Podcast
Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour
Hosted by Kim Lee · EN
I am a Chid & Adolescent Psychotherapist. The podcast are educational and orientated towards parents. We cover a wide range of sometimes, tricky subjects, in the hope of reassuring parents that no matter how hard things may seem, there are things you can do.
Thank you.
Kim
38episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Whose Feeling Is This?
Jul 800:21:37Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailYou can start the day calm, talk to one person, and end up tense, guilty, or strangely hopeless. That shift is not always “just you.” We dig into a phenomenon we call emotional contamination: the way feelings move between people through tone, posture, breath, and unspoken cues, until you’re carrying an emotional state that may not fully belong to you.We walk through everyday examples, then connect them to the psychology behind emotional contagion, attachment, and nervous system attunement. From the first days of life, we borrow regulation from caregivers, which is how safety gets built into the brain over time. But the same pathway can spread anxiety, fear, and dysregulation in families, workplaces, friendships, and intimate relationships, especially when stress or conflict stays unspoken.We also introduce two therapy concepts with real-world power: transference and counter-transference. The past can quietly shape how we react to people in the present, and sometimes what we feel “with” someone is information about what they’re carrying. The turning point is learning the difference between empathy and absorption, so you can care without becoming responsible for emotions that aren’t yours.If you’ve ever wondered why certain relationships leave you exhausted or self-doubting, press play and try the question with us: whose feeling is this? Subscribe, share this with someone who takes on too much, and leave a review. What’s one situation where you want stronger emotional boundaries?
Transcribe →I can do better than that......
Jul 500:01:27Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailThis is just the intro....and verse 1.
Transcribe →The Boy Who Found His Anger
Jul 500:13:30Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailA kid who never raises his voice can look “easy” to the adults around him, but that quiet can be a carefully engineered survival plan. We tell a true story about a boy growing up with abuse and neglect, learning that silence is safer than being heard, and slowly disappearing in plain sight. Then, after protection and removal from the family home, something unexpected begins: not instant happiness, but the first real cracks in the silence as words become stories and stories become feelings.We also share a simple framework for trauma recovery that comes from lived experience as much as professional insight: recognition, reckoning, and recovery. Recognition is naming the truth without self-blame. Reckoning is the surge of energy that follows, often taking the form of righteous indignation, the clear internal message that what happened was wrong. Recovery is redefinition: making usable sense of the past while refusing to carry its weight forever. Along the way, we break down a key psychology distinction, privation vs deprivation, and why removing a child from danger is not the same thing as taking away love.The turning point isn’t just leaving home. It’s discovering the responsibility never belonged to the child. If you care about childhood trauma, attachment, complex PTSD, nervous system healing, or what real safety actually unlocks, this story will stay with you. Subscribe for the rest of the series, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review. What part of the recovery process do you recognize in your own life?
Transcribe →The Truth That Changes Everything
Jul 500:07:45Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailYou’ve probably heard the line: “You can’t handle the truth.” We start there and take it seriously, because in real families and real relationships, the truth often lands like an explosion. When something has been held back for too long, the reveal is loud, raw, and impossible to ignore. And instead of facing what’s true, people often flip the script and villainize the person who finally says it out loud.We dig into a practical concept I use in my work: reality confrontation. That means naming what is happening, what the behavior looks like, and what the consequences are, without turning it into a fight or a debate. The goal is not to punish anyone. The goal is to put reality in view so we can stop pretending, stop colluding with denial, and actually do something different. We also talk about the predictable reactions, like defensiveness and blame, and why those reactions do not erase the facts.Then we bring it home to everyday life and parenting. Teaching children to tell the truth is less about lectures and more about example. I draw a clear line between being “truthful” and being “open,” because a carefully edited version of events can still be a way of hiding. Openness helps kids (and adults) drop the fear, stop manipulating, and tell the whole story without feeling unsafe. If you’ve ever wondered how to speak hard truths without cruelty, and how to build honest communication that lasts, this conversation is for you. If it resonates, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review.
Transcribe →Story 1. Episode 2. The Cost Of Untruth
Jul 500:15:28Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailTruth doesn’t usually get shouted in families, it leaks out through consequences. When adults cling to competing stories about who is right, who is to blame, and who has suffered most, kids are left to adapt to a reality no one is willing to name. I’m Kim Lee from the Children’s Consultancy, and this chapter of “Living with Untruth” sits with a hard idea: families rarely collapse because one person is simply cruel. More often, they slowly unravel because truth becomes subordinate to narrative, and the narrative feels safer than grief, shame, and shared responsibility. We talk through what that looks like on the ground: externalizing blame, cherry-picking events, and turning selective fragments into “a truth” that begins to govern the whole family. Then we follow the real-world cost for children. One child learns to earn love through silence, achievement, and emotional caretaking. Another child’s distress becomes visible through outbursts, aggression, school refusal, depression, withdrawal, self-harm, or drifting into risky groups. When parents criticize each other to their child, the child gets pulled into an alliance and a loyalty conflict that can be deeply destabilizing. The turning point is a simple question that cuts through the noise: what has happened to the children? From there, we explore accountability without humiliation and why paying attention to trajectories matters, not just the past, but the future your child is being set up to live. If you care about child mental health, high-conflict co-parenting, family systems, and breaking intergenerational patterns, this conversation will stay with you. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more families can find the show. What do you think children are trying to tell us when adults won’t tell the truth?
