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This paper outlines five problem parenting behaviours exhibited by alexi thymic parents in relation to their children. 1. Difficulty identifying feelings; Alexithymic individuals typically cannot recognize, understand, or give verbal accounting of emotional arousal in either themselves or others, and have therefore a profound inability to recognize and help regulate their own infant / childs emotional life. For the child of an alexi thymic parent this means that mirroring of his / her affective states and the ability to soothe, comfort, and modulate distressing emotional states cannot be facilitated by the parent, leading to serial distress and subsequent repressing of affective expression by the child. With children -particularly pre-verbal children- the reliance on a parent who can identify feelings is the sina qua non of parenting capacity. It is a core parenting feature relied upon by adults to effectively parent an infant. Most fathers and mothers must and do inherently know the wishes and needs of their infants, for how else can they sucessfully meet their needs?
Clearly parents per se rely greatly on the presence of their own interpretive feeling skills, and clearly those parents who lack these abilities also lack core parenting skill. As Henry Krystal writes: "Parents who have an exceedingly high rate of alexithymia are unable to assist their children in the process of affect maturation. [Integration and Self-Healing]. Taking this feelings-deficit into account, one can see that parents with alexithymia would have enormous problems conceptualizing and understanding the nature of and the context of the thoughts and feelings of those they are parenting. And to the degree that a parent lacks this ability and where that parent is the primary attachment figure there will be, as yet unnamed, attachment problems for the child.
Alexithymic parents cannot adequately discern the emotional aspects of thoughts, wishes, knowledge, and intentions of their own child, and it is remarkable that no one seems to have looked closely at this problem, as this is a matter of concern especially as regards children who are in the sole care of such a parent due to marital seperation or death of the non-alexi thymic parent. What is possibly more remarkable is the fact that this reality is not yet seen in the custody and access or child-welfare case law. 2. Misattunement and misinterpretation; Here we find the tendency to misperceive a childs gestures (e. g. crying, frustration or silence as bad or naughty) resulting in difficulties for children of alexi thymic parents. Some of these handicaps are well covered in the following excerpt on asperger's parents which subject converges on many points with alexi thymic parenting: If we look at an example of one pattern of parental asperger's behavior one can see how this impacts: Mind blind parents have difficulty distinguishing whether their child's actions are intentional or accidental.
This is huge for a child over the course of years. Non-autistic parents face this dilemma at times, but not in the manner or degree of the Asperger Syndrome parent. This one small piece adds enormous dysfunction to these families. Lack of a theory of mind (or mind blindness) leads to very evident problems around child discipline, criticism, resentment, blame, and correcting behavior (punishment) with obvious related issues for child mental health. Discussions with children of AS parents almost uniformly reveal child concerns with being scape granted, with the wrongful attribution of guilt or innocence amongst children in times of familial dispute. Face blindness or Agnosia is the neurological inability to recognize and read faces.
Individuals with a variety of neurological conditions suffer from Agnosia, including parents with Asperger's Syndrome. Agnosia is a problem that adds to the overall problem of reading ones children for these parents Face blindness in addition to mind blindness handicaps the parent attempting to reach and relate to their child. As much as the autistic community argues that autism is a difference as opposed to a disorder, one cannot help but wonder how the child of a mother with Asperger's Syndrome is being helped by this difference in terms of all that we have learned about evolution from Charles Darwin & all that we have learned about the psyche from Dr. Sigmund Freud.
Surely it is problematic for a child when its primary attachment figure cannot discern the nature of its emotional state either through mind reading or looking at its facial expression. I suggest that misreading one's child's facial expressions could prove very dangerous for that child. (Is he drowning or playing? Is she choking or coughing? ). Mind blindness in a mother is the very opposite of what we know to be mothers instinct, namely the uncanny ability that many mothers have to know and sense the state of their child's condition (whatever it may be) even if the child is in denial, unaware or pre-verbal.
Parents rely on reading their child's face to understand and respond to signs in the child of alarm, distress, fatigue, nausea and signs of sadness, loneliness, joy, and fear. If we take the example of childhood illnesses, long before clinical signs show up, non-autistic mothers can tell that something is amiss with their child. Pediatric literature now advises pediatricians to listen to the parents of their patients sixth sense or intuition. (I suggest what is taking place is heightened mind reading in the sense that Baron Cohen means is. Pediatric ally Mothers instinct then is a noted added & valuable clinical sign. [ 1 ] It is a parenting feature that supports child well being.
Its absence I argue has the opposite effect. This is an important child welfare issue additionally because autistic offspring have high pain thresholds and have been known not to self report even very serious illness and so signs and signals MUST be seen by the parents of these children. On this, pediatricians may need to become aware that the parent who brings the child to see him or her may not in fact be fully able to correctly describe that child's condition or illness or its severity. When it comes to children, parents are normally very highly tuned & read very well to signals of all kinds that their children give to them. Unless of course they are signal blind, mind blind, or face blind. Children need a parent who can read them.
