Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘communication’

Difficult behavior is always a sign that there is an unfulfilled need. Most of the time, everybody focuses on the desires the difficult people express and not on their needs, while the difficult people are so stuck on what they want that they are not at all in a position to fulfill their own needs.

That can be changed by you helping them find what they need and by helping them get it.

The following technique was developed by observing 2- and 3-year-old kids. At the age of 2, they start with the question phase. Here is a typical discussion I have had with my own children and many kids I have worked with.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a card game?”

“What’s a card game?”

“It’s a pack of cards with things printed on them that we use to play a matching game”.

“What’s a matching game?”

“It’s a game where you have two cards that look exactly the same and you have to find them out of all the cards”.

“Why do we have to play a matching game?”

“It’s good for our brain. We learn to recognize things that are the same and others that are different”.

“Why is it good for our brain?”

And this conversation can go on forever if I could manage answering questions forever. The trick is always to answer calmly. It is a game, a very healthy game, and children learn a lot from it. You could say that this type of questioning is difficult behavior, but I think it is your reaction that makes it a learning experience or a difficult behavior. If you answer calmly, it is a learning experience. If you answer with anger, it becomes a difficult behavior.

Now that you know what quality time is and what quality time is not, what can you actually do with your own kids? Here are some great things you can do to have more quality time with your children and help them feel loved and close to you.

Ask open questions

Whenever you meet your kids after school and work, show interest in their day. Do not confuse asking questions with interrogating – one comes from curiosity and the other one from a need to control. So pay attention to the tone of your voice and to your intention and ask to hear the child’s answer. If you expect some “correct” answer, it is not quality time and your child will not trust you next time to answer your question. Instead, gently explore with your child his or her impressions, reasons and feelings.

Tip: when you ask a child “How was your day?” the answer is typically in the form of a rating, e.g. “Good”. To avoid this dead end, rephrase the question as “Tell me about your day” or “What happened to you at school today?”

As you have seen in the previous post, every difficult behavior can be mapped to an unfulfilled need that the “difficult person” cannot find other ways to fulfill. Each need is a strong belief that they must have something, they cannot live without it and they can only get it by “being difficult”.

Now that you understand the missing feeling that difficult people are searching for, you are probably asking yourself, “What do I do to give it to them?”

One of the biggest challenges of helping and supporting difficult people is the fear that giving them what they want will make them think their obnoxious behavior is a good strategy of getting what they want and it will only make things worse. I have heard this claim millions of times when working with children – “If a child is behaving in a bad way and you give him what he wants, he learns that this is a legitimate way to get what he wants”.

Well, that is not the case.

Focus on needs, not desires

There is a big difference between giving children what they say they want and giving them what they need. Much like difficult people, children do not know that they behave the way the do to fulfill a need. If they knew, they would give themselves that thing without the difficult behavior.

If you focus on giving them what they need, then after a while, when the need is fulfilled, they will calm down and ease their demands. I am not saying, “Give them what they want”, I am saying, “Give them what they really need”. Give them what they are missing, because they do not know how to give it to themselves and may not even know what it is.

Love, as you know, is the most important thing you can give your children. Although you may not have any doubts about your love for your children, they often do. If you want to understand their doubt, think of your own doubts about your parents’ love for you.

Now, when I am a parent myself, I have no doubts about my parents love for me, but when I was a child, I had many doubts. It took me a long time to learn that what they called “love” was not my definition of love and I translated their behavior into “They don’t love me”.

In my parenting workshops and coaching sessions, many parents share the same feelings with me. There are things you discover about your parents’ love for you only when you have your own kids and when you get the opportunity to learn about “love languages”.

The great book “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman describes 5 different ways to express and receive love:

- Words of affirmation
- Gifts
- Physical touch
- Acts of service
- Quality time

This post and the next one are about Quality Time, because Quality time is very tricky for parents in this day and age.

Let’s say you are willing to make the effort to manage the difficult people in your life and help them get the feeling they are missing, the feeling that causes them to behave the way they do. How can you tell what is the feeling they really need?

Needs are a complex issue. They are feelings that are so strong that you believe you cannot live without them. Each person’s needs are very individual, but they definitely get them out of control. If you can control a need, it is no longer a need but more of a preference.

Many people confuse wishes, desires, preferences, values and needs. Although they all have something in common, they differ in intensity.

If you have a discussion or an interaction with a difficult person and you feel their demands are a bit too strong and that they are having a little panic about their request, ask them, “What will happen if you don’t get it?” or “What will happen if things don’t happen the way you want them?” or “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

This question creates a loop in their brain and the answer does not matter. Their subconscious will answer itself and lower the difficult person’s tension from “I absolutely must have it” to “OK, well, I won’t die without it, so maybe it’s not the end of the world after all”.

Working in a group is an important skill for everyone and it is not something you are born with but need to develop. Teamwork is not always easy, because not every member of the group is the same, particularly when some people seem to do nothing at all.

