Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Your Feelings Set The Weather Your Child Grows In

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Your Feelings Set The Weather Your Child Grows In · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist, and this episode is an introduction to a another three-part series, and it has to do with the mental health of parents.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think specifically how parental mental health shapes the child.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: As a practicing clinical psychotherapist, I have an ethical and a personal responsibility to ensure that I pay attention to my own mental health.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I do this in a variety of ways, and one of them is through clinical supervision.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Clinical supervision is the opportunity to examine the work that we do.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: We discuss particular patients and we look at those things which we may be confused about or baffled by or touched by.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't the same as therapy, but what it does is to give us the opportunity to talk about what we're experiencing.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always feel good, but it's necessary because our supervisors are people who understand the complexity and the weight of our work, and they know only too well that as accessible human beings we are not immune.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Never mind what's happening in our own personal lives.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that we have to do during training is undergo therapy ourselves.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the reasons for that are to do with becoming aware of those parts of us that carry the effects of damage from our own experiences.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: In a sense, I remember I remember somebody once saying that to assume that you can sit in a room with a patient without having had that experience yourself is arrogant.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's true because our understanding and our compassion, I think, becomes deeper when we have a sense of what it's like to feel vulnerable.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's not to say we feel the same as the other person feels.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We know what it felt like for us.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that helps us to appreciate what the patient might be experiencing.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: For most modern day training of the less forensic kind, the requirement for therapy is really quite low.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say that, I mean that therapists or trainees are only required to have 40 hours a year.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's far too little.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: When I began my training, it was three times weekly because my training was of the psychoanalytic variety.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I returned to it many years later when I did additional training.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And although it wasn't it wasn't three times weekly anymore, it was for five years.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And during that time, I gained a stronger sense of my own internal workings, as it were.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what I found was that this attention to myself, which was highly necessary in my work, had a lot of other benefits too.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose what I'm saying is that I don't operate in isolation.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I work in the relational field.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that my part in that field has to be well or well enough.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Our work requires of us to work at very deep levels at times, and we come into contact with things that many would find intolerable because they're painful or shocking.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Our capacity to be unshocked and to be able to tolerate becomes greater when our own mental health is paid attention to.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But this is about parents, because parents don't have access to training or extensive psychoanalysis or even necessarily therapy.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say that parenting isn't just a practical task, it's an emotional, psychological, and relational experience.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Children don't only grow in the environment we create around them, they grow inside the emotional atmosphere we carry within us.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a judgment, it's a point of understanding.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And every parent struggles at times.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Some struggles are visible and named, others are hidden, misunderstood or even mistaken for personality, tiredness, stress, or simply the way things are.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yet children often feel these difficulties long before they're spoken.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So across this series, we'll explore the many ways parental mental health can shape parenting, attachment, emotional safety, and the developing inner world of the child.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I really do want to reassure parents and people who are suffering with mental health difficulties.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: This has nothing whatsoever to do with blame or judgment.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: This has to do completely with understanding.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: We will talk openly but compassionately about parental depression, which may appear as emotional flatness, exhaustion, withdrawal, reduced patience, feeling emotionally present, and children experience this not as sadness but as distance.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiety, including chronic worry, fearfulness, overprotection, irritability, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And children can begin to carry the parents' unspoken fears and may feel that the world is unsafe.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is this is wordless.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that children internalize without verbal instruction.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about stress, burnout, and emotional overload, trauma and unresolved past experience, because that will be touched by the child in one way or another.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever we carry inside us, children have this wonderful way of poking.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know they're doing it, but it happens.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about addiction and dependency, alcohol substance, prescription misuse, gambling, whatever it may be.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But these things create unpredictability, emotional absence, and confusion for children.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly where addiction, substance addiction is concerned, the effects of this can be incredibly far reaching.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Less easily recognized are the mental health difficulties of emotional numbing and detachment, for whatever reason, often associated with conditions like PTSD, but certainly not exclusive.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Chronic irritability or low mood, often mistaken for stress or personality, rather than the internal emotional battle that's going on.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: High functioning anxiety or depression when parents continue to function outwardly while carrying significant internal distress which causes collapse, perfectionism and control, sometimes rooted in anxiety, fear, or unresolved insecurity, shame and self-criticism, which can quietly shape parenting expectations and emotional tone in a family home, and relational withdrawal when connection feels effortful, overwhelming, or emotionally unsafe.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about perinatal and postnatal mental health, where depression, anxiety, trauma, or disconnection can affect the early attachment in the neonatal phase, but it can also influence the quality of attachment through the entire attachment formation period.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: But this series isn't just about difficulties, it's about awareness, and it's about helping people become aware of what they're experiencing, and to look at the best ways to pay attention.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we will gently explore how your emotional state shapes your child's emotional experience, how children sense and internalize things, how safety, attachment, and regulation develop inside the relationship, and how cycles of struggling can be understood and softened.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes very small shifts in awareness can create powerful changes.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Above all, I want to reassure you, there is no room for blame and judgment here because behind every struggling parent isn't a failure, but a human being carrying more than they were ever meant to carry along.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to offering you the next episode, and we will begin with parental depression and walk through that.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for watching.