It was back in January that I finally got around to reading (and finishing) Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive by Donald J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell. I decided to read this book after reading an interview with the author, Donald Siegel, on Salon.com. (You can read it here, though you may have to go some rigamarole or other.
For example, this bit:
The first thing a parent should understand is the difference between right brain and left brain. So much of what happens in our culture promotes left hemisphere emphasis: language, logic, linear thinking. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is about your body, it’s about nonverbal signals: eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, your gestures, the timing and intensity of your response, how you hold the posture of your body. One of the exciting things about having a baby is that babies are almost totally dominant in their right hemispheres. And you’re going to relate to them nonverbally. So it’s an opportunity actually to start increasing your awareness of your own sensations, your nonverbal cuing into your child.
My motivation for reading the book had more to do with wanting to understand how the brain works and develops than with a place of needing to learn how to parent properly. (Which, parenting, is not something I’m opposed to doing at some point, but I’d rather wait a bit longer, first.) There was some very interesting stuff here about brain development–specifically, that the quality of a child’s interactions with its parents actually effect the physical development of its brain. To which I can only say, Wow!
It’s a strange thing, reading and thinking about how the brain works and, while reading this book, there were moments when I had strange feelings of what I might call cognitive dissonance or empathy. Times when I would find my brain mirroring the state of the brain activity being described. It was very, very odd and it made me wonder if I am just very suggestible or if there was something else to it.
Like paying close attention to ones own heartbeats, thinking about ones own brain processes can become all topsy-turvy.