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How Avoidant Parenting Shapes A Child’s Inner World · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child, an adolescent psychotherapist, and welcome to this next episode in the series The Avoidant Parent and the Effects Upon Their Children.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: A child really is, and I have to stress this so very often, a child really becomes or can become the recipient and the internal carrier of what is happening between parents and what may be happening in a given parent.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I recently likened family dynamics or family systems to a chess game, not about winners and losers, but about strategy and about each piece on the chessboard having their own assigned moves.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: They can only move according to those moods that are permitted.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that then restricts them to certain actions.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, curiously, the same thing happens inside families, but they they follow the same patterns almost as if they have a series of moves that they can make.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And other people within the family know those moves or know those patterns, know what is likely to happen.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: They anticipate them.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The same as in a game with chess, where you're anticipating what your opponent might do.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so you take positions that counter or in some way move you forward, but in the knowledge of how the other person uh may behave.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is all well and good when you're a seemingly sophisticated adult, but actually when you're a child, you you're I suppose to stay with the analogy, you're something of a pawn.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have that much mobility, you don't have that much influence, and you can be wiped out quite quickly.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the emotions of children can be wiped out quite quickly, they can be restricted to moving one space at a time, and they get stuck.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So with that in mind, I want to talk about uh what the parent uh does and the parent that the child then ends up carrying within them.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a child eventually leaves the room, so to speak, but the relationship remains behind.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The parents' responses, what they notice, what they ignore, what they welcome and what they reject gradually becomes part of the child's understanding of themselves.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, the external relationship becomes an internal one.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the parent doesn't even need to be in the room, or the child doesn't need to be in the room.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what it what we mean by internalization.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the avoidant parent may no longer need to say, don't make a fuss, because the child starts saying it to themselves, if not consciously, then certainly behaviorally.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the parent may no longer need to withdraw when the child expresses distress, but the child learns to withdraw from their own distress before anybody else can see it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: The parent has become psychologically present, so to speak, even in their absence.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we call this set of understandings something which relates to what's called object relations theory.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's long been described as how early relationships become part of the internal world.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the word object in this context means a significant other person, usually somebody upon whom uh uh the the child emotionally depends.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: But but but Melanie Klein used the term object because extremely young children, babies, and those certainly within the first six months are developing a slow understanding that the object is a person.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Objects are functions, they serve purposes.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: But this this this this is not this carries no judgment at all.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The child refines the understanding through experience.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the child doesn't simply remember that person, they internalize experiences of being in a relationship with them, what that feels like, what how that's experienced.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they they carry an impression of the parent.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: They also carry an impression of who they themselves were allowed to be in that parent's presence.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the child may internalize an unavailable parent and a needy self, a critical parent and an inadequate self, an overwhelmed parent and a burdensome self, or a rejecting parent and an unlovable self.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this is once again children using uncommon sense because no one is telling them actually this isn't your fault.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is this is about the other person.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because that separateness hasn't been established, and even if it has, the the emotional attachment is infused with these kinds of experiences and subsequent messages.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And those internal relationships continue to operate long after the original encounter has passed.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: John Bowlby, somebody I talk about a lot, the uh the founder, a founding clinician and anthropologist, uh, where attachment theory is concerned.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he called this process the internal working model.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he he proposed that children develop mental models of themselves, other people, and relationships from repeated attachment experiences.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: But he's describing the quality of the attachment.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the model is described as working because the child uses it.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: It helps them predict what's likely to happen.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm frightened and I want comfort, will somebody respond?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: If I become angry, will the relationship survive?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: If I depend upon another person, will they remain available?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Am I somebody who needs or deserves attention?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: These are not questions that the child asks because the answers are built through repetition, the same patterns, the same chess moves.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: One isolated parental failure does not create an internal working model.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And no parent can respond perfectly.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And as I all too often say, children don't require perfection.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: What matters here is the pattern.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: What usually happens when the child is distressed?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: What usually happens after conflict?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Does the parent return?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Can a misunderstanding be repaired?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Does the child's emotional experience become thinkable or must it disappear?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now from these repeated experiences, the child develops expectations.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And those expectations are unconscious, but they then influence what the child notices, how they interpret other people, and what they do in relationships.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this internal working model is therefore more than a memory, it's a prediction system.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And all of the internal systems, psychological, physiological, neurological, are enforced and reinforced by it.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: So a child who expects others to be available is more likely to seek help when something goes wrong.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But a child who expects withdrawal may conceal the problem, reject help before it can even be off the door, behave as though nobody's needed.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is why two children within the same avoidant family may develop apparently opposite ways of relating.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: The compliant child may develop an internal model which says, other people remain available when I require very little.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I am acceptable when I am calm, useful, and undemanding.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: My anger threatens relationships, my vulnerability should therefore remain private.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the child starts to adapt by reducing themselves.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's told the child to do that.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: They've learned it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they become attentive to other people and then detached from their own needs.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: They might be generous, conscientious, highly responsible, but their goodness is not entirely free.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: It might be organized around fear, uncertainty.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, the internal working model becomes the template for how they manage subsequent relationships.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the angry child develops a very different expectation because their model says other people do not respond unless I force them.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody notices ordinary distress.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: If I stop demanding, I will disappear.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships are struggles in which one person must overpower the other.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: The child enlarges the emotional signal and they become controlling because they do not expect care to arrive voluntarily.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: So in a sense, the child who is compliant says, I must not need you.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The angry child says, you will meet my need, whether you want to or not.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now these positions appear very different, but both may be shaped by the same expectation.