Change Your Brain Every Day - What Impact Can a Parent’s Mental Health Have on their Child?

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

This week’s series of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast is all about daddy issues. In this episode, Dr. Amen and Tana Amen explore the ways a father’s brain health issues can affect his children. Whether a father suffers from OCD, Depression, ADD, or certain other genetic vulnerabilities, it’s important to look not only at how these conditions affect the father, but also how they shape the behavior of future generations.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. This is Daddy Issues Week, and I told you a little bit about mine. In this podcast, we want you to ask yourself, how did my dad's mental health, brain health impact my life?

I think that would be a good question for them to begin to ponder. Yeah. And you have some reviews you want to read. Just one short one. This is by Chen Sheng. It's from my YouTube channel. You are touching my soul and spirit. Thank you. So we post the podcast on a few places and they can access it and then pick it up. So.

So how did your father's mental health, brain health affect your life? No, this is really interesting. And I think that it's important for us to sort of touch on this because, so same dad, but there's me and my two half sisters and it affected us in extremely different ways. So I think it's because of the different, because we had different mothers as well. So I think it can be different. But if you talk to my sisters, the impact that my dad and his erratic behavior had on them was significantly worse. Well, they lived with him. Right. And you didn't. You only visited periodically.

So dose exposure. Very true. So how much exposure you got. So your dad might be schizophrenic, but if he raised you day in and day out, that left a much more intense lasting negative imprint perhaps than if he wasn't in the picture at all or only periodically. So dose response is really, I mean, that really does matter. So let's talk about some of the issues that the people we deal with and talk to, some of those issues that-

Well, I mean, as a psychiatrist for 40 years, this has been one of the major themes in my practice is not only how'd you get along with your mom, but how'd you get on with your dad? And- Isn't this really important for girls and how they go into relationships with men? It is, but it's also really important for boys about how they actually feel about themselves. Okay. That if you can never please your father, you often other people can't please you. Oh, interesting. Because you have this pain inside.

And we have talked about Eckhart Tolle's concept of the pain body, the sum of all the unresolved hurts you have that can get triggered at a moment's notice without anybody doing anything but looking at you a funny way because they had gas. And you can often be triggered for no clear rational reason because internally you have a lot of unresolved pain. And so, for example, when I was a young medical student, great psychiatrist we came to find out um and she denied this for a long time is that she grew up in a severely abusive alcoholic isn't it weird how you deny things she had such shame and felt so disloyal saying that he was an alcoholic even

though the definition of an alcoholic. So if you ever wonder if you're an alcoholic, it's your drinking gets you into trouble and then you do it again. It's like you don't learn that this behavior, in this case alcohol, is potentially toxic to your health, your work, your relationships, or your relationship with the law. And the police had been called multiple times, ended up getting divorced. There was a lot of drama and chaos around the relationship with her father. And so you know what it's like to have addiction around you and the impact that that has on children. Well, it's not true. My dad actually did have issues with substances. But you know in your extended family the impact on children. And what happens

is deep in your brain, there's a part of the brain called the limbic system. It's your emotional brain. And when you live in an unpredictable environment where there's moments of holy terror, right? Your dad beating your mom or him beating you or embarrassing you by the whole neighborhood knows that there's trouble in your house. Even though that may only happen 2% of the time, you never know when it's going to happen. And so it activates your emotional brain and pretty soon you're always watching for bad things to happen. And it changes your brain. And unless you purposefully do something to change it back, it can always be like that. Yeah, but some of us don't want to. Yes, I know you don't want to.

Because we don't trust that it – yeah, no. I mean, I don't live in a state of fear, but I live in a state of preparation. But your emotional brain is chronically heightened. Yeah, I'm never going to stop that. Because of the craziness you grew up in. Yeah, but I also was attacked on the street and that had nothing to do with it. So there's just this idea that it's not safe. What do you mean it had nothing to do with it? It took your already heightened emotional brain. No, no, no.

I mean it had nothing to do with my parents. And it made it worse. Right. But see, we are a sum of all the things that have happened to us and how we reacted to all the things that happened to us. So getting back to the question, what's the impact? How was your dad's mental health, brain health, and how did that impact you? I like that. And also though, what about stepdads? It's who's the primary male figure in your life. So your biological father was mostly gone, except for a couple of weeks in the summer. But your stepdad was very important to you, even though perhaps he didn't get an A for being a stepdad was very important to you, even though perhaps he didn't get an A for being a stepdad. But he ended up having a huge impact on me, whether it was good or not is a whole other question.

So stepdads are very important. And so I have an adopted child and his biological father was abusive abusive right was adb from hell was his mother said she had to chain him not literally but to the chair at night so he'd do his homework and had been was abusive to his wife. And when my adopted son was nine, he shot and killed himself. And given that Antony, my son, who's now 42, hard to believe, was raised primarily by me. He didn't have nearly the same level of trouble that his biological father did. So in my case, I had a stepfather who was a little bit crazy. I mean, although he did have

a big impact on my life. But for people whose fathers, maybe you have daddy issues because your dad is either absent, he's an alcoholic, he's abusive. But if you have a stepfather who's actually stable, consistent, and loving, I'm going to guess it can make a big difference. It helps to ameliorate it. Right. And so what are some of the issues that can really cause trouble for a child if the dad has OCD? There's so much time spent around negative thoughts and rituals, that obsessions, compulsions, that it's chronically stressful for the children. How does it present that in children? That's why if you have a problem, you want to get it treated so that the stress doesn't roll downhill, if you will.

But how do these things present in people later? If your father was an alcoholic, if your father had OCD, if your father was severely depressed, what ends up happening to people later? Well, sometimes they develop empathy and become therapists or psychiatrists or psychologists. Sometimes they feel damaged or defective because of what they grew up in and their self-esteem really takes a negative hit. Sometimes they become superstitious. So if you have an OCD parent, it's like, well, if I do this, then bad things will happen because they got that modeling. There's also, if you have genetic vulnerability, well, you're more likely to struggle with some of those problems unless you get serious about brain health. So yes, depression runs in families, but not always.

What about attachment? It can significantly affect attachment because your primary attachments were unpredictable. And that may mean when you're in a really good relationship and everything's fine, you may actually unconsciously stir up trouble. Or just not believe that it's, maybe it's not your template of what is normal. Like when I met you, I kept thinking you were manipulative because I'm like, nobody's that nice. I am manipulative. Well, everybody's manipulative. I meant in a negative way. But it's because if you grew up in chaos. I repeat this all the time for my patients, which is we're all out for ourselves. Right.

It's just the more sophisticated you are, the harder it is to tell. And I am naturally a very nice person. You are. But I'm really nice to you because I love you. But if you grew up in chaos, this is one. So we started off with a question and we always end with a challenge. And this is probably going to be one of my challenges. If you grew up in chaos, you may not have a template set for what's normal and healthy and nice, right? Like I didn't. So that wasn't my template for how a relationship or a man is. I mean, my, my examples growing up were insane.

So of what it should be like. So when someone was overly nice to me, um, overly nice to me, see how even I phrased it, um, it felt, um, like I was waiting for the other shoe to fall always. And so I actually had to consciously do therapy on that and fix my picture in my head, which you can do. It's actually not that hard, but you have to be conscious about it. So if you can answer that question, how did your dad's mental health, brain health impact you? And well, what can you do about it? And you just said in a very powerful way is you can change your template and it doesn't just happen overnight. It wasn't that hard. It just takes time.

But it takes focus on what do you want? Is this helpful? Is this healthy for you to do? And it starts with awareness. So please, you know, link to this podcast, share it with your friends on brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. And we want to hear your comments. Leave a question for us.

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