Parenting From the Inside Out
Implicit mental models that cast shadows on our own decisions
and the stories we tell about our lives can be made explicit
through focused self-reflection… We are active shapers of our
own construction of reality.(Daniel Siegel and
Mary Hartzell, Parenting from the
Inside Out)
If you're reading this article, you probably want to
be a good parent to your young children or have issues with your adult
children you'd like to resolve. While developing a workshop based
on Siegel and Hartzell’s book,
I searched the Internet to learn more about attachment
theory, and found this table:
A child’s security of attachment is strongly
connected to parents’ understanding of their own early-life experience.
Whether you had good parenting, “good enough” parenting, or even
traumatic parenting, making sense of your childhood can lead to healthy
relationships with your children. The
universal cure-all in any personal growth approach is to develop neutral
self-awareness, in this case mindfulness of your own childhood dynamics
and consequent worldview.
Siegel and Hartzell introduce the concept of
“mind-sight””—the ability to perceive the minds of others as well as
our own. For you, this means mindfulness about your own personality
and mind-sight about your children’s. Research further indicates that
intention, when followed by changes in behavior, can change how your
brain functions. I’m particularly heartened to know this can be done
”backwards”—no matter how old you or your children are, you can re-live
your own childhood and your children’s, affecting brain
chemistry in a way that heals long-held wounds.
All personality styles have strengths and challenges
as parents, whether you had a secure or insecure attachment when growing
up. An even distribution of attachment types across personality styles
is likely, though there's no research to confirm this, and each might react differently.
Nonetheless, some potential interaction patterns
are easy to guess.
Barbara Whiteside, in “Seeing Your Child” (September
2009 Enneagram Monthly), gives the example of a
Three mother “who had a
very easy time with her Seven daughter because they both had assertive
energy and enjoyed lots of activity (but) struggled in understanding her
Four daughter...”
Many, if not most, of you with grown children
will believe you could have done a better job as young parents.
However, thinking “If only I’d known then what I know now” will be
wishful thinking unless what you “know” now is based on deep
self-reflection about your own Enneagram style along with mind-sight
about your child’s, especially if different. In my workshop on Parenting with the Enneagram,
participants were inspired to deep inquiry with these two questions from
Parenting from the
Inside Out:
(1) Think of
an experience from your childhood when your reality was denied. How did
you feel?
(2) Think of a time when you and your
child had a different reaction to the same experience. Now
try to see the events from your child’s point of view.
I shared the following personal story
with workshop participants.
The baby in the photo, taken more than forty years ago,
is my daughter. With her personality barely forming, I naively assumed
she would be like me. This was long before I learned about the
Enneagram, and I had little capability as a young
Nine mother to be
present to an Eight daughter. A few years ago I wrote the poem “Swamp
Magic” which likens my daughter as a baby to a tadpole, sleeping
face-down with her knees bent outward (“still swimming in the amnion”),
ending with these lines:
...What could we talk about?
I was brought up to behave,
bewildered by a frog princess
who could be heard for miles.
A ring-tongued, Mohawked
Tarot reader, a hefty bike babe,
she teaches me computer skills,
and I accommodate the real.
As do all families, we had our good times and bad times
over the years, but—as a typical Nine—I tended to forget the bad times
and reacted defensively when my daughter’s recollections were different
from mine. Then she decided I would never see the world
through her eyes, and we became politely estranged. I labeled this as
“her” problem until I finally dropped my defenses and found a mother and
daughter team,
Alexandra Vance and Mariana Bernoski, who offer a
workshop in “Mother-Daughter Conversations.” Only then did I develop
retrospective mind-sight about my daughter.
Among the insights offered by
Alexandra and Mariana was a summary of healthy, average, and unhealthy
descriptions of a Nine mother. I could see I had shown little of the
healthy Nine mother (“I encourage differences from me in her” … “we
co-create a playful environment”), was mostly “average” (“I see myself
as nobody special but see my child as idealized... not the actual
person”), and to some degree “unhealthy” (“She needs my full presence
and she doesn’t have it”). Because of my lack of self-awareness,
remoteness, and blindness to the significant differences between us, I
was more than a bit backwards; I truly did not know who my daughter was.
When we first spoke with Alexandra and Mariana, I knew
no words would convince my daughter I could be authentically present to her
worldview, and I would only gain her trust by hearing and acknowledging
what her childhood was like for her as an Eight, not what I as a Nine wanted it to
be. During our second session she was beginning to accept that
maybe I had changed. Then, in a long phone conversation outside the
workshop she said, in true Eight fashion, “It’s clear you’ve worked your
ass off, Mom!” Affirming that both of us had matured significantly, we
joked about the Work Your Ass Off School of Coaching, a playfulness long
missing from our relationship. I hope my story, and Parenting from
the Inside Out, will help you get your you-know-what in gear.
Making sense of life can free parents from
patterns of the past that have imprisoned them in the present… By
deepening our ability to understand our own emotional experience, we
are better able to relate empathically with our children and promote
their self-understanding and healthy development. (Siegel &
Hartzell, Parenting From the Inside Out)
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