Dr. Robyn Koslowitz on Post-Traumatic Parenting and Breaking the Cycles that Almost Broke You

Debbie:
Hey, Robyn, welcome to the podcast.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Thanks so much for having me. so excited. It’s really fun to have the opportunity to be on a podcast I actually listen to. It’s very cool.

Debbie:
It’s always great for me to have guests on who are familiar with my show. So I’m, yeah, I’m excited. This is going to be a good conversation and I’m just gonna, I’m not going to bury the lead. I told you this before I hit record, but we’re going to be talking about your book, which is called Post Traumatic Parenting, Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. And I loved your book. I have so many pages of notes and I’m really excited to dive into it today. So what I was thinking in terms of getting started, if you would share some of your personal story, which is so powerful and you share it in the book, that kind of led you to doing this work that you’re doing today.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Thanks. Yeah, so kind of like you, was, I wanted to write the book that I would have needed to read when I became a mom. Like I remember reading parenting books that are, you know, that would say all these things like share your calm with your children or, you know, this is how you should talk to them. This is how to like remain centered with them. And I remember thinking like, but what if you don’t have calm to share? And for me, I kind of felt like all those parenting books were written as though you’re on the second floor of a mall and you need to get to the roof. And you know, you’re there’s a map right there and there’s elevators and there’s like complicated directions, but you get to the roof. But I’m in the sub basement and it’s pitch black and I don’t have a map and I don’t have light. And I need to get from the sub basement to the second floor from the second floor. get it, but I got to get from there. So I wrote my book as that bridge between the sub-basement of parenting with trauma and all the wonderful advice in every parenting book you can think of. Because it turns out if you don’t have calm to share, then you can’t share your calm, right? So for me, when I became a mom, when I was pregnant 27 almost years ago at this point, I was a grad student and I knew I had PTSD. And I went to the stacks at the library to look for research on like, literally what will flashbacks do to my baby? Meaning like if it’s this unpleasant for me to be inside my body What is this doing to a fetus inside my body like this can’t be a good thing and then it became how do you explain a flashback to a toddler? What do I do about my trauma coping adaptations that aren’t working for parenting and there was nothing like Crickets there was no research. This was prior to 9-eleven if you could believe that and the world was not talking about trauma yet so It took time for me to realize this, but I started realizing that everything that I’m specializing in, like I was working with in a clinic for kids who were acting out. I was working in another clinic for kids who were enco-predic, who would lose control of their bowels. I was working on a parenting study, like a large-scale study of child temperament. It took me a long time, and my classmates were all working on super-specific things, right? It would be like, know, Piagetian models of language development in four-year-olds. And I’d be like, why don’t I have a… single research focus. And then I realized I am looking for the impact of trauma on parenting. Because you know what happens in clinics with full of kids who act out a lot and in other clinics full of kids with ancopresis? What you’re really treating is a lot of childhood trauma in the end. Yeah.

Debbie:
Yeah, right. That’s showing up in their kids and the parents have no way of knowing how to respond. Yeah. I love that metaphor that you shared about feeling like you’re in the basement with no light and no map. just, that kind of says it all right there. And just as you said, so much of what is available isn’t accessible to so many parents. I led a workshop the other night and you know, there are definitely parents on that call who have trauma and it’s, like, you can’t just say do X, Y, and Z because you’re, you’re not even at a place where that could, you can incorporate those things into anything. You have to kind of go so far back.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, you have to build, you’re building the airplane as you’re flying it. And, you know, I had once had a mom say that to me, like, my whole life, I was raised to be selfless, which is very, you know, common, I think in a lot of traditional cultures. And like, you put everyone’s needs ahead of yourself and like, I’m just supposed to be this selfless person. And now you’re telling me to bring my whole self to parenting, but I don’t have a self, I’m selfless. And I remember like being so struck by what she said, like, right.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, you gotta build the self to parent.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah. Right. Wow.

