Parenting Styles

Goleman: Let’s get back to the parenting styles. You talked about the avoidant or avoiding style. What are the others?

Siegel: So, after the avoidant type of attachment, then we have something called the anxious-ambivalent attachment relationship. This is where the parent has been offering either inconsistent attunement to the child, or intrusive attunement. Where they take their own internal states and intrude them. An example would be, let’s say a child is hungry and let’s say the parent, because of their own background, is worried that they won’t be a good parent, worried that they’ll never provide enough nurturance for the child. So when the child shows hunger, instead of just getting that bottle and feeding, the parent gets extremely anxious. The parent moves toward the child with incredible anxiety. Inside of his head, he’s thinking, “Will I be a good dad? Can I really soothe discomfort? My child is really stressed, he’s really hungry.” Now let’s say I’m the dad. I take the bottle. I’m shaking out of nervousness. On my face is a feeling of incredible doubt and fear perhaps, and my hungry daughter looks at my face and her resonance circuits, including mirror neurons, then picks up my anxiety. My intention may be to feed her, but I’m full of dread. She feels anxious and fearful and I’m coming with the bottle, and after a bit of time, repeated experiences like that are going to be confusing. Unlike the avoidantly attached child, where it becomes kind of disconnected from others and even from the self. Here, with the anxious-ambivalent attachment, the self is more confused. “I’m hungry, yet I’m fearful.” What’s with that?" Not that those thoughts are there, but that’s the essence of it. Over time then, the sense of self of this child will develop into a sense of insecurity of the anxious sort, “I doubt whether other people will meet my needs. They might, they might not, they might, they might not.” That’s what you see. As the child grows into adolescence and then into adulthood, what the research shows is, in fact, they will have what is called a preoccupied adult status. What you see in the narrative there is that the parent who is asked questions like, “Tell me about your earliest memories of childhood.” They may say, for example, “My mother always favored my brother when I was young, and if we were fighting and I got hurt, she’d yell at me. You know, last week, my brother’s kids went with my mother to Disneyland and last night, they brought those Disneyland hats over and they were showing them to my kids and my kids were getting very upset.” Now you note in this interview, you’re talking about last night but the question was about the earliest memories of your childhood. So, this person gets the status preoccupied, because the past is intruding on the present. Just like in the case where I’m trying to feed my daughter. I haven’t made sense of my difficult childhood. I’m feeling full of doubt about my capacity as a parent because of those experiences. I now come to my child with all those fears. Instead of just lovingly feeding her a bottle, I’m feeding her fear.

Goleman: How might that preoccupied style show up in a spousal relationship? If you have had that kind of childhood and you’re preoccupied, and then your husband or your wife is there, do you then bring it up in the same way?

Siegel: Absolutely. This is such a useful view for thinking about our relationships with our loved ones. Especially close romantic relationships. For example, if I’m the preoccupied person (in this case we do talk about the person being preoccupied), I am going to take that overarching way I’ve adapted, where I have left over garbage, basically, and I will put it onto my spouse. So, let’s say my spouse is coming home from work, only she’s a little late. I will take her lateness as a sign she really doesn’t care about me. She really doesn’t like me. She’s going out with someone else. I’ll have so much doubt about me and about our relationship and I might just literally, what’s called project it onto her and I’m just a mess and she’s half-an-hour late. Where as another person might use that time just to read a book and whatever, and have faith that things would work out. This is really a sense of ambivalence, a mixed feeling: I really want to depend. I don’t want to depend. I’m not certain I can rely on others.

Goleman: So, in other words, it comes up in the adult relationship as though you were still that child experiencing the same thing. You know my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman has a book on Emotional Alchemy, where she writes about these deep patterns of fear of abandonment and emotional deprivation. She makes the point that sometimes we actually are attracted to romantic partners who will activate these same patterns in us. Perhaps in the hopes that this time will come out differently. Does that make any sense to you?

Siegel: Yeah, it’s a great book, and a great point that Tara makes. The nice thing about knowing that is we need to become very open and mindful, if you will, when we start making commitments because sometimes there’s a match with a person which is like getting lost in familiar places. Now sometimes that can work out fine, if both partners are working to make sense of their lives. So, just because that happens, because it happens so much, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, but if it’s done automatically without an openness to it, it can be a real problem in just the way Tara’s describing it. What is interesting in the brain is that it’s almost as if there is a lock and a key, or puzzle pieces that match each other. For example, in someone who’s preoccupied, at least in my clinical practice, and also in my personal friendships, there’s an amazing match between someone with a preoccupied attachment history and someone with dismissing status.

Goleman: Why is that?

Siegel: It’s almost like there’s enough room for someone with all those doubts when a person is kind of not really expecting too much from the relationship. It’s kind of strange, but I’ve seen a number of things like that, where ultimately the one with the preoccupied status may be a therapist and they go on to do their own therapy and they insist that the avoidantly attached, now dismissing, adult needs to do their own work but they’re not interested in it. It can become a real problem. I have seen it enough times to note it as a pattern. But, the way we make sense then can help us engage in romantic relationships in a healthier way.

Goleman: What you’re saying is hopeful because if that avoidant partner, for example, were to go on and make sense of his or her life just as the other partner has done, then they both could be more like two secure people together.

