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Feelings Without A Home · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode seven in the series about the effects upon children of having an avoidant parent.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've named this episode Feelings Without a Home, and I'm doing this because I'm trying to convey what it's like for children where their emotional states are concerned, and how they learn to how how they learn to manage them, learn what they mean, and how, in the context of having a parent who is avoidant and who can't easily cope with strong feelings, how that how that comes about.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to go back to the beginning a bit here.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've covered this in other podcasts, but I feel like it's it's relevant here.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing I want to say is that children are not born knowing what to do with strong feelings.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: They don't arrive with an established sort of capacity to recognize fear or tolerate frustration, manage anger, or recover from disappointment.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that are learned, and they're learned within relationships.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before a child can do this, before they can regulate themselves, they're regulated by somebody else.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the frightened infant is held, the distressed toddler is soothed, and the overwhelmed child is helped to put the experience into words as well as feelings.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And gradually the child learns these feelings have names, they have meaning, they can be shared, and they will pass.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when the parent repeatedly moves away from or becomes overwhelmed from the child's emotions?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when distress is minimized, anger is rejected, sadness is ignored, and dependency makes the parent uncomfortable.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: The feeling doesn't disappear, it simply loses its relational home.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, I think, one of the most significant consequences of parental avoidance.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: The child is left not only with dealing with the difficult feelings, but without a reliable way of understanding or managing them.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Beyond described the importance of emotional containment.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, in simple terms, the child communicates an experience they can't process.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: The parent receives it, thinks about it, and returns it in a form that's more manageable.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the child is terrified.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: The parent doesn't become terrified with them, nor do they dismiss the fear.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The parent communicates, I know, I can see, you're frightened, and it's all right.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: We can manage this.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: The feeling has been contained.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Containment doesn't mean making the emotion disappear, it means helping the child experience it without becoming overwhelmed, and indeed without the parent becoming overwhelmed.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Winnicott, another very famous psychoanalyst, approached something similar through the idea of what he called the holding environment.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this means that the child's development depends upon an environment that's sufficiently reliable and consistent to support experiences that the child can't manage alone.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, attachment theory describes this process as co-regulation.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Mentalization, a process I've talked about before, refers to the parent's capacity to recognize that the child's experience and the child's behavior is connected to an internal state.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so often you'll have heard me say behavior is the expression, but there is something underneath it that we have to understand.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, different theories use different language, but they essentially converge upon an important point, and that is the child develops emotional self-management through being emotionally managed with, not simply managed.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the avoidant parent finds this difficult because the child's fear activates the parent's fear.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The child's sadness may evoke helplessness.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: The child's anger feels like accusation or rejection.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than containing the emotional state, the parent actually attempts to end their own discomfort.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They say, Calm down, stop crying, there's nothing wrong, you're making this worse, or go to your room until you can behave properly.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sometimes temporary separation is necessary for safety, but when emotional exclusion becomes the usual response, the child learns that connection is available only after the feeling has disappeared.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the child is effectively sent away metaphorically or literally to regulate an emotion that they've not yet been helped to understand.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And two broad adaptations may follow.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the first is over control.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the child learns to suppress what they feel.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: They become quiet, careful, emotionally restrained.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: They may speak about painful experiences without appearing affected by them, saying things like, it didn't bother me, I'm used to it, I don't care.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Adults may regard this as resilience, but it's not.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Regulation and suppression aren't the same thing.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Regulation allows a feeling to be experienced, understood, and managed.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas suppression requires the feeling to be pushed out of awareness or prevented from being expressed.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a kind of pushing it down.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: What's the point allowing yourself to experience it when there's nobody around to help you hold it, literally or otherwise?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So a regulated child knows that they're frightened and can seek appropriate reassurance.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: But a suppressing child may insist that they're not frightened while their whole body remains highly aroused.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so they may then emerge through physical symptoms, headaches, stomach aches, you know, the usual range of things.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: The body expresses what the relationship has not allowed the child to say.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some children, on the other hand, become perfectionist or perfectionistic.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Achievement gives them a sense of control over an emotional world that feels unmanageable.