If your childhood was traumatic, you might expect yourself to have forgotten or moved past the difficulties and challenges you endured. Yet, from my clinical and life experiences, it is clear we never recover from childhood trauma – or any other form of it – unless we purposefully engage in mindful healing. We are told that “time heals all wounds.” But in reality, those wounds only worsen when they are marginalized or ignored. Unresolved childhood issues are unfortunately carried into adult life, where they negatively impact relationships and are transmitted intergenerationally through parenting and other formative relationships. Can self-work be the cure?

Join Dr. Carla Manly and trauma expert Dr. Robyn Koslowitz for an uplifting journey into the vital realm of healing from childhood trauma. Through the lens of attachment theory, dive deeper into key issues such as secure attachment, insecure attachment, self-discovery, trauma, PTSD, self-work, post-traumatic parenting, and the healing power of personal growth.

Please note that this episode contains sensitive trauma-related material. Listener discretion is advised.

Note: If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911,” “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline), or SAMSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

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

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543

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

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Become Your Best Self–and a More Attuned Parent–by Healing Childhood Trauma with Expert Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

Healing Childhood Trauma to Boost Self-Love, Healthy Relationships, Positive Parenting

Introduction

If your childhood was traumatic, you might expect yourself to have forgotten or moved past the difficulties and challenges you endured. From my clinical and life experiences, it’s clear that we never recover from childhood trauma or any other form of trauma unless we purposefully engage in mindful healing. We’re told that time heals all wounds, but the truth is that the wounds from trauma only worsen when they are marginalized or ignored. 

Unfortunately, unresolved childhood issues are carried into adult life, negatively impacting relationships and being transmitted intergenerationally through parenting and other formative relationships. Can self-work be the cure? Today, we’ll focus on this listener’s real-life question. My dad is an alcoholic and a workaholic. He’s always had a switch that turns him from a good guy to a bad guy in a split second. Growing up, my mom did everything she could to avoid conflict. 

My dad’s unpredictability and meanness went unchecked. I left home at 17. I’m 39, and I finally see that my relationships have gone south because of old patterns. I want a healthy relationship and even a kid someday, but I’m stuck. I don’t want to be like either of my parents. What can I do? With that question as the focus of today’s episode, please note that this episode contains sensitive information, so listener discretion is advised. If you need support, please see the special links in the show notes. Welcome to the show, Dr. Robyn. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Thank you so much for having me and allowing me to talk about my favorite topic. 

Your favorite topic is trauma?

Trauma and specifically how it impacts us as parents and in our future relationships. 

Before we launch into this passion of yours, your favorite topic, and your area of expertise, could you share with our listeners just a little bit about what makes you, you? 

I am a post-traumatic parent myself. When I was a very young graduate student, I had this nagging tear in the back of my head that I knew I had PTSD from my traumatic childhood. I wanted to know how my PTSD would impact my children. Being a research geek, I went to the library and looked for resources. There just wasn’t anything. There was nothing written about the ways in which trauma would impact me parenting my children. 

I even remember when I gave birth to my oldest daughter. I was in the hospital, and one of the nurses asked me what I do. I said, “I am a PhD candidate at NYU and I am a child development researcher.” She said, “Your baby is so lucky. She has a child development expert as her mom.” It was a lighthearted moment. She left, and the other nurses left. I had such a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach because my thought was, “This poor baby, she has me for a mother, and I am so damaged. How will my damage not damage her?” 

I think for many post-traumatic people, that’s what happens, especially for those of us who on the surface appear very functional. On the surface, we appear so good. My analogy is that we’re sort of like a duck. The duck is so serene floating above the water, but under the water, the duck’s legs are paddling madly. On the surface, I looked so together. I’m a grad student, I’m having my baby, and I’m in a loving, stable relationship. All the indicators for success are there, but deep down I felt so damaged and, as you say, so imperfect. I thought that only perfect people could be good parents. 

I am so grateful for your frankness and honesty because there is that tendency for people to look at those in the realm of medicine or psychotherapy and project onto them this idea of perfection. Yet, I think what can really set us apart as clinicians, as healthcare practitioners, is the fact that we can openly say we’re not perfect, but we’re working on it. We’re working on healing, evolving, and that we have struggles just like other people. 

We are imperfect just like everybody else. Again, if you’re a good healthcare practitioner or maybe, let’s say, an excellent, wholehearted healthcare practitioner, you’re working on yourself throughout your lifetime so that you can model not only to yourself and those in your environment but also to your clients what it looks like to be imperfect yet a wiser person evolving through life. 

I feel like that journey. I am a very present parent now because I think presence is much more important than perfection in parenting. I’ve learned that. I think I’ve become a much more present parent and a much more joyful parent, especially with my younger children, but it was a journey because I really thought that, like everything else, one of my sort of trauma coping tools was perfectionism. I really wanted to parent perfectly, but that desire to parent perfectly actually got in the way of my ability to parent with presence. 

Attachment Theory

You’re already saying so many incredibly rich things. It sounds as if you come from somewhat of an attachment background, attachment theory. Do you factor attachment theory into your practice and work? 

