You’re going to have a really hard time providing that co-regulation if your own emotional regulation skills are shaky.
Sometimes the things that you find difficult to do for your child are even harder to do for yourself. In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor talks about ways to help your child develop emotional regulation by working on your own—using self-compassion.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.
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As a parent who prioritizes not only your parent-child relationship, but also your child’s emotional well-being within that relationship, your ability to hold space for your child’s biggest feelings—to show acceptance even when they’re at their worst—is simultaneously one of the most important things you can do as a parent and the hardest.
Your ability to provide that kind of calm, nonjudgemental, and compassionate external emotional regulation is a crucial part of how your child develops internal emotional regulation. But here’s the thing—you’re going to have a really hard time providing that co-regulation if your own emotional regulation skills are shaky.
Welcome back to Project Parenthood! I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor—clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll help you repair and deepen your parent-child connection, increase self-compassion and cooperation from your kids, and cultivate joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
One of the most common questions I’m asked by parents is: “How do I control my own emotions, so I’m not flying off the handle at my kids so much?”
There’s no one answer. Making sure you’re getting enough sleep, exercise, healthy foods, nourishing interpersonal connection, and taking part in activities that bring you joy are some immediate ways to keep your internal batteries charged and give you more capacity for the rigors of parenting. But today, I’m talking about how self-compassion and the ways that being patient, accepting, and caring toward yourself can help you do the same for your child.
On a previous Project Parenthood episode called “How to Understand and Fulfill Your Child’s Attachment Needs”, I broke down the concepts used in the Circle of Security parenting intervention that uses a circle as a kind of map, giving parents a visual way of understanding the serve-and-return nature of secure attachment.
The top of the circle represents your child’s needs for autonomy, exploration, and discovery and the bottom represents your child’s needs for comfort, closeness, and connection. A pair of outstretched hands on the left part of the circle represents you, the parent, who keeps the circle of attachment “secure” by being sensitively attuned enough to guess what your child needs and also by being supportive and responsive enough to actually meet those needs as they move away from you to explore and toward you for connection and comfort. The Circle of Security creators refer to this attuned responsiveness as “Being-With.”
Being-With is the capacity to recognize and honor your child's feelings by staying with those authentic feelings rather than denying their importance. This is about being present with a child's emotions—without trying to fix or change those emotions—and providing a safe and supportive space for your child to feel their feelings without judgment.
Whether your child is feeling interest, curiosity, vulnerability, rage, grief, or something else—your child needs you to accurately identify their feelings with a willingness to accept those emotions as valid and important. Your child needs you to stay present with—and tolerate—their emotions, even when they’re difficult for you to witness and for them to experience.
It can be difficult to stay present with your child’s feelings, especially when they sometimes set off swirls of unpleasant feelings within yourself, which can lead you to try to shut your child’s feelings down by behaving in dismissive, critical, harsh, or placating ways as a coping mechanism. So it’s also important for you to develop the skill of Being-With you—which, for most parents in my practice, is a huge challenge.
Maybe you too are the kind of parent who finds it hard to validate and make room for your own feelings and you tend instead toward denying their importance and/or criticizing yourself for having them in the first place. Whether it’s your child’s feelings or your own, using the shame and blame-laced “Put your feelings away!” strategy in an effort to eradicate emotions and/or emotional expression actually exacerbates chronic emotional dysregulation.
Parents in my practice sometimes talk about how they can hold space for their children for a finite amount of time, after which comes a desire for their child to quickly “pull it together.” Similarly, when these parents notice their own painful and familiar feelings arise, they have a similar internal reaction. With self-criticism, they try to stop feeling something they’re telling themselves they “should be over by now.”
Tara Brach, prolific author, psychologist, and Buddhist meditation teacher, explains that feelings are made up of a thought and an accompanying felt sense in the body. Upsetting feelings recur again and again when they are entirely unconscious or only when you’re only partially aware of them. You might be aware that you’re angry, but you don’t realize the thought “My child is a terrible kid and I’m a terrible parent” is going through your mind. Or you’re aware you’re having those upsetting thoughts, but you aren’t aware of how it’s manifesting in your body sensations. In both cases, you’re only partially conscious of or in touch with your feelings.
