Understanding Trauma, Shame and Chronic Invalidation with Special Guest Lorie Ritschel

In today’s episode, Leslie speaks with special guest, Dr. Lorie Ritschel, a board-certified dialectic behavior therapist, and discusses the impact of chronic invalidation, trauma and shame in regards to both parents and children. Lorie emphasizes the importance of understanding and addressing shame in children, noting that parents often underestimate its punishing effects. She explains DBT-PE, a treatment that combines dialectical behavior therapy with prolonged exposure to treat trauma. 

Time Stamps

4:22 Defining Trauma - Criterion A and Traumatic Chronic Invalidation

9:00 and 11:26 Trauma Treatments - DBT-PE and CPT

• You are working to create corrective learning
• Trauma treatment is really tough, its like psychology Iron Man
• In vivo exposures - learning to do the things that are hard for you to do
• Imaginal exposures - where you talk about the trauma
• Processing - what can you learn from your exposures and how can you shift your perspective

14:00 Discussing the emotion of Shame

14:40 Parents are part of creating the internal dialogue of emotions within their child and they have the ability to impact their child’s understanding of emotions

16:20 Parents underestimate how punishing shame is to a child

17:05 Discussion on being how to be reinforcer of behaviors and punisher of behaviors by matching the intensity of your child’s behavior

18:05 Some kids go into a shame spiral and others don’t.  DON”T make assumptions about your child

19:24 Examples of implicit and explicit learning 

20:55 When shame is very visible in your child - 

• If a child hides their face or hides under covers
• They say “I’m bad”
• You can use the line “can you give yourself permission to make a mistake?” 

21:21 Watch out for the quiet child who internalize their emotions

22:14 Create a framework in your home to talk about emotions

22:50 High, Low, Buffalo Game - a great substitute for “how was your day at school”  

25:25 The benefits of Observational learning

26:38 Discussion of Invalidation for the neurodivergent child

28::43 Other examples of ways parents can invalidate their child

31:00 Having a trusted adult to speak to is key for a child who feels invalidation from their differentness

Leslie-ism: When expressing disappointment to your child, a light touch is enough.

Resources:  

Lorie Ritschel’s Website: Triangle Area Psychology Clinic (TAP)

E-Learning Courses through the TAP clinic

How to use High Low Buffalo Conversation Starter 

Trauma resources

• DBT-Prolonged Exposure Trauma Treatment
• Cognitive Processing Treatment (CPT) 

For a full transcript of this episode and more information about the host visit https://lesliecohenrubury.com/podcasts/ . You can also follow Leslie’s work on Facebook,  Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Join the conversation with your own questions and parenting experiences.

Credits: Is My Child a Monster? is produced by Alletta Cooper, Camila Salazar, and Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Theme music is by

Transcript

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

0:02  Lorie: You are creating part of your child's internal dialog about emotions. You know, a lot of times I think parents actually really underestimate how punishing shame is to a child.

0:21  Leslie Cohen-Rubury: Welcome to Is My Child A Monster?, a parenting skills podcast where you get to listen in as real parents and caregivers share their trials and tribulations. I'm Leslie Cohen-Rubury; and no, your child is not a monster, just misunderstood. 

I'm delighted to have Dr Lorie Ritschel here with me today. Lorie is a Board Certified Dialectic Behavior Therapist and an expert trainer and consultant of DBT and the DBT Prolonged Exposure protocol, or DBT PE for short, among a host of other things, which she'll tell you all about. Much of her work focuses on trauma, shame, and something called chronic invalidation. And we're going to really explore those topics in our conversation. 

I have had the good fortune to work with Lorie through group consultations and my DBT PE trauma training. I'm so excited to have her here with me.  Now, as a reminder, though I'm a licensed clinical social worker, this show is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapeutic intervention. 

So let's begin. 

1:35  Leslie: Hi, Lorie. 

1:37  Lorie: Hi, Leslie. 

1:39  Leslie: Thanks so much for being here. 

1:40  Lorie: Thank you for having me.

1:41  Leslie: I'm so excited. Can you tell us a little bit about the work you do and why you do it?

