All you need is love bombing

Psychologist Oliver James on how his new technique can transform children with common behaviour problems.

Oliver James: ‘Love bombing will reduce the time you spend imposing limits and nagging.’

In March 2010 I received an email from Miranda. She wrote that her son Tim, nine, “seems to not like himself and has no focus. He says he hates himself and that he’s rubbish at everything”. A bright boy, Tim refused to do his homework and was prone to temper tantrums.
The solution I proposed was love bombing, a method I developed to reset the emotional thermostats of children aged three to puberty. It entails spending a period of time alone with your child, offering them unlimited love and control. It works for a wide variety of common problems, severe or mild; from defiant – even violent – aggression to shyness, sleeping problems or underperformance at school.
This is not the same as “quality time” – just hanging out with your child. When you love bomb, you create a special emotional zone wholly different from normal life, with new rules. More than 100 families have tried it, nearly all with positive results.
So, how exactly does it work? First, you explain to your child that, sometime soon, the two of you are going to spend time together, one to one, and have a lot of fun. Your child is going to decide what they want and when they want it, within reason. You give the message that this is going to be a Big Event: It’s Coming Soon … How Exciting! The child then draws up a list of things to do. It doesn’t matter if it includes lots of SpongeBob SquarePants: the key is that your child has chosen it.
Throughout the experience, you are trying, as much as possible, to give them the feeling of “whatever I want, I get” – of being in control and of being gratified, as well as bombed with love.
You may be thinking: Is he mad? My child is a tyrant – rewarding him like that is just going to make it even worse! This is understandable. Love bombing seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which often recommends more control, not less, when a child is not complying, and stricter, firmer reactions to undesirable behaviour.
But the love bomb zone is separate from ordinary life. Outside the zone, you continue to set boundaries, consistently and firmly. In fact, the love bombing experience will feed back in a benign way, greatly reducing the time you spend imposing limits, nagging and nattering – the “Don’t do that”, “I’ve told you before, put that down”, “Leave your sister alone” into which all parents get sucked sometimes. Almost any child – even happy ones – will benefit.
A key practical decision at the outset is the length of time to spend in the zone and the frequency. At one extreme, you can take your child away from home for a couple of nights at a hotel, bed & breakfast etc.
Alternatively, as many parents have done, the rest of your family can spend the weekend with relatives or friends, leaving you at home with your child. There is no need to spend money. Many parents have done a day away or just bursts of a few hours.
In the case of Miranda and her depressed son Tim, as a dual-income family, they could afford two nights away at an inexpensive hotel. They settled in on the Friday night and set off into town on the Saturday. Much of the time was spent just wandering around, with a certain amount of shopping and a visit to an aquarium.
Miranda recalled that this day “made Tim feel very special. It worked. And when it came to spending money, Tim was reasonable about absolutely everything, much to my surprise.”
Children who feel loved are likely to be less consumption-obsessed.
After a peaceful Saturday night at the hotel with a takeaway and the television, Miranda and Tim pottered around again on the Sunday and visited a zoo on the way home.
As well as Tim feeling in control during this time, there was much affection expressed. Miranda recalls: “Tim spent a great deal of time cuddling up to me and telling me how much he loved me (always reciprocated). It was interesting for me not to be in charge. I do tend to lead. Here, it really was mostly Tim’s decision what we did next, what we ate and what we watched on TV.”
In the guidelines I offer, I suggest getting the child to give the experience a name before doing it, like Special Time or Mummy Time or Daddy Time. Often it helps to have a material object to remind them of the experience, like a stone from a beach or a teddy bear. Using this and the name to help as prompts, on returning, parents are asked to try to carve out half an hour an evening when they can briefly re-enter the love bomb zone together, even if only to watch TV.
The impact of Tim’s love bombing was immediate and dramatic. Five weeks later, Miranda wrote to me: “Overall he is happier. He still has tantrums, but since the weekend away I haven’t heard him say that he hates himself once.”
Eighteen months later, she reported: “It is getting better, largely due to the love bombing and subsequent changes in our relationship.”
I have had similar reports of sustained success – followed up one to two years after the love bombing – from parents helping children with violent aggression, myriad anxiety problems, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), sleeplessness, perfectionism and even autism.
In many cases, I suspect that the experience stabilises levels of the fight-flight hormone cortisol. If too high, the child can be manic or aggressive or anxious. If too low – blunted – the child may be listless or surly.
Even a brief experience of love and control seems to correct that. Recent evidence suggests that children are far more plastic than was once thought and that the way they are is not fixed, for the vast majority of problems.
The love bombing zone need not be a whole weekend. For instance, Sam, three, seemed a lot more sensitive than his younger brother, easily overwhelmed by simple situations. Sometimes he would melt down in toddler-like rages. He got very jumpy when separated from his mother, Emma. She said: “In the house, he wants to know where I am all the time. “If Emma was upstairs and he was downstairs he would scream asking her whereabouts.
For practical reasons, she planned two consecutive Saturdays away from home with him, rather than a night. Sam named the first Pirate Day because they went to a funfair. He adored feeling in control and the expressions of love. As recommended by my protocol of what to do, she told him that she loved him repeatedly. Once into the habit, she continued. Since that day they both have found it easier to express love frequently . She believes they have “much, much better communication” and says: “It reminded us of the good times that we can have together, setting us back on that track. It was a truly lovely day.”
Often it is not just the child’s thermostat that is corrected, it is also the parent’s in relation to the child. After love bombing, many report that it has been the first time for months, or years, they have remembered how much they love their child.
Emma and Sam’s second day was based at home and included a complete meltdown by him. It is extremely common during love bombing for the child to test out if the parent is for real – really loves them or will still love them if they are horrible. Emma rode it out and they emerged much closer.
Afterwards, she reported: “He has not had any unreachable tantrums since that one on the last love bombing day, four weeks ago.” What is more, Sam’s fear of not knowing where his mother is in the house has gone.
However you do love bombing, there is nothing to lose. What’s not to like about spending time having fun with your child? If it transforms them and your relationship, so much the better – the worst that can happen is you return from the zone having had a good time.

