In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on How to be a Cycle Breaker with Mindi Kessler, an episode of Parenting After Trauma with Robyn Gobbel.
Hosted by Robyn Gobbel, writer, trainer, speaker, and educator dedicated to understanding why humans behave the way they behave.
She teaches parents of children who have experienced trauma how the brain works, why behaviors are simply an externalization of what's happening in the brain, body, and nervous system, and how to respond to children's behaviors in a way the creates healing, not just behavior change.
Her guest Mindi Kessler, Ph.D. is a therapist and author of the book Cycle Breaker: A Guide to Transcending Childhood Trauma.
Read our notes on breaking generational cycles of abuse and trauma.
Topics Covered in this Summary
Trauma Re-enactment in Parenthood
How Our Children Trigger Our Own Childhood Wounds
Ways to Start Your Healing Journey
Trauma Re-enactment in Parenthood
Trauma can cause you to seek stress by re-enacting the events that traumatized you. We engage in interactions with people that are very similar to the interactions we had when we were victimized.
Often, our own experiences of trauma were minimized or not recognized as children, so it is sometimes difficult to acknowledge or face the pain of not feeling safe or not feeling worthy in childhood which are core experiences of trauma.
As adults, we can be in both roles where we are being the ones re-victimized and find ourselves in either role of the victim or the aggressor. We might have a child who gets physically aggressive or we might be the ones to get physically aggressive with them.
How Our Children Trigger Our Own Childhood Wounds
When growing up, experiencing things such as a lack of attunement, neglect, physical abuse, abandonment, rejection, or criticism can get deeply wired into us . We want someone else to do for us what our parents didn’t do and sometimes that plays out in our relationship with our kids.
Mindi Kessler explains: When we feel a sense of rejection from our kids, that can feel so painful because of the rejection from childhood. And so that's often a big trigger for parents when kids get into those stages.
It can really evoke a lot of those feelings of rejection and feeling unworthy. We feel like it's just so painful because it's happening with our child but the truth is, it's our own inner child re-experiencing that all over again like we did in childhood.
Ways to Start Your Healing Journey
When we do things for self-healing, it increases our own sense of empowerment. If we rely too much on other people, then it keeps us stuck being disconnected from our own power.
Find a balance between empowering ourselves and getting the support that we need by:
Therapy. Therapists are professionally-trained listeners who can help you get to the root of your problems, overcome emotional challenges, and make positive changes in your life.
Journaling. As we write, we can come to make more sense of things and it helps us get out of our heads, our spinning thoughts, and our worries.
Emotion Freedom Technique (EFT) (the youtube channel itself). A self-healing method where you can identify what’s bothering you to reduce anxiety, stress, PTSD, and depression.
(Brad Yates YouTube channel was recommended to listeners who want too know more about EFT.)
The magical thing is that as we heal what’s going on inside us, we see big changes in our external world. As we heal, it’s causing a contagious healing effect on those around us, including our children.