Taking up space: unashamedly

Recently I came across the poem Unashamed performed by the amazing poet and artist Harry Baker.

I have seen Harry perform live several times and hearing him again brought back good memories. I am always struck by Harry’s ease in using words. He is often funny, clever and at times the poems really stir my spirit. Harry’s poem Unashamed is one such poem that moves my heart and soul.

Harry writes that he wrote the poem Unashamed for a friend during lockdown and that it has now become a New Year’s Resolution to himself. I think I am going to follow Harry’s lead and make this poem a guiding light for me at the start of this challenging year!

‘Home is where you can be open-hearted’

Unashamed got me thinking about what it has been like for me, for so many of us, during these periods of lockdown. Spending more time at home with our families, maybe a partner, our children. For some they have found themselves with someone they perhaps would not choose to be with. For me, yes, I love my family very much, but on the whole, I am not usually with them 24/7!

During the first lockdown I realised my children were seeing me do things, be things they hadn’t really ever seen before, or certainly not since they were much younger children, before they started school. As I carried out routine everyday tasks that form part of running a household and a family, such as cleaning and washing, one of my children reflected that being an adult must be “so boring!”

Spending more time at home my children also see me in different ‘hats’; for example, the way I might speak to others on a call whilst I am working, the time I spend at the computer, the time I spend ironing their clothes. At times I find their gaze intrusive. I realise that they are perhaps seeing more of me than I am immediately comfortable with. This got me wondering. How much of myself do I show to others? To myself? How truly ‘open-hearted’ am I really? Over the years I think I have become quite adept at hiding away parts of myself; for others to see, in Harry’s words, ‘the small of me.’ Why might this be?

Watching our children does not sound much, but it is huge

Circle of Security Parenting has formed part of my journey that helps me understand this better. COS-P offers a user-friendly map of attachment theory. It describes the different needs our children, in fact all of us have, and the importance of these needs to be met.

Children love us to watch them, don’t they? Maybe you have been at the park with your child and they are on the swing, swinging higher and higher. Your child calls out, “Look at me, look at me!” Often times they don’t want us to do anything, but ‘just’ watch them. Watching our child does not sound much, but it is huge. For our children to know that we delight in them, that we want to know them, to see the all of them is crucial. It helps them to grow in the knowledge that they are worth knowing, that they are amazing. In the words of the poet, that they are adored for who they are, not for what is adorning them.

What does it mean to be seen, truly seen?

Like our children, we are amazing!

For some of us being seen, truly seen, might make us feel uncomfortable. To show the flawed broken parts of ourselves, the foolish bits as well as the wise can make us feel vulnerable. Becoming a parent is for me a new way of learning to share more of myself; to open up enough to let my children see beneath the surface. And this is wonderful, and at times scary!

My hope this year is that, like in Unashamed, instead of building up a fort around myself I can make a rocket ship; a big, wonderful, adventure-filled creation with endless possibilities.

Perhaps you would like to listen to Harry’s poem and see what stands out for you?

Helen Bell

8/2/21

Raising resilient children in difficult times

If the last year has taught us anything it should be that we are all more interconnected than we ever knew and that we are not always able to control things. Now, depending on the levels of privilege you enjoy, the control bit comes as more or less of a shock. For people privileged enough to be able to actively choose: their health and wellbeing, the job they do, where their children are educated, when they socialise and see their friends and where to go on the holidays etc. the last year may have come as quite a shock. Reading about the negative impact on baby, child and teenage mental health this week has been tough. We predicted it would happen, we saw it happening and tried to do what we could to mitigate it but now we have ‘proof’ that many of our fears and predictions did indeed come to pass. So what can we are parents, carers, professionals, human beings do about it?

As is so often the case, the answer is both horribly simple and yet very hard to do. It’s all about Lego. By which I do not mean construct your own car, house, castle or robot (although go ahead if you enjoy it), but I do mean focus on: Lament, Energy, Gratitude and One.

