- Session 6 is about the integrative process in child development
- Conflict is seen as a driving force of development
- The integrative process leaves its mark on the personality and character
- It leads to balance, self-control, understanding fairness, patience, courage, moral sensitivity, cooperation, consideration, perspective, and appreciation of irony and paradox
- These attributes cannot be taught or innate, but are a result of maturation
- School systems are trying to teach these attributes, but it is not possible through curriculum and instruction.

- The curriculum on virtues and moral education is successful for children who already have these qualities, but those who need it most are unable to benefit because something is missing in the process.
- Integration is about mixing without blending, where separate elements come together to create a greater whole without losing their individuality.
- Conflict is a key part of development, where conflicting elements are mixed together to create growth.
- The term "temper" means mix, and it refers to the proper blending of different elements to create works of art and symbolize a well-balanced individual.
- Development is about finding answers and adding them in, rather than cutting things out.
- Development starts with separation and then moves towards integration.
- All aspects of development begin with an either-or system and move towards a this-and system.
- Babies experience the world through one sense at a time, and changing the sensory modality before transitioning can help them adjust.

- Piaget's theory of cognitive dissonance changed our understanding of child development
- Between ages 5 and 7, children first show the ability to have conflicting ideas simultaneously
- Many adults, including politicians, lack the ability to think from another person's perspective
- Being well-tempered means living in the middle, balancing conflicting thoughts and feelings
- Emotional integration is essential for development, but Piaget focused primarily on cognition
- Having mixed feelings and conflicting impulses is a sign of emotional integration
- Paralysis is the first stage of civilization and allows for the control of impulses
- True movement comes from experiencing sadness and melting impulsiveness.

- The video discusses the importance of personal integration and social integration in human development.
- Personal integration, or the ability to experience conflicting feelings, is a prerequisite for social interaction.
- The prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in emotional integration and is larger in humans compared to other mammals.
- The prefrontal cortex allows for the handling and mixing of emotions, leading to balanced behavior.
- The prefrontal cortex can be developed through practice and exercise of mixed feelings.
- Even individuals with brain injuries or compromised prefrontal cortex can still benefit from developmental support and practice of mixed feelings.

- The prefrontal cortex develops in the occipital lobes and requires exercise to grow
- Registering more than one feeling at a time develops between 5 to 7 years of age
- Intense emotions take longer to mix and can delay the development of the prefrontal cortex
- The prefrontal cortex requires energy and may not function well without enough sleep
- Decision-making should be done when emotions are balanced and both sides are considered
- The corpus callosum is the bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain and allows for complex problem-solving
- The limbic system is the primary orchestrator of brain development and emotional regulation
- Non-integrative functioning can lead to deficits in experiencing conflicting emotions simultaneously
- Growing up means losing the purity of emotion but gaining balance and stability
- Being of two minds is not a weakness, but a strength.

- Many adults long for the purity of emotions they experienced as children, but this lack of balance and stability is not healthy.
- Being of two minds is not a weakness, but a strength. Delinquents lack inner conflict and sleep peacefully, while mature individuals may struggle with conflicting thoughts and emotions.
- Immature individuals lack integrative functioning and have untempered experiences and expressions.
- Bipolar disorder can arise from strong emotions swinging from one extreme to another.
- Many children and teenagers struggle with understanding the concept of work because they can only experience one feeling at a time.
- Immature individuals are unable to operate from two reference points simultaneously and lack true courage and patience.
- Dogmatism and black-and-white thinking stem from immaturity, not from religious or political ideologies.
- Preschoolers do not doubt their own perceptions and ideas, but lack the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.
- Knowledge does not always translate into action, and good intentions can be easily overshadowed by impulses.

- The ability to think twice and have conflicting thoughts requires a functional prefrontal cortex.
- Children with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes are often misunderstood and blamed for their actions.
- It is important to understand the deficits in their development and believe in their intentions.
- The lack of integration in the prefrontal cortex leads to a lack of certain abilities and skills.
- Understanding this can help identify what is missing and what needs to happen for development to occur.
- This concludes session 6 of the video series.