Transcribe →What goes around, instrumental intro
Jun 2900:01:04Tap to summarizeSend us Fan Mail
Transcribe →The Hidden Family Stories Behind Child Behavior
Jun 2800:24:44Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailKids don’t always tell the truth with words. Sometimes they tell it with panic, perfectionism, shutdown, rage, or a level of “acting out” that leaves every adult asking the same question: what is wrong with this child? We take that question apart and replace it with a harder one: what truth is this child carrying that nobody else can speak? Through a composite family story drawn from years of clinical work, we explore how children become the emotional record keepers of a home built on conflict, avoidance, and half-truths without context.We walk through how family polarization forms, how parents get trapped in victim and persecutor roles, and how a house can quietly organize itself around resentment. When repair never happens, kids adapt in predictable ways: one becomes the achiever who tries to earn safety, the other becomes the symptom bearer who expresses the family’s pain through crises, aggression, withdrawal, or despair. We talk about nervous system imprinting, rupture without repair, parentification, and why loyalty can start to matter more than the truth.We also get specific about trajectories and risk. When adults stay invested in denial, the child’s behavior can escalate from private distress to public consequences involving schools, social workers, hospitals, courts, and police. The core message is simple and urgent: symptoms are messengers, and ignoring them has a cost. If you found this meaningful, subscribe, share the episode with someone who works with kids, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
Transcribe →When Grownups Fight Kids Hurt
Jun 2800:03:53Tap to summarizeSend us Fan Mail
Transcribe →Mentalization Episode 10. How Parents Build A Child Who Can Reflect
Jun 2500:15:34Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailIf you have ever watched a child melt down and thought, “I don’t even know what’s happening right now,” this finale will give you a different lens. We talk about mentalization, the invisible skill that helps us look past behavior and ask what is going on in the mind underneath. For us, that shift changes everything: it turns power struggles into information, misunderstandings into repair, and confusion into curiosity.We reflect on why mentalization is not a parenting trick or a therapist-only concept. It develops through relationships where a child feels seen enough, and it keeps growing across the lifespan. Along the way, we connect the dots between mentalization and major foundations in child development and psychology: secure attachment, integration, brain plasticity, emotional regulation, and the biological need for safety and connection. If you want a clearer way to think about ADHD, autism, anxiety, trauma histories, and big emotions, this framework helps you stay grounded without minimizing the hard parts.Then we get practical. Boundaries and consequences matter, but they work best when they sit inside relationship rather than replacing it. We unpack why accountability without understanding so easily turns into shame, and why shame rarely teaches a child to reflect or regulate. The heart of the approach is simple and demanding: remain willing to wonder, especially when emotions run high, and come back with repair when you cannot.If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share it with a parent or partner, and leave a review so more people can find the series. What does “help me understand” bring up for you?
Transcribe →How Curiosity Shuts Down
Jun 2400:08:52Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailCuriosity is fragile, and families can lose it without meaning to. Kim Lee from the Children’s Consultancy unpacks the quiet patterns that shut down a child’s inner world: stress that makes everyone reactive, certainty that turns into labels, and shame that teaches kids they are “too much” or “not enough.” When curiosity disappears, mentalization fades too, and children stop asking “what am I feeling?” and start asking “what’s wrong with me?” We talk through real-life family dynamics that often look normal on the surface: emotions getting dismissed, criticism becoming the default language, and unpredictability that keeps kids walking on eggshells. Kim explains how homes shaped by conflict, emotional neglect, or substance misuse can push children into survival mode, where hypervigilance replaces trust. You’ll hear how children may become expert mood-readers while still struggling to understand feelings, and why some end up people pleasing, withdrawing, acting angry, or taking on the emotional caretaker role known as parentification. The heart of the episode is a hopeful reframe. Instead of hunting for someone to blame, we ask better questions: what happened to us, what hurts are we carrying, and what might we be missing? We end with the idea that mentalization is not perfection, it is relationship and relationship can offer a new beginning. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a parent or caregiver, and leave a review with the one question you think every family should ask more often.
Transcribe →