How Emotional Awareness Can Help Resolve Parent-Child Conflict – Interview with Adekemi Oguntala

Dr. O, aka Adekemi Oguntala, MD, is known for her dynamic speaking engagements, gifted connections she makes with teens, and inspirational published work about emotional education, medical conditions, and nutritional health. She is best known for her work that changes the dynamic between parents and teens, which has a ripple effect on the family. While traditional medicine aims to diagnose and treat, her focus has been to educate and heal her patients both emotionally and physically. She creates internal motivation in her clients that has reduced medication for chronic illness and enriched the relationships her clients have with themselves and others. She is so passionate about her work that others find it hard not to consider how her words can change their lives as well.

In this interview, Dr. O explains emotional education and its impact on the parent-teen dynamic. She explores how emotional health shapes identity, behaviour, anxiety, chronic illness, coping skills, and family connection.

Adekemi Oguntala, TheTeenDoc

“You can’t develop shame on your own. It is always something that comes in our interaction with someone else."

What first inspired you to work with teens?

Babies are loved. Teens, not so much. I felt like teens needed better PR, and I really felt like I could do that, make teens lovable, not feared. If not lovable, then at least understood. What I did not realise at the time was that the teens in the clinic room or my private practice would not always look like teenagers. They would become the metaphorical or childhood teen of their parents, caretakers, or colleagues with whom I worked.

Understanding the first teen, which appears when we are about 1 to 2 years old, and then the second teen, between the ages of 9 and 26, allowed me to understand many people around me so much better that it changed the way I practise being human and the way I practise medicine.

What have teens taught you over the years that adults often miss?

Adults “miss” the part of themselves that is still in their teen. In particular, they try to forget what it was, and is, like to be a teen in general. Teens become an embodiment of the unprocessed emotions that a parent could not express to their own parent.

Here’s an example. A teen wants to do something their way. They feel becoming who they want to become, even if it means moving away from home, is the right thing to do. They can see their path. A parent says, “No. Stay here near your family. Why would you want to leave?” The teen feels the parent has always asked for proximity to family at all costs. It is the first priority. So they argue over opportunities such as scholarships to attend schools in other states or countries.

I ask the parent, “What happened when you were a teen? Why didn’t you leave?” The mother is taken aback. She does not expect this question. She gets quiet and realises she was never allowed to consider what she wanted because she was the only girl and was expected to take care of her emotionally controlling and needy mother.

She tried to defy her mother and leave, but ended up coming back without completing school. The bond was too strong and the guilt overwhelming. The issue was never this teen. It actually had nothing to do with the teen.

This mother was reliving her childhood and trying to protect her child from being ostracised by the family for leaving for college. Her mother made her feel immense guilt for choosing a school just 45 minutes away. Her teen wanting to leave for college, this time requiring a plane ticket, reminded the mother of the shame and guilt she felt for wanting something for herself when she was younger.

My client’s mother would have sworn she was trying to protect her daughter, but in reality, she was acting from the perspective of her own inner teen, who feared loneliness and abandonment as her daughter prepared to leave. This parent-child dynamic seems like it is between a mother and daughter, but if you look a little deeper, it is really about the mother and her enmeshment with her own mother.

Why do you believe emotional awareness is so important for teens today?

I think emotional awareness is critical for life. I do not mean to sound hyperbolic. Animals survive in the wild because they learn to trust their body’s nervous system. Animals raised in captivity and then released into the wild can struggle because they have not learned how to trust their instincts. They trusted someone else to care for them.

This same dynamic happens with teens. They have to trust a caretaker to survive, and this can have a devastating impact when the adult has poor instincts and fears everything. The caretaker’s fear of the world causes them to repeatedly invalidate their teen’s decisions through rules, restrictions, and fear-based messages about what those choices mean regarding the kind of person they are.

For the teen who grows up in a household where they are validated, even when the parent disagrees, their intuition about themselves becomes much stronger. This teen learns to trust not others, but themselves. They are not manipulated as easily. They recognise danger signs earlier. They are curious and capable of critical thinking. They know themselves better and understand their value and impact.

They seem mature, not because they learned to drive at 10 years old due to having alcoholic parents, but because they understand how a moment fits into a larger picture. That type of awareness is priceless.

What do parents most often misunderstand about teen behaviour?

Parents most often misunderstand that their teen’s behaviour makes sense. Stay with me. If you are a toddler and accidentally hit your dad in the eye, it can hurt. An emotionally immature father may become angry because the punch caught him off guard and caused pain. He forgets this is a toddler and reacts by yelling and swearing.

