Intensive II Preview

0:00 Welcome to the intensive level two. Uh this is absolutely my favorite course. I get to talk about things I don't usually get to talk about or only briefly uh in other uh uh settings and venues. And uh and my favorite audience for a number of reasons. Uh one is if you survived already at least 22 hours of me and have come back for more, uh you know, I I I obviously I feel very invited. Uh so uh uh thank you uh for coming back.

0:43 And also the uh the spread of the audience both in terms of this particular presentation as we're taping as well as the distance ed uh distance education uh students themselves representing every uh helping profession um parents, grandparents, teachers, uh psychologists, social workers, uh pediatricians, and nurses, uh psychiatrists, uh and uh just every profession, counselors, uh play therapists, and so on. And so I like speaking to that group because when we do so, uh uh it there is a way of of realizing uh that uh the uh when we can distill something to the essence, the uh application is universal. So this is a challenge.

1:35 Um this course of uh is an extension of level one. It is built on the foundations of that material. Uh I'm going to be discussing eight uh or perhaps you could uh count them differently uh eight to 10 uh of the challenging childhood problems uh all rooted in attachment and stuckness. Uh in some versions of level one, I introduced this uh but only briefly for about an hour or so. Uh some of you will have heard me in different uh settings and venues uh talk about aggression. I do a three-day course in aggression.

2:15 Uh talk about counterwill. Um uh perhaps even uh talk about alarm. Uh but in this particular uh uh course, uh we see we link them all together and in so doing, it sheds light on these problems in a much different way. And I haven't uh been able to do this in any other venue. Uh like the level one, this material will apply uh to in all arenas. You can look at it personally.

2:49 Uh many people who take the level two uh end up very much uh thinking about themselves, especially when we get to the alarm problems and anxiety and the neuroses and the things that we all have. Uh these uh you know, these are ones that very much uh can look at in terms of ourselves, but it's meant to apply to every arena. When I first of all uh started the intensive the level one, I I tried to to make it applicable.

3:19 Uh I made it open to adult uh adult treatment as well. Uh but since then I've I've very much made my focus uh the uh arenas that have to do with children, the venues that have to do with children, and my favorite of course is the parent consulting. And so I will tend to make my examples uh more in that area. Uh but all you have to do if you're listening from a different application, it's fairly easy to transpose to whatever application that you are listening from.

3:56 Uh as I said, the uh the material is founded on the level one material. Uh so I'll go there uh just to uh to briefly review the main constructs. I won't take much time. Uh this will all be familiar with you. Uh but in uh in level one, uh we identified three dimensions, three of the keys, ways of making sense of children from inside out. The attachment uh key, the vulnerability key, the maturation key. These come from three traditions in psychology. Uh the attachment theory, uh classic psychology that had to do with human vulnerability and woundedness, and uh much of today's neuroscience on defendedness as well as maturation theory, which is from the approach of a developmental approach, the idea uh that uh that the primary uh issue of uh of development is to realize one's potential as a human being. This takes a lifetime, but most of the progress is supposed to be made during childhood.

5:05 And we divided this into three uh processes, but first the idea was is to master each of these dimensions, looking at a child from each of these areas. And then as you come to look at this, slowly you begin to see children three-dimensionally. It takes some time. First of all, you ask yourself the question, how is this child a creature of attachment? Uh where do I see issues of vulnerability and defendedness? How do I see this child in terms of the realization of his potential as a human being? And then slowly as you begin to ask these questions, they start coexisting, and you see three-dimensionally. And as you do so, there is a sense of being able to make sense of children from inside out. And then we also divided the processes of development uh primarily into three, the adaptation, integration, and emergence.

6:00 And that there was the the motor of development uh was emotion. That emotion was the engine of maturation. And that soft hearts were required. A child needs to be easily moved, and the pivotal feelings are feelings of futility, of fulfillment, uh feeling the futility of fulfillment, and of dissonance. And when a child loses access to these feelings, uh there is stuckness. And that is a primary construct of and in development, the idea of arrested development. Uh that uh we all grow older, but we don't all grow up.

6:38 And uh and this is a huge continuum. And so the idea of stuckness was the theme of the level one, which is the theme of any developmental approach, is the arrested development. And finally, the three-pronged approach, uh as you can understand already and you've ever appreciated, I'm sure, as you've listened to this material, I tend to have uh I like the the number three. And uh and I like the number three because it is the minimum number of sides that you can surround a phenomena or a a circle with, a circle representing a phenomena or problem or an issue. And so it's the minimum number of sides. So it always says to me as a theorist that if I've done my work and I've distilled things to the essence, I will see three sides to something.

7:34 And so I it's always rather reinforcing when I get to those three sides, it is a crystalline form in all of nature. Uh to this is that's why in terms of you uh you see this coming up over and over again. And the three-pronged approach to stuckness, of course, which is context, uh the attachment, which is compensating for stuckness, not trying to push ahead, but finding a way of working around the problems of children, and uh and ultimately uh correcting the root problem, working towards getting kids unstuck. It's on this foundation that the level two begins. And so it is it is building on this foundation. So all of this will be there, and now we go a step further. Uh we go now to focus uh on on attachment and stuckness as roots of uh of these common problems.

8:33 Now just a bit on the developmental approach uh to childhood problems. Uh the developmental approach is very different than the two other prevailing approaches. Uh if you're working in the field, you'll be very familiar with uh either the behavioral approach or the medical approach or both of those approaches. If you're a clinician, uh you will need to be aware of the medical approach uh because of the current uh uh the current uh dependency upon diagnosis uh for for treatment. Uh the developmental approach is a distinctly different approach. And and you probably will have quite appreciate this already, but it bears repeating because over and over again, I get with people who are expecting this to be uh to to help educate them in the medical approach or the behavioral approach. And I'm not doing this. This is this is a distinctly different approach.

9:31 Uh and so the the developmental approach, we're looking at how problems develop. So how they form. Uh and from this understanding how they can be reversed. If you don't know how something has come to be, then how can we know how to undo it? And that's the whole point. Uh the the title of my book on bullying is, you know, is is basically how bullies are made and then can be unmade. How they are begotten and then can be reversed. But from the developmental approach, you can't just go and try to intervene if you don't know how it's come to be in the first place. And so that's the whole idea here of how problems develop. We trace problems from their beginnings.

10:23 To their manifestations as opposed to working backwards. The prevailing idea both from a behavioral and medical approach is usually to work backwards. And even most of classic psychology worked with adults. Freud, Jung, Adler, they all worked with adults and they made their projections backwards to children. Now the difference in a truly developmental approach is you don't work backwards. You work forwards. You start at the very beginning of things. And of course neuroscience is now helping us with this because it starts right at the beginning and we see how things unfold. We know that the alarm system is active in the in the in the fetus by six months of age.

11:10 We can begin to study how the alarm system work. Now the classical psychologist did not have that benefit and so weren't able to build on that knowledge. So we're starting at the beginnings.