Opening Up About Parental Trauma

By Nicole Dauz

“TRAUMA IS PERHAPS THE MOST AVOIDED, IGNORED, BELITTLED, DENIED, MISUNDERSTOOD, AND UNTREATED CAUSE OF HUMAN SUFFERING,” SAYS PETER LEVINE, LEADING TRAUMA PSYCHOLOGIST AND HEALER. SOME TOPICS APPEAR SO BIG AND ALL-REACHING THAT IT PREVENTS PEOPLE FROM TRYING TO TACKLE THEM OUT OF FEAR OF GETTING THEM WRONG.

Thankfully, my curiosity and desire to shift the conversation around caregiving is allowing me to take the first step in sharing my experiences and learning. There are hundreds of millions of parents and guardians around the world. No caregiver should ever feel alone.

Personally, my most compelling reason for shining a light on this issue is that I believe trauma can only be healed by exposing and talking about it. This article is meant to be a launch pad. I ask you to keep an open mind and process the information at your own pace.

Caregiving and trauma

What keeps us caregivers from going the extra step and acknowledging the reality of parental trauma? It’s like a paradoxical loop that plays in our heads, “How can the child who cracked open my heart and introduced me to unconditional love be the source of my trauma?”

I believe the guilt caused by feeling negatively towards a child you love is why trauma related to parenthood is so unspoken among caregivers. In some instances, the guilt may be exacerbated by understanding that the person whose behavior is causing your trauma is someone you willingly choose to keep in your life—their existence might even be a result of your desire for children. The responsibility can feel overwhelming.

Regardless of how you became a caregiver, it can be incredibly difficult to wrestle with the idea that someone you cherish, and who is dependent on your care, is also harming you in some way. This is where the shame sneaks in and gets a grip; then, it becomes too much to untangle. The coexistence of “I’m caring for my child” and “I’m experiencing trauma because of my child” leads to internal conflict.

In my experience, I told myself for the longest time that my suffering wasn’t trauma because it wasn’t my daughter’s fault. Her behavior was a result of her rare genetic disease and autism. I didn’t dare ask myself how her screaming in public made me feel as I couldn’t bear to know that truth, and that question would only have been raised if my mind had ever allowed me to be honest in the first place.

I believe there are a few reasons why parents never consider their child’s behavior to be traumatic:

• Confusion of similar concepts: the belief that the caregiver journey as a whole is traumatic versus certain experiences during that journey being traumatic

• The parent being in survival mode and therefore being unable to look beyond the daily tasks, not having the mental capacity for self-reflection

• Lack of awareness that trauma is a person’s emotional response to any distressing experience

Acknowledging that we do in fact experience trauma throughout the caregiver journey requires lots of self-compassion.

Defining trauma

For the longest time, I rejected the idea that I could experience trauma as a parent of my daughter because I had a narrow view of what trauma could be. I associated it with combat soldiers and abuse victims. Nothing more.

Psychology Today states that trauma is a person’s emotional response to a distressing experience. Unlike ordinary hardships, traumatic events tend to be sudden and unpredictable, involve a serious threat to life—like bodily injury or death—and feel beyond a person’s control. Most importantly, events are traumatic to the degree that they undermine a person’s sense of safety in the world and create a sense that catastrophe could strike at any time.

What’s important to highlight is that trauma isn’t the event, like abuse or a war; trauma is the wound sustained as a result. So, we carry the memory of traumatic events in our body, which then can be triggered.

Furthermore, Dr. Patrick McGrath, clinical psychologist, says different groups of people will experience different types of trauma. For example, if you’re in a war, you will likely experience one kind of trauma. But if you’re a parent, you’re experiencing another type of trauma. Likewise, a caregiver in another circumstance will experience another type of trauma.

Denial causes the pain

It’s one thing to know what trauma is. It’s quite another to acknowledge that we caregivers experience it.

One of the “A-ha!” moments for me in understanding the impact of trauma in our daily lives is that it’s a cumulative effect. It’s not like practicing for something where the more it happens, the better we should become at managing it. It’s incremental; therefore, each traumatic event builds on the magnitude of previous ones.

One autism dad explained it as a metaphorical backpack where the gradual buildup of traumatic moments is like rocks being placed in a backpack. Adding a single rock might not be immediately noticeable, but one day you realize you’re carrying a 500-pound backpack, and it’s completely unmanageable.

Experience has taught me that when we deny something and don’t talk about it, we kind of trick ourselves into acting like it didn’t happen. Therefore, if we keep quiet, we can end up believing that if we ignore our unwanted feelings, they don’t exist. Unfortunately, denying these experiences is what actually causes much of the pain.

This is why caregivers must talk about their experiences and share their stories. People need to know it happens to all of us, so we feel less alone on the sometimes-isolating journey of caring for our children.

A bridge to hope

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

—Anaïs Nin

Many parents (like my former self) pretend they’re alright because they’re in survival mode. They aren’t thinking about themselves. Their focus and energy are on their child who needs affection and attention, therapies, medical interventions, medications, surgeries, etc.

Survival mode isn’t living. It simply means not dying. Our nervous systems weren’t designed to be stressed all the time. As caregivers, our lives are filled with unpredictability and uncertainty. We experience a lot of stress and live in waves of chaos.

Our nervous systems were designed to live in joy and connection among some challenges. That’s why compassion needs to be part of any discussion related to parenting, caregiving, and trauma. Compassion tells us we no longer need to be in survival mode and that it’s alright to take care of ourselves.

Acknowledging and accepting our traumatic experiences allows us to “free” ourselves from their hold and focus on living a meaningful life as a caregiver. Renowned trauma and addiction expert, Dr. Gabor Maté, says that time doesn’t heal trauma, vulnerability does. The example he uses is that a tree grows where it’s soft and green and cannot survive when the soil is hard and dry.

We caregivers can learn to be vulnerable by talking about the challenges we face and by being honest with ourselves about how we feel at any given moment. Acknowledging this leads to acceptance, from which we can proceed to more healing.

We should have no guilt in admitting that caregiving is hard. We should feel no shame in grieving the loss of dreams, ideals, and what we thought parenting would look like. Instead, we should focus on the unconditional love we have for our children and the amazing job we’re doing caring for them.

The more caregivers who share their stories, the more healing can take place. Everyone benefits from that.

References

Sussex Publishers, LLC. (n.d.). Trauma. Psychology Today. Retrieved January 2023, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/ trauma

Nicole Dauz is a caregiver coach and self-care advocate who chooses happiness despite her circumstances. Experience is her teacher as the mother of a neurotypical son and an autistic daughter with a rare genetic disease. Her mission is to change the story around caregiving and celebrate the journey. She honors the role of the caregiver by helping them recognize their worth and their true gifts. Nicole’s clients come to her because they feel stressed to the max. She provides them with the tools and strategies needed to shift them from feeling stressed and overwhelmed to regaining control of their lives and feeling gratitude and joy. She blogs regularly on her website and is the author of Self-care: From the Trenches…with Love, Humour & a Kick in the Pants.

Website: https://www.nicoledauz.com/

Book: Self-care: From the Trenches…with Love, Humour & a Kick in the Pants