Parenting through our trauma responses

No matter how many years can elapse, still that unhealed trauma can show itself in our responses to stress. So can the trauma also show itself in the way we parent our children.
 
Psychiatrist Judith Herman explains the dialectic of trauma in her book Trauma and Recovery. That is, when we feel too much, we experience hyperarousal. When we feel too little, we experience hypoarousal. When we are in either one of those states, we are outside of our window of tolerance. As a result, we are not able to function as effectively as we would like, or connect calmly and compassionately with others, especially our children.
 
It is exhausting enough to be stuck on a seesaw of hyperarousal and hypoarousal, but when you add the exhaustion of parenthood, and the pandemic (with all the fallout from it in the last two years), it is easy to see how some families are at breaking point. Trauma elevates your baseline, and so the near miss on the highway, the spilled juice box, and the playful shrieks from your children can shoot your nerves off the charts and outside your window of tolerance. You simply do not have the bandwidth.
 
Give your family the gift of therapy. With an experienced trauma therapist, you can learn to turn the volume down on those trauma responses.
 
Book online for a free initial call.
 
Chris Warren-Dickins
Trauma therapist in Ridgewood, New Jersey