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

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

To avoid the bad feelings, the child slowly learns to identify only with what he thinks of as “good” and to deny anything “bad” as part of who he is. He actually starts limiting his identity to only include what he has come to believe is “acceptable” in the eyes of his parents. Yet another child may despair altogether of getting any good strokes fr