Please stop saying parenting is hard for everyone & read Parenting with PTSD instead

Sometimes, we feel anxious, intrusive, or afraid when changing or bathing or own babies.

Sometimes, we feel sick to our stomachs and worried while potty training, nurturing, or disciplining our toddlers.

Sometimes, we feel shame-filled and ill-equipped when talking about puberty, body parts, or sexuality because of how and where we were compromised by caregivers as children as in our bodies, homes, and families.

Parenting is brutally hard for some. If affection, attention and intimacy have been complex, mysterious, difficult, dangerous or deadly it's easy to understand why parenting can feel impossible in the present at times.

"Parenting when you have experienced childhood abuse can feel like walking back into a war zone as a soldier with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are flashbacks and triggers everywhere, and most parents are completely blindsided by them because no one talks about it."

Those words were written by @Dawn Daum and @Joyelle Brandt explaining why they co-edited Parenting with PTSD in order to create the parenting book, resource and community they had sought and could not find.

We live in a world where it's easier to find books on gluten-free baby food than it is to find books on break-the-cycle parenting after "acing" all of the way through childhood.

So please stop saying parenting is hard for everyone. It's true that it can be hard for everyone but it's not true that it's the same kind of hard. Parenting is not a universal experience and once-size-fits-all parenting advice, plans and programs fail hard and often.

Parenting without ACEs or traumatic stress is not the same as parenting with them.

To say parenting is hard for everyone ignores the avalanche of evidence about the cumulative impact of adversity in childhood that lasts in adult life which includes and extends through the parenting years.

Finally, there is a book that addresses the facts, fears and frustrations of mothers and fathers with post-traumatic stress directly.

Finally, there's a book that includes the voices of dozens where we speak for ourselves, to each other and with allies.

A book with tools, resources and a whole bunch about what ACEs are and why they matter.

Brandt and Daum write:

Over the last two decade, science and research on toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has shown us that abuse which occurs during childhood interrupts healthy brain and body development. Some children who experience this kind of interference in healthy development will be supported with therapeutic interventions; most will not. However, all survivors of childhood abuse have one thing in common; they grow up, and most become parents. Parenting survivors need support to get through the flashbacks and other post-traumatic stress symptoms they will experience.
As new mothers, editors and contributing authors Dawn Daum (of Northville, NY) and Joyelle Brandt (of Port Moody, BC) both went looking online and on book shelves for something to validate how they were experiencing motherhood, but never found what they needed. What they did find was each other after Daum published an online article describing her struggles with raising her daughter as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Brandt contacted Daum after reading the article and asked her if she wanted to create the resource that each of them went looking for.

The essays in this book bring voice to the many challenging experiences shared by survivor parents in all phases of parenting. They write:

Each essay included in Parenting with PTSD walks you through not the individual's abusive experiences, but rather how such experiences have affected the author as a mother or father.

How can we change the present, our relationships and our families if we don't understand the way we're impacted by the past?

Parenting plans, programs and advice will continue to fail, fall short or do harm if they don't address the actual needs of the parents they are created for. Some, no matter how well-intentioned, hurt or re-traumatize people.

I love people who take it upon themselves to create the resources they needed in order to help themselves and others. That's inspiring. But it also means that while ACEs are common, resources that speak specifically to the millions of us who are parenting with ACEs - are not.

Parenting with ACEs is not the same as parenting without ACEs. Parenting with ACEs with resources is not the same as Parenting with ACEs without resources.

We need this book, community and resource.

We need more books, community and resources.

Part of the reason the Trigger Points Anthology was revised and rebranded, is to be more inclusive and expansive. It has more voices, essays and perspectives and more tools and resources for parents, professionals, and allies.

Brandt and Daum write:

Parenting with PTSD has the original content from the first edition including essays written by fathers, a queer woman expecting her first child, mothers from inside and outside of North America, women of different ethnicities, single and married parents. Essays on post-traumatic symptoms not previously discussed, writings by parenting survivors who either provide trauma-informed services or educate those who do, and new tools have all been added.
Despite two time zones and a country between them, Brandt and Daum worked together to talk to other parenting survivors and collect their stories. Through hundreds of emails, texts, and phone conversations Daum and Brandt created the Trigger Points Anthology, now Parenting with PTSD. The decision to revise and republish the original anthology is due in part by the overwhelming response from readers, the majority of which carried a diagnosis of PTSD or C-PTSD, but also because the editors have significantly increased their knowledge and awareness of how to best serve, inform, and support parenting survivors.

I'm grateful for this book and for all the post-traumatic growth, community and healing I've experienced as well.

Many of us are now breaking the cycle and the silence together, encouraged by and encouraging each other directly.

We don't need at us advice but to be heard, honored and supported when healing and spaces where we can do that for one another and ourselves on paper and real life. Places where we can celebrate the joys and triumphs as well as well as the struggles, like when our children feel safe and loved while young and vulnerable, how we get to watch as they explore a world that they mostly trust and can relax in, how they have safety, security and solace when hurt.

We get to provide comfort to our children and learn how safety makes people blossom. It's magical and celebration-worthy stuff. Maybe it will be the topic of their next book.

For now, I'm thrilled to be a contributing author in this book and a part of this work in the Parenting with ACEs and ACEs Connection community.

Note: An online version of Parenting with PTSD is available, for free, for 48 hours.

Note: If Dawn Daum and Joyelle Brandt sound like familiar names it's because they are members of ACEs Connection Network, were featured guests on the Parenting with ACEs chat a few months ago and because I've written about them and their earlier version of this book, Trigger Points Anthology, previously.

Disclosure: I am contributing writer of this book but have no financial stake or reward in the sales. I'm promoting it because I hope parents struggling the most feel less alone and honestly, because I'm so thrilled at how much ACEs are all over so many pages. I'm thrilled to be a part of a parent-led, survivor-led, ACE-aware initiative by and for other parents.

More information on Editors & Parenting with PTSD Community