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: They prepare excessively, fear mistakes, become highly distressed by ordinary failures.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the apparent issue may be a school result, but beneath it lies something deeper.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: If I remain competent, nothing unpredictable will happen.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: If I do everything correctly, I will not need help.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: If I succeed, I will remain acceptable.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So emotional overcontrol can also produce, may almost produce numbness.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: The child doesn't feel connected to sadness, fear, or need.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: But emotional systems can't be divided neatly.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when painful feelings are shut down, pleasure, tenderness, and spontaneity may also become less accessible.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: The person is protected from emotional overwhelm, but also distanced from emotional vitality.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the second adaptation is under control.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: The child doesn't suppress emotion, they become flooded by it.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: So a minor disappointment produces an apparently enormous, disproportionate reaction.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: It may be that a boundary feels intolerable, a moment of separation becomes abandonment.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: The child may shout, strike out, destroy property, or make threats.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Their emotional state moves rapidly from manageable to overwhelming.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: The adult might say, why can't this child control themselves?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, self-control isn't created simply by demanding it, it develops from repeated experiences of co-regulation, emotional recognition, and consistent boundaries.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: The overwhelmed child may never have learned how to identify their early stages of distress and the signs.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: They notice the anger only once they're already enraged.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: They recognize anxiety only when they're in panic.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: They become aware of disappointment only after it's turned into attack.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reflective space between the feeling and the action.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is really important because it reminds us of the task of mentalization, and that collapses when emotional arousal becomes too intense.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: The child can no longer think.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: They can't think, for example, I'm angry because I feel excluded.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: They only know you did this to me.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is important because in mentalization we think about and talk about the capacity to think about the impulse before the behavior takes place.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: If the thinking doesn't happen, the impulse turns into action without awareness of the consequence.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And all people will see is the behavior.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the feeling is often experienced as an external event caused entirely by somebody else.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So action then replaces thought.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I see this not just with children, I see it with adults.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the capacity to think, he made me feel this way, he did this, he did that, she did this, and so on.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, the part that's missing is the joining of the internal dots, you know, actually putting it together.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the reaction that the person may have completely avoids the possibility to make sense of what's happened.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: You see this in people who are very reactive, very chaotic, and and who are inaccessible because when they're in that state, reasoning is just not possible.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the compliant child and the explosive child may seem to occupy opposite ends of the emotional life.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one might feel too little, the other feels too much.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: But both may have difficulty recognizing, tolerating, and communicating emotional states.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: One manages distress by shutting it down, the other manages it by expelling it into the environment.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: The compliant child keeps the feelings inside so that the relationship survives.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: The explosive child puts the feelings into everybody else so they don't have to carry them alone.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: In psychoanalytic terms, the second process may involve something we call projection or projective identification.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the child can't manage an internal state, so the emotional experience is communicated through behavior until somebody else begins to feel it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't conscious, it's not a kind of intentional thing.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a behavioral reaction, incredibly common, and it happens in all relationships at some point.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: The child feels helpless, and very soon the parent feels helpless.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The child feels out of control and the whole household becomes out of control.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The child feels persecuted, and everyone begins treating them as dangerous.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: The internal experience has entered the relationship.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this formulation that I'm putting to you doesn't excuse aggression.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us to understand why simply punishing the behavior may not only fail to change it but reinforce it.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if the child's action is carrying an unprocessed emotional communication, the behavior requires both a boundary and an attempt at understanding.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: The adult must be able to say, I will not allow you to hurt somebody.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I also want to understand what's happened before you became this angry.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: The avoidant parent may provide neither, or if they do, it won't be consistent.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: They may withdraw from the aggression until it becomes intolerable, then respond with sudden rejection or excessive punishment.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Alternatively, they may give in to end the confrontation.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: The child experiences boundaries as inconsistent, unpredictable.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's no limit, sometimes there's an explosion, sometimes the parent disappears.