Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

by Daniel J. Siegel

If you had a difficult childhood but have come to make sense of those experiences, you are not bound to re-create the same negative interactions with your own children. Without such self-understanding, however, science has shown that history will likely repeat itself, as negative patterns of family interactions are passed down through the generations. This book is designed to help you make sense of your own life, both past and present, by enhancing your understanding of how your childhood has influenced your life and affects

times parents have said, “I never thought I’d do or say the very things to my children that felt hurtful to me when I was a child. And yet I find myself doing exactly that.” Parents can feel stuck in repetitive, unproductive patterns that don’t support the loving, nurturing relationships they envisioned when they began their roles as parents. Making sense of life can free parents from patterns of the past that have imprisoned them in the present.

Building a positive relationship with our children involves being open to our own growth and development.

Children don’t need us to be fully available all the time, but they do need our presence during connecting interactions. Being mindful as a parent means having intention in your actions. With intention, you purposefully choose your behavior with your child’s emotional well-being in mind. Children can readily detect intention and thrive when there is purposeful interaction with their parents. It is within our children’s emotional connections with us that they develop a deeper sense of themselves and a capacity for relating.

Having the attitude that you can learn throughout your life enables you to approach parenting with an open mind, as a journey of discovery.

Being able to respond in flexible ways is one of the biggest challenges of being a parent. Response flexibility is the ability of the mind to sort through a wide variety of mental processes, such as impulses, ideas, and feelings, and come up with a thoughtful, nonautomatic response. Rather than merely automatically reacting to a situation, an individual can reflect and intentionally choose an appropriate direction of action. Response flexibility is the opposite of a “knee-jerk reaction.” It involves the capacity to delay gratification and to inhibit impulsive behaviors. This ability is a cornerstone of emotional maturity and compassionate relationships.

Talking with children about their thoughts, memories, and feelings provides them with the essential interpersonal experiences necessary for self-understanding and building their social skills.

Children need to be enjoyed and valued, not managed. We often focus on the problems of life rather than on the possibilities for enjoyment and learning available to us. When we are too busy doing things for our children, we forget how important it is to simply be with them. We can delight in the opportunity to join with our children in the amazing experience of growing together. Learning to share in the joy of living is at the heart of a rewarding parent-child relationship.

Experiences that are not fully processed may create unresolved and leftover issues that influence how we react to our children. These issues can easily get triggered in the parent-child relationship. When this happens our responses toward our children often take the form of strong emotional reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions in our perceptions, or sensations in our bodies. These intense states of mind impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible and affect our interactions and relationships with our children. At these times, we’re not acting like the parents we want to be and are often left wondering why this role of parenting sometimes seems to “bring out the worst in us.” Issues that are rooted in our past impact our present reality and directly affect the way we experience and interact with our children even when we’re not aware of their origins.

There is often a reason why traumatic experiences are not processed in a way that makes them readily available for later retrieval. During the trauma, an adaptation to survive can include the focusing of attention away from the horrifying aspects of an experience. Also, it may be that excessive stress and hormonal secretion during a trauma directly impair the functioning of parts of the brain necessary for autobiographical memories to be stored. After the trauma, recollection of those details encoded in only nonverbal form will likely evoke distressful emotions that can be deeply disturbing.

I was able to see this as an unresolved issue in myself and not as a deficit in my son. And this understanding allows me to easily imagine how having an emotional intolerance for helplessness can lead to parental behaviors that target that helplessness in children and attack them for it. Even with love and the best of intentions, we may be filled with old defenses that make our children’s experiences intolerable to us. This may be the origin of “parental ambivalence.” When their lives provoke the intolerable emotion in us, our inability to be aware of it consciously and to make sense of it in our own lives leaves us at risk of being unable to tolerate it in our children. This intolerance can take the form of becoming blind to or ignoring our children’s emotions, which gives them a sense of unreality and disconnects them from their own feelings. Or our intolerance may lead to a more assertive act such as irritability or an outright though not consciously intended attack on the child’s emotional state of vulnerability and helplessness. Then, the unsuspecting child becomes the recipient of hostile responses that become woven into his internal sense of identity and directly impair his ability to tolerate those very same emotions in himself.

Parental ambivalence comes in many forms, often derived from unresolved issues. Parents can find themselves filled with conflicted feelings that compromise their ability to be open and loving to their child. With defenses rigidly constructed in our own childhood and beyond, we can become frozen in our ability to adapt to the new role of caring for our children in a consistent and clear manner. Normal aspects of our children’s experience such as their emotionality, their helplessness and vulnerability, and their dependence on us can feel threatening and become intolerable.

