Then there’s Allen Ginsberg’s definition from The Fall of America back in 1963 that goes like this:

Well, while I am here I’ll do the work –

and what’s the Work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.

As a survivor, I have done a lot of the Work, but I have also come to realise that there is a belief surrounding this Work that is perpetuated by the 8 week groups, the therapeutic goals prescribed by insurance payments, the “happily ever after” narrative that we inhale daily. This belief is that when you do the Work, and you do it sufficiently well, the Work will be done. When it is done, you will then step into the stream of the happily and ever after.

This is a giant lie that we’re all selling ourselves. We have built to mythic proportions the hero’s journey, the narrative that a Survivor is someone who has overcome. Overcome suggests an endpoint, a ceasing, an arrival after which there is no more Work to be done. Overcome says that you will reach a stage where your past, your wounds, your pain will be healed, completely and irrevocably.

Instead, it seems more real to say that the Survivor has all the symptoms of a phantom limb. The wound is healed. There is a scar. But that isn’t the sum of the Work, just the beginning.

The Work is dealing with the burning sensation in your pelvis even though you haven’t suffered that particular pain in years. It’s waking in the night to the memory you thought you’d erased. It’s seeing the same mistakes played out time and again when you believed it was over.

Is It ever really over? Why do we expect it will be? Do we expect survivors of war and bombings to be stop flinching when they hear a loud car start? Will a veteran never again wake up in a sweat after yet another dream where his friend is blown up in front of his eyes? Studies seem to suggest that is an irrational expectation, and society seems to be more accepting of the ongoing consequences of this sort of physical and psychic trauma.

Why do we expect this to be different for survivors of different types of war? Why do we expect that the vestiges of sexual assault and molestation, of boundary erasure and manipulative love, will magically disappear because someone has been doing the Work?

I certainly had that expectation for myself. I truly believed that I would one day be “free.” Heaven knows I prayed for it often enough. To never again smell something that brings up overpowering waves of nausea. To not jump when someone comes up behind me. To not feel my body go numb when physicality becomes overwhelming. I’m still waiting for this freedom to arrive, and I have begun to expect it never will.

I’ve also extended that expectation to others, including friends and partners. If they are doing the Work, I expect that they will stop having intense anger, stop needing extreme amounts of attention, start being capable of activities they were never capable of before.

But I was wrong to expect this of myself or of them. I cannot know where someone else’s Work will lead them or which path they will choose to travel at what point in their life. I cannot know when they will decide that particular Work is not worth pursuing further, because something else needs their attention.

Beyond that, there is a pain of living that a Survivor never loses, because it’s etched in the cervices of their body, in the corners of their minds. And even the slightest bit of shame or confusion can trigger a whole new onslaught of memories, of fear, even of physical pain. With every major life change, like the loss of a loved one, a divorce, even a much longed for child being born can require more processing. At every point where a person’s being shifts and stability is lost, when they are truly living, they experience that pain. Then they can choose to drown again or return to the Work, painstakingly rebuilding their raft out of the wreckage. If they have done previous Work well, they may have large pieces of the prior creation to draw from, but there will invariably be days when it seems like none of that effort mattered, like they have returned to the beginning all over again.

I have been here multiple times. With the ending of a marriage, of a relationship, the loss of parents, the loss of friends, and even the birth of LA. That last one shocks me even now.

There has never been a way to express the maelstrom of emotions that flooded through me after his arrival. Joy, of a kind never felt before, most certainly. A bit of fear that I was not nearly as prepared as I had hoped. All the usual feelings you read about in books. But there was also pain and a deep sadness. At first I imagined it had to do with the child that poured out of my body and onto the linoleum floor, lost to me forever. That was certainly part of it. But it was also the sadness for when I was born, for when the world was still new, my parents present, a world I don’t remember except through photographs and the stories my father told me. That little baby with her blue and pink hat, face scrunched against the bright lights, she disappeared too soon. She became an adult for all the wrong reasons, and I grieved for her as I held LA in my arms. I grieved for all those years taken away from her. And I grieved for all the years taken away from so many others like me, statistics on paper who are still subject to the completely real pain of living.

