In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitabl

She develops an attitude of anxious expectation regarding her needs and the world. Emotional deprivation can have the same effect. If the child is very heart-centered and needs to feel loved in each moment, but her parents withdraw their heart connection whenever they are displeased or just busy with something else, the child feels emotionally aban

Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or aggr