Dr. Dan Siegel, Parenting from the Inside Out

Jessica Honegger [00:00:04] Hey, there, welcome to Going Scared. I'm Jessica Honegger, founder of the world changing Brand Noonday Collection, and I am so glad to have you here for today's conversation. Our Going Scared community gathers here every week for direct and honest conversations that help you live a life of courage by leaving comfort and going scared. We are now in the middle of our journey towards knowing our self, and this new series called Know Thy Self, and today we are in for a treat. We are welcoming Dr. Dan Siegel to the show. Hopefully, by now, you're seeing that self-awareness is understanding the space you are holding for others, as well as the space that you're holding for yourself. And the true expert on awareness truly is Dan. It was an overwhelming honor to get to interview him. He is the founder of Interpersonal Neurobiology. He's currently the clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. But in addition to all of that, his work has shifted me as a person and specifically it has shifted me as a parent. So that is where we are going to focus today. How can self-awareness make us the kind of parents that we want to be? I have high hopes for today's episode. I am hoping that his insights changed your life today, so take this one off double speed. Settle in. It's truly an invitation that we are offering you today that could change you and your relationship with their kids forever. Dr. Dan Siegel, I'm so excited to have you on the show today.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:02:02] Thanks for having me. It's great to be here with you, Jessica.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:05] I'm a little giddy. I'm not going to lie. I don't get nervous very often, but you are legendary in my mind. You are the very reason that my own therapist is a neurobiologist, and his work has transformed me. And so I truly feel like I owe a lot of my healing to you. I am part of your legacy. So thank you for your life's work.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:02:29] Oh, well, you're welcome. And that's so kind of you. And I'm so grateful that it's helpful.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:35] It's so helpful. So this podcast series, it's a nine part series all about self awareness and you have written I wish I could just tell you right now how many books you've written, you've written so many. I have about five of them. How many have you written?

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:02:49] You know, it's about it's over a dozen. And if you include the developing minds editions, then I think it's, I don't know, 15 or something like that. Some, some some number around there.

Jessica Honegger [00:03:01] Wow. So there are a lot of different paths that we could take in this 30 minute conversation.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:03:07] But they they all have to do with awareness and some level. And so talking about awareness and parenting is great because I think a lot of you know, as a dad, I think a lot of my learnings from my kids have been how it's shaped my awareness and the role being present as a parent plays, you know, my kids are now, you know, adults. But, you know, all through their childhood, that was crucial to how we parent

Jessica Honegger [00:03:33] Our children parent us, really. That is that's what I'm learning. And there is nothing like raising three teens, which is what I have right now. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:03:43] And that storm is your your ticket to two? Oh yeah.

Jessica Honegger [00:03:46] Well, I have read pieces of that out loud to my children and they're able to debate, mom, I've just got teenage brain right now. OK, OK. So even just a couple of weeks ago, my daughter had her first homecoming dance and she had decided to invite a few girlfriends over for all of them to go together. And she was super excited. She was showing up confident, not just in her words, but in her tone, her posture. And there was literally nothing telling me that she was anything but joyful. But I, on the other hand, was having all sorts of anxiety and my mind got on what you call the low road. And I began to wonder about her own feelings about not going with a date. And I'm thinking, does she feel rejected that she isn't going with a boy? And is she really anxious and she's not telling me? And how does she feel about dressing up? And I am literally reliving my own homecoming. And thanks to your work, I was able to recognize I'm on the low road. This is not about her. This was about me. I was tempted to make it all about her. I started ideating even about how I can manipulate the situation. I may have acted out a little bit on my anxiety, but I'm not going to go into that. But to just to say and I had a moment of self understanding, and that's what turned me around, and my understanding was realizing that this was about my own anxiety I had around high school dances. And I was wanting to protect my own feelings that I had not hers. So I had to go back to these high school dance parts of my own story and let them heal so that I could just truly enter into her true excitement about Homecoming. So this is really where I wanted to start, because these I'm having a million of these moments where I am on the low road and then I'm having a moment of this isn't about her or him. This is about me. [00:05:36]And you say that making sense of our own story is the most important work we can do as parents, and that if there is one thing that our listeners take away today, I want them to be convinced of that. I want them not to look at their kid and say, You need therapy. I want them to look at themselves like, Oh no, I need to get to therapy. [18.9s] So why did you break down this concept for us?

