Processing Events To Avoid Trauma | #FinishStrongWithTPJ

0:00 - If you've been through something that was really rough or your child has, this video is for you. I'm Avital, welcome to the Parenting Junkie Show, the place to be, to love parenting and parent from love. But first I just want to disclaim and say I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist and if you've truly been through a trauma that may need clinical or professional help, then please seek that out. What we're gonna talk about here today is just when you've been through a really tough time in your life or you've gone through you know, difficult struggles, maybe a low point, maybe just feeling bluesy or feeling upset, maybe massive transitions that have been hard to handle, that's the type of thing that we're gonna talk about here today.

0:43 So this applies both to you and to your child. Even something as minor and small as falling over on the side of the road and getting a little bit of a scraped knee is something that we can help our children to process. And if we've gone through like really intense time at work or a period of isolation or dealing with being sick again and again or exhausting late nights, anything that's really left you feeling exhausted, depleted, frustrated, a little bit, minor little bit subclinical trauma, then this video is for you.

1:16 Hey, if you're not subscribed to the channel yet, please hit the subscribe button and that little bell so you're sure to know every time a new video drops. First, I wanna invite you to my finish strong challenge. This November we are going to take a look back at the year that has passed and I know that if you're listening to this as it drops 2020 has been a really complex year. A lot of different things have happened, a lot of grief, a lot of loss, a lot of massive transitions, a lot of complete reshuffling of the deck in many different ways.

1:49 And our families have been under potentially more strain and stress than ever before. A lot of isolation, a huge burden and a lot of massive changes. You might be feeling and you might be seeing the memes on social media that are just writing 2020 off that just want it to end or ready to completely erase this year from memory. Or maybe you're seeing those blog posts that are saying, hey, give yourself permission to just completely let it go, eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, chug away on your coffee or wine and numb yourself out to escape the terrible things that have gone on this year.

2:27 And I wanna say whilst I completely understand and of course we all have permission to let things go a little bit from time to time, maybe you're looking for another way. Maybe you don't feel that just writing off a whole year of your life, trying to forget it or trying to numb it out and escape it and giving yourself permission to just let go of all of your goals or who you wanna be right now, maybe that doesn't feel good to you.

2:50 Maybe instead I can invite you and together we can sit down or we'll get a cup of tea, we're gonna journal this out, we're gonna reflect and process and really actually face and heal the tough spots that happen this year but also to energize ourselves and to make ourselves realize that we don't have any spare days. This is real life, 2020 or not. This is happening right now and you deserve to feel empowered and capable and really take back a little bit of the control over your mindset, over the way that you approach the things, you may not have any control over what's going on in the outside world and the school system, the pandemic, politics, all of that stuff, but, remember what I often say is that when I feel like I'm completely out of control in some areas of my life, I try to double down on the areas that I do feel control over, maybe a little bit more self-care or a little bit more mindset work so that I don't feel completely helpless and spiral into this nihilistic, depressive, anxious state.

3:55 What I wanna offer you is the chance to finish this year strong. We've got holidays, we've got all sorts of events that may or may not happen, family that you may or may not get to see, disappointments perhaps in store or perhaps some magical times. I want you not to feel like this is just a complete waste of a year, a fake year, something that you need to forget. And if you did experience genuine feelings of, you know, really going through a tough time this year then this is your time to actually process that so that you don't take it with you, the anxiety and the frustration and the difficulty can lessen and we can and you can feel more empowered and strong.

4:37 So if you would like to join me, this is a completely free challenge. This is my way of supporting you through this time, through whatever's coming up for you at the moment, go to TheParentingJunkie.com/FinishStrong. It's a free challenge. I warmly invite you and ask you to invite your friends, invite anyone who might need some uplifting, you know, kind of coaching, this is free coaching in essence, we're doing it all together. And really this is gonna be a very emotional challenge where we focus on what are the emotions that have come up?