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the child can't use the parent's response to develop stable internal control because the external control is itself unstable.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So avoidance also interferes with emotional repair.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: So after a difficult incident, the family may behave as though nothing has happened because it's all calm again.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody returns to the child and says, What happened?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: You were really angry.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, your brother was hurt.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: We have to understand what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the absence of repair means that the child can't integrate the experience.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's an explosion followed by silence, followed by another explosion, and shame accumulates.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: The child will know that something bad happened but received no help in separating the behavior from its cause.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of thinking I did something harmful, they begin to believe I am harmful.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: The compliant child develops a parallel shame.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: They may believe my feelings create trouble.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: My anger would make me like my sibling.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I've no right to need when the family's already struggling.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: One child becomes ashamed of having expressed too much, the other becomes ashamed of feeling anything at all.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And these patterns will continue into adult life.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: The overcontrolled adult may appear composed during a crisis but collapse later in private.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: They may find tears humiliating and need uh and unbearable.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: They may tolerate excessive stress because they can't recognize when they've reached their limit.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: They may care for everybody else while becoming resentful that nobody cares for them.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But others may not know that care is needed because the person has become extremely skilled at concealing it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: They just complain when they don't get it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: The undercontrolled adult may continue to experience feelings as emergencies.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: They demand or might demand immediate reassurances.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: The struggle to tolerate another person's boundary as rejection and respond with anger, this is what they they may do.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: They may interpret that a person says no, they have a boundary, and it's turned into rejection with anger, accusation, or withdrawal.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And both adults are attempting to manage emotional states without sufficient internal containment.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: One disappears from the feeling, the other disappears into it.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And emotional health lies somewhere between these two positions.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: It involves being able to notice a feeling without being governed by it.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these capacities develop in childhood, but in a reliable relationship, you see that it can it it can actually repair some of the some of the damages that were caused in earlier childhood.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is the case that these things can they can change, but the person has to learn how.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: This was written to help people who are wanting to recover from damaging relationships.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And some people have who've read the book have said that actually what they can see is that, which is nice for me, they can see that this isn't just about recent relationships or relationships in the present.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: It has to do with the origins as well.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: So those that may have occurred in childhood that have followed through into the present day, and learning how to understand the events and the experiences that caused them, how to recognize them and how to come into contact with and recognize the feelings that were experienced or suppressed at the time.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: A kind of making sense, and that's that that's that that's the purpose of the book, before going on to a kind of stage of recovery, which is more like a sort of redesign and doing things differently.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I could go on about the detail of the book, but it would be easier for you to buy it.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oops, another plug.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's on Amazon.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I I think the important thing here is we can't.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm often amazed at how open they can be.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: While I am being not avoidant at all, I am being completely receptive, curious, consistent, able to manage what they tell me, what they show me, help them to make sense.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm working in a regulating kind of way.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And very often, you know, a child might arrive in therapy and they'll be absolutely explosive.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or they may have periods in the session when they're explosive, and I remain the same.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, the explosiveness reduces dramatically, and it's really significant.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of proves the point that uh everything that I've described about children's emotional states and their capacity to be regulated occurs in relationship.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, trying to teach a parent those same things is possible, but it can be very difficult.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: It takes time.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'm going to do in the next in the next episode is to return to the other parent, the parent who may be carrying the emotional, practical, and protective responsibilities of the family, and really consider what prolonged exposure to that avoidance system does to them.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I take very seriously how the other person is affected.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And even in cases where there are no children and it's a relationship, understanding what happens to the person who is in a relationship with a person who is avoidant in this way, I think is very important.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And for those who have had such experiences, this next episode may be very helpful.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about psychological health.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about villainizing people.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is all about people gaining understanding and and being healthy.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if they have children, what could be better?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because they will pass that on.