Lament is important because it helps us grieve what has been lost. Lost experiences, opportunities, relationships, people etc. It’s good to acknowledge ourselves, and be able to help our children acknowledge that the restrictions they are experiencing due to the pandemic (struggling to stay motivated to learn from home, being cut of from friends, not being able to go to clubs, never getting away from your parents) is rubbish. Depending on our own comfortableness with sadness and struggle, we may find this hard to do. If we as children didn’t have parents who could accept these emotions, and help us make sense of them, dwelling on these emotions for any length of time can feel really uncomfortable. So we find ourselves coming out with phrases like ‘look on the bright side’ or ‘at least you… ’ or  ‘so many other children have it way worse than you’. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those phrases although I have genuinely never understood why getting a child to think about children whose suffering is significantly worse than theirs helps them feel better. Overall those encouragements are okay, they just need to come a while after we acknowledged their feelings, their pain and their struggle (and helped them make sense of some of their behaviour). Accepting struggle is the fastest way for children to feel better, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy for us to do.

Energy – choose to expend your energy on what you can change. Right here right now you can continue to provide the ‘bigger, stronger, wiser and kind’ parenting that we’d all love to do. In a seminar last week Dr Kathryn Hollins talked about aspiring to get it right 1% more of the time a day, of all the great things she said I love that one. Your relationship with your child remains of fundamental importance. You are the secure base they are doing their (very limited) exploration from and the safe haven they come back to when they need help and comfort and their feelings are too overwhelming. Even when you realise you don’t control so many things, you do control how you tune into your child and how you respond to them.

Gratitude – being thankful for what we can is incredibly good for us. There are times when this is extremely difficult and I’m not advocating summoning ‘fake gratitude’ for the sake of it. But choosing to focus on things that we can be thankful for, helps us and helps our children.  You can be creative in how you do it, draw a big thankfulness trees or decorate a jam jar and turn it into your gratitude jar. On days no one can think of anything good, go into the jar and read out one of them.

One minute or hour or day at a time. When things are stressful and difficult the large future expanses of days and weeks make the now seem terrifying and unmanageable. In her truly brilliant way Caitlin Moran writes:

“Here is a promise and a fact: you will never, in your life, ever have to deal with anything more than the next minute. However much it feels like you are approaching an event – an exam, a conversation, a decision, a kiss – where if you screw it up, the entire future will just burn to hell in front of you and you will end, you are not… You will never, ever have to deal with more than the next 60 seconds.”

Caitlin Moran – Letter to teenage girls

So while future planning is important, getting fixated and anxious about the future can rob us of our ability to live in the now. One maths worksheet, one more meal, one more cuddle, one more ‘it’s not fair’ at a time.

As is the way with most things in parenting LEGO can feel repetitive, never ending and not the ‘quick fix’ we’d like. But studies show that this way of relating and being does help build resilience. Let’s encourage one another to get the LEGO out and keep using it.

Jenny Peters

written 5.2.21

In the present moment

“Hurry is an unpleasant thing in itself but also very unpleasant for whoever is around it. Some people came into my room and rushed in and rushed out and even when they were there they were not there - they were in the moment ahead or the moment behind. Some people who came in just for a moment were all there, completely in that moment.

Live from day to day, just from day to day. If you do so, you worry less and live more richly. If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

HonC! , like many stay and play groups, is usually a busy place to be! I arrived one time to set up as usual and my mind was in overdrive. I found myself rushing, rushing to thoughts ahead, rushing to thoughts behind. A friend stopped me and said "you look like you need to just take a few deep breaths", I tried, it didn't help. I was struggling to be in the moment.

And then a new family arrived, with a 7-week-old baby and a two year old who was needing time with her mummy that was all hers, away from the presence of her sister, whom had arrived abruptly, changing her world forever.

So I took Freda* in my arms and sat down. What to do? Well of course I needed to be in the moment, to be fully present. Freda was asking nothing from me, other than to be there, holding her safely, with no expectations, worries or rushed thoughts. I surrendered. I sat. Thoughts vanished from my mind and I was able to live more richly in this moment.

