What If Children Learned Psychology Before They Needed Therapy?
There is something I find slightly strange about my job.
Often, somebody arrives in therapy and we begin explaining things.
How anxiety works.
What avoidance does.
Why thoughts aren't necessarily facts.
Why the body reacts when we are frightened.
How behaviour gets reinforced.
Why we repeat patterns even when we know they aren't helping us.
How emotions work.
How to recognise what is happening inside yourself.
How to communicate what you need.
Useful stuff.
Sometimes life-changing stuff.
And occasionally I find myself thinking:
Why are we telling you this only now?
Why did you have to become so anxious that you stopped going outside before somebody explained avoidance to you?
Why did you have to hate your anger before somebody explained that feeling anger and acting angrily are two different things?
Why did you have to reach a therapy room before somebody helped you become curious about your own mind?
Perhaps some of this information arrived earlier.
Perhaps it didn't.
But I keep coming back to the same question:
What if children learned psychology before they needed therapy?
We plant so much information in children's brains
I wrote this in my notes:
“We plant so much information in the kids' brains, but we often don't plant the most important and necessary for the growth.”
A slightly clumsy sentence.
But I still know exactly what I meant.
We teach children an extraordinary amount.
How plants reproduce.
Where countries are.
What happened hundreds of years before they were born.
How to divide numbers.
How the digestive system works.
How to identify a metaphor.
How electricity travels through a circuit.
And yes. Please teach them all of it.
But there is another rather complicated thing they will have to operate for the rest of their lives.
Themselves.
Their mind.
Their body.
Their emotions.
Their behaviour.
Their relationships.
Their fear.
Their defences.
Their expectations.
Their differences.
The strange collection of experiences, learning and biology that eventually becomes me.
Shouldn't they learn something about that too?
What makes me tick?
This phrase appears again and again in my notes.
“What makes me tick?”
I like it because it doesn't sound clinical.
A child doesn't need a lecture on psychopathology.
They don't need to sit at eight years old wondering which disorder they might have.
I am talking about something much more ordinary.
What happens in my body when I'm scared?
Why do thoughts just appear in my head?
Why do I want to run away from things that frighten me?
Why can avoidance make the fear bigger next time?
Why do I sometimes say something horrible when I'm angry and regret it later?
Why does my friend react differently from me?
Why does something feel easy for one person and difficult for another?
Why do we form habits?
What happens when I'm overwhelmed?
How do I calm myself enough to think again?
How do I listen to somebody I disagree with?
What happens when I make a mistake?
How do I repair something after I've hurt somebody?
And perhaps one of the most important questions:
How do I find out why I do what I do?
That is psychology.
Not therapy.
Psychology.
Imagine knowing your brain before becoming frightened of it
I wonder how different some experiences might feel if we recognised them before we became afraid of them.
Imagine a child already knowing that a frightened body can beat faster.
That thoughts can become strange when we're anxious.
That an unwanted thought doesn't automatically tell us something important about who we are.
That avoiding something can bring enormous relief. And that relief itself can teach us to avoid again.
That anger can make us feel incredibly certain.
That emotions come and go.
That our brains learn through repetition.
That what feels automatic today may have been learned somewhere along the way.
Not so the child can diagnose themselves.
Not so they become their own therapist.
Just so that when their own brain does something very human, their first thought isn't necessarily:
What is wrong with me?
We could teach children to explore
There is another note of mine that I particularly like:
“We don't know what will be okay in ten years.”
I certainly don't know what problems today's children will have to solve when they are forty.
The world will change.
Technology will change.
Work will change.
Relationships may change.
The problems facing communities will change.
So perhaps we shouldn't become too obsessed with giving children all of our answers.
Some of our answers will be outdated anyway.
Perhaps we should also teach them how to find answers.
How to observe.
How to ask questions.
How to test something.
How to notice when an idea isn't working.
How to tolerate I don't know for a little while.
How to listen to somebody whose experience is completely different from theirs.
How to change their mind without experiencing it as a defeat.
How to become curious rather than immediately defensive.
How to experiment with their own behaviour and see what happens.
How to ask:
What happened before this?
What happened afterwards?
What did I learn?
What am I assuming?
Is there another explanation?
What could I try next?