For the rest of the night, he avoids the toddler. No one considers how frightened the toddler is in that moment. The toddler may even look shocked, if someone is paying attention, and start crying in response to the outburst. I have heard parents describe their toddler’s tears as manipulation or selfishness. So no one bothers to check on the child.

But that interpretation is inaccurate. No toddler understands they can hurt such a large adult. They are simply playing and interacting. What often happens next is that the father holds or plays with the toddler less. He gives them nicknames like “slugger” and offers little warmth or connection.

The toddler continues trying to approach the father, but the interaction remains minimal. As the years pass, nothing changes. The child, now a tween, starts to isolate from their father. They do not share secrets. They do not seek advice. They resent that this person is their father because what kind of father treats their child like a stranger?

What the parents see is an insolent child. They complain that the child does not talk or engage with them. Meanwhile, a younger sibling born a few years later receives more attention and affection. The father gives much of his energy to that child. They become best friends.

This favouritism is witnessed by both parents, but the mother either cannot change the father’s behaviour or feels similarly herself. As a result, the oldest child becomes isolated, not just from the father, but from the family as a whole. How is it possible, knowing what happened, to believe this teen’s hurt, disguised as anger, does not make sense?

I uncover incidents like this in my clients’ lives. These experiences help explain the teen’s pain, hopefully not only to parents and siblings, but more importantly to the teen. The teen is the most important person for whom the story must come together because, without understanding and feeling something for their own story, they will lack the agency to authentically be themselves with others.

Both the parents and the teen may feel the original incident was insignificant and not worth remembering. However, look at the impact. There are countless moments like this in the lives of my clients. These experiences contribute to misunderstandings and ongoing suffering in the form of anxiety, depression, and chronic illness.

What both parents and teens often fail to recognise is the impact of not understanding why they behave the way they do.

How is social media affecting teen self-worth right now?

In some ways, social media is a scapegoat because it is exceptionally good at exploiting many of the reasons people seek escapism. However, I want to be precise in how I describe what social media is doing. A “chicken and egg” phenomenon is occurring.

For the student or person who already does not feel good enough, social media becomes an opportunity to amplify those feelings through comparison, bullying, manipulation, and self-harm, among other things. In the hands of someone struggling with self-worth, social media becomes another form of drug that can accelerate the shame spiral.

In reality, social media is a distraction, much like food, exercise, achievement, or other coping mechanisms. What I try to help people understand is that they are often using social media to avoid feeling what they are actually feeling, some version of shame, worthlessness, loneliness, rejection, or a combination of these emotions.

Unless you are mindful of how something or someone makes you feel, and curious about it, emotions can take over your body very quickly. We engage in behaviours such as scrolling social media to eliminate uncomfortable sensations, but we fail to recognise that these sensations are emotions.

This lack of emotional awareness was demonstrated in the work of Brene Brown, who noted that the average person can identify only a small number of emotions. I ask people all the time what they do when they feel sad or anxious, and they tell me they never feel sad or anxious.

Humans can experience hundreds of emotional states throughout a day, often several at the same time. So when someone tells me they never feel sad or anxious, I know it is not because they are being dishonest. It is because they are unaware.

Ignorance, combined with shame about having emotions like sadness and not knowing what to do with them, creates a sense of helplessness. That helplessness can feel like weakness. The reason emotions are so complex is that we often experience more than one at a time.

You have to be taught what to do with emotions, and most parents were never taught themselves. As a result, many people inherit a generational pattern of emotional unawareness, sometimes referred to as alexithymia.

Social media did not create that problem, but it certainly capitalised on it. The vast majority of teens and adults were never taught how to question what they were feeling while scrolling through content designed to trigger comparison, self-criticism, and emotional reactivity.

What is one simple way parents can improve communication with their teen?

A.B.C. Always Be Curious. We are accusatory or sarcastic, but we are rarely genuinely curious. Even when we ask the question about why a teen did something, it comes out more as exasperation, not a desire to understand. Here’s the gag, if you understand how teens think, you know they often do not have an answer because something, an emotion, hit them in that moment and they performed a behavior, such as fidgeting or being silent, to keep them safe or distract from a random vulnerable thought in their head.

Apropos of the sarcasm, there is tone. The tone makes curiosity a snide remark. Teens already have brains that perceive the adult face as mean or angry even when it is not, so to add a tone like, “What the hell did you do that for?” is too much for teens to have the confidence to be vulnerable enough to explain why they did something that might be rooted in not feeling cool enough, smart enough, or pretty enough. It takes radical amounts of vulnerability to admit we are feeling this way, so instead we use behavior like humor, people-pleasing, or being super smart or successful to hide the vulnerability.

These feelings are rooted in the attachment to caretakers. You can’t develop shame on your own. It is always something that comes in our interaction with someone else.

