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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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.