Debbie:
So let’s talk about trauma. You do define it a little differently than other people. And I’d love if you could just so we’re on the same, you know, page here. What do you mean when you say trauma?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So for me, trauma is any experience too big for your brain to metabolize. So anything that happens where when you finish it, you say, wait, what just happened to me? Who am I again? Am I safe in this world? Can I cope? That experience was traumatic. And I know some people say that that’s like a very wide definition of trauma, but when you define trauma that way, then you get away from the specifics of like what happened to you, the details of the story. because what I’ve discovered in treating so many traumatized parents and so many traumatized people is that very often the story that would grab the headlines is not the thing that created the psychological impact on the brain. Very often it’s the quiet moments that people wouldn’t, like it wouldn’t grab the headlines that actually traumatize you. So like in the book, I have an example of a woman who lost her mom to cancer. I think everybody would agree that, you know, losing your mom to cancer when you’re like nine years old or whatever age she was is traumatic. But what actually traumatized her, what really left an impact on her brain was her friends did not know how to treat her afterwards, which a very similar thing happened to me. I lost my dad at a much older age, but you know, her friends didn’t know how to treat her. So they dropped her and then that left room for the mean girls to really bully her. Then at the same time, she was using food as comfort and she gained a lot of weight. So it gave the mean girls something to really make fun of. And she says, it sounds terrible, but losing my mom was not nearly as traumatic as the bullying and social exclusion that happened when I was a little older. Like that’s what really left the damage on my psyche. And I think anyone who’s been traumatized gets it. But people who don’t understand trauma well will only look at the details, almost like the trauma porn, right? Like. my God, you were in a fire. my God, somebody died. Your parent was incarcerated. You know, they look at that. That’s very often though, not the thing that overwhelms your nervous system.

Debbie:
Mm hmm. Yeah, and you talk about something called the S ACEs, the secret adverse child experiences, because you say they can develop invisibly and cumulatively. So and that would be more of that chronic trauma than an acute thing, you that one thing that’s happening. Could you give some examples? have a whole list here of things, but I think it might be surprising for people to understand what would fall into this definition of an S ACE.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So an essay to me is any sort of secret experience that no one knows your family is going through or that you’re going through, but that’s really leaving cumulative devastating harm. For example, being raised by a functional alcoholic where you never know which version of the parent you’re coming home to. Being raised in a home where there’s a lot of anxiety, so there’s a lot of criticism. There’s a lot of height and tension. living in a home where it’s not that there’s food insecurity, but there’s a lot of like financial instability where sometimes the family’s flush and sometimes there’s no money, but you as a kid never know, you know, you’re going to ask for something simple. And some days it’s like, sure. And sometimes it’s like, how dare you ask for that? So those kinds of things don’t make it onto the adverse childhood experiences scale, right? They’re not this like major situation, but living with it year after year after year living in a family where you’re the glass child where there’s a sibling with you know an illness or there’s a golden child dynamic because one of the parents is somewhat narcissistic right where it’s not major abuse but years and years and years of being you know the one who’s called lazy while picking up the slack for the family or the one who’s just not the star of the show and always see looked through. Those kinds of things, those are secret ACESs and I think we have to pay attention to them.

Debbie:
Mm Yeah. And I think even just to kind of talk about trauma right now in this moment in the world, like it’s a loaded term. I think there’s a bit of a backlash to this idea of trauma because I think a lot of people have declared their trauma and now the people are saying, well, that didn’t really happen to you or it’s not, you know, they’re minimizing that. think the same thing is happening with neurodivergence and all kinds of things in this moment in time. And you write in your book about the trauma controversy. And I loved what you said. You said, we can ask ourselves when you think about what happened to you, was it something that you would go to any lengths to make sure it does not happen to your child? If the answer is yes, congratulations, you’re traumatized. And I’d love if you could kind of talk about that, because I think there are probably a lot of listeners who are doing that comparative trauma, like, well, yeah, but mine isn’t as bad as this. So it doesn’t really count.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, I call that the game of trauma poker, right? Like where I see your trauma and I raise you this and I raise you this. And sometimes we play trauma poker with ourselves. But the thing with trauma poker is no one ever wins, right? And it’s a very silly game because what someone will say might not be what is really traumatic, right? I share a lot of instances of my own trauma in the book, but there are some traumatic things that happen to me that I don’t share in the book, right? So sometimes you don’t know someone else’s trauma. Sometimes they’re talking about one aspect because that’s the aspect that the world recognizes, but there’s another whole aspect there that they don’t know how to talk about. So it’s just a silly game to play. But also there’s no comparison. If it created a wound, it created a wound. If you fell off a two foot ledge and you broke your leg or you fell off a 50 foot ledge and you broke your leg, your leg is broken, right? The impact on you is what matters. It doesn’t matter how it happened. have a friend who literally tripped over a painted line and ended up with like a shattered arm when we were in camp, when we were about 11. She literally, it was a painted line. Like in other words, she didn’t fall from any height, but her arm was shattered. It was years of therapy and years. I’m probably to this day, she has, you know, you know, lingering effects from that injury, right? It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t a car accident, right? Or that it wasn’t a shooting, right? Her arm was completely shattered.

