Why are we so afraid of feedback?

Why does the thought of someone else’s professional opinion fill us with dread? In school, the workplace, as an athlete or even a wife and mom.

Now, put that in context with your children, it’s term end and teacher meeting time. What is it that you feel off the bat? Apprehension? Fear? Indifference? Loathing?

Surely we are not projecting, are we? Or are we?

I know us parents are like feral bears when it comes to our children, and nothing, NOTHING will stop us from defending them, protecting them and coming to their rescue. But is it justified in the case of feedback?

It is part of the education process to give necessary feedback to the parents, and it is our job as parents to take that feedback and decide what we are going to do with it. We have received, what is considered, a professionals opinion and now we need to weigh up what was said and decide what is valid and needs to be picked up from our side and what we are going to put down.

I know this process is difficult for so many parents, due to many factors and experiences that come into play, but is it possible to keep the main thing the main thing and separate your emotions from the feedback and take is as “neutral toned”? How do we teach ourselves to take feedback (for ourselves or our children) with grace and to leave the emotions at the door when we weigh up what was said?

We decide to focus on the facts in front of us, and deny the emotions that want to overtake us. Easier said than done, I know, and I will be the first one to say that I have a highly emotional side, linked like a Siamese twin with my insecurity. This makes it extra challenging to process feedback directed at me without taking everything personally and seeing it as an attack on me, instead of what it is, factual information to assist me (or my child) on how to improve in certain areas that may be affecting my (or their) ability to master certain concepts or tasks.

So, where am I going with all of this?

End of term 1 and we received feedback from C’s teacher and it wasn’t easy feedback for the teacher to give or for me to receive. Before the meeting I had a feeling that I just need to let go of my emotions and allow her to speak, to lay it all out for me and separate myself from the emotions.

Now, some of you may say, “Disassociation isn’t healthy and you can’t do that”. In my case, it is how I cope with highly emotional or stressful situations. Just sitting across the table from anyone for a meeting makes me sweat and fall down a hole of imposter syndrome, before a client meeting I need loud music to wind myself up, and afterwards I need quiet and no people to recover.

Back to the feedback, it was recommended that C go for an assessment with an educational psychologist, even though he has grown so much on the sensory side of things, he is prone to boredom and races his reading, amongst other things and this would be to establish where he is now to help map out his future in school and give us tools to provide him with stimulating education and ways to aim him in the direction of his gifts. Even with the past years of O.T. and assessments and educating myself and reading and more reading about SPD, this kind of news is like another pile of dirt on the heap of things to process. The amount of paperwork and phone calls, appointments and organising that goes along with something like this is enough to make a trip to home affairs a walk in the park. Bearing in mind that we had just finished a trip to the dentist for sedation and multiple extractions the week before, which incidentally, is leading up to an E.N.T. appointment to have his tonsils removed.

The teacher delivered the news with such compassion and explained, in detail, all the things that have led to her recommendation. I am all on board for this kind of explanation, because it includes examples to help me understand how everything fit together leading to this recommendation. At the end of the previous school year, his teacher from the previous grade had also recommended the Educational Psychologist, so the seed had already been planted and it was as if the little seed sprouted with the help of this year’s teacher. Making a conscious choice to embrace this news and run with it was the determining factor that kept my mind on the positive side of the feedback, and made the process of getting names and booking appointments so much easier. Not allowing it to be seen as a negative experience (now I have to pay for something else, and find out more things that could be “wrong” with my child) but to see it as an opportunity to discover something new about my boy and be there to help him navigate how his brain sees the world around him.

We did the assessment and I went to the feedback meeting, and it was a liberating experience. Not only did I go with hope in my heart, but I remembered how my son had said how much he liked the Ed Phsych and how she had said he was doing so well with all the activities, gave me the strength to face it his optimism. We discovered that what had made us think our son was on the spectrum was actually completely the opposite, and that he is going to grow and mature into himself and make a huge success of life ahead of him. We are excited for our next appointment with the new O.T. for a sensory integration plan and I am grateful for educated professionals that can help us guide my son into his potential.

So, what I’m trying to say is, that how we take feedback on is based a lot on how we experienced it in the past. The trick is to change your thinking, forcing yourself if you have to, until you do it enough that it becomes an every day thing to receive feedback.

Feedback isn’t the enemy, our insecurity is.

xx Kim.