Yes, very much. In my book, research, and classes with parents, I focus on attachment, specifically on the idea that even if you don’t have the internal working model of attachment. The way the attachment system is designed is that we’re supposed to replicate the attachment we got because if you’ve got good enough attachment, you actually have this beautiful internal working model of how to provide attachment. 

The system just self-replicates, and the system is built that way. If you didn’t get a good attachment for whatever reason, and some of us had a good attachment in our toddler years and our young years, but then there was a trauma. A trauma can actually interfere with attachment, even if there is good attachment because it can interfere with our sense of security in the world, which is what we want from attachment. 

What I have figured out is that you can learn how to repair that broken internal working model. There are specific ways to do it. It’s not a mystery. I’ve had so many people tell me that reading attachment research makes them feel hopeless because they don’t have those things. They don’t know how to give those things. You say the four S’s of attachment. We want our baby to feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure, but I never felt those things. 

How can I make someone else feel something that I’ve never felt? It’s a really serious pain, but there’s a flip side, which is we can learn these skills. There are specific ways and practices to instill all of those things in our kids, even if we don’t have them. The added bonus is that we can actually heal our own inner child while we’re doing it. Parenting is not just healthy, it’s also healing for us. There’s actually amazing research now about the early years of matrescence specifically.

Now I’m talking to the post-traumatic parents who are mothers, because this research, I’m not sure if this research goes with patrescence, which is the process of becoming a father. Our brains are reorganizing during matrescence. There’s a tremendous burst of neural growth. Our brains are reorganizing anyway, but actually, it’s the perfect time to repair attachment wounds while we’re providing attachment. That is the most hopeful thing. 

It is so hopeful. Let’s take a pause for our listeners to give them some background because they may not be well-versed in attachment theory or it may not be something that’s even on their radar. When we’re talking to listeners about attachment theory, it goes back to the 1950s to Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Winnicott. In fact, it was Winnicott who came up with the phrase that I just love called Good Enough Parenting. 

It lets us off the hook from being perfect parents because none of us will ever be perfect at anything, much less parenting. The idea of being a good enough parent, and you’ll likely hear Dr. Robyn talk about this repeatedly, the word attunement. The good enough parent is appropriately attuned to the child, let’s say 80%, 85%, or 90% of the time. 

When you’re able to do that, to really see that child, soothe the child, and make the child feel safe and secure for not 100% of the time, that’s physically, humanly impossible. You are then able to help the child have this healthy, secure attachment to the caregiver, and then that’s taken into the outside world. 

If that doesn’t occur, then the child develops one of three types of insecure attachment, which is, as you’re saying, Dr. Robyn, the beauty of the attachment model is that you can heal your attachment wounds. If you have an insecure attachment, you can earn a secure attachment. If you had a secure attachment and it got broken, then you can re-earn that secure attachment. You can get that. 

Childhood Trauma

You can maybe earn it for the first time, whatever way you look at it. That’s the backdrop for what we’re talking about today. Back to you, Dr. Robyn. Now let’s look at the listener’s question because I have so many thoughts for you. We’ll start with the listener’s question. What would you say to this listener who is giving us a glimpse into what their childhood may have looked like? What would you say? 

First of all, it’s a very courageous question to realize that in order to become a parent, I have to give birth to the mother of my children now. I must give birth to the mother before I give birth to the children. Saying, I want to heal because I eventually want to parent and I don’t want to replicate what I saw, that’s an amazingly insightful first step. 

Now, I just want to normalize something because this happens in post-traumatic parenting classes all the time. People are very familiar with trauma with the famous Kaiser Permanente study where they talked about adverse childhood experiences, which are really difficult things that a child can experience like the death of a parent, the incarceration of a parent, extreme poverty, and extreme abuse. 

People look at trauma sometimes and think that if they’re not in those categories, they’re not sufficiently traumatized. Really, trauma is any experience too big for your brain to metabolize. If it was too much and your brain said, “What is going on here? I cannot cope,” congratulations, you’re traumatized. I like to talk a lot about what I call ACEs, which are the secret ACEs. 

There are a lot of families that look perfect and functional on the surface, and people don’t know. Sometimes you have a parent who’s an alcoholic, who’s like Mr. Nice Guy to the world, and the family just seems lovely. They’re the mother and the father. It’s like that old-fashioned 1950s sitcom family. Then behind closed doors, when Dad has a hangover, he is a really mean drunk and he is scary. All the kids have to tiptoe around because we don’t want to wake up Dad. We don’t get into a fight. I cannot feel seen because I might poke the sleeping bear, and that’s a really bad thing to do. 

Even though that family on the surface might look like, yeah, she hasn’t got the four S’s, she’s missing seen and she’s missing safe. It’s important to know that just because you go on to one of those apps and try to take the ACEs quiz, did I have trauma in my childhood, and the traumatic experiences you’ve had aren’t on that quiz, it doesn’t mean you didn’t have a traumatic childhood. There are so many post-traumatic parents in the post-traumatic parenting community. 