Debbie:
Okay. So in the book, you use a term trauma app to describe how past trauma can override a parent’s instincts in the moment. And I was hoping you could kind of walk us through how that works in the brain and what it might look like in everyday situations. Yeah, so could you explain that concept to us?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Sure, the way I look at trauma is after the wound happens, your brain needs to restore an illusion of safety. It needs to be able to go through life again as if the world is safe, even though trauma just taught you that the world isn’t, right? So what your brain does is it creates this algorithm, this set of rules. If X, then Y. For example, if people are stressed out about around me, then I people please. keep the, keep soothing the troubled waters so that the world feels safe again, or the opposite. If people are stressed out around me, I become the loudest voice in the room, right? And the idea of the trauma app is it makes you feel safe and it might even work for you, but it really interferes with your parenting. For me, my trauma app adaptation was two things. I really learned perfectionism through my trauma and I really learned to dissociate. I can, know, most people complain about like not being able to get into a flow state. I am literally the opposite. can’t get out of one. I can work, which I’ve made work for me very well, kind of the way you talk about neurodiversity as like a strength that we can make work for our kids and for us, right? Even if the world sees it as a deficit, right? My dissociation can be a tremendous strength for me. I used to like work on my dissertation and writing and things like that on the train or on the bus from New York where I was in school at NYU to New Jersey. there could be a drunk guy, I don’t know, drooling all over my shoulder and I am dialed in focused on my research. See how I say the trauma app makes you feel safe. It doesn’t necessarily make you actually safe, right? I felt very safe in my pink cloud of work, right? And it makes me feel calm. Really hard to parent with presence though, if you’re constantly dissociated. So my trauma app was great because it really worked for me. until it didn’t. And usually where it doesn’t work for you is in parenting. People pleasing is great at work. It sometimes works well in romantic relationships. It sometimes works well in friendships. You can’t people please your kids because at some point you’re going to say no or like it is bedtime or like, we can’t go to that toy store right now. Right. And then what? When they’re upset and you have that urge to people, please, what do you do?

Debbie:
Right. Right. And so that app, you you have a visual in the book where you actually show an image of a phone, you know, and this Trump, you’re in this situation and then you’ve got these kind of default responses that are based on your personal experience that just kind of automatically happen. So how do parents kind of start to kind of stop the app from taking over and get out of that default response?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So our job is to actively deselect the permissions from the trauma app. Like right now, I am very tempted to dissociate, but I am going to remain present. And then there is different ways for me, like grounding exercises, like doing actual exercise, physical exercise, removing as much stress as possible right before my kids come home so that I can focus on them, right? But like actively tell the app, thanks, I know you’re trying to help me, get it. I’ve got this now. I’m not a kid anymore. I know how to handle this. In the post-traumatic parenting group, I had a parent say how it’s really hard for her when her middle schooler gets snarky. She’s a people pleaser to a very high extent and her middle schooler uses that. She knows that, right? Relationships are a two-way street. She was so proud of herself because they went somewhere, her middle schooler started getting snarky. She was so tempted. to give in and say yes to something that she did not, that was not in accordance with her values and she stuck to her guns. And she said, I really did it. I was told my trauma app, thanks, but I’ve got this. And she stuck to her guns and she said to her kid, I get it. You’re really frustrated with me. It’s annoying. You have your own money. You can choose to spend it. If you want this, whatever randomly shaped bit of plastic that I’m sure the kid wanted, whether it was a Stanley cup or a booboo doll or a crop top, that’s way too much money, right? Whatever it was, she was like, I get it, you’re frustrated with me.” And she was okay with her kid being frustrated with her. And she was just such a victory, right? Like when you deselect permissions on that app, mindfully, the world opens up for you.

