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WORK TITLE: The Reflective Parent
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://reginapally.com/
CITY: Santa Monica
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://health.usnews.com/doctors/regina-pally-611576 * http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992699 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/regina-pally-m-d-24b63123/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Received degrees from Queens College and University of Southern California.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Therapist, psychiatrist, and author. Center for Reflective Parenting, co-director and founder, 2008—.
AWARDS:American Psychiatric Association fellow, 2000; Sigourney Award, American Psychoanalytic Association, 2007.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Regina Pally is a licensed therapist and psychiatrist who specializes in counseling families and youth. Her experience in her field spans for nearly four decades. She works with the Center for Reflective Communities, where she serves as its co-director and creator. She has also written several books related to her field and specializations.
One of her books, The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids, is aimed specifically at how to improve the child and parent relationship so parents can guide their children more effectively. On her personal website, Pally explains that parenting should be fostered and developed as a complete bond, not a responsibility parents must endure for eighteen years. Keeping this in mind, parents shouldn’t simply give their children orders; rather, they should make the attempt to understand their children as individuals and learn what influences their thoughts and behavior.
The Reflective Parent serves as a guide to help parents to better follow this philosophy. In the book, she introduces the term, “reflective capacity.” She defines this principle as taking the time to evaluate a person’s mental and emotional state, using that knowledge to determine how it could have led them to commit a certain behavior. Pally encourages parents to take a step back from their current lives as parents and, as the title describes, reflect. This process includes thinking back on their youth and how they were parented, understanding how children think and perceive the world around them, and similar steps. While there is no harm in parents creating household rules for their children, Pally encourages them to do so in a more flexible manner. In other words, they must keep their children’s point of view in mind and be willing to craft new approaches to better care for their children emotionally and physically.
Pally contrasts this parenting technique with the concept of the “reactive” parent, who only responds to a child’s behavior without taking the time to comprehend the emotions and thoughts that could have led to it. Pally peppers The Reflective Parent with several suggestions on how to better approach one’s children, giving them specific ideas of how to communicate in the face of problems. Pally asserts that, by following this parenting technique, parents can enjoy more productive and happy relationships with their children. One Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that The Reflective Parent possesses “valuable insights into social psychology, the developing child mind, and how parenting style is affected by one’s own childhood.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids, p. 56.
ONLINE
Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (May 15, 2017), Mark B. Baer, Esq., “Let’s Make an Effort to Be More Reflective and Less Reactive,” review of The Reflective Parent.
Regina Pally Website, http://reginapally.com (October 13, 2017), author profile.
U.S. News & World Report, https://health.usnews.com/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., http://books.wwnorton.com/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.*
Regina Pally, M.D.
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Founder Center for Reflective Communities
Center for Reflective Parenting Queens College
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Center for Reflective Parenting is a non-profit organization dedicated to "promoting healthy child development by using reflective thinking to strengthen the relationships that children have with all the people who take care of them". We are building Reflective Communities where children can thrive because they feel cared about, understood and accepted.
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Experience
Center for Reflective Parenting
Founder Center for Reflective Communities
Company NameCenter for Reflective Parenting
Dates EmployedDec 2008 – Present Employment Duration8 yrs 11 mos
Location2014 Sawtelle Blvd. LA CA 90024
Center for Reflective Communities is dedicated to promoting healthy child development by strengthening the relationship bonds children have with all the people who care for them. CRC is affiliated with the New Center for Psychoanalysis which let's us use space for our office and educational and training events.
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Education
Queens College
Queens College
Regina Pally
REGINA PALLY, MD, has practiced as a psychiatrist and therapist for over 35 years, working with parents, couples, young adults, and teenagers. She is the Founder and Co-Director of Center for Reflective Communities, a nonprofit organization that believes relationships that are safe, accepting, emotionally responsive, and supportive can transform lives—most especially of children and families. She is a highly respected author and teacher on the subject of interpersonal relationships and reflective parenting, both nationally and internationally. She has three grown children and lives with her husband in Santa Monica, CA.
