Children Absorb What We Don’t Process

A child’s biggest struggle might not start with the child at all. When stress, fear, grief, or anger can’t be carried by the adults in a home, it doesn’t disappear. It often shows up in the child’s body and behavior, quietly and persistently, as if they’re holding something that was never meant to be theirs. We talk through how that happens, why it’s so common, and why it’s not a story about blame. 

We explore internalization and attachment in plain terms: children are exquisitely attuned to caregivers, not only to words but to what’s felt. Using real clinical examples, we look at separation anxiety and the feedback loop that can form when a parent’s worry amplifies a child’s worry and vice versa. We also unpack anger that appears “sudden” in a child but actually reflects unresolved, unspoken tension in the family system. Along the way, we share a simple moment many parents recognize (a child falling and grazing a knee) to show the difference between panic, dismissal, and true emotional containment. 

We then widen the lens to intergenerational patterns. With tools like genograms from systemic family therapy, it becomes easier to see how themes like silence, overwhelm, or addiction can echo across generations. The aim is practical: notice what’s being carried, understand its origins, and create enough support and reflection that children don’t have to become tiny caregivers. If you found this helpful, subscribe, share the episode with a parent who needs it, and leave a review so more families can find the conversation.

Transcript

Welcome And Series Purpose

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Hello and welcome back. This is Kim Lee from the Children's Consultancy. In this episode, I want to try and bring everything together that we've been looking at and things that we've been thinking about during this series, what parents carry, and also what happens when they can't carry, it can't be held, whatever it may be. And the core idea here is because children don't develop in isolation, they develop within the emotional environment that surrounds them. And when something can't be carried by the parent, it doesn't disappear. It is often carried imperceptibly by the child. Many years ago I was working with a child who had quite profound separation anxiety. I think he was about six or seven. And this separation anxiety was really pervasive. It meant going to school was really problematic. And you know, he would cling to his mother, and but it got to the point where he found it hard to leave the family home. If his mother was leaving the family home for any reason, he would be overwhelmed. And so if we if we look at that as a set as a set of symptoms, then clearly, yes, we're talking about separation anxiety. But actually, yes, anxiety and fearfulness was being experienced and presented at the point of separation. But my question is, why? What is underneath all of that? Now, this child was constantly worried, had great difficulty settling, seemed always to be scanning the environment, and certainly in the consulting room that was the case. And it really did appear as if you know this is this this child's the one with the problem. But as I learned more about the family environment, what I noticed was that his his mother was also very anxious, and her anxiety about his anxiety reinforced his anxiety about her anxiety. They were caught in this loop, and I remember thinking actually, what the child is signalling is that the mother's anxiety had been internalized by him. Now, please don't think this is a criticism of the mother because it most certainly isn't. However, what it tells us is how children can internalize things. So anxiety is is one example, and often it's not expressed directly, so it's present in other ways, perhaps in the tone of the way the person speaks and their constant anticipation. And these things are then really experienced by the child. We actually have to remind people that we we don't just communicate with words and we don't just interpret through common or uncommon sense. You know, we have a lot of systems within us that become activated, and those systems create pathways which in the brain which are constantly reactivated. Now, if we look at this in the context of attachment, we have to understand that children are, as I've said so many times before, they are exquisitely attuned to the emotional states of their caregivers. And not just in terms of what is said, but what is felt. So internalization is that process which over time means that the emotional states of others are absorbed and they become internalized and they stop being something external, but they become something that then belongs to the child. Now, in another case, a child who presented with frequent anger was incredibly quick to react, difficult to soothe, but within the family system there was also anger. It was unresolved, unprocessed, and often unspoken. And it would find way, it would find expression sometimes through just physical behavior. I don't mean by that arguments or anything physically aggressive. It was more a question of the way in which tension was created by certain facial expressions, certain movements, distance between the parents. So the child wasn't actually creating something new, they were expressing what was already present. I've spoken before about Wilfred Beyond, and he he talks about a parent's capacity to receive from the child, process what they've received, and return it to the child in a way which is manageable. If you think, I mean, this is an example I use quite a lot while I'm teaching, if you think, for example, of a child running down the garden path and then falling over, what is the reaction of the caregiver? Well, if the caregiver drops to their knees in a state of absolute shock and says, We oh, we've we we we must call an ambulance, we've got to get you to the hospital. It's you know, child's grazed their knee. We might think that's just a little bit over the top. And what what is the distress of the caregiver saying to the child? What is the child experiencing? They've got their own distress, and now they're experiencing the parents. Now, okay, we might say a too too uh elaborate example, but it's the principle that I'm trying to communicate. Alternatively, you might have a parent who says, Right, come on, get up, get up, there's nothing wrong, come on. Now, you might say, Well, that that's what strengthens children, shows them they can cope. I'm not so sure. Such children's emotional sensations at that time could be experienced as not valid. You know, don't cry, don't cry, well, just hurt yourself, it's okay. The third option would be, in my view, the parent who says, Oh dear, come on, let's take a look. That looks sore, let's put some magic cream on. And you know, so you know in that example, we're talking about a child learning that whatever it's experiencing can be contained, managed, nothing bad happens. You do that often enough when children get stronger. And this is really what Beyond, Winnicott, Bulby, all of the all of the major contributors to the psychological understanding of child development. This is what they talk about. Containment so incredibly powerful. Children who are dysregulated are uncontained. Containment is a process that is learned through experience. So what I think is important here is to remake that connection of that the child's behavior doesn't exist in isolation, it is shaped by the environment in which it grows. I remember a child once said, I don't know why I feel like this, I just don't understand it. And it seemed there there wasn't a clear objective reason, and there was no obvious trigger. But this was a child who became frequently overwhelmed, and I was curious because it wasn't a case where the there were