Parenting with ACEs & Parenting After Trauma: If you write or read any essays or articles about parenting with ACEs, please share them. I'll make sure to do the same. Resources are welcome as well.
The only abuser left in your life,” a yoga therapist said to me once, “is you.”
When I talked about what a lazy, gruesome idiot I was another therapist would say, “Your self hears you.” She would look at me and wince at the way I was slicing and dicing myself on my own dime.
I didn’t even notice I was judging or insulting myself up until that point because I had no idea how others spoke to themselves. Quoting Swami Kripalu she would say:
My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Every time you judge yourself you break your own heart.
I was in therapy to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder from years of childhood physical and sexual abuse, chronic chaos and neglect – or what is now called developmental trauma. I was suspicious of the soft-speaking and kind-eyed therapists saying, “Give yourself some credit” or “be gentle with yourself.” Hearing their words I’d think: “you obviously grew up rich with intact family because that self-love s@#t don’t fly where I come from.” Self-compassion sounded like whiny people making excuses for themselves. I had no idea how compassion for myself would help anyone or anything.
Until I became a mother.
Originally in The Fix.This piece is one of the first I wrote, publicly, as writer, mother and trauma survivor.
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