Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Traumatizing or Resilience Building? Supporting Children Through Hard Things

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 126

Share episode

When hard things happen to our children (our ourselves), our instinct is often to protect them from discomfort at all costs. But what if the goal isn't to shield them from difficult experiences, but to support them through those experiences in ways that build resilience? In this episode, I share a recent scary experience with my 5-year-old son getting industrial paint in his eye, and how understanding nervous system principles helped turn a potentially traumatic moment into an opportunity for connection and growth.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • What happened when my son got industrial paint in his eye
  • How fear and urgency can hijack our parenting in the moment
  • The three elements we need to feel safe
  • How to support nervous system repair after overwhelming experiences
  • Why the goal isn't to protect our kids from hard things, but to support them through them
  • The three elements children need to feel safe during and after difficult experiences

3 Takeaways:

  1. Hard experiences become traumatic when context, choice, and connection aren't available or restored afterward. 
  2. Repair is more important than preventing ruptures.
  3. Co-regulation is your most powerful tool. Your calm, regulated presence after a crisis helps your child's nervous system settle and process the experience in a healthy way.

—

Looking for more personalized support?

*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.

Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast

Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaontherise/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandaontherise

Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now, let's dive in. 

Amanda Armstrong  0:24  
Today, I'm going to share with you a recent experience I had with my five year old son that turned into what I feel like is a really, really powerful lesson about nervous system regulation, repair, regulated parenting, how we can support our kids going through really difficult experiences, and then reflectively, what we need to feel supported in our own difficult experiences in life as well. So this story is going to involve a bit of a scary parenting moment, some parenting choices I'm not particularly proud of other ones I am, and ultimately, I think serves as a really beautiful example of how understanding nervous system principles can help us turn potentially traumatizing experiences into opportunities for instead building resilience. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:18  
So let's dive in by starting with what happened this past weekend, my five year old asked if he could help our neighbor paint something. My husband and I said, Yes. It seemed like a nice way for him to be helpful, learn something new, whatever he loves our neighbors loves to help with projects and gardening. Can I paint something? Sure, dude, go and paint. About 30 minutes later, we see our neighbor rushing him back to the house, and it's really obvious he has paint in his eye. Now, this was not cute, washable Crayola paint. This was rust oleum oil based industrial paint, the kind that has serious warning labels about eye contact on the containers. And when I see him, my system immediately panics. My first instinct is, get him in the car. Let's go to the ER. Let it be their problem, their responsibility. But my more steady and hospital averse husband, in an instant, looked up online what needed to be done first, and everything we found called for 10 to 15 minutes of continuous eye flushing. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:28  
But here's where it gets challenging, because my son won't let us flush out his eye. He is scared. He's in pain, and obviously, like the last thing he wants is running water in his eye, and the reality still is that it has to be done. So while he's like in between sobs, trying to make his case, there's not a whole lot of room in the moment for negotiation, right? Like we are looking at potentially serious eye damage. So we start by trying to get his head in the sink. It's too hard to position him properly. We end up just putting him in the tub. I'm in the tub with him. My husband's on the side, and we are trying to explain to him that if you can't do this, if you can't put your head under the running water, then we are going to have to do it for you. And ultimately, we do. We have to do it for him. Many times. He is upset, he is uncomfortable. He doesn't want any of this to be happening, and yet it's happening. We try to let him know that if we don't do this, there could be real damage to his eye. We might have to go to the hospital, neither of which he wants, but also he doesn't want to keep flushing out his eye. So this poor kid, this poor kid, but we just we have to force it. We have to keep forcing it. And I'd like to say this only happened once. It actually happened twice. I don't realize that the water that I'm pouring to flush out his eye also, like, goes up his nose, so he's like choking. He comes up coughing. He's even more uncomfortable and panicked because I'm basically waterboarding him. And we still need to flush his eye for another like five minutes. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:10  
And I want to pause here. I want to pause here, and I want to acknowledge something that I am not particularly proud of. When I reflected back on this experience early in this crisis, I tried to get him to cooperate by basically saying that he could lose his eye if we didn't do what needed to be done. I made what was essentially an unsupported threat to coerce compliance. This is what happens when we're scared. We do suboptimal things, sometimes when our nervous system is activated, especially in a case where your child might be in potential danger, we can default to fear based parenting tactics that we might not normally use. And I'm sharing this because I think it's really important to normalize; that even those of us who understand nervous system regulation, myself is who I'm talking about here, can have moments where fear takes over, where we raise our voice, where we make threats or unfounded statements. And the key isn't to be perfect, especially not in high stakes or crisis moments, but even in the moments of your day where you're just overstimulated or overwhelmed, it is what we do afterwards that matters most. And what I was really proud of was how I helped him resolve this overall experience, how I helped his nervous system find a reset after the emergency was handled. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:10  
So once the worst was over with his eye situation, we felt pretty confident it was out. There wasn't a lot of lingering redness. He also still had paint all over his face from where he had, like smeared. What we think happened was, I think there was, like a bug in his face. He was wearing gloves, but there's a ton of paint on the gloves, and I think a bug, like, flew near his eye, and just instinctively, he took his glove full of wet paint and, like, brushed it over and into his eye. So when we had gotten what we figured was the most of the paint out of his eye, he still had that paint all over his face, all over his hands, all over, all over his feet. It was just all over, all over, everywhere. So at this point, I am stripped down to Bra and underwear. I am fully in the bath with him, and I just say, Hey, I'm gonna need you to lay against me. We need to start scrubbing the paint off, specifically around your hands and your face to make sure that it, you know, doesn't get in your eye again. And I decided to start with his body first, because his sweet little face just, it just needed a break. So as I am scrubbing his hands his legs, we start chatting. His system starts to settle. Okay? There's like a small reset happening here. And then it comes time to revisit his face. I still need to scrub the paint from around his eye and on his eyelid and underneath on like his waterline, like the paint, it's just it's everywhere. And as I tell him, you know, I'm gonna start scrubbing around your eye, I watch his body get so tense again, tears well in his eyes, even though I am not going to pin him down and flush the pain out of his eye again, me getting this close to his face, to his system, feels really familiar to that overwhelming experience that just happened. 

