When Childhood Trauma Affects Parenting: 3 Ideas to Help You 29:00

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it is really hard to raise a strong-willed child. And when you throw in the fact that many of us had a traumatic childhood, our own experience with trauma from our own parents, man, that just, that makes it infinitely more difficult. So I want to go through that. I posted this on Facebook a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was fairly straightforward. I said, hey,

Here's what I want you to do. Resign from your job. Give yourself a pink slip from this burdensome job you have carried for 30, 40, 50 years. The job of trying to make sure everybody is happy and successful. It is not my job to make my kids or spouse happy. It is not my job to control other people's emotions. It is not my job to fix other people. And a really good ROM replied and said, the amount of distress I felt just in reading that

is startling to me. I'm sure this is childhood related and the need to try to help manage strife. And I agree. I'm sure it's related to childhood wounds. And in this episode of the Calm Parenting Podcast, I want to help you work through some of this childhood trauma. And in a follow-up episode, I want us to get to a place where you and your child's emotions and happiness are not

entangled so that you can be free from this. So welcome to Skirk Martin Founders Celebrate Calm. You can find us at Celebrate Calm. If you need anything, reach out to us. Just email Casey, C-A-S-E-Y at CelebrateCalm.com.

Tell us what you're struggling with, and we will wrestle through this with you. It's our mission, and we love doing that. If you need help with anything, just reach out to Casey. So you've got some dysfunction. You've got trauma from your childhood, right? And we all have dysfunction, right? I hate when people are like, oh, I had a dysfunctional childhood. Who didn't? We all had that. I'm not dismissing it, but it's...

It's human nature. We're all very broken, flawed, dysfunctional people. But some people had a little bit more trauma than, say, others. And what happens is it hardwires into your brain, into your heart, your emotions, these survival instincts and these patterns of thinking and behavior that continue to play out in all of your relationships.

So some of you, you learn that to get your parents' approval, you needed to be the good, compliant child. Or as one mom told me, I just had to be slightly better than my sister. Isn't it fascinating that even as little kids, we learn how to do these things intuitively because we're just responding to it. We just have to have our needs met, and so we do that intuitively.

Some of you, so some of you became that compliant people pleaser who gets taken advantage of. You probably, if you're a woman, you probably grew up and married a controlling man.

Or maybe some of you had an alcoholic parent or maybe a parent who was explosive. So you became responsible for holding your family together. You learned to manage everybody's emotions. In fact, you had to. Why? Because these things create homeostasis in your world. They keep you safe and stable and ensure you get your basic needs met.

And it is just fascinating how we internalize these things without even knowing from a very young age. And these qualities do serve us well as children, just not as adults. So then what happens? We all grow up, right? You grow up and you meet your perfect trauma match. It's kind of what I call it, your trauma match. You discover that your husband is, shocker, just like your dad, right? Smart guy with an explosive temper.

Well, why would anybody do this? Well, because this girl, I just take it out of being you, this girl, she was comfortable spending the first 20 years of her life managing her dad's emotions. She knew exactly what to expect. She knew how to manage and navigate that. So then she meets another really intelligent guy with...

explosive temper perfect I know how to navigate those waters I've got my role this is comfortable to me and as it turns out this guy's mother maybe she was kind of that old-school kind of emotional punching bag back in the day because that's what we did to women and we still do it actually we still do it unfortunately

This mother was the emotional punching bag who knew how to calm the waters at home. So when this guy met his future wife, she was a perfect trauma match for him. As I like to say, they are perfectly imperfect for each other. I did the same exact thing. So here's what happens in our relationship of, well,

I'm not really good at handling conflict. I don't like conflict. Why? Because I grew up in a home where my dad screamed at my mom and hit her sometimes. So any conflict in my brain, conflict bad. What do I do with conflict growing up? Avoid it. I'm third born. I hide behind my brothers. I avoid it. Well, guess what? Guess who my perfect trauma match was? Well, the person who had abandonment issues. So

So watch what happens. Conflict comes up in the marriage. What happens? I run away. Triggers what? My perfect trauma matches. Where did I just go with that? I'm not re-recording this. I'm tired of re-recording when I mess up. So this is practicing imperfection. Triggers her abandonment issues. So she comes out harder, full force, like, no, don't do this. I run more.

We all do these things. So, and if you look at your life, you'll see some similarities. Your spouse, your friends treat you the same way because this is the way that you have modeled and told them to treat you for your whole life. You're no guilt in this. I don't do guilt blame stuff.

