Parenting From the Inside Out
Parenting From the Inside Out is a book I just started (on the 10th) and will probably finish by the 12th. We shall see. Daniel J. Siegel wrote The Whole-Brain Child, and there were excerpts of this book. So, I ordered it to see how they relate together. Parenting from the Inside Out is not an easy read. You will need to take your time with this book.
From what I’ve read, it is a book I will probably get a lot out of helpful information. I tend to read books very fast. According to my husband, “no way” I can retain what I read. However, I can, and I do. More times than not, I try to implement what I’ve learned into how I parent.
This book, however, comes at parenting from a different angle. It hits parenting from the angle of our childhood experiences. Good and bad. It helps “explain how the parent-child relationship directly affects brain development, and offer parents a step-by-step approach to forming a deeper understanding of their own life stories to help them raise compassionate and resilient children.”
How We Remember
“When we become parents, we bring with us issues from our own past that influence the way we parent our children. Experiences that are not fully processed may create unresolved and leftover issues that influence how we react to our children. These issues can easily get triggered in the parent-child relationship. When this happens our responses toward our children often take the form of strong emotional reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions in our perceptions, or sensations in our bodies. These intense states of mind impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible and affect our interactions and relationships with our children. At these times, we’re not acting like the parents we want to be and are often left wondering why this role of parenting sometimes seems to ‘bring out the worst in us.’ Issues that are rooted in our past impact our present reality and directly affect the way we experience and interact with our children even when we’re not aware of their origins.”
And that, my friends, is why I am reading this book. It is almost like they read my mind, put my thoughts to paper, and created a book. I am blessed that my parents will be married 60 years this year. That is amazing. As children, growing up (my siblings and I), we are loved immensely. Of course, there were some scary, uncertain, and chaotic times. That is normal. It is how my brain processes it all that becomes the problem.
I will be picking apart this book after I finish with it! So far, so good, and lots of great information on re-parenting myself so I can better parent my kids.
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