1:48  Lorie: Sure, I actually wear several different hats. I'm the co-owner of the Triangle Area Psychology Clinic in Durham, North Carolina, where I provide direct clinical services to adolescents and adults. I do some consultation through various entities on DBT. And then the last piece of what I do is I am part-time faculty at UNC in the Teach Autism Program, where we're working on modifying DBT to be more neurodivergent-affirming and delivered in a way that honors the treatment and also honors the person's brain and learning style.

2:32  Leslie: I love that. That's so exciting. And I believe you're a parent. 

2:36  Lorie: Yes, I am. I have two amazing, I want to say little girls, but actually, I have a nine-year-old and an eight-year-old. So yes, they are very cool, and they keep me on my toes. They're a good reminder that even if you know behaviorism, backward and forward, and you understand child development and have all of this training that we have, that you are still a human being. And in the moment, it's really hard to do everything right in a way that makes sense for everybody. That's impossible actually, now that I say it out loud.

3:11  Leslie: I'm so glad you said that, because it is so true that being a professional and being a mom, we might know some things that people who haven't had the training might not know. But when you become a mom, you're standing in a place that says: this is brand new to me. And so I like to just be able to validate that for other parents that we know what it's like, trying to raise kids. It's not easy. 

3:38  Lorie: No, it's not easy. 

3:39  Leslie: Really hard job. Okay, so in my last family that volunteered on the podcast, Dad was trying so hard to deal with his anger that would show up with his eleven-year-old daughter's behavior. And it was very clear to me that—and we discussed the context—that it came from his childhood. There was chronic invalidation, there was some physical aggression; and we talked about the idea that there might be trauma living in his body. You work a lot, you do a lot of training with DBT PE. Can you talk about that, maybe give our listeners some understanding of what trauma is?

4:22  Lorie: Sure. So, that's a very interesting question. I'm actually working on…I'm writing a chapter right now on the topic of traumatic invalidation in Stage Two DBT. So, I've been thinking a lot about this topic, and what is trauma. Because what the diagnostic manual tells us is that trauma involves having experienced what's called a Criterion A Trauma Event. And those are things like sexual assaults, physical abuse, car accidents, natural disasters—it can be any of those sorts of things, but where we can point to direct threat to health, life, well being. And that excludes any of these kinds of what you just talked about, that was important about this person's history, which is this kind of chronic invalidation. 

So, the technical definition of trauma does not include traumatic invalidation. And yet, we see a lot of that in our work, and certainly in the intergenerational work. Invalidation, in general, is this communicating to another person that their thoughts, urges, beliefs, emotions don't make sense or are crazy or normal people wouldn't think that way, or whatever the kinds of messaging is. That leaves it very hard for a person to know, really, to experience their own emotions, label them, feel confident that they know how to do that accurately, that they know how to communicate to other people effectively, that they can tolerate distress and disappointing other people and all those kinds of things.

And in some cases, the level of invalidation that has happened produces essentially the same effect as a Criterion A Trauma. And in the case of what you talk about with anger, it sort of gets into this question of, like, most people with a trauma history struggle with, fight, flight, or freeze in some way. And so is there a point at which he has control over his anger? Is there a point at which he loses control of his anger. And to what degree is untreated trauma the thing that's kind of left to do to get him better able to cope with that?

6:36  Leslie:  Right. There was such a strong desire to stop his anger, to learn about it, and so he was really involved and engaged. But then when we talked about the trauma, I think that's really scary. And the idea that you just explained that number, one professionally, chronic invalidation, is a way of understanding what some people experience generationally and as traumatic, and have PTSD from that. And then being able to acknowledge that there's trauma and acknowledge that the chronic invalidation is valid, as very painful, yeah. It did give him a tremendous sense of relief that, “Now I understand why it's so hard for me to stop my anger.”

7:28  Lorie: Well, somewhere back there it probably served a protective function, I'm going to guess. And if nobody is saying to you and kind of walking you through, like, “Listen, this strategy is working really well right now because of this environment that you're in. 

