Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Oh, I'm so glad that you could carve this little 10 or 15 minute slot out in your week. We have listeners to this podcast from all around the world.
And it's always thrilling to know how rich and robust a community we have gathering around these ideas of how to raise children simply and clearly, warmly, firmly. This week, I wanted to talk about children who go into denying, lying, blaming. And I, you know, it's a difficult situation.
And I want to see, reframe this is that denying, lying, blaming is a form of coping with overwhelm. That's the theme. Okay, now let's dig into this a little bit in the next 10 minutes or so.
Some of you might be familiar with a previous podcast I recorded, when I gave the picture that was given to me by my dear friend and colleague Davina Muse, who said to me, you know, a lie is a lost wish, looking for the path back to truth. Gosh, I was struck by that, a lie is a lost wish, looking for the path back to truth. And I would add to that, and I'll help you find that path.
But underneath that a little bit, if we sort of go layering down into when children lie and deny and obfuscate and blame others, and so on, we can, what lies underneath that is very often the picture of a child where things have gotten too big for them. It's overwhelming. It's all too much.
They're overstimulated, it's too big, they can't cope with it. And then they kind of up the drawbridge, if you know what I mean, they just pull the drawbridge up and they shut down to any kind of input from other, from their siblings, other kids at school, from teachers, parents. And some kids will, you know, get up onto the ramparts and start pouring hot oil over the side, you know, and shooting arrows and so on.
And we just don't want to get caught up in that siege mentality. A child's retracted and withdrawn by that, but by what had been going on. And it's important to know that there's just no point in storming the castle.
We'll get hurt if we do that. And then the recriminations and the frustrations become just too intense. And into that intensity, we can often, when a child, it's all got too big, we can often sit down and we can try and understand too much.
You know, we can try and talk too much about this. We can try and pull and pick the issue of what was going on too much. And a child will feel that they're being invaded and it'll increase their withdrawal behind their barriers.
An example of this, or words that really stood out for me, came from the film producer Werner Herzog, a film director and producer that I greatly admire. But as a thinker, I admire perhaps even more. And he said something about this going too deeply into an issue.
Here's what he said. These are his words. There is far too great an emphasis placed on psychotherapy and knowing all there is to know about oneself, a knowing in a greedy way.
If you illuminate brightly every corner of your house night and day, night and day continually, you will cease to have any mystery. Your house will become unlivable. It will drive you out.
What modern psychotherapy and much of the new age movement is doing is just this. We get fascinated by the illumined detail, but it's the wrong kind of light. He said that in an NPR interview in a program called Fresh Air back in 1999.
But I apply this to us when a child is angry, is denying and lying, and we know that they're not being truthful and they're blaming others. Trying to illuminate every aspect, trying to pass it out, trying to pick it apart, trying to say, well, that actually isn't true. No, no, it's not okay.
You're blaming your brother for that because I know that you did that. Look, no, I was standing right here and I watched you do that. And he's just saying, well, ha, I did not.
And you just watched him do it, right? Frustrating. But shining more and more light on it will, as Herzog said, force a reaction. And the reaction is for a child to withdraw often or just excarnate.
Herzog talks about being driven out of our own house. We can get driven out of our own body and emotions where we just go into denial. Now, what to do? What to do so that drawbridge can be lowered down? One of the things that I find most helpful is this simple little saying, and some of you might recall this from previous episodes, is that nothing gets worked out when we're worked up.
Nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. And in a sense, to give time, space, and grace to a child when they're withdrawing and blaming and let them know and they're denying, and is to say, I know that went really wrong and you wish that had enough. I know you wish something else could have happened that was more fun and better.
And we're going to work that out soon. Well, yeah, because he, and you've got this whole lot of blaming. And if the child they're blaming is right there with you, say, you don't agree with perhaps the exaggeration or even lie that a child is telling, but you can say, I know, I know.
You wish this had gone better, and you can turn to the other child, and you wish it had gone better too. But nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. We're going to give this a bit of space now.
And then we're going to circle back and see how we can get this right and then move on. Now, getting it right, and then this crucial little piece, right? And then moving on. We'll talk more about that in future episodes.
And then give it space. Just stop it right there. We're not, no, no, no, no, not right now, love.
No, we're not going to work this out while we're worked up. We're going to take some space. And just over and over be as insistent as you possibly can to be present for a child or children, but not engage in the dispute.
Non-engagement in that, but strong presence for them both. And to be able to say to them, there was absolutely a reason why this game went wrong. And you both have good reasons of why this got to being like it is.
But we're going to have some space and time right now. Now, it's a little bit like a very recent podcast episode I recorded about dialing back play stages. In this sense, you're just giving us some space so the kids can calm down, the adrenaline can calm down, the cortisol can calm down.
Usually, it's about the age of a child, if they're 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. It's about their age in minutes. If they're 12 years old, it's about 12 minutes.
If it's highly elevated, 12 to 20 minutes. If it's just an ordinary argument, 12 to maybe 8 minutes. So it's similar in that sense, isn't it? Because we're giving some space, some time and some grace for things to hunker on down, to calm on down.
And then when we re-enter back into what they were doing, it's a whole bunch easier than trying to work it out on the spot. So when kids are lying, denying, shaming, basically just deflect it. Let it go.
Just let it go. Don't enter into it. Not all situations lend themselves to this, I know.
But just let it go. And assure the other child, too, that let's let all that go. Because when we come back, we're going to work this out.
Each of you have got your own way of seeing this. It's a big point, isn't it? Each of you have got your own way of seeing it. And then we'll work it out so we can get on.
Now this last little part, so we can get on. We're going to quickly work it out so we can get on. That's avoiding this too much detail, too much light, too much focus that Werner Herzog was talking about in that quote that I read earlier.
Because kids then will really retract and recoil from us helping work stuff out if we're trying to sort of go into like family-based psychotherapy with all this. And I don't mean to be in any way disrespectful of psychotherapy because, my goodness, it does so much good in the world. But in this situation, going too deeply and shining too much light onto the situation will have children recoil and it will even increase that up the drawbridge.
And it will increase their kind of insistence that their brother, their sister, their classmate was lying. As opposed to letting all that go, letting them calm down, listening to the way they see it and letting them know not everyone's going to see it the same way. Big point.
So we can get on and get back to having fun. We can get back to doing things. But it begins with understanding that the lying, the blaming, the shaming is in some way a child's, in so many situations, it's a way of a child signaling to you that they are overwhelmed.
And all that behavior is just spillage coming out of their little cups. Okay. I sure hope that was helpful.
Bye-bye for now.