There may be experiences from your own childhood that you couldn’t make sense of at the time, because no caring adult was available to help you understand your experience. From the beginning of life, the mind attempts to make sense of the world and to regulate its internal emotional state through the relationship of the child with the parent. Parents help children regulate their internal states and bring meaning to experience. As children grow, they develop the capacity to create an autobiographical narrative from these experiences. This ability to tell stories reflects the fundamental way that the child has come to make sense of the world and to regulate his or her emotional states.

There can also be horizontal integration in which the left and right sides of the brain work together. This bilateral integration may be at the core of how we create the coherent narratives that emerge when we make sense of our lives. As coherent narratives are the best predictor of a child’s having a secure attachment to us, this bilateral integrative process may be at the heart of a parent’s ability to provide a child with a nurturing environment and a secure base.

Stories involve logical sequencing of events, but they also play a powerful role in regulating emotions; in this way, stories are a good example of how emotion and analytical thinking are intertwined.

which information is filtered, as lenses that help us to anticipate the future and therefore prepare our minds for action. These lenses are outside our conscious awareness and bias our perceptions without our having conscious knowledge of their existence. They are built from past experience, are activated in specific ways, and function quickly to shape our view of reality, our beliefs and attitudes, and the way we will engage with the world

The shadows that implicit mental models cast upon our decisions and the stories we tell about our life can be made explicit through focused self-reflection. Such a conscious process can deepen self-understanding and may be a way to alter mental models and open the door to ongoing development throughout life. Self-understanding, which can liberate us from these imprisoning shadows of the past, requires that we become reflective of how these patterns of perceptual bias and behavioral impulses may be a fundamental part of ingrained mental models and inflexible states of mind. Taking time to reflect opens the door to conscious awareness, which brings with it the possibility of change.

My schematic, freeze-frame account (self/language/other) reflects the fact that an entire passage of developmental history, normally requiring many months to transact, is compressed in Keller’s case into the space of a revelatory moment. . . . Keller stresses both the relational dimension of the episode (the decisive role of ‘Teacher’) and the grounding of the entire experience in her body.”

The openness to growth of the prefrontal cortex throughout life may help us to understand how deepening self-knowledge can alter the ways we experience others and ourselves. It may be that as we develop throughout life, the experiences we have with others and within our bodies form the foundation for our emerging sense of self that grows throughout our lives.

Emotions shape both our internal and our interpersonal experiences and they fill our minds with a sense of what has meaning. When we are aware of our emotions and are able to share them with others, our daily lives are enriched because it is through the sharing of emotions that we deepen our connections with others.

This doesn’t mean you have to live with bugs in the house, it just means that it is important to attune to, or resonate with the emotional experience inside the child before changing the external behavior. Attuning to your child’s emotions can mean getting down on his level, having an open and receptive demeanor, looking at what he has brought to show you, and expressing curiosity and enthusiasm in your tone of voice. “Let me see, wow! They’re colorful little beetles, aren’t they? Thank you for showing them to me. Where did you find them? I think they’ll be happiest living outside.” Not only would this have supported the parent’s relationship to the child but also, because the child would have experienced that his ideas and emotions were of value to his parent, he would have felt a stronger sense of himself. When a parent resonates with the child’s emotions, the child’s experience of himself is that he is “good.” Emotional connections create meaning for the child and affect his understanding of both his parent and himself.

Attuning to each other’s internal states links us in a state of emotional resonance that enables each person to “feel felt” by the other. In this resonating connection, two people mutually influence the internal state of the other. This attunement, this connecting resonance, enables us to feel joined.

Around the same time, the girl said to her father, “Dad, you are becoming funny. Really funny!” Her father was very pleased with her observation. He said that he began to feel a new awareness of his body—sensations in his gut, feelings in his chest. He became more aware of images in his mind that weren’t connected to particular word-based thoughts and described feeling “at ease” and connected to his family. He felt more in the present and less preoccupied with his own thoughts. With the growing connection of his right and left modes of processing he may be ready to explore the elements of his unresolved feelings surrounding the loss of his father and become aware of his feelings about his mother’s and his colleague’s illnesses.

