The art of connection begins with deeply listening to people. I learned from my mentor Dr. Tarr that connection comes from right-brain to right-brain emotional relating to one another. Some people naturally can tune into another person’s emotions with extreme accuracy and be incredibly empathic. Others of us need to improve our ability to understand our own emotions and also the emotions of others.
My Story:
I learned about micro expressions in psychiatry residency from an older resident who was alexithymic (he was unable to feel other’s emotions). He told me he studied it so that he could understand people’s emotions. I watched the TV show “Lie To Me” which depicts Paul Ekman who through the power of observing people’s expressions and body language solves FBI and other crime cases. I soon after read his book and have since taken some advanced training. Subsequently I created a video that expresses highly emotional content. I broke down the video content of this which I will have linked in this post.
Lets start with Anger
When you see anger consider being curious about it.
As I see you express that I wonder if you are frustrated?
Perhaps you are frustrated about something?
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-29 04:14:522019-01-14 14:47:49How to notice and use micromicroexpression to connect
I have watched this video at least 100 times. Told my friends about it. Lectured about it. It changed my life, by showing me what is connection and disconnection. Perhaps it is why I am so fascinated by connection. When you see it, and really soak it in, think about all its implications, it changes everything!
Before I go any further, please watch it and pay close attention to it, and ask yourself these questions:
How does the mother and child connect with each other?
How does the child try to connect with the mother when the mother has a still face?
Here is what I noticed from the video:
1st the mother interacts beautifully with the infant. They are mirroring each other: smiling together, moving their hands together, following each other’s cues, and when the baby points, the mother looks. Of note, when studying healthy parents who are instructed to play with their infant, this type of attunement (“acting the same way at the same time”) only happens on average 13% at 3 months, 10% at 6 months and 21% at 9 months (Tronick, 2007 p 155). Acting the same at the same time only happens ~15% of the time in normal infant-mother interactions so don’t worry if you are not doing this all the time!
Various authors call this type of connection different things including: synchrony, reciprocity, matching, coherence, mutual delight, affective attunement, and intersubjectivity…
Then the mother is told to not move and hold a “still face”.
In this film a normal baby (without attachment issues) is interacting with a normal mother (without depression or drug/alcohol issues). In contrast we can think of many reasons why a “still face” would happen over and over frequently through a child’s life:
Alcoholic parent: the parent’s intoxication prevents normal mirroring
Drug using parent: consider a mom on meth who is frantic, hyper, and not emotionally responsive
A parent who is very self-focused
Parents being glued to the TV or phone (something for most of us to think about!)
A depressed mother or father whose face shows less emotion. A Study has show that depressed mothers were only in social play 5% of the time whereas infants of normal mothers were in play about 13% of the time (Tronick, 2007 p 160)
Imagine the baby moves from foster care to foster care where they are neglected
In this video, the baby has different tactics to re-engage the mother. Think about how we also have these tactics to engage other people! The child tries to signal the mother to reengage in all the ways he has in the past. This is done by either signaling with positive affective tones (e.g cooing), neutral affective tone (pick me up gestures), or negative affective tones (making a fuss).
You can see the child pointing, trying to touch the mother, and then scream… all things that normally would elicit some connection.
Then the child bites himself, goes into what I would consider a fight and flight sympathetic state. Anger expressions are evident. He tries to self comfort himself, which in the still face experiment is classified as oral sucking, self-clasping, or rocking. He will also try to shift his focus, on objects and on his self.
When the child goes into shut-down or dissociation, biologically the child enters a dorsal vagal state and certain higher functioning brain areas are going off line. He looks away. Body posture falls apart, and at this state, if you are tuned in, you might feel slightly light-headed even watching it. You can see the distress in part on this mother’s face, who is trying her best to follow the research proticol. In the still face experiment they classify these states as withdrawal, escape or avert/scan.
Research showed that when that child was re-intruduced to the same room months later cortisol levels (a stress hormone) were higher then normal.
How this changed my life:
1. I started noticing when I was disconnected or “still faced” with my family and those I interact with professionally.
2. I spent time breaking down the components of connection and disconnection which I will further elaborate in future posts.
3. I started noticing more and more the world of non-verbals.
4. I now know consciously why when I receive a “still face” from someone else it is so painful.
So have you ever noticed when someone is mirroring you or not mirroring you well? What have your experiences been like?
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-25 03:16:402019-01-14 15:23:14The Video That Changed My Life (The Still Face Experiment)
I am no longer on the market, but I have some friends and patients that I talk to about dating. There are three mistakes that people make in dating:
1. Not meeting the right people.
2. Not setting up a low intensity first date.
3. Feeling a deep commitment early on with someone you do not know.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-20 18:00:102019-01-14 14:47:49Connecting In A New World Of Dating.
I was taught by Dr. John Tarr as a resident physician and now co-teach with Dr. Tarr on Thursdays. We teach psychotherapy classes and review video with residents on their therapy sessions. Dr. John Tarr’s passionate portrayal of the inner workings of the mind have inspired me and informed many of my ideas on how to connect with people. Although I am sure Dr. Tarr could fill volumes with his knowledge, and likely most of my posts are influenced by him, I will try to summarize some of the things I hear most often.
