Parents Have Feelings, Too

Untangling the messy emotions of parenthood with Julia Fraga and Hilary Jacobs Hendel

One of the hardest things about parenting, for me, is handling my own emotions. When my kids aren’t listening, when they are challenging my patience, or when they are really upset themselves, I often get riled up — and then it’s hard for me to make calm and rational choices.

The thing is, parenting advice so often ignores parent emotions. The focus is always on our kids and their feelings. We’re told what we should do to help them, but we’re never told how we’re supposed to do it — how we should regulate our own feelings in order to do what’s appropriate and helpful for our family.

That’s why I’m so excited for today’s Q&A with psychologist Juli Fraga and psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel. They are co-authors of the new and fantastic book Parents Have Feelings Too: A Guide to Navigating Your Emotions So You And Your Family Can Thrive, which speaks directly to these challenges. In our Q&A, we talked about all sorts of things: why emotions are “survival signals"; why anxiety, guilt and shame often mask real core feelings; how our childhood and gender norms shape our reactions to our kids; and what we can do to help ourselves self-regulate in the moment.

Our interview covers a lot of ground, but I strongly recommend you buy the book, too!

Your book title, Parents Have Feelings Too, is so simple but it really spoke to me. Why is it that so many parenting approaches focus on kids’ emotions rather than parents’ feelings? The hardest thing about parenting is managing my own feelings — but this is something that is rarely talked about in the parenting advice world!

Juli and Hilary: A prevalent message in our culture is that once you become a parent, you should focus on your child. Pediatricians, preschool teachers, and child experts advise parents to help their child manage their “big feelings,” forgetting that parents need these tools as well. If we do not know how to handle our own potent emotions or regulate our tempers and anxiety when stress strikes or when our children press our buttons, we cannot model these skills for our kids as effectively.

In our feeling-phobic society, however, many of us never learned how to name, validate, and work with our own emotions in ways that help us feel calmer and stay connected with those we care about. Parenting books rarely teach us about the connection between our own emotions and our child’s ability to regulate their feelings. Decades of psychological research, especially on infant-parent attachment and emotional attunement, explain these connections, but this information isn’t often included in mainstream parenting books.

You describe emotions as survival signals. Can you unpack this idea a bit, and also explain why it’s helpful for us to try to feel emotions in our bodies, rather than just trying to decipher them inside our heads? How can we do this?

Hilary: Contrary to what our emotions-phobic society tells us, emotions aren’t in the head; they’re in the body. It’s biology. We pick up on what’s happening in the world and with those around us through our five senses. Life happens, our nervous system fires, emotion ignites in the mid-brain, the vagus nerve fires in a pattern consistent with the emotions triggered, and all of a sudden, we’re gripped with a big feeling- for better and for worse.

Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and A.D. (Bud) Craig have described core emotions (sometimes referred to more broadly as core affects) as biologically wired survival responses. These “programs” ignite from the middle of the brain, where there is no conscious control to prevent them.

Once triggered, core emotions affect every system in the body, preparing the body for an “adaptive action” such as fleeing or fighting, which is necessary for survival. For example, if our toddler darts out into the street, fear prompts us to run after them; we don’t give it a second thought.

Core emotions can’t be changed with reason or logic. All we can control is our response. To regulate them, we want to notice how they manifest in the body. Because we cannot think our way through emotions — they have to be experienced — here’s a brief exercise we invite parents to do: it’s called Dropping Into the Body.

You talk about different categories of emotional responses we often have when we are struggling: defense responses, inhibitory emotions and core emotions. Can you tell us more about what these are, why they exist, and what their benefits and drawbacks are? Why, ultimately, is it most helpful to access and understand our core emotions?

Hilary: Different categories of emotions address different human needs. While core emotions help us respond to the world in ways that promote survival, inhibitory emotions help us stay connected to people we need, society, and they also prevent us from hurting others.

Inhibitory emotions, such as guilt, shame, and anxiety, “block” or “inhibit” core emotions. Sometimes this happens because our core emotions — sadness or anger —were not honored, empathized with, or validated by our parents or caregivers when we were young. For example, if my parents told me that expressing anger was “unkind” or made me a hot head, or perhaps they poked fun at my fiery temper and called me a “drama queen,” I may feel ashamed, as if anger makes me “bad” or “wrong” in some way. Unknowingly, as a child, I learned to inhibit this core emotion. As a parent, I may feel that expressing anger towards my children makes me a bad parent. Alternatively, when my kids show fury, I may treat them the way my parents treated me. None of this is done to hurt my child; it’s the survival strategy I learned because I had to block my core emotion of anger.

If we aren’t able to tolerate the experience of our core and inhibitory emotions and work with them, we will use protective defenses to avoid them. Sometimes we turn our emotions toward ourselves and develop symptoms like perfectionism, depression, and chronic self-criticism. We see this in parenting a lot, parents who strive for perfectionism or beat themselves up over every human mistake, as if they’ve scarred their children for life.

Alternatively, we may “act out” with defenses, such as losing our cool with our kids or criticizing their aspirations when they differ from ours.

How do our own childhoods shape the kinds of emotional responses we often initially have in different contexts with our kids?