Dr. Regina Pally MD
Psychiatry | Santa Monica, CA
Overview
Contact
Insurance Accepted
Hospital Affiliation
Experience
Overview
Dr. Regina Pally is a psychiatrist in Santa Monica, California. She received her medical degree from Keck School of Medicine of USC and has been in practice for more than 20 years.
Quick Stats
(310) 394-0801 PHONE NUMBER
21+ YEARS IN PRACTICE
F GENDER
Board Certifications Psychiatry
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Office Location & Contact
320 16th St;
Santa Monica, CA 90402
(310) 394-0801
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Dr. Pally does not have any insurances listed.
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Specialties & Qualifications
Specialty: Psychiatry
Psychiatrists diagnose and treat mental illness, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and schizophrenia. Most psychiatrists rely on a mix of medications and psychotherapy.
Subspecialties: General Psychiatry
Education & Medical Training
UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital
Residency , Psychiatry
University of Southern California - LAC+USC Medical Center
Internship , Pediatrics
Keck School of Medicine of USC
Medical School
Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute
Other Training
Queens College
Other Training
Certifications & Licensure
American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
Certified in Psychiatry
CA State Medical License
Active through 2018
Awards, Honors & Recognitions
Sigourney Award: American Psychoanalytic Association
2007
Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association
2000
Publications & Presentations
Pally, R "Reciprocal Responsiveness and the Matching of Nonverbal Cues in Psychoanalysis.."
Pally, R "A Primary Role For Non-Verbal Communication in Psychoanalysis.."
MY BACKGROUND
As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I have been in private practice for over 35 years, with a special interest in parents and couples. For 25 years I studied and wrote about neuroscience for mental health professionals. Most recently I have dedicated myself to working in the community to improve the lives of children and their families. In 2008 I founded the Center for Reflective Communities, whose mission is to ‘promote healthy child development, by strengthening the relationship bonds that children have with all those who care for them through an emphasis on reflective thinking’.
about_parenting_script
The current focus of my writing is Reflective Parenting. My latest book ‘The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids’ to be published February 2017, is available now for pre-order. The book, for parents of children of any age, emphasizes that relationships matter most in the life of a child and provides parents with the skills for building positive relationships with their children. What parents will gain from reading this book, is that they will feel less anxious and more competent as a parent, while at the same time feeling confident that they are giving their child all the necessary ingredients for healthy development.
MY PHILOSOPHY ABOUT PARENTING
Parenting is a relationship not a task to complete or a job to do well. A strong parent-child relationship is the single most important gift you can give your child. It is the gift that keeps giving. Relationships are about caring, connection, understanding and communication. Everything else is secondary.
True communication requires understanding another person and communicating that understanding in an effective way. In fact when we try to understand another person it is one of the major ways we express how much we care.
I emphasize the relationship when I talk with parents, No matter what issue they are facing with their child, parents always ask me “what should I do?” I always tell them “No matter what you do, make sure to keep your eye on the relationship”. What is important in parenting is not what you DO. It is HOW you DO what you do that matters. It’s the how you relate to your child, which will influence whether or not the relationship you have together is a strong one.The actions you take, the activities and lessons you provide are no where near as important as HOW you RELATE to your child.
Every parent wants their child to be healthy, happy, get along with others and to be successful. It’s a worthy goal. But if you want to increase your chances of getting there, make sure you first build and maintain a strong relationship with your child.
Cooperation is good but its not everything. The truth is you can get kids to cooperate in lots of ways. But unless you have a good relationship, their cooperation now will not necessarily improve their chances later on for long-term success as a person. Only a strong relationship can do that.
How you relate has a lot to do with how well you understand where your child is coming from; what your child’s perspective is. You can’t just react to their behavior. You need to respond to what is underneath their behavior. You need to recognize the behavior is communicating a feeling, or an intention or a belief the child has. This is what being Reflective means.
