The courage of parenting if you have a history of trauma 

From a blog by Gretchen Schmelzer

Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD is a licensed psychologist and trauma survivor who has worked for twenty-five years with the complex issues of trauma. In this abridged article, she writes to all of you parents who lived through difficult childhoods, difficult years, through neglect, through war as children.

You had to do whatever you needed to do to survive and now you are out on the other side. You made it with a lot of grit and effort. Your life is calm. It is good. And you are working hard as a parent to raise your children, whether they are toddlers, teens or young adults.

As a therapist, I saw how hard it was for you, as you work to raise your children in a life of happiness, even as that was something you did not get as a child.

You grew up in the country of trauma - and you managed to emigrate from that land and come to this new country of health - of peace. The country of health where your children are now growing up.

On the outside this sounds like the perfect happy ending. Parents are safe, and children are happy and healthy. It should be easy, right? It’s not. Because if you do it well, if you raise your children to get what you didn’t have - attention, and consistency, and care. I am talking about help with their homework and going to their games, and friendly dinner conversation. I am talking about the freedom of being a child, of being able to be age-appropriately self-focused; to be able to lean on you and struggle with you, and even ignore you.

If your child lives in this world of health, what’s difficult and painful is that they really will never understand your world - the world you grew up in. And this can be incredibly lonely. And can make a parent feel incredibly torn. On the one hand all you want is for your children to get what you didn’t get and have the opportunities you didn’t have, and on the other hand you worry that they don’t appreciate what they have and that they won’t get the strengths you have that saved your life. Holding these two vastly different worlds is so very hard and takes so much strength.

What I tell parents who have lived through trauma is this: If all goes well, your children will never completely understand you. They will love you and they will learn from you, but your experience will always be foreign to them. Maybe when they are adults they might be able to understand some of it, but they will never know what you really lived through. They will never see the world through the same lenses as you do. They will take things for granted that you see as the biggest gifts. They will not see all that you do for them, because what you do for them is a part of the fabric of their lives. Children only see what they live in. This is as it should be. It means you are doing it right, but for you it can feel so isolating.

One of the most baffling things for parents who have lived through trauma is this: childhood isn’t always easy, even if everything is going well. Learning is hard work. Growing up is hard work. Kids struggle and wrestle - they cry, they tantrum, they worry, they do things wrong. They get sad over small things and small disappointments. Even in the happiest of households, it is a long trail with a lot of ups and downs. It takes a lot of learning to build the muscles of becoming a healthy person. And for parents who lived through trauma, this can come as a shock. Many of the parents I have worked with have voiced a similar sentiment: I thought a happy childhood was easy - I never imagined my kids having a hard time if there weren’t bad things happening. I don’t understand them when I see them getting upset over ‘nothing.’ I don’t understand them. And they don’t understand me.

And what I try to help them understand is that in healthy families, the kids are doing the developmental work they need to do. They are working on their growth, not yours. You need to work on your own growth, healing and development so that you can support the growth and development of your kids.

It is tempting when you have had a difficult childhood to want to give your children the childhood you didn’t have. Yet the most important thing you can do is give your child what he or she needs. Each of your children will need different things - different parenting - than you needed – or even than the other siblings need. A more anxious kid needs different parenting than a more risk taking kid, for example.   

Parenting with a trauma history is one of the bravest things that people can do - and it is invisible. If you are doing it well, nobody knows. Nobody cheers. If you had been physically disabled by a past trauma and chose to run a marathon - people would call you brave. But we don’t do that with emotional wounds. They are invisible and the parents who rise to the occasion - and parent with love and purpose - who give what they never got - they are unsung heroes.  

So I say to you. Stay strong and know you are doing one of the most difficult things I have witnessed. That you may feel alone, but you aren’t alone. That your courage and bravery are creating not only a better world for your children, but for the world right now and for generations to come. And as you teach your children about love, have compassion and love for yourself and the journey you are on. 

Read the full article here.