not there were no clear developmental markers. But as I worked with the parents, it was clear that there was a great deal being carried in that environment. There was a huge amount of difficulty inside that family, largely because of life events that the family were enduring and had endured, but it wasn't being expressed, it wasn't being processed, and so none of it had anywhere to go. Now, Winnicott and Bockwick talked about the importance of the environment as being a space in which the child can exist without having to manage everything themselves, and when that holding is limited by the parents, then the child becomes the holder. And this might look like anxiety, anger, withdrawal, sometimes perfectionism, emotional over-responsibility, or physical symptoms, or a whole combination. A child once said, or say an adolescent, and she said, I just tried to keep things okay. And she wasn't speaking about herself, she was speaking about everyone else. And it seemed to me that she had moved from being a care receiver to a caregiver. And the way that she was doing that was by being alert to how her parents' moods appeared to be, and how she began to suppress her own needs as a consequence. Additionally, what she had learned was that when when she did express her needs in some way and what she was experiencing, that would actually trigger anxiety in the parent. So rather than being a sort of gentle response from them, she felt like she was in the floodlight, so she stopped having needs. So again, this isn't about blame because parents carry their own histories, their own pressures, and their own experiences of what was or wasn't held for them. There's another element here which I think has to do with intergenerational expression. And curiously enough, what is not processed in one generation very often finds expression in the next. And if you are interested in how that works, in systemic family therapy, quite often clinicians will do uh they'll create a genogram, and that is something which is looking at the significant family members in this generation, the current the current generation, as it were, or current family, looking at the relational patterns, looking at the things that have worked in the family, and also the things that haven't worked, which is you know most often what's brought the family to therapy. And then they go back a bit. And so they look at the the parents' parents or the grandparents and what their relationship was like. Was you know, what were they were there any divorces, separations, problems within the family that that were hard to manage or that were destructive. And it's almost like what you can do is you find threads that intergenerational and carry the same kinds of themes. So it's almost as if, and these things are they're seldom talked about. And quite often what you'll find is certainly you find this with addiction that one member of the family develops an addictive disorder, and they're seen in isolation. But when you look back, you see, well, actually, this person had addiction, and then you look back a bit more and that person had addiction. Now, they didn't catch it, and I'm afraid I don't buy the argument that there's an addictive gene. I don't buy that at all. I think a person's predisposition can be influenced by DNA and RNA, but that's a whole other uh subject. But but the truth is, here we have within the history an intergenerational pattern. Okay, addiction is, I wouldn't say it's a standalone, but it demonstrates what can happen. You know, sometimes people say, Oh, we don't talk about things in our family, and then you think, well, I wonder if that goes back away. And almost always it does, because when I interview parents and I talk with them about how they were parented, I hear some incredible things, which make me think, well, no wonder you're struggling, you know. And then, of course, the parents' parents probably grew up with similar sorts of themes to manage. So this notion of intergenerational uh transference, the intergenerational expression is I mean, it's it's really helpful because it we can see origins. However, this is only useful if we can see it as a point at which a shift can occur. Because that's when change becomes possible. Once something is recognized, it can be thought about and done differently. I always remember somebody saying to me, the only people who can make you feel like a child, this was an adult, the only people that can make me feel like a child is is my parents. The moment I go home, I feel like a child again. And this this takes us into the the area of that was then, this is now. Because what you experienced then resides in you now and and it and can be can be triggered. And I'm sure many people who are listening will say, I can identify with that. Yes, I can. Well, that's a good thing because it's saying, yes, there's a connection, but it doesn't have to stay that way. But it's certainly something to think about. Now, what helps isn't necessarily perfection, it's about noticing what's being carried, understanding its origins, and creating space for reflection and really allowing the parent to be supported as well, because when a parent feels held, not judged, understood, they're more able to hold their child. And the the aim isn't about trying to remove all the difficulty, but I suppose it's about ensuring that the child doesn't have to carry it along. Because children will always carry something. The question is whether they're carrying their own experience or something that was never meant to be theirs. So when the parents carry when what sorry, when what parents carry can finally be held by them, children are no longer required to carry it for them. On a final note, a little girl, I saw a little girl and her mother, and very recently, and they this is a family who are have been going through and are still going through an incredibly difficult time. And the mother was talking about something that she she had to attend that was quite important, a meeting that was quite important. And the little girl said, Can I come with you? And I said to her, I think that's a meeting for grown-ups, but you want to go, and she said, Yes, because if if mummy, if mummy gets upset, I can be there to help her. This little girl's about seven. And it occurred to me, you know, this child, this this child was so attuned, understandably, given the whole situation. I mean, the mother she was she was wonderful. She just said, you know, that's the sweetest thing you could say, but it's okay because I've got a grown-up coming with me, and it's fine, you know, it's alright. Which I thought was a perfect response because she was acknowledging the child's uh what the child was experiencing, but also that generosity, but she also maintained the boundary. No, you're the small person, and that's okay, you be the small person, I'll be the grown-up. So it's not your job to look after me. I hope this series has been helpful, and I will be coming back with something slightly different soon, and it's about safeguarding. And the reason I'm doing this series on safeguarding is that there is a lot of mythology about what safeguarding means. It is actually not a punitive process, that's not its intention at all. But I want to talk about safeguarding from the point of view of what it is, what its origins are, why those things are important to remember compared to, say, 40 years ago, and the ways in which the safeguarding process works, what the definitions of safeguarding are, and how these things then develop. And a lot of parents have understandably the notion that safeguarding equals having their children taken away because they're bad, the parents are bad people. Well, the good news is that's not how it works. So I'll be back soon with episode one what is safeguarding. Thank you for listening.