How is family change possible (when I feel so stuck)?

By Sally Prebble (PhD), Cofounder Peace Talks NZ

How is it possible to create change when your family life is feeling impossible? How is it possible to get unstuck when you're knee-deep in the bog of overwhelm, with the sticky mud of daily parenting challenges oozing over the top of your boots? How can you retrieve your footing and float gently back to a place of much greater ease and peace?

In our work with parents, we've noticed some pretty reliable patterns about what works - and what doesn't - when it comes to changing tricky family dynamics.  

I like to visualise the process of change within families as a pyramid, with each layer providing a solid foundation for the next. In this article, I want to introduce you to this pyramid of change, and how understanding it can support you to make lasting change, while also giving you a reliable method to come back to anytime you feel stuck. 

The Change Pyramid

Level 1: Increasing your capacity

Level 2: Reconnecting with yourself

Level 3: Reconnecting with your children

Level 4: Peaceful ways to manage conflict  

Putting the change pyramid into action

How do I start when I am so low?

How to create a self-feeding system

The Change Pyramid

So, what is this reliable pyramid-shaped flotation device? It involves four levels:

Level 1: Our capacity (e.g. our energy, resources, motivation, skills and understanding etc)

Level 2: Our connection with ourselves, connection

Level 3: Our Connection with our children

Level 4: Peaceful ways of managing behaviour and conflict.

It works like this: as we increase our capacity (i.e. energy, understanding, skills, etc.), we are better resourced to find a grounded, peaceful inner relationship with ourselves (e.g., be present with our emotions, self-regulate etc). Greater self connection support our ability to create close, affectionate, easy relationships with our children. When we are more connected to ourselves and our children, we are better able to manage behaviour and conflict peacefully and there tends to be less of it to manage. 

This may seem obvious enough, but the funny thing is, in the midst of our busy lives, most of us (myself included) try to invert this pyramid. When we are struggling with a challenging parenting situation or family crisis, we are drawn to starting at the top of the pyramid by focusing intently on 'fixing' our child’s behaviour. It seems logical to us that, if we can't get our child into the car for school each morning, that this is where we should put our energy to fix the problem.

This is where much parenting advice falls short. We may be offered excellent advice and skills for managing difficult behaviour and challenging situations, but without any focus on the lower levels, these techniques are very unlikely to work well for us.

By focusing our attention at the top of the pyramid, we're likely to neglect important foundational pieces lower down.  

We might be trying to empathise in a heartfelt moment with our child, but if we have not taken the time to self connect first, we might inadvertently convey our pain rather than compassion, leaving our child confused. Or we might try to engage our child in dialogue to resolve a difficult moment; if we have not first connected to our child and created a solid relationships base, our words will likely fall on deaf (probably hurt and angry) ears. These failed attempts might lead us to believe that all of this parenting advice is unrealistic and fanciful.

For meaningful and lasting change to take place in our families, each step on the change pyramid needs to be attended to, and a certain solidity is needed at each level before progressing higher. 

1. Increasing Your Capacity

As parents, so often we are living at the very edge of our capacity. We are worn down from supporting our children and the demands of keeping life going. We are conditioned to push ourselves to operate beyond our capacity, and to “keep going” when we are feeling stressed. We are often quite overwhelmed and dysregulated, and end up reacting to our children in ways that are not aligned with the way we want to parent them.

When people operate outside of their capacity, they have far less ability to solve problems, reason, manage emotions, empathise and engage in a caring way with others. This means that conflict, challenging behaviour and family tension are all much more likely when we are operating outside of our capacity. Unfortunately, this is also the time when we most need everything to work smoothly! 

Rebuilding a basic level of capacity is therefore the top priority for making changes in your family life. It can also seem challenging, as it requires commitment, self-responsibility, and a degree of faith. To care for my capacity, I must take seriously how important I am to my family, and how important my capacity is to all of our functioning. 

Prioritising capacity means reassessing what I say 'yes' to, learning to say 'no' to things that drain my energy, and taking responsibility for how I care for my time and energy. This is the first and most important thing I can do to create meaningful change in my family. 

2. Reconnecting with yourself

An important step towards increasing your capacity is how to connect with yourself: returning to your body, noticing what's happening in your inner world moment-to-moment, regulating your emotions, calming your nervous system and understanding your needs and how you can meet them regularly and consistently. The skills of self connection include:

• Learning to interrupt your habitual patterns of thinking and reacting and build awareness of your feelings and needs.
• Gentle practices to rewire your frayed nervous systems and learn to self regulate in times of challenge.
• Creating daily habits that support you to stay regulated, present and to care for your needs with compassion.

Having regular habits of self connection can start you on a gradual path of connecting with your inner world so that you can find a solid, stable place from which to parent your children.

 3. Reconnecting with your children

​​The third layer of the pyramid is often the easiest to overlook. We might be able to convince ourselves to do some more yoga or get a bit more down time to connect with ourselves, but finding the time to reconnect with our children? This can seem...frivolous somehow.

It seems so habitual for us to think that happy, joyful, fun time with our kids should FOLLOW them behaving a bit better. We might reason: If I give them lots of extra smiles, cuddles and shoulder pats when they are still behaving like THAT (*glancing over at a pile of fighting, snarling children*), won't this just reward their outrageous behaviour?

This kind of logic is the deep and painful legacy of behaviourism - the idea that our children are basically like lab pigeons - we can use reward and punishment to shape them into fine, upstanding citizens.

Unfortunately, your child is not (I presume) a pigeon. 

Despite the popular ideas that you see in TV and movies about effective parenting being about discipline or firm boundaries, the only true power any of us have with our children is the magical, ancient, evolutionary power of connection. And this power is really freakin....powerful. 

