Bryan Post on Navigating Trauma in Parenting & the Healing Power of Love

Debbie:

Hey Bryan, welcome to the podcast.

Bryan Post:

Thank you, Debbie, and glad to be here with you.

Debbie:

I’m glad to explore all kinds of interesting topics with you today. I was very intrigued when I learned about your work and your focus. And I think there’s so much overlap within what my listeners are or may be experiencing in their families and with their kiddos. as a way to kind of kick us off, would you talk a little bit about just the work that you do in the world and the specific area that you’ve really honed in on as being where you feel your purpose is?

Bryan Post:

So I’ve spent the last 25 years specializing in trauma adoption and foster care specifically. And I always say that the message that I teach and preach is applicable to all human relationships because it applies to all of us. And so really it is about taking a deep understanding of how stress shows up within ourselves and how that manifests in fear and how our children’s behavior is driven by stress and fear. And when we see their behaviors, if we’re not aware of our own stress and our own fear, then we end up parenting them from a state of fear. And then that just creates a self-perpetuating negative feedback loop. And so my, really for the better part of 25 years has just been about helping people to understand the dynamic of stress and fear in relationships and how ultimately we have to move to a place of love because love is the most powerful healing force that exists. And it is the thing that binds relationships together.

Debbie:

What drew you specifically to help parents in this work with kids?

Bryan Post:

Okay, so I was adopted as an infant and I was in foster care for a short period of time and I also had a sister who was adopted. We were not biological, but our parents were unable to have their own children. And so they wanted their own children and they brought us in and they were loving, amazing parents. However, they both came from a background of trauma and they didn’t realize it in the 70s. You’re not thinking about trauma. You just realize that you live through life. They were both children of alcoholics. My father was a Vietnam veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother’s father died in front of her when she was nine years old at the kitchen table. All of her siblings have different stories for how their father died because no one talked about it. And then what happened is they brought us into their home and adopted and fostered children. I like to help people understand they are stress sensitive and fearful.

And so adopted and foster children by nature of their early experience have experienced trauma. So that drives our behaviors. And when parents encounter problem behaviors with children, usually they revert back to the way they’ve been taught, which is usually decades and generations of parenting that ultimately is rooted in creating more stress and more fear, even though we don’t realize it. And that doesn’t work with adopting foster children. And it really doesn’t have to be that way with biological children or children who haven’t had significant trauma histories. But we can use those common practices like time out and spanking and consequences and behavior modification. And we think they work, but the reality is with children who have a healthy ability to regulate stress, anything you do works. Nine times out of 10, you don’t have to do any of that kind of stuff. You can just raise your eyebrow or snap your finger and that child will end up complying and doing what they’re asked to do. But children who are stress sensitive and who are fearful, when you use those practices, they just create more stress and more isolation. And ultimately, the child doesn’t get better. They just grow older and they don’t grow better.

Debbie:

Yeah, and that, you described that as a healthy response to regulating stress. And I think about, you know, and just, you know, to back up where your kind of specialty is with supporting kids who are adopted or have been in the foster care system and that trauma. And, you know, the reason why I was so curious to connect with you, certainly there are parents in this community who have adopted or are raising foster kids. And even if that’s not the case, we know that so many neurodivergent kids have experienced trauma because they are more wired for threat and their spending a lot of time in environments can really kind of trigger that stress response. So could you talk about that relationship between neurodivergence and stress and how you’ve seen that in the work that you do?

Bryan Post:

Well, sure, and I’d like to really encourage your listeners to go and look up ACES, Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey, because it will give you, the average listener, a really good overview of traumatic experiences that occur that you never associate with trauma. Most people don’t even know what trauma is. We think about trauma as the physical abuse, the sexual abuse, the neglect, the maltreatment, but we don’t realize that trauma is any stressful event which is prolonged, overwhelming, and unpredictable. And when you don’t get an opportunity to express, process, and understand, a short-term stressful experience can become a long-term life-altering, brain-altering stressful experience. That becomes trauma. And so a lot of times we talk about neurodivergence versus neurotypical. And I’m really curious because I think that when we’re talking about a neurodivergent child, we’re talking about a child who’s just more stress sensitive than maybe a neurotypical child.

