DeepSummary
Janet Lansbury welcomes Elisabeth Corey, a trauma recovery expert, to discuss a parent's struggle with reacting calmly to their 2.5-year-old daughter's challenging behaviors. Elisabeth explains that parents who experienced childhood trauma often project their fear and need for control onto their children, leading to anger and reactivity. She recommends emotional journaling to process repressed emotions and build self-awareness.
Elisabeth emphasizes that reacting in anger is involuntary due to an escalated nervous system response from past trauma. By allowing themselves to feel and express emotions like sadness through journaling, parents can develop self-compassion and better regulate their reactions with their children. Modeling this emotional expression is valuable for children.
While challenging, Elisabeth encourages the parent to be patient with herself in this healing process. Making small efforts towards self-awareness through practices like grounding can gradually improve the ability to stay calm with a child's emotions. The goal is to break intergenerational cycles by processing one's own trauma triggers.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Parents' angry or reactive behaviors towards their children are often rooted in their own childhood traumas and emotional suppression.
- Practices like emotional journaling can help parents process repressed emotions, build self-awareness around their triggers, and develop self-compassion.
- Modeling emotional expression and healthy regulation is an invaluable gift parents can give their children to break intergenerational cycles.
- Responding calmly to a child's challenging behaviors requires inner work to understand and heal from one's own traumatic experiences.
- With patience and practices like grounding, parents can gradually improve their ability to hold space for their child's full range of emotions.
- Commonalities in triggers across generations highlight the importance of recognizing shame, rejection, and emotional abandonment as lasting wounds to address.
- Journaling after emotional escalations allows for release and comprehension of underlying fears, grief, or shame fueling angry outbursts.
- Self-compassion and understanding trauma's impacts are crucial for parents to regulate their own emotional expression appropriately.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Anger is almost always a defensive emotion for us. And what I mean by that is there's something beneath it. Could be grief, could be fear, could be shame. But there's something there that we can get in touch with only once we have allowed the anger to express itself.“ by Elizabeth Corey
- “There is nothing better for us to model to our children than I used to get angry at you because I was triggered and now I have processed my anger and I express it in a grounded way. You cannot model anything better for your children.“ by Elizabeth Corey
- “The more that this parent can work with this journaling and really bring an understanding to why they're reacting the way they are, the more they're going to be able to encourage the child to express emotion in a more expressive way, building a grounding practice over time, even if it's 30, 60, 90 seconds worth of grounding at any moment.“ by Elizabeth Corey
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Episode Information
Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled
JLML Press
4/2/24
Janet is joined by trauma recovery expert Elisabeth Corey to answer a parent’s email about her struggles to become a respectful parent. This mom says certain behaviors of her 2.5-year old daughter set her off. “I don’t stay calm, focused, kind to my child.” And she believes her own upbringing (“in no way respectful”) is the root cause of her reactions. She is overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising her child and wants to know: “What can I do to help myself?” Janet and Elisabeth consider the common underlying issues of our own childhoods and how we can recognize and heal negative cycles to become better parents.
Elisabeth's work and free resources for parents are available on her site at: www.BeatingTrauma.com
For more advice on common parenting issues, please check out Janet's best-selling books on Audible. Paperbacks and e-books are available at Amazon. Also, her exclusive audio series "Sessions" is available for download. This is a collection of recorded one-on-one consultations with parents discussing their most immediate and pressing concerns (www.SessionsAudio.com).
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