Dr. Dan Siegel on Conscious Parenting
Erik: It sounds like one of your starting points is something Freud kept coming back to, the idea that insight can free us from the hold the past has on us. Have I got that right?
Dan: More or less, though the word insight needs some care. Plenty of people hear it and think of pure intellectual understanding. That's part of it. But what I'm after goes further, and I'm fond of the phrase making sense, because it means actually feeling the senses of the body, and some of those won't ever translate cleanly into something you can reason about. Take a feeling of shame, or fear, or longing. If you let yourself register those sensations, the ones that were probably alive in you as a child, you start to crack open to the longing in your own child, to the vulnerability in your own child. So yes, it's insight, but insight of a kind that carries nonintellectual understanding inside it.
Dan: If that's how you mean the word, Erik, then it's about me sensing the whole of what I lived through and trying to hold it, to stay open to it in myself, when before I couldn't even sense it in my child. Vulnerability. Helplessness. If I was punished for showing those as a kid, I may not let myself feel them in my child now, and I'll come down hard on him, when what I actually need is to make room for the plain facts of being a child. We are vulnerable. We are helpless. Owning that lives more in the sensory side of making sense than in some tidy mental note of oh, now I understand it intellectually. The intellectual grasp is worth having. It just isn't sufficient on its own.
Erik: Right, exactly. That's where the thinking on insight has moved more recently, I think, that it isn't only the mind. It's body sensations and emotions too.
Dan: It isn't only the intellect, yes. When I say mind, for me that word already takes in the body sensations and everything with them. But I agree with your point: it's not the logical, language-bound, reasoned kind of knowing. It's a feeling that sits underneath words, and comes before them.