- Session 6 discusses the integrative process in child development.
- Conflict is seen as a driving force of development, leading to balance, self-control, understanding fairness, patience, courage, moral sensitivity, cooperation, consideration, perspective, and appreciation of irony and paradox.
- These attributes cannot be taught or innate, but are a result of maturation.
- School systems try to teach these attributes, but it is not possible through curriculum and instruction.
- Integration is about mixing without blending, where separate elements come together to create a greater whole without losing their individuality.
- Conflict is a key part of development, where conflicting elements are mixed together to create growth.
- Development starts with separation and then moves towards integration.
- Emotional integration is essential for development.
- The prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in emotional integration and can be developed through practice and exercise of mixed feelings.
- The prefrontal cortex requires energy and enough sleep to function well.
- Decision-making should be done when emotions are balanced and both sides are considered.
- Being of two minds is not a weakness, but a strength.
- Immature individuals lack integrative functioning and have untempered experiences and expressions.
- Dogmatism and black-and-white thinking stem from immaturity.
- Preschoolers lack the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.
- Children with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes are often misunderstood and blamed for their actions.

Well, welcome to session 6, the third of the trilogy of maturing processes, the integrative process, the crowning achievement of nature, an incredible process really.

And we covered some of the source material, the theorists that looked at the role of conflict in development, as conflict as a motor of development, the driving force of development.

And there's a rich, rich array of literature on this, intuitive literature, much in the English literature, in classic literature on this, many philosophies that revolve around this idea of opposing forces.

The idea for every force, there's an equal and opposite force.

The primary principle in physics and in the universe.

And so this is a very big construct, but here we're looking at it basically in terms of child development and in our own development, the realization of human potential, and the role that inner conflict plays in the unfolding of this.

And again, I think you'll find this, my challenge is to, of course, distill it to the essence.

But I think if I can do this, and if I can do this properly, that it makes sense of a lot of phenomena, that it can actually explain a lot of the problem behavior in children as well as the fruit that we would all aspire to in our children.

So this is the first of 2 sessions on the integrative process.

And it's again, as I said, it's an impressive process.

And the word character actually comes, the root meaning is mark.

And we'll go into the next session how this is really the essence of character, of human character, the development of character of, in traditional language, we would speak about virtue.

But here we'll take a look at the fruit of how it leaves its mark on the personality.

And starting off with the slide as we have with the other 2 processes, the adaptive and emergent process, this slide of the fruit of the integrative process, where I've tried to bring all of the material together and see what results from this.

Certainly a balance and stability come from the experience of conflicting processes or forces in oneself at the same time.

There needs to be, it's simultaneous at the same time.

Self-control, we'll take a look at the very essence of overcoming impulsiveness.

We generally think of self-control as will versus impulse.

That's not the secret of self-control actually.

We'll find that it's in the conflicting emotions that the key is, not in cutting something out, not in will against emotion or will against impulse, but against the experience of emotional discord.

We've mentioned this in past sessions, that fairness is a sophisticated construct.

No preschooler understands fairness because simply they say it's not fair if they didn't get the biggest piece, if it didn't work for them.

But that's not, fairness has to do with justice, and justice has to do with at least that there is justice for 2.

And so you have to take somebody else into consideration and that requires a development to take someone else into consideration.

We'll take a look at this, why work is often considered a virtue and why many children are not capable of work and why our school system, which is based upon a concept of work, many kids do not get it.

They're not, they haven't developed the ability to understand work.

To be patient when frustrated, capable of courage.

Again, we'll go into that more the next session.

Courage is not the absence of fear, rather it's a relationship we take with fear.

And so it involves much emotional discord, sensitive to moral issues, especially things like taking turns, moral issues that have to do, again, with justice and fairness.

Kohlberg's whole theory of moral development was based upon being able to experience conflicting points of view at the same time.

It wasn't, it was not something that can be taught.

It's the fact that, you know, the kind of problem of you have a life raft and only 6 spaces in the life raft and you have 20 people on the boat and who gets to go.

And when you ask a child this question, there is not a right answer.

The answer is how many different viewpoints can they take?

And they can move easily from 1 to another.

If they're not riddled with conflict, then there's something wrong.

If you ask a person a question that has this kind of moral issue to it.

If they're not actually squirming with inner conflict, there is a problem.

And you can see this has huge implications.

Capable of cooperation, operating from 2 reference points simultaneously.

To be considerate, 1 of our highest values, to consider others, to be able to consider context, to appreciate context, civilized of course, capable of perspective, to understand irony and paradox, wonderful.

Irony requires the ability to carry conflicting signals simultaneously, to see double meanings, to feel more, to see more meanings.

Paradox, metaphor, All of these depend upon the capability of cognitive dissonance, about being able to experience conflicting ideas simultaneously.

And again, a three-year-old, a four-year-old is incapable of metaphor.

There's many adults who are incapable of irony.

I used to sometimes play with my students at university in terms of just to be able to see how developed they were and that's always 1 of the tests and I'll talk about it a little bit later on as well.

And so I'd say my favorite form of humor is to say the opposite of what I mean.

