Healing Your History to Help Your Kids Heal Theirs with Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, Ph.D.

Do you feel like raising a child with a history of trauma has stirred up your own traumatic past? If you wonder how to parent from a position of healing, listen to this conversation with Dr. Robyn Koslowitz. She is a psychologist, trauma expert, and author of the new book, Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle, Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be.

In this episode, we discuss:

• You open your book by saying, ‘It’s not you, it’s your trauma.’ That feels like both a relief and a challenge. Can you unpack that for parents and caregivers who blame themselves for every misstep in their parenting?
• When you use the term post-traumatic parent, what do you mean? How does that differ from saying ‘parent with trauma’ or ‘healed parent’?
• Many caregivers feel haunted by an internal guilt that says, “How can I give what I never received?” How can parents or caregivers move from guilt to agency—without glossing over the pain?
• What are the 5 post-traumatic parenting defaults you identify in your book? What do they look like in real-life moments of parenting? 
• How does a parent choose not to opt into those old trauma-driven defaults (e.g., yelling, withdrawal, overcontrol) in the moment? 
• The metaphor of trauma as an app
• What is the concept of cycle-breaking versus cycle-making, and how is it valuable for breaking those unhealthy parenting patterns?
• What are some practical applications of this post-traumatic parenting reframe? 
• How can a parent create and maintain trauma-responsive routines or rituals that will increase a child’s sense of felt safety, without being rigid or feeling like a bunch of rules they must follow?

Chapters

• 1:37 You open your book by saying, ‘It’s not you, it’s your trauma.’ That feels like both a relief and a challenge. Can you unpack that for parents and caregivers who blame themselves for every misstep in their parenting?
• 4:08 When you use the term post-traumatic parent, what do you mean? How does that differ from saying ‘parent with trauma’ or ‘healed parent’?
• 8:45 Many caregivers feel haunted by an internal guilt that says, “How can I give what I never received?” How can parents or caregivers move from guilt to agency—without glossing over the pain?
• 18:23 What are the 5 post-traumatic parenting defaults you identify in your book? What do they look like in real-life moments of parenting?
• 22:44 How does a parent choose not to opt into those old trauma-driven defaults (e.g., yelling, withdrawal, overcontrol) in the moment?
• 38:16 What is the concept of cycle-breaking versus cycle-making, and how is it valuable for breaking those unhealthy parenting patterns?
• 44:36 What are some practical applications of this post-traumatic parenting reframe?
• 51:43 How can a parent create and maintain trauma-responsive routines or rituals that will increase a child’s sense of felt safety, without being rigid or feeling like a bunch of rules they must follow?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Is parenting a child, impacted by trauma, stirred up some big feelings and challenges
for you? Are you recognizing that maybe you have some unfinished business from your
own history that you weren't aware of before you welcomed this child to your family?
Hello and welcome to Creating a Family, talk about adoption, foster care, and kinship
care. I'm Tracy Whitney, the content director of the nonprofit organization
CreatingAFamily .org. I'm also your host for today's interview with Dr. Robin Kozloitz.
I think you
become trauma informed and integrate social and emotional learning into their
curricula. She is also the author of a brand new book called Post Traumatic
Parenting, Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. And we
just want to say welcome and thanks for joining us, Dr. Kozloids. Thanks so much
for having me. This is such a great organization to speak with because I feel like
you're already trauma informed, which I think is the biggest hump. Yeah, well, we do
try. It's a lot to learn. And we feel like as a team, we're always learning.
And that's part of the reason we get so excited about bringing new information to
our audience. So I think this book is going to be of great appeal to those that
we're supporting and serving in the adoptive foster and kinship space. Yeah. You open
the book by saying, quote, It's not you. It's your trauma. That feels, when I read
it, kind of like a relief, but also kind of like a challenge. Can you unpack that
for the parents and caregivers who may tend to blame themselves for every misstep in
their parenting? Yeah, so much, right? Like it feels like when you're parenting, for
every parent, it's like you, something happens and you react and then later on in
the dead of the night maybe you're thinking like why did i yell so loud why did i
get that mad why did i turn away when my kid was really being stressful instead of
leaning in and we feel so bad about ourselves like who could yell at a four -year
-old right like what like she's 14 i get that you know 14 is challenging but at
the same token like she's a kid. How did I get that frustrated? And later on upon
mature reflection, we feel so bad, but we learned that somewhere, right? There isn't,
it's not like you became a parent and suddenly you started yelling and you've never
yelled before in your life. That's not how it happens. At some point in your life,
you learned whatever that pattern was. And I'm going to call that instance of
learning trauma, right? So You didn't just wake up one morning and say, hey,
I want to get really stressed out with my kids. Or, hey, I want to space out,
ignore my kids, just zone out on my phone, and just completely check out today.
Like, that never happened. No parent wakes up in the morning and says, I want to
do this poorly, right? When we do it poorly, which we do, because sometimes we're
more skillful, sometimes we're less, sometimes we're more overwhelmed, sometimes we're
less. Usually there's a trauma backstory that taught you that coping pattern.
And I think you're right. It's a little scary because it's like, wait, if I've been
rehearsing this pattern for so long, how do I unrehearse it? But then there's that
other side of, you're not the worst person in the world who just decided to yell
at a 10 year old, right? That's not the thing because that's the thing I hear the
most from parents is the yelling, right? Parents really say I was much harsher than
I intended to be. I got much angrier than I intended
post -traumatic parenting. But I'm wondering, how does that different from saying a
parent with trauma or an unhealed parent? So not necessarily is it different.
I think we're carrying different legacies and different burdens when we're talking
about unhealed, when someone, for example, has an unexamined, like, mental illness,
right? Or when someone has a behavioral health challenge, right? Someone has a
diagnosis like depression, somebody has a diagnosis like OCD. And maybe See.