This speaks to issues of security and safety. It also speaks to how children learn what intimacy means in their family of origin. Lessons about security, attachment and intimacy are key cornerstone emotional sign posts of childhood. [From Parenting Problems for Parents With Asperger's Syndrome by Sheila Jennings Linehan, B. A. , LL. B. , J. D] One 3 yr old daughter (of an alexi thymic mother) posed this problem to her father; I remember my daughter looking up at me, at 3 years of age and saying in her tragically innocent 3 yr old voice "Daddy, why does mummy always get it wrong?" she was deeply upset and disturbed by her mothers inability to understand her communication even then...
no mother who could read her face, her words, her gestures whatsoever. [Quote from Triton: Alexithymia Exchange] According to Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame, by repeated successful attunement's an infant begins to develop a sense that other people can and will share in his / her feelings; This sense seems to emerge at around eight months, when infants begin to realize they are separate from others, and continues to be shaped by intimate relationships throughout life. Goleman goes on to say that positive attunement is not experienced by all children, which bears directly on our subject of parenting deficiencies resulting from alexithymia: When parents are mis attuned to a child it is deeply upsetting. In one experiment, Daniel Stern had mothers deliberately over- or under respond to their infants, rather than matching them in an attuned way; the infants responded with immediate dismay and distress. Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and child takes a tremendous emotional toll on the child. When a parent consistently fails to show any empathy with a particular range of emotion in the child -joys, tears, needing a cuddle- the child begins to avoid expressing, and perhaps even feeling, those same emotions. In this way, presumably, entire ranges of emotion can begin to be obliterated from the repertoire for intimate relations, especially if through childhood those feelings continue to be covertly or overtly discouraged. [The Costs of Misattunement in Emotional Intelligence] 3.
Random unregulated emotion-discharging; An alexi thymic parent may have a tendency to discharge anger or otherwise emotionally vent at children due to the parents own unregulated affective chaos. The alexi thymic individual cannot easily recognise and identify physiological signs of emotional tension and subsequently has no ability to regulate and dampen these unrecognised affective states. This leaves the raw affective uprisings untempered and liable to erupt in random, inappropriate, and extremes displays. Moreover, if affective states are not recognised as linked to a particular aggravating stimulus then the affective-venting may be misdirected and displaced willy-nilly onto the nearest bystander. Such emotional displacement may then, by the logical implications of ineffective affect-regulation, be a problem to some degree for all children of alexithymic's as portrayed in the following example from the husband of an alexi thymic mother: Last night, the night before Easter I purchased $ 100 worth of easter eggs and planned to make it a joyful occasion for my children. I noticed Anne was in an inexplicably tense mood, but not because of anything I or the children had caused, as far as we know.
Anne started demanding the children do chores in a very loud and intimidating voice, and she then walked over to open a cupboard door in the kitchen (which I happened to be standing in front of) and proceeded to burst out with another frightening yelling session at me for not getting out of the way of the cupboard quickly enough. The kids and I see this regularly... Anne will be sugar-n-spice-n-all-things-nice and then go into either a sudden rage or long tirade. I knew I couldn't reason with her, but as the children were looking very frightened I decided to have a futile word with Anne pointing out that no one had done anything wrong, and that she was upsetting the children with her outbursts.
Anne then started yelling at me even more for defending the kids (again who had done nothing wrong) and the children started to cry in a pan nicky way, even more afraid of her, as they know this can get out of control when mom gets in her sudden "moods." After some 30 minutes it dawns on Anne, vaguely, that she has done something completely inappropriate, and so starts being sugary-nice to the kids, and they respond back with a phony "nice" persona for mommy because they don't want to upset her, while feeling inside violated by her behaviour. When Anne is faced with a problem (such as an unpaid bill, financial difficulties, child frustrations, or social stresses) she becomes anxious and cannot comprehend, or regulate, the emotional states that are initiated by the problem. As a result she is prone to sudden anxious outbursts, both verbally, and occasionally physically, against the children or myself (she has unexpectedly assaulted me on a few rare occasions). On four different occasions Anne has vented severe physical abuse against the children where, for example, on one occasion she twisted my sons arm and on another violently pushed him over, and on one occasion brutally punched my daughter with a clenched fist in her lower back when she was just 18 months old. When Anne punched my daughter she developed a large blue on her lower spine and could not move for days without winning in pain. Regarding this last incident, I was bewildered and emotionally devastated for my daughter, and I could not make sense of what caused the violence.
I was later to ask Anne why she carried out this random act, and after some consideration she was able to say that she was angry at me about something (I can't remember what) and claimed to have hit my daughter in an attempt to upset me, or in place of hitting me (I was carrying my daughter on my hip at the time of the punch). I don't fully accept this explanation as I think it might be a later rationalization, and I believe what really happened is that Anne had an uncontrolled affective outburst, though quite possibly in relation to something she was emoting in relation to me. Sometimes Anne will go into a verbal tirade against the children seemingly for no reason, or for some trivial reason. The children and I both know that if the child (I have two children) who is not involved in this argument gets close to the fight, Anne will turn to that child and then start aggressively abusing that child too (kicking the dog), and so I advise my son or daughter to go and hide until it is over. This happens approximately once every week to the children. After these outbursts Anne clearly feels better, as if she has gotten something off her chest, and seems uncognisant of what has just occurred, and then moves into a sugary caring mode with the children almost immediately.
Its as if Anne feels apologetic, but at the same time is somewhat vague about what has just happened. After these events Anne rationalizes that the children simply must have been naughty, and leaves her thinking about the matter just there. [A quote from Triton husband of an Anne a self-proclaimed alexi thymic. Extracted from the Alexithymia Chatsite] Support for the occurance of random emotional discharges by alexi thymic individuals comes from several sources. Graeme Taylor and Michael Bagby (2000) write: some alexi thymic individuals experience chronic dysphoria or manifest outbursts of weeping or rage, and intensive questioning usually reveals that they know very little about their own feelings and, in most instances, are unable to link them with memories, fantasies, or specific situations. [An Overview of the Alexithymia Construct]. Likewise, Joyce McDougall writes: Another common trait is the sudden affective outbursts, such as crying or flashes of rage, shown by many patients. Here the alexi thymic defense breaks down Such expr...
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Research essay sample on Emotional Intelligence Attachment Figure