But also don't do excuses because I want to work on these dynamics to change them. Because otherwise, these generational patterns will repeat themselves and you pass them down to your kids and their kids. And we don't want that. So look, I can't go through five years of therapy in a podcast. But I want to try to go through a couple things that you can do that I found helpful in working with people to hopefully make some progress. So let's deal with that part. How do we break those generational patterns?

patterns. Now, quick side note, for those of you who are dealing with abuse from a religious parent, from a church leader, I'm addressing these issues in a lot of detail on a separate podcast. It's called The Alternative Christian. Go to thealternativechristian.com and you may find it really helpful. So let's talk about reconciling some of these things from our childhood. The

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Go to phyla.com and type in the code calm. That's p-h-y-l-a.com and use code word calm. And I'll give a caveat. Please hear this the right way. I want to get to the root of these things. I want to spend appropriate time. It can take years to do this. At the same time,

I encourage you to watch. I'm not a big fan of endless navel-gazing and spending eons of therapy time delving into every single thing in the past or a childhood and getting kind of trapped and stuck there because you can end up creating a needy relationship with

with the therapist, right? And I don't want to shortcut the process or rush it either, but do be cognizant of whether you're making progress or sometimes here's what happens. Because this work is so hard emotionally, you end up putting off the hard emotional work

Because it's a little bit easier and more satisfying just to keep talking about what they did to you and having someone validate you endlessly. I will validate you. Email me. I'll validate how painful this is. It is horribly difficult.

But I just don't want to become, I don't want us to identify with what happened before so that becomes kind of our identity. And I don't want that victim mentality to persist forever, right? It happens, becomes more comfortable to do this. And so just be aware of that. So here's what I encourage you to do in this particular podcast. Here's the focus. Let's choose one pattern from your childhood.

And then first thing I want to do is define how did this trait serve you as a child? So I'll share mine. When I was a child, I hid behind my two older brothers and learned not to speak up because that kept me safe from my father's wrath and abuse. That was smart. It served me well as a child because I didn't experience the same abuse my brothers did.

Yours might be, hey, when I was a child, I learned that the only way to get my dad's or mom's approval was by anticipating what they wanted and always being compliant. That served me well as a child because it meant and it guaranteed that I received some of my parents' limited emotional affection and resources. It was good for you. You were smart doing that.

When I was a child, I learned to be overly responsible and take control of situations because my father or my mother was an alcoholic. This served me well because it allowed me to create order and stability amidst chaos. See, I like this kind of dialogue because it removes any blame or guilt for things you did for your childhood patterns that you learned.

These were good things. They served you well. It's almost like going into your inner child and saying, hey, you did a really good job. I'm proud of you because you were a five or six or two or seven-year-old child and you learned that this situation, forgive me for the language, was all effed up. And as a little kid, you intuitively learned, hey, when I do this and take care of this situation,

whew, at least I'm safe and I can manage this. Kudos to you, little kid. Kudos to you, little version of me. This helped me. I know the first time I did this, I was like, this sounds so stupid. But I found it was really helpful to go into that part of me and say, you know what? I'm proud of you. You did a good job.

You hid. And by the way, I'll tell you the upshot of some of this. For those of you who became overly responsible, I can guess what your job is. Many of you became nurses.

You are fantastic because what does a nurse do? A nurse can handle any situation for other people, right? And you can spring into action and you're used to that and all that chaos that surrounds you in the emergency room or people coming in sick and you develop that caretaker pattern or you're a social worker or someone in the helping field, helping others, right?

It's served you well. You're fantastic. When I go in and I hopefully, thankfully, knock on wood, it doesn't happen that often, but when I need help from a nurse, man, I look at them and I'm like, I'm glad this childhood served you well. You take really good care of me and nothing phases you.

Now, the downside is you don't take good care of yourself. And that's another one of your challenges is you're really good at being a caretaker for everybody else, but you don't take very good care of yourself. And that will be one of your action steps is to learn to take care of yourself, not just other people. Otherwise, that just leads you'll be burned out. You will be resentful because you do everything for everybody else and you'll notice that other people take advantage of you.

But you learned that as a child and that served you well. Me, I learned how to hide. Guess what I learned how to do? I learned how to listen and be hyper aware of my surroundings. Why? Because when my dad came home from work, I could tell by the way that he slammed the door of his Chevy Impala door

company car. I could tell what kind of mood he was in and I could anticipate, is this the night that he's going to come in and start screaming at my mother? And then she's going to scream in a shrill voice and it's going to terrify me and I'm going to run to my room and hide from it. And I got very good at listening and noticing little patterns. Guess what I do in my everyday work now?

That's one thing I'm really good at because I can listen to couples when we're doing phone consultations. I can hear it in the tone of voice. I got very good at noticing little things in kids. That's why when these camps at our house, working with strong-willed kids and kids on the spectrum, I could feel and hear things in little tiny signals from them. It served me well.

