You Can't Think Your Way Out of Everything!

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of foundations when building a brain, but also about the hope offered by our amazing brains and their ability to adapt and form new connections. Today, I want to take that idea in a slightly different direction and think about the importance of building strong foundations in the therapy room. 

Bruce Perry talks about a fundamental principle known as the 3 Rs: Regulate, Relate, Reason. This draws on our understanding of how the brain develops and responds to stress. Crudely, our lower brain regions are responsible for our core regulatory systems. Moving upwards, our limbic brain manages our emotions, and then finally our cortex is the part of our brain that enables us to problem solve, be rational, have an awareness of time and all those higher order thinking properties. 

In the therapy room, it is so important to keep this in mind. And of course, the same applies in classrooms, at home, at work, or in any setting where someone might become overwhelmed when the expectation is that they should be learning or making progress. 

We can set therapeutic goals and hope that therapy will be a space where someone can explore difficult experiences, face challenges and gradually work through them. But if that person doesn't feel sufficiently safe or regulated to engage, we may need to pause and return to the foundations first. 

Dan Siegel talks about “flipping our lid” (there are some great explanations on YouTube if you're unfamiliar with the phrase). It's a useful way of describing what can happen when we become overwhelmed by stress. Our capacity to think clearly, reflect, take in new information and make considered decisions can become significantly reduced as our brain prioritises responding to a perceived threat. 

Imagine it for yourself. You're in a situation where you feel threatened, anxious or overwhelmed. Perhaps you become restless, start looking for a way out, feel angry or defensive, or find yourself shutting down and struggling to take in what's happening around you. You might know, logically, that you're safe, but your body is telling you something quite different. 

In that moment, how easy is it to listen, reflect, learn something new or have a meaningful conversation about what's troubling you? Probably not very! 

First, we need to feel safe enough to engage. 

So often in the therapy room, we need to return to regulation. Therapy can involve gently approaching experiences, feelings or situations that feel difficult, and this may mean moving beyond someone's familiar comfort zone. As we do this, a child may begin to feel overwhelmed or show signs that they are becoming dysregulated. Our role is to notice these signals and respond accordingly. 

For some children, these signs are easy to spot. For others, they are much harder to recognise. We can become incredibly good at masking our feelings, after all. A child who looks calm on the outside may still be experiencing a great deal internally. 

This is why we need to look beyond what we can see and remain curious about what a child might be experiencing. Rather than pushing on with the task because it's what we planned to do, we may need to slow down, offer connection, adjust our approach or simply help the child feel safe enough to continue. Recognising when to pause isn't a step backwards; it's part of the therapeutic process. 

And what about relationships? This is where the second R, relate, becomes so important. 

When a child feels safer and more regulated, they may find it easier to begin trusting that another person can support them, understand them and help them manage difficult feelings. When they feel overwhelmed or threatened, however, their focus may shift towards survival. They might try to control the adults around them, push people away, become defensive or withdraw altogether. These behaviours can sometimes be understood as attempts to manage a situation that feels unsafe or unpredictable. 

This doesn't mean every difficult behaviour has the same explanation, or that we should ignore boundaries. It means taking a moment to look beneath the behaviour and ask ourselves what the child might need in order to feel safe enough to engage. 

Relationships cannot be built simply by telling a child that they can trust us. They grow through repeated experiences of feeling understood, supported and safe, particularly when things are difficult. 

And this brings us back to our foundations. Just as we can't expect a building to stand securely without a solid base, we can't always expect therapeutic progress without attending to regulation and relationships first. Sometimes the most important work we do in a session isn't completing the activity we planned or reaching the goal we set. It's helping a child feel safe enough to come back, connect and try again. 

What state of thinking are you in right now?

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