Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Episode 3. The Parent in The Consulting Room, The Depressed Parent

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Episode 3. The Parent in The Consulting Room, The Depressed Parent · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome back to this series entitled What Parents Carry.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the motivation for doing this has to do with what I see inside the consulting room.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not only do I assess the mental health of children and try and make some sense of the difficulties they experience, I try and pay close attention to the parents who come for the first consultation to provide a history, but also in the task of ongoing parental guidance, because it seems to me that if I pay attention to the child in isolation, I might be missing some very important points.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Parents get into difficulty for a whole variety of reasons.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes those difficulties are mental health related.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, I'm talking about recognizable disorders and illness, but I'm also talking at a lower level about what parents carry from their own life experiences and how these things become activated by children.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something I learned a very long time ago when I was working with children and young people in residential care and in a therapeutic community.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It soon became apparent to me that I was experiencing things which were internal reactions that had been triggered by the behavior of the children and young people concerned.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, my blind spots were being exposed.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Part of my training as a psychotherapist meant that these things had to be explored and understood so that I could put something between my internal reactions and the behavior of the child concerned.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But parents don't, not automatically.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so the left doing the very best they can, but sometimes finding themselves in situations where it all becomes too much.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I want to look at the depressed parent.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are parents who can be and who are physically present, and there are parents who are there but not fully.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: From the outside we see that routines are followed, meals are made, days continue, and from the outside everything may very well look intact.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: But inside something has gone quiet.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Energy feels distant, emotion feels muted, and connection feels just out of reach.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now the parent may not say it out loud, but there is often a quiet question that sits underneath it all.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Something like, why does this feel so hard when I love my child so much?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: This can be the experience of the depressed parent.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Depression in parenting is often misunderstood.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: It can be mistaken for a lack of effort, disinterest, lack of care, or a withdrawal by choice.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, depression isn't a failure of care.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a condition that alters the parent's internal world.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: It affects energy, motivation, emotional availability, and the ability to feel pleasure, connection, and responsiveness.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And crucially, it creates a gap.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: A gap between what the parent feels towards their child and what they are able to express in the moment.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this gap is often where the pain lives because the depressed parent does care deeply, but caring doesn't always translate into emotional presence.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when I work with parents and I see that there clearly are difficulties that they are struggling with, and I approach this with them, and quite often they say, But I'm not here for me, I'm here for the child, and it almost as if it feels wrong.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I explain to them as gently as possible that there is a connection between those two things.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: That really isn't the message.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's more a kind of look, if we can find a way of helping you, that means you're better positioned to do what needs to happen to help your child, but you can't do that on your own.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: You've tried.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Inside the depressed state, the world changes.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Things that once felt manageable feel heavy, things that were joyful feel flat.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Even small tasks can feel effortful, and in parroting, where responsiveness, energy, and emotional engagement are constantly required, this becomes particularly difficult because there may be a sense of exhaustion that doesn't lift, difficulty engaging in play, a reduced capacity to respond emotionally, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by ordinary demands, never mind the extraordinary ones.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And often this is accompanied by a sense of guilt.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: I should be more present.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: They deserve more than this.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm letting them down.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: But depression is not resolved through effort, it's not something a parent can simply push through.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not just about behavior, it's about the availability of the self.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Depression in parents can emerge from many places.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It may be a long-standing condition, one of those that comes to the surface and goes down again, like a transient depressive stage or an episodic stage.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: It could be the result of chronic stress, which could be linked to loss, trauma, unresolved grief, that could be connected to relational experiences that have shaped the parents' internal world.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in some cases, it reflects a history of emotional deprivation, of not being met, understood, or emotionally held.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And over time the system adapts, not through activation as in anxiety, but through withdrawal, a kind of turning inward, a reduction of emotional intensity, a kind of psychological conservation.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this adaptation, whilst protective in one context, becomes highly limiting in another.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the parenting relationship, this can take subtle but powerful forms.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: The parent may be physically present but emotionally distant, quiet but not containing, responsive in function but not in feeling.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: There may be fewer spontaneous interactions, less shared emotional experience, less energy for engagement, and importantly, this is not intentional.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not neglect in the conventional sense.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's reduced emotional availability.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And for the parent, this often feels like a painful mismatch between intention and reality.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Children don't interpret depression as a condition, they experience it relationally.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: They may feel unsafe unseen, unmet, unsafe, and are uncertain about their impact with the parent.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And often they adapt.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some children become very good, they become undemanding, self-sufficient beyond their years.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Others may increase bids for attention, become dregulated, and try to reach the parent emotionally.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in both sets of responses, beneath that is the same question.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can you feel me?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Are you here?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when that question is not consistently answered, the child begins to organize themselves around that absence, not consciously but emotionally.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: What is often missed in these situations is that both parent and child are struggling.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: The parent isn't withdrawing.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're unable to access what is needed in the moment.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the child is responding to what is available.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So this is not a story of blame.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a story of misattunement shaped by psychological difficulty.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And without understanding, both sides can feel alone with it.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Repair begins not with perfection, but with awareness.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Something shifts because depression thrives in silence and self-blame.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it becomes more workable when it's named, understood, and supported.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And even small moments of connection begin to matter: a look, a pause, a moment of shared attention.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are not insignificant.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: They are regulating, meaningful, and they accumulate.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: What is really important to understand here is that depression is a neurobiological condition.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: When a person is depressed, their brains are not functioning in the way that gives them a wider range and optimum performance.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is because the production of natural antidepressant hormones like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin are at a low level.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the body's capacity to balance the person's emotional states and behaviors is really compromised.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most difficult things is an additional factor, which may be sleep disorder.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: What we know about sleep is that it's vital for repair.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: When a person has sleep disruption, insomnia, early waking, frequent awakening, then these things contribute to the depressed state.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have to think about how do we remedy this?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are averse to antidepressants because they mistakenly believe that if they take antidepressants they won't feel anything, or that it's a sign of failure, or that it's something which will change their personality, or that they will become addicted.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some people believe that taking antidepressants doesn't solve the problem.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's true, they don't solve problems, but what they do is change the internal functioning, which then makes it possible to manage differently and then do the work of understanding how did I get here?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: How has this happened?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there can be so many factors.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: The single most important of these is about the absence of blame.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you see a parent who is looking or saying they're depressed, what they really need is the kind acknowledgement that it's not their fault.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I once heard a person say something like, This person says they're depressed.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: What have they got to be depressed about?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't say this, but I thought, well, comments like that would probably lower the mood.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have to be sympathetic and we have to be constructive.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have to recognize, okay, you you're suffering at the moment.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's try and do something about that.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about this, it's like any other kind of illness.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: We have to be alongside the person who is suffering.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have to be able to name and recognize, signpost, and validate the fact that the person is feeling this way, and we don't ask why, because the person won't know.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they might be able to talk about certain things that have happened, but actually, what's important in that stage is to is the intervention that changes the brain chemistry.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it's for.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a stepping stone, it's not a solution.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to close by saying parents aren't distant because they don't care.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: They can become distant because something within them has become quiet and has become heavy, has become difficult, almost impossible to access.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: But parenting doesn't require constant availability, it requires enough moments of connection, enough moments of being seen, and enough moments of being felt.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when a person, when a parent begins to gently understand their own internal state, they begin to create those moments, not perfectly but meaningfully.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for a child, that is often enough.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to validate and acknowledge that this is an illness or an ill state.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening, and I look forward to coming back with episode four.