But when you get out there in the rest of the world, you're going to have to figure out a different way. “Nobody's telling this guy this, and nobody's saying, “And by the way, here's some of the things you could do differently out there when people do things that upset you.”. And so it relies on this implicit learning that really is not how we grow up. We don't grow up thinking about and talking about and understanding emotions in that way, that would allow for those connections to be made for a child in that sort of environment—that's just really too big of an expectation.

8:18  Leslie: Interestingly enough, a lot of my podcasts, the mission, or the goal, is to see what we can prevent. Parents who are showing up to learn to do things differently—we can stop things from happening before they happen, or stop them as they happen. They're very concerned that it doesn't get passed on to her. The idea of being able to name that for their daughter…getting yelled at is really scary, and taking responsibility for it, for the dad is a way to do some prevention. 

And so I've gotten several certifications in to be certified in DBT PE and CPT. Those are two trauma treatments that I'm thrilled about. I've seen amazing results. Can you talk a little bit about these treatments, and what's out there for people?

9:12  Lorie: Yes, I'm also trained in those two. There are others and I really fall very heavily toward the PE side of things. And so I think it may be important to point out that that's my bias, to kind of think behaviorally. And what I mean by that is that, generally, part of an effective treatment is talking about the trauma directly. And some people need to do a lot of that, and some people need to do relatively less of that, and potentially learn and get some feedback that's really specific to their trauma. 

So for example, I've shared with some of my clients where my threshold would have been for contacting child protective services, in the narrative that they tell me. Like, if I had been your therapist when you were X, Y or Z age. Just so they have that information that they don't currently have. So that corrective learning, I think, is really important. But it's also important to practice what it's like to be in the world and acting and behaving and transacting with the world without the sort of filter of trauma, like everything’s got to go through this big filter. 

And so I sort of think about that as people who are really still in the grip of trauma, particularly when there's this kind of chronic invalidation problem. It's sort of like walking through the world where there's a sniper on the edge of every building, constantly on guard, no amount of mistake is allowed. Just the exhaustion that would come from being in that kind of environment, I think that's some of the equivalent. 

So I think these treatments are really designed to both help you get some corrective information about what specifically it is that happened to you. And also figure out: What are the kind of tentacles of that event, or those events that continue to impact the way I think and behave today? And how can I practice something different, so that I can also get some corrective learning there?

11:17  Leslie:  Can you give us—this is a hard ask—a short definition of DBT PE, what that stands for, what that is?

11:27  Lorie: DBT: Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DBT PE adds in Prolonged Exposure. And so DBT treatment developed for chronically suicidal folks, many of whom have experienced trauma. And so DBT PE is the more newly developed intervention to tackle PTSD as early as possible, within the context of DBT.

11:55  Leslie: That's why I'm fascinated—the work has created such huge changes for people to help them. 

12:04  Lorie: Yes. Trauma treatment is really tough. In general, if you know a person who's going through trauma treatment of any kind, just assume that they're doing a really, really difficult thing. This is psychology-Iron-Man kind of stuff. And so for those folks, we spend some time in DBT teaching skills to regulate those behaviors so that we're learning other ways to cope with intense distress, other than going to something like suicide or self harm. 

And then once that person has stabilized a bit, then we start this trauma treatment. And for DBT PE, what we do is we lay out a plan and we systematically tackle the trauma. And we use two really important things. We use in vivos, and that's that behavioral practice: what are the things that you want to be able to do out in the world that you can't do right now because of the trauma? Not like I'm trying to get you to be a daredevil, and do all kinds of whatever. But I want you to be able to do things, like interview for a job if you want to be able to have a job. So we practice that, and then we do this thing called imaginal exposures, which is that piece of actually talking about the trauma specifically. 

And then we have a part of the session that's called processing, which is where I talk with the client about: What what did you learn in that? What did you hear yourself say? What kind of thoughts popped up as you were going through that narrative of your trauma, and what can we learn from that? How are we going to get you to shift your thinking? Because generally, there's a lot of self blame when people first start trauma treatment. How are we going to get you to sort of shift your blame about the responsibility you hold for what other people did?