Debbie:
And really what we’re talking about is the fact that when we have trauma, that it shows up in different ways in our parenting. you talk about these subtypes of post-traumatic parenting. I’d love if you could kind of talk through, are five of them that you share in the book, but just to kind of, again, set the stage, what we’re talking about is… understanding how our trauma shows up in our relationship with our kids so that we can shift that. So we can understand that this aspect of our past, this trauma piece within us is leading us to parent in a way that might hurt our relationship and might kind of impact the results that we have with our kids. And so what we want to do is kind of be aware of this so we can shift and parent from a place without that stuff interfering. That was really messily said, but am I getting it right what we’re trying to do here?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
You are, just to explain a little bit more in my story. I really thought that my trauma adaptations were fine. Like I had the superpower, I can dissociate my perfectionism. I was sort of getting under control. I had been in therapy and I had dealt mostly a lot with like my flashbacks and things like that. Like the aspects of trauma that were absolutely like crashing my life. Those were dealt with. But I had this dissociation that I would do which is when my kids got stressful, I would just go into this pink cloud in my head. And I thought that was great because I never yelled at them. in my mind, the worst thing you could ever do as a parent was yell. So I would go to dissociate. And one day my son, he was about 10 years old, he said to me, mommy, where do you go when you go away behind your eyes? And he started to cry. He said, sometimes you’re talking to me, but you’re not there. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is harming him. And I just remember looking at him and being like, what do you want me to do, kid? Like, feel my feelings? That would be terrible. I would yell at you. Like that was my initial thought. Like it was as if he said to me like, mommy, you’re so short, you’re five feet tall, grow a foot because like, I want you be able to dunk a basketball. Like, okay, well I can’t, right? And it was almost like it didn’t compute. Like, what am I supposed to do now? But I realized, my goodness, what I thought was helping me is harming my ability to parent. This is hurting my kids. He’s crying, right? So in that moment, I had to learn something else. And that’s what happens with our trauma app adaptations. It’s not that our trauma app is wrong. They really work for us. I got through being a grad student and in a very prestigious program while parenting young kids and getting a lot of work accomplished with my dissociation. really worked for me. People Pleasing can work for you. Lashing Out can work for you. It works well. The place where you actually care though is your kids. Right? Because my friends would sometimes say, Robin, you space out. Like one of my friends was just once like, They wanted to go somewhere and they’re like, are you like very busy with a research project? Cause I don’t want you to come if you’re going to like your brain’s going to be elsewhere. But I didn’t care enough for my friends to that. That doesn’t sound nice, but like it was just like, yeah, this is me. Take me or leave me. This is what my brain does sometimes. Sorry. Right. Like, but for my kids, I would change it. Right. And that I think is the core. Parenting is not the only way to fix our trauma app, but parenting is the best motivation we’ll ever have.

Debbie:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I would love if you could talk us through these five subtypes. You mentioned disassociating, and I’m wondering, that part being a disengaged parent, which is one of your subtypes? Would you just take a few minutes and talk us through those five? They were fascinating to me.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, and this is based on like so many years of teaching post-traumatic parenting classes and just realizing that people were falling into these groups. So the first subtype I have is the paralyzed parent. Very often that’s a people pleaser. It’s someone who’s trying to do all of the things and all of the priorities at the same time. So like they’re attending to one kid and then another kid starts screaming and then something’s burning on the stove and then they really need to clean up and like they’re all over the place. Paralysis looks like frenetic movement, but It’s paralysis because you can’t pick one course of action and stick to it. Then I have that disengaged parent, which is very often comes from a place of, I’m trying to protect you from my sharp edges. Like I’m taking my edges off because my edges are very sharp. And that might be like me with like escaping into work. That might be like sort of mommy wine culture, although I don’t know why we gender it. might be, that might be anything that you do to disengage or just going into a pink cloud in your mind. And then you outsource your parenting. you know, I’ll hire, like, I don’t know, the pastor will give my kid the sex talk and the personal shopper will take my kid shopping. The homework tutor will do homework with my kid. And if it’s not like somebody who’s that privilege, it’s like my sister and my other sister and my neighbor will do all of these things. My husband, right? Someone else. Then we have the perfectionist parent. Perfectionist is, you know, I’m going to do it perfectly. And they so double down on that. that you?

