While her first marriage to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin was crumbling, Gwyneth Paltrow explored all kinds of ways to address the pain before they announced their "conscious uncoupling" in 2014.
She was inspired, in part, to work hard to resolve her own issues because she'd learned from her children's holistic dentist-orthodontist that she could be inflicting that pain on her son and daughter if she didn't, Gwyneth has revealed in a new Goop podcast.
On the June 2 episode, the Goop founder had a conversation with Dr. Sherry Sami, DDS, about ways to help children heal from pain. The most important way adults can do that, both agreed, is to focus on their own healing.
As first reported by MailOnline, the Oscar winner explained on the podcast titled "Gwyneth Paltrow x Sherry Sami: The Presence Prescription," that she remembered "the first time I came to see you and I brought Apple and [Moses], gosh, it was a long time ago. And I remember going to talk to you in your office… and sitting down with you and then you're asking me all these questions about my emotional trauma and my marriage, which was going through a really hard time — and we all know how that ended."
Gwyneth explained that as they were talking, "I thought, 'Why is this amazing, lovely dentist-orthodontist asking me about my childhood trauma and what's going on in my marriage?'"
Dr. Sami – who's an integrative pediatric orthodontist and co-founder of Be Hive of Healing – then explained, "We're not just our physicality. We're also our emotion and thoughts… and I also feel that everything is a spiritual curriculum — I'm interested [in] this whole being. When I look at a patient, I'm not just looking at whether they have cavities or not and whether they have crooked teeth. I look at what is the cause behind everything. And then if I can address the cause, then so many other things will come forward."
Gwyneth said she's learned that parents can pass down their own unresolved issues to their kids, something Dr. Sami also believes. "That's what I think they mean in the Bible when they talk about the sins of the father," Gwyneth said. "You know, it's really like our weaknesses that we pass down generation to generation without understanding that without a shift in consciousness and without bringing awareness and healing our own stuff…we just unconsciously pass our s— down to our own kids."
Gwyneth went on to share, "I think so many of us, we certainly come from a generation of people who sublimated all of their feelings or maybe were too unregulated with their feelings… You can tell in a household when people aren't expressing and processing their emotional lives — it's really palpable."
The actress also told Dr. Sami that she'd learned from the pediatric dentist's husband, Dr. Habib Sadeghi, how in tune mother and child are. "One thing your husband taught me a long time ago was that children are on the mother's WiFi. So they're tapped into the mother and you can pretend that you're OK and you can have a smile on your face but they know everything."
Added the dentist, "…and then they start misbehaving and you're like, 'Why is this little being misbehaving?' and then you tune in and you see that, 'Hey, I'm completely disturbed, everything that he or she is exhibiting is actually what I'm feeling inside.'"
Gwyneth explained that until recent years, "it never occurred to me that my unprocessed, undealt-with emotion could be manifesting in my children. Like, we just aren't raised to think that way."
She continued, "But the closer that I got to myself and the more that I worked on always processing through, I think the more you give [your kids] a chance to be in their own space and consciousness and have their own feelings — because they're not worried [about] you know, what is the mystery going on that I'm feeling. There's more emotional integrity in the house."
The podcast summary provided by Goop explains that Dr. Sami "is devoted to looking at the whole picture. She believes that 'disharmony in the mouth' could even be linked to a detail from a child's birth or the emotional traumas of their parents," it reads. "Today, she shares fascinating (and sometimes heartbreaking) stories about patients she's worked with. And she offers sage advice for parents: 'Be very committed to your own healing, because that's the best thing that you can do for your child.'"