In preparation for Mothering As Medicine, the six week Zoom course I’m co-teaching with pediatrician and ACESAware trauma expert Rachel Gilgoff, MD, I’ve been thinking about the experience of being parented and the experience of being a mother, with compassion for both my parents and myself, as well as for the kids we impact. Being a parent, especially when you’re barely old enough to stop being a kid yourself, as my mother was, is no small feat. Our biology as women certainly doesn’t cooperate with giving us enough time to heal our own psychological and emotional wounds before we lose our fertility. So we often wind up inadvertently and unwittingly passing those wounds down generational lines.
The good news- and the inspirational invitation- is that we can break the chain at any point and repair any damage we’ve done.
What might need repair? How can we mess up in ways we might not even know about?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Well, let’s start with the big stuff. Most of us know that if our kids experience Adverse Childhood Experiences (as my co-teacher Rachel Gilgoff discusses here) they’ll need to heal from those traumas in order to prevent adult onset physical and mental health diseases. It’s no surprise our kids will be impacted if there’s domestic abuse, child abuse, neglect, substance abuse, or a parent who took off, died, or went to jail. So first, let’s examine those ways our kids can struggle because of what happened at home.
Here are the 10 ACE questions. If you add up your child’s or your own answers, giving one point for each yes, that’s their ACE score.
- Did you feel that you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, or had no one to protect or take care of you?
- Did you lose a parent through divorce, abandonment, death, or other reason?
- Did you live with anyone who was depressed, mentally ill, or attempted suicide?
- Did you live with anyone who had a problem with drinking or using drugs, including prescription drugs?
- Did your parents or adults in your home ever hit, punch, beat, or threaten to harm each other?
- Did you live with anyone who went to jail or prison?
- Did a parent or adult in your home ever swear at you, insult you, or put you down?
- Did a parent or adult in your home ever hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt you in any way?
- Did you feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were special?
- Did you experience unwanted sexual contact (such as fondling or oral/anal/vaginal intercourse/penetration)?
If you add up all these “yes’s,” you’ll have yours or your child’s ACE score. As I wrote about in my books Mind Over Medicine and Sacred Medicine, those with ACE scores of 7 or higher die twenty years earlier than those with low ACE scores, unless those traumas are treated with cutting edge trauma treatments. As loving parents, it’s our responsibility to care about these impacts on our kids, not by shaming or blaming ourselves, but by showing up to empathically support the healing of ourselves and our young or adult kids. That way, we can help rewire their nervous systems and help them achieve the physiology of healing, which is possible because of neuroplasticity.
The Trauma of Everyday Life (aka Attachment Trauma, Developmental Trauma, Relational Trauma)
ACEs are the “Big T” traumas. But what about the little “t’s” that come from how we were parented? Let’s look at 10 ways we might harm our kids without meaning to.
- Helicopter parenting.
Sure, we mean well when we’re obsessively focusing on micromanaging, protecting, helping, fixing, or ensuring our kids succeed in their schooling and extracurriculars. But when we’re too intrusive, we interfere with their natural need for autonomy and agency, effectively infantalizing them and potentially handicapping them for life- until we help them heal or free them to find their own path to healing. (Read more about my own helicopter mother and how it impacted me here.)
- Preventing them from feeling disappointed or experiencing failure.
It might seem like a good idea to give trophies to everyone who participates, whether they excel or not. Maybe you help your child on that school project because you know their output just isn’t up to snuff and you want to make sure they get into Harvard. But real life isn’t like that. Adults have to face a competitive world where bosses don’t give trophies for effort and promotions don’t get handed out to people who don’t strive for excellence. We mean well when we don’t want our kiddos to feel sad, disappointed, let down, or not good enough. But the best thing we can do as parents is help our kids learn to tolerate uncomfortable emotions while they’re still in our homes, where we can help co-regulate them. Otherwise, we can raise unnecessarily fragile adults who may feel entitled to things they’re not entitled to.
- Raising approval junkies.
Our kids are desperate for our positive regard, so loving praise, affection, positive validation and appreciation for their uniqueness is a part of good parenting. But excessive love bombing, flattery, unearned praise, or showering our kids with too much approval can create narcissistic monsters who have an insatiable hunger for approval in adulthood. Especially if approval is only granted when kids do what we want- and it’s withheld when they don’t do what we want- approval becomes a manipulative tactic for control. Approval is judgment. It’s positive judgment instead of negative judgment, but it’s judgment nevertheless, and it can be taken away just as quickly as it’s granted. Our kids learn this early on and they will do anything- including sacrificing their unique authenticity- to make sure we don’t take away the heroin of our positive approval.
- Outsourcing the early years to nannies, adopted parents, preschool, or other family members.