Freda, someone whom we might think is helpless and totally dependent, was able to show me my 'unique call' in this moment. Henri Nouwen writes that the most 'healing response to the illnesses of our time' is 'our faithfulness to a small task'.

Parenting is full of small tasks.  Most go unnoticed, unseen and are unremarkable in themselves. May we surrender completely to these moments as they pass, so that we might live more richly in them.

* name changed to protect confidentiality

Helen Bell

I Don't Know

“Why can’t the school just say they don’t know when we will be going back, rather than keep changing the date?”

This was my teenager’s question when we received yet another email from their school about when they are to return in the new year. A question that got me thinking; why couldn’t they say “I don’t know”?

Why is it that for so many of us these three words, “I don’t know,” are so hard to say?

There has been so much not knowing in 2020. A year marked by uncertainty, changed plans, disappointment, unexpected events, a feeling of being out of control. For most of us I think we seek certainty. This is true for one of my children. “What time is dinner?”, “When will we be going out?”, “How many minutes till bedtime?” Many questions all with the underlying wish for certainty, that the world is a predictable and safe place.

Certainty helps us feel secure, it gives us a sense of what is to come. If we say we don’t know, perhaps we fear looking stupid, maybe we worry about showing our weaknesses. Where do we find our security? In what do we put our trust?

Young children look to their parents for answers

For very young children, they look to their parents for the answers. They believe that we know it all. That we can answer any question that starts with “why?” and perhaps for a time we can. However, they reach an age, or perhaps something happens in their little life, when they realise that we do not have all the answers. For me, trying to home-school during the first lockdown I think was one such moment of revelation for my child! 

“Mum doesn’t have all the answers.”

I might not have the answer. Often times I don’t. But what I do try to be for my children is to stay connected, to be the hands for them. ‘Being the Hands’ is an idea we explore during Circle of Security Parenting groups. How can I as a parent, stay on the circle? How can I be someone whom they know will still be there for them when they try out new things (a ‘secure base’) and a place for them to come home to when they need to rage or seek comfort (a ‘safe haven’)?

Connection helps us feel secure

The Circle of Security Parenting group is a safe space to say, “I am struggling”, “I don’t know”. A place for us to show our weaknesses and to know that it is okay because we are not alone. We are in it together. A chance to explore how we might stay connected through times of uncertainty, which let’s face it, is all the time. For our children to know that they have something, someone they can trust.

I am proud of my teenager to be okay with the not knowing when they will return to school. I hope I can be there with them on the circle, whatever 2021 brings. As we walk through 2021, I hope that I can continue to trust in the not knowing. To be okay with the uncertainty, certain that I am not alone.

Helen Bell

Written 31/12/20

REFLECTIONS ON CONNECTIONS

As I write this piece London has just fallen into Tier 4 and Christmas celebrations are now severely restricted. The name of our charity is Connected Lives and at the end of this year of years I’m reflecting on connections, 2020 style.

Let’s start globally. If the Covid-19 pandemic taught us anything useful (other than to learn how to wear face masks and to insert ‘socially distanced of course’ seamlessly into all plans for seeing anyone) it has surely been how connected we are as a global community of human beings. Within weeks a truly terrible virus spread globally (let’s not get into the politics of how different governments responded here) and forced a vast majority of the world to press pause. Travel was banned or severely restricted, those who could were asked to work at home; non-essential shops closed, the hospitality and beauty industries shut, sports venues closed and grass-roots sports halted.

Whatever we think about our place in the world at large, this year taught us we are all intricately connected, with people, goods and services travelling across the globe at astonishing rates. Historians tracking these things calculate that the 1346/7 outbreak of Bubonic Plague, which originated in Mongolia, took approximately 2 years to reach these shores, it came through ships trading goods. The Covid-19 virus took a matter of weeks simply because of the strength and speed of our inter-connectedness. We are a global body and we need to care for one another on a global scale because (to quote from the Bible)

“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)

How we treat one another and our planet matters to us all. This truth should dominate political, climate change, trade and any negotiations ‘nations’ make with each other.