1. You are entitled to your emotions.
Entitled here means that your subjective and unique emotional experiences have value. You have an experience which is unique and different and often comes with emotions (anger, sadness, fear, happiness, suprise). Shame and guilt will only send your emotions into your unconscious and cause psychological defenses to pop up.
Let me explain this deep but profound idea. If you have anger over someone cutting you off in line, and the anger is intense
Emotions-> Shame/Guilt-> Defenses
Some common defenses:
Intellectualization of anger: “I am NOT ANGRY… I just am following the truth of the situation and have studied legal”
Commonly happens when loosing a loved one, the sadness is so intense, and has no place, that the person dissociates it and feels disconnected. A defense against the sadness felt might be the person pours themselves into busy activity, binges on food, or drinks alcohol. What if we were to create a space for such emotion and not need to disconnect from it?
I can imagine if you are a spiritual person, being entitled to your emotions might sound off.
Therefore to connect with our own experiences, our emotions have value, meaning and we should be allowed to feel them.
Someone shares their frustration to b”she is entitled to feel angry,
2.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-17 20:47:052019-01-14 14:47:493 Life Lessons on Connection I learned From My Mentor Dr. John Tarr
I am speaking in this post to people who at times feel disconnected, out of body, dizzy, light headed, and un-grounded. These times can come around times of stress, trauma triggers, or sometimes people feel this perpetually for a season. I think if we tune into someone’s story, if they feel this, then we will also in part. For example, I sometimes will be talking to someone in a session, about something stressful, and I will get a sense that this is happening because I get a bit light headed. I will ask “do you feel light headed or having a hard time focusing?” And they usually describe something similar. Interestingly when my child was crying with colick this was the same experience I had. Or when in some argument a close friend, I will feel it then as well. More intense versions of it will happen in life or death situations. Sometimes people describe panic in this way.
How to exit disconnection:
1. Try to resonate (feel with) their disconnection
When you sit with someone who is in a state of disconnection or dissociation, you might feel it in part. This is your mirror neuron system, which allows you to experience a bit of what the other person is experiencing.
I first try to put into words why what they are talking about is disorienting, “it makes sense that you feel disoriented here, at this moment, because of what you have been talking about”…
2. Find the emotion.
In dissociation or disconnection, the emotional area of the brain is off line, it is important to reintegrate it. Often when we start to feel, the intensity of rage, fear or shame keeps us from coming out of a state of disconnection, and once again we go back into a dissociated state.
Sometimes we need to ask the question in different ways, to get us to feel.
What do you feel in your body while you tell me this?
What might you wish me to feel by telling me this?
What might you fear I might feel by telling me this?
I sometimes read clients’ micro expressions and then help them find their emotions.
We can journal an angry journal entry. Put words to all the reasons we are angry! “I am angry because my plans were interrupted, my rights violated, I was concerned for my wellbeing, expectations were broken, I was totally overloaded!” Then try to notice the body sensations of anger “my hands and legs tell me I am ready to fight, my neck is tight, my eyes glowing, I notice a tightness in my chest and stomach”…
We can journal our embarrassment and shame. I wanted to cover my face, cower in the corner, my own son stood up for me and I let him down, he found out that I lied to him for years. He was my biggest fan and now I lost his respect.
3. Become grounded in your body.
In disconnection, the right anterior cingulate (which has to do with interoceptive awareness) and the anterior cingulate cortex (which integrates bodily responses with behavioral demands and with emotional awareness) both have decreased activity. For centuries humans have felt at times disconnected. I speculate that every culture and time has tried to find solutions for this. Yoga, Tai chi, Pilates, and Qigong are examples of this, which essentially is focus on calm breathing in different body postures. My favorite exercise is to stand up and shift weight from your right to left leg. Focus only on the bottom of your feet. Start with shifting 50 lb back and forth. Then decrease it to 25 lb, then 15lb, then 10b. At this point if you can still feel the slightest shift of weight from right to left then continue this for several minutes. Likely you will notice that it grounds you! Another way I do this is by walking and focusing on the bottom of my feet. As you walk, return your focus to all the different sensations that occur simply by moving your feet up and down. For those who need a much more stronger sensation, it might be helpful to hold ice while lifting up your hands.
4. Doing mirroring exercises.
More on this later. But basically sing with others, laugh with others, dance with others. There is something about movement with others that is important. Improv seems to have different exercises to help groups move into connection. If you understand the mirror neuron system they seem less silly! Often without knowing why, disconnected clients gravitate towards these things, in order to find ways to ground themselves.
5. Optimizing your sensorium. Sensorium is not something most people think about, but I think it is a helpful concept to understand. Sensorium is our mental capacity at a given moment. If we are tiered, starved, sleep deprived, with no connection to loved ones, we have a lower sensorium then our baseline. Someone with dementia will have a lower base sensorium and therefore a small urinary infection will make them delirious with hallucinations and increased confusion. If you have obstructive sleep apnea (stop breathing thousands of times per night) then you will have lower sensorium then normal. Doing things that increase our bodies inflammation hurts our sensorium. Alcohol decreases our sensorium. To optimize our sensorium, we eat healthy, have moderate exercise, and eliminate certain medications, alcohol and drugs, and increase our sleep quality… I will blog more on this later.