I mentioned that most parents are not taught how to understand emotion, and as a result, they form different types of attachment to their children. The main attachments are secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. The secure attachment is a caretaker who shows up consistently and reliably most of the time in an emotional way. The anxious attachment has a parent who inconsistently shows up emotionally, so we struggle to become the person who can get the caregiver to show up consistently to meet our needs. The avoidant attachment shows more signs of alexithymia. They do not understand emotion, so they tend to be aloof parents who display minimal, if any, emotion. They often show neglect in how they interact with others, including children and partners who struggle to bend over backwards for a crumb of emotional connection.

Finally, the disorganized attachment has the disadvantage of having the child rely on a caretaker for their physical and emotional needs while being afraid of the caretaker's treatment towards them. As children, we blame ourselves for the relationship with our caretaker, and we never think there is something wrong with the caretaker. Even as these thoughts sneak in, we ruminate and forget the violent behavior through dissociation and confusion. It allows us to block out that someone is not safe so we can be cared for. We are children. We need a caretaker to survive. But, to be clear, it is to survive. It has nothing to do with any of that love and loyalty to family stuff. We are practical as children. We need adults to survive.

Sadly, when we are not allowed to be a separate person, called individuation, who learns about ourselves, we maintain that childlike state with complete dependence on the caretaker. We place the caretaker's needs first and lose our separateness to be who they want us to be, which is enmeshment. This means despite being chronologically in their 20s or 40s, we can observe dependent or childlike behaviors, even using terms that one would use between a parent and child. Prince describes this beautifully in Kiss with his line, “Act your age, not your shoe size.” The inability to understand this concept of enmeshment confuses bystanders who watch the abused return to the relationship time and time again. The person is not just a partner, but a parent.

So being emotionally curious allows us to discover concepts like attachment theory and shame, and we can use this to be curious and improve the attachment to our children so they are validated for who they are, not who someone needs them to be.

What do you mean when you say, “validation is not permission”?

We all have a part of us that can react to what is new or unfamiliar. For our safety, we want what is familiar. So when teens behave in ways that seem antithetical to their parents, parents can default to invalidating the teen by judging and/or criticizing their behavior. This shaming behavior of criticism and judgment by caretakers creates self-distrust and a poor caretaker-child relationship. This is the anatomy of an anxious or insecure attachment with caretakers. It makes the child have to trust the caretaker instead of themselves.

If we want the teen to feel confident, they need only be curious about themselves so they can know themselves well. To do this, the teen needs a caretaker who can validate their experience. This concept always makes me think of Bruce Springsteen, who struggled in his relationship with his father. His dad wanted him to cut his hair short and be responsible by going into the service. It is his mom who bought him his first guitar with the money she made and encouraged Bruce to be himself. Still, despite her unconditional support, it was his dad’s approval that impacted him so much. It was Bruce’s inability to fully trust himself, still longing for his dad’s validation or approval, that created years of turmoil for him. So when Bruce wins his Academy Award for the song he wrote for the movie Philadelphia, the first thing he does is go home and place the award on the kitchen table as if to ask, now am I good enough for the choices I made about my life?

Bruce had no idea that his dad’s disapproval was about his own dad’s disappointment in himself, and most likely seeing Bruce have the courage to do things despite not having his dad’s approval caused his dad so much suffering through the emotion envy, where we see something someone else has or can do and we dislike them for it. We want to sabotage it because we cannot or could not have it. Bruce absorbed his dad’s shame about his dad’s father-son relationship and led a life doing things that he thought would bring him approval.

The truth is, had his dad realized how he was making Bruce feel, the way he felt as a kid, he most likely would have realized that he didn't need to say, “I permit you to be a singer-songwriter,” if he had anxiety about the chances he would be successful. But what Bruce’s dad could have done, which probably would have meant the world to a younger Bruce, was to validate Bruce’s choice. He could have said, “I see this means a lot to you, and I can see how hard you work at it and how much joy it brings you. I may not understand it, but I can absolutely see what it brings out of you. So keep at it.” Validation, without permission.

What have you learned about the connection between shame and self-worth?

Before I understood the difference between self-worth and self-esteem, I thought it was what the self-help books and inspirational speakers were saying about doing things that made you feel better when you felt bad. Those books focused on using language to focus and work hard through affirmations and cognitive change. I have learned a lot over the years and understand the power of shame.

I will even admit that when I first heard Brené Brown eloquently define shame in her TED Talk, I got that it was feeling bad about yourself and naively thought I understood what shame was. Then, my kid said something to me that would change the textbook definition of shame to a visceral or body-changing definition, which clarified its connection to self-worth. They said, “Shame makes you feel like trash.” I felt this in my body. It made me instantly understand the aggressiveness to hide the shame and the behavior that was so determined to overcome it. It helped me understand why, in response to shame, people needed to escape with activities, food, or substances, and it helped me understand why it caused people to dissociate and collapse with the inability to do anything, even things that felt relatively simple.

