- This session is about aggression and discipline in relation to adaptation and integration
- Aggression is a complex problem that has been present throughout history
- Traditional approaches to understanding and addressing aggression have failed
- The speaker's experience working with violent offenders led to a deeper understanding of aggression
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the developmental process and adaptation in order to make sense of aggression
- Aggression cannot be defined solely based on behavior, it is a psychological and emotional issue.

- Aggression is not solely a behavioral problem, but an emotional problem
- Aggression is defined as any eruption of attacking energy
- Attacks can be physical or verbal, and can also be experienced vicariously
- Aggression can also be directed towards oneself, leading to self-attack or suicidal ideation
- Aggression among children is increasing, as evidenced by rising suicide rates
- The preschool period is the most violent period in human lifespan
- Anger is not the primary emotion driving aggression, but rather frustration
- Frustration is a primal emotion shared by all mammals
- Dollard and Miller proposed that there are alternate outcomes to frustration that are incompatible with aggression
- Understanding and finding these alternate outcomes is key to promoting civilized behavior.

- Dollard and Miller's work on emotional understanding was disregarded during World War II
- The speaker realized the concept of alternate outcomes while driving in a roundabout in Provence
- Frustration is a universal experience and a key aspect of human life
- People try to change themselves, their world, or others when frustrated
- Frustration arises when faced with things that cannot be changed, leading to a sense of futility
- The impulse to change shifts to the impulse to cry, marking the beginning of transformation
- Emotional defendedness can prevent the expression of futility and lead to attacking others
- Frustration is a crucial emotion that drives change and adaptation.

- Frustration is an important emotion that is often mislabeled as anger.
- When we view a child's aggression as anger, we focus on finding a reason for their behavior instead of addressing the underlying emotion.
- It is important to recognize that aggression is a result of frustration and a failure to adapt to certain situations.
- Children may not be aware of what is causing their frustration, so it is important to approach them with empathy and understanding.
- Aggression is a way for children to release their pent-up energy and find relief.
- Understanding the connection between frustration and aggression can completely change how we interact with and address aggressive behavior in children.

- Conventional discipline, using consequences or social isolation, does not work for aggression because it increases frustration.
- Taking things away from children increases their defendedness and can lead to more aggression.
- Aggression is a result of lost tears, and pushing a child's face into futility through consequences does not resolve the underlying issue.
- The primary challenge with aggression is to prime the adaptive process and take tantrums to tears.
- If a child cannot find their tears or the process is broken, normal discipline will not work and a different approach is needed.

- It is important to address a child's frustration and reduce it where possible to prevent aggression.
- Punishments and consequences only escalate aggression and frustration.
- It is the responsibility of adults to change situations and structures that are too much for a child to handle.
- Facilitating safe eruptions of frustration can reduce the violating nature of aggression.
- Autistic children, in particular, need to be allowed to express their frustration.
- The adaptive process is nature's discipline, but if it is broken, traditional discipline methods won't work.
- Discipline should be about imposing order, not teaching a lesson.
- Intuitive cultures used spanking as a catalyst for futility because they understood the importance of allowing a child to express their tears.

- Nature's discipline involves pruning out things that are futile, which can lead to sadness and disappointment.
- Intuitive cultures used spanking as a catalyst for experiencing futility and tears.
- Spanking can be abusive when parents haven't processed their own tears and resort to hitting their children.
- 30 countries have outlawed spanking, but in doing so, have lost the understanding of the importance of encountering futility.
- Discipline is an encounter with futility and an opportunity for adaptation and growth.
- Consequences and sanctions can harden a child if they don't bring sadness or disappointment.
- Instead of trying to control the child, it is more important to control the circumstances and situations that lead to trouble.
- Non-adaptive children need more structure and guidance in their lives.
- Pointing out what does work is more effective than pointing out mistakes for non-adaptive children.
- We need to develop instincts to deal with what isn't working and have sadness about the things that do not work to find our way through.
- The adaptive process is crucial in understanding discipline and aggression.