The classes that have this childhood where there was a functional alcoholic did so much damage. Then they questioned themselves, am I traumatized? Is that really bad? I mean, I know people who lost their mom to cancer. This isn’t like that, but we don’t play trauma poker. We’re like, I see your trauma, I raise you my trauma. It’s not a good game to play, no one wins. It’s a way of discounting other people’s experiences. Yes, this listener is traumatized, and it is wise for her to work on healing those wounds before she becomes a parent. 

Then she’s likely going to have to continue healing that wound as she becomes a parent because trauma doesn’t happen in the past, it happens in the future. What sometimes happens is you experience something and you think like, “It’s a past event. Like this happened to me once.” The truth is that attachment really keeps happening to you. Sometimes when you have a child, the wound that was like sort of scarred over rips open because you might suddenly realize just how young you were when you experienced something. 

Perhaps let’s say with this mom, maybe when she was four, she was tiptoeing around her dad so as not to make him upset. Then one day she’ll have a four-year-old and she’ll look at how heartbreaking the young four-year-old is and she’s not making the four-year-old tiptoe around her mood. It’s going to be so sad because she’s suddenly going to realize, “This is how you parent a four-year-old. I didn’t get that.” It’s not that you didn’t heal or that you’re not better. It’s that you’re being sort of re-traumatized as you re-experience being four. 

That makes perfect sense, Dr. Robyn. Let’s take a pause because there’s so much intense information here and we want to look at this individual who wrote in. I don’t know the gender, so I’m just calling them they. It could be a potential father, and I really appreciate that part where you’re saying you must grow a healthy parent before you are the parent. If you’re a dad-to-be or a mom-to-be, you want to be able to grow as best you can into the healthy dad or the healthy mom. 

If you already have little ones or big ones, it’s never too late to grow that healthy dad or that healthy mom inside of you because you’re able to then use that process of self-growth to become a more well-rounded human being and then a better uncle, a better person at work, a better aunt, a better grandfather, a better parent to your adult children. 

It’s never too late, and that’s a really important piece. The other piece when you were talking about, let’s take it back to the question about the alcoholic parent and the outside world’s perception. I’ve seen this with quite a few clients. Very few people know what’s going on behind somebody’s closed doors. 

That household looks high functioning, whether they have money, success, all the fun things, or whether they’re just getting by, people often don’t realize what’s going on unless they see physical signs of alcoholism, physical signs of physical abuse. It can often be harder, and I’d like to know your opinion on this, for that person to actually fully appreciate that they were traumatized. 

It sounds like that’s what’s happened to this listener who wrote in that the outside world may have seen that dad as high functioning and the mom, as you said, as being the leave it to beaver mom, but not realizing that inside the home, when you’re walking on eggshells and things are highly dysfunctional, that can actually skew your perception of being traumatized because no one in the external world is validating it. 

No one is saying, “Your dad is a raging alcoholic, a dry drunk, or a high-functioning alcoholic. I’m really sorry for you, you’re going through a lot.” Does that make sense? When you aren’t validated from the outside world, people tend to believe that they weren’t traumatized or really push the trauma more under the surface because it was never seen and validated. What do you think? 

I agree with everything you’re saying. I think that it’s even worse when you have that parent who’s the nice guy and other people think of them as the nicest guy. Even if you do reach out for support when you’re a kid and don’t know what’s normal, you might say something and people will say to you, “Your father? He’s the nicest guy in the world. You know what a jam he helped me out of or when my car broke down, he fixed it for me.” Then you really doubt yourself. It’s like, is he the nicest guy in the world? 

Sometimes he’s the nicest guy in the world because a father like that sometimes feels very guilty and is very overly loving and kind and fun and adventurous at some times and then at other times is so scary. In some ways, that’s the worst. We call that disorganized attachment when the parent is simultaneously the harbor and the storm. Like you’re the scary one, but I need to run to you because you’re my parent. That’s sometimes the worst thing. That outside Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde persona can really be confusing. 

Post-Traumatic Parents

Absolutely, and thank you for illustrating that and going into it more deeply because I do see that a lot in the adults I work with who had childhood trauma from that particular type. The disorganized attachment is the most difficult style of attachment because it is based on Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. You are always waiting. That adult is always waiting. That child is always waiting for the bad guy to come out. They’re walking around on eggshells waiting for the criticism, waiting for the attack, waiting for the scary person to come out, so they can never fully relax. They’re constantly hypervigilant. I do have another question for you on this piece. 

Have you noticed that for many people who had a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde type in their background, they tend to either completely demonize the parent, and the parent is all bad, or they completely idolize the parent? It’s harder for them to find a middle ground, not only in the past but also in the current world, until they undergo the healing, that they tend to be an all-or-nothing, all-good, all-bad mindset? Have you noticed that? 

I think in the book, I have different subtypes of post-traumatic parents like we have a perfectionist, a paralyzed, and a disengaged, and they all have different styles. What I notice more than an either-or is that it’s very confusing to grapple with the reality of our parents, especially our imperfect parents, but especially our toxic parents as adults. A lot of times there’s a flip-flop. 