That grief on receiving new life into my arms, coupled with sleepless nights and general exhaustion, slowly undid the Work that had been done before, forcing me to a place where I had no choice but to start the Work again.

You either do it, and keep doing it, and hope that in doing it something good will remain for the next round, or you fall into whatever is your personal version of a drunken stupor. That’s the part they really don’t talk about.

The post On Doing the Work first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

I stood frozen to the spot as the words slammed into me, knocking my breath out of my chest and flooding me with the dark heat of shame.  I started to disassociate which allowed me to make a joke, to pretend it meant nothing.

She may have had no idea how her words would land. Or maybe she did, because, from the vestiges of my trauma, I had hurt her.

I have no way of knowing intent, only effect.

What I do know is that the person who spoke those words to me was one of the few people I trusted completely. She had seen me curled in a ball on the bathroom floor, fighting the waves of panic slamming into my body. She had helped me apply the electrodes of the TENS unit to my abdomen, sending electrical current through my body to counteract the pain caused by invasive physical therapy. She is one of five people who knows the names of both of my abusers.

But that day she walked away. My trauma was too emotionally expensive, my break downs unattractive. There were other people out there who had far less to manage.

Everyone has trauma. It’s part of the process of living, of sharing space with others.

When the trauma is particularly complex or was mixed in with other traumas or occurred in secret, it has longer lasting effects. Trying to understand that sort of trauma when you’re someone who has not experienced it like trying to understand starvation when you have always had enough to eat. You believe it exists. You’ve seen the skeletal children on television documentaries. You may even cry a bit. But your pantry is still full of food.

One of the hardest realities I’ve had to face is the judgement from others when trauma rears its ugly head. People get tired of the dark days, the behaviours that keep tripping me up, the pain that comes seemingly out of nowhere. They know someone else who “had a hard time”—past tense—but “got over it”—past tense again. This is said in order to spur me on to do the same as quickly as possible. Strangely, no one wants this more than I do for myself. And no one feels the shame of failure more intensely on the days when I fall sideways in my healing journey.

Shame permeates everything about sexual assault, like the shame of not fighting back enough or being somewhere you “shouldn’t” have been. It makes sense, then, that childhood sexual molestation, has even more shame attached to it if it occurred over a long period of time in secret. While an adult survivor of rape may be able to call on a community of friends and family as a support system, as a counter to the shame, allowing them to be resilient, children who are molested generally do not have access to that sort of system. Instead, we have the long-term physical and emotional consequences of the abuse., and, as studies have shown, secrets cause pathophysiological consequences that are still being explored.

Given the havoc it wreaks on our professional and personal lives, most of us would be thrilled to put it behind us and never think about it again. We would never again be overwhelmed by memories and sensations, never fight dissociation, never need to take another shower to cope with the feelings of dirtiness and shame.

As I stood there, my back against a rented Toyota Corolla, being told that I was too expensive, the inky black shame of my childhood crept out of its hiding place. Shame that I had allowed myself to be hurt in the first place. Shame that I hadn’t managed better, healed faster, been stronger. Shame that I had ever shared my story.

Shame whispered to me, “You are damaged. You will always be damaged. No one can love damaged things.”

At its heart, as Brene Brown often reminds us, shame is tied to unworthiness. Shame tells us we are flawed and we do not deserve love or belonging or connection. Shame is a powerful tool, because it keeps us from building a support system we can rely on. And it keeps us in silence and alone.

Caught in the moment, but with my adult self not present in any way, my child self showed up. Alone and vulnerable, she accepted again that she was flawed, that her only value was what her body had to offer. She was definitely not worth the price of having to deal with her trauma.

I would like to say this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. The person I trusted wanted more light, less darkness. She wanted easier conversations, fewer unexpected triggers. She had the ability to walk away, so she did.

My child self did not have that option and neither does my adult self. As the saying goes, wherever I go, there I am. The shame will likely always haunt me, and I will often be tempted to accept it as truth. I will drive myself hard to be more than enough to make up for what I think I lack. The problem is that shame thrives in the dark places, becoming ever more monstrous the longer it floats beneath the surface.

What I wish my adult self had been mindful enough to tell my child self at that moment in time was that no one was more worthy of love and belonging than she was, because she had nothing to be ashamed of regardless of what someone else spoke over her.