It’s an inconvenient truth, but the traumatology science is becoming unmistakably clear that nobody can replace the attachment needs a child has with its biological birth mother. It’s not a feminist thing to say, but it’s trauma truth that being ripped away from the birth mother- because of a working mother, adoption, surrogacy, a child’s or mother’s physical illness, or the abandonment of a mother has profound impacts on child and adult development. As I wrote about here, my daughter and I are still reckoning with the impact, 19 years later, of the first year of her life, when I was still an OB/GYN working 72 hour shifts in a hospital instead of holding her to my breast, before I was finally able to extricate myself from the hospital when she was 12 months old, in large part because she was showing early signs of avoidant attachment. Sadly, and as much as we might wish it were different, nothing replaces the attachment bonding with the birth mother, no matter how kind, generous, well-intentioned, attentive, and loving others might be.
- Not trusting our children.
Kids cannot grow up to be trustworthy adults unless they are given the chance to earn your trust. If you’re paranoid, too controlling, untrusting, or otherwise giving your child the message that there’s no way they can earn your trust, this will have a grave impact on the way they deal with trust and trustworthiness in future relationships. Our kids need to know we trust their path- even if it’s not our preferred path, even if things don’t go the way we like, even if our kids make their own mistakes and lose our trust from time to time. Kids want the trust of their parents, but if you can’t earn it, no matter how hard you try, many kids will just decide “WTF? Why bother being trustworthy when I can’t get it right anyway?”
We’ll be discussing these and many other parenting mistakes- as well as what to do instead- in our upcoming Zoom class.
Save $100 if you register now for Mothering As Medicine.
While there is no official developmental trauma quiz that’s been studied the way the ACE score has, I consulted many cutting edge trauma experts to put together this Developmental Trauma Quiz, which I wrote and published in my book Sacred Medicine. Someone can have an ACE score of 0 and still say yes to many of these questions. Trauma experts are now concluding that developmental trauma may impact the future mental and physical health of our kids even more so than a high ACE score. And if our kids have both, there’s a great need to support their recovery, if they’re on board. And if not, everyone is entitled to their own journey. We don’t have a right to control our kid’s healing journey when they’re adults! But we can offer to pay for treatment, come to therapy with them, and be an empathic, non-defensive listener if they want to talk about their childhood wounds with us.
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA QUIZ
Have You Been Impacted by Developmental Trauma?
While there is no well-studied, universal score like the ACE score to assess risk for developmental trauma, The Body Keeps The Score author Bessel van der Kolk has suggested adding Developmental Trauma Disorder as an addition to the DSM.34 Even so, his proposed description does not include a way to diagnose, calculate, and study risk the way the ACE score does. In the absence of a well-studied developmental trauma-informed way to test yourself, you might ask yourself the following questions to get a sense of your own developmental trauma burden.
Before your 18th birthday:
Did you often feel that at least one of your parents wasn’t capable of connecting with you in a loving and bonding way, leaving you with poor self-esteem, chronic shame, or the feeling that you’re somehow damaged?
Did you often feel like you could not trust one or both of your parents to attune to you, protect you, and meet your needs?
Did you often feel like you had to the be the grown up or caregiver in the family when you were still the child?
Did you often feel like one or both of your parents smothered you, engulfed you, dominated you, or wouldn’t let you individuate, make your own choices, and become your own person?
Did you often feel like you were expected to be a perfect, high achieving, good girl/boy who made your parents proud or you’d be severely judged, rejected, punished, shamed, or abandoned?,
Do you live with a persistent feeling of nameless dread or terror without understanding why?
Do you prefer being alone to being around people, fear and avoid closeness with people, or struggle to maintain intimate relationships?
Were you raised without good boundaries or the ability to say no, set limits, or protect yourself?
Did you grow up feeling like you were an imposition or burden to one or both parents?
Do you seek out spirituality or have frequent mystical or esoteric “out of body” kinds of experiences?
Do you struggle to know what you need or ask others to help you get your needs met?
Do you frequently feel overwhelmed, struggle with adult responsibilities, or fixate on your one big problem, assuming that if it could only be solved, everything would be fine?
Did your mother have a difficult pregnancy or traumatic birth, or were you born prematurely or hospitalized at an early age?
Did one or both parents fail to help you normalize, feel, process, and handle difficult emotions?
Did one or both parents feel hurt or rejected when you tried to pull away, rebel, or become your own person?
Were one or both parents self-absorbed, narcissistic, or unable to see you as separate from them?
Do you tend to stay “in your head” or over-intellectualize, rather than being in your body or your emotions?
Is it hard for you to manage conflict, express displeasure, or stand up for yourself?
Do you try to stay below the radar, make yourself invisible, or otherwise keep yourself small and safe?
Would you identify as highly sensitive, an empath, or neurodiverse?
Do you struggle with low energy, diminished life force, lack of motivation, difficulty staying focused, achieving tasks, or feeling pleasure, or following your dreams?
If reading this activates your nervous system, try taking a few deep breaths. Go outside for a walk. Try silent meditation. Do a few yoga stretches. Pet your animal. Go to the gym. Give yourself a hug and a lot of self-compassion. Or listen to some of my guided meditations here.
Again, if Mothering As Medicine resonates with you, please join us here.
And if you have a longing to heal your own relational trauma, we invite you to join us in our ongoing IFS community of practice devoted to healing relational trauma LOVE SCHOOL.