There’s coming in, they were completely awful. Then the hard part is they weren’t completely awful. Sometimes they were great, or the other side of a parent who just has to constantly defend somebody in their past for the things they did wrong, but I really provoked it, but it was really more my fault, but you have to understand, or blaming one parent, but absolving the other parent. 

It’s just a process. We have to mourn the childhood we never had, and we have to come to terms with it and fully understand it. Sometimes, for some of my patients, when they’re on that healing journey, there’s a time of either estrangement from a family of origin or setting very high and firm inflexible boundaries for a while. Then as the healing continues, if the parent wants to, not because their own parent wants, but because you know what, I’m willing to change these boundaries a drop and give you a chance. 

It’s a sign of healing to be able to sort of let’s flexibly figure this out. Some extremely toxic relationships from childhood really do just need to be over, and there really is no way to repair them. There are times where we’re going to work with the boundaries, and we’re going to see, I will give you a chance, I will come to a family holiday party, but I’m leaving after an hour. 

I will socialize with these siblings, but not these siblings for a while. I’ll give it a chance, and I’ll see. It’s my choice, it’s my boundaries. I get to decide and I get to figure out what I want to do with that. I think that sometimes the hardest part is when it isn’t so clearly caught like this person was all bad and therefore I just don’t have a relationship with them anymore. Certain things were okay and there were other things that were really bad, and I want to have a dialogue with them about it. 

I don’t know how they’ll receive the dialogue, but I cannot be around them until we do have the dialogue. I always say that there are two parts to any communication. There’s the getting it said and the being heard. Getting it said is on you. You own your words, you have the right to get it said. Being heard is on the other person. They can either hear you or not. You don’t have to sit there figuring out the perfect word because you’re going to argue this case in front of the Supreme Court and you’re going to convince them. What you have to do is say your truth and they either can hear it or they cannot, but that is entirely on them.

Absolutely, Dr. Robyn. Just winding it back a little bit to emphasize some of the pieces, it’s fairly common to have someone come in and either flip-flop between a parent’s all bad, all good. I’ve seen many people come in and think of one in particular where the mom was all bad. As that individual did their work, they were able to see, there were some good parts of mom. 

Then they were able to let Mom in a little bit with nice boundaries, let her in. Unfortunately, the mom’s bad behavior hadn’t changed. The mom hadn’t done self-work, so they had to have a strong boundary and keep the mom out. The door may open again if change happens. I’ve also seen it with individuals who idolized, say the father, the father was all good. 

As they did their healing work, they were able to see, “There were really parts of this person that put me at risk, that hurt me, that hurt my siblings, that did a lot of negative things and the unpredictability of the behavior has affected me now.” We’re looping back to the listener’s question, who is a good example of this, where they’re saying I can now really see the impact of these behaviors. How can I heal? What work can I do? 

I love that you’re pointing us in that direction that one of the key ways forward is to look at what occurred through as balanced a lens as you can, seeing the good and the not-so-good, appreciating both of them, or at least acknowledging both of them, appreciating the impact of them. Then if it feels safe, if the parent’s still alive or around, that it is okay and can actually be healing to open the door and practice healthy boundary setting. Is that a good summation of what you’ve said? 

Yeah, we can always, if we choose, give someone another chance and clearly state what the expectations are, and they either will rise to that or they won’t. Then at least we have data and we say, “I gave this another chance, it didn’t work. Now I know, and anybody who wants to criticize me or be upset about it, I tried one more time. Now I can say to myself that this boundary must remain in place in the way I want it to remain in place.” 

Remember, boundaries are about protecting relationships. They’re not about walling people out. They’re about saying, this is how close I can get to you and still feel safe. This is how close you can get to me and still feel safe. It’s not about very often in these situations when I’m working with a family with the grandparents, they say, “My daughter’s setting boundaries against me.” 

I always say, “No. She’s trying to set boundaries with you.” I remember one mom who said to me, she thought I was much younger than her. She said, “One day you’ll have adult children and they’ll set boundaries against you and you’ll see how it feels.” I said, “I do have adult children and boundaries with me. I am so happy because if I call my adult daughter and she is not available, I don’t want her to grit her teeth and talk to me anyway. 

I want her to feel free to say, Mom, it’s not a great time. Can I call you back tomorrow?” Then we’ll have a great conversation because the point of the conversation is connection, even though she’s not living at home anymore and she’s an adult in her own right. I don’t want her to grit her teeth and tolerate me. That’s not a relationship. Yes, of course, my adult children have set boundaries with me because that is how relationships work. They’re not how relationships don’t work. They’re how relationships do work.

I agree. I also like to see boundaries as oriented towards protecting relationships, including the relationship one has with oneself. Let’s get back to attachment theory, which is about attunement. When we attune to ourselves and know what we want and what we need in healthy ways, not in completely egocentric ways, which I want and need is often a sign of trauma. 

