Composure

Composure is the first topic Dr. Becky Bailey presents in the Conscious Discipline series. Composure is the act of willing oneself into a calm and receptive state. Every parent and/or teacher has had the experience of losing one’s cool with children. I am often amazed that a tiny, two foot tall creature can cause a big capable adult to swirl into such ridiculous out-of-control behavior, but boy oh boy can they ever! Seeking composure is the strategy we can use to refute the emotional spin we too often find ourselves sucked into.

Brain Fact:

When are we ‘hot’ (angry, hurt, extremely frustrated, afraid), the oxygen in our brain actually drops out of the frontal cortex (behind your eyes) in to the brainstem (at the base of your skull). The frontal cortex is the thinking department of your brain. The brain stem is the reaction/keep you alive part of the brain. The brainstem is a great part of the brain to oxygenate if you have to lift the car off your child or run away from the cheetah. It’s not so useful when you are trying to evaluate options, listen and think! For those functions, the brain depends on a well oxygenated pre-frontal cortex, at the very top of your brain.

Dr. Bailey observes that people become reactive when we feel threatened. It’s a bit perplexing that a child’s behavior or comment can result in an adult feeling threatened, but it happens every day. We all have sense of personal ‘buttons’ - experiences that seem to inevitably cause us to react. Self examination can help us understand our ‘buttons’, and admitting that these moments of reaction are likely to occur and making a plan for how we want to behave when we feel ourselves erupting, can short circuit the reaction dance (oxygen drops to the brainstem and we feel like we can’t think, so we react) and can return the adult to a thinking and conscious disciplinarian!

So let’s play with this idea of being less reactive and more thoughtful with our children. How can we trick our brains? How can we escape the pattern of oxygen dropping to the brainstem? Dr. Bailey proposes three primary strategies:

Strategies:

  1. BREATHE - actively send oxygen back to the top of your brain. Stop and take 3-5 deep full breaths. It might help you to stretch your body out (when we are mad, we often scrunch ourselves up). Feel your neck and body relax. Amazingly often, just breathing helps us reorganize and face the situation at hand more adeptly.

  2. TAKE BACK YOUR POWER - change your language from “you can’t or don’t make me…” to “I am going to…” Remind yourself that you are in charge; you are not a victim. When we let kids (or anyone else) push our buttons and make us feel victimized or threatened, we lose our capacity to think. When we perceive that we are being victimized, our brain doesn’t know that the victimizer is three years old, but instead it would respond if the lion was coming after you — sending you the oxygen down to the safety section (brain stem), which prevents us from thinking our best thoughts.

  3. USE LANGUAGE OF SAFETY rather than language of fear “Come hold my hand so I can keep you safe” vs. “Get over here before somebody grabs you!” Fear escalates the cycle of reactive behavior, drives oxygen to the brainstem and prevents us from being our most capable. Help you and your child rise above fear into a plane of thoughtful connected behavior!

Maggie Sprattmoran, LCC Executive Director (1983-2013)