Last month, Francheska wrapped up her annual live 24-week DBT-C Superparenting training for parents and caregivers. In furthering our mission to train in multiple languages, we offered simultaneous Spanish interpretation for parents throughout Iberoamérica for the first time, which allows us to launch a Spanish on-demand version soon, complete with all the questions that were asked by parents and impromptu demonstrations (with the consent and privacy protection of the participants of course). ¡Hurra! And we always donate our Superparenting trainings to Ukrainian parents (and DBT-C training for Ukrainian clinicians) – Слава Україні! – so the result was a multicultural group of parents learning DBT-C side-by-side, sharing their challenges with the group, and everyone benefitting from Francheska’s answers to their questions. Parents (and clinicians) supporting each other worldwide is 100% our vision. As such, this was a mission milestone for sure.
In her closing comments, Francheska reiterated that parents work on healing their own vulnerabilities in the core senses, using Core Problem Analysis (CPA) to light the way, so that they can create a change-ready environment and be coaches for their children by modeling/honing the emotion regulation skills they have learned from Superparenting.
As the co-founder of CTC, we joke that even as a non-clinician, I can practically teach the course myself at this point through osmosis learning (don’t worry, it’s just a joke). But in all seriousness, similar to repeating a mantra or reciting a prayer thousands of times, new realizations about how important it is for parents to do the self-repair work just keep coming.
This particular realization about parents doing self-repair work centered on anxiety in pre-adolescents. But first, a crash course in CPA (sorry Francheska!) is needed: The three core senses that Francheska identified in her decades of working with clients, (including children as young as 4 years old) are: Sense of Self-Love, Sense of Belonging and Sense of Safety. It is varying levels of vulnerability in these core senses that drive our thoughts and behaviors, and her CPA intervention model enables anyone (including children) to identify their unconscious vulnerabilities “below the waterline”, bring them to the level of awareness, and then override them. FYI Here’s a deeper crash course 😊.
Now let’s drill down on Sense of Safety, because that is the core sense at the bottom of the pyramid, similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In Francheska’s words: “Safety dominates everything, because when high vulnerability in Sense of Safety is involved, you can forget about Self-Love and Belonging. Nature doesn’t care if we’re happy, nature only cares if we’re around long enough to procreate.” So, what is the main emotion associated with Sense of Safety? Fear, followed by anger, which comes along to restore control and decrease fear. A strong Sense of Safety (ultimately meaning the ability to maintain control and improve predictability) comes from accumulating knowledge, connections and/or resources.
So how do you decrease vulnerability in Sense of Safety? By gaining real control – not the illusion of control. Real control comes from controlling the only thing we can – ourselves (what I do/feel/think/physical health). Illusion of control comes in two flavors: 1) Making other people, life or specific circumstances responsible for our problems and for fixing them, through using force against others (i.e. verbal/physical aggression, threats, criticism, judgment) and 2) using force against ourselves (self-harm, suicidality, self-punishment, self-criticism).
Now, a question and then the realization: If a strong Sense of Safety comes from gaining self-control, accumulating knowledge, connections and/or resources, aren’t those all “adult things”? Following that logic, wouldn’t kids, by default, have a high level of anxiety because they aren’t yet out in the world?
Answer: No, because their parents (i.e. caregivers) provide the foundation of the Sense of Safety for children by offering protection, resources, knowledge and connections drawn from their own life experience to date until children become old enough to gain all of these aspects of the Sense of Safety for themselves. The parents are the protectors, so a child’s anxiety is moderated by this. BUT, if the parents do not provide protection, this is a recipe for anxiety. Sense of Safety goes right out the window. That’s why highly-sensitive children with emotional dysregulation have such high anxiety and co-morbid anxiety disorders – because they can’t even control themselves, and therefore can’t predict how they will react.
Providing a child with Sense of Safety is exactly why parents have to heal their relationship with Self first. Otherwise they will foster anxiety in their kids because they cannot fulfill the role of protector, which kids need to establish healthy emotional regulation until they are old enough to gather their own resources (or as Francheska calls it, Bake Your Own Bread, which is her child-friendly metaphor for maintaining a healthy relationship with Self.
If parents do not heal their relationship with Self, they pass on the programming inherited from their parents – even if they swore not to do so and are aware of the damage it caused them. This is the mechanism behind the transgenerational transmission of violence. What we can develop is freedom of choice to no longer be at the mercy of heretofore unconscious programs that have dictated our thoughts and therefore dictated our reactions. Again, that’s where CPA shines the light on those unconscious programs and brings them to the level of awareness, so that we can them override them.
In summary, our children’s long-term wellbeing begins with our ability to develop our own Sense of Safety, perhaps long before babies are born.