That child who wasn’t protected becomes all about themselves. When we have really healthy attunement to what we need, then we’re able to set healthy boundaries. That’s a big part of the healing. Then, when you have children or are already working with children, to be able to model those healthy boundaries and also continue to do that healing. 

I’m a firm believer that one of the best things we can do in our relationships is to show healthy boundaries, healthy self-care, and healthy self-love, to be able to say, “I have a boundary around this. I’m feeling really disrespected. That behavior doesn’t work for me. I want more for myself and for our relationship.” 

In that healthy boundary setting, we are also healing that part of the self and possibly in the other person who didn’t know what it was like to be respected, who wasn’t allowed to step up and say, “Wait a second, this doesn’t feel respectful.” As a 5-year-old or 10-year-old, I want self-respect here because if you’re growing up in a toxic environment, the parent’s not going to care if you’re disrespected or not. It’s not even on their radar. You don’t deserve respect. How does that strike you, Dr. Robyn? 

I will tell you an interesting anecdote that happened to a parent in a post-traumatic parenting class. There was a mom who was keeping very firm boundaries with her family because of her dad’s alcoholism. She and her husband decided together that they were going to go to the family holiday party for a very short time. Now, her mom did not have great boundaries. Her mom, the grandma, called her daughter who was about ten, maybe a little younger, and said, “Tell your mom that you want to stay at the party the whole time. Why do you leave so early?”

The kid said this to her mother. She said, “Debbie, she called me,” and we hashed it out. She said, “When I was little and we would have family holiday parties, Grandpa drank a lot of alcohol. When he drinks a lot of alcohol, he starts saying hurtful words. The more alcohol he drinks, the more hurting words he says. At the beginning of the party, he doesn’t say any hurting words. As the party goes on, there are more and more hurting words. I don’t like hurting words. I don’t want you to hear hurting words. We’re going to come to the party until the alcohol comes out. Then we’re going to leave because I don’t want to sit around and hear hurting words, and I don’t think you do either.” 

Her daughter accepted that explanation. About half a year later, this daughter was in a situation where there was a real mean girl bullying situation going on in the grade. Her daughter stood up to the mean girl and said, “You cannot speak to me that way. You cannot speak to anybody that way. This is not okay.” 

She recruited adult support, and the teacher called this mom and said, “Your daughter is so impressive. Kids don’t usually handle this relational aggression or mean girl bullying the way your daughter did. She just knew that this was not a behavior she was going to tolerate. She set a firm boundary. This was stellar. What did you do? I want to know. I’m a mom myself. I want to know what you did.” 

You know what she did? She modeled it herself. I won’t subject you to hurting words. I won’t listen to hurting words. The impact that had on her daughter was this incredible sense of self and this incredible sense of you cannot disrespect me because my mom doesn’t believe that I should be disrespected, and my mom doesn’t believe that she should be disrespected.

The whole family has that same voice of, “Yes, we will go to the holiday party for a little while until there’s a risk of hurting words and then we will vote with our feet.” It was just incredibly powerful. She reached out to me months after the parenting class, emailed me to tell me this story. She said, “You have to hear the story.”

It is such an incredible story and so emblematic of the power of a parent doing the work. The mom in this situation clearly did work to understand whether it was on her own or with a psychotherapist, you, to understand the importance of knowing that she didn’t have to tolerate that environment and how to use iMessage to say, “I won’t tolerate this. It does not feel healthy to me. It’s not okay with me. Hurtful words are not okay with me.” 

Then she modeled that for the daughter. In that moment of not only standing up for herself and her beliefs and her right to be respected, she then intergenerationally gave that gift to her daughter. We’re talking about the antithesis of the transmission of intergenerational violence. We’re talking about the transmission, the intentional transmission, of intergenerational healthy coping mechanisms, healthy boundaries, healthy love, and genuine love. Such a beautiful example, Dr. Robbins, so beautiful. 

You’ll notice that the mom, first processed with me, didn’t say to her daughter, “Grandpa’s a toxic narcissist.” She didn’t say anything developmentally inappropriate. She didn’t even interfere with her daughter’s ability to have a relationship with her grandpa. She just set boundaries around it. 

We can see how then the daughter’s behavior was impactful to the group of mean girls. It also impacted the teacher and her parenting abilities. It goes back to the mother having had the desire to become a healthier human being and a healthier parent. You look at all of the people that she touched in a positive way through her own self-work. I applaud that. 

It is one of my favorite things in life when you see that you’ve worked with a client and that they have done the work, that we hold the lantern, we hold the light, but they do the work, they do the heavy lifting, and they make a difference. They stop. That daughter will then be a force in not using her, as you call them, hurting words because let’s pause just for a minute please on the power of hurting words. 

The Power Of Words

I am a big believer in the power of loving words and I am a big believer in the ability of hurting words to stay with us, to linger, to cause trauma in their own right. You probably hear this from your clients. I know I have from my client base where a phrase from a father or a mother or brother or sister was just this punch. It’s usually not just that one phrase. It wasn’t a one-off. It’s usually the one that becomes symbolic. The psyche didn’t take in and retain all of the other ones, or maybe it took it in, but it didn’t retain the plethora of similar hurting comments, hurtful comments. 

