Relationships | Dr Rebecca Ray: Recent Episodes
‘I’m triggered!’
I’m happy that social media is now being used to spread mental health education. Prioritising psychological well-being is finally being seen as legitimate and necessary for overall quality of life, and experiencing mental ill-health is slowly being destigmatised and acknowledged as debilitating and worthy of treatment. However, with this broad-based awareness comes limitations. Social media is reductive by nature. Characters are capped and app design rewards the briefest of attention spans. As such, there’s little space and tolerance for the depth and nuance that psychological concepts deserve and need, making it easy for mental health discourse to muddy these concepts in a way that botches their actual definition. It’s a phenomenon called conceptual bracket creep, and it’s particularly relevant to how the terms trauma and triggers are currently bandied about.
The Real Definitions
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, a trauma is defined as exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. The recollection of that trauma is painful and occurs in the form of re-experiencing symptoms (intrusive thoughts and images, distressing memories, flashbacks, and nightmares) that effect the person’s ability to stay connected to the present moment and create extreme overwhelm and/or stress. Re-experiencing symptoms are usually unwanted and involuntary and occur in response to triggers that are internal and external stimuli in the individual’s environment.
In the translation from academic walls to everyday living, conceptual bracket creep occurs, and the subtleties of interpretation are lost. Clinical terms like trauma and triggers bleed into popular culture. Jokingly, people refer to a power cut during their online game, the discontinuation of their favourite denim brand’s skinny jean, and their barista mistaking oat milk for soy milk in their latte as ‘traumatic’. Anything that results in the smallest of discomforts is now a ‘trigger’. And while I’m the first to promote the therapeutic benefits of humour and have regularly been known to poke fun at the absurdities of our human experience, we must recognise that not every unpleasant life event is a trauma, and not every tiny annoyance rates as a trigger.
Triggers and Parenting
Now that we’ve cleared up the definitions, let’s look at triggers and parenting. When it comes to the way you parent your littles, you may very well be legitimately ‘triggered’. You may experience uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, and body sensations that relate to painful memories of the way your grown ups parented you, triggered by setting boundaries, showing love and affection, and modelling effective regulation to your own child. As you do so, being triggered can occur in a way that you repeat what was done to you, or in the discomfort of realising that the way you were parented was not okay.
Of course, not everyone has parents who were ineffective enough to mean that their children will be triggered when they are adults trying to parent their own children. But it’s worth noticing any discomfort you might feel as your children grow, and how your interactions with them when things are challenging are coloured by your own childhood (especially the way you were shown love and affection – or not, disciplined, and what you were rewarded and punished for).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL EPISODEThe post Parenting when you are triggered (Parenting the Parent with Dr Rebecca Ray) appeared first on Dr Rebecca Ray.
Not a secret: Parenting is hard. But it’s even harder if you’re raising a little human while recovering from the trauma of the way you were parented.
If you are an adult who has had a childhood, then you’ll be carrying something from that childhood that continues to hurt in some way. Oh wait, do I hear a chorus of older generations of parents saying, ‘Well, you turned out fine?!’ Did we?
We’re the children that are unsettled in peaceful environments because we were raised in chaos. Our bodies are in perpetual fight/flight mode, seeking out drama because it’s what we know how to navigate. Our psyches are anxious, depressed, traumatised. Our sleep is non-existent, we can’t regulate our emotions, we rely on others for validation of our own worthiness, and respectful conflict resolution and relationship repair are terms that belong to weird people who know how to say sorry without thinking that person will now hate you forever.
We’re the ones who have been so accustomed to abrasive environments that receiving compassion feels not just foreign, but cloying, smothering even. It feels like if we were to relax into being loved, we’d be compromising everything that has kept us safe up until now, like the false sense of security offered by a duck whistle that leads us directly into the line of sight of a hunter. A duck is a duck until it’s not, remember. We are absolutely fine.
The thing is, loads we carry are so often carried on the shoulders of the people who gave them to us, and before that, on the backs of the people who passed it to them. And it impacts the way we parent our children, especially if we’re not aware of it.
