Although trauma can be genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, that does not mean there is no escape. The same cellular process that transmits family trauma contains the potential for healing it. Any individual can retroactively process their family’s historical experiences to effect real change in their own lives, and in the lives of the entire family system, so that their children will never suffer the same way. Occasionally, with self-reflection, people can accomplish this on their own. More often, especially with deep programs that are having a large impact on an individual’s life, reprocessing and healing will require the support of a trained coach, therapist, or healer.
Let’s be real for a moment. I write parenting books and counsel parents and kids, but I needed someone to guide me. I couldn’t believe that my unconscious mind was running the show. I was reliving old patterns until my counsellor and teacher pointed them out—and then I couldn’t stop seeing them. My counsellor introduced me to modalities I’d never heard of. Some included talk therapy; others worked to bring my subconscious mind in line with my conscious mind. For example: I am a child psychologist and a fierce mama; I know that I am awesome and my kids are lucky to have me. Yet when they went to their father’s house for a night, I worried they were going to leave me. I tried to talk myself out of this thought but to no avail. My subconscious mind believed this, and my conscious mind doesn’t give the orders. My counsellor directed me to a subconscious “healer” who helped me absorb the statement, “My kids will never leave me” until I felt an internal shift. The worry still comes up, but I am able to tend to it now; the walls are no longer crashing down on me.
I also looked for a village of people who would support my personal development. Thankfully, my counsellor had already created one. Every week, she holds a circle filled with people who are facing the challenges raised by their marriages, their children, other relationships, their finances, and their health. They are challenged by the same things I am, and I heal through witnessing their work. When I am challenged by life and stuck in blame and unable to find the opportunity for growth, I can put up my hand and ask for help. When I am not at the circle, I can call any of these people at any time to make sense of what is going on for me. I have created an entirely new village to help me grow myself up while I grow up my children.
Attachment-Centred Parenting
You now have a deeper understanding of the influences working away on how you parent. You know that you bring baggage into this wonderful and exciting role—some that you’ve carried in on your own, and some that has been passed down to you from generations past. Either way, this new knowledge has put you in a much stronger position to break free of habits that may not be in your child’s best interest, or yours. And there really is no better time to take that leap than right now. Society is in the relatively early days of a sea change in our understanding of human development, a change that is leading to a new understanding of what children need from their parents and how their parents can provide it. Thanks in part to contemporary advances in neuroscience and the science of child development, we now know that secure attachment in the relationship between a loving caregiver and a child is utterly essential to a child’s healthy growth.
Attachment theory has brought about a radical shift in the study of child development since it was initially developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1940s,8 and more deeply studied and scientifically understood through the 1970s and 1980s. Psychologists such as Edward Tronick, Bruce Perry, Megan Gunnar, and Daniel Siegel have amassed a large body of evidence-based science irrefutably linking attachment to healthy child development.9 In fact, attachment may be more essential than food in terms of a young child’s hierarchy of needs.10 What this research tells us is that children need to be seen, heard, and responded to by someone who loves them in order to thrive. Along with the concept of consciousness—understanding the programs that live below the surface in us and run our lives—attachment theory is the philosophy on which this book is based.
The Dominance of Behaviourism
As intuitive as attachment-centred parenting might seem, it is a recent development in our pedagogical practices, coming hot on the heels of a far more pervasive and persuasive approach: behaviourism. The driving force behind behaviourist-influenced parenting was that if you wanted good behaviour in a child, your job as the parent was to manipulate that into being. Indeed, this behavioural manipulation would virtue signal that you were a “good” parent. Today’s parents (or anyone whose parents were born after the 1930s) were likely raised according to the tenets of behaviourism, which was the psychological and cultural norm of their own parents’ day.
A disturbingly far cry from the science-based principles of attachment theory, behaviourism has its roots in Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in classical conditioning, such as the iconic one featuring the ringing bell and the salivating dog. But it was John B. Watson who established and promoted behaviourism as a game-changing psychological theory.11 Watson was an early-twentieth-century American psychologist whose research focused on applying the science of prediction and behavioural control to child development. He went so far as to warn parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument.”12
Watson’s work influenced renowned American psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose theories came to dominate child psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Skinner’s approach was to keep children famished for their parents’ love, affection, and approval. Many twentieth-century parents wouldn’t have thought to question this approach, which amounted to withholding love and affection in order to control a child’s behaviour. Behaviourism has ruled the day for decades in Western society, likely in part due to the outward appearance of quick results. What parents and even scientists failed to realize, however, was that these so-called results were achieved through a devastating sacrificial play. The parent’s relationship with the child was wielded as conditional, and it was in rendering conditional a bond we now understand to be essential that a well-behaved child was produced.
One of the earliest societal steps away from behaviourism and toward attachment-focused parenting came with the publication of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. Published in 1946 amid behaviourist fervour, this wildly popular parenting book espoused a more child-centred approach in which parents were encouraged to let their love for their children flow freely, to embrace flexibility over rigidity, to treat children as human beings, and to trust their own intuition as the only true expert on their child. Mothers flocked to buy his book and devoured its contents with relief, making it the second bestselling book of all time (behind the Bible). But Dr. Spock faced a long campaign of public scrutiny and a backlash that blamed him for encouraging mollycoddling, laziness, and a host of social ills. He may have encouraged a step toward attachment, but Dr. Spock was not successful in overriding the popular notions of behaviourism that were deeply entrenched in Western parenting culture.
Unfortunately, of all the psychological theories that influence the pop culture of child-raising, behaviourism is the most dominant, even to this day. You will continue to run into parents (and non-parents!) who are quick to offer advice that feeds off the finger-wagging admonitions of the behaviourists, such as when they advise you to “train” your children using consequences and other disconnection-based antics. Don’t fall for it! (I’ll explain why not throughout this book, and have written extensively on this in Discipline Without Damage.) The bottom line is that the generation of parents influenced by the allure of behaviourism (and who among us has not secretly wished for well-behaved children at one point or another?) would have been hard-pressed to escape trying out some of its tenets on their children—and that includes you.
Above, you learned that you can understand much of your own programming by identifying what was missing from the parenting that was practised on you. As you seek this understanding, you may need a safe place to vent years of anger and sadness. Many of us have tried to explain away our