Moving from macro connections to micro connections. 2020 saw us spend significantly more time with some members of our family and significantly less time with wider friends and kinship networks. I have documented in previous blogs how this created huge stress and had at times a devastating impact. As a charity which exists to support these vital family connections we sought to play our part in helping families and couples cope with this extraordinary set of circumstances. At the very beginning of the crisis, in March 2020 I led the prayers for mothers at the (online) Mother’s Day Service of my church. It caused great hilarity amongst my family that I said that we all needed to “mother-up” and that the next season was going to be parenting like we’d never known it. Of course, my slightly flippant March 2020 self didn’t know how long the whole thing would last and “she” thought it would be done by early summer (ha ha). But she was right about one thing, being a parent in 2020 whatever age your children are was incredibly tough and demanded new wisdom and endurance to survive.

Speaking personally this year has shown me the preciousness of family life and the complexity of it. With three adult children forced to return to live at home, one husband and a slightly crazy puppy, life was not dull. Love turned to hate, delight to frustration before you could say ‘tier 2, rule of six, or Covid secure’. I remain hugely grateful for the map of attachment (made so stunningly visual through the work of Circle of Security Parenting) to help guide me through all this craziness. When I was able to take that all important step back and think ‘what’s going on here’ ‘where are they on the Circle?’ ‘What is their behaviour telling me?’ things went significantly better. We also saw in the countless (well 10 actually) online groups that we ran that this way of thinking helped and transformed many other families seeking to connect in the midst of everything.

My desire for 2021 and beyond (aside from us all getting vaccinated) is to get this important insight and understanding to the people who need it most, the parents and partners across the UK. This is not simply a vague hope; we are about to launch 2 new Connected Lives hubs, one in Cambridge and one in South East London. We hope that these will be the start of many more over the next few years. 

So goodbye and good riddance to 2020, come quickly 2021 and huge thanks to you our volunteers, helpers and supporters all for the help, support and generosity you have shown over the past year.

Jenny Peters

23/12/20

IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR

When we established Connected Lives it was always our vision to set up a network of delivery hubs across the UK in order to give more people across the country access to the attachment-based groups and programmes that we run.

We are utterly delighted to be able to announce that from January 2021 there will be a Connected Lives Hub in Cambridgeshire! This is a very exciting development for us as a charity. A brilliant team of people in Trumpington led by Dr Helen Bell have drawn up a plan for delivery across the county and together we have successfully applied for funding to get this up and running. I’m not going to lie, it has been a lot of work, and it hasn’t always been easy to find the time along with all the other things we have been doing as an organisation, supporting families in the middle of a pandemic. But every single zoom planning meeting, logic model draft and conversations with a wider network have brought us to this point. Helen and her co-hubber Kate Logan are both tenacious and courageous people and even if I had wanted to stop pursuing this I’m not sure I’d have been able to!  So I want to take a moment to celebrate this achievement and look forward to all that is to come.

There is an African proverb which says:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far go together.”

I’ve seen the profound truth in these words this year. At Connected Lives we want to go far, we want to help partners and parents across the UK get the help and support they need at the earliest possible stage. We know we can’t do this alone so we are committed to pursuing partnerships and working with brilliant people and organisations across the country. We commit ourselves to doing it together. Will it take us time to work these things out? Indeed it will! Will I have moments of regret and annoyance, almost certainly!  But going far in this context helps a far greater number of families which makes the striving, and even the occasional times of slowness and frustration completely worth it.

Jenny Peters

16/12/20

QUESTIONS FOR CONNECTION

On the market (especially at Christmas) you can find a number of different 'family relationships' games. In them you get to pick a card and ask a question of a sibling, a partner, a parent or friend. The idea is to get families chatting and it's a great idea but in reality you don't need to fork out on a game, you can actually have these conversations for free.