• Love Bombing: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat is published by Karnac Books, £9.99.

As I sit on my knees, laying my body forward and bowing humbly to the earth, tears begin to effortlessly graze the sides of my cheekbones.

I feel a slight pulsating of my heart, a tingling cringe in my upper thighs, and a swirling sensation at the base of my core. I turn my head from side to side and I hear a slight creek and crack as the knots in my upper back spread to my shoulders.

I attempt to pull myself up quickly but I stay, finding refuge in the internal tornado of what appears to be a breakdown. Amongst the knots, the cracks, and the cringes, I feel my heart screaming loudly at me; so loud that I cannot help but listen with a sort of desperate curiosity.

In the same way a starving body craves food, my heart is screaming for my attention. It is beating at me like fists to a punching bag, and weeping for me like a baby to her mother.

Stop hiding from me!

Stop burying me beneath a pile of worthless psychobabble!
Stop running!

Stop ignoring me! Please, please, please… it begs, it calls, it howls.

My heart begs to be ignited; lit with a fueling fire, embraced by passion and power.

I have found myself here before, but never quite like this. I have recognized a tug-of-war between my heart and my head, but never felt a literal pull from my soul like I am now.

I have never felt so humble, yet so hungry all at once. I have never seen so much clarity while experiencing such intense levels of confusion. In a state of seemingly permanent inner chaos, my entire being is calling to me with a craving for something, somewhere, to bring me closer to a feeling of alive-ness.

Alive-ness: What it feels like to be fully alive, while living.

Alive-ness: Waking up to the calling and the pulling from the soul, to do just that–wake up.

Maybe this is what a “spiritual awakening” feels like.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m in pre-breakthrough, mid-breakdown.

I remember the night I booked my flight to India and the exact seated position I sat in while the plane strained upwards. It took 9 months to travel from Goa to Nepal and I lost so many things along the way.

I delved into “soul-awakening” topics such as cultivating self-compassion, practicing forgiveness, and accessing vulnerability. I engaged with groups of people I didn’t know in places I had always dreamed of. I looked for answers in ashrams, in gurus, saw glimpses in the eyes of young children on the way to Varanasi. I went to India on a quest, to discover something uncertain, convinced it would spark an intensely rich form of healing that would allow me to live a courageously full life.