Cooperation and care and family peace cannot be born out of fear or control, reward or punishment (for reasons that we are going to explore at length); they can (and reliably do) arise from a child with a settled nervous system, who will follow you anywhere because of the deep attachment bond you share.

Our ancestors knew this instinctively, but part of what makes modern parenting so challenging is that there are multiple pressures on our connection with our children that we are working against.

As modern parents, the connection with our children is under enormous strain from the stresses of a busy, hectic world that does not prioritise this precious human connection. When the connection is strained, our peace and functioning as a family will suffer. And so will we.

Creating a strong connection with our children is not about grand gestures, extravagant outings, amazing Christmas presents or saying perfect words or exotic holidays; it is about how we interact with our children in the mundane moments of our daily lives together. Connection is a strong, malleable rope made up of thousands of threads, thousands of individual loving interactions that take place in the ordinary individual moments of daily life. 

The truth is, by virtue of your nature as a human being, you already have all the resources needed for a peaceful, easy connection with your children.

We evolved to live as deeply interconnected creatures; our brains, bodies and nervous systems are perfectly designed to support this. Connection is not a new skill we need to learn so much as a birthright we might rekindle.

We can learn to redirect energy we are currently leaking into managing behaviour challenges, guilt and conflict and pour this into reliable, consistent, joyful, loving daily connection with our children.​

 4. Learning peaceful ways to manage conflict

The final layer of the pyramid - the icing on the cake - is learning peaceful ways to manage conflict and tension with our children. 

For many of us, challenging behaviour and disagreements with our children are a pretty constant feature of our family lives. When there is tension, we tend to revert to patterns that we learned when we were children -  blaming, judging, criticising, force and threats, reactivity or withdrawing and giving in. 

We don’t know how to hold onto our needs in moments of conflict and tension in a way that will also maintain connection and care for our child’s needs. We don’t know how to establish understanding when we disagree and find solutions that care for everyone’s needs.

There is no magic bullet to make behaviour challenges and conflict go away. But we can learn ways to manage these inevitable daily struggles in a way that will bring about much more peace and understanding and less resentment and rebellion. 

In order to manage behaviour challenges and conflict in a peaceful way involves learning how to:

• Express ourselves honestly, without judgement or criticism
• Enter into open dialogue with our children, where we can hold their needs and ours with care
• Understand and hear what is really important for our children even if we disagree with them,
• Make clear, doable requests that our children are more likely to be to hear what we need.

The magical part is that, once you learn how to navigate these daily challenges using peaceful methods, moments of conflict and tension can become a doorway to greater connection with yourself and your children.​ Your life can be a whole lot easier!

Putting the change-pyramid in to action

What I have witnessed time and time again, both in my own life and in those I have worked with, is that bringing these elements together creates a really reliable pathway for lasting change in our families. It works, reliably, because each part supports the other parts and creates a self feeding system. I only need to pt a bit of effort in at the beginning to start this process off, and then the system will start to feed itself.

When I am more connected to myself, I am more regulated, present and able to know clearly what I need and therefore naturally better able to connect to my children. 

When I am more deeply connected to my children, they are naturally more settled, operating from a calm and open nervous system state, and tend to behave in ways that are easier for me to manage. Conflict and tension arise less often.

But when it does arise, if I have the skills to manage the conflict and tension that comes up in a peaceful way, and we are able to move through these challenges in a way that cares for our relationships (level 3) and cares for my inner peace and capacity (levels 1 and 1). Whatever life throws at us, we have the skills and inner resources to manage. 

How do I start when I am so low?

If this worked so well, you might be asking, why doesn't this "self feeding system" kick off for ME?

So here's the kicker. We know that, as modern parents, many of us are very low in capacity. We are tired, drained, overworked, stressed, anxious and lacking in support. The challenge here is that any change at all (even changing a t-shirt) requires a certain foundational layer of capacity - meaning that you need to have enough energy, resources, time, motivation, skill, and support to make the first move. 

Without a certain capacity, it is almost impossible to proceed to the higher levels of the pyramid.

Sometimes, we can muster sufficient inner resources to make the first step: we can start a new habit, learn a new thing, take some inspiration, practice a new skill or change the way we do something and that will start the process moving. All we need is a little shift at one of these levels to create movement and a self-feeding system will likely emerge. We have seen the power of this, and are in awe of how this pyramid of change can take place in people’s lives.

Other times we need some serious support from outside to make this kind of change happen. When we are feeling really stuck, we may need a serious boost in our capacity, in the form of empathy from others, support and care, motivation from a community, some serious hand-holding and care. The power of a caring community cannot be underestimated for increasing your motivation and energy for change. 

Creating a self-feeding system

The good news is, each step that you take to make change in any of these levels will also massively increase your capacity. 

• When you are more self connected, your inner resources to manage your life increases. Your capacity increases.
• When you are more connected to your children, the amount of strain on you reduces, and your capacity increases.
• When we learn to manage behaviour and conflict in a peaceful way, the amount of energy leaking into conflict reduces. So your capacity increases. 

This creates a self feeding system. 

This pyramid of change works so effectively precisely because our capacity, our inner connection, our relationships and our ways of engaging in challenging moments are all deeply interconnected. Change at any level creates change and movement at the other levels (for good or bad).

If you're feeling stuck, whether it's just today or in your life in general, take a moment to ponder this pyramid. Which level are you stuck at? Pick the lowest level at which you notice stuckness and start there.

Make a little change, any change, to create more space at that level, and notice what happens elsewhere in your life. 

By Sally Prebble (PhD), Cofounder Peace Talks NZ