5:10 How can we face them? How can we work through them? I know not everyone has access to therapy right now or maybe an amazing friend that they get to talk to with these things and I would love to be that person for you a little bit if you feel that you need somewhere to go to really get those thoughts in order. Head on over there, there's a free journal that I've put together for you and there is 30 days of reflection, prompts, ideas, meditations, thoughts et cetera that will guide you through, finishing strong and feeling like you didn't waste 2020.

5:42 There were lessons, there were gifts, there were all sorts of things, maybe grief that needs to be processed. Let's talk about that in the challenge and let's talk about that here today. Have you ever wondered how it can be that two people can go through the exact same experience, maybe a really bad experience, maybe they live through a war or they were abused or they were attacked somehow or something really, really bad that happened to them, and they come out of it with very different psychological states.

6:14 Have you ever wondered what goes into that? What makes one person traumatized for the rest of their lives? Upset for the rest of their life, you know, really sensitive to the topic and maybe bitter, maybe depressed, that they can't seem to move forward and heal and feel better about it. Whereas other people can go through the exact same experience and they somehow manage to integrate it into their lives and to feel better and stronger as they go.

6:43 What is the difference between these two people? Well, there's a lot of differences and a lot of things go into that and it's a very complex question. Things like our genes and how we grew up and the baggage and the modeling that we had and all the different things are going to influence it. But one of the things that is going to influence who really takes these stories with them and who grows from them and moves on is their mindset and is what they do to integrate that experience into their lives.

7:11 So today I wanna invite you to start to adopt a tool that I have found incredibly helpful and that I've learned from Dr. Daniel Siegel. Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about, and this is in Parenting from the Inside Out. He talks about the difference between understanding our childhood and not understanding our own childhood. Someone can go through a pretty traumatic childhood, they could have really not a very good attachment with their parents, maybe even some abuse, they can have some neglect, they can have gone through something very, very difficult in their childhood, however, once they are able to coherently and cohesively tell that story to themselves, once they can make their narrative makes sense in their mind, basically they know what happened to them, even if it was dark and scary and difficult, they know what happened, they pretty much understand the chronological series of events, they pretty much know who did what, when and why perhaps.

8:11 And once they're able to articulate that for themselves, they are far more likely and far more capable of healing that and moving forward from it, it doesn't linger in them as a trauma would in the same way if they hadn't integrated it. Now, someone who's gone through an abusive, difficult challenging childhood but doesn't understand themselves, doesn't understand their story, can't tell it clearly and concisely is still very much in the throws of that experience. When they try to talk about it they get very mixed messages popping into there brains, they jump back and forth, they change perspective between their perspective and someone else's perspective or their perspective now and their perspective when they were a child, they don't have clarity over what happened, why it happened, when it happened, et cetera.

8:59 And that leaves them in this kind of fog and at the mercy of all of those feelings suddenly hijacking them and coming up. They have less awareness, less self-awareness as well so that when they get triggered, when they get sudden belts of fear or anxiety or flashbacks, they can't make sense of it, they don't know exactly what it relates to or why it's coming up now. When someone has made sense of their narrative, made friends with it in a sense, they actually go a long way to healing that trauma.

9:32 So it's interesting Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about actually interviewing people or giving people therapy sessions and when people were prancing around and not making much sense and going back and forth and talking about now and then talking about then or talking very positively and very negatively all in the same sentence, it was all a bit of a mumble-jumble, mish-mash, then they hadn't basically made order and made sense of their story and they were still very much traumatized by it.

10:03 Whereas others could tell a pretty horrific story of something that's happened to them but still have clarity around it and therefore not be as effected, kind of be healed from it and there's a certain detachment there, they weren't in it, they weren't confused by it. So how is this something that we can use today? Well, let's bring this past year as an example, seeing as we're talking about processing. If there was certain things that happened this year that surprised you, that shocked you, that disappointed you, big frustrations, big let downs, perhaps massive losses as well, massive transitions, changes, difficulties that you faced, obstacles that you had to overcome, perhaps still have to overcome, a depletion or an exhaustion that you went through, a burnout perhaps, a big fight with someone, an argument, a falling out, maybe some minor events or small in terms of their time slot but that feel big to you like that time that you really lost it or the times that you couldn't sleep all night or the times where you cried so much that your throat started hurting.