Our adult load starts with the loads our grown-ups carried for themselves and whether they were capable of shielding us from the impact of those loads. Everyone has ‘stuff’. When we become parents, it is our responsibility to process and integrate our stuff so as to prevent it from leaking out into the family system and onto our children. This isn’t me advocating for a case of ‘everything is your parents’ fault’. Instead, it’s me inviting you to put down the load you are carrying that doesn’t belong to you. Instead of blaming yourself, this is your chance to break the cycle by understanding how these loads are passed down through generations and choose that it stops with you.
The parent who was shamed for having feelings as a child grows up to keep their emotions under lock and key (in which case, they spontaneously erupt, or they implode and wind up in cycles of self-loathing). The parent who was criticised and shamed as a child grows up to be perfectionistic, rigid in their expectations, and unrelenting in pressuring themselves to be not just good enough, but perfect. The parent who was seen and not heard as a child grows up with a hardened exterior, viewing softness in others as weakness. You get the point.
It’s one thing for an adult to struggle with these issues for themselves. It’s quite another thing for that adult to then repeat the same cycle in parenting their own child. This cycle might be even more destructive, lapsing into dangerous. It could involve abuse, neglect, and/or exposure to such unpredictable and unsafe environments that a child has no option than to be traumatised. The parent’s parent used alcohol or throwing objects, or infidelity, or working all the time, or emotional absence to cope. That parent then models exactly the same behaviour to their own child. It becomes a cycle of emotional incompetence, poor coping skills, and unprocessed pain that go on to compromise another child’s emotional development, because their parents’ parents didn’t know any better and no one in the generational line has had the capacity to take responsibility to contain and heal their load.
How did your parents parent you? And how does that influence you in how you parent your children?
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL EPISODEThe post Bloody yell! Why we should resist the urge to shout at our kids (Parenting the Parent with Dr Rebecca Ray) appeared first on Dr Rebecca Ray.
You just found your phone is in the fridge and your shirt is on inside out. When you talk to friends or family you forget to finish your sentence or the point you were trying to make.
If you’ve found yourself in a similar kind of muddle, chances are you are the parent of a young baby.
Sometimes it can feel that every part of your brain is just a little bit disjointed.
Unless bub is crying, that is. In those moments, you’re superhuman.
The rest of the time it seems like whoever made up the baby brain thing really did you a disservice by not warning you that it’s actually REAL.
As frustrating as it might be, there are some very good reasons why your cognitive functioning appears to have taken long service leave without approval. When we give birth, our brain goes through a series of changes that helps enhance our capacity to parent.
PREFER TO LISTEN? CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL EPISODEBear with me while I give you a crash course in brain science. There are a few structures in the brain that are most active when it comes to pregnancy and birth and parenting thereafter:
- the limbic system, which is located deep in the middle of the brain and responsible for activating your fight/flight/freeze response if a (real or imagined) threat is detected;
- the left prefrontal cortex, located behind your forehead just above your left eye, which is responsible for the ‘smart’ functions that your brain offers, including problem-solving, planning, logical and rational thinking, decision-making, and ensuring our behaviour is socially appropriate; and,
- the right brain, which is associated with all the touchy feely stuff we experience.
Pregnancy and birth see changes occur in our brains which enhance the activity in the right side of the brain, helping us become ‘smarter’ at behaviours that support bonding with our baby including reacting to cries of distress, cuddling and nurturing, and acts of connection.
This super-charged bonding capacity influences the left prefrontal cortex to pipe down. It doesn’t quite go offline altogether, but right-brain-bonding-things take precedence over smarty-pants-problem-solving-things.
And to go with this, your baby-bonding super-self might also be a little edgy, because, you know… #safety and #responsibility for someone’s LIFE. No biggie, right? Except it is a biggie for your limbic system who is absolutely ready to go with every neural alarm available at the first sign (or catastrophic mental imagining) that bub might be at risk of any form of harm.
If only the newborn love bubble could be gentle and worry-free. Alas, your brain is primed to make sure that you connect with your little one and keep them safe. So, if you’ve been a little OTT on doing parenting ‘right’, or turned into a control freak-zilla, please know that it’s your brain’s fault!
While we can’t turn these systems off, and we don’t want to because it’s for a purpose, please remember that you will adjust. Your left prefrontal cortex will return to having a say, and you will settle into your parenting position minus the jumpiness.
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