Well, it ends up not serving you well in your adult relationships. So we do that language. Hey, this served me well as a child. But then your tone pivots. But now I'm a grown man and I don't have to hide anymore. I can speak up without fear of being hit or yelled at.

See the tone change? When I was a little child, this served me well. I'm glad I did this. But now I'm a grown adult. But now I'm a grown woman and I'm worthy of affection from my spouse, kids, and others. But now I am a grown woman. I'm an adult and I don't need to control everything around me. I am free from that burden. If your faith is important to you, you can add something of like, no, God takes care of me. I'm good.

So you do that pivot of, hey, when I was a little girl, I learned how to take care of everybody else and manage everybody else's emotions. And that was really smart of me. But now I'm a grown woman and I don't have to run interference for everybody. I don't have to manage everybody's emotions.

Now, we'll get to it in a separate podcast. Here's the dynamic that happened. You ended up growing up and you married that guy who has the temper and now you are running interference, right? So strong-willed child's acting up and you go into overdrive. Here's where the trauma happens. Now you're like, uh.

uh-oh, my strong-willed child is getting upset, and I also married a man who can't control his emotions just like my dad couldn't, and so when my husband hears my son doing that, my husband starts to go into overdrive with his thing and starts yelling at the child, and now you're seven again, and it almost made me cry when I said that. You're seven again, and now it's like,

And I almost wanted to swear there of like, oh, like you're seven. And it's like, I've got this dad who's screaming and yelling, who's raging because he's an alcoholic. And now as a little kid, I've got to jump in and make everything better for my family. And here you are 30 years later doing the exact same thing. But now it's your husband.

that's a hard place to be. And I'm trying, I try to address this with your husbands. And so we'll do that in a separate one, but that's where you have to break that pattern. And you're gonna have to speak up to your husband. And I'm trying to do that in some of the recent podcasts of teaching how to do that. In fact, I just recorded one. For those of you who are listening to this, it is, you know, hold on just a second, because this is important.

It's a podcast called Tough Talks with Men, something like three tough talks with men to have. And I go through this. And so I encourage you to listen to this. I didn't plan on saying that, but I appreciate you giving me the freedom to kind of roll with this a little bit and see where kind of all of this takes us.

It's heavy stuff, right? It's really hard. So if you need to stop right now and just process this, do it. And then come back to the next part later. That's completely okay.

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So here's the second part. Actively practice new behaviors. Start small. I want you to make it doable. I don't want you to take on too much. I'm breaking all these generational patterns today. Stretch yourself with discomfort.

But I don't want you to suffer, right? So get a success, repeat it again. Slowly change these patterns and create healthy ones. By the way, that thing that I was just talking about with the husbands, if, look, go see a therapist, do someone else. You don't have to talk to me.

But it is something I'm doing on phone consultations where a couple moms recently just did this of like, can I get my husband to talk to you? I was like, yeah, sign up for a couple consultations. I will talk to your husband. I will be blunt. I'll be straightforward. I'll be honest. But I'll also be very practical and work with him to break those patterns because we don't know we're doing these things, right? You're flawed. Your husband is flawed. And we just grew up with this stuff. And it's really hard work.

But it's important work and I want to do it. So let's start working on some things. Here are a few examples. So for me, when someone asks, you know what happens? When someone asks me a question about myself, you know what I usually do? I deflect. I'll turn it around and I'll ask them a question. Why? I don't always like talking about myself. You know why? Because I kind of learned that when I was a child. And so when someone asks me a question about myself, instead of deflecting,

I share my experiences or I share my opinion. That's something I've had to learn how to do. I speak up for myself. This is for a lot of you as moms. I speak up for myself and I'm assertive about what I want or need. On family movie night, I don't always let the kids determine everything. I get to choose a movie. At the restaurant,

I asked the waiter if he or she could check and see if they have spinach instead of the mixed greens that's on the menu because you know why? Because I like spinach.

I actually did this one. This was part of me learning how to speak up. And I do it without apologizing because here's what I used to do. Hey, I'm really sorry. Could I ask you a favor? Now, there's nothing wrong with that because that's a nice way. I don't want to be demanding of a waiter. Hey, go check on this for me. But I also don't want to apologize because, well, I'm sorry. My mom did that all the time. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to ask you for this. You know what it was? It was a worthiness issue because she didn't think she was worthy enough.

of receiving good things from people. And some of you have that pattern. It was drilled into you from childhood. Some of you, it was drilled into you because of your awful, horrible teachings you learned from church, right? You're not worthy of that. And so it's like, it's awful. So I would ask, I began doing this. Hey, and I did, I'd sometimes say, can I ask you a favor? Because it's a favor. They're going out of their way. Nothing wrong with that. Hey,

Could I ask you a favor? Could you check and see if they've got spinach in the back? Because I really like spinach more than I like the regular mixed grains.

