Compliments of AI, the images above capture the sentiment of the time when my mom and I got in a power struggle when I was about five years old. Like Linus from the cartoon Peanuts, I brought my blanket (blankie) everywhere, and was about to over my bring it into the bathroom with me. Typically, my mom was good at what we call in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) ‘dropping the rope’, and avoiding power struggles. But this time, mom wasn’t going to budge, grabbed what psychologists today call ‘transitional objects’, and tried to pull my blankie away from me.
Given my strong will and formidable attachment to this object, I was having none of it. Thus, it didn’t take long for the blanket to part like the Red Sea, and tear right down the middle. Immediately, I started crying and so did my mom. After we calmed down, and processed the incident; mom apologized, told me how bad she felt and then expressed that she was really worried about me trying to take my blanket to school, getting in trouble and being made fun of by my peers. I don’t blame her; especially because I had already been profiled young, and had to go to a special purpose Preschool program to rework my difficult behaviors. She remembered the look they gave her when I showed up for the first day of the new Preschool with my cowboy guns in holsters. And then the staff turned towards her and said, “we don’t encourage guns in school.” Given that experience, her desire to help- and that I had already got into trouble with another peer on Kindergarten’s orientation day, I can see how she got sucked into this power struggle with me.
Looking back, I remember being struck with how rigidly she had set the limit; seemingly abruptly, and then held her ground without budging. Mother and I revisited this episode many times over the years, and would always laugh about it. The storytelling was a precursor to my journey in meditation, our relationship with our attachments, and how we approach working with them. This experience also informs how we can more effectively co-regulate with each other, and navigate transitions between structured, unstructured, preferred and non-preferred activities. Besides, the blankie was already about to set itself on fire, and was no longer salvageable. The agreement was that I would get a new blanket to replace the old one but under the expectation that the new one would not be going to school with me. During my career as a school social worker, I have told this story many times to students, parents, staff and coaches when situations like these have come up. Like the old T’ai Chi Master Professor Cheng used to say, learning to be human isn’t always easy, and is a lifelong developmental process; our attachments notwithstanding. Humor gets us to look at things differently, and is a powerful change agent in the transformational process of relaxing and letting go of our attachments.
Classroom Mothership Earth 