Part of my work in the aftermath has been digging deeply into the shame that has always lurked inside of me, stealing my joy. As tends to be my case, I found solace in art, particularly in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when a friend sent me a link to an exhibition at the Met. According to the curator, in the 15th century artists began turning broken pottery into artistic masterpieces instead of discarding them. Carefully placing the pieces together, an artist seals the cracks with an epoxy laced with gold, silver or platinum. The final result is not the original piece, but instead of hiding the breaks, keeping them out of sight because they are ugly, they become beautiful and are put on display.

This has given me hope, because it tells me that the work I do, the shame I battle, is not for nothing. If I can find a way to see the broken places as an invitation to become more beautiful, what was once ugly is transformed. In the Reformed tradition of Christianity, they would see Kintsugi as a form of redemption. As much as I shy away from religious terminology, there is something about redemption that can still move me, because it holds within it the notion that nothing broken is ever lost, just transformed into something even more beautiful.

Grappling with my trauma, taking responsibility for its effects, comes out of my deep desire to shield LA from its repercussions as much as possible. That includes being honest with him about it whenever I can be, and being honest with those around me so they can help me protect him. Most of all, it means I have to accept I am not my trauma, but it is a part of who I am. My faith is that constant, persistent work will lead to a sort of redemption out of which, I hope, will come someone more beautiful, someone he can be proud to have as a mommy and someone I can be proud to hold out into the light.

The post Speaking of Trauma and BMWs first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Godishness owned Sundays. We were not allowed to play outside, do homework or see friends. Instead, we went to church, returned home for lunch and rested until it was time to get dressed and head out to church again. If you didn’t want to sleep in the rest period, you were allowed to read, but your options were limited. The book couldn’t be secular—not related to God. I may have tried to push the limits with reading the Encyclopedia once or twice, because, after all, God made the world, but otherwise, it was a dreary day for someone who enjoyed books.

Now, my Sundays are radically different. They are still days for rest, but I spend the day with LA, playing and laughing. We take walks to the park to use the swings. He naps in my arms. We do household chores, because he loves to “help.” We read books. 

There are days when I feel a rush of guilt, when the past comes back to whisper in my ear that I am destroying his life by not raising him in a strong community of faith that meets multiple times a week and will teach him how to live. On a good day, this feeling is followed by New Order reminding me mentally that “Guilt is a Useless Emotion.” 

Just another day in the week
Waiting for an opportunity to step in front of me
Maybe I’m losing my mind
Searching for another place in another time

Choosing to parent with mindfulness means accepting that those are my thoughts, but my thoughts do not necessarily reflect reality. They only create my experience of what is real. It is not true that my child is not being raised in a good community. It’s just a much more varied community, one full of people who care for him exactly as he is. I don’t want any institution teaching him how to live. They did that to me. and I almost died from their attempts. I want him to know that the world is much bigger than the walls of a church, that love exists in many forms, that God cannot possibly be contained to a denomination. This what rational processing tells my anxiety.

Granted, my rationality depends on it being a day when the sun is shining, the breeze is cool, and I have had 8 hours of sleep. In other words, it’s rare. This is because I have what some people term Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Coined by the psychologist Marlene Winell, RTS describes the way that trauma from religion can affect people. It’s a relatively new term that isn’t even in the DSM unless you consider it under the large umbrella of PTSD. But what it boils down to is a way of understanding how people can have a physical, emotional or psychological response that is traumatic and due to religious situations and structures.

When we talk about childhood trauma, the default is to think of violence or sexual trauma, occasionally verbal or emotional. Religious trauma sounds almost absurd, because religion is generally considered to be a refuge, a place for healing and community. I will be the first to say that I know many people for whom this is very much the case. Beliefs in God, Allah or any number of divinities give people strength to overcome addiction, to restore broken families, to lead a life of purpose. 

That is not my experience with religion, because I was raised a Christian fundamentalist. This is not the same as Evangelicalism, although they have more in common than they like to admit. Contemporary fundamentalists include individuals such as Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell. In a later post I may link to a good description of the difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism and explain more about how the particulars of this sort of thinking create trauma, but for now, suffice it to say, most of what you hear about fundamentalism is true. It’s dogmatic. It’s authoritarian. And it’s all about indoctrination, but they like to call it “salvation.” 

