The Importance Of Having A Good Emotional Model In Childhood

All human girls and boys need physical care, intellectual stimulation, and respectful emotional accompaniment. However, this last aspect, despite the enormous impact it has throughout our lives, is usually the most neglected of all those of parenting.

Many children live in environments where parents yell, insult, and even hit or hit, when they feel overwhelmed by their emotions.

This inappropriate emotional management is tremendously harmful for children, not only because of the violence they receive, but also because they learn an unhealthy way of managing their emotions.

Trouble managing emotions

When Pedro came to my office, he recognized that it was difficult for him to connect with his emotions. He could barely identify what he was feeling himself and it was tremendously difficult for him to recognize the emotions of others.

This emotional blindness caused her enormous problems in raising her children. For example, it was difficult for him to tell when they were tired, frustrated, or when one was getting angry with the other. Quite often, because he did not know how to identify the emotional trigger that caused them, he was involved in loud arguments or fights.

Having not learned to manage his own frustration as a child, the only way he knew to end a dispute between his children was to yell louder than anyone.

At times, he screamed so much that his lungs ran out of air and his throat ached with a hoarseness that lasted for days.

This problem is very common in people whose parents have not been able to offer a healthy model to their children to understand and manage what they feel.

How we learn to manage our emotions

In this natural or respectful parenting model, it is not about “teaching” or “educating” emotions, but rather leading by example, with parents being the first to be able to handle, in an appropriate way, their frustration, their anger, your fear or your euphoria. You learn to manage emotions at home, observing how our elders do it.

If the model has not been balanced, it will be very difficult for the child to have healthy emotional management.

In Pedro’s case, his parents were very bright intellectually. His father was a renowned surgeon and his mother had been one of the first female engineers in the province. Both had received various awards for their professional careers, but within their home, the emotional support they offered their children was disastrous.

Shouting and banging on doors or tables were common in Pedro’s house. Whenever a problem arose, the parents were the first to explode. In addition, his older brothers were learning this type of explosive reactions, so that when Pedro was born, the atmosphere of their home was one of continuous tension.

At any moment, someone could get angry and, then, “the hurricane would break out”, as Pedro explained to me.

Due to the lack of emotional support he had, the damage suffered by the young man in his childhood was threefold. On the one hand, the violence he received, on the other, he did not learn the healthy and balanced model of emotional management that every child needs and, finally, he internalized as normal the response of reacting with screams and lack of control in the face of the slightest frustration.

In cases like this, the therapeutic task that we set ourselves must also be threefold. It is essential, in addition to assimilating and healing all the wounds received, deactivating the automated pattern of the emotional outburst and, finally, looking for healthier ways of managing and communicating emotions.

Regain control of emotions

Throughout his therapy, Pedro began to understand that, although his parents were very bright on an intellectual level, they had a long delay in terms of self-control of their emotions. This lack made it impossible for them to offer him a healthy and balanced model of emotion management.

They, in turn, did not have a healthy role model on the part of their respective parents and we could continue the chain backwards for countless generations. When he came to my office, Pedro had decided not to continue repeating the same pattern. As he told me, “I wanted to be the last link in the chain.”

Throughout his sessions, Pedro was recognizing the situations that made him lose control and he was oriented towards dialogue and assertiveness. As he freed himself from the insane model of his parents, he was connecting with his own emotions lived in childhood: his anger, his anger, his frustration, his fears or his joy. He recognized them as legitimate and, for the first time, he was able to express them.