Debbie:
That’s so me.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
You know, it’s like this is where parenting scripts come in. Like the people who are like, I’m trying so hard to remember the script, but then I don’t remember the world, the words, right? I just don’t remember. Like then you’re being present with the script, not with your kid. Who are you attuning to? You shouldn’t be attuning to like my words or some other parenting influencer’s words. You should be attuning to the child in front of you. The words don’t matter. The intent of what you’re trying to say matters, right? You don’t have to like use the exact words to say like, get why you did that and that wasn’t the greatest thing to do because now there’s all these consequences to your behavior, right? Like there’s a way of saying that that doesn’t matter about the words. The intent is what matters. And then we have the survivor parent. Then we have the entangled parent. The entangled parent is someone who’s so tangled up in a different relationship that they have no room to parent. So that might be a family of origin. That might be, a really difficult job or like a boss who’s like, you know, sort of on one hand a mentor, but on the other hand doesn’t get that you have a life. Could be a frenemy. It could be a ex-spouse or like their new girlfriend or, you know, this is the drama that so tangles you up in it that you can’t move forward towards your kids. And, you know, and then we have the survivor, which is you’re not yet a type. Sort of like in psychology, we have this concept of acute stress disorder that happens before PTSD. like as your house is burning down around your ears. You know, that survivor mode and sometimes that can last for years. You know, I had someone just joined the post-traumatic parenting community and she said like, one minute I was living in one state and this was my job and this was my spouse and this was my financial status and this was my life. And three years later, I’m living in another state to be near my parents. My marriage fell apart, my business crumbled. I’m in a completely different field. My kids are older. Like when did that happen? like almost the last three years, like what? And it’s like, yeah, you’re waking up from survival mode right now.

Debbie:
Yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, that can take a while. And just to clarify, people, it’s not like everyone fits neatly into one of these categories. There’s probably overlap and combinations. Yeah.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Right. Yeah, yeah, and people very often move between categories. Like you’ll very often see a paralyzed parent move into perfectionist or you’ll see an entangled parent move into like either paralyzed or disengaged. those kinds of things can happen a lot. Or you’re like perfectionist with a tinge of disengaged like that. You know?

Debbie:
I definitely like I was like, oh, perfectionist, like you have so many helpful charts in the book where you kind of talk about this is happening and this is how you respond and this is what’s going on and so helpful because it’s very practical and in situations that most parents would find themselves in. And I was squarely in the perfectionist, but I also had some other little bits and bobs here and there. So in your book, you say, often tell my patients that parenting is a mirror, a map and a motivator out of trauma. And you describe parenting, which I believe so deeply that it can be a powerful opportunity to heal our own trauma. So I’m just wondering, what is it that kind of shifts for us that helps a parent move from being triggered by their child’s behavior to deciding I’m gonna use this moment? the situation, the circumstance for personal and relational growth.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So I want to point to one thing that you said that a lot of people make this mistake, and I don’t think you’re making this mistake, but you’re quoting people. When people say, I’m triggered by my child’s behavior, which you hear all the time, our kids don’t trigger us. Our kids reveal our triggers. And that is such an important shift, because when you think that your kid triggers you, then you start judging yourself. What is wrong with me? What kind of a parent could get triggered by a four-year-old? How could I get this enraged? How could I get this helpless? How could I feel this stuck? Right? And when you just realize that, no, no, no, no, no, no, your kid reveals your trigger. And here’s the key in psychotherapy. We know we have to reveal it to heal it. If I don’t know what triggers you, I can’t help you. Right? But the minute you know what triggers you, then I can say, oh, so every time you feel judged, here’s how you react. So your kid having a loud meltdown in a store makes you feel like you might be judged. where’d that come from? And then you’re going to be able to tell me, right? So it’s the best thing ever that can happen when your kid triggers you because now I know what triggers you, right? So, and that’s why I say it’s not that the trauma app concept or everything, like I was being interviewed on a podcast and someone said, you know, my demographic is not parents, but I think this trauma app could work for anybody in business. A lot of entrepreneurs tend to, you know, have trauma stories. They might not want to own it, but they do. And I said, right, it’s just that kids are the best reason to do it, right? Like they’re the motivation, but they’re not the only reason, but they’re the best reason. So when your kid triggers you, it’s like, now I know my trigger. Great. And then in that moment, eventually you get to choose because you’re like, I can keep getting triggered by this, right? Or I can simply say, The person in the store who judges me because my kids having a meltdown and I’m going to let them have that meltdown and I’m just going to say, I’m here for you when you want to talk or whatever I’m going to do. And that person’s like frowning at me and saying in my day that, you know what? She doesn’t get a vote. She doesn’t know me. You know, I don’t care. Right. In that moment, inner 10 year old who was bullied is going to feel a certain level of like, I can do this. Like, wow, this is amazing. Right? So it’s that, it’s that, it’s not that, cause we judge ourselves so much when we feel triggered by our kids. When we become, I know like the, the intensity of my rage sometimes, right? Or the, you know, the, you know, depths of my self doubt, especially as a child psychologist sometimes, right? It’s like, wait, what? But you know what? That, that in and of itself is such good data for me.