- Aggression is a complex issue that cannot be solely defined by behavior, but is also a psychological and emotional problem.
- Frustration is a primal emotion that drives aggression, and understanding alternate outcomes to frustration is key in promoting civilized behavior.
- Aggression among children is increasing, and it is important to recognize that it is a result of frustration and a failure to adapt to certain situations.
- Conventional discipline methods, such as consequences and social isolation, do not work for aggression and can increase frustration.
- It is important to address a child's frustration and reduce it where possible to prevent aggression, rather than focusing on finding a reason for their behavior.
- Discipline should be about imposing order and facilitating safe eruptions of frustration, rather than teaching a lesson or controlling the child.
- Non-adaptive children need more structure and guidance in their lives, and pointing out what does work is more effective than pointing out mistakes.
- The adaptive process is crucial in understanding discipline and aggression.

Well, I'd like to welcome you to session 5.

This is our second session on adaptation.

Following this, we'll have 2 sessions on integration, the third process, the third maturing process.

Now I chose this time basically as a pull-out session to deal with the issue of discipline and the problem of aggression.

I thought this was an appropriate time because we can easily access both issues here, the problem of aggression and the issue of discipline, when we understand how things should unfold.

It's amazing, actually, when you have this information, how quickly daunting problems like aggression yield their secrets.

Now, aggression is a very complex, a very daunting problem.

It is probably 1 of the oldest problems of mankind, going back to the earliest story and recorded history of Cain and Abel.

It's a significant issue, and it's an issue that boggles our minds, and it's very difficult to address directly.

When we actually try to understand aggression by simply looking at aggression, we have nothing to compare it with.

This is partially the issue of aggression that challenged me to go deeper into understanding the human psyche, especially the unfolding of human potential and how it works, and to look at the dynamics of preschoolers.

When I graduated With my PhD, my first assignments, as I had mentioned previously, were working in the prison systems.

And 1 of the prisons I worked with housed the 30 most violent offenders of the province that I reside in, British Columbia.

And it became very quickly obvious to me, very obvious to me, that all of my training, all of my knowledge, all that I knew about aggression, all that we knew about aggression, failed to explain this problem.

I was immersed into a whole milieu of aggression and without any ability to understand it.

And we would throw everything we could at it.

At that point, we could do this, and it just made matters worse.

We tried consequences, and it made matters worse.

We tried empathy training and it in fact made matters worse.

In fact, we had to cut all empathy training programs because we found it was like arming heat-seeking missiles.

You simply, you could not ever, ever convey your vulnerabilities to individuals inclined to aggression because they would take advantage of it.

And so this is, this did not make any sense at all.

And it was primarily that experience of needing to make sense of something, needing desperately to make sense of something.

I was dealing with 2 young 14-year-olds who had actually killed their mothers among these individuals.

How could I be of any assistance when I did not understand the problem.

At the same time I was teaching at university putting together this material, developmental psychology, and gathering as much as I could through synthesis and distillation, as you know, to join the dots, to put all the puzzle pieces together, and was beginning to understand the theory of adaptation, the factor of adaptation.

And it was from there and accessing it that way, that dynamic, all of a sudden it shed light on the aggression problem, but coming from underneath rather than trying to get at it from on top.

With all the complexities of human dynamics and with all the alienation aspects of behavior, It was almost impossible to get at it from looking at it directly.

Although I have created a course on aggression, I actually created a three-day course on aggression that I taught across Canada for many years, but I have a four-hour course on aggression, I still prefer to do it this way.

Therefore, we're going to take a look at this briefly now and then again when we talk about integrative functioning and when we look at it from understanding these dynamics and again it underscores how important it is to be able to master, in a sense, the map, the developmental approach.

If you can make sense of kids from inside out, some of these complex and daunting problems start revealing their secrets for us, making sense to us.

And also, as I said, the issue of discipline, a very troubling issue, an issue that preoccupies many minds.

Many parents find, and even teachers find, that they are preoccupied with issues of discipline.

What to do when, again, is primarily an issue of discipline.

