Self-Reg with Fairies

Soul-sucking fairies and surrogate emotional regulators

Photo by Lloyd Newman on Unsplash

What does a Regency fantasy novel have a in common with a scholarly parenting text? A lot more than I’d have guessed.

We’ve all been there

I’m in the library bathroom with my two young children, and they’re screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. It’s a trivial brother disagreement, but in the heat of the moment, they perceive it as a passionate dispute. Their furious—and oh so loud—voices are amplified in the echoey bathroom. I try to soothe, I try to distract. I squeeze my eyes shut in a mix of embarrassment, overwhelm, and desire to be anywhere else. I open my eyes and bite back the urge to threaten that this will be our last trip to the library. Ever.

Instead, I lecture on proper library etiquette. I lecture for too long. As I walk out of the bathroom, a couple parents shoot me sympathetic glances. Yeah, we’ve all been there.

On the drive home, while my lovingly reunited boys rock out to The Beatles in their car seats , I’m still mulling over the scene in the bathroom. I’m thinking about the Regency fantasy novel I’m reading on audiobook, and I’m thinking about the most recent parenting advice book I’ve read.

The Regency fantasy novel is called Half a Soul by Oliva Atwater. I bought it hoping to try my first fantasy-romance read. I’d actually classify Half a Soul less as a romance, more like Jane Austin with fairies. 

The parenting book is Self-Reg by Dr. Stuart Shankar. The subtitle of Self-Reg is long and descriptive: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life. 

Neither Half a Soul nor Self -Reg were exactly the reads I’d expected. Both have taken time to process. To my great surprise, I wouldn’t have truly understood the wisdom in either book if I hadn’t read the other.

Fairies and Feelings

In Half a Soul, protagonist, Dora, loses half her soul to a greedy fairy. As a result, Dora doesn’t experience emotions the way a normal young lady would. 

Dora’s magical disability creates some serious problems for her. Her emotional reactions aren’t ladylike, her behavior fails to conform to social norms, and she’s unable to create the kind of connections and allies needed to navigate the London social scene. To top it all off, the missing half of her soul makes her unmarriagable.  

As the story progresses, Dora’s emotional disability reveals itself as a potential strength.  She’s calm when others panic. She’s far less swayed by the opinions of others. Most surprisingly, she’s better at seeing the wants and needs of others than other young women around her. This makes her better able to act decisively when it’s time to help. 

It took me awhile to understand how removing half of someone’s emotions could make them more compassionate. It wasn’t until that ride home from the library and reviewing my notes for Self-Reg, that I began to understand why. Dora’s decreased emotional reactivity made her the ideal candidate for mastering the art of self-regulation.

Behavior as communication

When I read the parenting book, Self Reg, I highlighted nearly three-quarters of the book. I made so many highlights and notes because understanding self-regulation was like uncovering a gemstone by chipping away rock. All the beliefs I had about being a parent (and frankly the beliefs I had about how I handle my own emotional life) had to crumble in order to accept that best practices for coping with tough emotions weren’t what I thought. Those best practices sure as heck weren’t what I was taught as a kid.

What’s more, the knowledge of Self-Reg, itself, can only take me so far. Dr. Shankar has wrote Self-Reg to communicate principles, not to troubleshoot individual lives or assemble a framework for how to manage my days. The work of applying principles is for the reader to sort out. 

Some days I do a reasonable job. Other days, I’m on the verge of a mommy meltdown while wrangling shrieking kiddos in the library bathroom.

Here are some of my big takeaways from Self-Reg:

1. “Bad” behavior really means undesirable behavior. Whether we like it or not, all behavior is communication. Before behavior can be corrected, we have to understand what it’s telling us.

2. Strong negative emotions typically indicate low energy AND high tension. Many strong negative emotions can be addressed through physical wellbeing. Are we hungry/tired? Sick? Is the environment putting too much stress on us? (ahem, such as loud screaming in a public bathroom)

3. Never lecture a dysregulated kid. (oops)

4. As parents, we serve as surrogate regulators of our child’s emotional lives. Kids gradually learn to self-regulate, but not until they’re developmentally ready, and have learned and practiced the requisite skills. This takes time

5. Adults care for much of our own self-regulation, but we still require surrogate regulators, like friends and family. Parent have no hope of regulating kiddos until we’ve regulated ourselves.

6. Our goal as parents isn’t to make undesirable behavior stop—no matter how much we wish it would. Our goal is to teach our kids to recognize their low energy and high tension, and teach them how to bring themselves back to a place of emotional balance. Only then can they can feel empathy and develop those prosocial values we parents so want to instill.

So, what does all this have to do with fairies?

Reactivity

When I picked up Half a Soul, I had no inkling it would wrangle with the principles of self-regulation. Dora perceives her partial loss of “soul” as an inability to feel. However, she’s completely wrong. Throughout the novel Dora worries, gets excited, feels glad, angry, sad, guilty, offended, and hopeless. 

What she doesn’t do is experience strong or immediate reactions to those emotions.

When Dora’s aunt berates her, hurt stirs in her belly. But she’s able to let the hurt stir without snapping back at her aunt, cowering, or running off. Dora feels plenty, but her siphoned-off soul allows her to stay calm and composed through whatever comes her way. It’s not that Dora doesn’t feel emotions, she just doesn’t react to them the way a normal person would.

This, it turns out, makes Dora an ideal surrogate regulator. In the story, she’s able to take advantage of these surrogate regulator super powers to support friends, her love interest, and a child in desperate need.

I wish I’d had her along with me and my boys in the library bathroom. 

My fears that I was unable to feel calm enough to be a skilled surrogate regulator for my kids nearly made me miss much of of the value and wisdom of Self-Reg. I also came close to missing the point of Half a Soul—which isn’t that having no emotions is a super power, but that not reacting too strongly in response to emotions is a superpower. 

Learning to stop feeling strong negative emotions isn’t going to happen for me—and probably wouldn’t happen for anyone. Learning to react less strongly to those negative emotions is still really hard work, but at least it’s possible. Given that there are no fairies in my neighborhood willing to suck out half my soul, I’ll have to put in the time and effort to learn the requisite skills. I’m confident that my two amazing and strong-spirited boys will give me lots of chances to practice.