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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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.