And the adaptive process sheds light on this.

It starts from a completely different place of what was meant to happen, how things should happen.

So we'll start with aggression, making sense of aggression.

And the key theme here, obviously, is, because I placed it here, is the understanding, the belief that an understanding of adaptation is absolutely pivotal, critical, to making sense of aggression.

And we can't address a problem we do not really understand.

We cannot make truly make a difference if we do not understand it so we have to understand it at this place.

The pressure always is nowadays because of the predominance of the behavioral approach is to define everything behaviorally.

We need to do these things, of course, to do research on them, but if you look carefully at the textbooks, for instance, and the research on aggression, there's very little research on aggression directly because we simply cannot measure it.

It is 1 of these things that when you define it behaviorally as hurting somebody, it just falls apart because you can hurt people for all kinds of reasons.

You can be clumsy, you can be immature, you can be honest about your feelings, you can do all kinds of things that have nothing to do with aggression.

When you start this way, it doesn't make sense.

And so when you start with the definition of hitting or fighting, a child may get into a fight to defend his dignity, to defend his sibling, to defend a handicapped child.

It may have nothing to do with aggression whatsoever and so it gets rather ridiculous when we start to define these things behaviorally because we lose the very meaning of what it is, what it's about and so we have to start with a definition of aggression that actually gets close or is psychological in nature, and in this case emotional in nature.

In fact, the word to aggress in Latin comes from the word to attack with the emphasis on the to, in other words, 1 is moved to attack.

Now when is moved to attack, to bite somebody's head off, to attack somebody's dignity, to put somebody else down, it doesn't mean it will necessarily have any impact.

So you cannot define it by its impact, which is a mistake.

It is simply in the movement and again as I've mentioned before what moves us is our impulses, our emotions, that is what moves us and so we define it by that movement we're moved to attack.

As a Canadian like many Canadian boys I played hockey.

I wasn't particularly good at it and so I was put on defense.

The puck was awfully small and I had great problems making contact with the puck so I was told always to hit the man, to whoever was going for the puck to take them out.

There wasn't any particular aggression about it, I was just doing my job.

I just made aim and tried to make contact and would do this.

I was not moved to attack, however things would happen.

Things would happen and suddenly I was moved to attack.

And when I was moved to attack, I got even worse as a hockey player and I couldn't hit anything I aimed at.

The only person I ever hurt was myself but I was still moved to attack.

You see the difference between impact and movement and so you've got to start with a psychological definition and that's part of the problems in research you have to operationally define something you have to define it in terms of behavior in some of these issues and complex human problems you can't define it that way it just doesn't work because aggression as we're going to look at is by and large not a behavioral problem, an emotional problem.

And if we understand it that way, it begins to reveal itself.

So we're going to define aggression in a bit of a different way as any eruption of attacking energy.

1 is moved to attack, and hence the volcano is a perfect image for it.

Now this covers all kinds of things, of course.

The normal hitting and striking, biting and throwing, fits and tantrums, hostility and screaming.

But we can attack somebody's dignity through shaming, we can, or through insults, we can put them down, we can attack through sarcasm, that is our attacks are as sophisticated as we are.

If you're very emotional, your attacks will be emotional, I hate you if you're very intellectual your attacks will be intellectual, you'll attack somebody's ideas somebody's theories, it will be completely intellectual We can euphemize it as wit, but sometimes it's downright sarcasm.

The attacking energy can be experienced as vicarious attacks.

You enjoy seeing other people getting beat up, hurt, put down, insulted, shamed.

And you can see this vicarious energy now on the internet, in the social media, of how many individuals actually move to, how much this attacking energy is in there.

You can always tell the energy in a person by the kind of expression they seek.

When I was working with these kids, the first thing I asked them is what kind of music they like listening to, because I could tell the music will tell the energy inside of them.

1 of the concerns is that more and more individuals, more and more of our children are gravitating towards expressions that have attack at the theme.

It's very attacking energy, and it tells us that our children, that it are increasing, the aggression problem is increasing among our children.

