HELP FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND THERAPISTS OF CHILDREN

When our children get upset, often our biggest struggle isn’t what is happening in front of us, but with what is going on inside our own heads. Circle of Security has a term for this: they call it “shark music.” 

 

Glen Cooper, one of the Circle of Security originators, video-recorded movement down a wooded path toward a beach from the viewer’s perspective. The first version of this is accompanied by Pachelbel's Canon. The audience is taken on a serene walk through nature, and is rewarded with a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean at the end.

 

The first time I watched it years ago, the scene injected me with a sense of peace, and I enjoyed this rare treat of relaxation at work. The second time the scene plays, the music is replaced with the theme song to Jaws. Going down the path to the beach becomes uncomfortable this time. By the time the beach comes into view, my stomach was churning and I felt the familiar two simultaneous urges: to look away and to see what would happen next. But nothing happened next. It was the same scene as before, just different music.

 

The idea is that your children’s behaviors are basically harmless. Implicit memories (memories that aren’t images in our head, but feelings that are kept from as early as our time in the womb) are why we get so upset in reaction to our children’s strong emotions. This theory says that when we were left alone to deal with our feelings as young children, it left a hurt that returns whenever something, like a child’s cry, reminds us of it. 

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According to Circle of Security, the trick to overcoming our negative reactions to children’s feelings is to realize that when we are triggered, it is the past we are reacting to, not the present. In order to become present with children in their hard moments, we can remember that we are hearing shark music, and that it is tainting our view of the situation.

 

Remembering that can in the moment be difficult. Here’s why: when we are angry, our minds do something called “cognitive tunneling.” This concept refers to a phenomenon in which certain thoughts come into our awareness, or tunnel, and other thoughts stay out. Anger makes it so that only thoughts that support our anger come into the tunnel, and thoughts that would work against our anger stay outside of the tunnel. 

 

When we tunnel, we can only see our children as annoying brats. Only memories of other times they challenged us come into focus. The good memories of when they were cute or cooperative are hard to fathom because they are kept out of our brain’s tunnel.

 

You may have felt sorry for the things you said and did with a child when you were angry, and then resolved that next time, you would remember this or that to keep you from saying or doing things you would regret. But the next time you got angry, it didn’t happen. That is because of tunneling.