It’s difficult to pinpoint an “expert” on RTS, because it’s relatively new and still evolving. The term has only existed a little over a decade and the Religious Trauma Institute, the first site to undertake studying RTS systematically, was established as recently as 2019. Due to this lack of research and study, much of what I will say regarding RTS is purely anecdotal, since it can’t be anything else. But, there is a good video that explains the effects on RTS on the nervous system from a clinical perspective, here.

This much I do know: I had RTS long before I knew what it was; I just thought I felt the way I did because God hated me. The effect of RTS is so powerful that, even after years of working on my issues, of rethinking my theology and my relationship with the world, just walking into a church building can prompt my body to tense up, my breath to become shallow to the point of hyperventilation. I used to bitterly joke that I was literally allergic to church, to Sundays. 

LA was born in the pandemic, so I was able to postpone guilty feelings since churches were not even open. But, when they started to open up again, I found myself sobbing over feeling like a bad mommy for not taking my son to church. I had just enough clarity to message a dear friend who kindly listened to my hysterical outpouring of fear that I was condemning my child to eternal damnation. Wisely, she said, “Breathe. Just breathe. That’s not the God I know or you have told me you know.” 

This is why you will find me on a Sunday morning feeding my little guy spoons of oatmeal and listening to gospel music, because a church is not usually a safe space for me. We look at birds fluttering in the yard, blue and red brown. He laughs with delight, and I tell him that he is loved exactly as he is. When the voices intrude, and the guilt increases, I breathe. 

The post Sacred Sundays first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Several years ago, my brother bought a home with an unfinished basement. To his disgust, he soon found that there was an unidentifiable leak that dripped incessantly and caused flooding. He employed the handy method of the bucket under the leak, emptying it as necessary to avoid water backing up all over the basement floor. But he did not like having to do it and frequently let me know via text message. Unfortunately, there was no one else who could do it since it was his house, so he trudged down there dutifully on a regular basis to haul the bucket out into the yard.

There is something similar that can occur to those of us with trauma: we can have bucket issues. I say this based on observation and my own experience. For much of my time in therapy, I focused on what was done TO me. By this I mean, I learned to have emotions, to ground myself, to accept the painful places inside of me that responded to external triggers. The usual suspects for blame emerged: my abusers and the people who enabled the abuse. 

A few months ago, though, I realized there was an unexpected deleterious effect to all this work. I was becoming unbalanced. By focusing so extensively on my triggers and reactivity, I was ignoring the way my trauma had been spilling out on people around me, in some cases for years. Although I try to be a thoughtful person who puts others first, I started to see that my self image was not in line with reality. My true self may be someone who is thoughtful and kind, but I had completely ignored the necessity of dumping out the bucket. My thoughtfulness and kindness were being drowned in my obsessive focus on my trauma to the exclusion of all else. 

I had allowed myself to be enveloped in a fog of victimhood that was impenetrable and manifested with some narcissistic traits like lacking empathy for others or feeling a sense of entitlement because I had suffered more than someone else had. I thought mostly about what was good for me, not what was good for anyone else. I failed to listen closely, to show concern and care, to love. 

Consequentially, I caused deep damage, some of which I will never be able to undo. 

The problem with trauma is that even if the leak in the basement isn’t my fault, I’m still the only person who can take that bucket out to keep it from overflowing. No one else is responsible for that bucket, because I am the home-owner.  

This isn’t to say other people cannot be supportive through the journey, occasionally helping me carry the bucket up the stairs. But when it turns into “me, me, me” all the time, that’s a problem. I’m not a person who enjoys admitting to mistakes, so having to first reconcile myself with this took time. Then, to reach out to those I’d hurt, to admit my shame to others, was even more painful. The most you can say is “I’m sorry,” even though you both know it’s not nearly enough. 

In my case, the individuals whom I hurt were mostly gracious and forgiving. The bitter pill is that sometimes you cannot rebuild some bridges that you’ve burned. You cannot rebuild trust, rebuild connection, rebuild relationship if two people are not involved. Nor can you force a person you have already hurt to be willing to rebuild anything. Although I have never struggled with addiction to substances, I imagine this is a bit what it’s like to be in recovery, working the 12 steps. You can try to make amends, but sometimes, as I was told, “it’s just too late.” 