It can be a preoccupation with killing myself.

These are all eruptions of attacking energy.

And 1 of the reasons we know that aggression is increasing among children is because suicide rates themselves have increased fourfold in the last 50 years from 10 to 14 year olds, threefold in terms of children altogether and ninefold in many of our inner city places, in places where there is cultural breakdown like Nunavut and so on, we have a huge problem with this.

And the suicidal ideation has increased even more than that.

And so we know these are the hard signs that aggression is increasing among our children.

Many of us are living in a time of peace, especially in the countries that are represented here that are relatively free from this, what is happening, that aggression is actually increasing.

And so my challenge as I was working on the 1 hand with very violent, violent offenders, on another hand I was beginning a private practice that was largely of parents of preschoolers, and as we'll look at a little bit later, the preschool period is the most violent period of the whole lifespan, and very naturally so.

And so we begin to understand that, why this is.

And then on the other hand, I was trying to put together a theory of the unfolding of human potential for my students at university, a coherent theory that they could apply in any venue.

And so what came together is making sense of aggression, not from the top down, but looking at it from how, through the process of adaptation, what was meant to happen.

So I'll just briefly describe it here, briefly describe it and I'll use the roundabout, the traffic circle, as the main image, main metaphor to tie things together here.

And so the issue is, of course, the issue is if we are moved to attack, if it is moved to attack, you can feel the energy, you can feel the steam, you can feel the charge, then what emotion is this?

Most people think that it's anger, but anger doesn't make any sense because the aggression problem is something that all mammals have.

Every single mammal is capable of aggression and only humans are capable of anger because anger involves some cognitive component of it, the cerebral cortex, not just the limbic system.

They all have the same basic primal emotions as we have, but anger is not a primal emotion.

Anger is a secondary emotion that involves cerebral cortex activity.

And this is 1 of the biggest mistakes we make is those individuals who have an emotional theory of aggression usually talk about anger.

So we have anger management courses, anger management workshops, we do these things and I'll go over, we go into the cerebral cortex rather than the limbic system.

It turned out that as we become more aware of what the primal emotions were, 2 brilliant theorists in 1939, 2 American researchers, Dollard and Miller, narrowed it down to said that it is a very very primal emotion that is responsible for aggression and that primal emotion is frustration.

Frustration is something that we share with all other mammals.

It is a 1 of the 1 of the primary emotions of the limbic system It is simply an emotion that we experience when something doesn't work.

We can't get to our food system or our food, where something is blocking us, the mother bear is separated from the cub, the stomach doesn't work, there is pain in the system, something doesn't work.

And so it's the experience of this frustration now when 1 doesn't have to be aware of frustration this is the thing with the primary emotions 1 doesn't have to be aware of this at all 1 of the things that I discovered is that very few of the violent offenders that I worked with were even aware of being frustrated.

They never talked about it, it wasn't in their writing, they never said this doesn't work for me, that doesn't work for me, there were there was no indication of frustration generally there at all because it's a primary emotion it can exist in us we are Moved feelings are the are the are the conscious tip of emotion But emotion and in humans are basically the only ones that are capable of feeling their emotions.

But all mammals, our horses, our cats, our dogs, our monkeys, the mice, they all have the basic primal emotions that we do.

And so Dollard and Miller said that they were convinced that it was frustration that moved us to attack, but they were equally convinced that in humans at least, we could be very, very frustrated without erupting into attack.

And so, Dollard Miller said, there must be alternate outcomes to frustration that are incompatible with aggression.

Finding these alternate outcomes is the key to civilized behavior both as a society and as an individual.

Unfortunately, and ironically, the Second World War II broke out in 1939, and all Dollard and Miller's work was basically cast aside and by the time the war was finished, the psychology departments had moved, had changed to a much more behavioral kind of approach and dismissed emotional kinds of understandings and so on and it began the rational approach, the great rational experiment and so we lost all that wisdom.

When I realized what Dollard and Miller, and the book still stands there, and it's 1 of the most outstanding little reads if you want to read it.

