Tag: self-esteem

PACE – it’s the way forward!

I ended up sitting in a conference listening to an expert talk about PACE this week. I ignored my ego telling me to leave because I know it all. I’m glad I did this because something I realised while he was talking is that this little-known ‘attitude’ is probably what could fix the divides between humans. A big statement, I know.

Sit down, with a cup of whatever makes you feel cozy and stick with me here.

So for those of you who don’t know, PACE is an attitude developed by Dan Hughes, that teachers, social workers, parents and therapeutic services use for children and young people with a traumatic background. These children and young people have developed attachment difficulties and so to put it simply, their brains have been wired differently to those who had a secure attachment in early life. To begin to rewire and therapeutically reach these children and young people, we need to take a different approach, which is PACE. Now bear with me.

PACE stands for Playful, Accepting, Curious and Empathetic. These are the attitudes you need to use when interacting with these traumatized individuals, all the time and forever. In other words, you don’t judge their behaviour, their words or their reactions; you accept it. You empathise and get curious about why they are doing those things and what makes them tick. And as often as possible you keep things light and playful, without sarcasm or shaming.

I will tell you from personal experience that it’s hard to do all the time. My parenting and teaching programming overrides my attitude sometimes but I reign it back in because the outcome is amazing.

Imagine a world where every person you encountered listened to you, empathised with you, accepted what you said and kept things light? Just take a moment to think about your interactions, now. With your boss, partner, bank manager. How would they differ?

As I sat there listening to the man give examples, I thought, what if; what if everyone applied the attitude to everyone, not just the traumatized? It wouldn’t harm anyone to feel accepted no matter what, or to feel listened to, to feel like you can have fun and be light-hearted with the people in your life. As an adult, that may seem overly simplistic but it also sounds pretty lovely to me. Imagine meeting people where they’re at and having an honest conversation because you know they will meet you where you’re at. What a difference!
So I stand by my original statement: if everyone could have a PACE attitude towards anyone, there would simply be less judgement, less fear, fewer lies, less boasting and bullshit. If everyone could accept each other’s truths, that would go a fucking long way to eradicating hate too.

PACE – it’s the way forward!

To learn more about PACE and Dan Hughes: http://www.danielhughes.org/about.html

‘For girls’

My eldest son came home from school a few months back proclaiming certain tv shows, games and what-not to be ‘girl things’.

Now, given that most of his friends are girls, his male friends also have long hair like him and his favourite tv shows were Care Bears and Luna Petunia, I was struggling to figure this out!

I guess I had naively thought that gender equality would filter into him by osmosis. That he would view the world differently through his side-swept bangs, stay-at-home Dad and working mother. He would know that what others classed as normal, we were throwing out the window.

But no, he’s 5 and his friends views and phrases hold more weight than mine.

So I was very chilled out in explaining that there’s no such thing as boy games or girl games. 6 times. 6 times I was super chilled and explained it as carefully as I could.

The seventh occasion involved scrolling for a tv show on Netflix and hearing, ‘Urg, that’s a girl show’. I may not have had the same chilled out tone in my repetition this time and I may have gone a little over the top listing every show he likes and every game he plays that are technically ‘for girls’, in quite possibly an irate tone of voice. The answer I got was, ‘oh’ and he hasn’t mentioned it since. Personally, I think finding out that She-Ra is a ‘girl show’ was the clincher in making him throw out the whole idea, not me.

In the end, I learnt not to expect my kids to innately understand gender equality through what they see in their family, as the world has many more contradicting examples than we could possibly compete with. This is too important to leave to chance, this must be taught in everything we do and addressed head on when needed.

So I will curb the irate tone and be prepared for whatever comes next, all the while setting and highlighting positive examples where I can.

Planting seeds

Female body image portrayed in the media is toxic. This isn’t groundbreaking news but apparently this common knowledge isn’t enough to stop it. So we each fight our own personal battles from the humiliating baseline that we are not naturally emaciated  as well as the female body generally considered shameful in one way or another. The other day a small victory happened from a surprising source which has given me so much hope.

