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

by Daniel J. Siegel

One way to explain this finding is to look to the right hemisphere’s role as a supplier of social and emotional context.

we can suggest that for the mind to tell a coherent story, one that makes sense of one’s own or others’ lives, the left hemisphere must integrate itself with the right hemisphere. Thus, coherent stories likely result from bilateral, interhemispheric integration.

Communication that involves an awareness of our own emotions, an ability to respectfully share our emotions, and an empathic understanding of our children’s emotions lays a foundation that supports the building of lifelong relationships with our children.

Emotions shape both our internal and our interpersonal experiences and they fill our minds with a sense of what has meaning.

it is important to attune to, or resonate with the emotional experience inside the child before changing the external behavior. Attuning to your child’s emotions can mean getting down on his level, having an open and receptive demeanor, looking at what he has brought to show you, and

expressing curiosity and enthusiasm in your tone of voice.

Emotional connections create meaning for the child and affect his understanding of both his parent and himself.

Emotion can be thought of as a process that integrates distinct entities into a functional whole.

Emotion is the process of integration that brings self-organization to the mind.

Emotion, meaning, and social connection go hand in hand.

Primary emotions are the “music of the mind.”

Relating at the level of primary emotions allows us to integrate our experiences within ourselves and with others. Attuning to each other’s internal states links us in a state of emotional resonance that enables each person to “feel felt” by the other.

To “feel felt” requires that we attune to each

other’s primary emotions.

When the primary emotions of two minds are connected, a state of alignment is created in which the two individual...

Resonance occurs when we align our states, our primary emotions, through the sharing of nonverbal signals. Even when we are physically separated from the other person, we can continue to feel the reverberations of that resonant connection.

So much of what happens in relationships is about a process of resonance in which the emotional state of one person reverberates in that of the other.

The mirror neuron system is the new finding that in humans a particular kind of neuron directly links perception to action. This system of mirror neurons may be the early basis for how one mind creates the mental state of another inside itself.

mirror neurons

reveal that the brain is able to detect the intention of another person. Here is evidence not merely for a possible early mechanism of imitation and learning, but also for the creation of mindsight, the ability to create an image of the internal state of another’s mind.

When children experience an attuned connection from a responsive empathetic adult they feel good about

themselves because their emotions have been given resonance and reflection.

Attuned communication supports the emergence of a more autonomous self and flexible self-regulation. Emotional communication enables a form of joining that is truly an integrating process that promotes vitality and well-being in both parent and child. This experience of joining helps children develop a stronger sense of themselves and enriches their capacity for self-understanding and compassion.

Continual intensity of a parent’s focus on his child could actually be experienced as quite intrusive by the child. Within parent-child relationships there are cycling needs for connection and separation. It is important for parents to be sensitive to times when the child needs solitude as well as joining.

Even the categorical emotions may be denied and only brought to our awareness by behavior that projects our feelings outward, often in ways that are hurtful to our children.

That is why it is important that we try to be aware of our own emotional processes and respect their central role in both our internal and interpersonal lives.

Without our own reflective self-understanding process engaged, such defensive parental patterns of response can produce distortions in a child’s experience of relating and reality.

Self-reflection and an understanding of our internal processes allows us to choose a greater range of responses to our children’s behavior. Awareness creates the possibility of choice. When we are able to choose our responses we’re not being controlled by our emotional reactions that are often not directly connected to our children:

The integration of our own self-knowledge facilitates our being open to the process of becoming emotionally connected with our children. Coherent self-knowledge and interpersonal joining go hand in hand.

When our internal experience keeps us from connecting with our children, their experience of our intense emotion may trigger the arousal of a defensive emotional state in them. When this takes place, we are no longer in a collaborative relationship but each person has separated into his or her own internal world and feels alone and isolated. When both the parent’s and the child’s authentic, inner self is hidden behind the mental walls of psychological defense, neither person feels connected or

under...

our own emotional issues can create responses in our children that further impair our ability to emotionally understand them or ourselves.

When our children experience this resonance with us it enables them to feel comforted even in

our absence. They feel felt by us and can sense that they are in our minds, just as we

are woven into their developing s...

Though the limbic system doesn’t seem to have exact borders, its circuits do seem to share types of neurotransmitters and a common evolutionary heritage. The impact of limbic activity is widespread, going

throughout itself and both down to the brain-stem regions as well as up to the third area of the brain, the neocortex.

social interactions help to regulate their own bodily functions!

Neocortical processes, especially in the frontal regions, enable us to think flexibly, to reflect on abstract ideas such as freedom and the future, and to use words to describe these complex thoughts to others.

“By words the mind is winged.”

Reasoning has been shown to be profoundly influenced by emotional and somatic—bodily—processes; the neocortex’s activity is directly shaped by the neuronal processes of the limbic system and the brain stem. Emotions and bodily states influence reasoning. Our “higher,” more evolved neocortex does not call the shots by itself. The social, emotional, and bodily processing of the other areas of the brain directly shape the abstract perceptions and reasoning of the neocortex. • • •

we are focused on the internal states of others—especially parents on their offspring. This focus by parents on their offspring enables them to develop a balanced way of regulating their young’s internal states.

As inherently social animals that have survived through evolution because of our ability to read each other’s external expressions as signs of internal states, mirror neurons may enable us to readily and accurately respond to others’ intentions. The survival value of being able to “read minds” in a social setting to determine another’s status as friend or foe is profound.

We learn to understand others’ internal states by the states our mirror neuron systems create inside us.

Some authors state that emotion links physiological (bodily), cognitive (information processing), subjective (internal sensory), and social (interpersonal) processes. Others write about the relationship between the regulatory and regulating aspect of emotion: emotions

regulate the mind and are regulated by the mind.

emotion has something to do with a process called neural integration. Integration is the linking together of separate components of a larger system.

Neural integration is how neurons connect the activity of one region of the brain and body to other regions. Within the brain, regions called “convergence zones” have wide-reaching neurons that extend to distinct areas to bring together the input from a variety of zones into a functional whole.

Viewing emotion as an outcome of neural integration enables us to consider the wide impact of emotion on the functioning of a person. It also enables us to see how emotional dysfunction may occur when the normally integrating processes of the brain that enable balanced functioning have been impaired. Dis-integration is the result. On the interpersonal level, we come to feel emotionally connected when our minds become integrated with each other. These linkages of one mind to the other occur when the subjective, internal state of one person is respected and responded to by the other. We feel that our minds exist in that of the other person. This can be seen as the integration of the activity of two brains: neural integration, interpersonal style.

This is called contingent communication and means that the signals sent by the child are directly perceived, understood, and responded to by the parent in a dance of communication that involves mutual collaboration. Parents feel good and their children feel good, too, when interactions are respectful and responsive to each individual. This contingent communication enables a vitalizing sense of connection that may be at the heart of nurturing relationships across the life span.