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

by Daniel J. Siegel

The child’s vulnerability became a threat to our active but nonconscious effort to avoid our feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. In retrospect, the children’s vulnerability became the enemy. There was often little we could do to cure their devastating illnesses, and our inability to help them added to the overwhelming sense of sadness and despair that we felt. We were fighting against disease, fighting the existential reality of death and despair during that relentless and sleepless year. Helplessness had to become the furthest thing from our conscious minds or we would have collapsed. Vulnerability became the target of our anger toward the villain of disease we could not conquer.