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

by Daniel J. Siegel

Avoidance and a Dismissing Stance For those whose histories included a sense of emotional unavailability and a lack of attuned, nurturing parenting, there may have been an adaptation that minimizes the importance of interpersonal relationships and the communication of emotion. This minimizing stance may have been very adaptive to children raised in an emotional desert. Children do the best they can, and reducing dependence on emotionally unavailable caregivers may have been an appropriate and useful adaptation for their survival. As this adaptive response continues, children may have a decreased connection not only to their parents but to other people as well. Although studies reveal that individuals with avoidant attachment have mindsight and can take others’ perspectives, their defensive state of mind appears to reduce their motivation to be open to the emotional experiences of others. In addition, there may be a decreased access to and awareness of their own emotions. These avoidant adaptations can be seen as a minimization of right-mode processing in favor of a predominance of left-mode thinking in order to reduce their emotional vulnerability. With this perspective, one can imagine that the degree of bilateral integration connecting the right and left modes of processing may be quite minimal as well. This may be revealed in how people with this early history do appear to have very underdeveloped life stories. Often they insist that they don’t remember the details of t...