Parenting with a Trauma History
“You won’t know the trauma I have experienced. I won’t let you. When I hold your perfect, fragile body, the pain of my own childhood hits again. It’s now even harder to comprehend how a parent could treat their child like that. I comfort myself with my own mission to give you everything you deserve.
I will never rest in this mission but sometimes I find it crushes me. The anxiety lives in my body and it creates such a buzzing noise in my head, I am frozen in knowing what not to do and not knowing what to do instead. I want to give you everything you want so you never miss out on anything and yet I know structure and boundaries are important. I want to help you manage your big emotions, but I don’t know how to without yelling. I want you to engage in the amazing things in life, but I can’t let you go when I know how dangerous the world is. I also know I need time to be myself again… to take care of my mental and physical health, be a partner, be a friend, achieve my own goals, remember who I was before I was a mother. This isn’t the parenthood I thought I would have.”
While you may feel alone in this experience, it is incredibly common, and I help both men and women wanting to do better at parenting than their parents did. One of the most often things I hear from clients is “I don’t want my kid to end up in a counselling room like me!”, even from those who had a relatively good childhood.
As a parent, being so aware of the importance of your child’s mental health can easily slip into anxiety where every small parenting moment feels like a critical event. Also, parenting with a trauma history creates a new set of triggers you may not previously been aware of, such as dealing with a crying child.
Counselling individuals in this scenario usually involves a number of processes, such as:
- Evidence based education on the elements of positive parenting
Basic parenting skills
Understanding your parenting and other triggers
Increasing your ability to regulate your own emotions
Supporting you in processing and healing your trauma
Collaborating with your partner and extended family to parent together
Other skills, psycho-social education, and processing as required by you
If you feel like you may benefit from counselling to support you in your parenting journey, please feel free to contact me to discuss your needs further or make a booking here. I offer in person counselling services from my offices in Edithvale and Somerville as well as Australia wide online. Or read more from my blogs on topics I am passionate about below.
For privacy, this vignette has been woven from many different people’s experiences, to illustrate typical client presentations that I frequently work with and is not a testimonial. Any resemblance to a single, actual person, is purely coincidental.