The philosophy and doctrine of The Process closely parallels that of Daniel Siegel, MD, and Mary Hartzell, M.Ed., Parenting From the Inside Out. What does assessing your own childhood have to do with how you parent your own children? The answer is “Everything!” Siegel and Hartzell say it very eloquently. Below we provide a set of direct quotes from their wonderful book, with page numbers in brackets.
From PARENTING FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell, copyright (c) 2003 by Daniel J. Siegel & Mary Hartzell. Used by permission of Jeremy P. Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
How you make sense of your childhood experiences has a profound effect on how you parent your own children…Understanding more about yourself in a deeper way can help you build a more effective and enjoyable relationship with your children. [1]
Making sense of life can free parents from patterns of the past that have imprisoned them in the present. [2]
History often repeats itself, and parents are vulnerable to passing on to their children unhealthy patters from the past. Understanding our lives can free us from the otherwise almost predictable situation in which we recreate the damage to our children that was done to us in our own childhoods. [3-4]
Children are particularly vulnerable to becoming the targets of the projection of our nonconscious emotions and unresolved issues. Our defensive adaptations from earlier in life can restrict our ability to be receptive and empathic to our children’s internal experience. Without our own reflective self-understanding process engaged, such defensive parental patterns of response can produce distortions in a child’s experience of relating and reality. [69]
The good news is that healing is possible. Often the hardest step is acknowledging that there is some serious and frightening unresolved business. When we can take the deliberate steps to face the challenge of knowing the truth, we are ready to begin the path toward healing and growth and become more the parent we’d like to be. [139]
The passing of unresolved issues from generation to generation produces and perpetuates unnecessary emotional suffering. If our own issues remain unresolved, there is a strong possibility that the disorganization within our minds can create disorganization in our children’s minds. It is important to recognize that each of us may have leftover issues that create vulnerabilities that don’t become apparent until we raise or work with children. [163]
Being a parent gives us the opportunity to reparent ourselves by making sense of our own early experiences. Our children are not the only ones who will benefit from this making-sense process: we ourselves will come to live a more vital and enriched life because we have integrated our past experiences into a coherent ongoing life story. [248]