Reflective is about understanding what is in the mind, not just what is on the surface. A good parent-child relationship requires being reflective. The parent who can reflect will be better able to understand, respect and validate the child’s perspective.
This does not mean agreeing or giving in all the time. It only means ‘getting it’. This is what kids crave- when someone understands their viewpoint.Even if your child is acting up or not cooperating, whatever you do in response make sure you try to see it from within the perspective of your child and to incorporate your understanding into how you respond.
Here is a very simple example. When your older son hits his little brother, the natural thing is to say “Stop hitting your brother”. There is nothing wrong with that. We all do it. But I am adding something extra you can try, a little shift in how you relate. Something like this. “I know you didn’t like it when your brother grabbed your toy. I get that. But you still can’t hit him. In a way you get to have your ‘cake and eat it to’. You show your understanding and get to set the limit at the same time in a way that maintains the connection.
Fortunately you don’t need to be perfect at understanding. It turns out that for healthy child development to occur, kids need understanding, but they also need some misunderstanding. This is because a lot of development happens around how parents and children clarify and work out their misunderstandings.
The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and
Relate More with Your Kids
Publishers Weekly.
264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids
Regina Pally. Norton, $25.95 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-393-71133-2 Psychiatrist Pally (The Mind-Brain Relationship) centers her gentle, thoughtful,
and non-judgmental parenting approach around "reflective capacity"--the ability to understand other
people's behaviors and responses as products of their internal mental states. By increasing empathy, she
seeks to improve the central relationship between parent and child. Pally's choice to couch the justifications
for her philosophy in introductory "brain basics" neurobiology is misplaced; the space occupied by that
shallow science might be better used for exercises or additional parenting examples. However, she does
have valuable insights into social psychology, the developing child mind, and how parenting style is
affected by one's own childhood. Pally guides parents on how to take on the adult responsibilities of setting
boundaries while using reflection to adjust responses to the child's needs and perspective. At the end of each
chapter she gives examples of things parents can say to children, which adds to the book's usability.
Illustrative "Stories of Parents and Children" feel stylized, and though her ideas are compassionate, Pally's
voice is that of a teacher and not a peer. This tone works with her message of balance as a key to strong
relationship building, but lacks the warmth some parents may need to feel supported. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids." Publishers Weekly, 16 Jan.
2017, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478405322&it=r&asid=2903868456b9f5997177ef2d350a2137.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478405322
Let’s Make an Effort to Be More Reflective and Less Reactive
Reactive governing is no less harmful than reactive parenting.
Posted May 15, 2017
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On the evening of April 25, 2017, I attended UCLA Friends of the Semel Institute’s Open Mind Lecture: Dr. Regina Pally The Reflective Parent.
The Institute described the program as follows:
“Figuring out how to raise happy, healthy, and successful kids can be overwhelming. Parents often find themselves wading through tons of conflicting advice. Books that outline a ‘right way’ of doing things can leave even the most dedicated caregiver feeling discouraged and inadequate when real life doesn’t measure up. An experienced psychiatrist and founder of the Center for Reflective Communities, Regina Pally serves up something totally different in The Reflective Parent. She argues that the key to successful parenting is to have a strong relationship with your child. This requires parents to slow down, reflect, and recognize that there is no one right way to parent.
Pally synthesizes the latest neuroscience research to show that our brain’s natural tendencies to empathize, analyze, and connect with others are all we need to be good parents. Each chapter weaves together discussions of specific reflective parenting principles like ‘Tolerate Uncertainty’ and ‘Repair Ruptures’ with engaging explanations of the science that backs them up. Brief ‘Take Home Lessons’ at the end of each chapter and vivid examples of parents and children putting the principles into action make this a practical guide for anyone looking to build loving, lasting relationships with their kids.”