Amanda Armstrong  7:37  
So in this moment, I took a deep breath. I'm a little impatient. We're past bedtime. I'm tired, but I know what he needs right now is not more forcing, not more threatening, not more me telling him it'll be fine, get over it. What he needs for me right now is for me to move slower, to be gentle, and I just had this idea where I realized that I was wearing a particular mascara that I know runs terribly when it gets wet. So instead of just being like, gotta get it done, dude, lay down. I take a moment and I say, Do you want me to show you on Mommy, what I need to help you do. And he was like, Yeah. And I was like, Okay, so I'm gonna splash water on my face, and you know my mascara, you know my makeup, it's going to go everywhere. It's gonna make me look a little crazy. Okay, so I do. I splash the water on my face and I kind of rub it around. And so now I have black all over my face, all around my eyes, not so dissimilar to him. And he laughs. He looks at me, he goes, Oh, it did get crazy. It's everywhere. And then I demo, I'm like, Okay, I am gonna need to wipe your eyelids just like this, and I showed them on myself. And then I'm gonna need to get really close under your eyes, by your eyelashes, just like this. Do you want to try to do this on me? And then I can have a turn doing it on and of course, he did. He pushed really hard on my eyes, and he went to go do my eyelids. He did it. And then I took the washcloth and I was able to wash the paint from around his eyes. It was uncomfortable, but it got done without force, without extra tears, without re traumatizing him, and I felt pretty good. 

Amanda Armstrong  9:34  
And I am so lucky that I have a husband who thinks to pull out his camera sometimes, and bless him, I didn't realize at the time that he was like filming this. And as we were laying in bed the other day, and he goes, Man, you get like, Mom of the Year Award, like you like thinking to use your mascara, like that, the whole interaction was filmed. And it's just like such a sweet and tender moment where what I really wanted to do, what my my system was like. Like, just pin him down and scrub his face, get it over with, put him to bed. But I didn't. I was able to have enough self regulation to provide co regulation and a different experience for him. 