11:13 Maybe you're going through lots of different things like every human is, and as you look back, as you look back at it maybe it still feels like a complete mish-mash. You can't quite make sense of what happened when and why? How did we get to where we got to? Why is this happening? What was the series and the sequence of events? And it feels overwhelming and perhaps if I asked you about it, if I said well, how has this year?

11:41 Maybe you'd have a bit of a lump in your throat, a physical reaction, your body would tense up. Your eyebrows would firm, maybe you'd have tears in your eyes. Maybe it's incredibly raw. So how can we learn from this Dr. Daniel Siegel tool of what he is sharing about in terms of making sense of our narrative? Well, let's now bring it down to a really small example to illustrate this. If a child falls over and scrapes their knee, and if you're a parent you've probably experienced that situation, they scrape their knee, it's a little bit bloodied, they're crying, they're upset, they're in shock, they got a shock, a physical shock and they feel bad for themselves and they feel upset.

12:23 So initially they're flooded by those shocking emotions. It's a literal physical trauma. There's a hit to the body. And so what happens often is that we as parents are kind of motivated to get them to forget it and move on, like, oh, nothing happened. Have you ever seen parents do this? Nothing happened, you're fine, you're okay, come on. Or there are even parents who will start like clapping and smiling because they think that if they smile and clap, the child will imitate that emotional reaction and they'll think it's no big deal, et cetera.

12:58 And what these things usually do is actually send a child into a state of confusion because there is a complete discongruence between the adults reaction and the adult's emotional processing and what they're experiencing internally. Something did happen, they fell, it's not true that nothing happened, they fell on they're bloodied. It might not be a big deal, is maybe what the parent is trying to say. It might not be as bad as they might think but something did happen.

13:23 And when a parent just kind of wants to brush it off and forget about it then they tend to feel really confused and feel like there's a complete lack of sync between what the world is seeing they're experiencing and what they're experiencing on the inside. What also happens is that they don't get a chance to process what happened. They don't get a chance to express the feelings in that moment, they can't fully cry and let it all out.

13:47 And they also don't get a chance to make sense of it. So you can imagine for a very young child, I'm running along on the sidewalk and suddenly I'm in pain with a bloody knee and I feel in shock, I don't have the kind of narrative, the storytelling skills to make sense of what just happened to me. So one of the tools to help them actually to process this is to tell them what has happened, and if they're verbal and able to for them to tell us what has happened.

14:16 They can't do it immediately, they're probably a little wounded, they need to cry, but pretty soon we can say you were running along and you didn't notice that there was a crack in the sidewalk and you tripped and you fell and your body fell and you caught yourself with your hands which was great cause that protected your face, but your hands got scraped and your knees got a little bit bloodied and you've got a shock and that really hurt.

14:38 Now, some parents will say, well, why would I say that to them? Why am I wanting them to it relive it? So it's a little bit of a counter intuitive but surprising truth that when we re-live traumas, when we re-tell the difficult stories that happened to us we integrate them into our mind and they lose their punch. They actually get a little bit less of a stink. When we don't tell them, when we suppress them, and we don't talk about it then they might manifest in other ways like irrational fears, irrational in quotes, right?

15:14 Fears of running or maybe in big tantrums or on big emotions about other things or in a body, maybe like a tummy ache, it will manifest in other ways because we haven't made sense of what just happened to us. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors and one of the things that was very, that is still is in some cases very common amongst Holocaust survivors is that they would not tell their stories for the first decade, two, three or four maybe, one of my grandpas would only tell his story well into his seventies, I think, was the first time he shared with us and he wouldn't tell it to his children, he would only tell it to his grandchildren.

