Author: Rebecca Thompson Hitt

What is Healthy Expression of Feelings? The most difficult part of learning to express our feelings appropriately is recognizing when someone else is doing so. We have seen healthy, appropriate expressions of feelings so seldom in our lives that we don’t know for sure when it happens, much less how to model it for our own children. Emotion is energy

Feelings as Our Guide: Shifting into New Behaviors Through Awareness • Become aware of our thoughts and feelings by checking in with your physical body. • Express your thoughts and feelings to a safe person. (A safe person is one who will allow you to completely express your feelings and thoughts without needing to stop you by invalidating, shaming, distracting,

Principle 6: All individuals have a right and a responsibility to learn to express their feelings appropriately. Feelings allow us to connect to our internal guidance system. Few parents find navigating the landscape of feelings to be easy. Perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of parenting, we all need guidance to understand the language of feelings and what our role

Shifting Our Interpretations, Changing Our Relationships “My daughter is manipulating me!” “He did that to me on purpose just to make me mad!” “I’m the parent, and he needs to listen to what I say!” Phrases like these are common among parents, and they are remnants of another age in which we did not fully understand brain development and what

Judgments and Interpretations My son bared his teeth and moved his head in toward mine so that our foreheads nearly touched. For a split second, I thought he was going to bang into my head. With that realization dawning, I decided he was being playful and just moving in to kiss me. I reached toward him and kissed him. He

Communication: way more than words! Referring to neurophysiologic feedback loops, the word ‘neurophysiologic’ is important here because we can recognize that we aren’t just communicating with our words, but also with our thoughts and our feelings. The work of the Heartmath Institute out of Boulder Creek, CA helps us to understand that our bodies are constantly communicating to one another,

Principle 5: Parental interpretation of behaviors comes from both a conscious and subconscious place, resulting in positive or negative neurophysiologic feedback loops. When our child does something, literally anything, we parents make connections, both consciously and unconsciously, to things that happened in our past. Memory doesn’t work in a linear fashion; in our brain, something that happened this morning may not

Earned secure attachment is a designation given to someone with an insecure attachment who integrates his or her history into a coherent narrative and works through the negative issues from the past. One way to integrate is to tell the stories of your life in connection with someone who cares for you, sharing your thoughts, your feelings, and staying connected to

The Effect of Trauma on Attachment Trauma has a profound impact on a person’s ability to attach, particularly if the trauma occurs early in life and more so if the trauma is a relational trauma–a trauma that occurs with someone who is supposed to love and care for this person. When a caregiver is abusive or very inconsistent, many times it

Principle 4: Behaviors occur on a continuum. Behaviors in children (and parents, too) correlate to the parent’s own neurodevelopment and attachment status. The more we had our early needs met, the more our own children will develop optimally. The more difficulty our parents had meeting our needs when we were young children, or the more difficulty they had navigating discipline with