Debbie:
And I’ll just say that we parents of neurodivergent kids, we’re have opportunities to collect a lot of data, right? I always say that we’re kind of like the wingsuit flyers of parenting because they’re not gonna like let us gloss over things they are going to keep demanding that we show up for them, which I love that reframe, it’s revealing our own triggers. And it is such an opportunity to heal. You talked about And you do talk about in the book, your inner child and I love this work. And you also touched upon internal family systems. We did an episode on that recently and that’s work I’m currently doing with my own therapist. And I find it so powerful. But I love if you could talk about that. There’s a couple of things. One, you said a wounded inner child is a ghost version of ourself from each stage existing inside of us. It goes unnoticed. until we’re confronted by its unresolved essential questions. So can you talk a little bit more about that inner child that’s within us and its relationship with our trauma app?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, I think the inner child for me is a great metaphor for like an earlier version of yourself that’s still grappling with a question like, will they like me? Am I as good as the other kids? Am I as competent as the other moms or as the other second graders, right? It’s the same, it’s those essential questions. you know, Erickson really went through those stages where, and really what Erickson’s stages were was an essential question. Am I as good as the other kids? Am I able to exert my will? Am I able to, you know, is my judgment good? Right? All of those kinds of questions. And sometimes the question isn’t resolved in our childhood. Sometimes it’s resolved well in our childhood, but it’s our adult life that makes us like question those things. I know certainly parenting a neurodiverse child can be a form of trauma and people don’t like to think of it that way because it sounds like maybe you don’t love your kid or something like that. It is traumatic. when every other kid is doing ABC and your kid is doing XYZ with a dash of, you know, JKL, you know what mean? Like, and you’re like, wait, what? You know, um, I use the metaphor in my parenting classes when people come in and they’re parenting a neurodiverse kid of like parenting Peter Rabbit, you know, like the Peter Rabbit stories and like all the other kids are Flopsy Mopsy and Cotton Tail, the little good little bunnies who stitch their samplers and do what mama rabbit says. And then your kid is Peter Rabbit, you know? Um, I know from like, from my own years of parenting a neurodiverse kid, like what that felt like, you know, in terms of, you really do start doubting your competency because like everyone’s like, this is how you do it. Like, you know, make a sticker chart and tell them how to behave and then they will listen. like, this doesn’t work, simply tell them to, and this doesn’t work. This works for your child, not for my child. It’s not because I’m doing it wrong, it’s because it doesn’t work, right? And What ends up happening is that makes sometimes that makes us doubt earlier stages that we did resolve or we never resolved it in the first place, right? So there’s an inner child who always doubted her competency and then she becomes a parent. And now parenting makes her doubt her competency.