I am sure it happened to you that you had to submit something in a group and the level of frustration rose very high. I can sure tell you it happened to me during my studies. If you are a good student, it is probably even more frustrating that you have to form a group and do something together and some only appear on the last day to add their name to your work. My frustrations were not very long, though, because I remembered how hard it was to be on the side that cannot contribute, so when I was leading a project, I was much more tolerant and accepting.

During my studies, I had the honor of working in a very special project called “Creative Thinking” that was led by Professor Gideon Carmi and taught physics to students in Grade 1 and Grade 2. Professor Carmi’s philosophy involved co-teaching, so we taught in teams of two, one educator and one who was not. That was the first time I discovered the real advantage of working and learning in a group.

These 4 years of amazing experience thought me that just everyone not being the same could be a huge advantage. When working by myself, I was limited to my own abilities and talents, my own point of views and my own thinking paths. When I worked with another person, we had a wider range of skills and talents at our disposal, different ways of thinking and better solutions to problems. In fact, the bigger the group was, the more successful we were.

People who are energy consumers do not have an easy life, not only because others keep away from them or that they do not get what they want, but because it is a cycle. A never-ending cycle. What they are missing is a feeling.

While they behave in a way that aims to achieve this feeling, others feel uncomfortable and awkward around them, stay away from them or react in an aggressive way towards them, so they feel bad and miss that feeling even more. The problem is not with them missing a feeling but that they try to get that feeling in a way that others do not like. Sometimes, their behavior seems like they are unable to read social cues or they do not follow the unwritten rules of normality.

Personally, I have an allergy to the concept of normality. I believe it is overrated and sometimes confused with majority or average. However, I still think there are socially acceptable rules in every group and that following them will give you an advantage, while not following them will make you a social outcast.

As a special education professional who works with lots of social outcasts that are not normal/average/the majority, I wish our society would be more tolerant towards different people. Yet, while helping them, I spend most of my energy teaching them the “rules of the game”, instead of protesting the closed mindedness of society.

Yes, we need to create a more accepting society, but when we need to face the day-to-day challenges of living with a difficult loved one, changing a whole society is way more challenging than changing one person.

Ronit and I read a lot about happiness, we talk a lot about happiness, we write a lot about happiness and we do our best every day to be happy. In fact, we believe that happiness should be the main pursuit of everybody’s life. But some people say this focus is filling the world with selfishness and that people who want personal happiness are selfish.

In a book called The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman wrote in 1950 that people could be split into two groups. He said that the inner-directed person “has a trustworthy character and builds his life on the stability and security of his family. Usually, he believes in the Judeo-Christian faith”. The other-directed person, on the other hand, is “dependent on the approval of others, especially experts. They are consumed by a quest for personal happiness, so that … anything becomes permissible if it makes me happy”.

Yes, this is an old book, but I read this quote this morning in a much newer book on personal power and relationship skills, so the notion that our pursuit of happiness makes us selfish and self-centered is still very much alive today.

So what’s the deal? Does personal happiness equate to selfishness? Does the search for personal fulfillment make us lonely?

If you have read about the 20 types of difficult people, you might have started to see difficult people everywhere. It must be very scary to think you are surrounded by them, but I think it is very important to define each difficulty better, because there are not that many of them out there.

Usually, we call others “difficult” when we find them hard to deal with. Although we find it hard to deal with them, this does not make them difficult people. Sometimes, the combination between people highlights their difficulty, so to make sure that the difficulty is not just a conflict between the two of you but something general, check that this behavior is a pattern that appears in this person’s communication with others as well.

If more than three people think they have a dysfunctional relationship with this person, and for the same reasons, it is usually a sign that the problem is with the difficult person and not with the combination of both of you. If others share mixed impressions of that person, we should take a closer look at our particular interactions with him or her.

For us to consider someone as difficult, we also need to make sure that the behavior is not temporary but consistent. We all have times when we show off, we all joke sometimes and even say something sarcastic, but it does not make us difficult. Usually, it needs to happen consistently over a period to be considered a problem. If someone is suddenly difficult, he or she is not a difficult person – they are just experiencing a temporary challenge they cannot handle. In that situation, maybe there is something we can do to help them.

Here are types that can be mistaken for being difficult and we need to be careful before considering them difficult.

Sometimes, the Universe seems to conspire to make us do something. In this case, I think it wants me to write about how important fathers are in the life of their children. We keep focusing on parenting in this blog, but there is a difference between mothering and fathering, which we have not discussed much.

I have a friend who goes on a men’s camp every year. When his boys were young, he went by himself and felt very supported there. As soon as his boys turned 13 and were allowed to go with him, away they went together and spent a great time bonding – singing, dancing, doing physical exercise and watching performances. He has been nagging me to come with him on that camp for a few years now, saying there is something special about the freedom and “safe space” it provides.

So far, I have not gone.

In the past few months, Ronit worked with several boys whose father had died or spent a lot of time away from home. Whenever we talked about them, I kept having the feeling that although they were young (5 to 8 years old), they felt like little men. I felt they saw themselves as somewhat responsible for the wellbeing of their family and had to fill the very large shoes of their absent father.

That was not enough either.