Just saying
Colman Noctor is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and the author of two books, ‘Cop On’, and ‘The 4-7 Zone’. Aged 46, he lives on the Carlow/Kilkenny border and is a father of three children.
I had two older sisters. I was the youngest and I think I would probably describe myself as being spoilt. That combination of being a boy and the youngest was a formula for getting away with murder.
My dad worked as a warehouse manager in Renault, and I spent most of my time with my sisters and my mum.
I see that very female influence as having been important in shaping how I saw the world.
My mother would still be one of my closest friends. She worked nights as a nurse and would get us ready for school when she got home in the mornings, then she’d sleep and then pick us up in the afternoon. Phenomenal.
After school I did mental health nursing – within a week I knew I was home. I was 17. The human subject fascinated me. The first question I ask is: ‘How did you come to sit in front of me here today?’
I should have had more craic.
I progressed through the ranks of nursing quite quickly in my 20s. When other people were heading off travelling, I was working. I was very ambitious.
We sometimes think that the harder your life is, the more resilient you become. This is the resilience myth. Resilience determines how you respond to adversity, but adversity doesn’t determine resilience.
I wonder will that child be alive when I go into work tomorrow. There were often times you’d lie awake at night worrying about a youngster. I worked in inpatients psychiatry, so there can be the most acute situations.
Sometimes when we sell recovery, we assume that’s what the person wants. You’re saying to someone that they’ll be able to go back to college – and get a job, and have a life – if they just give up this symptom. Whether it’s an eating disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or whatever.
But in actual fact, that responsibility – those relationships, and the college, and jobs and mortgages – that’s almost always the thing they’re running away from. We assume that people want to recover. Where in actual fact recovery might be the most daunting prospect of all.
No one will love you to the point you are satisfied unconditionally. The key is to tolerate that people will love you, but they might be upset with you as well.
We’ve become a very performative society. There was always keeping up with the Joneses, but the emphasis on the outward facing ego is so prominent now. I would call it the Tinderisation of society.
If you think about the Tinder profile – your image, your job, your witty one-liner – that’s what gets you swiped right. The focus is always on what’s facing outward. Not what’s behind it.
Pressure and expectation are the two massive differences for children now, for everything – school, parents, peers. When adults get involved with children, the competition goes up, and the fun goes down. It’s about adults encroaching on children’s space.
I was trying to explain to my daughter the importance of hobbies. And she said: ‘Well you don’t have any’. But I play tag rugby on a Monday night. That’s sacrosanct. It’s two hours. And it’s not enough.
Resilience determines how you respond to adversity, but adversity doesn’t determine resilience
Everyone gets stressed and I’ve no issue with stressed parents. But from the point of view of reassuring your child, it’s not that everything’s going to be OK, but if things aren’t, we’ll get through it. “Whatever happens we’ll get through it” – that’s the most reaffirming thing a child can hear.
For me, the best aspect of parenting is being able to say to your kid: we’ve got this. It’s being containing. Not getting hysterical about things that are going wrong.