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:05:59] Yeah, absolutely. [00:06:01]Everyone listening should realize that there's no such thing as perfect parenting. There's only being present as a parent, and we can learn to cultivate that capacity in a deeper way, in a more long lasting way, in a way that's actually a win win situation. [18.8s] So if you found like I have when I was parenting my young kids now their adult offspring, you know, but you know that I had to find a way to know that not everything goes as planned. Not everything goes how you intended it to. So let's talk about what that means. You know, when I first heard about this research just to start with the science, it was an incredibly powerful research finding. [00:06:52]Literally the statistical power of it was bigger than anything people had seen before in what's called correlations, that is the best predictor of you having a child that is what's called securely attached to you and will say why that's important in a moment. But the best predictor is not so much what happened to you when you were a kid, but how you've made sense of what happened to you. [27.6s] When I read that, I just went, Oh my gosh, that's what we do as you know, therapists, and that's what we can do as educators. That's what we can do as parents, because of course, [00:07:29]you cannot change the past, but what you can do is change your insight. This is where awareness comes in into exploring your memory of what you recall happening and then put together what we call a coherent narrative to make sense of things even that didn't make sense when they were happening. [21.6s] [00:07:52]So this finding to start with that is where the research comes in to say that as parents, our first obligation is actually to make sense of what happened to us when we were kids, and then we can really show up. [15.1s] We can be present in all sorts of ways in awareness so that the filters that make us worry about dances or, you know, worry about danger or whatever might have been our own experiences when we were kids. You know, don't get in the way of us really being fully available in our awareness and how we focus our attention and how we respond to our kids. So that's lesson number one, is that you can make sense of your life, even if it's painful to go back and think about what happened. [00:08:40]Because while you cannot change what happened back then, you can change how you make sense of number one: what happened, number two, how you had to adapt to it, and then number three, you can then change in a sense, your relationship, your understanding, the way you did adapt so you can free yourself now and not be a prisoner of the past. [23.3s]

Jessica Honegger [00:09:04] It's so freeing. Yeah, I think we want to open up books and read a formula, but actually, this is so much better because it really, truly it's now. It is hard work. It's scary work. It is vulnerable work. It requires courage to go back into our own story, but that truly is the pathway to being a good parent. I just I had never heard it framed like you framed it until picking up I think the first book of mine, perhaps that I read was Parenting From the Inside Out.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:09:37] Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, our daughter was, you know, a preschooler and I was finishing my first book, which was a textbook for basically for professionals called the Developing Mind. And it explored the science around this finding, which I was trained in the National Institute of Mental Health Research Training Program to actually study narrative and study the narratives, the stories of parents and how they predicted how their children turned out. Because children who had a secure attachment to their primary caregiver, they basically developed resilience and flexibility. They could meet their intellectual potential. They could meet their potential for mutually rewarding relationships. They had emotional and social intelligence. All these cool things, if they had secure attachment. So then the question was, Well, how do they get secure attachment? And then there was this incredible finding was yes, we can study how parents interact with kids. That's fine. But even more robust than that was doing this narrative analysis called the adult attachment interview. So I got a grant to study that, and then I basically was trained as a researcher. And, you know, people said, Well, why don't you write about this? So I wrote a textbook basically to say, here's the science of why that research finding is likely to be true by looking at both the science of relationships and the science of the brain. And that's what the book was all about. Anyway, our daughter was in preschool, so I ran into the preschool director, Mary Hartzell, and she asked what I was up to and I told her, This is a book I was finishing said, Oh, why don't you teach the parents about this? And so I did. And the teacher showed up too and Mary was there and she goes, Well, this is really cool. I didn't know anything about the brain, but this is, you know, what I've been doing for 30 years running this preschool. So then people said, Why don't you two teach a workshop together? And we did. [00:11:39]And people loved the workshop, and it basically taught you about your brain, about how memory and emotion and narrative work in your brain as a parent and then how you can free yourself from the various kinds of prisons that insecure attachment creates for any of us so that you can move from your own adult insecure attachment towards security by understanding how you're actually changing the structure of your brain. [28.8s] Anyway, so Mary and I thought these workshops and people said, Wow, you know, why don't you write a book about this? And we said, we don't. We're so busy we don't need to write a book, but we went to the bookstore in those days. That's what you had to do to see books. And so we go to the bookstore and there's no books that have this research finding made available for the public. So finally, we took a deep breath who said, OK, let's do it. Let's just write a book that's like a big hug because this is really hard work. And let's give a big hug to parents because it's like the hardest job in the world. And let's walk them through what a lot of people don't want to do, which is to look at a painful past. [00:12:48]But unfortunately, what the research also shows is that if you don't look at your painful past, even if you love your child more than anyone could love their child, if you haven't done the work of reflecting on what that pain was about for you, you're unintentionally very likely, the research shows to create the same patterns of pain and insecurity in your kids that you yourself survived, even though you don't want to do that. [30.7s] So then we said, OK, let's give this book a chance, and that's Parenting From the Inside Out.