That individual’s psyche is just filled with all of these words of prejudice, criticism, hatefulness, and meanness, and then that person carries it on in their psyche and transmits it. Transmits all of that negativity into their love relationships, their work relationships, their parenting, all of these. What do you think about the power of hurting words to cause trauma in and of themselves?

I agree with you. I think that sometimes the hurting words are because our brains are pattern analyzers and pattern generators. What happens is that used to happen to me in childhood when I would discover a new vocabulary word and suddenly I would hear it everywhere. What happens is, my eyes are suddenly open to this word, and now I’m looking for it. 

Once someone uses a hurting word towards you, you’re worthless, you’re selfish, you’re lazy, you’re stupid. Whatever that word is, your brain starts looking for evidence to confirm or disconfirm it because those are the words our brains are primed to look for the words that could get us socially rejected because social acceptance is survival. Social rejection is dangerous. 

We’re looking for those words. If you hear worthless or you hear stupid, your brain is going to be looking for worthless and stupid forever. The disconfirming evidence is just going to become like, “Today, I wasn’t worthless.” It’s not going to come, “Wait, I’m not worthless and I’ve never actually been worthless.” To this day, I had a relative, not a parent, who used to call me lazy as a child. 

I remember being someone who was very productive in life, yet always felt lazy. I had this with a patient who told me she felt too lazy to do something. This woman is not lazy like someone who really personifies that, like pushing yourself through trauma, someone who started a business, is a single mom, and pushes herself in every way. 

I remember when she said this, I replied, “You do know that you’re not lazy.” We had to really identify whose voice was saying lazy. When I finished that session with her, I had to go to my own therapist and say, “That session hit me hard because that is me. I still have that lazy voice inside of me. I know whose voice it is, and we need to work on this.”

Still to this day, even though I am very productive and proud of what I’ve done, I’m proud that I figured out how to be a post-traumatic parent. I’m genuinely satisfied and proud of the clinical work I do with people. Like what you said about being in awe of the courage of people who do the work. I get to see that every day, but there’s still a little voice inside of me that says, “Maybe you’re lazy.” 

Thankfully, I know enough to dispute that voice and really talk back to it, saying, “I know who installed you. It’s okay. That person doesn’t get a vote.” These words are so right. We think, “Big deal. Somebody disrespected me a lot when I was a kid and said these mean things to me, so what?” But that’s what has to be processed in therapy a lot. Sometimes more than the trauma that’s on the surface are the hurting words.

Thank you, Dr. Robyn. I 100% agree because our brains as children are like little sponges, taking in everything. When somebody we look up to, our protectors, our mom and dad, the people who should be our protectors, even if they’re not, we still tend to look up to them because they’re all we have. 

We look up and these big figures are telling us either, “You’re wonderful, you’re strong, you made a mistake, that’s okay, let’s figure it out, let’s do it differently.” That’s one way of being. The other way, and there are many permutations, is the parent who says, “You’re an idiot, you’re stupid, you’re worthless, you’ll never amount to anything.”

Whichever parent you have, that’s the one you’re going to believe because your brain is a little sponge soaking up all of this. Unless you have someone or something in your life that seriously counteracts those messages, it is exactly what you said. It’s the confirmation bias. You’re going through life looking for evidence. Forget all of the good evidence about what a wonderful person you are and how productive and kind you can be. 

Your brain is searching for validation. In this case, it would likely be the dad’s voice saying, “You’re bad, you’re not worthy, you’re a horrible human being,” whatever the trauma was because all sorts of things come out of the mouths of addicts. The prefrontal cortex is disinhibited, and all sorts of vomit is spewed onto people in the environment. 

Yet the child doesn’t have the mental capacity to know, “Dad’s inebriated. I should distance myself from his words. They don’t have meaning. I’m a really good person.” The child is not capable of doing that. In fact, many adults aren’t capable of doing that. The child consumes those words as if they are truth and is then hobbled through their entire lifetime until, as you say so beautifully, we identify whose voice it is. 

Is that the voice of grandma? Is that the voice of Grandpa? Is that the voice of dad, of mom, of big brother? Whose voice is that that is taunting me, that is terrorizing me? I also like how you said that voice doesn’t get a vote. They do not get a seat at the table. They do not even belong in your head. That voice can be excised and set aside. The voice will keep coming back. It’s part of the wiring. Even if you do good therapy, the voice will come in now and again. It’ll come in less and less and have less and less power over you the more you work at putting that voice away from the table. Is that pretty much what you were saying, Dr. Robyn?

Exactly, and it doesn’t have to be a parent. It can be a teacher. You have to be very careful in the schools I consult in. I don’t allow teachers ever, when they’re consulting with me, to use a pejorative term for a child. I always restate it positively. Even that is like a mean girl statement. I wasn’t consulting with that school. She has leadership abilities that she needs to learn to channel properly. 