I happen to treat a lot of, you know, young parents with OCD. When you're
parenting, you can't spend three hours getting dressed because the skirts, you know,
every skirt in your closet needs to be symmetrically hung up before you can put any
clothing on, right? For example, or, you know, something feels germy so you can't
put it on. When you're a single person, you can figure out a job where, yeah, I
can come three hours late and that's fine. That works. You can't do that with a
three -year -old, right? So in some ways, it's not that different. Parenting is very
often the first time that we take the aspects of ourselves that are unheeled and we
say, wait, I've got to get a handle on this. Trauma, though, in particular, teaches
us certain lessons about ourselves and the world, and it very often takes us over,
and it very often makes us think that this is the only way to cope. Very often,
when you have something like OCD, you know you have OCD. You just think like, this
is me. I have my quirks, right? With PTSD very often and with trauma in general,
very often, you just think this is the world, this is how the world is. You don't
think, oh, maybe there's something about my response that could be different.
Maybe I don't have to get that anxious. Maybe this is not that dangerous. Maybe if
I held onto my anger and didn't lash out with it, nothing terrible would happen. I
wouldn't explode. Like I wouldn't die. Like nothing would happen. We don't think that
way because your trauma has taught you for so many years to be and to cope and to
adapt in the way that you adapt. So there's a little bit of a difference in terms
of often people do realize when they have a condition. It's just parenting that
makes them say, oh, I've actually got to get a handle on this. versus trauma, which
sometimes you don't even realize until your children sort of reveal it, which is
cool. And if you're parenting children who have their own histories of trauma that
have not been addressed or not been identified, that escalates both experiences of
trauma and how each person is manifesting that trauma. And then we have to be the
adults in the room and say, okay, somebody's got to deal with this and somebody has
to get this healed. And that's us. Right. Exactly. Right. And unfortunately,
right, that does fall on the adult, but also fortunately, because one thing I say
in the book is it's not that our kids trigger us. It's that our kids reveal our
triggers. Right. So in some ways, there's this use advantage to parenting with a
history of trauma because our kids are going to reveal our triggers, and then we
can actually do something about our triggers. And you're right that when a child has
their own trauma history, everything becomes a little bit accelerated because they're
not experiencing the world the way the most neurotypical child with,
like, what I would call like a psychotypical profile has. They're not making the
same assumptions about the world that everybody else might like new people are
friendly and are going to be nice to you and adults are there to help you right
these are assumptions about the world that we sometimes think that all children have
but children who've grown up with an adversity don't have those so then everything
that we might imagine would go smoothly doesn't like the first day of school or a
friend's birthday party or you know, a bad mark on a test, right? Which,
you know, in any other situation, you would expect the child to say, oh, I don't
understand this question on the test. I will raise my hand and ask the teacher, a
child with a trauma history might be like, I don't want the teacher to know that
I'm struggling. Right. And if you have a trauma history, then that might become
disproportionately large, right? And that's where the real interesting work happens.
So that brings up the issue of kind of that internal guilt that when we become
aware of it and we say, oh, yeah, this is something that is an opportunity for
healing, but it can also make us feel like, oh, how can I give this child what
they need when it's not something I myself ever received? How do you help parents
and caregivers move from that maybe sense of guilt or that sense of lack without
glossing over their pain. Yeah. And that's a huge question. I don't want to sound
glib with the answer. This is something I do all the time. It's something I've
lived. So that awful feeling of my kids are going to be damaged by my damage is a
really scary sensation to have. A lot of us with trauma histories walk around
feeling defective. We feel like, you know, we're that broken toy in the bin that's
50 % off. Like there's something wrong. Right. And then we parent and it's like,
oh, no, I have this child entrusted to me and I cannot let this child be damaged
by my damage. But then at the same token, when we realize that in some ways our
damage becomes our superpower, right? That very thing that we look at as this makes
me defective is also something.
dinner on the table and coming home to the smell of food cooking and a parent
who's ready to do your homework with you and a home that's cleared for and clean
these are gifts and something to appreciate right you might feel defective because
you didn't experience it so you had to learn how to do it and it was hard but
now you've learned how to do it and you can give that gift to another child yeah
that's huge and your inner child can actually experience the experience of nurturing
from the standpoint of the nurturer but
just like roughhouse and just do kind of what dads do, right? Just play around. And
I was this very like sort of organized task focus. Some of it had to do with
being a graduate student and working and having small children, but very organized,
very like task focused. And I would get irrationally angry when my husband would
come home and start like roughhousing with the kids too close to bedtime. Until I
realized that this was my inner child feeling really jealous of my real world
children because they were experiencing something right this experience of playing with
a parent not growing up in a hospital right but like playing with a parent that I
never had that joy of just like that throws you up into the ear and you're
giggling right that I had just never experienced but at some point I was able to
look at that and say you know I can join in the play and my inner child can
experience it from the standpoint of the adult who's playing, but I can play too.
Right. And that was such a profoundly healing moment for me, right? Because my inner
child just got something. Yeah. Repeatedly in the book, you talk about the act of
parenting can heal where your parenting was not adequate in your own history.
