Sunday, June 14, 2015

The Toxic Child Within.


Today's Sunday Times carries an article about damages toxic stress causes in children. It describes how a mother's affectionate attention can shoot electrical impulses to the developing neural circuits of an infant, strengthening their neural pathways and inciting new synapses to grow. This process develops the child's capacity to think, learn and process emotions. On the contrary constant neglect or  abuse results in toxic stress which not only impedes the child's learning capacity but may also affect his/her long term physical and mental health. Research has found that infants are very responsive to the emotions and social interaction around them. Chronic neglect or abuse or home violence impairs the child's social-emotional development whilst the child's constant feeling of helplessness can cause him to be depressed, withdrawn, apathetic, hyper-vigilant or angry well into adulthood.

Angry or withdrawn is the more noticeable character trait in some of the children I interact with at the children's home (mainly from dysfunctional families) . I wonder about those who do not have behavioral issues and are thus not presented for therapy. Could they also harbour long term anxieties or hyper vigilance or apathetic dispirit within them? Thus I am extremely patient with children from toxic background.

But then again even amongst us, the adults, how much of peoples' behaviour which we find difficult to tolerate are caused by toxic stress plaguing them since childhood? How many amongst us are so fortunate to grow up almost scar-less? Yet we don't empathize an adult with behvioural problems as much as a child. I remember on one occasion I was trying to deal with a complaint one subordinate lodged against another. I appealed to the complainant's empathy by remarking that his colleague came from a poor and frictional family, to which the complainant retorted that he too came from an impoverished family.

I have thought about why I find it difficult to tolerate bad or irrational adult behaviour even if I know the person has some emotional baggage; whilst my threshold for children misbehaviour is quite high. I guess when one looks at a child, one sees one's own inner child within oneself, feels the other child's pain as one's own pain carried silently over the years. Hence sympathy and the urge to comfort the child arise.

To forgive an adult on the other hand needs the abandoning of an egoistic self and the cultivation of true compassion. Perhaps it may help if we begin by imagining how we would have turned out if we have been born in his circumstances. Alternatively for me I can try to see the inner child within the adult, the child whose cries have been ignored and suppressed.

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