Like the minute someone says to me, “He’s lazy,” I say, “He really values efficiency, and we have to teach him how to tolerate discomfort and maximize some effort.” I don’t ever allow a teacher to use pejorative language, whatever that pejorative language is. I always challenge them. How can we restate that positively? There is always a positive way to restate it. She’s not a mean girl. She has leadership abilities. She’s just not using them properly. 

I love that because neurolinguistically, you and I both likely work from the same framework of the power of our word choices. Sometimes we’re actually not choosing them. They just wrote something that’s been in the brain. For example, when you talk about mean girls, it might be a meme that’s out in society, a mean girls’ movie, or something where people are choosing those words and realizing, “Wait a minute, I get to start choosing my words and sure, I’ll slip up now and again.”

We all do, but if I start choosing my words, my words about myself, I’m not as stupid as Dad or teacher said I was. In fact, English might not be my forte, but I’m really gifted over here. I maybe won’t be a word wizard throughout life, but it doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It simply means that it’s not my strong subject. That’s okay. Not every subject is everyone’s strong suit. When we start using the power of neurolinguistics to set the bar higher for ourselves in a really compassionate, loving way, that allows us to be better individuals, better partners, and better parents, which goes back to the question of the day. 

Group Work

This individual is not destined to be the chaotic father or the doormat of a mother, the mother who was so afraid of conflict that she just let the dad have his way with everything. This individual can do the healing work in psychotherapy, using self-help groups, using group work. Let’s take a pause here because now we’re into tools for the listener. What do you think about the power of group work?

I love groups. I feel like there’s something about being with other humans who have experienced similar things. It’s one thing when a therapist tells you, “You are not lazy.” It’s another when other people in a group who have experienced similar things and have struggled and are impressive say, “You’re not lazy.” I know where that’s coming from. There’s also insight when people have been through similar experiences that you cannot always get one-on-one in therapy. I love the combination and sometimes the flip-flopping between different types of therapy.

Sometimes one aspect of healing’s going to work and then you’ve sufficed it for a while, and sometimes a different type of healing is going to work. Sometimes you try something that’s not for you, like you try groups and it’s not for you. Maybe it was just the dynamic of that group, or maybe you’re in a different place in your healing journey. Then five years later, you try a group and it’s wonderful. I think it’s about using the tools that are available to you as you go through your journey. 

I also agree with you. I say this a lot on the show about how important group work is because not only is it often no cost or low cost, but in a well-run group, the confidentiality is there. Witnessing, even if you’re not speaking, just witnessing, as you were saying, the analogous experience, seeing your experience in somebody else’s words and their eyes is so bonding because it’s another human being and you’re able to say, “I’m not alone.” 

That other person had a difficult childhood experience. That other person had the veneer of the ideal family on the outside with a horror show or now and again unpredictable horror show on the inside. “That individual got terrorized by the mom or the older brother. I’m not alone.” That other person who has a high-functioning lifestyle also had trauma. “That person over there also struggles in their relationships because they haven’t learned how to work through the trauma yet.” 

It’s just such a powerful, often overlooked resource in people’s communities. I know in our own community, there are many groups for women, especially women who have suffered abuse, whether it’s ongoing abuse or past abuse. There are great groups. There’s a group for men called MEN, Men Evolving Nonviolently, which I wish was a nationwide resource because so many men grew up in violent households because violence is often male-to-male violence.

It’s often accepted as a norm. Like, it’s okay because that’s what men do. Men are angry. Men are aggressive. Men are sarcastic. We are now, I believe, evolving enough as a society to see that there’s no place for this violence. There’s no place for this disrespect. Behind closed doors or outside in public, it’s not a healthy way of being for individuals, partners, or kiddos. Not for anyone. What do you think, Dr. Robyn? 

I think the most important thing is the idea that just because this is how it’s always been doesn’t mean it’s how it always has to be. To me, when people start seeing that in their own therapy and in their own lives, that tells me that we’ve reached a milestone in healing. Just because my dad was sarcastic and mean doesn’t mean I need to be. When you see that, then you are already so much further in your healing journey than you realize you are. 

Final Thoughts

Bravo, Dr. Robyn. Just a beautiful place to start winding up. Are there any other thoughts that you would like to share with our listeners? I know there’s so much more, but any final pieces?

I think what people need to know is that when you’re a post-traumatic parent, that sense of, I don’t know how to do this, can sometimes lead to pulling back from parenting or outsourcing your parenting to other people, maybe to your parenting partner, maybe to paid people, because you feel like you don’t know how. 

I know that that comes from a protective place inside of us where we want to shield our children from danger and think our damage is dangerous. Not only is your damage not dangerous, if you work with your damage, it can be transformative and make you into the parent your kid needs. In the end, our children want their attachment figures and they want us, imperfectly present. What you said at the beginning about D.W. Winnicott and good enough mothering. 

One of his, I think, best lines is this idea that even the beneficial is toxic in excess. Vitamin D is good, too much vitamin D is really bad for you. It’s like that with anything. Tylenol is good, a whole bottle of Tylenol is not so good. Perfect parenting is toxic in excess because children need present parenting. You can do this. You can be that present parent. It just means healing. For many post-traumatic parents, that protective instinct for our kids is what finally motivates us to make those changes. To me, that is the most beautiful, incredible, courageous thing. 