I love that that's kind of the recurring theme that you talk about. In that vein,
it sounds to me like there's a lot of reframing that you do with parents and
caregivers to help them see through a different lens that the inadequacies or the
traumas that they experienced from their own family of origin can be opportunities
for not just their own healing, but then to help the children in our demographic
who've been adopted or fostered or come through relative caregiving experience their
own healing. Is that a kind of a good summary of that? Yeah, it's an excellent
summary of that. And I think that I also want to point out that very often when
people had traumas in their childhood, it doesn't necessarily mean that their parents
were abusive or neglectful or in some way bad, right? A lot of people will,
you know, I had someone say to me, like, I bought your book, but I can't, my mom
comes to my house a lot. I don't want her to see it because I don't want her to
realize that I look at my childhood as traumatic, right? Which I think at some
point, you know, clarity and communication is a very good thing to do, but that's a
separate conversation. But sometimes your parents did the best they could with the
tools they had, right? My father certainly did not intend to be ill, Right. I grew
up in a home that was very dedicated to keeping him alive. He had many hard
episodes as I was growing up and they were very scary. My parents did the best
they could with the tools they had. Sometimes there are no adequate tools for
certain life situations. Right. Sometimes parents are immigrants. Sometimes parents are
dealing with, you know, really stressful life situations, a business that's on the
verge of collapse, an older sibling with a really serious disease, right? Things that
just aren't in the control of parents. And sometimes parents are doing the best they
can with the advice they're given and the advice is poor. You know, I've worked
with people who were bullied whose parents were told, ignore it, let the children
work it out on their own with the advice being very well -meaning, but there's a
difference between good nature teasing and a campaign of harassment and bullying.
Right. Or a parent who puts their child into a certain form of treatment. There's
certainly, you know, a lot of adult survivors of like the troubled teen industry who
are talking now about what they went through in certain like rehab facilities where
the parents were terrified for their children. We're told this is the best treatment
for your child. It landed traumatic. Right? We can't necessarily, so to speak,
blame the parents. When we look at, when we look at someone, we we say your
childhood was traumatic, it's very easy to sort of bleam the parents. This isn't
about blame. Like my book is very much not about that. My book is very much about
trauma happened. It was an instance of learning. It affected you in some way. That
doesn't mean that the trauma was inflicted intentionally. Right. Right. And I want to
give people that permission because like that person who told me my mom can't ever
see I read your book, we're not indicting your mom. Your childhood was traumatic.
That's not an indictment of your mom. Right. Yeah. Things are true. That's an
excellent point. I love that. I've actually said to my adult children, I did the
best I could with what I had. And I'm sorry if it hurt you. And there's been
times in this journey of learning how to be trauma informed. I've had to go back
to my adult children and say, I did this incorrectly or I did this badly or I did
this, you know, in a way that caused harm. And please forgive me for that. But now
that I know better, I'm going to do better. But I love that you proactively did
that. You didn't just say, ooh, I didn't do that. I hope they don't remember. You
went back to them and you repaired. Because it's never too late to repair, even
with our adult kids. Like we sometimes look at child development or human development
as though it ends at age 18. But our relationships with our children are constantly
evolving. I have adult children now, and we've had conversations about their
childhood. I'm a child psychologist. I didn't do everything right. And the ability to
repair and to say, you know, that was wrong. That landed the way I didn't intend.
That was a mistake. I'm sorry. How do we fix it now? What can I do now to make
that up to you? How do we talk about it differently? What have we learned from it?
That's such a superpower. I think a lot of post -traumatic people don't realize that
that's a superpower. Like when you've experienced a lot of trauma in your childhood,
and for any parent here who's raising a traumatized child, very often people who
experience a lot of really intense trauma early on don't really know about the
possibility of repair. They think that anything that goes wrong is wrong and it's
over. And there's nothing you can ever do about it. And that's like something that
we have to really explode and we have to say okay so how do we fix it yeah we
messed up i messed up you messed up this was a messed up situation how do we fix
it because we always can that's so hopeful i appreciate the encouragement that that
brings i am sorry to interrupt this conversation i'm finding it fascinating to
consider how to reframe trauma into an opportunity for healing, and I hope you are
as well. But I wanted to make you aware of another tool that we have here at
creating a family that can help you reframe your parenting and strengthen your skills
to help your family find the healing that they need, especially if you've got
children who have experienced trauma. And that is our library of 15 free courses,
thanks to our partnership with the Jockey Being Family Foundation. You can go to
Bitley -slash -J -B -F support. That's b -it .l -Y -slash -J -B -F support.
And there's 15 free courses there that you can use to build up your toolbox for
parenting and strengthen your family. And we're grateful to the Jockey Being Family
Foundation for those courses. Thank you. You talk in the book about five post
-traumatic parenting defaults. Can you explain what those are and then what they might
look like in real -life moments of parenting so that people can kind of start to
put hands on what we're talking about today? Sure. So the defaults really came out
of teaching so many post -traumatic parenting classes and over the years hearing
questions and realizing that people tend to default into certain categories. So the
first post -traumatic parent type is the perfectionist post -traumatic parent. And this
is the person who says, I am going to do everything right. Like my childhood was
terrible. My kids are not going to experience anything wrong. I am going to be the
perfect parent. And they're working so hard on parenting perfectly.
They forget to parent and be present. And they forget that there's no such thing as
perfect parenting. It's a bad idea, right? Winnicott said even the beneficial is
toxic in the excess, right? Perfect would be a bad thing for kids. So there's that
parent. Then we have the disengaged post -traumatic parent, which is somebody who
feels so damaged by their damage that they disengage from their children. So that
might be someone who outsources their parenting, like they let their parenting partner
do a lot of it. Sometimes that's somebody who disengages in the form of like,
you know, dissociating, being very like mindless, being on their phone all the time,
sort of, you know, taking a step back. Like, my kids are going to be stressful.
I'll zone out on my phone. Let them sort it out. I'm just not going to deal with
it because my, you know, I got to take the edge off because my edges are so
sharp. Sometimes that's a little bit of like, you know, mommy wine culture. I hate
to gender it but like you hear that type of thing a lot but parents who just take
a step back I was a disengaged parent for me it was very much being a workaholic
and my husband I felt like was the undamaged one who had the normal childhood so I
used to let him do a lot of the like the play and a lot of that kind of
parenting stuff then we have the entangled parent entangled parents are ones who are
so caught up in some sort of a drama that they can't quite get to their kids.