15:53 He needed some kind of detachment both of time and of kinship to be able to open up and tell this terribly painful truth. What also happened is that many Holocaust survivors found a certain level of catharsis in telling their story, found a certain healing, found a certain level of processing in releasing those emotions and letting it out and making sense even of things that you can't make sense of. Making some level of sense, some cohesiveness around, at least around the storytelling aspect, at least around what actually happened.

16:31 So when a child falls what we want to do is tell the story with them. We tell the story and what you'll find is that children will often tell the story again and again and again, and it can get boring and annoying for us as parents like, okay, yes, we get it, you fell, right? But when they tell it again and again and again eventually it becomes boring and that's what we want. We want it to become something that they can just tell without crying again, without getting upset again because they've gone through it, they've processed it and they've desensitized to it.

17:02 Initially the trauma is so painful that you cry. And even when you tell the story you might stop crying but as you tell it again and again, it holds less of a power over you and you're less likely to bring up those emotions because you've integrated the story into your system. It's part of you, it makes sense, you understand it. Let me give you a personal example of this to illustrate it. In my last birth I had a bit of a traumatic event happening in the birth.

17:31 Thank God I was healthy and so was my baby but there was a moment that that was very traumatic and I felt it was badly handled by the medical staff. And afterwards when people said to me, hey, how was your birth? You know, congratulations. I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and I could hardly tell them, I was just like, yeah, it was fine, it was okay. I felt so choked up, I couldn't talk about it because it was very war for me.

17:56 And if I had to, I didn't in fact go back to see that same doctor ever again. I didn't wanna see her because I knew that it was gonna trigger such a big emotional reaction for me, I didn't wanna see her, I felt kind of traumatized by her behavior. Talking about it was hard, thinking about it was hard. I just thought about the birth and I started crying. Have you got an experience like that in your life?

18:19 Knowing what I know about trauma, I actually called and I was so lucky to have this opportunity, I called a postpartum doula who did you know, all sorts of things including helping with babies and with your healing and with your energy work as well and your psychology, and I said, look, I'm fine, my baby is nursing, my other kids are fine, my household is fine but what I really need help with is processing my birth story.

18:43 It was a traumatic birth and I need to process it. And she was amazing, she came over and I told her the whole story and I just said it and I spoke it and when I needed to cry I cried and we let it be, we let it be told, we let it be witnessed. It was such a profound healing experience for me and after that, maybe I needed to tell it another few times but eventually it became something that was just something that I could talk about easily that I'm not particularly triggered by or attached by it.

19:15 I'm sure I could see that doctor again now with no problem. It doesn't cause that same lump in my throat because I've integrated that story as part of my life, I've learned from it, I've understood it, I know what happened, It makes sense. I get it. It might still be a painful story, It might still not be what I had wanted, but it is, doesn't have that power over me. So my invitation to you today is first of all join me on the finish strong journey if you're watching this as it drops, there we're going to really process the things that have happened to us in this way.

19:47 You can tell your story creatively to yourself, to your journal, through dance, through art, to a friend. It doesn't matter. But tell your story of this past year, of the trauma that it may have brought up, of the grief that it may have triggered, or even if just the annoyance and the irritations. And do the same with your children, when they've gone through something difficult, tell it, allow them to tell it back to you, let them draw a picture of it, let them make a video about it, sing a song about it.

20:15 Use whatever creative modality is necessary in order to integrate it so that it doesn't have the scary power that we can't talk about it, right? You shall not be named, but it just become something that's true and part of our lives. This is how we ward off trauma. This is how we help to integrate the parts of our lives that were difficult and that were challenging and that leave us with a bit of a lump in our throat.

20:40 If you think this video might be helpful for someone else who's gone through a tough time or someone else who has a kid who's going through a tough time, please tag them on Instagram and just share the link out with them. And remember, keep on loving parenting and parenting from love. (upbeat music)