A neurotypical child just having had a different in utero experience, a different birth experience, a different conception to five experience, which helps them regulate stress more effectively. They have a healthier oxytocin response, oxytocin being your brain’s anti-stress hormone versus what we call neurodivergent children. And I think that even when we say neurodivergent, we’re missing the core and the essence of the child. I just like to simplify things. If you have a child who’s experienced trauma, you have a stress sensitive child. So you can call them neurodivergent, but what does that actually mean in the day-to-day application of their life, the day-to-day parenting of their life? You’ve got to understand that neurodivergence means stress sensitive means all of their sensory pathways are more readily exposed to stimulation, which overwhelms them, which makes it hard for them to focus, hard for them to sit still, hard for them to be in environments, hard for them to eat certain foods, take baths, all these different things. Whereas those are the things that you need to focus on regulating. But the real linchpin is that when our children who are neurodivergent, stress sensitive, when they’re having their reactions, to the environment or to the relationships, the thing that we miss is that it causes us to have a reaction. It causes us to have a stress reaction. And Joseph Ladeau, he’s a New York University neuroscientist. He wrote a book called The Emotional Brain. And it’s one of my favorite quotes. He says, “In times of stress, our thinking becomes confused and distorted and our short-term memory is suppressed.” That’s for all of us. So the moment we become stressed, we’re no longer thinking clearly and we can’t remember.

So what happens is our children, because of their stress, they’re acting out. I always say an acting out child is a stressed out child. You can take it a step further and say an acting out child is a stressed out child is a regressed child. Because they’re not acting from their chronological age or their physical age or their cognitive age, they’re acting from their emotional age, which is the other thing that we don’t understand about child behavior and about relationships. Child behavior and relationships are emotional. They’re not cognitive. We try to do everything through a cognitive framework. You try to think through behaviors. Well, behaviors are not a thinking dynamic. They are an emotional dynamic. So when the child gets upset, the parent gets upset automatically, and doesn’t realize it. So now they’re stressed, their thinking’s confused and distorted, their short-term memory’s suppressed. And when that short-term memory gets suppressed, then all of a sudden they go back into their brain stem, which is where we store all of our memories, and they go all the way back to decades-old parenting approaches.

And then they react to the child’s negative behavior based on the decade old parenting approaches, rather than being able to breathe, stay present, realize that no one’s gonna die, realize that that child’s behavior in that moment is not the end of the world. And that what they need more than anything is for you to understand that in that moment, they are stressed out. And the first most important thing you can do when your child is stressed out is to regulate yourself because of mirror neurons. Because if your child’s stressed out and you become stressed and your mirror neurons are triggering their mirror neurons, then you’re actually creating a higher frequency of stress and anxiety in the relationship. So the first thing we have to do, and we just don’t teach this enough, the first thing we have to do is we have to take personal inventory. We’ve to regulate ourselves and then we’ve got to work towards regulating our children.

Now, I’m going to say one last thing and then I’ll turn the mic back over to Alan Shores, a neuroscientist from UCLA, who wrote a book, or USC, he wrote a book called Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. He wrote three tomes, and they’re so big. In the introduction of that first volume, Taylor et al is quoted, 1997, “Affect Dysregulation is a fundamental mechanism involved in all psychiatric disorders.” Meaning being stressed out, being stressed out is the fundamental cause of all psychiatric disorders. If we take that on a continuum and we just bring that all the way back down to simply a child arguing or a child not eating their peas or a child not wanting to take their bath, we can go from the severe affect dysregulation is the fundamental mechanism for all psychiatric disorders all the way down to being stressed out is the fundamental cause, the fundamental root of all problem behaviors. And when we realize that that stress causes us stress, we have to regulate ourselves first, and then we work to regulate our children. When we can do that, then we’re diminishing fear and we’re increasing love. When you do that, relationship becomes the most important thing.

