The Power of Discord: Quotes & A Better Normal Community Discussion with the Authors

The brand new book, The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust was the topic of one of our A Better Normal series discussion last week. We were honored to be joined by the co-authors, Ed Tronick, Ph.D., and Claudia Gold, MD. More about each of the authors and the book can be found here and this A Better Normal community discussion is below. 

The audio from this conversation can be found here and selected quotes from the book are below:  

FROM MANAGING TO LISTENING

“...I increasingly felt that neither my pediatrics training, nor my almost 20 years in practice had given me the tools to address the wide range of challenges that arrived in my office. Asking questions, and offering advance, and behavior management often resulted in a sense of frustration and failure both for me and for the families I worked with.” Pg. 4

“When I took time to listen to parents together with their child, parents were able to access the feelings that were in the way of their viewing their child’s true self, often some combination of shame, anger, and grief. I was learning to simply listen with curiosity instead of jumping directly from diagnosis to treatment. Rather than searching for “What is it?” and “What do we do?.” I asked more open-ended questions such as, “How was your pregnancy?,” “What was your child like as a baby?.” and “Does she remind you of anyone in your family?,” With this invitation to talk, parents opened up, and the stories flowed.” Pg.s 6-7

“I started to see that behavior problems occurred, when, for a range of reasons, a parent and child did not connect - a situation I would later come to understand in Ed’s language as mismatch.” Pg. 6

“Moving from misunderstanding to understanding - repairing the disconnection - allows us to form deeper attachments in our larger social world.” Pg. 9

FROM BLAME TO RESPONSIBILITY

People may wonder if a child’s behavior is a result of poor parenting. A more constructive approach begins with accepting that when relationships falter, individuals with struggle.” Pg. 13

“The primary message of the still-face is one of hope. The baby communicates in her quick recovery that this experience of mismatch, while magnified and dramatic in the experiment, is family to her. She knows what to do to engage her mother.” Pg. 29

“The central takeaway of this book is that discord in relationships is normal; in fact, your sense of self and your ability to be close to others emerge by welcoming it.” Pg. 31

“The central lesson of the decades of research that followed the original still-face experiment is that this process of moving through mismatch to repair is not only unavoidable but essential if relationships are to flourish rather than stagnate or fall apart.” Pg. 39

“But agency, like hope, is instilled by the iterative, repeated process of moving through mismatch to repair in relationships with people close to you.” Pg. 45

“Though it is not the parents’ fault that troubles from their own life may interfere with their ability to respond to a child in the way that is needed, it is their responsibility to address these issues, at least enough so that they can have a clear view of their child.”  Pg. 127

“What would happen if we replaced the word fault with the world responsibility? When we take responsibility, we generally feel empowered.” Pg. 127

“Our research findings together with the Adverse Childhood Experiences study suggest that we can understand the full range of adverse childhood experiences as derailments of buffering interactive regulation. ACEs represent relational poverty with a lack of opportunity to experience repair.” Pg. 136

RESILIENCE RECONSIDERED 

“.... the ability to have big feelings without falling apart as well as the ability to form close relationships with others grows from the co-regulation you experience in moment-to-moment interactions in your earliest relationships.” Pg, 136

"Those relationships can either buffer you from adverse experiences or amplify their effects. You then carry that way of being in the world forward into the future. The experience changes your brain and body, organizing the way you function in new relationships throughout your life with friends, teachers, siblings, and romantic partners. The effects of early experiences may be amplified even more if similar patterns of interactions occur in subsequent relationships. Even if the situations of adversity are no longer present, when you become stressed, your capacity for self-regulation may regress as a result of these early disruptions.” Pg. 137

“Caregivers whose energy for self-regulation is depleted by dealing with external events, such as poverty or community violence, or internal events, such as depression or anxiety, may not only fail to buffer the child from stress but actually transmit the stress of the disruption to the infant. Put another way, a distraught adult cannot calm an upset child and can agitate a calm child. Cumulative instances of repair and buffering over time stimulate infants to expand their own capacity for coping and resilience, whereas chronic failure of repair diminishes the infants’ resources and induces helplessness and fragility.” Pg. 137-138

“We can understand the term adversity as anything that depletes caregivers’ resources and prevents them from being present to regulate both their own and their infants’ psychological state. Substance use, domestic violence, parental mental illness, marital conflict, and divorce exert their harmful effects and impede the development of resilience by depriving the child of the scaffolding that would otherwise be offered by interactive coping through mismatch and repair.” Pgs. 139-140

HOPE

“As I continued working with children from infancy through adolescence with a full range of emotional and behavioral problems, I heard story after story of relationships that derailed very early in development. And I began to see that, even if the roots of troubles were deep, as long as I protected time for listening and re-connection, relationships could heal no matter the child’s age.” Pg. 13

RESOURCES & LINKS
Author & Book Links:

• Child in Mind blog
• Hello It’s Me Project
• The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust
• The Still Face Experiment
• UMass Infant Parent Mental Health Program
  
  

ACEs Connection & Parenting with ACEs Links: