Parents must work through their own feelings to raise emotionally healthy kids, experts say

By Terry Ward, CNN

(CNN) — If you’re a parent or guardian, you’ve heard about the importance of respecting your child’s feelings. Teaching our kids can help them work through the negative emotions they experience as they grow up.

But what about your feelings as a parent? Hilary Jacobs Hendel, a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and Dr. Juli Fraga, a psychologist and parenting educator, flip the script in their new book, “Parents Have Feelings, Too.” Together, they teach parents how to face and move through their own emotions so they can raise emotionally healthy children.

“Emotions affect us every day and often get us into trouble, and they have huge repercussions for how we understand emotions for future generations,” Hendel said.

In the book, Hendel and Fraga introduce an “emotional health tool” called the Change Triangle. This tool, which Hendel adapted from the Triangle of Experience in the AEDP model of psychotherapy, helps parents name, validate and work through six core emotions: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy and excitement. (AEDP stands for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy.)

Like “fast-acting programs,” these core emotions cause physical changes that propel us to act first and think later, the authors said.

“We want to access all of the emotions to be mentally healthy. That’s kind of the way I think of mental health now — being able to experience the full range of core emotions with minimal amounts of defensiveness, protection and inhibition,” Hendel said.

To learn more about the importance of parents learning to work through their emotions, I talked to both authors.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

CNN: Is there one emotion that’s particularly important for parents to work through?

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Anger is the one that gets people in trouble because it has the capacity to be destructive, so we bury it. Anger can implode and manifest as depression, guilt, anxiety and shame. It can explode and come out in aggression. The idea is to learn to experience anger without acting on it — a wholly internal process that includes naming anger, noticing how it feels in the body, recognizing what its inherent impulses are in the moment and ultimately releasing its energy.

These techniques settle the nervous system, so we can think through how best to handle the anger. Most people don’t think of it as a two-step process. They think if they feel anger they’re going to do something bad. When we teach emotions education, it’s to understand it as two separate steps: 1) experiencing the anger, which is a wholly internal process, and 2) consciously choosing actions including whether and how to express it in ways that are constructive for oneself and one’s family.

CNN: We’ve heard of “mom rage.” Do dads also experience “dad rage”?

Dr. Juli Fraga: Yes. When we have a conversation about parents, moms are often at the forefront. But dads also have anxiety and a lot of shame, without even realizing they have shame. That’s because nobody has ever validated for them that their childhood trauma can play out in their role as a dad, too. When they don’t name and work with the emotion, a lot of times they go to their defenses. Those could show up as working too much, playing too many video games, shutting down, disengaging from their partners. It’s validating for dads to know that their experience in fatherhood matters and that they have emotions, too.

CNN: What are some common myths about emotions?

Hendel: A big one is believing that emotions are under your conscious control — that if you are tough enough or have enough grit, you can not have an emotion. But we have emotions to help us survive. They are rapid-action programs for movement.

Think about it: If a lion were to burst into the room where you are right now, you’d run before your thinking brain could say, “Oh, here comes a lion. Run!” The purpose of an emotion is to make us move in adaptive ways. Core emotions originate in the subcortical part of the brain, not in areas under our conscious control.

A lot of people have never considered their feelings, and they don’t even acknowledge they have emotions. They live in their defenses — the brilliant and creative ways people avoid feeling emotions. That becomes a sort of entrenched, defensive way of living. But there are costs to our physical and mental health, as well as to relationship satisfaction, when we stay stuck in our defenses.

CNN: How does your emotional health tool, the Change Triangle, help parents work through their emotions?

Hendel: This tool can guide you from emotional distress back to your calm, confident, connected self. The top of the triangle is where most of us live. On the top-left corner are our defenses — anything we do to protect ourselves against emotional discomfort and pain. And on the top right are the inhibitory emotions — emotions like anxiety, shame and guilt; their job is to push down our core emotions, which are at the bottom of the triangle.

Core emotions are the doorway to our authentic self. When we can feel and make use of them, our nervous system likes that. It’s adaptive for living — we know what we feel and what we need. However, when we learned in our childhood that some or all core emotions were not acceptable to our parents, we block those core emotions with one of the inhibitory emotions, such as shame or guilt. Then our defenses come into play as a reaction to that discomfort.

The goal of using the Change Triangle is to move down through the core emotion you’re experiencing toward the four Cs: calm, connection, curiosity and compassion. That’s where you’ll find a physiologically regulated state of mind and body.

As a parent, understanding how to navigate your emotions using this tool can change the whole direction of an interaction with your child. It can open your heart to a greater connection with them because you better understand how emotions work in their body. Understanding your child’s emotional state better also helps you be less triggered by defenses they might use, like rolling their eyes or being rude.

You want to keep establishing these open doors for connection and secure attachment so your kids will come talk to you as a parent and know you are a safe haven. We have to understand how to not unwittingly shame and create anxiety in our kids. The only way we can understand that is by understanding our own emotions.

CNN: Where does shame, which comes up in the book as an inhibitory emotion, fit into your tool?

Hendel: Healthy shame exists for a reason. In small doses, it teaches us to be good people, follow laws and not hurt others. This is adaptive because it keeps us positively connected to the groups and communities we need, like our families and friends.

The problem arises when we are shamed for aspects of who we are. If we think back to our childhood, was there anything our parents did that made us feel we were unacceptable? Let’s say we didn’t excel in school like our parents did, or we showed our emotions in a family where they scoff at emotional displays.

A child’s brain makes the connection that if they show that aspect of themself and their feelings, then they are going to be shamed. That part of a child’s self goes underground. For example, if shame binds to sadness, then you lose your capacity to feel sadness and successfully move through life’s many losses.

To feel better, you’d want to move from your defenses back to your core emotions — to use them for living and to thrive and to regulate your nervous system — so you end up back in your authentic self, in that open-hearted state. The open-hearted state feels right and good. By working with the Change Triangle, we come to spend more time in the open-hearted and recover more quickly from our triggers.

CNN: Can tuning in to joy more make you a better parent?

Fraga: Absolutely. If we can’t feel joy for ourselves, it’s really hard to feel it for our kids. Sometimes, the core emotion becomes blocked because a parent’s joy was shut down during their own childhood. I’ve seen it with many moms that it’s shameful to feel joy — that they’re doing something wrong by celebrating their children’s success. These moms don’t want to come across as if they think they are better than other people.

With so much strife in the world, our brains are also looking for ways to ward off danger, especially when it comes to keeping our kids safe. Therefore, the time we spend noticing our joy, or our kid’s joy, can be the blink of an eye, versus the time we spend trying to troubleshoot our worries. Simple exercises like “joy seeking” — perhaps by practicing gratitude or noticing the way we feel in our body when our kids share uplifting news — can help us better experience this emotion. Joy makes us feel expansive, and it’s a wonderful emotion to savor. And research shows that savoring meaningful and joyful moments of connection can help us manage stress.

CNN: Can we become emotionally savvy parents at any time?

Fraga: It’s never too late. There is always hope for healing, no matter what you’ve been through, because of the powers of neuroplasticity in the brain — the brain’s ability to rewire itself, to form new neural pathways. You can’t change your past, but you can change the present. You can change the way you work through your emotions. The ability to work through your emotions is one of the best things we can do for our kids. Think of it as the bread and butter of wellness. When we can navigate our own emotions, we raise kids who can do the same.

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