Jessica Honegger [00:13:25] Oh, my goodness. Well, that is where I would love for us to just stay over the next 15 minutes or so. And one of the concepts that you talk about in that beautiful work is mind sight, which you went on to go write a whole another book called Mind Sight. Yeah, but tell us a little bit more about how mine site can help us on our journey to becoming better parents.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:13:50] Yeah. Well, you know, it's so interesting, Jessica, because, you know, Mary Hartzell sadly passed away not so long ago and so I'm kind of filled with my emotions about her. And, you know, mind sight also carries a lot of emotion for me because when I was in medical school, you know, I'm a physician, and when I finished college, I went to medical school. I was so disappointed and disillusioned by my experiences with my teachers that I ended up dropping out of school, ended up writing a book about this later on called Mind. But it was basically where the mind was missing in medicine so that, for example, if a teacher of mine was super bright and everything very accomplished, if they had a patient who they did some tests and sadly, the tests showed the patient had a terminal illness, they were going to die, they'd go in to the patient's room, I'd be on their side as a student and they would just say, you know, here in the lab results and you're going to die and they'd walk out. And I would be pulling on their coat and I'd say, Don't you want to talk to them about what you just said? They said, Why would I do that? I gave them all the information. I said, Well, you just told them they're going to die, and they could probably use your emotional support. And they go, That's not what doctors do. So I ended up dropping out of school and in the time away, I never thought I was going to go back, but in the time away, I really thought, Well, our feelings are actually real. Even if you can't study them in a test tube or put them in an x ray machine or something like that. And the stuff that goes along with emotions like meaning and memory and thoughts and all intention, hopes, dreams, longings, all the stuff of the mind you can't see with your eyes, so you can't see with eyesight. So I said, Well, what do you see it with? I said, Well, you can't see it is real, but it's not eyesight, it's like mind sight. So I made up this word and I said, You know, I need to go back to medical school. I went back where I was, which is a research medical school. [00:15:57]And I said to myself this word mindset, which I made up, you know, to protect me because of course, the teachers hadn't changed. And so that notion that we have a perceptual system, you know, which influences how we relate to each other. If you, you know, are with a friend or a family member or if you have a patient or something and something serious is going on when you tune into their suffering or their fears, their sadness, their longings, all the inner life of the mind, you know, you establish a kind of connection of a we were you're joining with someone which was absent as far as I could see in my professors in medicine. [41.0s] So I just took that term with me when I went into pediatrics and noticed even in the field of pediatrics, you know, some parents had mind sight that they used. And even if their child faced a devastating illness, the family did better when people were talking about feelings and meaning and memory than families that just had no mind sight. So then when I switched over to psychiatry, the concept of mind sight was really useful for becoming a therapist. And when I became a researcher studying parent child relationships, it was the centerpiece as far as I could tell, you know, on what allowed secure attachment to develop so good.

Jessica Honegger [00:17:19] So where can our listeners begin and becoming more? How do you say it strengthening their mind sight?