6. Find your meaning and purpose.
Meaning and purpose activate your frontal lobe, and bring your brain into more integration. In disconnection our frontal lobe activity is actually decreased in brain scans. I find Rembrandt’s picture of the prodigal son and Henri Nouwen’s story “The Return of the Prodigal Son” has been very grounding in my life on a spiritual level. I have read the book which is Nouwen’s quest into the story behind the picture. I can visualize it in my mind when feeling disconnected. In one 2 year longitudinal study of a group of 596 medically ill elderly patients, feeling disconnection from God, designated by those who answered positive to “Questioned God’s love for me” increased their risk of death by 22% compared to those who did not (RR, 1.22 P=.05). (Pargament, 2001) I will therefore in my blog try to address connection and disconnection in this context as well.
Please write any comments on things you might add or have worked for you. Or if you have any questions or thoughts about what I might write on in more detail, leave a comment and I will try to address it in a further blog.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-16 02:42:452019-01-14 14:47:496 Ways To Move Out Of Disconnection.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-14 04:32:502019-01-14 14:47:49How to sit with a feeling…
Shame is more prevalent in our culture now then shame. We no longer think “I am bad” [guilt] but rather “I will be seen as bad” [shame]. In large part this is a change in how parenting is done.
Here is guilt inducing parenting which is a relic of the past:
“Don’t do that because it is wrong”
“How would you like it if somone treated you that way”
“I expect better from a big girl like you”
“I don’t enjoy punishing you, but it is for your own good”
More commonly shame inducing parenting is geared at the perception of the world looking in:
“What will people think if you wear that?”
“Other kids won’t want to play with you if you behave like that”
“You are embarasing me by your behavior today in public”
Photographer Ty Foster “Cones of Shame”
And so the dog above says it all. All to often, in the quest for curiosity and exploration, shame and guilt shut us down and lead to feelings of disconnection.
My question is rather how do we connect with others without inducing guilt or shame.
When a 1 year old is pulling off flowers from a bush, consider this response:
Lifting your child up away from the flower, the child starts to cry. In a soft, empathic tone “Wow lovie, that is really sad to not be able to play with that, lets come over and play with this instead.” Then the child is lifted off to another toy to play with. Call it empathy or emotional resonance followed by other options.
When a 2 year old pushes over another 2 year old. Rather then removing the two kids, I bring the little pusher over to look at his crying friend. I say to him “do you feel anything by watching your friend cry?” He tries to turn away, and I say “It is hard for you to see how you hurt your friend”
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-12 02:31:502019-01-14 14:47:49The Cone Of Shame
As a psychiatrist I see the multiplicity of problems that arise in early infanthood and play out in adulthood. So on Mother’s Day, what better way to remind mothers that their job, often a more ambigous and hidden wonder, is in fact (and I am merging together a lot of research here) the most inportant job for society and the world at large. If you find yourself with the ability to love, control your emotions, form friendship- you can thank your mother. It saddens me that more is not written about the mothering of famous people. For example, in looking into the Dali Lama’s mother I could find “His Holiness recalls his mother as undoubtedly one of the kindest people he has ever known” but not a discription of this by examples. The same is true for Jesus, little is known about what kind of parent she was, but we can speculate from scripture that she was humble, spiritual, kind, dedicated and thankful. In taking an adult attachment interview, I may ask can you give me several adjectives to describe your mother when you were young. Then I ask for specific examples. These specific examples are very helpful, much more so then adjectives like “kind” or “warm”.
1. Connection patterns are layed down in the first years of life that live on in adolecents and adulthood. It is well known that children’s attachment style (anxious, avoidant, disorganized or secure) which is identified as early as 9 months, influences the way the child will interact with people in adulthood. Being present, paying attention to your babies cues, feeding and comforting the baby when needed, and embracing motherhood leads to a securely attached child. This attachment with the mother, will influence every relationship that comes after.
2. Your mothering will be internalized into your child. A mother becomes internalized as a sense of love and confort in your child. Every time you held and nursed your child, helped your child when they were scard or hurt– you became a calming source of love that eventually gets internalized.
3. Emotional regulation is caught from mothering. By providing a stable attachment and an internalized calming figure, your child learns how to regulate strong emotions. Anger will thus not get out of control as easily and destroy, and fear will not keep your child from exploring the world and developing new things and ideas.
So consider mothering to be of upmost importance, life-transforming and world changing!
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-10 20:48:332019-01-14 14:47:495 Reasons Mothering Is The Most Important Job In The World.
What is Connection…? Attachment? Embrace? Love? Harmony between people? Is Connection something that can be learned, experienced, grown in? YES. Journey with me into the art of connection. Perhaps we can grow together in the process.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.png00David Puder/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/logoEC-david-puder-.pngDavid Puder2015-05-09 04:37:262019-01-14 14:47:49Read Me