Debbie:

Yeah, so good. So you said earlier that trauma is any stressful event that is prolonged, overwhelming, and unpredictable. And I imagine that there are parents listening who may not recognize that their child has experienced trauma especially. And I’d love to know your thoughts on little t trauma. Is that a thing in your opinion? But I’m wondering what are some kind of subtle signs that might indicate to a parent that their child has experienced trauma?

Bryan Post:

What is little t trauma?

Debbie:

Yeah, just, you know, I’ve heard people mention this as an idea that it’s not this big dramatic event, but rather it’s kind of, as you said, of prolonged, maybe over time, small little microaggressions or small events that happen in schools or other environments that the child may kind of incorporate as trauma.

Bryan Post:

Yeah, bullying is a traumatic event. Being separated from one’s parents can be a traumatic event. Tiffany Phils was a researcher at the University of Miami. She did this study back in the 90s. She took two infants and she hooked them both up to brain monitors. The brain monitors looked exactly the same when the healthy parent got up and walked away from her baby compared to when the depressed parent walked towards her baby. So a parent doesn’t have to do anything except just be depressed for a child to have to experience trauma. So there’s so many variables for how trauma occurs, but the key is that you have to have the opportunity to express, process, and understand. When the child can be bullied or the child can lose a friend or the parent’s depressed, when the child can have an opportunity to talk about it, to be able to cry about it, to be able to eventually make sense of it, then it’s no longer traumatic. Then it’s just a stressful experience that the child has lived and grown through because stress is unavoidable. It’s just a part of life. But the thing is in our society, because of generations of suppressed emotion, we don’t talk about things and we don’t allow children to have feelings. And then we don’t even allow ourselves to have feelings. We’ve spent so many generations suppressing one another and suppressing ourselves that when we have painful events,

We don’t talk about it. We don’t share through it. We don’t grow through it. We don’t learn through it. So that’s how we end up creating, we take stressful things and make them dramatic things. But to answer specifically your question, you know, a child who can’t sit still, a child who is aggressive, a child who cries a lot, a child who has night terrors, a child who can’t get along with peers. These are not indicators necessarily of traumatic events that have occurred in the child’s life. But what they are definitely indicative of is a child who is stressed, a child who is in a state of stress. Now, when you can attend to that stress, well, now I’m jumping ahead of myself. I’m gonna give you an example. I had a mom, she reached out to me and she said, my daughter will not take a shower. Every single night she resists taking a shower. And this has been going on since she was four years old. So since she was four years old, she’s fought to take a shower. And we’ve been going through this now for five years. So this little girl was nine years old. She said, what can I do about that? And I said, well, here’s what I want you to do.

The next time it’s time for her to take a shower, before you go up to her bedroom, I want you to slow down and I want you to breathe and I want you to get yourself regulated. Because after five years of taking a shower, there’s this negative feedback loop where mom is anxious about going, basically entering into the battle. So mom’s already stressed. And so I said, the first thing I want you to do is I just want you to get yourself regulated. I want you to breathe, get yourself regulated, then go up and say, hey, it’s time to take a shower, but keep breathing because I know that when we are stressed, we stop breathing. And when you stop breathing, when you start taking really short, ineffective breaths, then your thinking gets confused and distorted and your short-term memory gets suppressed. So I said, just keep breathing. mom, actually emailed me back two weeks later. She said, I went up to my daughter’s bedroom. I said, honey, it’s time to take a shower. She said, sure enough, just like she always does, she started talking back, rolling her eyes. She didn’t want to do it, but I kept breathing and I said to her, honey, if you need anything else, just let me know. And she said, my daughter went and got in the shower. But sure enough, like she always does, mom, the water’s too hot, it’s too cold, I don’t like this towel, I don’t like this soap. Mom said, usually bugs the heck out of me, but tonight I was breathing, I was regulated, I went in, I got what she needed.