Self-worth is about understanding that you, yourself, are worthy of love and belonging. This means that you are not worth how you are treated by others. It is also not the same as narcissism or other emotionally unavailable coping mechanisms of using external gratification to make you feel good enough in minuscule moments, such as competition, grades, the school you get into, material possessions, or consumption. Inherent in self-worth is radical amounts of self-compassion. Notice this is a gift you give yourself and not one that you rely on others to give you.

This was never explained to me like this when I was a new clinician. So, I could never understand why a teen, despite not wanting their parents to discover they were sexually active, would continue to be sexually active without birth control. I felt like if you don’t want them to know, then the worst way for them to find out is because you are pregnant. But teens would refuse until I understood the concepts of shame.

Now, I know the desire for parental approval or validation made them abide by certain rules their parents had and then compartmentalize the behavior so they could have deniability. If I am not on birth control, then I am not the unlovable child whom my parents can’t trust and who doesn't listen. I developed way more compassion for why it was important to have the teen compartmentalize or place in different parts of their psyche who they were, potential self-worth, and who they wanted their parents to believe they were because of the longing for approval, self-esteem and shame.

Self-compassion is the ability to be imperfect and still see yourself as worthy. It turns out we are more likely to complete a hard task if we are self-compassionate because we do not identify with the mistakes, meaning we don’t think that if we lose then we are a loser. This means we can look at what went wrong and learn from it in order to get it right. This is what Carol Dweck was explaining in her two modes of mindset, fixed and growth mindsets.

We can look at relationships, academic and personal problems, political and social challenges, all with compassion, being able to discern the reality while having compassion for both sides. This is the crux of what makes it difficult to let go of our beliefs. We identify with them and feel we are bad for having believed them, so instead of letting them go, we cling tighter. This prevents us from healing from devastating events and circumstances by ensuring that our suffering matters.

Well, we cannot heal when we believe we are broken or bad for choosing the wrong belief, such as the belief someone tells us is wrong, inaccurate, and even morally wrong. We don't hear that our beliefs are misinformed. We hear that we are the scum of the earth. We hear that we are trash. This is what makes us repel the information and compartmentalize our self-esteem about the choice by denial and aggressive pushback. We do this with all kinds of things, not just the history of the country, but the history of us.

When I discuss someone’s childhood, the awareness that they were neglected as children is overwhelming at first, but they start to make sense to themselves, and as they do this, their percentage of self-compassion towards themselves rises first, and later, towards their abuser. This is the best of both worlds. Before the acknowledgement of their own worthiness, they only had understanding for the abuser, permitting them to be abused repeatedly. After increasing self-compassion, they have compassion for themselves as well, so they have no desire to change the other person as we do when we are in shame, but a willingness to accept the person as they are while choosing to engage or not, depending on how they are feeling.

There was no more guilt or obligation to be someone the other person could abuse in order to make them happy. Sure, the other person might not have liked their independence, but there is no yelling or hatred or fighting this way. There is peace. So the amazing gift of imperfection, a term used by Brené Brown, is not just self-worth, but the inherent decrease in shame associated with it because of the inevitable self-compassion embedded in the words self-worth. It has been such an honor to walk people through this process.

What is one message you hope every teen and parent remembers after reading this interview?

My hope is that, despite the work necessary to change automated behaviors, everything we do is for a good reason, even if the behavior is not desired by us. We have the ability to emotionally learn and grow, even if we make the choice not to. So change is possible. Changing how you see your behaviors has a lot to do with it. It’s not just who you are, but what you learned to do in order to keep yourself safe.

I’ve worked with kids on the spectrum or with diagnoses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as well as medical conditions like multiple sclerosis, irritable bowel syndrome, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes, and there has always been an ability to shift behaviors and emotional awareness when someone wants to. I don’t think all clinicians can do it, and that is based on people telling me they’ve worked with someone for years and didn’t realise they could feel so much better.

I’m always sceptical of someone who makes big promises, I don’t often believe they can deliver. Here, I actually know what prevents outcomes, and I believe I’m really good at this type of change. So if you are willing to take a chance on yourself, I can authentically help you quiet the chatter in your head and feel better.

My clients often wonder, after a month of work and they are starting to get it, what their life would have been like had they met me five years ago. If you are reading this article, reach out here and schedule a free consultation. You will never have to wonder, you can just start now. So if you’re ready, call or email for a free consultation. You literally have nothing to lose.

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