Night Fright Resolved in the Family System

Who knew that by my husband and I talking about our current fears our daughter would no longer be afraid to go to bed! It all started one night when our daughter was six years old and she got up during the night and could not find us in the house. We were in the very back of our basement on the computer, but when she called down there we didn’t hear her. She was really scared and eventually made her way back there to find us. But it started a pattern where every night when we put her to bed she was afraid and she wanted to know where we were going to be in the house or tell us we couldn’t leave the second floor.

We tried reasoning with her and telling her we wouldn’t leave her alone and that we would be somewhere in the house. She would cry and beg us not to leave. We set up a system where we put a stuffed animal on the top of the stairs to let her know we left the floor. None of it made a difference.

We brought the issue into our parenting coaching session with Dr. Bob Wright and we were surprised that rather than try and figure out what was wrong with her, he asked how the two of us were doing and what we were afraid of but not talking about. What did this have to do with our daughter’s night fright? Knowing a bit about family systems I understood that sometimes if feelings are being withheld in the system someone else will play those feelings out. It turns out that once we started talking my husband and had a lot we were afraid of. He had just started his own company and I had recently gone back to work after having been a stay at home mom for four years. These were exciting changes but we were ignoring the fear we were also experiencing. Once we started openly expressing this fear with each other and talking as a family acknowledging the changes that were going on my daughter’s fears literally stopped! She had unconsciously been playing out the fear in the family system. So now, whenever one of our daughters starts acting out in some way we look at what is going on with each other as the first step in dealing with it.