I said, honey, if you need anything else, I’ll be right here. She said, I just sat right there in the bathroom while my nine year old was completing her shower. And she said that was the best shower that we have had in the last five years. It was the best shower. So I thought I’d go for a home run. So I took my little girl. had her towel wrapped around her. We went to her bedroom. I sat on her bed. She sat next to me. I put my arm around her and I said, honey, That was the best shower we have had in five years. What scares you so much about taking a shower? And she said, my little girl looked up at me and said, mom, the guy who sexually molested me made me take a shower with him. Mom knew about the sexual molestation and it happened at daycare. She didn’t know about the shower. Still breathing, still regulated, still thinking clearly, still with an active, active short-term memory. Mom says, I looked at my little girl and I said, honey, you don’t have to take a shower anymore. You can take a bath. Two weeks later when she was emailing me, two weeks later she said, when I’m emailing you, my daughter gets in and out of the bathtub faster. I don’t even know she’s in and out anymore. It completely dissipated. We dissipated five years of stress, five years of stress in five minutes, simply by getting the mom to regulate and then be able to see that her daughter wasn’t just being disrespectful and disobedient and defiant and manipulative and controlling. Her daughter was scared. Her daughter was traumatized. She was having a reaction. Mom had to calm down and regulate enough to be able to stay present to her daughter, not get hijacked herself, and then be able to ask her daughter a very simple question. Honey, what scares you so much about taking a shower? Transformative.

Debbie:

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that story. Yeah, I mean, it’s such a reminder that there is always a reason. And it’s so hard for parents when we’re in it. And we do feel like we’re going to battle every day, whether it’s taking a shower or getting out the door or whatever it is. We do tend to get hijacked. so that is my personal ongoing work is remembering to pause and breathe and to regulate myself. Not super easy to do, but it does get easier with practice, I would say. So you talked about, again, this idea of showing up with love versus fear. And I love that language. like the book Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsh. That’s kind of the premise of his book. And he says that we’re doing everything. Every choice we make, everything we do is through one of those lenses, fear or love. And I think fear is often the default for so many of us, right? The stakes feel so high when we’re parenting and we don’t know what we’re doing and we can easily kind of get caught up in a negative feedback loop, as you said. So can you talk a little bit more about that juxtaposition between fear and love and what you’ve seen in the work that you do with parents?

Bryan Post:

I would love to, and I would love to, I’d love to really create the understanding around it. The reason we are fearful by default is because of our amygdala. Our amygdala is our lower limbic system. It’s our fear receptor in our brain. All it is doing is looking for threats. So the moment the amygdala sees a threat, it pumps out cortisol. So it is automatic, it’s natural, and that comes from the time we were, we were cavemen and cavewomen. So it’s so old. It’s your reptilian brain. And so then what happens in our society is we have all these experiences where we become stressed and no one is soothing us. No one is settling it. What happens is we just end up exacerbating the stress. And the stress, the moment you get stressed, your entire body constricts into survival. Your body only knows two energy states. It knows a surviving state and it knows a thriving state. That thriving state is the state of love. But if when your amygdala recognizes that threat and your amygdala doesn’t think, it’s just all emotional, then it takes over. And when it takes over and you’re surviving, you can’t be in a place of love. Love and fear don’t coexist. Where one is, the other one isn’t.

So that’s why breathing is so important. Herbert Benson is a physiologist in the 1970s at Harvard. He discovered the relaxation response. He said, the first thing that we do when we become stressed is we stop breathing. And then we start taking very short, ineffective breaths. Now, if you fast forward to the 90s when Joseph Ladeau said, in times of stress, our thinking is confused and distorted and our short-term memory is suppressed. Now we’re stressed, we’re holding our breath, we’re not thinking clearly. The linchpin is we have to breathe. We have to become conditioned to mindfully breathe and stay present. Because if we don’t, stress does three things. Stress causes us to react from the past because it sends you deep into your brain stem. It causes you to obsess about the future. So now you’re worried about your five-year-old, what your five-year-old’s gonna be like when he’s 15 or when he’s 20, because you’re obsessing about the future, but it takes you out of the present. And the present is the only thing that exists. The future has not happened, it has not occurred. The past is the past. Deepak Chopra says, you cannot prevent the future from happening, but you can influence the future from the present. So that truly is, we reap what we sow. The frequency and the vibration that we create in the present moment is what we end up seeing in the future moments. So you can influence the future from the present by trying to stay anchored to good feelings and good frequencies and good vibrations. But that’s so hard because your amygdala keeps wanting to kick you into fear. That’s why you have to counter that by breathing, by slowing down. And one of the things I tell, I just told a whole church full of parishes the other day, yesterday as a matter of fact.

The first thing you gotta do when you’re stressed is you gotta take a deep breath, take three, I always say take three to 10, and the first thing you say to yourself is, I’m not gonna die. Because your primal brain, that’s where it takes you. It takes you into survival. People think that’s extreme. It’s not extreme. That’s what your neurophysiology is doing when you become stressed, because it’s just energy. It’s survival. So you gotta say, I’m not gonna die and the second thing you say is everything’s gonna be okay. You say I’m not gonna die Everything’s gonna be okay as soon as you do that now you’re talking to your unconscious mind now You’re talking to your amygdala you’re saying calm down big boy and when you do that you’re turning on oxytocin See the hypothalamus releases oxytocin so when the amygdala releases cortisol and it passes the hypothalamus the hypothalamus is supposed to counter that by releasing oxytocin, your anti-stress hormone. Oxytocin is also known as the love hormone. But what we don’t realize is that your amygdala releases cortisol automatically. It starts from the time we’re conceived because that stress helps us to grow. In the hypothalamus, you learn your oxytocin response. You learn it has to be taught to you. So you have to have an attentive, nurturing, affectionate caregiver coming and soothing you when you’re stressed, when you’re upset, when you’re in distress, taking care of you. What they’re really doing in taking care of you is they’re helping you develop a healthy oxytocin response so that you can learn, learn, which means you’re training your brain, amygdala, cortisol, hypothalamus, oxytocin. You’re learning how to regulate yourself because you have an effective oxytocin response. So the child who can go to school, who comes from a regulated environment, goes to school, they fall down, they hurt their knee, their oxytocin kicks in. They’re able to calm down, go back to playing and go back to focusing.

The child who goes to school at five falls down and hurts their knee, who comes from an environment maybe that was more stressful, they don’t have the same healthy oxytocin response. So the cortisol keeps flushing through the brain, causing their thinking to become confused and distorted, suppressing their short-term memory. Now they’re completely stressed out. The teacher’s saying, you’re gonna lose points, or you’re gonna get a consequence, or you’re not gonna get dessert, or you’re gonna lose playground time. What stresses them out even more, now they’re running around acting crazy. The teacher goes and gets the principal. The principal comes marching in and says, listen here young man, if you don’t stop that, I’m gonna call the police. We’re all freaking stressed out. We’re all stressed out and we all forget, it’s a five-year-old. No one’s going to die. Everyone’s going to be okay. But that five-year-old doesn’t have adults around them who’s helping them turn on their oxytocin.

Debbie:

Okay, that was so helpful. I really appreciate you walking through what’s happening and talking about the oxytocin response. That’s something we had Stuart Shanker on the show and he wrote the book Self-Reg and he came to visit my community and we got really into oxytocin, which was fascinating and learning how we as parents can help our kids, you know, using that oxytocin response. So that’s one thing I’d like to explore a little deeper, but I also just want to say that, you know, this idea of our kids having parallel emotional experiences as us, right? So you’re talking about what we need to do for ourselves to regulate and taking those breaths, which is so powerful. It seems so simple, but it can change everything, So, but imagine how hard it is for us to do that. And then we get frustrated that our kids get dysregulated so easily.

Bryan Post:

100%. I say that all the time. We have a difficult time. So this is the other thing and I could talk to you for 50 hours. We, as adults, when we become stressed, so we have three pathways for emotional expression and their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. And the reason we have these pathways is these pathways help us transition energy because everything’s energy and vibration. So when someone asks you to do something, you have to have one of these pathways in order to transition. So you mentioned that your husband and your son were downstairs playing video games right now. If all of a sudden your son or your husband said, hey mom, we need you to come down here. Mom, come down here. You’d immediately inside because you’re on video, you’d freeze. You’d freeze. You’d find the mute and you’d start trying to breathe. And then if they kept calling you, you’d say, hang on a minute, Bryan. And then as you were walking downstairs, you would be like, Those are pathways of attitudes. So then you’d go downstairs and you’d say, hey, I’m trying to do my podcast. You guys calm down and they’d say, sorry, sorry, mom, sorry. And then you’d come back up. Now you’re going, in your head, you’re going, my God. And you’re having all this attitude. You transition in energy and then you sit back down and we get back to talking. imagine as kids when we grew up, if you had an attitude with your parents, they’d tell you, don’t you huff and puff with me. Don’t you roll your eyes at me. You just do what I want you to do. And so if you can’t express your attitude, you get suppressed, that energy gets suppressed down to feelings. So then when we were growing up, we couldn’t yell, we couldn’t cry, we couldn’t scream, we couldn’t do any of that. So you can’t express your feelings.

If you can’t express through your attitudes and can’t express through your feelings, you drop down to behaviors. Well, parents sure enough aren’t gonna let you have behaviors. So they try to suppress that. I always say, you know your stress when you’re trying to control, suppress and change behaviors. Because behaviors, if you can’t express through your behaviors, you drop down to anger and depression. Anger and depression become our only options. Anger and depression have to come out through behaviors. They have to come out through behaviors. So if we don’t give children an opportunity to have an attitude, if we don’t give them an opportunity to have feelings, they’re gonna get suppressed down to behaviors and then that energy is gonna have to come out one way or the other. And pretty soon you’re in a negative feedback loop. And all that comes from being raised for generations of believing that attitudes are signs of disrespect. Attitudes have nothing to do with disrespect. My attitude has nothing to do with you at all. My attitude and expression is me trying to transition the energy to accept and do what it is you’ve asked me to do so that I don’t drop down to my feelings. But what we don’t realize as parents is that when someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do as adults, what do we do? We have attitudes and feelings. And so we get to have attitudes and feelings, and that’s neurotypical. But when our children have behaviors that are neurodivergent, we say, don’t have those behaviors, but we won’t let them have attitudes and feelings. So we give them no options. So in so many instances, we’re taking our neurotypical children and we’re making them neurodivergent because we’re not modeling for them any other option.

Debbie:

Yeah, so fascinating to hear you describe it that way. And I think about parents who, yeah, mean, first of all, it sounds like you have lived in my house the way you were describing how this would play out with what’s going on downstairs. But if this wasn’t modeled for us, for our generation, Like, certainly I grew up in a household where it was not OK to express anything, any kind of big emotion, especially anger. So how do you work with parents to help them, whether it’s re-parent themselves or just kind of healing that part of them so that they can do what’s required to really show up for their kids in the way that we’re talking about?

Bryan Post:

The first key, Debbie, is self-reflection. It’s self-reflection instead of other focus. when you, for 20 years I’ve been saying, any time you have a reaction to some person or some place or something, it has far less to do with that person, that place and that thing, and far more to do with something going on within you. So the first thing that parents have to be willing to do is just stop. I like to say slow down, breathe, and soften. So you slow down, you breathe, and then you soften. And the softening happens during the slowing down and the breathing because you move from being overwhelmed and stressed, and you start to regulate, and you open up your heart. And you just ask yourself, it’s very simple. Number one, why am I feeling the way that I’m feeling right now? When have I felt this way before? And how did that make me feel? And even yesterday in my lecture, a parent came up and talked to me and as she was talking to me, she was talking about her husband who doesn’t believe in this new, I call it love-based parenting approach. He wants to spank and hit and do all this other stuff. And I said, well, that’s okay. I said, well, he’s getting ready to spank or hit. I said, you know, are you able to ask him to just pause? And she said, immediately she said, well, I don’t want him to get mad at me. And that’s, know, we want to modulate that because of societal shame, but I love that expression. I love that it’s automatic. And I said, hang on a minute, because she probably thinks I’m going to talk about him being mad and getting mad at her. I’m not interested in that. What I’m interested in is, and I said, when was the first time an adult got angry with you? And she paused and she, And then she said, well, I was always really close to my dad, but she said my mom used to yell at me all the time. And I said, how did it make you feel? She said it would make me feel so sad and so scared. And I said, so when your husband, because your husband is getting angry, that’s his right. That’s his right to get angry. That’s where he’s at right now. So when he gets angry, what happens is you become that little girl all over again and you get scared. So now you’re trying to avoid his anger because of that little girl, but you’re not that little girl anymore. So you’ve got to calm that little girl down and let her know you’re okay.

And then when he gets angry, you have to take some deep breaths. And here’s what you do. You say, honey, you’re angry. Well, tell me more. Let that out. Give that to me. I’m your wife, I love you, I can take that anger, go ahead and express it. That’s got to shock him. Because he doesn’t even know he’s angry in that moment. He’s just in self-protection. He’s in survival. And in survival, all we do is… Instead of reflecting and realizing that this is coming from a state of helplessness. This is coming from a state of fear and overwhelm and stress. We just have such a hard time supporting one another. So I really just encourage parents, the next time you’re upset, the next time you’re stressed, the next time your child’s doing anything crazy. Number one, start practicing your breathing. You practice your breathing when you’re calm, not when you’re stressed, because if you wait until you’re stressed, then you’re already not breathing, okay? But as soon as you realize you’re not breathing, start breathing. And instead of, because your amygdala in that moment’s gonna want you to control, suppress, or change, because your amygdala in that moment is all about, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die. So you gotta breathe. You calm your amygdala down. Realize that no one’s gonna die. Everything’s gonna be okay. And then you say, when have I felt this way before? However you’re feeling. How am I feeling? How am I feeling right now? How am I feeling right now?

I had a mom, had a similar situation. When she’d mentioned to her daughter it was time for a bath. The daughter would flip out on the ground kicking and screaming and mom would jump on top of her. And she said, this has been going on for years. We have a fight around the bath every night. It was so bad that mom wouldn’t even take the daughter. She wouldn’t even wash her hair. She would take the daughter to the hairdresser to get her hair washed. Cause she said trying to get her hair washed is just too much. So mom said I’d jump on her and I’d hold her down until she calms down. And then, then we go into the bathroom. She sees the bathtub. She starts flipping out again, kicking and screaming, but I’m going to give her that bath whether she likes it or not. Even if I got my clothes on, she’s getting in that tub, water’s splashing and splashing everywhere. Then we both fall out of the tub exhausted and then she doesn’t want to go to sleep. She said, what do I do about that?

I said, here’s what I want you to do. Next time it’s time for a bath. I want you to go in, I want you to mention, hey honey, it’s bath time. And as soon as she starts flipping out, kicking and scraping on the ground, I want you to sit on the bed. I want you to take three to 10 deep breaths. I want you to get in touch with how you’re feeling in that moment. And then I want you to call me back. That’s all I want you to do. Mom was a retired marriage and family therapist. She was 65 years old. Her child was 10 years old, adopted child. She said, that doesn’t seem like very sound therapeutic advice. I said, I understand, I understand. I said, I want you to give it a shot. So she called me back four nights later. She said, you’re never gonna believe what happened. I said, okay, try me. She said, I went into my daughter’s bedroom. I mentioned it was time to take a bath. She started flipping out on the ground, kicking and screaming like she always does. Normally I’d jump on her, but this time, I sat on the bed, she said, I felt like an idiot. I felt like an idiot sitting on the bed while my daughter’s throwing this huge tantrum in the middle of the floor. She said, but do you realize that in less than 10 seconds, she completely stopped what she was doing, climbed up on my lap as if she needed a hug, realized that she didn’t, and then she went and got in the bathtub. Mom said that was too much for my old heart.