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that is, another person cannot be relied upon to remain emotionally present.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: The child's internal working model also shapes their sense of themselves.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: If a parent repeatedly avoids the child's distress or becomes overtly distressed themselves, then the child is unlikely to conclude that the parent has the emotional capacity to manage them.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And children are naturally self-referential.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: They're more likely to believe that something about their distress has caused the withdrawal.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: They might think I'm too much, I'm difficult, I'm weak, I'm unimportant, or I'm only valuable when I'm useful.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how an avoidance, avoidant parents' limitations, can become the child's identity.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Something the parent couldn't tolerate because something because it becomes something the child believes is wrong with them.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the child also internalizes the ways that a parent manages their feelings.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: If a parent deals with emotional discomfort by denying, minimize, or escaping it, the child is likely to do the same.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: They may become unable to recognize sadness until it becomes exhaustion.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: They may experience anxiety as a physical illness, they may convert vulnerability into anger, they may sound disappointment against themselves.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They may act before they can think.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, emotional regulation develops within relationships.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Before a child can reliably calm themselves, they are calmed by somebody else.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Before they can put experience into words, someone has to help them name it.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before they know that feelings can be survived, they need to experience another person surviving those feelings alongside them.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The parent's mind initially helps the child make sense of their own.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is what's being modeled.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: This connects with the idea of parental reflective functioning or mentalization.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: It means the parent's capacity to recognize that behavior has an internal meaning.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The reflective parent can think.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: My child is furious, but underneath that fury, they may be frightened, ashamed, or disappointed.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Quite often in the consulting room, if I see a parent and a child together, I will talk to the child in a way that the parent might not be able to.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: I will ask questions, I will be curious about what the child experiences when they behave in a particular kind of way.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the number of times I've seen parents look completely shocked.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly when a if I if I say to a child, do you sometimes worry about mum or dad?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do you worry that if you were to tell them the sorts of things that you tell me that they it would hurt them and almost always the child will say yes.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And parents are being protected by the child.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Parents quite often feel guilty for that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: But think about it.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mums and dads need to be okay, because if they're not, what the hell is going to happen to the child from the child's perspective?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So don't make it any any more difficult.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it really matters that we understand that quite often children will learn from the unspoken.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to be told particular things.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to have things stated in an explicit kind of way because they respond to what they are learning.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the avoidant parent may find this difficult because thinking about the in child's internal world brings them too close to emotional experiences they're trying not to feel.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: They respond to what the child does without becoming curious about why.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where they get stuck.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the child certainly gets stuck.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the child's then told stop the behavior, but receives no help in understanding what is beneath it.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So over time, the child may also lose curiosity about themselves.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: They know that they are angry, but they've but not what the anger protects.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: They know they must succeed, but not why failure feels catastrophic.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: They know the closeness is uncomfortable, but not necessarily what they fear will happen.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially, children learn within systems like this their place within that system, how to experience, make sense of, and managing what happens within the family.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have the language or sophistication to be able to communicate that.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what the essence of this really comes back to is that helping children learn to be well and helping children to manage themselves and relationships means that we have to come back to the internal working model.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: When a parent says, I can survive your anger, when a parent says, okay, okay, and then comes back to it and looks beneath the behavior with the child.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: When the child is aware that this compliance in the other child, for example, is something which, whilst it may be very convenient and helpful, is actually normally that you'll find that there'll be episodes of anxiety in that type of child to contain it, you know, find expression and other things could be relationships at school, somatic expression through illness, a whole host of things.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Particularly, well, that that's how it might start out, and they might say here adolescence while the fireworks go off.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I think having a curiosity about what you're hearing, about what you're seeing, without coming to a conclusion and stopping the behaviour.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I say, and I say it probably every podcast, yes, the behaviour can be a problem, and yes, it does need attention.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But frankly, without understanding what's driving it, you're making no difference.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I use the example of weeds, and if you just pull the tops off the weeds, what are they going to grow again?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: You've actually got to get into the roots and find out, find, you know, and and and do it that way.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And with children, it's it's absolutely fascinating what children will tell me and what they'll show me, what their expectations of me might be, what they can say, what they can't say, fearing that I might I might judge them, criticize them, correct them in some way.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one child told me recently about how angry he became in certain situations, and I said, What kind of angry is that?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he looked down and I said, Is it is it loud angry?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it breaking stuff angry?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I don't I can I can't help it, I just trash the room, I break my things, and I said, Yeah, I know that kind of angry.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he looked as if to say, Who are you?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's a strange thing to say.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, the thing is, it's okay to be angry, it's absolutely fine.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing wrong with feeling angry.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Learning how to manage it is the bit that a lot of people get stuck with, and you're no different.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we can we can look at that together.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, in a sense, I mean, there are a number of things I was doing, you know, separating the anger, the angry behavior from the child, you know, or distinguishing, making the point that these are feelings.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And feelings are normal, feelings are what make us human.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Unless those feelings are pervasive and they find expression through behavior that's damaging.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then, of course, people don't necessarily join the dots, and it's not just parents.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, oddly enough, this applies to people who work with children, and I encounter that a hell of a lot.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, I I I hear people who work with children, mostly in education, saying things about the child that demonstrate to me that you're looking only at the behavior, and you are trying to fit this child into your expectations of what they, in your view, uh should be like.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good luck with that, because it doesn't necessarily work.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I should say, though, that what will very often happen when I'm holding a clinical meeting with a school is that it doesn't take too long before those same people start to experience the curiosity about what might be going on because I communicate it to them and I bring the child into the room in a way that perhaps nobody's understood before.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because these people work in a different context.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't expect them to automatically know.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: In the next episode, I'm going to look at what happens when these internal working models enter later relationships and why the adult child may find themselves repeating, reversing, or desperately trying to escape the emotional pattern in which they grew up.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.