I recently shared with Good Housekeeping my thoughts on the pros and cons of being a highly sensitive parent.
We so often talk about managing our own emotions before we can model and guide children through theirs that it can be easy to forget that for some highly sensitive adults, it can be more difficult than for others.
Being a highly emotional person can be both a superpower and a challenge when it comes to parenting. Let’s explore how and why this matters when emotions run high—for everyone.
Highly emotional parents typically are very sensitive to and able to connect with the emotions of others – their children, spouse, friends and family members. Their sensitivity enables them not only to tune into the emotions of others, but also with their own emotions. This sensitivity provides for the building of empathy, which is necessary for promoting understanding and providing support of their children’s needs and feelings. When sensitivity and empathy are combined with emotional awareness, constructive expression and emotional regulation, the parent’s emotional competence becomes a model for fostering emotional intelligence in their children.
Although highly emotional parents feel things strongly, enabling them to recognize and be in touch with the emotions of others, sometimes they’re not able to manage these overwhelming emotions nor have the self-reflection needed to be aware of what’s causing the emotions.
Emotional dysregulation often is a problem and not having the skills and experience in talking about what’s causing the problem in themselves or others can create heightened anxiety and an emotionally volatile and inconsistent environment. This inconsistent environment leads to insecurity, confusion and poor boundaries between the parent and child. Big emotions can elicit big reactions, which can result in the flight/fight /freeze reaction— none of which solves the problem. These “fight or flight” reactions only bring issues to a temporary end without resolution – until the next time it raises its anxious, confused and uncertain head - and it will.
A helpful, reflective question parents can ask themselves during heat-of-the-moment parenting is: am I escalating or de-escalating the emotional intensity of this situation? If you find yourself escalating the situation, take a deep breath, a step back, count to ten and self-reflect.
While being a highly emotional person has its positives, it’s also important to build and practice self-reflection, the process of thinking about oneself - our thoughts, feelings and behavior. Self-reflection leads to self-awareness - our ability to recognize and understand these aspects of ourselves, which is at the heart in fostering one’s own emotional intelligence and competence. Self-awareness leads to understanding what is behind the emotion. Asking yourself ‘what is making me feel this way’ helps to recognize and identify a reason for the feeling. Once identified, known and understood provides you with the information needed to deal with the issue at hand.
By understanding what’s causing the emotion, parents can then respond rather than just react, which allows for healthy conversations about what caused the emotions and how to manage and resolve the problem. Going from experiencing a big emotion that can leave you feeling out of control and exhausted to a managed emotion that leaves you feeling and being in control is truly life changing, from being a prisoner of your emotions to being the boss of your emotions.
It’s also helpful to keep in mind that when your brain is hijacked by big emotions, it impairs thinking and interferes with decision-making, problem solving and learning. The solution to calming an emotionally dysregulated and overwhelmed brain involves the following steps
Becoming aware of what the emotion is and what’s causing the emotion allows for behavioral change and resolution of the problem.
At the end of the day, we want to be the boss of our own emotions and not let our emotions be the boss of us—the same thing we want to be able to promote, foster and model for our children.
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