When I realized what they had done is they had sketched out the ultimate issue, I realized it was a traffic circle, it was a roundabout that had to be the image because these are alternate outcomes.

Now I'm talking about a kind of a roundabout that you see in Paris or you know in Aix-en-Provence where we were on sabbatical.

It was actually when I was in that roundabout and with our big minivan that we shipped over because they didn't have a big enough car for us to use.

And I was actually on around the third spin, around the roundabout, and I couldn't find the right exit off of it.

And I was getting very frustrated and wanting to honk my horn and foul words of frustration starting to emanate from within.

The children were in the car, they didn't get out.

But I was in Provence basically on sabbatical to try and solve the riddle of aggression.

I thought if I can't understand the most daunting problem of humankind, if I can't make sense of this, if I can't make sense of it in preschoolers and in myself, I don't know anything about, I don't understand humans.

And I had to crack this riddle, and then it all of a sudden became clear, oh my goodness, that's what they were talking about.

It was, and it's the roundabout that is there, alternate outcomes.

We're frustrated the day we're born because we can't stay where it was warm and safe.

This is absolutely part of everyday life.

So how in the world do we keep from hitting others, from attacking others, from biting others' heads off, from sarcasm, from all of this, what is the answer to it, what are the outcomes?

And well, once we've got it laid out, and once you understand adaptive theory, it actually, it's very, very easy to understand.

Once it came, it just tumbled in and I started reading.

I had brought into with me hundreds upon hundreds of case studies of all the individuals I had worked with through the years.

The violent and the not so violent, the suicidal and so on, to try and see if this model made sense.

And the more I looked at these, the more excited I got that the model indeed was very, very simple, but it could make sense of a wide array of manifestations.

First of all, when we're frustrated, what do we do?

When a child is not getting his way, when mommy said no, when he's not getting his agendas fulfilled, what's the first thing?

He doesn't say mommy, mommy, poopoo face first.

Yes, the first thing we try to do when things don't work is to effect change.

Some of us develop whole approaches to this.

Many of you here today and taking this course are basically change agents.

Now the difference between us and those in prison is we have a different outcome to our frustration.

Why would you take all this time To come and attend a course if you weren't frustrated if you're completely satisfied with your world, so I know you're frustrated I'm frustrated But what do we do with it again some of us try to change ourselves some of us try to change our world Some of us try to change our world some of us try to change others Now we don't even know everything that frustrates us the thing about this is you'll know you'll know you'll be able to see for instance if you know Maybe close friends of yours a marriage doesn't work But maybe they don't know that and so they're busy trying to renovate their house.

You know, busy trying to change things that have nothing to do with the actual problem.

And so you see, individuals that are always trying to change things, you know that underlying it very simply is they're frustrated.

Something basic isn't working and so they're busy trying to affect change if they're effective in in changing things or at least there's a lot of things that seem to be there to change all the energy goes to this place that's it Doesn't go around anymore in the traffic circle.

But the problem is, as we looked at yesterday, is that there are so many things we cannot change.

There's the natural laws, there are so many things that are out of our control.

Circumstances and situations that we could just go on and on and on we can't make anyone want to be with us that doesn't want to the invitation to exist in another's presence that fundamental thing that we all desire and it's out of our control.

And so whenever we're up against something that we cannot change, we encounter futility.

Now from last session, what is the issue here?

Humans are the most capable of any organism of being able to adapt to do those things that they cannot change.

We try to change most everything but we get up against things that we cannot change and when we cannot change them instead of the impulse to change things from last session, from session 4, then where does the impulse change?

When it hits the amygdala, when it sinks in, the impulse stops from trying to change things, and the impulse now is to?

1 doesn't have to have tears on the outside.

But when it sinks in, there's nothing left to do but cry.

And that is the great journey of human adaptation.

As we mentioned in the last session, where this begins is to have our tears about that which we cannot change.