My husband and I had a big wedding celebration in Johannesburg a few years back, in summer, so it was due to get pretty hot. I was helping my mum pack and she only had thick t-shirts and dresses with sleeves. My mum doesn’t do hot. She melts at anything above 23 degreesC.  I told her she needed vests and sleeveless tops, to which her answer was ‘oh no, I don’t like the tops of my arms and everyone will see my flabby bits’.

This was not a shock, I have heard it from women far younger and skinnier than my mum. I’ve heard it from myself plenty of times historically. However, since I decided to not give a fuck about what other people think of my body, I have become more comfortable and happy in my own skin; I have stopped trying to prove something through my appearance and have become far less self-conscious.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t got it cracked and I’ve certainly not a healthy BMI score. But I am happier. I do have more self-worth.

So I gave my mum the rant I have given so many times before to essentially brick walls: “who gives a flying fuck what other people think of your appearance? If they honestly don’t have better things to think about than your flabby arms or wrinkles at the top of you armpits, then I would be more concerned about their pitiful, meaningless lives than about your body.” This time I added, Mum, “you have fought cancer and won who gives a shit about other people. You are going to die in 35degree heat- wear a fucking vest top!”

So she bought vest tops and wore no sleeves for the full 2 weeks she was there. A massively significant victory for me and my mum. 

But here’s the lesson that has struck me. She now attends slimming world and is enjoying it, not for other people but for herself; she feels good. In the heatwave we’ve had this year, her fellow slimmers have admired her ‘courage’ in wearing sleeveless tops. When they comment on her ‘bravery’ she gives them the speech I gave her, just with less swearing. I don’t know if those ladies have gone on to show their armpit folds and bingo wings but the seed has been planted. And that seed was planted by my mum, which makes me excessively happy.

 

Jameela Jamil giving a perfect real-life example:  https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jameela-jamil-body-shaming_uk_5b9a249be4b041978dbff413

A post about the impact of negative female expectations: Negative distribution

Negative distribution

As I have reflected on my own thoughts and views of women, men, restrictions and equality, I have realised that many of the moments in the mirror – the self-doubt – sound an awful lot like the words of some women I have known.

Friends who have had distinct views on men and relationships have influenced me and shaped my thoughts at different times in my life. We are all surrounded by each others views all the time, especially now that we can give them from across the world. Even when you don’t agree with a view, it still has the ability to stick with you years on. One woman I knew viewed men as a tool who were not allowed to get too close; the other would bend and mound herself to what the stranger, aka potential husband, might possibly expect of her. When the relationship went south, one would blame the men for whatever slight she could remember and the other would blame herself for whatever ‘crime against perfection’ she could find in the mirror.

Here’s the clincher, both women were confident, funny, talented and beautiful, which they knew…until a man entered their lives. The patriarchal programming was jarring to me at the time and sickens me in retrospect.

I was once told by one of these ‘friends’: “if you don’t wax your arse, he’ll never want to stick his dick in it”. As if it was my responsibility to remove hair I didn’t know I had, just in case a guy I had just met wanted anal sex. My response was along the lines of it being ‘his problem’ but the shock from the depth of that statement has rung with me for a long time. The implication that if a man doesn’t want to have any kind of sex with me that it must be my fault! That something as natural as body hair could make me unattractive! That my appearance could be such a turn off after I had wooed them with my personality and wit!

In my darkest moments, I felt naïve that I had underestimated the aesthetic appeal, that I was a joke for thinking I could ‘compete with beauty’. However my façade, and now my darkest voice too, calls bullshit! My dad’s last argument against my first tattoo was ‘what if you meet a man who doesn’t like tattoos’, to which I responded ‘well I won’t like him very much either, so he’s obviously not the man for me!’  I stand by that. If you don’t like me for how I am, fuck off. I am not contorting, waxing, plucking, starving myself for anyone. I like me. I am funny, interesting, clever and strong, whether my legs are hairy or not. No “double agent for the patriarchy” (J Jamil, 2018) is going to tell me otherwise.

So I guess my point is that I am now much more critical when listening to well-meaning advice. For generations upon generations, we have been programmed by the patriarchy but at least if we can be aware of it and censor the programming from being redistributed from our mouths to other women, we stand a chance of evolving.

Read more about female body image: Planting seeds