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When Your Child's Big Feelings Activate Your Childhood
Parenting • May 10, 2026 Soraya stood in the kitchen, the late afternoon sun filtering through the blinds and casting soft stripes across the counter. Her daughter, Maya, was on the floor nearby, wailing inconsolably after a minor fall. The sound felt like an echo from Soraya’s own childhood—an unbearable crescendo of distress that once left her feeling invisible and powerless. As Maya’s cries grew louder, Soraya’s chest tightened, her breath shortened, and a familiar, churning anxiety began to rise. Despite her years as a professor and her cultivated calm, something primal stirred beneath her composed exterior. This was more than just a mother’s concern; it was a nervous system reawakening a buried, unprocessed pain. This experience—when a child’s intense emotions trigger unresolved wounds from a parent’s own early life—is at the heart of what I call activation of childhood trauma through parenting. Clinically, this phenomenon occurs when a parent’s nervous system is sensitized by past relational trauma, emotional neglect, or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and a child’s distress inadvertently reactivates these latent patterns. The child’s “big feelings” become a mirror reflecting the parent’s own unmet needs and hidden vulnerabilities, often leading to a cascade of emotional responses that feel overwhelming, confusing, or even shameful. Understanding this through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology, as pioneered by Dr. Dan Siegel, MD, helps us recognize that the parent’s nervous system is wired to respond not only to the child’s immediate cues but also to the somatic and emotional imprints of their own developmental history. When a child’s distress activates these embedded memories, the parent’s brain can shift into a state of dysregulation—triggering fight, flight, freeze, or collapse responses—rather than the attuned, regulated presence the child needs [1]. This dynamic is not only common but also deeply human. Mary Ainsworth’s attachment research demonstrated how early caregiving environments shape the regulation of affect and arousal in children, and crucially, how caregivers’ own unresolved trauma can impair their capacity to soothe and respond sensitively. When a parent’s nervous system is dysregulated, it impairs their ability to co-regulate the child’s emotional state, which is essential for healthy attachment and emotional development. This activation is a neurological reality rooted in what Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD, describes as the pol...
What Children Know About Presence That Adults Forget
I arrived in parenthood the way I imagine astronauts arrive in orbit, well-prepared for everything except what it would actually feel like.My curiosity, personal and professional, drove me to study the psychology of extreme environments. I had considered what it would mean to support people adapting to life in space: the loss of familiar reference points, the disorientation when every system that had once worked now refused to, the need to navigate without the physical tools, using what we already have within. I thought I understood something about the unknown.Then the baby came. And I was on Mars.The routines dissolved. The inner architecture I had carefully built over years of practice, study, and orientation toward presence and awareness, simply stopped functioning. Sleep deprivation does not negotiate with what we know; it speaks only to what we can access. And what I could access, in those early weeks and months, was very little of what I had thought was mine.I recently sat with James Faulk, host of the Neon Galactic podcast, in a conversation that began with parenthood and arrived somewhere I had not anticipated. We were talking about what parenting does to us, not what we do for our children but what they open us to, and James spoke about his wife with a phrase that stayed with me long after the recording ended.“Ferocious intuition.”Image: Iya and James Faulk, host of the Neon Galactic podcast. April 03, 2026She made parenting decisions based on what she knew, not what she was told. She trusted her own inner navigation at the moments when the external advice pointed elsewhere. There is always so much of it. Over years, consistently, she was right. Not because she had superior information. Because she was listening to something the noise around her could not drown out.I recognise this. I believe we all do, underneath the noise.Before our children were born, I had quietly imagined the life of practice I would eventually inhabit: the extended study, time in the mountains, the monasteries and contemplative communities that had always carried a certain light in my imagination. Having a family seemed, in some soft and unexamined part of me, like a detour from that path.Then I understood.What if the monastery is within? It is not somewhere you go. It is somewhere we already are.I am not the first to say it. The contemplative traditions have said it for centuries. But parenthood made it undeniable, because it removed every other option. There was nowhere el...
Journal Prompts for Presence As A Parent - therma.one
Why journaling about presence as a parent matters When presence shows up as a parent, your mind tends to loop. The same thoughts, the same conclusions, the same stuck feeling. Journaling interrupts the loop by externalizing it. You move the thought from your head to the page, and in doing so, you create distance. That distance is where insight happens. Not wisdom from a book. Insight from your ...
Cheryl Herbsman | mindfulness meditation for parents
With over 25 years of experience raising children with medical and mental health challenges, along with a master's degree in Clinical Psychology and certification as a mindfulness meditation teacher, I share mindfulness tools and resources to guide parents toward calm and well-being, even in times of crisis.