Maybe it's family of origin drama. Maybe it's a toxic workplace. Maybe it's a
frenemy. Maybe it's an ex -spouse, but they're so caught up in something else. I
always picture like a fish that's tangled up in a net and their kids are over
there and they can't quite swim forward. That's a great word picture for it. Yeah.
And you see it a lot with people who are just like in a real custody dispute, in
a real like in a real like family of origin expects them to drop everything for
the family of origin and they just can't parent everything sort of an emergency then
we have the paralyzed parent and this is somebody who feels so lacking in
discernment they just don't know how to make a decision so they're frantically busy
which is not what you usually think of a paralysis but they're not doing anything
effective so they might be intervening with one child and then something's burning on
the stove and then they start cleaning up one room and then you know they get a
phone call about something else and they're just rushing from thing to thing but
they're never committing to one course of action at a time and they really need to
learn to trust a level of discernment like tonight dinner is going to be peanut
butter and jelly my kid is crying I'm focusing on that right and really making that
decision and then there are parents who are in survivor mode which is not even
really a default it's just what happens sort of like if you look at PTSD right as
the condition that sets in after trauma there's a condition called acute stress
disorder ASD which is sort of when right when the trauma's happening someone's dying
in the hospital right now my house just burned down I just got fired right like
huge traumatic experiences and they're operating on the adrenaline of shock but the
damage hasn't yet set in Okay. And people can be in survivor mode for years and
years and years and just one day sort of wake up and be like, how did this
happen? I had somebody like very dramatically in the post -traumatic parenting class
say that she was talking about how she's waking up from survivor mode.
Like four years ago, I was living in another state with a job and a spouse and
like this was my life. And then COVID happened. My business fell apart. My marriage
unraveled. I'm living back at home with my parents and my kids are four years older
and I just woke up and I was like, wait, what just happened? And it's like, wow,
yeah, you're waking up from survivor mode. And it's suddenly hitting you that your
children's childhood is passing as this is happening. You need to start parenting
again. It makes perfect sense, right? So when you're in a moment where your default
is being activated, how can you start to spot some of that for yourself?
So it's really helpful to sort of hear about the default and then say, oh, that's
totally me. And a lot of parents have one of two, right? I was somewhat entangled,
somewhat disengaged. So between those two things, I was entangled in my family of
origin, which happens very often when there's a severe illness in a family. And I
was also the only daughter, and daughters very often take on caregiving roles. And
then also, you know, that disengagement of As a child, I had learned to be very
dissociated and focused on my work. So that was just my coping pattern. So I just
learned how to do that. As a parent, I just thought that's the world, which is
what happens with our trauma default. We don't even think like, oh, this is a
trauma default. We think this is the way it has to be. So when you start
realizing, oh, it's not the way it has to be, like when someone asks you a crucial
question, like, so what happens if you do make a mistake with your kids and the
thought is so intolerable like no I can't that can't happen right then you say oh
other people are not afraid of making a mistake with their kids or like other
people don't need to dissociate in order to get through a stressful evening with
their children or you know other people tell their family of origin or their toxic
best friend sounds like you have a crisis but i'm with my kids right now so i'll
speak to you tomorrow like other people are free to do that it's almost shocking.
It's like, oh, wait, you can do that? Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I,
I love this part of the book because you stop and talk very specifically about the
steps parents can take, parents and caregivers can take when they feel those trauma
defaults, those unhealthy patterns starting to emerge, you offer,
what, like five or six steps that parents can take, would you walk us through kind
of those steps? Yeah. So I look at it as, I look at trauma as an app in your
brain, as opposed to seeing trauma as a past wound, which is how people
conceptualize it. And they're like, oh, you know, I had this wound happen to me.
I should be over it by now. I should be healed. The way you break your leg, two
years later, you expect maybe an occasional ache in the bone, but on the whole, you
expect it to be fully strong and healed, right? We look at trauma that way, but
trauma actually installs an app in our brain, and that app very often overrides what
we would like to do. And when you look at a trauma as an app, you understand that
it's not about a past event, it's about current programming. So the idea is to look
at it exactly like you would an app on your phone and be like, I want to deselect
these permissions. This is so mind -blowing to me. When I was looking it over and
reading it, I was like, that app metaphor is so perfect for when we do understand
what trauma is and what it does to a developing brain for our kids,
but then we don't often apply that same mindset to ourselves.
So I'm very excited that you're explaining the metaphor and that you're going through
the four steps of how to address it. I love that you love the metaphor because for
me, when I thought of the metaphor, it changed everything in terms of my own
frustration with myself because I still sometimes say like, why am I still so
hypervigilant about things like health? Like I should be over that by now. Like, no,
it's an app. You got scary news and the app turned itself back on. It reasserted
its permissions. That makes so much sense. It's part of your programming now, right?
I always say PTSD is not how my brain dysfunction, even though the D is disorder.
