All Behavior is a Communication, Principle 1 revised for It’s Never Too Late to Heal book

I’ve been hard at work on my 4th book, It’s Never Too Late to Heal and it’s coming in early 2022! This book is written for parents and also for anyone who was once a child or anyone who is in a relationship with someone else who wants the relationship to work and feel better. In my first book, Consciously Parenting: What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families, I wrote about the 8 Guiding Principles of Consciously Parenting. I wrote the book when my children were young and I was thinking primarily about parenting. This new book is expanded to talk about all relationships. It still focuses on situations and experiences between parents and children as they are fundamental for understanding our challenges in our current relationships, whether we’re parenting, working through a sticky place with a partner, or we’re healing a relationship with extended family, friends, or someone who is no longer in relationship with us (whether through choice or death).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing excerpts from this new book with you. I’m in a different place in my life right now than when I wrote the first three books. First, my children are now 18 and nearly 23. I’m in a different phase of parenting and relationship with them. I have a wonderful new partner. I’m literally in another country (Mexico) and I’ve had a lot of new adventures with my family and with my clients that have really impacted my work and deepened it in a profound way.

So today, I’m sharing my updated Principle #1 fresh from my editor with you. My editor has really challenged me to define more clearly what I’m talking about and I hope you find it helpful and relatable!

Principle #1- All behavior is a communication.

Behavior is about how you’re currently feeling about yourself, and what’s happening with your body, brain, and nervous system; you’re going to act out of (communicate) the state you’re in. What you are communicating through your behavior may or may not be conscious, and it may or may not have anything to do with anyone else. For example, perhaps your child just kicked you. If you’re having an understandable reaction to it, that response results from someone else’s behavior directly impacting you (like a tennis volley). But sometimes your response involves internal feelings, sensations, and reminders of situations from your own past. In this situation, for example, when your child kicks you it reminds you of when you were hit as a child, and you react from that place of fear or pain. The latter response is not just about the present moment (it’s as if a ball were served to you from somewhere in the stands). Behavior holds what belongs to you, and you are communicating sometimes without saying a word—through body language, facial expressions, and the sounds you make.

At the same time, behavior can also be a communication about the state of the relationship. If there is connection in a relationship, you’ll see behaviors of connection, such as good eye contact and touch, and tone of voice that is friendly. This is communication that your relationship is in a connected place. If there is disconnection, you’ll see behaviors showing that: lack of eye contact, avoidance, not talking, harsher tone of voice and often, increased volume.

Behavior is also a communication that reveals more about the connection or disconnection in the relationship, regardless of the ages of the individuals involved: A parent and newborn baby can be connected or disconnected. A couple can be connected or disconnected. A parent and an older child or a young adult can be connected or disconnected. It will look different in each situation, but if you’re paying attention, you can begin to see the communication happening through the behavior.

We tend to judge behaviors as right or wrong. What happens when we begin to shift and recognize behavior as communication, and then see and be curious about the communication within the behaviors we’re witnessing, is ask ourselves, “Is this a behavior from someone who is connected or disconnected from our relationship? Is this behavior about me or is it about what’s going on for them?”

When my oldest son was between four and eight years old, his difficult behavior communicated his grief over the loss of his brother and the disconnection in our relationship. He was showing me his story and showing me that he really needed connection with me, but I didn’t understand what he was communicating to me—what he was trying to tell me through his behavior. I just wanted his behaviors to stop. When I tried all the things suggested by the parenting books I read—everything from punishments to taking all his things away to excessive praise—and nothing worked, I realized I needed to look at myself. With the right support, I was able to see the impact that Jacob’s death had had on my son and me.

I saw the effect the situation was having on my nervous system. I was essentially in a freeze response because my son’s behavior reminded me of what it was like to grow up with brothers who had very difficult behaviors that no one knew how to handle. My body was in a collapse and my son felt that. I suspect that to him, it felt that even though I was physically present with him, I wasn’t really present with him, and his behavior was his trying to get me to come back to him—to be the way I had been when he was younger.

When I was able to do my own work and understand the impact of my story (childhood with my brothers) on the situation, I was able to reconnect with my son and then everything changed; my son’s challenging behaviors went away when our connection was re-established. Had I continued insisting that the problem was only him, we would have missed the opportunity to heal together. (You can read more about this story in my first book, Consciously Parenting: What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families)

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