13:45  Leslie: So, you also brought up what we call shame and feeling that you're not good enough; and how to start to only take responsibility for your part, but not for the chronic invalidation that you experienced, and change that lens. Anything else you want to say about shame? Because, boy, do I think between chronic invalidation and shame—as parents, those two things do become toxic for your child, or gets passed on.

14:19  Lorie: Well, there's an intergenerational trauma potential problem here. Some of the data are…again, this is an animal model about intergenerational trauma, but we know in some of the human studies too, that something is happening here that's really important. So we've got to be really mindful of that. But I think for a lot of parents, one thing to think about is when I coach parents in talking to their kids about emotions—their kids’ emotions, the parents’ emotions, other people's emotions—that they've witnessed, whether it's at school or in the news or friends on the street or any of those kinds of things, is you are creating a significant part of your child's internal dialog about emotions. 

So, when something happens, a lot of times when we have an emotion, people may or may not realize we're having an emotion in the world. But something's happening for us. We're thinking something, or we're feeling something, or that kind of stuff. And so what do you want to go through your kid's head in that time, in that sort of private moment of experiencing emotion, whatever the emotion is? And so the more that you talk about it, the more that you make that external, including how you deal with negative emotions, including your own mistakes, by the way. I think that actually is a way to do some corrective learning for all of that. 

So, yes, with shame, I could talk for a really, really, really long time about shame. Ultimately, I don't think I've ever done a trauma case that didn't involve directly targeting shame, because there's just been so many problematic messages that have resulted in shame-driven behavior. 

And this can certainly happen for parents, too. But what I would say for parents, a lot of times I think parents actually really underestimate how punishing shame is to a child. And part of that is because there's no readout. There's just no indicator of what the child is feeling. But when I talk to kids about their experience of like, what is the thing that is really…it's that moment of being invalidated or told you messed it up or you screwed it up, those kinds of things, I think, are often quite powerful. And we generally try to tell parents, from a behavioral perspective, you match both the reward or the reinforcer—if you're going to give one—with the behavior; but also the punisher. So if a child misbehaves just because you're really angry and upset, you don't magnify the punisher threefold. And if you do by accident, by the way, go back and talk about it. Change it.

17:13  Leslie: You're saying so much that I really try to focus on in the podcast. I mean, no, your child is not a monster. They're misunderstood. And the number one thing that I hear from kids along the lines of what you're talking about here, is: “My parents don't get me, my parents don't understand me.” How many times have you heard that? Even when a parent tries very positively to give their child some, Well, next time you should get up earlier, next time you should start earlier doing your homework. Even though the parent’s intention is, I'm just giving my child helpful information, what we do need to understand is that child hears, I'm not good enough. 

17:59  Lorie: I think that's entirely true. And some kids are more prone to that than others, that they somehow just go to this shame spiral without what seems like all that much coaching. But yes, I think trying to actually get a sense of, Do I have a kid who responds to shame, and do I actually know that without having made an assumption? Don't do this at a time when everybody's really distressed and you've just had a fight, but, “Remember when you and I had that big blow up last week and when I said that to you that you were in trouble or that I was mad? What happened? What was that like for you? Because I have this thought that I actually have no idea what it feels like to be you.” Experiencing what my emotions are, I know it feels like to be me, right? And you can sort of hear in there all of the teaching that you're trying to do indirectly with a child of: other people have different emotions. People experience things in different ways. 

This is one of the things I have to tell you, Leslie. You know that I've been taking this deep dive in the autism world over this last eight or nine years, and it's been this really incredible learning experience for me. But one of the concepts that I think resonated for me so much, outside of autism—just forget autism for just a second—is this concept of implicit versus explicit learning. It's this idea that we come into a situation knowing, or can pick up on quickly what a thing is; versus we need some amount of scaffolding. A little bit or a lot, who knows? But some amount of having that explained to us. 

