Parenting as a Practice of Letting Go: Lessons from the Beginning
by Dr. Denise Renye
Before I was a psychologist in private practice, before I specialized in trauma or sexuality, I worked in Early Intervention—supporting families of children from birth to three years old. It was intimate and sacred work. I sat on living room floors, in tiny apartments and shelters, in homes filled with both tenderness and tension. I accompanied parents navigating diagnoses, delayed development, and overwhelming circumstances. I witnessed love that was fierce—and sometimes, love that was fractured under the weight of unmet needs.
It was in these early years, perhaps paradoxically, that I came to understand how trauma can take root—not only in the child’s developing nervous system, but in the relational field between parent and child.
Even at the very beginning of life.
I worked with families living through domestic violence, food and housing insecurity, emotional neglect, and what I have come to call emotional poverty—where survival consumes so much bandwidth that there is little left for attunement, delight, or repair. I saw babies who had already learned to shrink their cries. Toddlers who hypervigilantly scanned the room before reaching for a toy. Parents who wanted to connect but had never been mirrored themselves. The beginnings of trauma were there—not as dramatic events, but as ruptures in relationship, moments of absence where there might have been presence.
And yet, alongside the heartbreak, there was also profound beauty. I saw the possibility of repair. Of resilience. Of what could shift when a parent was given just a little more support, just a little more reflection, just a moment to pause and see their child anew.
At the time, I didn’t yet have all the language that would later come through clinical training and spiritual study. I had been introduced to Buddhist psychology in 2002, when I studied with Thích Nhất Hạnh during a retreat in Rhode Island—a formative experience that planted the seeds of mindfulness, presence, and compassionate awareness. As my path deepened—through psychoanalytic work and continued spiritual practice—I began to understand that parenting, especially in these early years, is not simply a caretaking role. It is a spiritual practice. A practice of letting go.
Letting go of the fantasy of control. Letting go of the child we imagined. Letting go of the inner narratives that tell us we're failing if things aren’t unfolding the way we hoped. In Buddhist psychology, we learn that attachment—clinging to fixed ideas, identities, outcomes—creates suffering. Parenting demands we release those attachments daily. Just when we think we’ve found a rhythm, something changes. The child becomes someone new. And we, too, are invited into new versions of ourselves.
The psychoanalytic frame reminds us that parenting activates our earliest templates. In caring for our children, we meet our own unmet needs, old wounds, buried griefs. We might feel triggered, overwhelmed, or inadequate—not because we are doing something wrong, but because something in us is being stirred. When we can bring awareness to that—when we can reflect rather than react—we interrupt intergenerational cycles. We make space for new possibilities.
Letting go, in this context, is not abandonment. It is presence without possession. It is deep care without control. It is choosing to attune, again and again, even when the past wants to repeat itself.
To parent is to love with open hands.
To support parents is to honor the sacred labor of that love.
And to reflect on these early years—from my work in Early Intervention to my current practice—is to be reminded that healing begins not only in adulthood, but in infancy.
In relationship.
In presence.
In the willingness to stay, witness, and let go.