Accepting our need for connection to others often requires the painful acknowledgment of how fragile and vulnerable we all are. This father’s understanding of his experiences before therapy led to his awareness that his primary emotions had been shut off because of his early family life. An initial inborn appraisal that relationships are important and “good” had to be adaptively disconnected from the rest of his mind in response to his experiences with his family. This adaptation, a kind of minimizing defensive mechanism, was crucial to reduce the flood of feelings of longing and disappointment that would have incapacitated him in that emotional desert. That shutting-off process of his childhood was so efficient that it had blocked the elaboration of his appraisal/arousal systems from creating more intense or categorical emotions. He was left with a sense of numbness and a lack of meaning. His parents’ distanced emotional communication had left him disconnected from the very processes that created meaning in his own life. With his work in therapy and self-reflective writing, his relationships as well as his emerging internal experiences could now reinforce a new integrated way of living that created more meaning in his life.

To “feel felt” requires that we attune to each other’s primary emotions. When the primary emotions of two minds are connected, a state of alignment is created in which the two individuals experience a sense of joining. The music of our mind, our primary emotions, becomes intimately influenced by the mind of the other person as we connect with their primary emotional states. If communication is limited to a focus only on the rarely occurring categorical emotions, we lose the opportunity to experience the magical moments of connection that are available to us each day.

Resonance occurs when we align our states, our primary emotions, through the sharing of nonverbal signals. Even when we are physically separated from the other person, we can continue to feel the reverberations of that resonant connection. This sensory experience of another person becomes a part of our “memory of the other” such that the other person becomes a part of us. When relationships include resonance, there can be a tremendously invigorating sense of joining. This joining is not just in the moment: we continue to feel the connection to the other through the resonance of the relationship. Such resonance is experienced as memories, thoughts, sensations, and images of the other and our relationship with him or her. This ongoing sense of connection can be thought of as the ways our minds have become linked. This linkage reveals an integration of two minds.

nonconsciously, that state is created inside us. For example, we may begin to cry when we see someone else crying. We learn how someone is feeling by putting ourselves “in the other person’s shoes”—we know how others are feeling by how our own body/mind responds. We check our own state to know the state of mind of another person. This is the basis for empathy.

At the heart of feeling joined is the experience of empathic emotional communication. The way one mind becomes interwoven with another is through the sharing of the surges of energy that are our primary emotions. When children feel positive sensations, such as in moments of joy and mastery, parents can share these emotional states and enthusiastically reflect and amplify them with their children. Likewise, when children feel negative or uncomfortable sensations, such as in moments of disappointment or hurt, parents can empathize with their feelings and can offer a soothing presence that comforts their children. These moments of joining enable a child to feel felt, to feel that she exists within the mind of the parent. When children experience an attuned connection from a responsive empathetic adult they feel good about themselves because their emotions have been given resonance and reflection. Perhaps a story can bring more clarity to this concept of attunement.

Attuned communication supports the emergence of a more autonomous self and flexible self-regulation. Emotional communication enables a form of joining that is truly an integrating process that promotes vitality and well-being in both parent and child. This experience of joining helps children develop a stronger sense of themselves and enriches their capacity for self-understanding and compassion.

Continual intensity of a parent’s focus on his child could actually be experienced as quite intrusive by the child. Within parent-child relationships there are cycling needs for connection and separation. It is important for parents to be sensitive to times when the child needs solitude as well as joining. The attuned parent respects the natural oscillating rhythms of the child’s need for connection, then solitude, and then connection again. We are not designed to be in alignment all of the time. Attuned relationships give respect to the rhythm of these changing needs.

For example, a recently divorced mother whose husband had left abruptly would become furious with her three-year-old son’s demands for her time. Still unable to deal with her own sense of loneliness and abandonment, this mother found her son’s “demanding behaviors,” which expressed his need for connection to her, threatening. Her young son became the object of her anger as she projected her discomfort with her own neediness onto him. She felt rejected and alone, feelings not dissimilar to experiences in her own childhood, and she was unable to be receptive to her own child’s needs for connection. This is how a child can become trapped in the emotional turmoil of a parent’s unresolved issues. As this mother processed the pain of her divorce and integrated this significant life change into her understanding of her own childhood, her emerging life story enabled her to move through her defensive reactions and she no longer became unreasonably angry with her son. She came to realize how her own unresolved issues had been impairing her ability to respond warmly to her son’s healthy desire to be close to her.

Self-reflection and an understanding of our internal processes allows us to choose a greater range of responses to our children’s behavior. Awareness creates the possibility of choice. When we are able to choose our responses we’re not being controlled by our emotional reactions that are often not directly connected to our children: they are overreactions driven more by our own emotional state than by engaged emotional communication with our child at the moment. The integration of our own self-knowledge facilitates our being open to the process of becoming emotionally connected with our children. Coherent self-knowledge and interpersonal joining go hand in hand.

