, to get your child, or client, to be aware that whatever happens, it is important to continue to aim, and re-aim their thinking to imagine more appropriate behaviour.
When your client is smiling or laughing at the silliness of treating a 'relapse' as failure, when you get your client to fully realise that the important thing thing is to always aim and re-aim towards more appropriate behaviour, in any event, whatever happens, you massively enhance their chances of rapid and sustainable change for good.
And, by the way, I didn't name my son Agamemnon. My wife wouldn’t let me.
posted by Steve Tromansat
12:46
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