ABSTRACT
This book is designed to enable adults to help children whose emotional well-being is being adversely affected by troubled parents. These are children who live with the burden of having to navigate their parents’ raw or tormented emotional states, often leaving them with a mass of painful feelings and a chaotic disturbing world. When parents are preoccupied with their own troubles, they are often unable to address effectively their child’s relational and emotional needs − for example, soothing, validating, attunement, co-adventure and interactive play. As a result, children are left self-helping, which all too often means drugs, drink, self-harm, depression, anxiety, eating disorders or problems with anger in the teenage years.
