Speaker 1: 0:00

Do you ever get frustrated with how you parent? Do you ever wonder to yourself why did I act that way? Why did I react that way to my child's behavior? Well, part of the reason is because of something that's completely in your unconscious, something that you don't have any active control over, something called your internal working model, and that's what we're going to talk about in this video. What is your internal working model, how did you develop it and what does it have to do with your parenting? I'm Ron Gord. I'm an attorney who works with children and families, and I provide co-parenting education to attorneys and parents.

Speaker 1: 0:35

The best way to think of an internal working model is that it is an active, as opposed to static, representation in your mind, a model of the world and your place in it, specifically as it relates to attachments, as it relates to how you connect with your romantic partner, your children, your parents, other family members, anyone with whom you've made an attachment. The benefit of an inner working model is that it gives some guidance in advance about what you can expect in the world, what you can expect from the people, what you can expect from the people with whom you're interacting. It can provide a shortcut that helps you navigate the world more quickly and efficiently. That's the good case. That's the best case scenario. This idea of being efficient and helpful works great if you grew up in an environment in which you were able to develop secure attachments. If you're able to develop secure attachments, then you see the world as being comprised of people who maybe you can trust, who will have good intentions, who aren't trying to hurt you. But if you grew up in a world in which you didn't develop secure attachments as a child, your inner working model may not be so helpful. It's an adaptation to the environment you experienced when you were growing up, but that environment may not exist now. What may have been helpful and protective when you were a kid is now hurtful. When we're younger, our brains are much more plastic. We're able to change faster on the fly. As we get older, the more we get like the Titanic. It takes a long time to swerve to avoid that iceberg.

Speaker 1: 2:08

As children grow, their daily interactions with their care providers starts to create this scaffolding upon which all of their other psychological development is going to be based. They're starting to get what are called scripts, these shorthands that help them understand the world and their place in it. Here's an example of a healthy script that a child might develop with secure attachment. Their script might be if I fall down and get hurt, I want to be able to go to my care provider and they're going to take care of me. They're not going to be mad at me, they're going to take care of me in a loving way. If you grew up in an environment in which you didn't receive that kind of parenting, then your script may be different. Your script may be as a child if I fall down and hurt my knee, then my parents are going to be mad at me for interrupting them. My parents are going to tell me that I wasn't being careful enough. My parents are going to yell at me. That's a different script. But that script is also based on that child's daily interactions with their caregiver. That script is reinforced daily by negative interactions.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Now, under Bowlby's theory, these inner working models aren't just niceties. They're survival tactics, because it's so closely ingrained with the survival of a child who isn't able to take care of themselves. Natural selection has made it such that these are really incredibly important things to us in our development. It's so important and so ingrained in us that it's not just giving us a map and understanding of the world around us and what we can expect of our caregiver. It's also telling us how we should view ourselves, because this is an interrelated process and, from what we view of our caregiver's response to us, we're starting to learn about ourselves. If our caregiver tells us through their actions that we're important to them, that we should be coming to them for assistance because we're valuable, they want to take care of us, well then we start to get the idea, as kids, that we're valuable, that we're lovable, that we deserve the love that we receive. But if your caregiver is inconsistent, if your caregiver is not warm and responsive, then the reflection back that you're seeing of yourself, the reflection off of your caregiver that tells you who you are in this world, is that you're not worthy of love, that you're not worthy of time and attention. And so the inner working model is not just of the world around you, it's of you yourself. That's where we develop our self-esteem. It's a view of yourself. That's where we develop our self-esteem. It's a script about us too.

Speaker 1: 4:37

So let's get back into the different ways in which children can develop inner working models, based on how they've experienced their parents, how they've experienced the care they receive from their caregivers. So when you have a child who has a secure attachment, their experience has been and their inner working model is it's safe for me to go out and explore the world and when I need to, I can come back and seek comfort. That's a child with a secure attachment. Now let's talk about children who don't have secure attachment. Let's look a little bit more about how they view the world, and when we're talking about these strategies, we're thinking about primarily threat-related strategies, because that's where Bowlby was coming from. Bowlby was coming from attachment in interworking models as related to safety from threat, that biological imperative to stay alive, to be able to grow and to reproduce, and so this is primarily in the context of threats, and so this is primarily in the context of threats.

Speaker 1: 5:34

So children who don't have a secure attachment, who don't have that confidence in their parents, they tend to engage in minimizing or maximizing behaviors when it comes to threats. The children who engage in minimizing behaviors are the ones who have experienced a great deal of rejection when they sought comfort from their caregiver. These children have come to view their caregiver as someone who has rejected them, as a source of protection from threat and they've come to view themselves as unworthy of the protection. These children perceive themselves as being at risk of alienating their caregiver. Remember, this is the person who has rejected or rebuffed them in the past. These are the kids who don't feel like they're potentially worthy of protection. They still have this biological imperative to be close to their caregiver, because closeness to some degree better than zero implies access to protection, even if it's not always granted granted. So these children have a deep desire to maintain proximity to their caregiver, but they know that to do that, they can't alienate the caregiver by being more of a disturbance, by being more of a nuisance, because they perceive themselves as being someone who's a nuisance to the caregiver. So they're not going to show their anger or frustration at not being given the care they immediately need.