As you'll know if you've read anything I've written before, at Connected Lives we use attachment theory as one of our main lenses for understanding people. In summary the idea is that we were designed to live from cradle to grave enjoying close, ‘attachment’ relationships with a small group of people. Starting with our relationship with our parents or carers, we were created to live interdependent lives, where we can call on our ‘go to people’ and we know they will respond. So much of the work that we do at Connected Lives is around helping people tune in to and respond to this fundamental need for connection with our go to people. Everyone (babies, children, teens and adults) needs to feel connected to the key people in their lives. We function well when we have this connection but we start to malfunction both emotionally and behaviourally when we start to feel disconnected.

This need is wired into our brains, our very beings. If we are having a problem with a friend, a child or a partner, instead of asking the question ‘why are they doing this to me’ it can be more helpful to ask ‘do they need something from me’.  Wise partners, friends, parents and carers are able to take a step back from the problem and begin to think about responding in a different way from our normal knee-jerk response.  If we are able to take that all important step of reflection we can begin to see the problem in a new way. This involves both thinking about what our loved one might be showing us about what they need and considering what we are bringing to the party.

All too often when we stop to think (in a non-pressured way) we realise that we are particularly sensitive to this kind of behaviour due to our own relationship history. So if we get mad when a friend is clearly struggling but refuses to talk to us; we might want to think, 'why do I hate this so much?' and maybe even 'is there anything I’m doing or not doing that makes this harder for them?' We all have ‘raw spots’ as Sue Johnson calls them, a place on our emotional skin that is particularly sensitive to the touch. Reflective conversations with loved ones can lead us to feel even more closely connected if done well. Because in these conversations we openly acknowledge the importance of the other person to us, and to show our willingness to learn to respond in new ways that leave them feeling safer and more connected.

I have one extremely important caveat to all this. This kind of ‘is it me’ thinking does not apply in situations where our partner is being violent towards us. A victim of partner violence should not be thinking ‘what did I do to provoke this’; rather they need to start thinking ‘I need to stop this happening to me?' If you are in this situation please seek help immediately. A good place to start would be the National Domestic Abuse Helpline: 0808 2000 247.

In general being willing to think about our responses and our loved ones’ needs gives us new options when we are feeling stuck and frustrated and can lead to greater intimacy and connection. Starting off with questions like ‘what do I do that makes you feel most loved’ can be a gentle way in. So what have you got to lose (and where have you got to go)? Give it a try and here’s to happy connecting!

Jenny Peters

9/12/20

GIVING AND RECEIVING

The strange thing was that for every drop he helped put in someone else's bucket, he felt another drop in his own bucket

Tom Rath and Mary Reckmeyer - How full is your bucket?

How full is your bucket? is a great book for getting children to think about how our feelings impact our actions. The idea is that we all have an invisible buckets that we all carry around with us. When our bucket is full we feel great, we can be kind, we can behave well but when it is empty we feel awful and often behave pretty badly too! Felix also learns that if he does a kind act for a friend, not only does his friend's 'bucket' get filled but he notices that his bucket fills up too!

Turns out that Felix has stumbled upon something extremely powerful here. If we go out of our way to help others, it is good for our own mental health and sense of wellbeing. Dr Bettina Hohnen said a similar thing at our Connected Lives First Birthday. She outlined the research which is showing that the act of helping others is incredibly good for teenagers, especially those struggling themselves.

Teenagers have a bit of a reputation for being ego-centric and self absorbed but actually it's not true. For them and for everyone we (almost) get more when we give to other people because we are such social beings it's really good for our mental health when we help others.