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:17:28] Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. That's a great way to say it. You know, here's the thing where most of us, almost all of us have the potential to develop this perceptual system to see the inner life of the mind within us. We call that insight or within a some person we call another person, you know, which we call empathy and compassion. And together, we just call those mind sight when you're also promoting kindness and care, which is coming from something, you in all these books I talk about called integration. Things being allowed to be different, but then linked together, that's integration. [00:18:06]So mind sight is those three things, you know, insight, empathy and integration, which is kindness and compassion, basically. So for yourself, what I would say if you if you want to give a gift that keeps on giving and is like a gift that gives to everyone, it's cultivate mind sight, [20.4s] which, you know, if you want to start somewhere, I would start with where you're starting, Jessica, you with parenting from the inside out because it's basically teaching you to cultivate inner mind sight. The insight part of that and that naturally gives rise to the empathic part of it, which we also teach in that book. But, you know, with a student who became a colleague and our wonderful coauthor, Tina Payne Bryson, she and I have written many books where mind sight is kind of at the heart of them and this approach where we kind of combine all these sciences together to form a framework called interpersonal neurobiology, but we need to worry about that. So it sort of is the science behind why mind sight is so important. So I would do inside out first, Parenting From the Inside Out. If you find something is particularly challenging, you know, some people like the book Mind Sight that you mentioned, some people find writing in a journal really helpful. You can come to our website and do a kind of reflective practice called the wheel of Awareness, which can be really helpful. Some people ultimately, you know, say they they like to find a therapist, and that can be useful too for sure. Others like that be with groups of parents, you know where you can do book clubs or whatever. So I would start there because you here's the thing most of us have the neural capacity, the brain networks that are capable of having mind sight developed. But as I talk about in the case of Stewart, who is an example of a person in the mind sight book, you'll see that he didn't have mind sight taught to him by his parents. It's usually not taught to people in school in most schools. So here was Stuart, a really successful in this case lawyer, but a successful professional who, like my professors of medicine, you know, just didn't seem to have this capacity that he had nurtured in any way or had supported in his development. And so he was running around with eyesight, but not with mind sight. So you'll see how step by step in therapy in Stuart's case as a, you know, person in his 90s, he developed it so much so that his wife called me up and said, You know, Dr. Dan, you know, did you give Stuart a brain transplant because, you know, our life is so different when we develop it. [00:20:58]And that's basically how you develop presence. You you learn not just to be like following your automatic impulses and knee jerk reactions. You develop this inner life. We call it the hub of this wheel of awareness, this awareness space, which really gives you freedom and choice. [18.4s] And when your kids feel this from you, it is it just it just makes me pause and just honor the incredible work parents over these years have done, because when you go from someone without might say, trying to parent and you're missing not only your own inner mind, you're missing the mind of your child. It's one particular kind of attachment your children will develop that's not secure. And then when parents learn to do this, their children start developing secure attachment with them because they're seeing the inner life of the child. This reflective ability, or what's called mentalization in the science world, is mind sight ability allows you to feel felt by your parents. And so when they've done the work to develop mind sight, it's keeps on giving because now you've given the gift of mind sight to your children. And if they go ahead and have children, they'll keep on giving it to theirs.

Jessica Honegger [00:22:13] So good. Yeah, for me when I first, when I've been in and out of therapy over the years, but specifically with Curt Thompson, he's a neurobiologist. He, I told him my goal is to learn how to be a non anxious presence. I want to be a non anxious presence and obviously in my colleagues' lives in the company I lead and everything else, but particularly with my children, because it's there something, especially I think about adolescents, at least for my friends who are also raising teens, that chess brings up all the triggers.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:22:49] Yeah, yeah. And those triggers, you know, I mean, and I'm glad Curt Thompson has been helpful. He's written some wonderful books himself. And, you know, another colleague of mine Ed Tronick tells us that, you know, these triggers and these things that happen that are ruptures in our connection, we need to realize that, you know, the repair of those ruptures reconnecting after losing connection, which happens all the time. And I try to put this in every one of my books where I've messed up and you know how to, you know, take a deep breath and realize we're just human. We don't always do what we wish we could have done. And then to go back, apologize, make a reconnection, make a repair. You know, that's the stuff Ed Tronick writes about, you know, that helps build security because you're teaching your child as a role model that, wow, not everybody does things just right all the time. And then when they recognize that in their awareness, they have the courage and the humility to go back and say, You know something, I messed up. Let's try it again because what I did was not right, and I really want to try to connect with you now. So when you're ready, let's make a reconnection. And that's true, you know, little kids with, you know, adolescence and, you know, adult children. It's true with our partners, you know, and making sure you give yourself an invitation to do that kind of reconnection with kindness to your inner life as well as your inter-relational life.

Jessica Honegger [00:24:25] I just did a repair this weekend. I when my daughter was four, she had got a couple of gift certificates to Build a Bear, which is this, you know, place at the mall where you go and you build a bear. And I first time parent, I've always had a passion for the poor and my children understanding how to reach vulnerable people. And she got two gift certificates and I thought, You know what? I don't want her grown up thinking, like, everybody is just this Build-A-Bear family. So I had her go build a bear and then drop it off right afterwards at the Salvation Army. And I looked back later. She actually does not attach meaning to this, at least and explicitly. But I just apologized to her recently and I said that was way too intense like that, that it that not that is not what have registered for you. And there are so many other ways that you could learn to care for others and by the way, you do. She's 15 and is just very, very thoughtful towards other people. So this weekend, I blindfolded her and I took her to the mall and I took her to Build-A-Bear.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:25:37] Oh, wow.

Jessica Honegger [00:25:37] She's 15 and she built a bear. And um, but I do think it's because of this work of me going back into my own story and wanting to make repairs with myself and now going back into, OK, well, where could I have parented in a way that would have brought connection instead of a lesson, you know? Yeah. So I thank you for that. I thank you for that. I wanted you to talk about the wheel of awareness. You've mentioned it, but I do think that's such a great practical activity that our listeners can do even after getting off this episode. But could you give them a primer for that activity?