So when you just gave that example of, “Next time, you should do your homework earlier.” Great, totally, absolutely—that's time management, right? It's just very non-specific time management. And so I think the idea there would be to say, “Seems to me like we got to get you started on homework a little bit earlier. And that all involves figuring out how to manage the clock in the evening, when the last thing you want to do is your homework. So how about tomorrow? We sit down and we work on a time management schedule so that you can actually look at it and see it and figure out something that'll work for you.” Because I'm not going to assume that whatever age my kids are, eight, nine years old, that they automatically know how to do time management when what they really want to do is play and hang out with their new puppy and go ride their hoverboards and do anything but homework for very understandable reasons. 

20:30  Leslie: Exactly. I love that. It's making sure that we really again try to understand them. They can share some information, but we can put it out there to make sure we're checking in with them and seeing like you said, how are they reacting to what I just said? It's interesting, because I have three children and one of my daughters, I could see the shame all over her, because she literally would go and hide under her covers if she thought she made a mistake. Now, I'm very laid back, so if anyone spilled anything…but if she spilled something, it was not okay with her, she went in under the covers. And that's where I made up the line, “Can you give yourself permission to make a mistake?” So we see the children who might really wear it on their sleeve: I feel badly about myself. I'm a bad person. They might even say it. On the other hand, my oldest son was someone who kept it all in, and I missed it. And I missed checking in with him, and so he was cooperative. This is where parents come to me with the child like my daughter, because she was yelling back, she was defiant, et cetera. And parents come in with those kids because it's much more explicit, as you said, but the child that's feeling it internally, we don't want to miss those kids. 

22:02  Lorie: And again, sometimes you've got kids who are talkers and they'll open right up, and you've got kids who, if you get five words, that's probably a pretty good thing and reinforce more of what you want to see. But part of that is creating a framework in your home where it is okay to talk about emotions. It's okay to be confused by emotions. It's okay to have negative emotions. It's okay to not want to fix your emotions immediately. It is not okay to, you know, X, Y, and Z, things like, you know, ruin other people's evenings. It's not okay to kick the dog because you have emotions. You know, those kinds of things. And if your emotion is at that level, let's talk about some things that we might do to manage that more effectively, something along those lines. 

But, we started this—I don't even remember where we got this, Leslie—my husband said, “Let's do this game for dinner.” When my kids were younger, they were similar to what you described, where one was a little more…you knew when the shame was happening for sure, and you knew when the emotion was happening in general. And the other one, the younger one, was harder to read. Not so much anymore, so she'll say that stuff now. But the dinner conversations, a lot of times are everybody's sort of, you know, we're a two working-parent household, so we're skidding in from work and whatever sports or all the many, many things. And now we're eating, and it gets very easy, so easy for parents to go right to the question that we really do want to know the answer to. I really do want to know how your day was and how school was, and what you did, and all of the things. And that is approximately the last question you want me to ask. So, yeah, my husband said, I want to play this game. It's called high low buffalo. What we do is we go around the table and everybody says—and there's different versions of this game out there—you say the high point of your day. Can be anything that was a high point to you. Don't worry about the rest of us and whether we would have thought it was the high point of the day. What was the high point of the day to you? Then what was the low point of your day? And then the buffalo category can be for anything that you learned, something funny, something unexpected, or, just anything else that you want to put in there. 

And that opened up a lot of conversations about emotions. It gave my husband and I an opportunity to really skillfully not make a deal of having made a mistake that day. It's just a part of what we talk about over dinner, and we can problem-solve things together. And that just really helped, I think, give everybody green lights to like, it's okay to screw up. It's what you do with it that matters.

24:50  Leslie: That's beautiful. And the fact that you made it the game, you made it a routine. Even if you believe that all emotions are welcome here, and we can always talk about everything, I hear parents say all the time, “You can ask me anything.” You can talk, but if you don't actually engage in the behavior, they are words. It's like they're talking the talk, but they're not walking the walk. So your game is actually, No, we're going to do what we said. We're really going to bring something to the surface that you get to think about. It's your share. I love that.

25:25  Lorie: You're talking about the importance of observational learning. When kids see what you're doing, they are more likely to copy. We all know this. And so if you're trying to teach emotion words, then model emotion words. Sometimes we say things like, “It was hard. I wasn't really sad and I wasn't really angry, but it was something between those two things I don't have…” And that's okay. We can sit there, we can tolerate that ambiguity with one another. So, model it. 

