The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired

by Daniel J. Siegel

For years Dan has used a helpful analogy for confronting our past. If trauma is like a dog bite, we can understand how our natural impulse is to pull away from it. So if a dog bites you on the hand, and you pull your hand away, he digs his teeth in even more strongly and your struggle worsens the injury of the bite. But if instead you shove your hand down the dog’s throat, he’ll gag and actually release his grip on your hand, minimizing the damage and optimizing the healing. Trauma is just like that. We naturally pull away from reflecting on the trauma, not wanting to be flooded by the painful memories or thinking, “It’s the past, so what’s the point of dwelling on something you can’t change?” But in reality, memory retrieval when combined with narrative reflections can be a memory modifier.