Then our brain, it occurs to a brain that we can handle it and it also transforms us so that we are not the same anymore we are changed for the better but it is through those tears, that acute sadness and disappointment that but, but here is the problem as we mentioned last time, the impediments to adaptation.

We must be able to find our tears and we'll look later on in a later on session, the feelings of futility are very vulnerable feelings and if there's any emotional defendedness whatsoever often the feelings of futility are the first that to be lost and so we lose that place of tears we can't find the tears and and we need a safe place to cry so if the futility we encounter is not felt that is where we're moved to attack.

Now frustration is the workhorse of the limbic system.

Frustration is 1 of the most important emotions we ever have.

You look at it, frustration moves us to change what we can and moves us to adapt to what we can't, to be able to have our tears about what we can't.

This is a phenomenal process and it's all rooted in frustration.

Frustration isn't a bad thing, it's a wonderful thing.

Frustration is a powerful working emotion that is absolutely essential to be there.

We don't even have words for it with our children.

We don't even bring it into consciousness.

In fact, we misname it, when we misname it, as anger.

And again, the problem with anger, you see, if you go to anger, I'll come back to this But if you if you think anger you're thinking cerebral cortex the rational Anger is when 1 is angry when it's somebody's fault.

When we think it's somebody's fault that something doesn't work.

And so when we think of it as anger, the first thing we do, we ask the child a question, why did you hit your sister?

We're looking for a reason not an emotion.

We made up our mind that it's anger so now we're looking for the reason why it would be anger and so they tell their story, well she didn't share her toy.

Well now we know that issues of anger are issues of justice and there's always 2 sides of the story.

So now we have to turn in from the inquisitor to now we have to be detective and find the other story.

So we go to the sister and find out what happened and sure enough we find 2 stories.

Now we have to decide which story is true, which story isn't, so we have to turn into a judge.

And once we decide which story is true and which story isn't, now we have to restore justice because whenever you get aware of what justice is, you have to correct it.

And actually, nobody's happy about this, because it was all wrong.

The fact is, as most children don't have any clue, we ask them why, and they invent a story.

We know that they erupted in attack because something isn't working for them.

But we don't know whether it's a migraine headache, we don't know whether their stomach isn't working, we don't know whether it is a basic relationship isn't working, that dad didn't come to visit when he was supposed to, we don't know what it is and most likely they don't either.

But where we should be looking for the emotion.

You see, if we do this, it changes everything.

Oh my goodness, honey, something's not working for you.

Instead of asking them to justify their behavior, it brings us alongside because we know we know if there's an eruption of attacking energy that child is frustrated so we know even if they don't know something is not working for you we might not know what we may have a very good idea of what isn't working for them, but that is key, that is key to be able to address it as frustration And so that's why it's so important to, the insight is so important, why it makes all the difference how you approach aggression.

Not as an anger problem, not as a behavioral problem, not as a problem of meanness, of rudeness, or anything like that.

The child is highly frustrated, but what it indicates is the child has not yet had his tears about whatever it is that is not working.

The child has not yet had his sadness and that's why it is so important to understand this.

It brings you back to a dance that is informed by this knowledge.

Well, what happens when we go back to the exit over here, to the aggression?

We're getting to the last place of the roundabout.

See, this is where frustration turns foul.

And what does the body try to do with what it cannot use?

What does it do with the food it cannot use?

It tries to get rid of it, tries to excrete it, this is exactly what it's trying to do with the energy that it cannot use, now we, frustration is meant to move us to effect change, to move us to our tears when up against futility, after that it's useless.

And so we need to get that energy out and that's exactly how the kids in the prison talked.

They looked for relief, Even their language for aggression was a language that had to do with the excretory functions.

And that is exactly what it is, there then there is a release, and that is where the aggression comes from.

Once we understand this, it completely changes how 1 interacts.

But the key to this is in the adaptive process.

Aggression is the outcome of a failure to adapt.

As human beings we have a great capacity to adapt to things that are beyond our control.

Our failure to do so, our failure to be able to have our sadness about the things that are out of our control give rise to elevated frustration that turns foul.

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Intensive I - Session 5