Perhaps we need fewer children who can repeat exactly what we told them and more who can continue from where we left off.
Actually, I wrote something less polite than that:
“I don't want children to do exactly what we did. I want them to move further. Question. Challenge. And be fucking difficult at times.”
I still rather like that.
Teach them difference before difference becomes frightening
I think psychological education could do something else too.
It could make human difference ordinary.
Children notice difference anyway.
Different bodies.
Different personalities.
Different abilities.
Different ways of communicating.
Different brains.
Different families.
Different cultures.
Different things that frighten us, excite us, overwhelm us or make us comfortable.
We don't have to pretend these differences aren't there.
We can become curious about them.
One child needs quiet to concentrate.
Another needs movement.
One speaks constantly.
Another takes a long time to answer.
One loves being touched.
Another cannot stand it.
One child finds the task easy and another is using an enormous amount of energy to do exactly the same thing.
Imagine learning early that different doesn't automatically mean wrong.
And imagine learning how to ask another human being about their experience rather than assuming that yours is the standard one.
Children are capable of learning this.
Sometimes I think we underestimate them.
Where do future adults learn how to be with other people?
This is where my thoughts become a little more ambitious.
Because children don't stay children.
They become partners.
Friends.
Neighbours.
Parents.
Colleagues.
Managers.
Teachers.
Doctors.
Politicians.
The child learning how to listen today may one day be the adult making a decision about somebody whose life looks nothing like theirs.
The child learning that another person's needs can be different from their own may one day design a workplace, a school, a hospital, a policy.
The child learning how to disagree without immediately attacking may one day take that skill into a marriage.
And I wrote this question down:
“Where will the future parents learn how to talk to each other and to children? Why not at school?”
I don't have a particularly clever answer to that.
Why not?
We teach children how to write formal letters they may never write.
Perhaps we can also teach them how to listen to somebody they love when they're angry.
This isn't therapy
I can already hear the concern.
Do we really want to turn school into therapy?
No.
Absolutely not.
Not every emotion needs analysing.
Not every behaviour needs a formulation.
Not every difficult day is a mental-health problem.
Children shouldn't be taught to constantly inspect themselves for symptoms.
That would rather defeat the point.
This is about practical psychology for everyday life.
How learning happens.
How behaviour develops.
How thoughts work.
How emotions work.
How relationships work.
How our environment affects us.
How we affect our environment.
How to notice patterns.
How to communicate.
How to experiment.
How to understand ourselves a little better.
We don't teach anatomy because everybody is physically ill.
Why should understanding the mind begin only when somebody is psychologically struggling?
Perhaps therapy is too late to introduce psychology
I don't mean therapy itself is too late.
Therapy can be enormously useful at any age.
I mean that therapy is a strange place to introduce somebody to the basic idea that their own mind can be understood.
By then, sometimes years of patterns have already accumulated.
Years of I'm just like this.
Years of avoiding.
Years of believing every thought.
Years of being frightened of particular emotions.
Years of assuming everybody else's mind works approximately like ours.
Years of thinking difficulty means defect.
What if some of that curiosity came first?
Before the diagnosis.
Before the crisis.
Before somebody decided there must be something terribly wrong with them.
Let them continue from where we left off
Perhaps education isn't only about transferring what we already know.
Perhaps it is about preparing somebody to go further than us.
We don't know what world today's children will inherit.
Good.
They will have to help create it.
So teach them maths.
Teach them science.
Teach them history and literature and art.
Teach them about the enormous world outside them.
But perhaps give them some tools for exploring the world within them too.
Teach them to notice.
To question.
To listen.
To experiment.
To communicate.
To recognise fear without automatically obeying it.
To recognise difference without immediately turning it into defect.
To know that behaviour has a history.
To understand that they are still learning who they are.
And then let them surprise us.
Let them question things we thought were settled.
Let them find answers we didn't find.
Let them become better communicators than we were.
Better problem-solvers.
Perhaps even better parents.
We don't need them to finish where we finished.
We need to give them enough understanding to continue from where we left off.
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About the author
Anita Toze is a Clinical Psychologist (HCPC registered in the UK) with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy. She works online and in person with adults and young people aged 11 and over.
Cover photo by Didier Castelain on Unsplash