I agree. I believe in any self-work we do because it’s not easy and it is lifelong, and it takes true courage to do trauma healing. It takes true courage to dive in and do the self-work and it takes true courage to realize you’ll never get it perfect. You will never get it perfect. The very best you can do is to get better and better. When you stumble, as you will, as we all do, we all stumble, the very best thing you can do as a parent, as a partner, as a caretaker, and as a teacher is to have the courage to say, “I’m sorry. This is what I did that I wish I had done better. This is what I will strive to do differently in the future.” 

Episode Wrap-up

By doing that, not only are we neuro-linguistically telling ourselves, this is what I’m going to work toward next time, it’s okay that I made a misstep, but we are showing that other person our true intentions of evolving into a better human being, a kinder human being, a more respectful human being. That’s what our world needs, yes. Dr. Robyn, I so appreciate your wisdom, your time, and your energy. Where can our listeners find you? Could you tell us a little bit about where they can find your book and a little bit about your book? 

The post-traumatic parenting community really organically grew on Instagram. You can find it @Dr.KoslowitzPsychology. That’s where the post-traumatic parents hang out. We have a Facebook group as well. We are very active. The community is very active. People will post suggestions for reels, questions, and specific content that they’re looking for. I’m pretty active in my DMS and in my comments.

I cannot always promise because sometimes I’m not on there, but on the whole, I really want to hear from the community. I also have a YouTube channel called Post Traumatic Parenting. That’s where I do slightly longer-form videos where community members send me Reddit threads that they want my take on or specific questions about their parenting. Recently, a lot of post-traumatic parents don’t have great discernment. 

When someone gives them feedback on their parenting, they immediately doubt themselves. YouTube is where I answer those questions. A mom recently asked me if she should use Baby Talk because someone told her it could harm her baby’s brain development. That’s where I can answer questions like that in a slightly longer form. 

We also have the post-traumatic parenting podcast that’s available wherever you get your podcasts. The book is Post-traumatic Parenting. The publisher is Broadleaf and it’s somewhat prescriptive, somewhat descriptive, with aspects of my own story interwoven. The beginning of the book is all about how trauma interferes with parenting. 

The end of the book is about what to do about it in terms of your own trauma and then what to do about it in terms of parenting practices, like what to actually do with your children. Most post-traumatic parents know what they don’t want to do, but they don’t necessarily know what they do want to do. That’s really the book in all three of those components. Like I said, it’s the book I would have needed when I became a mom. I had to write it myself. 

Those are the best books in my mind, the ones that are written from the heart and from life experience. Then they offer really grounding guidelines for how to do it differently, as you said, the way you wish you had had the direction to do it. Dr. Robyn, thank you so much. listeners, I’ll give the spelling of Dr. Robyn’s name. It’s Dr. Robyn Koslowitz. 

You can find her also through the show notes. There will be a link to the platforms she’s described so that you’ll be able to access her on Facebook and Instagram. You are such an incredible resource, Dr. Robyn. You make healing from trauma not only possible but also something that can truly help us. We can do it. We can become the parents we never had and the parents we want to be. Thanks again. 

Thank you so much. I love this show and I love the way you are so open to talking to so many different experts and working together to answer listener questions because I think that collaboration and putting our heads together is the best thing. That really models how to do it. 

Thank you, Dr. Robyn. I think it’s the way forward for our world that collaboration is something that has been sorely missing. Thank you for that. Kudos to you for all the work you do. As always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your time and your energy with us today. This is Imperfect Love.

Important Links:

• Dr. Robyn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram 
• Tiktok – https://www.TikTok.com/@dr.koslowitzpsychology
• LinkedIn – https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/drrobynkoslowitz/
• https://www.DrRobynKoslowitz.com/podcast-2/
• https://TargetedParenting.com/
• https://www.PsychologyToday.com/us/blog/targeted-parenting
• https://MentalHealthHotline.org/ptsd-hotline/
• https://www.Nami.org/support-education/nami-helpline/
• https://www.Samhsa.gov/find-help/988

About Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz is a clinical psychologist, parenting educator, and the host of the Post-Traumatic Parenting podcast. Dr. Koslowitz received her master’s degree in School Psychology from New York University in 2002, and her Ph.D. in School/Clinical Child Psychology from New York University in 2009. Prior to that, Dr. Koslowitz worked in a variety of school settings as a fourth and then third grade teacher. While at NYU, Dr. Koslowitz was privileged to serve as a research assistant to such prominent professors as Dr. Ester Buchholz (author of books on child psychotherapy); Dr. Carol Gilligan (whose book In A Different Voice revolutionized the psychology of women and adolescent girls) and Dr. Sandee McClowry (whose research on Temperament Based Teaching and Parenting pioneered empirically validated temperament based parenting programs). Dr. Koslowitz has been working as a licensed school psychologist since 2002, and as a licensed clinical psychologist since 2017 (NJ License # 5751).