Parenting with a History of Childhood Trauma
There is nothing that will blow the lid off of your neatly contained childhood trauma like becoming a parent. So much about becoming a parent can be healing and transformational, but there’s typically a messy part to getting there or at least messy parts alongside the joy and beauty.
Some parents feel excited as they get closer to becoming parents, while others feel an impeding sense of doom and often they aren’t sure exactly why. And more often than not, parents fall somewhere in between.
What many people don’t know is that as you get closer and closer to becoming a parent, deeply buried implicit memory starts to wake up. Your unmet needs from your earliest days begin to resurface in new and different ways.
As you look into your baby’s eyes and see how tiny and vulnerable they are, something wakes up inside you. You begin to realize just how vulnerable you were too.
The hardest part about navigating childhood trauma as a new parent is that you don’t have explicit memory (picture memory) for the earliest parts of your own life. But your body does. Your body remembers through implicit memory, the type of memory that is not conscious. It’s the type of memory that comes back in body sensations and emotions.
For some it can look like frustration or irritability when your baby cries.
For others it can mask as postpartum depression, where you struggle to bond with your baby.
For some it might look like feeling really anxious about getting it wrong because you have no template for how to get it right.
Others may feel deep connection and compassion for their babies, but feel very triggered by ways other people or your partner parent.
Implicit memory is often very confusing. You can have subtle or intense emotions or body sensations that arise and don’t seem to match the situation you are in. This type of memory is powerful, but it can be challenging to identify where it comes from. One of the things I specialize in is helping adults to navigate complex childhood memory that is implicit or hidden. Through ego state therapy, hypnosis, and somatic work, together we are often able to bring peace to the past.
The path to a more fulfilling, meaningful, enjoyable parenthood is often by working through your childhood trauma.
And often a lot of grief comes up too. Grief for what little you didn’t receive and sometimes grief for the type of grandparents you wish you could have for your own children. And then there’s the grief around your parents not showing up for you in the way that you need them to around birth, postpartum and beyond.
As someone who has navigated this path myself, I am passionate about serving parents who are healing alongside raising littles. I can promise that a beautiful bond is possible between you and your child, as well as a beautiful experience of parenthood.
I truly believe with the right support, nothing is more healing than parenting a child of your own.
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