How Trauma Affects Parenting (And How to Break the Cycle)
Written by Casey Jackson MS, LPC
Parenting can be difficult, challenging, and awarding. We as parents want to raise confident successful adults. The hardest part of parenting is seeing our kids struggle with a limit we set and making the hard decisions they may not like because we want to see them happy. Giving your children everything they want however sets them up for failure in a world that will not. In this Blog we will be exploring how our own trauma can lead to reactions in our nervous systems that affect our behaviors leading to reactions we may later regret.
What is trauma?
Unresolved trauma can be like a monster that creeps up and causes us to react when we would prefer not to.
Trauma is relative to everyone and not always what we think. Trauma can be as severe as verbal, physical or sexual abuse. It can also be as minimal as not having a parent that sets limits, being sheltered from difficult situations as a child or even internal trauma. An example of internal trauma is a person who perceives themselves short and because of this belief limits themselves and is aggressive inside of their own self talk leading to insecurities that follow them into adulthood. The best way to describe a trauma response is knowing we are doing a certain behavior, trying not to, but having it continue to happen impulsively out of emotional responses.
As a clinician I have had many clients state they don’t have trauma and find out they do or minimize their trauma stating they had all their physical needs met when despite that they may not have felt safe physically or emotionally in their childhood environment. Finally, trauma is generational and passed down because of the way it affects our communication style and behaviors. We may see out parents make a child clean their plates because their parent did so, and so on due to the trauma of the Great Depression generations back. Unfortunately, modeling behavior is very strong. Do as I say not as I do is not effective because of this and when you can’t control what you do that complicates things. I am sure when reading this you can pick out one specific behavior one of your parents did that you did not like and may be repeating this same behavior in your parenting.
How does unresolved trauma affect the way we parent, cause me to overreact to small things and be anxious?
Trauma can lead parents to either be passive, passive aggressive, or aggressive in our parenting. These styles of communication can lead to mental health problems in children and guilt and depression within the parent. If you had an aggressive parent, you may be passive as a parent and not set limits or stick through with consequences because you steer away from conflict due to the abuse you experienced learning speaking up just made it worse. This can set your child up for failure as an adult because school, work, and relationships later in life will have their own expectations on them. You may also model the aggression shown to you and aggressive parenting can alienate you from your child, limit their ability to make their own decisions, cause depression and anxiety, and affect your relationship with them later in life and their self worth and esteem. If you had a passive parent, you may may learn this yourself which can lead to symptoms of feeling stuck and hopeless or feel like life is out of their control because they don’t act or change things, feel resentful their needs are not being met when they are not communicating them, and lead them not to emotionally mature because they are not taught to express and deal with emotions in a healthy way. Passive aggressive parenting where a parent uses manipulation, extreme sarcasm, or who are nice one moment and unpredictably upset the next can create significant mental health diagnoses like Borderline Personality Disorder.
Is it too late to change my parenting patterns and not feel guilty about focusing on me?
It is not too late and learning self-love and self care is exactly how we enable ourselves to give more love to others and be more effective in relationships!! I use a certain example in therapy session when coaching on this. When you first sit on a plane and the flight attendant is telling you the emergency procedures do they tell you to put the oxygen mask on someone else or yourself first? The answer is yourself. You are not going to be able to help your kids, family, and people around you if you are passed out and the same goes for your mental health. Our parents repeated the patterns of trauma their parents and grandparents did but there is one difference. Now we have the knowledge to know how to treat things they did not have access to!
Fortunately, modeling behavior is very strong…yes I flipped that from above. Hopeful is much more motivating than hopeless!
By learning healthy assertive communication patterns, learning more about our own trauma responses/nervous systems, and triggers in your environment it can be done and your kids will appreciate it. When we take the nervous system/trauma responses out of the picture it clears the way for our mind to catch and change our behaviors and eventually the more we stop these the less they happen. Our brain has connections and the more we use these the more they happen because our minds are built for efficiency. The more we stop them the more likely they are not to happen in the future. Picture your brain like a tree all the branches intertwined. If you don’t use the branch it prunes itself and just falls off leaving the space for a healthier branch to grow. This is the essence of therapy.
What Kind of Therapy can Help Parents?
Many different types of therapy can help. I have to admit I am personally biased to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) but I like to combine this with Communication skills work, Dialectical behavior therapy(DBT), Cognitive behavior therapy(CBT), and Sensorimotor therapy to address as many aspects of a client’s trauma reactivity as possible. When you are in REM sleep your minds processes through experiences you have throughout the day and stores them. These are stored with other experiences your brain feels are similar creating negative neural networks that all connect and feed trauma responses and behaviors we do not want. This happens when you are triggered by something around you. EMDR uses pulsators you hold in your hands, light bars you follow with your eyes, knee and shoulder tapping to cause bi-lateral stimulation while you think about past and current triggers and helps your brain more effectively process through trauma the way it was stored.
In conclusion, you don’t have to continue to feel poorly about your parenting and frustrated over not being able to control those unwanted behaviors. EMDR combined with CBT and other talk therapy methods it can be very effective and lead to meaningful changes that can improve your parenting and relationships with your children ensuring they remain meaningful even after they become adults.
About the Author
I have been practicing in mental health for over 23 years and worked in many different fields including acute hospitals, residential facilities, community support case manager, schools, and outpatient. I have been a licensed LPC for 8 year and 6 of these were in acute hospital and residential working with kids and teens in state care with highly acute levels of complex trauma. As a community support case manager, I worked doing IEP’s in schools and coaching parents in their homes on many off the things talked about above. I am also trained in Family Systems Theory and worked with parents of the residential patients I did therapy for on how to manage their own trauma and reasons to get help in order to better support their children. I am trained in EMDR, Polyvagal theory EMDR(nervous system), CBT, DBT, Communication skills work, Sensorimotor, and Neurofeedback.
Please reach out if you would like to meet me in person and do a free 30 minute consultation!!
Written by Casey Jackson MS, LPC
