Kids as Catalysts for Healing

An Excerpt from Parenting with Presence by Susan Stiffelman

At times I am astonished by how quickly a client’s long-repressed, unresolved feelings come to the surface when she is ready to face them. Cecilia was the mother of a five-year-old daughter and an eighteen-month-old son. Describing herself as gentle-natured, she scheduled a phone session with me because she became enraged when her daughter expressed anger. “As a child, I wasn’t allowed to get angry. I want my daughter to know that she can express her upset, but when she does, I become furious.”

I asked if a part of her felt that her daughter was breaking a rule — kids shouldn’t be angry — when she got mad. She admitted that she did feel that way. When I suggested that it might also bring up feelings about the fact that while she had to bury her upsets as a child, her daughter was being permitted to express them, she agreed. It wasn’t easy to reconcile the double standard she was facing — wanting it to be okay for her daughter to embrace unpleasant emotions that she herself had been required to suppress.

I ...

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