And then you have to get a lot of signals to be able to see that you're saying the opposite of what you mean.

And so I'd start a class by saying the opposite of what I mean.

And you could see the looks in individuals, as some of them would immediately get it because they'd get the context.

So obviously I was playing with this, and you know, but you'd always have the hands.

But you said the opposite thing yesterday.

Okay, we've got a concrete thinker here, black and white, dogmatic, doesn't understand metaphor and won't do very well in the exam because the exam is going to have a lot of multiple meanings on it, which is exactly the kind of thing.

This has nothing to do with the intelligence.

But there's many people who don't get irony, who don't get paradox.

Many adults who do not, who don't understand metaphor, who are concrete thinkers, who think in black and white, who are dogmatic.

So it's how to get beyond black and white thinking and mix well with others.

And again, this is the separateness without loss of togetherness.

Not simply getting along, but this idea of togetherness without loss of separateness, integrity without loss of diplomacy, diplomacy without loss of integrity.

Wouldn't we be pleased if 1 of our children, 1 of our students wasn't given a reference letter with this list of attributes?

If we could, oh my goodness, would we be ahead.

Can we teach a child to understand irony?

So a child is not born nor can we teach them.

And again, the answer is, this is a result of maturation.

This is a result of this integrative process, the third process, the crowning achievement of nature.

Unfortunately, today as our school systems are becoming more aware of the lack of these attributes in our school children.

They're getting more into saying, we've got to broaden our education and we've got to teach these things.

Thinking that if they're not there, it's because they haven't been taught.

And no, this is, although it's admirable to realize these things are missing, absolutely it is important, but we cannot get there that way.

This will not lend itself to a curriculum, to instruction.

You take children who are already like this and they love the curriculum on virtues.

They love the curriculum on moral education and so on because they get it from the inside.

And so it feels quite successful, but the ones who need it most are the least able to benefit from this because it is something is missing again.

Something is missing, the process by which they get there.

Again the key to the essence of integration, each of these has a very very simple simple key when you distill it to the essence, is a blending without mixing, or sorry mixing without blending, sorry, the mixing without blending, that is when you mix you bring separate elements together, separate feelings, part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way, but you don't lose the separateness of it.

2 cells begin to interact with each other but each cell remains separate the hemispheres of the brain begin to interact with each other creating the whole of the brain but there remain both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and so this is a togetherness that comes from separate entities that interact not a fusion The left hemisphere doesn't become the right hemisphere.

The right hand doesn't become the left hand.

They remain discrete elements but they come together in a greater whole.

But that whole is made up of different parts.

So it's mixing without blending, togetherness without the loss of separateness.

And so the ultimate process of maturation, the image for this that I've chosen, like the maze for adaptation, is simply the mixing bowl.

It's where conflicting elements are mixed, where the child has 2 separate ideas at the same time, 2 separate feelings at the same time, is both alarmed and filled with desire simultaneously.

This is the ultimate developmental process.

And if we understood this, we would understand our role with children then is to help get things in the same place at the same time that ordinarily don't coexist together.

And so you get the hugs and the hits together.

We'll talk more about this, but this is the idea.

You actually foster this process of getting them in the mixing bowl.

Now there is a term for this that means mix, a very important term.

I talk about it in my book, hold on to your kids.

And the word temper, and you can see how we've lost our intuition about this term, but temper comes actually from Latin and it simply means mix, and as I talk about it in the book, temper referred to there, it became a metaphor, but it referred to the proper, if clay was well-tempered, clay was a proper mix of sediment, of sand, of moisture to enable the potter to make works of art.

And in Latin and in Greek times, works of art, of clay, symbolic of culture, of civilization.

And so this was the tempered, the mix, to be able to create works of art this way, symbolizing the cultured, the civilized, the well-balanced, the well-tempered individual.

And this is the key here, that everything in us has an answer.

The left hemisphere of the brain has a right hemisphere.

1 emotion has another emotion as the answer.

The sympathetic nervous system has a parasympathetic nervous system.

Everything has an answer and in finding that answer development is increased.

The brain doesn't work on a cut-it-out system.

That's the adaptive process where you cut something out, but you have to have your tears.

You add in the answer that would ultimately be, and it's a fundamentally different process here.

And it's recapitulated like everything else is here.

It goes from the very, very simplest in terms of, for instance, 2 cells.

2 cells, when they divide, that's a separation process, the division, they divide.

When they divide, there is actually a moratorium on the interaction between 2 cells.

The axons and dendrites, the parts of the cell that are meant to communicate with the other cell, the interactive part, and the neurotransmitters, there's actually a depressive effect on those.