 [Music: Acoustic Motivation by Coma-Media]

26:16  Leslie: So you brought up working with neurodivergent kids, autistic kids—love the topic. I'm also learning everything I can and living it, by the way, with family and myself. Chronic invalidation for the neurodivergent children—a big topic. 

26:38  Lorie: I was wondering if you were going to bring this up in some way, shape or form, because I was thinking to myself, I am still struggling to get my head around that we have had a recent pronouncement that autism is an epidemic to be eradicated…by September, no less. Invalidation can range—I think this is important to understand. We all invalidate people, we invalidate ourselves, we invalidate our kids. We do it all the time. Invalidation can range from an accidental oversight, misspeak, whatever. You can still invalidate somebody in doing that, all the way to systemic policy level changes that tell you that your brain and the way that your sensory and emotion regulation systems operate is deeply, deeply problematic and must be eradicated. Are you kidding me? I can't think of a clearer example of systemic invalidation. 

Well, actually, I can, but that will just put that up in the pantheon of them. The level of invalidation for any minoritized identity, but certainly for neurodiverse children, I think that the environment is well set up to be invalidating at every turn in the road for autistic kids at whatever level. And I think the analogy would be: what's it like to be a left hander in this world? Can you get through it? Are people still going to say that you're cutting with scissors when you're in second grade isn't as good as your right handed classmates? Because the world wasn't built by or for you, but with handedness, we can see the handedness, and so we can say, “Oh, that's what's different.”

28:31  Leslie: So let's bring it back to some takeaways for parents, because we've talked about a number of things that are really, really important here. What's on the top of your brain for takeaways for parents? 

28:43  Lorie: One is, particularly when it comes to the question about invalidation, is it's very hard to know what another person finds invalidating unless you kind of have some sense—you've talked to them a little bit, you know where, kind of, their spots are. So let's say, for example, we've got parents of a youth who is going through what is typical for adolescents and identity development, and is trying out some new way of dressing that you don't necessarily like. I get lots of pretty judgmental comments from parents. And in all honesty, they very often think they are well intended. But the dramatic eyeliner, and they're giving me this, like, motion, very clearly communicating, You look like a clown, without saying those words. The kid hears that—the kid hears that. And so for some kids, they're like, Whatever, I don't care. And for other kids, it's shame prompting. 

And so paying attention to how some of that is received, and how we're responding to ways in which our kid is a little bit different from how we are from society, any sort of minoritized identity. So, certainly, queer kids, kids who are biracial or multiracial, first generation American, any sort of minoritized identity that sets you apart in some way, and that increases the likelihood that you're going to get some sort of invalidation from the environment. 

This can extend to, of course, let's say, a child, a non-religious child, or a religion-questioning child in a very religious family. Or vice versa, atheist families with a child who's curious about religion. Just trying to get a sense of where the joking lands, where the conversation lands: How okay does it feel to you to be a little different than the people around you? Do you feel supported in that? Do you feel like you can talk about that? It's a little hard to be different from other people, those kinds of things. 

And so just getting a sense and opening up the conversation, so that if and when they do feel that they are problematically different or suffering because of their differentness, that there's at least a person to talk to. Some of those things can be problem-solved. Some of those cannot, and so having a person to speak to, a trusted adult to speak to, is key. 

31:20  Leslie: That's a great takeaway. So seeing the differences, welcoming the differences, discussing the differences. When I say, “welcoming,” you don't have to agree with your child, in the case of religion or whatever, but to respect that they have their own individual thoughts and desires and values. That's hard for some parents, and that's a great takeaway, because it makes such a difference in the life of the child. Again, we're trying to prevent that chronic invalidation that could later become traumatic.