Dr Bettina Hohnen, Connected Lives First Birthday

Human beings are social beings, we were designed to be in groups, therefore it makes sense that we feel good when we are able to do something which helps out someone else. How many of us scrambled to try and help 'in some way' in the midst of the pandemic and lockdown? We did it not because we were bored but because we desperately needed to do something to make a difference. I myself tried to volunteer to sew masks. Given my general sewing abilities I think there are medics all over the UK who should be grateful that I wasn't allowed to contribute in this way! I ended up volunteering to give 'check in' calls for vulnerable people and saw again that when you give you receive back more. In fact with one particularly wonderful person my weekly 'check in calls' to her became one of the highlights of my week.

So let's encourage our kids (and ourselves) to look out for each other, to try and spot people who might need a helping hand or a kind word and give it. How about having a family 'day of secret good tasks' where everyone is given another family member to do something nice for? Rules are it needs to be something they'd like and you mustn't let on who did it! Thinking outside of our immediate family, look around you and see who comes to mind, there are many people struggling to cope right now, if we do what we can to help, we will find that we receive a lot more along the way.

Jenny Peters

2/12/20

A REFLECTION ON THE FIRST YEAR OF CONNECTED LIVES

Connected Lives was set up to offer help and support for our closest relationships.  We do this because we know how fundamentally important these relationships are to our wellbeing and we also know how tough it can be at times.

Someone who attended one of our couple’s courses reflected:  

‘Rather than fishing drowning people out of the river, the programme stops them from falling in, in the first place.”

I like that, we are all about prevention, we want to give a helping hand at the earliest possible time to help people understand one another, reconnect and thrive together.

Now rather like the rest of the world I have to tell you that 2020 did not quite pan out the way we’d planned! Relationally as we know the lockdown forced us to live closer together with some people and further apart from others. We were in constant contact with families and partners whilst being separated from friends and wider communities.

All too predictably the worst effects were felt by those already vulnerable. Rates of domestic violence rose (91% of women experiencing partner violence said it had worsened in the period); the number of babies killed by their parents rose by 20%. Adolescent and maternal mental health worsened; relationships stress increased.

As a charity set up to support family relationships we sought to respond to the (okay I’m going to use the word) unprecedented situation. We tried to be a bit of a save haven for parents and partners in the storm. That’s what we’re here for.

We saw a fivefold increase in the numbers of parents referred to our Circle of Security Parenting groups. To meet this need our fantastic team of facilitators (you know who you are) rallied and together we delivered 9 online Circle of Security Groups. In general facilitators used to delivering ‘in person’ groups found the transition to online hard work. Although online life did have it’s advantages, one group was joined by parents from Hawai, Ascension Islands and Australia and the UK.

We also saw a 150% increase in participation in our online Hold Me Tight Course. These courses help partners unpick negative patterns of relating and rebuild trust and connection. The format of the couples courses (presentation then lots of time for couples to do the exercises) works brilliantly online. It makes the course so much more accessible (no baby-sitters, no rushing to the group from work) and we’re likely to continue that format going forward.

We have struggled more to find creative online alternatives to our drop in groups. We have handed out Connection Boxes with crafts for families and delivered Weekly online Toddler Time; Weekly Mammaccino groups. None of these feel like a good enough substitute for having a large, safe place for children to gather and play and parents to chat and connect.

In one sentence covid and the pandemic meant that demand went up while income went down. Two big training events, which are an important source of income for us were cancelled, all income from activities was reduced and grant making bodies were swamped responding to material needs. We are incredibly grateful to the regular givers who gave so generously throughout this time.

Whilst slightly cautious about making any hard and fast predictions our broad plans are to increase our impact through delivering more groups, moving into new areas, expanding support for parents of teens, continue to encourage ‘best practice’ amongst facilitators and to set up a network of hubs offering the attachment-based groups in locations across England.

I think the best thing I can think to say on 2020, is that we survived it and we did what we could to be the hands for families in the storm. As always our staff team and volunteers were amazing and gave selflessly with wisdom and grace. Looking ahead into the next year we are very excited for the birth of our first ‘baby hubs’ and teenage work. Thanks for all your support, stay safe and stay connected.

Jenny Peters

25/11/20