PTSD is how my brain functions at this point. So I have to understand it really
well because I have to sort of become a good user of my app. It's there, it's
installed, I've got to use it. It has some good points to it. It has some poor
points to it. I need to be able to say, oh, that's what's going on here. But
that's what I want parents to do. So if, for example, you are that paralyzed
parent, right, and you're, oh, should I, should I be making dinner? Or should I be
talking to my kid? My teenager stomped upstairs, I went to their room. Should I
give her space? Or should I go up? And then you're like indecisively doing 30
things at once. Right. And saying to your app, wait, I've got this. I'm going to
pick one course of action. It might be wrong. And that's okay. You're screaming an
alarm at me. Might be the wrong action. That's okay. It's better to do one wrong
action, right? Better to like stay downstairs and focus on dinner and not go up to
the teenager, even if going up to the teenager would have been the smarter thing in
retrospect than to half make dinner while calling to the teenager to come down and
therefore accomplishing neither. Or I'm going to decide to go up to the teenager and
maybe that's not the best thing. Maybe they need to blow off steam in their room
and I'll talk to them later. That would be okay too, but I've got to pick a
course of action. Trauma app, I need you to stop yelling the alarms. I'm muting
your alarms right now. I picked a course of action, what we call pick and stick, I
picked, and I'm sticking to it, and that's that. And even if somebody's going to
criticize me later, right? You were chopping onions while your kid was crying in
your bedroom. Yeah, I was because I wanted to give her space. And maybe that was a
great choice. Right. Right. And sometimes that was a great choice. Actually, when I
talk to paralyzed parents, I'm sometimes like, no, you made a good choice there. You
focused on the kid who was crying and you let the other kid who was loud but not
actually in need of your empathy right now, sort of like, be mad for a while. That
was okay because you can't be in two places at once, even if your trauma app has
such faith in you with things you can't, you can't. Yeah, and that's okay. So pause
and pick a course of action. Yeah. That's great. And then each post -traumatic
parenting subtype, we sort of say, okay, this is what your trauma app wants you to
do. And now tell it thanks. Appreciate the help. Good idea, but I've got a better
idea. So I'm going to do mine and I'm going to override your signals. Right. As
long as later on, you look at those signals and you say, hmm, you were giving me
valuable information. What do I want to do with it now? That's fantastic. So can
you talk a little bit about when we're doing all of that? How do we kind of
identify the triggers that we're feeling in the moment? Okay.
So for me, the key thing is I look for disproportionality.
So when a parent says I yelled much louder than I should or it's been three days
and I haven't talked to my kid. Like I've basically been giving her the silent
treatment, not because I'm
was wrong, right? If you're four -year -old, this may or may not have happened in my
home this morning, if your four -year -old takes off their shoes for the fourth time
when we're trying to like get somewhere because like mom has a day of work and we
have to get you somewhere, that can get you angry. Like you're not, anger identifies
a problem. That's a problem, right? If you got so angry that you yelled and that's
not consistent with your parenting values, that's disproportionate, right? Your reaction
was a 10 when it should have been a two, right?
If your kid is going to be late to school and you're so stressed out about that,
why? Why is that so scary? Kids are late to school sometimes. Not great. It's not
ideal. Teacher doesn't love it. It's not great for they're learning. But it's not
the end of the world. So why are you so stressed out? Well, the teacher might
judge me. Okay. And if the teacher judges you, what might happen? And then we're
going to hear a story. And that story was likely an instance of trauma.
Because If you look at trauma as simply an experience that was too big for your
brain to metabolize, something that made you feel alone in the world,
something that made you feel like the world is unsafe and you can't survive with
it. Within it, you don't know your place within it. Then whatever that story was,
maybe you were judged by your teacher when you were a kid, maybe you were harshly
criticized by a parent, right? Something made you think that this is the worst thing
in the world as opposed to just like, yeah, you're going to be late to school or
like, yeah, you know.
And very often you're going to find out, right? But then you also want to be
checking in with your trauma app because your trauma app tells the truth. It just
exaggerates a lot, right? So there's a kernel of truth there. So what do you want
to do with it? For example, let's say, you know, for me, health can be scary,
right? So let's say I, you know, a doctor finds something and they say, oh, I want
to biopsy this, figure out what's going on. That is Indeed scary. Now, until we get
the results of that biopsy, there's not much I can do about it, right? But my
trauma app is going to keep me up every night all night, like thinking of all the
worst case scenarios that everything could possibly be and like planning the eulogy
my kids are going to give it my funeral, right? Like my trauma app is like
creative. It's ready to do all of those things. To be able to say to that trauma
app, thank you. This is indeed true. If this is indeed something scary, we will
have to deal with it, but guess what? Not much I can do right now. I have two
weeks to wait. You can't do much about it. Right? And that's very glib,
right? Because it's still going to keep keeping you up. But if you keep deselecting
that permission, can't be hypervigilant. I can't worry about this right now. Good
information. Thank you, Trauma app. Appreciate it. Not so much I can do about it.
Very often, we can then come to like a much healthier place of coping or dealing.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we can ask ourselves, like, what do I need right now to help
silence that voice and keep the deselected? Do I need to go for a walk?
Do I need to journal? Do I need to practice yoga or go do Pilates or,
in my case, crochet? Do I need to do something else that will silence that and
keep it silenced until I decide that I need to turn it back on? Right.
And that's another big pillar of the book, this idea that self -care is child care,
right? Because I cannot bring my whole self to parenting if I don't have a self.
And some of that means that, sure, I remember like when I was a very young mom
and I would want to go out and do something and it was something like not
absolutely necessary go to the gym go to a friend go to you know go to a party
and you know you go through that like only mommy phase that like toddlers do you
know where you're the preferred parent and you feel so bad like forget it I don't
need to go out with my friends tonight it's fine I'll stay home he's so upset
right right like no self care is child care if I go out with my friend I will be
more myself when I come home. Daddy is a very capable parent. The kid will be
distressed, but it's a normative distress and repair as possible. Right. It's okay.
Just even those kinds of things. I think we sometimes, nowadays especially, there's a
lot of rhetoric about that where, you know, we understand attachment better and we
understand how important is, but we sometimes give it magical powers or mythelize it,
you know, give it this mythic status of like, everything will disrupt attachment.
Right. No. Sometimes, like, good quality, you know, daycare or good quality,
you know, someone else watching your kid or, you know, a break from the children
that isn't strictly necessary. You're not like, you know, at death's door, you're
just going out with friends. Sometimes that actually makes you a better parent and
it enhances attachment. attachment. But if you listen to certain influencers online,
you would think that if we're not all living on farms and baby wearing till our
kids are four and, you know, growing their wheat with our own hands to make our
sourdough pancakes for them, then we're harming attachment irreparably and, you know,
best we can do is pay for their therapy. Yeah. And I'm an old mom, very old mom.
