“I Had a Great Childhood” — So Why Do I Fall Apart Every Time My Baby Cries?
“I had a great childhood.”
It’s one of the most common things I hear from new and expecting parents in my office - usually said right before they tell me that their body goes into full dysregulation the moment their baby starts to cry.
Racing heart. Tight chest. The urge to either fix it immediately or, honestly, walk out of the room. And then the guilt that follows, because on paper, nothing about their childhood explains this reaction.
If this is you, I want you to hear something clearly: a “good” childhood and an unmet childhood aren’t mutually exclusive.
You Can Have Had Everything You Needed - and Still Feel Something Is Missing
Shelter. Food. Love. Safety. A childhood that, by every external measure, was good - even great.
And still, somewhere along the way, no one attuned to your big feelings the way you’re now being asked to attune to your baby’s.
Attunement isn’t the same thing as care. It’s the specific experience of having another person notice what you’re feeling, stay with you in it, and help your body find its way back to calm - over and over, thousands of times, until your nervous system learns how to do it on its own.
Plenty of loving, well-intentioned parents didn’t have that modeled for them either. So they couldn’t hand it down. Not because they didn’t love you - because no one ever gave it to them.
Why This Shows Up Now, in Parenthood
This is what happens when your nervous system never got to practice being regulated by someone else: it doesn’t know what to do now that it’s being asked to regulate someone new.
Your baby’s cry isn’t just a sound. For your nervous system, it can be an alarm - one that reaches back further than conscious memory, into a body that’s still holding the imprint of needing to be soothed and not quite knowing how that worked, or if it worked at all.
This is why so many new parents are blindsided by their own reactions. They expected to feel exhausted. They didn’t expect to feel this - young, panicked, or shut down, over something as ordinary as a crying baby.
The Work I Do With Clients
This is a lot of what I help clients with, using two approaches together:
Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you get curious about the parts of you that show up when your baby cries - the panicked part, the shut-down part, the part that wants to run - instead of judging them. Every one of those parts developed for a reason. IFS helps you understand what that reason was, and build a different relationship with it.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps you actually process the original moments those parts are still protecting you from — even moments you don’t have clear memories of, or moments that don’t look “traumatic” on paper - so they stop hijacking the present.
Together, this work helps your nervous system finally learn what it didn’t get to practice the first time around: that big feelings can be met, tolerated, and soothed, without anyone falling apart or disappearing.
You Don’t Need a “Bad” Childhood to Deserve Support
You don’t need a dramatic story to justify getting help. You just need a nervous system that’s asking for something it never got - and that is more than enough of a reason.
If you’ve been quietly wondering why parenthood is bringing up more than you expected, even though “nothing bad happened” to you, I’d love to help you build that awareness before it’s needed most.
Ready to Talk?
👋🏻 Hi, I’m Andrea - a therapist for moms, a mother of two, and someone deeply committed to using EMDR and IFS to support parents through pregnancy, postpartum, and the transition into parenthood.
If you’re in Washington state and interested in EMDR or IFS, I’m currently accepting new clients.
☎️ Book a free 15-minute intro call to see if we’re a good fit.