They're not in full interaction because the cells need to divide completely, have their own nucleus, have their own boundaries, be viable as separate entities before nature deems it ready to interact.

We would have much to learn with our children.

We are so busy pushing them into social situations to interact with each other when they have not yet come, their own persons have their own feelings, their own boundaries.

That's why even in preschoolers, there's such a thing as parallel play.

They're not even supposed to be aware of each other.

And yet we're doing everything in the opposite.

We think that we have to get, you know, if they're ever gonna get along, if they're ever going to be able to interact, we've got to start early.

And so we practice right at the end result instead of understanding that all development has seasons.

And this is not the season of social integration, this is the season of separation, of becoming one's own person.

And we must go with that season so that there's proper foundation for the final place where they can interact with each other.

So it starts right right off at the cellular and it continues in terms of the senses and just to give you a picture of how this principle works.

For instance, even within the sense, in vision, when a child is born, although both eyes, hopefully, are functional, The occipital lobe is only operating.

The occipital lobe is where the sensory input is registered.

The occipital lobe is only using 1 set of signals to be functional.

Now both sets of signals are registering but only 1 set of signals is operational and so the child is actually seeing only out of 1 eye at a time and the reason for that is each set of signals has to be established and It has to be established so when it is time and each set of signals is established, then the brain says, OK, it's time.

Both signals are now the child can see out of both this eye and that eye both are operational simultaneously when their operational depth of vision is born because you see there's slight conflict in the signals when I'm looking this slightly different than this that gives me depth vision and this becomes the metaphor of all development I see first 1 perspective then another but it's when I see both simultaneously that I have depth vision I have I there is depth to my Perspective there is balance and so on but but it starts with 1 Then the other and everything begins this way it's either or system All of development starts on either or and moves, if successful, to this and.

I am a boy or a girl, and then finally this and.

I experience both female and male energy within me.

Everything begins on an either or and if successful moves to a this and.

And so this is you see it in all aspects of it.

Grandparents who are intuitive know, or a grandmother who is very intuitive knows that a baby only experiences the world through 1 sense at a time.

Baby absolutely loves the bath and cries when they are pulled out of the bath.

Well, an intuitive grandmother will know exactly what to do.

2 minutes before you pull the baby out of the bath, you change the sensory modality.

When you sing to the child, they're taking in their world through the auditory, not through the sensory, the skin, the touch, the warmth, and when you pull the child out of the bath, nothing has changed for them.

Because you're operating on that sensory modality.

The cognitive thing, this is Piaget, his whole theory is based upon cognitive dissonance.

And what he discovered, this great developmentalist who changed the whole face we used to think that children were little adults we used to think that they were just little adults and they and you know even the art depicted them as little adults and then they were just little miniature aspects of this and grew up into bigger adults and we had no idea about development and development is fundamentally different and Piaget realized, oh my goodness, his own and he studied his own 3 children, Lucienne, Laurent, and Jacqueline, and he studied his 3 children intensely, and he found out that none of them were capable of having conflicting ideas before the age of 5.

None of them could say, well, part of me thinks this way and part of me thinks that way.

I have a double, you know, I'm conflicted on this.

And it was between 5 and 7 years of age where they showed the first ability to be able to have conflicting ideas simultaneously.

This changed absolutely the face of our understanding of children.

And then others realized in North America that oh my goodness there's a lot of adults who can't do that and they misunderstood Piaget's theory.

Piaget didn't say that this would happen between the 5 to 7 European theory is based on potential not the norm American theory is based on the typical, the norm.

And then they said, well, Piaget said that individuals will experience it between 5 and 7.

No, he said they could experience it between 5 and 7.

The tragedy is there's a lot of adults who aren't capable of conflicting ideas and a whole lot of them become elected as politicians.

And they have no ability to think about how another person thinks.

And we confuse this with certainty, thinking that they know their minds when in actuality they are actually functioning as preschoolers.

They are unable to think of the other person's perspective.

At least the Latins were very intuitive about this.

When it came to electing their senators, they wanted to elect well-tempered individuals, individuals who could see the opposite point of view because without that, there was no balance.

And that is where they got the idea of well-tempered to be well-tempered and when I understood this it became my yearning to be a well-tempered father a well-tempered husband a well-tempered teacher a Well-tempered a theorist to be well-tempered.

I suddenly understood what it meant It means to live in the middle of the mix.

I want to teach from the place where I can feel both my head and my heart.

Where I am both a father and a grandfather and a teacher and a therapist.