See, now I'm valuing myself. For some of the moms out there, I did a little Instagram video on this of stop doing everything for the kids. Stop making everything about them. Your needs are important. And if you don't speak up about your needs, nobody will take care of your needs. Nobody will respond to that. You've got to be assertive about that. And I want you to be confident and start breaking that pattern of like, well, what do they want? Because some of you will even anticipate that

You go to do something that you just really want to do. And that's not called being selfish. That's not selfish. None of you are selfish. You're listening to a parenting podcast, trying to be a better parent and human being. You're not selfish. But as soon as you think about doing something, you immediately start to think, well, what does my husband need? Or what do my kids need? What will they think about that? I want you to push through that and start doing things for yourself and even start speaking to your family and saying, hey,

One night a week, every Wednesday night, I'm going out for one hour. I'm going to meet my friend Sally and we're going to go to grab a dinner or a drink or we're going to a coffee shop on Saturday morning, whatever it is, we're gonna meet at the bookstore or I'm just gonna go up by myself and sit in my car by myself and just enjoy peace and quiet for one hour. And I expect that you all can figure out

dinner time and bedtime hubby one night a week I want that time whatever it is and do it because in the course of doing it you're valuing yourself other people will not respect you because you don't respect your own time and your own needs it's it's called demonstrating self-respect that my needs are important here's another I expect affection from my family even when I'm not perfect

I practiced doing one thing imperfectly today, leaving two dirty dishes in the sink overnight. Yeah, I'm going to be a rebel. I'm going to be bad and do something imperfect. And I still know that even though I'm imperfect, I'm worthy of being loved.

I walk into a room, I see something or I see a situation that needs to be fixed, but then I sit down and I purposefully do not fix that situation and I purposefully do not carry that burden. You know how we get together with, we do these like family get togethers? How many of you like to go in and you try to manage it and make sure that everything goes okay and the food is perfect and you've got all the nice linens and everything

and all the nice gifts and everything, you want it to be perfect, I want you to let go of that. Let someone else at the family get together, let them handle it. I guarantee you've got an in-law that's a control freak. Let them do it. And you sit back and enjoy the imperfection that that event didn't go perfectly.

Get comfortable with that. Purposefully do these things. I know this sounds simplistic, but I like simple because otherwise we get up in confusing, overwhelming dialogues within ourselves and nothing changes. I'll give you one more to try. So remember, we're going to identify with ourselves as kids, let ourselves off the hook, right? When I was a kid, that served me well. And I'm proud of that. That little kid inside of me,

I'm proud of you. You did a good job. But now I'm a grown adult. I don't have to do that anymore. And I'm going to practice one simple step this week of doing something different than I've always done to break that pattern. And the third thing is...

A shortcut of that is something I really like. I go through this process in detail. And if you have the 30 Days to Calm program, go through it because we identify triggers. Then we go get mastery over that trigger so it doesn't control our reactions. So go through that. Write down your goals. Go through the workbook there. So here's a shortcut. Begin doing the opposite of what you would normally do.

Begin responding in the opposite way of how you would normally react to situations. Instead of lecturing or yelling, I ask questions. Instead of trying to control that situation, I walk in the midst of it and I start asking the kids questions of how they think they could handle that. Instead of standing with hands on hips or gesticulating with your hands, I just sit down. Instead of barking orders, giving instructions, or disciplining,

right in this harsh way i just do it quietly i do the opposite of what i would normally do because what i'm doing now is that pattern i've carried for 30 40 50 years and so i'm just going to do the opposite i'm going to become i want to get comfortable with that different pattern and say huh

I just did that. It was really hard, but the world didn't end. And actually, it ended up being better. It worked better. So I want to end there because I know this is a lot of emotional work to be done and it's exhausting. So be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself. If you need help, reach out to us. I'll gladly try to walk you through these things. Definitely go through the programs because they do that too, but I can help you with it. Anyway,

Choose one pattern or issue that's bothered you, that causes you dysfunction in your relationships. Go through that dialogue we did. Release yourself from guilt. Embrace the freedom you now have. You're a grown adult. Let's do the adulting thing together. We can do it. Begin practicing in small steps these new behaviors. Tell a supportive friend about it so they can say, you know what? Good job. You can email me and I'll say like, you know what? I'm freaking proud of you because that took courage and I love that you're doing that.

And try doing the opposite of what you normally do because you're on your way to becoming a new person, confident, bold, happy. And I am proud of you for that. Hey, we love you all. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.