Juli: In a nutshell, how our parents respond to us from day one sets the stage for how we respond (emotionally) to our kids. If my parents convey that my needs for care and attention are burdensome and this happens repeatedly, I learn to prize independence; in fact, I may even equate it with love because it maintains my parents’ approval.

As a parent, I may want the same from my child because of how I was raised (and that’s not wrong), but there’s more to the story. Without someone to respond to my needs, my nervous system can’t regulate. I learn to pair needs with “neediness,” and this feels dangerous. And without realizing it, I pass along the same message to my child. This is how intergenerational wounds can be passed down through generations.

Another example: if anger was expressed in our own childhoods in hurtful actions, such as yelling, door slamming, and in worst-case scenarios, physical violence or neglect, and we have not worked through this wound, we may become anxious or feel ashamed of our own parenting when our unwieldy toddler throws a tantrum in public or bites another child at school. I have seen so many moms over the years who assume their babies dislike them whenever the baby turns away or doesn’t want to be picked up. This is trauma playing on repeat in the present, and we may think it’s normal because that’s all we saw.

This is why it’s so important to recognize our emotions, even when they’re painful. Emotions are data, and when we realize (as parents) that it hurts to be treated a certain way, we’re in a better position to think twice before doing the same thing to our kids

Do mothers and fathers tend to struggle with different emotional defenses or inhibitory emotions? How do cultural expectations — say, pressure for moms to be self-sacrificing — shape our responses?

Hilary: The emotions our parents sanctioned are the ones we feel safe expressing. Many fathers grew up with parents who criticized soft emotions, such as sadness and fear. These men may then struggle to feel sadness and fear, even when sad and fearful things are happening. These core emotions are still there, in the body, exerting an upwards force, but they are blocked by anxiety, guilt, shame, and protective defenses like depression and aggression, which push them down. The upward push of core emotions and the downward push of inhibitory emotions and defenses create stress in the mind and body, leading to unwellness and dis-ease, such as loneliness, or staying in defenses to cope, such as blame or self-criticism, or numbing out. We can reverse this process and move from defenses and inhibitory emotions to authentic states by re-learning how to be with all our core emotions.

Cultural expectations for women to be self-sacrificing are very problematic. They create a fundamental conflict between our core needs for boundaries, rest, and respect, on the one hand. Conversely, when we go against what society has taught us is the “right way to be a good girl,” we experience shame and guilt. The upward push of “Hey! This doesn’t feel good to always be self-sacrificing” and “If I stop being self-sacrificing, I suffer guilt and shame” creates a sense of stuckness. Defenses like depression, disconnection, contempt, and resentment show up. This hurts relationships dearly.

You introduce the concept of a “Change Triangle” to help parents access core emotions. How does this work? How a parent might use the Change Triangle in a heated moment — say, when a child is melting down or pushing their buttons — and how can it help?

Hilary: The Change Triangle is a map that illustrates how emotions function in the mind and body. The goal is to identify the ways we block our core emotions (with inhibitory emotions and defenses) so we can ultimately validate them.

When core emotions are blocked, the first thing we want to do is calm and ground ourselves in the body to calm the nervous system. Deep belly breaths are one example, or taking a walk. Ultimately, the goal is to identify the core emotions that underlie the inhibitory emotions or defenses that block them.

For example, let’s say I feel a wave of fury at my teenager who hasn’t answered my question about their weekend plans. I notice tension in my jaw and an impulse to confront them. I know this is “defensive anger” because my teen has not really violated me by not communicating directly.

Once I realize this and calm my body, I notice that underlying my defensive anger is deep sadness. I feel sad about the loss of time with my child. Realizing that they will soon leave for college and now have a life of their own is a loss I must mourn. Once I connect the dots, I can say “I feel sad,” instead of “I am furious!” Notice how this is a game-changer. I can now tend to my emotional health in ways that serve me well and don’t hurt my connection with my teen.

Once we validate our core emotions, we can work with them to release them from our body, channel them in a positive direction, and spend more time in the open-hearted state of our authentic self. The openhearted state is a calm state where our nervous system rests in balance. In this state, we can simultaneously feel our emotions, address the challenge at hand, and connect positively. It’s a lifelong practice that reaps benefits as awareness grows.

No matter how much we know and understand about our emotions, we’re still going to lose it from time to time, or react in ways rooted in our defense mechanisms. What should we do when this happens? What’s the best way to initiate repair with our kids?

Juli and Hilary: Show ourselves compassion and commit to regulating our emotions with tools like the Change Triangle. Specifically, revisit those moments when we lose it and repair with a heartfelt apology and admission of our wrongdoing. Commit to healing old wounds and using our core emotions constructively, like setting boundaries or taking breaks when we are overwhelmed and stressed beyond our capacity.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention or emphasize?

Juli: No matter how old we are, we can always learn to heal past trauma and work with our emotions. The brain can change throughout one’s lifetime. As parents, we will make mistakes, and the goal is not to strive for perfection but to remember we’re playing the long game. The tools we share in the book help make working through emotions more straightforward, and when we practice them, we have more energy and vitality to deal with our kids and life.

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