Really Listening

Seven-year-old Billy begins to speak of a recent nightmare. “Dad, it was really scary. These monsters were out to get me. They are holding me upside down, over a cliff, and they were going to drop me over a thousand feet. I was…”

“Wait a minute, hold on Billy,” Dad cautions with a worried and condescending tone. “Did you have this bad dream because you saw that monster movie on TV last night?”

“I don’t know,” Billy cautiously responds. “It could have been…”

“The movie, Billy,” Dad says with another abrupt interruption, “was only make believe. There are no real monsters, not like those in the movie, that’s for sure.”

Billy looks at Dad, says nothing with his voice. His eyes sag downward and he resembles a balloon whose air has all escaped.

Dad senses that his logical argument is not doing the job. He digs deeper into his bag of persuasion. “You know that the movie was only make-believe, now don’t you?”

Billy knows what his dad wants to hear and he decides to go along with the program. Dad obviously has a big stake in convincing his son that the nightmare doesn’t make sense. Billy gives up trying to share his fears. Dad throws in one last stab of logic. “Besides, son, there aren’t too many thousand-foot cliffs. And there are none around here!” With that, Dad smiles down at his confused and silently angry son.

Billy dutifully smiles back. His forced smile is not all that convincing, but Dad accepts it. It’s the best he’s going to get from his offspring who has strong and contradictory feelings storming in his young boy.

What’s wrong with this scenario? Where had Dad messed up? What effect does Dad’s posture have on Billy?

Dad totally has dismissed what Billy really is talking about. The boy’s nightmare may have been triggered by a scary movie, but the dream is about the boy’s own fears. His dream and how he talks about it, if given a chance, is his personal code for his inner terrors and feelings. These feelings only can be expressed in symbolic and somewhat disguised form, precisely because they feel so threatening.

Billy is offering his father a glimpse into his young and fearful inner world. There is lots to be frightened about when one is so young. Contradictory feelings of powerlessness and omnipotence grip children. They are surrounded by a sea of large, often intimidating, adults. These giants can be real monsters!

A child, also, engages in much magical thinking. In their worlds, their wishes can produce results. Such omnipotence can be tremendously frightening, for example, their wish that mother gets hurt coincides with her accident. For the child, his wish caused the accident.

The child’s own destructive and angry impulses create much discomfort for him or her. It’s not good or right, children are taught, to have cruel or anti-social fantasies.

All this kind of inner turmoil can be expressed to parents if they will let their children talk. Billy’s father couldn’t tolerate his son’s anxiety. Therefore he crushed his son’s self-expression with logical and an attitude of intolerance, under the guise of reassurance.

The message that Billy got was, “Keep all this scary stuff to yourself. It’s too trivial, yet too upsetting, for Dad to. handle it. Act like everything is okay and it will be! Do a deceitful number on yourself and those around you.”

If kids are listened to for what they really are saying they will continue to confide in their parents. Most kids, however, get turned off from and by their parents. It even may have happened to you.