We have all seen it. A baby or a toddler has a tumble or a bonk, and they immediately look to one of their parents to see how upset they should be about it.

Did that hurt? How much? A lot… Or a little? Should I cry… Or carry on? Are you afraid? Because if you are afraid, then I will be afraid. If you look horrified then I will commence with crying forthwith.

No? You don’t look horrified. Oh, good, I guess that didn’t hurt. I’m glad I have you to inform me.

There is an early brain development stage called mirroring. The reason we, as fully formed adults, have the ability to look at someone smiling and feel happy, look at someone laughing and laugh too, or look at someone crying and feel very sad, is thanks to these mirror neurons in our brains. They literally do what their name implies: They mirror emotions back and forth from person to person. This is what develops our capacity for empathy, to feel a bit of what someone else is feeling, to have emotions that connect with the emotional atmosphere in the room. If everyone is happy, we become happy. If everyone is grieving, we become somber, or we grieve with them.

One of the primary contributing factors in the early childhood of a psychopath or a sociopath (someone who literally cannot perceive the pain of other people) or in people with attachment disorders, is that there was either a lack of human connection at this very important time of brain development, or violent human connection where loving connection should have been. The mirror neurons failed to be stimulated or develop properly. The games that we all play with our babies–smiling at them and they smile back, smiling back at them when they smile at us, face to face connection regularly, relaying emotions back and forth, back and forth, constant eye contact… due to many different reasons, some babies do not receive this. And their mirror neurons are inhibited, underdeveloped, or even in the worst cases, non-existent. In the first two cases, this develops some level of an attachment disorder. In the worst cases, it can become sociopathic.

Our adopted son, who came to us at the age of fourteen, had underdeveloped mirror neurons. He had an attachment disorder, very common among adopted children. He almost never made eye contact. And his emotions rarely lined up with anyone else’s in the room. We would all be laughing and playing and joking, for instance, and he would sit, distantly, his face shut down and not connecting with anyone in the room. Detached. Vacant.

Or, someone would be sad or crying or angry, and he would remain blank. He often had no remorse for any of the things that he did that hurt other people. There were flickers of it, it wasn’t non-existent, but it was very inconsistent and intermittent, like wires that were frayed and only sparked on occasion, the connection poor and spotty. We knew he had it in him, because he had extreme empathy for animals. Just not other humans. And who could blame him? His brain had been taught many things over his short tumultuous life, but a safe trusting place among other humans was not one of them.

But something remarkable has taken place in the almost two years that have passed. His brain has developed rapidly, and he is starting to connect truly, and even deeply, with us and with others. He is able to make eye contact and connect soul-to-soul, he is able to perceive and experience the emotions of others. To mirror those emotions back. To feel remorseful, care when someone else is hurting, comfort someone in pain. To engage in the energy of the room. When we are laughing and playing, now he joins in with us. When we are sad or somber, he joins in the spirit of grief and reflection.

Ironic that God chose two people with Asperger’s to help this boy develop empathy… Let that just simmer awhile.

But also… wow, how our empathy has grown exponentially through this process as well as we have had to work harder than ever before to connect deeply with him, each other, and God in order to be successful. What an amazing synergy.

Going back to the original thought at the beginning of this post: looking to our parents when we are really little to see how we should react to things. Jack is in this stage of development with us.

Now that he has learned to mirror with us, and now that he has developed a sense of safety and trust… he is now connected to our emotions.

Therefore, when we are calm, Jack is calm.

What an amazing biological phenomenon! That God created us to be able to pass our emotional state of strength down to our children through mirroring! That they can, in their underdeveloped emotional age, still find a sense of peace and calm in stressful situations, by having it reflected into their brains from ours! I mean, what?! This is amazing.

That puts it in our hands. As parents, we can help our children connect with our emotions and follow them. That means that we have the power, even in cases as extreme as Jack’s, to shape and transform and strengthen the emotional responses of our children. We are responsible. It starts with our emotional strength and our ability to connect and mirror it to them.

So if your children are struggling with an insecurity that is causing them to regularly fall apart, what they need is you to become fortified. They need you to become stronger. They need you to become calmer. They need you to find the way and then show them, to mirror to their brains a sense of safety, of peace, of calm.

I am a reactive person by nature. Authentic and open, I wear everything on my sleeve and don’t have much of a capacity for hiding, filtering, or bull-shitting. Though I am also a happy and easy-going person by nature, I lived through a terrible first marriage from which I learned to set iron-clad boundaries in my life between myself and anybody else’s dysfunction. I also have a low stress tolerance from being an Aspy. I also come from a passionate and fiery Irish bloodline on one side and a powerful no-nonsense German one on the other side.

For a long time, his blow-outs seemed largely independent of us, separate from us, and we felt powerless against them. At the worst times, nothing we could do and no amount of staying calm could stop them until they blew over. The violence and the reactions were driven by so many internal factors. He was like a thrashing wild animal and we were like horrified hiker’s just trying to make it past on the trail without getting mauled.

But it was this amazing phenomenon of bonding and mirroring and connecting that has changed this.

As we grew to bond with one another, as he grew to trust us and look to us for how he should respond and when he is safe, his blow-outs can now be contained and ended quicker as long as we are able to contain our response to them. As he became more safe and secure with us, his really bad blow-outs only seemed to take place in response to one of us snapping first.

Now, for the most part, he remains calm as long as we were calm.

He has what is called Reactive Attachment Disorder, meaning that his outrageous reactions are due to short circuits in his ability to have healthy attachments. And his brain-stem is triggered easily, sending him into that wild animal state, thrashing for survival.

I needed to work so very hard to remain as calm as possible, so as not to set off that reactive part of his brain. I pressed in, put in the work, put in the prayer, challenged myself and stretched my self-discipline as far as it would go and then farther. I started EMDR therapy to unload any lingering traumas trapped in my brainstem and I worked hard to remain calm or step away in my weakest times, when tired, angry, or stressed.

The blow-outs tapered off, slowed down, were shorter in length, and we could get him back faster into his frontal lobes–out of the Lizard brain and into his reasoning brain–if we stayed as calm as possible, or even did not react at all.

Now they usually only happen if one of us loses our temper first. He has little capacity to be challenged, to be harshly disciplined, or to be confronted when he’s done something wrong. He is a runner, and if we try to block him from running, he lashes out. But, though it goes against normal parenting, if we step back, disengage, and let him run, we get him back quicker, than if we try to stop him.

The only two blow-outs I can recall over the past handful of months that were the someone-is-bleeding-and-neighbors-are-looking-and-parts-of-the-house-are-on-the-front-deck level of bad were when Jesse or I got so angry with him for something he did that one of us showed anger and extreme disapproval. Again, this goes completely against normal parenting, because we are not parenting a typical child with a fully developed brain. If he starts to unravel, our calm reaction brings him back very quickly. He has now gotten to the point of having very typical levels of anger and frustration for the average teenage boy. And it blows over fast. But mostly he’s just happy and content.

It is by no means easy to parent him. But it is as calm and functional as it can likely ever be.

Just like very small children who rely so heavily on gauging our responses to see how they should feel and react to things, our Jack is doing this now, and it is our adapting and growing and strategic responding that is steering his responses into our current. He has grown so deeply into our safety, we are such pillars to him, that as long as we are in control and do not lose our cool, he is held together by that. He can siphon off of our emotional strength now that he has connected deeply, emotionally, to us. As long as we maintain that strength, remain those pillars, he thrives. And true to attachment parenting, in this safety and security, he is starting to be able to venture out and explore independently. He is becoming more and more “together” outside of our presence now too. Not falling apart at school or having serious issues when he is away from us. He is becoming much more functional. Everyone who comes into contact with him is finding him a joy.

In fact, a woman at church, who knew Jack when he went there with his mentors before us, just told me on Sunday that when she knew him before, he would not make eye contact or say much of anything when she tried to talk to him, but now they can have a real conversation. She said it’s remarkable how much he is able to look her is the eye now. And he is this way with everyone, his confidence and ability to connect has gone from night to day. 

One fun example: Just last night a neighbor came by while we were cooking dinner, to complain that Jack and his friends were driving too fast on our street on their dirt bikes. Jack came in while we were still chatting. We told him the neighbor had something to say to him. He turned around and gave our neighbor his full attention right away, with an apologetic look. The neighbor said, “Hey, I got little girls, you have to slow down.” We supported this, reminding him that he knew the rules. He nodded and apologized and said, “Okay, sorry, we will slow down.” It was just so natural and peaceful. It made me proud.

In the past, he would have run and hid from the confrontation. He would not have been able to remain in the room with that neighbor, let alone make eye contact and respond and apologize. He might have even stormed out and disappeared for awhile.

I love Jo Frost, the Supernanny. She goes into people’s homes and the parents say, Please fix our kids! And she says, every single time, Ummm, actually, I’m here to fix YOU. In less than a week, after the parents change their behavior, the children are miraculously transformed. And nearly every single time, without fail, the main thing the parents are doing wrong is they have fallen into a going-through-the-motions type of parenting because they are so exhausted. They are tuning their kids out and not truly connecting with them anymore.

With every family, this is one of the main issues Jo fixes. True connection, face-to-face, one-on-one. The parents are always shocked by the immediate turn-around of how calm and fulfilled their children become within minutes of having their focused attention. When they really start connecting to them. Nothing could be a more clear example of how much we as parents are the structure within which our children find their footing and their own emotional tethering. Or how vitally important connection is to developing a sense of calm and of empathy leading to health and happiness.

We must, as parents, work on ourselves to help our kids, make sure we are those pillars of maturity and health and strength that our children can look to and feel safe beneath. We must connect face-to-face, soul-to-soul, with them. And if we have children who have had hindered or disrupted attachment early in life, the only way to heal them is to help them connect with healthy souls of other people around them. It is this connection to other humans emotionally and spiritually that makes us feel the need to be good people, that gives us the desire to be kind and moral, that gives us the ability to siphon healthy emotional strength from the people in our lives that are guiding us. Which gives us the ability to do the same with God, connecting and receiving his strength and peace and joy as well.

I am so proud of my son for growing. But I am most proud of Jesse and myself for, under extreme conditions, creating an custom-tailored environment in which he can finally grow. Because we, as parents, need to understand just how much our children are looking to us to find out who they are.

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