On her website, Dr. Pally explains what, why and how “Reflective Parenting is the best way [for parents to achieve their goal of wanting] their child to be happy, healthy, get along with others, and do well in school.”
As a mediator and attorney who works with parents and families, I thought my clients could possibly benefit by my attending that program, in addition to my interest in what seemed consistent with my understanding of what makes people tick.
In the Introduction of her book The Reflective Parent: How to Do Less and Relate More with Your Kids, Pally describes the sources of her knowledge as follows:
“The book draws on what I learned from my pediatric, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic training; my clinical work with patients; my studies in neuroscience; my personal experiences; and most recently my involvement with the nonprofit organization Center for Reflective Communites (CRC), whose mission is to promote healthy child development by strengthening the relationship bonds that children have with all the people who care for them. Through them, I learned that a parent’s reflective capacity is the factor most closely associated with healthy child development and can be protective against the negative impact of stress and adversity. CRC’s guiding principle is that what matters most in life is relationships and that being reflective strengthens the relationships we have with all people in our life.”
In her book, Pally says the following:
“Reflective parenting means understanding that everything your child does and says is motivated or triggered by something going on inside their mind, such as a feeling, an intention, or a belief, and that the same is true for you. Everything you do or say is motivated or triggered by something going on inside your mind. Reflective parenting involves two-way perspective-taking, in which you see the world from your child’s perspective as well as your own. Being reflective enables you to do all the things that research shows are associated with children doing better throughout their whole life....
“Reflective capacity is technically defined as a mental skill in which the mind is able to recognize (a) that all human behavior has meaning in terms of what is going on inside a person’s mind, such as their feelings, desires, intentions, motivations, and beliefs, and that this applies to one’s own behavior as well as the behavior of others; (b) that all people have a mind that is subjective, separate, and private; and (c) that what is in one person’s mind may be the same or may be different from what is going on inside someone else’s mind....
The mind is inherently subjective. Each mind views the world in its own way. Because the mind is both hidden and subjective, even being reflective will not ensure that you will always fully understand your child. When we reflect, all we can really do is make a good guess or inference as to what is probably going on inside another person’s mind. We may be right. But we are not always right. That is why reflective parenting emphasizes that misunderstanding is possible and common, but by being reflective, a parent is more likely to figure out and clarify misunderstandings when they occur.”
As I was reading her book, the following sentence popped out at me because of information contained in my last article titled You Think You’re Helping, Do You?
“When parents are not reflective, they tend to be more reactive.”
My article contained an excerpt from Thomas Digrazia’s book Mediating Family Disputes and Avoiding Adversarial Violence which quoted Dr. Dan Siegel, although Digrazia misspelled Siegel’s name. The excerpt is as follows:
“According to Dr. Daniel J. Siegal, a neurological and child psychiatrist, in his book called, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, from a physiological perspective when the nervous system is receptive and an individual is centered in the prefrontal lobe, facial muscles and vocal chords relax, normal blood pressure and heart rate are enjoyed. We are more creative and open to what the other person is stating or proposing. By contrast, when the nervous system is reactive, we are in a limbic or survival mode, physically and emotionally. According to Siegal, in a reactive state, ‘…we distort what we hear to fit what we fear.’ This causes us to hear (which is a physical act) without listening (which is a neocortical, cognitive event).”
The connection between Pally and Siegel is by no means coincidental, by the way. In fact, in the Acknowledgments section of her book, Pally said, “I am grateful to Dan Siegel, who first got me involved in learning about the brain and for his support of the reflective work I do.”
In any event, it’s long been known that “although theoretically distinct, fears and generalized anxiety appear to be highly interrelated.”
Obin Marantz Henig explained the difference between fear and anxiety in Understanding the Anxious Mind as follows:
“ANXIETY IS NOT fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger. It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing—but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”
While anxiety may not be “fear, exactly,” it does lead to a “reactive state.”
