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How Early Wounds Resurface When You Become A Parent · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: In the first episode, we explored what anxiety is biologically, neurologically, and relationally.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: But today we move deeper because anxiety in parenting rarely begins with a child.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It often begins quite a long time before.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: So anxiety is essentially an inherited experience because it's not simply a reaction to present circumstances.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Often it's an echo.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it can be an echo of early unpredictability, emotional inconsistency, criticism and high expectations, emotional neglect, or, and quite often more commonly, a parent who was anxious themselves.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if children grow up adapting to the emotional climate around them, and if the atmosphere was tense, unpredictable, or hyper-vigilant, then the nervous system may have learned that the world is not fully safe, I must stay alert, something could go wrong.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that learning becomes embodied rather than conscious thought.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And later, when you become a parent and the stakes feel higher, because now it's not only you at risk, it's someone you love.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now attachment theory helps us to understand this more clearly.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: If a child grows up with inconsistent emotional attunement, they may develop hypervigilance, fear of rejection, a sense of over-responsibility, or a need to anticipate others.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now this isn't weakness or failure, it's adaptive survival.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But when that child becomes a parent, those adaptations can resurface as overchecking, overthinking, catastrophic imagining, and difficulty tolerating the child's distress.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what feels like concern for your child is actually your own unresolved anxiety being activated.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when we see this, we can regard it not as blame but as insight.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: When your child is distressed, something inside you may also be distressed.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps your own fear of being alone, your own memory of not being soothed, your own experience of being misunderstood.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And parenting activates these unfinished parts of ourselves.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And anxiety often signals, this feels familiar, I've been here before.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But now as an adult, you have capacities that you didn't have as a child.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can learn to pause, you can learn to reflect, and you can learn to respond differently.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now anxiety passes between generations when it is unconscious.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It stops passing when it becomes understood.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: That which is conscious can be understood.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: That which is unconscious remains a reactive state.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it stops passing on when it becomes understood because three powerful questions can be asked.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: The first is, is this fear about my child right now or about something older in me?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: What did I need when I felt this way as a child?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can I give that to myself now?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And when parents begin soothing their own nervous systems, they begin changing the emotional inheritance of their child.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But this is courageous work.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: When we start to recognize what is activated in us, we can separate what is now and what was then.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And very often I will say to patients, try in that moment to remind yourself that was then.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially, you did the best you could at that time.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: You were a small person and no one made it make sense for you.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: But this is now.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Learning to separate those two things moves the person away from reacting to responding.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you recognize yourself in this episode, please don't feel shame because it's not failure.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Try instead to feel some compassion.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're not anxious because you're inadequate.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're anxious because somewhere in your history safety was uncertain.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have the opportunity to become the secure base you may not always or even ever had.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And next time we'll talk about how repair and resilience are built and how even anxious parents can raise emotionally strong children.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.