So I watch those and I just think, oh, honey, you are going to wear yourself out
before they get to kindergarten. And it's exhausting to feel like you have to be
that on all the time, because attachment is primary and it is foundational, but it's
not the only thing that matters in parenting our children well, especially when we're
parenting children who've got extensive histories of trauma or neglect or complex
issues of, you know, the impacts from prenatal substance exposure, this kind of
parenting that we're doing kind of is like parenting up a notch or parenting on
steroids. And if we're not supplying and fueling ourselves well,
the attachment is not going to be whole and healthy on both sides of the equation.
And that's the thing. Attachment is a two -way street. It's not just a one -way
thing. It's also, if you look at like Edtronic's work, you understand that attachment
is a dance. And in a dance, there are steps forward and step backwards, right?
There are pauses, right? There are moments where you change direction. It would not
be a very interesting dance if you just were walking in one direction the whole
time. That would be a march, and that's not fun to watch, right? Right. In fact,
that's somewhat menacing, right? It's not great. Attachment is meant to be this dance
advances back and forth, which might mean we drop off at daycare and there's some
tears and then we pick up and there's repair. Yes. And that's such a beautiful
thing, right? Think of like the, I love the picture book like Lama Lama Mrs. Mama,
right? Mama comes back at the end of the day, right? It's very sad. Mama's not
there and that's very, we've all, we had that experience. We've experienced that with
both as kids and as adults, but mama comes back, right? And sometimes we have to
teach kids that mama comes back, but mama can only come back if mama leaves, right?
Not in a bad way. Obviously, we're talking about high -quality daycare or a high
-quality kindergarten and high -quality babysitter, right? You know, there's other
considerations to take into place. But like when you look at some of what people
say, it really does sound like, you know, attachment is this fragile,
like, precious thing that attachment is precious, but it's not fragile, right? And in
fact, it gets stronger with all these minor ruptures and repairs. Right. But if
you're post -traumatic yourself, you're going to awfulize that. Right. It makes a lot
of sense. Yeah. Catastrophizing is something that those of us who maybe tend towards
perfectionism do quite well. Yeah. Yeah. So in your chapter on becoming the parent
you want to be, you discuss cycle breaking versus cycle making.
And I really appreciated that section of how to kind of integrate everything that
we're learning and then actually apply it to our parenting in healthy new cycles.
So could you talk a little bit about what that is, why cycle making versus cycle
breaking is such a valuable tool for the kind of long -term parenting patterns that
we want to establish. Yeah, you're pointing to something so important in the book
because, you know, after the book came out, this new research came out that the
newest form of parenting that people are embracing is cycle -breaking parenting. And I
think as I've been thinking about it, because my thinking has evolved, you know that
idea of like the pendulum that switches from like side to side, right? And so I
feel like gentle parenting was sort of the pendulum shift away from the harsher,
more authoritarian parenting that we used to have in the past. But it was about
breaking a cycle. When you think about cycle breaking, it's really about understanding
that it's not that hard to break a cycle, right? You just stop doing something.
But that's really not enough, right? Still leaves a gap. Still leaves a gap, right?
You know what not to do. So I'm going to not hit my cat.
Waltz to is so hard. Right. But what are you, yes, doing? Right. Your kid still
needs to be taught something. Your kid still needs to be redirected. Your anger
needs to be handled. Right. There has to be a way of dealing with it. On the post
-traumatic parenting podcast, I had somebody who, we were talking about this idea
about how it's never too late to repair. And she was talking and she was saying
how her own mom used to give her the silent treatment her whole life. And this was
a psychologist herself who researches families. And she said her mom used to give
her the silent treatment.
And they had this conversation. And as a psychologist, she knew how to broach it in
a very gentle, like this was meant to be a repairing because they still had a
strong relationship. And her mom told her it was a point of pride with me, I never
laid my hands on you. No matter how mad I get, I might have gone away for like a
week, but I never hit you. And she said, wow, she was trying to break a cycle.
I never realized, to me, it was like, why does she silent treatment me? This is so
painful. How could a mother who loves her child do this to her kid? I tried so
hard to be good so that she wouldn't give me the silent treatment. It was so
painful for me. And then she would just like disappear into one of her moods for a
few days. And it felt like such a, you know, almost emotional blackmail that I had
to not trigger her moods. But she was trying not to hit me. Wow. And it was such
a profound moment of repair for her, right? She is cycle making, right?
As a post -traumatic parent, she is working on like, how do I communicate with my
kids through stressful moments, right? Because she is taking it that one step
further. So yes, cycle breaking is super important, but sometimes cycle breaking does,
like you said, leave a void and leave a gap. So cycle making is, but what do I
want to do instead because it is so hard to have a to don't list and a to -do
list when you're parenting. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. To -do list, it grows and grows
and grows and grows and grows. Right. If you're also juggling a giant to don't
list, that's really hard. We also know from acceptance and commitment therapy that
the way our brains work is that when we focus a lot on what we don't want to do,
we end up doing it more. Right. If you think don't yell, don't yell don't yell you
end up yelling if you think when I feel stressed I'm going to sing you will do
that yeah right but we have a to don't list because we feel damaged by our damage
it makes a lot of sense yeah so it's kind of flipping that from focusing all of
our energy on the to don't which is not as you said the worst thing in the world
but then taking it that step farther and saying, and here's what I'm going to do
instead and choosing something positive and healthy and focusing your time and energy
on that. It goes, you know, it goes back to that conversation. What you focus on
is what you will become. And, you know, we teach that to our kids. Like, if you
surround yourself by positive, healthy endeavors, then you are much more likely to
become positive and healthy yourself. and kind of giving ourselves that permission to
do the same thing and the grace to do that same thing. Yeah.