Siegel: They would be two secure people. In fact, do you know what the research shows? This is a mind-blower. The research actually shows that the natural history of how these things change in adults is if you have an adult status which is insecure, of the preoccupied sort or dismissing sort, and if you marry someone who’s secure, what’s called a 'free narrative' – a secure adult narrative – within five years your status, without therapy, will naturally move toward security. That’s pretty neat.

Goleman: That’s remarkable, and I think very encouraging. You’ve described how different parenting styles can affect how a child experiences his or her emotions, how they behave, and whether they become securely attached or not in adulthood. What’s going on in the brain? As I’ve pointed out in my own work, the emotional and social circuitry of the brain is the last part of the brain to become anatomically mature. It doesn’t finish that work until the mid-twenties, some are saying. Because the brain shapes itself through repeated experience, the kinds of interactions between parent and child that you’re talking about seem to be one of the main forces in sculpting your brain. So, could you map that out for us, in just a bit more detail?

Siegel: I’d be happy to, and it’s a great way you’re posing the question. First, let me say that it would be safe to make the statement that no one really knows how the brain is related to the mind. This is a big philosophical issue, and it’s important to be very humble. We know there are correlations, and we know certain brain areas seem to be involved in certain mental functions like thinking or feeling. We just need to be humble about it. When you make the move from brain to mind and add in the third thing we’re talking about, relationships, then we have to continue that humility and say it’s a big and exciting area and we need to be open.

What I’ve tried to do in the last fifteen years is to develop this field called Interpersonal Neurobiology, which draws on science and other aspects of knowing to try to look at the relationships among these three entities: brain, mind, and relationships. Ultimately, I think it’s important not to reduce any one of those three into the other. Relationships, mind, and brain can be seen as three sides of a triangle of human experience, and of well-being. So we’re going to talk about empathic relationships – relationships filled with emotional intelligence, and a coherent mind, which we’ll define in a moment, and something I call neural integration. Integration meaning separate things being brought together as a whole. So neural integration means separate parts of the nervous system being linked together. So those three things: neural integration, coherent mind, and empathic relationships are three domains of human experience that reinforce each other.

The first thing to say is what we know from the study of attachment that can inform our response to your question, which is such a great question. How is the brain shaped by relationships? What we know from attachment research is that you can study relationship patterns, which are ultimately patterns of communication, and how those patterns influence the development of the mind. We can say a lot by looking in-depth at attachment. We could say parents who have relationships with their children filled with attunement to the internal world of the child have children whose minds, this embodied and relational process that regulates energy and information flow, if you want to define the mind that way, are filled with flexibility. The mind is adaptive. The mind is coherent. Those kids have energy for life. They engage in social situations. They have a stable way of being. So they’re very resilient. That’s ultimately the way the mind develops. You can say, okay, we’ve got relationships that are empathic and attuned, leading to a mind that’s coherent and full of adaptation. What about the brain part?

Now we’re going to the field of cognitive neuroscience to ask if you have these aspects of resilience in a mind – being adaptive and able to engage in the world and process things in a very flexible way, the essence of well-being, what is going on in the brain that correlates? Because we’re going to use the word correlation, it’s important to realize that in fact the mind uses the brain to create itself. People in science often say the brain is creating the mind. While you’ll see a lot of people, including Nobel Prize winners saying that, it’s important not to buy into that perspective alone. Because when you only take it as a one-directional arrow – brain leads to mind – it’s very limiting. First of all, it’s limiting in how to understand actual experience, but secondly, it’s very limiting in what to do. At the very least, we can talk about it as bi-directional: brain leads to mind and mind leads to brain. In our model, of course, it’s going to be a tri-directional model. We’re going to talk about relationships leading to mind, leading to brain, leading to relationships, and all these things interact with each other.

The correlations, what are they? Basically, neural integration, this linkage of differentiating components, is what comes with a coherent mind. It’s also what comes with empathic relationships. The broadest statement we could say is that secure attachment seems to promote the integration of the child’s brain. Now what does that mean in literal terms? For example, in Emotional Intelligence and your beautiful work in Social Intelligence we’re going to look at the circuits, let’s say of the higher part of the brain, the cortex – especially the part behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex – so just think about what’s behind your forehead. The prefrontal cortex actually has regulatory circuits that go from it down to the lower areas that generate emotion called the limbic areas, including the area you mentioned in the book, the amygdala. So, what we have here then is a simple circuit, if you will. These prefrontal circuits have the ability to coordinate and balance the limbic areas. In secure attachments, when kids have attuned relationships, what we believe happens is the prefrontal cortex develops in a fashion directly responsive to relationships, so that it can keep the lower limbic and brain stem areas in a nice coordination, and balance. Especially on the right side of the brain, and a lot of studies show that it’s the right side of the brain that is dominant in its regulation of the limbic areas for emotion and balance. We call that resilience, and it’s really neural integration leading to a coherent mind. What happens in the other cases? In an avoidantly attached child what happens, unfortunately, is there isn’t the nurturing of the development of the right prefrontal areas. There is an emphasis on the left, which doesn’t have a direct route to balancing those emotions. So, life can become pretty non-emotional. There’s kind of a disconnect from one’s own emotions.