Amanda Armstrong  10:12  
Now at this point, I look down and the bath water is filthy. It's cold. We decide to drain it, and I give him the option, I said, Do you want to kind of sit in a warm bath or go read some extra books before bed? And he decided he wanted to stay in the bath. So we fill it up. It's warm, it's clean, it's soothing. And we just sat there. We just sat in this warm bath together. We chatted, and after a few minutes, I notice his shoulders drop again, his breath starts to steady. His whole self just lightens. And as we're there, we are talking about a lot of things, but we do come back and revisit, and we talk about what happened tonight and how it was scary, and he remembered he left his walkie talkie at the neighbor's house, and he's gonna have to go get it. And all of the things, any thought that pops into a five year old's brain comes out of their mouth, and then what felt like kind of out of the blue, he asked about getting shots at the doctor. 

Amanda Armstrong  10:58  
We had a children's book that we had recently read about getting shots at the doctor. His brother recently got a shot, shot at the doctor. I don't know why this came into his mind at the moment, but he asked about like, why we have to get shots at the doctor. And I decided to use it as an analogy. I explained to him how when I was a kid, I got something called chicken pox, how it was these little bumps all over my body. It itched and I cried for days, but now they have a shot that can make it so that kids don't get chicken pox anymore. And I asked him, I said, Well, what do you think like would you rather get a quick shot at the doctor, or would you rather get chicken pox and have these like itchy bumps on your body for days? And he paused for a moment. He goes, I don't like shots, but I think I will get the shot instead. And I laughed, and I said, yeah, probably me too, bud. And then this was where, like, Oh, such a such a good mom moment. I brought that back to this particular experience, and I just shared. I said, Yeah, see, sometimes we have to do things that hurt or that we don't want to do to prevent something worse from happening. Sometimes we have to do like a little thing we hate to prevent a big thing we're not gonna like. And I said, Can you tell me what that what that looked like tonight? And he replied, and he said, you had to wash my eye out so that it wouldn't fall out while medically probably inaccurate, it was close enough, and I agreed, and I said, Yeah, that was a really hard thing. You did a really hard thing. I know it was not comfortable when Dad and I had to hold you and wash your eye out, and it's still we had to do it. Because what's my number one job? My number one job is to keep you safe, even if you don't like it, even if you don't like it, and that's what I had to do tonight. To do tonight. And we had to do that, that hard thing for 10 minutes to make sure that you get a good healthy eye for the rest of your life. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:10  
And I think this is where I want to talk about the kind of like theoretical thing that I think is crucial behind this conversation, and the whole point in me kind of sharing this story with you, is to remind you that our nervous system needs three primary things to feel safe enough in a particular situation, it needs enough context, choice and or connection in the emergency moment. We did not give him a whole lot of choice. There wasn't really choice to be had we pinned him down and we flushed out his eye. There wasn't a lot of time for context or connection either. But in hindsight, I could offer him those things once the emergency was handled. I helped him physiologically settle through connection and CO regulation, the warm bath, dimmed lights, my regulated calm presence. I then offered him context with the vaccine analogy. I offered him a little bit of choice. Do you want to sit in the bath? Do you want to read a book? I offered him even an element of choice with that analogy of, well, what do you think you would choose? Kind of the short, hard thing or the bigger, longer, hard thing. Oh, okay, so while it didn't feel like I have choice in the moment with the new context, I yeah, I would have chosen, actually, for you to have flushed out my eye in the way that you did. And it was still hard situations overwhelming. Hard situations become trauma, stored trauma when we don't get this kind of a reset, when we don't reestablish safety after the overwhelming experience, when we are left alone with overwhelming emotions, when we don't have the space or the time or the support. To reset before something else overwhelming happens. That is when something becomes trauma. 

