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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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.