Speaker 1: 6:53

These children aren't going to be the ones who throw a temper tantrum. They're going to be the ones who are quietly upset about the situation, because these children are worried about alienating the caregiver, who doesn't seem to care about them. They're going to start to repress their own emotional responses. They're going to start stifling the expressions on their face, the tone of their voice, their activity. They're going to bottle it all up. They learn this over time through tons of interactions and as these children get older they're going to be the ones who aren't expressive of their needs, who keep things close. So those were kids who minimize.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Now let's talk about kids who maximize. Now these would be the ones that we think of as an anxious attachment. So these children have had inconsistent responses from the caregiver in the past. Sometimes their caregiver comes and is helpful. Sometimes they kind of feel rejected or ignored. These aren't the kids who are worried about alienating their caregiver like the ones who had the minimizing style, those kids who would have an avoidant attachment. These kids are trying to get all that attention that they can. They think, well, if I can just get this caregiver's attention, then they may do something for me. They're not worried about alienating them. So these children are going to be expressive and loud. They're the ones who are going to throw the tantrum. They're going to express their displeasure. They're not going to down-regulate themselves. The view of these children is I'm only worthy of care when I'm as big and loud and asking for it as possible. So these children are not learning to regulate themselves well and as they get into adult relationships that's going to cause a lot of problems for them as well, different problems than the ones who have the avoidant attachment, but problems nonetheless.

Speaker 1: 8:37

This idea of interworking models hopefully to you is a little bit interesting, but the question is how does this relate to parenting or even co-parenting? The idea is this as we develop these interworking models, they become so deeply ingrained in our unconscious that they continue with us as we get older. It can start to feel like the intellectual side of our brain is really in charge. Sometimes for some of us, that's what we like to tell ourselves, but the truth is is that that intellectual brain was constructed on top of the development of the emotional brain. Those developmentally impactful experiences that we had as children, even if we can't remember them because we didn't even have language yet to organize them for ourselves, those are still there. The impact on our body of those experiences is still there, and even though we like to think of ourselves as intellectual beings driven by our intellect instead of our emotions, our emotions are just right there underneath the surface.

Speaker 1: 9:37

How many times have you been surprised by an emotional response to something? How many times have you watched a commercial? If you still watch commercials and you had a tear fall. Unexpectedly, it comes out of the blue. It's surprising. It's because the undercurrent beneath all of our intellectualizations is that emotional brain. And when we get overwhelmed, when we get dysregulated, when we get upset or snippy and we don't understand our behavior, it's because these constructs that were developed as children emotionally take over. This is true in parenting as well.

Speaker 1: 10:14

To have truly responsive parenting, one of the things you need to do is to be able to see your children as they are. But if you have an inner working model that is unhelpful, if the script that you developed is that you're not lovable or you can't trust people, or that when people show big emotions it's a manipulation, well then that's going to affect how you view your children too. If you have an inner working model that tells you people aren't safe, people can't be trusted, that you yourself aren't lovable, that is going to skew how you view your child. Your child is going to go from an innocent child who is not trying to manipulate you, who is really upset, who has a real need. They're going to go from that to this annoying kid who is just trying to manipulate you into getting what they want. That is a change in perspective that is created by your inner working model.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So if you find yourself routinely saying, man, this kid is just manipulative, you know, if you think to yourself whenever your child is crying or very often when your child is crying that they're not really hurt, that they just want something, that they just want something, then you should ask yourself what is it in your experience that led you to the point where your view of your child is that they're just a little manipulator, like the big manipulators that you see in this world? There's something there, potentially, that is skewing your perspective of your child. Is it possible that your two or three-year-old is just highly manipulative? No, I don't think that's true. Now, certainly when a child is a toddler, they're starting to get an understanding of how to interact with their parents. They're starting to learn which parent is more likely to do what they want them to do.

Speaker 1: 12:15

But these children are not masterminds. They're not laying out these long-term plans to get what they want. When you see your child fall and skin their knee, telling them it's not that bad, telling them something that implies that they're manipulating, is really saying more about you than it is about them. So sit back and think about your responses to your child Think if you're putting things on them that are more about you than about them. If you find yourself being one of these parents, one of these parents that has sort of a negative view of their child's motivations and intentions, especially when they're younger, then I encourage you to try to become more insightful, to start being able to see things more from your child's point of view. Very often, what it'll mean if you're having these negative connotations of your child's behavior is that it's really just a reflection of your negative view of the world as opposed to the inner working of your child's brain.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Being an insightful parent means being open to consider that you misread your child's intention, being open to getting feedback from your child about how they're feeling in response to how you've interacted with them, being open to challenging a problematic behavior from your child and not assigning to them all of the negative inferences that you would assign to an adult who acts the same way, because you're not an adult. If you can be this sort of insightful parent, if you can see things from a child's point of view, if you cannot ascribe malice to a child's misbehavior, if you can start to see that a child's misbehavior is a sign of a need that hasn't been met, then you're on your way to raising a child who's securely attached. If you're able to do that, you're going to be raising a child who feels like their thoughts and their feelings and their needs are understood and respected. You're raising a child who's going to feel like they're worthy of love, that they're valuable, that they independently have worth in this world, that they're not just an annoyance, that they're not a bad person. So if you find yourself having sort of the worst thoughts about your child's intentions, I ask you to please reconsider.

Speaker 1: 14:34

I ask you to please look and see. Is that how you see other people in the world? Is that how you view the majority of your relationships? If I were to ask you how much can you trust other people? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being I can trust them a lot and 10 being I can't trust them at all what would your answer be? Would you be a 10 out of 10,? I can't trust people at all. If so, then that applies to your child too. It's not accurate to say you can't trust people at all. It's not accurate to say that your child just has the worst of intentions. You're looking at the world through glasses that are unhelpful. You're looking at the world through glasses that are unhelpful. Maybe it's time to take those off. Thank you for listening to this video. Hope you found it useful. Have a good day.