But what I later found out is that when this little girl was picked up by Child Protective Services at the age of three, she had lice so thick on her you could pick it off with your fingers. That was the child side. The other side is mom got in touch with the fact that when she was a little girl, she had an older sister and her older sister used to set her down and would scream in her face for long periods of time, time and mom would freak out. So every time this little girl would start freaking out, mom would freak out, except mom was jumping on her instead of soothing and calming and regulating herself. So they were both stuck in PTSD and neurophysiologic feedback loop.

Debbie:

Wow. Yeah. And it’s, I think what I so appreciate is the hope that you’re sharing, you know, cause I imagine there are parents who are stuck in this kind of conflict cycle. And I, you know, I used to call it accidental parenting, but we just go down this road and then we don’t know how else to be. And so we find ourselves just, yeah, just repeating the same bad things all the time. And of course nothing changes. And you know, so I guess, you know, as a way to kind of like, wrap us up a bit here, if there are parents who are listening who, who are stuck in conflict cycles who maybe have, are responding to big behaviors in ways that they know is not working, but they feel paralyzed to do otherwise. I mean, you’ve already shared such great insights and I love connecting with your younger self for the first time you felt that. We just did an episode on internal family systems a few weeks ago, which I love as a modality for this kind of work. But are there any other last thoughts you would share for parents if they really are feeling overwhelmed and they want to do right by their child and they’re afraid it’s been too late or it’s too late to kind of get unstuck?

Bryan Post:

Number one, it’s never too late because the orbital frontal cortex, just like the hypothalamus and the hippocampus, are the emotional structures of the brain that are open for change and development throughout the lifespan. They’re also the parts of their brain that help us regulate the most effectively. So they’re open throughout the lifespan for us to be able to change. When we’re able to slow down and the things that create brain change are repetition and emotional impact. So when we’re able to continue to learn and continue to study and hold ourselves accountable to practice our breathing, to get in a community of other parents who are having, you are not alone. A parent who is struggling feels like they are isolated because they’re in survival. When you’re in survival, you feel like you’re all alone. But there are so many parents out there that are going through the same challenges.

Find yourself a community of support that you can get involved in. Not to, not to sit around and pass the bottle like alcoholics and be drunk on the fear and the stress and the overwhelm, but to be in relationship with other people who are also struggling, but also wanting to walk another path because they know that they don’t want to continue doing what has been done in the generations because trauma and stress can be passed down for 15

generations through the DNA. So getting into support, continuing to learn, realizing that in any given moment, in any given moment, and this is really where it starts, we always have two choices. We can continue to react from our same blueprints of stress and fear and overwhelm in which I believe, I believe those come from grief. I believe unexpressed grief is the single most pervasive form of trauma that exist in our society. We have not grieved. And I believe that most children’s severe behavior comes from unexpressed grief. And I believe that most parents’ biggest reactions come from unexpressed grief. The best thing we need to do is cry it out, but we have a hard time with that. So we can, in any given moment, we can continue to react from those blueprints, from what we’ve learned from the generations, or we can stop. We can slow down, we take three to 10 deep breaths and we can choose love. In any given moment, a parent is capable of doing that. And I hope that your parents will choose love.

Debbie:

So good. Thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciated this conversation. Where would you like listeners to check out your work? I know you have a lot of places online.

Bryan Post:

Yeah, I would say if you go to fear to love.com, you can download a free copy of my I’ve sold over a million copies of that book. You can get a free ebook copy and then you can see some of the other things that we’re doing. And then I just released a new AI AI driven parent support tool called Bondify.AI. And you can try that out for 14 days. You literally have me in the palm of your hand. I hope that parents can use it. Not only is it a community, it’s also a lot of educational resources, but you can talk to me and ask me questions. And I hope that parents will use it before there’s a crisis, before things get tough, because I can guide you and this AI guides you, because it’s programmed on 25 years of my knowledge to guide you in how to do things differently and interrupt stressful, problematic situations.

Debbie:

That’s very cool. All right, listeners, I’ll have links to that in the show notes page. So check that out. And Brian, thank you again for taking time. I know you’re on the road. You’re busy speaking all over the country. So thanks for taking the time to chat with us today.

Bryan Post:

Thank you very much. pleasure.