Whatever is not in your conscious awareness constrains you. The feelings stay in a big ball of stuckness inside you—acting on you outside of your awareness. Sometimes it even expresses itself as all of the parenting habits you’ve been hoping to break. But you can loosen that stuckness by Being With both your thought patterns and the felt sense of them—with a kind and accepting presence.
Just like you can soothe distress in your child with your compassionate presence, you can soothe yourself in a similar way—with self-compassion. Dr. Kristen Neff talks about three components of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness.
I recently did a mindfulness deep dive on an episode called How to reduce parental stress with mindfulness—you can find the link in the show notes of this episode. I explain that mindfulness is about noticing your present experience with a curious and gentle acceptance. No judgment, no amplifying it, no reducing or eliminating it. Just acknowledging the existence of whatever body sensations, emotions, thoughts, images, beliefs, or needs are in your awareness.
Common humanity means remembering that you are a fallible human who sometimes suffers—just like all of the other humans. It’s what everyone has in common and links us together.
Self-kindness means talking to yourself with tenderness, patience, understanding, and comfort rather than with shame or blame.
Tara Brach suggests that you think of feelings as wild creatures hiding in the woods of the psyche and they’ll only come out into the open if they feel safe enough. Self-compassion creates a welcoming inner environment of safety—the same kind of safety you provide to your child when you silently look at them with care as they’re struggling and show them that you’re in it with them. That look that says, “I’ve got you. I’m here with you.”
Slow down a bit when you notice you’re experiencing strong feelings or emotional overwhelm. Label what’s happening in you in a neutral way. “There’s anger here,” you might say to yourself gently. Labeling your emotions turns down your fight/flight/freeze response and activates the part of your brain that can make logical and calm decisions.
Then intentionally allow this feeling to be present—with your only task being to notice what’s happening in your throat, chest, belly, and your limbs in this moment right here right now. How does this anger show up in your body?
Next, just see if you can let the feelings and sensations exist without pushing them away. See if you can send some kindness to these emotions. Perhaps put a hand on your heart or your cheek or your shoulder and imagine you’re speaking right to your shame, fear, or anger. You can say to them: “You belong. You’re a wave in my ocean.”
When you don’t resist your challenging thoughts and body sensations, but instead make a welcoming space for them, you’re releasing the emotions to flow through you, wash over you, crash on your inner “beach,” and then subside. It’s allowing yourself to feel your feelings.
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In order to develop healthy emotional regulation, your child needs you to create a safe and supportive space for them to feel their feelings. When your child is in distress, Being With is what provides comfort, helps to make confusing emotions make some sense to them, and it’s what helps them begin to see themselves through your eyes—as a person who is capable and worthy of seeking and receiving comfort.
Being-With yourself is the practice of self-compassion. Recognizing and labeling your thoughts, body sensations, and emotions; allowing them to stay in your awareness and notice how the feelings live in and are expressed in your body and mind, understanding all of it as part of the human experience, and finally directing kindness and acceptance toward all that you’re noticing happening in you. It’s letting yourself take in the comfort you have to give yourself.
As a parent, a huge part of regulating your emotions—which allows you to co-regulate your child’s emotions—is developing the capacity to actually experience your feelings in an embodied way, while also meeting them with kindness. Just like you strive to do with your child.
That’s all for today’s episode of Project Parenthood—thanks for listening, and I hope you found this helpful! Be sure to join me live on Instagram @bkparents on Monday, August 14 at 1 pm for a Brooklyn Parent Therapy “Ask Me Anything!” It’s exciting to answer your questions in real-time!
If you have a question for me about parent-child relationships, respectful parenting tips and/or parental mental health that you’d like me to cover in a future episode, shoot me an email at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com, leave a message at 646-926-3243 or leave a message on Instagram @bkparents. And you can learn about my private practice working with parents living in New York State at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com.
Catch you next week!
The balance of Being-With. (2020, August 18). Circle of Security International. https://www.circleofsecurityinternational.com/2016/04/15/the-balance-of-being-with/
Releasing the Habits that Imprison your spirit – Part 1. (2023). Tara Brach. https://www.tarabrach.com/releasing-habits-that-imprison-spirit-pt-1/?cn-reloaded=1
How to Feel Your Feelings an Interview with Tara Brach (n.d.). 1440 Multiversity blog.
https://www.1440.org/blog/how-to-feel-your-feelings-an-interview-with-tara-brach