If I can be well-tempered and experience those things, then that is the place that I can find my growing edge.

That is the place that I can find the most mature aspect of me.

As soon as I get on 1 side of me I lose that place and that is that well-tempered that is the growing edge tears are the growing edge in the adaptive process our mixed feelings are our growing edge in terms of of becoming fully considerate and civilized and and and dealing with our impulsiveness and so on.

And so that was cognitive, the cognitive.

I remember Shay saying, he was about 12 or 13.

Up until that point, he was gonna be like daddy and be a psychologist and something shifted in him and I knew by his turn of the phrase here, he said, daddy, there's something dreadfully wrong with my brain.

A psychologist says there's something wrong with my mind.

And so it was my first premonition that he would ultimately go into neuroscience, which he is now, studying the brain.

But I said, tell me what's wrong with your brain?

He says, and he already spoke like a scientist at that time, he said, I don't know, for every thought I have a counter thought, for every thesis there's an anti-thesis, I spend my whole time arguing with myself, there must be something dreadfully wrong with my brain, and I said no, that's the music to my ears.

It doesn't feel very good, It doesn't feel very good, but that's exactly what is meant.

That is part of the essence of the growing process.

That every idea we have collects its opposite.

And so we see it in there every feeling collects the counter and so we experience that's where our balance is that is where we are meant to be but that takes a process it it takes a development what what What Piaget did not know about or discuss was the emotional integration.

In fact, he was rather resistant to the idea of emotion and preferred to stay in the realm of cognition.

And he's 1 of the most brilliant cognitive developmentalists.

But neuroscientists have discovered that emotion is even more significant in that we need to have our mixed feelings.

And our mixed feelings come at the same time that a child can say part of me feels scared but part of me really wants to do this, part of me is excited but part of me is afraid and is able to say on the other hand I have mixed feelings I have double feelings and there's the same the same kind of age range 5 to 7 when they should first show although the delinquents I worked with and there's many adults who show no indication of mixed feelings whatsoever.

And that is hugely indicative because when we can only have 1 emotion at a time, we're governed by the impulses that are associated with that emotion.

If it's affection, we're moved to come close.

And so the very term impulsive refers to being governed by 1 set of impulses.

And the answer, the answer, nature's answer to impulses is to match it with its opposite and so if there's desire to match it with alarm so that we have 2 sets of impulses which bring a certain kind of inaction or paralysis.

Paralysis is always the first stage of civilization.

When you actually feel paralyzed, I'll give you an example.

We get frustrated with the ones we love the most for very good reason.

We have the greatest expectations on them.

And so 1 of the reasons I married my wife is because she made me feel as if I was the only person when I told my story, she loved to hear my stories.

Absolutely, she was all there, and I have a lot of stories.

And then we made a mistake, we had too many children.

And they all had stories, and their stories came first, which of course is right that it should be so, but that meant that my stories came at the end.

So here we are, 11 o'clock at night, I still have all my stories to tell and I always know that it's not going to be a good thing if I start telling my story and Joy says, is this going to be a long story?

And that gives rise to frustration in me.

I get very frustrated, but I'm also very attached to her and the whole reason I want to share my stories is to be known, seen, and heard, and understood, and all of those wonderful things about attachment.

So here I am attached, and because you're attached, you don't want to hurt, and I'm also frustrated.

And with frustration, you already know that that can go around the traffic circle very quickly.

And so there's impulses, and something inside of me wants to say we've got to get a hold of our life I told you we should have gone to bed early and and and you know there's an edge on the voice etc and then while I'm feeling I'm in bed now and while I'm feeling both of these impulses I notice my whole body starts lying at attention totally paralyzed which is a good thing because if I if I would would would act out my impulses my frustration I Could do I could hurt the 1 I love and of course would be sorry for those things in the morning So you actually feel and you can actually feel yourself Absolutely paralyzed by the conflicting impulses 1 theory actually represents it that way, actually represents you absolutely paralyzing conflicting impulses.

It has the very beginning of civilization as you experience that and it gives you a chance to grab the steering wheel to be able to have intentions rule but in this case of course you're up against the ultimate futility of all there simply is not enough time and so the true answer is to have your sadness which absolutely melts the impulsiveness, and you find your movement again.

But this is exactly that part, that part, the answer is not, and cut it out, it's not, and you notice, the answer is not to not be frustrated, And that's what we're continually telling our children.

Don't hit, don't smash, don't be frustrated.

In effect, we're telling them not to be upset, when in actual fact, that's not nature's answer.

Nature's answer is, of course we get frustrated with the people we love the most.

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Intensive I - session 6