One more quick interruption to tell you about a couple additional ways to help you
keep learning and keep building your parenting toolbox. First, we think you should
check out our free monthly newsletter, which you can find at Creatingafamily .org
slash newsletter. And When you get there, you can choose a free downloadable guide
that's full of practical tools that will strengthen your family. You can pick from
one called Parenting Child Exposed to Trauma. There's another one called navigating
challenging behaviors. You can pick one of the four as a free gift from creating a
family. Second, you can like, follow, or subscribe to this podcast,
And that way you'll never miss anything new that we put out in terms of interviews
or weekend wisdom, all of which are designed to strengthen your family. So between
those two actions, you're never going to miss what's going on here at creating a
family and what new resources and tools we bring you every week. And the monthly
newsletter kind of summarizes all of that for you. Thanks so much. I would love to
jump kind of into some very practical real life experience that we can give to the
parents and caregivers that are listening today, whatever that looks like in your
language or how you advise parents, you know, say kind of, what do you want parents
to do when they come away from this conversation? What are the to -dos that you
want them to fill their minds and fill their lists with. So that's the entire,
like, third section of the book is sort of the how to parent section where what I
did was myself, I felt so damaged, right? And I felt like my poor kids that they
have me for a parent. And thankfully, you know, as somebody who was doing research
on child development and as, you know, somebody in school to be a child
psychologist, because of course all research is research, right? We're always trying
to figure out what we don't know about the world, right? It's not like an accident
that in the, you know, 90s, every doctoral dissertation in psychology was about
divorce because like the children of divorce were growing up and becoming grad
students, right? It keeps happening. It's not an accident that after 9 -11, there
were a lot of dissertations about trauma, right? So for me, I realized that my
whole journey to become a child psychologist was this one question of like, what is
the impact of trauma on parenting? And of course, if you're on social media, there's
so many parenting trends and so many people who will tell you, like, if you don't
follow my approach, then you're screwing your heads up forever, right? Like, that's
it. You're done. But really, parenting boils down to what I call R2,
which is being responsive and responsible, which comes from Diana Baumann's research
on like the four parenting types, you know, authoritarian, partative, neglectful,
permissive, right? This idea that what you want to be, on the one hand, is the
gentle parenting folks have a good point. We want to be child development focused.
We want to be neurodevelopment focus. We want to be attachment focus. We want to
understand about big emotions and little bodies. We want to understand how kids,
brains make sense of the world. And we want to start and lead with that empathy,
right, of like really standing them and talking to them. Then there's the other side
of being responsible, teaching them skills, holding them to a standard of behavior,
imparting our values to them. The one does not have to cancel out the other. But
if you look at social media, it almost feels like you have to pick one or the
other. Right. You know, I always use this example because it drives me crazy. There
are corners of the internet where people will say things like sticker charts are
abusive and they harm attachment and they're coercive. And to me, it's like, oh, so
you're a post -traumatic parent who felt coerced growing up or you were coming out
of a coercive relationship. Sticker charts managed well are a tool that you can use
in a responsive and responsible fashion, right? And in the book, I have a whole
acronym of, like, how to use them. And it's the same thing with, like, communicating
disagreement with a child's behavior to them. There are corners of the internet where
if you say to a child, that was a rude thing to say, you're harming attachment,
right? As opposed to saying, like, get that you were very disappointed with the gift
that grandma gave you. And I really get that when you were so excited and you
thought she was going to give you a gift that you liked, and then you got this
gift that was disappointing, I get why you said that. And let's put ourselves in
grandma. grandma shoes for a second how do you think she felt right that does not
harm attachment that makes it actually what happens then is the child is like they
themselves have a sense like ooh that look on grandma's face oh maybe I didn't do
the best thing you're right sizing the situation of them you're helping them
understand it and you're saying to them you know if that happens again if you're
ever disappointed in a gift and you react the way grandma expects you to. You say,
thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And you come to me later, I will buy
you the gift that you were hoping for. Or I will contribute some money towards it,
right? Or I will give you a different treat. We'll stop off on the way home for
ice cream because I will help you. I will give you something else to look forward
to. Right. That does not harm attachment that teaches the child, right?
You're responsive. I get it. Totally get it. You're not like You rude, harsh,
terrible child, how could you say that to grandma? You're not doing that. You're
like, yeah, I get it. You were so disappointed. And grandma's human too. Grandma has
feelings. How do you think she felt? It's a both -ant. That's really, for me,
what boils down, what is good parenting? It's being responsive and responsible.
And then I have very strong feelings about playing with kids and reading to kids,
that those are two parenting practices that we need to integrate in as much as we
can because you really want to build the building block of attachment is something
called attunement where you and I together are sharing a space and we're joining
together and we're you know having that dance of attachment with each other and the
way you do that is either through play or through a shared fantasy like reading
together right right yeah it builds their social emotional skills. It builds,
again, that attachment and that connection between you. I'm a huge fan of reading to
and with kids. It's harder for me to play. I'm probably not the most playful person
in our home. I have different ways of playing with my kids than, say, my husband
had, but I've been learning on the journey that it's not that I'm not able to
play. It's that Yeah. And also we have to, you have to expand your definition of
play. Yeah. Crocheting together might be play. Going on and walk together might be
play. Gardening together might be play. Cooking together might be play. Different, you
know, different kids, different neurologies of kids. And then also yourself. I'm also
not like, you know, playing with kids is sometimes what I do for a job. So
sometimes I'm a little burnt out from playing with kids right in the evening but i
love to go on like what we call schmoozing walks with my kids um i love cooking
in the kitchen like with one of my kids who like that for us that's play yeah
it's about a activity that you approach with joy that you do together or side by
side or face -to -face that's the attunement it doesn't necessarily have to be like
we're sitting down and doing candy line right yeah it's just different uh board
games are the bane of my existence We do kitchen dance parties.
