The Sense Connection: Discovering How Your Five Senses Determine Your Effectiveness as a Person, Partner, and Parent

Copyright © 2009 Natalie Robinson Garfield

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-6559-7 (pbk)

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-6560-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009935496

iUniverse rev. date: 10/14/2009

Contents

Acknowledgments

Overview

Part I Defining the Sense Connection

Common Senses:

Sense Mode Profile Test

Sense Connections Briefly Defined: KATOV

Part II Relationships

Sexual Incompatibility

Psychotherapy

Friendships

Part III Parenting

Duo-Dyads

Sibling Favoritism

Tuning in to a Preteen

Preparing for the Future

Part IV Applications

Interview Intuition

Office Frantics

Attorney Attunement

Part V For Our Selves

Modal Meditation

Maturing Modes

Sense Secrets

Final Thoughts

Bibliography

Dedicated to David and Spencer Garfield,

my inspirations

We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

The Talmud

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to all the people I have been privileged to work with as an administrator, psychotherapist, parent counselor, and consultant. You have shared your inner lives courageously. Your fears, hopes, and struggles are woven into the fabric of this book and remain deep in my heart.

My friends, acquaintance sand peers have contributed their support and caring and have warmed my solitary writing process, and I cherish their presence in my life.

My family is most precious to me; their belief and can do cheerleading kept my wheels turning. My grandchildren, Sydney and Daniel, are my joys always, keeping my eyes open to the wonderment of discovery.

Thank you all.

Overview

For most of my life, I have wondered about the ways that people connect. How do classmates, neighbors, and co-workers become friends? Why do some people meet and become lovers or life partners while some simply lose touch? Why does any individual immediately click, hit it off, or have chemistry with certain people but not with others?

Even as my personal world expanded and my professional role as a psychotherapist emerged, my questions remained unanswered. While working with parents and young children to develop and strengthen their familial bonds, I began to realize that connections begin in infancy, if not in the womb, for even new babies show preferences as they begin perceiving the world. In the hundreds of families I saw, I observed that some relationships seemed in tune; others were out of sync. I knew that if I could discover the essence of how we connect with each other and the world, I could offer strategies to improve not just relationships between parent and infant child but between husband and wife, friend and friend, and even among co-workers and professionals.

In 1979 I was working in a social service agency with families and their young children. Each week I would meet with fifteen different groups, each made up of ten mothers and/or fathers and their babies. These parents loved their children and wanted to create happy families and a nurturing environment in which their babies could grow and learn. Some of them felt satisfied with themselves as moms and dads. Others, however, felt inadequate as parents, and believed their little offspring were simply not thriving as they could have been.

I try to figure out what he needs, said one mother, but a lot of times, when I pick him up, he just starts crying louder.

My little boy is just the opposite, a father countered. I pick him up, jiggle him around a little, and he stops crying. And when I put him down, he wails. Each parent had a different response to his or her child’s discomfort. Every parent had the same question—How am I supposed to know what to do?

I made it my mission to find out. With a roomful of babies demanding a kind of attention their parents were often unable to identify, my discovery was no easy task. Being with these eager, yet worried, parents and their infants and toddlers each week was a distressing experience for me. I truly wanted to help, but I found it frustrating to interact with a baby for a short time, magically quieting him or her, only for the baby to lose composure again once back in the parent’s arms. Often it was only when I held the babies that they went from agitated to calm, from withdrawn to friendly and attentive. I didn’t know why. I did all I could to articulate to the parents the finer points of how I interacted with their children, and I encouraged them to imitate my actions. But my tactics and my results were hard to explain. I was acting as much on intuition and instinct as on theory, and although I knew I must be taking my cues from the children themselves, I could not pinpoint what those cues were.

After a particularly trying day filled with maternal and parental anxieties, I retreated to a restaurant for a quiet supper in the evening. At a nearby table, a baby grew cranky and began to fuss. I couldn’t take my eyes off this scene. The child’s father and mother sat next to each other on one side of the booth, across from an older couple who looked as if they might be the baby’s paternal grandparents. At the end of the table was an adorable, approximately nine-month-old girl in a high chair.