Amanda Armstrong  15:05  
Now this, what I'm about to say, is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but to put it simply, when we experience hard situations, overwhelming situations, with a lack of context, choice or connection, it can lead to traumatic imprints, but when we have sometimes even those same hard experiences, but in the presence of enough context, choice and connection, it creates resilience. I am not here to protect my kid from hard things. I am here to support him through them so that eventually he is more capable of supporting himself, and I think the same thing applies to my experiences in life. I am not here to avoid hard things, but instead to have the support I need, internally and externally, to feel supported in those hard things in a way that creates greater capacity and resilience for even me in my adult lived experience. So in essence, while experiencing hard things as part of life, the availability and the quality of support systems that we have access to significantly influences whether those experiences lead to lasting trauma and anxiety or contribute to building resilience. And the difference isn't in what happens to our children, but oftentimes it's what happens after what happens to them, or the support that they have access to in and around those hard experiences, 

Amanda Armstrong  16:41  
and back to the story just one more time. So after all of this, we get out of the bath. Dad puts him in his jammies. He gets into bed. I go and check on him after 10 minutes, and he is out. He sleeps through the night. The next morning, he wakes up and i Hey, bud, how you feeling? And he just looks at me, goes, I'm good, Mom, my eye feels fine. Thanks for helping me last night. And that response told me everything that I needed to know about how his nervous system had processed that experience. He was he was fine. It was resolved. And there have been experiences where his response in the morning didn't quite feel so resolved, and what that tells me is okay. We need to revisit this. He needs a little bit more context, choice, connection around that experience. But in this instance, kid was good. I was fine. He was fine. And I just want to reiterate that it is okay. It's probably unavoidable to have to do hard things with our children, and I personally think it's actually really, really, really important that they have those experiences, and in those experiences, it's even okay for them to lack key elements of safety, like context, choice, connection, in the moment, it's okay for those things to be overwhelming and even create rupture, but those experiences become traumatic when those elements don't come back, when the hindsight context isn't offered, when connection isn't reestablished, when choice that can be given isn't given back, when the body isn't supported in resetting back to a regulated state. And so it's not so much about that hard experience. It's not so much about the rupture, whether the rupture was created because you showed up in a in a suboptimal way, because of your own survival state, or through something else entirely. Do those elements come back? 

Amanda Armstrong  18:37  
And I want to be So, clear here, I am not a perfect parent. I don't have this totally figured out. My kids are still quite young. I have yelled, I have made threats that I regretted. I have had moments, moments and moments and moments that I'm not proud of. But what I do know, and what I think I can say with confidence is that my relationship with my children won't be defined by those moments, because I don't leave them there, because I have done the work to be reflective and accountable, because I am regulated enough to step into repair, because I understand how my nervous system works, enough to work with it so that I can better support them in the development of their own nervous systems and regulation, regulated parenting, regulated living. All of this. It's not about getting it right every time. It is about understanding that ruptures can be repaired and how to do that, that hard experiences can become opportunities for connection and growth, and that our children's resilience is built not in the absence of difficulty, but in the presence of support through difficulty 

Amanda Armstrong  19:52  
and to help you maybe bring this into your life in a bit more of a personalized way. How can you apply these principles? So when there are hard things happening for your kids, first, I think, is, don't try to prevent every hard thing from happening like your kid needs to hurt themselves, they need to fall, they need to fail, they need to bleed, they need to face disappointment and frustration. They need to do this in hundreds of small, layered experiences, so that they have evidence that they can survive hard things. And so when you find yourself in moments like this, at first do what needs to be done to keep your kids safe, even if it's uncomfortable, don't worry about being perfect. Keep them physically safe, even if you have to use force and make tough decisions, you just do what you got to do, and then look for opportunities after the crisis to focus on CO regulation, to not rush the settling process, to give them time to decompress, to set up an environment that feels comfortable and safe. Can you offer them context? Can you restore choice? Can you maintain connection, staying present and available. And also watch them. Watch for their signs of regulation and repair. Their body language. Does their system relax? One thing I always look for is the double inhale with the exhale, the that physiological sigh our body naturally does to help us reset. Can they talk about that experience without distress? That is a number one thing that tells me whether an issue has been resolved within my kid's system or not, is, can they talk about that experience without distress, not necessarily without emotion, but without distress. And this is ultimately how they also learn that they can trust you to help them through difficult things, which teaches them to eventually be able to help and trust themselves through difficult things. 