In fact, Marantz describes the how anxiety affects us as follows:
“In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to over-reactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight.”
With regard to anxiety, one of Pally’s principles of reflective parenting is,
“Tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty, and not knowing. This includes accepting that misunderstanding and conflict are normal and inevitable. By tolerating and accepting these things, parents are less likely to react reflexively or rigidly to situations. As explained in Chapter 2, there is no single truth about what is happening, only various perceptions. Life and human relationships are by their very nature a messy business.”
Meanwhile, Pally tells us that while in a reactive state we are not reflective and according to Siegel, “'…we distort what we hear to fit what we fear’ and hear without listening.”
Now, consider how much of such behavior is related to what’s known as binary thinking and how that leads to polarization.
On December 14, 2016, Huffington Post published my article titled Shameful U.S. History Repeating Itself. Reaction to fear was the cause of that “shameful U.S. history”, as it is the cause of history repeating itself.
In her book Daring Greatly, social science researcher Brene’ Brown referred to binary thinking as a Viking-or-Victim worldview. As she described it,
“What emerged from these interviews and interactions was a lens on the world that essentially saw people divided into two groups (ahem, like me and Sir Ken Robinson) that I call Vikings or Victims....
[T]hese folks shared the belief that everyone without exception belongs to one of two mutually exclusive groups: Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or loser who’s always being taken advantage of and can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show your vulnerability.
As I coded the data from these interviews, I kept thinking about the chapter in my dissertation on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and binary opposition (the pairing of related terms that are opposite). While the respondents didn’t all use the same examples, a strong pattern of paired opposites emerged in the language they used to describe their worldview: winner or loser, survive or die, kill or be killed, strong or weak, leaders or followers, success or failure, crush or be crushed. And in case those aren’t clear enough examples, there’s the life motto of a high-achieving, take-no-prisoners lawyer, ‘The world is divided into assholes and suckers. It’s that simple.’
The source of their Viking-or-Victim worldview was not completely clear, but most attributed it to the values they had been taught growing up, the experience of surviving hardships, or their professional training....
Fear and scarcity fuel the Viking-or-Victim approach.”
A great deal of fear and anxiety is caused by a lack of knowledge and the remedy for such fear and anxiety is quite simple—raising the level of one’s knowledge. However, doing so requires empathy and compassion, which involves being reflective.
Pally explains it as follows:
“To have a strong parent-child relationship means being comforting, empathic, validating, understanding, accepting, and supportive of your child. But it also means taking this same approach toward yourself! In other words, in order to give your child what they need, you have to give those same things to yourself. In fact, the most common reason for parents to have difficulty with being comforting, empathic, validating, understanding, accepting, and supportive of their child is that they have difficulty being this way in relationship to themselves.”
It would be a mistake to believe that such advice is limited to parenting. In fact, as Pally explains,
“The ability to be reflective is essential for relating well to others, because it enables us to try to see the world from the other person’s perspective as well as our own and to accept that there is always more than one way to view a situation.”
Back in 2014, Huffington Post published my article The Power of Empathy. Approximately a year later, that article was republished as the cover article by DR Currents, a publication of the Dispute Resolution Section of the State Bar of Georgia. The following year, it was referenced Empathy Conversations - Testing their effectiveness as a policy-making instrument - A Pilot Study by Dr. Lynne Reeder, Director of Australia21, “a not for profit public think tank specializing in promoting new evidence-based thinking about the big issues confronting Australia in a rapidly changing global environment.”
In November 2016, Psychology Today welcomed me to its expert community as a Psychology Today Blogger and titled my overall blog column Empathy and Relationships: Fostering Genuine Open-Mindedness. My debut blog was titled Bridging Our National Divide Demands Empathy and Compassion: Solving problems facing our nation requires empathy and emotional intelligence.
For what it’s worth, reactive governing is no less harmful than reactive parenting.
How about we all try and be more reflective and less reactive?