You get the soundtrack from any of the trolls movies going and it's time to dance
in the kitchen. Yeah, and that's play, right? It's about understanding what is play.
And then again, that dance of attunement. Because like you were saying before, I
look at, you know, foster care or any sort of, you know, parenting, any sort of
traumatized child, a little bit like being in the parenting olympics right like
anybody can play in like the neighborhood league right but it takes a really
skillful person to be in the olympics so you you have to put a lot of skill into
the parenting olympics right and sometimes that means also understanding what is
skillful because a kitchen dance party on a random tuesday night is very very very
skillful even if some influencer is like nope 25 minutes of candy land or your
nurse is not doing it right. Oh, I love your repeated emphasis in the book on the
value of routines and rituals like playing with your kids or reading with your kids.
How can parents balance that sense of routine because it is so important for our
kids to have that consistency and to know what's coming next and to be able to
predict what their environment will hold for them when they get home from school? I
know that this is what's going to happen without feeling like you're kind of being
oppressed by that routine or it's just a big bunch of rules and rigidity. So you
have to know, I think, what your neurology needs because, you know, parents are
people too. And you have to, you know, some people really need predictability and
routine and just the sense of like knowing what to expect. And some people feel
very, very hemmed in by it. So it's about knowing yourself and knowing what you can
tolerate and what you can't tolerate. And it's also about knowing your kids. Routine
is so much more necessary when they're toddlers and when they're small than we
realize. And a lot of parents who grew up in chaos don't realize how just like I
can very often troubleshoot a good 75 % of like dysregulation and toddlers just by
instituting a routine in the home. And once you see the routine as, oh,
wow, now we don't have meltdowns at dinner because we move dinner up at a half
hour and it's always happening at the same time. And it's better to have peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches at 4 .30 than, you know, roast chicken at 7 p .m.
when the kids really ready for bed then. Right, right. And we've suddenly, like, you
know, we fix it and it doesn't feel so much like a prison. But as they get older,
we can break routine. And as they get older, we can say, like, oh, we can change
this. Like, we needed this framework when they were young. We don't need it as much
anymore. But very often when kids are toddlers, parents who didn't grow up with
routines themselves, don't realize just how much little ones really need the
predictability. It makes them feel extremely, extremely safe. So you can feel hemmed
in by it until you realize, like, oh, it's actually freeing me up because I don't
spend all night, like, you know, in angst about how I handled 15 million meltdowns
because there weren't 15 million meltdowns. Right. It's similar to the conversation
about the sticker charts. If you can use it as a tool to accomplish your goals,
then it's a fantastic tool. When it becomes something that's blocking you from your
bigger goals of healthy attachment or, you know, smooth running evening together as a
family, then you need to re -evaluate and reassess. Right. And usually it's because
it's for the little things like developing a habit of brushing your teeth or putting
your bike away or hanging up your coat when you come in. You know, like you don't
use a sticker chart for, you know, something that's much larger than that because
then it can end up becoming coercive and the prizes get big and it just becomes
this whole mess. It's more about like, okay, you hang up your coat, you put a
sticker on your chart, and then next thing you know it becomes second nature for
the child to hang up their code and then we move on to something else. That's not
going to harm attachment. That's just going to be like, this is what we expect to
happen. Yeah. Right? And then when those routines exist, you don't have to have
constant battles about situations. A lot of times with the littler kids, we always
talk about control the environment, not the child. And it's so much easier if you
the more you can control the environment you know if you don't want your kid to
use their screens at night in their room don't have don't have screens in their
bedrooms like right it's like very often as simple as that like phones need to be
charging overnight in the kitchen powered off like simple things where you institute
it there's some grumbles for a little while but then it's not a daily battle every
night at 1130 you got to log Why are you still on TikTok? You have to log off.
Why are you still on this? Why are you still on that? Because it's off. Yeah.
There's no Wi -Fi in our home after this hour. Like, end of story. And sometimes
then a whole host of other problems don't happen. Right. Yeah. That external routine
or schedule becomes an internal rhythm. Yeah. And that's really what we want for
ourselves, but it's also what we want for our kids. Yeah, my own now adult children
will talk about like, yeah, I was frustrated about not having a phone when I was
in high school, but boy, now that I do have a phone all the time, boy am I glad
that I didn't have a phone in high school, you know? Right, right. You know, you'll
thank me later. If it's done in a way that's consistent yourself, that you're also
doing, and that's also, you know, you're explaining why. And you're empathizing.
Like, I totally get it. Yeah. Feel like you're left out of the loop. Your friends
are still on this grade WhatsApp chat and you've logged off. Something might happen.
You're right. I feel really bad about that. And maybe I can make it up to you in
this other way. And we're not having a phone in our bedroom overnight. Yep,
that consistency. Well, I so appreciate that this kind of shift in mindset is
accessible and it's not just a challenge, it's kind of also the relief that we
talked about at the beginning of the interview. There is so much more listeners in
this book that we did not even get to capture today in this interview. One hour of
conversation is nowhere near enough to cover everything that you'll find is beneficial
from this book. So I highly encourage you to check it out. It's called Post
Traumatic Parenting, Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be.
Dr. Kozloitz, thank you for your time. Thank you for introducing us to these mind
shifts and these reframes. We appreciate your time and your expertise, and we wish
you well with the selling of the book. Thank you so much for having me. I really
enjoyed our conversation, and I really appreciate the mission that you're doing.
Like, it can feel so, like I said, when you're in the Parenting Olympics, I can
feel really isolating and really hard, but the really hard, the really valuable
things come from the really hard things. So I'm just blown away with what you guys
do. Oh, thank you so much. We appreciate it, and I'll share that with the rest of
our team as well. Thank you.