India was hard, I ended up in a Nepalese opium den where I grew a beard and wrote a bad book. When friends eventually found me, I could see the well meaning concern in their eyes as they ushered me towards a hot shower and a pair of scissors.

For this I am grateful.

Today, twenty two years later as I felt my heart drop to the earth, my hands in a very tight prayer in front of me, I felt many of the sensations I had while I hiked free in the Himalaya . I felt a similar level of desperation and a familiar desire to jump off the diving board and do something “courageously” extreme.

I’m not the best swimmer, but the urge to dive into the deep end has always been there, finding a sense of pride in working through struggle as I find my way back to level ground. I have searched and searched, waiting for that defining moment when a breakdown would transform into a breakthrough, and in the search, the dive, whatever you want to call it, I have plummeted, often.

I took off with a desire to find something and feel anything but came home feeling just as lost as ever. Now, all this time later, I see that it’s called a journey for a reason.

For me, there has been no singular “defining moment” that suddenly sparked a sustainable sense of being fully alive (like one sees in classic Bollywood movies), although I can certainly recognize the profound difference between living and being alive.

Ironically, today, bowing humbly to the earth, letting the tears effortlessly graze the sides of my cheekbones, feeling the pulsating of my heart, the cringe in my upper thighs, and the swirling sensation at the base of my core, I felt more alive than I have in a long time. I felt my heart screaming again and instead of running from it, I listened in stillness.

The beauty of letting go of the ceaseless chattering of mind is that it offers us the chance to break through. I always thought the breakthrough just happened, but the true breakthrough, or “awakening,” happens in the sitting with, the listening to a deeper core space, beyond mind.

Sometimes it doesn’t take diving into the deep-end to get there, but rather, simply, keeping the head above water without a struggle, gently sipping air.
The heart always knows what it needs.

I’m working on listening to it, and in doing so, I come alive.

When people size you up, what are they looking for? …

“It turns out that when we decide how we feel about someone, we are making not one judgment, but two. The criteria that count are what we call “strength” and “warmth.” Strength is a person’s capacity to make things happen with abilities and force of will. When people project strength, they command our respect. Warmth is the sense that a person shares our feelings, interests, and view of the world. When people project warmth, we like and support them.

“So we warm to warm people but dislike cold ones. We take seemingly strong people seriously but often disregard those who seem weak and inconsequential. People who project both strength and warmth impress us as knowing what they are doing and having our best interests at heart, so we trust them and find them persuasive. They seem willing (warm) and able (strong) to look out for our interests, so we look to them for leadership and feel comfortable knowing they are in charge. Strength and warmth are the principal criteria on which all our social judgments hinge.

“Once you grasp this insight, it opens up a whole new window on the human experience. You can understand why a person is appealing by looking closely at how they project strength and warmth. Or, if a person is not so appealing, you can see what makes them seem cold or weak. The waitress’s sweet talk projects warmth, while her level gaze suggests she does not put up with nonsense. The boss’s awkward posture projects insecurity and undercuts his employees’ respect for him. The customer service rep projects warmth by sympathizing with the caller, saying that the snafu must have been aggravating — but then expresses confusion about the problem, projecting weakness and losing the caller’s confidence. Like a cost-benefit analysis or a pros-and-cons list, the strength + warmth lens reveals something fundamental about our experience.

“Knowing that strength and warmth matter is one thing, but when it comes to ourselves, acting on that insight turns out to be tricky. Any time we are in the presence of others, we are communicating, sending social signals, even when the message is just “This is who I am.” We project strength and warmth using many different signals, including ones we never think about. Most of us generally have only a dim understanding of the signals we are sending. In fact, a stranger who spends just a few minutes in your presence usually walks away with a much clearer sense of the impression you make on people than you have yourself.

“But understanding the signals you send is not the biggest challenge.

“The trickiest thing about strength and warmth is that it is very hard to project both at once. This is because strength and warmth are in direct tension with each other. Most of the things we do to project strength of character — wearing a serious facial expression, flexing our biceps, or flexing our vocabulary — tend to make us seem less warm. Likewise, most signals of warmth — smiling often, speaking softly, doing people favors — can leave us seeming more submissive than strong.”

Author: John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut
Title: Compelling People
Publisher: Hudson Street
Date: Copyright 2013 by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut
Pages: xi-xii