As the baby continued to whimper, her mother reached into her purse and took out a rattle. The little girl gazed at the bright object, quieting for a few moments as her mother moved it closer to her. When her mother began tapping the rattle on the high chair tray, the baby began to fuss again. Her father continued his conversation, but he occasionally shifted his visual focus to his baby’s eyes. Again she stopped fussing. When he looked away to catch the waiter’s attention or admire the view, she resumed whimpering. Without looking over at her child, the mother shook up the ice in her beverage with one hand; with the other, she picked up a teaspoon and brought it into the baby’s line of sight. Again the infant stopped fussing. Again the mother tapped the object; again the child began to cry and fret. This routine continued throughout the rest of their meal, and it was clear that the disruption was making the family uncomfortable.

I could see that there was something this young couple was missing, something that dawned on me as I watched their restaurant evening unfold. The young woman was not a bad mother. Nor could the situation be explained away as a simple case of a cranky child in a restaurant. What became clear to me was that some things appealed to the baby; others did not. Was there a pattern?

Yes! The father and baby shared a sense connection. For them, visual stimulation, eye contact, a beautiful view, a brightly colored rattle, a shiny spoon were both captivating and calming. The mother and baby, however, relied on different primary sense channels to interact with their worlds. The mother, who enjoyed the rattle and tap of the child’s toy, was a highly auditory person. It was only natural that she would try to comfort her baby in ways that would comfort her—by rattling and tapping an object as she moved it closer and closer to her baby girl.

This mother was doing the best she could with what she knew, and I couldn’t help but believe that if she could become mindful of the way her child perceived the world and received comfort, she would welcome the knowledge and try to interact with her in a new way. The baby would stop fussing, content at last to be understood. The baby’s father would relax. The baby’s grandparents would beam approvingly at their loving, capable daughter-in-law. The baby’s mother would feel competent and satisfied. And of course, there would be many enjoyable restaurant dinners.

I thought again about my weekly parents’ groups. Was sensory preference the key to the challenges I witnessed there? Could primary sense channels be identified, delineated, catered to, and compensated for? It occurred to me that mothers and babies were not the only people profoundly affected by sensory differences. Siblings, spouses or lovers, friends, and co-workers could also have conflicts based on differences in the ways they experience the world. True, there were many influences to factor in: cultural background, social development, gender, and physical handicaps, to name a few. Sense channel theory, however, could be applied across all these lines by anyone interested in improving self-awareness or interactive ability. Even someone with an impaired sense could glean insight into his or her perceptions and interactions. Anyone interested in enhancing self-knowledge and building relationships could benefit from identifying the sense mode hierarchy—the order of predominance of the five senses.

For parents, understanding the sense connection enhances the skills needed to raise happy, well-adjusted children who will become successful, emotionally balanced adults. For spouses or lovers, gaining insight into the ways that primary sense channels conflict with or compliment each other can shift the balance from discord to harmony. And for friends and co-workers, a firmer grasp of how we, as individuals, take in the world could mean more fulfilling and productive relationships and careers.

Can understanding others be as simple as identifying their primary sense channels and adjusting accordingly? The sense mode does not define the entire personality. But the sense preference can offer useful shortcuts to understanding. Consider the many ways we put ourselves and others into tidy, limiting pigeonholes. Categorization has almost become a human quest! We’ve heard so many of these expressions!

What do you do?

Where are you from?

What’s your sign?

But these categories are merely stereotypes, whether professional, regional, ethnic, astrological, or even the results of the Myers-Briggs examination. (It’s hard enough to keep our own multi-initialed identities straight without attempting to clue into and then memorize and cater to anybody else’s!) Worse than that, categories are dead ends. (He’s an only child, one might say, losing sight of all the individual’s other aspects, or She’s a Pisces.) These stereotypes do not allow room for adaptation, for coming together and making a connection. By adding the sense connection to our lexicon, we can find a way to understand others quickly and accurately and then modify our interactive style to fit better