In mindfulness practices, there is what is called “the conscious witness” or the “neutral observer.” The basic purpose of this observer or witness is to step outside of the chaos of your thoughts, your reactivity, and observe without passing judgement. When you manage to find your witness, you can detach from what is happening in your mind allowing you to be present and aware. You can see yourself as you are, not as you wish you could be.

In theory, I love this idea, but my personal observer and I have a somewhat tense relationship. Even though I have never read mindfulness masters suggesting that the witness has a name, I call her Linda. If you were around in 2014, there was a viral video of a kid named Mateo who was trying to convince the camera-holding Linda to not punish him for eating cupcakes. When trying to deal with my personal observer, I often find myself in Mateo’s position saying, “Listen, Linda, listen.” Except Linda is not interested in listening, because Linda is not easily manipulated. She is the voice reminding me that our actions have consequences, that there is nothing personal in that reality, but it is what it is. This is why I have a love-hate thing going on with Linda. She tells me what I would rather not hear, and no amount of denial works on her. 

Several months ago, I was happily blaming all the wrong people for my suffering and feeling justified in doing so. Then Linda showed up. She raised her eyebrow at me. Oftentimes, Linda does not need to speak to get her point across. My suffering was my own doing. By allowing myself to focus on my leaky faucet, I had completely ignored the overflowing bucket, and everyone around me was starting to drown; they had to save themselves. The consequences of this were the suffering I was experiencing. I really hate it when Linda is right. 

The post Leaking Trauma first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

There is a lot to like in this term. For one it emphasizes cooperation instead of ownership, unlike the legal term, “shared custody.” For another, it clearly places the responsibility for childcare on more than one person since “co” as a prefix indicates that the job of parenting is shared. I have seen many children with parents where one person silently seethes with rage while doing the bulk of the childcare, usually holding down a full-time job as well. “Parenting” does not indicate that the duty is shared.

Co-parenting is not simple, but I’m not sure it’s any harder than other types of parenting when co-parents are friends and capable of communication. With the exception of people whose co-parent is an abusive partner, I have come to think that co-parenting is actually a better model, based on the fact that, by definition, it requires mutual cooperation, planned moments of sitting down to discuss options and strategies. My co-parent and I have to be on the same page, because otherwise everything falls apart. We communicate better now than we ever did in the past.

Successful co-parenting relies on the ability to put oneself aside for the good of the child. When disagreements arise, the question comes down to “What is best for our child?” Not my child. Our child.

Co-parenting with a history of trauma, however, requires a level of self-awareness that I never imagined reaching. There are days when I fail, when it seems I will need miracle to get where I need to be. Except I have no choice but to reach for more awareness, continually walking into uncomfortable places where I am forced to stretch and learn. Put simple: I cannot advocate for what I need or for what my son needs if I remain unaware. 

Despite not being traditional life partners, I rely on my co-parent more than ever before. I rely on them to be the counterpoint in situations where trauma rears its ugly head. When I cannot see clearly, because trauma has taken over. This is when they need to be able to be the voice of reason. Since beginning to co-parent, we have had to have far more discussions about trauma than we ever did before, because we are both survivors.   

Here are some random tips that have worked in my experience. Take from them what you will.

Consciously putting our child first over my desire to win. CP and I are both competitive, Type A people. We set high standards for ourselves, and tend to stand in our righteousness, as Martha Beck would put it. When I’m wrong, I find it next to impossible to admit it, although I’m getting better, which means we can end up in a disastrous situation quickly. Since LA is too young to have an opinion at this point, he cannot be the final say in the matter. When we clash, someone has to cede or, more often, a compromise must be reached. I have had to bite my tongue many times now, reminding myself that this is not about old issues in our relationship, or about losing or winning. This is about LA’s well-being, and no child needs to see his parents fighting even if it’s over what they both believe to be in his best interest.

