Your Story Matters - To You, and Your Children
How healing your own wounds can transform your children’s lives
What if the one thing your kids are hoping and waiting for is for you to do the work to grow with them instead of staying stuck in old behaviors and reactions that never served you, and certainly don’t serve them?
If this resonates, how do you begin?
Healing Yourself Heals Your Kids, Too
First, know that healing yourself IS healing your children, and their children. Feeling dysregulated, a nervous system stuck on high alert, self-blame, high reactivity, a lack of self-compassion and self-care, all of these are passed down until one person decides to do the courageous inner work to break the cycle once and for all.
This is how we begin to heal others. This is how we prevent trauma from being passed down from generation to generation.
In giving lectures around the country, I’ve spoken to 1000s of parents and the #1 thing they tell me is this: our world today feels overwhelming, and some days family life can feel that way too. Research backs this up. In a new advisory, Parents Under Pressure, surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned that 41 percent of parents report being so stressed most days they can't function. Forty-eight percent say their stress levels are completely overwhelming. Murthy says parents today need more ways to support and shore up their own well-being. For their own sake, and because their stress levels impact their children in negative ways, too.
Parents tell me they feel so stressed out, overwhelmed, or dysregulated that when their kids struggle, they find it hard to be the calm, wise parents they long to be. They want to be more regulated, especially when their kids are stressed out and facing hard things, but instead they get caught up in their own worried internal self-dialogue or become reactive and say or do the wrong things.
Simply put, it’s hard to soothe others when you’re struggling to soothe yourself.
I’ve spoken to 1000s of young people who say they wish their parents would work on themselves so they can support them through life’s big, difficult moments. They long for their parents to show curiosity, provide emotional comfort, model healthy communication skills, give them space to express their feelings, and model connection-centered conversations – even in the midst of navigating tough challenges.
Old, Unresolved Trauma Keeps us From Being the Parents We Want to Be
Studies show that if we’ve faced challenging, adverse experiences growing up, it can change our set point for well-being in ways that make it harder for us to stay calm when our kids are struggling. Why? First, early trauma wires our brain and nervous system to be more hypervigilant, making us more anxious and reactive when we’re stressed. Second, old fears, anxieties, and negative self-beliefs that imprinted themselves on us when we were young resurface during emotionally charged moments in adult life, and nowhere is this truer than in parenting life.
When our trust is broken as a child, these big feelings and reactions from our past can be hard to override.
What does this look like?
You were five and accidentally stepped on flowers in the garden while playing with a friend and your mom raged at you. Or you were six and struggling to tie your shoes when your dad snapped, “What’s wrong with you?” You were eight and struggling to figure out a math problem and your dad barked, “You’re a dunce!” You were ten and missed the goal when playing soccer and the whole way home your father wouldn’t speak to you. You were eleven and trying on a bathing suit when your mom pinched your waist and said, “You’re getting fat!” You were thirteen and came home upset about how your two best friends were making fun of you, and your mom asked, “What did you do to them?” and your dad told you “Toughen up!” And so on.
These experiences reverberate down the family line, even though we want nothing more than to be there for our kids in all the ways they need us to be.
It can be hard to admit things that happened to us when we were young hurt us in ways that show up now. That we too often feel anxious, reactive, or judge ourselves or our kids. That we get quickly swept up in a state of emotional overwhelm – like getting caught and spun in the center of a wave. That our nervous system’s set point is a state of hyper vigilance.
So how do we do the work of becoming the parents we want to be?
The key is right inside you; to understand the connections between the challenging experiences and adversity you faced in your past, and how you respond to stress and adversity in your life now. To understand your own story.
A Short 3-Part Writing-to-Heal Exercise
First Reflection: Reflect on a Challenging Moment in Your Life as a Parent
Think back to one of the most difficult moments you’ve faced in life as a parent, in family life.
What was the emotional climate like in your home? Was it a climate in which your child felt safe and seen, and able to say everything and anything on their mind? Or, looking back, were you so caught up in your own reactions and feelings that you struggled to soothe and help regulate your child in the way you wish you could have?
Take a moment to write about what emotions come up for you as you think about this experience.
Second Reflection: Reflect on Difficult Moments in Your Own Childhood
Go back farther in time, to your childhood living room. Reflect on the emotional tenor of your own childhood home when your family faced a really difficult time, or when a parent had big, negative emotions.
When you were emotionally hurting as a child or teenager could you safely turn to, be honest and vulnerable with, be validated and soothed by your mother? Your father? Or did you have to be emotionally vigilant: careful about what you said or did so that you wouldn’t upset your parent?
Take a moment to write about what emotions come up for you as you think about this childhood experience.
Third Reflection: Again, Reflect on Challenging Moments in Your Life as a Parent
When your children are emotionally hurting can they turn to you and be honest and vulnerable, and feel validated and soothed? Are you able to soothe yourself first so you can soothe them? Are you the person with the lowest heart rate in the room?
Take a moment to write about what emotions come up for you as you ask yourself these questions. How might you be better able to soothe your child wh
en they’re upset or struggling?
Making a Repair
If you’re still reading this, then you were probably always headed right here to this moment: ready to revisit your own story and understand it, to stare at the tear in the fabric of your story and find tools to make a repair. For you. For your kids. For their kids. For generations you may never meet.
Yes, you were changed by what happened to you. You also survived what happened to you. And the gift you are given is that when you make sense of your own story, when you do this work, you get to see the effect your healing has not only on you but on your children too. You get to witness the joy of watching them heal, as you heal your relationship with them.
Then, you receive another unexpected gift: you find yourself falling in love with your whole story, even the hardest bits. Because every minute of it brought you to right here, to right now, to the beautiful tapestry that is your life. You realize that you’re not broken; you never were.
This work – the work of healing – is work we do with our whole selves. This is how we become whole again.
This is what your kids are hoping for. To see you do this work. For you. For them. Because freedom from the legacy of trauma is the most valuable inheritance that exists.
If you want help along the way, or if you want access to additional writing exercises, might I suggest picking up a copy of my latest book, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal. My guided journal is a tool that allows you the space to process, heal, and reclaim yourself.
Yours,
Donna
Note: Some of my free content here is also available on Psychology Today.
Such important work and the journal prompts are so helpful. Your books have been a great resource for me