Debbie:
Mm-hmm. It’s like, yeah, it’s like shining a big light on that. There’s another thing you talked about with the inner child that I found fascinating, and that was when your inner child is envious. You said, as they heal, some of my post-traumatic patients express that their inner child is envious of their current children. Can you talk about that fascinating concept?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, yeah, this happens all the time. It’s one of those common post-traumatic parenting things that until like you read the book or take the class or talk to other post-traumatic parents, you don’t get it. But when you’re giving your kids something you never got, your inner child is going to be jealous. And then you really judge yourself. Like, how can I be jealous of my kid? Like, what’s wrong with me? What kind of a parent is jealous of their kid? But it’s not you, it’s your inner child who’s going like, wait a minute. For me, I was raised with a very ill father. And when my husband, who was a healthy young dad, would come home and like do the dad thing, right? Rough house with my kids, be playful. I would get irrationally angry. And I wasn’t entirely wrong. I would say things like, it’s too close to bedtime to rile them up. Or like, she hasn’t done her homework yet. Why are you distracting her? Or he didn’t take his bath yet. Or he just took his bath. Why are you taking him outside? Right? Those kinds of things. There’s an element of truth to that. Like we got to keep the schedule going, you know, but why was I so enraged? Right. And really through therapy and through some, you know, IFS work and inner child work was being like, Oh, my inner child is so jealous because my inner child is just looking at this experience of like young, healthy dad, rough housing with kids. I’m thinking I never got that. And then of course my inner child would restore permissions to my trauma app and be like, let’s double down on perfectionism. We got to stick to the bedtime. We got to stick to the schedule. Right. And then eventually I learned to say, not only can I watch the play with joy, but I can tune my inner child into, you know what? We’re going to play too. We’re going to join in and in giving it by being playful parent with the kids, being mom who also can roughhouse and play. You’re going to get it too. Like tune yourself in and notice yourself getting it. Right? So there’s a moment in the book, I have some meditations about like how if you’re giving your kid something that you never got, you can say that to your inner child. Like right now, I am going to be there for my kid in the way you would have needed someone to be there for you. Let’s experience that from the standpoint of the giver and then you get it. And that’s so healing for our inner child.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, now I love that so much. And I think, again, because there’s so many parents who are discovering their own neurodivergence as adults, that that can also really be showing up because they’re providing for their kids or seeing their kids be seen in a way that they never were. So I imagine that dynamic is prevalent among many listeners. Gosh, there’s so many things I still want to touch upon. I’m recognizing the time and I want to. Keep us on track here. So I do want to ask one more question, one more concept question, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what parents can do to heal and do this work. But I thought it was so interesting when you wrote about trusting your gut or your gut instinct. So that’s another thing that we’re often told, and I say it too, like you know your child better than anyone else. Or if something doesn’t feel right about a therapeutic approach you’re being asked to do, trust your gut. You wrote that traumatized people have a gut instinct that is either way too reactive, so they’re seeing everything as a threat, or way too desensitized, not seeing legitimate threats as dangerous. And so we’re left believing that we’re naturally bad at parenting or that we don’t have that mysterious maternal instinct everybody else seems to have. So can you talk about that instinctual thing, that piece that some parents may really not have access to?

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, I think that your gut is either very, very, very right or very, very, very wrong. And with trauma, sometimes your gut gets trained to be very, very, very wrong. Or like I said, very, very, very right, but then it doesn’t know what to do about the right. For example, you might notice something’s going on with your kid. You might have an instinct that something’s wrong. And really what you, what you should do is just monitor it, keep an eye on it, but don’t do anything. But your trauma is like, I need to know what’s going on right now. So you start. questioning them and questioning them and questioning them and then the kid retreats, right? It’s counterproductive or like my kid might be late for school and then the whole day is gonna go bad because my kid gets very reactive and like a slip becomes a slide very quickly. So then you’re pressuring them in the morning and creating the mood that you’re trying to avoid, right? So your gut might be right in that moment, but you’re handling it wrongly. So our job really is, and that’s why we have to work on our trauma. because we have to like befriend our gut again and be able to say to like the trauma app, you know what, you’re right. Something’s going on with this kid right now and you want me to double down and drill down and get the answer but the best thing I can do right now is actually take a step back. So the information is correct but the action urge is wrong. So I need to think this through and that’s where trauma healing really helps us. It lets us interpret our gut instinct in a way that’s helpful as opposed to being like a fire alarm that goes off at all times. without telling us that, this is getting a little hot as opposed to there’s a fire raging out of control.

Debbie:
Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. And would you mind taking a few minutes to explain the AIM method to us, which is really your way of sharing how post-traumatic parents can become can kind of integrate their lived experience, right, so that they can do this healing and show up better for themselves and for their kids.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, so AIM is my model for treating trauma. And really what I did is I looked at every single trauma treatment methodology, because I’m trained in pretty much all of them at this point that I know of. Most of them, there’s probably always new methodologies. But if you look at every single trauma treatment methodology out there, there’s three components. There’s an acceptance component where you sort of undo counterfactual thinking. You say, this happened. It sucks, shouldn’t have happened, but it did happen. I can’t keep rehashing it in my brain in an effort to make it not happen, right? That’s what flashbacks are. Flashbacks are our brains trying to rewrite history because the part of our brain that makes flashbacks doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and future. So there’s an acceptance component in pretty much every trauma treatment model. Then there’s integration. Now that this really did happen, how do I integrate parts of it into my sense of self? How do I understand myself? How do I understand the world? How do I come out with a sense of self that is whole rather than fragmented? And then there’s meaning. Most trauma treatment models have some component of making meaning or making a mission out of what happened to you, reclaiming your narrative for the purpose of some greater good, whether it’s your own greater good or the world’s greater good, but really, you you accept it, it happened, you integrate it into your sense of self, you make a mission or meaning out of it. And then you’re a lot better. I’m not saying you’re healed, but you’re a lot closer to that.