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:26:19] Yeah, absolutely. You know, the wheel of awareness was developed in and inspired by the idea that you could use your mind to actually create something called integration, this honoring differences and promoting linkages. And it's basically the table in our office. But no one wanted to call the table of awareness. So it was it was a wheel where there's a center hub of this table, if you will, that's glass and an outer wooden rim. So we said, let's put all the things you can be aware of on this rim of this wheel. The metaphoric wheel. And let's imagine the knowing of being aware, like if I say, Hello, Jessica, you have the sound. Hello, Jessica, you know, on the rim, you would be in a part of the rim where you have put hearing. But then you have the knowing that I said, Hello, Jessica. And we put that knowing in the hub, then what you do is you basically systematically move a single spoke, a metaphoric spoke of this wheel, you know, from hearing to sight, to smell, to taste, touch as the external senses we have. You take a deep breath. You move this spoke over to the second segment, which is the internal sensations of muscles and bones and organs. And then you take a deep breath, you move the spoke over to mental activities like emotions and memories and thoughts and things like that. Take a deep breath and you then move it over to the fourth segment, which is our sense of relational connection to family and friends and people we work with, people we live near, and all of humanity and all of nature. And then in it in a more advanced step of the wheel in which you can do all this from our website, Drdanseigel.com. [00:28:17]You know you you actually add some statements that research has shown really work for building kind intention. And then you continue to build on your other two pillars. We call them not just kind intention, but now and your sense of connection, but you build your focused attention with this moving this book around and this open awareness when you're in that hub by an advanced step of bending the spoke around or leaving the spoke in the hub. So you just experience basically pure awareness. [31.9s] And we've done this now in person of the days when we did that in workshops, you know, initially with 10000 people, then it was over 50000 people. We ended up with remarkable results to, you know, help people reduce anxiety, helps them with mild to moderate depression for parenting. It helps you stay more present because presence is the hub you see. So when you can cultivate and I do this practice every morning when you cultivate the wheel, what you're doing is you're distinguishing hub from rim. So let's say you're interacting with your daughter, your son. Something can come up on the rim, you know, and you're irritated. They're saying this or saying that, your triggers being pushed. Now you've developed the ability to sit within that hub doing the wheel practice. But now you're in real parenting time. [00:29:41]And instead of becoming reactive, you remain receptive because instead of being lost and pulled to the rim, you're actually staying largely in the hub. So your child says this, they say that and you say, Tell me more about that. And soon your child feels like, Wow, my mom, my dad, there they see me, they know me. And it doesn't mean you're just saying yes to everything they do by any means. It means you're starting with connection before you offer redirection. You know, and this is where basically, I think making sense of your life story comes from ultimately, [40.6s] as you develop the ability to feel so comfortable and familiar with your own hub. That when you start exploring that third segment of the room, all these memories of your childhood, however disappointing they may have been or frightening they might have been or whatever you survived it because you're doing this exercise now, so you did survive only now you're doing it with a strengthened hub. And you know, in this book Aware or its companion book, Becoming Aware, you learn how to do the wheel and in the in the Aware book, you'll see examples of people who as one of them is example of a parent who is really having a hard time with triggers that her children were activating in her. She did the wheel practice and you can see the difference because you end this, you know, this cycle of accelerating reactivity that often can happen in families, because now the parent is taken the bold move of doing this wheel of awareness practice, cultivating that hub, and now they disengage from the reactivity feedback loop. And now everything is de-escalated. And a whole different communication comes in a whole different feeling of connection and a new kind of security of attachment is developed in the child with that parent.

Jessica Honegger [00:31:50] So much goodness. So much goodness. Well, thank you so much for your work. Thank you for your time today. I am putting all the information for these books you've mentioned in the show notes, and you have helped me. I call it my no freak-out zone that you've helped me access my no freak-out zone on a more frequent basis so that I can have a beautiful choose connection with my kids, with my teens, especially. Thank you so much.

Dr. Dan Siegel [00:32:20] Thank you, Jessica. Thank you for all your wonderful work, and it's really beautiful to be here and connecting with you around these important issues.

Jessica Honegger [00:32:32] We included links to the wheel of awareness and our free Know Thyself digest, and if you want to get a hold on that, we are going to be sending out a digest with links to all of the different personality tests that we've talked about on the show. Just really quick tips and synopsis of the various tools that we've talked about so far on this series. This digest gives you everything at your fingertips, and all you need to do is head on over to JessicaHonegger.com. For my email list, sign up there, or you can head over to Instagram. There's a link there. We would love to get you this free resource. Thanks so much for joining me today. Our music is by Ellie Holcomb and I'm Jessica Honegger until next time. Let's take each other by the hand and keep going scared.