As I prepare to teach the Alpha course (along with my trusty teaching buddy, Robin Brooks-Sherriff) I am reminded of a time when my boys were young and things went awry. It was before I knew about alpha and dependent roles and the whole thing was a bit mystifying to me. Like so many parents who take this course, once I understood this material, the whole situation made so much more sense …
My boys were six and three when my husband and I went away for a rare getaway. Grandma, who they adored, came to stay with them for the weekend. When we came back on Sunday afternoon, I was confused by the aggressive bossiness I noticed in my older son. Usually gentle and mild-mannered, for the next several days he was controlling, demanding and physically aggressive. Over the course of the next week, I noticed him softening and his bossiness fading. At the time I didn’t really understand it, but was mostly just glad it hadn’t stuck around.
A few months later I enrolled in Alpha Children, my first course here at the Neufeld Institute, and in short order I could understand what had happened that weekend. The alpha material resonated deeply with me and helped me make sense of my own experience as a former alpha child (yes, the Grandma who had come to stay was my mother).
Most parents are aware of the importance of attachment these days–it gets a lot of press and airtime. However, what is often left out is this crucial nuance: just as important as our kids being deeply attached to us is the position from which they are attached to us.
If we understand attachment as a mammalian survival instinct, it only makes sense that it would be inherently hierarchical - where one member of the duo is the caregiver and other is the receiver of care. I vividly remember a story told by the instructor (none other than our campus director, Tamara Strijack) in my Alpha Children class: Tamara told us that she and a friend would have a weekly tea date that took place in her therapy office. Depending on who was more in need of caretaking and who was feeling more in the caregiving role, they would take turns sitting in the therapist chair and sitting on the client couch. They would ask each other playfully “Who gets Tamara’s chair today?”
As that example illustrates, in adult relationships, be they friendships or romantic partnerships, the roles of alpha and dependent can be fluid. Ideally, these roles are an instinctual dance, sensitive to each person’s needs on any given day. I’m feeling under the weather, you bring me tea. You had a hard day at work, I can provide a listening ear. However, in the parent-child (or grandparent-child, or teacher-student) relationship, these roles are not meant to be fluid. In this relationship, parents are meant to be firmly in the alpha role and children (yes, even teens and adult children!) are meant to be in the dependent role – so that values, instruction, and nourishment can be delivered and received; so that kids can rest in their parents’ care.
The alpha-dependent structure can get turned on its head for any number of reasons: hypersensitivity, parental illness or absence, peer orientation or parents presenting as needy (this is the culprit with my mom/my son’s Grandma) just to name a few. When this happens, kids take on the alpha role and the parent-child relationship goes awry. Behavioral problems can become rampant, bossiness and aggression take hold and kids become immune to our influence. Whenever I have a parent come for a parent consulting session saying, “I never thought parenting would be so hard” or when a parent sheepishly admits that they don’t actually like their kid very much, I am alert for alpha issues.
Luckily, Dr. Neufeld has named and explained this most important dynamic for us so that we can put words to what we see and instinctively feel is “off”. Even luckier, though, is that through this understanding, our way forward becomes clear. It is completely possible to get back into right relationship with kids who have become alpha – it might take a while, but it is essential if we are going to be able to do our jobs as parents.
As I made my way through the course, it became clear to me what had happened inside my sensitive eldest child when Grandma had come to stay. Sensing her lack of alpha energy, his alpha instincts came to the fore. An interesting nuance about alpha instincts is that when they arise in the appropriate situations, and the heart is soft, we can see such beautiful caregiving: picture a young child holding a baby or tending to a kitten. But when those alpha instincts are activated in relationships where the child needs to be cared for or if they are coupled with alarm or anything else that can cause the heart to harden, we then see alpha instincts turn towards bullying energy. For my son, his alpha instincts were coupled with alarm and frustration – he was used to adults taking a strong alpha lead, he missed me and his dad, and he needed Grandma to be in charge. As it happens for most of us, when he sensed an alpha void, he was moved to usurp that position.
Without having the words for it (yet – the course would take care of that shortly), I could on some level maybe not understand, but at least recognize what had happened for my son. I was familiar with the bullying energy that rose up inside me in interactions with my mom. Thankfully, both my husband and I have pretty solid alpha instincts, and within about a week my son had once again come to rest in our care.
This experience wasn’t the last time one of my sons would dip into alpha territory in our relationship, but the concept of the alpha and dependent dance gave me a template for both recognizing the dynamic and for knowing what was needed whenever I sensed there was an alpha issue.