Amanda Armstrong  21:50  
I'm also going to pause for a moment my youngest just woke up from his nap. I have 30 minutes of childcare left, and they are using it stampeding directly over my office. So if the remainder of this episode has little thundering footsteps or excited screaming happening, it's because I think my boys are upstairs playing some some chase game. But tis just is the working conditions of of my life right now. We squeeze in recording podcasts when and where we can ideally when the house is quiet, and sometimes the quiet doesn't last as long as I need to get through a full episode. 

Amanda Armstrong  22:32  
But let me kind of wrap this up, because I think there's a misconception in our culture that good parenting means protecting our kids from hard experiences, and that's just not realistic, and it's not actually helpful for their development. Life will bring difficult experiences, medical procedures, accidents, disappointment, loss. Our job is not to shield them from all those things, but it's to help them develop the internal resources to navigate them and every single time that we have enough regulation within ourselves to support our children to go through difficult experiences with context, choice and connection. We are making what I call like deposits into their resilience bank account. We are teaching them that hard things can be survived, that they're not alone in facing difficulties, that they can trust us to help them through whatever comes. And so many of us carry so many burdens from our childhood because we weren't supported, we weren't taught, we weren't held, and maybe didn't have somebody that we could trust to help us through all of those difficult things. And so I just want to applaud, because those of you listening, there's been something that's resonated in this conversation. You are likely a parent who is trying to parent differently than you were parented, and that's hard, and I'm so, so proud of you for trying to do so 

Amanda Armstrong  23:50  
I had just the absolute one of these, like, what I call like, these micro moments of just like delight or pats on the back. My son is in a rock climbing class, and his teacher came up recently and told me that even though he is the youngest in the class, he's one of the most confident and emotionally regulated kids in the class. And that's not an accident. And I know every kid is different, and there's I have a lot to learn, and there's parents of older kids who might be listening to this episode and just like, oh, you wait. Oh, you wait. But honestly, I'm looking forward to it. I am looking forward to every phase of each of my children. I am looking forward to figuring it out with each of my kids, in their own way, the kinds of support that they need, what they need from me, and it's my job. I see it as my job as a parent to create the capacity, the flexibility, the skill set, to be able to meet them in their unique needs. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:43  
So as I wrap up this episode, I want to leave you with this hard things are going to happen. They're going to happen to you. They're going to happen to your kids, and you are going to have moments where you don't handle things perfectly. You will have to make decisions in crisis that don't feel ideal. But if you can remember these three elements content. Context, choice and connection, and focus on providing those after the emergency has passed, you can help your kids nervous systems process difficult experiences in a way that builds resilience rather than trauma. And not just your kids, like I've said, but yours too. How can you offer these same things or seek them out as you navigate your own overwhelming experience, the goal is never to do this perfectly. It's just to do it presently in the best way that you can. To be available for repair, for reconnection and for helping your children, but also yourself. Make sense of these experiences. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:41  
All right, here are your three takeaways from today. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:44  
Number one, hard experiences become traumatic when enough context, choice and connection are not present or or or or restored afterward. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:54  
Number two is that repair is more important than perfection. Repair is more important than whether you prevent rupture. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:04  
And number three, can you hear this? I don't know if my mic is picking up these like thundering footsteps, so All right. Number three, number three is CO regulation. Co regulation is your most powerful tool, your calm, your regulated presence after or during a crisis is what helps your kid's nervous system settle and process the experience in a healthy way. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:32  
All right, friends, as always, if this episode resonated with you, please share it. Please email me. Let me know what resonated. If there is another question or another topic you'd like me to cover on the podcast, I always, in the show notes, drop a link to a little form where you can submit something you're struggling with, an experience you had. You want feedback on a question. I love to hear from you. I love to see the names or the faces of the people who tune into this podcast. Drop into my inbox. My DMS tagged on stories, and ultimately, the greatest gift that you can offer me for the time and the effort that I put into creating this podcast is to share. It is to help bring these tools and resources to even more people who need them. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:19  
All right, until next week, I am sending hope and healing your way. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:23  
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.