Wrangling the winner/loser mindset into submission—usually by meditation—I implement the technique a friend refers to as “overriding priorities.” My friend is a lawyer, so she likes clear nomenclature. I ask myself: is this issue a life or death one for me? If not, I cede. If it is, I try to reach a compromise. For example, I was raised without screens. No television. No movies. CP had the opposite experience. I do have issues with screens, so ceding completely was not an option. I negotiated a compromise. Since another priority is to raise LA with regular exposure to other languages, I agreed to limited screen time and CP agreed to keep screen time to content in Spanish.

While setting aside the winner/loser mindset would apply to all situations, in a situation where coparents have histories of trauma, there are other important aspects to be considered. We have to support each other in taking care of ourselves. As much as it is my responsibility to care for myself, it helps to have CP notice that I am in a rough place and offer to take LA for a half hour while I go for a run. Sometimes, I’m unaware that I am trapped in the trauma mindset until it’s pointed out by someone else. CP could remain quiet, but because CP knows that LA’s wellbeing depends on mine, CP will sacrifice a half hour for me to have space to meditate. In order to do this well, words matter. No commands. Just suggestions from a place of kindness and empathy.

Clear boundaries are key. I tend to default to doing whatever is necessary to avoid conflict even when it means sacrificing my needs. This coping mechanism leads to exhaustion and an inability to function which is, again, not an option when a child is involved. I have learned to take a few minutes to go to a quiet place and write down how I feel, to try to discover why I am feeling that way. For example, a couple of months after LA was born, I felt a level of tightness inside that I could not shake loose. When I used the writing method, I discovered that I felt there was an injustice happening in regards to time, but I was afraid to speak up. Writing helped me see my responsibilities for LA were not daily occurrences but more sporadic–larger–time investments. If you haven’t had an infant in a while, you may not realize how often they have to go to the doctor to be checked. Plus, LA was born with a Cow’s Milk Protein allergy that took a while to identify. In the first two months of his life, I was in and out of the pediatrician’s office, radiology, urology and gastroenterology until we found the answer to his constant crying. 

It wasn’t until I could pinpoint the source of my feelings, however, that I could approach CP to try to find a solution. Awareness of how I felt and why I felt that way was crucial to renegotiating the terms. 

Coparenting is a matter of trial and error, of grace and compassion. It’s a practice, a lot like mindfulness. 

The post Mindful Coparenting first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

My son was born as my father lay dying of terminal cancer. There were tears in my eyes when I placed my son into my father’s arms for the first time and tears in his when he accepted he would not live to see his grandson grow up. Death has a remarkable power to strip you of artifice, of your false self. In the weeks leading to his death, my father and I dismantled our egos and hid nothing from each other, not the good and definitely not the bad.

With my tiny son snuggled in his arms, my father asked me to be a better parent than he had been.

That promise was the beginning of this blog.

“Mindful Mommying” starts with the premise that just as every life path is distinctive so is every parenting journey. This is especially relevant for those of us who come into parenting having survived childhood trauma (emotional, sexual, physical), familial cycles of abuse or religious indoctrination. Regardless of intentions, when trying to free ourselves from the pain of the past, it can be easy to slip into unconsciousness, to blindly repeat ingrained patterns or create new, unhealthy ones.

As Shefali Tsabary points out, “It is no surprise we fail to tune into our children’s essence. How can we listen to them, when so many of us barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life?”

While I am a firm proponent of seeking professional support for healing and parenting, there is not enough therapy in the world that would have prepared me to be the mother to this child. My therapist was not there two days after his birth when, thanks to pandemic precautions, a random nurse took my child away only to bring him back with blood on his navy blue and white striped sleeper. My therapist was not on call when I had to hand my child over to a complete stranger and find enough courage to believe he would not be harmed while I did my job.

When LA was born, I knew I had no choice but to become a mindful parent so that when my wounds surface—as they have and will—I don’t give them the power to control another child’s life. Mindfulness tells me that my challenges may be unique to my circumstances, but they are only as powerful as the narrative I give them. When I am not a victim, but an aware survivor, I face the job of parenting from a pro-active position that denies what Tara Brach calls the “trance of fear” that traps us in reactivity.

Mindful mommying is about being a mother who happens to deal with trauma, but who refuses to allow that to singularly define her experience of parenting.
“To mother” is the technical verb form. If you are anything like me, you wince at the word “mother,” associating it with criticism, with never being enough, with impossible standards you cannot ever meet. You do not wish to be a mother to your child.

