The Conscious Parent

explain, “No matter how you feel, you simply can’t act out in this way.
Let’s find another way to communicate how you feel.” You can then
teach your children to communicate their feelings in a direct manner
instead of indirectly by acting out.
If children are unable to find a means to express themselves in a direct
manner, their mind and body find other means of expression. Split off
from their internal world, they are driven to seek what feel like their
“missing pieces” elsewhere. This tends to take the form of self-
destructive behavior or behavior that harms others.
When children become excessively clingy, defiant, begin to steal, cut
themselves, stop bathing, or fail at school, these are all signs that
something is amiss with their emotions. Often a child’s emotional state
manifests in symptoms associated with the body, such as migraines,
stomachache, or panic attacks. This happens when children have become
so split off from their real feelings that they have overloaded their body
with unexpressed emotion. They may have become so overwhelmed in
the role of pleasers or overachievers— or, in contrast, as rebels and “bad
children”—that they finally collapse, with their body bearing the brunt
of the collapse.
As parents, we tend to react anxiously when faced with this secondary
means of attention-seeking. For example, if our child begins to fail in
school, we become angry and controlling. If our child is experiencing an
inordinate number of physical problems, we take them to see specialist
after specialist. With physical symptoms, the situation is particularly
tricky because there’s always the possibility that such symptoms have a
physical cause. The difficulty is that we may inadvertently reinforce our