31:58  Lorie: Well, I think you want to sort of ask yourself…generally, when you ask parents, What is your main goal for your child in terms of like outcomes? I want them to be happy, is almost always the number one answer. Happy, functional member of society—something along those lines is almost always what you got. At times, there is a delta in the way that what you're saying: you want your child to be happy and what you're communicating behaviorally actually suggests two different things. So if the child's happiness involves being openly gay, and that's not what you envisioned for your life as having a queer child, then that's an us thing as parents that we got to deal with. Adolescents and young adults are supposed to be becoming their own person, not a younger version of us.

32:49  Leslie: I love that you're pointing out that we may have had even…not aware of the plans we had for our children or the desires we have for our children. But to help parents hold on to that “I want my child to be happy,” and then to help them understand that there might be their own version of, what do I expect from my child? What do I hope for my child that might need to be adjusted if they want to stick to their goal of, I want my child to be happy? 

33:18  Lorie: Yes, and that doesn't mean that you're not allowed to express disappointment to your kid by any stretch. Also part of good emotion regulation is being able to sit with uncomfortable emotions. In fact, that's a huge part of it. And at the same time, that's back to that point of parents, at times, not realizing the strength of the shame response, that a light touch actually is quite enough.

33:44  Leslie: That’s another great takeaway: a light touch. I love that image. Any final thoughts that you'd like to share? 

33:50  Lorie: The only other thing that I would say is that we try wherever possible, when a parent has suffered some amount of trauma, to validate wherever possible. That person also did not come out of a vacuum. Parents had their own experiences. Kids do not need to know all of those experiences in great detail, particularly if they're hugely problematic. And having some sense that I don't have all the answers, in part because nobody has all the answers; and in part because, like, “I had some problematic experiences growing up that we can talk about when you're older. But the best way for me to parent you in a way that works for you, is for us to have an open dialog of what that is.” 

One of my favorite clinical experiences that's happened recently is, I told one of my teenagers that I work with, you want this thing from your parents, and you've asked for it many different ways, but you're not really doing very good behaviorism, to be honest. So if you want them to parent you in a particular way, then do the same things behaviorally that they're doing with you. And the kid went out and read a whole book on behaviorism. So it's that kind of stuff you’ve got to figure out: What is happening for other people in some way, shape or form? 

35:03  Leslie: That leads me to the question of: where can parents find resources about some of these topics?

35:09  Lorie: The TAP clinic. So tapclinicnc.com is our website, and we do have some stuff on there, but we also have some e-learning courses that we've developed for parents. And so there's a SPACE training course on there, so that's Supportive Parenting of Anxious Childhood Emotions. And there's a course for parents of youth with misophonia. And I'm recording a parenting course. It's a three-section introductory, intermediate, and advanced learning for parents of neurodiverse kids and also of newly diagnosed sorts of things, to really understand autism a little bit better and from a non-judgmental perspective. 

But we also are in the midst of recording an e-learning series on shame and self-compassion…

35:56  Leslie: and those can be found where?

36:59  Lorie: On the TAP Clinic website—it's under our resources page. We'll be adding to that. And we also offer lots of continuing education under TAP CE, so mental health professionals can get continuing education credit for those things. And sometimes I think we have things that are maybe of interest to the public as well. So feel free to take a look at our website.

36:21  Leslie: Oh my goodness, that's perfect. I'm so excited to be able to share them as well. They sound fantastic. Thank you so much for being here today, Lorie.

36:29  Lorie: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

36:36  Leslie Cohen-Rubury: To learn more about Lorie's work and for additional resources on trauma and other things we mentioned in this episode. Visit my show notes at ismychildamonster.com. And this week, keep in mind something Lorie said that when you're expressing disappointment to your child: a light touch is enough. 

Join us next week when we meet a stay at home mom of three who is struggling with sibling rivalry, especially as her children vie for her attention. 

Subscribe to Is My Child A Monster? Wherever you get your podcast and please rate and review to help spread the word. You can also find a full transcript of this episode or sign up for my newsletter at ismychildamonster.com. The Is My Child A Monster? team is Alletta Cooper, Camilla Salazar, and me. Special thanks to Eric Rubury. Our theme music is by L-Ray Music. I'm Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Thanks so much for listening. 

Transcribed by Eric Rubury