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

by Daniel J. Siegel

The proposal here regarding attachment experiences and the “dismissing” grouping is that the emotionally unengaging family lives of these individuals when they were children did not enable the laying down of easily recalled details of their childhood family experiences. There may be factual knowledge—of television shows, sports events, and facts about family events—but little autobiographical recollection. A unique feature of explicit autobiographical memory is that it has a sense of self and time. It appears to be mediated in a different set of circuits, those primarily within the right hemisphere, than explicit semantic/factual memory, within the left hemisphere. In this manner, the insistence on lack of recall, mediated by being raised in an emotional desert, creates an underdeveloped right-hemisphere autobiographical-knowing process, or autonoesis.