When our internal experience keeps us from connecting with our children, their experience of our intense emotion may trigger the arousal of a defensive emotional state in them. When this takes place, we are no longer in a collaborative relationship but each person has separated into his or her own internal world and feels alone and isolated. When both the parent’s and the child’s authentic, inner self is hidden behind the mental walls of psychological defense, neither person feels connected or understood. When our children feel this sense of aloneness they may express their fear or discomfort at this disconnection either by behaving aggressively or by withdrawing. Children’s behavior may then become the focus of our attention and our own feeling of isolation can keep us from making mea...

All relationships, especially parent-child relationships, are built on attuned, collaborative communication that gives respect to the dignity and uniqueness of the music of each individual’s mind.

Connecting to our children can be one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding of experiences. As a parent we have the possibility of building lifelong meaningful relationships with our children when we learn to develop a sense of joining through integrative communication. When we align ourselves with them, we begin a process in which the basic elements of our minds become integrated. This linkage of minds enables us to have a vital sense of being with them. Integrative communication happens across the life of our relationship with our children. A sense of resonance begins to emerge through which we carry the other person with us even when we are physically apart. When our children experience this resonance with us it enables them to feel comforted even in our absence. They feel felt by us and can sense that they are in our minds, just as we are woven into their developing sense of self. This feeling of being connected gives children a sense of security and supports their exploration of their own emotions and the world around them. Emotional communication builds the foundation of our relationship with our children as well as their relationship with others.

Awareness. Be mindful of your own feelings and bodily responses and others’ nonverbal signals. Attunement. Allow your own state of mind to align with that of another. Empathy. Open your mind to sense another’s experience and point of view. Expression. Communicate your internal responses with respect; make the internal external. Joining. Share openly in the give-and-take of communication, both verbally and nonverbally. Clarification. Help make sense of the experience of another. Individuality. Respect the dignity and uniqueness of each individual’s mind.

Integration is a process whereby separate parts are linked together into a functional whole. For example, an integrated family enables members to be distinctly different from each other and encourages them to respect these differences while joining together to make a cohesive family experience.

Communication in such an integrated family system has a vitality to it that reflects the high degree of complexity achieved by blending these two fundamental processes: differentiation (people being separate and unique individuals) and integration (people coming together to join with each other). Such a blending of differentiation and integration enables the family to create something larger than the sum of the individual parts. Integrative communication enhances both parents’ and children’s individuality as they join together as a “we” that enhances their sense of connection in the world.

The ramifications of such a system in helping us understand social experience are powerful. Empathy can be seen as metaphorically putting ourselves in the other person’s mental shoes. We may learn to understand others’ internal states by the states our mirror neuron systems create inside us. Emotional understanding of others is directly linked to our awareness and understanding of ourselves.

Dis-integration is the result with a tendency toward states of rigidity or chaos. On the interpersonal level, we come to feel emotionally connected when our minds become integrated with each other. These linkages of one mind to the other occur when the subjective, internal state of one person is respected and responded to by the other. We feel how our minds exist in that of the other person. This can also be seen as the integration of the activity of two brains: neural integration, interpersonal style.

Learning to communicate and listen empathically is a vital part of parenting. At the heart of this openness is parental presence—the receptive state in which we take in the signals from others and have compassion and kindness in our interactions. Caring communication supports the development of a healthy attachment that is especially important in building a trusting parent-child relationship. Studies performed across many cultures suggest that a common element in healthy attachments is the ability of the parent and child to have a reciprocal give-and-take of signals. This is called contingent communication and means that the signals sent by the child are directly perceived, understood, and responded to by the parent in a dance of communication that involves mutual collaboration. Parents feel good and their children feel good, too, when interactions are respectful and responsive to each individual. This contingent communication enables a vitalizing sense of connection that may be at the heart of nurturing relationships across the life span. This is how we “feel felt” by another person, the gateway to how a “me” joins with another and becomes a part of a “we.”

Collaborative or contingent communication allows us to expand our own minds by taking in others’ points of view and seeing our own point of view reflected in their responses. From the beginning of life, the infant requires collaborative communication in order to thrive.