“To mommy” is the verb I chose instead, because words are power. To mommy is to have a chubby hand patting my face in the early mornings hours; it smells like milk and laundry soap. It sounds like the Darth Vader noises my son makes as he experiments with pushing his breath through his voice box. It feels like showing up in my life every single day, regardless of how I feel or what has been triggered, because I am determined to be his mommy, not his mother.

Beverly Engel encapsulates the difficulty of being a mommy when one was raised by a mother when she says, “For some reason […] I imagined that I’d escaped our family curse. I should have known that it’s not that easy.” Before I became a mother, I would try to mentally prepare for what not to do with a child. I would sit on park benches watching children with their parents.  Pinching an arm. No. Yelling in anger. No. Roughly pulling a child to her feet. No.

There is no real way to prepare for when triggers push me into a space where my first impulse is exactly what I know not to do. At those moments, generally at 3am when I have had two hours of sleep, l feel the beginnings of a disassociation coming on. My self starts pulling at its moorings, detaching ever so slightly, lifting into the air and heading for the ceiling.

What happens next is all in my hands, and I know from repeated visualization and practice that I must do the exact opposite of what comes naturally. I must remain present, ground myself and breathe. I must remind myself that I am an adult, that I am capable of caring for myself, that any threat I feel is in the past. When I know that I am anchored in reality, I can care for my child as his mommy.

In this struggle, I know I am not alone. RAINN statistics tell us that in the US alone, roughly 1 out of every 9 girls and 1 out of every 20 boys are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. The numbers do not count children in violent homes, children who are emotionally or verbally abused and so forth. They do not account for duration or familiarity level. The numbers only tell us it happens, that it is incredibly common.

Scores of important research studies done on the effects of trauma in childhood and quite a few clinical treatise try to approach the damage of child abuse in order to suggest strategies to combat this epidemic or to heal its survivors. I’m happy that these all exist. When it comes to parenting as the survivor of childhood abuse, however, the pool of resources starts to dry up.

Since my day job is as a researcher, I’m no stranger to finding source material on a variety of topics. Imagine my surprise at how little exists on this topic outside of academic databases. Try to read these studies sometime, and you’ll see why this is not a positive outcome. Here’s a snippet of a conclusion from a study in 2012 published in a reputable scientific journal. The researchers conclude that, “in the current psychiatric nosology, multiple comorbid diagnoses are necessary—but not necessarily accurate—to describe many victimized children, potentially leading to both undertreatment and overtreatment.” Allow me to translate in case you don’t have time to look up what nosology means: We conclude that child victims often have multiple issues at the same time which means they are at risk for getting not enough treatment or, conversely, too much.

There is presumably a great deal of useful information to be gathered from these studies, but first you have to clear the hurdle of discipline specific language. You also have to accept that most of these studies are hedging their bets a bit. Whatever they find, they could be wrong sometimes, because humans are complicated. They are definitely not about to give you a roadmap to being a parent.

If you prefer to avoid the scientific lingo, you can go to the easier reads. I found a smattering of insights across the web, some blogs, a few e-books, anthologies of survivor stories. These are good for what they are, but hardly seem adequate to the enormity of the task the statistics on child abuse suggests we are facing.

I have yet to come up with a good answer as to why this disparity exists, because it seems like an important market if one accounts for the population statistics. Consider Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead book from 2018. In it, she teaches people how to be better leaders using insights from her research on vulnerability and courage. Dare to Lead was at the top of the NYT Bestseller list and sold over 2 million copies. Now, don’t get me wrong. That is a great book, even if you’re not a leader, and I love Brené Brown. Her work has been fundamental to my growth as a person. But the numbers say there are more people parenting with the burden of trauma than there are individuals who want to learn to lead. Except we have no book on the NYT Bestseller list.

Where do we go from here? I have absolutely no idea, but this site is the beginning of my process of finding out the answer to that question. My parenting bar is high, perhaps too high, but I am determined to do better by my son. I owe it to my father. I owe it to my son, and I owe it to myself.

The post Being a Mindful Parent With a Side of Trauma first appeared on Mindful Mommying.