Debbie:
And you just keep practicing that over and over again as the opportunities arise.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Debbie:
So then the last chapter of your book, and this will be my last question, then we’ll wrap up. It’s about parenting hacks for post-traumatic parents. And I thought it was a great chapter. And I also know the hacks would probably depend on the type of parent and the type of situation. But I’m wondering if you have a favorite hack from that chapter that you could share with us.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So for me, I’ll give you two because there’s two separate things. One is doing whatever you can to systematize the mental load of parenting, like the work of parenting. If Chat GPT can menu plan for you and if you can get that stuff delivered and you can like, for me, I like to cook all the suppers of the week in Sunday afternoon and get it off my head. Whatever you can do to systematize, do it. Right? Because otherwise, especially when you’re parenting a neurodiverse kid, all of the, my gosh, I’m out of gas and then I have to take him to the dentist appointment and then we’re running late. And then this happens. like, what can you do to systematize every single thing? So your brain does not have to hold onto any of it. Right? So that’s the first part, like freeing up the capacity. The other part is as much as possible, and this is going to depend on the wiring of your kid, read to your kid and play to your kid. Right? Those are the two things that. If you think about parenting and connecting, we are most attuned with our kids when we’re playing with them. And play might look different for your child than you might think of. It might not be a tea party. Your kid might be on the spectrum and play might be helping them stack cars in order or admiring them and being like, there are 14 purple cars in that row and there are 17, right? And whatever that is, whatever play looks like for that kid entering that attuned state with your child where you’re joining with something, maybe that’s playing Minecraft with them, maybe it’s reading a story to them, maybe it is imaginary play or board game play, but during play we are so attuned. So if you’re doing that, you are prioritizing the relationship. So prioritize the relationship. And like I said, if you’re freeing your brain to do it because the mental load is as systematized as possible, you will have time for those things.

Debbie:
That’s great. I love the brought up play. And I was just trying to find the name of the book that Tina Payne Bryson and Georgie Wise and Vincent wrote about play. I’m going to have a link in the show notes page for listeners. It was a great conversation. really talks about what play is. And it’s similar to how you described it. It’s very just being attuned to your child and meeting them where they are. And I’ll just share my favorite hack in there was just the reminder that self-care is childcare. And I was like, yes, because that is so much of what I talk about here is like, have to take care of ourselves in order to show up for our kids.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Yeah, it’s very true. And I think that there’s this dichotomy, right? This false dichotomy of like, how do I take time away from my kids to go to, you know, out to coffee with my friends or to whatever the thing you do that makes you feel the most yourself to go for a run to whatever, right? But you are taking care of your kids, right? You’re restoring. Remember we said at the beginning about like, I need to bring my whole self to parenting. You’re building a self to bring to parenting. You’re making a parent for your kids. in those moments and it’s such a false, even when people advocate for it, like you sometimes have like people in like the trad white space who will like advocate for it, like take away time from your kids to, you know, nourish yourself in some way. And it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not taking time away from your kids. This is time, so to speak, with your kids, cause you’re building a parent for your kids, right? It’s not a necessary evil. It’s part of childcare.

Debbie:
That’s good. Yeah, yeah, it’s great. I love that. So good. So listeners, the book again is called Post Traumatic Parenting, Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. Again, I thought it was a fantastic book. It’s definitely one I will be going back to time and time again. It was very readable, accessible, and practical. So. Fantastic resource. And would you share with listeners where people can connect with you? I know you have a YouTube channel. You have a lot of content out there.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
So yeah, the post-traumatic parenting community kind of hangs out on Instagram. It’s at Dr. Koslowitz Psychology there. We have the post-traumatic parenting podcast where I’m about to start the next season, post-traumatic parenting on YouTube. And I also write a blog on psychology today called targeted parenting. So those are all resources. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, local independent bookstores. But that’s really where people can find me.

Debbie:
Awesome. Great. Well, I’ll have links as always in the show notes page for all of those places listeners to go check that out as well. I’ll have a full transcript of this too. So you can print it out and highlight it or do whatever you need to do. Robin, I just want to say thank you so much. It’s been such a fascinating conversation. I’m really grateful that you got this book out into the world. So thank you.

Robyn Koslowitz, PhD:
Thanks so much for having me. I just really appreciate your podcast and like the support you give. I have sent so many patients your way. So it’s really an honor to talk to you.

Debbie:
Thank you so much. That is so nice.