Posts Tagged ‘reflexive practice’
Strange Loops and Sleepless Nights
Emily Tipton
I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day, who is struggling to get her nine- month-old son into a sleeping routine at night. As I was empathizing with her plight, I was reminded of my own struggles as a new mother with my eldest son, and how in retrospect I was able to use Reflexive Practice to help me to understand why it seemed I was caught in a loop and unable to make any progress.
I was educated as an engineer and had spent much of my career in various project management roles. So I must admit that I approached motherhood as a project and was quite confident that I would be able to strategize, organize and manage all aspects of this new role in my life. I was unprepared for the emotional side of motherhood, and my effectiveness was severely handicapped by lack of sleep. I’ve written in other blog postings about my birth experience, and the trouble that Ollie had afterwards (Trust), so I won’t revisit that here except to say that I believe the suffering he experienced in his early weeks impacted his ability to sleep through the night because he didn’t learn to settle himself as an infant. So, at nearly one year old he was still waking me several times a night and adamantly wanting to nurse, because that’s how he soothed himself.
At the time I felt like I was trying everything. But I found it challenging to be consistent – when he was teething, we were travelling, or I was just too tired to do anything else, I would succumb and nurse him, knowing that this was reinforcing the very behavior I wanted to stop because as his mother I wanted to soothe and nurture him. I found the situation difficult on so many levels – my rational and emotional selves were not aligned, I found it difficult to communicate the decisions I made in the wee hours of the morning effectively to my (very supportive, but frustrated and sleep-deprived) husband, and I was desperate for sleep. I believed that I was somehow failing to solve this problem, when it seemed like every other mother in the world had it beat.
It’s funny how, looking back, I don’t actually remember exactly how it all turned out. I weaned Ollie when he was 12 months old and I know that by the time my second son, William, was born, Ollie was 22 months old and sleeping all night long every night. But I remember clearly the intensity of the frustration as I descended into the depths of despair each time I realized I was cycling both Ollie and I through behaviours that were not serving either of us, or our relationship.
When I look at the situation retrospectively, with my Reflexive Practice lens, I can clearly see how we were in a strange loop. Each time I put increasing pressure on myself to “solve the problem” either by making rules for myself or finding some new tactic to try, I would react to setbacks in a very closed way – being unkind to myself and to Ollie by feeling like I had failed to implement solutions that should work, or that had worked for others. I would push expectations on my son that I couldn’t effectively communicate to him. When we failed, I would revert back to old habits and then stop trying, just feeling like I was never going to solve the problem. Then, I would see some kind of change in Ollie – he would sleep a little longer, or fall asleep on his own, without nursing, and all of a sudden I would be hopeful again. I would design more rules or research new methods, and enter the cycle all over again.
Strange loop pattern
What I didn’t understand at the time is that Ollie was not a problem to be solved. I had to start thinking about him, and his sleeping patterns, as a mystery to be explored. Relationships are complex and it was my role to try to understand and explore why he was behaving the way he was, not to compare him with other babies or push expectations onto him based on what I read in a book. Just that shift in perspective allows me now to see the situation completely differently. When I treat my children as opportunities to learn, instead of problems to be solved, my feelings about the situation or the “problem” shift. It was not wrong to design rules, or try different things I read in books, but it was wrong to place expectations on his response to these things, and feel like a failure when he didn’t live up to those expectations. I was telling a story about us both where we were failures. Instead, when I was able to openly observe and learn from how he responded, I could give us both grace, and stay out of the strange loop.
Complexity, Relationships, Strange Loops: Reflexive Practice
Today, organizations are downsizing, reorganizing, rightsizing, redesigning, and re-engineering in an attempt to be effective in a turbulent and uncertain marketplace. Although meant to help, more often than not, these initiatives do not come close to what is necessary for organizations to thrive in this complex world. They often fall short because they ignore the key aspects of an organization: its people and the relationships they form that allow work to be done effectively. Without people, there is no organization. Without resilient relationships among the people within an organization there is no high performance.
Everything that we do, as individuals and as groups, involves relationships. These relationships can be with our own ideas, assumptions, and values, with other people, with our jobs, or with the organization. Every situation is defined by its relationships. Fragile relationships translate into inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, low productivity, and a lack of innovation. Resilient relationships translate into high levels of effectiveness, productivity, and innovation.
No matter how resilient it is, every relationship experiences ups and downs over time. Like riding a roller coaster, sometimes we feel great in our relationships, and other times we feel overwhelmed by the strange loops these relationships manifest. To create and sustain relationships that work, we need to understand them, and how we, and others, function within them. Reflexive practice helps us to ride the strange loops that relationships create so we can develop and sustain resilience, and be prepared for other relationship roller coasters that may come our way.
We’re a leading-edge research and development company that focuses on building your organization’s capacity to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. We work with you to produce measurable results, so that you can learn at the speed of change. We research, field-test, and evaluate a variety of thinking and learning processes to identify which ones produce high performance.