In contingent communication the receiver of the message listens with an open mind and with all his or her senses. Her reaction is dependent on what was actually communicated, not on a predetermined and rigid mental model of what was expected. The exchange occurs in the present moment without preoccupation with internal events of the past. Contingent communication is full of possibility for connecting because instead of responding in a rote manner, a parent responds to the signals actually sent by the child. In contingent communication the parent gives respect to the act of listening. So often parents don’t listen to the message their child expresses because they are preoccupied with their own thoughts and feelings. A child’s true message is not always immediately apparent and a parent may have to “decode” the message in order to understand it. It’s important to remember that even if your children’s messages don’t immediately make sense to you, they are trying to get their needs met in the best way they can at that point

The mother tries to put the child off so that she can complete her own goal before attending to her child. The child becomes more upset, cries louder, lies down on the floor, and starts kicking his feet against the wall. This annoys the tired mother, who doesn’t want to hear the banging or wash the scuff marks off the wall. The mother feels that her child is being unreasonable and demanding. She says sternly, “I’m not going to play with you unless you stop that kicking right now!” On hearing this, the child experiences an even greater disconnection because of his mother’s anger toward him. He now becomes even more upset and takes a swing at his mother. Now the mother doesn’t want to give her child any positive attention because in her mind he’s not behaving well and the mother doesn’t want to reinforce this “bad behavior.” The child’s message of how important it was to reconnect with his mother after a long day of separation wasn’t received and he began acting out of frustration at not being understood. He then continued to seek and get connection, albeit through negative ways.

We feel understood. We have a sense that we are not alone in the world, because our self is connected to something larger than the boundaries of our own skin. Over time, repeated patterns of contingent communication also enable us to develop a coherent autobiographical self that connects the past, present, and anticipated future. Both the here and now and the reflective autobiographical forms of conscious awareness shape our experience of ourselves in the world.

I wonder if this is why I have little autobiographical memory from being a child.

coherence. The resultant feeling in the child is that the world is not a reliable place and the sense of self may become filled with anxiety and uncertainty. In order to thrive, a child (and perhaps each of us at any age) needs contingent communication with significant others. A child especially needs a “good-enough” parent: no parent can provide contingent communication all of the time, but frequent experiences of feeling connected are vital in building relationships. It is often a challenge to make sense of our children’s signals and some children may be especially difficult to understand and to soothe. When the inevitable disconnections and misunderstandings occur, we can repair those ruptures so our children learn that a healing reconnection is possible. The accumulation of our children’s positive, connecting experiences with us, through contingent communication and essential moments of interactive repair, enable them to build a coherent sense of self as they develop.

Being open to the complex process of contingent communication requires a willingness to become a part of something much greater than a self that is defined by the body’s physical boundaries. Such intimate collaboration may be difficult when parents did not experience a sense of connection in their own childhoods. It is a challenge to remain open to the basic processes of perceiving, making sense of, and responding to the communication sent by our children. A child’s experience of inappropriate, noncontingent communication can create emotional distress and limit her openness to making further attempts to connect. It is confusing to children if their reality of an experience is denied or misunderstood by their parent or another significant adult, because those are the very people with whom they most need to connect.

Every day we miss opportunities for making true connection because instead of listening and responding appropriately to our children we respond only from our own point of view and fail to make a connection to their experience. When our children tell us what they think or how they feel, it is important to respect their experience, whether or not it’s the same as our own. Parents can listen to and understand their children’s experience rather than tell them that what they think and feel isn’t valid.

Or let’s imagine that your child enthusiastically expresses a desire for a particular toy that she has seen advertised and you respond with, “Oh, no, you don’t really want that—it’s just a piece of junk.” Your child just told you that she does want it, which doesn’t mean that you have to get it for her, but you can acknowledge her desire. “That toy really looks like it would be fun to play with. Tell me what you like about it.” If she continues to insist on getting the toy right away, you can say, “I see that it is hard to wait when you like it so much. Maybe you want me to write it down so when it is time to get a present, I’ll know what you might like to have.” When parents understand that they can let their children have and express their desires without having to fulfill them, it frees the parent to make a connection to the child’s experience without having to deny their feelings. Here’s another more extreme example

Andy had been frustrated with his work and was seeking connection and help. What was his internal experience of that interaction with the teacher? For any of us, not having connection when we need it can induce intense emotion. That emotion is shame. For a five-year-old, trying to understand the words “You are not here” must have also been quite confusing. He not only has noncontingent communication to deal with, but the teacher’s response is “crazy-making”—her words deny both his reality and also her own behavior! If he were truly “not there,” why was she even talking to him? This is a prime example of a mismatch among her words, her behavior, and his need for connection.